Am I Racist? | Matt Walsh | EP 479

So at this time, we thought it'd be interesting to take a different approach, and that is to start, and rather than remaining a blank slate and remaining skeptical, I'll just believe whatever I'm told. Then I'll let that answer lead me to the next place. So that was the goal, to not just ask them about it, but to take what they say, put it into practice on screen, so that people can see it. It's a much more direct, I think, way of kind of stirring these ideas, maybe even than we did in "What is a Woman?"

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Hello everybody, I had the opportunity today to talk to Matt Walsh of "What is a Woman" fame. Many of you are familiar with that movie where Matt went out as a naive investigator into the world of gender ideology to try to answer the most fundamental question that can possibly be posed to a human being, which is, can you tell the difference between the sexes? By the way, that is something that creatures without nervous systems have been able to do for 650 million years, so hopefully the answer on your side is yes.

In any case, Matt made quite a success with that documentary, and he has a new movie, "Am I Racist?" which you can access at amiracist.com. Maybe that's a question you want to be asking yourself. In any case, as many of you know, unless you live under a rock, the issue of racism has raised its ugly head in a massive way once again in our culture since about 2015. Mostly because people badly educated at idiot universities have made that the center point of their propagandistic fulmination, much to the decrement of interpersonal relationships across the West, and certainly relationships between the different ethnicities and racial groups. It's really an appalling thing to see, and Matt has decided to hit the Hornets' Nest once again with this new movie and to launch himself out into the world as a diversity, equity, and inclusivity expert. He’s in search of the answer to the question that all white people in particular are supposed to be torturing themselves with, which is, "Am I racist?"

That's a complicated question actually because human beings have pronounced ingroup preferences, which is why we like our families, for example, and there are some downsides to that, like the fact that people who are less familiar to us are more likely to receive a more negative response instinctively. We have to fight against that, which I think we were doing with dramatic success before the idiot propagandists got bone back in their jaw. In any case, Matt's launching this movie, and we talked a lot about the movie "Am I Racist?" We also talked about Matt's conservative ethos, right, and how those two things tie together. Well, people are beating the anti-racist drum, I suppose, because they're looking for meaning in their lives. That's part of the reason, to the degree that they're not simply exploiting the situation.

We talked about sources of deep meaning, and for Matt and for myself, the meanings in our lives have really come from our dedication to our wives, our families, our kids, and our grandkids, in my case, because I'm older than Matt. So we talked a lot about sources of true meaning and false meaning, and so you can join us for that at amiracist.com. That's the URL you want to keep in mind.

Join us.

Hello, Mr. Walsh. I hear you have a movie coming up. Do you want to tell everybody what it is and when it's breaking and all of that?

Uh, yeah, we do. We have a movie coming out September 13th. "Am I Racist?" is the title, and tickets are on pre-sale right now. We just opened up pre-sale about a week ago. It's already going really well on the pre-sale for the tickets, which is important because that determines in large part how many theaters actually show the movie. So people are responding in a big way, and I'm excited about it. "Am I Racist?" September 13th.

Well, I suppose we could cut right to the punchline. We'll start with you. Are you racist?

Well, that feels like a spoiler, I guess. I mean, look, one thing we learned in the movie is that, you know, I'm white, so I guess the answer is yes. That's how they define racism on the anti-racist side: that if you're white, you're inherently racist, and if you're not, then you're not racist, no matter what you say or do. From their perspective, the answer is yes, and it's actually, you know—unlike "What is a Woman?" the first movie that we made, obviously that was a question that they didn't want to answer. It was hard for them to answer. This for them is an easy question to answer.

Now, if you were to follow up and say, "Well, what exactly do you mean by racism? What is racism exactly?" then that becomes a more difficult question. But they have no problem pointing to the people who they consider racist, and really, it's just a matter of looking at your skin color and deciding from there.

Alright, so maybe we could try this. Maybe I could try to give a case from a psychological perspective for the leftist claims, and we could take them apart that way.

I think it's a hard conversation to delve into because I don't exactly think this is properly characterized as a leftist claim. It's partly that, but it's also partly a claim of devious, manipulative, psychopathic narcissists, and that's not exactly the same as a political or an intellectual claim. You know, just like on the religious front, the religious claims of great monotheistic systems are often hijacked by bad actors and manipulators. That's the Pharisees in the gospel accounts. You see the same thing on the political side.

But let's delve into this a little bit because there's plenty to be said about the idea of—well, we could start with implicit bias. So that's something that the scientific community, centered at Harvard around Mahzarin Banaji and her work on the Implicit Association Test, that idea of implicit bias is something that the scientific community has offered to the radicals to buttress their claims. So maybe we could delve into that a little bit, because people need to understand this. Does that seem reasonable as far as you're concerned?

Yeah, I think so.

Okay, so your perceptions—all of our perceptions are biased, and they're biased towards our goals. So when you look at the world, basically what you see is a pathway forward to a goal that you're pursuing, and then you see the things in the world that will either help you along that pathway or get in your way. Everything else is turned into irrelevance. Obviously, when we look at the world, we don't see most of it, right? We see what's right in front of us, for example. But even more specifically, we see a pathway to a goal and things that move us towards that and things that get in the way, and that could be friends and foes, for example. Your goals do determine your perceptions in a large manner.

Now, there are exceptions to that. If something unexpected happens, because if something unexpected happens, and it stops you from moving forward, that will attract your attention, and you'll turn to investigate it. But that's basically the perceptual landscape. And one of the implications of that is that we do live inside something that, if it's described, seems like a story rather than a set of facts.

Okay, so this has been more or less understood for something approximating 100 years because the psychoanalytic types like Freud and then Jung kind of cottoned on to this first: that we live— we have a perceptual structure that filters the world when we interact with it. Now, the social psychologists got a hold of that, and they built a test that purported to measure implicit bias. They purported to show that the research is unclear and, at best, it's speculative and theoretical. They purported to show that we had perceptual biases that favored our ingroups, and that's not really that surprising as far as I'm concerned, because, you know, you obviously have an inbuilt preference to care for yourself, and then you have an inbuilt preference to care for your mother and your father and your siblings. You have a kin preference, and then you probably have something like a tribal preference, and then you probably have a race preference in so far—at least in so far as other race people are somewhat novel and so on. That edifice was built up—the notion of implicit bias.

And of course, the DEI types grabbed the implicit bias literature and ran with it. It was a gift and a godsend to the HR types, the Karens in the HR world, who could then point to scientific validation. Now, Mahzarin Banaji of Harvard, her colleagues who helped invent the Implicit Association Test—most of them have backed off with regards to its political implications, but Dr. Banaji, who's really quite a leftist right down to the core like most social psychologists, is still beating the implicit bias drum.

