Rex Murphy (REXTV) interviews Jordan Peterson

[Music] About to join me now is probably the world's most famous intellectual. Certainly, the most famous intellectual to come out of Canada in the last 20 years. He will be speaking with me about the role of the university and about his meteoric rise to intellectual and media influence, Dr. Jordan Peterson.

Dr. Peterson, I'm going to start on an incidental thing, at least incidental to me, and has bothered me since you became known as it is now to all the world. That was in the very early days of the controversy that came to you when the University of Toronto sent you some military letters that I thought—I’ve used this word before—insolent, that I thought were against the spirit of a university. They weren't supporting you; they were actually threatening you.

Yes. And that said to me that something is beyond a particular controversy; something deeper is wrong here, that universities—this university—is upside down. How did you reason that? How did they get there, that they could be so completely unaware of their own position?

Well, I think a lot of it was confusion and a lack of experience with this sort of thing. I mean, the University of Toronto is a peaceful place and a rather conservative university, all things considered. The administration wasn't prepared to handle a controversy of the nature that swirled around me. They were used to making minor administrative decisions, and when they were put on the spot and forced to defend their fundamental presumptions, let's say, it isn't clear that they were ready and prepared to do so, partly because of lack of practice.

It isn't necessarily the case that you climb the administrative chain in the university by engaging in continual philosophical reappraisal of the fundamental presuppositions of a university as an institution. You know, it's a much more honest rate of job. And so I'm going to say everything I can in favor of the University of Toronto before I say anything contrary. You know, I've found too that when I've been put on the spot by journalists and asked to defend, let's say, customs that everyone has always accepted, like marriage, yeah, it's very difficult to generate a defense for such an institution off the top of your head, let's say, because part of the whole purpose of customs is that everyone accepts.

You don't think reflexively why they are there; they're there, unstated presuppositions. And so when you're put on the spot, you don't know what to do. When I first got the letter—the first letter—and I know how HR departments work, they send you one letter of warning so that it's documented, and then they send you another so that it's documented, and then they send you a third. And if you haven't ceased by then, well, then they go to the next step, which would be something to do with whatever approximation of determination they might document you.

Yes, yes, and they're documenting all their steps. And I told the person who delivered the letter to me, who's a person I actually got along with quite well, that it was full of errors and it was poorly written, and that they should take it back and read it properly.

I did. Oh yeah, I followed. And no, and because if they're gonna do this, they better do it right, or there was gonna be—yeah, trouble. And I didn't mean that I was going to cause trouble necessarily, but that there was going to be trouble. But they didn't take it back, so I read it on YouTube.

And then I did the same thing with the second letter, and then I met the Dean after that. And, you know, we agreed—we had quite a congenial discussion, I would say—and we agreed to have a discussion, at least a debate.

Yeah, it never was a debate; it was— I don’t know what they call those now; they can't be debates. They were forums or something. Something like, yeah, not a debate about free speech on campus; that was the three.

Yeah, I'm sorry I saw that. It's awful.

Yeah, it was quite—it was—but they did do it, which was something, you know.

And I've also heard that behind the scenes—because I have some friends who some colleagues who have some access to administrative decisions—and they believe that the University of Toronto, in the aftermath of all this, has actually reconfirmed its internal commitment to free speech. So, and you know, I don't know how much of that is true, but I'm willing to give them a certain amount of benefit of the doubt. But it's important to understand that people can be caught unaware.

And the other thing too is that they actually did me a bit of a favor because one of the things I claimed in the YouTube video that I made was that what I was doing by making the video was probably illegal.

Yes, I remember.

And their lawyers basically said that it was probably illegal, and so that also helped establish my bona fides, let's say, as a reasonable interpreter of the law. And so it wasn't all bad, although it was extraordinarily stressful.

Yeah, demonstrations that followed. How is it that in a university, which involves things—obviously it's the exercise of thought, the training in mind, and therefore the power of expression that comes as a result of those two things—that to say things we, under the banner of reason and an exercised mind—that's what it is.

So how comes that on certain issues, the transgender one as well—there's a whole list of the politically correct ones—that suddenly I don't need as language being bent? It's being turned upside down.

In some cases, it's been—the neologisms are floating out there every six seconds with new rules on them. A word you never heard yesterday is somehow or other prejudiced, and you say it today, yes, or even illegal to use. Very much like the idea of dead naming.

Well, the very one—I was thinking that—a word didn't exist two days ago.

Yeah.

And now if you did name someone—which is a word that doesn't exist—you're in violation of something over here because when the heavily—let go to scraps—that kept us either to something like reason, or when have we lost our nerve that when people come to you and they say to you things that you know not from bias are nonsense, that they can't simply be dismissed as nonsense with no peril whatsoever?

Well, you're all—you're assuming that we had nerve.

Yeah.

I mean, sorry. Well, I mean, you know, some people have nerve, but one of the things I've learned over the last three years—because really, this all started in October of 2016—was that the percentage of people who have nerve is very small and vanishingly small. You know, I've met people—Douglas Murray has nerve.

Yeah, that's for sure.

Roger Scruton has nerve.

Yes, he has.

Lindsay Sheppard has nerve.

