The Education of a Journalist | Rex Murphy | The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - S4: E27

[Music] hello everyone it's my great pleasure to introduce all of you to mr rex murphy who's my guest today rex is a canadian commentator and author who deals primarily with canadian political and social matters he began his lengthy career as the main interviewer and commentator for here and now the canadian broadcasting corporation's nightly tv news program in the province of newfoundland he was the regular host of cbc radio 1's cross-country checkup for a good while the only nationwide call-in show in canada and one that was avidly listened to across the country for 21 years before stepping down in september 2015. he has been a columnist for two of canada's most influential newspapers first he wrote a weekly saturday column in the globe and mail for most of the first decade of the century and is currently writing an influential column three times weekly for the national post all the newspaper readers in canada look forward to those columns mr murphy is one of canada's most well-known figures he writes and speaks with a witty intense informed acerbic style his capacity to lampoon satirize and think critically makes him the bane of unprepared politicians and other public figures across the country thanks very much for agreeing to talk to me rex well thank you very much for having me on and before we get into any of the chat let me say on zoom what i said in private it's very good to see you back and i know i'm giving the giving words to about twenty thousand times twenty thousand other people when i say that well i appreciate that very much and it's it is i'm very pleased to be able to be doing this again it's it's it's it's been it's increasingly a treat to do well i'm very pleased to hear that i spoil your treat though you picked the wrong person for a treat go ahead yeah well i guess it depends on your taste eh yeah so i thought we might start by walking through your professional career your career your life for that matter uh you you were born on the east coast yeah i was born on the east coast you know by the newfoundland stand a fairly large town it's called carboneer uh my father worked on the american base which was one of the five in newfoundland at winston churchill kind of traded to the americans remember the lease for ships uh he worked there from the very beginning in 1941 we moved closer to that place i mentioned this for a reason uh when i was about 10 it was a much smaller town but because i was adjacent to the base i had some american influence even as a kid in newfoundland in the 50s and that precipitated after i finally finished walking around universities i actually taught american students 1-12 in the naval station school and i spent a whole year there back and forth drawing up curriculum and teaching canadian studies believe it or not to american kids it's a it was an experience that for the last 10 or 15 years when american politics has become so dominant that little visitation to the argentina school has proved i won't say useful but it gives me a deeper context i think so where did you go to university and what did you study i went to university two places i went to memorial university i stayed there for five years i studied english literature and i was blessed if you want to talk to what i am pleased to call my life i think a cardinal experience and i'm not just saying it is that the english department at the time at memorial university and the university was quite small in 3000 people and by the time you got to your fourth year if you were in an honors program uh you had maybe 15 or 16 students so you you really did get to meet and know the faculty and three or four of them one of them in particular dr gm story who wrote over 20 years in collaboration with others the dictionary of newfoundland english and let you know this is not some silly remark dr gm story was also one of the editorial advisors for the great oxford english dictionary all 22 volumes of it so here was a man of tremendous talent and and controlled enthusiasm but impeccable taste and a knowledge of english literature that i haven't encountered since i know i'm rambling on but it's the nature of my mind then i went off to oxford i only spent a year there i signed up for law and actually ended up going to all the english classes uh helen gardner was the editor of don the friend of t.s eliot and the helen gardner would be giving a lecture uh it would be like if you were a rap fan or something and you you avoided all the big names so i i basically read a lot for that year uh second year law came back and i figured out then uh i've been going to school i went to school very young at the age of four i've been going to one form of school or other for about 20 i'm sorry about 17 or 18 years straight and i decided to kind of just stop for a while by the way you'll already have noticed this i talk too much so stop me when i when i ramble on well good we'll have a good competition that way because one of the things that people constantly comment they're well that would be good it would be good for me to lose that particular battle now and then so i i have something to ask you about that particular comment so i talked to john me park yes yawn me park a week ago now you may know the name she is a she escaped from north korea yes and she wrote a book called in order to live which is an amazing book and the book ends in 2015 but after 2015 she enrolled in columbia university which was a dream of hers and a dream of her father that she'd be an educated person and she studied humanities at columbia and i asked her what that was like and she said that it was a complete waste of time and money and that she felt that she was completely unable to utter an opinion that was genuine the whole time she was there and it shocked me you know and so i asked her very specifically i said come on come on you you're you're not going to tell me that the entire time you spent in columbia you didn't have at least one professor or two professors who stood out who really taught you now she had told me during the interview that she had encountered george orwell's work when she was in south korea particularly animal farm and that was what um partly what influenced her to start speaking and writing and so and she had read a lot when she was educating herself in south korea prior to going to south korean university and then to colombia so it's not like she was unfamiliar with the potential impact of let's say the classics on on on on on her life on her philosophy but when i pressed her the best she could do was to identify a single biology class which dealt with evolution which was a complete mystery to her given her background because history sort of started when her dynastic totalitarians were born um but she said even that took a wicked turn to the politically correct direction by the time she was done so but your experience at university go into that a little bit more detail well i'm glad you you elaborated that as you did and i i suppose not i suppose i know i brought up that university experience in the hope that and we'll do it now down the road in this conversation i think outside of family that is always principle and will never be superseded outside of family if there's anything that that contributed to the way that i look at things and have given me lasting benefit okay you may be familiar with samuel johnson's remark about literature it applies to all the arts that it exists better to help us enjoy life or to enjoy it uh it fixes the mind and when you have a real university you get these things i might the professor i i i mentioned for example when he found a book it was one of our other kessler's i won't bother to name it he actually walked to my house on a saturday uh after not just a kid and in all of them but he came to the little uh studio of sorry the student house and wanted me to have this book for a week so i could read i mean this kind of almost genuflection to the emergent or emerging mind of a young person is something that stays forever so that long winded again the university experience is was the strongest because the universities then had values they worshipped and that's a good word not to be backed off from they worshipped the best creations the best fashions the best styles of thought the best scientific uh finesse and they they made you not made you they induced you entities grateful to to be grateful for what other first-rate minds have contributed to the temper of the entire human race and now when i see you know i know this perhaps not quite as well as you because you are a professor and you've gone through some of the the grinder universities now at the humanities level from everything i read are a disgrace uh the the treason of the clerks it is it is they are so suffocated by these arch and empty philosophies that have no logic and are punitive i would now i'm a person that was so taken by the university that i almost worshipped it and now i tell people that have younger people younger children 20 21 22 don't go to the damn university unless you're taking science go to a trades college or just go out on your own it's the saddest thing that has happened in the western world that we've allowed second-rate minds political agents propagandization as instruction we have decimated the soul of the university uh by the way i i totally agree with you uh you said somewhere and i probably will not be quoting you correctly burn them down and start it all over again uh west what not for you one little footnote if the first world as we're accustomed to calling it wants to keep its precedence i often think of students in asia in india in china even they are so intent on really learning something and they'll in an indian school that maybe plays a hundred dollars a pupil they're doing so much better than the school that's the schools are in this game too then schools getting ten and fifteen thousand dollars per student the west is trivializing its main dynamic that has always been intellectual and it always will be i mean so let's zero in on that so yesterday i talked to paul rossi and paul rossi is the high school teacher math teacher yes you remember he wrote a letter a week and a half ago column that barry weiss published in her sub stack i read it right okay so we talked and he talked about his time in university studying with the post studying post-modern philosophy yes and and he said that he was very much attracted to it at the time but then he unpacked why and he believed that he was resentful at that point about lacking a genuine creative voice and that the postmodern philosophy that he was taught gave him and the professors that were teaching him and his peers a weapon with which they could a weapon to undermine what it was that they were not capable of doing themselves and so instead of the worship that you described which characterized your professors and fortunately for me my professors as well who taught me a tremendous amount especially in my junior college they they were taught a method of dispensing with literature yes reading it as if it was something else and i suppose morally superseding it in some sense oh no absolutely the idea that especially when post-modernism and the reconstruction and all those attendant pseudo philosophies uh you read milton to find out uh if he was treated his daughter's not this this miracle that we call paradise lost or samson agonisties you he read homer to find out you know if he's a blood worshiper this whole this whole game of taking the great documents of western civilization as a hunting ground for moral uh woke offense well first of all it's catastrophically stupid if you have the 48th symphony of mozart or the beethoven's fifth and the only reason you're playing it is to find out if either most of their beethoven had a sexist attitude you're out of your mind self-stop this and and the idea that what are the great propulsions of a certain segment of western society is simple envy and resentment of its success even as those who are envious and resentful are basically being fed and kept by it they go into these institutions with some sort of childish immature animosity towards what you know if you think of it the rise of thought is is the greatest thing we have and at the in the richest part of the world the most prosperous the highest institution have you been reading some of these whiteness things the new rules and this is like the ones the federal government are using to train your civil servants you mean yes the epidemic of of anti-racism which is a kind of racism diversity which is monosyllabic if you don't have our ideas you don't have any or you're a racist or you're this or you're that i don't know how a free people have succumbed so easily and so lethargically to a kind of it's not physical but it's a metaphysical restraint and the cowardice about some of these but these universities that apologize for some professor the the new york times guy 49 years columnist and in an explicatory conversation using that n word editor said no there's nothing wrong with him but then he fired him uh the universities damn them were the place that this this other pandemic began and while we're living through culver we should also understand that the intellectual pandemic this goes to our heart and core we are displacing ourselves by allowing charlatans to wreck the intellectual standards of the western world so what did your education your education in english literature what did that do to you and for you so you were one person when you went in and you were a different person when you came out so what has been the advantage and i also mean so i interviewed jocko willink on my podcast a while back and he talked about going to take an english literature degree after he had finished his military training and then he explained for 20 minutes the unbelievable potency that being able to communicate gave him as a individual and but also as a military leader so it was very striking because he made a practical case as well as a metaphysical and intellectual case so personally what did this education do for you while you were having it and but then also afterwards in your life well i actually have a fairly retentive memory uh for the entire experience especially at memorial university uh the first thing i'll give it hanger i'll give you an angle i'm not usually a biographical by the way but i'll do this there was an english professor he was from england and he was one of those collaborators with dr george story on this dictionary he was a dialectician his name was john woodson i haven't said that name in 35 40 years but he came into uh i it was my was only my first year yeah in the first year we had an excerpt from paradise lost it was one of the great epic similes