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May 24, 2017 - Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

02:10:40

2017/04/21: A Left-Wing Case for Free Speech

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	I thought I'd do something different today, so I haven't given this talk before.
	I'm going to tackle the issue of free speech from a left-wing perspective.
	It's actually dead simple to provide a left-wing rationale for free speech.
	It should be self-evident to people who are pursuing social justice that the most potent weapon in their artillery is the ability to communicate.
	What if people who lack power have other than their ability to speak on their own behalf?
	And isn't it on their behalf that the right to speak must be most jealously guarded?
	Anyway, I thought I would begin with a crucial observation.
	There's a fundamental structural reason why our political system has developed both a left and a right wing, and that's the tendency for scarce resources to become unequally distributed.
	So let's discuss that.
	In my clinical practice, I once had a client, an older guy, in his 80s.
	He'd come to me after his wife had died because he was lonesome, but also because he was obsessed, mostly with mathematical ideas.
	He gave me this little gold statue he'd have printed of the most beautiful mathematical equation which equates i and e and pi in one simultaneous equation and I showed it to a woman in our department who is also very enamored in mathematics and she was awestruck by it.
	The moment she saw it, it didn't really have the same effect on me because I'm not someone who sees, I'm not mathematically gifted enough to see beauty in a symbol that represents that sort of thing.
	Anyways, I got to know him pretty well, and it was actually, in some sense, funny that he was paying me to come and talk to me, because I certainly learned as much or more from him than he did from me.
	I did help him with his grief, and I also helped him, I think, come to terms with this mathematical obsession.
	He couldn't stop thinking about mathematical issues, but that was more or less just the way he was.
	I mean, he was wired that way, and, you know, he felt mad about it in some sense, but...
	Well, if you're an obsessive genius, that's just life, you know?
	There are people like that, and they're not that common, and it's good that there are some of them, and he was one of them.
	He had been a psychology student in his youth, but then he switched into economics and tried to learn how to take his fortune, which he had been quite successful at.
	And he introduced me to some concepts that I hadn't encountered, which shocked me.
	It shocked me, because The concepts that he introduced me to were actually fundamental, of fundamental importance.
	And I couldn't believe that I had gnawed through so much education and so much further education and research and developed a certain expertise in statistics, although I'm no statistical expert, without encountering his said ideas.
	And he introduced me to What has come to be known as, well, it's the work of Vilfredo, Vilfredo Perito, who is an Italian economist, and also the work of Derek DeSola Price, who was someone who was studying scientific productivity back in the 1960s.
	He wrote a book called Big Science, Little Science.
	I tried to get a copy of it on Amazon, which I initially did, and I believe the first edition is on print.
	I think they were selling for about $630.
	Which is quite staggering.
	It shows you how interested people are in that particular piece of work.
	And so, I'll tell you about DeSolo Price first, and then I'll tell you about Perinoid and the Perinoid distribution.
	So, DeSolo Price was interested in scientific productivity.
	And basically, you can index scientific productivity by looking at how many scientific papers a given scientist publishes.
	And scientists are Obsessed with their size, but they're also obsessed with their size of a publication record, because, well, they like status, just like the next person, and status has to be measured and tracked and communicated,
	partly because Well, you have to promote people, and you have to assess them, and you have to hire them, and so you have to rainboard them, and so if you don't keep track of people's accomplishments, then you do that rather stupidly, and then you don't hire, or promote, or place the proper people.
	So the scientific community has organized itself very well, and keeps very tight track of different metrics of research potency, let's say.
	And so one of those would be a number of papers published in Here we do journals, and that's a pretty good one, as it turns out.
	Pure number is actually, as it turns out, a very excellent index of scientific quality.
	Partly because, generally speaking, quality and quantity in a productive field are quite tightly correlated.
	And the reason for that is, well, it's kind of obvious.
	The more you practice at something, the better you tend to get at it.
	So quantity and quality tend to be tightly insulated.
	But there are other indexes, like The quality of the journal that you publish in, and that's indexed by the average number of citations that a given paper might get, and citation count is an indication of impact, right?
	If no one cites your work, like, 80% of published humanities papers have zero citations, just so we know.
	80%, that's absolutely appalling, right?
	People write those papers, They're published in journals.
	The libraries buy them.
	Zero people read them.
	It's a good scam.
	It's a financial scam because journals are very, very expensive and publishers publish them because they're expensive and libraries have to buy them.
	And so the libraries buy them even though no one reads them and no one cites them and they stack the libraries with them and they increase the ratio of noise to signal and we subsidize that.
	It's not very intelligent.
	It's one of the reasons the humanities are dying.
	probably not fast enough.
	I say that with a heavy heart because I'm a great admirer of, let's say, the more classical The humanities are the heart of the university.
	And make no mistake about it.
	If the humanities don't, the universities are done.
	The tech stuff, the scientific stuff, that can be parceled out.
	Other agencies and mechanisms can take care of that.
	The humanities are the heart of the university.
	We lose them, we lose the university.
	And that's a terrible thing.
	But it's not as terrible as having them continue on the path that they're on right now.
	So, okay, so anyways, back to scientific productivity.
	So, DeSole Price was curious about who was productive, and what the differences in productivity were.
	And he looked at the average number of publications that a PhD student had, and this was in the early 60s, upon graduation.
	Now, the rates have gone up since then, but upon graduation.
	The rate, the metrics have stayed the same, in terms of what I'm discussing, but the rates have gone up.
	So, the median number of publications, which is the typical number, not the average number, right, the typical number that people would produce, was one.
	One publication.
	And then you might say, well, okay, fine.
	The median person published one.
	How many people published two?
	And the answer to that was half as many as published one.
	And the answer to that question was, well, how many people published three?
	And the answer was half as many as published Two.
	And four was half as many as three, and five was half as many as four.
	And so what you see is a staggeringly rapid drop-off of productivity as you move upward in a number of publications.
	And there's a side effect to that.
	So imagine a graph.
	What happens is if you're graphing the number of people at a particular number of publications, you have the vast majority of people at one, half as many at two, half as many as that at three, four, five, and then you get outliers out here that have maybe like ten, or maybe twenty, and those people are, well, they're super geniuses in their field, right?
	They're unbelievably smart, they're unbelievably fast, they're unbelievably productive, And there's hardly any of them.
	And so, Price made an observation about scientific productivity, and it's a terrible, terrible observation.
	It's a hate fact.
	He observed that if you took a domain of scientific productivity, and you were trying to figure out who did the productive work, the answer was that It was the square root of the number of people who were operating in that particular specialization produced half of the publications.
	Now, it's worthwhile thinking this through.
	So let's say there are ten people in a particular domain.
	This also applies to employee productivity in corporations, by the way.
	Same general principle.
	So if you've got ten employees, three of them do half the work.
	Well, that's not surprising.
	You have people who don't do any work.
	You have some people who do so little work that they actually cost you money.
	In fact, that's the estimate for, if I remember correctly, 65% of managers.
	Well, it's hard to run a company.
	It's easy to save one, and they fail all the time.
	Okay, so if you have 10, 3 do have to work.
	Well, that doesn't seem so bad.
	Well, if you have 25, 5 do have to work.
	That's getting rough.
	If you have 100, it's 10.
	If you have 1,000, well, it's hard to hit anything.
	It's 30.
	So what does that mean?
	It means that productivity is distributed in a manner that was described by Bill Frito-Purito, and that's the Frito distribution.
	And when you look at the distribution of income and the distribution of wealth, it's Purito distributed, which means that almost everyone has none.
	And a few people have a little bit, and then even fewer people have a little bit more than that.
	And there's some people, Bill Gates, for example, Carlos Slim, Jeff Bezos, who had more money than God.
	And you might say, well, that's a consequence of improper social structuring.
	And the right response to that is, no, it's not.
	It's actually something more akin to a natural law.
	It governs, the same distribution governs the size of cities.
	That's an interesting thing.
	It also governs the size of Planetary bodies, that's harder to blame on the patriarchy.
	But it's also true.
	It also seems to govern the distribution of every single thing that human beings produce creatively.
	So for example, and I mean everything, it's really quite staggering.
	So it applies to number of hockey goals scored, for example.
	Such that someone like Wayne Gretzky, I read, if he took away all his actual goals, he'd still have more points than any hockey player that ever lived.
	And so, you know, in the NHL, that's really interesting, because the NHL is 1%.
	No, it's not.
	It's like one-tenth of one-tenth of one percent of all the people who play hockey get into the NHL. Like, no one, right?
	Give it up.
	It's not happening.
	If it does happen, and you're like the average NHL guy, like you're a superstar, and then you're some son of a bitch like Gretzky.
	You're so much better than you, and you might as well just stay whole.
	And that's the case in all of these domains of creative production.
	I can tell you some other...
	People who are kind of Gretzky-like in their old fashion.
	So we can talk about Pablo Picasso.
	He's an interesting character.
	He had a very long, productive life, right?
	He did, if I remember correctly, into his 90s.
	One day I looked up how many works of art Picasso produced.
	And you know, you might think these are just sketches that he was, like, just thrown off.
	But don't think that.
	Go on to the...
	Online Picasso archive, where 15,000 of them have been documented.
	Well, now I've given away my punchline.
	So I found that, and then I did some research to find out how many artworks this crazy character had produced, and the answer was 65,000.
	Three a day, every single day, for 65 years.
	So I tried that.
	But he had a wife, too, right?
	I mean, he wasn't just obsessively producing artworks, although he was.
	A huge proportion of those things were masterpieces, right?
	So this was no Piker, this guy.
	He was something else.
	And then Bach is a good example, J.S. Bach as well.
	He wrote so much music that it would take a copyist 45 years of eight-hour days Just to copy what he had composed.
	So these people are off the scale with regards to what they do.
	You know, you see the same thing if you're looking at patent numbers or that sort of thing.
	So the question is, this is a really interesting problem, but the question is, two questions.
	Why in the world is the world set up like that?
	That's the first question.
	And the second question is, well, it makes Since it makes everything radically unfair, in a sense, at least with regards to distribution, I mean, maybe it's good because those people are producing things like that and the rest of us, at least in principle, get to enjoy it, but nonetheless, there's a big problem in terms of inequality of distribution and ability and all of these things.
	Why?
	Why is that the case?
	Well, here's one reason.
	So, and this is something I worked out, at least in part, with my client.
	Who also had a theory on societal revolutions, which I think was quite an intelligent theory.
	He introduced me to a field of inquiry that I'd never heard about before called econophysics.
	And I didn't know there were econophysicists, but there are.
	And some of them are very productive and the other ones aren't.
	The econophysicists figured out that you could model the distribution of money in a population using the same equations That you could model the distribution of a gas into a vacuum.
	So there's a deep entropy-like phenomena driving the distribution of money.
	And here's how it works.
	Well, you guys have all played Monopoly, right?
	And so...
	Monopoly is basically a random walk.
	I mean, you know how to play Monopoly.
	You buy everything you can as fast as you can.
	And the person who's the luckiest wins.
	That's basically how Monopoly works.
	You know, there's a lot of, I wouldn't say a skill, there's sort of a lot of stupidity.
	If you're stupid enough while you play, you lose.
	But mostly, barring that, it's a random walk.
	And you know that, because if you play ten Monopoly games, it's very unlikely that you're going to win more than your random share of it.
	So think about what happens in monopolies.
	The first thing that happens is you start from a position of equity.
	Everybody has exactly the same amount of money.
	And then you engage in random trading, essentially.
	You shake the dice.
	And so what happens?
	Well, what happens is, so here's the graph.
	One bar.
	Here's the number of people.
	Four people are playing.
	They all have exactly the same amount of money.
	I think it's like $2,000 to begin with or something like that.
	Then you start shaking the dice.
	And then what starts to happen is a few people start to win a bit more, and a few people start to lose a bit more.
	And what happens to the winners is that they become more resilient.
	They can take more losses than the people who are starting to lose.
	And so what happens is the distribution flattens out.
	Couple of people get more and more money, one person pulls out into the lead, some people get less money, and a loser starts to develop.
	And you keep shaking the dice.
	And soon what happens is, bang, someone hits zero.
	Now, zero is a terrible number.
	And you can see this in all sorts of ways.
	For example, if you're trying to start a business, Zero customers is really the wrong number of customers to have.
	It's way harder to get your first customer than to get your second customer.