Yes, yes.

There's a handful of people that I've met who you can't move. You know, you're one of them, I would say.

Try. Well, succeed. I would say. And I've met a number of journalists who've—you know, I've had my fair share of conflict with journalists, that's for sure.

I would say talking to journalists is the most stressful thing I've done, apart from talks at university campuses.

Sure.

That's just a sidetrack, though, because it's a very good issue. Journalism—I've been playing at it from the margins for a long.

Journalism is very much corrupted.

It is.

It is not the media in the middle; it is, in many cases, wittingly or unwittingly partisan. It is part of the game that it says it's covering journalism. This is one of the failing institutions in society, much like universities.

Yeah. Well, you know, there's technological reasons for that. You know, journalism as such is under unbelievable pressure from the new technologies, YouTube, podcasts in particular, which of course have also vastly expanded what constitutes journalism. And so journalists are running scared. It's very difficult for them to find paying jobs. Their staffs are shrinking, the newspapers are in trouble, television stations are vanishing.

And so there's an increasing spiraling, I would say, as well as decreasing professionalism among those who still practice. And so some of it’s the personal failings of the ideologue who happen to be occupying the positions that ideologues occupy, but some of it's a consequence of these transformations in communication technology that are so vast that they're actually inconceivable.

And I think both YouTube and podcasts are great examples of that. Podcasts even more than YouTube because YouTube serves billions of people, which is one walloping network. But podcasts are maybe ten times as popular.

So, and that's all underground—is interesting.

Yeah.

They don't attract as much attention, you know, or as much controversy, maybe, because they're more siloed in some sense, but the journalists are fighting a losing game. And I think as you fight a losing game—I've seen this happen with corporations—you lose your best people first, and then the death spiral begins.

And I think we're seeing exactly that, and then that's exaggerated by this proclivity to polarization that also might be part and parcel of the technological changes, you know?

Okay, let me sweep back to that. Our nerve, I know. Because I follow you, how deep your respect and attention to Alexander Solzhenitsyn is. If he's—if you have a hero, obviously he is it. Now, in the Soviet Union, if Solzhenitsyn said a small note or something, he gets tossed off into a pool for like nine years or more.

If a man looks the wrong way in China, he can be some damn camp, and in Korea, we won't even go into it. In those countries, if you want to say something—even if it's not fairly innocuous—you really have to have courage. Solzhenitsyn should be called Stalin; he had the steel.

Over here, when okay, we have a trans activist group that's—and yeah, listen, anything—and you almost know innately that this is absurd. And you say, "Well, I don't think I'm gonna say that's absurd."

What are we afraid of? We fight wars and say we gave all our soldiers that we would preserve democracy and freedom of speech. There is no loss if you decide to challenge in terms of any contrast with the totalitarian systems where if you said something, you really did pay a price.

Yeah. The worst thing you do over here is lose a job. Well, you can be hauled in front of quasi-judicial—I know the tribunals as well—and I mean, they're certainly willing to do that. I think the Human Rights Tribunal should—in my opinion, they should be obliterated. They're a travesty.

They're setting up these quasi-judicial inquisitions in all sorts of—it's an ideologically constituted, because I've read the biographies of some of the people who are appointed to them.

Yeah, and no one can be a judge in their own cause. And in this context, it's the cause of people judging the causes.

Yeah, precisely. But I look what's happening in British Columbia with this case—what's the name? Jessica or Jonathan?

I prefer Jonathan, I think.

Yeah, with Jonathan. I think he will haul us in front of it; we will row together. It would be too much to bear. But no, he's got 16 people— a good portion of them are immigrant women—he is insisting that they wax his penis and testicles.

He's got hair on the first—it’s a bit of a blurry—and he's got 16 of them under charge. And I asked a question: If 16 people are of this mind and one person is of this, who is the more likely to be off?

Yeah, well, it seems irrelevant. And I mean, it's a consequence. You know, one of the things I pointed out with Bill C-16 was that it contained multiple internal contradictions, especially in the background policies, which I had read in quite a bit of detail. They were formulated in Ontario, although the federal government removed the link on their website to those policies after I pointed out the fact that that link existed—which I thought was unbelievably underhanded, and I still believe so.

But Carl Jung once said that internal contradictions are played out in the world as fate. You know, is that the thing about propositions, if they're accurate, is that they represent real states of being in the world. And if you enter a set of propositions that are internally contradictory, then you're going to run yourself into all sorts of sharp objects and dead ends. And that's exactly what's happening.

And every time—and I—this really, for three years, every time you think that there's no possible way that this could get more absurd, then one more example comes up where it's more absurd. And I would say the situation in BC is precisely that.

I mean, one of the women that he's persecuting—because I think he and this terrible bureaucracy is persecuting—was an immigrant woman; I believe she was Muslim, who had an aesthetics business in her own homeland basement.

As a consequence of the negative publicity or the publicity and the pressure, she shut down her business. God only knows what that means for her family and well—and for her.

And you were asking about courage earlier. You know, one of the things that I have watched quite frequently is the way that people respond to being mobbed on Twitter.

Yeah.

You know, now I've almost stopped looking at Twitter.