Okay, sorry for the lengthy explanation, but you can see that the thorniness of the problem, and that's an important thing to attend to. Because the claim that we have as human beings that we have a bias towards those who are closer to us, depending on the dimension of evaluation, appears to be true. And I'll just close with two things, and then please push on me. That's implicit or unconscious bias. It's before you perceive that. It doesn't mean that can't be overcome by learning. In fact, much of what learning does is modify your implicit biases, right? Because you have to see something a particular way when you first perceive it, but you can learn to differentiate your perception and to become more sophisticated. That's what socialization is for, and that's what education was for too.

But also, there's no reason to presume whatsoever on the implicit bias front that it doesn't characterize all ethnicities and racial groups equally.

Well, I'm kind of curious about what you think about all that.

It's complicated. You know, the idea that we look at the world through a motivated framework, that's a real challenge to the Enlightenment view of rationality. And I'm afraid that the Enlightenment rationalists were either the empiricists, in particular, who thought that we derived all of our conceptions from sense data—that's not true. It's wrong.

Yeah, well, I think—I mean, I don't think I would disagree with anything that you said, with maybe perhaps the exception of—you know, you said that we've known this for the last hundred years or so. I would argue we've probably known most of this for as long as human beings have been self-aware, because, I mean, just the basic idea that we all are biased and we're all moving through the world in a—you know, in a way that we aren't seeing things, exactly objectively, like robots. I think that, of course, that's the case.

We all have our own priorities and preferences and motivations and goals and everything, and you carry that with you, and you bring that into every interaction with everybody and into every situation in your life. Now, as far as that extends to even racial biases, I think history proves that that is often the case. Also, the problem is that on the kind of quote-unquote anti-racist DEI side of this, the issue for them is that—well, there are a couple of things. The big one is that they would probably also agree with a lot of what you just said, and even they would say that it kind of vindicates their point of view. They would listen to that and say, "See, is what we're talking about?" Except that for them, that applies to white people only, and if you were to say, "Well, no, this is just the human condition; everybody is this way," they wouldn't track you that far. They wouldn't go that far; they can't go that far.

So that, to me, that's the essential problem with the whole implicit bias conversation right now. It might have been different 50 years ago, but right now, the problem with it is that when we talk about implicit bias, we're only talking about it with one group, and we're not engaging with it as a fact of human nature, but instead as a fact of white human nature, which these people see as something completely distinct and different from, I guess, the nature of all other people who are not white.

And then the second problem with the way that they approach the issue is that they see it as something that they have to fix, which I think is an issue in and of itself, because I don't think that it's something they need to fix.

Yeah, and then all of their prescriptions for fixing it are completely wrong. So there might be a kind of a starting point here where there's some truth in the starting point, but then it just falls apart as you continue along.

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And something new about the world is revealed. Okay, so let's delve into that a little bit more. So, you said that this has been known, you know, in some ways since the dawn of time, and the idea that people have motivations and goals and that they affect their perceptions—that's key to the whole universe of storytelling, right? Because when you tell a story, this is actually the definition of a story: a story is actually a description of the framework through which someone sees the world.

So when you go to a movie, what the movie maker shows you are the goals of the protagonist. So in your movie "Am I Racist?"—and you did the same thing in "What is a Woman?"—your goal is to conduct an investigation into something that's key to the culture war, and so we watch you as you pursue your goals, and we can see the world through your eyes. You're enabling us to do that, and the reason that's so useful is because, well, it's useful for me to see the world through my own eyes. But if I can see the world through the eyes of another person, then I get the vantage point that they developed and that they are learning from without having to take any of the risks.

Okay, so now there is a huge issue here, Matt, philosophically underneath all this, because the empiricists and so they'd be people more on the scientific front who claim that we derive all our knowledge of the world from facts and from objective facts—they're wrong. The postmodernists pointed that out. Now, they weren't the only people that pointed that out. We really don't know what to do with the fact that we see the world through a story, because that's not what the scientists claimed. It's not what the Enlightenment types claimed, and they were definitely wrong, and this is a big problem.

Now, my solution to that, for what it's worth, is to observe that we've had evolved ways of looking at the world. They biologically evolved and culturally evolved, and they expressed themselves in the form of traditional religious views. But we can get into that a little bit later, and if those decline or dissolve, then you have the emergence of these terrible ideologies.

So, okay, so the implicit bias types and the postmodernists have a point: we do see the world through a story.

Okay, now here's an explanation of why it's only white people that are racist from the radical leftist perspective. That's where I see the Marxism creeping in. So what happened? In the 1970s, the postmodernist types, Derrida and Foucault and so forth—Foucault is the world's most cited scholar, by the way—the world's most cited scholar, more than Darwin. So the postmodernists climbed in bed with the Marxists. Almost all the postmodernists were Marxists to begin with, like radically leftist; there's no doubt about this on the historical side.

Then Marxism took a vicious hit on the moral side in the 1970s, not least because of Solzhenitsyn, who exposed all the catastrophes of the Stalinist system. Then the postmodernists, the French in particular, they played a slight-of-hand game, and they transformed Marxism into a multi-dimensional power game.

For Marx, the axis of oppression was economic, and I think if you had to make a case for an axis of oppression, the strongest case you could make is economic. But the new Marxist types, the type that we see now as the leftist radicals, they multiplied that, so virtually every dimension of comparison that you could use to categorize human beings became an axis of oppression: race, ethnicity, sex, height, looks, ability—you name it. If it distinguished people, it was an axis of oppression.

It was like a metastasized Marxism. And because in principle white people are at the top of the oppression hierarchy, they're the only ones that can be the oppressors. And then, so this is where this is the real toxic element of the narrative, as far as I'm concerned: that victim-victimizer narrative.

It's also empirically preposterous because it's actually the case that first of all, white people—depending on how you define white—aren't at the top of the economic hierarchy in the United States. The wealthiest people are Indian Americans from the continent of India, for example, and Asians of all sorts do spectacularly well in the American economy, as do Nigerians. Black women do pretty well, as it turns out, and Asian women do quite spectacularly well, and of course, there's the ever-present fact that Jews do disproportionately well too.

And so it isn't even obvious that white people are at the top of the economic hierarchy, but the reason that the radicals insist that racism is only a white problem is because of this Marxism that's crept into the stew.

And so, well, I'm curious about what you think about that.

Yeah, well, I think, right, the victim hierarchy on the left is what this comes down to, and I think what you just pointed out—this is a big problem for the leftists that they've never come up with anything approaching a satisfactory answer for it. But the fact that white people are supposedly at the top of the pile—the top of the heap, as it was put to me by someone in the film—but Asians are actually above white people. The fact that what you alluded to, that African immigrants do, by almost every measure, significantly better in this country than black Americans who have lived here for multiple generations—that fact alone completely destroys their entire narrative.