	You know, it's way easier to get your hundred and second customer than your third customer.
	Massively easier.
	Partly because who the hell wants to buy something from you if you haven't sold something to someone else?
	You know, people use social proof.
	And you might say, well, I'm new and revolutionary, and they think, well, that's all good for you, but there's no damn way I'm going to take the risk of being wrong buying your product.
	If a hundred other people bought it, then I can say, well, these other hundred people bought it, so I thought it was okay, which is a reasonable justification.
	But, you know, otherwise they have to say, well, you know, I went out on a limb, and this looks new and exciting, and it's like, yeah, you're fired.
	So...
	So it's hard.
	It's very, very difficult to get away from zero.
	Now, in Monopoly, it's impossible.
	Because as soon as you hit zero, you run into a problem that you don't have when you even have $20.
	And the problem is you can't invest zero to make any more money.
	You're done.
	You stack up at zero, you're done.
	And so zero is a rough number.
	While you keep playing the Monopoly game, what happens is someone walks away with all the money.
	Now, you can complain about the rules of the game, but you know, the funny thing is, people will play.
	Even if they know, they know what the damn outcome's going to be.
	One, you know, put a crap, walks away with no money, and everyone else is poverty-stricken and repressed.
	Not blessed, everyone plays.
	But then, what you also notice is that if you recast the game and play it once more, the tables will often turn.
	Now, my client's hypothesis, which I thought was a very good one, was that That's what happens in society.
	That's why they move towards revolution.
	And it's kind of a Marxist idea in some sense, which is that you play the game long enough, you can assume it's a random trading game.
	It's not exactly a random trading game, but you can model it quite nicely as a random trading game.
	What happens is eventually, you know, some people have everything, and almost everyone stacks up at zero.
	And the problem with zero is that you've got nothing to lose.
	You might as well flip the damn board over and start a new game.
	And that's especially true if you're male.
	And the reason it's true if you're male is because males need status.
	And the reason they need status is because females don't like men with no status.
	So that's a fundamental rule.
	So the correlation between Male socioeconomic status and access to mating partners is roughly about 0.6, which is a staggeringly high correlation for the social sciences.
	Massive correlation.
	The only correlation I've ever seen higher than that is the relationship between inequality and male-on-male homicide, which is about 0.8, which accounts for all of it.
	So as inequality cranks up, men start to kill each other.
	And they're young men, and they kill other young men, and they do it in status disputes, and they do it within race.
	You say something rude to me.
	I say something rude back.
	We're trying to save face.
	We're trying to crank up a little status.
	Soon, if we're not careful, because we're impulsive.
	Because our future isn't that bright.
	We have a short time horizon.
	All we've got is our reputation.
	It's like it's you or me, buddy.
	And so you end up dead.
	Or maybe I end up dead.
	It's a toss-up.
	And so what happens?
	You get charged with second degree murder.
	There's not enough prosecutors to go after you.
	So it's a plea bargain down to manslaughter.
	You can argue self-defense.
	You're put in prison for three years.
	You serve 18 months.
	And when you come out, no bloody one messes with you.
	Right?
	Right?
	It's a harsh economics recalculation.
	And it's an effective one.
	And so, but it's one of the consequences of inequality.
	So we did research using this When you're thinking about creativity, there's two ways to think about it.
	You can think about creativity as a process, and that would be How creatively can you think?
	And that would be associated to some degree with your IQ, especially with your verbal IQ. And also with this trait, this big five personality trait known as openness, which is a fundamental, deeply biologically rooted personality trait.
	And basically, people who are creative are good at generating exemplars either of a category or between categories.
	I can test your creativity right now.
	It's actually quite straightforward.
	So, for example, if I got you guys to pull out a piece of paper and write down as many words as you could that began with the letter S in three minutes, the number of words you generated would be correlated with your creative capacity at about.3 or.4.
	And you think, well, that's not very high, but actually that's higher than Well, small effect sizes have a lot more effect than you think, for a variety of reasons.
	Partly because the extremes matter, the middle doesn't matter so much.
	And I can do a better job if I said, write down as many uses as you can for a break.
	Three minutes.
	And then I scored it not only in terms of how many uses you came up with, but how comparatively rare your uses were compared to the rest of the Population that was being scored.
	Now, you know, it would have to be sensible.
	It would have to be a plausible use for a brick.
	But rarity and fluency seem to make up a lot of what constitutes creativity.
	So that can be measured pretty well.
	And that's kind of normally distributed, like intelligence.
	We are interested in something else, because creativity can be defined in different ways.
	So we're interested in creative achievement, accomplishment, right?
	So not only could you think creatively, but you actually produce something in the world as a consequence.
	And you can debate about which is the better definition of creativity, but it doesn't matter.
	You can have both definitions, and they're useful for different purposes, and we chose the creative achievement definition, because that's what we're curious about.
	And so what we did was, we thought up, we thought up, As many dimensions as we thought were reasonable of being creative.
	And so that was like dance, music, theater, inventions, cooking, you know, novel cooking, architectural innovation, fiction writing, non-fiction writing, I don't remember all 13 of them, but you get the picture.
	And then we had, we developed An eight-point scale of levels of achievement, and we have them generated by experts, and then we rank over them in terms of their improbability.
	So category zero was, I have no training or talent in this area, and category eight was like, well, I have an international reputation.
	And so then we had people fill out the questionnaire, and we looked at the distribution, and what we got was Pareto distribution.
	Now, that was before I knew what Pareto distributions were.
	I thought, hmm, we must have Followed up in making the scale, in some sense, because everyone who's a social scientist basically learns that everything is normally distributed, which is wrong.
	Many things are Pareto distributed.
	As I'm pointing out, everything that people produce creatively is Pareto distributed.
	And that is really, really, really, really important, because, you see, one of the things that shows you is that whatever's going on with income distribution doesn't just characterize income distribution.
	So you can't just blame it stupidly on unfair social circumstances.
	It's also the case that every society, every study, has a Pareto distribution of income.
	Now, how steep it is, that varies to some degree as a consequence of things like social policy.
	It's very, very difficult to get away from the Pareto distribution.
	In fact, we don't know how to get away from it.
	That's the real truth of matters.
	You don't know how to get away from it.
	Anyways, with the creative achievement question here, what we found was that I think it was 60% of people had a score of zero.
	Zero!
	They hadn't done anything creative in any of the 13 dimensions.
	Look, it's not that surprising.
	How many of you have written a book?
	Well, none.
	And if you have written it, you certainly didn't publish it.
	And if you didn't publish it, no one bought it.
	Seriously.
	No one writes books.
	It's pretty hard.
	And then you write them, and the rejection rate for trying to get public age is like 99%.
	And then there's like a million books published a year, and I think, I can't remember, it's like 2,500 sell more than 10,000 copies or something horrible like that.
	You know, and Stephen King gets all the money.
	And this brings us to the reasons for such things.
	So, I have a friend who's a novelist, and he's not Stephen King.
	But he does pretty well.
	He's written a novel here for about 20 years, a couple of his head hits L.A. Times Best Alchemist.
	But he's breaking the edge of the radical freedom distribution.
	He hasn't really hit the big time yet, but he's pushing.
	Whereas most novelists, they just starve to death.
	Like artists, they just starve to death.
	So, we talked about this.
	It's like, well, what the hell?
	What's going on here?
	Why does all the money flow to like five people?
	And he said, well, think about this.
	Think about it geographically.
	Although, in a strange manner.
	Think about real estate territory in relationship to books.
	And then think about going to an airport.
	And then think about going to an airport bookstore.
	And then think about the best-seller stand.
	1, 2, 3, 4, 5, no, down to maybe 50.
	The top 5, everyone buys them.
	And then think, well there isn't just one of those stands.
	There's like a million of them.
	And that's like 70% of the selling real estate territory.
	And it's overwhelmingly dominated by...
	The person up in the left-hand corner, who is very often Stephen King, whose name everyone knows, whose work everyone can predict, makes the choice easy.
	You know, you're preoccupied, man.
	You're on a flight somewhere, you don't want to spend ten minutes figuring out what you're going to read.
	It's like, oh my god, I'm going to play whackin' Stephen King.
	And there you go.
	And that's how he makes his tens of billions of dollars.
	And that's how it goes for everything.
	So, here's another example.
	So, think about composers.
	It turns out that five composers, Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn, Tchaikovsky, I think I called them, composed the works that make up 95% of the performed classical repertoire.
	Because how many damn composers do you need?
	There's a dominance hierarchy of composers, some of them are really good, You learn them good enough.
	You don't have to worry about the rest.
	If you go to the classical music, you can listen to.
	And then you look at those people's musical compositions, and what you find out is that 5% of what they composed gets 95% of the playtime.
	So it's like, hardly any composers at all composed all the music that everyone listens to, and that was hardly any of the music that they composed.
	And that's life.
	That's life.
	And so the economists who know about this sort of thing call it the Matthew Principle, which is an interesting nomenclature.
	It's from a statement by Christ in the New Testament.
	I don't think he has many economically valid statements, but this is one of them.
	It's a vicious, vicious He says some very vicious things in the New Testament, you know?
	Which is one of the things that lends a bit of credence in my estimation.
	If you think that those things were being edited out, you know?
	But here's one of them.
	To those who have everything, more will be given.
	From those who have nothing, everything will be taken away.
	It's like, that's the Matthew principle.
	That's the Pareto principle.
	Success breeds success.
	And that's how the world works.
	Now, what's the problem with that?
	The problem is that people stack up zero.
	Maybe that's not even too much of a problem, because it isn't actually zero.
	But it's close to zero.
	There was an article in the Atlantic Council a few months ago.
	Some reporter decided to go out, and he didn't do an overwhelmingly complex survey, but he surveyed a bunch of people to see what proportion of people could come up with $500 in an emergency.
	The answer was a shockingly low number of people.
	They're overextended.
	They don't have any excess money at hand.
	So, these were people who were...
	They work at zero.
	Which is a very rough place to be.
	Well, you don't want people to stack up at zero.
	Because what happens is that...
	Well, one of the things that happens is that the male violence levels start to climb.
	So you think, young men...
	They need status.
	They also need opportunity.
	They also need something aimed for, right?
	They need all of that.
	And if they're in a place where the inequality, where inequality is really steep, it gets hard for them to move out of the zero position.
	And they're desperate to do it.
	So they'll do it by any means whatsoever.
	And so what seems to happen is that as society becomes more and more unequal, the pressure on young men grows.
	And you can imagine, well, what sort of young men becomes vile at first?
	This is where you can have any other What would you call them?
	Variables that predict violence.
	Maybe the impulsive guy.
	Maybe the guy who drinks too much.
	Maybe the guy whose father swung him against the wall three or four times when he was drunk when he was three and damaged his brain.
	Anybody who's impulsive and liable to discount the future is going to be even more hyper-motivated by impulsive violence as the levels of inequality climb.
	And they are climbing!
	If you go back to 1895, you know, in 1895, the average person in the Western world lived on one dollar a day.
	And you might think, well, a dollar quite a lot more back then.
	It's like, no, no, no, today's dollars.
	Like, back then, everyone had nothing, and a few people had some.
	I mean, even the rich back then didn't live like any of you live now, right?
	I mean, you've got running water, you've got central heating, you've got Reliable, sheltered.
	You've got an infinite amount of information at your fingertips at every moment.
	It's like you're filthy rich.
	No, you are.
	You're filthy rich.
	Money has bought everything that you can have, except status, because that's comparative.
	So, it's a good thing to know, because, well, otherwise you might think of yourself as poor, and you're not.
	You might be relatively poor.
	Which usually means you have to wait three years to get the thing that the rich guys have now.
	It's like, you know, it's just not that big a catastrophe.
	So, anyways, okay.
	So, we've got this problem that societies, with regards to creative products, tend to tilt so that people stack up at the low end, and a few people stack up at the high end, and then things start to destabilize.
	That's the big problem.
	My clients' hypothesis was, well, societies run out their abandon trade game until most people have zero and a few people have everything.
	And then the revolution comes and the board's flipped and everybody gets to start again.
	It's like assuming that there's anything left in the rubble.
	And so, there's a Marxist flavor to that.
	And of course Marx pointed out that Capital tended to accumulate in the hands of fewer and fewer people.
	The thing he got wrong, and this is an important thing to understand, is that although there is the 1%, and even more there's the one-tenth of 1% who have almost all the resources that the 1% have, right?
