Conversations with John Anderson： Jordan Peterson and Dave Rubin (TVYDdZWUWlE)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=TVYDdZWUWlE

pharmaceuticals. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome John Anderson. Well, Jordan and Dave, thank you so much for giving us your time. JohnAnderson.net is basically dedicated to something that is very, very dear to me. It’s someone who is very worried about our country and where we’re going. And it’s that you cannot get good public policy without a good public debate. And it seems now we don’t have debates anymore. We just have abusive, emotional mudslinging. So that’s the sort of the background theme. But then we come to this incredible opportunity today to engage with these two gentlemen. And I wanted to get the ball rolling by talking about a number of issues. Firstly, personal responsibility. Then I’d like to move on to freedom. What is it? Because it’s not licence. It’s not what so many people think it is today and how do we make it work? I then want to talk about courage, because we’re going to need a lot of it going forward. And you’re going to hear a lot, I would see demonstrated some real courage, I think, here and what we’re going to talk about and what you’re going to hear, what you’re going to witness. Then a bit about social media and how we make it all work. And then it’s over to you. We live in an age when it seems that there’s a crisis of trust in our culture. It seems that we are very uncertain of our institutions and the people who make them up and what their motivations might be. And indeed, the research backs that up. The Australian National University has been tracking Australia’s confidence in their politicians and the political process now for many decades. We are in uncharted waters. Record numbers of Australians no longer have confidence in the system. Record numbers of Australians now distrust the political process and the players in it. Just more recently, we’ve had the latest of a series of royal commissions of inquiry into various institutions, this time banking and the financial services. And we learnt that we couldn’t trust bankers. Now, there are many trustworthy bankers in case there are any here. But plainly, people were deeply concerned by what emerged. And you stop and think about this. When people are in relationships of trust, harmony and progress can be made. When it breaks down, harmony and progress are impaired and people flee for safety. If you don’t feel safe with someone else, you’ll look for the rule book. And you’ll look for policing and you’ll look for protection. So it’s a good thing we’ve had the royal commission of inquiry so we know what’s been going on. It’s a good thing we’ve got the 78 recommendations, new laws everywhere, new surveillance, new policing. But it’s a tragedy that it was necessary in the first place, that people have not been doing what they should have been doing without coercion. So now we’ve got a great big battle as to how to resolve these things. The law-based approach. But Jordan, you’ve said something quite different. In the midst of all of this, what you have said is that the redemption of the world is not political. It happens at the level of the individual. That’s not what we hear in the media every night. There’s a new scandal. It’s we need more rules. We need more policing. We need more surveillance. We need a different party in power. You’re not saying that. You’re saying it comes back to the individual. Well, the first question is, do you want that? Do you want a more, a state with more regulatory power? Do you want a state with more surveillance? I mean, first of all, why would you think that that would be trustworthy when all the evidence suggests in the past that as a state expands its surveillance power, it actually becomes less trustworthy rather than more? And why would you want, you might think, well, I certainly want someone looking into your affairs, but I don’t want anybody looking into mine. Well, good luck with that, because, you know, to the degree that I have someone, elect someone to look into your affairs, they’re bloody well going to be looking into mine as well. And that just doesn’t strike me as a particularly positive development. And practically, because I don’t believe it’ll work, I don’t think surveillance states do make people more honest. I think all the evidence is the opposite. And then I would say from the individual perspective, it’s like, I believe that the fundamental, what we got fundamentally right in the West, because there was a number of things we got fundamentally right, even though we don’t like to admit that anymore, is that the ultimate moral responsibility for the state relies on you. It relies on your moral integrity. And you know, it’s not that hard to think that through. It’s like, well, first of all, you have the right and the responsibility to vote. And we could say, well, that’s not exactly given to you by the state. It’s something that exists in some sense outside and before the state. It’s part and parcel of your intrinsic value. Okay, so that’s a decision that we’ve made in the West, that each person, regardless of their flaws, is characterized by a value, an intrinsic value that’s so deep and so profound that the very regulation of the state itself rests on their shoulders. And that’s really something. That’s why you have the right to vote. And that’s worth thinking about. The first question is, well, do you think that’s a good idea or not? Do you believe that we are, in fact, sovereign individuals? And then, well, let’s assume that you believe that we are, because the alternative is some sort of autocracy, right? It’s some sort of tyranny. It’s the parsing off of that sovereignty to a bureaucracy or to some arbitrary form of leadership. And maybe you can believe in that and you’d like a strong leader. And fine, but you want to think that through. Because if it’s not that, then it’s you. Well, then if it’s you and you have to make sure that the ship of state is sailing properly, the first thing you might want to ask yourself is, what makes you think you’re any more trustworthy than the people that you’re despising or criticizing? If you are, well, more power to you. But it isn’t self-evident that you are. And my suspicions are that it’s not even self-evident to you that you are. Because it’s a very rare person that you come across. If you talk to them with any degree of seriousness, they’re able to lay out a whole litany of ways they fall short of their own values. Their own values, not values that other people are putting on them. Certainly that as well. And they can name innumerable ways that not only are they not doing what they should be doing, so they’re falling short of the mark in that way, but they’re doing all sorts of things that they definitely shouldn’t be doing. And they know it. It’s like, well, are we going to put that right or not? My sense is, you know, I wrote a rule in my book, put your house in perfect order before you complain about the world, before you criticize the world. What’s the idea? It’s like, well, you’re the sovereign, man. If the states, if the ship of state is listing and sinking, that’s you. That’s your problem. It’s your fault. You’re not doing it right. You’re not educated enough. You’re not awake enough. You’re not articulated enough. Articulate enough. You don’t know enough about history. You’re not taking on enough responsibility. You’re looking for other people to blame because it’s convenient. And that’s kind of understandable because it’s the dispersal of responsibility. Who wants all that responsibility? But there’s a huge price to be paid for it. The first price that you pay for it is, well, there goes the adventure of your life. It’s like you could get yourself together and be the bedrock of the state, right? That’d be hard. That’d call on everything that you have. That would be your adventure. You’re going to pass that off to someone else? And then what do you do? You’ve got nothing left in your life but triviality. And you can’t live. I don’t believe that people can live ethically, trivially. That’s why I think the pursuit of the idea that life is for happiness is wrong. Because life is too difficult for that to be the case. Our lives are too profound, too characterized by suffering and malevolence. The world is too characterized by trouble at every level for happiness to be the proper solution. The solution is something like a heavy burden of ethical responsibility, the kind that sets the state straight. And then in that, you find the purpose of