Jordan Peterson | Full interview | VPRO Documentary (2019)

[Music] first of all i'd like to tell you that um i already knew you before you were famous now how did you manage that yeah you co-offered some articles on fiction and empathy oh yes with raymond maher raymond martin keith oatley yes yeah how can you do those i know them and i know they are oh how nice yeah because i cited them in my dissertation what was your dissertation on it was on literature and empathy well it turns out literature is good for something it is it's just you know likely why we read it and yeah talk about it and tell stories and watch movies and do all those sorts of things yes that was that would be my first question uh what do you find interesting about that fiction and empathy topic well it's a matter of mimicry you know for me to to feel empathy for you i have to see the world through your eyes and i do that with my body i go what i do technically is i attempt to to determine what your goal is and i do that by observing well your nonverbal behavior substantially your verbal behavior as well especially the direction of your eyes and i get some sense of what you're focused on as a consequence of that and because of that i can also focus on that and if i do the same thing then my body reacts the same way yours does in which case i feel emotions that are similar to yours and then i can understand you and so when you go to a movie or you read a piece of literature you focus on the protagonist or whatever or the series of protagonists and you identify their goals and by identifying their goals you can place yourself in the same state of mind that they are and then you can embody their emotions it's not a cognitive process it's an embodied process and then you can read off your emotions and infer what they might be thinking and then that gives you the opportunity to see the world from the perspective of other people which you need to do if you're going to cooperate and compete with them successfully and so literature storytelling not literature specifically but storytelling and ever all of the dramatic arts are there precisely to facilitate that understanding that's why children pretend play so often and so naturally they they adopt roles to to become other people so that they can understand each other it's crucially important and one of the things that i'm concerned about is the fact that our modern technologies especially phones because they're so ubiquitous are likely interfering with children's ability to engage in sufficient dramatic play and because of that it's destabilizing their identities i often wonder if these these these adolescents who are having gender role confusion and say let's call it identity confusion in general are are doing something like delayed pretend play because they didn't get it when they were young and it's not optional it's crucial there's about a four year period from about the age of let's say three till seven or eight where you need to engage in continual dramatic play and that's what catalyzes your identity enables you to practice who you're going to be and if that's interfered with well we have no idea what the consequences of that will be i would say social isolation to begin with because a kid that can't play you know is is hopeless socially you're hopeless socially unless you can play and and you need that early i'd like to get back to this later but perhaps first for our dutch viewers who don't know you yet how would you introduce yourself well i'm a psychologist and a researcher and a professor and an author and a business consultant and a speaker and i don't know if that's the proper order i have a family i have a wife and children um that's me my i've become notorious or well known because of my youtube presence i don't know exactly how you characterize someone like that a media personality a new media personality i suppose i have a very popular podcast and a very popular youtube channel with two million subscribers and a million twitter followers and 500 000 facebook followers and it's some insane number of social media contacts and i've learned how to use that i suppose to some degree over the last four or five years and you just exploded well i mean what i used it for to begin with youtube was to put my lectures online because they were popular and because there was some in interest from television stations in canada small television station and um they were a small hit by the standards of such things and i thought well there's youtube i don't know what the hell youtube is for how about i record my lectures and put them on youtube and see what happens maybe i can teach thousands of people instead of dozens of people and why not so i set up an ipad and a lapel mic you know for two hundred dollars and started to record my lectures and they became very popular even before all the political um scandal enveloped me and then well in 2016 i objected to legislation that was brought in by the canadian federal government had already been brought in by the provincial governments mandating certain forms of not only certain forms of speech but certain forms of conceptualization about what constitutes sex and gender and i felt that it was unconscionable there is no scientific justification for it there is no logical justification for it's completely incoherent doctrine and policy i think it's dangerous beyond belief i think it's an incredible intrusion on free speech i know that the legislation is unprecedented in british common law history and i also know that in the united states the supreme court in 1942 i believe expressly forbade precisely what the canadian federal government did in 2016 and so because i objected to that i got myself in a tremendous amount of political trouble because people assumed that i was bigoted against trans uh people and well and and racist and and homophobic and all the other things that you're tarred and feathered with if you dare to have an opinion that varies from the noisy um virtue signaling minority and after that i think partly because i already had 300 youtube videos up things just exploded around me and also i published a book in january of 2018 which added to the 2018 2018. yes 2018 which it added to the general um racket let's say and i found myself um in a very strange position traveling the world talking to i've traveled to 160 cities in the last year and spoken to about 350 000 people about personal responsibility and the meaning that is to be found in and not in rights but in but in responsibility and no one seems to be talking about that for reasons i don't understand and so people are starving to hear that also for reasons i don't understand so that's the situation now and it's a very odd life although my name is not i would say particularly positive among certain elements of the press i'm accused of all sorts of things that have absolutely nothing to do with what i believe but my normal life such as it is is continually punctuated by encounters with people on the street dozens a day if i go outside of people who tell me that they're they've watched my videos they listen to my podcasts they read my book they're they were in desperate straight six months ago they're doing much better and so they're thankful about that and help and pleased that someone is offering them an encouraging word because i actually to be happened to be rather positively predisposed to people and i think that's rare because in our culture we believe that we're something like a cancer on the planet and that our activity is unconscionably destructive and that the best thing we could do is to cease having children and make ourselves scarce and i think that that's a viewpoint that's cruel and vicious and resentful and appalling and i buy none of it we do the best we can under very difficult circumstances and we're only barely baking waking up to our planetary responsibilities and not doing such a bad job for people who've only figured it out 50 years ago so i'm trying to offer people some encouragement for their trouble and they seem in staggeringly desperate need of that it's touching sure well it's very it's very peculiar and difficult to accustom myself to meeting endless parades of strangers everywhere in the world who tell me a desperate story with a happy ending it's a very private story you know and they obviously trust me enough to first of all tell me what was wrong and then let me in on the fact that things have improved dramatically because they've developed a vision for their life and because they've decided to marry their girlfriend and because they've decided to have a family finally and to settle down and to work at their career even though they may just have a job and to tell the truth and that that's working and so they're very pleased about that and so you know maybe i don't know what the proper reaction to receiving information like that on a rather random basis is but but it's not nothing we've met some of your fans and uh we got your impression they were all male fans that the ones that we talked to um and that they were struggling with their manhood and that you uh give them this message that it's okay to be a man it's not okay it's necessary what the hell are we gonna do without men you look around the city here you see all these buildings go up these men they're doing impossible things they're under the streets working on the sewers they're up on the power lines in the storms and the rain they're keeping this impossible infrastructure functioning this thing that works in a miraculous manner they work themselves to death and often literally and and the the um the gratitude for that is sorely lacking especially among the people who should be most grateful you see university professors especially of the social justice bent who are among the most protected and privileged people that the world has ever produced they take everything they have for granted failing to understand entirely that there's a massive infrastructure of unbelievably hard-working solidly laboring working-class men breaking themselves in half on a regular basis making sure that everything that always breaks works and so a little gratitude for that is in order and it's very useful to tell everyone not just men that they have an important role to play a necessary role and that if they act properly and honestly and forthrightly that they can put their lives together and they can help their families and they can make their communities better and that that's not toxic masculinity that appalling phrase it's what keeps the world going round if we had any sense we'd understand that instead of doing everything at every possible moment to label what we have in the west as oppressive and patriarchal and and and fundamentally predicated on power of all the insane propositions anybody who's ever worked for a functional organization knows perfectly well that the organization isn't predicated on power you have a boss who's whose fundamental motivation is power well first of all the probability that he's going to be successful is very low because everyone will be working against him behind the scenes the people who are successful are good mentors and they're hard workers and they're productive and they're competent and they do their job properly and they do everything they can my observation has been that they do everything they can to find junior colleagues who have potential and possibility and work diligently to further their careers and find that a major if not the major source of satisfaction in their life certainly the people i've met in my life who've been very successful and i've met many very successful people are thrilled to death when they can find someone who's young and willing and able and conscientious and straightforward and diligent and they open doors for them in every direction they can possibly manage and none of that's credited to the oppressive capitalist patriarchal system which also is doing miracles is performing miraculously all around the world raising this standard of living of poor people everywhere in the world at a rate that's unprecedented in human history the u.n itself which i would hardly regard as a pro-capitalist organization believes that absolute poverty will be eradicated by the year 2030 in its totality it's been halved since between 2000 and 2012. we're right we're moving rapidly towards a post-poverty world economy where no one is starving except for political reasons and there's no gratitude for that either you think capitalism is there's no there's absolutely no doubt about it it's it's the collapse of the soviet union and the catastrophic economic policies that the communists implemented especially in places like south america and africa the burden of that has been lifted at least slightly and so we start to see some semi-sane economic policies that reward people for their own entrepreneurial productivity and provide them with a modicum of security and we're producing surpluses in every possible direction free electronic communication for everyone in the world rapid dissemination of fresh water and sanitation facilities markedly reduced child mortality which is now in sub-saharan africa down to the same levels it was in europe in 1952 it's an absolute miracle and no one's aware of it and and it's to be laid at the feet of the dissemination of the idea of individual sovereignty and free market principles around the world and if you're if you're if you dare to put yourself forward as a spokesperson for the poor you could do nothing better but to hope that we make everybody on the damn planet as rich as we possibly can as quickly as possible because the evidence also suggests that as soon as you get people's family as soon as you get the gdp of a country up above five thousand dollars a year then people start to take care of the environment and so you see in places like china and in india there are more forests now than there were 30 years ago there's more forests in the northern hemisphere than there were 100 years ago there's all sorts of things on