Yeah, it's been about three months that I've taken a Twitter hiatus, let's say.

I still post—hey, I don't even have my password anymore. I send what I want posted to a third party, and they post it because it keeps me out of an antiseptic distance.

That's right, exactly. And that's exactly the right way of thinking about it. You know, civilized people—and I mean that in—they socialized—people cannot tolerate being mobbed because, no, again, because then there's a reason for that.

You see, you said with regards to the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal, you know, through 16 people on one side and one on the other, you might be thinking that the 16 people are right more or less right, right? But then you think of the situation where you've said something on Twitter and you know 6,000 people have mobbed you publicly.

I mean, your first response, if your first response is going to be to examine your own conscience and see how you transgressed, it's not really much psychologically.

I mean, it's lesser I suppose, but it's not that much different than waking up one morning and coming to your door and finding a mob of your neighbors angrily updated on your lawn. You know, it's a terrible shock for people, and it really hurts them.

You know, they're often by all accounts, you know, damaged for lengthy periods of time by this. And their first impulse is to apologize, which is truly the wrong thing to do—stand.

Well, the right thing to do is to understand that if you haven't done anything wrong, you don't apologize.

No, that's a very difficult—very difficult.

And then to wait because if you wait two weeks, people won't come to your defense. It takes the people who will come to your defense two weeks to get their act together, whereas it takes the activists who are unbelievably organized 15 seconds to mob you.

Well, there's two points to draw out of there. First of all, because you have now been almost fire-hosed into the world of celebrity, multimedia and vast attention.

I've dabbled in a lesser zone for a long while, so you adjust to the kind of swirl.

Okay, but what I've never forgotten—and I'm serious—is that people who are not in it at all—my father or the mechanic down the road or the doctor over here—doesn't that pre-class? If you haven't had media, and if you haven't adjusted to it, and suddenly your name—and just backing up your point—your name suddenly becomes the center of some great Twitter snowstorm in pejorative terms and people are speaking of you and with the most vulgar responses.

It is a terror; it isn't to me. I just miss it, but people who have not experienced it, it is really, really, really something.

But it's an unbearable pain. Yes, and they bring it down with Club Force and the great, great megaphones of national networks in the States, etc. You can expunge a person's personality with this kind of brutality.

Yes, well then it's permanent, right? Because the record never disappears. And I wanted to put a personal question to you now. Because I know you had been on YouTube; you thought you knew the media in that sense, but you weren't a media person.

In your baptism, harsh as it was, how hard was it in the first couple of weeks for you to find balance and scale? You may be a clinical psychologist, and you are obviously—majority—oh, I don't think I've ever found balance and scale.

Join my club. I knew—I mean, in the Indies, that great throbbing moment when all this stuff came in, and he hates this one, and your name is flashed all over the world, that was the first real magnitude of media attack on you.

Yeah, so even for you, how was that period?

Well, it was dreadful. I mean, especially the first couple of months because, well, because the attention was—well, it has been since then, but the attention was unbelievably intense.

I mean, I had there were days upon days where there were reporters lined up coming into the house one after the other, and that really hasn't stopped. I mean, it stopped, let's say, in the last two months since the end of March, however long ago that is.

Because I've shut myself off because of my—I have some family health trouble that's very serious, but I don't think I've ever adjusted to it.

What's made it bearable, I would say—and some of it's being very good—I mean, it's taken my life, which was fairly broad—a fairly broad range of experiences partially because I'm a clinical psychologist. And, you know, it's taken it from good and bad to great and unbearable, and I yo-yo between those states.

What's helped is, well, the first thing is, is that, you know, I determined right from the beginning that I was going to say carefully what I believe to be true because there wasn't a safer route than that.

It's interesting, you know, that in the final analysis it wasn't certain that anything would protect me better than by willing to write. Well, whether that would work or not was debatable, but there wasn't a better option.

Yeah, I can understand that, and I believe that, you know, I still believe that. And I think the success of what I've done is an indication of that—the success of my book, say, which is also absolutely overwhelming.

I mean, it's impossible to—yeah. Actually, I'm kind of old; you know, I'm just about 60.

And then you have your white tenure, may look at all of those things—bad man.

Yeah. Well, the old part I think has to do with—yeah, well. But you know, it’s fulfilled.

And the lectures and the podcasts as well, and the YouTube videos—they've fulfilled a need, which also is something that's very difficult for me to reconcile myself to.

You know, I mean, every time I walk down the street, someone stops me. Someone stopped me on the way here, you know.

And as opposed to my treatment at the hands of a minority of journalists, which has been atrocious—support occasions—and academics as well, the treatment I receive from people in public is so positive that it's almost unbearable.

Let me tell you a personal anecdote that relates to you. I don't mix my own stuff with family members, but my sister is a non-political kind of person. And as I say, I don't mix those things.

She called me—she's out of this world altogether. She called me, I don't know, a year ago—"Have you seen her, Jordan, Dr. Jordan Peterson? Do you know what, Doctor? Lovely stuff!"

And she is following the videos, the biblical lectures. You know, she's a smart, nice woman.

And then that was one thing—that was unsolicited. She's not in the world of publicity; she'll follow fads, but somehow your name got in there and she's watching these with great attention and great enjoyment.