your life. And so not only if you want the external monitoring and the surveillance state, not only do you sacrifice your privacy and invite all that invasive attention and lose your impulsive freedom, you lose everything that’s profound about your life. And someone takes it from you. They take your destiny from you. And that’s no way to live. That’s the tyranny that we’ve struggled against in the West successfully for, I would say, in one way or another for a number of thousands of years and with a substantial amount of success. To draw Dave into this, we met in LA a couple of years ago over breakfast. Dave, you’re a great defender of culture, too. Now when we met, it was very interesting. You set out the reasons in a way for me to think, he’s a card carrying progressive. You know, you told me where you came from and what you believe in, what you didn’t. And then you said, and I’m a gay married man. And then you went on to say, and I thank God every day I live in Christian America. And I thought, that’s a surprise turn in the conversation. And we had a fantastic breakfast talking about it. You’re a defender of culture now or of our cultural roots at a time when the West seems to be its own worst enemy and doesn’t believe in its cultural roots. Can you elaborate? Yeah, of course. Well, you know, first off, as you guys I’m sure know, Jordan and I just left the Sydney Opera House a few minutes ago and we’ve done about 120 some odd shows where I’ve opened for Jordan. And it just struck me in the last two minutes that having to follow you is much less fun than having to go before you. That’s easy. You’re just setting them up and you’re knocking them out of the park. But OK, I’ll try. Well just quickly on what Jordan said about the individual because it links exactly to that. You know, people ask me all the time in the Q&A’s and in our meet and greets, what is going on? Why is it that people are following this psychologist talking about lobsters all over the country? And actually that question is what I believe is the answer. There has been a complete obliteration for young people to understand what being an individual is, what being a person that owns your own mind, that decides to get out there and live the life they’re supposed to live, that doesn’t want to take from somebody and give to somebody else or just take for themselves. And that has really been lost. And what’s been amazing to me, as we’ve done now 20 some odd countries, is that the same things that you guys are thinking about in Sydney are the exact same things that people are thinking about in Toronto and Los Angeles and Stockholm and all over the country. And that’s absolutely fascinating. So to your question, because I am an individual, that is what led me here. That’s I think what led you to want to have breakfast with me in Los Angeles, that the differences, the immutable characteristics that we either have in common or separate us, whether it’s sexuality or gender or skin color, are completely irrelevant. If we really want to be a society that is truly free, that truly respects each other, it makes no difference. I mean, when I go to colleges, I usually just single out somebody in the crowd. And it’s like, how sad would it be if I just looked at you and I was like, oh, well, you’re a white guy. You look like you’re in your early 20s. As if that would give me any inclination that I would have any insight into what you think or how you should think actually is the better point. Because you should think whatever you think and hopefully be willing to have that exchange of ideas. So I’m very appreciative that I live in a Christian country because the simple fact is while the media will imply that every day there’s another story on how evil Christian white people are or something like that, and by the way, I see that spreading all over the world as well. I mean, there’s a weird thing going on with the media where I thought it was really an American crumbling of the media, but now I see it all over the place. I live in the freest country in the history of the world, period. The United States in 2019 is the freest place in the history of the world. You can, with the most tiny exceptions on speech around yelling fire in a crowded theater or a direct threat of violence, you can say whatever you want. And even being here in Australia where you guys have it pretty good on speech, I can tell people are jealous of what America has. And certainly when we were in the UK where they have all sorts of things where this YouTube creator Count Dankula had his dog do the Nazi salute and gotten all sorts of trouble. I mean, we won’t have this forever. And that’s very clear to me. And I would just add this that Douglas Murray, who I’m sure you’re familiar with in the UK, he’s also gay and he’s a brilliant thinker. And I didn’t even want to ask him anything about that because it’s completely irrelevant in a certain way. But the last question when I had him on last time, I said to him, do you think your sexuality has a little something to do with your sensitivity about freedom? Because you know it might be you first. And he said that he thought his skin was a little thinner because of that. And so I do think that people that are on the outside for whatever that is, it doesn’t have to be sexuality. It could be obviously a myriad of different issues. I do think you become a little more sensitive to it. And for that reason, I’m incredibly I’ll go a step further. I am blessed that I live in the United States of America and I can do I can live. I’m a free man in the freest country ever. And I’m very appreciative of that. You can see why we get on. Yeah, I seriously. Can anyone push back against that? And yet half the time when you listen to the elites who have their hands on the levers of influence today, you would think we lived in cruel and oppressive cultures. Think of the four great revolutions, the American War of Independence and what came out of that. Think of the French Revolution. Think of the Russian Revolution. Think of the Maoist Revolution, which one has produced a real understanding of the individual and secured their freedoms in a greater way. And we in Australia, of course, are unbelievably blessed to use your word again, because we’ve inherited what’s called a washminster, the best of the British House of Congress. Sorry, House of Representatives based on the House of Commons. Senators closely modeled on yours. And it works unbelievably well. But you wouldn’t think it. Listen to the public commentary today. Now let’s come to freedom. When you and I talked in Sydney back just before Easter last year, we had a great conversation and to my enormous delight, I found that we had a friend in common, Alexander Solzhenitsyn. There you go, there’s a photograph of him. Now he doesn’t look very happy. Well, there’s a good reason for that. He would have been probably busted up physically and in all sorts of other ways as well when that photograph was taken. He was a hero in Russia in the Second World War. But after the war, he dared to disagree with the regime in Moscow, which was an unbelievably evil regime. And for the price, the price for disagreeing was that he ended up in the Gulag in a prison. This is a remarkable book. He wrote about his experiences. This wasn’t the only one. It was smuggled out to the West. There’s no doubt that his writings shortened the life of that evil regime. But the bit that stayed with me and which you referred to and have many times, you wrote a great essay on it over Christmas, I recommend it to you. It was published in the Times and then in the Australian or you can Google it, was that this black recorded that one day was lying in his cell, I’d imagine freezing cold, probably incredibly unhappy in his circumstances. He hears the thumping of a guard down the rows belting another prisoner up, the screams of the prisoner. And then he writes of that. It dawned on me as I listened to it that the dividing line between good and evil actually doesn’t lie between captor and captive. Can you imagine a prisoner in those circumstances saying the bloke doing the beating is captive too. He’s not free. Rather, he said the dividing line between good and evil lies somewhere across every human heart. It’s not between man and woman. Tell that to some of the people in today’s movements. It’s not between Catholic and Baptist or man and woman. The dividing line between good and evil lies somewhere across every human heart. That was very profound for me in public life. And I was telling these friends on the way out that, for example, a