Jordan Peterson at Room for Discussion

[Music] professor Peterson welcome again to room for discussion now lots of controversy has kind of surrounded your visit coming to this platform and we've even even made national news and if one thing is clear from the last five weeks it's it's that some people either perceive you as a hero or almost as a villain to what extent do you think you're responsible for causing this polarization of the two camps how's that that's good well I'd like to say I'm completely responsible for the hero side and not responsible at all for the villain side [Applause] I take responsibility for it what I think I do is say what I think and there's consequences to that and the consequences unfold and then I deal with them as I can so I'm no fan of collectivists whether they're on the right or the left and I've aimed most of my thoughts not the collectivist left because they dominate the universities disproportionately and I'm not happy about that and so it's to their advantage to paint me as villainous and I suppose to some degree that's the case because there's a little bit of villain and everyone but mostly it's just the same tired ideological cliches that are put in place of reasoned investigation and discussion and I do my best to dispel those or perhaps I allow people to dispel that for themselves I mean part of the reason that I've still moving forward let's say is that when the political controversy broke around me in Canada I already had 300 hours of video content online and so people could go and make up their own minds which they did and so the the ratio of public support to antipathy towards what I'm doing runs at about 50 to 1 so that's fine as far as I'm concerned but do you not also want to kind of foster a convergence between the groups like even though as you said what you said has a consequence and people are free to follow what they do don't you think you have some kind of responsibility to at least bring these polarize camps together yes I think I've done all sorts of I've done many things to do that I'm working with a group of people who are trying to modify the Democratic position in the United States with the Democrats trying to bring them back to the center and away from the radical left I think that my lectures provide a way out for people with regards to ideological possession the regarded list of whether they're on the left to the right and my sense is and certainly what I've encountered in terms of the people that I've spoken to and that's many thousands of people now that most of the people who are listening to my lectures instead of reading about them in the New York Times let's say almost always modify their views both psychologically and politically I'm not particularly interested in the political element by the way I'm interested in the psychological element and that's often obscured by the press coverage because most journalists would rather be politicians and they only see the world in political terms and so if you do something that's not political they have no idea what to do with it so I have to cast it one way or another you must be left you must be right you must it's like no I'm not playing a political game well there are every game is political it's like no it's not that's just how you see things so and as far as I'm concerned the non-political game I'm playing is working just fine so well I think it's it's without any doubt that you helps a lot of people and that you have a lot of fans but if you if we look for example to to the reaction in your block you really choose to to attack especially on certain moments in the block like why do you why do you do that gloves are off when it comes to professors okay they're part of my crowd let's say and when I see them write a letter that's that incoherent and then sign it so carelessly then it's perfectly reasonable to put up a let's call it vigorous defense I mean one of the most comical things about that letter I thought was the attempt by the authors of the letter and and by implication the signatories to go after me for for the insufficiency of my scientific objectivity I mean first I thought that was just absolutely beyond the pale given that the people who occupy the ideological position that would compel them to write that letter are critics of the very idea of scientific objectivity itself and so it's quite convenient for them to be critics of the idea that that even exists and then also to claim that while despite the fact that it doesn't exist they happen to be much better at it than me yeah so it's like really well so yeah that and then that was only I mean that letter could be taken apart line by line which I didn't do I only took it apart paragraph by paragraph yeah okay no but I think I think it's clear because I think what you're saying is that if academics cross the line then you choose to attack is that is that correct well it's not so much attack it's more like defend defend you know it's not like I wrote a letter to 80 academics at the University of Amsterdam accusing them of whatever I might accuse them out so and I don't that arousing defense is not an attack even though it might not be particularly happily received by those on those that the defense is aimed at so I'm and you know given as I said if it's professors then then I'm more likely to be let's say less circumspect in my criticism and I think that's correct because there are meant the member they're members of the Academy just like I am and so we're on home ground let's say and then they also have a responsibility to the students which i think is often abdicated especially when a letter like that is constructed so incoherently yeah okay clear there are many different groups right now in society we all have as we have experience also with this case who have their own opinions known opinions are sometimes very strong and over the past years I think we saw that the X extremes became way more visible if you for example look to Charlottesville and the and the center voices are often a bit overshadows almost what do you think that says about the public debate do you think there's still a room for discussion in the debate I don't think it says I don't think it says much about the public debate I think it's mostly the consequence of a technological transformation I think that as the mainstream media collapses under the weight of this technological onslaught that's constituted by the web and by YouTube and by podcasts that their their professionalism declines okay so someone is asking to all sit down so we all considered an Peterson okay democracy at work so so what's happening I think is is to is to fold the the budget for high quality journalism is being slashed mm-hmm that makes the journalists more desperate and less able to spend time on stories they're fighting for a increasingly small share of an increasingly dispersed market and they're much more likely to concentrate on polarized issues and also to imitate each other and so see if you look at the situation in the United States for example people say well it's become more polarized the data actually indicates that the Republicans on by and large have moved closer to the center and the Democrats have moved farther to the left but and I don't I don't know what to make of that precisely but in the United States you know people were shell-shocked the Trump was elected and they thought about that is indication of increasing polarization it's like well fifty percent of Americans are Republicans yeah that's figures is that a fire alarm I don't I don't think so no oh that's a Domon sorry no common trip so I thought that might have been I don't know what that's fire alarm sound like okay well anyways I mean yeah it's been for decades for elections of the United States where it was fifty percent Republican and fifty percent Democrat right down the middle and really tight exactly the same thing happened in the last election so it's like where's the polarization it's not happening at the at the at the public level now I mean Trump is kind of an anomalous candidate but when I look at the American election I think the idea that Trump won that election is preposterous obviously what happened was Hillary Clinton lost that election and she roundly deserved it she abandoned the group of people that could have put her over the top she chose to campaign in New York and California primarily even though she'd already won majorities there it's like she abandoned they she abandoned key sections of the American working class plus she pandered to the radicals and played identity politics it's like it was her presidency to lose and she certainly managed to lose it even though she doesn't seem to have completely admitted that yet okay so to connect with you to what you just said about identity politics we also want to talk about that for during the interview and we want to start off by saying that today we are of course in Amsterdam and it's the capital of the Netherlands and the Netherlands was the first country in the world who legalized gay marriage actually into 2001 and so we wanted to start off with a with the kind of a straightforward question to you are you in favor of gay marriage of legalizing that by law well I'm in favor of marriage and I'm in favor of the continuity of marriage and I think it's a reasonable social experiment to extend that the way it has