https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=Ne5VbOMsQJc
I thought I’d do something different today, so I haven’t given this talk before I’m going to tackle the issue of free speech from a left-wing perspective It’s actually dead simple to provide a left-wing rationale for free speech It should be self-evident to people who are pursuing social justice that the most potent weapon in their artillery is the ability to communicate What are people who lack power have other than their ability to speak on their own behalf? And isn’t it on their behalf that the right to speak must be most jealously guarded? Anyway, I thought I would begin with a crucial observation There’s a fundamental structural reason why our political system has developed both a left and a right wing And that’s the tendency for scarce resources to become unequally distributed So let’s discuss that In my clinical practice I once had a client an older guy in his 80s He’d come to me after his wife had died because he was lonesome, but also because he was obsessed mostly with mathematical ideas And he had a whole statue he’d have printed of the most little icon he’d made out of the most beautiful mathematical equation Which equates I and E and pi in one simultaneous equation And I showed it to a woman in our department who was also very in love with mathematics And she was awestruck by the moment she saw it didn’t really have the same effect on me because I’m not someone who sees I’m not mathematically gifted enough to see beauty in a symbol that represents that sort of thing Anyways, I got to know him pretty well and was actually in some sense funny that he was paying me to to To kind of talk to me because I certainly learned as much or more from him than he did for me I did help him with his grief and I also helped him I think come to terms with this mathematical obsession He couldn’t stop thinking about mathematical issues, but that was more or less just the way he was. I mean he was wired that way and You know he felt bad about it in some sense Well, if you’re an obsessive genius, that’s just life You know there are people like that and they’re not that common and it’s good that there are some of them and he was one of them He had been a psychology student in his youth But then he switched into economics and tried to learn how to take his fortune which he had been quite successful at And he introduced me to some concepts that I hadn’t encountered which shocked me Because the concepts that he introduced me to were actually fundamental a fundamental importance and I couldn’t believe that I had not through so much education and so much further education and research And and developed a certain expertise in statistics, although I’m no statistical expert without encountering this this set ideas And he introduced me to what has come to be known as the Work of Bill Fredrick You know Fredrick Perito who is an Italian economist and also the work of Derek DeSolo of Price Who was someone who was studying scientific productivity back in the 1960s? He wrote a book called Big Science Little Science. I tried to get a copy of it on Amazon So I initially did and I believe the first edition is out of print. I think they were selling for about 630 bucks Which is quite staggering it shows you how interested people are in that particular piece of work And so I’ll tell you about DeSolo of Price first and then I’ll tell you about Perito and the Perito distribution So DeSolo of Price was interested in scientific productivity and basically an index scientific productivity by looking at how many scientific papers a given scientist publishes and Scientists are obsessed with their science, but they’re also obsessed with their scientific publication record because well they they like status just like the next person and Status has to be measured and and and and tracked and communicated partly because Well, you have to promote people and you have to assess them and you have to hire them And so you have to rank order them and so if you don’t keep track of people’s accomplishments Then you do that relatively stupidly and then you don’t hire or promote or place the proper people So the scientific community has organized itself very well and keeps very tight track of different metrics of research Poetry, let’s say and so one of those would be number of papers published in Here we do journals and that’s a pretty good one as it turns out pure number is actually as it turns out a very excellent index of scientific quality Partly because generally speaking quality and quantity in a productive field are quite tightly correlated and the reason for that is well It’s kind of obvious the more you practice at something the better you tend to get at it So quantity quality tends to be type in late But there are other indexes like The quality of the journal that you publish in and that’s indexed by the average number of citations That a given paper might get and citation count is an indication of impact right if no one cites your work like 80 percent of published humanities papers have zero citations 80 percent that’s absolutely appalling right if you just you write those papers They’re published in journals the libraries buy them zero people read them It’s a financial scam because Journals are very very expensive and publishers publish them because they’re expensive and libraries have to buy them and so the libraries buy them even though no one reads them and no one cites them and they stack the Libraries with them and they increase the ratio of noise to signal and we subsidize that it’s not very intelligent It’s one of the reasons the humanities are dying probably not fast enough Let’s say the more classical approach to the humanities I think the humanities are the heart of the university and they don’t mistake about it if the humanities don’t the universities are done The text stuff the scientific stuff that could be parceled out Other agencies and mechanisms can take care of that the humanities are the heart of the university we lose them we lose the university And that’s a terrible thing But it’s known as terrible as having them continue on the path that they’re on right now So okay, so anyways back to scientific productivity so the solar price was curious about who was productive and What the differences in productivity were and he had he he looked at The average number of publications that a phd student had and this was in the early 60s upon graduation now the rates of Dohnoxism, but upon graduation the ratio that the measures have stayed the same in terms of what i’m discussing So the median number of publications which is the typical number don’t the average number right the typical number that people would produce Was one one publication And then you might say okay fine The median person published one how many people publish two? And actually that was half as many as published one and The answer was well how many people published three the answer was half as many as published two and Four was half as many as three and five was half as many as four and so what you see is a staggeringly rapid drop off of productivity As you as you move upward in number of publications and there’s a there’s a side effect to that so so imagine a graph what happens is if you’re If you’re graphing number of people at a particular number of publications you have the vast majority of people at one Half as many as two half as many as that as three four five and then you get outliers out here That have maybe like 10 or maybe 20 and those people are well, they’re super geniuses in their field right there They’re unbelievably smart. They’re unbelievably fast. They’re unbelievably productive And as hard as any of them and so Price made an observation about scientific productivity and it’s a terrible terrible observation It’s a hate fact He observed that if you took a domain of scientific productivity And you were trying to figure out who did the productive work the answer was that It was the square root of the number the square root of the number of people who are operating in that particular specialization produced half of the publications Now it’s worthwhile thinking this through so let’s say there are 10 people in a particular domain This also implies applies to employee productivity Incorporations by the way same general principle. So if you’ve got 10 employees three of them you have to work Well, that’s not surprising, you know, you have people who don’t do any work You have some people who do so little work that they actually cost you money. In fact That’s the estimate for if I remember correctly 65 of managers Well, it’s hard for a company it’s easy to save one and they fail all the time Okay, so if you have 10 three you have to work. Well, that doesn’t seem so bad Well, if you have 25 five do have to work that’s getting rough if you have 100 it’s 10 if you have a thousand Well, it’s hardly any it’s 30 So what does that mean It means that Productivity is distributed in in a manner that was described by vilfrido perito and that’s the perio distribution And when you look at the distribution of income And the distribution of wealth It’s perio distributed which means that almost everyone has none And a few people have a little bit and then even fewer people have a little bit more than that And there’s some people bill gates, for example carlos slim Jeff bezos who have more money than god and And you might say well that’s a consequence of improper social structuring And the right response to that is no, it’s not It’s actually something more akin to a natural law It it governs the same distribution governs the size of cities. That’s interesting. It also governs the size of Planetary bodies that’s harder to blame on the patriarchy It also seems to govern The distribution every single thing that human beings produce creatively So for example, and i mean everything it’s really quite staggering. So it it it applies to a number of hockey goals score, for example Such that someone like wade gretzky. I read if he took away all his His actual goals he still had more points than any hockey player that ever lived And so, you know and the nhl that’s really interesting because the nhl is one percent No, it’s not it’s like one tenth of one tenth of one percent of all the people who play hockey get into the nhl Like no one right give it up. It’s not happening If it does happen and you’re like the average nhl guy like you’re a superstar and then there’s some son of a bitch like gretzky Better than you can actually just stay home right and that’s the case in all of these In all these domains of creative production I can tell you some other People who are kind of bratsky like in their in their old fashion So we can talk about pablo Picasso. He’s an interesting character. He had a very long productive life, right? He did if I remember correctly into his 90s one day. I looked up how many How many works of art Picasso produced and you know, you might think these are just sketches that he was like just thrown off But don’t think that go on to the Online Picasso archive where 15 000 of them have to be documented. Oh now I can give you the way my punch line but but but so so so I found that and and then I I did some research to find out how many artworks this crazy character had produced and the answer was 65 000 three days Every single day for 65 years So I tried that He wasn’t just obsessively producing artworks although he was a huge proportion of those things were masterpieces, right? So this was no piker this guy. He was he was something else and then bock is a good example j.s. Bach as well He wrote so much music that it would take a copyist 45 years Of eight hour days just to copy what he had proposed So these people are they’re off the scale with regards to to what they do You know when you see the same thing if you’re looking at packed with numbers or that sort of thing and so So the question is This is this is a really interesting problem. The question is two two questions Why in the world? Is the world set up like that? That’s the first question and the second question is Well, it makes Since it makes everything radically unfair in a sense at least with regards to distribution Maybe maybe it’s it’s good because those people are producing things like that and the rest of us at least in principle get to enjoy That but nonetheless there’s a big problem in terms of inequality of of distribution and ability and all of these things Why why is that the case? Well, here’s one reason