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Nov. 7, 2017 - Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

01:27:44

The New Media: My Experience and More

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	So our next speaker certainly does not need any introduction.
	He is the man you cornered by his seat, he is the man you cornered in the foyer, and he is the man you cornered outside the bathroom.
	So please put your hands together for Dr.
	Dr. Peterson.
	So I was kind of perplexed
	about what I was going to say today because I'm not a media expert by any stretch of the imagination, but I was speaking with Jonathan Paggio this morning because he's staying in the same Airbnb as my wife and I, and he suggested that I talk to you about my experiences with media and he suggested that I talk to you about my experiences with media over and I thought, well, that's A, that's something I know about, so it's always good when you're talking to people to talk about something that you know about.
	That's actually a really good tip for public speaking, right?
	Well, it's really true.
	You have to remember that.
	You should know about three times as much about the topic as you need to talk about the topic.
	And then you have places you can go and, you know, you can wander around a little bit and be a little spontaneous.
	So that's really useful.
	But then I also thought that makes sense because nobody knows anything about the situation with regards to the media now.
	And so we're all feeling our way because the technological transformations are so rapid.
	They're going to come one after the other in the next 10 years.
	I don't think we can even imagine what's coming down the pipes.
	And we're all struggling to keep up.
	We don't even know how much of the current state of more radical political polarization is actually a secondary consequence of technological transformations that we don't understand.
	Because I was thinking today about...
	You know, about Facebook and about Twitter and about YouTube and about the idea that people are in an echo chamber and I'm not really sure that's the right metaphor.
	I think we might be in an amplifier rather than an echo chamber.
	You know, and I've thought for a long time that When I'm thinking about the effect of the individual, I read something that Solzhenitsyn said at one point, and I think he was citing an ancient Christian theologian who defined the universe as a place whose circumference was nowhere and whose center was everywhere.
	And I really like that idea.
	And I think it's actually relatively true from a technical perspective, like from a physical perspective.
	But Solzhenitsyn pointed out that each of us was to be regarded as a center of the cosmos.
	And that we have the power that's associated with that.
	And I've thought about that a lot because there's something about it that's...
	It's either obviously true or it's true enough so that we all act it out when we interact with each other because we treat each other like conscious beings who have a destiny and who have choices and who make choices that are important and who make choices that can be good or bad or even good and evil.
	We all act like that.
	So we act that out.
	And I was thinking that you can think of network models in that way, you know.
	You can think of human beings as like nine billion dots in a row and there's no connections between the dots and then you're sort of like a dust moat in the wind and who the hell cares what you think anyways and you don't have any impact on things or you can recognize that you're at the center of a Networked system and that you know you know a thousand people or you will in your lifetime or perhaps more than a thousand people and then they know a thousand people so you're separated by one person from a million and two people from a billion and that's a much better way to think and we are seriously networked
	together and we're networked together more now than we ever have been and so one of the things that that might mean is that the choices you make are amplified and distributed not only far faster than they ever have been but with far more impact and you know one of the things that Carl Jung pointed out was that well he had this idea that when science that you know alchemy is the root of science in some sense it's this dreamlike substrate out of which science emerged and But
	alchemy was kind of a weird admixture of religious thinking and scientific thinking because those two things hadn't been differentiated back when there were alchemists.
	Jung believed that what had happened in Europe at least first was that the scientific end of alchemy blew up and expanded at an exponential rate and that led to this advanced technological civilization that we have but that the moral dimension that was embedded in the religious symbolism didn't develop at all and so we're in this unstable situation where we're far more technologically proficient than we are wise and that that's actually a big problem because obviously the more powerful the tools you generate Intelligent,
	ethically, you better be, or things are going to really, are going to go to hell in a handbasket very, very rapidly, you know?
	And I had this thought, I think I shared it a little bit last night, that, you know, in the next five years, six years, we're going to develop pretty viciously intelligent AI systems, and that's already happening, you know?
	I mean, They're monitoring YouTube, and they're monitoring Facebook, and they're monitoring Google, and they're trying to make ethical decisions, these AI systems.
	And the problem is, is that the ethical presuppositions of the programmers are being embedded into the infrastructure of the net.
	And that's a hell of a thing to think, because it means that for better or worse, we're building automated intelligences that reflect our own morality.
	And we better be very careful about what our morality is if we're going to automate it, because automated systems are incredibly powerful.
	So that's kind of, that's where we're at, at least to some degree, in terms of the new technological transformations in communication technology.
	You know, it puts each of us at the center of a wide web of connections and makes the consequences of our moral decisions much more immediately manifest to each of us, It kind of begs the question, too, like, how should you behave on Facebook?
	And how should you behave on Twitter?
	I think Twitter drives me a little bit crazy.
	You know, I'm on it a fair bit.
	I'm not sure it's a good thing.
	And I tend to distribute things that are alarming, let's say, in some sense.
	Maybe they are alarming ideologically.
	They're disturbing.
	And I was thinking about that today in preparation for this talk, and I wasn't really sure that was necessarily a good idea, because There are a lot of alarming things happening all the time, everywhere, obviously.
	And now we can share all of them, always, all the time.
	And so that means that instead of hearing about one alarming thing a day, you're hearing about like 500 alarming things a day.
	And so then, you know, what are you supposed to do about that?
	Does that indicate that there's a state of emergency?
	Well, you don't know, because you don't know how to calibrate the information.
	So I was thinking, well, maybe the right way to behave on Twitter is only to forward good things that are happening, you know, because there's lots of good things that are happening.
	But I actually don't know the answer to that.
	I have no idea, and I don't think anybody else does either.
	I do know that there are studies with regards to Facebook that show that the more time that you spend on Facebook, the more depressed you are.
	And that it looks like it's a causal relationship rather than just a correlational relationship and it seems to have something to do with the fact that Facebook is one of those platforms where everybody puts up an advertisement for their life, right?
	It's like here I am with my new girlfriend in the Bahamas being happy and then here I am on a mountain being happy and it's like it's not you like miserable with the cover over your head unable to get out of bed you don't you don't you don't broadcast that you can think well That means you're presenting people with a falsely positive view of your life, and then they compare their lives to it, and they come up short, and you think, well, that's a kind of deception.
	But by the same token, you don't stop random strangers on the street and tell them how miserable your life is, right?
	They don't want to hear about that.
	They want to see a facade of normality In, you know, just casual day-to-day interactions.
	And so, part of pro-social behavior is only to put what's at least, you know, normative and good forward.
	So, it doesn't matter.
	I mean, so I don't think that's necessarily deception.
	But the mass consequence of that is something that we don't understand at all.
	And so...
	Well, so with that sort of introduction, I'm going to kind of walk you through my experience with social media and, let's say, the old media, for lack of a better word, and I'll try to give you a balanced account and to tell you, well, and to see if I can draw some conclusions about what's happened.
	I mean, my life for the last year has been so busy that...
	I haven't had proper time to reflect on what's been happening, and even if I did, I'm not exactly sure I would be able to understand it anyways, because I don't think I have a framework of reference within which to put it.
	So, I started working for this company called Television TV Ontario about 15, 16 years ago.
	I had talked to a producer.
	His name was Wodek Schemberg.
	He's an emigre Polish Jew and a really smart guy.
	And he phoned me up at the university.
	And one of the things that distinguishes me to some degree from my colleagues is that I'll talk to the press and that I'm actually not afraid of them or distrustful of them.
	Like, a lot of my colleagues, not all of them, are...
	Like, they're critical of the press, partly in an arrogant way and partly in a defensive way.
	They say, well, they always get it wrong.
	It's like, well, first of all, there isn't a they, and they don't always get it wrong.
	And, you know, they'll also shy away from the press as if they're being intruded upon when the truth is, generally speaking, the ideas that they're putting forward aren't of sufficient interest to draw public attention anyways.
	And so...
	But I talked to Wodek for a long time, and he invited me to go on a couple of shows, and then...
	Then I ended up on TVO's The Agenda, which is a pretty good public affairs show.
	It's one of the few, I would say, deep news shows left that are on normal broadcast TV. They go into issues in some depth, although they've fragmented that up a bit in recent years.
	I became a fairly common guest on those shows, and people seemed to like what I was saying, which always surprised me.
	I mean, but it was good, because, you know, it must be pretty damn horrible to put yourself out in the public eye and face primary criticism for what you're doing.
	I think that would be unbearable in some sense, unless you were very, very strongly constituted.