in the very first book he scarce and sees when the superior feeling was walking towards the shore i could do the whole damn thing but we won't bother you with that but whitison as opposed to saying now you should read this thing it's very complicated it's one of those deeply ramifying similes that only milton ever wrote and he read it out loud and he had a good voice and even though the milton is is a very difficult poet by the way even though it was difficult the sound of it milton is the genius of the auric sensations of the english verse even better than shakespeare and i'm telling you the truth here i am when he finished that i hadn't heard of it that's how bad i was i had we had very few books in our house growing up i went over to the library because the simile was so exciting i had to read paradise laws this wasn't prompted by anybody else and i could repeat instances of that kind where the sharpness of what was being related or the beauty of it never underestimate aesthetics the beauty of it the precision of it the ability to find words that have depth of meaning that echo their own etymology to marshal them in patterns of order and the intellectual aura that comes out of and one other little tiny note i'll give you was i we read john don a lot a lot later some of john dunn's love poems are extremely complex they're so called metaphysical but they're intellectual in a real sense they're hard to understand i remember wrestling with one poem of john don's for about a day i mean only 14 15 lines wasn't the sonnet but it was insane phone and i finally got it i can still see the light bulb over man in the library in other words i come from an outport background more or less in a cut-off culture this is not a criticism it's just fact uh not as i said a lot of material growing up in the house and then all of a sudden it was like a series of of benign explosions the second thing that university did and i think properly so by their example less than by their preaching the professors that i met they really did value language they did value the the the great resource of poetry that exists by the way over the centuries and they also said they also taught a certain courtesy of mind that you could have your disagreements but based them on you know the material at hand that don't float them out of the year if you want to talk about john milton uh you talk about his poetry you talk about if you want you talk about these pros but very few do but you don't go into the poem to find something that in some sort of deeply infantile manner offends you now when you write paradise lost i'll listen to you criticizing it anyway once again i might but yeah here's what i did i memorized a lot and that's something i would recommend to all of the people who are listening to you when they listen to you that a lot of education should be just that it should be simple retention put poetry and prose in your head and in your heart the power bloom used to point it out and i agree with them that learning by heart is more than just a trite phrase once you put it in there it expands your person and to answer your question now directly the difference was this wendy and callow immature would that's standard for the age but i came out with something that was permanent and as far as i'm concerned at least uh had the most enduring value outside of as i said domestic circumstance that i have ever had it's still here and so you've talked to us a fair bit specifically about poetry and you just made a case for for memorizing it so that you can decide it and you did recite some and i've often found it's surprising and and remarkable to hear someone i i haven't memorized a lot of poetry and i'm i'm struck not infrequently by someone's capacity to recite there's something unbelievably impressive about it but you're really making a case for first poetry and epic poetry and second um for for for memorizing it so first let's go to the poetry what's it done for you you talked about aesthetic experiences first so that was a marker right these series of benign explosions yeah yeah well what's it done for me one of the great things it's done for me um yeah this is this is consistent i'm being correct on this if you read oscar wilde it is easy to approach writers or walter peter or samuel johnson or sir thomas brown uh some of the later essays of the 20th century by giving you charles lamb you'll never write as well as they and understand that if you or if you're inclined to do this writing stuff but my god they set the standard they sent you something you i can't do that nab nabakov is probably my best in the mod he's the best modern prose writer never been able to write a sentence like never but having read him i'm ashamed i'm ashamed when i'm sloppy or lazy and you always aim at the high ground and what it did it set an ideal in the mind and words by the way are very precious things i mean you teach the bible in many ways and the bible is apart from its obvious spiritual it is a textbook of the highest forms of language even milton put it before greece but it sets a standard it gives you a wrestling match if you read in the back of essay and there are some and then you look at in my case some scribbled column you're still trying i tried to find the right word because i've been prompted by all these people i've read before and i i i'm glad you made the memorization here's what that does you can get meaning you can get the meaning of a line or the meaning of a verse but there's there's a secondary engine or energy attached to poetry and great prose and you bring it into your mind so that you have you know into your living sensibility so that in some weird osmosis it will lift your style or your attempts and the second thing is if especially sir thomas brown and hydra yotappia if you have a model of of high prose and it sits in your head and you i do i know several lines of it uh i think somehow or other it contaminates you this is a good word to use in the in the play but it contaminates you in a rich way you get something from it this osmotic imitation that will only take place if you've lodged it in your in your consciousness and one final point if you wish to memorize poetry and things your best years are 15 16 to 25 whatever you learn then and learn by heart as i call it i can give you screams of hamlet they stay it's a lot harder to memorize at 50 or 60. or god knows 70. and i hate it even to say the word i'm rambling on again jordan this is bad of me no it's exactly right it's exactly right and it's it's definitely not rambling and maybe that's because you've been infected with the poetic spirit i mean i i have to let all our readers our listeners and watchers know that i mean rex's column is very very influential in canada and it's not least because of the manner in which he crafts his words and so how much poetry do you know by heart do you think in my prime i i this is not sound like a most of this most i memorized all of john dunn because his poems apart from the uh immortality that's all that those are very long but all his songs and sonnets they love poetry and the religious on it the divine silence of john done by the way are marvelous things so so so also is is his sermons i wish people would read them today just for the glory of the rhetoric it's it's it's phenomenal i mean it is phenomenal i read a did a lot of milton memorizing most of the sonnets he thought i saw my latest spells insane individual by saints whose bones i scattered on the alpine i can go on i i memorized the ones that most impressed me and i had impact and i listened to richard burton and john gielgud on record and after listening by the way that's the easiest way if you listen five or six times and it lodges in your mind it will never go out and so the recordings in those days you get the seven ages of shakespeare with gilgood reading it with his uh infinitely nuanced articulation no one could speak a word better than you would it stays with only the easier to remember of course is music music plays in your head if you play the sonata or something enough on the record uh that that'll be alive 25 years later but to memorize poetry do it when you're young and what you memorize at that period becomes permanently installed it fades can you remember would you recite something for us uh i'll probably stumble now because you're putting me on the spot but i just i just started with the uh the building caller i think i thought i mean we thought i saw my latest spells that satan brought to me like alcestus from the grave from joel's great son to her glad husband gave rescued from death though pale and faint and the thing there is he thought i saw my latest spouse at saint that was milton's second wife brought to me like alcestus from the grave and there there's there's a place to stop let's see we're doing this alcestas uh was a greek woman i forget her husband's name but the husband was told that he was shortly to die and he was very very young and they were both friends of hercules okay and so hercules came to their house after the wife had died but he didn't know that alcestas had died and he didn't know the house was in mourning and after nine days of feasting as only hercules could uh me thought i saw malay the husband came and told him the story that he had been told by the gods that he was going to die young and he went to his parents and they said he said to them you are very old so therefore if you take my place you will not lose many years but i will be saved and his parents turned him down and his friends turned him down and obsessed as his wife without even being asked she submitted herself to mortality she died for him so when hercules heard the news and that he'd been treated so well he hercules he determined to repay the hospitality by going into the underworld he picked ancestors away from this and he brought him back i forget the husband's name for some reason but he would not he wanted to make it a surprise so he put a veil over the returned wife's face and when he came to the husband he gradually undid the veil and gave him back from the dead his living wife now go back to the couple of sentences i gave you he thought i saw my late espoused saint brought to me like alcestus from the grave there's a few lines down her face was veiled yet to my fancy sight love sweetness goodness in her face shine as in no face with more delay so when milton throws out alcestes there's only one word there's an entire train of secondary thought and mythology just in that one little line this is why you would study him so that you get in tremendous range and depth all within these are silence anyway that's the me thought i saw my latest about the saint avenger lord i slaughtered saints whose bones i scattered on the out by mountains et cetera et cetera so now we can do this all day but there's no need well it's so interesting me to me to see you reflect on your education and your poetic education given the track of your career and well because it's pr it was also so practical i mean yeah yeah and you're you're making a very strong and personal case for the utility of english literature now you said you grew up in a house that didn't have a lot of books you know we were not making any depression stories we were we never missed a meal uh but we didn't have books uh once in a while one of those readers digest condensed books would my father harry would get them on the base or something uh in the school we went to there was a library that consisted mainly of the lives of the saints uh what no there weren't there was you know if there were five or six by the time i was 13 14 i was buying the novels in the drugstore the drugstores used to have the little book racks in those days but it was only when i got in university and it all came on i devoured i did about 14 out of 20 courses in those that 20 [Music] 14 or 15 of them are english i even added a couple of subjects english studies in the fourth year i was up to seven when you did five a year in those days but in the university like i told you about the paradise lost you go over you you went to the library you could pick up what you wanted and those days you walked the stacks so you would often be prompted merely by the title of a book take it out so now there weren't many uh but that's not unusual in newfoundland and but in other ways newfoundland education would be looked upon as very back you know backward now but we missed certain things i was catholic and we bought it by in a nun school presentation sisters and one of the benefits of the catholic education was the catechism this is something you had to memorize we're back to this again the butler's catechism you had it for seven or eight years continuously it started off who made you god made you why did he make it to know and love him here on earth and afterwards serve with him forever in heaven uh it got more complicated as it went through now you were being taught religion but when you got old enough to see it it it also had taught you slyly logic because it was a question and it was a cataclysm catechism uh how do you know that there's a purgatory they had a great long i can almost do that one too a great long answer to that they said if this is this and that's that then there must be this so it was inferentially teaching you logic and because it was using scholastic terms these were old books it was it was basically building your vocabulary be paid attention to it we often get the best benefits from certain kinds of learning inadvertently and and insidiously but benignly insidiously they come at us i never understood why the catechism held such power but it was just that it was essay writing too uh you didn't do things sloppily or loosely so what would be looked about how they're teaching them wrote and this is terrible or treating like robots you never know what's going in and the chemistry that forms anyway well it's really interesting to me that you're that you're making a case for it as an advanced form of imitation yeah i mean when children play when they play being a dad for example when they're playing house they don't mimic the father but by which i mean they don't precisely duplicate with their body the actions they saw their father take what they do is they view the father's actions across a broad range of situations and they extract out the gist and then they embody the gist and that that play development is incredibly important and it's based on a very complex mimicry and the case you're making is that by embodying the poetry which is to memorize it that you're also you're also imbibing the gist essentially yes so there's a living spirit there that inhabits you as a consequence of the of the of the mimicry and i've never heard that case made before it makes sense to me because of course poet poetry especially declaimed poetry is a dramatic