the on the even on the biological front that are positive in in ways that people don't know about it's not to say we don't have our troubles you know i would say the oceans are overfished badly and and that's that's a big mistake but that's a tragedy of the commons and but most things are far better than they've ever been and there's so little gratitude for that that it's a form of incomprehensible miracle to me in our documentary we're focusing on male female relations in canada and in the west and on feminism so i'd like to get back to you to that point because that was one of the things that you that you mentioned do you think that men are having a more difficult time today than women oh that's very hard to say i don't think men are encouraged i think they're discouraged actively right from day one whether that makes them have a harder time than women is very difficult to say i think those things are best judged on an individual level i mean i was thinking about and then if you think about it historically well you know it's 2019 well imagine 1919 well we'd that would have been four years of a terrible war with tens of thousands of people dead and then the spanish influenza you know it could be a hell of a lot worse than it is now and and so we have our problems i i think the most serious is a form of strange political polarization that threatens to some degree that seems to threaten the stability of our political systems um and the civility of our society but um you know it depends on your on your grounds of comparison it's not like we're starving it's not like we're in the middle of a plague there's no civil war you know things could be a hell of a lot worse but there's there's a there's a pernicious social viciousness that's emerged over the last 10 years that i think is disheartening to people and it would be nice if that would dissipate and perhaps it will perhaps people will gain their senses and stop causing unnecessary trouble i mean it's not surprising to me to some degree we have a technical problem the technical problem fundamentally is that the birth control pill radically altered the relationship between men and women it admit it turned women into creatures who did not know who they were and unsurprisingly because an entire plethora of new options opened up and it destabilized the relationship between men and women for the same reason and it's not easy to understand the new dynamic that that should or could emerge as a consequence of women having voluntary control over the reproduction so to me it's it's in large part the the male female issue is the the upheaval of something that's the equivalent of a major biological mutation so what we've had 40 years to figure that out it's like we haven't figured it out um i think that we've also compounded that by doing almost nothing but lying to young women because that's all we do to young women you know we tell them that well first of all that career is the most important thing in life which it by there is no evidence whatsoever that that's true if you look at standard public opinion polls you find that 75 of people regard their family and their friends as the most important part of their lives men as well men as well yes it's the social well jesus most careers aren't careers they're jobs how many bloody people have a career and even if you have a career what makes you think it's worth giving up a family for what are you going to do when you're 50 and 60 and 70 and you're alone and believe me there's going to be plenty of people facing that and you know so it's no solution and to tell young women that their fundamental orientation in life is going to be a careers complete lie it's it's it's not only not true conceptually because that isn't how people are oriented but it's untrue demographically because what happens to the vast majority of women even professional women is that when they hit their 30s their early 30s they cut back radically on their career commitments and start to focus on having a family and no bloody wonder because well you better get at it that's the first thing because 30 is pushing it and second well what makes you think that your job is so all-consuming and and meaningful you mostly get paid to do things that you don't want to do which is why you get paid for them you know there's this tiny fraction of people who have hyper interesting creative careers and they're a tremendously tiny proportion of the population and even those people it isn't obvious to me have lives that are better served by their extraordinary careers than they would be served by normative family arrangements and and you need people you need an intimate partner you need children and grandchildren these aren't optional and to to tell young women that that's part of the propaganda of the oppressive patriarchy is you could hardly do them a more cruel disservice and they will discover that when they're 30. you know it's why the lost law um why the law firms lose all their women in their 19 in their 30s they all go and take part-time jobs or work 9-5 they're not interested in the c-suite do you know how goddamn hard you have to work to be a c-suite executive it's 80 hours a week i know some insane men that work in the c-suite you know and the the mystery isn't why there are few women in the sweet sweet c-suite the mystery is why there are any men at all in the c-suite because all they do is work and they have a tremendous amount of responsibility and you think well they have many millions of dollars and they know they have their yachts and their freedom and you know that's trust fund people or people who are benefiting from unearned oil revenue in the middle east you know the the the parasitical rich let's say who aren't productive but most of the people who occupy themselves in business have thousands of employees that they're responsible for and unbelievably heavy responsibilities and they pay a huge price in that price for that because all they do is work now some men in particular and some women but a fewer proportion of women some men are wired like that and wherever you put them they're going to work 80 hours a week because they're hyper conscientious and that's the it's in their nature but i wouldn't necessarily recommend it as a recipe for a balanced life even though the rest of us might be reasonably pleased that there are at least some people who are willing to do that but to think of that as a target for ambition is it's just not realistic for the vast majority of people who wants that why would you want to work 80 hours a week it's exactly what i know this i worked with female lawyers for for a decade high performing female lawyers and all of them woke up at 29 or 30 once they'd made partner and thought what the hell am i doing i'm working constantly i mean the salaries were very good the level of income was very high but they were usually married to men who also had very good incomes because those two things tend to correlate very highly women generally marry men who have incomes who are higher than theirs they're thinking well how about if i have a life you know which is a perfectly reasonable question and so but a lot of it's confusion you know but what i also don't understand especially from the feminists is that if the goddamn oppressive male patriarchy is such a hellish structure bent on the oppression and domination of everyone in the world why in the world are women encouraged to flock into it and occupy all the positions of power that makes no sense to me at all if like is it supposed to be magically transformed in its oppressive nature merely because women happen to be doing exactly the same jobs that men were are the women magical in some sense and are going to decrease the degree to which the oppressiveness occurs there's no evidence for that you know that women who have male bosses are happier on average than women who have female bosses the data the the psychological data on that are quite clear so there's no evidence that women run more compassionate and or efficient organizations than men and i don't know why you would expect them to because men and women are more the same than they are different even though the differences aren't trivial so and the idea that there are no differences between men and women which is the standard social constructionist line is only indicative of an ignorance of biology that's so profound that it should be criminal so there's many many differences between men and women and and morphologically physiologically psychologically temperamentally hormonally developmentally right from from from in utero exposure to different sex hormones and these are not trivial matters and they have a not a determining effect but a crucial effect and you see these especially manifested in the extremes which is why for example that the rates of incarceration of men are 10 to 15 times those of women that's not sociological it's because there's a small proportion of men who are hyper aggressive and you can identify them when they're two so you know the social constructionists judith butler and people like that they know absolutely nothing about biology nothing and their ignorance of biology is so profound that they don't even think that they need to know anything about biology because it's not real it's all a social construct and it's it's it's it does no one any good we know in the scandinavian countries you know here's this here's a statistic the freer the site the country the fewer women in the stem fields now explain that it's easy if you allow women their choice they go into professions that care for people if you allow men their choice they go into professions that deal with things and the freer the society the more that happens and so the scandinavians are in this strange position where they've maximally freed their sexes by introducing socially egalitarian legislation and one of the fundamental consequences is that the differences between men and women in scandinavia are bigger than they are anywhere else in the world both in terms of occupational choice and personality and the scandinavians have no they have no idea what to do about that it was a shock to everyone including the psychologists who discovered it but what are we going to do we're going to force little boys and little girls to be exactly the same we're going to set up a huge bureaucracy to start to hyper-socialize them when they're when they're tiny so that they become identical in every way by the time they're adults you really think that's going to work you have to be ign arrogant beyond conception and cruel to think that such a policy would be either viable or or reasonably implemented jordan you're touching on a lot of things right now and there are some things that i can that i have some arguments for but i i'd like to separate a few things and try to get a few things clearer from you and one of them is it sounds when i hear you talking that you would be in favor for a more of a more traditional gender world division is that true well no not necessarily but i'm certainly in favor of a more traditional familial structure it's like have some damn kids what are you going to do with your life you know you've you've got what's the difference between a more traditional familiar structure and a more traditional general division well you know perhaps we can set it up so that men have the opportunity to spend more time with their kids you know now exactly how we're going to do that isn't obvious because it seems to me that men are not well equipped to take care of infants under a year old i don't i don't see that they're they're good at that at all that's been my experience and my observation and well no my observation as well and but men get better at it as the children get older and and they're perfectly capable of establishing extremely tight relationships with their kids especially i think after they after they're old enough to start to engage in rough and tumble play which starts to happen really after about nine months the men can really start to step in in my view i think that for the first year of life of a child's life the woman's role is to take care of the baby and the man's role is to take care of the woman and the baby and to step in and to and to stop her from becoming exhausted and to make sure that things go smoothly and then the couple can negotiate the roles after that and make them as egalitarian as they want or can manage and there's nothing wrong with having men deeply involved in their family structures it's it's to their benefit clearly the most detrimental predictor of poor long-term outcome for children is fatherlessness and of course that's something no one will talk about either because well every family is the same and it doesn't matter if you have a father well it turns out to bloody well matter a lot because if you don't have a father you're far more likely to become pregnant as a teenage girl you hit puberty earlier you're way more likely to be alcoholic your rates of mental illness go through the roof and if you have sons they're far more likely to be criminally incarcerated and drug addicted and it's not a trivial effect and so men are necessary in families and the more time they spend with their children proper time the better and so that's not exactly traditional not suggesting that women stay home with the babies constantly and have 10 of them while the men go off to work like they did 40 years ago or say 60 years ago there's more intelligent ways of organizing a family but we should get our priorities straight and a birth rate of 1.2 or whatever it is that we have that characterizes the western world at the moment is not it's the sign of a very unhealthy society it's the sign of a society that's lost the idea of the divinity of the virgin mother and the child and it's not a good thing so and i i don't i don't see any evidence that it's improved people's qualities of life all of the demographic evidence suggests that women have become increasingly unhappy since the early 1960s so you know the cross-sectional studies