Because you would think that if the hierarchy and the victim axis work the way they said, then you would think that, you know, black immigrants would be the worst off because they're not only black, but also they're immigrants, which are supposedly oppressed as well. That's not the case. It's an easy thing to explain, by the way, because when you look at all of the groups that do pretty well in this country, and then you compare that with their marriage rates and their divorce rates, the math is pretty simple here. Asians do well; they also get married and stay married. African immigrants get married and stay married. White people, our divorce rates are not great. Out-of-wedlock birth rates for whites are going up, and whites also are going down, are traveling down the other way and becoming less successful in comparison to these other groups.

So to me, there are probably many factors that explain why these various groups perform well, but that's the number one. And if there's an exception to this, I'm not sure. I mean, is there an example of a demographic group that has sky-high divorce rates, sky-high out-of-wedlock birth rates, but also performs pretty well economically? I can't think of an exception.

Well, there's an interesting example on the Asian side. So if you bring, say, first-generation Asians, they do comparatively well in the United States, and their children do better than Americans do. But if Asians are in the country for three generations, then their performance declines to the point of the average American. So there's obviously something cultural going on.

And it's hard to specify exactly what's going on in the cultures of the immigrant people who do well, but you can speculate, at least probably with particular accuracy on the Asian side, that there's a tremendous emphasis on getting the hell out there and working yourself half to death because your parents took the risk of their life by immigrating, and you'd better get your act together and succeed.

And so there's a kind of desperation, I think, that drives the success of the immigrant groups that you're describing. And why that isn't present in our culture, well, that's a hard question too. We don't exactly know what drives people to be conscientious. You know, conscientiousness is the big personality predictor of long-term success, and conscientious people are diligent and orderly and industrious. More importantly, I would say they probably are good at foregoing immediate gratification and planning for not only the long term, but also sacrificing themselves for the good of other people.

You know, if you're married, for example, you want to make your marriage work. It can't be all about you. The same applies to your wife; both of you have to prioritize the marriage over either of your immediate short-term needs. And you really have to do that with kids even more, which is why I don't think people ever grow up until they have kids. Because I don't think you can grow up until someone is more important than you are, and that doesn't happen to most people until they have children.

And then it's kind of self-evident at that point. And so we don't exactly know what's necessary in a culture to instantiate that ethos of self-sacrifice and conscientiousness, but it does seem to be the case that it's more prevalent among the immigrant communities that do particularly well. Would you say this—the issue I just raised with the marriage rates, intact families—how much do you think that plays into it? Even like that, that's a big part of raising kids to be conscientious. They have to, I would think, have a mother and father in the home who are focused on instilling that in them.

And in the black community, the rates of fatherless, out-of-wedlock births are like 70-80%, especially in the inner city. This is just catastrophic—like apocalyptic-type numbers. You can't have a functioning community or a functioning society when the numbers are that high.

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Yeah, well, we don't know the relationship between fatherlessness, let's say, and conscientiousness. That's a study that should clearly be done. But we do know that we do know probably more accurately than we know anything else in the developmental psychological literature that fatherlessness is a catastrophe. Fatherless kids do abysmally well.

Here's an example. This is so striking: everyone listening should take this with a tremendous amount of seriousness. Fatherless girls undergo puberty on average more than one year earlier. Now that's a walloping biological effect and an early one. The life expectancy of fatherless children is lower as well, and that's because they undergo chromosomal damage because of stress.

So right at the biological level, there are massive consequences of fatherlessness, and probably having a father is an example of long-term commitment, across all the ups and downs of life. If you have a father who hangs in there, if your parents are honest, you see them contending with each other, wrestling with each other, fighting with each other as they try to sort out the complex problems of life.

There's lots of tragedies that a married couple goes through—lots of difficulties—and the example of committed monogamy shows people that it's possible to make a voluntary bond, a contract, or a covenant that extends across decades, regardless of the difficulties that life throws your way.

And you commented on the accelerating rates of fatherlessness in the black community, and that is a complete bloody catastrophe. And here's, I think, the explanation for it. Matt, you tell me what you think about this.

So imagine a pyramidal structure that represents economic position in the patriarchy. Let's put it that way. Okay, now imagine that you stress the system. One of the ways you could stress it is by defining the family unit as the fundamental basis of oppression and that all other family arrangements are fine, and that it's okay to love whoever you want for as long as you want, or for as short as you want—like let's say the next hour—and that's perfectly acceptable.

And then you throw that into the culture, which is what we did in the early 1960s. Then you might ask, well, who is that going to destabilize first? The answer to that is crystal clear: the lower you are on the socioeconomic ladder, the more catastrophic the results of a sociological intervention like that are likely to be.

And so the black community tended to be at the lower end of the pyramidal distribution. That radical sociological change that emerged in the 1960s affected them first. Black families started to fall apart in the 60s, and that's been accelerating ever since until we get the numbers that you are pointing to.

But one of the things we should absolutely 100% be clear about is that Hispanics and Caucasians are not far behind. There has been a decline in marital stability in the white and Latino communities since the 60s. If you match the curves, the Hispanics and the whites are about 10 to 15 years behind the black community, so that cataclysmic collapse is starting to spread through our entire culture.

It's just that the black population happens to be at the forefront of it, and we know perfectly well that fatherlessness, apart from the biological effects, early puberty for girls—why do girls hit puberty early if they don't have a father around? Well, how about so they become sexually attractive earlier so that a man shows up? How about that for a theory, which seems to be precisely the explanation?

And so that's not exactly so good because probably it's not that good to throw yourself into a sexual relationship when you're still psychologically a child despite the fact that you might be physically mature. So that's quite the catastrophe. And fatherless boys are much more likely to be in prison; they're much more likely to drop out of school; they're much less likely to attain gainful employment; they're much less likely to be reliable marital partners.

And so it's a cascading effect—a complete bloody catastrophe. And even the conservatives have been stupid about this. You know, I talked to a conservative leader the other day, and I asked him about families, and he said, “Well, you know, as long as two people love each other…”

And I think, no, I don't think so. Not just as long as two people love each other—love each other? What does that mean? Love without commitment, you mean? Does it mean love for tonight? Does it mean sexual desire? Or does it mean that you're going to commit to someone for decades, for better or worse? What does love exactly mean here?

And then, you know, is there a model for love other than monogamous, child-centered, long-term, committed family? It's like, well, can three people be a family? How about five? How about seven swapping sexual partners? How about a man and a man? That's not a model that's going to duplicate well across society because two men have a very difficult time reproducing—case anyone hasn't noticed.