	That exists and it's always there, but it's not the same people.
	That's one of the things Marx got seriously wrong.
	It's not the same people.
	Most family fortunes only last three generations.
	Because, I don't know, you guys have had money sometimes.
	Did you keep it?
	I doubt it.
	Did you invest it wisely?
	No, probably not.
	Did other people want it?
	Yes!
	Yes!
	They were willing to get it from you as fast as possible, and oh my goodness, you were willing to dole it out just that quickly.
	But you have a lot of money.
	You just spend large amounts of money equally stupidly, unless you're somebody who really knows how to deal with money.
	Those people are really quite rare.
	And so family fortunes disperse very, very rapidly.
	And the typical Fortune 500 company only lasts about 30 years.
	So although the distribution is the way that I described it, the constituent elements of the distribution turn over quite rapidly.
	So I think if you're...
	What is it?
	I think you have a 10% chance of...
	How is that?
	How old is that?
	I think you have a 10% chance of being in the top 1% for at least one year of your life, on average.
	And a 40% chance of being in the top 10% for at least one year, on average.
	So, you know, when people move up and down throughout their life, and another thing to keep in mind, which is very important, and no one ever talks about this, Is that most of the reason that people have money is because they're old.
	Right?
	Because young people don't have any money, but they're young.
	Old people, old women in particular, because all the old men die, old women have most of the money right now, by the way, because old men die, conveniently.
	Now, you know, the problem with being old with money is that you're old.
	And so if you ask the typical old person's money, if they'd rather be young or poor, the answer would be, well, yes.
	You can think about that yourself if you're young.
	It's like, okay, you can have...
	Twenty-one dollars, don't you have to be?
	Eighty-five!
	It's like, what are you going to take?
	So, you know, to some degree, it depends on how you calculate wealth.
	Right.
	So, okay.
	So, what's the point of all that?
	Inpolity exists.
	And it's actually a fundamental problem.
	And even if you're a conservative person...
	You might say, well, it's a fundamental problem because if the inequality gets out of hand too badly, then society starts to destabilize.
	And, you know, we don't want that.
	Conservatives, Republicans, say they're tough on crime.
	Progressive conservatives, for that matter, tough on crime.
	It's like, well, what drives the worst kind of crime?
	Male-on-male, violent homicide, let's say.
	We know what it is.
	It's inequality.
	The correlation is, like I said,.8.
	It's all of it.
	It's all of it.
	That's what drives status competition.
	I just interviewed Dr.
	Martin Daly, who's an evolutionary psychologist at McMaster, that infamous place.
	And he did all the Brown work for this sort of research, so I'm going to release that in about a week.
	And he wrote a book recently called Killing the Competition.
	It's a very nice book.
	He talks about male-on-male violence as a Rational strategy for uncertain environments where there's a lot of chaos and a lot of inequality.
	It's worth reading.
	He's a very strongly biologically oriented evolutionary psychologist.
	Very, very highly credible in my estimation.
	The last two chapters deal with social contributors to Inequality, and I don't think that that's a particularly powerful part of his book, because I don't think it deals with the fundamental issue.
	I'm trying to tell you what the fundamental issue is.
	There's something going on here that's like a natural law that produces these white disparities in outcome.
	Now, the question is, well, what should we do about it?
	And the answer isn't nothing, because if you let it run to its conclusion, then All hell breaks loose.
	And you end up, even if you're rich, like, you think, okay, you're rich.
	You're down in Central America.
	You live in Colombia.
	Do you want to be rich in Colombia?
	Well, great.
	You have to, you don't get to go outside, except inside the confines of your compound.
	You're in a jail.
	It's a nice jail.
	You know, you're the only people in there.
	You give it to your family.
	But fundamentally, it's a jail.
	You've got a huge house.
	Hooray!
	More to clean, as far as I can call it.
	You've got a big fence around you with barbed wire.
	You've got guards everywhere.
	And if your kids happen to go out, they get kidnapped.
	It's like, are you rich?
	Well, I don't think so.
	I lived in Montreal.
	I was poor, narratively speaking.
	I just had a student's stipend.
	And I didn't spend much time in my apartment because it was an okay place.
	But Montreal was peaceful.
	Great infrastructure.
	Great street life.
	You're safe there, man.
	Three in the morning you can go anywhere in the city.
	There's always something going on.
	Often it's very little cost.
	You live out in the public, essentially, like in many European cities.
	Hell!
	You're rich!
	Well, part of the reason you're rich under circumstances like that is because the inequality hasn't gotten out of control.
	And so, you know, we need to figure out how to define wealth, too, because wealth is not just what you happen to possess.
	That might be status.
	And status is useful.
	But, status and wealth are not the same thing.
	Okay, so, now the issue is, well, there's a problem.
	The problem is inequality.
	Goods are unequally distributed, and that's not fair.
	Now, there's additional problems that go along with that.
	The problem is that if you happen to be in the top 1%, it's easier for your children to also climb up the socio-economic ladder.
	Now, it's not as easy as people think, and there's a reasonable probability that you'll fall.
	And some of it is actually due to intelligence, because it turns out that, on average, intelligent people have more money than unintelligent people, which hardly comes as a surprise.
	And conscientious people have more money than unconscious people, which also hardly comes as a surprise.
	And if you have intelligent parents, then you're more likely to be intelligent yourself.
	Not as intelligent as them, because you regress to the me.
	Even the unequal distribution of intelligence sorts itself out across time.
	But you still have what you might describe as a technically unfair advantage.
	Okay, so you've got a distribution problem, you've got a technically unfair opportunity problem, and it's reasonable to point those out.
	And that's what the left does.
	Right?
	That's what the left does.
	When it's functioning properly, it says, look, we've got to keep the damn inequality, the Gini coefficient, let's say, we've got to keep the inequality flattened out, because we won't have a civil society without it, and we'll leave people at the bottom who could be productive and useful, and they won't get an opportunity, and then we won't get to enjoy all the cool things they might have made or invented.
	And that's fine.
	That's a good point.
	And, you know, the right-wing people say, yeah, but if you flatten out the damn distribution too much, then you remove people's incentives, and you don't want to do that too much.
	It's like, yeah, that's right.
	True enough.
	So you've got truth A, and you've got truth B, and the question then is, well, which truth rings?
	Right?
	Well, that brings us to the next one.
	So, I'm going to tell you some things about right-wingers, and I'm going to tell you some things about left-wingers.
	And the first thing I'm going to do is tell you About why people are like that.
	And we, and other labs, other labs first, in fact, have been investigating the relationship between the fundamental biological temperaments, including intelligence, and political, let's call it viewpoint.
	Now, it's better than opinion or attitude, the idea of a viewpoint.
	Because, you see, when you guys look at the world, you don't see the world.
	You just see that tiny little fragment of the world that you aren't valuable.
	Right?
	You can feel it's too complicated.
	And I don't know how many of you have seen the famous Invisible Gorilla video, but, you know, there's a bunch of people playing basketball, one team of white, three of them, one team in black, three of them, they pass the basketballs back and forth between them, you're supposed to count the number of times the white team passes the basketball,
	they fill up video streams, Six people, they're dancing around, bouncing the basketball, you're counting, you're thinking you're pretty damn smart because you can count, and then he walks this six-foot gorilla, stands in the middle of the screen, beats his chest for like 15 seconds,
	and then his song goes off, and then the experimenter asks you, did you notice anything strange, and you say, no, and he says, well, how many And then he says, did you see the gorilla?
	And you say, what gorilla?
	Or half of you say, what gorilla?
	And so then you rerun the tape, and sure enough, quick count of basketballs, and then there's a gorilla right in the middle of the screen.
	You are just not very bright.
	That's right.
	You're really blind.
	We are so blind, and so focused, you know?
	We're kind of like putting up a pen on a piece of paper, you know?
	The human consciousness is like the ballpoint It's writing, but it's just barely making contact.
	Now, it's enough to write and move on, which is not trivial.
	But that's how focused we are.
	And we're focused on the things that we find important.
	Another question is, why do we find the things we find important, important?
	And the answer to that is, at least in part, temperament.
	Temperament filters for you.
	So, for example, if you're high in openness, you're going to be attracted to beauty.
	You're going to be attracted to aesthetics.
	You're going to be attracted to ideas.
	If you're extroverted, it's like the whole world's a party, and you're the entertainer.
	If you're neurotic, it's like, keep things that are dangerous away from you.
	If you're agreeable, it's relationships.
	You want to take care of things.
	You want to form intimate relationships.
	If you're conscientious, it's like, be away, be away, be away, dutiful, diligent, industrious, orderly.
	And not only does that cover your attitudes, but it also Filters things for you, so you see the world through your temperament.
	You can filter news through your temperament, right?
	Well, and part of that is because there's different niches in the world.
	It's like, you know, maybe you're an entertainer, so people like to invite you to parties, and you can be relied on, so people ask you to help them move, which is annoying for you.
	And, you know, maybe you're agreeable, so, you know, if someone needs to have a talk about something that's bothering you, and you're there, maybe you're disagreeable.
	And if someone wants the blunt truth, then they'll come and talk to you.
	And so these are all places that you can fit in the social structure and in the world.
	And so that's why I use that variability.
	You know, more power to it.
	It's faith.
	People come equipped in the world with different tools, and the tools allow them to do different things.
	And that's diversity.
	It's real diversity, not that idiot diversity that keeps getting pushed on us.
	Alright, in place of real diversity.
	Alright, so you're the way you are.
	Now, you know, temperament is highly heritable.
	Now, it can be moved.
	So, for example, if you have a child who's High of neuroticism, let's say.
	And you can tell, if you have a child like that, because they're more fussy.
	It's hard to calm them down.
	They start more easily to a noise.
	They're more, you know, they're more cautious among strangers.
	If something new, a famous study by Jerome Kennedy used to play little mobile robots to test kids to see how neurotic they were.
	He didn't describe it that way precisely.
	You know, some people would roll this robot into the room, these were like two-year-olds, and they'd be beeping away with lights flashing, and some of the kids, the extroverted, non-miotic ones, would just get right up and, you know, interact with the damn robot.
	And the more timid ones would hide behind their parents, mothers, usually, legs.
	It was sort of decoud.
	And that was evident as early as six months.
	Now, what Kayden found was that if the people who had What he called inhibited children, were diligent in encouraging them to get out and explore the world, that their level of negative emotion could move towards normalization over a number of years.
	But they never became truly fearless people.
	You know, you could modify it, and of course if you have a kid like that, and you mistreat them, and you make their environment very uncertain, and you take away all the security from them, then you can turn them into a complete neurotic wreck, and they'll never recover.
	And so, you know, the same applies for extroversion, and the same applies for conscientiousness, and for agrealism.
	These things are deeply, deeply rooted in people.
	Now, you can move them around to some degree, but first of all, why would you?
	Except maybe it's nice to have the kid be a little more emotionally stable.
	It's okay that diversity exists.
	And it's useful to know that it can't be easily modulated.
	That's partly the reason that's useful to know, is because One of the things that you want to know, if you want to be successful, is find a damn job that suits your temperament.
	Because it's easier than changing your temperament to suit the job.
	So if you're an introvert and high in negative emotion, I would say, sales?
	No, probably not.
	And if you're like a radical extrovert, it's like, computer programming?
	Probably not.
	You're going to be the guy that's wandering around chatting Okay, so back to politics.
	Well, it turns out that temperament predicts political belief very nicely.
	At the level of only predicting, say, party affiliation or voting behavior, you can get about 10% of the variance in political belief, which doesn't sound like much, but which is plenty to throw an election, right?
	Because, you know, they hinge on tiny, tiny margins, especially in places of the U.S. But if you do a detailed analysis of people's political beliefs, so you differentiate them out much farther than you would with your voting behavior, you can get, like, 30% of the variance.
	It starts to get viciously powerful.
	Powerful enough to make the assumption that the primary determinant of political belief is temperament, and the primary determinant of temperament is biology.
	And so you're biologically predisposed to be whatever party you are.
	Now, you might say, well, what about the well-known phenomena where young people tend to be more liberal, left-leaning, and older people tend to be more conservative?
	Part of the reason for that is that people get more conscientious as they age.
	And so that doesn't Destroyed that hypothesis at all.