	And then, well, that went on for a while, and Wodek was running this series called Big Ideas, which was actually quite prescient, you know, so he had lecturers come To Toronto and and he had all pretty much all the major public intellectuals in the world over a period of about five years or six years or so come and deliver bare-bones lectures of this sort fundamentally need tape them and put them on TV You know and and that was sort of unheard of the production quality was
	Well, high, but not overproduced.
	There weren't multiple cameras and edits and intelligent commentary from people in the background.
	It was purely content-driven.
	It actually got pretty popular on iTunes, and you can still find the lectures there.
	But TVO couldn't...
	They pulled the show, even though their primary...
	Mandate from the government was to educate the public, and this was a very low-budget show with very high-quality minds that people were actually watching and downloading a lot on iTunes, but they didn't seem to take the non-standard media with any degree of seriousness.
	You know, that's kind of a common human attribute, which is that if you don't know about something you don't take it seriously.
	And it's because if you don't know about it, well, it's just grey and fuzzy, right?
	You have no differentiated knowledge, so it's easy to oversimplify it.
	And I think part of the problem with classical media, let's say, trying to make a transition to the digital age is that they have no idea what the digital media is.
	Like, I was watching an MSNBC clip the other day about this robot, I think her name is Sophia, who has a fairly advanced degree of Artificial intelligence and who can manifest pretty realistic human facial emotions and it was a four-minute clip and had a 30-second ad at the beginning of it and you couldn't skip the ad and I thought there's a real arrogance on the part of the MSNBC people to put that on YouTube because anybody who's familiar with the YouTube let's
	say culture knows that well you get to put a 10-second ad on and then you get to skip it after five seconds if you want like You can't ask people to pay 30 seconds of attention for four minutes of content.
	It violates the norms.
	And so it had only had about 12,000 views.
	And that's a really interesting example of Marshall McLuhan's idea that the medium is the message, right?
	As you build a new technological infrastructure, And it's sort of like the old thing, because YouTube is sort of like a TV network.
	But it's also not like a TV network at all.
	Partly, for example, because when you put something on YouTube, it's permanent.
	That's way different than broadcast TV. Like, it's seriously, revolutionarily different.
	And so, and it's also the case, too, that And this is a strange thing, and I don't think the classic media understands this either, is that YouTube people don't like high production values.
	In fact, they're very cynical about them.
	And I think that's because they've come to identify advanced editing and glitz as markers that the information is actually being manipulated, which of course it is.
	Now, for better or worse, I mean, editing doesn't have to be manipulating, but it certainly can be.
	And besides that, a lot of the more tech-savvy people that watch YouTube can duplicate those sort of special effects in their own home in half an hour.
	So they're no longer markers of the kind of competence and technological prowess that would signal the sort of competence that you could trust.
	So what YouTube viewers seem to like is Basically, ordinary people, more or less, trying to have an intelligent conversation about something confusing and important.
	And the attention span that people are willing to devote to that is actually quite remarkable for a medium that was nothing but cute cat videos, say, five years ago.
	The fact that, like, a lot of my lectures and, like, Joe Rogan's podcast, like, three hours long.
	It's like, what the hell?
	People weren't supposed to have that capacity to pay attention in this era of fragmented attention.
	You know, and Rogan, I don't know if you know this or not, he has 120 million downloads a month now.
	So that's 1.5 billion downloads a year.
	And so the last time I saw him, and that was with Brett, who just spoke...
	I asked him what it was like to be the most powerful interviewer the world has ever seen, because I think he probably is, if you think about it in sheer numbers.
	I mean, maybe Walter Cronkite back in the 60s had some comparable influence, but he said, I just don't think about it.
	And, like, what the hell is he supposed to think about it?
	Because no one knows what to think about that.
	And so he just has the conversations and posts them and away he goes.
	But he has no idea what role he's currently playing in society and we don't have proper metrics for measuring it and we don't understand it at all.
	So anyways, I did these big idea lectures with Wodek, and they were ranked on the TVO channel, and the five lectures or six lectures I did all ended up in the top 20, which really surprised me, but it was an indication that there was something about what I was talking about for which there was a market.
	Now, there's some reasons for that, I think.
	I wrote a book from 1984 to 1999 called Maps of Meaning, and a lot of the things I talk about come out of all the reading I did during that period, because I was reading an insane amount and thinking really non-stop, 16 hours a day.
	The only way I could stop myself from thinking was to go work out with weights.
	I couldn't shut off my concern with the issues that I was dealing with, and I was spending about three hours a day writing.
	And I did that every day for 15 years and that was the consequence, that was the book.
	The writing also helped a tremendous amount because it helps clarify your thinking, writing.
	You're smarter when you write because you can externalize your thoughts and then you can use your working memory to analyze what you've written instead of remembering the thought.
	And so you're externalizing your memory.
	You can analyze what you thought.
	You can refine it.
	You can reorder it.
	You can edit like mad with a word processor, which is also a very new thing.
	Editing is very difficult if you have to do that with pen and paper with a typewriter It's like forget it you you get your first draft and that's it and so But what I was doing with maps of meaning was I was trying to solve a problem and the problem was It was the problem as far as I was concerned that underlie the conflict between the Western world and the communist world essentially and that problem was Well,
	the reason it was a problem was because we were so highly armed, even as we are now, and of course that problem's manifesting itself once again with North Korea.
	That might render everything we're talking about completely irrelevant, right?
	Because we don't know which catastrophe is the one most worth worrying about.
	But I was interested in the conflict between the communist way of looking at the world and the Western way of looking at the world, and I think I actually had a post-modern concern with that, because one of the things I was curious about was, well, The world is susceptible to a multitude of interpretations and opinions, and the communist interpretation is one...
	Form of interpretation and the Western capitalist democratic form of interpretation is another form of interpretation and is there any grounds on which you can determine that one of those is superior to the other or more correct than the other?
	Or is it a matter purely of opinion and social organization or maybe even warfare to determine who's going to be the victor?
	Maybe there's no other way of determining who's going to be the victor than actual conflict.
	It's certainly possible and so I started to look underneath belief structures and I didn't know you could do that really to begin with.
	You know my first degree was in political science and I kind of wandered out of that when the professors kept insisting to me in the upper years of my studies that all the conflict between human beings was driven by economic disparity and I just never bought that because That's like saying that people fight about what they value.
	And for me, that just beg the question of, well, yeah, fair enough, obviously, it's almost self-evident, but the real question is, why do they value what they value?
	Because human beings are quite a diverse lot, and it's not self-evident why we value some things rather than other things.
	Like, if you're starving to death, it's obvious that you're going to value food, but that's a limit case, you know?
	It's not that interesting, so it's too simplified.
	So I didn't find that a compelling explanation, and I still don't.
	I think the economic explanation for human conflict is shallow and tautological even.
	And then I started to read some people.
	Whose writings really gripped me.
	And I think that's an interesting phenomena, you know?
	And I was studying psychology by this point.
	I switched into psychology.
	And I was starting to read the psychoanalysts.
	And I really got interested in what they had to say.
	Partly from reading Freud.
	Because I was really interested in his analysis of family dynamics and of dreams.
	But more particularly from reading Jung.
	And one of the things I learned from Jung, which really...
	It never ceased to shock me.
	See, he basically made a point.
	The point was that you're not master in your own house.
	That there are forces that are operating on you at an unconscious level that determine, for example, the direction of your attention.
	So, for example, you know how sometimes you'll read something and it'll really grip you.
	And then you read something else, and you're like, you can't even concentrate on it.
	And you might say, well, I need to concentrate on this boring thing, you know, because an exam depends on it or a promotion, and there's just no damn way.
	You're reading it, and your attention flits all over the place, and, you know, you're undisciplined and all that, but then you have this other thing, and it just grips you like this, and you think, okay, well, what's doing that?
	It's not your will, because your will would be the thing that would allow you to concentrate on whatever you chose to concentrate on.
	It's something underneath your will that's actually directing your attention.
	And you could say, well, it's random, but of course it's not.
	It's maybe random if you have a serious case of schizophrenia.
	And I think in some sense that's actually the definition of schizophrenia.
	But it's not random if you're a functioning human being.
	The thing that grips your attention and directs it to one place or another is something that's Well, it's a deep instinct.
	It's a manifestation of what Jung called the self, which is a very interesting idea.
	So Jung thought, it's such a cool idea, he thought that the mechanism that directed your attention in the present was your future self attempting to manifest itself in the present world.
	So you might say, well, you have a potential.