continually conducted year after year show precisely that and it could easily be because they've you know they're taking on more and more responsibility you think well you have a career and it's fulfilling and all of that but it's not just fulfilling it's stressful and difficult and if you have a career and a family especially if you're a single mother well good luck to you man you're run off your feet non-stop and you're a target for every predatory male in the neighborhood it's not a pleasant mode of existence and it's not one i would recommend for people even though there are many single mothers who do you know heroic work doing the best they can for their families but they're completely overwhelmed you can't work and have kids and be single how the hell could you do that there it's two full-time jobs at least and that's only if you have one kid so and we don't know how to solve a lot of these problems because it turns out that having children is very expensive and farming them out to um daycare doesn't make economic sense you can you can do the calculations on the back of an envelope and figure that out in about 15 minutes if you're vaguely arithmetically inclined and would actually like to know the facts so you know you need a trained child care worker so that's maybe 45 000 a year you have to double that for overhead that includes the buildings and the rest of the structure especially if the children are young so that's 90 000 a year well and then if you have young children the most the largest number of children that you can place with the caregiver is three possibly four but if they're young enough let's say three that's thirty thousand dollars a child well that's post-tax money well if you have two children how many people make enough money to spend sixty thousand dollars a year having someone else take care of their children and that that problem isn't going to go away you're going to hire un untrained workers to to take care of the children you're going to have substandard um physical infrastructure two to to to provide them with because no one's figured that out economically well the scandinavians seem to have figured it out with cheap child care or even state funded child care and also a paternal leave that's divided and what's their birth rate well but why is that so important to birth rate because it's it's well i don't know oh what what's what's so important i mean that's part of the question well what's important well children are important and one isn't enough for well first of all we don't even know if children can be raised on their own i mean how we don't know i was raised on my own well i mean it happens but you know the natural human environment is to be is for children to be surrounded by other children and we have no idea how much socialization occurs as a consequence of having siblings you know you think well you're raised by your parents it's like no not in a not in a standard human environment mostly you're raised by your siblings and your friends and if you don't have any siblings then well what does that do to you well you don't know and no one knows but it makes you different than you would otherwise be i would say one of the things that it's likely to do is to make you substantially more narcissistic than you would otherwise be in that's obviously no slur on you but you know siblings keep each other in place and they and they teach you they teach you how to interact under very competitive conditions with other people and they play with you and they're role models for you and you know we don't know if the a structure of two parents and one child is stable or healthy we know nothing about that and my my suspicions are that it's not because children need other children so now we do see that the scandinavian countries and i don't include holland in that people tend to include holland i don't think we are scandinavian country that they are they score highest on happiness so they must do something right well they're rich but they're also they're also other rich countries but then yes and most of the rich countries score quite high on happiness the scandinavians do do particularly well but the difference between them and the canadians and the americans and so forth isn't that great i mean they're and and they are actually quite staggeringly rich especially the norwegians since they have all their oil money and so there's multiple reasons why their societies are stable they're also homogeneous countries in the large which also seems to be something that contributes to the stability of communities according to the work of robert putnam from harvard and they're small countries and they're relatively easy to govern and so there's multiple reasons why the scandinavians might be doing well and their egalitarian policies are perhaps part of it but it takes careful analysis to pull those things apart and hand and measure half and measuring happiness is no straightforward thing either and i would say that their alcoholism rates are relatively high so um it's a complex question yeah i know i studied psychology it is it's a complicated question and so and the scandinavians but i wouldn't underestimate the degree to which general economic prosperity and a relative heterogeneity or homogeneity of of social expectation is a major contributor but i'm just trying to find out uh do you or do you not think that gender equality is also something that leads to happiness that makes couples happier well it depends on what you mean by equality well you know if you mean well that equality is a very complicated word because people use it to signify equality of outcome which i think is absolutely an appalling concept or they use it to signify equality of opportunity and equality of opportunity means set your society up so those who have the talent have the untrammeled ability to express it well great anyone with any sense even if they were greedy would agree with that i mean if you're talented let's say you're a great musician well i just assumed you had the chance to show that because maybe i could listen to your music you know you have to be a fool not to be in favor of equality of opportunity talent is in short supply and we need to encourage it wherever we can possibly discover it independent of race creed and color and gender and all of those things sex and so people should be shouldn't hide their light under a bushel we've known that forever but then to equate that with equality of outcome and to say that well because there are differences in let's say the sex um represent representation by sex at different strata of different organizations that that's a consequence of of of some sort of fundamental sociological oppression is an entirely different argument as well as being different than the argument that all of the outcomes should in fact be the same if the society was equal because there's no evidence that men and women given free choice will choose the same outcomes and why would they i mean look here's a question diversity inclusivity equity that the triumphant right the modern triumvirate equity is equality of outcome okay let's talk about diversity are people different or not well if they're diverse and diversity is worth pursuing then people are different or they're not it's one or the other so if they're diverse they're different well if they're different if you let them manifest their diversity you're not going to get equality of outcome it's so incoherent that it defies comprehension it's like if people were the same well then you get equality of outcome and if they were the same then you wouldn't have to worry about diversity but if they're different importantly different culturally or biologically whatever the reasons you happen to come up with and you leave them be they're going to pursue their individual idiosyncratic diverse interests and that's going to produce an entire plethora of unequal outcomes and in fact we mostly work for unequal outcomes you know i mean you have a career you picked a specific career you don't expect to be absolutely equal with everyone else on every single parameter because you specialized in something and you're hoping that you can develop some expertise that that ratchets you up a competence hierarchy so that you're good for something and so that you have some opportunities and that's all associated with unequal outcomes as well and one there's supposed to be something bad about that it's like it's what we're striving for it doesn't mean that people are happy when they walk down the street and see a homeless person lying there you know half frozen to death an alcoholic in their sleeping bag no one wants that but those problems are very difficult to solve you think well it's an economic problem it's like not usually it's usually a mental illness problem or it's an addiction problem or most commonly it's an alcoholism problem and throwing money at that is not going to help so you know we we have these hyper simplified solutions for problems that are so complex that that that that fools leap in where angels fear to tread and we associate poverty with lack of money and that's both the conservatives and the liberals do that and it's the height of hypersimplification because people's problems are far more complicated than their mere economic difficulties i it would be lovely i was thinking about this the other day when i was writing it like it would be lovely to believe that the one percent you know who control the world's resources are somehow protected in some fundamental way against the catastrophes and tragedies of existence but they're not you reap you meet people who are well off you know they have a buffer it's better than to be poverty stricken it's certainly better than to be homeless but the relationship between happiness and income comes to a halt at about middle class level and i don't care how much money you have you're still going to get alzheimer's disease you're still going to get cancer the people that you love are still going to die you're still going to fight with your children you're still going to divorce your spouse and you're not protected nearly as well by your money as everybody would like to hope you know and that's actually rather sad because it wouldn't it be lovely if we could have one percent of the population who are actually in a glass bubble protected from the catastrophes of life and at least other people could strive for that but it's nowhere near that simple now again we have to separate a few things because i'm gonna get some water because you're touching upon every time you're touching upon a lot of different things so it's also difficult for me to choose what i'm reacting no problem so um i heard you say this before that this when you were confronted with several facts of women being oppressed in the past that you say well that's an awful story to tell young men this really gets to you everybody's bloody oppressed in the past jesus human history is a complete catastrophic nightmare the more you read it the more horrified you become it's like the vast majority of people killed in wars or men the vast majority of people who are killed in dangerous jobs are men it's like it's not like either of us had an easy time i mean the huge problem for women prior to the 20th century was death in childbirth at least we got that under control you know and you could say well women didn't have all the rights that men had for quite a substantial amount of time but it wasn't like most men had rights christ what percentage of eastern europeans were serfs until 1850. the vast majority of people in the feudal ages were essentially slaves the men didn't have any rights most men didn't get the vote until very late and you know women got it afterwards but not that many decades afterwards and to construe the history of the human race as this as the pervasive oppression of women by men is is it's a story invented by women who have never had a satisfactory relationship with a single man in their entire life not a brother not a father not a husband not a son nothing because if they had a satisfactory relationship they would not be driving that narrative forward you really do believe that i absolutely why would i not believe it what's the counter evidence well the counter evidence are all those facts that women have less less rights like here with certain adults when you're looking at tiny periods you of history of course for the vast majority of human history most people were slaves men and women there were very few free people and then in the west you know in the west for what since the enlightenment a small and increasingly large percentage of men started to develop a certain amount of freedom and that spread very rapidly very rapidly over the over the period of over a minimum number of hundreds of years it spread i think as fast as it possibly could have given all of the things that have to happen in order for that kind of equality to manifest itself and we don't even know what the preconditions are for that equality you can walk down the street in holland safely no no compared to most places in the world you can walk down the streets in holland safely most of the places in the world you can't walk down the street safely well how long does it take to establish a society that's civilized and sophisticated enough so that one of the primary hallmarks of your freedom would be the ability merely to walk somewhere unaccompanied we should be thankful women should be thankful i didn't say women should be thankful i said people should be thankful that we've managed these things and that we freed so many people in such a short time you know the social constructionists their view of history is 300 years long if that usually it's more like a decade you look at this over any reasonable period of time that freedom has spread among people so rapidly especially in the last 500 years that it's it's an absolute bloody miracle you know most men didn't have the vote 150 years ago so we're looking at very small periods of time and and the proclivity