Actually, but the better one—a particular friend of mine from home—never finished school. He's about 55, 56, so we're not into the teen cohort.

Yeah.

And he calls me about it—I don't think he's read a book in six years—and he says, "I've been watching this Peterson fellow."

And you know, I can't reproduce what he was saying—it’s just that he found such comfort, yeah, and he thought he found such support.

And my thought when I was hearing this, it was some way to relate to you in all the ping pong back and forth that you're going, "Yeah, these voices are saying something! You're doing something really fine for people that I could never project would be receiving the message."

It's very—this is also something that's been very difficult to both understand and I would say, in a strange way, to tolerate because I've become opened up to the trouble that people have in a way that far exceeds even what I experienced as a clinical psychologist.

Yeah, you know, last year, my wife and I went to 160 cities.

Yeah, well, we figured we better make—oh, me!

Well, the sun shines.

So you're stronger mentally—so you know, you'd get caught up and you get caught up in the wave of events, self-supplies.

Well, it was exciting and worthwhile, and the demand was there, you know. Yes, I enjoy lecturing.

And I used the opportunity—I delivered a different lecture every night, and I used the opportunity to think, you know, and—and to communicate, which of course is what—and in a psychologically, in a manner that I believe to be psychologically helpful.

But it was also, I think—and I don't know exactly what the cumulative effect has been—lured me. But I had no idea the degree to which people were dying for a word in Kerrville—many people want—that’s what my friend was about.

I'm speaking back to you now on the same thing. I know what he was saying; he had felt no soft brain for a long, long time, yeah.

And he was in this camp of the truly neglected.

Yeah, yeah.

Uneducated and not particularly sophisticated, he's got a low-paying job, about you, yeah.

And then someone is out there of stature and credibility, and this guy who would never be in your circle—never!

Yeah. You sent an echo ping to him, and he was calling me to say, "My God, this is so!"

Allow yourself to feel good.

Yeah, well, I did. The thing is, the funny thing is, is that it doesn't feel good.

You know, and that might be a reflection of my general state of mind, which is very unsettled at the moment for the reasons that I told you.

And well, because of everything that's happened over the last few years.

But to get a taste of the depth of despair that can be ameliorated with not much more than, you know, some words of encouragement, some statement that, you know, you as a human being aren't intrinsically worthless, and that you have a spirit worth preserving, and the things that you do in your life that you do correctly are important.

It's like people are literally dying for lack of that. I mean that—not only honestly.

I don't know how many people have told me, and these are very hard things to hear. It's been hundreds of people because I meet people after each of my lectures, you know, who've told me that, yep, they are still alive because they watched my lectures or because they read my book, or—and then they usually have a good story to tell, you know, about what sort of hell they happened to be in six months earlier and what they did to pull themselves out and how that's brought their family back together or helped them advance in their career or got them out of bed, or stopped them from using heroin or being alcoholic, or something.

Yeah, well.

And, you know, all of that is—I'm—is it something that you at some point—and at least to shield against—?

No, no, no!

Well, I may be—I can put it in another way. I meant to ask this a little earlier, but you're already telling me.

When you—when this began—once it—when you began this—when this began—this is a experience.

And you set out to the world—you started.

Yeah.

You had maps of meaning.

I also know without knowing you that you had spent some considerable time doing actual thinking, which is something people don't do very much successfully.

You thought, and you thought things through in a way that this generation has almost abandoned, but so you were prepared in that sense.

And you went out, and there were certain things you saw wrong or discordant either in the universities or in the general system, and you said, "I'd like to spread some reason there. I'd like to talk also about reality and life."

Now when that began, I would think everything was fairly sufficient.

What did you learn, and how did—I’ll call it a mission, if I may—how did the mission change over time when you came in contact with the audience that you're now describing?

And what is it that you have learned?

You'll have a lot of thought beforehand. You know what you're at, but when you go out and encounter all of these individuals, what new came to you?

Well, I would say it is obvious to me that the mission itself changed.

I think it's an extension of what I've been doing since 1985 and maybe even before that. It's just that the scale continued to grow.

I mean, even with my YouTube channel, where I put my lectures in rather primitive technological form because I was just using an iPad and, you know, lapel mic, I had a million views by April 2016.

And, you know, that really made me think because I worked with TV, of course, and my lectures were popular with Big Ideas, which showcased a number of public intellectuals.

Yeah.

I think I had five lectures in the top 20 or something like that. So I knew that there was—and I was getting a certain amount of recognition in public for that— not a lot, you know, enough—and then from a very wide variety of people, you know, which was quite, quite interesting.

When I hit the million mark on YouTube, I really thought about that because I thought, "Well, I don't know what to do with that figure. I don't know how to conceptualize it in context because a million—there's a lot of people.

It's, you know, 20 football stadiums full of people. It's a vast—it's an overwhelmingly best-selling book.

It's, yeah, it's far more people than you'd teach in your life.

And I thought, "Well, what?" And it wasn't cute cat videos. You know, and this was back when YouTube was still a developing course, let's say.

That's right, and something to be sort of ignored in some sense because of its humble beginnings; it was a very secondary place.