been extended so I mean I mean homosexuality has been around forever it looks like particularly on the male end of the distribution that has a fairly powerful biological component it seems like a reasonable experiment I mean it leaves open questions because we have no idea what the long-term viability of such relationships might be compared to heterosexual relationships that's a completely open question and we also don't know to what degree it's optimal for the development of children to have both a male and female role model close by but my suspicions are those things can be dealt with in an effective manner and I suspect that it's better for children to have two parents than one now I think the conservatives who objected to the legalization of gay marriage had their point because they believe that the institution of marriage had had been under sustained assault for a substantial amount of time which is something I also happen to believe and so they had the reasons for resisting further change but I think you can make a strong conservative argument for the utility of gay marriage as well as a libertarian or liberal argument so we'll see and we've also developed a consensus around that that's pretty much universal across the West and so that's how we decide things we develop a consensus and it doesn't look like it's ushered in the apocalypse so so far so good well the reason we ask is because please done well we actually have a quote of you about your opinion on gay marriage and regarding gay marriage in Australia and you've said quotes I would be against it if it was backed by cultural Marxists because it isn't clear to me whether it will satisfy the ever-increasing demand for an assault on traditional modes of being but don't you think that opposing gay marriage just because it was also it's also in the agenda as you say of cultural Marxists is is a bit problematic and it's kind of against your principles as a principle liberal person I said if right so if you read the quote again that's what it started with I mean it's complicated when when you're trying to determine what stance to take on a particular issue because it's very complicated to determine just exactly what the issue is so for example with this notorious bill c16 or perhaps my notorious response to it my those who regard themselves as my enemies chose to focus on the element of the legislation that that was relevant to at least in principle relevant to the well-being of transgender people now I'm not so sure it was relevant to the well-being of transgender people but because I looked at the methodology that was used to do the public surveys for example prior to the to the introduction of the legislation and they were handled an absolutely incompetent manner and and I think but the the issue was with Bill c16 well was it about the rights of transgender people or was it about the desire of a certain ideological group to write a social constructionist view into Canadian law or was it about compelled speech it's like it's not obvious you have to be a careful diagnostician to make such judgments I believe that it was fundamentally an issue of compelled speech and the desire to write a social constructionist view of gender into Canadian law and so I imposed it on those grounds and I think I was correct now people could say well you know isn't it rather reprehensible of you to object to the extension of rights to transgender individuals it's like well it depends on your level of analysis so well those are complicated things it's maybe good that you brought up Bill c16 because there's also been two recent hot topics I don't know if you know but in the Netherlands three weeks ago the first official non gender passport was given to a Dutch citizen at the same time in the u.s. of course the new Trump bill which considers too narrowly defined gender as something that's immutable and that's totally Constanza natively at birth is is the now a potential law so if you had to choose between these two laws which one would you pick well if you're transgendered is it immutable I don't know right neither does anyone else and so there's tremendous incoherencies in the theory so at the moment for example it's perfectly reasonable to formulate the proposition and and and this is this is very characteristic of of let's say the ideological types who drove bill c16 to say you can beam at a man born in a woman's body which is a biologically determinist argument and to say that gender is socially constructed and to say that it's a personal choice it's like sorry all three of those things cannot simultaneously be true so there's going to be a variety of legislative responses to that but mostly it's just incoherent and I also think that it's driven by something deeper it's driven at least in part by the desire to destabilize traditional perceptual and cognitive categories and I see that as part of an assault on the idea of categorization itself that's been undertaken with a fair bit of success in the since the 1970s and so generally speaking I'm opposed to such things I don't believe that introducing confusion about gender identity into the lives of young people at an early age is going to have a net positive consequence we'll see but I doubt it but wouldn't you be also against the trump bill because like as you said it is also a way in which the law compels a certain identity upon you which is the reason you opposed bill 16 so how would you go about what is your position on this well I opposed bill C 16 because it compelled my speech in a particular manner yeah it wasn't that compelled an identity upon me it was very specific in that in the entire history of English common law there has never been legislation that required people to to utter particular phrases now you could be there were limitations on what you could say that's a whole different thing and you know I'm no fan in general of limitations on what you can say but there are certain legal limitations that are reasonable you can't incite to crime for example and that seems appropriate but it was a matter of compelled expression and it's also the case that in 1942 the Americans decided at the Supreme Court level that such requirements were unconstitutional and the fact that it's unprecedented in English common law history and unconstitutional by American standards indicated to me that it was a very bad piece of legislation which it most certainly was especially the gender provisions so here's the argument biological sex gender identity gender expression and sexual preference are independent okay they're not the definition of dependent is that there's a strong statistical relationship between them could be correlational could be causal it is in fact causal it's also correlational but some unbelievably tight linkage so that the overwhelming majority of people who are a particular biological sex identify with that sex it's 99.97% okay the overwhelming majority of people who are of a given biological sex and an isomorphic gender identity Express their gender in accordance with those two fundamental elements of their identity and that would be more perhaps something in the range of 95% assuming that 1 in 20 is playing with fashion and self presentation in a gender-bending manner which is not uncommon that's been going on for a very long time and then of this of the people who are of a given biological sex the the isomorphic gender identity and who present themselves that way the overwhelming majority are heterosexual that is not independent it's the very opposite of independent even though that's not now the law and then the other element is there is a strong element of biological proclivity along all of those dimensions now it's not it's not complete obviously anyone with any sense understands that people are quite mutable in their self and cultural presentation I mean we are people we are creatures with long developmental histories and we can learn but the idea that biology doesn't play a strong role in influencing phenomena had every every one of those levels of analysis is absolutely preposterous and so and that's pushed very hard by the social constructionist and I think that's reprehensible it flies in the face of it flies in the face of anything reasonably defined as fact and it does no one any favors well not least because you can't say well you're a man born in a woman's body it's like well is that a biologically determinist argument yes or no so what are we saying you can be a man born in a woman's body and that's biological but if you're a woman born in a woman's body that's socially constructed it's like really that's supposed to be an argument that's it's it's beyond preposterous so okay thank you is there anyone in the audience who wants to ask a question to mr. Peterson and please keep them relatively short so Lewis you're gonna pick someone choice is yours you have to turn it on by pressing the button hello hi dr. Peterson I like to start by saying that I really appreciate that you view a lot of your arguments through a species-level lens with that said you and your daughter have recently been in the news a lot for your new way of eating it's been coined the carnivore diet I wonder how you reconcile this way of eating which is not exactly environmentally friendly and your I I think your love for our species and hopefully our planet and the idea that you would like