for freedom to spread and for equality to spread is very very powerful and then there's virtually no one opposing it you know i mean in the span of a single lifetime it seems like things are progressing rather slowly but from a cultural perspective the rate of change is so fast that it's well that we can barely keep up with it and i don't believe for a moment that the typical woman has fewer opportunities now than the typical man i don't see that that's true at all i don't think the facts support the i certainly don't think the facts support that that's true women are outperforming men at every level of the of the economic hierarchy you know they they don't do as well economically once they graduate but that's partly because of the majors they determined to take and because of the of the choices they make with regards to their career strategies so i don't this this narrative of oppression is it's it's so it's so resentful and so ungrateful and so unrealistic and so historically ignorant that it that it that that it's a miracle to me that people can swallow it it's human history is simple things were terrible before 1895. terrible the average person in the west lived on less than a dollar a day in today's money which is half the current rate that the un regards as abject poverty right you're you're going to be pregnant from the time you were 14 till the time you were 30 and the chances are that you were going to live through that was like zero your parents were going to be dead at least one of them you were going to lose at least half your children you're going to spend the vast majority of your time in backbreaking work you were your life was hard hard in a way that modern people can barely imagine and there's been an economic miracle of unparalleled of of of unparalleled significance in the last 150 years and we have so much more than we had then that that the world isn't even it isn't even vaguely the same and yet we read backwards and we say well men were privileged which bloody men were privileged exactly i mean let's get let's let's let's get down to the nuts and bolts of it who were privileged the the the serfs who who who tilled the land the knights who defended the feudal communities the kings perhaps although i'm not so sure you would have wanted to live in a drafty and freezing castle with no plumbing or electricity or heating or entertainment through ice cold winters with the constant threat of war the men went off to war constantly we were all there were endless numbers of devastating plagues no one had enough to eat it's like and what are we doing we're quibbling about whether men or women had a rougher time it's like jesus you know and when what there was no cooperation between men and women what's that men help raise children do you know how rare that is in the mammalian community it's almost unfor it's almost unheard of and they actually do a pretty good job most men love their children and so where's the oppression some some temporary imbalance in rights as as the idea that universal human suffrage was a appropriate idea slowly manifested itself from about 1500 onward eradicating slavery bringing in universal suffrage over a very short period of time five 100 year old men that's the life that's the span of time we're talking about and now we have this narrative that men were fundamentally oppressing women for since the beginning of time it's like here's a question for you answer this marriage is a patriarchal institution that goes along with the patriarchal oppression narrative okay fine why do rich women marry because they're the only ones that do because marriage is now a privilege reserved for the rich and if you're married you're much less likely to separate you're much more likely to have a stable family you're much more likely to have a stable income especially if you're a woman if you fall down the economic chain you have a series of short-term relationships most of them involving people living together you're much more likely to separate you're much more likely to end up alone and so if if marriage is a patriarchal institution then why are the rich engaging in it okay let me because because we don't have a lot of time i can't really pursue this further i would like to because i could of course go into the fact that right now it's not a patriarchal institution anymore because women do have equal rights and in the past women used to get fired when they got married and all of this sort of stuff but i'm not going to go into that because we need to shift to another topic um because what we're also looking at here that was mostly happened in the 1950s that wasn't even true for most of the 20th century all right but let's let's not go into that further because we're looking at uh how it could be that canada has had two incidents of anti-feminist violence the attack at the polytechnique college and um and the toronto van attack of course yes so um you lived in montreal and i was wondering if you when you first heard about montreal massacre how was that for you well there's there's no shortage of insane and resentful men you know and and they strike they strike innocence in all sorts of different ways there's this the same pathological thought processes characterize the people who shoot up elementary schools or high schools you know there are people who brood and dwell on their failures and their resentment and their and their rejection by the general social community and often by people of the opposite sex but often by people of the same sex even with friendships and they sit in their basements or in their in their in their you know in the hell holes they've created for themselves and they fantasize about taking revenge on the world for the inequities that have been delivered upon them and then they act and they're very rare and they're very unpredictable and we don't know what to do about them and they gather a tremendous amount of press coverage and notoriety for their actions and that's part of what drives it it's a terrible thing but it isn't a problem that we know how to solve because we can't identify the precursors and we can't stop the publicity so it's terrible i i don't think that it's i don't think that there's any evidence that that particular form of appalling insanity is more frequently directed contra sexually than than than generally yeah but we're looking at these two attacks yeah those are terrible attacks and the interpretation of why it happened here in canada no you don't i don't well certainly not in a place like montreal i mean while our toronto for that matter they're pretty civilized cities i mean i don't think you can find a safer city anywhere in the world than for women than toronto and montreal christ in montreal you can walk around if you're female you can walk around unaccompanied everywhere all the time and virtually you're you're you're as safe as you are anywhere in the world it's the same in toronto so there's no explaining fundamentally rare and random acts you know this in-cell character i mean i was interviewed in the new york times about that and i made a comment that monogamous societies tend to be more stable which is absolutely obvious anthropological finding that everyone who's even vaguely educated has known for at least 100 years and the reporter made much of that suggesting that i had this idea that you know undeserving men should be delivered up women on a platter by some sort of state institutional function which is not only something that i certainly don't believe but nobody who's sane has ever believed since the beginning of time this man who drove over his victims was resentful and full of hatred and i said that he had a hatred for god he had hatred for being why because he was rejected i'm not excusing it it's terrible there's no excuse for him whatsoever he should have gone out and made some friends he should have gone to the gym he should have put himself together he should have got educated you know i don't know it's also possible that he had a mental illness that wasn't curable you know i mean there's no shortage of people who are barely clinging to the edges of the of the world with their fingertips and now and then one of them slips off and does something terrible and it's very difficult to draw general conclusions from that except that such things happen the only thing i would say about that is that if you're going to perform an act like that you usually spend many many months or many many years fantasizing about it and it's and the notorious aftermath that will glorify your name and there's nothing in that that's good and i've never suggested for a moment that men who are rejected by women should do anything but look to themselves and improve themselves so that they make themselves into the kinds of partners who would be voluntarily attractive to women who were making voluntary choices it's obviously the only sort of solution that's ever going to work anyways so they're terrible catastrophes and and besides there's no reason to assume necessarily even that the person who undertook the attack is fully cognizant of their own motives you know i mean we don't trust politicians i don't know why we'd trust mass murderers to tell us exactly what was going on in their minds the moment before they perpetrated their terrible crime but i certainly don't think that it reflects specifically on canadian society i i can't see how that can possibly be true given that you know we're among a handful of countries who are essentially egalitarian in their not only in their legal structures but in their in their entire society you know i mean women saturate the workplace in canada and have for 40 years certainly since i've been especially in the professions that i've occupied the vast majority of my colleagues and my students have been women it's par for the course and and it's not a surprise or or a shock to anyone or anything that anyone is complaining about as far as i can tell i just think mostly when i think about it that it's well i find it sad because i've seen so many women especially in their early 30s desperate to have children and i'll tell you that if you want to spend a miserable decade one good way to do it is to wait till you're 30 to try to have children and then to find out that you can't that's no picnic and your chances at that point if you're a couple at 30 is one in three is fertility difficulties which is defined as unlikelihood of or inability to conceive within one year of attempting it and so i don't know precisely how it is that people go about balancing their for an intimate relationship and a family and their career it's a very very difficult problem to solve just like how to raise children is a difficult problem to solve because it's so incredibly expensive i don't know how you solve that economically because the utility of children economically is deferred decades into the future and we don't know how to fund that i want to get back to the attack again because of course a lot of people are saying that it's a backlash against feminism and in the case of the polytechnic massacre that was really clear yeah they say that because it's in their own best political interest it's two bloody people what are you going to do you're going to generalize from two insane people when was the polytechnic massacre how long 89 right so it's it's more than 20 years ago and you had this attack a year ago it's two attacks 35 million people two attacks in three decades you're going to draw generalized political conclusions from that and then you're going to assume that those generalized political conclusions aren't a consequence of your own motivations what's that a random sample or something two insane people that's no random sample there's no drawing conclusions from that remember the man who shot up the elementary school in in the eastern seaboard in the united states you draw a conclusion from him you're gonna say something general about society because someone was insane enough to go kill children you can't do that you can barely generalize about social trends if you do a random stratified poll even those things haven't been accurate recently in predicting uh um political outcomes so it's all well and good for people who are already grinding at acts to say that these acts are you know indicative of widespread attitudes towards women it's like two attacks out of 35 million people in 30 years is not indicative of widespread antipathy towards women now these are two attacks of course just two but you have this huge red pill community online and you you must be familiar with the red pill community i'm vaguely familiar with them yeah but so what of it well their whole thinking is that feminism is oppressing men no their whole thinking is that radical social justice warriors are polarizing society and that's exactly what's happening so there that you can't you can't accuse the red pill society of holding viewpoints that are even vaguely commensurate with people who commit crimes of that magnitude there's there's nothing fair about that at all it's like it's like painting half the population in the united states half the population is republican has been for the last 40 years you know they tend towards more conservative perspectives on many many things has nothing to do with antipathy towards women as unless you assume that it's only the liberals that have the best interests of women in mind and i certainly don't believe that at all i don't think that the liberals do the especially the radical i'm not the liberals so much because they're more in the center but the radical left types i don't think they have the best interest in women in mind at all in fact i don't think they have anybody's best interests in mind and and to identify uh a uh a vague amalgam of of of loosely connected people online who discuss in a meme like fashion being red pilled with some generalized vicious antipathy towards women i think is there's no evidence for that at all a tremendous amount of it is merely adolescent trolling and mainstream media people don't