Yes, it was a very secondary place, although that was starting to change.

I thought, "What the hell is this YouTube? What are we doing here?"

And then it struck me that, well, this was a Gutenberg Revolution that we were experiencing—that the spoken word was now as permanent and as immediate—more immediate than the printed word and just as permanent, and with a much larger audience because more people, as far as I can tell, can listen than can read.

And even with my book, a tremendous percentage of my books have been sold in audio form.

So I really started to think about YouTube at that point, and I suppose that was one of the things that drove me in my foolish curiosity to make those political videos that I made in October, which was the first time I'd ever tried something like that.

Now, it was, in some sense—I wouldn't call it a whim, but you know, I woke up at 3 in the morning because I was so irritated about this bill, and it's attempt to force a certain type of language usage.

And I could see what was behind that quite clearly. I thought, "Well, you know, this really is annoying me to death."

And often what I would do when something was annoying me to death was get up and write, but I thought, "Well, I'll make a YouTube video and see what happens."

It’s like, "Well, I certainly saw."

Yeah, you did.

Yeah, no kidding.

Well, the thing is, you know, you've got a hold of something, let's say—it's YouTube, and you think you know what it is, and you don’t. You don’t have any idea what it is, and neither does anyone else.

And that’s certainly still the case. We have no idea what these multiple technologies are doing to us. But I can tell you that YouTube is an overwhelming force, and it's becoming more and more powerful day by day.

I've especially seen that in countries—Slovenia was a good example—where no one really trusts the mainstream press.

All the young people—do and not so young either—pretty much everybody under 35, I would say, all they watch is YouTube.

And that's the case all over the world.

And so, I think on my YouTube channel my videos have been watched 110 million times.

Probably like—because people keep cutting them up and distributing—in other ways.

Yeah.

Which is something else that can be done on YouTube. Right? You can have a dialogue.

Right.

Yeah, yeah, edit and make their own commentaries.

And the total for that would be at least 500 million.

Yeah, that's for sure.

If you're a god—it's a new conversation; it's a new idea of conversation. You know, that’s the word for it.

Yeah, well, it is certainly—it certainly has that conversational aspect that television lacks.

It's very comical to watch an organization like CBC try to adapt itself to YouTube because they'll put on a ten-minute clip—

Yeah, they break all the rules.

—yeah, they break all the rules; they put two 30-second commercials in front of it, which you can't skip—

So no one will watch it.

No, what do you do with YouTube? You put on this 10-second commercial, and you let people skip it after five seconds. That's the rule.

They break that rule, then they don't allow comments.

And so they'll put up a—something you might want to watch, you know, for ten minutes and they'll get like, you know, 20,000, 30,000 views because they don't take the content seriously.

You should take YouTube seriously.

Well, they also have no intuition for these particular forms.

And they're also—that's a circle back to even to the beginning—they're wrapped up in certain ideas about things, and they're wrapped up in a certain orientation towards change and politics that there's only a certain quarters that they will walk down.

Yeah.

And there are other quarters which are forbidden to Lourdes, or it is heresy to even admit that they exist.

Yes.

In populations, you won't deign to address. So one of the things that's interesting about the YouTube stars, you know, like Rogan and say Dave Rubin is that they don't think their audience is stupid.

That's a good beginning.

It is! It's a really good—my lectures as well.

You talked about the gentleman who sent you the email, 55, who wasn't well educated. A tremendous number of the people who are coming to my lectures are people in that camp—they're working class.

Yes.

Often men, but not always women as well, but more men.

And they're long-haul truckers or construction workers, and they're listening to three-hour lectures and complex—that’s the point!

And it's because they're not stupid; they're interested in the world.

It also defines a great axiom: If you were in the television world—private or public—for 30 years, the idea, if you had an interview—I did a provincial show for years and years—if you had an interview, you may make it four minutes.

Right.

They're gonna watch you for five minutes, right? If you had a commentary, can you make it 60 seconds?

Yeah.

The idea that people had an attention span—that we had four minutes—never entered into the world of people in the studio.

And you put stuff on that has no glitz, it is profound, it can be complex, and it goes on for 60, 70, 80 minutes, and everyone is happy.

Yeah!

I mean, it's all upside!

They've been operating under wrong assumptions for three decades.

Yeah!

Well, and Romans’ Rogan's interviews are three hours long.

Yeah!

You know, and people watch the whole thing or listen to the whole thing.

Let’s go back to another area where you really have been on the mark. I'm saying that personally, and I think you're absolutely correct. And this is not significant—see—the—some of the stuff that goes on in the university, some of the—if I read the course syllabus, if I read some of these real peer reviews, some of the subjects in there are beneath tripe.

Well, that’s why they've flourished.

I'm serious; I thought about this a lot. It's like, what the hell happened?

And here's what happened: The scientific types and the serious scholars— they’re—they're a specific sort of person; they're rather obsessed—the good ones, yeah.

The good—the great ones are completely obsessed, yes.

And partly mad, you know.

Well, and then—well, maybe you need a bit of that.

I’d be completely obsessed.

I think you—and you know, a minority of scientists produce the majority of a literature, and it's the same in the social sciences.