	Now, the reason that's useful to know is that if you're a lefty and you're talking to someone who's right-wing, you're not just talking to some blind idiot who can't see the obvious truth.
	You're talking to someone who's different than you.
	And there's reasons that they're different.
	They have a different niche.
	They occupy a different niche, and that's a real niche.
	It's real.
	So here's an example.
	I've been trying to predict entrepreneurial behavior for a long time.
	I've learned to do it.
	Quite successful.
	And it's not obvious who entrepreneurs are.
	You know, are they the same as executives?
	Are they the same as managers?
	Are they the same as administrators?
	Are they the same as university professors or artists?
	None of that's obvious.
	Turns out they're the same as artists.
	So entrepreneurs are creative people.
	They're high in openness.
	Now what that means is they're pretty damn good at coming up with new ideas and moving sideways, and really moving sideways if they have to.
	But they generally aren't very good at all at running companies.
	What you want to run a company is someone who's conscientious.
	And conscientious people, they'll do what they're supposed to do if they know what it is.
	They're not jumping all over the place.
	They want a track to walk down.
	So if you have someone installing gas pipes, where there's not supposed to be any leaks, because otherwise they explode, you want some obsessive, conscientious guy who wants to get it exactly right.
	You don't want some creative guy who wants to make, like, a corkscrew out of the pipe.
	And so, entrepreneurs are a creative end.
	They're liberals.
	And managers and administrators are on the conservative end.
	And so you need liberal types to start companies to be creative.
	And you need conservative types to run them.
	And so that's kind of nice, you know.
	Now, how many creative types you need compared to how many managerial types is the same problem as how many liberals you need in the political sphere versus how many conservatives.
	And actually, that is, it depends on circumstances.
	Okay, so now we'll go into it a little more deeper.
	So, here's the predictors, the fundamental predictors of political belief.
	Just liberal and conservative for now, just left and right.
	I'll tell you about the clinical practice in a moment.
	We'll just say the conventional left-to-right distribution.
	The right-wingers are low in openness.
	That's the creativity dimension, right?
	They can't think of very many uses for a break.
	If you ask them, the use is, well, You can't do anything with one brick, you need a bunch of them, and then you build like a chimney, right?
	It's obvious.
	You know, where the creative guys think about all sorts of, like, it's a hack, you know, for the creative guys.
	And so, and so the conservatives are low in openness and high in conscientiousness, and conscientiousness fractionates into industriousness and orderliness, and they're particularly high in orderliness.
	So that's the conservative.
	Not very creative, orderly.
	And, you know, convention.
	Here's some other things about them, let's say.
	Orderly, traditional, hierarchical, diligent, dutiful, hygienic, puritanical, conventional, narrow, predictable.
	Now, some of those things Especially if you're liberal, you're like, no, none of that for us.
	You know, but traditional, hierarchical, diligent, dutiful, orderly, it's like, well, do you want things in order or not?
	You know, do you want the traffic lights working?
	Do you want the trains to run on time, so to speak?
	Do you want things to do what they're supposed to do?
	It's like, well, let the order eat people out of it, you know?
	Do you want to go do something exciting and get the hell away from them?
	But, you know, they have the damn point.
	Now, you can get too ordered, that's for sure, and you can get too anything.
	That's the thing.
	There's catastrophes at the end of the temperamental distributions.
	Too neurotic?
	Not good.
	Too conscientious?
	You get a little on the obsessive side.
	Maybe you develop an eating disorder.
	Too agreeable?
	Oh, I love everyone.
	I'm sacrificing myself for everyone.
	It's like you're resentful and bitter because you can't stand up for yourself.
	That's right.
	That's what happens.
	Too disagreeable?
	Prison for you.
	It's the best connector of incarceration.
	To your extrovert, it's like, well, then you're Robin Williams, right?
	You're manic.
	You go off the rails because people think, wow, we want to be happy.
	It's like, well, how happy do you want to be?
	Happiness, positive emotion, makes you impulsive.
	And there's no one crazier than someone who's manic.
	They spend all their money.
	Why?
	Because the world's such a wonderful place.
	I should buy this, and I should buy that.
	Happy people are impulsive, as you may have noticed, if you're one of those people who like to drink because it energizes you, and you know, there's probably 10% of the people in here like that.
	It's like you drink, you get energized, most of you just get relaxed, but some of you get energized.
	It's like, do you make good decisions when you're in that happiness?
	It's like, no.
	Happiness means grab what you can, grab now.
	And sometimes that's a good idea, but sometimes you really acknowledge that.
	So don't be thinking that, you know, you can't be too happy.
	It's like, yeah, right, you can be too happy.
	And so, you know, the excess of any virtue becomes a vice.
	And that's why the damn liberals and the damn conservatives have to talk!
	Right?
	Okay, so, you think, you've got a company, you want to figure out how many managers versus how many entrepreneurs you need.
	And the answer to that is, depends on the circumstances.
	There isn't an answer.
	You can't say, well, you need like 40% creative people and 60% conscientious people.
	And the reason you can't say that is because the environment is a giant snake.
	And it continues its giant eternal serpent.
	And you're on its back.
	And you don't know which way it's going to move.
	And if you fall off, you die.
	You fall off the left side, you die.
	You fall off the right side, you die.
	And so what you want to do is stay approximately in the middle.
	And so what you need is...
	A conservative guy on one side pulling you, pulling, and a liberal guy on the other pulling, and what you hope is that by pulling each other, you stay in the middle of the damn snake.
	And then you think, well, how do you decide how to pull?
	And the answer is, Well, you can find it out if you want.
	But then maybe you kill the other person, or a bunch of them, or maybe they kill you.
	And maybe you need them, as it turns out, or maybe you're dead.
	That doesn't seem like a very good solution, given that that's actually the problem you're trying to solve.
	And so you can become slaves to the other side, you can oppress the other side, you can fight with the other side, or you can talk.
	That's the alternative.
	You can talk, and you're going to talk to those annoying people who aren't like you.
	And one of the advantages to that is, those annoying people who aren't like you know things you don't know.
	All those people you get along with so well, they're already like you.
	You can't learn anything from them.
	They just know the same things you know.
	Now, that's fine if you know everything you need to know.
	So then you might ask yourself, well, how do you know whether or not you need Whether or not you know everything you need to know.
	And actually that is, well, you don't suffer.
	So if you're suffering, and you are, then I would suggest you probably have something to learn.
	Because maybe if you learned it, you wouldn't have to suffer, because that's actually why you learn.
	And then I would say, well, since if you learn you don't suffer so much, you should talk to someone who knows some things you don't, because then they'll tell you some things you don't know, and then maybe you won't suffer so much.
	And that's fundamentally The purpose of free speech.
	Okay, so let's retract a little bit.
	Now, human beings have problems, obviously.
	Life is tragic and short.
	We have problems.
	Everyone has problems.
	Poor people have problems.
	Rich people have problems.
	One of the things that's actually quite sad about socialists, and perhaps about capitalists as well, is that both radically overestimate the degree to which money can solve fundamental human existential problems.
	It actually can't.
	A bonus thought will convince you of that.
	You just have to think about it.
	But the research was quite clear on that, too.
	Once you make enough money so you're not suffering from absolute privation, which means that bill collectors aren't chasing you around and making your life miserable, then additional money has no effect on the quality of your life.
	And so you get that maybe midway up the working class, maybe a little higher than that.
	You know, you might still be resentful because there are other people who are richer than you, but if you get more money, it doesn't help you.
	Why?
	Well, why wouldn't?
	You still die.
	Maybe a little.
	You live a little longer.
	Maybe they can hook you to the ventilator for an extra year.
	That's a good deal.
	But divorce, well, it doesn't help you get along with your wife.
	It doesn't help you necessarily get along with your kids.
	It doesn't prevent you from dying.
	Falling prey to various diseases.
	It doesn't make your life simpler.
	Well, sometimes it does, but sometimes it doesn't.
	You know, it's once you solve your basic economic problems, because you do, just to repeat, once you have running water, heat, shelter, enough food, and access to an infinite amount of information, you're about as rich as you can be, except to be comparatively rich, right?
	Your basic problems are solved.
	You've already hit the 90th percentile, and maybe you want to hit the 99th, and you'd like more power to you, but you've already solved most of the problems that money's going to solve.
	Anyways, people's lives are problematic, right?
	Life is suffering.
	That's a fundamental rule.
	And another fundamental rule is accepting that helps you transcend it, which is a very strange, very, very strange thing.
	We won't talk about that for now.
	Why do you think?
	Okay, so here's how animals think.
	They actually really don't, but here's the equivalent.
	I mean, they're not stupid.
	Hunting animals are unbelievably intelligent, but it's not the same kind of intelligence that we have.
	So, the mosquitoes are riding the giant serpent, too, and it's flippin' everywhere.
	Some mosquitoes are trying not to die, and so how do they manage that?
	Well, their idea is, well, let's make and produce a whole slew of mosquitoes, like a million of them, a million natives, and they'll all hatch into mosquitoes, and they'll all die, except for one.
	And then they can produce another million mosquitoes, and that's how mosquitoes keep going.
	And so, like, many, many mosquito eggs are the mosquitoes' way of thinking.
	Right?
	Because what the mosquito is doing is producing small variants of itself, has no idea which of those are going to survive, they're slightly different, and then Mother Nature, in all her wonderfulness, wipes all the amount, except One mosquito.
	And you know that, because otherwise we'd be knee-deep in mosquitoes.
	And I mean, we are in Canada.
	But I mean, we're in no time flat.
	So the mosquitoes produce a bunch of variants of themselves, and then most of them die, and then, you know, one mosquito lives.
	And hooray, that's how they propagate themselves through time.
	So, human beings, we do the opposite thing.
	We produce very tiny, not because of ourselves, very few, very Number-limited replicas of ourselves.
	And we put a lot of effort into educating them.
	And we do that because our children are capable of producing variants of themselves internally.
	That's what our brains are for.
	So, you know, you play video games, you have an avatar, you can send the avatar off, pah, the avatar dies, you know, get a little penny-nated promotion, but you're not dead, so hooray!
	Well, that's what an idea is.
	An idea is an avatar of you and the world.
	And you can even think about this from an evolutionary perspective because the prefrontal cortex, which is the home of your capacity to think abstractly, grew out of the motor cortex.
	And the motor cortex is the thing that enables you to voluntarily move through the world.
	And so what you do when you think is generate abstract versions of yourself, test them in a fictional environment, Figure out which ones are stupid and likely to die, and then don't act those out.
	Now, some of you are better at that than others, but nonetheless, the typical person doesn't act out their stupidest ideas.
	And so we've internalized the Darwinian process.
	We think.
	We produce variants of ourselves.
	We kill them off ourselves.
	And then we implement the ones that we think are most likely to survive.
	Pretty damn smart.
	So, yay us.
	Black thinking has limitations.
	What have the limitations?
	Well, we talked about one.
	Canberra.
	You know, if you're a person with low in openness, this is one of the things that drives me crazy about conservatives.
	So, Conservatives are blind to beauty.
	They're so blind.
	I remember Harper.
	This is going to be one of the dumbest things he said.
	He was talking about artists.
	He made some speech about limousine artists that were What?
	Sponging off the public purse, you know, these rich artists.
	There's like three rich artists in Canada, right?
	The probability that you're going to get rich as an artist is so low that, I don't know, you're like a mutant.
	You're like an X-man if you're an artist who's even making enough money to survive.
	It's impossible.
	There's no rich artists.
	But the Conservatives, they don't see that because they don't see the contribution that artists make.
	They're blind to it.
	And so, I can give you an example of how open people work and how they contribute to the public good.
	If you live in a large city, like most of you do, you don't have these trashy areas that are kind of cool.
	And the open people go there.
	And the reason they go there is because that's the frontier.
	And that's where open people go.
	They go to the frontier.
	They're the creative types.
	That's their niche.
	It's the frontier.
	And there's frontiers everywhere.
	There's frontiers in science.
	There's frontiers in mathematics.
	There's frontiers in literature.
	There's frontiers in cities.
	And the frontier in the city is where there's a little more chaos than order.
	But there's potential.
	And now, artistic types sniff that out.
	Now it's hard that they can only afford rent there.
	But that's not the reason.
	They don't just go hang out in a little rough neighborhood.
	They go hang out in a rough neighborhood and think, hey, this place has potential.
	They can sniff out potential.