understand what happens online at all they they these people there's there's plenty of people there who do what they do merely to distract and confuse the mainstream media types who have no idea what the culture actually constitutes and they do it with incredible effectiveness they play them for fools all the time the whole peppy thing was a perfect example of that that right wing conspiracy that was supposed to manifest itself in some you know horrible bloody uprising just vanished as soon as the trump election was over so we don't understand these internet communities and to assume that they're somehow associated with the desire for violence against women is is i think there's no evidence for that whatsoever and certainly i don't think that that's the case of the red pill community such as it is most of them are people who've were more left-leaning and liberal who've converted to some degree to a more conservative perspective mostly because the liberal center keeps moving left and leaving so many people that were once liberal behind most of the people who were in the idw were liberals joe rogan's a liberal as far as he's concerned dave rubin's a liberal as [ __ ] as far as he's concerned ben shapiro isn't but you know shapiro is a political pundit so you can hardly expect it from them i never thought of myself as a conservative you know i'm i'm a social scientist and i know perfectly well that it's dangerous to experiment on large scale with untested social policies on on populations that haven't precisely agreed to the parameters of your experiment because the probability that you have the diagnosis correct and the and uh and the answer at hand is zero let's make this more concrete what is it exactly that you think is so dangerous what is it exactly that you think is so dangerous i think the doctrine of equality of outcome is dangerous can you explain that because it forces all the all the individuality out of people it denies the individuality discuss equality the assumption that here's the assumption if at every level of every at every hierarchical level of every organization every demographic group is not represented in the same proportion as they're represented in the population then the reason for that is systemic oppression on the part of the patriarchal of the of the of the patriarchal of the patriarchy let's leave it at that well that's just not the case that isn't the reason for it and why is it dangerous because it it invokes the demand for social policies to redress the problem which is impossible there are too many different kinds of people first of all i mean maybe you work for gender parity or sex parity in terms of wages well first of all that's extraordinarily difficult just that and that's a single dimension you're going to do that for race you're going to do that for ethnicity you're going to do that for social class you're going to do that for attractiveness you're going to do that for the multitude of genders that apparently exist you're going to equate for all of that but jordan i think you're making an assumption that this is what people want while they're the ones that are advocating for equity who are who are well what do you mean who are the entire basis of the social justice movement who are these people who are these people well mostly there's there are people who occupy um academic positions in the social sciences and humanities and they're people who work primarily in human resources departments for example in large corporations that's the and then there's a large swath of the general mainstream media who holds similar views there are people who are on the farthest left extreme of the political continuum there's only it's only about seven percent of the population that holds views of this type although they're much more highly represented than that in in university set settings and this is the agenda that they've promoted so and i mean that i don't maybe it's not the same in holland but the tri the the the the uh the diversity equity and inclusivity mantra is it's like the central policy of our entire federal government it was the central policy of the provincial government before they got demolished thankfully in the last election it's the new morality it's it's not it's not it's not something i'm just inventing out of whole cloth it's it's trumpeted everywhere christ the law society in in ontario last year the the the people who ran the law society made it a regulation that if you had a law firm of a certain size and not that big that you had to write a statement proclaiming your um allegiance to the principles of diversity inclusivity and equity on pain of well it was unspecified at the point but the eventual threat was loss of your legal license well thankfully this year a woman spent 18 months garnering up a new slate of candidates to run the ontario law society and chased all the radicals out of the organization and hopefully they've scrapped the requirement but this is this is it's pervasive in the uh it's pervasive in the um elementary school curriculums it's pervasive in the junior high school curriculums it's taught in all of the gender and ethnic studies departments in the universities it characterizes the viewpoints as i said of a substantial proportion of social scientists and humanities there's almost no conservatives in the social social sciences and the humanities and if you had to boil down the the cliches and slogans of their political viewpoint that's it that's what they've picked diversity inclusivity and equity i've never even really been able to figure out what inclusivity means this is such an ill-defined concept i know what diversity means it means representation by immutable biological quality and equity is a weasel word that means equality of outcome and that's exactly what people are aiming for and and and they make no bones about it so i i don't see how it comes as a surprise that that's the fundamentally appropriate way of summing up that particular political viewpoint well i don't know exactly how this is in canada but in the netherlands if we have quotas or whatever it's people are not as strict as as you present them to be they just want equal representation as far as possible just that the people representation on what basis look our prime minister when when in the last federal election 27 percent of the of the mps who were elected were women 50 of the people in the cabinet were women now how in the world two questions a how is that possibly fair and b how is it possible statistically that he picked the most competent people it's statistically impossible how many people were there that he could choose from it's hundreds so then you still have a large enough it doesn't matter it's a matter of pure proportion if 75 of the people if you have 75 of the people on one side of the room and 25 of the people on the other and you pick the most competent people you'll draw three quarters of the people from the one side of the room and one quarter from the other it has nothing to do with that the number of people well it could also be that those women worked harder to get there since they're they're but it also couldn't be and then without stringent evidence that that was the case i wouldn't make that assumption because i don't think that first of all 50 of women vote or 50 of the people who can vote are women and so if the women are interested in going into politics which they seem to be less interested in by the way than men then they have the opportunity to appeal to their gender to be elected and i'm not going to um accept the proposition that they had to work twice as hard to get where they wanted to go maybe they did and maybe they didn't and it's something that would be judged on an individual by individual case and regardless of that there's still absolutely no listen i think that the women the cabinet women the cabinet members who took their cabinet positions who were women in the trudeau federal government should be ashamed of themselves for the rest of their life for allowing themselves to be elevated to position of power based fundamentally on their genitalia there's no excuse for it if they had an ounce of pride they would have rejected it and said you pick the most competent people that's your job it's 2015 and so we have 50 percent women it's like no these are important positions we elect we appoint the people who are the most competent for the job and we do it independently of their fundamental biological nature that's the whole point of an egalitarian society and you say well women were oppressed in the past so these women deserve a specific advantage and in what possible manner is that just it doesn't it doesn't offer the people who were transgressed against any recourse because they're all dead it offers the women who are being promoted now a completely unfair advantage and not only that makes anyone who has any sense whatsoever skeptical of their capabilities because i'm skeptical of the capabilities of anyone who's promoted on any basis other than merit and if you were promoted on any other basis then merit you should be skeptical a of your ethical um what would you call ethical justification for accepting the position and also deep in your heart at three in the morning when you're wondering just how competent you are you're going to be waking up thinking hmm just exactly why am i here and am i so bloody sure that i didn't take the position of someone else who deserved it more so and also one of the consequences of that too is that the trudeau government has pursued an exceptionally feminist agenda and virtually every piece of ed of legislation that they've run through their process so far has concentrated on such things as the wage gap in canada which believe me is not the most pressing problem we have in canada by any stretch of the imagination it wasn't even a bloody issue until the trudeau government came into power so no one was even talking about it and it was working itself out at a very rapid rate you know and then the pay the whole pay gap issue is complicated beyond belief not least because for example women are much more likely to work part-time and they're likely to work shorter hours you work 10 percent more hours do you know how much more money you make just jordan you make 40 more money if you work 10 more hours but i want to i want to kind of yeah not go into all of these different things again so competence um the issue of course is as you you know you're a psychologist that men often get jobs uh in power because they're better at presenting themselves as confidence this is there's very little evidence for that the best predictors of this just talk about no there is no evidence for that the best predictors of being hired and being successful are intelligence as measured by iq tests and conscientiousness as measured by the big five there are tiny advantages to extraversion there are tiny advantages to attractiveness so it's not the case that that men are better at whatever it is that takes for them to get hired at a particular job and it's certainly not the case in most modern high-level educated corporations in the universities for example the evidence is crystal clear at the moment that if you're a female especially in the stem fields your probability of being hired is overwhelmingly higher than a man with the same qualifications in that field but i'm talking about powerful positions what about powerful positions there's the dunning-kruger effect and you know about this right tell me the daunting people who present as very confident kind of narcissistic are more likely to be believed by other people and to be judged as competent even though there's no correlation between this overconfidence and right but it's a varied it counts for a very tiny part of the variance in the initial in the eventual outcome we're not looking at 50 of what constitutes the probability that someone will be hired we're looking at two or three percent look iq accounts for about 25 of your probability of being successful so that leaves 75 percent unaccounted for and conscientiousness accounts for another 10 so the best two predictors together account for 45 after that the next best is neuroticism and it's a negative predictor and it only accounts for about four percent and then these effects that you're talking about they're trivial they barely register so they're certainly not accounting for the differential positioning of men and women in positions of power and also i would also take some exception to the conceptualization of those positions as positions of power because i would say that their positions of competence and authority most of the time unless you're talking about a tyrannical dictatorship because the people that i know who are ceos and cfos and who run c-suites aren't wandering around with a mace and a club and beating people into submission if they don't do their will they're engaged in a very very complex and sophisticated series of negotiations on a constant basis with all of their employees and they bear a tremendous responsibility to ensure that their employees are satisfied and happy because if they aren't they leave and their companies fail and the managerial evidence suggests as well that managers are far more stressed psychophysiologically by their subordinates than subordinates are by their managers and that's partly because if you're a subordinate you have one manager and if you're a manager you have a thousand subordinates and so it's very difficult and so to call those positions of power it's like well sometimes they are but they're not just positions of power first of all power is an unstable way of establishing a hierarchy it doesn't even work for chimps positions of authority positions of competence positions of responsibility okay let's let's but it makes a difference men occupy positions of power first of all no most men don't it's a tiny tiny tiny percentage second why power why use that word well it's simple it's a derivation from a marxist philosophy that's 150 years old that people bandy