And so those are people who are working 70 or 80 hours a week; all they do is work, and what they work on is their thing.

And they need to do that because, well, they're on the cutting edge, and they want to stay there, and they have their ambitions—for some of them, sometimes it's political ambitions.

But their stuff never lasts.

But the good scholars—or some of them are great—they discover amazing things!

I mean, I've encountered amazing psychological research, you know, that's just especially in the physiological or the physiological end of things and in the general literature that's just absolutely brilliant beyond belief!

And even to the voyage of discovery is a tremendous ecstasy in itself!

Yes, well, and it's a minority taste, unfortunately.

And then there's the pseudo-disciplines, which have multiplied since the 1960s, and no one who was serious paid any attention to them.

See, that's what happened. It’s that the serious people were busy doing their serious things, and there was all this stuff—yeah, political activism, politics.

Yeah, gender stuff—that's right, that's right.

Didn't they—in the—what did they call them?—the grievance studies departments? You know, and everybody just sort of assumed that they were noisy but harmless.

But they were not harmless because they're extraordinary well—it stands—that the balance tipped!

No, it almost tipped in the '90s because there was a big rising of political correctness around then.

The American economy moved like mad, and I think that just kind of took the steam out of the objections.

Yeah, but something happened four years ago, something like that—five years ago—where the scales tipped, and I think it was a fair part of this.

I'm like, I really like your opinion—is the growth of this—it's an awful philosophy—the idea of identity politics—which carries two great axioms: that I can only communicate with you if you aren’t the same tribe as I am, and you're teaching me in particular.

I can't be taught by you if you're not my tribe.

But education is actually to receive it from everybody else and take you out of yourself.

And the second thing is the subdivisions of identity politics—that ridiculous story odeon be seized on that identity politics.

Yeah, gender politics—yeah, that's roared out into society!

Damn half the people who have two dinner tables of North America are afraid to bring these subjects up!

You're probably more than half, and we're being ruled by them!

Yeah, well it doesn't take much—it doesn't take a very large determined minority to shut down a large and silent majority; that's unfortunately the rule.

And the identity politics issue—it's a reversion to tribalism, and you know—and so it's—it's a miracle, actually! The surprise isn't actually that it's back; the surprise is that it ever went away.

And we took the fact that it went away for granted, and we forgot the reasons that it went away—we forgot the axioms, right?

We started to lose faith in them, let's say, and, well, that's partly what I've been trying to fight against and to write about why those rules were necessary and what they meant.

Is it part of your project? You know the various words I'm using here—is part of your project a kind of restoration or a reminder that certain markers are fundamental, cannot be moved?

Well, that is—isn't the project!

I mean, when I wrote my first book, it took me about 15 years to write, and I spent—really, I spent all my time—except when I was writing scientific papers and when I was socializing, which I did a fair bit of—thinking about that book.

I mean, it was really obsessive thinking, chronic, from the time I woke up till the time I went to bed, unless I was engaged in some other activity that would shut down my mind.

I was trying to understand whether there was a foundation of stone underneath the presumptions of Western civilization, or it was really a postmodern book, Maps of Meaning, which I didn’t understand because at the time being unfamiliar with that lexicon, let's say there was a terrible Cold War raging, and you know, it wasn't obvious that it wasn't merely a matter of opinion.

You know, you could make that case—is that, well, here's your set of Marxist presuppositions, many of which sounded incredibly attractive and which still do to some— you know, from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.

I mean, no one likes to see people with needs unfulfilled; the problem is that needs multiplied without end, and ability is limited.

But you know, you have to start thinking about the world in a harsh and sophisticated way to notice that flaw.

I wanted to analyze that system and the Nazi system to a lesser degree, but also that and the Western system to see if there was something at the bottom that was rock-like, that wasn't merely arbitrary.

And I believe that what I discovered, let's say, or thought through, was that we got some things in the West fundamentally correct.

And they're correct for biological reasons, which is very important because we'd be around a very long time.

Yeah!

Biological reasons are very fundamental, but also that that biology reflects some underlying metaphysics as well that we don't understand because we don't understand anything about the fundamental nature of the world, beyond as a why—yes, the whys and the wherefores, for that matter—the purpose, all of that—the fact that people have religious experiences, and that they're easily duplicable, and that they seem to be consistent across societies, at least to some degree.

And what I decided then—kiss me, because I was trying to understand why the world had divided itself up into armed camps that were hell-bent on mutual destruction.

Right.

Mutual assured destruction, right? The terrible acronym—that was, you know, an insane satanic joke.

And why it was so important for us to defend our tribal positions in that manner.

And what—if anything, could be done about it?

Like, here's the solution: We have this terrible tribal warfare—it's characteristic of our species and its accelerated to a degree that's not sustainable.

What do we do about it?

And the answer that came to me as a consequence of what I studied was that we try to make ourselves better people.

It's a—the solution to tribalism is the elevation of the individual.

The West got that right—the individual is—yes, that begins the entire reaction.

Yes, that's why the identity politics makes the individual a simple avatar of the collective, right?

And everything that attaches to him is always extrinsic and not essential.

Yes!

And you strip personality, and we're adding up groups and trying to administer justice via our collective.