	And that potential is what you could be in time.
	And in order for that potential to manifest itself, it has to be palpable in the present.
	And the way that instinct for further develop manifests itself in the present is by directing your attention towards things that are likely to increase your competence and further your growth right now.
	And that's just an unbelievable idea.
	You know, it's like your potential better self beckoning to you in the present.
	Amazing.
	And I really can't think of a better explanation for it than that.
	That's a really good explanation, but a very frightening one because it means in some sense that something as fundamental as your attention is more or less controlled by processes that are so deep that you don't have a tremendous amount of voluntary control over them.
	Like you can interact with the forces to some degree, but you're not one of those creatures that can just tell yourself what to do.
	Life would be really easy if that's what it was like, right?
	It's time to go to the gym three days a week, two hours a day.
	It's like, you know, you're Superman in two years.
	You're going to eat properly and, you know, you're not going to drink too much and you're not going to take cocaine and all of these things.
	You just tell yourself that and bang, you quit.
	And it's kind of weird that it isn't that way.
	But it's really seriously not that way.
	Anyways, when I was looking at the difference between the communist system and the Western capitalist system, I started to get underneath the belief systems to find out what was there.
	Jung was extremely helpful, and other thinkers that I'm sure you've heard me mention, if you've listened to my lectures, Nietzsche and Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn, seemed to be the people who had dug deepest down into those subterranean levels.
	What I found, I think, was that the communist system was very shallow.
	It was predicated on a set of rational assumptions that were generated by a handful of people with no real biological or historical rooting.
	And I think that the fact that that was the case was part of the reason why, when those ideas unfolded in real time, they were so murderous.
	They just weren't...
	Imagine that, you know, Karl Marx was thinking, well, here's the game that we're playing and here are the rules, and so that he laid out the rules explicitly, and then people made societies that followed those rules, and it turned out that that game didn't work at all.
	He just got it wrong, and like seriously wrong.
	Whereas in the West, the ideas emerged from an unbroken historical process that stretches back probably to the beginning of civilization, say, maybe all the way back to Africa.
	Who knows?
	how ancient these ideas are and there's there's an unbroken continuity of ideas that emerged up and that and they're expressed in symbolic form and it's on that symbolic platform which actually matches our biology and our behavior that our more articulated ideas rest upon and so i found that extremely Useful and surprising.
	I mean, it wasn't what I expected.
	And at the same time, I had another problem that emerged while I was dealing with this, and one was that I come to understand what group identity meant to people.
	Like, you have to have a group identity because you live with other people, unless you have a shared identity.
	Jonathan talked about this a bit.
	Unless you have a Central pole around which you're all oriented.
	It's all chaotic and confused, and you're in constant conflict and warfare.
	It's like, that's a bad thing.
	You do not want that.
	And you're all confused individually and all of that.
	That's a state of chaos.
	It's unbearable.
	But if you tighten up the group identity to great a degree, say like the Nazis tried to do, then the probability that you'll come to blows with other groups reaches almost a point of certainty, right?
	And so it seemed to me that human beings were damned if they did and damned if they didn't.
	On the one hand, if you dropped your group identity, then you fragmented and degenerated into the chaos.
	And if you gripped hard to your group identity, then you tilted towards totalitarianism and group conflict.
	And then I thought, well, that was okay in the past to tilt towards group conflict because, you know, when we had sticks and swords, We'd have a war and lots of people would get killed and lots of people would get hurt, but the entire planet wouldn't burst into flames, right?
	So, you know, this inborn...
	dichotomy of catastrophe that characterized human existence wasn't something that could spiral into complete destruction and so we could get away with it but now in a thermonuclear age it's like we can't get away with it but that's still what we're like we're still like that and so for months I thought oh my god I always believed that if you could get to the bottom of a problem you could solve it because that was sort of the definition of getting to the bottom of it you know a solution would emerge and When I got to the bottom of it,
	as far as I could go, I thought, oh, it's group identity and, like, group fostered warfare and catastrophe on the one hand, and degenerate nihilism on the other.
	It's like, well, jigs up, there's no way out of that.
	And I had a prophetic dream at that point, which, and I won't tell you the details of that, but it outlined a third path to me that I had already picked up to some degree from reading Jung and also Eric Neumann.
	Who is one of Jung's great students.
	And that had to do with the embodiment of the idea of the hero and the individual, like the pathway of the courageous individual as the mediating force between the chaos of nihilism and the totalitarianism of authoritarian certainty.
	That there was a third path.
	And then I started to understand its relationship to religious thinking, mostly to Christianity, partly because that's my tradition.
	Insofar as I'm a Western person, say, and I understood as well that it had something to do, and that this was what was dramatized in the Passion story in the New Testament, was that it had something to do with taking responsibility for malevolence, because Christ is archetypally the person who takes the world's sins upon himself.
	And what that means in some sense is that If you read about history, you read about Nazi Germany, you read about the Soviet gulags, you don't read as an observer looking at what other people have done.
	You read as the subject and the object of the history.
	You're both the person who was persecuted and the victimizer at the same time.
	And you have to see both of those inside you as actual forces in order to understand history properly.
	And of course, that's a very, very terrifying thing to do.
	It's easier to take the part of victim in some sense, even though that's terrible, right?
	Because who wants to be the victim of a concentration camp?
	Obviously, but maybe that's preferable ethically to being the perpetrator.
	But when you're reading about Auschwitz, you're not reading about past history, you're reading about exactly what people are like.
	And that's a very terrifying thing.
	And so one of the things you have to do if you're going to take responsibility for the nature of your being is to take responsibility for the malevolence that's truly part of human nature and that's that's part of the encounter with the shadow from the Jungian perspective and you know one of Jung's proposition was that the human shadow reaches all the way down to hell and you know we're used to Thinking of religious language maybe even as outdated superstition,
	but if you take that sort of statement seriously from a psychological perspective, what it means in some sense is that the malevolence that resides inside you, at least in potential, is of the same sort as the malevolence that produces the worst things that human beings have ever done.
	And I couldn't see any way out of that argument.
	I mean, the more I read about the gulag system in the USSR and what happened in China and what happened in Nazi Germany, the more it became evident to me that these weren't top-down systems imposed by tyrants on an unwilling, innocent population, but decisions on the part of entire cultures to go down a certain road.
	Often the leaders were following, which I would say was particularly the case with Hitler, which isn't to deny him his criminal culpability, Hitler was unbelievably good at letting the crowd tell him what to say.
	You know, he was a mirror for the crowd, and he was a good orator, but he paid attention to the crowd, and so when he said something that made everyone cheer, you know, their dark hearts would come out in the mob and cheer about something he said that was, say, dramatic or vengeful.
	Well, then, he'd say more of that, and the things that he said that were peaceful, that produced no emotional reaction from the crowd, he just said less of, And so the crowd taught him over time exactly what to sell them.
	And that can be good in some sense if a leader does that carefully.
	That means he's integrating what the crowd wants with his style of leadership.
	But it can be terrible if the mob is the crowd and the mob is outraged and out for blood.
	And that's what happened in Nazi Germany.
	And so you can't blame it on Hitler.
	That's just not reasonable.
	It's distributed through the entire population.
	And it's at the individual level of analysis that's most significant.
	And, well, so there's malevolence that has to be contended with.
	And then the other element is that you have to contend with the tragedy of life.
	And that's so...
	Passion of the Christ did that in that story Christ of course encounters Satan in the desert and so that's and is tempted there and so that's the encounter with evil archetypally speaking and then the crucifixion itself is The encounter with the tragedy of life, right?
	It's betrayal and death voluntarily accepted.
	And so I understood that that was a symbolic representation of the logos and that that was the, what would you say, the embodied manifestation of this heroic path that mediated between these two extremes.
	That was really useful, like that was a really useful discovery for me.
	And because there was implications to it too.
	And profound implications that also seem to work out in relationship to what I was learning about clinical psychology.
	So, for example, one of the things you do if you're a clinical psychologist is you help people learn to encounter Things that they're afraid of in a controlled manner, and they don't get less afraid, they get braver.
	So you actually act out the process of confrontation with tragedy, voluntary confrontation with tragedy, and that's curative.
	It doesn't matter if you're exposing them to their past or the present or things they're worried about in the future.
	As long as they decide to do it voluntarily, they get stronger and better.
	So you think, well, what's the limit to that?
	Well, the limit is to accept the limitations and catastrophes of your own mortality voluntarily.
	And that's potentially the proper pathway through life, or at least it's the least bad pathway through life, which is something, you know.