point that came to me to be quite real, I was a young federal member of the parliament. I was in the outback town of Walgut and a very, very angry young Aboriginal man came up to me. He swore his head off at me. He said, you sons and so’s, you stole this from us, you ruined us, you know, you’re an absolute litany of my crimes and now you’re going to pay us back. And I remember thinking, stop, stop, remember that this guy has the stamp of nobility on him too. It’s just I can’t see it at the moment, you know. And I’ve got no right to do him over. He’s like me. He’s a mixture of good and bad. But let’s tease this out. This incredible writer who eventually was freed, found his way to America. The Americans and the West refused to listen to his warnings. He was there like a kind of prophet saying, look out, you’re losing your freedoms. What did he mean? How do you find freedom when it’s not physical? You can’t move, you’re in fear of your life. But in some other way, he found freedom. What’s it mean? Can we unpack that? Because I think it’s important. Well, one of the things that Solzhenitsyn did, and this is something I think worth thinking about. I mean, I’ve thought about it for decades because it’s such a remarkable story. I think he tells it in the second volume of The Gulag Archipelago because it’s a three-volume book, the full book. And it’s all worth reading, especially the second volume and especially the second half. And in that, he details his transformation, I would say, his psychological or spiritual transformation. Now, he was on the Russian front, which was not a pleasant place to be because Stalin had signed a pact with Hitler and Hitler broke it and the Russians were completely unprepared. And so to be on the Russian front at the beginning of World War II was a very bad place to be. He wrote letters to a compatriot of his complaining about the lack of preparation and that’s what got him thrown in the camps. Now, it’s interesting to note that Stalin threw all of the Soviet prisoners of war into camps. So if you were a Soviet soldier and you had gone to the West and fought and you were captured and put in, say, a German prisoner of war camp and treated terribly because Stalin didn’t sign the agreement, it was from Switzerland. Geneva. Geneva Accords on the treatment of prisoners of war and the Russians were treated so badly that the Allies used to feed them. It’s not like they were not hungry. And so you would end up in a POW camp there and then when you were done with that, when you went home to Russia, for your hero’s welcome, you were thrown into the Gulag. Because Stalin believed that the mere fact that you’d been exposed to the West now made you a class enemy. So that was the sort of place the Soviet Union was. Now Solzhenitsyn spent a lot of time in the Gulag and he observed that there were people there who he admired. Now the camps were mostly run by the prisoners. Because most prisoners, many prisoners, became trustees and then would move up the administrative ladder and that’s pretty interesting in a really dark way, right? Because it’s like a hell that’s run by the devils and they could escape at any moment if they just realized that they were the ones running it but they didn’t. And so that made the situation even more brutal than it might have been because he noticed too that prisoners who became guards were often more brutal than the civilian guards. Maybe to justify to themselves what they had done, who knows. Anyways, Solzhenitsyn at one point noticed that there were people in the camps whose comportment he truly admired, who seemed incorruptible, who wouldn’t deceive or lie or take the easy way out regardless of what it was that they were being threatened with. And they wouldn’t sign the confessions that everybody had to sign, guilty or not guilty. They refused to play along. And some of them certainly died for that but many people died in the Gulags so that was hardly an anomaly. He said that many of the people who ran the camps were terrified by these people. And also that many of them were religious believers which was quite interesting. And so what he learned was that even under terrible circumstances there were ways of being more or less noble. And I suppose it would be under terrible circumstances where that sort of thing would be put to the test. It really made him think about his own role in his own demise. He had Hitler to blame because there was the second world war and he had Stalin to blame. If you need people to blame for your misery, those are credible people to blame, especially both of them at the same time. And yet he started to consider what did I do in my own life that increased the probability that I ended up here. As a citizen for example who was responsible for the way that the country operated. Because in East Germany one third of the people in East Germany were informers. And everybody in the Soviet system lied about everything to everyone all the time. Which is of course what you would do if one in three people were informers because that would be like two people in your family. And so the whole system was set up and maintained because everyone lied. You think well if I stop lying I’m done for. It’s like yeah, fair enough man, but if you keep lying and so does everyone else, you’re also done for. And so is everyone else. So that doesn’t seem to be much of an option. And Solzhenitsyn noted that there were people even under these extreme circumstances that would tell the truth. And he decided that he would go over his life with a fine tooth comb. He had nothing but time to think about every time he had acted in some manner in his life that transgressed against his own conscience. Where he did something he knew to be wrong and then to see if he could figure out how to set it right then. Now obviously he couldn’t necessarily apologize to the people against who he had transgressed. Because you have to pay for something you did in a currency other than that which you took. And his determination was to chronicle his experiences in as truthful a manner as possible. Which was basically impossible. It wasn’t like he had paper and pencil and time to write and privacy. Had his notebooks ever been discovered, well he would have been in serious trouble and they would have been destroyed. In fact when he got out he had two copies of the full manuscript. Each out to a different typist. Secretly the KGB got a hold of one, destroyed it and the typist committed suicide. So he basically memorized the book. And it’s 2400 pages long of 8 point type. It’s one remarkable work. It’s one long scream of truthful outrage. And that came out of his decision to set himself right. And then it was, as John said, it was smuggled into the West where it had a walloping impact. It completely demolished, at least for a long while, the moral credibility of communism. Completely. From like 1972 on, if you knew about the existence of the Gulag Archipelago, you didn’t get to say anything good about communism. And that lasted for a long time. It even convinced French intellectuals that there was something wrong with communism. And there’s no doubt that it was one of the historical events that caused the Soviet Union to collapse. And that was a good thing. And you know, it collapsed relatively peacefully, all things considered. No thermonuclear war. Yugoslavia was no picnic. But for the demise of one of the most evil empires that ever existed, it was pretty damn smooth. And certainly the world’s been in way better shape, especially Africa, since the Soviet Union has disappeared. Because the African economies are booming like mad now. And it’s partly because they aren’t doing things that are insanely foolish under the guidance of communist direction. And so Solzhenitsyn decided, under these conditions of absolute powerlessness and privation, to put himself together and to say what he had to say. And that was enough to knock over the Soviet Union. It wasn’t all that knocked it over. But it wasn’t nothing. It sold 35 million copies. It’s arguably the most influential non-fiction book of the 20th century. And it’s unbelievably powerful. You think, well, what power do you have if you’re willing to tell the truth? It’s not easy to tell the truth. It’s complicated. You have to take yourself into account, right, over the long run. You have to take your family into account. You have to take your society into account. You have to think it through. You have to think strategically. And then you have to find your words. And that’s hard to find your words, because you tend to use other