And so the fatherless catastrophe is definitely germane, Matt, and it's not an issue that people are prone to highlight because they don't want to be tarred with the brush of prejudice and judgment. They're hard to dissociate from one another. But I can't see any other model for the long-term viability of children than stable, committed, long-term, child-centered, heterosexual, monogamous couples.

And people can go to hell in a handbasket as far as I'm concerned, whatever way they want, but we're bloody fools if we think there's any ideal at the center of a culture that can replace that. I think the evidence for that is everywhere, as you already pointed out.

Yeah, I think people—well, the fact that we're not talking about it just means that no real improvements can be made culturally because this is, to my mind, the first issue that has to be addressed. And if we're not going to address it, then you can't solve anything else farther down the stream.

And I think that people don't want to talk about it because, yeah, it's not politically correct; it's not sensitive. Also, because I think we just talked about how everyone has their own personal bias, I think because fatherless rates and out-of-wedlock birth rates are so prevalent now, that a lot of the people who should be having this conversation don't want to talk about it themselves because they're a part of that very problem— you know, they've abandoned their kids, they've abandoned their marriages, and so they don’t want to indict themselves.

I do think, just to back up, you said, you know, is it enough for two people to love each other? And of course, this is the common thing we hear on the left. I think the answer to that is that it is enough for two people to love each other as long as we define love the right way. You know, if we all had the right conception of love, then it could just be as simple as that.

And if we define love, I think Thomas Aquinas said, love is to will the good of the other. And you know in a religious context, what I would say is that to love is—another way of putting that is to love someone is to try to help them get to heaven. That's my job as a parent: to help my children get to heaven.

So if we define love that way, then yes, in fact, that could be the guiding principle of your life, and if you are trying to will the good of the other at all times, then it can rarely steer you wrong. But people don't see it that way; they see it as an emotional thing.

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A short-term emotional thing too, which is even worse because short-term matters.

Hey, I'll tell you something cool and interesting that’s very relevant to this, and it’s terrifying. So in the biological world, there are two reproductive strategies, and you can conceptualize it as a continuum. There are low-investment strategies and high-investment strategies.

So the low-investment strategies characterize animals—many animals, mosquitoes, fish. Mosquitoes, let's talk about—or fish. Their sex without commitment and many, many offspring, right? So a mosquito doesn't invest in any of its children. There's the sexual element: fertilization of many eggs, like with fish—up to millions of offspring, let's say. In the case of plants, for example, puff balls, I think, produce billions of spores. Almost all of them die, and just enough survive to prop up the species, right? So it's a low-investment, high-production strategy.

On the other end, you have animals that reproduce slowly and invest a lot in their offspring, and human beings are the most extreme example of that strategy. So we have very few offspring and we actually make a multi-generational investment in them because it's not only that you're a parent—you’re also a grandparent—and one of the explanations for the human lifespan, from the evolutionary side, is that we get as old as we get because there's utility to having grandparents around.

So anyways, to have a child—a human child that flourishes—requires an investment that spans decades, okay? So we're a high-investment species. Now imagine you took the same logic and you looked within human beings, and you said, well, there's going to be human beings that tilt more towards a short-term investment strategy, and there's going to be human beings that tilt more towards a long-term investment strategy.

So the short-term investors would be the hedonists, Matt; they'd be the ones who are pursuing the one-night stand and believe that love is free and that every form of sexual expression is acceptable and that you should just do your own thing and let it all hang out.

And they started to—what would you say—march forward en masse in the 1960s, probably partly because birth control made that a more viable philosophy, practically speaking. Okay, so then you might ask, well, you can identify men who have a short-term mating strategy versus men who are high investment.

Now you might ask, well, what are the characterological differences between those men? And this is where it gets fun—the short-term oriented matter men are psychopathic, narcissistic, and sadistic. So isn't that fun?

So what that means for women is that if women pursue men who are oriented towards one-night stands, let's say, and casual sex, they end up delivering themselves to the dark tetrad types, the psychopathic, narcissistic, Machiavellian sadists.

Now you can say the same thing about women. It's rarer for women to adopt a short-term mating strategy because sex is more costly for women. Obviously, they pay a higher emotional price for short-term pairings. They're more likely to mistake short-term pairings for genuine emotional commitment, and they're much more likely to be psychopathological if they adopt a short-term strategy to men.

Independent of that, and so what we also see with the breakdown of the family—because that breakdown facilitates short-term mating strategies—is that we see the untrammeled rise of the psychopathic narcissists. And, like, I see that making itself manifest in the hedonistic pride movement continually.

It's like, "We can have sex with whoever we want, whenever we want, under any conditions whatsoever." It's like, okay, who are you? "Oh, well, we're the psychopathic narcissists who never grew up."

It's like, oh, those are you. Those are the people marching in the streets for their hedonistic sexual freedom, and we're going to turn the culture over to them with their short-term self-oriented, pure emotional gratification view of the world where everything's about them. Now, it’s no different than turning the world over to the worst behaved two-year-olds you could possibly imagine, and I mean that technically too, because all of that is a sign of radical failure to mature.

So isn’t that fun? All that literature has basically come out in the last four or five years identifying the relationship between the psychopathic narcissists and the short-term mating strategies. Brutal.

Yeah, and it—I was just—there was a clip that went viral on Twitter I saw a day or two ago of someone on some podcast—a self-professed queer person—saying that, talking about—and he's HIV positive—and he was explaining why he doesn't think he should have to divulge the fact that he's HIV positive to any sexual partners of his.

And basically the answer is that it’s uncomfortable for him to talk about it, and he shouldn't have to do it. And it just—it kind of goes to show, and it's right—and it’s no surprise that this is a self-professed queer person because on the LGBT activist side, it is entirely a celebration of the self and pursuing your own desires at any cost whatsoever.

To the point where now you have LGBT activists—some of them anyway—coming out and saying that you should be able to pass along HIV if you want to because it doesn't matter what anyone else says.

One of my—you know, we talk about this and how it leads to fatherless homes and everything else. I think the other, even more catastrophic consequence is that it also leads to the decline in population because what ends up happening, I think, is that people give up on having kids.

And I think there's a lot of people in my generation that were raised by parents like this, either broken homes or maybe both parents were there physically, but they were very self-centered and just kind of miserable parents. And so then those children grow up, and that's the only example of parenthood that they have.

And so they associate being a parent with just abject misery, and so then they swear it off entirely. And I think that we see that now. I was just talking, on my YouTube channel, I put up a video a couple days ago of—I went to the Reddit; it's called "Regretful Parents." There's a Reddit forum, and it's a very dark and disturbing place, as you can imagine.

And it's just nothing but parents—as the name implies—parents who had kids and regret it, and now quite openly hate their own children. I mean, some of these—I read a few of them, and it's mothers with five-year-old daughters expressing that they hate their daughters just for existing because their kids are infringing on their lifestyle and making them do things they don't want to do.