to further our species in a positive way if more people start eating this way it would not be the best for our planet or our species so it might stop them from dying it might stop them from so that's that's been my primary concern with my daughter okay is there shorts other question hello so I was also at your talk last night and one of the things he mentions is that you criticized protesters often for being very low resolutions what do you meant with that if that if they say okay they're against poverty or the for the environment this is great and amazing but thank you for like contributing to that I'm gonna see that on the other hand I feel like those are very complex issues where we also need to have a social conscious of that so we need to be aware of that as a society so can deal with that so I wouldn't say that those statements are necessarily bad because they are important or need to be reinforced so that we can work on complex issues and that people are aware of that as a policy that is important to tacko well I mean there's there's certainly a variety of ways that important issues need to be brought to public consciousness and sometimes protest is a reasonable way of doing that but as far as I'm concerned it's primarily become institutionalized since the 1960s and is something approximating a right of passage and it's just rather dull in my estimation and often not helpful I mean I I think it's much better if you're serious about something to try to go out and solve it I mean you have a young man in the Netherlands boy onslaught who's a very good example of that I don't know how much you know about him but he's invented a device it's taken him about seven years and it's been a very difficult process too and he thinks he can take 50% of the plastic out of the world's oceans in the next five years it's like great that's that's commitment man that's commitment and he started when he was seventeen he did something absolutely impossible and so you know he's out to do something for the environment at least to try now I don't know if it'll work because there's a moral hazard involved if he can take the plastic out of the oceans it might just encourage reprehensible people to dump more in and that's definitely a problem but I'd like to see and this is something that you know I think that students should be encouraged to to in a very serious way perhaps there is something about the state of the world that particularly bothers you and I don't mean for ideological reasons I mean for whatever personal reasons that issue stands out for you it's mysterious right because some things in the world attract your attention and other things don't and obviously you can't every problem that exists can't be your problem because you would just die of problems but some problems announce themselves to you as targets of particular concern and those are like beacons for your destiny so you're very much concerned about something it's like great devote your life to it see if you can do something about it and I would say protesting is very very low on the hierarchy of things that are usefully done if you actually want to solve the problem problems are very complex and they're very difficult to solve and then there's also the there's also the the ease of the protest which is that you can solve your conscience with very little effort and you can go home and feel morally superior and that you've done your duty and you haven't done your duty you haven't even started to do your duty you're not even in the universe yet of doing your duty it's decades of work to address even the smallest component of a very complex problem so okay thank you very much for your question we will there will be plenty of room for other questions later in the interview we want to talk a bit about relations between men and women right now you once you once expressed that we don't have the rules right between between men and women's who successfully work together on the workplace and we were wondering what what do you mean by these rules do you mean social rules or do you mean like legal policies or how do you what do you mean by saying this I mean I mean all of those things I mean day to day there's conflicts that we don't know how to resolve exactly so you know when you put people together in the workplace they're obviously going to be concentrating on their work but they're also going to be people and so and people are sexual beings for example and so we don't know how to properly balance the inevitability of sexual interactions between people in the workplace and the demands for propriety and efficiency and so that causes a lot of trouble so I know NBC now I think has a no hugging rule for example which seems a little heavy-handed to me perhaps it's necessary but we don't exactly know what is necessary because we don't know how to precisely articulate the boundaries that constitute acceptable behavior and so and what and the reason for that is that men and women have only been working in hierarchical workplaces of extreme complexity together at the level that that we experience now for a very short number of decades and it's not surprising that it's taking us a while to work out the bugs so and what what would you define as the concrete problems that then arise right now well part of the problems are for example how you define in unacceptable sexual behavior and so exact for example the National Academy of Science just released a report to dignify it with the name of report in my estimation that that indicates that fifty percent of women in STEM fields experience sexual harassment in a given year whereas the corresponding figure for one of the latest studies that was done by the Australian Government is point zero eight percent well that's a big difference and the different stems at least in part as a consequence of definition and the problem with something like sexual harassment which isn't a scientific category right it's not a proper set it doesn't have defined inclusion and exclusion boundaries like all triangles for example so the borders of the concept are very fuzzy and they're partly socio-cultural in nature and you can twist and bend them in one direction or another to suit your purposes which is clearly in my estimation what happened with the National Academy of Science report well their recommendations are that we restructure the STEM fields so that they're for example less hierarchical because hierarchical structures are obviously what are driving sexual misbehavior on the part of men in the STEM fields all of those propositions are completely they may be true but they're completely unfounded there's no evidence that there's true they're true and there's certainly no evidence that restructuring these enterprises by modifying their hierarchical structure is going to produce the desired end especially when you can't get the initial measurements right to begin with we don't know the rules so what are the rules no relationships that are sexual in the workplace is that going to be the rule well what does that mean exactly does that mean no flirtatious behavior does that mean no jokes like what does it mean does it mean no longer answers because there are corporate policies in the United States that are already regulating the amount of time that you can look at each other right yeah so so we don't know what to do about this now generally what you do is try to comport yourself like a reasonable and decent human being which is a mode of being that's so complex that it can't be articulated fully in dogmatic legalization right you can't make our policy of reasonable behavior I don't know either document would be 500 feet thick because it would have to cover every possible eventuality but these are a way than to approve to to make those rules better is there is there a solution to the problem because of course like the example you named with limiting the amount of time looking into some of these houses yeah this is quite bizarre but is there is there something we can do together to achieve a better situation on the workplace well I would say see I wouldn't conceptualize the solution at that level of the problem I mean what I'm trying to do is to encourage people to be more responsible individuals and I think if the workplace was populated by more responsible individuals than many of these problems would go away so but that's a low rather low resolution a solution to that particular problem but I don't see a better one at the moment so you know don't comport yourself in a reprehensible manner what does that mean a lot of the misbehavior that that that people object to is driven by such things as excess alcohol consumption so one of the things you might recommend if you're in the workplace and you want to be careful is be careful one drink with dinner with colleagues might be plenty 10 might be pushing your luck now you know I'm a little loath to say that because I also know that people need to blow off steam and they need to have some fun but it's dangerous and the borders will be pushed and that will be and there will be consequences to that and so we don't know exactly what to do about that so you know do you have to be if do you have to be more careful in a mixed gender setting that you have to be in a Singh gender setting it seems to me that the accumulating evidence the accumulating evidence suggests that you do