people’s words, or ideological words, or words that mask or hide. It’s not easy to find your own words. But if you find your own words, and they’re truthful words, there isn’t anything that can stop them. You think, well, do you believe that? Well, let’s go back to the sovereign idea. Are you sovereign citizens or not? Well, if you are, well, why is that? Well, it’s because you have a certain faculty, a certain power. Well, what do you have? You have the power of your convictions and your truth and your ability to communicate. And that’s what’s supposed to set the state straight. OK, so you have that. It’s like, well, then maybe it’s truth that you’re pursuing and seeking, if you have any sense. And what’s truth? Well, truth is the best reflection you can manage of reality. Imperfect, because you’re imperfect, but it’s the best you’ve got. It’s like, what’s going to be better for you than to have reality on your side? And what’s going to stand in your way if you have reality on your side? Lies? I don’t think so. That isn’t how it works. I don’t think anyone believes that, because the other thing I’ve noted and discussed with people frequently is, if you have someone that you love, a child, let’s say, and you’re trying to raise a child in a decent manner, you don’t tell them, look, kid, this is how the world runs. Everything’s corrupt beyond belief, including you and your parents and society and nature, for that matter. It’s just complete bloody hell everywhere. The only possible way that you can make it through life effectively is to learn to lie as brilliantly and undisguisably as possible. No one does that. Well, why not? If you believed in falsehood, if you believed that that was the way forward, then that would be the right thing to teach. But you don’t. You teach your children to tell the truth, even if it’s painful. The reason for that is that you actually believe in the power of the truth. I’ll finish that with one thing. There’s a very interesting scene in Revelations. There’s a very strange document appended to the end of the primary book in the Western canon, right? It’s a hallucinogenic nightmare, Revelation. In it, Christ comes back to Earth. He’s not the merciful savior of the Gospels. He’s the judge. There’s a reason for that, a psychological reason. The reason is that if you have an ideal, and whatever Christ is, metaphysically or psychologically, he’s an ideal. If you have an ideal, an ideal is a judge, because the ideal judges you, right? Okay, so he comes back as a judge. He has a sword in his mouth, and he judges that’s saved and the damned, and it’s not pretty. But here’s something interesting. It’s so fascinating. He saves his worst contempt and uses contemptuous language. He says, I will spit you out of my mouth. It really means I will vomit you out of my mouth. Not if you were a bad person. Not if you were a good person. Not if you were a bad person, but if you sat on the bloody fence, right? If you were neither warm nor cold. You wanted to play it both ways. Well, I’ll lie when it’s in my favor, and I’ll tell the truth when it’s expedient for me. It’s like you’re in the category of the damned. And I think that’s absolutely right, because that’s real cowardice. If you believed in falsehood, it’s like, good, get on with it, man. You can be a criminal and lay your life out and see how that works. And if you believe in truth, well, then perhaps you put yourself on the line for the truth. But you don’t play the two sides against the middle, because there’s nothing in that that isn’t self-serving at the cost of your own well-being and at the cost of everyone else’s. So you have to think about your relationship with the truth. There isn’t anything more important that you can do than that. Because I’ve seen people in major corporations that were corrupt and failing spend three years doing nothing but telling the truth, often at their own peril, fix the companies. And it’s such a relief to the people that they were talking to, because they’d go talk to them, the companies run by people who are not doing what they should be doing. And they’re questioning. It’s like, OK, well, what’s really going on here? Well, no one wants to talk because they’re afraid. But the person who’s doing the questioning actually wants to know. And people start opening up. And he gathers information. It’s like, oh, I see. Here’s the real problems here. It’s like, we’ve got all sorts of problems here. This is why the company’s in trouble. But it’s OK. If we know the problems, well, then we can fix them. And we’ll go ahead and fix them. And then the company will work. And everybody who’s terrified and won’t say anything and isn’t really working hard anymore because they’re so dispirited and believing that the projects are corrupt and that the leadership isn’t doing what it’s supposed to, they start having a bit of hope. It’s like, really? You mean, you’re actually willing to admit that that is the problem? And you’re going to give me a problem that is a real problem that I could actually work on and actually solve and benefit from that? And the whole company switches around. That works. It’s not naive to believe that. And I’ll say one more thing about trust that’s very much worth knowing. So this is what you learn if you’re a clinician. Most people who trust are naive. And naive is not a virtue. It’s a fault. It’s partly a fault because if you’re naive and you run into someone who’s malevolent, including you, they might do you incalculable damage so that you will never recover. So that’s not a good thing. You don’t want to be naive. If you’re not naive, that means you’ve been burned once or twice or three or four times. And, you know, once you’ve been burned in that manner, well, then it’s hard to trust because you think, well, why would I trust you or me for that matter knowing full well that I can be betrayed? And so then you’re cynical. And you think that’s an improvement over being naive. You’re more mature, cynical than you are naive, even if it’s premature. And it’s often premature in young people. It’s like, okay, so how do you get out of that conundrum? Well, this is a crucial thing to know. You trust people because you’re courageous. That’s why. It’s the same reason that you’re grateful. It’s a mark of courage. It’s a mark of commitment. It’s like, you and I, we’re going to make an agreement. And you’re full of snakes. And so am I. And there’s lots of ways this can go sideways. But we’re going to put together an agreement. We’re going to articulate it out. We’re going to try to find something that is of mutual benefit to both of us. We’re going to put our hands out and shake. And we’re going to try to stick to that. And we’re going to risk trusting each other. It’s a risk. And that’s the risk upon which the state is based, really. I believe, and I think the evidence for this is very strong, by the way. I don’t think that there is any other natural resource than trust. And for trust, you need courage. Not naivety. And you’ve got to overcome your cynicism so that you trust. And then you ask yourself, too. If you don’t trust your institutions, it’s like, hey, they’re your institutions. Why don’t you go out and do something about them? You think, well, I can’t. It’s like, that’s not true. That is absolutely not true. There’s nothing vaguely accurate about that in a society like this. Almost all of our democratic institutions are crying out for people to participate. They can’t find enough people to do it. And if you participate, and you do it diligently, and you have your say, and you’re careful and trustworthy, and you speak your mind, you can have way more effect than you think. So if you’re cynical about the institutions, it’s like, look in the mirror. Because the corruption of those institutions is a direct reflection of your inability to get your act together. And that’s what it means to be a sovereign part of the Western community. So it’s not someone else. This issue of trust. Now, I would have thought that after what he’d been through, and you’ve outlined it, but not alone by any means, but some of these people who have warned us of the need to be responsible and to heed history, Sonson-Nielsen is a classic example. What has happened? You made the point that for a very long time, we understood how dangerous that sort of drift towards totalitarianism is. It seems to have washed out of the system now. It seems as though we don’t teach history, we don’t respect it, we don’t understand that it can teach us valuable lessons. And what worries me about that is, as the old saying, if you don’t