art and so it is a performance it's even more than that it's it's incantatory in both senses here's another little little this is my here's a better key to it there's a line and again another line of milk sweet is the breath of mourner rising sweet with charm of earliest birds now you know what a charm is it's a spell it casts you over uh he uses another word another place in china we speak of of poetry when he says the word the charm of early he's talking about song but it's interesting that song and charm are actually synonyms that when we speak of charming we're speaking of an invisible power of allure and when we speak of a poem as incantatory or spell we're doing the same thing there's an aura you you use slightly different terms once you absorb it uh there's a sheen that propels some some part of the motor of your consciousness but only if you imitate the best because only the best contain this particular here's an awful ugly word battery okay all right so i'm gonna have to think about that some more we'll return to it so you took an an excess load of courses what did your parents think about your choice of university education and and how did you manage to how did you manage to fortify yourself psychologically let's say to go commit yourself to an english literature degree well i was again i was very young it was the slowest mark i had in high school so there was there was a little bit of a paradox and i was only in the university but it it came on as a bit of my own metaphor with with very sudden uh powerful attraction and action and the more i got into it the better it was but also here it wasn't there was another dynamic factor because you just spoke of parents and seeing that that's the territory that you often enter a a volunteer but normally i wouldn't my father he came from very hard circumstance mother not not not alive i won't go into all of it but he basically got the grade two or three in newfoundland uh he was a smart man and he did all sorts of hard work when he was teenager and when he finally went to work on the base it was as a you know dishwasher but he met some people on the american base he knew and he remember he was again one of these stoics which i much more appreciate than the gush merchants of the day and the oprah vacation the thing was he knew and he never made a point of it that had he had school could he have been able to attend a real one that he had this facility in this case by the way it was with language uh even though he was not a reader because i've reasons i've given you he had a taste for words and and compressed experiences and he met one or two very well educated americans and i think just by being there with him knowing how much i think it must have been a great pain actually knowing how much he knew that he had missed and how how hell how amputated were his ambitions by the non-education that it seeped down to me that getting one uh was a was just something formidably insistent and i i suppose we all as you say appearance i suppose i was trying out of some sort of devotion to kind of by surrogacy pick up what he could never have gotten because of time and circumstance well it also it would also imply i would say that he at minimum didn't interfere with the manifestation of that spirit in you and i suspect would have encouraged it both parents had great belief in one thing i love the old phrases by the way we should bring them back do your books if you don't make it through the school you'll be digging ditches marie my mother was like hiring my father they had a justifiably dutiful respect even in some of the more ignorant instructors that were in those presentation schools but they knew that there was one way up and i'm not speaking commercially not speaking with something attached to the dignity of the person and the amplitude of the personality only gets released by trying to imitate listen to walk your mind around the minds of other people whose minds are better than your own and that's what philosophy literature i would expect your specialty it is always those who have thought more deeply more profoundly and have a better equipment that give us things and that's why i'm back now to the university that's why it's so deplorable that this this is just i'll use their words this is petty fascism of wokeness uh is suffocating uh the number one energy of any free society so now so how do you think your parents it's it's interesting how how do you think your parents developed that respect and why did they hold it well harry my father uh because he was he was certainly bright enough to know when he heard other people i'm speaking chiefy now the americans with sophisticated understandings and sophisticated things he he saw the goal in in the rift but he never had a chance to reach for it so but then he and he was willing to admire it rather than to be resentful about it absolutely he would he would listen to these people he would remember some of their sharpest lines he had a great sense of humor he was he was himself a very good talker most newfoundlanders are and they often have a very good sense of humor which is appreciation for words well i i think that you know that that's the second context uh i i do remember you know the older guys that i knew and not just these folklore stories either they could talk about going in to buy a plug of tobacco and hold you spellbound that's actually something i've noticed about um extremely intelligent people who aren't educated yeah they have a facility to dramatize their lives that's really quite spectacular where i grew up i had friends who were really not literate a number of them but they weren't stupid and they could spin a story man it was impressive and in a way i couldn't in some sense i think i lost the drama dramatic sense of my own life because of the books i had been exposed to but they were very good at that i i i your point i i've made this myself you might want to tell us uh that there's a whole lot of illiterate newfoundlanders that may well be your choice but do not think do not think that they're not some the most verbally intelligent i'll i'll tell you as a fact i've done i don't know 100 200 documentaries and i did a documentary on the newfoundland fishery about 25 years ago and i met a guy up in lansa meadows fishermen hard case heavy drinker i would guess i'd i'd give him a grade two or grade three but he walked out of his house on a cold frigid february saturday morning on with the wind coming off the water and then it kept the air flaps out and he gave me an answer to wanna come on to my questions a five minute area i you know i can already see that boat over there it gives me a a is a knob of me guts and a tear in the eye is how it began and i tell you uh outside of shakespeare going on that was the most that was the most verbally charged anecdote that i ever put on film frank when we brought it back to the to the national people were coming into the edit room to watch this guy and as i said he may have been illiterate but by god he knew his words and that's another one by the way i always admired i think we called it uneducated that's nonsense so the smartest people i know probably couldn't sign their name but by god if you if you felt them if you if you moved around them i was always afraid of fishermen because they were always smarter not all of them but if you do it together with one of them you got you better be on your toes anyway going on again okay so you and you took an excess of of courses at memorial so you were very highly motivated what about your peer group at that time uh no that was they were more or less again they had a bit more uh i think commitment to the idea of real education as i'm calling it then perhaps today i i think there's a lot of just going for the credential but moving on again i'll give background more in particular because i'm going to interrupt there i would say one thing about undergraduates that i've observed because i loved teaching the undergraduates i had contact with they would come into class with a veil of cynicism and sometimes that was while we're doing this for the grade or we have a practical reason in mind but if you could get under that and communicate something to them that was genuine genuinely philosophical and meaningful they would drop that surface level cynicism and dive into it like people who were starving well that if you will forgive a reference back to you uh the explosion that you set off uh once the controversy had propelled you into this world arena and the number of otherwise cynical minds i told you when you and i had a previous interview on that silly channel that i have i had this call i'm not going to name him because it would be embarrassing a 55 year old uh working in a really hard job and no big money and he actually called me up i hadn't met you or anything and he called me up to say that you know what i've been reading jordan peterson this is if if the teacher if the guide offers something that is real uh depth dignity spirit points towards you know you are better than you are uh speaks honestly there's another thing so that's the advantage to something of higher value it's like of course you're lesser in relationship to it but it's what you could become to offer people what they could become is the best possible thing you can do for them well i i've seen again maybe mischaracterizing i don't think it's deliberate but uh insofar as there is a standing champion leading something of the counter rebellion against the degradation of analysis and thought and and the casting aside of cultural verities uh you're it uh and you have by example and and also true to great tribulation uh you've given solace to a hell of a lot of people and i think it has a lot to do with something general in the air that there's a lot of suffocated minds because they feel the walls coming in they wonder if they're alone and then someone comes by and says something in some cases nothing insulting some very obvious things but with a lot of thought and energy and commitment behind it and as you know did half the world arenas are affiliating to hear anonymous voice that's pretty good by the way you went from memorial to oxford how did that happen i wondered scholarship there was newfoundland because it had been uh sorry you won a rhodes scholarship yeah i won the road scholarship uh 68 and uh again it was a bit of my father i thought i wanted to study law for some reason when i got over there as as i think i told you before we started here uh i i entered into second year studies with any break i mean trust landlord i mean just terrible stuff and the weekly assignments but you're in oxford you got blackwoods you got some of the greatest lectures on english literature some of the editors some of the prime editors of some of the great voices as i you know helen gardner was t.s eliot's friend for god's sake and she's giving a lecture on dumb she edited the done songs and sonnets so i i became completely absorbed in i did the law stuff but i spent more time reading i never read this much in my entire life what was it like for you to to go to oxford have you traveled at all no no so this is the first time you've been to europe i mean the reason i'm asking in part is because i've met some very educated englishmen like stephen fry and it's really something to meet an educated englishman because they have a depth of education that's just quite stunning and it's so it's so impressive when you see it manifest itself and i've been fortunate enough to talk with people at cambridge and oxford who are scholars from the old school let's say yeah it's so it's so impressive to watch them talk and to watch them think and so you pulled yourself out of newfoundland and went over to oxford what how old were you and what was that like i was 19 i think i went to universities very early uh what was it like um i'd had as i mentioned uh five years in memorial studying literature i should have kept added about i should have picked up a d film stayed away from law i met like you did i met some extremely keen minds i met a guy who could play uh debac de cotta on the great organs and i met them in all fields and that was the only advantage of it to me by then maybe a bit young but nonetheless i i'd settled in pretty well to english literature and it was that that kept dragging me away as i was just about to say i don't think i've ever read more in a single year than i did that year there well that's the thing about university and i suppose also about those english universities in particular because you imagine what the university because i've tried to think well what is the university part of it is while this it's this continuous conversation across centuries part of it is the exposure to the greatest thinkers and and for for the purpose of of mimicry essentially i believe that's central to it because you can pick your peers in some sense that's what you do when you read great books is you make these people your peers at least insofar as you're capable of doing that and and but then there's also an identity that it provides you with is you're a student you've got this time that's cut out and now you can go throw yourself into the study and and society has built a wall around you that says you can stay in this room and you're good read away we're happy about it well that that that's it the one thing i will remark and i don't care how pretentious it sounds in in one area i was a little disappointed uh i thought because of the reputation of the university uh that it would have a surplus it would have an excess of overbright people who listened to late quartets of beethoven as they got out of bed i had a false notion that reality is often just day to day and while there will be great exceptions and there were and people were so bright that they embarrassed you if you were standing in front of them but a lot of it was apart from the architecture and the grounds which is first class it was nice to be there as a kind of a visitor but the intellectual level as i said i probably didn't get out as much as i should but once i got near the libraries i became enthralled and that's the same word as enchanted and charm i keep reminding people that the art art has magic well and i think it's really useful to point out the connection between those words because they all point to the possession to the capacity to be possessed by this spirit which and it is the spirit that inhabits the university when it's properly conducted yes it's the spirit that that manifests itself as the creative and communicative conversation that's gone across centuries that you can now immerse yourself in and become a part of and there isn't anything better than that that's that's that's as good as it gets that's also why it's so wonderful often to be a university professor or teacher is because you can