have to be more careful and that's a problem in and of itself because one of the things that we're striving for is equality of treatment in the workplace and I don't know how you get equality of treatment in the workplace if you also have to be more careful in mixed gender settings maybe it's possible but I don't know how it's possible so-so but it but again it's not that surprising because we've only been at this for you know a short number of decades and these are very complicated problems so maybe time will tell yes and well and and the other thing too is that many occupations are sorting themselves out spontaneously by gender and we also don't know what the consequences of that is going to be that's happening at an accelerating rate so and no one no one knows the social consequences of that I mean one of the one of the one of the interesting consequences of that is that for example in the universities the majority of the female dominated disciplines are politically correct so that's interesting as far as I'm concerned and and I'm not sure why it's the case but it's definitely something that has social ramifications and and we also talked about that later in the interview actually and now I want to shortly talk with you about you you express multiple times that you're in favor of equality of opportunity between men and women but not in favor of equality of outcome because of biological day for example biological people equality of outcome is fine I'm not in favor of the enforcement of equality of okay yeah I mean if the outcomes happen to be equal oh yeah fine maybe that would be great doesn't happen but the thing is is that and and and the data are strongly in support of this unless you don't believe data and of course you don't have to but then you have to throw out I believe that a so that says well it's fine so so this is what's happened so it turns out that as you increase the wealth of a society and you tilt it towards egalitarianism that you radically increase the magnitude of the differences between men and women in terms of temperament and interest and so I should tell you how big that effect is because it's actually unbelievably big so the last paper that was published on this phenomenon was published in science a week and a half ago and so science is the premier scientific journal in the world it's a sufficiently influential journal so that if you're a scientist and you publish one paper in science that permanently establishes your professional reputation so it's the gold standard along with nature of scientific accomplishment and the last paper was published on on this issue in science a very large sample and the correlation between an index that was a combination of national wealth and egalitarianism and the magnitude of differences in preference between men and women was 0.7 and point 7 is a larger correlation that is reported in 99 percent of social science papers it's bigger than the correlation between IQ and academic achievement so it's among the largest effects ever discovered by social scientists in any domain considering any phenomenon and it's been replicated three times in the last month alone and and sufficient and sufficiently replicated now so that even the London Times three weeks ago stated forthrightly that it's one of the most if not the most well-documented finding in the social sciences so this is the finding as you make a more egalitarian social environment the differences between men and women in personality and interest magnet magnify and so we'll concentrate on interest in preference and leave temperament aside because interest in preference is probably more relevant to occupational choice so the biggest difference between men and women that we know of psychologically speaking is preference for people versus things and men tilt towards preference for things and women tilt towards preference for people now the distribution still overlap to a substantial degree but most of the forces that drive occupational selection are driven by the extremes of the distribution and not the central tendency so for example if you're going to be an engineer you're going to be one of those people who's really interested in things because if you're just sort of interested in things while you're not going to be an engineer and it turns out that almost all the people who are really interested in things are men so in the Scandinavian countries as is also the case in the Netherlands the vast majority of Engineers are men just like the vast majority of nurses are women could as shortly interrupt you because I actually want to connect to that for example in Scandinavian society so it's very I cannot Aryan and therefore so you haven't there's an equality of opportunity and that results for the reasons you just explained in in an inequality of outcome right see that's that's exactly the crucial issue yeah we could be it could easily be that our attempts to produce equality of opportunity are run contrary to the desire to produce equally trying to point it out what does that be a nasty thing because if the outcome is if the outcome is in equal so if some business some fields are dominated primarily by men and others by women so if you for example look to big multinationals are primarily dominated by men like in the top position so for example not in the sale divisions well if you look to nurses there there are way more women war nurses but by that inequality of outcome which is resolved actually of equality of opportunity that that inequality of outcome then also results in an inequality of opportunity in some sense right because then it becomes harder for for example a man to write make make a career in in yeah yeah yeah you get you get so how there's a breed of distribution problems yes yeah yeah how would you then solve that oh I don't know I don't think anybody knows how to solve that like that the the inequality problem is a really deep one one of the things that I lecture about quite regularly on my lecture tour is it's a critique of more sysm at least in part so there's a there's room on the on the right-hand side of the spectrum politically because we need to produce hierarchies because the reason that you produce a hierarchy generally speaking is because society has identified a goal that's valuable and then people have to organize themselves to pursue that goal and that organization tends rapidly to become hierarchical and the reason for that is that some people are better at pursuing the goal than others it doesn't matter what the goal is and not only that some people are radically better at pursuing the goal so in fact there's actual mathematical estimates of that and they basically run in the following manner so the square root of the number of people pursuing a goal will do half of the productive work and it's a vicious vicious formula it governs scientific publication for example almost perfectly and that was discovered by dis ola price back in 1962 so if you have a hundred scientists working in a given problem ten of them produce half the publications but if you have a thousand scientists working on the same problem then thirty of them produce half the publications it's a vicious vicious proclivity towards producing steep hierarchies now you need the hierarchies because you can't solve problems without them but the problem with hierarchies is they dispossessed people and so that's the point that's the place for the left because the left can say look careful with the hierarchy there your dispossessing people they stack up at the bottom and that's not good for those people because for example it forecloses opportunity in the future especially over multiple generations it might it might stop you from maximally utilizing the talent that's available in your society and the hierarchy can become rigid and unmoving and intransigent and corrupt across time yeah so you need the right in the left to have it out about how the hierarchy could be structured the problem is though as you pointed out is that once inequality starts out it can really spiral rapidly so because one of the things I wonder about for example you see men barely bailing out of the humanities at a very rapid rate so maybe maybe there's a rule something like you can have 40 percent and 60% women or 60% men and 40% women in a discipline and that is an equilibrium that'll maintain itself but if you get 65% men or 65% women then it goes to 100% and it could easily be that because you get these positive feedback loops developing and complex systems that you can't control but would you then would you then think it's favorable to to have a mechanism or some sense of rules or a quota or whatever to not ensure why not because I think that the risks outweigh the benefits because I think the best you can do and I studied assessment of talent for a very long time for about 30 years and I think the best you can do is to define the function of the hierarchy not that that's easy because it's often very difficult but you that's the best you can do is to carefully define the function of the hierarchy and then select on the basis of competence in relationship to that function now that's going to produce trouble but every selection method produces trouble that one will just produce the least trouble and so you don't consider extraneous variables as far as I'm concerned partly because there's an infinite