understand history, you may very well repeat it. Why do we walk away from people we can trust warning us of the consequences? Well, I think there’s an interesting reason for that that sort of brings the Solzhenitsyn story into 2019. Which is that he was truly oppressed. This was a life of actual oppression, right? Now we have people that are walking around, everyone in this room has this in their pocket. And if you have this in your pocket and you think… Turned off, I hope. Yeah, hopefully it turned off. But if you have this thing in your pocket and you think you’re oppressed, you’re very confused. We live in a time with such absurd freedoms in the West that are so beyond imagination of what people could only dream of two generations ago, even one generation ago, especially with this, that people now have a perceived oppression instead of a real oppression. So one of the things that I find when I go to college campuses is that these kids will protest and they’ll scream and that everyone’s all right and everyone’s a neo-Nazi and the rest of this. And I always find, all right, well, how do you break through to somebody like that? How do you actually, when they have… You’ve talked about this, when they have that look in their eye, truly a possessed look and this postmodern monster has become sort of a secular religion. And I think that’s also one of the reasons why what Jordan’s doing is resonating because they’ve removed religion from the equation and now they have no meaning and they put it all into this really competing set of ideas, what we call the Oppression Olympics, where they’re constantly competing for oppression because they believe that victimhood is virtue and victimhood, of course, is not virtue. What’s virtuous is getting your life in order and going out and doing something. So I’m always looking for a little trick to get through to these kids and it’s really hard because when they have that sort of glossed over zombie look, it’s tough. And I found one trick that actually kind of works if you can get it to them in the most simple personal way. And this particularly works in the United States and I have no doubt that it would work here in Australia as well. I’ll say to them, anyone in this room, does anyone in this room have it worse than their grandparents? Now I’ve done this, I don’t know, a hundred times probably. Nobody has ever raised their hand. Nobody ever. If you live in the United States, you basically short, I mean the only outsider case would be if your grandparents were oil barons or something like that and then they lost all the money, in which case the leftists would actually love that too because it would show that, well, it would show that that accumulated wealth doesn’t stay beyond generation. So they’re all about that, right? But if you can do something like that, I mean, if you say, I mean, everyone in this room can do it. Like, can everyone picture their grandparents? Do you have it better or worse? I mean, does anyone in here have it worse than their grandparents? And that shows you that it’s a perceived oppression, not a real oppression, that the thing that they’re fighting, this patriarchal postmodern capitalistic thing that they’re fighting, I mean, they can’t define it so it’s hard to define it for them, that it actually has bent toward justice always, always. And if you can plant that seed in them, I think it’s a little bit of something, but it’s very hard to break them out of that. But I think the key here is understanding that it’s a perceived depression. If you live in a free society in the West in 2019, you’re not oppressed. You maybe don’t have it as well as your neighbor does and maybe you came from more and they came from less or maybe you’re sick and they’re not or a series of other things, but you’ve got a chance and that’s all you’re supposed to have in life. And I think getting that through to them as opposed to, oh, the system is horrible and I have to now destroy the system as if they could magically reconstitute a system that really would just be, in effect, throwing away thousands of years of human history, that they’re so wise. They’re so wise at 24 years old as they’re shouting down speakers that they could build up what nobody before them could. And that’s the danger there. So I think getting them to think about their own lives, where they come from, I think is a pretty effective way of getting through to people. Well, we could also say, like, look, there’s a claim that the West is an oppressive patriarchy. And so that’s actually true. The problem with the claim is that it’s not just an oppressive patriarchy. And there’s a big difference between something being completely something and something being partly something. Because one of the things you might point out is that you can look at human history anywhere and what you see is a complete bloody nightmare, right? It’s death and struggle and privation and war and horror everywhere, with some progress, you know, some ability of us to pull ourselves out of the mire, you know, and the West is the same. There’s plenty of catastrophe in our past of all sorts. And I think it’s necessary to know that. But then it’s necessary to separate the wheat from the chaff. You know, one of the things I see with readers who are unsophisticated and intellectually arrogant is they’ll read someone great, maybe they’ll read Nietzsche, for example, and they’ll find the odd thing that Nietzsche said that greats against their current moral sensibilities, whether they do that in context or out. And then they’ll throw away the whole book. It’s like, you don’t throw away the whole book. It was Nietzsche. You don’t throw away the book. He’s like one in a billion. You read it carefully and you think, well, okay. No to that. But yes to this. And you do the same thing with Dostoevsky and you do the same thing with Tolstoy. You do the same thing with the great writers of the past that have been passed down to us. You read intelligently. You separate the wheat from the chaff, right? And you gain wisdom that way. Well, you do the same when you look at your own history. It’s like, well, of course it’s a bloody nightmare. What do you expect? It’s like, what’s your point? We’re going to burn it down and then we’re going to have something better as a consequence? Well, not so easily. Not so quickly. Maybe we read our history carefully and we think, okay, well, what did we get right? Well, what did we get right? Well, the sovereignty of the individual. That’s pretty good. The fact that you have right to property. That’s pretty good. You can argue about the limits on that, but you don’t want someone just taking your purse. You know, it’s helpful that there are things that you can earn. You know, the dignity of the individual. That’s another one. The innocence before the law. God, that’s a miracle that we ever came up with that idea. I can’t believe that that idea exists because in most cultures it’s like, well, you might be guilty. Okay, you’re dead. Because, well, that’s easier. You might be guilty. You know, why go through all the trouble? There’s plenty of people where you came from. It’s like the trouble of presuming your innocence. It’s innocent. It’s even hard for you to do it. It’s innocent. It’s even hard for you to do that for yourself. And the idea that each person has an intrinsic worth regardless of their, well, externalities, let’s say. That’s another idea. That’s a complete miracle. It’s like, well, what are we going to do? We’re going to throw all that away with the statement that we live in an oppressive patriarchy. And then we’re going to be left with nothing. And what good is that? Well, how about we look at our history and we take responsibility for it? We think, okay, well, here’s some things that need to be fixed. There’s plenty of them, right? There’s plenty of them for each of us to fix. And we’ll go fix them. And maybe then we can atone for the bloodiness of our history and for our so-called unearned privilege, you know, some of which all of us have. And that would be good. That would be part of the adventure of your life, too. And that’s a far more sensible and wise approach to the diagnosis of what’s wrong with the West than, well, it’s an oppressive patriarchy and it should be overthrown or whatever that, you know, current low resolution and resentful ideology happens to be. And there’s something to be said for a bit of humility as well. It’s like, really, you really think that you’re capable of making large-scale social transformations and getting it right, do you? You really think that. You’re 