And then you just think, well, when those kids grow up—because, of course, those kids know that they're hated—even if they can't put it into words. And those kids grow up, and many of them are probably going to say, well, if this is what having kids is all about, then I don't want to do it. They don't know any other way.

And then you end up with people that just swear off family life entirely, I think, because of it.

Well, I think too, Matt, it's possible that that's also what's manifesting itself in the proclivity of young people not to date and have relationships. You know, if you're—a—there's lots of young women out there who've never seen anything remotely resembling a positive male role model, and it's no bloody wonder that those girls are attracted by the radical leftist insistence that the patriarchy is an oppressive monster.

You know, it's interesting, I read Rob Henderson's book—unfortunately, at the moment I can't remember its name, but Rob ended up with a Ph.D. in psychology, but he came from the foster care system, and his foster parents were broken family types. And so were the families of all the working-class kids that he associated with.

And it's perfectly possible now to grow up as a girl and never encounter a man who can commit to anything—not to a job, not to a person, not to his own future.

The funny thing about the hedonists is that they take advantage of their future selves just as badly as they take advantage of everyone else. This is the problem with being guided by short-term emotional gratification. It's like a two-year-old is motivated by short-term gratification, emotional gratification, but you don’t see them organizing themselves into effective two-year-old societies and planning for the future.

To plan for the future and to take everything—and everyone else into account—requires a lot of socialization and maturation, and it requires a model. And these girls that don't have the model of positive masculinity, they assume that men are there to do nothing but take short-term sexual gratification and carry none of the load.

It's no bloody wonder they're skeptical of the patriarchy and then avoidant of men, and it's no wonder that they also see any claim of a man to being competent and productive as just a lie to mask his essential proclivity to take advantage and depart.

And so it is a cascading spiral of failure, and there are many communities that are caught in that now.

I'll give you an example of this; it's weird, Matt. So when I go do my lectures, my wife does the introduction, and then she does the Q&A. And we didn't exactly plan that; as we've been touring around, I've had different people open for me—Dave Rubin did for a while, my daughter Michaela did for a while, I've had various special guests, Douglas Murray, for example, who've done that.

At one point for the opening, we were just doing some advertising for this essay product that my son is working on and for this Peterson Academy that we've launched, this online university. And Michaela, when she was introducing me, was talking about those ventures, and then she decided to go pursue her own things, and I asked my wife if she would do the intros, and she said yes.

And so that's how that came about. And then she did the Q&As, and that sort of branched into her pursuing her own descriptions of my rules and so forth at the beginning of the show.

Okay, so sorry for all the detailed background, but one of the things that we found was that people were very pleased to have her on stage with me. And so we were watching YouTube comments, for example, when people were viewing this, and what we came to understand was that a very large proportion of the audience had never seen a man and a woman sit down together—like a married couple sit down together and actually do something productive and useful and peaceful voluntarily together.

So just this example, Matt, so when the audience asks questions for the Q&A, those are submitted electronically, and then Tammy goes through them to see which ones are upvoted but also to sort of string together a coherent set of questions in a conversation. Then she asks me the questions, and then she actually listens to the answers actively, you know, and sometimes probes further.

And we were stunned to find how much of a relief that was for people just to see that it was possible. And that's so catastrophic because it shows you the depth of misery, I suppose is a good way of thinking about it, that characterizes so many people's lives—that they're relieved to see a display of genuine cooperation between a committed man and woman.

You know, that's really sad. It's really sad.

So a lot of these girls who are susceptible to the blandishments of the left, it's not surprising in a sense when you look at their autobiographical background.

Yeah, I think for the boys too, you have girls that, as you say, grow up and never have an example of a male role model. I think it's probably even more disastrous for the boys who grow up having never had that example because, you know, for a girl that means that they're not going to know what to expect from men, how to interact with men, they're not going to trust men, and so on.

But for boys, it means they don't know how to be what they are. And that's one thing myself as a father of four boys—two of them are still babies, but two are a bit older now. And you really notice that as a father, when you have sons—that they—and that's why I think it's—people ask me sometimes, like, is it harder to have boys or girls? Because we have two girls as well.

I think, you know, there are different challenges with both sexes, but I think probably for a father, it's in a way harder to have boys if you take it seriously because there's more pressure. I think as a father of girls, I think there's a little bit less pressure on you. But as boys, you could just feel them watching you all the time because they're looking to you to figure out how they are supposed to be in the world, how they're supposed to act.

They have all—boys have all this energy, just bursting at the seams with energy and all this desire to, like—I know with my boys that literally they want to run out into the woods every single moment of the day. They don't even want to be inside the house; they don't want to be contained at all.

And so they have all of this, and they're looking at me as an example of how do you harness that? What do you do with that? And so it's quite a bit of pressure because I know that if I give them the bad example, then I've set them up for failure.

A big part of it is this isn't all of it, but when you see, I think when you see these boys in the inner city that join gangs and they go out and do—you know, not just in the inner city, but teenage boys can be known to do things that are just absurdly dangerous—almost suicidal, even if they are not actually suicidal. I think it's because there's this masculine urge for risk-taking, and one of the most important roles of a father, I think, is to show a boy how to take risks in a healthy way.

What are healthy risks to take? And if you don't have a father there to show you how to do that, to show you what that means, then you end up, you know, then you have a teenage boy who's drunk and drives 105 miles an hour on a back road somewhere.

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Yeah, well, okay, a couple of things on that. It's like boys are definitely more difficult to socialize than girls; there's no doubt about that. I will say the tables will turn when your daughters become teenagers, so be prepared for that because they experience a whole new form of exposure to risk then.

And well, boys are less agreeable than girls, and so they are more risk-taking and exploratory. For example, men and women differ within the dimension of extraversion: men are more assertive, and women are more enthusiastic.

They're pretty reliable sex differences in temperament; most of them seem biologically grounded. You can distinguish between men and women with 75% accuracy on the basis of personality scales alone, and if you include interests, because women are more interested in people and men are more interested in things on average, you can increase that diagnostic ability, too.

That's independent of any physiological signs, right? Just if you just knew someone's personality and their interests, you can very reliably categorize them. And there's no evidence whatsoever that that's cultural, by the way, because those differences get bigger in more egalitarian societies; this is very well known by psychologists, even if they're afraid to talk about it, which they are.

So it is harder to socialize boys, and the way we socialize them to take risks, fundamentally, as far as I'm concerned, is by encouraging them to take responsibility.

And it's a time frame issue again: you want your boys to be able to carry a maximum load, and there's adventure in that, but that has to be a socialized adventure. So let's delve into that a little bit. How long have you been married?

Uh, almost 13 years.

Okay, why do you like being married?