So and this is something I worked out at least in part with my with my client Who also had a theory on societal revolutions, which I think was quite an intelligent theory He introduced me to a A field of inquiry that I never heard about before called econo physics And I didn’t know there were econo physicists, but there are and some of them are very productive and the other ones are The econo physicists figured out that you could Model the distribution of money in a population using the same equations that you could model the distribution of a gas into a vacuum So so there’s a deep entropy like phenomena driving The distribution of money So and here’s how it works Well, you guys have all played the novel right? and so Monopoly is basically a random walk. I mean, you know how to play normally you buy everything you can as fast as you can And the person who’s the luckiest wins that’s basically how it works You know, there’s a lot of I wouldn’t say a skill. There’s sort of a lot of stupidity But mostly barring that it’s a random walk, you know that because we played 10 monopoly games It’s very unlikely that you’re going to win More than your random share of it So think about what happens in monopolies. The first thing that happens is you start from a position of equity Everybody has exactly the same amount of money and then you engage in random training essentially Shake the dice, right? And so what happens? Well, what happens is so here’s the graph One bar here’s number of people So Like 20,000, but you have to be 85 It’s like what are you going to take? So, you know to some degree it depends on how you calculate wealth Right. So, okay. So what’s the point of all that? The equality exists and it’s actually a fundamental problem And even if you’re a conservative person You might say well, it’s a fundamental problem because if the inequality gets out of hand too badly Then the society starts to be stabilized and you know, you don’t want that Conservatives Republicans say they’re tough on crime progressive conservatives for that matter tough on crime. It’s like well What drives the worst kind of crime? They don’t they don’t violate the law What drives the worst kind of crime they don’t they don’t file a homicide Let’s say we know what it is. It’s inequality the correlation is like I said 48. It’s all of it. It’s all of it That’s what drives status competition I just interviewed dr. Martin Daly who’s a who’s a evolutionary psychologist at McMaster that infamous place and And he didn’t only he didn’t know the groundwork for this sort of research So i’m going to release that in about a week and he wrote a book recently called killing the competition It’s very nice book. He talks about male-on-male violence as a rational strategy for uncertain environment where there’s a lot of chaos And a lot of inequality it’s worth reading, you know, he’s very strongly biological Biologically oriented evolutionary psychologist very very highly credible in my estimation. The last two chapters deal with social contributors to Inequality and I don’t think that that’s a particularly powerful part of his book because I don’t think it deals with the fundamental issue I’m trying to tell you what the fundamental issue is. There’s something going on here That’s like a natural law that produces these wide disparities in outcome Now the question is well, what should we do about it? And the answer isn’t nothing because if you let it run to its conclusion then All hell breaks loose and you end up even if you’re rich like you think okay, you’re rich you’re down in central america You live in columbia you want to be rich in columbia. Well great you have to you don’t get to go outside except inside The confines of your compound you’re in a jail. So nice jail, you know, you’re the only people in there You can get to your family but fundamentally it’s a jail. You’ve got a huge house. Hooray more clean You’ve got this big fence around you with barbed wire you’ve got guards everywhere and you know if your kids happen to go out they get kidnapped It’s like are you rich? Well, I don’t think so. I lived in montreal. I was poor apparently speaking. I just had a student’s student’s uh a stifin and I didn’t spend much time in my apartment because It was a lucky place, but montreal is peaceful, right? Great infrastructure great street life. You’re safe there man three in the morning. You can go anywhere in the city There’s always something going on often. It’s very low cost you live out in the public essentially like in many yorkian cities Hell you’re rich Well part of the reason you’re rich under circumstances like that is because the inequality hasn’t gotten out of control And so, you know, we need to figure out how to define wealth too because wealth is not just what you happen to possess That might be status and status is useful but status and wealth are not the same thing Okay. So now the issue is Well There’s a problem The problem is inequality goods are unequally distributed and that’s not fair Now there’s additional problems that go along with that because one problem is is that if you happen to be in the top One percent it’s easy for your children easier for your children to also apply to socioeconomic lab Now it’s not as easy as people think And there’s a reasonable probability that you’ll fall And some of it is actually due to intelligence because it turns out that on average Intelligent people have more money than unintelligent people which hardly comes as a surprise and conscientious people have more money than Unconscious people which also hardly comes as a surprise and if you have intelligent parents, then you’re more likely to be intelligent Yourself not as intelligent as them because you regress to the mean even even the unequal distribution of intelligence Sorts itself out across time But you still you still have what you might describe as a technically unfair advantage Okay, so you’ve got a distribution problem. You’ve got a technically unfair Opportunity problem and it’s reasonable to point those out and that’s what the left does Right, that’s what the left does when it’s functioning properly It says look we’ve got to keep the damn inequality the gini coefficient Let’s say we’ve got to keep the inequality flattened out because we won’t have a civil society without it And we’ll leave people at the bottom who could be productive and useful And they won’t get an opportunity and then we won’t get to enjoy all the cool things they might have made or invented And that’s that’s fine. That’s a good point And you know the right way people say yeah, but if you flatten out the damn distribution too much Then you remove people’s incentives and you don’t want to do that too much. It’s like yeah, that’s right true enough So you got truth a you got truth b and Question is well which truth raise right? Well that brings us to the next one So i’m going to tell you some things about rank readers and i’m going to tell you some things about left leaders the first thing i’m going to do is tell you about why people are like that and We can and other labs Other labs first in fact Have been investigating the relationship between the fundamental biological temperaments Including intelligence and political let’s call it viewpoint Now it’s better than opinion or attitude the idea of a viewpoint because you see when you guys look at the world You don’t see the world you just see that tiny little fragment of the world that you find valuable Right, you can’t go those too complicated and I don’t know how many of you have seen the famous invisible gorilla video, but you know There’s a bunch of people playing basketball one team of white three of them one team in black three of them It has the basketballs back and forth between them. You’re supposed to count the number of times the white team passes the basketball They fill a video screen these these six people they’re dancing around bouncing the basketball You’re counting you’re thinking you’re pretty damn smart because you can count and then He watched this six foot gorilla Stands in the middle of the screen and eats his chest for like 15 seconds and then Saunches off and then the experimenter asks you did you notice anything strange and you say no And he says well, how many passes you say 16 and you think? And then he says did you see the gorilla and you say what gorilla or captain you say what gorilla? And so then you rerun the tape and sure enough quick count basketballs. There’s a gorilla right in the middle of the screen You are just not very right That’s right. You’re really blind. Look we are so blind And we’re so blind and so focused, you know, we’re kind of like a pen on a piece of paper, you know Human consciousness is like the ballpoint Point of that can it’s writing but it’s just barely making contact. No, it’s enough to write and move on which is not trivial But that’s how focused we are and we’re focused on the things that we find important The main question is why do we find the things we find important important? And that’s what that is at least in part Temperament filters for you. So for example, for example if you’re high and open you’re going to be attracted to beauty You’re going to be attracted to aesthetics you’re going to be attracted to ideas if you’re extroverted It’s like the whole world’s a party and you’re the entertainer if you’re neurotic It’s like keep things that are dangerous away from you if you’re agreeable It’s relationships you want to take care of things you want to form intimate relationships if you’re conscientious It’s like And then not only does that cover cover your attitudes, but it also Filters things for you. So you see the world through your temperament you can filter news through your temperament, right? And so well and part of that is because there’s different niches in the world It’s like, you know, maybe you’re an entertainer some people like to invite you to partisan You can be relied on so people ask you to help them move which is annoying for you And you know, maybe you’re agreeable So, you know if someone needs to have a talk about something that’s bothering them and you’re there maybe you’re disagreeable And if someone wants the blunt truth, then they’ll come and talk to you And so these are all places that you can fit in the social structure and in the world So that’s why there’s that variability and you know more power to it straight People come equipped in the world with different tools and the tools allow you to do different things and that’s diversity It’s real diversity not that idiot diversity that keeps getting pushed on us All right in place of real diversity All right. So so you’re the way you are now, you know Terror is highly terrible now it can be moved So, for example, if you have a child who’s hiding neuroticism, let’s say and you can tell if you have a child like that because They’re more fussy. It’s hard to calm them down. They start more easily to annoy. They’re more You know, they’re more cautious than strangers Um, if something new the thing that’s studied by drowden can be used like little robots to test kids to see how neurotic they grow He described it that way precisely You know some people you grow all this on the robot in your room these were like two-year-olds and Beeping away with light splashing and some of the kids the extroverted non-erotic ones would just Get right up and you know interact with the damn robot and the more tender ones would hide behind their parents mothers And that was evident as early as six months now what kagan found was that If the people who had what he called inhibited children were diligent in encouraging them to get out and explore the world that their Level of negative emotion could move towards normalization over a number of years, but they never became Truly fearless people, you know You could modify and of course if you have a kid like that and you mistreat them you make the environment very uncertain And you take away all the security from them then you can turn them into a complete Neurotic rat and they’ll never recover and so and so, you know The same applies for extroversion and the same applies for conscientiousness and for realness These things are deeply deeply rooted in people now you can move them around to some degree But first of all, why would you except maybe it’s nice to have a kid be a little more emotionally stable um it’s okay if that diversity exists and And uh It’s useful to know that it can’t be easily modulated that’s partly the reason that’s