	And then they start to build galleries, and then they start to build coffee shops, and then they start to do cool things, and it starts to get cool, and then the less open people who are still kind of open go there and hang out, and they think that's cool, and then the entrepreneurial capitalist types start to notice, and they start to talk to real estate, and then the place gentrifies, and the artists get chased away, because they don't have anybody, because they don't have anything, and then they go off and improve some other part of the city.
	And so that's what creative people do.
	Beauty has incredible, incredible value.
	Think about Europe.
	Canadians are blind to beauty, too, as a people.
	Our cities are so goddamn unbelievable.
	Compared to European cities, man.
	Like, we're barbarians.
	And you know, if you think about the hundreds of millions or billions of dollars that those damn Europeans spent unifying those cities, You think about the return on investment that they gather.
	You know, I mean, places like France and Spain have more tourists than people all the time because people are going there from all over the world to bathe in their beauty.
	So, you know, it's useful to talk to the open types and to appreciate what they have to offer.
	So anyways, you're blinded by a temperament.
	Conservatives can't see beauty.
	Liberal types, especially if they're low in orderliness, they can't see the value of diligence or duty.
	So, I read the right readers.
	Traditional, hierarchical, diligent, dutiful, orderly, hygienic, puritanical, conventional, narrow, and predictable.
	The hygienic and puritanical thing, that can really get out of hand.
	That's associated with disgust sensitivity.
	And orderly people are very sensitive to disgust.
	And part of the reason that the hyper-conservative types are exclusionary, It's because they build walls around themselves to prevent contamination.
	And we'll get back to that, and there's reasons for that.
	It's not arbitrary prejudice, although it can be arbitrary prejudice.
	Unfortunately, it's more complicated than that.
	Left-wingers.
	Radical, fluid, mercurial, careless, chaotic, unsanitary, and promiscuous.
	Alright.
	Well, some of that's good.
	Well, maybe even the promiscuity is good.
	It depends on your perspective.
	It's a little harder than the old sexually transmitted disease problem, but, you know.
	And how many people did AIDS kill?
	About 400 million, I think?
	That's a fairly high price to pay, I would say.
	So it's not like there's nothing serious at the bottom of these variances.
	There's something damn serious at the bottom of them.
	And there's room for fora of informed opinions.
	Alright, so.
	You got the conservative types.
	Low openness, high conscientiousness.
	You want something done there for people to do it.
	They're reliable.
	They're traditional.
	They're hierarchical.
	They have value structures.
	They're diligent.
	They make good soldiers.
	It's a great predictor of military accomplishment.
	Conscientiousness is a good predictor of grades.
	It's a good predictor of managerial ability.
	It's a good predictor of administrative ability.
	It's not as good as IQ. But it doesn't predict creativity production.
	Openness predicts it.
	Openness is actually slightly natively correlated with scientific productivity as far as we can tell.
	Because scientists are mostly diligent rather than artistic.
	Because science is a diligent process.
	You know, it's a factory.
	You can grind it out, which is part of why it's so damn powerful.
	So then I was thinking, well, why would openness and conscientiousness go together to determine political belief?
	Because they're not correlated with those traits.
	It doesn't seem to be any real reason.
	Why they should clump together to determine political opinion, viewpoint.
	I was thinking about this a lot, and I thought, well, you know, the open people, they like the jack-in-the-box to jump out of the box.
	They don't want the box to stay closed.
	They want all the possibility in the box to spring up so they can do cool things with it.
	And if they're low in conscientiousness, they're low in disgust sensitivity, so they don't care if there are borders between things.
	So, on the one hand, they're not afraid of the absence of borders, and on the other hand, they like the exciting things that happen when borders are transgressed against.
	And then I was thinking, well, the conservative types, their high conscientiousness, it's like they like borders.
	That's order.
	They like to be protected from contamination.
	And they're over openness, so they don't get any thrill when the jack of the box jumps up the box.
	They just think that thing should stay in the box where it belongs.
	And so, then I thought, well, that's interesting.
	You know, I bet you that works every single level of analysis.
	It's like, The conservative types like the border around concepts to remain tighter.
	Identities.
	Sexual identities.
	Homes.
	Private property.
	Towns.
	Provinces.
	States.
	I thought, well, that's what happened in the last election.
	That's what happened with Trump.
	Because what did he say?
	Let's build a wall.
	It's about the borders.
	Well, that's what's happening in Europe, too.
	It's about the borders.
	And then I thought, yeah, that's right.
	That's exactly right.
	That's what politics is about.
	It's about borders between things.
	And the fundamental argument is, well should the borders be open or closed?
	And the answer to that is, it depends on the circumstance.
	Because we're grinding a giant serpent.
	And we don't know which way it's going to turn.
	And sometimes, here's what happens if you open the borders.
	Right?
	Let's say you open them accidentally.
	So this is what happened to the Native Americans.
	They opened the borders, let's say.
	And the Spaniards showed up.
	Well, you know, the Spaniards who showed up were a little on the anti-social side.
	They had a particularly rough time for the Native Americans.
	And, you know, they conquered an entire territory with no men.
	Now, they had horses and armor, and the Indians were having a crisis at the time, and so, you know, that was bad luck.
	But that wasn't the real problem!
	The real problem is that the Spaniards were filthy, absolutely filthy, like all the European city dwellers of the time, packed into these filthy cities, living with animals, rife with disease.
	Now, they don't develop immunity with the diseases, so, you know, you've got smallpox, but you probably didn't die, it just made you look pretty horrible.
	You could live through chicken pox, and you could live through measles, and you could live through mumps.
	Filthy you were, but You are well armed against pathogens.
	Well, not the North Americans, not the Americans, not at all.
	There's hardly any disease here.
	So the Spaniards showed up.
	95% of the Native Americans died.
	Right?
	Think about that.
	So many of them died that an appearance showed up, which is a long time after the Spaniards showed up.
	The Native Americans were happy to see them because they didn't have enough people to take off their crops.
	Decimated.
	Like, a third of Europeans died in the Black Lives.
	Yeah, that was a border issue too, right?
	Because the rats came in off the ships that had sailed somewhere else.
	30% of the Europeans died in the Black Lives.
	Well, that's nothing compared to 95%.
	It's like, open the borders and see what the hell happens.
	It's dangerous.
	You know, liberal types say, oh no, it's all wonderful.
	It's like, it's not all wonderful.
	Now, the liberals will say, well, just hold on a minute.
	It's like, yeah, yeah.
	There's some danger in open borders.
	Well, they won't say that because they can't see that.
	But if they were sensible, they would say, yeah, we buy the argument that there's danger in open borders.
	Bob, let's think of all the advantages to open borders between everything.
	Well, it's like, yeah, man.
	Fluency and thought.
	We've already talked about the relationship between fluency and thought and the ability to think divergently and creativity.
	It's like, well, without open borders between things, between concepts, between people, between towns, we're not going to have any new ideas.
	We're not going to get anything new happening.
	We're not going to go find this stranger from another culture and welcome them in and find out what the hell they're up to and trade with them and get all their cool stuff.
	That's the big problem.
	If we close the borders too tightly, then what's going to happen is we're going to stay the same.
	We're going to stay the same.
	We're going to look the same and talk the same.
	And then the damn snake is going to move and every single one of us is going to fall off.
	It's like, death.
	So the conservatives say, yeah, well, open the borders, death.
	And the liberals say, close the borders, death.
	And they're right.
	Both of them are right.
	That's the thing.
	They're both right.
	And that's why we need to talk to each other, you see.
	Because we cannot figure out how to stay in the center of the snake without talking.
	Now, you've got your biases, your cognitive biases, they're built into you.
	And so you're blind to almost all the world.
	And so you're going to sit there and think, and if you're thinking, you actually Break yourself into avatars.
	And you give all those avatars a voice, and then you let them hash it out, and the one that wins, you go with.
	So, even when you're thinking, you're basically engaged in dialogue.
	It's just that you're doing it internally.
	But you have limits on that because unless you're very good at thinking, and you're probably not because people aren't very good at thinking, they're really going to jump into predetermined conclusions and very bad at thinking.
	Because it's hard to think.
	It's annoying.
	It's stressful.
	It's technically difficult.
	It requires training.
	You have to be able to write.
	You have to be able to think clearly.
	You have to be able to formulate an argument.
	You have to have read.
	It's like, it's really hard to think.
	So, as much as you just rely on your built-in apriori temperamental filters, which is what people do, to a great degree.
	But let's say you can fake to some degree.
	Well, good.
	So that means there's forms of death and misery that you can avoid with some degree of utility.
	But you're full of biases.
	You're going to miss things, man.
	This is part of why married people live longer.
	You marry someone, they're annoying.
	You can think differently than you.
	But that's so helpful if you listen to them because they can have two brains.
	And two brains actually gets you through the world better than one brain if the brains are communicating.
	And if they have some differences, right?
	Because then they're not just producing the same output.
	So, if I open myself up to someone else and talk to them, engage in dialogue, then they can correct the errors in my thinking.
	And then perhaps...
	Well, you have a less chance of suffering and dying.
	And so the reason that you have to engage in dialogue is because that lifts you out of your parochial viewpoint and helps you clarify the world and clarify how to act in the world with all these different people that you have to get along with.
	That's part of it.
	But also to survive just in the world.
	I'll make a little sidebar here.
	This is something I'm going to talk about more in the future.
	I've been thinking about those damn post-modernists.
	They have this idea, this pernicious, horrible idea, that's true, that any text has an infinite number of potential interpretations, and that therefore there's no way of determining which interpretation is correct.
	Now the problem with that interpretation is that In some perverse sense, it's true.
	Because there are so many phenomena that lay themselves out before you in the world that you can construe them in multiple different ways.
	but here's where they're wrong they say you can interpret a text anyway and therefore you can interpret the world anyway because the world looks like a text in that it has multiple potential interpretations But here's where they're wrong.
	Some of those interpretations will kill you.
	Some of those interpretations will make you suffer.
	Some of those interpretations will make people around you suffer.
	Some of those interpretations will make people hate you.
	Some of those interpretations will make people refuse to cooperate with you.
	So then you say, well, there's this multiplicity of interpretations, but it's constrained by the necessity of preserving yourself, preserving dyadic relationships, preserving the broader social Social context, so acting in a manner so that pursuing your own selfish interests doesn't destabilize the whole damn game, and also that when you act in the actual world, it doesn't slap you so hard across the face that you perish.
	And so, yes, there are a multiplicity of interpretations, but there is a very tiny fraction of them that actually have any functional utility.
	So that undermines completely the The nihilistic argument related to multiplicity that's at the basis of postmodernism.
	Now, they know it's at the basis of postmodernism, because that's why they turned to Marxism to orient themselves, because you can't do anything if you're a postmodernist, because there's no proper solution.
	So, anyways, back to free speech.
	You have to think, because if you don't think, you die.
	But you're too stupid to think properly.
	So you have to talk to other people, because they tell you why you're stupid.
	And then if you listen, you're not quite so stupid, and you don't die so often.
	And so that's the bottom line.
	And then you might say, well, who should you talk to?
	And the answer is, well, if you talk to the people that you agree with, you don't earn anything, because they already think the same way you do.
	And unless you're 100% correct, And I would be very, very hesitant about concluding that, if you're still suffering.
	Unless you're 100% correct, then you've got to go find out an enemy to talk to.
	Because maybe they'll point something out to you that you seriously, seriously, seriously need to know.
	And so, like, you know, our culture, Western civilization, let's say, roughly speaking, is a good culture, man.
	You know, like, I'm no utopia.
	It's got its problems.
	If you compare it to a hypothetical utopia, it's hell on earth.
	Except...
	When that hypothetical utopia actually tries to manifest itself.
	Because then you find out what hell on earth really is.
	But that isn't how you compare a society.
	What you do is you take a society and you say, well, how is it compared to other societies?
	And the answer is, well, where do all the immigrants go?
	Because they can go wherever they want.
	And so where do they go?
	Well, they go to that tiny handful of countries that has the legacy That's tightly associated with free speech.
	Why?
	Because basically we can solve our problems.
	That doesn't mean we have, we don't have any, we got lots.
	But we can solve them.
	Why?
	Because we figured something out.
	We figured out that there's nothing more important than free speech because that's what thinking is.
	That's the logos that sits at the bottom of our culture, right?
	The divine word that transforms chaos into order continually.