play a role in transmitting that to young people who will benefit immensely from it in all possible ways yeah it's very true it's also true again i'm sure you have because you're in the university context i've met two or three uh i'd almost compared them to you know some of the great medieval monks you meet one or two or three people who are so uh completely immured in in the dignity of learning from the past and pursuing great minds truly learned people uh they're almost always in a kind of personal cloister but there's one or two or three in the course of a lifetime and you say there's so almost priestly about the human being that gives to inquiry to learning uh to the development and and fulfillment of the mind and you you just know you're in a very special place now when i i went to teach at harvard in the 90s and i was privileged to have a position there for five years six years i guess and harvard pulled in senior professors from everywhere who were at the top of their profession and so there was a handful of senior psychology professors there when i was there and it was wonderful to talk to these people i had never been anywhere where there wasn't anything i could say that they weren't familiar with it was so amazing there wasn't a topic i could possibly bring up that these and it would have been six or seven people which is actually a lot it was a small department the the senior faculty were absolutely outstanding people especially the older ones because they weren't only great psychologists they were really educated and so yeah yeah and they weren't afraid of ideas at all and my mind ranges across ideas and i'd often encounter people with whom i could have a conversation about one thing but definitely not about another and i just never ran into that barrier among the older senior faculty members at harvard the junior faculty members were impressive in their own right they hadn't had the whole advantage of a lifetime of study yet you know they were headed in that direction but the senior faculty were remarkable and you couldn't help but be immensely uh what would you say to to to be possessed by immense respect in their presence and it was a privilege to be there well here's the other thing for the people today that if the universities become proselytizers and and semi political agent prop waltness and all this garbage they're stealing a lot of joy i mean a real university as you as you just said and dealing with people that are better than you that's the great thing incidentally uh it's it's such a pleasure and you don't have who has as you said you're given freedom to do this uh and and get credit for it as well and you'll advance in society but the simple joy of taking in uh and especially the inhumanity i know science has its ecstasies as well and they're probably even more powerful but the joy of the humanity is that you as you said you you're talking to charles lamb i often when i read his letters because he had a very hard life i i take great i almost oh i'm allowed to not allowed i'm capable of reading what a person up in the early 19th century actually thought and how he's he's in the room that's a great privilege too see what i mean absolutely yeah we throw away so many things that are under at our elbow and we we search in vain for things that are 20 miles away it's it's awful so okay so you were at oxford and you were there for one year yeah one year and and then what what happened next well he uh it found me very foolish as i said i i started to think about it uh i went to school at four and i'd been going continuously oxford was the sixth year of university i think it was and when i got home to newfoundland during the summer break i decided i'd take another break and that's when i said i got to i got to stop going to schools and there was a job when i i did some teaching i went on the american base and taught some american kids and then uh literally and i know the meaning of literally uh i stumbled into a radio station in st john's when i was doing some work on a master's thesis just idle work i had no money and they gave me a job for the afternoon in the newsroom monday uh they signed me up for a month to fill in for an open line host and a month later i was working at cbc so here that's it uh my so-called career uh was as accidental as walking into that newsroom because i had a friend there uh i i needed a bit of money i took on the open line show with no experience no and this is a newfoundland overland show by the way and uh started to write editorials for the radio station so why couldn't you do it like we talked about your education obviously that played a role but and it's accidental in a sense but i mean you've been preparing to use words for a long time yeah i had so so i mean it was an accident waiting to happen in some sense so you walked into the radio station but what was it about what you were capable of that opened up the doors well i tell you newfoundland had another advantage newfoundland is a large part of every newfoundlander in a way that other problems are not being parochial are perhaps not perhaps not and newfoundland politics when i was growing up was the politics of this writer he was legendary for sure joey smallwood he brought us into confederation he was mercurial he was he was another autodidact he was another self-taught man in the old sense oratorical the tommy douglas kind of oratory and newfoundland politics was both cursing and entertainment and i often said i've wrote this that we put up with it because on other planes it gives us continuous amusement newfoundland has weather in politics and they both exist as a form of conversation and entertainment and my father again was speaking the words listening to joey giving some great tirade he just loved to listen when small would let it loose and a lot of new lenders did as well it is a verbal culture i have no doubt about that whatsoever i never but journalism per se i never aspired to it uh but once i got in there i found that if you'll forgive this i found it very easy and natural uh that you should write things uh i didn't think much of the writing by the way i'm not being shy not being coy i always because i have examples flannel brian would be yet another one uh and macklemug i met him once or twice these were masters so there was always a kind of not a chill but a holding back but as you get older there's not much to hold back anymore so no it was accidental but it just happened i then ended up in cbc that here and now program you referenced at the very beginning and did that for seven or eight years it went through a few other places but i always came back and obviously once i came to toronto in the middle 90s this is not 23 or 24 years this has been the kind of most most furious uh commitment to the cause because i'm i'm very i'm very lethargic in thinking of it in terms of any great seriousness i like to think that i just assume you were amused with something i said i think i was right well often there's not that much difference between those two things very true very true so okay so you were you were working at here and now and and how how often were you broadcasting a show every night i did usually one or two interviews a night i also did they were much briefer in those days i also did i was the only one who did actually uh commentary i did two or three a week i wrote uh i uncovered reviewed concerts for certain national radio programs and write reviews of concerts uh on and off i had a lot of a lot of fires in the irons and a lot of fires but it just seemed more of a hobby it's an easy word i don't know why i couldn't find it this is like you know it's something you were half pleased to be doing and was paying your rent that's that's been journalism to me i do not have uh this is high compulsive sanctified idea of the great worth of the journalists of the earth they're the only people that i think could be put in competition with the politicians there are certain exceptions i think glenn greenwald right now for example in the last seven or eight months uncovering a lot of the mistruths of journalism is doing a great job but it was there i did enjoy doing it i liked politics as a drama uh and those therefore and i liked books so you could okay i did book reviews as well so it all just came together in a non-planned but by inertia and uh and taste uh something i stuck with at this moment i'm talking with you and so why do you think you had public appeal that's a really good question uh i was always chastised in the earliest part of the so-called racket why don't you i've ever written one one column for the radio station other people read it when before i get the cbc and the owner of the station he called me in afterwards he i he hired me to write the he had his announcer read and he i did this call uh and he calls me into his office he said what was all that about and so an informal conversation i gave him the gist of what i had written and structured for the announcer and then he looked at me why can't you do that all the time that was a problem that was a problem with cbc as well they kept telling me that you can't write like that and uh that's too too i have the totally different understanding of communication now here's another one this is this is true i did a particularly savage thing one night and in loubound you can be much more savage than you can in the delicate altitudes of toronto and cbc believe me you can you can draw blood on here if you have the skill do you think there's a consequence of it being a fun fundamentally a working-class culture in newfoundland uh yeah you're exposed more you actually tasted more reality yeah well i know where i grew up was a working-class culture and it like the the the verbal barbs and exchanges were quite brutal generally very very funny and also brutal when you when in my case because you got really well known in the in the island uh if you said something the previous night and you went out the next morning uh i almost got chased a couple of times but to go back to this one point about communication i did this savage thing attacked mercilessly a lot of phone calls because before the internet registered in reaction when they came into cbc one of the one of the cleaners was there and he looks at me rexy said well he said that was something going over there last night and i said god i said yeah he said by the way he said whose side were you on here's the point communication even when it's verbal cars a lot more tone tells you your sensibility goes under the text a manner of delivery gives an index of where it's going i've had people from pakistan and don't give me any old racist pakistan and africa meeting the cabs in the cabins of toronto and i know they can't understand this because they haven't yet picked up the english okay don't come back with any complaints and they say oh that was so good it always reminds me that even was hyperverbal though i might be in certain ways that there's a deeper communication especially in the mass media that has never taken account so what i was by their standards doing a little bit of high style you're communicating by your manners by your eyes well that's one of the things that one of that's one of the things i think that that makes you somewhat singular among canadian journalists is that not only are you very able with your words and witty with them and powerful with them but you're also markedly a dramatic character and i i don't i don't know exactly how to separate the character from the pers the person and maybe there is no separation but i watched you what watched you on cbc and listen to you when there's always drama in your presentation there's there's a performative action aspect so it's it's romantic i suppose is the right way of thinking about it is because that's the the effective union of emotion and and rationality and and you embody that so it's like watching someone put on a performance although it's well and then i suppose you've been doing this for so long i don't know how much of it is a performance and how much of it is you it's very effective well i know one thing that that long use has given i found the hardest and this was the only conscious part i think the hardest thing to do if you're in the television business don't go into it now it's on its way out but if you're in there is to gradually reduce to extinction the gap between i use this phrase in the comment recently preparing a face to meet the faces that you meet the gap between oh i'm on a camera and therefore i got to do this i got to say it's this way and all this stuff when you can bring the prepared remark identically with a totally relaxed being and if you mean it i used to say this five or six columns a year are commentaries that i really meant and if you really mean it you could go on stammering and people would listen to you reducing the gap between the posture or the posturing and i'm talking to a neighbor today so well so one of the things i've really observed because i've done a lot of television interviews now and i've yes and a lot of this sort of discussion which i radically prefer which i think is immensely superior but so in the typical television interview i would walk into the studio and i would meet the interviewer and we would have a cordial and professional conversation but i was actually talking to the person more or less and then the cameras would go on and yeah the person was no longer there at all i know and i know so then i was trying to figure out well what's exactly there and well part of it was the the the person in some sense didn't dare to be there because the bandwidth was extremely expensive and if you're there being spontaneous you can make spontaneous errors and and and that can be very costly to you and to your network and so so frequently i was just talking to whoever it was acting out the role of the journalist they thought their station demanded and so there was no conversation and some of the conversations interviews that i've had that have gone viral were exactly like that where it wasn't a conversation what whatever it was was something completely different but this this there's something essential about what you said with regards to this diminishment of the gap between the persona and the and the person and so the persona this is from the psychology of carl jung jung thought about the persona as a crafted presentation that you used for expedient purposes absolutely and so maybe you walk into a bank and you do a transaction and you're the customer and she's the teller or he's the teller and there's a script there and that's fine that's where a persona works because you don't want to get personal while you're just you know exchanging business information but in a conversation it's a different thing because the persona is something that isn't genuine and what that means