useful to know is because One of the things you want to know if you want to be successful is find a damn job that suits your temperament Because it’s easier than changing your temperament to suit the job So if you’re introverted and high in negative emotion, I would say sales No And if you’re like a radical extrovert it’s like computer programming probably not you’re going to be the guy that’s wandering around chatting To all the other programmers and doing the hell out of them because they’re introverted and they and conscientious All they want to do is be alone and work and so go away like joke Okay, so back to politics well it turns out that temperament predicts political belief very nicely now At the level of only predicting say party affiliation or voting behavior You can get about 10 of the various in political belief, which doesn’t sound like much But you’re just planting to throw an election right because you know, they hinge on time county margins Especially in places like the u.s But if you do a detailed analysis of people’s political beliefs, so you differentiate them much farther than you would with your voting Behavior you can get like 30 of the various it starts to get viciously powerful Powerful enough to make the assumption that the primary determinant of political belief is temperament and the primary determinant Temperament is biology and so you’re biologically Predisposed to be whatever party you are now you might say well, what about the well-known phenomenon? Where young people tend to be more liberal left-leaning young people and older people tend to be you know more conservative part of the reason For that is that people get more conscientious as they age and so that doesn’t Destroy the hypothesis at all now the reason that’s useful No, is that you know if you’re a lefty and you’re talking to someone who’s right-wing You’re not just talking to some blind idiot. You can’t see the obvious truth. You’re talking to someone who’s different than you And there’s reasons that they’re different they have a different niche. They walk about a different edge and that’s a real niche. It’s real So here’s an example I’ve been trying to predict entrepreneurial behavior for a long time. I’ve learned to do it quite successfully And it’s not obvious Who entrepreneurs are? You know, are they the same as executives are they the same as managers are they the same as the administrators? Are they the same as university professors or artists? None of that’s obvious turns out they’re the same as artists So entrepreneurs are creative people they’re high in openness Now what that means is they’re pretty damn good at coming up with new ideas and moving sideways and really moving sideways if they have to But they generally aren’t very good at all at running companies What you want to run a company is someone who’s conscientious and conscientious people They’ll do what they’re supposed to do if they know what it is. They’re not jumping all over the place They want to track to walk down, right? So if you have someone installing gas pipes where there’s not supposed to be any leaks because otherwise they explode You want some obsessive conscientious guy who wants to get it exactly right? You want some creative guy who wants to make like a coxswain rather than a pipe And so entrepreneurs are creative men they’re liberals and managers and administrators are on the conservative end and so you need liberal types to Start companies to be creative and you need conservative types to run them And so that’s kind of nice, you know Now how many creative types you need compared to how many managerial types is the same problem as how many liberals you need In the political sphere versus how many conservatives and actually that is it depends on circumstances Okay, so now we’ll go into a little more deeply. So Here’s the predictors the fundamental predictors of political belief Just liberal and conservative for now. I say that just left and right i’ll tell you about the political types in a moment We’ll just say the conventional left to right distribution the right wingers Are low in openness. That’s the creativity dimension, right? They can’t think of very many uses for a break if you ask them the use is well You can’t do anything with one brick. You need a bunch of them and then you build like a chimney Right? It’s obvious Creative guys think about all sorts of like it’s a hack, you know for the creative guy and so Oh And high in conscientiousness and conscientiousness fractionates into industriousness and orderliness and they’re particularly high in orderliness So that’s the conservative not very creative orderly And you know convention here’s some other things about them. Let’s say Orderly traditional hierarchical diligent dutiful Hygienic puritanical conventional narrow predictable Now some of those things especially if you’re liberal and think That for us, you know Traditional hierarchical diligent dutiful orderly. It’s like well, do you want things in order or not? You know what the traffic lights working what the trains to run on time so to speak You want things to do what they’re supposed to do. It’s like well, let me order people out If you know what you want to go do something exciting get the hell away from them, but they have the damn point Now you can get too ordered that’s for sure and you can get too many things That’s the thing is that there’s catastrophes at the end of the temperamental distributions Too neurotic not good too conscientious. You get a little on the obsessive side. Maybe you develop an eating disorder too agreeable Oh, I love everyone. I’m sacrificing myself for everyone. It’s like you’re resentful and bitter because you can’t stand up for yourself That’s what’s what happens to disagreeable prison for you I It’s like You go off the rails because people think wow you want to be happy. It’s like well how happy do you want to be? Happiness positive emotion makes you impulsive and there’s no one crazier than someone who’s mad at it It’s been all the money why because the world’s such a wonderful place. I should buy this and I should buy that Happy people are impulsive as you may have noticed if you’re one of those people who like to drink because it energizes you And you know, it’s probably 10 percent of the people in here like that. It’s like you drink you get energized Most of you just relax, but some of you get energized. It’s like you make good decisions when you’re in that No happiness means grab what you can grab now And sometimes that’s a good idea, but sometimes it’s really not So don’t be thinking that you know, you can’t be too happy it’s like you can’t be too happy So, you know, they’re excessive any virtue becomes a vice And that’s why the damn good wills and the damn good service have to talk Right. Okay. So you think you go to company you want to figure out how many managers versus how many entrepreneurs you need and that’s what that is depends on the circumstances There isn’t an answer you can’t say well you need like 40 percent creative people and 60 percent Conscientious people and the reason you can’t say that is because the environment is a giant snake And it continues its giant eternal server and you’re on its back You don’t know which way it’s going to move And if you fall off you die fall off the left side you die fall off the right side you die And so what you want to do is stay approximately in the middle. And so what you need is a conservative guy on one side pulling you Pulling and a little guy never pulling and what you hope is that by pulling each other you stay in the middle of the damn snake And then you think well, how do you decide? how to pull and the answer is Well, you can find it out if you want but then maybe you kill the other person or a bunch of them are maybe to kill you And maybe you need them as it turns out or maybe you’re dead. That doesn’t seem like a very good solution again that that’s actually the problem you’re trying to solve and so you can you can You can become slaves to the other side. You can oppress the other side. You can fight with the other side or Or you can talk That’s the alternative you can talk and you’re going to talk to those annoying people who aren’t like you and one of the advantages to that is Those annoying people who aren’t like you know things you don’t know All those people you get along with so well, they’re already like you You can’t learn anything from them. They just know the same things, you know Now that’s fine if you know everything you need to know So then you might ask yourself. Well, how do you know? Whether or not you need whether or not you know everything you need to know and that’s why you don’t suffer So if you’re suffering and you are Then I would suggest you probably have something to learn because maybe if you learned it You wouldn’t have to suffer because that’s actually why you learn And then I would say well since if you learn you don’t suffer so much You should talk to someone who knows some things you don’t because then they’ll tell you some things you don’t know and then maybe you won’t suffer So much and that’s fundamentally the purpose of free speech. Okay, so let’s retract a little bit now Human beings have problems Obviously life is tragic and short. We have problems. Everyone has problems poor people have problems Rich people have problems one of the things that’s actually quite sad about socialists and perhaps about capitalists as well Is that both radically overestimate the degree to which money can solve fundamental human existential problems. It actually can’t a bonus thought will Convince you of that. You just have to think about but the research literature is quite clear on that too Once you make enough money, so you’re not suffering from absolute privation, which means that bill collectors aren’t Chasing you around and making your life miserable then additional money has no effect on the quality of your life And so you get that maybe a mid midway out the working class maybe a little higher than that You know, you might still be resentful because there are other people who are richer than you But if you get more money doesn’t help you why? Well, why would it Like you still die Maybe a little you live a little longer. Maybe they can hook you to the ventilator for an extra year But divorce well, it doesn’t help you get along with your wife doesn’t help you necessarily get along with your kids You know, it doesn’t prevent you from dying For the great various diseases doesn’t make your life simpler. Well, sometimes it doesn’t but well sometimes it doesn’t You know, it’s it’s once you solve your basic economic problems because you do Just to repeat once you have running water heat shelter Not food and access to an infinite amount of information Your most rich as you can be except to be comparative your basic problems are solved You’ve already hit the 90th percentile and maybe you want to hit the 99th it might more power to you But you’ve already solved most of the problems and money’s going to solve Anyways People’s lives are problematic, right life is suffering That’s a fundamental rule and another fundamental rule is Accepting that helps you transcend it, which is a very strange very very serious thing Why do you think Okay, so here’s how animals think They actually really don’t but here’s here’s the equivalent I mean, they’re not stupid hunting animals are unbelievably intelligent, but It’s not the same kind of intelligence that we have so The mosquitoes are riding the giant circuit too. It’s flipping every some of the seeders are trying about to die And so how do they manage that? Well, their idea is well Let’s make and produce a whole slew of mosquitoes like a million of them million eggs And they’ll all hatch into the skills and they’ll all die except for one and it’ll make and produce another million mosquitoes and that’s how mosquitoes keep going and so like Many many mosquito eggs are the mosquitoes way of thinking Right because what the mosquito is doing is producing small variants of itself Has no idea which of those are going to survive they’re slightly different and then by the nature You know her run from this white fellow about except One mosquito and you know that because otherwise we’d be knee deep in the seals and I mean we are in canada I mean So mosquitoes produce a bunch of variants of themselves and then most of them died and then But you know one mosquito lives and hooray, that’s how they propagate themselves through time. So Human beings we do