about without ever thinking about it you know the people i know seriously the people i know who have positions of power like they're they're terrified constantly that their companies are going to fall apart or that they're not serving their employees properly or that they're not going to make the next payroll or that some technological transformation is going to cut their legs out from underneath them they're not sitting in a money bin like scrooge mcduck throwing their coinage up in the air and and triumphantly um what would you call trumpeting their superiority to the rest of the human race they're not interested in having slaves they're interested in having collaborators they're interested in mentoring people and they're ambitious many of them are actually trying to accomplish important and difficult things rather than merely trying to occupy the power positions that the post-modernists love to identify they're doing things you know and then it's the fact that they're doing things that are giving them the positions at least in a in a company that functions when the company starts to deteriorate and that happens very frequently you know to generate into something that's more tyrannical then the political types who who who work fundamentally on power and intimidation have a chance to clamber up to the top but by the time that's happening the company is so damn dead it's probably only got a lifespan of about 10 years okay second point against this this issue of of people in powerful positions um now there are certain positions that are so important because they represent the society like these mps the ministers also judges which are predominantly female now in the netherlands wouldn't it be better to have a more equal division between men and women in those positions not slower certainly it's possible that it would be better i don't know whether it would be better or not it might be better it could be better it's certainly worth the experiment but that doesn't mean that it's better it's better to establish that by quota or by insisting on equality of outcome because you don't know what the determinants are of equality of outcome you know it may be for all you know it might be in 20 years that 75 of the judges are women i mean it's happening very rapidly in all the on all the fields that have to do with with primary human care which is also part of the reason that women's salaries are lower because you can't um scale human care you know if you're a computer programmer and you make a computer program then you can make a million of them if you're a nurse there's like you you know and so some things are very difficult to scale and it's going to be the case that in many disciplines women predominate and whether that's a good thing or a bad thing i have no idea and neither does anyone else you know i mean and i wrestle with it to some degree almost all the elementary school teachers are women well is that a good thing well it's good in that the women chose to be elementary school teachers and they got to follow their free choice and so to the degree that following your free choice in a free society is a good thing that's a good thing is it good for the children to only be exposed to one gender well they're being educated at such a young age i don't know those are separate questions but things are sorting themselves out quite quickly and they're not going to sort out at 50 50. and then so what are we going to do about that we're going to decide that some profession should be 50-50 so that would be the c-suites because that's where the feminists concentrate half the corporate executives have to be female they don't say that about the damn bricklayers it's 99 of bricklayers or men almost all heavy machinery operators almost all construction workers of course it's about the positions of power like judges and like and people well power you know power that's one way of thinking about it but like why is it any more relevant that women are under-represented let's say in the c-suites than that they're under-represented among bricklayers you know the answer no i don't know the answer to that if the goal is 50-50 representation because women have been systemically um what would you call uh they've been systemically excluded from trades and occupations how do you possibly draw the line between those positions where gender equity should be pursued and those positions where it shouldn't it's not possible and i i i defy you to make an argument for why 50 percent of the bricklayer shouldn't be women why why is that not just as unjust let's say as the fact that a small smaller percentage of women occupy c-suite positions well c-suite i'm not concerned about i'm concerned about the mps and the judgments right now and they are highly professional players are not representing high level professional positions then we'll go with that now let's go for the mps and the judges well what they're elected or appointed we have mechanisms for determining this already you put quotas in place there's no excuse for quotas because we don't know how this is going to play out that's your main concern that you don't know how it's going to play well first of all you don't put quotas in if you don't have an equal pipeline that's for sure if there's fifty percent one sex of candidate and fifty percent the other well at least if there were quotas you would be sampling randomly from the talent within the two populations but if there's 10 women and 90 men and you pick 50 of your candidates from the women then you've picked a bad lot of candidates statistically speaking and not just a little bit bad and you see this this sort of thing makes a tremendous difference because the difference in competence between people isn't linear it's non-linear and so if you start to populate um disciplines with sub-standard people who aren't competent then you destroy the disciplines and that happens very rapidly it certainly happened to many disciplines in the universities so that's happened to the government here our government's pretty stable and you know it it it takes a hell of a fool to ruin it in four years you know most western democracies have a lot of different checks and balances in place you know and in canada we have federal system and so the provinces have a fair bit of power and as the liberals rose to ascendancy i hate to call them liberals because they're far left of what the traditional liberals in canada were um because they were always centrists what's happened is that the provincial parties have become increasingly conservative and so canada manages to maintain a pretty decent balance of political viewpoints i would say and so i'm not worried um to any great degree that trudeau has done any long-term substantive damage to the canadian political structure as such although i think his policies have devastated western canada just like his father's policies did um and that was incredibly ill-advised and is going to cause an immense amount of trouble over the next five or six years um but you know there's not more than a moderate chance that he's going to survive the october election anyways depending on how foolish the conservatives are as they attempt to oust them and how divisive their own internal politics become so you know our our western countries are are pretty stable they they have a lot of moving parts that tend to keep them on a relatively even keel so um i don't think the situation is is dire especially by historical standards worse things have happened i think that he's been extraordinarily divisive as a leader i do believe that the relationship between indigenous people in canada and the rest of the population is far worse than it was when he when he first took office and is likely to become worse yet because the drum is continually being beaten and the fundamental problems are not being addressed the fundamental problems are like unbelievably difficult to address but and no one has the courage to do it let's then go to your opinion about this missing and murdered indigenous women report what's your well first of all to consider that a genocide is is is it's like a criminal use of terminology as far as i'm concerned because genocide has a very specific meaning as far as i'm concerned it's it's state or or or police army militia planned militia eradication of specific populations for the purpose of eradicating them everyone knows that that's not what's happening in canada what's happening is that there's an underclass of indigenous canadians who suffer for an endless plethora of reasons isolation especially in northern communities which have no hope of economic survival no more than non-indigenous northern communities have hope of economic survival all the small towns in canada have died all the small towns in europe are threatened the french can't keep their small towns running neither can the italians they're beautiful and ancient they can't even keep them going we have these little places that were scraped out of the bloody frost 50 years ago that were barely functional when they first started they've all died thousands of these towns have died in places like saskatchewan you can't keep tiny reserves going in the north it's completely impossible and the rates of alcoholism are through the roof the same with drug use and it's no bloody wonder it's frigid and dark six months of the year and there's very little to do plus there's no future and so you know people migrate from those places to the city and they get themselves in all sorts of trouble and there's plenty of willing people to aid them in their catastrophes and to consider that a genocide is it's it's a form of false it's a it's a form of it's a form of extortionary false compassion it's it's it's extortion because it requires anybody who objects to the use of the term to present themselves as uncaring and it's it's um inappropriate because the the reason that there are thousands of missing indigenous women and plenty by the way uh missing indigenous men is because of a dozen reasons all extraordinarily complicated and none of which are being managed properly i i would say probably alcoholism being the number one contributor is a very intractable problem in in small communities it's a very dangerous drug fifty percent of the people who are killed are drunk fifty percent of the people who commit the murders are drunk your your highest risk of death is drunk family member right alcohol is a very very toxic drug and it does terrible things to people it impairs their judgment very badly and so well and the problem of alcoholism is widespread not only among the indigenous community but in isolated northern communities in general but it's not like anybody knows what to do about it it's it's a it's a very difficult problem to solve and i lived in an isolated northern community it's no bloody wonder people drink themselves half to death for six months of the year you know it's cold bitterly cold it's bloody dark and there isn't anything to do and the communities don't have a future so you know under those circumstances people turn to alternative forms of hedonic hedonic pleasure and it's it's not surprising but genocide requires a perpetrator so the question is who exactly here is being identified as the perpetrator and the second is exactly why are they being identified as the perpetrator and i know perfectly well the answer to the second part of that question which is that it's very convenient for the ideologues who are underwriting the more extreme elements of these documents to make yet another case for the oppressive colonial patriarchy and to lay the responsibility at the feet of people who aren't them so there's no excuse for it now that doesn't mean there isn't a problem there's a problem the the the the relationship between indigenous people and non-indigenous people in canada is unstable and it's not improving and but but we don't know what to do about it you know i've been working with a native carver for 10 years 15 years i made friends with him when i went to vancouver island i've been buying his artwork since then and uh he carved a 53-foot totem pole that's in front of the montreal museum of fine art that commemorated the residential schools he was a residential school survivor and he had a childhood that was so brutal that it's almost unimaginable it's it's unimaginable that's that's good enough if you if you heard it you'd be suffering for the tail for a few days and he had his slice of hell and that's for sure and you know i've done everything i could along with a friend of mine not to help him because that's not the right way of thinking about it but to engage in useful mutual productive trade so that he has an opportunity to pursue his livelihood and so that i'm a beneficiary of what it is that he produces and his circumstances are so complex that for every step he takes forward the probability that he'll slide back at least one is almost 100 percent it's catastrophes continual deaths alcohol fuel familial breakup chronic divorce fetal alcohol syndrome multiple patterns of drug use abuse on a widespread scale um of both men women and children fragmented culture it's very very very very difficult to make headway in a situation like that and to come out with a report that says well this is a consequence of genocide is to take your own political conviction and hold that as your a prior axiom and then to take all the facts that you can muster and line them up behind what you already knew so well instead of taking the problem apart in all its hopelessness and trying painstakingly incrementally piece by piece to slowly address some of the underlying issues a very difficult thing to do so there's something that i find difficult to to understand about you as a phenomenon and that's that you're you're against polarization but yet you call your opponents like the postmodern feminists the social justice warriors you compare them to nazis and to feminism no i haven't compared them to nazis you say they're like marxists and marxists that's true but i didn't compare