	And then I think the same can be said fairly decisively for the willingness to grapple with malevolence on a personal and individual level, you know.
	So anyways, I started to lecture about that and to lay out those ideas more and more clearly over the years as I've been lecturing it.
	That's what I did for TV Ontario and I think that that's why the lectures became popular because, you know, I'd put some words to ideas that people already knew and could revitalize a symbolic vocabulary that people had become divorced from and that there was a hole in the culture exactly where those ideas needed to be and so people found that they were Well, people tell me when they come and talk to me, they said, well, when you're talking, it's like I already know what you're saying, but I don't have the words for it.
	It's like, well, that's exactly what an archetypal story is like, is that you all know the story, you just don't know you know it.
	Or you know at a level that you can't articulate, but you still recognize it when you see it, and you still act it out, and you see it in other people.
	But it's really, really, really good to have the words.
	And that's partly why you should be very careful about what you say and particularly careful about what you write.
	Now, anyhow, after the big ideas thing, Wodek came into my classes and taped Maps of Meaning and made 13 30-minute TV shows out of them.
	And that was pretty interesting.
	And they were broadcast and kind of evanescent because at that point, they weren't put on the web.
	So they're broadcast.
	They pretty much disappear, right?
	so so so so fine so and I got some degree of what would you say I got I was exposed my ideas were exposed to a large number of people tens of thousands of people as a consequence of that and that seemed to go pretty well and so then YouTube came along and I thought well I don't know what this is this YouTube thing it you know The comment section makes you like...
	What would you say?
	Wary about being human, I would say, generally speaking.
	And, you know, there was a lot of...
	well there are a lot of things that it would be easy to be contemptuous of on youtube like the canonical cute cat videos but i'm actually not so contemptuous of that or the interesting animal videos because i think they actually speak to a part of people that's actually quite good we like cats we like dogs we think animals are kind of cool and you know we take a break and look at look at something that's pleasant and cute and maybe that's not so bad it's not serious but it's certainly not malevolent and that's something So,
	I thought, okay, well, I'll find these old videos I did for TVO, and I'll put them up on YouTube, and maybe I'll just tape my classes.
	And so I set up a...
	Because I have this theory that if it's worth doing, it's worth doing badly, which, you know, it's true, but it's also true that if it's worth doing, it's worth doing well.
	You just need to know when to apply those two principles.
	And if you're loath to do something and procrastinating, then sometimes it's better to do it badly.
	And I thought, well...
	I can't get a whole production studio up and running because I just don't have the time.
	I'll get an iPad and learn to use it and get a lavalier mic and just set the thing up or maybe have a student film it.
	And so I did that for a couple of years for my personality class in this Maps of Meaning class, which is the class where I outlined the sorts of ideas that I just described to you.
	And last April, I noticed that I'd had a million views and about 15,000 subscribers, you know, and I thought, huh, million views, eh?
	That's actually a lot of views.
	It's like if I... I've never write a scientific paper that's been read a million times.
	No one has.
	That just never happens, right?
	That happens zero times.
	If you have a paper that's cited, you know, someone else refers to it in one of their scientific papers a hundred times, it's like, that's a home run.
	And a thousand times is a miracle.
	And then if you write a book, you know, there's, I think, 1.2 million books published last year, something like that, and I think 500 of them sold more than 100,000 copies.
	So that's a sea of books, right?
	It's an ocean of books.
	And all of them fail.
	Really, so many of them fail that you might as well never write a book.
	Because the probability that it will fail is like 99.99%.
	And that would be very depressing if it wasn't the case that that's the case for anything creative you ever do.
	So it's just baseline probability.
	But I thought, well, if I wrote a book and it sold a million copies, man, I'd be out dancing in the street.
	Probably not, but, you know, you get the idea.
	So what does it mean to have a million YouTube views?
	Well, who the hell knows, right?
	I mean, we don't have metrics for that.
	We don't know what sort of influence that's having.
	We don't know anything about that.
	We don't know whether we should take it seriously or who you're talking to or anything.
	But I thought, well, still, it's a million and that's a lot.
	And I thought, well, maybe this is a more serious thing than I initially envisioned.
	and then i really thought about it and i thought oh i get it here's a hypothesis you know back in the medieval times and before if you wanted a book someone had to copy it by hand And so there weren't many books and they were very expensive.
	And then Gutenberg came along and invented the movable type press and it was like poof!
	Books were inexpensive and everybody could have them and that was a major revolution, right?
	Within 400 years almost everyone in the Western world and then very rapidly almost everyone in the entire world was literate and could read silently even which was something that before that was reserved for a very small number of people because most people read out loud when they read it all.
	So that was a massive revolution.
	And then I thought, wait a minute, maybe YouTube is a Gutenberg revolution.
	Because it allows the spoken word to have the same reach and longevity as a book.
	For the first time in human history.
	Spontaneous speeches...
	Can reach an infinite audience for an unspecified duration of time.
	Well, that's a whole new thing.
	That's an entirely new thing.
	And maybe it's easier for people to listen than it is for them to read.
	You know, I mean, I'd rather read than listen because I can read way faster than I can listen.
	But people will listen to a YouTube video at twice the normal speed, sometimes more.
	So you can circumvent that.
	And then also...
	With a YouTube video, if you convert it into a podcast, let's say, which I'll get to in a moment, you all of a sudden have way more time than you used to have.
	Because you can listen to a podcast while you're doing other things.
	So you can do mundane, the mundane things that you have to do from day to day, like commute and so on.
	But you can listen to a podcast.
	And I've found that my students, my young students, are now listening to podcasts instead of music and that's really something you know because music of course has been an unbelievably dynamic cultural force for maybe the the primary artistic cultural force for what maybe maybe since the 1950s anyways and that's being supplanted to some degree by podcasts and that's really something and then it also turns out that people have an an appetite for long
	detailed podcasts that are deep and informative it's like who the hell would have guessed that like no one it's it just sort of came out of nowhere and so I thought well maybe this is worth taking seriously and then like at the same time I've always been interested in entrepreneur types and creative types.
	They're high in this big five personality trait called openness.
	They're the people from whom all innovation flows.
	But it's very hard for creative people to monetize their creation.
	Because to monetize something, you have to have the idea.
	And then you have to translate it into a product.
	And then you have to bring it to market.
	And then you have to sell it.
	And then you have to develop customer relationships and customer support.
	And it's like, by the time you do all that, if you're the creative person, you've either been bought out and shunted to the side, or you're dead.
	So you don't get to have the money.
	You produce the value, but you can't monetize it.
	It's a big problem.
	That's why it's so frustrating to be a creative person, often.
	So I was looking around for ways that creative people could monetize their production online, mostly because I'm far too curious for my own good.
	And my wife went off to visit her father for about a week and I had a bunch of time.
	I could stay up till 3 in the morning, which I shouldn't do, and work.
	I found this site called Patreon.
	You know how Patreon works.
	It allows people to make voluntary donations to support creative people who are basically usually making their work available for free.
	I thought, well, that's pretty interesting.
	It's appealing to the basic human desire for reciprocity.
	People actually don't like getting something for nothing.
	It kind of puts them in existential debt.
	People generally feel that if they've received something of value, that they would like to give something of value back.
	Now, not everyone, but most people, most people.
	And I thought, well, what the hell, I'll set up a Patreon account and see what happens.
	So it took me about, like, six hours or something like that to figure out how to do it exactly and how to make a little, what, a banner on the YouTube videos that was linked to the Patreon account.
	There was all sorts of little weird tricks that you had to learn behind the scenes.
	And I thought, well, whatever, we'll see what happens.
	And then...
	At the end of that month, I had about 50, 60 subscribers and about $500 US a month.
	And I thought, huh, that's pretty interesting.
	You know, I don't know what to make of it, but I could take that money and increase the production quality if that keeps happening.
	And I'll just run this and keep seeing how it works.
	So, okay, so that was pretty interesting.
	And so...
	I thought through what it meant, what YouTube meant, that it was a Gutenberg revolution and it deserved to be taken seriously.
	And then I found this platform for monetization for creative people, and the two things were married, and that was April last year.
	And then at the same time I was writing a book, which is called 12 Rules for Life, and some of you may have, or there's some flyers that are going to be distributed that tell you about the book, but...
	In any case, I was writing this chapter in the book called Don't Bother Children When They're Skateboarding, and it took me deep into the polarization of society because I wasn't very happy about the fact that children are overprotected and that adventurous children, like skateboarders, for example, are often shut down when they're manifesting their bravery and their stupidity, often, but that's not always distinguishable from bravery, right?