multitude of them it's like okay what are you gonna equalize across what are the canonical groups sex ethnicity race gender who says that's a very small subset of the potential universe of canonical groups why are those why are those the right groups and let's say it is race well what races are there three are there fifty there's more genetic diversity in Africa than there is in the rest of the world so it's like how much do you fraction a trace and then how much do you fraction a gender and what about class attractiveness personality temperament IQ all of these things I would say that we enter a wrong then of the almost infinite amount of difference sure well the the intersectional theorists already figured this out although they didn't notice it because they're not very bright so they thought oh well history is an oppressor oppressive a pressure oppressor victim victimizer narrative ok across what dimensions groups what groups well here the four canonical groups arbitrarily chosen but nonetheless fair enough well we have a problem what if you belong to more than one of those groups well then what's your oppression well it's either this sum or the product of your group membership it's like fair enough how many group memberships are there well there's an uncountable number okay so what does that mean well all you have to do is do the arithmetic it's like imagine you belong to ten groups and and the probability may be the probability that you'll belong to those let's say there are only ten groups so your position in each of those ten groups has a probability of one in ten and so your identity is the product of one in ten times one in ten times one and ten so forth up to ten which means there's one of you well that's the individual that's why the West figured this out like two thousand years ago the proper category for a human being is the individual because that's the only category that takes into account as well as it can be taken to account the diversity and then you can't gerrymander that with group identity it doesn't work so we're gonna go for equality of outcome okay across what dimensions oh well we didn't think about that oh well that's an intractable problem it's not oh we made a small mistake and we can still go for equality of outcome it's like no that's a fatal error just like the error of assuming you can pursue equality of opportunity and equality of outcome I mean look I should tell you to it's not like this data that indicated that men and women got more different as societies got more egalitarian was something that social scientists were out having a like cake party about it was a bloody shock to everyone no one suspected or expected this and and no one even believed it until it kept being replicated over and over and over you know I think the general consensus among psychologists thirty years ago and and they were fairly liberal as a group even then and are far more liberal and left-leaning now was that as we made societies more egalitarian and more wealthy that men and women would become more of the same didn't happen so light you know reality doesn't necessarily manifest itself in accordance with our deepest ideological hopes and now we don't know what to do about that now my sense is that what we should do is let men and women make their choices now there's gonna be consequences to that and the point you made is a really good one because those you know you can get these spirals where you might end up with like zero female engineers or zero male schoolteachers and you might think well there's there's there's potential negative consequences to that from a social perspective and and there could well be but I don't know a better technique for for allowing people entry into a hierarchy than to judge them on the basis of the measures of competence that are in keeping with the function of the hierarchy so that's the least destructive mode of discrimination because there's gonna be discrimination unless I suppose you could decide membership in the hierarchies randomly you know that would solve the problem but then it wouldn't work because you wouldn't get competence yeah so you know and you end up with situations like Harvard like you had you had 50% chance of being accepted to Harvard if you were Asian like that was a consequence of each of these these group identity social policies and I know why Harvard did it I knew the people when I was there who ran the admissions sections and most of them were very decent people and they were trying to in in many ways trying to do exactly what they said they were trying to diversify the student body along multiple dimensions but one of the cons I mean this is a big consequence that you had a 50% disadvantage if you were Asian that's not trivial it's actually unforgivable in my estimation I hope Harvard gets walloped in the courts and then I hope that they're subject to a very large class-action suit because that is what should happen in my estimation ok maybe at this point we could turn to the audience for another question a quick question please maybe someone from the back a little bit not not too bad from you oppressed people at the back hi Jordan my question is what is the antidotes towards toxic masculinity well the the antidote is responsible masculinity and and what does responsible mean it means well if you're responsible then you're trying to do you're trying to do what's honest first so you're careful with your speech and your actions you're careful with your speech in that you don't say things that you know to be false and you're careful in your actions so that you don't have to lie about what you do that's a good start and then the next thing would be that you're capable of taking responsibility for yourself at least so that once you're an adult no one else has to bend over backwards to ensure that you don't unduly suffer in the world and so that's responsibility for yourself and then if you get half ways good at that well then you know you might think about taking on the responsibility of a family and contributing to your community and doing all those things in a harmonious manner and that's obviously the antidote to toxic masculinity which is not a phrase I would generally use I just think about it as you know what would you call it I think sinful behavior is a much more accurate representation personally but it's honesty and and responsibility and I do think about it as a Hartmann of harmony I got that a lot from reading Jean Piaget whose work was annexed I colossal extension of Kant's categorical imperative because can't believe that you should act in a manner such that if the way you acted became a universal that that would be beneficial and but Piaget formalized that very nicely showing that one of the basis for the emergence of a system of genuine ethics was a an interval form of reciprocity so that you know so for example oh I can give you a quick example of that my granddaughter who's now 15 months old has discovered a new game and it's it's it's it's a pure Aryan game a developmental game and she she discovered this by watching but also on her own and partly because it's a very deep part of human nature so she has this little wooden spoon and her game is you sit with her at the table at her gave me us she gives you the spoon and then you take it and then you give it back and then she's all happy about that and then she gives the spoon to the person who's sitting beside her and then they give it back to her and she's very happy about that and so it's it's an amazing game because she's learned to give up something she let go of something that she wants and to trust someone else to return it to her and that's what she's playing with and then you can play with that game it's quite fun so you know and you have to pay careful attention to her and watch how she's manifesting her emotions and so maybe what you do is you take the spoon and you hide it under your hand that sort of disconcerts are a bit then you show it to her and pick it up and give it to her and she's happy about that because what she sees is that the principle of reciprocity can maintain itself across a set of transformations and that's really exciting to her or you can give her the spoon and she can give it back to you and then she can reach for it and you can pull it away a quarter of an inch and that sort of disconcerts her and then chill I'm sorry I said that didn't cover really a toxic masculinity right because yes it's dealing with just dealing with the principle of reciprocity I'll put it this way when I'm giving the spoon back to my granddaughter I'm not engaging in toxic masculinity and that was the point that I was trying to make is that and this deep reciprocity and Trust is part of the social contract and it is precisely the antidote to what precisely it since we're going to pursue this what precisely is toxic masculinity as opposed to say toxic femininity or toxic humanity what exactly are you asking me about I really want to know what would you like how you would describe masculinity no I want you to define what tossed toxic masculinity constitutes since we're going to define things so carefully let's do it I think I guys sorry but we really have to move on so there will be more questions later on there will be a lot of opportunity how about this maybe that's if you if you okay so let's define it shortly all right shortly please