Oh wow, well, why not just—you’re a famous guy and you have a lot of money, and so in principle, you could have women at your disposal if you wanted to go that route. That's very common for celebrities.

And so I could say to you, look, well, you know, why not have your cake and eat it too? You could keep up the appearance of your marriage, but you could be having plenty of action on the side, and I'm presuming you're not doing that.

And if the opportunity is there, which it is now because many men, you know, many men are going to be monogamous or involuntarily celibate because they don't have the bloody opportunity. So there's no morality in that, but now in a position where you could, well, you could pretty much do whatever the hell you wanted on the sexual front.

And so why are you committed to your marriage? What's in it for you?

Well, I would say, yeah, it's interesting because there's an—you know, you could say, I have to say this if I'm speaking publicly, but it also—and maybe I do, but it also happens to be true that there is nothing about the scenario that you just described that I find even remotely appealing.

The idea of being unfaithful to my wife, I find—it's not even a horror show when I think about it; like every aspect of that is a horror show. Nothing about it I find even remotely tempting.

Okay, why? Why is it a horror show when you think about it?

Well, because you're—everything you're bringing into your life is terrible. You're bringing lies and deception and betrayal into your life. I also happen to love my wife very much, and as we just talked about loving, I believe is willing the good of the other—that is very much not willing what is good for her or my family.

Every part of it—I don't see any advantage; I don't see anything about it that's appealing at all. And it's the same if I were to imagine having never been married at all and being single right now.

At least you don't have the betrayal and all of that, but that also, I find incredibly unappealing.

I quite literally thank God every day that I'm married. I look at people who aren't and I feel sorry for them—especially men. And as you point out, there are men who want to be—they just don't have the opportunity, and I feel an immense amount of sympathy for them.

I would hate to be in their position; I don't want to—I don't want to lay it on them even thicker if they're watching right now, but I just—I feel for them.

I'm incredibly happy to be married all the time, and I guess the reason is it's only hard—it's only difficult to answer the question because the reasons are really infinite in a lot of ways. But it brings meaning into my life every day that wouldn't be there without it. You know, it brings purpose.

There are people in my life who I can love in a way that, if they weren't there, I just wouldn't. Yeah, I could, you know, you could have friends that you love, you love your siblings and your parents, but especially having experienced it now, I know that it's just a different kind of love that I have for my own kids and my own wife.

If I didn't have them, I wouldn't have any opportunity for that kind of love either—to give it or to receive it. And as I said, to me, not having that is nothing but pure horror. I see no advantage of it.

Right. So you've outlined two dimensions there. You said that, you know, if you took the short-term mating strategy route, let's say, that that would introduce all sorts of deception and lies and betrayal and brokenness into your family, so that's sort of on the hell side. And, you know, when I used to counsel people who were thinking about having an affair, one of the things I would do with them was think it through.

It's like, so what's your fantasy here? I see, so you found someone new, and you're having fun with them, and you find them very attractive, but they don't have to bear any of the responsibility for your continued life together. They get all the fun, and your wife, who you're thinking about cheating on, she gets all the responsibility and the burden, and now you have this imaginary person that you do nothing with but play with.

And that's a person who's also willing to break up a marriage. So that's the sort of person that you've tangled yourself up in, and what you're just going to keep this secret? So you're going to lie constantly now about everything for the rest of your life while you betray your wife, and you're going to pretend that there's something positive in that for you and your wife and your children?

That's the game that you're going to play? Often—not always—but often when people started to think it through, you know, they changed their mind.

Now, you also talked about the positive side. You know, when I worked my first job as a professor was at Harvard, and my wife and I moved down to Boston, and we had our second child there. Tammy stayed home with the kids for a variety of reasons, one of which was that she didn't have a green card. There were other reasons too, because she wanted to be with the kids and all I did was work and spend time with my family—that was it.

You know, because at that point in my life it was necessary to cut out everything that was extraneous if I was going to be successful at those two things. But there wasn't anything I ever found more enjoyable than spending time with my kids and my wife. It was great.

And you have a quality of love from your children that you will not get anywhere else in your life, period. And the same is true if you are actually in a committed relationship with someone.

And the depth of that—what I've been trying to lecture to people, young people around the world, is that you find the meaning in your life through adopting long-term responsibility. And you know your kids are the only people you'll ever meet in your life who want more than anything else to have a good relationship with you.

That's what they offer you, and that's such a gift. I mean, you alluded to that; it's such a gift. And the thing is, too, it's also something—you know, we have a society that's searching for meaning.

It's like having a committed relationship with someone for 60 years, which is what you'll have with your kids if you're fortunate—that's actually quite meaningful. And then you have grandkids too, and that's another source of bountiful provision of stability and responsibility and love.

And you know, conservatives have done a very bad job of selling this to young people because they always take the dutiful side and portray it as an obligation and not an opportunity, and that's just ridiculous.

Even on the sexual side—the purely sexual side—people who have the most sex are religious people in long-term committed monogamous relationships—at least the heterosexual people who have the most sex.

So that's pretty interesting. Who the hell would have guessed that? And then you might also contemplate for a moment the difference between sex with love and sex without love.

Sex without love produces a fair bit of post-coital regret, both on the side of the man and the woman, and that's a real symptom of just exactly what the hell is going on, which is something like mutual short-term exploitation. And then the realization of that—and sex with love—that's a whole different enterprise; they're not even in the same universe.

And that's not something that people speak about very much, but they should.

Yeah, I think—and highlighting the—I think you're right. And I say this as a conservative commentator myself who talks about these issues all the time, but you're correct that obviously we have not done an entirely sufficient job of making this point, and probably part of it is not highlighting the positives enough.

And I mean, when it comes down to it, isn't it—it’s an issue of happiness. And I think that you—I think it's probably true, and maybe there's like rare exceptions—very rare exceptions—but it's probably true for almost everyone that you cannot be happy—you can't be truly happy alone.

I mean, nobody can be truly happy entirely alone, and now most of us—unless you're on a desert island somewhere. And if you were on a desert island, you would go insane very, very quickly actually being that isolated.

But we're not on a desert island, so none of us are actually completely alone. But I think it probably is true that the closer you are to being alone, the more unhappy you will be. And the farthest you can get from being alone is to have a spouse and children.

Now, even then, there's like a certain element of aloneness, I guess, that just because we're human beings and we have our own minds, you know, we—in a certain way, there's always going to be that. There's going to be a certain feeling of isolation, I think, that we're all capable of feeling no matter how many people you surround yourself with.

But as far as you can get from alone is to have a spouse and have children. And so—and so that doesn't mean—now, there are plenty of people that have kids and are miserably unhappy. I just talked about the regretful parents in the Reddit forum.