	That's like the trickster figure that Jonathan was talking about earlier.
	It's not always that easy to segregate the people who take unrealistic, unreasonable risks from those who are courageously extending their competence into the unknown.
	And so anyways, for reasons I won't tell you about, that took me deep into the...
	Into the political polarization landscape with the increasing tension between the left, which I think has become increasingly totalitarian in the right, and also with what seems to be something like an assault on, well, Jonathan called it the logos, which I think is exactly right, which I think is a reflection of Nietzsche's death of God and an assault on masculinity, which is often now seen as toxic or part of the oppressive patriarchy, et cetera, et cetera.
	And so this was kind of making my blood boil while I was writing this, you know, because you get tangled up in that and it's kind of emotionally distressing.
	And I saw the spread of these sorts of Radical leftist ideas through campus, and I thought we'd killed all that off back in the 1990s, you know?
	There was a spike of political correctness in about 92, and I was in Boston at that point, and it kind of got pushed back, and it disappeared, and I thought, well, that's good, that's gone.
	And then the economy boomed like mad in the U.S., and people had other things to concern themselves with, and then all of a sudden, you know, three years ago or so, it was like, wow, this is back with a vengeance.
	It's like we ain't seen nothing yet.
	And so, that was bothering me.
	And then in my clinical practice, I had a couple of clients who had been bullied into poor states of mental health by social justice warrior types at three different workplaces.
	And they were quite different people, you know.
	Some of them more left-leaning, some of them more right-leaning, but all had the same story, as they were sensible people.
	And now they were required to do things at their workplace that they just couldn't tolerate doing, you know, like sensitivity training or unconscious bias training.
	Here's one story.
	God!
	This woman that I was working with, this is the stupidest story.
	I wouldn't even believe it, except she showed me all the emails.
	She worked at this large bureaucracy.
	We'll leave it at that.
	The people at the bureaucracy would make presentations with those, you know, those boards that you can set up that have big pads of paper on them.
	Well, those pads of paper that you can flip are called flip charts.
	Okay, and so, but somebody got it into their head, and this was the manager of this particular client, that flip was a racist term, because apparently, you can call Filipinos flip.
	I didn't know that, and so flipchart is actually insulting to Filipinos, and...
	So, and so then she showed me this string of like 30 emails that had gone back and forth within her company from the management and a bunch of people, you know, the typical suspects who are all concerned about this and they ended up banning the word flip chart.
	And you know, she was coming to talk to me saying, look, this is actually driving me crazy.
	I can't believe this is that people are spending their time doing this and that we're required to assent to it as if it isn't insane.
	Which, of course, it is.
	And so, then I got wind of Bill C-16, and I'd been looking into the Ontario Human Rights Commission already at that point, and I wasn't very happy with the Ontario Human Rights Commission.
	I think there It's a fascist organization masquerading under the guise of compassion, which is very, very typical and very intelligent.
	like if you're going to be a power hungry authoritarian who wants sensorial control, the best way to allow yourself to be able to look at yourself in the mirror without screaming is to wear a mask of compassion, which is exactly what I think is happening.
	And Bill C-16 came out and it purported to add transgender rights to the list of protected rights in the Canadian Human Rights Code and in the Criminal Code.
	It was one of those Trojan horses that Brett Weinstein just talked about.
	You read the legislation, it's only two paragraphs long, you think, oh yeah, Canadians are being nice to people who are in a strange category and get oppressed.
	That's the surface of it.
	But then I went back and I read all the...
	because they said on the federal website that it would be interpreted in accordance with the policies developed by the Ontario Human Rights Commission.
	So I went and read those policies and I thought, man!
	First of all, they were completely incoherent.
	They were extraordinarily poorly written.
	They were philosophically appalling.
	And they couldn't have been designed to get more people in trouble if that would have been the purpose of the design.
	So, for example, if you're a business owner, they're not pro-capitalist, let's put it that way.
	If you're a business owner, you are as responsible for the utterances of your employees as if you were uttering them yourself if the employee's utterance caused offence Whether or not they meant the offence and whether or not there was any offence taken on the part of the person that was being offended.
	It was like, my God, really?
	That's really the rule?
	And that was like one of...
	And there was another rule in there, which was that the Ontario Human Rights Commission could suspend jurisprudential tradition in pursuit of their goals.
	It was like Clause 13a.
	You know, just 13a.
	It's just a little clause.
	We can ignore all legal precedent.
	So I was reading this and I thought, what the hell?
	This is absolutely insane!
	And then at the same time, the university, HR department, and equity, right?
	Equity, that's, that's, that's, you hear that word, you're, someone utters that word and you know they're ideologically possessed.
	So you move away from them, right?
	You move away from them.
	Because equity is a terrible, it's a terrible word.
	It's one of those words that masquerades as compassion.
	It is a dreadful, terrible word.
	So anyways, The HR and Equity Department had decided that, you know, the university was rife with systemic racism and that was all implicit in our unconscious biases and that all the HR staff would have to undergo mandatory unconscious bias retraining.
	Well, then I thought, okay, okay, come on, really?
	First of all, you're using the implicit association test, right?
	And actually, I tell you a little bit about that test, but I'll only tell you a little bit.
	To use a test to diagnose an individual, the test has to pass certain standards of reliability, which means it measures the same thing within the same individual the same way across time.
	Because it's like otherwise you have a ruler that's made out of rubber.
	It's not helpful, right?
	It has to produce the same results with repeated administrations.
	And it has to predict behavior in a way that's consistent and with some degree of power.
	Okay, well the IAT is not reliable.
	Not nearly reliable enough to be used as a diagnostic instrument.
	And it's not particularly valid.
	It predicts a little bit of behavior, but not much, like a fragment of behavior.
	Maybe enough to even have a significant effect from time to time.
	But it's a small fraction.
	So your unconscious biases, which are actually indistinguishable from your perceptions, or maybe even your in-group favoritism, and people are characterized by in-group favoritism, which is why we like our families, It's not easily distinguishable from your From your reaction to novelty as well, because your implicit racial prejudice under some conditions is indistinguishable from your preference for familiarity over novelty.
	So, like, the psychological community is by no means united on what the implicit association test means.
	By no means.
	And it has plenty of severe critics.
	And even the people who have produced it admit that it shouldn't be used for diagnostic purposes.
	Wink, wink, wink.
	So, and then there is no evidence whatsoever that unconscious bias retraining, especially if it's mandatory, first of all, reduces unconscious bias, which you can't measure very well anyways, or has any positive effect on explicit behavior.
	And so I thought the attempt by the HR department to make that mandatory was an unwarranted intrusion on the civil rights of the employees using pseudoscience as a mask.
	And so I was thinking about these things at like 2 in the morning, and I thought...
	I can't sleep and I learned when I can't sleep to go right and this time I thought I'm not gonna write this down I'm gonna make YouTube videos instead see what happens yeah so I sat in front of my computer and I made these like low-quality videos and the content was pretty good I laid out why I was irritated about Bill C-16 and talked about the background you know Context
	of the legislation and and then I made another one telling the HR department at the university that what they were doing was completely unwarranted and that they had no business doing it whatsoever and that they should stop and So then I released the videos and I thought then I went to sleep And you know the reason I made the videos was because I wanted to think these things through right so So, like I'm doing on stage right now, I'm thinking things through.
	It's like something was bothering me, and so I was trying to lay out the arguments, and trying to figure out why it bothered me, and to put a logical, you know, to arrange it in a logical manner, and to try to communicate it.
	And you do that partly because you think, well, this is bugging me, and here's what I think it is.
	It's like, is it bugging you too?
	And how about you?
	And if it isn't bugging any of you, well, then I'm probably crazy.
	But if it's bugging all of you too, then, you know, maybe there's something here.
	Speak freely right because you have to be able to bumble around with your thought and Formulate things and then see how other people respond to it and they'll criticize you or maybe agree with you and you get to modify what you're thinking and So and plus I was experimenting like I often do I was experimenting with YouTube.
	It's like well, let's see what happens well That was quite something so Well, the first thing that happened was there was a big demonstration, like an anti-Peterson demonstration.
	So I had my own demonstration, and that was in front of the building I worked at, and not too many people came, but the people who came were calling me the sorts of names that Eric was called, or that Brett was called.
	You know, I was a bigot and a transphobe and a racist.