okay I think that the moment when you kind of let's say gosh that you kind of go over a boundary that kind of neglect neglect the freedom of the opposites well gender or whatsoever so that masculinity and that you kind of but that would also be toxic feminine thank you and then also I lost my sentence now but help me here in the audience okay so let before before we move on let me point something out you know that I was willing to to undertake this line of discussion allowing for the possibility that the category of toxic masculinity had some content right but if we're if we're going to pursue that line of reasoning and quibble about the answer then we're certainly going to quibble about the definition that's embedded in the question and so part of what's happened in our discourse is that we're required earth eclis to assume a priori merely out of politeness that the utterance toxic masculinity actually constitutes a meaningful phrase and if you push it you find very rapidly that it doesn't because it's very very very difficult to define and definitions actually matter and so if it's a matter of transgressing against the boundaries of gender appropriate behavior well first of all that indicates that there's something Universal and normative about gender appropriate behavior which is something that people who push the idea of toxic masculinity generally tend not to presume and second it's just as likely to happen among women as among men in which case it's not toxic masculinity so maybe on to the next we will shortly ask one or two questions and then we will open up for completely open up to the public now but we can continue the conversation after one or two questions and then we will open up so because you there is this ok so you have freedom of speech and you often express that you're very much against political correctness so how I would define that is putting societal boundaries on free speech would you would you sure just can I continue is that a good definition of political correctness in your opinion no ok how would you define it well political correctness is something that I see as having been primarily formulated in the early 1970s I think it's a unholy marriage so to speak between Marxism and post-modernism and I've been criticized for that view because people say well it can't be a marriage between post-modernism and Marxism because post-modernism is predicated on skepticism towards meta-narratives and Marxism is Amerinet meta-narrative so obviously there can't be any postmodern Marxists and my reply to that is well yes clearly that's the case from the perspective of pure coherence but that doesn't seem to matter because there are plenty of postmodern Marxists and that's not my problem because I can't distinguish between them conceptually it's just the manner in which things have laid themselves out it was a movement that was primarily a consequence of activity among French intellectuals in the early 70s and to me it was in part a consequence of two things it was a it was a consequence of the demise of the intellectual and moral credibility of Marxism especially in the aftermath of the revelations of the of the Stalinist and Maoist atrocities that characterized much of the 20th century so and so that was one of one of the what would you call motivating factors because all the people who held those Marxist viewpoints had to find another avenue of expression for their ideological commitments and but then the second one and this is a deeper one is that there has been a very troublesome epistemological problem that's emerged in multiple fields since the early 1960s in artificial intelligence and in psychology and in literary criticism and the problem is attendant on the discovery that there's a virtually infinite number of ways of categorizing a finite number of objects and so what that means is this is this is integrity tied in for example with the difficulty that AI pioneers had in producing machines that could perceive the world because we thought that the world was made of sort of discriminable objects in in there what self-evident categories and that was just there for the perceiving and that turned out to be seriously wrong and so the postmodernist types ran across this problem they thought well how many interpretations are there of a Shakespeare play and the answer is innumerable interpretations and and then the next problem is well then how do you rank order those innumerable interpretations in terms of quality and that's a major problem and so political correctness is well it's an those are its sources but it turns out practically speaking that it's an amalgam of a rather nihilistic strain of post-modernism with a rather desperate strain of Marxism so okay thank you but I wanted to talk about either not regulating free speech at all and putting some societal boundaries on mother already our legal boundary so unfreeze of course yeah but for example in the u.s. there are there are very little but yeah let me let me look together with you two and two an example if for example in the 2016 elections with Donald Trump there was a lot of it's proven that there was some fake news and some hate speech circulating on those platforms which was not actually true and it reached a lot of people yeah would you and Facebook and Twitter are now regulating those those boats no they're trying to regulate them yeah they're trying to regulate them so would you be in favor of regulating debts or would you say don't regulate it good luck to Twitter and Facebook regulating their content okay good luck to them man they've bitten off something that they'll never swallow yeah so so what who's gonna regulate it so look am I look am i in favor of a system that would ensure that all we ever received from the media was truth sure if such a system could be produced but I don't think for a second that that's even vaguely possible even technically possible it's like who decides but the alternative you don't know but it doesn't matter what the alternative is the question is who decides it's the only question now when I do agree with you that's very difficult to decide that but it's not difficult it's possible saying mmm and there's a big difference between difficult and impossible and then what happens is those who choose to regulate end up being precisely those who you would not want to regulate now the way we solve that problem in the West Was you can say your stupid thing and I can say my stupid thing and all these people who are just as biased and ignorant as the two of us can listen and we can all come to our determination about what constitutes truth and that's the best we're ever going to be able to do and I believe that so so and I don't see any improvement on that okay okay let's close off with a final final question maybe to conclude the question so we've looked at the individual from various perspectives what do you think the role of the individual is now that we're living in the world with different groups and different conditions how would you see the role of the individual in society in the future are you optimistic about it yes fundamentally and the reason I'm optimistic is partly because I'm very deeply pessimistic by Nature and I've looked at a very large number of terrible things both in my studies and in my personal life and in my private practice and my conclusion has been that despite the vast ocean of ignorance that we all swim in and the overwhelming proclivity for malevolence that characterizes the human psyche that the nobility that's part and parcel of us and the potential can transcend that and defeat and so it's a very dark but there's something very bright at the bottom and so I'm very optimistic about that and that's part of the reason that I'm well that I wrote the book that I wrote but also that I'm touring around the world talking to people about adopting something approximating vision that's noble and worthy and setting their speed straight and getting their lives together and shouldering the responsibility of the world in a manner that's good for them and their family and their communities and to think about that as an aspirational goal that provides them with a meaning to offset the tragedy of their life and I believe that's solid right to the core and my impression is that it's that knowing that hearing that which is something that all people already know in some sense but hearing that articulated clearly is of great utility to people and every time someone comes up to me and this happens very often multiple times a day no matter where I am and someone comes up to me and says excuse me are you dr. Peterson and they usually say that very politely and they're apologetic for disturbing me even though they're not disturbing me they say look I was having a rough time a couple of years ago addicted alcoholic lonesome disturbed in my personal relationships I've been watching your lectures listening to your books listening to your podcasts things are much better thank you it's like every time that happens it's overwhelming him sorry it always breaks me up but it's very overwhelming it's very overwhelming tab strangers come up and tell you things that they won't tell people that are close to them you know it indicates that they trust that there's a trust there that's a deep trust because the people who are doing this they come up and tell me that because