25, you’re 30, you’re 40. I don’t care, you know. What makes you think you’re smart enough to pull off something like that? It’s very, very difficult. Very, very, very difficult to take a system that works not too badly and to do anything to it that doesn’t make it worse, much less to radically reconstitute it and make it better. That’s really hard. So, you know, if you’re upset about your culture, well, maybe you could think of some small ways that are local that you could go out and improve it. I think you should start with yourself. Well, then you’re only harming yourself and you’re not a bad person to practice on. Then you could extend that to your family. Well, at least you suffer for the consequences of your own experiments that way rather than having someone else do it. And then maybe you can work on bringing a little more harmony into your family. And maybe you can get a job and see if you’re any good at that. And then if you manage those three things half ways, respectively, well, then you could dare to put a toe hold out into the broader community and think, maybe I have an idea here that we could tentatively attempt that might make some small things slightly better that we could measure carefully and assess. And that would be your contribution. And maybe you get real good at that, you know. So by the time you’re 50 or 60 and you have a solid life behind you, you’re actually capable of generating large scale improvements carefully. You know, as you were saying that, I was thinking, I mean, this is exactly what Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is. I mean, this is a failed, this is a bartender with a 430 credit score, which is pretty terrible. But all she’s ever done in her life has been a bartender. Now, that’s fine. I’ve been a bartender at times. But her only accomplishment is becoming a congresswoman with, I think, around 15,000 votes by saying the exact thing that the media wants you to say all the time, right? The idea that she could write this Green New Deal and that somehow she is the one that can, now, of course, she didn’t really write it. We don’t know who really wrote it. But the idea that she could present this as if she has the ideas that could rejigger the entire United States economy and how we deal with energy and transportation and everything. And we’re not going to have planes and we’re going to pay people unwilling to work, although then she deleted that part and put that, you know. It’s like it’s the lack of humility there that’s actually staggering, that she thinks no one before her might have tried to move some of these things on the margins a little bit. But the crazy part- Or that moving things on the margins isn’t enough. Well, they don’t believe it’s enough. But the really crazy part of this is that pretty much, I think the five or six Democratic candidates that we have now have all basically signed on board this thing. This thing which is a, I think you could probably argue that it’s unconstitutional on the grounds of it’s just taking more for the government. But it defies everything we know from history about how economics really works. Well, she’s admitted you can’t pay for it. It’s a complete denial of history. She says, well, tax the billionaires and then she also tells you that the billionaires are the blight on society. So it’s like, well, which one is it? Because you need the billionaires to pay for it even though it won’t pay for it. And if you don’t want billionaires, well, now we can’t pay for it. So what are we doing? Give me one. Australia’s longest serving Prime Minister was a man called Bob Menzies. And he was a man of incredibly powerful intellect and very, very deep learning. And he wrote, fascinatingly, that democracy is not a machine, it’s a spirit in which the peculiar Christian conception that no matter what your station in life is, each of us has a spark of the divine and every soul is of equal value before heaven. Why do I mention that? Partly because I think it’s a very relevant point personally, but it’s because in the mocking and the ridiculing of that respect for our faith out of the door, we’ve knocked out one of the pillars of democracy. We’ve knocked out the idea that whether I agree with you or not doesn’t matter. I have to respect you because a higher authority places as much value on you as he does on me. Now it seems that the problem is that if you dare disagree with me, I don’t have a reference frame for good and bad anymore or for respecting you. Therefore, I have to insist I’m right. See, I’m God over my life and you dare to challenge me because you want to be God over yours. Well, that’s the problem. So you’re an evil person or you’re a racist or you’re something terrible. We lack a framework for respecting one another. And it seems a massive problem for us. Well, it’s the problem with the collectivist viewpoint. Because if you’re defining characteristic is that you’re a member of a collective, then you live or die by the propriety of the collective. The antidote to that is that strange metaphysical claim, which is that, well, which is fundamentally that we each have a spark of the divine in us. You think, well, it’s easy to be cynical about that. But you shouldn’t be. Because you act like it’s true. And that’s worth noticing. It’s like if you have friends or family members and you don’t treat them like they have profound intrinsic value, then they’re not happy with you. Right? You can’t have a loving relationship without that. You can’t have a relationship of reciprocity without that. You can’t have a relationship of respect without that. You can’t have a relationship of respect without that. None of it. And they also want you to treat them like they’re, in some sense, masters of their own destiny, which is also interesting. Right? Because if you have, say, a 21-year-old child and they’re upset with you, they say, well, I’m 21 years old. I’m able to make my own decisions. And you say, and they want you to agree with that. And you want to agree with it because you hope that they are ready to make their own decisions. And you think, well, maybe they have matured to that point. So what are you saying? Well, you’re saying that they are gifted with the ability to take the responsibility to shape the reality around them. And they insist upon that. They insist upon you recognizing that in them as a hallmark of respect and love. And you know, you might be irritated because they’re not acting responsibly enough to deserve that. But it’s still what you hope for and want. It’s so like, well, so what is it? We’re the sovereign cornerstone of the state, each of us. Are we going to dispute that? Well, we know the cost of that. OK, well, do we have that spark of divinity? Well, what do we struggle with day to day? We struggle with the potential that’s in front of us and transforming that into the reality that could be. That’s as close to a divine faculty as anything I can think of. It’s completely mysterious that we can wrestle with the fabric of becoming and turn it into the actuality of being and that we seem to do that as a consequence of our ethical choices. Right? You make bad choices. You think they’re bad. Bad things happen. Right? And you think they’re bad. And so you took the potential that was there in front of you and you made something bad of it. You can do that. And you can also do what’s good. And we know that of each other. And that’s part of the reason that we’re granted, let’s say, the right and the responsibility of being the cornerstone of the state. And so the idea that there is that divinity in us, I think that’s associated with our consciousness, whatever that is. Because consciousness is a mystery. It seems to give reality to being. Right? What’s being without consciousness? There’s no one there to perceive anything. There’s no one there to shape anything. It’s like, is there anything there? Well, our consciousness itself seems to be what participates in the reality of being and the transformation of potential into actuality. For better or for worse. So there’s an ethical domain to it, too. It’s like there’s no reason for us to be questioning this fundamental assumption. Unless we think we have a better theory. What is that? Well, it’s your race. It’s your power structure. It’s like that’s what you want. You want to be judged by collective standards. It doesn’t matter what you did. In this foreword I wrote for the Solzhenitsyn book, you know, the people who ran the magazine Red Terror. That’s a hell of a magazine. Red Terror. As they said, well look, if you’re getting rid of the