	Oh, I was a racist because the HR department at the university had taken advice from Black Lives Matter in formulating these policies.
	And Black Lives Matter in Toronto was led or established by two women who I thought were reprehensible and had nothing to do with their race like I don't care who you are you can be reprehensible and they were reprehensible in my estimation and there was plenty of documented evidence for that and so I said well why the hell are we taking advice on our HR policies from from these people it's like when did that become acceptable and so that that's why I was a racist so And so,
	you know, all of these accusations were thrown at me.
	And I thought about that a lot in the last year.
	It's like, well, was that reasonable?
	And it's actually kind of reasonable in a weird way because Canada is a stable country and has been for a long time.
	It's pretty peaceful and things work pretty well.
	And so if you pop your head up and say, something stupid and reprehensible is going on, the Canadians say, no, this is Canada.
	You're crazy.
	Which is the right response, right?
	And so, then they throw a bunch of things at you that might match the kind of crazy you are, and if one of them sticks, then, well, then they can ignore you.
	And, you know, I'm obviously being a bit facetious, and it's not like the people who were doing this to me didn't know exactly why they were doing it, and it isn't like they weren't trying to bring me down and destroy me, because they certainly were.
	and then 200 faculty members and graduate students and the like from the disciplines that you'd expect wrote a petition saying that I had made the university an unsafe place and and then there was a counter demonstration that the students who decided to support free speech set up and they asked me to speak and Lauren Southern to speak and a couple other people and they had an open mic session so that anyone could speak and It was out in front of the same building,
	and there was quite a few people at that.
	There was about 200 people.
	And I went out there, and there were some bad guys there.
	You know, there were just your typical students who were confused and squawking away and chanting.
	But peppered among them were the types of people who were seriously looking for trouble.
	And I'm a clinical psychologist.
	I've worked with all sorts of people.
	I can identify people like that.
	They're not very common, thank God.
	But there were plenty of them at that rally.
	And it could have been any kind of rally where the possibility for trouble was emerging and they would have been the type that was going to be there.
	So I was keeping my eye on them.
	And they were blasting white noise and they were unplugging our PA systems and stealing the mic and, you know, just behaving in a...
	Manner that should have been shut down by the university authorities But wasn't but the university authorities were taken off guard by all of this and they didn't really know what to do and they weren't really aware of the underlying legal transformations that were going on in our society and Anyways,
	they unplugged the mic and so then I talked very loudly about the necessity for free speech and that was recorded and went online and then I left and I came back about two hours later to talk to the cops and to see if anything I didn't was hoping that nothing you know of any significance no one was hurt so I wanted to go talk to the cops and see if it all went okay and I went talk to them and then when I came back this group
	of Trans activist protesters who claim to be speaking for the trans community, which doesn't exist.
	There is no trans community.
	They're not a homogenous group.
	They don't all think the same way.
	And besides, you don't become the spokesman for a person by claiming that you're the spokesman just because you happen to share some of the attributes of that group.
	But we're so guilty about the treatment of our minorities that we're willing to regard anyone who Plays that particular card as worthy of listening to.
	And that's a big mistake.
	Because, you know, there's valid representation and invalid representation.
	Anyways, they surrounded me and videotaped the exchange.
	And there was one particularly noisy person there who was quite dismissive and insulting.
	And I tried to have a conversation.
	And the first thing this person said was that, Peterson, what do you think about the Nazis that were at your rally?
	And I thought...
	You know, you have to really look hard in Canada to find a Nazi.
	There just aren't that many of them, you know?
	So, I thought it was preposterous to begin with.
	And I said, well, I don't, you know, what do you want me to say?
	It's like, welcome Nazis.
	It's, no, it's like, I said, I don't like Nazis, you know?
	And she said, well, what about, you know, the fact that they were here?
	And I said, well, I can't control who happens to appear somewhere.
	And it was all false.
	None of that was true at all.
	It wasn't even a little bit true.
	But, you know, it's an easy weapon to haul out.
	And so, she, he...
	No, I'm not being smart about that.
	It was like, this was a trans person, and I don't know exactly...
	I couldn't figure out how to refer to, we'll say, her.
	And I got hell for that, too.
	And I tried to have a conversation, and it was just...
	She was just blaring non-stop ideological, like, nonsense at me, you know?
	It just hurt, because I like to talk to people, you know, but I really do not like having ideological slogans blared at me.
	Really, I find it...
	I don't know exactly how I find it, but...
	It's like really loud white noise.
	It's something like that.
	Or maybe it's worse than that.
	It's like static.
	It's like really loud static.
	It's jagged.
	And I said, look, quit that.
	I'd like to talk to you, but I can't tolerate that.
	You know what slogan means?
	Slogan is derived from two Welsh words, sluag and germ.
	And it means battle cry of the dead.
	So that's really worth thinking about, man.
	The next time you want to, like, have a slogan on your t-shirts, just remember who you're standing for.
	It's like you're the skeletal army of zombies come to life.
	And they're possessing you, right?
	It's their words you're mouthing.
	It's nothing alive.
	And it's not something that likes life.
	It's a horror show.
	That's what a slogan is.
	Anyways, they videotaped all this, and they're going to put it online to show what a reprehensible creature I was.
	So they did, and that didn't work.
	I have things being viewed about three and a half million times now, and the positive comments outnumber the negative comments like 99 to 1, something like that.
	And so that was an interesting case of that inversion that Jonathan was talking about, you know, how everything's upside down.
	And so they tried one tactic, and it just flipped on them completely.
	and so but here's something to think about like if one person who is nominally supporting me at that rally would have done Anything stupid whatsoever that was captured on videotape, I would have been sunk, right?
	And so we're in this situation where the actions of specific individuals have a determining effect far beyond what we're accustomed to.
	You saw that in Charlottesville where that guy ran somebody over with a car and it was like political polarization in the U.S. increased instantly by 10%, right?
	And that's part of the, I said, like social media isn't an echo chamber, it's an amplifier.
	so Well, so I was very fortunate and then this person also said that she had watched all my YouTube videos and I looked at her Because that was ridiculous because there was like 200 of them online by that point like you Some people I presume have now watched all 200 of them,
	but it's like 500 hours of content so I knew that that was complete rubbish and and uh and basically said as much and anyways it went well for me and it didn't go so well for the protesters and then the university and so that was my first encounter with YouTube and its tendency to amplify and and also what the tight rope line is when these sorts of things happen you know and for a whole year it's not quite so bad now although it's just about as bad
	I lived in absolute terror of two things.
	Ever saying the wrong thing.
	Even if it was clipped out of context.
	Or having something unearthed that I said before that was the wrong thing, even if it was taken out of context.
	Now, luckily, And this was kind of unique.
	I already had 260 videos, 200 videos up.
	And so when I was being accused of all these things, I could say, well, you know, have at her.
	Every single word I've said to students in the last 20 years has been recorded.
	If you want to find some Nazi propaganda, it's like, have at her, man.
	Good luck to you.
	And, of course, it was not only false, it was antithetical to the truth, because I've been teaching people about Nazi propaganda.
	atrocities for 30 years and trying to help people understand how it was that it would be likely had they been in Nazi Germany that they would have been on the side of the Nazis and not on the side of the Jews you wouldn't have been the hero you would have been the perpetrator statistically speaking and that you really need to understand that so I was fortunate I was protected by that backlog of information and so that was really good and then the university did another thing that reversed you know they wrote me a letter saying You know,
	all these people are complaining.
	You're making the campus an unsafe place.
	And you might be violating our code of conduct and the law.
	And I thought, I didn't know what to make of that letter.
	I told them to take the letter back.
	Because I said, look, if you're going to go after me, because I actually like the University of Toronto, so if you're going to go after me, you should go after me correctly, and this document is actually untrue in that it contains sins of omission, because you may have got letters from the staff saying what a reprehensible person I was, but you also got 15,000 signatures on a petition and hundreds of letters from people supporting me, and you didn't say anything about that in the letter.
	So how about we...
	You know, you write a letter that says, well, some people aren't very happy with you and other people are, but we've decided that what you're doing is too risky and, you know, you should stop, but they wouldn't take it back.
	So I read it online.
	And that's what's interesting too, because now, if something happens to you, It doesn't have to be secret.
	I didn't even comment on it, except maybe with raised eyebrows from time to time.
	I just read it, and say, you draw your own damn conclusions here.
	And so, and I was actually, I wouldn't say secretly happy about it, because I wasn't, because my job was at risk, and that wasn't all that was at risk, but my job certainly was.