them to nazis i compared them to marxists which are just as bad as nazis well on an ethic at the ethical level yes but it doesn't mean that they're the same political they have the same political stripe i don't like people who play group identity politics they're promoting tribalism tribal societies are extraordinarily dangerous and i think they're doing it primarily because of resentment i don't trust i certainly don't trust the marxism and why would i i mean how is it you tell me you tell me after 150 million deaths how it's okay to be a marxist but that's not what i'm getting at what i'm getting at is the type of language you're using to qualify your opponents it seems polarizing as well it depends on the opponents i don't like marxists it isn't that i don't like them there's no excuse for it you call me polarizing if i objected to nazis yes or no paul if i injected no nazis am i polarizing or not but you see these people who want the gender-neutral pronouns that's basically their main point you see them that's their claimed main point but you think they're actually more dangerous than this it isn't that i think they're more dangerous than this i know they're more dangerous than this they wouldn't have put in compelled speech legislation if they weren't more dangerous than that well they would say we don't want discrimination yes that's what they would say but they still put in compelled speech legislation and that never happened before in the history of british common law and as i already pointed out the american supreme court made it illegal in 1942. you can compel speech commercially if you sell tobacco you can make people put a warning on their package you cannot tell people in the united states what they have to say it's not constitutional now you can do it in canada i don't appreciate that jordan you you are all about taking responsibility for your actions and then when i see already in our team also we've had these really fierce discussions about things that you were saying and there was already a schism in the team so it seems like you are somehow a polarizing influence and that that concerns me and i wonder if that concerns you too well of course it concerns me the question is what's the alternative got no i've got no patience for marxists there's no excuse for it there's no more excuse for it than there is for being a nazi in my estimation and now maybe you should say well i should have patience for nazis but i don't that's of course that's not what i'm saying no but one thing is a comparison it's not what you're saying because because it is the marxist that i'm objecting to and it did seem how it's okay to be a marxist because maybe you're for the poor even though you're not i don't think it's okay to be a marxist i don't even think it's a little bit okay to be a marxist i think maybe in 1918 when you didn't know any better even though wise people had already warned against the danger for at least 50 years then maybe you could have assumed that you would bring in the utopia with your ideas of equity but it's a hundred years later and we've seen the carnage but you really see these people as the same thing as the marxists they call themselves marxists no they're worse than the stalinist marxists because the stalinist marxists didn't know who stalin was going to be and we know who stalin stalin was and we knew who mao was and we know who paul part was so let's let's make this clear you really think that these people who are battling for social justice against discrimination that they want some sort of stalinist regime well they wouldn't say that no of course they wouldn't say that their policies would lead inevitably to it and god only knows what they want in their heart of hearts you know it's the postmodern neo-marxist types who are always on about power every structure is predicated on power well first of all that's not true but if you make that claim then you have to ask well why exactly is it that you're claiming that every structure is based on power what exactly does that have to do with your own motivations if you happen to be embedded in a structure does that mean what are you somehow immune to that if it's the only game in town or is it exactly what you're pursuing and so you know it's not like all the people who started the russian revolution wanted a bloody nightmare but that's what they got and then there was a certain proportion of them who were perfectly happy with that outcome too and so no i don't trust them so and i especially don't trust them because they're in a much better historical position to understand the consequences of their doctrines than people were 60 years ago or a hundred years ago far better we had the experiment we ran them multiple countries multiple economic conditions and the same thing always happened it was a complete bloody catastrophe so because for contemporary feminism you think it's it's that dangerous there's lots of different kinds of feminism um there's enough different kinds of feminism so i'm not even sure what the term means the feminists can't agree they can't even have a woman's march together without fragmenting into four into four warring factions so um if feminism means equity then i'm not in favor of it if it means equality of opportunity well more power to them as far as i'm concerned but usually it means something more radical which is why the vast majority of women do not identify as famine as feminists so the majority does identify as feminist if you look at if they are given an actual definition of feminism but it depends on the poll let's put it that way let's put it that way yeah it depends of course it matters if it depends on the definition just like it matters whether or not i'm a feminist whether it depends on the definition if it's a matter of equality of opportunity then i'm a feminist if it's a matter of equality of outcome then no so i have a daughter it's not like i didn't encourage her to be everything that she could be she's really quite something you know she's nobody's fool she's no pushover she's a tough cookie and and that's in large part a consequence of encouragement i have a wife i've had many female colleagues many female graduate students i've worked with women my whole entire life attempting to improve their career trajectories and with plenty of success so i'd say my feminist credentials are beyond question but that doesn't make me a marxist and i don't like ideologues because they don't like to think they just like to think that they're right and they're not right because things are a lot more complicated than they appear to be they get together in their coteries and they pat themselves on the back for having unidimensional solutions to incredibly complex problems and they go home and think that they've done something positive to change the world and there's none of that none of that's work none of that's effort none of that changes anything so i'm not impressed with ideologues let's make it once again very clear what you mean what you are against so equality of outcome ideologues what exactly is it equality of outcome you do yeah well in any and anything that smaps of smacks of marxism yeah but marxism of course you can also define that in various ways basically marxism is the is the hypothesis that human history is the battleground between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat so that human history is best conceptualized as a continual battle between those who have and those who don't but we're now talking within feminism well it's changed into identity politics so it's it's just switched from economic power to other forms of power it's the same damn thing okay so and the problem with that too is that there's an infinite division of privileges so one of the things i found out about the russian revolution please start it let's not go into the russian revolution but just what's important is within i know you asked about equity yeah okay how many identities do you have do you think let's say 10. okay you're an oppressor on at least two of them you're white yeah and middle class okay good two so when the when the revolution comes you can have your eight dimensions of victimization and your two dimensions of oppression and you can bloody well be sure that you'll be punished for the oppression and not rewarded for the victimization and that is what happened in the russian revolution and it's an inevitable consequence of those sorts of policies because you can fragment people's identities to the point where you find where they're the oppressor and as soon as they're the oppressor even for one reason then they're the enemy and if you happen to be the sort of person who enjoys collecting enemies let's say and there's plenty of people like that then one reason that you're the enemy is more than sufficient okay so it's identity politics within feminism that it's the presumption that the fundamental hallmark of human identity is the group that's wrong it's not only wrong it's it's it's far worse than wrong it's retrogressive it's tribalistic it's dangerous it's an incitement to violence it's resentful and it's malevolent all of those things no group identity politics we got it right in the west the sovereignty of the individual and the reason for that is each of each of us is a sufficiently complex nexus of individual group identities so that we have to be treated as unique individuals that's the ultimate lesson of intersectionality if only the intersection of intersectionalists had enough sense to think it through which they don't so actually you're a real intersectionalist feminist then um with friends like me they don't need enemies yeah look there's no reason that the human race shouldn't take advantage of the talents of every woman on the planet it's foolish otherwise one of the best predictors of economic growth in any country is the degree to which women are granted rights right it's a great predictor which is extraordinarily interesting and why we would waste half the talent who in the right mind would possibly do that so i've got no problem with providing people with a plethora of opportunity the more the better but the oppression narrative the the group identity the the insistence that structures of authority and competence are only predicated on power all of that is toxic and dangerous now this to me seems like a different uh thing from what you were saying before and it's oh just in the in the manner that you're expressing yourself now i think it's much clearer now what you are actually against and uh and how you see these male female dynamics well the funny thing is it's that i'm not so much against you know when i talk when i do my this is why interviews are so strange when i do my lectures i don't talk politically i'm not against things i'm for individual people individual people so get out there do your best tell the truth set the world in order have a family accept some responsibility fix up your community and and take the beam out of your own eye before you worry about the moat in your neighbors yeah and i like that part of 12 rules and of everything that you're saying but then there's there seems to be this other side or it comes out in interviews sometimes but it's also in 12 rules where you equate the feminine with chaos i don't do that no that's ridiculous the taoists have done that for 3 000 years i know but right it's not me no right but you're selecting right you write a book which is an antidote to chaos and you're selecting the stories in which the feminist feminine is chaos and also you i'm observing and collecting the stories but it's it's adding up right so you also talk about the importance of the bible in which women are deemed subservient no they're not that's complete that's complete rubbish how in the world could you possibly derive that idea from biblical readings the most fundamental statement in the bible and this is a miraculous statement it's it's absolutely incomprehensible that it was written some thousands of years ago men and women are made in the image of god not men men and women but you know that there's also passages in there which do posit the woman as subservient what what passages are you referring to well where where it's told to adam and eve that women will henceforth have to obey their husbands that wasn't that wasn't uh what would you say that wasn't a divine injunction it was a terrible warning okay it wasn't it wasn't a it wasn't a statement about how society should be structured it was a statement statement about the inevitability of that happening because women were going to be um um vulnerable in pregnancy and in child raising now i understand your interpretation you're interpreting the bible and you're interpreting nietzsche and bringing it all together it's it's fine that you're you're doing that in your way but can you understand that to women it may feel like you are you are against what do you mean it may feel to women like there's no injunction in that story no but gender men have the right to lord it over women it's not in the story it's not just this story of course you know what is it there's there's heroic females in the in the entire corpus of the old testament and there's no evidence whatsoever throughout the biblical corpus that women are any less worthy of the kingdom of god than men and so this is part of the same thing there's this there's the pervasive notion that even the fundamental documents of western civilization have this inbuilt patriarchal bias look as far as i'm concerned that statement that men and women are both made in the image of god which gives them each a spark of divinity out of that tiny little statement grew the entire idea of individual human rights the idea that the state couldn't impose its purview past a certain limit and that that idea grew over thousands of years to provide the relatively free society that we have now and to assume that that is associated in some manner with with patriarchal oppression especially given the time when that was written is just think about how unlikely it