	But you partake in that, not individually, precisely, although you do as an individual.
	You participate in that by engaging in conversation, communication with other souls.
	And those souls set you straight.
	And if you're not straight, Then you suffer and die.
	And so do people around you.
	And maybe you're aiming at that, because lots of people aim at that.
	But if you're not aiming at that, and if you're aiming at that, you should really think it through.
	Some people have thought it through and concluded that.
	They concluded that.
	It's like, being is a catastrophe.
	I'm going to work to bring it to a halt.
	You can make a very strong case for that.
	I think it's a terrible case, I think it's a profoundly flawed case, because it's predicated on the idea that you've already done everything you could to improve things, and you haven't.
	So I would say, well, before you transform yourself into the ultimate judge of being, you should try to get your act together, to some degree, and see if you can improve things around you before you render your final judgment.
	And how do you do that?
	Well, with humility.
	What does that mean?
	What do you know?
	Not now.
	That's why things aren't going so well.
	Right?
	That's the evidence.
	They're not going as well for you as they could be.
	They're not going as well for your family as they could be.
	Or your community.
	Or your country.
	Or the world.
	Or the ecosystem for that matter.
	There are problems you could be trying to solve.
	Then you ask yourself, well are you trying to solve?
	That's not the right question.
	The right question is, are you trying to solve them with all your heart and mind and soul?
	And if the answer to that is no, I spend six hours a day wasting time, which is pretty much standard, then you've got no right to say anything at all, except it's time to get your act together.
	And so, it's time to get your act together.
	For everyone, right, left, right character.
	That's the right response, because that orients you properly towards being, and then being humble, knowing that you don't have your act together, then maybe you open your eyes a little bit and you think, God, there's a lot of things I don't know and I'm blind and stupid, and there's some people who are different from me, and maybe if I talk to them, listen, mostly, because you wouldn't believe what people will bloody well tell you if you listen to them.
	It's just absolutely unbelievable what they'll tell you.
	I have thousands of hours of experience listening to people, because I'm a clinical psychologist, and it's like, It's a Dostoevsky novel over and over and over.
	Amazing!
	Once you get them out of their idiot ideological presuppositions, and they start talking about the reality that they're actually in contact with, they're endlessly revealing and remarkable.
	And you learn in immense amount by listening to them.
	What a good deal that is, because you're not very smart, and you're suffering.
	And so, you know, if you can learn something from someone, especially someone different than you, it's like, well, it's a good day.
	It's a good day, Nash.
	It's a great day.
	So, okay, so.
	Back to the left wing.
	Well, there has to be a left wing.
	I told you why.
	That's what the creative types are.
	They're annoying.
	They're messy.
	They're chaotic.
	A lot of them aren't conscientious.
	You know, they let things disintegrate around them.
	They don't pick up after themselves.
	But someone's gonna think laterally, because sometimes we need that.
	And then, So, they're in the land, but they're necessary.
	Then the conservatives.
	Well, you know, they've got the blinders on, man.
	And they're just not that exciting.
	And everything around them is beige.
	And they're blinders of beauty.
	And they're a little orderly.
	And maybe they're a little discriminatory.
	And they like things to stay where they are.
	So they're not that much fun to party with.
	But if you want something done, well, they're your people.
	You know, they're probably the people that you want to be, well, sterilizing your hypodermic needles, for example.
	Or any person is really good for that.
	So let's be a little appreciative of the political distribution.
	And let's understand that we need to communicate to stay on the back of the damn snake.
	Okay, so then I'll close with a little more elaboration on the left-wing rationale for free speech.
	Okay, so the story right now is something like, Free speech is being used by fascists to oppress the oppressed.
	Well, as far as the politically correct radical left is concerned, everything is being used to oppress the oppressed.
	It's like they've got a one-size-fits-all solution to everything.
	And it's crooked intellectually, and it's pathological morally.
	And that's part because it's just too easy.
	It's like, I'm on the side of the oppressed.
	That makes me a good person.
	It's like, no, it doesn't.
	First of all, what makes you think you're on the side of the oppressed?
	Really?
	You really dare to claim that?
	It's not so easy to be on the side of the oppressed.
	It takes a hell of a lot of work to be on the side of the oppressed.
	And waving a few signs in the face of people that you think you hate, that's not being on the side of the oppressed.
	That's no better than saying, well, I'm against poverty.
	He's like, well, you know, look, wonderful.
	Find someone who's for poverty.
	That was this crazy idea, which I just ran into again.
	You know, I was invited to speak at Linfield College.
	He would call himself here.
	And all the flight arrangements were made and everything.
	And they cancelled it, right?
	Two days ago.
	They didn't even email me to tell them, you know?
	They just cancelled it.
	You know, I got a word that there was some controversy about me coming to visit.
	There was a little article in their student newspaper.
	Some English professor said that I don't know.
	It was reprehensible to invite me or something and that I was making the space unsafe, as you can tell.
	Which I like to do.
	I like to make spaces unsafe because I like to challenge people's presuppositions and get down to the difficult manner I can't.
	And so, I read that, and you know, it was kind of annoying, so I tweeted out, off to Linfield College to violate some safe spaces.
	It wasn't a joke.
	It was a satirical joke.
	And they got wind of it.
	That's a pretty vicious tweet, man.
	So they cancelled it.
	So, it doesn't matter, because we arranged a different venue.
	and maybe so I'll go out there anyways.
	Thank you.
	Thank you.
	I mean, seriously.
	Of all the people who should be in favor of free speech, it should be the people who are hypothetically on the side of the oppressed.
	Why?
	Well look, the radical left presupposition is everything is a hyper-dominant patriarchy and the people at the top have all the power.
	Okay, well then the people have to talk to you to say whatever the hell they want.
	Whatever they want.
	They own the newspapers, they own the TV stations, they own the advertisements, they own the corporations, they can say whatever they want, whenever.
	They don't need to be protected, obviously, they have all the power, and I'm speaking from within that ideological framework, right?
	Well, who needs protection if they want to speak?
	Well, obviously, the people who are at the bottom.
	Okay, so, let's review the evidence.
	Social movements of the 20th century.
	What's a left-wing mantra?
	Speak truth to power.
	Oh, that means you have to be able to speak.
	You have to be able to speak truth to power.
	And hypothetically, you're not going to be telling power things like, hey!
	It's lovely that you've got all the power.
	You're going to be criticizing him, like Michael Moore, eh?
	Like Michael Moore.
	And I get a kick out of Michael Moore.
	He's got a lot of courage to that guy.
	And he's comical.
	And you know, he's a showboat.
	He's sort of like the left's version of violinopolis.
	And people like that, provocateurs like that, comedians like that, they've got a role to play because they're good social critics, you know?
	So fine.
	If you're going to speak truth to power, well then you better be able to speak.
	That's the fundamental issue.
	So, okay, so, you're a left-winger, you want to flatten out the inequality problem, and you think, well, jeez, I better be able to talk about this at least.
	And then you think, well, let's restrict free speech.
	And then you think, here's a lesson from the military.
	If you make a weapon, your enemy has it in 15 years.
	So, you know, the logical conclusion to that is something like, Kind of be slightly careful about which weapons you make.
	And so, what's the lesson for the free speech?
	Truncators.
	It's like, you guys are the ones who think that everyone else has the power.
	You start restricting free speech.
	Which you're doing.
	You're doing it radically, continually, non-stop.
	It's like, you think for a moment that those people who have the power, and let's say, the crooked people who have the power, just to clarify, Do you think that they're not going to get a lot better at that than you really quick?
	You're so goddamn naive that it's not even funny.
	Every single weapon you use to oppress free speech is going to be aimed back at you with force that you can't imagine.
	And so then you wonder, well, the people who are pushing us, what's up with it?
	Are they naive?
	Is that bold?
	Are they naive?
	Or are they willfully blind?
	Or are they actually malevolent?
	Are they actually aiming at trouble?
	Now, I'll go with naive.
	Because that's the simplest explanation.
	But I wouldn't rule out the other ones.
	Alright, so let's look at the 20th century.
	Suffragettes and women's rights.
	How did that come about?
	Freedom of speech.
	Labor unions.
	Now, believe me, the powerful did not want the labor unions to organize.
	How did that come about?
	Freedom of speech.
	How about civil rights for black people and Mexicans?
	The Mexican civil rights movement is well known.
	How'd that come about?
	How about constitutional protection for freedom of speech?
	What about the students movement, which started in that absolute rat's nest, Berkeley?
	The free speech movement started in 1964 or 1965 at Berkeley.
	Why?
	Well, there was a ban on non-standard campus political activities, and so the students fought for the right to free speech and academic freedom, and they won!
	Well, they weren't fascists.
	They were on the left, those people, right?
	They were already allied with the civil rights movement.
	They became the leaders of the students movement and the Vietnam anti-war movement.
	Two other movements which depended on free speech.
	What about the environmental movement?
	Or the LGBT movement?
	Were those not dependent on free speech?
	Well, obviously, these were To use the parlance, marginalized people, all they had was their capacity to formulate an argument, to make a stance, that's it.
	They didn't have the power, right?
	Right?
	Lefties?
	They didn't have the power.
	That's the bloody claim.
	So what power did they have?
	They had the power to speak.
	Turns out that's actually power.
	It's real power.
	And so if you're on the side of the oppressed, like you claim, Then you should be standing up as diligently as you possibly can for free speech because it's the most powerful weapon you have to right the societal wrongs that you're hypothetically and perhaps realistically concerned about.
	We have to discuss inequality, for example.
	We have to discuss it long enough until we figure out how to stop everything from stacking up at one end of the distribution and everyone else Getting zero.
	And this is going to be a big problem.
	So, I'll give you an example.
	The Tesla guys.
	They're building autonomous automobiles.
	But they're not stupid, you know.
	You may have noticed that.
	They're not building autonomous vehicles, they're building robots.
	And robots Autonomous robots are first going to take the shape of a car.
	But an autonomous car is no more a car than a car with a horse-drawn carriage.
	They're not the same thing.
	They're not even close to the same thing.
	And they're going to produce societal transformations that are so radical that they're unimaginable.
	But I can tell you one of the transformations that's going to occur.
	What's the most common source of employment for man in North America?
	Driver.
	Driver.
	Right?
	And so once the autonomous robots show up, which isn't going to be very long, then what are all those people going to do?
	And the answer is, they're going to stack up at zero.
	And that's what's already happening in the United States in particular, even in the Rust Belt.
	I mean, that's why Trump got elected, right?
	Because the damn Democrats, in their absolute stupidity, abandoned the working class whom they purported to represent.
	Well, it's not good.
	There are going to be dispossessed people.
	It's going to be a big problem.
	And we need to figure out how to solve it.
	And so we need an active left.
	We need a left that actually stands for not post-modernism and not damnable, murderous, reprehensible Marxism.
	Like, that has to go.
	You might be accused of attracting Nazis and I don't know what to say about that.
	It doesn't seem to be true.
	But in any case, that's an accusation that's been leveled at me.
	But here's something strange.
	At McMaster, you know, there was that big demonstration against me.
	There's a bunch of students there.
	Maybe they were students.
	They were professional protester types.
	And if they were students, they haven't been educated by their professors.
	That's for sure.
	They've been indoctrinated into what's essentially a cult.
	And they showed up with a big banner that had a hammer and sickle on it.
	It's like, what the hell?
	No, I'm serious.
	This is not funny.
	This is not funny.
	The sickle was mostly used to cut off people's heads.
	What happened in the 20th century was no goddamn joke.
	And we're not out of it yet.
	We've still got North Korea to deal with.
	Oh, that isn't real communism.
	It's like, oh yes it is.
	Oh yes it is.
	We've seen plenty of examples of real communism.
	And so I would say, you'll be able to tell when the universities sort themselves out properly, because people will no more dare to go to a protest with a bloody hammer and sickle than they would dare to go in a Nazi uniform.
	One in five Social scientists in universities identified themselves as Marxists.
	It's like, why the hell is that acceptable?
	What does it take for us to learn?
	Well, obviously, a couple hundred million deaths, and the Cold War, and the threat of thermonuclear annihilation wasn't enough.
	Well, what is?
	Anyways.
	The mythological investigations that I've done Trying to get to the bottom of things have indicated to me that there's something to the notion of the eternal human soul.
	Now, you can call it a metaphor if you want.
	That's fine.