	But, I had said, when I made the video criticizing Bill C-16, that the act of making the video was probably illegal.
	And then the university came out and said, what you're doing is probably illegal.
	And so, my claims, which the press, the press was very divided about this, and they thought, well, maybe I was being too radical in my claims, but then the university came out and said, well, you're probably violating the law, and you should shut up.
	And I said, ha!
	I told you that that's how this law was constructed.
	And so, and then they did it again.
	And I know how HR departments works.
	It's like one letter, it's like, shut the hell up.
	Second letter is, we told you once already to shut up.
	Third letter says, we told you twice, you didn't.
	So, like, now you're in trouble.
	And then the fourth letter is, see you later.
	And if you're a tenured faculty member and you break the law, that's sufficient to be not a tenured faculty member.
	So they were gearing up to do this.
	And, well then, well, to say that...
	Well, man, that was really something.
	Then what happened was, there were reporters at our house for like four months, lined up, just all the time.
	Literally, eight hours a day.
	There were reporters coming in and reporters going out.
	There's about 250 newspaper articles published in Canada about this over about a two-and-a-half-month period.
	And that didn't count the podcasts and the radio shows and the TV coverage.
	Like, it just went absolutely...
	It was absolutely insane.
	I've never seen anything like it.
	See, I was trying to figure out what was going on at that point because my sense when I made the videos was this had nothing to do with transgender rights.
	This is indicative of a deep war of ideas and this is just the latest manifestation of that deep war of ideas.
	Maybe it was a war at a philosophical level or even a war at a theological level which I actually think it's such a deep war that it is a war at a theological level.
	and that was sort of the level at which I was going after it and I believe that subsequent events demonstrated that that was the case because what should have happened I always think of counterfactuals you know if a client comes into my office and the first time I see them and they're all upset because they Couldn't find a place to park and they're late and they're all apologetic and I think okay well now I know something about you because you could have come in here and said why the hell didn't you tell me where the parking was I'm late or or you could have said thought to yourself
	well this is my time anyway so I don't have to apologize so you run these counterfactuals it helps you understand the world better and I thought Well, what should have happened was that, you know, I made these videos 2 in the morning, 15 minutes long.
	There's a little flurry of interest, and then it's like on to the next thing.
	But that is not what happened.
	That didn't happen even a little bit.
	What happened was so opposite from that that I still don't know what to make of it.
	And, of course, this is part of it, the fact that I'm here talking to all of you people.
	And...
	And so, and then what happened...
	was that the press flipped and came on my side so 200 canadian newspapers there's a consortium came out and said well we support peterson and then a huge number of mainstream journalists like the powerful independent mainstream journalists barbara kay um uh antonella uh what's antonella's last name i can never remember names it's so embarrassing uh margaret wenta conrad black That crazy Newfie, he goes on CBC at night.
	What's his name?
	Rex Murphy.
	Yeah, they all came out on my side.
	Because what they did, they did the journalistic homework.
	And they went and read the things I read, and they found out that, if anything, I was understating the catastrophe that was written into the Ontario Human Rights Commission website.
	So, for example, one of the catastrophes was They wrote in a social constructionist view of gender identity.
	That's law in Canada now.
	And, like, it's hard to say exactly how significant that is if you don't know.
	What it means is, maybe, is that to have a view that biology is the primary determinant of gender identity is now illegal.
	Now, I don't know that for sure, and you can say, well, maybe that's alarmist, but hey, I know how ideas unfold across time.
	You know, you have an idea, you put it in the law.
	The law is a living thing.
	It's got lots of tentacles.
	Nobody knows how it unfolds.
	You throw something new in there, you don't even know what it is you're throwing in.
	You throw a demand that a social constructionist view of gender identity is now legally true.
	So what do you do with all the evolutionary biologists, like Brett, who say, uh, no.
	That's wrong.
	It's partly socially constructed, like everything is among human beings.
	And so anyways, the journalist went and read that, and they thought, oh well, this guy...
	First of all, isn't any of those things that he's being accused of.
	One of the funniest days of my life was I went to this lecture where I was being accused of, like, being a racist and a transphobe and a bigot and all of these things.
	And the same day, literally the same day, there were 30 people in my house on the third floor.
	And about 15 of them were from this native tribe, Kwakwaka'wakw.
	They live on the northern...
	Tip of northern Vancouver and I'd established a relationship with a carver there named Charles Joseph who recently had a huge totem pole erected in front of the Montreal Museum of Fine Art.
	I'd established a working relationship with him.
	He was a residential school survivor and I'd been buying a bunch of his art and I built a replica, a modern replica of a Kwakwaka'waka I had a big house on my third floor with his help and filled it with totem poles and all these things.
	He brought a bunch of his people to Toronto and had induction ceremony and I was inducted into their tribe.
	And that was the same day.
	It was like, what do you make of that?
	It's so surreal, you know, to go from one of those worlds to the other.
	And I had many surreal days like that.
	Then I had this debate at the university, which the university graciously decided to host, and I talked a lot to the dean, and we kind of came to some terms, and they basically decided that they would leave me alone.
	And I had a terrible catastrophe of health in December.
	It was absolutely unbearable.
	I don't exactly know what happened, but I could barely get going to teach in January.
	It was very shaky for like two months, but it went forward and the students were very welcoming and inviting, so that was very good.
	But then all of this crazy background media The explosion didn't quit at all.
	It just kept snowballing and snowballing and snowballing.
	And then I was talking to people.
	Gad Saad was one of the early people who interviewed me.
	I'm going to be speaking with him on November 11th in Toronto, and I'm actually quite afraid of that, because I think the radicals who shut us down at Ryerson, I know full well they're planning to come out in full number, and I really don't...
	I'm really concerned about that.
	And if you know anybody who's going and who's purportedly supporters, let's say, of what we're doing, I really would like you to encourage them to, like, keep themselves in control.
	It's like...
	I know there might be agent provocateurs in the crowd because these people are certainly capable of that, but I don't want anything stupid to happen.
	Now, we're not going to cancel it because we're not canceling it, and that's that.
	But I don't want anything stupid to happen.
	It would be better if it didn't.
	So, anyways, I talked to Gad Saad and then a whole bunch of other YouTubers, and then I got to be aware of this whole YouTube universe that You know, that Jonathan was talking about.
	And that's been an unbelievably bizarre experience because it is the case that there's nothing really uniting us in some sense.
	We're very different people.
	Like, I'm very different than Joe Rogan, for example.
	And I was on this show called H3 the other day.
	And he's this crazy Israeli clown comedian, you know.
	And Dave Rubin's a married gay guy.
	And, you know...
	Well, Gadzat is a Lebanese refugee, basically.
	There's nothing about us that's the same, except something is uniting us, and we all kind of know about each other now, and we're all communicating.
	And I don't know what that means exactly.
	I don't know what that means.
	And then at the same time...
	So that's all been extremely strange, this multiplication of...
	Of voice that the internet provides, you know, for better or for worse.
	And I think that is what it is.
	It's a moral amplifier.
	And I also think that these AI systems that we're building are moral amplifiers.
	And they're going to be moral amplifiers to a degree that we can't even imagine, even knowing how much Facebook and Twitter and so forth are moral amplifiers.
	So we bloody well better be careful because we're building super intelligent machines and they're going to be patterned on us.
	So, we have to watch our step.
	And that's basically what I've been telling people, you know, because I've been trying not to be political about this in some sense.
	I think it's a degeneration because I'm more philosophically minded and when things become political around me, it's like I'm at the wrong level of analysis.
	I'm not facing things properly.
	I've also found that and this has been a strange thing too see I've been talking to people about responsibility and truth and religious topics as well now for really intensely for the last year really for my whole career but really intensely for the last year and one of the things that's strange and this is another way the world is upside down is that After being fed a non-stop diet of freedom and rights for 60 years,
	people are starving to death for a diet of constraint and responsibility.
	And who the hell would have ever thought that was saleable?
	And I have people coming up to me all the time.
	It already happened many times today.
	They say, well, you know, you've talked about responsibility.
	I've been listening to your YouTube videos.
	It's really straightened out my life.
	I now have a purpose.
	I'm not nihilistic.
	And when I talk to people about...
	Responsibility and rights, especially young men, and my audiences are mostly young men.
	Man, you can hear a pin drop!
	You think, well, what's going on there?
	Well, that's so weird.
	It's like, it's this crazy inversion.
	It's the least saleable thing possible has become the thing that's most in demand.