is the questions aren't genuine and if the questions aren't genuine then it's not interesting you said you can stammer and stumble about as long as you mean it and you can and what is it do you think about what is it well you talked also about the non-verbal component what do you think is carrying the the sense that you mean it what are people observing in the performance let's say or in the presentation there's an intensity yes it really is and i know this is straight that's a really good question i always knew uh it's intuition that when you showed up on television especially in the role of commentator and interview instantly if i was pretending it bled out through the screen now of course sometimes you're having fun and you're not being serious you do all sorts of but in the ones i i used to like to say the ones that really count if you put on a face the radar of human beings the radar of every human being especially again in this public thing they know it's wrong politicians i remember i did a thing on the national every time the politician comes to an election this is true of mr harper whom i like as it was of mr trudeau in particular that the voice that starts to come out of them in their commercials is like something that's never been heard on heaven or earth before they actually change their vocal tone uh when they give out their problem they may as well hang a sign around her next saying i'm lying to you now because you can hear the way i talk in the cases that you're describing there's so much in television and media interviews that's simply dishonest these little conversations you described having before you started the interview and i know you must have experienced this i know a lot of journalists who use those as kind of a set up for a sucker punch put the smiley face on oh i love you like jordan etc oh yes that's happened then as soon as the lights go on the lack of integrity in these things is just savage but those people uh maybe intellectuals it's something like orwell's famous thing i only let you to believe it sometimes it's only intellectuals who can't see the point educated in a formal sense but not in a real sense there's something so stupid that you have to be extremely intelligent to perform it and news guys and those ladies who think that they can out cute the guests and get them see they're not they're not not even not going for a conversation they've decided in advance that they're constructing a moment factitious is the recovery word for that it's constructed and they only want that so you can be passing off the wisdom of plato socrates and jesus in a single sentence and they're still grinding in their heads i have i have the net ready i'm going to drop it on any minute not even listening to you it's not an interview it's a plot well that's why i'm hoping that these long form videos are transformative i've interviewed a couple of are interviewed i've had a discussion with a couple of political figures and that is going to continue i hope i believe that in a two-hour discussion you reveal yourself i don't think you can help it and you might reveal yourself as someone who's covering up so they can't won't reveal themselves yeah that's revealing in and of itself it is i used to say that when especially doing political interviews in newfoundland i remember one cab diminished in particular said well he said you asked me a lot he said but you never got me to say it and i told him i said you're not saying it was the interview you know there's always a reality and unfortunately now in public communications from when i started and this is not nostalgia to the present moment uh the the oppressive complete not completely so many of the press organs have just dropped uh all the essential attributes of news gathering and information and have become partisans have become propagandists uh our advancing agendas all under all we are the guardians of the democracy okay well so from the post-modern perspective at least how it's generally put forward with its neo-marxist surround there's the proposition is something like all language games are games of power and so whether you think you're doing it or not you're putting forward an agenda and if you can't see that that's just a sign that you're completely yeah so but now you made a distinction between real journalism and this false journalism that you're decrying what do you think are the characteristics of genuine journalism well the first of the the the old bromide that everyone has a bias well of course they have a bias they have life but we talked at the very beginning of this for a long time about education and what education is in another domain is fashioning deliberately fashioning your mind to be able to stand beside itself to be able to stand outside and look at those things that by temperament or disposition or social situation you have automatically come to accept we have the power of self-scrutiny and so let us let me make an easy example i i love john diefenbaker and i'm going to deliberately going back as a person and i'm going to vote for him as a citizen but i'm a journalist and he comes to my town of saint john and he does a bad stumble and he makes an awful mess of this and whatever and i said to myself well this is don dieberg i love him so i'm going to hold that one back well no you're a journalist and you say even though on a personal level i'm going to go with him i have the capacity to see that he really messed up here this was stupid this was wrong so i'm going to report it that's the interior of every person has control over their bias and while we will never be perfect in expunging it we all have a responsibility to examine where we are on our own personal domain and if that's the case then if you're covering politics and you let yourself be agitated by the emotions of either hatred or love and do damage to the ones you hate and puff up the ones you love you're lying and the idea that you because we all have bias that therefore you go to the ridiculous extreme of not only indulging it but injecting it into everything every story and every story meeting that you have journalists want to have about what i tell you about one of the silliest phrases in western journalism is speaking truth to power this is when i always go back to your hero sultry if you want to know what speaking truth the power is to have 10 years in in siberia have it to tyranny visit your family that's speaking truth to power these are sacred words and you get it over here when someone makes a jab at a donald trump dear god it's a comedy so you were eight years with here and now uh yeah eight years in newfoundland every night five five nights a week and traveled all over the province right so you're traveling everywhere you're doing book reviews you're doing uh classical music reviews so you're continuing your education in a major way yeah yeah that's why i have one most that i'm not ashamed of i i've never stopped liking english literature it wasn't the door to closed when you walked into the university uh i'm reading sir thomas brown right now i read him 45 years ago as well i never the enthusiasm and energy that comes from the best writers you've adverted to the best matthew arnold the best that has been taught and said uh is still there and that's an almost a surprising thing that even at this very nocturnal hour uh the kind of exuberance that you had at 20 still lingers in the chambers of music and literature well that's something that's yes i would say so obviously something indicating the lasting benefit of a of a yeah of a genuine education in the humanities it's it's an inexhaustible source of of what exactly well we said mimicry of the great spirit that animates the ages right how could that you simply get no i like your description because that it's not often presented as a and now of course the the idea that education is for the job i do know how important jobs are i come from newfoundland uh but there's a whole set of spirits as you know you've met them that also say that there's another target in education and that's that you just spoke of it you remember always john the better to enjoy life or the better to endure it i don't think there's a better short description of what education is no i had a vision at one point of of the people many people who were influential to me in my life these were this particular vision mostly involved men and and so it was like a review in my mind of men that i had seen that had been influential to me and then it was like there was something behind that that was the greater men that i had been exposed to as a as a as a student to people i had read and identified with i mean when i found someone a thinker that i that captured me i tended to read everything i could that they had produced and i would fall into their mode of thinking it would take me over completely and then i'd re-emerge somewhat on the other side changed but but then i could see behind those great thinkers there was something else and i think that's something that you know people think about that as the ancestral god the ancestral father and and that was the spirit that was shining through the great men i had read and then all the people that had influenced me it's shown through what was great good and great about them by the way good good and great you're committing terrible sins here these these adjectives are now off of limits uh the idea of good and great mathematics this is where they did well it's the association it's the association with power as soon as you buy the by the doctrine that any hierarchical organization is predicated on power then obviously the higher up you are in that hierarchy the more corrupt you are so you might say well what so what what do you lose from that because you lose your sense of inferiority in relationship to the better well what you lose is the better and that's fine if you're good enough the way you are and but i've never met anyone who felt that they were good enough the way they were there's always clamor inside your soul for more the more that you could be and where else are you going to find it except among those who have deemed been deemed to be the best and it and it isn't arbitrary right you said when you went to university you'd hear these words and they would hit you you called them benign explosions that's not indoctrination by your by your educators that's introduction to the benign explosions well that particular professor all he did i i can still hear it uh it's about making a guess here it's about a 42-line simile he just read it and i i mean it was like beethoven's fifth because milton does have a certain power of expression and you're right there was no message attached he didn't say even by the way no message saying that you must like this it was just done and let the spirit respond as the spirit will but this is this fashioned education this fashion you go to university now to to be to be injected with attitude not thought and some of these these white uh programs and the new anti-racism which is all identity and and you only read things from the tribe to which you belong i know enough about newfoundland i want to read about the trojan war not the war on the southern shore i mean really they're canceling homer they're canceling shakespeare they're making fun of mathematics they're talking about white physics i do not know how we wandered so easily into this terrible and dominating lunacy have you seen the latest statement by the president of the cbc catherine tate following the the the george lloyd the george trial down in the states i mean it's like it's like a parody of of virtue thinking and how cbc is going to take notice of this and the systemic racism cbc and all that dear god i i spines requires calcium and there's no milk in cbc none how did i get under that i'm not even sure all right so you're you're eight years in newfoundland you're traveling all over the province you're you're listening to people you're watching their reactions to your shows you're you're reading how much how much do you read how and habitually oh two three four hours a day uh there was periods when i i i was out for a while i could go for eight or nine but i have books in the morning i have books in the evening and of course this stuff here the internet uh has diluted uh some of that traffic but i i do have a fair store i also by the way i this is a good point to make for people who are going rereading uh as an avocado has pointed out you can't read enough you can only reread it i find great pleasure i've reread johnson's letters for example recently uh even the anatomy of melancholy which is a bit of a task proofed re-read so i do that a lot i find that it's a refreshing uh that you borrow power not power in any militaristic or or status sense how about authority well it teases your brain and yeah i i if you you get thrown into a mood in which the actions of the mind are more prompt and more precise it's mood you can't you can't claim i i will now say this you have to wait for the damn word to come to you and but this puts you in that advertisement well see that's a mystery too right that's a mystery yeah that element of thought and you know people uh people are easily cynical about prayer but it seems to me that there isn't much difference in posing a question to yourself and waiting for an answer then there is i don't distinguish between that in some sense in prayer and prayer because the act of receiving revelatory thought which is the thought that bubbles up is it seems to me that you pose yourself a question and if your intent is genuine you want the answer you don't want something comfortable which is uncomfortable in itself mysteriously the something will arise and the less you put that persona that you described between you and the source upon which you call the more likely you are to be rewarded with the words that are correct yeah you that being you is a very strange idea because it it it happens of its own accord in some sense the book i was referring to way back and i said i wouldn't quote the title by kessler called the act of creation and it was an analysis of literary insight or literary inspiration uh humor the discovery of the punchline and mathematical the eureka moment i think i've read that i think i read that as an undergraduate it's a long while ago but it is precisely your point i have i have a puzzle in my mind i'm trying to find a phrase or if i'm a mathematician i have a real positive reconnect and at a whole series of time i have no answer i can't get it uh i go out and sloppily make a cup of tea and as i'm stirring the first cube of sugar oh i got the answer what was the difference between the two minutes before and the time that this thought exploded in your you had to have your mind prepared for the thought to have a place to pop okay so you just used