was that that long ago those words were penned but jordan please listen to the question that i'm trying to pose and it is it's not about this it's about everything adding up and that makes women feel that somehow you are against them and wait wait a minute before before you answer because you're all about taking responsibility and that it's very important to look at the consequences of what we do and somehow yeah somehow a lot of women feel well okay so what's what's going on there what's your responsibility here you have no evidence whatsoever of what proportion of the people who are watching my videos or listening to my podcast or reading my books who are women feel that way your your your accusations are purely speculative it's not i have that it's not an accusation sure it's just an observation it was sort of conservation based on what well i have i have women who've dozens of women hundreds of women who've written me letters thanking me for the books and for what they've done for their sons and their and for their husbands and about 30 percent of the audiences to my shows are now women and that's increasing as a consequence of the book of course so i don't know all women not all women yeah well there's a there's a there's a small and unspecified percentage of women who may hold the perspective that you describe but you have no idea what the percentage is and you have no hard facts on it and so there's no way of defending myself against it and the idea that i happen to identify the feminine with chaos is why is that a problem chaos is no worse than order order is tyranny chaos is possibility the mere fact that people don't do a close enough reading to understand that these two powers are equally balanced in that order can be security or tyranny and that chaos can be potential or uncertainty the fact that people aren't reading carefully enough to understand that is not my problem they could read it carefully enough to understand that and to say that that's a fabrication on my part is absolutely foolish i mean for 40 years the the let's say the mystic left has been um enamored of the taoist philosophy well the philosophy that i'm putting forward is the taoist philosophy so how in the world can that be laid at my feet and it's certainly not the only example of the symbolic utilization of masculinity for order look at it this way why do you think the feminists assume that we live in a patriarchy if they're not identifying masculinity with order that's what they're doing well they're doing it symbolically they don't understand it's a symbolic issue yeah but jordan you've been asked this question before but i didn't think uh your your answer i wasn't quite convinced yet uh your book is an antidote to chaos and not an antidote to chaos and order or not the next books yeah it will be an answer to order and the book isn't an end the book is the the antidote to chaos is not order no right that's not what the book's about the antidote to chaos is the balance between order and chaos right and the book says that repeatedly it's impossible to read it and actually read it and not to come away with the conclusion that the position that i'm adopting is that the meaningful place to stand in life is halfway in order and halfway in chaos it's not it's not a criticism of chaos and it's not a criticism of order except in the extremes and the extremes are terrible in both directions which is why the balance has to be there and so i'm not saying we replace female chaos with male order first of all i'm not saying that chaos is female i said it was symbolically feminine and that's not the same thing at all it's not it's not even close to the same thing because there's a difference between a symbol and something that's real and because we have a gendered cognitive structure we tend to view the world through gendered categories and that's the categories that emerged and i'm that's not my responsibility it's just how it is and it's certainly not me that came up with that idea so tomorrow we're meeting with margaret edwards what do you think of her have you read the handmaid's deal i haven't read the hand means tale i've read other books of margaret atwood i think she's exactly what you'd expect from a torontonian middle class feminist writer and what is that what would you expect i'm not a fan why not i don't like her books well i i don't have a more elaborated description of that i've read three or four of them years ago when i was an undergraduate the edible woman particularly springs to mind um she i don't share her ethos what is that ethos it's uh i would say uh rather it's complicated it's a canadian ethos in some sense there's an undercurrent of complacent and self-righteous ideological feminism that grates on my nerves i don't think of her writings as literature particularly i think about them as a relatively sophisticated form of propaganda that a particular kind of educated canadian is particularly susceptible to propaganda i like margaret lawrence i know yeah with propaganda she wrote the stone angel for the kind of world view that we've been talking about the general world view the the oppression narrative i mean the handmaid's tale is a good example of that so oppression of women okay so you would not like to be it's not like women aren't oppressed i mean we've already made that perfectly clear you know it's that people are oppressed and it's a lot more important to remember that than it is to remember that women are oppressed so and i don't know if it's that useful to have an oppression race i don't find it productive especially given how horrible most people's lives actually were and how much better they are now and how ungrateful we are for that okay so you would not like to meet margaret i had met her at an elevator no um and oh well this was quite a long time ago well i said hello and was polite i don't have anything against her personally i'm i mean and and more power to her she's been very successful and and brought canadian literature um a much broader world market and uh you know she's a talented person and obviously very diligent but i don't find her philosophy attractive it doesn't compel me i don't find it uplifting or encouraging or profound for that matter um so that might have something to do with being from the west i suppose you know well she was part of the toronto establishment and the toronto establishment was never really all that popular in western canada so you know maybe it's a regional thing to some degree i don't hold her any ill will although i have to admit that i wasn't entirely dissatisfied when the feminists who she happened to annoy last year um took their piece of flesh from her on twitter and to me too yes well you know be careful about what sort of children you give birth to that's what i would say about that what sort of children you give okay precisely you think that she's part of the feminist movement that created those creatures yes definitely and no doubt about it and they showed her no mercy and that's because that's about how much mercy they're capable of okay so then my final question to you this is our the larger question that we're exploring in this series um whether and to what extent canada is the last fortress of civilization god whole let's hope not no i don't believe that not in the least um it's a pretty good country um we have good british institutions and thank god for that they're in a bit of conflict with the less good french institutions in my estimation because i think the english common law system is far superior to the french civil law system i think it's demonstrated that repeatedly um it's a good place you know people get along um we have high rates of immigration here in toronto for example and i would say that it's improved the city um quite to my amazement it's a very difficult thing to manage i don't know how we do it seems to work um people here are relatively well off we're all compressed into the middle class you know it's not like the united states with this because it's well it's a much smaller country of course with the massive extremes that you see there of of good and bad and and poverty and wealth um it's a little bit more socialist here it's yeah it is it has a it has a wider safety net which actually increases the rate of entrepreneurial activity interestingly enough because people are more likely to start businesses so that's kind of an interesting thing [Music] the health care system for for a system that's attempting to do something that's absolutely impossible does not too badly i don't think it is worse than the american system i don't think it's as good at the top end but it's certainly much better at the bottom end um there's plenty of places in in the world that are bastions of civilization not enough of them but more maybe more all the time you know there is some evidence for that um i don't think that we're any better off or any better ethically or from a governmental perspective than 20 countries you could easily name australia new zealand the uk although the uk has its troubles at the moment france i i think the netherlands is a wonderful country i think you people have created a country that's a complete bloody miracle especially given that it's actually underwater you know which is i suppose one of the things that's kept you rather awake the scandinavian countries most most european countries even eastern europe is showing signs of life again you know there's no wars in the western hemisphere right now it's possible especially as the drug wars start to calm down that we'll get a bit more civilization out of south and central america that would be nice but i don't i don't see canada as a particularly special nation apart outside of that group of countries that i named and what was your first reaction good god not canada is the last fortress of civilization oh because i just don't think it's true you know it's it's it's not that desperate i'm i mean there's there's no shortage of civilization in the united states it's an amazing country it's unbelievably diverse it's unbelievably powerful and and their political system is actually despite what everybody thinks working quite well i think it might be working better than any other political system in the west because there's a pretty good balance between the opposing viewpoints you know there's no no one's clearly got the upper hand that's kind of nice it's more polarized than it has been but no more than under nixon you know the nixon years weren't particularly peaceful and the years under reagan weren't either so we've seen this sort of thing before but canada is a fine place and we're fortunate to live here and people are fortunate to come here and hopefully we'll have enough bloody sense to maintain it and enough good fortune and you know it's becoming an old democracy by world standards 150 years old it's it's actually not that new a country as far as countries go and we muddle through we've managed to keep ourselves intact despite a couple of very close calls with regards to quebec separatism which would have been a real catastrophe and that threat seems to have receded i would say permanently and we do a pretty good job of bringing people together from all over the world and having them live peacefully you know there's no real ghettos in toronto there's no dangerous areas of note you know like there are places that are perhaps somewhat less safe than other places but and montreal is like that too and vancouver's a good city we have three really good cities and then some other up-and-comers um you know hopefully we'll have the wisdom and good sense to keep our country thriving just as you will in the netherlands with any luck because you have a great country do you see yourself as a typical canadian typical i i don't think that that's a word that's very usefully applied to me much to my discomfort so i'm not exactly sure how i would characterize myself so but you're not one of the apology culture that's so canadian no no i'm not an apologist for the west every human history is a complete bloody catastrophe and if you and every nation has its sins and its advantages and to the degree that we can rectify our past mistakes good for us and to the degree that we can capitalize on what we've accomplished good for us but like what are you going to compare the west to where else would you live where else has it been better that doesn't mean it's perfect it doesn't mean we're without our historical errors but little gratitude along with the judgment goes a long way and i don't see the people who are criticizing the structure of western civilization emigrating on mars to saudi arabia let's say okay joanna peterson thank you very much thank you you

Channel: vpro documentary

Views: 1,322,208

Rating: 4.8615975 out of 5

Keywords: vpro documentary, documentary channel, vpro, jordan peterson, jordan peterson interview

Id: 1ruwVc0t2c0

Length: 131min 53sec (7913 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 15 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/slax03]

He is out of it.

I love how he keeps saying young postmodern neomarxists come up with unreasonably simple solutions for complex problems, while boiling every criticism of them down to incredibly reductionist talking points.

[u/Proud_Regular166]

lol I jsut got to the part where he says that trans activists are worst than Stalin. What fucking planet does this man spend his time on?

His bizarre constant use of declarations. He never has any doubt. Just like a preacher or something.

[u/Proud_Regular166]

He does really look like shit.

Also, his insistence on how correct he is. He has no self doubt. It's remarkable how smug he is.

[u/Jacinda-Muldoon]

I lasted less than one minute before I had to switch off.

Jordan looks absolutely terrible, partially a result of the terrible lighting, and sounds even more irritated (irritating) than usual. I feel really sorry for him.

[u/IJustLikeUnionsALot]

Guy's always wearin a blue suit; why can't we see him in like a Miami Vice pink suit with big shoulders?