So I think it's more accurate to say that if you have a—a—if you have a spouse and you have children, you have the opportunity for the greatest happiness that's available to human beings.

Now, you have to take advantage of that opportunity, but it’s not necessarily going to be automatic, but you have the opportunity for it.

I think about there's a movie called "Into the Wild" about Chris McCandless, who was a guy who left everything behind. I think this was back in the 90s. He burned his credit cards, burned his license, and his social security card, and just went off into the Alaskan wilderness by himself—left society entirely behind.

And then when he was up in the wilderness, he ended up eating a poison berry accidentally, and he died out up in the wilderness by himself. And in the margins of his notebook before he died, he wrote something like, “Happiness isn't real unless it's shared.”

And I think that that's—I think that's true. And he learned it—the hard way. He learned it the hardest way you could possibly learn a lesson like that. But there is no happiness unless you're sharing it.

I feel this—you know, I travel a lot for my job, as I know you do, and people say to me all the time, well, it must be nice to get to go out and travel and see the world, and you know, you get a break from the wife and kids.

And the truth is that when I'm traveling, you know, I’m going to do a job—even if I'm in a really cool place, I don't go do a lot of sightseeing. And in the few occasions when I do get out and do something kind of fun on my own, it's just—it's not that fun anymore because all I can think to myself is, "Well, I wish I had my kids here; I wish I had my wife here to see this because they would really enjoy it."

And because I can't share that moment with them, you know, it's nice, but it's just lacking a certain quality that it could otherwise have.

So our whole culture, insofar as our culture is Judeo-Christian—and it's particularly emphasized on the Christian side—our whole culture is predicated on the idea of sacrifice. Right? That's why we have the crucifixion at the center of our culture as a symbol; it's a sacrificial symbol.

And you're pointing to why it’s like you find the meaning in your life in the sacrifice of your solitude and your narrow self to the future and to the broader community. And it really is in that where we find not only our happiness, Matt, which you pointed to, so our hope for the future, let's say, our enthusiasm and our courage—but we also find our risk from anxiety.

There’s no difference between being self-conscious and being anxious; they're statistically indistinguishable from one another. The more you think about yourself, the more miserable you are.

And so it is the case—and human beings are so deeply social that we can punish psychopathic predators by putting them in isolation. Just think about that. What that means for how social people are: you can take the worst people—the most predatory people, the repeat violent offenders who can't regulate themselves at all, who act like they hate everyone and do nothing but prey—and if you put them in solitary, they find that torturous.

That's how social human beings are! You know, in your observation that you only find realistic meaning in communal experience, it's like I feel the same way when I'm traveling. I mean, I take my wife along, and we often have family members and friends along, and that makes a huge difference.

But I'm just not that interested in having fun without my wife mostly because it's just not that fun. You know, I'm not— for Christ's sake, I'm not searching for immediate gratification; it's shallow.

And we have a crisis of meaning in our society, and it is because people don't understand the relationship between responsibility—like long-term committed responsibility—and meaning. That's where all of it is to be found.

And that's even true as you get older. Like, I can't imagine what my life would be like now if I didn't have my kids and my grandkids and my wife. Like, what the hell? What am I going to be doing—something trivial and pointless to while away the time? It's so dull and dry; there's no depth in it at all.

And like conservatives have done a terrible job of showing young people that commitment and meaning are the same thing. It's so interesting to watch this because I've noticed when I lecture that whenever I draw a relationship between responsibility and meaning, the audience always goes dead silent because no one's made that case—least of all the conservatives who are always on about duty.

And you did a much better job today than the typical conservative, let's say, in highlighting what you find so spectacularly positive about having a family.

You know, it also does a lot for your genuine regard for self. You know, because if you can view yourself as somebody who's reliable and committed in the face of all of life's catastrophes and that you can keep your word across time, then you’re not some miserable, cringing milksop of a thing that's blowing in the wind and crushed by every one of life's minor tragedies, right?

You're trying to live out a pattern of someone who can take a fair bit of battering and still prevail and be a model of that sort to your kids, which they look to you for. Partly the reason your boys torture you and push you is to find out what you're made of. Your wife does the same thing, and you know, maybe you can find out that you're made of more than you think if you are willing to put a little committed effort into the situation.

So, let's turn to the movie. Sorry, go ahead.

M: I was going to say that that's an interesting point because I was thinking about it the other day that I agree with what you said at the beginning of the conversation, that you’re not—you don’t really grow up until you have—until you get married and have kids. I certainly see that in my own life, and I didn’t—I got married when I was 25 and had kids when I was—our first set of twins when I was 26.

And I look at my life up to the age of 25, and I see all of that as basically childhood. I don't—I look at myself at 22 and I don’t—it’s like I might as well have been 12 in a lot of ways because for me, adulthood started once I was actually a husband and then a father.

And I think—and also for me, it's interesting because in the culture, we're always told that having a family is going to prevent you from being financially successful because it's an extra financial burden. And it is true there is more—it is more of a financial burden, quote-unquote, if you want to put it that way.

But it hasn't been my experience that it prevents success. In fact, my own career didn't really take off until the moment when I had kids. I could almost—there's almost like a starting point right there, and I could draw a line going up from that moment.

And I think part of the reason for all of that is that—to the point you just made—that I really started to take myself a lot more seriously when I was a husband and a father. I mean, I had the responsibility to care for my family, but I also just started to see myself as a grown man in the world and take myself a lot more seriously.

And I think that especially as a man, that's one of the prerequisites to being successful: is to see yourself as a serious person, which I think a lot of young men probably don't see themselves that way. And then as a consequence, the world doesn't see them that way.

You're probably not a serious person until it's about more than you, and that means you don't bring the grim seriousness of intent to your pursuits.

And the developmental literature is very clear on this—most young men are quite profligate and hedonistic, let’s say, with regard to their consumption of alcohol. And why? Well, because it’s fun! You know, we like to think that people drink to drink away their misery, and there is some truth to that because it is a good respite from anxiety.

But mostly, people drink to party and have a good time, which means to engage in hedonistic stupidity of various forms. And the reason that people do that is obvious; they do that because the substances like alcohol that people use are physiologically rewarding—they activate the dopaminergic systems.

That's the same system that’s activated when you're pursuing a worthwhile goal. The real question is, well, why not just drink and use cocaine all the goddamn time? And the answer to that that people usually come up with around the age you did is that they take on responsibility and decide that that’s actually more worthwhile.

And so then young men do start to take themselves seriously and to work, and then it doesn't matter that they're burdened by the obligations of a family because that's actually something that becomes motivating.

And so it’s not a burden; it’s an opportunity to mature and to show that you’re capable of a hell of a lot more than you thought you were if you just stopped doing all the stupid things that were interfering with your life.