bourgeoisie, you know, don’t just be stopping with the people who own businesses. You want to get rid of their children, too, because they’re infected with the same damn evil spirit. And just to be on the safe side, how about you take out the grandchildren, too? Six-year-old, ten-year-old, doesn’t matter. Everyone goes. And what happened in the Soviet Union, everyone judged on their collective identity, right? That’s how you’re going to be judged. I’ll find something about your collective identity that’s not so positive. Some manner in which, regardless of how oppressed you are, you’re also an oppressor. For you it might be your male. Well, that would do it, you know? For you it might be that you’re middle class. I can find some dimension of your multiple collective identities on which you’re an oppressor. And that’s good enough to do you in, if you take the collectivist’s route. The alternative to that is no, no, no, no. We have that spark of divinity. It’s associated with a deep, deep responsibility. And it’s the ability that goes along with that. And we play that out all the time. We play it out every time we play fair games with one another. We have decent, honest relationships with one another. We have business arrangements that are honest and work. And we can cooperate for long periods of time. We take care of our children properly. We take care of our old people properly. It’s all predicated on the same thing. You have intrinsic value. And even if you do something terrible, let’s say, and I still have the conviction that you have value, then it’s incumbent on me to say, well, you did something terrible, but you aren’t necessarily something terrible. And it might be possible for you to shed that and to atone and to rejoin those who are good. And that’s something, too, and it’s built deeply into our political and economic and justice systems. And it’s no time to be abandoning this, you know? Especially when you look around the world, you see as it’s spreading, and it’s spreading quite rapidly, everywhere it’s spreading, things are getting way better. So enough crisis of confidence in the West. Like, we’ve got our house to put in order. There’s no doubt about that. But I see no reason why we can’t do it unless we lose faith in ourselves. And there’s reason for that. Like, life is brutal. There’s reason to lose faith. But not in the final analysis. It’s a mark of malevolence and cowardice to lose faith. The inherent problem with that, though, just very briefly, is that the people that are promoting these ideas, they actually believe that the experiment of freedom, which is all that it is, they believe it is bad. They believe that America is bad, that the freedoms that you’ve won here are bad. And what’s interesting is I’ve seen such a massive, look, I was a lefty my entire life. You were. And yeah. And I should be judged accordingly. But I mean, look, what I see now is, look, I could sit up here and give you my lefty cred, right? So I’m gay, married, I’m begrudgingly pro-choice, although I’m really struggling with that one lately because the left has now, especially in America, gone so bananas on the abortion issue. It really has gone bananas. Completely crazy. I mean, they’re literally, quite literally talking about post-birth abortions. I mean, it’s really nuts. I’m against the death penalty. I’m for reforming the prison system. I’m for strong public education. I mean, I give you a litany of lefty ideas, right? But I can’t get invited anywhere by the left or a Democratic group or anywhere by any of these people. But you know who invites me? The conservatives. And I go up there and I tell them all the reasons I disagree with them and the libertarians. I mean, I like the libertarians. They’re mostly stoned. But like, you know, I’m also pro-pot. But why is it that almost everyone right now, I would say if you’re a conservative, if you’re a libertarian, if you’re a classical liberal or sort of a disaffected lefty, if you’re an independent, and a couple other things, if you’re any of those, there’s a great group of people right now that are willing to agree to disagree and get to exactly what your question was, which is how do you sit down with people without impugning them? The only people we’re talking about at the moment that have any institutional power, because you know, every time you talk about this, someone says, well, but there’s four white nationalists here and it’s like they have no power. No one cares about them. The media promotes them to make it seem like they’re massive and they’re not. But even the right does a pretty decent job of saying that these people are no good. So all we’re really fighting is this hysteric. What was that study in the Atlantic where it’s only something like 8%? Yeah, and about 30% of them think it’s gone too far. So something like 8% of the people believe really in this postmodern progressive view of the world. And a lot of them are shaky within that belief. So it seems like a big monster because the media is always pushing it on us because they’re allowed. But I’m extremely enthused that we’ve gone all over the world and met good people who I think need to be a little braver perhaps, but are here and are willing to fight. I want to come to that bravery in a moment. What you’ve just said reminds me of two remarkable men in history, GK Chesterton and George Bernard Shaw. They disagreed on just about everything you could think of. But they loved each other’s company. Now isn’t that incredible? They couldn’t wait to be together to have another good argument and a good feed together. That’s what we need. The genius of Western Harmony surely is lying in our ability to respect one another even over our deepest differences. One day Chesterton was huge. He was 6’4 and very, very heavy. George Bernard Shaw was in great shape like you two fellas. GK Chesterton looked at George Bernard Shaw slim as a rake and he said, by gee, George, you look as though there must be a famine in England. George Bernard Shaw shot back as quickly as you could imagine. There’s a great big gargantuan man and you look like you’re the cause of it. But you just mentioned courage. And I want to get to some of the terrific questions that people have put up. Before I do, that courage is something you’ve both displayed in Spadefuls and it’s incredibly important. We live in a culture now where I think there’s a lot of fear. When I was last with you, we were at Chatswood and there’s a thousand people in that auditorium. A lot of them are young men. I looked around and I thought, these are terrific young Australians. They’re pretty concerned about whether their masculinity might be toxic. And they’re pretty fearful about speaking out because we had, once upon a time we used to burn people at stake, didn’t we? And then we went for the guillotine, then we went for the hangman’s news. Now we kill people in social media. And we do. People get kneecapped every day and worse. I think we owe you a great debt, both of you actually, because you dared to break the ceiling. And Dave, you actually asked Jordan about this in Norway. This is the beauty of modern, even I caught up a bit, you know. Heard your conversation. You said, you asked Jordan, did you expect when you started on this journey to end up like this? And you asked him what it’s like to break through that, how do you feel about it when you’re attacked? And you were very open and very honest. And you said that it’s very tough when a journalist does you over. But you might like to repeat that question to Jordan. Yeah, well, quickly on the bravery thing. My partner hates when I say this, but I don’t consider myself brave. I’m doing what I think is right. That is it. That really is it. I wake up every morning and I feel that I have something to do that’s relevant and important. And being on this tour with Jordan has been life altering, not only for my life, for all the people that show there, but I don’t view it as bravery. I couldn’t not do it. I guess is the best way to say it. I couldn’t not. I just got to make the point there. I think you’re probably being very tough on yourself. I think the reality is that courage is not so much not knowing fear, it’s overcoming it, isn’t it? And there must have been times when you wanted to sort of say, gee, I don’t want to be under this attack. Well, I guess I saw enough when I started waking up to some of what was going on on the left. And I had seen the tactics over and over and how they destroyed good people. I suppose that as that went on and as I woke up and got out of it, I just became numb to that. And