Yeah, it's—it’s terrible. It's so dangerous!

And why—I heard you on this—why do we seek to perpetrate some sort of justice over two generations?

It was one of the worst things in all of history that you would make this honor to a daughter and carry the sin that they're after parents.

Yeah!

And now you're seeing it in reparations again!

Yeah, yeah—all the ideas that we thought had been completely wiped out—enlightenment or just simple logic itself—they're back!

Yeah, why are we so easily yielding to this?

I mean, the patterns of correctness in the language of people kind and things of that order—it's an absurdity!

Well, I think some of it is the desire to escape from individual responsibilities.

No, if you can dissolve yourself in the collective, then the impetus isn't on you to act as forthrightly as would otherwise be necessarily the case.

So there's that.

And then there's the undeniable attraction of having someone to blame for the miseries of your existence, which are likely manifold.

It's also the comfort of saying I can start a small war with one driving another, and we can play games with each of these blocks.

It won't be a society; it won't be a country!

But if you dissolve the collective politics—I mean the real politics—into subcategories of gender, sex, ethnic, religion, and each of these is now claiming a rate only as a collective, everything else falls apart.

You know, you know your Yeats?

Yeah, and you don’t need to vote!

Yeah, but again, back to the universities.

If there's one place that can reset balances, it starts with mine!

It starts with the younger mind that, when we met with a more mature mind and taught the ways of the mind—out of mine works, what we should read, how you form judgments, how you put contrasts over great lengths of time—not today in, tomorrow.

Five hundred years ago, if you train the minds, and there is a balance, and there's an opportunity to see the world as it really is, you have to believe in the mind in order to do exactly what we were discussing.

Is that, you know, one of the things I've pointed out to my audiences is that there isn't a debate about who should speak on campuses. There's a debate about whether free speech exists.

That's a whole different debate!

I know people don't understand the difference in the severity of those two debates.

Like, if I don't want you to talk, I still might believe that people can talk. Yes, you can exchange opinions, and bacon changes others’ minds, and even if they're different.

The argument that's being put forward on the campuses to stop people from speaking is that there is no such thing as free speech.

All there is is the exchange of the ideas of avatars who are possessed by their group.

Exactly!

And the logical—that is to refuse to let them speak.

Speak because why should you allow the group that you're in direct competition—sadly—to have its voice?

And so it’s—the collectivists—the identity politics types—it's the very idea of individuality that they're opposed to—that they've dispensed with.

And that goes back to their, you know, to the French—the terrible—the despicable French intellectuals who, in my opinion, were responsible for leading this revolution.

And it got picked up, as always, the most obnoxious in your society, useless in the sense of their intrinsic logic, find the easiest walk around the campus—this is the most trendy institution in the world.

Yeah, well, and it came through!

Well, it came through the Yale English department!

Yes!

Yeah, yeah, that’s where the French Continental ideas made their entrance into North America, you know?

All your travels, the speeches—I know much of it gets small peat into the policy because politics, because that's the world we're in.

Do you get much chance—because obviously no Gataki were around, they wouldn't last—do you get much chance to expand on the beauties of the culture? I mean, poetry and music and things of this nature—the other side of the academic?

The things that sometimes they sing to the humans?

I do!

I mean, that's one of the reasons that I was so motivated to continue the lectures because we actually put together a sequence of tours.

What? We didn't plan 160 cities in one go.

I mean, it sort of unfolded.

Donahue and Bono left.

Yeah, yeah, well, it unfolded across time, you know, because they were so popular.

Yeah!

And the popularity didn't seem to be waning.

And but it was an opportunity to put forward the case for all the wonderful things that we've done.

I mean, and to express gratitude and amazement at the fact that, you know, our—the fact that our city—this city, Toronto—the city works is—for me, it's an—and I think this is partly because I've been sensitized so much to the catastrophe of existence—sort of the collective and the personal senses—that when I go outside and everything works, and there's all these people of different colors and creeds and religions walking down the street, and it's all peaceful when the lights go on regularly, and the power is always working, and everything technological is a hundred percent reliable, and there's no riots in the street and the probability that you're going to meet with an untimely and painful death at the hands of someone else is almost nil.

And that we live for such a long time— all of this to me is a complete—it’s a complete miracle!

It truly is, and I remind people of the unlikelihood of that constantly in the lectures and ask them to be grateful for the fact that maybe you think you look—a hundred years ago—1919—you just think of what you would have been through in the last six years.

Right? The Russian Revolution, the First World War, the Spanish Influenza—just absolute bloody hellish catastrophe, one after the other—conception.

And that season was brewing then too.

Right, right, right, right—the seeds that next— the after free were already at work!

They were, and also, of course, the same thing with the Russian Revolution, which was bloody enough to begin with, but which certainly accelerated in its brutality as it expanded.

And, you know, we don't have any of that at the moment.

It's actually—the world is more peaceful than it's ever been!

There's no wars in the Western Hemisphere—that's the first time since the coming of Columbus that the entire Western Hemisphere is free of conflicts!

I see frequently on your various sites that you do list up—and that's—that's another great counter to the environmental crowd!

And I don't take them as being pure either.