the opposite thing we produce very tiny Replicas of ourselves very few very number limited replicas of ourselves and we put a lot of effort into Educating them and we do that because Our children are capable of producing variants of themselves Internally, that’s what our brains are for So, you know you play video games you have an avatar you can send the avatar off pack The avatar dies, you know, get a little panic of a motion, but you’re not dead. So hooray Well, that’s what an idea is an idea is an avatar of you in the world And you can even think about this from an evolutionary perspective because the prefrontal cortex Which is the home of your capacity to think abstractly grew out of the motor cortex and the motor cortex is the thing that enables you to Voluntarily move through the world. And so what you do when you think is generate abstract versions of yourself Test them in a fictional environment figure out which ones are stupid and likely to die and then don’t act those out Now some of you are better than that at that than others But nonetheless The typical person doesn’t act out their stupidest ideas And so we internalize the darwinian process we think we produce variants of ourselves We kill them off ourselves and then we implement the ones that we think are most likely to survive pretty damn smart So yay us But thinking has limitations well limitations well we talked about one Camera You know if you’re a low person’s low and openness, this is one of the things that drives me crazy about conservatives So conservatives are blind to beauty. They’re so long. I remember harper. This is going to be one of the dumbest things he said He was talking about artists He makes some speech about like limousine artists that were Like Sponging off the public purse, you know these rich artists like there’s like three rich artists in canada Right. It’s the probability that you’re going to get rich as an artist is so low that I don’t know You’re like you’re like a you’re like a new you’re like an x-man if you’re if you’re an artist You’ve even made enough money to survive. It’s impossible. There’s no rich artists So But the conservatives they don’t they don’t see that because they don’t see the contribution that artists make they’re blind to it And so I can give you an example how open people work And how they contribute to the public good if you live in a large city like most of you You know, these trashy areas that are kind of cool And the old people go there And the reason they go there is because that’s the frontier And that’s where people go That’s their niche is the frontier there’s frontiers everywhere there’s frontiers in science There’s frontiers in mathematics. There’s frontiers in literature There’s frontiers in cities and the frontier in cities where there’s a little more chaos than order But there’s potential in that artistic type sniff that out not that they can only afford rent there Go hang out They can sniff out potential then they start to build galleries and then they start to build coffee shops And then they start to do cool things and it starts to get cool And then the less open people who are still kind of open go there and hang out. They think that’s cool. And then the entrepreneurial capitalist types start to notice and they start to talk the real estate and they have a place to enterprise and like the artists get chased away And then they go on and improve some other part of the city and so that’s what creative people do You know beauty has incredible incredible value. You think about europe. I mean communians are blind to beauty too as a people at least our cities Compared to european cities man like we’re we’re barbarians And you know you think about you think about the hundreds of millions or billions of dollars that those gap europeans spent unifying those cities You think about the return on investment that they gathered, you know I mean places like france and spain have more tourists than people all the time because people are going there from all the world to bathe in their beauty Also, you know, it’s useful to talk to the open types and to appreciate what they have to offer. So anyways You’re blind blind tempered Conservatives can’t see beauty Liberal types, especially if they’re low in orderliness, they can’t see the value of diligence or duty. So I read you the right way Traditional hierarchical diligent beautiful orderly hygienic pure technical conventional narrow and predictable the hygienic and pure Can really get out of hand that’s associated with disgust sensitivity and aren’t people are very sensitive to disgust and part of the reason that the hyper conservative types are Exclusionary is because they build walls around themselves to prevent contamination and we’ll get back to that and there’s reasons for that It’s not arbitrary prejudice although it can be arbitrary prejudice, unfortunately, it’s more complicated left-wingers radical fluid mercurial careless chaotic unsanitary and promiscuous All right. Well, some of that’s good. Well, maybe even the promiscuity is good. It depends on your perspective It’s a little harder on the old sexually transmitted disease problem, but you know How many people did age kill About 400 million, I think That’s a fairly high price to pay I would say So it’s not like there’s nothing serious at the bottom of these variances There’s something damn serious at the bottom of them and there’s room room for for informed opinions All right. So you got the conservative types low openness high and conscientiousness. You want something down there for people to do it They’re reliable. They’re traditional or hierarchical. They have value structures. They’re diligent. They make good soldiers It’s very good military accomplishment conscientiousness is a good predictor of grades. It’s a good predictor managerial ability It’s good predictor administrative ability. It’s not as good as IQ But it’s the next best thing but it doesn’t create creative production openness Openness is actually slightly natively correlated with scientific productivity as far as we can tell because science is mostly diligent rather than Than artistic because science is a delicate process, you know, it’s it’s a factory you can grind it out Which is part of what so damn powerful? So then i’m thinking well why Why would openness and conscientiousness go together? To determine political belief because they’re not correlating those those traits doesn’t seem to be a real reason why they should clump together to determine political To determine political opinion viewpoint I was thinking about this a lot and I thought Well, you know them open people They like They like the jack in the box jump out of the box, you know They don’t want the box to stay close They want all the possibility in the box to spring out and so they can do cool things with it And if you’re low in conscientiousness, they’re low in discussed sensitivity, so they don’t care if there are borders between things So on the one hand they’re not afraid of the absence of borders And on the other hand they like the exciting things that happens when borders are transgressed against and then I was thinking well The conservative types their high conscientiousness it’s like they like borders that’s order they like to be protected from contamination And they’re going to open us so they don’t get any thrill when the jack the boss jumps out of the box They just think that they should stay in the box for too long So then I thought well that’s interesting, you know, I bet you that works in every single level of analysis It’s like the conservative types like the border around concepts to remain tighter identities sexual identities Homes private property towns provinces states I thought well, that’s what happened in the last election. That’s what happened to trump because what did he say? Let’s build a wall. It’s about the borders. Well, that’s what’s happening in europe, too It’s about the borders and then I thought yeah, that’s right. That’s exactly right. That’s what politics is about It’s about borders between things and then at the fundamental argument is well should the borders be open or closed and the answer to that is And it depends on the circumstance Because we’re driving a giant serpent. I don’t know which way it’s going to turn and sometimes here’s what happens if you open the borders Right, let’s say you open them accidentally. So this is what happened to the native americans They open the borders. Let’s say and the spaniards showed up Well, you know the spaniards who showed up were a little on the antisocial side And they have a particularly rough time for the native americans and you know They conquered an entire territory with no men They had horses and armor and the indians were having a crisis at the time. And so, you know, that was bad luck But that wasn’t the real problem The real problem is that the spaniards were filthy absolutely filthy like all the european city dwellers of the time Packing these filthy cities living with animals right with disease Now, you know develop immunity with the diseases. So, you know, you’ve got a small box, but you probably didn’t die It just made you look very horrible you know you could live through chickenpox and you could live through measles and you could live through mumps and like Filthy you were but You were well armed against pathogens. Well, not the north americans not the americans. Not at all. There’s hardly any disease here So the spaniards showed up 95 percent of the native americans died Right Think about that So many of them died and the appearance showed up which is a long time after the spaniards showed up The native americans were happy to see them because they didn’t have enough people to take off their crops Decimated like a third of europeans died in the black. Yeah, that was a border issue too, right? Because the racks came in off the ships that had sailed somewhere else 30 percent of the europeans died in the black lake Well, that’s nothing compared to 95 percent It’s like open the borders to see what the hell happens It’s dangerous. You know Now the liberals will say well just hold on a minute. It’s like yeah There’s some danger in closed borders in open borders Well, they won’t say that because they can’t see that but if they were sensible they would say yeah We buy the argument that there’s danger in open borders, but let’s think of all the advantages to open borders between everything What’s like? Yeah Fluency and thought we already talked about the relationship between fluency and thought and the ability to think Divergently and creativity. It’s like well, we’re open borders between things between concepts between people between towns We’re not gonna have any new ideas. We’re not gonna get anything new happening We’re not going to go find this stranger from another culture and welcome them in and find out what the hell they’re up to Trade with them and get all their cool stuff That’s the big problem If we close the borders too tightly then what’s going to happen is we’re going to stay the same We’re going to stay the same We’re all going to look the same and talk the same and then the damn snake is going to move and every single one of us Is going to fall off it’s like Yeah Well, so the conservatives say yeah, well, you know open the borders death and the liberals say Close the borders death and the right both of them are right. That’s the thing. They’re both right And that’s why we need to talk to each other you see because We cannot figure out how to stay on the center of the snake without talking Now you’ve got your biases your cognitive biases They’re built into you and so you’re blind to almost all the world You’re blind to almost all the world and so you’re going to sit there and think and if you’re thinking you actually Break yourself into avatars and you give all those avatars a voice and then you let them hash it out And the one that wins you go with so even when you’re thinking you’re basically engaged in dialogue It’s just that you’re doing it internally But you have limits on that because unless you’re very good at thinking and you’re probably not because people are very good at thinking They’re really going to jump into pre-determined conclusions and very bad at thinking Because it’s hard to think it’s annoying. It’s stressful. It’s technically difficult. It requires training You have to be able to write you have to be able to think clearly You have to be able to formulate an argument. You have to have read. It’s like