that phrase explosion again you talked about the benign explosions that introduction to literature set off okay so there's a thematic relationship between those two ideas and yeah we already talked about the idea of mimicry and so you know what you do in part when you're educating yourself by pursuing what's see what appears to you to be meaningful and true is you build that spirit inside of you that's it and then that's the thing that's informing you when you ask questions yeah and you should build that spirit out of you build that spirit out of what the best out of the best the past has to offer you and there's markers for that and the markers are that aesthetic that aesthetic uh grip right it's not something that someone can impose on you it doesn't work it has to be you meet it halfway and so one you know when we have a conversation like this that that's spontaneous what i'm trying to do when i have a conversation like this is to become transparent in some sense i don't want my concerns about the podcast let's say the quality of the podcast the audience any of that i don't want those proximal concerns to interfere with my immersement in the conversation and if i do that correctly and open myself up then there's a spontaneity about the dialogue and that seems to be associated with the search for and the discovery of some additional truth we have to uh personally one of the words that that classic phrase man prepare to face to meet the faces that you meet anytime we artificially or self-consciously construct ahead of time some personal interaction which is what a conversation really is if we go in with the scaffolding already prepared in there it's kind of an armor nothing can happen uh you have you've put yourself in in in the closed container and you've done the right ritual moves your other point is also very interesting you don't care about the damn podcast and the quality no don't don't these are not only these are secondary they're collateral or adventitious but if you want to have a chat make the chat the thing and even there you don't you don't make it too deliberate you just you sit you speak and back and forth i don't know by the way how i'm doing on this but that's not the point excuse me the point on this one is very simple that we have to allow some channel for the impulses that we don't understand call of duty unconscious common column sensibility the impulses that we we don't command but they are there and occasionally they emerge solving the problem having a conversation making a quick joke in the middle of a live conversation it's a great mysterious thing we're not nearly as metaphysical as we should be uh people should pay more attention to the spirit even if they're not religious because there's a whole aura i come back to that word again there's a whole aura around how we do things and how we are why do you you have used that word continually why why aura what what is it that well that's magical about that conceptualization well two things in that it is ineffable that's the first thing that it is it is a sheen or a halo effect but it is not not to be seen by the eye but there is from some center or maybe it's not a center maybe maybe but from some place we derive psychological and intellectual energy that we can't command but that in in some ways we can prepare for as you've said by stocking the mind as best you can there are elements in our areas of the highest thought that are structured logically and research and all of these but there's one other thing besides and i call it aura mainly because of its substantiality its invisibility but also its link to something that's close to magic or close to religion and you can choose either of those two terms so there's there the phrase that left to mind when you were describing that was the preparation of the temple for receipt of the divine revelation and well i studied i i spent a lot of time reading carl rogers carl rogers psychologist a counselor clinical psychologist a humanist but originally a christian seminarian deeply influenced by protestantism and he he wrote very deeply and practically about listening and talking to clients and and he insisted upon a certain kind of genuineness that if you were operating properly as the therapist that there were now no persona tricks you were fully there yeah integrated body and mind integrated and there's something about that it's things have to line up all the way down to the bottom properly and the more that happens the the better the quality of the revealed word it's something like that and you prepare that in part by exposing yourself to great thoughts because they also yes eradicate the dross and and the dead wood and and the impediments to that movement of thought upward and so while you're reading all the time and pulling in these great thoughts and the spirit that animates the great thoughts as well you're also feeding that part of you that responds when you call upon yourself to answer ques it's why i've stressed in my writings honesty in speech because you you have to rely on this capacity for creative revelation to to guide you through the darkest possible times of your life when you have nothing else to guide you if you've corrupted yourself with deceptive speech and therefore deceptive thought you won't that that won't be there won't be anything there that's reliable when you call on it desperately yeah i saw that you you made that point i think in one of your uh recent comments doesn't matter where but where you point out that some people go to university and say okay i'm going to bend uh to the current dilapidated regime i'm going to pretend that i i i adore all their sanctities but as soon as i get out of university and i got the goddamn piece of paper uh then i'm going to start fighting back and you wrote back or replied if you start lying and you make a habit of it i'm paraphrasing obviously uh you won't walk out as easy as you think and you either you either start from that point or you don't and if you if you make that your persona sometimes the persona takes over the person that oscar wilde is familiar with that one other thing i'd like to add just throw in there when you talk about getting so close to truth remember also words themselves as words if there is a place for enchantment and enthrallment and charm uh orpheus with his loot made trees remember that he could communicate with inanimate music in that case but language also i think one of the highest hardest sentences in already is the very first one there in the beginning was the word uh i mean words are actors uh we have major control over them i think but they have an internal they have an internal force they have a residual force they are magical uh hence poetry hence ecclesiastes book of job you know them better than i uh i don't know if we ever penetrated that but i do know that language in its individual terms and its actual words has latencies of of of disposition and force yes it's right to think of them as active agents yeah i'd like to hear you on that so you watch every word and you watch every phrase and you watch every sentence and you try to get the rhythm right and you try to get the harmony right and you you then you attack what you wrote and you see if it can withstand the assault that you can bring to it and maybe you do that 50 times to see if you can craft something that you cannot improve no matter how hard you try and that you can't break no matter what you bring to bear upon it well again as i said i got sometimes the very simple sentence i mean how can i how could i explain or explicate would be better that particular sentence in the beginning was the word they're all single syllables prepositions a definite article and in the beginning was the word there's always again there's there's always that extra outside uh contribution that comes from the language itself and putting i sometimes think the catalysts the great tradition of the capitalists that they're my mute examination of the of the intrinsic terms uh the individual letters uh it may seem like a superstition but i i i think of it less a superstition than as a kind of mildly encouraged path to a certain insight there is more things in heaven on earth than i dreamt of in our philosophy i i wish the universities again go back to our theme here it seems to go through in dealing with literature in particular in history those kinds of subjects would would pay much more attention to also giving your your students the capacity uh to imitate those writers best writer in america in certain ways is abraham lincoln isn't that an amazing thing uh his inaugural address is oh my lord they have power enough that when martin luther king came by some hundreds of years later that they were operating in his brain they were they were a living dynamic every drop of blood drawn by the last should be paid for one drawn by the sword uh you know once we acknowledge that words continue to have their some of their original dynamic if they have been placed in the mind and if they're kept up anyway i know i'm rambling and i'm slightly more than incoherent we tell our students right we should tell our students just what you're telling them now which is that you watch your reaction to the words and you note the awe that's generated spontaneously and you take note of the worship that you've just participated in despite yourself as the marker to what constitutes truth well i i think you have it uh we will never fully comprehend the operations of of our own full consciousness uh either it's it's it's it's it's beneficial or not beneficial but we do know that spiritu the spirit whether religious or however you want to describe it that there are elements that will not be put down in the account book because they cannot be tabulated they cannot be named at least at this point you're in in a clinical circumstance you're partly scientist and you'll we will go as far as the evidence can lead you in the physical properties but there are aspects and dynamics of all human action that come from inspiration the word put in inspiration to breathe uh the demon that you referred to in all creation we the ancient poets sought that our ancient philosophy that the poets were possessed well they were possessed something for a while herman melville great example 25 26 years old and produces what is probably the only text i'm using a 80s word the only text that could be placed pretty close to a bible he flooded his mind his mind was a volcano for about a year and a half that he did he never wrote like it after never equal anyone who reads and by the way he was fired by the bible by shakespeare and by milton these are i'm confirming what you've said so often here you get in touch with the best and the best get in touch with you it's just again a it's a marvelous field that's also a terrifying thing it's a terrifying thing that a real university education or real education introduces people to because there's some terrible fire that's associated with best because it does burn off everything in you that isn't worthy and that tends to be an awful lot well in my case it's everything so don't bring the match close so okay so you're eight years with here and now and then what happens uh odds and ends of things uh one thing that is probably interesting for the public side here is that at one point in my own flaws i was out of work and i i i'm going to subtract a lot of detail because time only i ended up as an executive assistant to the opposition leader for about 17 months and i wrote question period for the newfoundland assembly i wrote it for the caucus and because it was newfoundland i got inside i didn't want to do this by the way i dreaded accepting the political appointment but i wasn't working so i did on and in hindsight it was one of the most useful things i've ever done because apart from being the guy on the mountainside with binoculars staring at the bird you're actually in the damn room i heard what politicians think of journalists i heard what journalists obviously think of politicians there's a 30 ignorance ratio on both sides and never been cured but it also really educated me sensitized me to what what are the buttons that you press if you were if you go back to the journalists then i ended up writing some stuff and i did this a piece i did on newfoundland in particular the fisheries this was the i somehow ordered struck a chord rather widely and so this is when the cod stocks were collapsing this was the account what years what years was this 1992 93 would probably be i i may be off on a year or two but that was i did a half hour it was the year oh and had an unparalleled wealth of of fishery and miraculous and its bountifulness that was decimated entirely never recovered it is it is the entire reason that it exists the language comes out of the fishery this the nature of the settlements all those small places where they went there because it was a beach and place to fish the sense of humor the stoicism that you will find in some uh certainly the inventiveness in song and chat because you're you were really isolated and people met only on the water there was so much tied up with that that that collapsed was as much psychologically for the first time in 500 years you couldn't take a codfish out of the water so i did a piece on that and as i said it obviously struck some cords and the next thing i knew i was being offered three or four jobs in various places i read of of cod schools that were 300 miles long hundreds of feet deep yeah hundreds of miles wide and composed primarily of fish that were three to five feet long that were so plentiful you could hold them up in buckets that was the yeah that was the origin that was the original cod fishery it was a joke you could walk across harbors on the backs of cotton it was and it by the way the sustenance for inactive terms 300 years of all these wonderfully small places that also nourished because they were truly cut off i keep saying this you were in present bay you weren't in fortune bay and you weren't in saint mary's bay and therefore being so isolated the drive to make things uh either for utility or for recreation to invent practices they brought mumming over from mummering over from england uh folk song some of the newfoundland folk songs as literature have not been studied but they are so inventive even the list of names uh kelly rooseve you tried to do it yourself so it did also kind of fostered by force independence there wasn't too many other people around to help you so if you don't do it yourself you're going to be in a hard spot it had a lot of virtues but it had a lot of faults the lack of health and education being the two principal ones how many futures were amputated because you grew up in a place where there was no school and there was no health how many you know this this is thomas gray