they're very pleased about it but also because they know that I'll be pleased about it and I am overwhelmingly pleased about it and so and for me every time I hear something like that that's a victory you know I studied the structure of totalitarianism for a very long time and became a very firm believer in the idea of good and evil and I do believe that the most appropriate way to conceptualize the nature of human experience and is as a battle between good and evil and I think it's a very serious battle because the evil is very dark and very terrible and every time I see someone who has reoriented themselves in in an upward direction then I regard that as part of what defeats that terrible malevolence and bitterness and and I believe that the fundamental doctrine that each individual is a center of creation I believe that to be literally and metaphorically true and and I also believe that each of us partake participate in the process of transforming what could be into what is and that we do that as a consequence of our ethical choices and that we shape the world as a consequence of that and so then when I hear someone come up to me and say look you know I've done everything I could in the last while to put myself together and it's and it's much less dark around me I think that's one more major victory on the bitter road uphill thank you very much thank you very much so is there anyone from the audience who wants to ask a question Louis again can you so we have some questions coming in from our audiences at crayon so I would like to start off with some questions from them first okay let's do one from from kaya and then one from here so an audience member at Cryer asks how do we acknowledge that there are disadvantaged groups in society that need help while also acknowledging differences well I don't think it's I don't think it's particularly challenging to acknowledge that there are disadvantaged groups that's or people not seem self-evident I mean there are multiple dimensions of advantage and with each dimension of advantage comes a dimension of disadvantage and that's obviously a problem I mean and it's a really deep problem which is partly why I'm interested in criticizing the Marxist critique of the West and capitalism it's like the Marxist like Thule inequality at the feet of the West the capitalism for example that's naive beyond belief in equality is a way worse problem than than something that you can attribute to capitalism it's far far deeper than that and so if you're really concerned with the dispossessed you're going to come up with a more sophisticated explanation for why people are dispossessed than the existence of capitalism I mean you can analyze Neolithic gravesites if if you want to to to detect the existence of inequality our forebears tens of thousands of years ago were buried with grave treasures that indicate a pre distribution of wealth well before anything approximating a capitalist society emerged and that's just a human example I mean so inequality is a very deep problem what do we do about it well that's that's an eternal that's an eternal question I mean I think what we do mostly is try to ensure that our hierarchies are fair and and that means that at least they're based on competence and that they're oriented to something of value but then I would also say that hierarchies themselves have to follow the same ethical presuppositions that I described in relationship to the individual it's like let's say you're leading a company well hopefully that's good for you hopefully it's good for your family hopefully it's also good for the community and you should be concerned with ensuring that that's the case across all three of those levels simultaneously and maybe if you're very careful although this starts to get what would you say almost impossibly difficult might be not so bad to see if you could find out a way of doing that was okay for the environment as well but the environment that's a lot of variables so that starts to become interactively difficult so I think if you conduct yourself ethically let's say as a business person then that's one way of aiding the dispossessed that's certainly the case you could be generous personally that would be helpful you could take care of your family if you have some time left over to directly aid people who are in trouble if you have the what the wisdom and the caution and the judgment to do that without making the situation worse which is very very difficult then more power to you I hope you can manage that and so each of us has a responsibility to manage that in the way that we can them in the best way that we can imagine and implement and and it's a crucial issue which is why the left for example on the on the political spectrum has a place someone has to speak for the dispossessed but that's not the same as resentment for the successful those are not the same thing and discriminating between them is very very difficult and I would say if you're overwhelmed with compassion for the dispossessed you should ask yourself very carefully how much of that is driven by hatred for this successful now maybe it's very little and maybe you're a saint but probably not okay thank you very much is there maybe someone who is standing up yeah Louise maybe you go back to the back but to the back this is a kind of off topic but as a union si si a psychologist what kind of archetype should she say president Trump has inin or does he represent well there's a bit of the fool and I'm being dead serious like because he's got a trickster element to it me so and you can see that by the way he placed on Twitter and he's bombastic and he's certainly an entertainer so he's highly highly extroverted so there's a public performer element to him and you know from the Union perspective the fool is a precursor to the Savior right because the fool is often the only person who can tell the truth and I think that one of the things that happened in the last presidential election is that people regarded Trump not everyone obviously and only a tiny majority of people but many people regarded Trump as more honest than Clinton because his foolish impulsive lies were more trustworthy than her carefully scripted ideologically planned lies so and I'm dead I'm dead serious about that like there's something there's something about his his uncontrollable relatively uncontrollable impulsivity that reveals him in a way that someone who's all persona which was certainly the case with Clinton and her and her teams of persona constructors they never let the real person out same thing happened with Al Gore an election you know a couple of cycles before that and so I think people given those choices they they they they went for the they went for the trickster and so and so that's that's the archetype I would see at work there now there's also some there's also some devouring mother tyrannical father dynamic that played out in the last election as well and so you know a critic of Trump would consider him a tyrannical father and a critic of planet would consider her devouring mother and I think that the electorate also tilted slightly towards preferring the devouring trickster father to the persona compassionate devout or the tyrannical trickster father rather than the devouring compassionate mother but it was you know it was a knife edge it was a knife edge okay thank you is there somebody else I think so yeah so Louise maybe go a bit to the that's side of the room thank you yes very well prepared for you you've mentioned the word ethics a couple of times therefore this question can you define which you personally find of intrinsic value that should be part of an objective debate where we find a decent balance between tolerance in the freedom of speech and well I want to keep it and I mean can you mention one simple element that we perhaps need at this moment to to that we could like to not over see that is really crucial to his objective debate can we also go beyond the notion of left and right because we tend to describe and mention these aspects of the political spectrum but it is very fake well as I said most of what I'm doing as far as I'm concerned isn't left versus right it's it's something other than that and the only reason I got involved in political issues in Canada to begin with was because I thought that the politicians overstepped the political boundary and entered into a different realm and that was the realm that I happened to help hold rather dear and so that was cast as a political issue but for me it wasn't it was a philosophical or even a theological issue now with regards to free speech I mean for me the issue is quite clear is there such a thing as hate speech well you have to be a bloody fool if you don't think there's such a thing as hate speech I mean I'm sure many of you have uttered hate speech when you're having a vicious argument with someone that you love I mean people say hateful things all the time that's not the issue the issue is what do you do about it and the answer is well you you let you let the utterances play themselves out in the public domain and the reason for that is because there isn't a better solution it's not because there's no hatred but but it's also the case it's also the case that defining hatred is a very tricky business and who's going to define it is even a trickier business and you know like in Scotland