it’s really hard to think so As much as you just rely on your built-in a priori temperamental filters, which is what people do to a great degree But let’s say you can think to some degree well good So that means there’s forms of death and misery that you can avoid with some degree of of utility But you’re full of biases. You’re gonna miss this man. This is part of why married people live longer You marry someone they’re lying because they think differently than you but that’s so helpful if you listen to them If they can have two brains and two brains actually gets you through the world better than one brain If the brains are communicating and if they have some differences, right because then they’re not just producing the same output so If I open myself up to someone else and talk to them engaging dialogue Then they can correct the errors in my thinking and then perhaps Both of us have less less chance of suffering and dying And so the reason that you have to engage your dialogue is because that lifts you out of your parochial viewpoint And helps you clarify the world and clarify how to act in the world with all these different people that you have to get along with That’s part of it, but also to survive just in the world I’ll make a little sidebar here Is something i’m going to talk about more in the future I’ve been thinking about those damn postmodernists and they They have this idea. It’s a pernicious horrible idea That’s true that Any text has an infinite number of potential interpretations And that therefore there’s no way of determining which interpretation is correct now the problem with that interpretation is that In some perverse sense it’s true Because there are so many phenomena that lay themselves out before you in the world that you can construe them in multiple different ways But here’s where they’re wrong They say you can interpret a text anyway and therefore you can interpret the world anyway because the world is like a text In that it has multiple potential interpretations, but here’s where they’re wrong Some of those interpretations will kill you Some of those interpretations will make you suffer some of those interpretations will make people around you suffer Some of those interpretations will make people hate you some of those interpretations will make people refuse to cooperate with you So then you say well, there’s this multiplicity of interpretations But it’s constrained by the necessity of preserving yourself preserving diadic relationships preserving the broader social social context, so acting in a manner so that pursuing your own selfish interests doesn’t destabilize the whole damn game. And also that when you act in the actual world, it doesn’t slap you so hard across the face that you perish. And so, yes, there are a multiplicity of interpretations, but there is a very tiny fraction of them that actually have any functional utility. So that underlines completely the nihilistic argument related to multiplicity that’s at the basis of postmodernism. Now, they know it’s at the basis of postmodernism because that’s why they turned to Marxism to orient themselves, because you can’t do anything if you’re a postmodernist because there’s no proper solution. So, anyways, back to pre-stige. You have to think because if you don’t think, you die. But you’re too stupid to think properly. You have to talk to other people because they tell you why you’re stupid. And then if you listen, you’re not quite so stupid and you don’t die so often. So that’s the bottom line. And then you might say, well, who should you talk to? And the answer is, well, if you talk to the people that you agree with, you don’t learn anything because they already think the same way you do. And unless you’re 100% correct, and I would be very, very hesitant about concluding that if you’re still suffering, unless you’re 100% correct, then you better go find out an enemy to talk to because maybe they’ll point something out to you that you seriously, seriously, seriously need to know. And so, you know, our culture, Western civilization, let’s say, roughly speaking, is a good culture, man. You know, like, I’m no utopian. It’s got its problems. If you compare it to a hypothetical utopia, it’s hell on earth. Except when that hypothetical utopia actually tries to manifest itself because then you find out what hell on earth really is. But that isn’t how you compare a society. What you do is you take a society and you say, well, how’s it different compared to, like, other societies? And the answer is, well, you won’t hear a good school because they can go wherever they want. And so where do they go? Well, they go to that tiny handful of countries that has the legacy that’s tightly associated with free speech. Why? Because basically we can solve our problems. That doesn’t mean we don’t have any, we got lots, but we can solve them. Why? Because we figured something out. We figured out that there’s nothing more important than free speech because that’s what thinking is. That’s the logos that sits at the bottom of our culture, right? The divine word that transforms chaos into order continually. And you partake in that, not individually, precisely, although you do as an individual. You participate that by engaging in conversation, communication with other souls. And those souls set you straight. And if you’re not straight, then you suffer and die. And so do people around you. And maybe you’re aiming at that because lots of people aim at that. But if you’re not aiming at that and if you’re aiming at that, you should really think it through. Some people have thought it through and concluded that. They’ve concluded that. It’s like being is a catastrophe. I’m going to work to bring it to a halt. There is no case for that. I think it’s a terrible case. I think it’s a profoundly flawed case because it’s predicated on the idea that you’ve already done everything you could to improve things and you haven’t. So I would say, well, before you transform yourself into the ultimate judge of being, you should try to get your act together to some degree and see if you can improve things around you before you render your final judgment. And how do you do that? Well, with humility, what does that mean? What do you know? Not enough. That’s why things aren’t going so well. That’s the evidence. They’re not going as well for you as they could be. They’re not going as well for your family as they could be or your community or your country or the world or the ecosystem for that matter. There are problems you could be trying to solve. Then you ask yourself, well, are you trying to solve them? That’s not the right question. The right question is, are you trying to solve them with all your heart and mind and soul? And if the answer to that is no, I spend six hours a day wasting time, which is pretty much standard, then you’ve got no right to say anything at all except, it’s time to get your act together. And so it’s time to get your act together for everyone, right? That’s how you care. That’s the right response. Is that urgency property towards being and then being humble, knowing that you don’t have your act together, that maybe you open your eyes a little bit, you think, God, there’s a lot of things I don’t know and I’m blind and stupid. And there’s some people who are different from me. And maybe if I talk to them, listen, mostly, because you would believe what people will bloody well tell you if you listen to them. It’s just absolutely unbelievable what they’ll tell you. I have thousands of hours of experience listening to people because I’m a political psychologist. It’s like, it’s a Dostoevsky novel over and over and over. Amazing. Once you get them out of their idiot ideological presuppositions and they start talking about the reality that they’re actually in contact with, they’re endlessly revealing and remarkable. And you learn an immense amount by listening to them. And what a good deal that is because you’re not very smart and you’re suffering. So, you know, if you can learn something from someone, especially someone different than you, it’s like, well, it’s a good day. It’s a good day. It’s a great day. So, OK, so. Back to the left wing. Well, there has to be a left wing. I told you why. That’s what the Koreans tell you. Sorry. They’re annoying. They’re messy. They’re chaotic. A lot of them are conscientious. You know, they let things disintegrate around them. They don’t pick up after themselves. But someone’s going to think laterally because sometimes we need that. And then so they’re annoying, but they’re necessary. Then the conservatives. Well, you know, they’ve got the blinders on, man. And they’re just not that exciting. They’re getting around to this page. And they’re blind as a beauty. And they’re a little orderly. And they’re a little discriminatory. They like things to stay where they are. So they’re not that much fun to party with. But if you want something done, well, they’re your people. And, you know, they’re probably the people that you want to be, well, sterilizing your hypodermic needles, for example. Orderly person is really good for that. So let’s be a little appreciative of the political distribution. And let’s understand that we need to communicate to stay on the back of the damn snake. OK, so then I’ll close with a little more elaborate discussion. I’ll close with a little more elaboration on the left wing rationale for free speech. OK, so the story right now is something like free speech is being used by fascists to oppress the oppressed. Well, as far as the politically correct radical left is concerned, everything is being used to oppress the oppressed. It’s like they’ve got a one-size-fits-all solution to everything. And it’s crooked intellectually. And it’s pathological morally. And the last part of it is just too easy. It’s like, I’m on the side of the oppressed. That makes me a good person. It’s like, no, it doesn’t. First of all, what makes you think you’re on the side of the oppressed? Really? You really dare to claim that? It’s not so easy to be on the side of the oppressed. It takes a hell of a lot of work to be on the side of the oppressed. And waving a few signs in the face of people that you think you hate, that’s not being on the side of the oppressed. That’s no better than saying, well, I’m against poverty. It’s like, well, you know, look, wonderful. Find someone who’s for poverty. That was this crazy idea, which I just ran into again. I was invited to speak at Linfield College, in the south of here. And all the flight arrangements were made and everything. They canceled it. Two days ago, they didn’t even email me to tell me. They just canceled it. You know, I got a word that there was some controversy about me coming to visit. There’s a little article in their student newspaper. Some English professor said that, I don’t know, it was reprehensible to invite me or something, that I was making the space unsafe, as you can tell. Which I like to do, by the way. I like to make spaces unsafe. I like to challenge people for suppositions and get down to the difficult matter at hand. And so I read that, and you know, it was kind of annoying, so I tweeted that one time. Off to Linfield College to violate some safe spaces. It was a joke. What a funny laugh. It was a joke. It was a satirical joke. And they got wind of it. That’s a pretty vicious plea, man. So they canceled it. So, it doesn’t matter, because we’ve arranged a different venue. It’s not going anywhere anyways. What the hell? I mean, seriously. Of all the people who should be in favor of free speech, it should be the people who are hypothetically on the side of the oppressed. Why? Well, look, the radical left precepts this issue is everything’s a hyperdominant patriarchy, and the people have all the power. Okay, well, then the people have the talk, you have to say whatever the hell they want. Whatever they want. They own the newspapers, they own the TV stations, they own the advertisements, they own the corporations. They can say whatever they want, whenever. They don’t need to be protected. Obviously, they have all the power. And I’m speaking from within that ideological framework, right? Well, who needs protection if they want to speak? Obviously, the people who are at the bottom. Okay, so let’s review the evidence. Social movements of the 20th century. What’s a left-wing mantra? Speak truth to power. Oh, that means you’ve got to be able to speak. You have to be able to speak if you’re going to speak truth to power. And