in the english church how many mutant glorious militants it was hard it was cruel but it was rich it was rich in things again uh that individuals and communities and so what were you writing what were you writing that caused such a stir i i just i wrote looking back at it now it was basically analogy i called it on people's shores and that comes from another uh was it here the tide flows and here they had ed not with that dull unsigned tread of waters that move along on people's shores that's a poem written in 1930 about newfoundland and basically i was simply stating that the soul and i mean it solid newfoundland was being blistered and evaporated uh once you kill the cultural economic linguistic source of the being of the place i go so it was just a reckoning we talked mainly to fishermen that that poet i met on the northern northeast on saint anthony's atlanta meadow farmers by the way that's a good point to make farmers gave it the most response of most letters i've ever received and i wonder why you know fishermen are not farmers was it very simple their grandfathers had received uh salt fish from the newfoundlanders in the dirty thirties when they when they parry dust bowls and all the drought was going on newfoundland which was then just a country somehow got barrels of salt fish over the prairie farmers they remembered it and when they saw the fishery collapse i'm serious thousands of these were letters not emails you had to actually write and stamp them and three quarters from the prairies i always thought that when i learned that i thought that was a nice thing to kind of associate with canada the understories are much better than the newspapers what kind of consequences were there for for that writing uh it was a point where the story met someone who liked basically on me uh met the person who was close enough to it to do with some justice but it was the voices on i'm not one of these shy boys it was the voices uh of of the fishermen that i interviewed and also some officials it all dropped into a harmony 22 or 23 minutes so you really see i'm not bragging in the stating and because uh most canadians again despite the apologetics that come out every single damn day from ottawa how about how miserable and hateful we are at the national disposition in the main it's not confined to any group either is you know a reasonably lively interest in the bearings of other people and when they're having a hard time if there's any way we can intercede or at least offer you verbal comforts we're going to do it and when the farmers farming and fishing are very much like in some ways a small farm in shore fishery in the family farm they saw it and uh their their native theirs their identity as citizens that's what i want to say their identity is citizens uh was the preeminent one of that moment and when i think of identity politics i often ask and i think it should be asked a lot more when you go to university your identity there is a student and when you go to a university or you go to nepal your identity there is public servant the idea that you can concentrate your being into one small superficial attribute uh is is nonsense but the effect on me was i ended up here i came up here again i'm not not good on dates 94.95 and here is toronto yeah it's continuing from the periphery so to speak from completely different toronto absolutely what happens when you move to toronto uh not a lot as i said by that time both parents had gone um i had the the job at the national uh commentary in interviews and stuff and at cbc radio but i was introduced to a degree i had never been before to the full play of politics in a really large province ontario 10 million and because i was working at the national politics on the national scale and uh also there's another small dimension i i somehow ended up being reasonably popular as as a speaker all sorts of things and that gave me more opportunities than not financially they were they were financial too but i ended up in so many places addressing so many different groups everything from fishermen to academics to nurses to librarians and over a 20-year period just dropped me in and out of a hell of a lot of places and met a tremendous host of different people different occupations and there's a second that would be part of the reason why in some sense you have a national voice right because all those people that you've met they echo inside of you in the same way that the books that you've read echo inside of you i think the traveling under those hospitals you always you couldn't your schedule was too thick but i could always almost always linger for a day or two and the various associations uh also by the way here's another thing public speaking is is a great pleasure and it's a bit of an art and i was fortunate at this stage uh to be given other stages in which to keep practicing it you know again you've done hundreds but you i did 30 or 40 a year uh you you learn the arts of public communication that's a great bit of fun by the way and you take it but you're right on that thing that getting across the camp countries seeing how alberta is different from british columbia new brunswick is different from northern i can go on this this country is is fluid uh it has an underlying sentiment apache mr trudeau there are core values in canada uh and they should be stood up and emphasized a hell of a lot more but this was again this is the second part to practical education uh you get out you're not in toronto all the time and while i don't dump on toronto per se uh if you get within its charm circle uh you become one of the mental heard the set of synonymous attitudes uh among the cognizant and journalists in this city uh is bali and i think that's reflective of something that happens in the in the in north american culture yeah at least as far as the united states and canada are concerned that also happens at the level of the intellectual elite and there's seems to be something like a very distinct sense of contempt that emanates from that it's certainly something that people who aren't in toronto react to react what identify with toronto and react against and it is it is the kind of irritation that drives the populism for example yes exactly donald trump so popular exactly i've seen that in the contempt that reviewers continually express for my hypothetical followers like i don't think i have followers i think i have viewers and watchers and readers and and even if they were the people they're parodied to be i don't see any real sin in communicating with them in in in in whatever capacity i can manage but there's always a dripping contempt that is that is associated with the hoi polloi let's say who you know need such bromides and so forth well it's very true i mean in your particular case uh uh is low law low intelligence snobbery uh a kind of absolutely brazen snark by people again don't need to flatter you haven't read as much don't know as much but it is a verification of their standing within this little particular guarded sect uh and the opinions here have to be the only opinions it's almost like bloomsbury uh at a heavily discounted level uh i was i offered here i wondered in your case too in the very very beginning when the university of toronto was sending those letters i i kept asking what's the point of tenure if all these great tenured professors at the university of toronto when one of their owners being disparaged and to some degree threatened by these unemployment terms why why aren't they out on the principle uh it seems to have just gone away and i don't know that's i don't think that's particularly toronto mentality but it's certainly no there's been basically radio silence from my colleagues let's see yeah it is it is just it's very strange even even the level of success of the books i mean any serious engagement review full scale of of any of the three uh doesn't take place and they and then the kind of agitated morons on twitter uh dropping their low iq bombs from a great height i don't know why this is the case it makes you it makes you melancholy and i don't know we're able to fix it actually i wonder how far we can go along these paths before we degrade and degenerate well what have you seen happening what have you seen happening you've been observing our country and the culture for a long long time and yes you don't have any particular acts to grind as far as i can tell so what what's happening in the cultural sphere as far as you've concerned over the last say well pick a point and move i'd say that i would say the last 10 or 15 we we know origins and i won't go through all that and we know about the 60s but in terms of visible evidentiary impact it's the last 10 or 15. the first thing that i've seen that i resent is the idea tacitly held never explicitly made public uh that there are certain perspectives on the world that are okay and we hold them and therefore we're better and any dissent from them or disagreement with them or an alternate set is not to be not to be allowed half the reason i'll give it an illustration after reason the cbc audiences collapsed and shrunk to such a vast extent they did is that cbc was only interested in talking to the people who agreed with it and that's a much more narrow bunch than ever no i've watched my parents and and their reaction to cbc i mean we were avid cbc listeners when i was a kid especially to fm and and it was everywhere in canada and but also of course television as well but radio we'll concentrate on radio it was always of high quality and it did seem to speak to the whole country it did a credible job as it's a national broadcaster and then all of a sudden and it is probably 15 years ago everyone i know in the west just stopped listening it was like no this isn't us anymore it folded up and went away i could tell you that not regarding attacking them i i waged a small minor almost silent rebellion within i tried to get something out there whenever i was traveling in the last 10 or 15 years it was the most frequent phrase i'd ever hear i'm not watching it anymore i'm not watching it anymore and it's accelerated greatly uh the events in the states mr trump's election maybe to a degree brexit over across the border has has become attended with or is present simultaneously with this new uh wokeness this critical race theory the imposition of anti-bias uh the hypers and i think effective sensitivity of the business university and even the health community to the more fashionable virtue contests mr trudeau uh apologizing almost every six days i've written three or four columns saying if you do it these apologies great ahead we have our faults but every now and then find something good to say we have stripped the nation of its self-confidence that's one thing we have alienated and put out in the outer darkness a vast portion of the population they are not listening to its cultural leaders or the illuminati or the cleric people are afraid a political correctness is a very feeble phrase to cover the psychological landscape in which people uh of moral character are afraid to say what is extremely obvious we're polluting the political system and the intellectual system and finally aside from you uh on a large scale aside from you no one is resisting this this is this this tidal force uh that is emphatically cheapening the culture and shatter not chattering by piecemeal graduation canada law professor at queens has been a what would you say a truthful communicator with me and i also like david salway janice finango's husband he writes some very strong stuff okay so you've seen this and you don't think it's just the miasma of a cranky old man i mean that's no okay why not and what do you think about the trudeau government just out of curiosity and i don't mean i don't really mean politically i mean culturally i know because i've looked at so many governments and you you you do seem to me to be someone who gives out praise when praise is due and i certainly hope i do on the praise front uh two through two or three things uh there is in the in the case of trudeau not on the partisan level i think his view of canada is not only wrong that it has no core values and that there's no nonsense uh i i vehemently uh am against the propaganda side of obviously all his private meaning personal all his private so-called commitments this farcical global war on being the worst but also he adopted despite his own personal stuff he adopted the walk persona to the nth possible degree and why do you say he adopted that persona rather than being it i mean do you think that's calculated is there something under i don't know trudeau is there any like do you know him personally at all have you ever talked to him when he was oh yeah i i had one hour session but i'm not basically remarks on that but what i will base it on is that and i'm not trying to be harsh without cause that if for some reason it was fashionable to have exactly the other set of opinions the opposite they would be just i think he the one thing that in his biography that makes sense is at least that little inclination towards dramatics he's not a very good actor but he knows what roles are playing best and because the conservatives are such a a self-contradictory and disorganized and leaderless bunch it's enough to be half good on the proscenium uh to maintain it but the worst thing about and i should say this we have fractions of fractions in the west uh we have great disenchantments we have economic ruin facing some problems is that after this covert thing uh we have a generational tension set up between the oak and a lot of other people and he is so much on one side of all of these things and it emerges from his government and his ministers of smugness about any opposition i i can't think of a time when canada in a in a kind of soft way uh was in such a possibility of of of losing its own confidence and the shoulders back as you say this country bit by bit by bit is shedding uh the sense of its own integrity and drifting and politics is is so shallow these days i wish i wish i wish you could ever hear you don't have there's no orator because there's no truth you can't build a great speech around something you don't really believe in and by the way here's i'll toss it back to you we are a nation when was the last time you heard a national address you know meant to underline and and as you said though if there's no national identity what's to address yeah or if the national identity is essentially something like tyrannical power and oppression and to be fought at every possible um what every possible corner by every possible means what can you possibly address yeah and also the factionalism of identity politics is directly contradictory uh it it seeks to to suffocate the idea of commonality and citizenship that's another that's a huge worry we're in in