	Metaphors turn out to be extraordinarily powerful things.
	But then you might ask, well, how is this soul to be properly conceptualized?
	And the way that it's being conceptualized in the West is either as the prophetic voice, so you might think about that as a Jewish conceptualization, or as the logos.
	And what is that?
	Well, it's the voice that restructures inequitable social societies.
	That's the prophetic voice.
	And it's the voice that transforms the chaos of potential, which is everywhere around us, into habitable order.
	And the manner in which that soul manifests itself so that society can be guided by it is through dialogue, through communication, through free speech.
	And so to put a limitation on that is to put a limitation, I would say, on the Holy Spirit itself.
	And that's the sin that cannot be forgiven.
	And so I would say, wake up.
	Stop allowing people to do this.
	They are no one's friend.
	Left, right, whatever.
	Any good you can possibly do is dependent on your ability to communicate what you believe as clearly as possible.
	It's your holy duty to do that.
	And anyone who interferes with that interferes with the proper unfolding of being itself.
	And it's a catastrophe that at the moment the universities In general, and that humanities, specifically, are the worst offenders.
	Thank you.
	So it's time for our Q&A.
	So if you're a VIP ticket holder, you get to ask a question.
	See more in the whole room.
	Thank you.
	Hey, Dr.
	Peterson.
	Thanks a lot for coming.
	You're awesome.
	We all love what you've done.
	Yeah, we applaud you greatly for it.
	I don't actually have a question.
	I was just wondering if you could comment on kind of the before and after of your life from the point where you did that video games political correctness.
	If you just want to tell a little anecdote or a little story about kind of the vortex you got sucked into and your experience with that.
	Cool, thanks a lot.
	Okay, I can do that.
	Well, the first part of it, Mostly it's surreal, I think is the right way of putting it.
	So how would you delineate this surreal element of it?
	Well, first of all, you know, I made these videos, and as I've said, I made them Well, partly because I'm open and curious.
	And you know what happens to curious be?
	A lead happens, and then it's like, I'm in Paris.
	And so I do a bunch of things at the same time, because I do that as well.
	And I started to toy with YouTube, right?
	Because I had a little bit of exposure on public television in Ontario.
	And they did a series on my master meeting course.
	And so, I put those on YouTube, and you know, people watched them a little bit, and then I started doing my lectures on YouTube, and I thought that was cool, because if I'm not, it's a new technology.
	You know, I thought mostly it was for Kit Kat videos and that sort of thing, which it was, and now it isn't, you know, and it's a Frankenstein monster, like almost everything we create.
	And so I had about a million views by last April, and that's when I set up my Patreon account, because I was curious about how great people could monetize their products, and Patreon seemed like an interesting thing, so I thought I would Explore it, toy with it.
	The best thing to do with that is to get involved in it, right?
	Because then you really learn how to do it.
	So I got set up and I noticed by April I've had like a million views.
	And I thought, over three years.
	And I had about 10,000 subscribers.
	And I thought, you know, that's a lot.
	That's a lot of views, man.
	If I wrote a book and sold a million copies, you know, I'd be doing touchdown dances in ecstasy, which you never see something stupid like that.
	And so, in September or October, I've been thinking about political correctness for quite a while, and I was writing a book, which is going to be published in, I think, February.
	It's called Twelve Rules for Life, An Antidote to Chaos.
	And it's coming out relatively soon.
	One of those chapters in that book is called Don't Buy the Children with Their Skateboarding, and it's about political correctness and practice.
	And so it was obsessing me, because as soon as you get into that, it just takes over your life.
	And I got news about this bill, C-16, and then I investigated it.
	I also had a couple of clinical clients who'd been drinking beyond their limit of tolerance by politically correct people in the workplace who were really harassing the hell out of them, and they were sensible people.
	And so all that sort of came together, and I thought, I was not sleeping one night, and I could either write or I could make a video.
	I thought, oh, what the hell?
	I'll make a video and see if I can sort myself.
	Oh, it goes to this political correct issue.
	The university had also just announced that it was going to make it mandatory for their human resources people to undergo anti-unconscious bias training, which I think is reprehensible.
	And so I made one video telling them about why I thought Bill C-16 was dangerous, and then I made another one about Anti-biased training.
	Anti-unconscious bias training.
	And, you know, then I was a little clearer in my thinking.
	And I thought that was bad.
	And I thought, well, you know, some people will watch it.
	That turned out to be true.
	And then, it's been a tornado since then.
	And some of it's great.
	Like, this is great.
	Some of it's not so great.
	You know, it was very worrisome.
	For me for about two months, mostly I would say on behalf of my family, because my job was in jeopardy.
	Quite severe jeopardy.
	I got my two warning letters from the university, which were full of lies, mostly omissions, actually, mostly omissions of truth.
	And I know how companies, corporations, organizations, fire people, they send three letters of warning.
	And then they take action.
	And that's what they were doing.
	They were going down the HR pathway.
	And then, which they would continue going down, except that I got a lot of public support.
	And so what happened to begin with was the journalists, they didn't know whether I was a bad guy or a good guy.
	And fair enough.
	But some of them actually read the material I was relating on my videos and thought, oh, crap.
	He's actually just telling people what's actually in the legislation.
	And they were journalists.
	So I think the intelligent ones, who can to be more concerned about free speech than most?
	And so then a bunch of journalists started acting in my favor.
	And then the social justice warriors played their role because they came out to the free speech rally and did a variety of cinematically not strategically viable things.
	One of the things I've noticed, and this has been quite educating, I would say, in a cynical and dark-hearted way.
	Every time that the social justice warriors come after me, all I have to do is stand back and let them invalidate themselves.
	And that actually becomes somewhat amusing, although it's stressful.
	You know, they master, what would you call it, debacle.
	There's a good example of that.
	Like, I could just sit back and let The performance occurred, because I knew that a very large number of people were going to watch it, and a very large number of people did.
	And so, like...
	Great.
	I... Most of the rest of it is just surreal.
	I have no idea where it's going to go.
	I don't really have any idea what's happening.
	It's very difficult for me to pick the proper level of analysis, but I do believe that the fundamental level of analysis in regards to social movements at the deepest level is theological.
	Above that, it's philosophical.
	What's happening in the West is somewhere between philosophical and theological.
	We're in a moment of crisis, and things can go either way.
	And I'm hoping that they go the right way.
	And I'm hoping that what I'm doing is facilitating that.
	I'm trying to be very careful with what I do and with what I say.
	And...
	And then, to close, is that I decided a long time ago that there...
	I learned a long time ago that there are two ways of propelling yourself through life.
	One is...
	You decide what you want, use your language to get it.
	Now that's a lot better than not doing anything.
	Use your language to get what you want.
	Here's another one.
	You use your language to state what you observe and conceptualize as clearly as you possibly can and let whatever happen is going to happen.
	So that's what I try to do.
	This is all what's happened.
	And fundamentally, it's okay with me.
	Because I already decided that whatever the outcome was of doing that was going to be okay.
	It's an act of faith.
	It's THE act of faith, actually.
	Because you decide, does the world run better on truth or falsely?
	If it runs better on truth, that's a decision.
	Then you speak the truth.
	And you let the cards fall where they fall.
	And so I'm watching where they fall.
	And I'm trying to stay intact.
	And so far, it's working.
	so thank God maybe we can go let's make a living though because people want to know what the hell is going on so how about 20 after?
	what time is it?
	it's almost 9 now ok how about 20 after?
	is that good?
	ok because I won't be intelligible after that's the worst thing with open dialogue being the only thing that helps keep communication between two completely different viewpoints how do you combat the people who are equating certain words with violence?
	Okay, well, first of all, I wouldn't say that you necessarily come back.
	Right?
	So, there's an analogous problem in clinical psychology, which is, what do you do to help someone who doesn't want to be helped?
	And the answer is, I can use a New Testament quote again for that.
	It's another harsh one.
	Don't cast pearls before swine.
	It took me a long time to understand that statement.
	And, What it means is that you devalue what's valuable by offering it to people who will not appreciate it.
	If you can't engage in dialogue with someone, then go find someone that you can't engage in dialogue with.
	And maybe, and you might say, well, what about those people?
	And I would say, well, the best thing to do with them...
	The first answer is, you let the dead bury the desk.
	And the second answer is, the only way that you get A person out of a self-defined hell is by example.
	So you walk away from people you cannot communicate with, you communicate with people who you can communicate with, and you try to put your life in order.
	And then you hope that some of them wake up, and some of them will.
	So, yes?
	Thank you. . . . . . .
	Dr.
	Peterson, thank you very much for your speech tonight.
	It was fantastic.
	My question is very simple.
	It has to do with your crowdfunding of academic research, which you recently did on Indiegogo for your, I believe it's in the political correctness.
	And you raised more than double, so far, your original goal.
	It's now at $162,000, which is amazing.
	And I hope the organizers of this event will post the link so we can all get more money.
	But the question is, this is the first time I've ever seen university research being funded by the public at large, as opposed to through one of the Canadian research councils, which usually are, there's a committee and there's a different process.
	So, to me, it seems like it's precedent-setting and it's novel and groundbreaking.
	How do you think this will change the pattern of research funding in Canada?
	Well, that's a good question.
	I mean, one of the things, I had thought about, first of all, that's not my campaign.
	Right?
	It's the Rebel Media's campaign.
	Now, they asked me if they could run it, and I said yes.
	But I don't believe I would have done it on my own.
	Because it seemed like...
	Now, what did it seem like?
	It seems, in some sense, like capitalizing on misfortune.
	You know?
	And so, anyway, so they did it, and I'm happy about that.
	But, when they decided to do it, I talked to a number of people that I know...
	about what this could conceivably mean.
	And one of the things that we thought about was setting up a system whereby other professors could do the same thing, other researchers.
	Now, there are some sites like that set up.
	I think there's one called experiment.com.
	That isn't right, by the way, but it does spawn these sorts of things.
	It might be worth investigating whether this is setting a reasonable and productive precedent.
	But it isn't obvious to me that I have the time to investigate that well enough to figure out how to do it.
	And that's partly what I'm trying to figure out right now.
	So I'm going to be talking to people over the next couple of months.
	I have some supporters who are reasonably well capitalized.
	And they are interested in working to allow that sort of thing to happen.
	But it's very complicated.
	And I'm already occupied.
	The answer is I don't know what sort of precedent it will set.
	I do know that it's going to keep my graduate students working for the next three years.
	So, with any luck, I'll apply for another grant this fall and get it, and then I'll have more money than I would have, and that'll be funny.
	So I hope that's what will happen.
	I'd like to thank you for posting your videos, the lectures on the Jungian archetypes, President the Lion King.
	It's worthwhile if anyone's interested.
	My question though is about the limits and restrictions on free speech.
	So obviously we're opposed to anyone who wants to restrict free speech.
	However, how do we deal with issues like death threats or dishonest or pernicious advertising?
	Yeah, well I would say we've already dealt with that pretty nicely.
	There are limits to commercial speech that would be I think English common law actually has dealt with that very recently.
	I'm a great admirer of English common law.
	English common law is an evolved legal system, right?
	So, just so you know, because you should know, because our legal system has become followed up by the, what do you call it, intromission of French civil law precepts into the English common law system, which is a catastrophe in my estimation.
	Under English common law, you have all the rights there are.
	They're not granted to you by the government.
	You have them.
	And then what's happened in the English common law is, well, you have some rights, and I have some rights, and now we have a scrap, because, you know, we don't know where one right ends and the other one begins, and so then we take each other to court, and then the court decides, roughly speaking, where the line should be drawn, and then the law builds organically across time.
	And having done that, it's come up with all sorts of, we can call them limitations on, I wouldn't say free speech precisely, because I don't really believe that that's what they are, but, like, you can't utter death threats.
	So, and I guess it's partly the paradoxical situation where sometimes what you're doing with your free speech is interfering with the continuation of free speech, in which case you should be stalled.
	It's something like that.
	And so, you know, there should be limits on seditious speech of some sort, because that's treasonable speech, you know, and I guess if what you're doing is oriented towards demolishing the structure upon which your own freedom depends, Then something has to be, there has to be a limit there.
	Now, where that limit should be, well, that's a tough one, but that's, but a lot of that's already been settled, you know.
	There's lots of things.
	You can't have a death threat.
	You can't incite to criminal activity, right?
	You can't blatantly lie if you're a commercial vendor.