hypothetically, you’re not going to be telling power things like, hey, it’s lovely that you’ve got all the power. You’re going to be criticizing it like Michael Moore, eh? Like Michael Moore. And I need a kick out of Michael Moore. He’s got a lot of courage, that guy. And he’s a comrade. And, anyhow, he’s a showboat. He’s sort of like the left’s version of Milo Yiannopoulos. People like that, the marketers like that, comedians like that, they’ve got a role to play because they’re good social critics, you know? So, fine, if you’re going to speak truth to power, well, then you’d better be able to speak. That’s the fundamental issue. So, okay, so you’re a left-winger. You want to flatten out the inequality problem. And you think, well, jeez, I’d better be able to talk about this at least. And then you think, well, let’s restrict free speech. And then you think, here’s a lesson from the military. If you make a weapon, your enemy has it for 15 years. So, you know, the logical conclusion to that is something like, you’ve got to be slightly careful about which weapons you make. And so what’s the lesson for the free speech truncators? It’s like, you guys are the ones who think that everyone else has the power. You start restricting free speech. What you’re doing, you’re doing it radically, continually, nonstop. It’s like, you think for a moment that those people who have the power, let’s say the crooked people who have the power, just to clarify, you think that they’re not going to get a lot better at that than you really quick. You’re so goddamn naive that it’s not even funny. They’re going to be those every single weapon you use to oppress free speech is going to be aimed back at you and forced at you can’t even imagine. And so then you wonder, well, the people who are pushing this, what’s up with it? Are they naive? Is that bull? Are they naive? Are they naive or are they willfully blind or are they actually malevolent? Are they actually aiming at trouble? Now I’ll go with naive because that’s the simplest explanation. But I wouldn’t rule out the other ones. All right, so let’s look at the 20th century. Suffragettes and women’s rights, power back of the body, freedom of speech, labor unions. Believe me, the powerful did not want the labor unions to organize. How did that come about? Freedom of speech. How about civil rights for black people and Mexicans? The Mexican Civil Rights Movement isn’t as well known. How did that come about? How about constitutional protection for freedom of speech? What about the student movement that started in that absolute rat-sness Berkeley? The free speech movement started in 1964 or 1965 at Berkeley. Why? Well, there was a ban on non-standard campus political activities. And so the students fought for the right to free speech and academic freedom. And they won. Well, they weren’t fascists. They were on the left, those people, right? They were already allied with the Civil Rights Movement. They became the leaders of the students movement and the Viet Nam anti-war movement. Two other movements which depended on free speech. What about the environmental movement? Or the LGBT movement? Were those not dependent on free speech? Well, obviously, these were to use the power of marginalized people. All they had was their capacity to formulate an argument to make a stance. That’s it. They didn’t have the power, right? Right? Lefties? They didn’t have the power. That’s the bloody claim. So what power did they have? They had the power to speak. Journalism, that’s actually power. It’s real power. And so if you’re on the side of the oppressed, like you claim, then you should be standing up as diligently as you possibly can for free speech because it’s the most powerful weapon you have to right the societal wrongs that you’re hypothetically and perhaps realistically concerned about. We have to discuss inequality, for example. We have to discuss it long enough until we figure out how to stop everything from stacking up at one end of the distribution and everyone else hitting zero. And this is going to be a big problem. So I’ll give you an example. The Tesla guys, they’re building autonomous automobiles. But they’re not stupid, you know. You may have noticed that. They’re building autonomous vehicles. They’re building robots. And robots, autonomous robots, are first going to take the shape of a car. But an autonomous car is no more a car than a car with a horse-drawn carriage. They’re not the same thing. They’re not even close to the same thing. And they’re going to produce societal transformations that are so radical that they’re unimaginable. But I can tell you, one of the transformations that’s going to occur, what’s the most common source of employment for men in North America? Driver. Right. And so once the autonomous robots show up, which isn’t going to be very long, then what are all those people going to do? And the answer is, they’re going to stack up at zero. And that’s what’s already happened in the United States in particular, in the Rust Belt. I mean, that’s why Trump got elected, right? Because the damn Democrats, in their absolute stupidity, abandoned the working class whom they purported to represent. Well, it’s not good. They’re going to be dispossessed people. It’s going to be a big problem. And we need to figure out how to solve it. And so we need an active left. We need a left that actually stands for not postmodernism and not damnable, murderous, reprehensible Marxism. Like that has to go. You know? I’ve been accused, broadly times, of attracting Nazis. And I have… I don’t know what to say about that. It doesn’t seem to be true. But in any case, that’s an accusation that’s beleveling. But here’s something strange. At McMaster, you know, there’s that big demonstration against me. And there’s a bunch of students there. Maybe they were students. They were professional protestor types. And if they were students, they haven’t been educated by their professors. They have been indoctrinated into what’s essentially a cult. And they showed up with a big bag that had a hammer and sickle on it. It’s like, what the hell? No, I’m serious. This is not funny. This is not funny. The sickle was mostly used to cut off people’s heads. What happened in the 20th century was no goddamn joke. And we’re not out of it yet. We still have another career to deal with. Oh, that isn’t real communism. It’s like, oh, yes, it is. Oh, yes, it is. We see plenty of examples of real communism. And so I would say, you’ll be able to tell when the universities sort themselves out properly because people will no more dare to go to a protest with a bloody hammer and sickle than they would dare to go in a Nazi uniform. One in five social scientists in universities identify themselves as Marxists. It’s like, why the hell is that acceptable? What does it take for us to learn? Well, obviously, a couple hundred million deaths and the cold war and the threat of nuclear, thermonuclear annihilation wasn’t enough. Well, what is? Anyways. The mythological investigations that I’ve done, trying to get to the bottom of things, have indicated to me that there’s something to the notion of the eternal human soul. Now, you can call it a metaphor if you want. That’s fine. Metaphors turn out to be extraordinarily powerful things. But then you might ask, well, how is this soul to be properly conceptualized? And the way that it’s been conceptualized in the West is either as the prophetic voice, so you might think about that as a Jewish conceptualization, or as the logos. And what is that? Well, it’s the voice that restructures inequitable social societies. That’s the prophetic voice. And it’s the voice that transforms the chaos of potential, which is everywhere around us, into habitable order. And the manner in which that soul manifests itself so that society can be guided by it is through dialogue, through communication, through free speech. And so to put a limitation on that is to put a limitation, I would say, on the Holy Spirit itself. And that’s the sin that cannot be forgiven. And so I would say, wake up. Stop allowing people to do this. They are no one’s friend. Left, right, whatever. Any good you can possibly do is dependent on your ability to communicate what you believe as clearly as possible. So it’s your holy duty to do that. And anyone who interferes with that interferes with the proper unfolding of being itself. And it’s a catastrophe that at the moment the universities in general and the humanities specifically are the worst offenders. Thank you. Applause So it’s time for our Q&A. So if you’re a VIP ticket holder, you get to ask a question. See more in the hold. Hey, Dr. Peterson. Thanks a lot for coming. You’re awesome. We all love what you’ve done. Yeah, we applaud you greatly for it. I don’t actually have a question. I was just wondering if you could comment on kind of the before and after of your life from the point where you did that video games political correctness. You just want to tell a little anecdote or a little story about kind of the vortex you got sucked into and your experience with that. Cool. Thanks a lot. Okay, I can do that. Well, the first part of it, mostly it’s surreal. I think it’s the right way of putting it. I mean, so how would you delineate this surreal element of it? Well, first of all, you know, I need these videos. And as I’ve said, I need them. Well, part of it is I’m old and curious. You know, without such curious people, we eat apples and then we’re like, I’m a parrots. So I was doing a bunch of things at the same time because I do that as well. And I started to toy with YouTube, right? Because I have a little bit of exposure on public television in Ontario and they get a series on my last meeting course. And so I put those on YouTube and people watched them a little bit. And then I started putting my lectures on YouTube and I thought that was cool. I thought it’s a new technology. You know, I thought mostly it was for cat videos and that sort of thing, which it was and now it isn’t. You know, it’s a Frankenstein monster like almost everything we create. And so I got a million views by last April and that’s when I set up my Patreon account because I was curious about how creative people could monetize their products. And Patreon seemed like an interesting thing. So I thought I’d explore it. The best thing to do to do that is to get involved in it, right? Because then you really learn how to do it. So I had that set up and I noticed by April I’ve had like a million views, I thought, over three years. And I had about 10,000 subscribers and I thought, you know, that’s a lot. That’s a lot of views, man. If I wrote a book and sold a million copies, it’d be, you know, I’d be doing touchdown dances in ecstasy, which you never see something like this. And so in September, October, I’ve been thinking about political practice for quite a while. I was writing a book which was going to be published in, I think, February. It’s called 12… The 12 things everyone… No, it’s called 12 Rules for Life, an Antidote to Chaos. That’s what it’s called. It’s coming out very soon. One of those chapters is called… chapters in that book is called Don’t Bother Children When They’re Skateboarding. And it’s about political correctness. And so it was obsessing me, because as soon as you get into that, it just takes over your life. And I got news about this bill, C-16, and then I investigated it. I also had a couple of political clients who’d been driven beyond their limit of tolerance by politically correct people in the workplace who were really harassing the hell out of them. They were sensible people. And so all that sort of came together, and I thought, I was not sleeping one night, and I could either write or I could make a video. I thought, what the hell, make a video and see if I can sort myself out, what goes to this political correct issue. The university had also just announced that it was going to make it mandatory for their human resources people to undergo anti-unconscious bias training, which I think is reprehensible. And so I made one video telling about why I thought Bill C-16 was dangerous, and then I made another one about anti-biased training and unconscious bias training. And then I was a little clearer in my thinking, and I thought that was that. And I thought, well, you know, some people will watch this. That turned out to be true. And then it’s been a tornado since then, and some of it’s great. Like, this is great. Some of it’s not so great. You know, it was very worrisome