the in the name of anti-racism i see some of these tactics and some of the demonizations and some of the insults as provoking the very cause that they seem to be against we got stuff fascinating on the color of people's skin which is what identity politics sometimes just turns into uh i have never seen a time when the our country in 201 i wrote a column built this is not systemically racist i was in newfoundland when the americans landed in 9 11. i interviewed some of them no did it didn't have any problem with background color skin or anything else the normal reflex of the normal canadian welcome welcome welcome and yet we have people like mr trudeau catherine tayden cdc she accuses her own organization of being systemically racist mr trudeau says the parliament does not just happen to be like that it was planned to be like are we made of medieval you know flatulence is is this the noob it's a new patriotism that's why i that's just my deepest problem with mr trudeau he's not as large as the nation that he seeks or seems to think he's governing well i'm still struggling constantly to understand this to see to see because it does seem to me to have accelerated in the last few years whatever this is that is accelerating i mean in increasingly the pathology that has decimated the humanities in particular which is the core of the university and you you know it's self-punitive in some sense because enrollment in the humanities is plummeting right it's just catastrophically declining and so you might say well if the motivation was resentment of the creative process that produced the great classics then victory has been attained yeah classics have been decimated and everyone no one will attend to them anymore and so you know victory but it means the death of the universities as far as i'm concerned and then but worse than that and and i could see this happening five or six years ago is that this is starting in a very major way to percolate out into the broader culture so you see this in schools every faculties of education in particular should hang their heads in utter shame what they've done to the education system is beyond disgraceful and it's barely got going and you see this in the corporations too i see these corporations they they fall over themselves cow telling to their hr departments to bring in a philosophy that is um explicitly anti-capitalist yeah it's like what are you people doing it's like do you think you're going to be able to pick and choose bits of this philosophy once you open the door no you i just can't believe that that i can't believe well we're we're on the same page there uh it is it is inexplicable uh from the schools uh i've i've seen the material from some of the schools none because it was passed on to me uh some of the training sessions the idea that a human being with any self-respect would submit to anti-bias training who the hell are you to tell me what that i'm unconsciously biased i the the the the weakness and cowardice of the big corporations we don't even know what those tests measure i know people know there's serious research on those tests it's not obvious what that bias consists of it's the cultural revolution in china and who's the ignorant fool that has all this expertise does she or he have cultural advice well if it's unconscious how the healthy look a nation of citizens wouldn't accept this you don't go into a shop as an employee or a big firm or a law firm and let some jerk in her human roar and tell you take the sensitivity train who the hell are you i went to church i went to school that's what gives me my personality is that that's some corporate fool but no everyone shoulders down head under the desk that's the biggest worry i i think we're at the back end of of some deliques and some some some some melting of things that we knew and we knew had they had maybe we're so well off we were being shielded from on this side from the great wars and from poverty and from huge natural disasters our ancestors built the place up for our benefit and we waltz in and we're full of life and vigor and we can go places so you you get you get lazy and complacent and you let these these mice of thought take over the building uh but after a while as you said you can't you can't taste a bit of this you have to take it all and i i mr judo should be fighting this not underlining and endorsing it and so what what let's talk about the conservatives momentarily i mean they can't organize themselves they they don't have a story that's compelling i mean this isn't just a problem that's distinct to canada the inability of centrists to generate a romantically compelling narrative is universal across the west as far as i can see and so it i mean it it i presume that trudeau will win the next election i don't know what you think i think that uh barring some some easter scale uh miracle he will win mr o'toole the most recent thing he did was to embrace this this superstitional folly of apocalyptic global warming and promised his own carbon tax all of his mps are from alberta and saskatchewan i i and there are there's one or two people in the in the conservative party of real talent rhetorically there's no one matching uh uh uh significance is just something that slipped away uh pierre poliver but otherwise no they're they consent to the things do i should talk to pierre i think he's very very good uh again i i'm not suggested people think that i am partisan i am not i'd be just as hard if it was but polyvir uh i have i don't know i have talked with him uh he's organized yeah his seven minute speeches in parliament are very very good uh he agitates the other side greatly they hate him as opposed to don't like him uh he would have been a much more convincing depressed despises him which is another medal of canada uh in his favor so yeah he would be a very good he's articulate as hell i don't know much about him as such but i watched the performance and in the case of public life performance is everything so let's let's end this by we didn't walk through your whole life but we we walked into um journalism what was it like when you were younger and what's happened and and where do you see hope perhaps i think it was a for most people that go into it who actually intended or intent with intent went after a journalism career yeah fine i knew a lot of the editors of really small town newspapers there's about eight or niners in newfoundland when i was there at harbor grace uh saint anthony's clarenville and they are the old hometown reporter and these are small towns uh they were fun uh they were that that was their dirt of course either eviscerated or folded up so long st john's wasn't a particularly good newspaper town but at least they actually reported the news they didn't go out and seek out causes and stick up things that whatever would reflect this cause would be on the newspaper no it was the event it was the car crash it was the election it was some foreign it was something that actually happened and we report things that happen that are new uh we don't see ourselves as a running channel trying to bend the mind of our readers jump 30 40 years uh in the states it's absolutely toxic nothing outside of soviet russia when it was soviet russia and prabha was the screen of all lies journalism in the united states on all the big networks everyone goes on about fox have you ever watched cnbc have you ever watched cnn i mean you'd need a mental cleanser if you were in the same room they are ruinously corrupt they are ruinously incompetent some of their anchors are stupid i mean stupid in the sense that they had to work hard to get as stupid as they are and then you have the newspapers who decide well trump is such an evil that we have to change the entire doctrine of what a newspaper is we are out to get him when newspapers become activists it's time to walk to the cemetery and bury the the printing presses uh so how much rex how much of that do you think is is merely a consequence merely a consequence of technological revolution i mean there's so much journalism now it's because anyone can pick up a pen and have an instant international audience if they can attract it right you can blog you can do youtube videos it's like no one has a monopoly on bandwidth anymore and no so the newspapers and and and classical journalists are really up against it in in a profound way i mean are we just seeing the consequences of no you think it's more than that no no no i i know it's bored that i i'm being defined here now i know that journalists in the higher altitudes in national journalists especially they now see themselves as precurators as as persons as prestigious to some degree at least as those they report upon they also have invested themselves with a clerical view of things that they have a wisdom that perhaps even the people they're reporting on are are incapable of receiving they are there to teach you uh cbc uh from my perspective lost his audience mainly because he became a preacher and the the the the chief character boring preacher which is even more you you have hit so many nails on the head with that you do not need someone x if the cbc is on these days but no journalists have self-appointed this is the problem let's take the trans movement suddenly they can in three days they can put this particular issue which at best exists at a micro level in terms of the whole population and make that the new the the new litmus test uh you know for whether you're politically correct or not they endorse all ideological programs of the hard left and and i also i'll say this many journals and journalists don't like their own audiences or the people who read them uh don't like i said about the humanities if you're thinking about becoming a journalist please look around a bit more before you do although those who do it very well as i said glenn greenwald molly hemingway melanie phillips i'm going around the globe of these these are sterling examples of what we would hope well it seems that people like that are increasingly i would say going out there on their own yeah they are they are melanie phillips i do know uh has their own thing set up greenwald got tossed because he wasn't subscribing to the current philosophy but he had enough standing that his intercept i think it's the intercept uh is now and he gets a lot of air time because again he he is i hate the term a celebrity journalist but he's a good journalist i disagree with 95 of what he thinks but i i see him covering the press lately uh the last five or six months of some of his columns they are as they say must read and barry weiss's letter uh that's also good stuff so there are good people there but i think the weight culturally with the universities the corporations uh the news media itself the trend towards the enforcement tacit or by mob of a certain set of thoughts is so deep and is so unresisted by so many that i i think we're in for a long haul and then if we have a bad economy coming out of colvin and all the spending it's going to be a terrible two or four years there are so many people and it's not being reported lost shops lost jobs lost hope saw some life enterprise collapse and are you seeing this on the news no you're not anyway i don't mean i don't mean always to end up screaming at you what makes you optimistic any any flair of independence i'm not as convinced that some of the brilliant writing that is being done in analysis and opposition is reaching enough people but i am encouraged that there's a lot and i can't go through the whole span there's a lot out there if you if you search it out i don't know if this would be classified as optimism but when societies get really challenged i mean really challenged inevitably they revert to the genuine virtues if this current malays has set us back really badly and if canada is no longer a place that has instant access to almost everything it wants maybe it's citizens of the world again the eternal values of intercommunication of commonality of goals and values not skin colors or ideologies and that uh getting closer to reality if we are forced to it by economics or other things we will dispense with we will be those that all this is hollow and useless but it's like you know you can afford to play if you've got everything else taken care of if you're driven back to actually having to work for things think about things take time and avoid falsity these these will blow up in the day whether that's going to happen i kind of doubt it but maybe that is the the the cynicism of senescence creeping up on me you've had a stellar career as a journalist you've had this sort of career that i would say every journalist would like to have um you've been prolific and influential and well-regarded and controversial and and you've had a long life doing it and done all sorts of interesting things what advice would you have for someone who wants to write well what do they have to do if they want to write and it's particularly they want to be journalists who write go to the best examples one of every journalism school in the country should have the two volumes of malcolm muggeridge's biography i do this for two reasons i know your veneration of charles schnitzen and i also know you know that malcolm uggrich was the very first prominent western journalist who wrote of the terror and the famine uh he did it at the time in walter durant he was lying to the new york times and getting pulitzer and nobel prizes for it i would advise them to read flynn o'brien i would advise him to read charles i would advise him most of all in terms of reading read francis bacon's essays they are the best lead story the rest lines leading a story here's one what is truth suggesting pilot and would not stay for an answer if you want to know how to write a lead sentence read any of bacon's essays they have the most beautiful thing the other thing to write there's only one thing jordan if i may use your first name that anyone who seriously wants to write or wants to write stuff that is serious as opposed to some victims diary read read other people read other novels there's nothing that would help you more in the art of writing than reading and you could also add one more thing if you read say the rate gatsby you read the paragraph sit back or read the poem and ask yourself if i were to write this if i had to communicate this thought how would i have said it then compared with what scott fitzgerald did anyway i think i've probably dragged you sir to the point of perhaps mortal tedium so i'm going to stop it right there thank you very much i really appreciate you speaking with me [Music] you

Channel: Jordan B Peterson

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

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Length: 136min 8sec (8168 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 03 2021