	In fact, if you can vend tobacco, for example, and it tends to be sorted out in the Supreme Court in the U.S., you have to put warnings on your tobacco product.
	That's compelled speech, which was what I was objecting to with Bill C-16.
	But outside of the commercial domain, there hasn't been any attempt to compel speech, and that's how it should be.
	So I think those things have to really be dealt with on a case-by-case basis, because the devil's in the details.
	And that's also why I think the English common law is such a staggeringly brilliant contribution to world culture.
	And you know, if you want to think, well, is there any empirical evidence for that?
	It's like, yeah.
	Most countries that were founded on English common law are rich.
	In the Americas, founded by France, poor.
	Founded by Portugal, poor.
	Founded by Spain, poor.
	Founded by England, rich.
	So, and it's the legal structure.
	Now, that's not all.
	There's a great book, huh?
	What was it called?
	And Poverty of Nations was written by a Harvard-Americans professor who analyzed.
	He was really curious about why some countries in the Americas were poor and some were rich, because they all have natural resources, so, you know, what's going on?
	And so, and then other countries like Japan, you know, they've got no natural resources, and they're rich.
	A functioning legal system is the ultimate in natural resources.
	Thanks for coming on.
	Yeah.
	This relates to Sam Harris' conception of Biewoldt.
	It's slightly unrelated, but I'm just going to go with it, if you don't mind.
	So why can't the subjective I be an illusion and still fit into your methodological perspective?
	Well, see, the thing about a question like that, and this is the truth about any question like that.
	When you say, is A equivalent to B, The answer is, it depends on how you define A and it depends on how you define B. And, like, it's a weasel answer in some sense, but it's actually the correct answer.
	Because I can't answer that question without knowing what you specifically mean by illusion, and specifically mean about the subjective eye.
	Now, and I would also say the question is not formulated well, because the eye that you're referring to is not homogenous, it's heterogenous.
	There's a multiplicity of eyes You know, arranged in something like a hierarchy with something like a unity at the top.
	And some of that appears, in some sense, illusory.
	In the same way that the desktop on your computer is an illusory representation of the actual computational processes.
	It's not illusory in that it's functional.
	If you're thinking about illusion as something, you see, you have to define the metaphysical arena in which you are formulating the concepts before we can have the proper discussion of that.
	Now, having said all that, I would say, the simple truth that I adhere to is that civilizations that act as if human beings have free will seem to work.
	Now, that's a pragmatic bit of evidence.
	It's not a scientific bit of evidence.
	But I'm a pragmatist, so that doesn't really bother me.
	And so, from a sure-hand perspective, I would say, well, if something is functional and it's based on a particular first principle, then that first principle is true enough.
	And that's what I think about free will.
	And that's what I think about the idea of the soul.
	Now, I'm not saying that constitutes an exhaustive analysis of free will or of the soul.
	It isn't.
	It's a good first pass approximation.
	Thanks.
	Thank you.
	Peterson, big fan.
	I saw in one of your Q&As, and I hope this isn't too unrelated, but it probably will be.
	Keep it lighthearted.
	You said that you're a big fan of a guilty pleasure for Trailer Park Boys.
	I'm curious if you could give a brief, sort of, archetypal cycle.
	And maybe to tie back to Free Speech, how a show that is so crude and offensive manages to be maybe the most possible animated show.
	Yeah, there are many reasons why my wife hates me.
	She's here.
	She's here.
	She doesn't hate me with nothing else to come.
	But the Trader Park Boys is definitely one of the reasons.
	Why do I like them?
	Well, I'm from Northern Alberta.
	I don't know if you know the movie FUBAR? You guys know that?
	Well, I like FUBAR. It's actually about the people that I grew up with, and perhaps even about me to some degree.
	I watch FUBAR, I don't know, Probably eight years ago with a couple of my old friends from Northern Alberta and we were hysterical to the point of comatose watching it.
	There's something about it.
	I like working class guys.
	I think they're funny.
	They have great senses of humor and it's something I really miss.
	One of the ways that working class guys compete is through absurdity.
	I work in pizza restaurants and I work in lots of rough places.
	Rail crews and that sort of thing.
	And what keeps guys alive in situations like that is their absurd sense of humor.
	And the Trailer Park Boys is a great example of that.
	I think it's hilarious that the Canadian government funds it.
	What I also like about the Trailer Park Boys, and this is also what I like about The Simpsons, is that it's absolutely reprehensible in all of its details, except for its container.
	And so The Simpsons, the family is central to The Simpsons, right?
	No matter what you say about Homer, he loves his family, he'll do anything for his family, and fundamentally they're oriented towards each other.
	And so it's always a comedy, because they're aiming up.
	And so that's what makes The Simpsons just not mean-spirited.
	It's not mean-spirited.
	It's great satire.
	Everyone's in on the joke, and the characters are...
	Essentially moral.
	And it's the same, to a somewhat lesser degree, with the Terminal Park course.
	It's like, because the story's, when it's working, the story's about two things.
	It's about impulsive male stupidity.
	But it's also about friendship.
	And it really is about friendship.
	Even the enemies are friends.
	And so, the creators of that have done this remarkable job of walking the line between satirical Like English comedians.
	It's great satire, but they love their characters.
	They have love for their characters, even though they're completely reprehensible, right?
	So that's part of why I like the trailer part.
	I always read those comedians.
	I think they're unbelievably funny, because You watch it, and it does have this documentary-like aspect.
	It's easy to believe, like most of the fans do believe, that these are real people.
	And they're not!
	They're making this stuff up!
	They're great actors.
	The Konki episode, Dan, that's just...
	That's high artist, Dan.
	Thank you so much.
	Thank you.
	I have a bucket list.
	I don't, actually.
	If I had a caucus, one item on it would be to be invited on the trailer party.
	I just have a question about your claims on political belief and your correlation to K-5 personality.
	You mentioned that there's truth A and truth B fighting it out, and that's between the right and the left.
	What do you make of, perhaps, truth C, which is what I see emerging as a libertarian movement, which isn't really in either category?
	The first answer is I don't know enough about libertarians to say, because we haven't been able to sample enough of them to get a sense.
	Now, I should say that the politically correct types are not classic liberals, just so everyone knows.
	The big distinguisher for the politically correct types is that they're very high in agreeableness.
	And you might say, well, they don't seem very agreeable.
	Well, agreeable people are only agreeable if they like you.
	So if you're in their nest, then you're an aide.
	But if you're outside the nest, then you're a snake.
	And so, they're very agreeable to eggs, but they're not very agreeable to snakes.
	And most people are snakes.
	So, but the libertarians, my suspicion is that they're high in openness and high in conscientiousness.
	But I don't know.
	I really don't know.
	They may also not be very agreeable, because they're kind of like leave me the hell alone types.
	And those are the sort of people that I'm agreeable, I'm quite agreeable.
	You wouldn't guess that.
	I fight it really hard.
	But, you know, disagreeable types basically tell you, screw off.
	And that can be real useful, because sometimes that is what you should do.
	I suspect that the libertarians are more disagreeable.
	OK, thank you.
	Hi, Dr. Mishan.
	So you expressed some concern about losing your job at the University of Toronto.
	And I was just wondering, given that your Patreon income exceeds my own salary, is there a threshold at which you would consider resigning and pursuing a YouTuber, just being a professional YouTuber as your primary agent?
	Well, you know, I thought about that, but as I said earlier, I like to do lots of things at the same time, and right now, There's no reason to do that.
	I love my job as a university professor, and I should also say, on behalf of my students, like, look, I went back to teach in January, and I was not in very good shape.
	I had a real health crisis in December, which I think was unrelated to this, weirdly enough, but I was really not in good shape, and I had been It had been recommended to me by my chair that I not return to teaching, independently of what was going on at the university.
	But there's no damn way, because I was just like, no, I wasn't going to do that.
	But it wasn't clear to me how much additional stress I was going to be able to tolerate.
	But the students were extraordinarily welcoming.
	And you know, the students at the University of Toronto, and most students, Particularly at the U of T, most of them are kids of first-generation immigrants, right?
	It's like, they're not on a bloody political bandwagon.
	They're afraid for their economic future.
	They're pushed hard by the dreams and desires of their parents.
	And they're working themselves down to the tailbone, trying to get their degree and go out there and be functional.
	And so, I like the undergraduates.
	Now, there's a small...
	Percentage of them.
	It's very small.
	It's the same damn 30 protesters at every event.
	I know them.
	I can say hi to them.
	And I don't even know how many of them are students, for that matter.
	And then there's the administrators and a fair number of the faculty who are politically correct.
	But the university itself, EOT, is actually quite conservative in the small-c sense.
	Now that's annoying sometimes because I'm quite radical here.
	From a creative perspective.
	And so I find the attitude there somewhat constraining.
	Whatever.
	I've got nothing to complain about as a university professor.
	It's a highly, highly privileged job.
	I'm thrilled to have it.
	I'm lucky to have it.
	I'm fortunate to have it.
	I like teaching young people.
	It's a great privilege to do it.
	And so I don't see any reason to stop.
	And I think I can do both.
	And so far that's working.
	So as long as I'm left alone, which is my libertarian side, as long as I'm left alone by the university, and I generally am, then I can have my cake and eat it too.
	And so that's a good deal.
	Thank you.
	So, earlier in your speech, you mentioned how the left generally kind of come to the aid of who they perceive as oppressed. you mentioned how the left generally kind of come to Right?
	So, I kind of view the rights as being sort of oppressed.
	I'm a lefty myself.
	Do you think my perception is correct?
	And if so, why do you think that the social justice type, you don't also see it like I didn't?
	Yeah, well, you know, we're in the time of cat, right?
	Isn't that true?
	In chaotic times things reverse and twist and we're in chaotic times.
	And I believe that archetypically.
	And I do believe that that's part of why this mean process has emerged.
	Is the left oppressing the right?
	I think it's more like The left has gained, the radical left, has gained incremental control over many institutions as a consequence of inappropriate public subsidy.
	So, there are not that many of them, but there are whole disciplines that are pathologically, ideologically possessed.
	The ethnic studies, women studies types, women studies in particular.
	It's a complete catastrophe.
	And increasingly, the humanities are being pulled into that vortex that has postmodernism two-thirds of the way down, and Marxism underneath that.
	The problem is, is that we set up a system where people of that orientation can draw a stable salary For decades.
	There's thousands of them.
	Hundreds of thousands, perhaps.
	And do nothing but work on what they say they're working on, which is the undermining of the patriarchy.
	Which is a reprehensible term, by the way.
	It's a radical oversimplification, obviously.
	And it's also profoundly ungrateful, because although the patriarchy is an oppressive structure, obviously, because any social community requires conformity, or it's not a social community, It's also staggeringly productive and, for example, provides them with a degree of safety and security that's unthinkable while they pursue their fifth column agenda.
	You've got to stop it.
	It's not acceptable.
	And the way we stop it in part is, parents, don't let your children take humanity's courses.
	One of the things that I've been thinking about doing is, and this would be a great crowdsourcing project, I would like to make a technical, I'd I would like to make a technical, I'd like to do a technical analysis of post-modern slash Marxist slash social justice terminology.
	we've been working on that already, and then rate course descriptions, have course descriptions, rate them by that program and publish them.
	And so then we can rank-order universities and colleges by social justice infiltration and produce a manual for parents and high school students that would say who not to take courses from and which courses to avoid.
	Because I think that starving them out is the right approach.
	And it's going to be difficult because they're tenured.
	And I admire tenure, but the system's gone Sideways.
	There was a way of exploiting it, and it's being exploited.
	I mean, I don't know how many of you guys follow Real Peer Review.
	I would recommend that on Twitter, man.
	You want to see what the pathological humanities scholars are up to, you subscribe to Real Peer Review, man.
	It's like, you...
	It's far more absurd than the onion.
	So, I don't remember what your question was.
	Basically, is the left oppressing the right?
	And am I correct in that assumption?
	Well, the left is oppressing the universities.
	And the universities are oppressing the culture.
	Now, and that translates to some degree into what you described.
	So, thank you.
	We just wanted to, on behalf of the UBC Free Speech Club, we just wanted to thank everyone for coming out.
	And we wanted to thank Dr.
	Peterson for coming as well.
	We will be seeing some of you tomorrow where we will be doing the Devouring Mother.
	Thank you for coming out.

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