for me for about two months, mostly, I would say, on behalf of my family, because my job was in jeopardy, quite severe jeopardy. I got my two warning letters from the university, which were full of lies, mostly omissions of truth. And I know how companies, corporations, organizations fire people, and they send three letters of warning, and then they take action. And that’s what they were doing, going down the HR pathway, which they were continuing to go down, except that I don’t have a lot of public support. And so what happened to begin with was the journalists, they didn’t know whether I was a bad guy or a good guy. And fair enough. But some of them actually read the material I was relating on my videos and thought, oh, he’s actually just telling people what’s actually in the legislation. And they were journalists, and the intelligent ones, who tend to be more concerned about free speech than most. And so then a bunch of journalists started acting in my favor. And then the social justice warriors played their role because they came out to the free speech rally and did a variety of cinematically, describe the mass, not strategically viable things. One of the things I’ve noticed, and this has been quite educating, I would say, cynical and dark-hearted way, every time that the social justice warriors come after me, all I have to do is stand back and let them invalidate themselves. And that actually becomes somewhat amusing, although it’s stressful. I mean, take Master, what would you call it, debacle, because an example of that is I could just sit back and let the performance occur because I knew that a very large number of people would want to watch it. And a very large number of people did. And so, great. I… Most of the rest of it is just surreal. I have no idea where it’s going to go. I don’t really have any idea what’s happening. It’s very difficult for me to pick the proper level of analysis. But I do believe that the fundamental level of analysis in regards to social movements, at the deepest level is theological. Above that is philosophical. What’s happening in the West is somewhere between philosophical and theological. We’re in a moment of crisis, and things can go either way. And I’m hoping that they go directly. And I’m hoping that what I’m doing is facilitating that and trying to be very careful with what I do and with what I say. And… And then to close is that I decided a long time ago that there… I learned a long time ago that there are two ways of propelling yourself through life. One is you decide what you want, use your language to get it. Now that’s a lot better than not giving anything. This is maybe the further way of giving things like, except that’s not giving things like. Use your language to get what you want. Here’s another one. You use your language to state what you observe and conceptualize as clearly as you possibly can and let whatever happen is going to happen. So that’s what I tried to do. And so this is all what’s happened. And fundamentally it’s okay with me because I already decided that whatever the outcome was of doing that was going to be okay. It’s an act of faith. It’s the act of faith, actually. Because you decide, does the world run better on truth or falsehood? If it runs better on truth, that’s a decision. Then you speak the truth. And you let the cards fall where they fall. And so I’m watching where they fall. And I’m trying to stay intact. And so far, it’s working. So thank God. Alright, thanks a lot. Is it okay if we go past 9? Yeah. Let’s make a limit though because people want to know what the hell is going on. So how about 20 after? What time is it? It’s almost 9 now. Okay, how about 20 after? Is that good? Yeah. Okay, because I won’t be intelligible after. That’s the worst thing. With open dialogue being the only thing that helps keep communication between two completely different viewpoints, how do you combat the people who are equating certain words with violence? Okay, well first of all, I wouldn’t say that you necessarily come back. Right? So there’s an analogous problem in clinical psychology, which is what do you do to help someone who doesn’t want to be helped? And the answer is, I can use a New Testament quote to get to that. It’s another harsh one. Don’t cast pearls before swine. It took me a long time to understand that statement. And what it means is that you devalue what’s valuable by offering it to people who will not appreciate it. If you can engage in dialogue with someone, then go find someone that you can engage in dialogue with. And maybe, and you might say, well, what about those people? And I’m just saying, what the best thing to do with them? The first answer is, you let the dead bury the dead. And the second answer is, the only way that you get a person out of a self-defined hell is by example. So you walk away from people you cannot communicate with. You communicate with people who you can communicate with, and you try to put your life at risk. And then you hope that some of them wake up, and some of them will. So, yeah. Thank you. Dr. Peterson, thank you very much for your speech tonight. It was fantastic. My question is very simple. It has to do with your crowdfunding of academic research, which you recently did on Indiegogo for your evidence in the political crisis. And you raised more than double so far your original goal. It’s now at $162,000, which is amazing. And I hope the organizers of this event will post the link so we can all get more money. But my question is, this is the first time I’ve ever seen university research being funded by the public at large, as opposed to through one of the Canadian research councils, which usually are, there’s a committee and there’s a different process. So to me it seems like it’s precedent setting and it’s novel and groundbreaking. How do you think this will change the pattern of research funding in Canada? Well, that’s a good question. I mean, one of the things, I had thought about, first of all, that’s not my campaign, right? It’s the Rebellious campaign. Now they asked me if they could run it and I said yes, but I don’t believe I would have done it on my own. Because it seemed like… Now what did it seem like? It seems in some sense like capitalizing on misfortune. So anyway, they did it and I’m happy about that. But when they decided to do it, I talked to a number of people that I knew about what this could conceivably mean. And one of the things that we thought about was setting up a system whereby other professors could do the same thing, other researchers. Now, there are some sites like that set up. I think there’s one called experiment.com. I thought I was right by the way, but it does fund these sorts of things. It might be worth investigating whether this is setting a reasonable and productive precedent, but it isn’t obvious to me that I have the time to investigate that well enough to figure out how to do it. And that’s partly what I’m trying to figure out right now. So I’m going to be talking to people over the next couple of months in all likelihood. I have some supporters who are reasonably well capitalized and they are interested in working to allow that sort of thing to happen. But it’s very complicated and I’m already occupied. And so the answer is I don’t know what sort of precedent it will set. I do know that it’s going to keep my graduate students working for the next three years. So with any luck I’ll apply for another grant this fall and get it and then I’ll have more money than I would have and that will be funny. So I hope that’s what will happen. I’d like to thank you for posting your videos, the lectures on the Jungian archetypes present in the Lion King. It’s worthwhile if anyone’s interested. My question though is about the limits and restrictions on free speech. So obviously we’re opposed to anyone who wants to restrict free speech. However, how do we deal with issues like death threats or dishonest or pernicious advertising? Yeah, well I would say we’ve already dealt with that pretty nicely. There are limits to commercial speech that it be…I think English common law actually has dealt with that very nicely. I’m a great admirer of English common law. English common law is an evolved legal system, right? So just so you know, because you should know, because our legal system has become followed up by the what we would call intromission of French civil law precepts into the English common law system, which is a catastrophe in my estimation. Under English common law, you have all the rights there are. They’re not granted to you by the government. You have them. And then what’s happened in English common law is when you have some rights and I have some rights, now we have a scratch. Because we don’t know where one right ends and the other one begins. And so then we take each other to court and then the court decides, roughly speaking, where the line should be drawn. And then the law builds organically across time. And having done that, it’s come up with all sorts of, we could call them limitations on, I wouldn’t say free speech precisely, because I don’t really believe that that’s what they are. But you can’t utter death threats. So, and I guess it’s part of the paradoxical situation where sometimes what you’re doing with your free speech is interfering with the continuation of free speech, in which case you should be stopped. It’s something like that. And so, you know, there should be limits on seditious speech of some sort, because that’s treasonable speech, you know. And I guess if what you’re doing is oriented towards demolishing the structure upon which your own freedom depends, then something has to be, there has to be a limit there. Now where that limit should be, well, that’s a tough one. But a lot of that’s already been said, you know. There’s lots of things. You can’t utter death threats. You can’t incite to criminal activity. Right? You can’t blatantly lie if you’re a commercial vendor. In fact, if you can vend tobacco, for example, and that’s been sorted out in the Supreme Court in the US, you have to put warnings on your tobacco product. That’s compelled speech, which was what I was objecting to with Bill C-16. But outside of the commercial domain, there hasn’t been any attempt to compel speech, and that’s how it should be. So I think those things have to really be dealt with on a case by case basis, because the devil’s in the details. And that’s also why I think the English common law is such a staggeringly brilliant contribution to world culture. And, you know, if you want to think, well, is there any empirical evidence for that? It’s like, yeah, most countries that were founded on English common law are rich. In the Americas, founded by France, poor. Founded by Portugal, poor. Founded by Spain, poor. Founded by England, rich. And it’s the legal structure. Now that’s not all, obviously. There’s a great book, what was it called? The Wealth and Poverty of Nations. It was written by a Harvard Americas professor who analyzed, he was really curious about why some countries in the Americas were poor and some were rich, because they all have natural resources. So, you know, what’s going on? And so and then other countries like Japan, you know, they’ve got no natural resources. And they’re rich. A functioning legal system is the ultimate natural resources. Thanks for coming on. Yep. This relates to Sam Harris’s conception of fuel. Yeah, I’m slightly unrelated, but I’m just going to go with it, if you don’t mind. So why can’t the subjective eye be an illusion and still fit into your methodological perspective? Well, see, the thing about a question like that, and this is the truth. This is the truth about any question like that. When you say, is A equivalent to B? The answer is, it depends on how you define A and depends on how you define B. Like it’s a weasel answer in some sense, but it’s actually the correct answer. Because I can’t answer that question without knowing what you specifically mean by illusion and specifically mean about the subjective eye. Now, and I would also say the question is not formulated well because the eye that you’re referring to is not homogenous, it’s heterogenous. There’s a multiplicity of eyes, you know, arranged in something like a hierarchy with something like a unity at the top. And some of that appears in some sense illusory in the same way that the desktop on your computer is an illusory representation of the actual computational processes. It’s not illusory in that it’s functional. If you’re