And so what’s the consequence? What has been the consequence for you personally in taking on that additional responsibility? You know, you said you regard yourself as a child or an overgrown teenager until you got married.

So what has been the consequence for you of starting to take your own life with some degree of mature seriousness?

Well, the consequence for me has been entirely positive. I mean it’s—you know, I say that there’s a starting point from when I had kids to now, and I can draw almost like a—not a straight line up, but you can see the incline from there.

And it’s not quite as simple as that, but I can trace all—whatever success I’ve had in life, you know, both career-wise, financially, pretty spiritually—pretty much in every sense I can—I can start it there from starting a family and realizing that, you know, everything I'm doing really matters because it's not just for me.

I guess that was a big part of the problem when I—you know, I can think back. I moved out of the house when I was 20 years old—so not too early but also early compared to a lot of people these days. I moved out when I was 20, got married when I was 25.

So there's about—there's almost exactly five years in between when I was living on my own, but I wasn't—I was single; I wasn't married. And yeah, there was—you know, there was an opportunity for a lot of the partying and all the profligate stuff that you talk about. There's some of that.

But I remember mainly as a time of just—it was a very miserable time. I was not happy. And I think it's because, like I didn't say, I had a job; I was working at the job; I was trying to advance in my career. But then I come home to this empty apartment and there's just nobody there, and it doesn't really matter to anyone else what I do or whether I succeed at all.

And I found that to be quite burdensome. It was much more burdensome than having a family. Having a family actually lifts that burden because coming home and just knowing that it's like it literally would—it’s like it doesn't matter to anyone in the world really, except for my parents.

And they're not as invested in it as say your kids and your wife will be. It just doesn't matter to anyone whether I'm successful. And I just found it, you know, maybe there's a way to push through that; maybe there’s a way—I mean, there are people—I don't think so.

No, I don't think so. I don't believe it because why? Like what's the point? And that’s very important because there’s lots of suffering in life, and so if there isn’t a point, man, good luck to you.

And the point seems to be in something like the adoption of maximal responsibility. Like that’s the—that's the—that’s the story of all our great adventure stories, our great romantic adventure stories: the hero is always the person who takes on maximal responsibility—always, right?

Like Frodo to destroy the ring of power. Well, there’s a maximal responsibility. He fleshes out his whole character in the course of his quest so that he can contend with the all-seeing eye of the totalitarian state and the terrible burden of power.

No one—there's a reason those stories echo. I guess the only caveat I would make here is that I think in some cases it is possible to have a happy and successful life where fulfilling your responsibilities, having a sense of purpose and meaning, it is possible to have that.

And to not get married and not have kids, there are some people that I believe are called to forgo that, but in those cases, that means—and if we're talking about a man, that means that they're going to find another outlet for this kind of paternal—as a man, I think we're all called to some kind of paternal service in the world.

For most men, that means having kids. And if you can’t have kids, it means adopting—that’s going to be most men. There are going to be some men, though, small minority, who aren’t called to that.

And so they find some—but you have to find some other way to kind of act as a father in the world. And you know, as a Catholic, I would say one of the best examples—that maybe you're called to the religious life; maybe you're called to be a priest or a monk—that certainly can be a very happy and joyful life.

But that is also—it's like you're not just working some job and trying to make a lot of money for yourself and then coming home to your empty apartment. We call a priest "father," so you are a father in a different sense, in a spiritual sense.

So there is that. But I think the point is that you can't discard that entirely and say I don’t want to be in service to anyone; I don’t want to be a father in any sense of the term at all; I don’t want to have anyone depending on me at all, and I just want to focus on myself and have fun.

If that's your mentality, there's just no way to be truly happy, except in the most fleeting moments that you talk about. You get more and more desperate to pursue those fleeting moments too. That's the cataclysmic abyss of hedonism because those will also get more and more rare the more you pursue them.

You know, I talked to Jocko Willink. Jocko wanted to be a mayhem-distributing soldier from the time he was about three, and you can tell that by just looking at him because he's such a monster. You know, and I imagine he was a boy that was quite difficult to socialize, right?

Because there are lots of boys who are—well, 5% of boys kick, hit, bite, and steal at the age of two. Very few girls, by the way, but about 5% of boys. Most of those boys are socialized by the age of four, by the way.

And most of the people who are miserable with their kids have no idea how to discipline them, right? So it’s like they have—they're not living with three kids; they're living with three unhoused, stupid attack dogs. And it's no bloody wonder that they're miserable because they're too fragmented and clueless and poorly educated and undisciplined to have any understanding at all of what it means to bring your children under some sort of acceptable social order.

And so that’s a complete catastrophe. I mean, it’s obviously the case that disregulated social relationships can make your life hell, but that doesn’t mean, as you pointed out, that that’s implicitly the case because you don’t have to let your children run roughshod over you.

It doesn’t take that much—Jesus, how much discipline does it take for a grown man to bring a three-year-old into alignment? I mean, he's three. You can probably take him both psychologically and physically, and if you can’t, well then you're a coward fundamentally, or you've had very bad models.

In any case, Jocko, when he went off to be the Special Forces character that he developed into, discovered very quickly that he really liked mentoring and that that was way better than just, what would you say, living for the sake of adventurous mayhem.

And you know, that was a real profound realization on his part that there wasn't anything better he could find to do with his life—his like monstrous Viking life easily could have been a criminal, right? Taken that pathway because he's got that aggressive temperament.

He found that there was nothing better that he could find than to mentor young men and to—that’s to adopt that paternal role. That’s the spirit of the patriarch that’s celebrated in the biblical stories.

It's part of the manifestation of the spirit of the God of Isaiah and Abraham—that long-term paternal focus that’s committed and the opposite of idiot hedonism and pride, which is celebrated for months now in our society at a time.

So Matt, let's take a turn to your movie. Do you want to walk people through that a bit? I saw it, by the way, and it looks to me like you'll have the same kind of radical success with it that you did with "What is a Woman?"

You've got this everyman quality about you, you know? And I think it's true, by the way. I mean, there is some of that about you, but you also do a good job of being a naive investigator into the crazy world of ideological possession. Do you want to walk us through the movie a little bit?

Sure, yeah. You know, we decided—of course, we had "What is a Woman?" and it was very successful for us, and we were thinking about, you know, this is going back two years ago, thinking about what topic do we want to tackle next and how to tackle it.

For me, it was very clear I wanted to get into—we talked about, you know, we did the movie; we investigated gender broadly speaking. Race is the other big one culturally, and so I knew I wanted to investigate that. The question was, like, how do you approach it?

And with "What is a Woman?" I mean, the strategy is right there in the title. It's just this one basic question that the whole thing hinges on. Now, with race, it's not quite like that; there isn't one, there's a lot of questions. There’s not one basic one.

And it’s just a different beast