Some of them are obviously—most of them are not—they're always having a spectacular at the high table, the catastrophe—the world is ending!

The more—this is worse—it would ever be—we're destroying the planet!

You point out very frequently that certain of the technologies, certain of the advances of the civilization that lifted people out of poverty—they put them into new situations.

They—we have relieved more suffering—in some cases—not maybe not more than we have caused, but it's a different century!

We should be grateful for things! Gratitude is in short supply!

Yes, it's completely absent among the collectivists! There's no gratitude at all!

And that's so interesting! It's so interesting to me to see that because, let's say, the professors who lead those movements—they are the most protected people who've ever lived.

It's like—they're standing on a hill, and around them is a wall, and it's four feet away.

And around them, that wall is another wall, that's four feet away.

And another wall, and another wall, there's just sequential walls!

And that this edge of the sequential walls is a huge army, and its power!

Yeah!

And all of that protects them!

Absolutely, absolutely! And they say everything is corrupt!

And there's just no sense whatsoever! And that's appalling to me because it's so unlikely to occupy a position like that.

And the proper response—although criticism is necessary obviously—criticism means, "Well, this is wrong, and this is how we could fix it."

It doesn't mean tear everything down and leave them with nothing!

And that certainly happens to people in universities now—they come in barely formed!

Yeah!

And they leave ill-formed.

Yeah!

They leave—they leave in tatters!

You know? And that's—that’s also—children—to go back to where you may refer to what I’ve referred to—there are so many people outside of the higher structures of society that no one is talking to!

That's where Mr. Trump comes in!

Yeah!

And more power to them for that matter! He is talking—enlisting!

I know that's another absolute heresy!

He's not the cause of these things; he’s the result of failures of order, and more sophisticated people.

Well, I think—I have a friend.

He's working very closely with the Democratic Party in the United States and has been quite effective at doing so, trying to move the party closer to the middle and away from the radicals.

And we discussed this a lot because, you know, I think one of the reasons that the people who hate the Democrats in the United States truly hate—there is just vitriol here—is because they've proved themselves incapable of generating a candidate who can actually take on Trump.

Yeah!

And I think there’s a disappointment, even among the enemies of the Democrats, that's so profound that it generates precisely that material.

It's like the man is characterized by manifold flaws, and I'm not saying this in a partisan way—

No, no!

—except, and the fact that the system works so poorly that a credible centrist candidate can't be found to offer himself at least as a viable alternative.

I mean, my poor friend who I said has been following this and is being deeply involved in the debates—he's just tearing out his hair and watching degenerate when they should—

Well, exactly!

It's so sad!

You got—you haven't a new-age spiritualist who's gonna be President of the United States!

And you have them dissolving the idea of nationhood!

We will abandon borders!

I mean, it—anyway, it is such a waiting!

But the people didn't—the street—the guy who called me about you—that's a class!

And it's a vast class!

Yes!

And it is—that's the great fifty percent that has been walked over and is turmoil.

And all of the identity politics and all those things that get traffic and commerce in conversation in the media—these are irrelevant to them!

Yeah!

Apart from being insulting!

Yes!

And after a while, the social pressure will— is it—and this game that's going on over here will have to close, or something breaks!

Yes, yes!

Well, I guess Trump was an attempt to break into Brexit was another attack.

That's right!

In Brexit, wasn't an Australian—good illustrate!

I let you go with one more question!

Only after all of that you have done and all the energy, obviously, that it required to do it—and have you come at this point to something fresh in your understanding about what counts and what does not count, how one conducts themselves about the universe?

Has something new occurred to you, or is it a refinement of what you went in with?

I think the fundamental thing that I've learned is that you can speak in the deepest terms imaginable if you're careful to an extraordinarily wide range of people and that that's desperately needed!

And that hopefully—it's salutary.

It looks like it's salutary!

And so that's hopeful!

You know, the counterpoint to the stress of over the last three years has been my observation of the positive consequences of having these sorts of deep—as deep as I can make them anyways—philosophical discussions and to watch thousands of people participate as if it's important!

You know, when I talk to Sam Harris in Dublin about the relationship between facts and values and religion and science, which, you know, is about as academic a topic as you could hope for, we had 10,000 people come to the resort!

It's—it’s—you see, it’s—a university may not be functioning where it's supposed to be functioning, but that doesn't mean that it's not functioning.

You know, it’s out there thought; we'll find this place.

Well, that's—that's what it looks like to me, and so that's been unbelievably positive, although very demanding!

Yeah, it's—well, I mean, in these interviews more frequently, I tend to get emotional, and the reason for that is the health problems that are plaguing my family—at least in part this understand, so that makes me much more fragile than I should otherwise be.

Just decide, despite my exhortation to people to know they're there.

Cause my friend—oh, I'm across for you the beer!

Listen, I thank you greatly and for your courtesy because you obviously didn't have to do this, and I really do admire what you're doing.

And I will say on behalf of the people who will never meet you, you were a very fine person.

Thank you.

Thank you very much for the support that you've shown me over the last few years.

So it was much appreciated.

I would do it 20 times!

Well, I appreciate that very much.

It was a pleasure to meet you, sir.

[Music]