https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=-Iqvnt64FMA
You’ve changed the lives of many young people and adults in this country, in the Anglosphere, in the West, in the world. You have a massive following. My girlfriend’s parents call you Uncle Jordan, for example. On the other hand, and this is just a fact, tons of people on the left, as we’ve just seen, because of your power and also your frontal attack on a lot of their views, hate you and viciously caricature you. Then there are these other figures, like Jonathan Haidt and Robbie George. They have a lot in common with you. They are respected academics. They are at least relatively well-known outside academia. They share your critiques of the humanities, of student activists, of trends in Western culture. They don’t have nearly the following that you do, but they also aren’t as hated or viciously caricatured. Moreover, they may have changed the minds of more people on college campuses. That is, people on campuses who have some sympathy for left activists or who may agree with much of what you say, but react negatively to confrontation and harsh criticism. Haidt has appealed to such individuals by taking the Dale Carnegie, win friends and influence people approach. So my questions are, first, do you agree with this dichotomy? Second, did you consciously choose one path over the other, and if so, why? Well, I mean, with Haidt, for example, there’s more power to him, as far as I’m concerned. He has a different temperament than me. He’s more introverted. He’s less volatile, I would say. He’s probably more agreeable or more polite anyways. And I think that what he’s doing is extremely effective, especially from the perspective of very carefully documenting the empirical facts about the ideological… the increasingly left-leaning ideological tilt of campuses, which is something that needs to be explored on empirical grounds. So, like I said, more power to him, and there’s nothing wrong with being reasonable. I guess… And then you asked, well, is that the right pathway for me? It’s like… Well, apparently not. What happened when I made my initial videos was that, you know, I had… I’d spoke… I’d talked to people a lot. I’ve worked with people a lot about negotiation. It’s one of the things that I specialized in, I would say, in my clinical and consulting practice, was teaching people how to negotiate. And I can tell you some things about negotiating that you might find interesting and useful. The first is you can’t negotiate from a position of weakness. So all of you who are going to be developing your careers in the future, you need to understand that if you want to push your career forward, first of all, that you do, in fact, have to push it forward, because if you’re competent and silent, you will be ignored. And, you know, that’s rough, because you might think, well, people should reward you because you’re competent, and yes, of course they should, but if you’re competent and silent, then you’re just not… You’re not a problem. You’re just part of the background that’s keeping everything functioning. And so if you want to develop your career, in terms of promotion, say, and salary, is like you have to be competent and you have to be strategic. And to be strategic, when you negotiate for a new position or for a new salary, you have to be able to say, if you don’t give me what I want, then something you don’t like will happen to you. And what that means, it’s not a physical threat, it’s that you have an option. You know, so you have your CV, your resume and order, right? You’re educated and competent and desirable to people outside of your immediate job. You’re willing to instantly put yourself in the job market and undergo the stress of finding a new position and undergoing interviews and all of that. And you have that all planned out, so that when you go talk to the person that you’re negotiating with, with regards to your salary, you’re credible. And you see, because they… It’s very seldom that you’re talking to the person who’s at the top of the pecking order, let’s say. What you need to do with them is to tell them a story that they can tell to their boss to make you not a problem. And a good story is, look, we really need this person because they’re hyper-competent and they have a better offer. It’s like, well, then you’re going to win the negotiation. But if you go in there with no power, well, you’re going to lose, obviously. So the first thing that you need to know if you’re going to negotiate is that you have to be able to say no. And what no means is that you’re not going to do it. And when I made the videos about Bill C-16, I thought it through. And I thought, there’s no damn way I’m following this law. I don’t care what happens. And I didn’t say that lightly. I thought it through. I thought, OK, well, let’s assume the worst case scenario, and the worst case scenario would be that a student would report me to the Ontario Human Rights Commission, and then they would do an investigation. Then they would find me guilty because the Ontario Human Rights Commission finds 99% of the people brought to it guilty because that’s what totalitarians do. And then I would refuse to pay the fine or to cooperate with whatever the re-education they would put me through would be, and then that would move to civil court. And then I would be fined for contempt, and then the whole legal catastrophe would unfold. And I thought, well, I could either do that, or I could allow the government to regulate my speech. It’s like, nope, that’s not happening. So you might think about that as confrontational. And it is confrontational. It’s like, there isn’t a goddamn thing that can be done to me to make me allow the government to compel my speech. That’s not happening. And the reason for that, I believe the reason for that, is because I spent decades studying totalitarianism. It’s not good. And the way the totalitarian states develop is that people give up their right to be, their right to exist with their own thoughts. They lie. That’s what happens, is that individuals sacrifice their own souls to the dictates of the state. And then everything goes badly sideways. And you think, well, how much evidence for that do we need? You’re looking at a quarter of a billion deaths. Isn’t that enough? Well, the people that I read who were profound, Victor Frankl is a good example for beginners if you want to read about this sort of thing. Wrote a book called Man’s Search for Meaning. And Frankl, and also Solzhenitsyn, and a variety of other commentators as well, who really looked into what happened in both in Nazi Germany and in the communist states. Their conclusion was universal, is that the lies of the state, the lies and tyranny of the state, are aided and abetted by the moral sacrifice of the individual. It’s not top down. The Nazis are telling you what to do, and you’re all innocent and obeying. That’s not how it works, is you falsify your being bit by bit, and you end up where you don’t want to be. And that’s a bad idea. And if you’re interested in that, there’s a great book called Ordinary Men. You read that, and you won’t be the same person afterwards. So I would beware of reading it. But it’s a story about these policemen in Germany. So they were middle-aged guys. And they grew up and were socialized before the Nazis came to power. So they were just your typical middle-class policemen. And they were brought into Poland after the Nazis had marched through and charged with keeping order in the occupied state. And their commander knew that it was going to be brutal, because they were in war, wartime. And they regard the Jews, for example, as enemies. So there was going to be a fair bit of rounding up with all of what that implied. And the commander told the policemen that they could go home if they wanted to, that they didn’t have to participate in this. And then what Ordinary Men does is document their transformation from ordinary policemen, the sort of people that you know, to guys who were taking naked pregnant women out into the middle of fields and shooting them in the back of the head. And it documents one step at a time how an ordinary person turns into someone like that. You think, well, we don’t want that sort of thing to happen anymore. Well, then you don’t want to be that sort of person. That’s how it’s fixed. And if you’re not going to be that sort of person, then you don’t take the first steps, because the first steps lead you down a pathway that, at least in principle, you don’t want to go. So while I think part of what makes me combative, say, compared to someone like Height is that I’ve spent years looking at the worst things there are to look at. And I’ve learned from that. And I’ve certainly learned things that I won’t do. And one of them is, I won’t let the government regulate my speech. It’s a mistake. I don’t care what compassionate principles hypothetically motivate that move. It was unprecedented in English common law, that move. It was all buried under this leftist compassion, which is mostly a lie.