thinking about illusion as something, see, you have to define the metaphysical arena in which you were formulating the concepts before we could have the proper discussion of that. Now, having said all that, I would say the simple truth that I adhere to is that civilizations that act as if human beings have free will seem to work. Now, that’s a pragmatic bit of evidence. It’s not a scientific bit of evidence, but I’m a pragmatist, so that is pretty boring to me. And so from a shorthand perspective, I would say, well, if something is functional and it’s based on a particular first principle, then that first principle is true enough. And that’s what I think about free will, and that’s what I think about the idea of the soul. Now, I’m not saying that constitutes an exhaustive analysis of free will or of the soul. It isn’t, but it’s a good first-pass approximation. Thanks. Hi, Dr. Cousin. Big fan. I saw one of your Q&As, and I hope this isn’t too unrelated, but it probably won’t be. Keep it lighthearted. You said that you’re a big fan of a guilty pleasure for a trailer for our boys. I’m curious if you could give a brief sort of archetypal cycle of things out there. I’m curious, maybe, if you could tell me what your favorite character is, and maybe to tie back to free speech, how a show that is so crude and offensive manages to be maybe the most popular Canadian show. Yeah, there are many reasons my wife hates me. She’s here. She’s here. She doesn’t hate me. Nothing left to come. The trailer for our boys is definitely one of the reasons why I like it. Well, I’m from Northern Alberta. I don’t know if you know the movie FUBAR? No. You guys know that? Yeah. I like FUBAR. It’s actually about the people that I grew up with. And perhaps even about me, to some degree. I watched FUBAR, I don’t know, probably eight years ago, with a couple of my old friends from Northern Alberta, and we were hysterical to the point of comatose watching it. There’s something about them. I like working class guys. I think they’re funny. They have great senses of humor, and it’s something I really miss. One of the ways that working class guys compete is through absurdity. I work in pizza restaurants, and I work in lots of rough places, you know, rail crews and that sort of thing. And what keeps guys alive in situations like that is their absurd sense of humor. And the trailer for our boys is a great example of that. I think it’s hilarious that the Canadian government funds it. What I also like about the trailer for our boys, and this is also what I like about The Simpsons, is that it’s absolutely reprehensible in all of its details, except for its container. So The Simpsons, the family is central to The Simpsons, right? No matter what you say about Homer, it’s like he loves his family, he’ll do anything for his family, and fundamentally they’re oriented towards each other. And so it’s always a comedy, because they’re aiming up. And so that’s what gives, that’s what makes The Simpsons just not mean spirited. It’s not mean spirited. It’s great satire. Everyone’s in on the joke, and the characters are essentially moral. And it’s the same to a somewhat lesser degree. The trailer for our boys is like, because the story is, when it’s working, the story is about two things. It’s about impulsive male stupidity. But it’s also about friendship. And it really is about friendship. Even the enemies are friends. And so the creators of that have done this remarkable job of walking the line between satirical, like English comedians. It’s great satire, but they have, they love their characters. They have love for their characters, even though they’re completely reprehensible, right? So that’s part of our trailer for our boys. I always rate those comedians, I think they’re unbelievably funny, because you watch it, and it does have this documentary-like aspect. It’s easy to believe, like most of the fans do believe, that these are real people. And they’re not. They’re making this stuff up. They’re great at it. The conky episode, damn, that’s just… That’s higher than that. Thank you so much. I have a bucket list. No, I don’t actually. If I had a bucket list, one I wanted would be to be invited on the trailer party. I just have a question about your claims on political belief and your correlation to a big five personality. You mentioned that there’s truth A and truth B fighting it out, and that’s between the right and the left. What do you make of, perhaps, truth C, which is what I see emerging as a libertarian movement, which isn’t really in either category? Yeah, the first answer is I don’t know enough about libertarians to say, because they’re not… We haven’t been able to sample enough of them to get a sense. Now, I shouldn’t say that the politically correct types are not classic liberals, just so everyone knows. The big distinguisher for the politically correct types is that they’re very high in agreeableness. And you might say, well, they don’t seem very agreeable. Well, agreeable people are only agreeable because they like you. So if you’re in their desk, then you’re an A. But if you’re outside the desk, then you’re a snake. And so they’re very agreeable to A’s, but they’re not very agreeable to snakes. And most people are snakes. But the libertarians, my suspicion is that they’re high in openess and high in conscientiousness. But I don’t know. I really don’t know. They may also not be very agreeable because they’re kind of like me-be-the-hell-alone types. And those are the sort of people that I’m agreeable, I’m quite agreeable. You wouldn’t guess that. I fight really hard. But disagreeable types basically tell you to screw off. And that can be real useful because sometimes that is what you should do. I suspect that the libertarians are more disagreeable. Okay. Thank you. Hi, Dr. Ruzin. So you expressed some concern about losing your job at the University of Toronto. And I was just wondering, given that your Patreon income exceeds my own salary, is there a threshold at which you would consider resigning and pursuing a YouTuber, just being a professional YouTuber as your primary? Well, you know, I thought about that. But as I said earlier, I like to do lots of things at the same time. And right now, there’s no reason to do that. I mean, I have this really, I don’t have my job as a university professor. And I should also say on behalf of my students, like, look, I went back to teach in January, and I was not in very good shape. I had a real health crisis in December, which I think was unrelated to this, weird enough. But I was really going in good shape. And I had been, it had been recommended to me by my chair that I not return to teaching independently of what was going on at the university. But there’s no damn way because I’m just like, no, I wasn’t going to do that. But I wasn’t clear to me how much additional stress I was going to be able to tolerate. But the students were extraordinarily welcoming. And you know, the students at the University of Toronto, and most students, particularly at the University, most of them are kids of first generation immigrants, right? It’s like, they’re not on the bloody political bandwagon. They’re afraid for their economic future. They’re pushed hard by the dreams and desires of their parents. And they’re working themselves down to the tailbone trying to get their degree and go out there and be functional. And so I like the undergraduates. Now there’s a small percentage of them. It’s very small. It’s the same damn 30 protesters at every event. I know them. I can say hi to them. And I don’t even know how many of them are students for that matter. And then there’s the administrators and a fair number of the faculty who are politically correct. But the university itself, the UT is actually quite conservative in the small C sense. Now that’s annoying sometimes because I’m quite radical from a creative perspective. And so I find the attitude there somewhat constraining. Whatever. I’ve got nothing to complain about. That’s a university professor. It’s a highly, highly privileged job. I’m thrilled to have it. I’m lucky to have it. I’m fortunate to have it. I like teaching young people. It’s a great privilege to do. And so I don’t see any reason to stop. And I think I can do both. And so far that’s working. So as long as I’m left alone, which is my libertarian side, as long as I’m left alone by the university, and I generally am, then I can have my cake and eat it too. And so that’s a good deal. Thank you. So earlier in your speech, you mentioned how the left generally kind of come to the aid of who they perceive as oppressed, right? So I kind of view the right as being sort of oppressed. I’m a lefty myself. Do you think my perception is correct? And if so, why do you think that the social justice type, you don’t also see it like I do? Yeah, well, you know, we’re in the time of cat, right? Isn’t that true? In chaotic times, things reverse and twist. And we’re in chaotic times. And I believe that archetypically. And I do believe that that’s partly why this mean process has emerged. Is the left oppressing the right? I think it’s more like the left has gained the radical has gained incremental control over many institutions as a consequence of inappropriate public subsidy. So they’re not that many of them. But there are whole disciplines that are pathologically, ideologically possessed. The most like the ethnic studies, women’s studies types, women’s studies in particular. It’s complete catastrophe. And increasingly, the humanities are being pulled into the vortex that has postmodernism, two thirds of the way down Marxism underneath that. The problem is, is that we set up a system where people of that orientation can draw a stable celery for decades. There’s thousands of hundreds of thousands, perhaps, and do not change, but work on what they say they’re working on, which is the undermining of the patriarchy, which is a reprehensible term, by the way, it’s a radical oversimplification, obviously, and it’s also profoundly ungrateful because although the patriarchy is an oppressive structure, obviously, because any social community requires conformity, or it’s not a social community. It’s also staggeringly productive. And, for example, provides them with a degree of safety and security that’s unthinkable. Well, they pursue their fifth column agenda. We’ve got to stop it. It’s not acceptable. And the way we stop it in part is parents, don’t let your children take humanities courses. One of the things that I’ve been thinking about doing is, and this would be a great crowdsourcing project, I would like to make a technical analysis of postmodern slash Marxist slash social justice terminology to be working on that already. And then rate course descriptions, have course descriptions rated by that group and publish them. And so then we can rank order universities and colleges by social justice infiltration and do this thing of discipline and produce a manual for parents and high school students that would say who not to take courses in and which courses to avoid. Because I think that starving them out is the right approach. And it’s going to be difficult because they’re tenured. And the system’s gone sideways, that there was a way of exploiting it and it’s being exploited. I mean, I don’t know how many of you guys follow real peer review. I recommend that on Twitter. You want to see what the pathological humanities scholars are up to, you subscribe to real peer review. And it’s like, you, it’s, it’s far more absurd than the onion. So I don’t remember what your question was. Basically, is the left oppressing the right? And am I correct in that assumption? Well, the left is oppressing the universities. And the universities are oppressing the culture. Now, and that translates to some degree into what you’re describing. So thank you. On behalf of the UBC Free Speech Club, we just wanted to thank everyone for coming out. And we want to thank Dr. Peterson for coming as well. For those of you, we will be seeing some of you tomorrow where we will be doing the Devouring Mother event. That will be a joint conversation between Dr. Peterson and Therian Maier who’s right there. And that will be live streamed as well along with this one. And that’s going to be on Baird Media for now. And I know that you want to copy that. So that’s going to be on your channel and assuming eventually. And for those of you who have VIP tickets, you get a photo op as well. So yeah, thank you for coming out. Have a great evening. Thank you.