now the police have posters up in the subways asking Scotsman and Scots women to to turn each other into the police if they say something offensive it's like well good luck thinking without being offensive I mean look look at it this way if you don't have a problem you don't have to think because you don't have a problem if you have a problem then you have a problem and it varies in severity and so let's say you have a serious problem well if you have a serious problem it's going to be emotionally engaging it's really going to matter to you how the problem is formulated and solved it's actually going to matter and so then you produce a diversity of opinions about the problem and how to solve it because you need a diversity of opinions because you have a problem and you want to solve it but because it's emotionally engaging you're gonna find a certain number of the opinions distasteful even hateful okay well what fair enough but how are you going to protect yourself against that and still be able to think and you might say well you don't need to think which seems to be the default conclusion it's like good luck with that why do you have to think you have to think because that's how you simulate the world and so you simulate the world through thinking you play out the consequences of a particular pattern of action if the consequences are negative then you don't embody the pattern of action then you don't die so the reason that you think is so that you don't die and if you're gonna think about contentious things then it's going to be offensive terribly offensive you're gonna get the full range and sometimes you're gonna be wrong about being offended it's like you're wrong seriously and this thing you find so offensive it's exactly what you need to correct your viewpoint and that happens to people all the time in their life you all know that you know perfectly well that there are periods of time where you had to undergo a painful radical psychological transformation for your own good and the way that you manage that was to learn something extremely bitter and distasteful and if someone would have asked you even while it was occurring is this something you want to know are you happy about being exposed to it the answer would be most definitively no because it leads you down into that state of disintegration that's necessary before you put yourself back together and the rate right to be offensive is absolutely indistinguishable from the right to think and so you interfere without at your peril especially as a consequence of like well-meaning compassion that's mostly aimed at what minimizing short-term conflict it's just it's it's not it's not there's nothing in that that's going to have a positive outcome all we'll get is polite people who say nothing offensive who can't think or produce art or anything of value and who can't solve problems and who avoid short-term conflict at all cost and that's not a society I want to live in so and it's not a society that's going to have much much of a lifespan in front of it so okay let's see and one last question let's do one last question Louis yeah what are you maybe move a bit like you keep it like dynamic I think we're definitely over privileged the top-seeded hierarchy in this particular maybe dive into nobody's maybe dive into the public for for last question maybe you guys can surf him mr. Peterson first of all I am a huge fan and honestly I'm about to be 20 years old and this is the greatest day of my life hearing your speech I can be honest I and I had a question because I understand what you're saying and especially being an Academical setting we are a huge number of students and of course we have to navigate towards many things especially for people who have come from other countries and therefore different cultures if you could give one advice to us how we could be able to actually put our opinion out there and to actually make people listen and not to cause some mindless conflict with just yelling what advice would you give us learn to write I'm dead serious like I'm dead serious about that because writing is formalized thinking and so the way you write is first of all you need a problem because why write if you don't have a problem so this is good advice if you're just writing an essay by the way for your classes there's like pick a bloody problem that you want to write about because otherwise it's false right from the start it's up to you to engage with the material until you find something that grips you that you desire to investigate okay so you need a problem well the next thing you need to do is what you need to have something to say about the problem well so reading reading is really good for that read as much as you can get your hands on that addresses the problem okay so now now you now you know a bunch of things or at least provisionally know them you at least have access to them well now you start you start sorting through it's like okay well maybe I need to summarize what I've learned and then I need to iron out the contradictions between what I've learned and I need to elegantly formulate that and and I need to get my word choice right and my phrase choice right and my sentence choice right and I need to organize this into proper paragraphs and the paragraphs into proper sequence so that I have a coherent argument and at the same time what you're doing is is your your your your your integrating your own personality at the highest and most abstract level of organization and you're sharpening your tools and you're putting yourself straight because you're learning to think you learn to do that by writing and so I would say pick some hard problems and learn to write very very carefully and when I say pay attention to the word I mean that pick the right words organize them into the right phrases get your sentences straight like when I wrote my first book maps of meaning I believe I wrote every sentence in that book 50 times 50 variants of every sentence I'd read it once I'd read it again I'd read it again I'd read it again and I have a little competition which sentence is better which sentence is better I'd pick that sentence do the same with the paragraphs over many many years you hone your words they're the most powerful thing about you bar none if you're an effective writer and speaker and communicator you you have all the authority and competence that there is and so you're at University maybe you're taking humanities degree well that what's the humanities degree for just to teach you how to think you learn to think by writing now there's more to read to speak and all of that but the best thing you can do is read and write every day a couple of hours every day write about things you find important and see if you can see if you can discover what you believe to be true and then it'll build you a foundation and it's unbelievably practical like if you look at people who are phenomenally successful across life there's various reasons but one of them is is that they're unbelievably good at articulating what they what they're aiming out and strategizing and negotiating and and and and enticing people with a vision forward it's like get your words together man that's that makes you unstoppable and that's really that's the core of the humanities that idea get your words together make yourself an articulate creature and then you're you're deadly in the best possible way so and take that seriously and I'll end with something to you students you might think in your more cynical moments that you have to offer your professors what they want and gerrymander the content of your language to suit their predilections or what you consider to be their predilections first of all it's a very small minority of professors who are corrupt enough to punish you for producing a high-quality essay that they don't agree with and and though that's reprehensible but it doesn't happen very often but more importantly it's it's it's the highest academic sin to do that because what you're here to do is to learn to find your true voice and every time you deviate from that for expedient reasons you corrupt yourself and not in a trivial way because when you formulate your arguments that that becomes a permanent part of your character you carry that with you it becomes part of the structure through which you view the world and that guides your actions and so you hold your words pristine and you work in a dedicated way to become as articulate and clear as you can possibly become and there's nothing that's more practical and Noble than that at the same time that's why the humanities are so valuable you know you think well what good is a humanities degree it's like well you come out if you're able to speak and think and write no matter where you go like you're you're headed for for the pinnacle and hopefully in a in a in a way that's positive for everyone so that's what I would recommend so turn Peterson there was a very for a beautiful way to enter the interview and Q&A I think we're almost already a bit over time almost 10 minutes but thank you for your passionate words and yeah again thank you very much [Applause] [Music] [Music]

Channel: Room for Discussion

Views: 702,238

Rating: 4.841619 out of 5

Keywords: #RfD, #RoomforDiscussion, #Interview

Id: v-PQbFfQKVs

Length: 87min 13sec (5233 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 07 2018