	Say, like, have a hard life.
	Do something difficult.
	Get yourself, get your act together.
	Quit blaming other people.
	Assume that you're the problem.
	Start small with, like, non-heroic activities.
	Don't broadcast it in public, right?
	Pick up something heavy.
	And assume that you're contributing in some important manner to the destiny of the world.
	And like, let your soul quake when you understand what that means.
	And everybody's thinking, yes, that's exactly what I want to hear.
	It's exactly what...
	It's like, what the hell?
	You know, and then there's these biblical lectures.
	And I thought, I thought this is another upside down thing.
	I thought, okay, as I've put business plans together before, and, you know, I know how you evaluate a business plan, so here's the business plan.
	I'm going to lay out $60,000 to rent a theater for 12 weeks, and I'm going to deliver a series of lectures on the Bible, and...
	That's a profit-generating enterprise.
	Do you want to invest?
	It's like, you know, this guy needs antipsychotic medication, and he needs it quickly.
	And so, I thought, well, I'm doing this because I want to walk through these stories.
	And the reason I want to walk through these stories is because they're foundational stories.
	I understand that.
	There are foundational stories, for better or for worse.
	And we can't get rid of them without getting rid of the foundation, and that's a bad idea.
	So, at least we better understand them before we dispense with them, you know.
	that goes for me too and so I started doing that and they're ridiculously popular like they always sell out the audience is dead silent when and and the the atmosphere of the room is really really positive not in that namby-pamby you know wretched harmless way but in the sort of charged energy looking for a good thing to do way and the questions are really intelligent and so and and deep too and so that's really cool and then you know I release them on the net and The most popular video
	I have ever made is an introduction to the idea of God, which is the intro to this biblical series, and it's got like 850,000 views.
	And then I get all these, like Jonathan said, he's got all these atheists supporting him.
	He's a bloody orthodox icon carver.
	What the hell's up with that?
	Like, a tremendous number of the people who are writing me and commenting on YouTube are also atheists.
	They're saying, well, you know, I'm an atheist, committed atheist, but I've been really interested in what you've been saying about these religious stories, and so that's another indication of the fact that everything's upside down.
	And so, and I'm going to keep making those biblical videos because I've been trying to sort through my priorities, and I don't know what my priorities are because my life is completely Surreal.
	It's like I stepped into a parallel universe, you know?
	And so, I've been trying to figure out, well, what should I be doing?
	And one thing I do know is that I'm going to continue with those biblical lectures because I think they might be the most significant thing that I'm doing.
	Okay, and then I'll just close and say, well, you know, With my colleagues, I've also been working on these programs that help people get their lives together, like the self-authoring suite, for example, which some of you might be familiar with.
	And, of course, one of the things that's been a consequence, and we've done research on, especially the future authoring program, really helps people.
	You know, if you give it to university students, especially the ones that don't know what they're doing and are kind of alienated, they're way more likely to stay in university and they get much better grades.
	So that's really cool.
	And so, the...
	The internet, these new communication channels has also made it possible to deliver reasonably high quality psychological interventions that are Devoted to helping people improve their lives and straightening themselves out at extremely low cost or extraordinarily widely and so now thousands and tens of thousands of people have done those programs now and so I get letters all the time from people saying this has really helped me and you know I was on the verge of suicide and this brought me back from the brink and like it's really nice to get letters like that you know and here's something else that's
	interesting you know People have been assuming that I've been deluged by hate mail, you know, so they're feeling kind of sorry for me.
	I'm like, I've had five pieces of hate mail in the last year, and that's it.
	So, like, I don't understand that.
	I don't know what it is.
	Maybe the SJW types don't have the energy to pen a hate letter, although they certainly seem to.
	But for some reason, although they'll come out and protest like they did at McMaster, they're not...
	They're not really directly going after me with those sorts of channels of communication.
	Someone spectacularly reprehensible just littered my neighborhood.
	I actually know who it is.
	Littered my neighborhood with community safety warnings, you know, claiming that I was, well, you know, the general Satan himself in various manifestations, essentially.
	And one of the things that was so funny, if you find these sorts of things funny, is that they have this picture of me, that's the background of the poster, like I'm looking really aggressive, eh?
	Yelling, like really, like I'm going to bite a child.
	And so that's the community safety warning, right?
	Look out for this man.
	And here's the way they play fast and loose with the truth.
	So that picture was from that free speech rally I told you about.
	And the reason that I'm yelling is because the same people, because I know who did it, the same people were the ones who took the microphone in the PA system.
	And so the only way I could communicate with the crowd was to yell.
	And so I looked kind of aggressive.
	And I was kind of irritated.
	It's like, What the hell?
	White noise.
	You're blasting me with white noise and you're taking the amps and no one's doing anything about it.
	It's like, I'm not going to stop talking because of your dopey tricks.
	And so I was, you know, reasonably fired up and I had to talk really loudly because there was white noise blaring.
	And so that's the picture that they used to show the demonic side of Jordan Peterson.
	That's such a lie, eh?
	The lie is embedded right in the poster.
	It's like, the only thing you could find that would make me look reprehensible is an action that I took as a direct consequence of your misbehavior in a public forum.
	But they don't care.
	They don't care.
	Or maybe they do care, and maybe they're happy that at the base of the poster is an extraordinarily deceptive falsehood.
	You know, they're happy about that.
	So...
	Alright, so let's sum up.
	You know, I'm not going to make a case for the antipathy of the old media to the new media, because I've actually been treated pretty well by the old media.
	And I can tell you that the Canadian journalists, the ones that you respect, are very much afraid for their personal safety, for their reputation, and for their livelihood.
	And so they're actually quite brave.
	Margaret Wendt is a good example of that.
	But so are the other people that I listed.
	Christy Blatchford is another one.
	And it's an Antonella...
	Still didn't get it.
	Anyways, so it's not like they're high and mighty people who have a tremendous amount of power who are like misusing their status.
	They're not.
	They're walking on eggshells.
	All those media empires are crumbling.
	Crumbling like mad.
	The Globe and Mail is crumbling.
	CBC is crumbling.
	They can't get anybody to watch any of their stuff online because they don't understand the the ethos but like I don't see it as a polarization exactly between the old media and the new media I just see it as we're in the brave new world of instantaneous permanent verbal communication and no one has any idea what that means And so it's producing all these strange phenomena like these new YouTube stars that have really come out of nowhere.
	And people are attracted to them because of their rawness and their unedited quality.
	You know, when Joe Rogan posts a video, it's every bit of it's posted.
	So you get to make up your own mind about what you're going to conclude.
	And so that seems to be a really good thing.
	So maybe that means that free speech is alive and well, you know, and maybe it's even flourishing.
	Who knows?
	So I can't draw any real conclusions about where we're at with regards to media, except the one I started with, which is, and it's sort of related to this message of personal responsibility, which is, your voice is amplified far beyond what it ever has been in the past, for every single one of us.
	and it can get amplified if you're not careful it can get amplified way more than you'd ever hope or suspect like you know if you make the wrong mistake in your life at some point you could be the next viral video you know and that's pretty terrifying thought and it's no wonder people are anxious about all of that but I do think it amplifies your effect on the world and so it's all the more reason to get your act together and to be careful with what you say and be careful with what you do because Now we're at a point in history where the
	fact that you're intimately connected with the rest of mankind, let's say, present and future, is manifest almost instantaneously.
	And we need to take that seriously.
	And hopefully we can take it seriously enough so that we ramp the polarization back, you know, and figure out how to communicate with one another and put things straight again at a deep level so that we can move towards a positive future.
	Because we could have one, you know.
	Like...
	Things are shaky and chaotic right now and strange and surreal on multiple dimensions, but we're also on the cusp of a technological revolution, the likes of which no one can even conceive.
	And maybe things could become incredibly much better if we walk carefully and think carefully and orient ourselves properly.
	And so that's what I hope that we all do, and that's what I'm trying to promote when I do my videos and all of that.
	And people seem to find that useful, and they actually seem to be doing it, and I think that's better than engaging in the polarized wars and trying to be right and win the arguments and all of that, because I just don't think that that's going to work.
	So...
	So be careful.
	And be awake.
	And pay attention to what you say.
	And clean up your rooms.
	And that's good enough.
	Thank you.
	Thank you so much.
	Phenomenal.
	All right.
	So our next thing will be the Q&A panel.
	We will get that going as soon as possible.
	But for the moment, we are millennials and we do want some group pictures.

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