I just wouldn’t live like that, I would think. But the question that I asked you in Norway in effect was you didn’t set out for this when C-16 came around. You were doing all sorts of other things. You had to practice. You were teaching all of these other things. And yet you’ve survived these. It’s not even the attacks. You’ve survived a road that you didn’t plan on being on. And the bravery that you’ve shown along the way is why people keep coming back. They’re rooting for us more. As you often say, it’s like these hit pieces come out. And then in a weird way, and now I see it with me, they’ve moved on from you, by the way. They’re working on me now. But yeah, I’m happy to help. But in a weird way, it wasn’t that you reveled in it, but you made a point of saying, look, every time they do it, I’m still here. And I think it really took me a while to understand that because I always wanted to defend my friends, but I also wanted to defend myself. And now it’s like, all right, keep coming. I’m still here. We must be doing something right because I don’t spend all my day attacking other people. I’ll gladly attack ideas, but I don’t attack people. I mean, I don’t think we’ve done anything up here where we attacked a singular person. And that’s a huge difference. So the question really was you inadvertently in a weird way. A little hard on Cortez. I’m not a big fan of Cortez. OK, fine. Fair enough. Yeah, exactly. So every now and again, though, but I think I talked about her ideas and not her. We’re talking about her ideas. She’s in the public sphere. Yeah, I talked about her and her credit score, but not her as a person. But right, and she is in the public sphere, and it’s also impossible to never talk about people. So you can’t be that lofty all the time, but you can try to be a little bit. But that basically you inadvertently ended up in this position where now, by virtue of showing bravery, well, you sold out the Sydney Opera House in five minutes. Well, it’s a matter. I think it’s a matter of being afraid of the right thing. That’s the issue. It’s like I decided a long time ago, partly from reading Solzhenitsyn, that I was going to try to be very careful with my words, and I was only going to say things that I thought, well, to begin with, weren’t lies, let’s say. I was going to try to formulate my thoughts truthfully. And the reason I decided that was because I thought that the opposite was hellishly dangerous. And I really, I really believe that. I truly believe that. And so, if I say things and I think they’re true, and they get me in trouble, then I think, well, that’s not as much trouble as I would have got into if I would have said something that wasn’t true. Like it might be more trouble right now. Who knows, right? Because, and you don’t know how these things are going to turn out. I had this interview, most of you know about it, with Kathy Newman from Channel 4, right? And that was a pretty strange experience. So what you’re saying is it was a great interview. Yeah, exactly, exactly, exactly. And you know, she was pretty professional when we went to the studio, like someone like that is professional, kind of hard surface and glossy and media presentable, you know, the TV turns you into that. She was perfectly polite in a professional way until the camera went on and then, you know, then she went after me. And then the whole interview went the way it went. And I thought, I had like 20 interviews that day. And so I walked away from that and I thought, oh, God, they’re going to take seven minutes of that and, you know, broadcast it and make me look like a complete monster and that’ll be the end of that. And that is exactly what they did. Except they also posted the entire thing on YouTube, not knowing at all that it was a train wreck. They had no idea. It wasn’t like they thought, oh, this is a train wreck, we better put it on YouTube. It wasn’t that at all. They thought it was a perfectly fine interview. So then it went on YouTube. And so, well, so like my mood changed a lot. It was first of all, well, this interview went catastrophically and then it was, well, they’re only going to use seven minutes of it. That’s going to be a drag, but I’ll probably get over it. And then they put it online. And then there was just an incredible reaction. And then five, ten newspapers came out to play the victim card for poor Kathy, which was now all the online trolls were after her. And I thought that really, really struck me. I thought she’s one of the most powerful people in the UK. One of the thousand most powerful, let’s say, or the 500 most powerful. She’s no bloody victim. And she’s played paid plenty well for what she does. Jordan, by the way, don’t forget that that night that this all happened, she did a video in her car reading the troll, the comments by the trolls, because at that moment she didn’t realize she should play the victim card yet. Yes, she was laughing. She was still reveling in it. Yeah, that’s right. And it wasn’t until she realized it. Yeah. So then her employees said, well, we had to call in the police to investigate. That’s an unbelievably crooked thing to say. It’s like anybody can call in the damn police to investigate anything. It’s like, well, what constitutes a credible threat? Well, there are ways of assessing credible threats. You know, they have to be direct and detailed. That’s how you assess suicidality, for example. If you tell me that you have a plan, you know when you’re going to do it, you know where, you have a gun, you’ve thought it through, it’s like that’s a credible threat. Sometimes I wish I wasn’t here. That’s not a credible threat. And you see the same sort of thing online. Well, then 10 newspapers played the victim card that poor Kathy was being trolled by, well, at that point by like a million trolls. Who knew there were that many trolls? But apparently they were. And then I thought, well, God, the whole thing’s going to go sideways again, because I’m going to come out of this as the villain who called forth, you know, the alt-right armada to take down poor, innocent Kathy Newman. And so it looked like it was going to shift that way for about four days. And then, well, that didn’t work. There was a couple of other interviews that started to push back that narrative, and then it switched back to my side. But look, I’m making a point with this. When I do an interview, like this interview, I don’t, I follow this rule in my book. Rule, which is it? Let’s say eight. I think it’s eight. Oh, all right. We’ve been doing this for a while. Sorry, it’s seven. Do what is meaningful, not what is expedient. Okay, so I come to an event like this, and I have an opportunity to say things. And I don’t come in here and think, okay, here’s a bunch of things I want to convince you of. You know, I don’t care if you’re convinced. It’s not like I don’t care about you, you know, in the sense that you care for people and hope the best for them. But I don’t care if you’re convinced. That’s not what I’m here for. What I’m here for is to hear the questions and try to figure out what I think about them, and then to say that. And then to see what happens. Like, who the hell knows what’s going to happen? But there’s, here’s, if the world is properly constituted through truth, then faith is the willingness to have faith in truth. To have faith in truth. And so then you say what you believe to be true. And then some things happen. And sometimes they’re not so good, which is why people often lie. You know, you tell the truth, you get in trouble for it. Every kid knows that. It’s like, well, why’d you lie? Because I thought I’d get in trouble. Well, obviously. It’s like, well, that’s not a good long-term strategy. It’s like, so you say what you believe to be the truth, and then you have the faith that no matter what happens, if you’ve said what you believe to be truth, whatever happens is the best thing that could have happened. And I believe that. I think that’s how the world’s constituted. And so it’s not bravery exactly. I would say it’s more like faith. It’s like, I’m going to say what I think. I’m going to try to do that as carefully as I possibly can. And I’m going to detach myself from the outcome. Because sometimes the outcome’s terrible. I’m at McMaster University or Queens, and there’s like a bloody mob of zombies pounding on the window. You know, it’s a little slice of hell. You think, this doesn’t seem to be a very good idea. But you know, the tide turns two or three times in the next three weeks, and something comes out of it. And so if you’re going to have faith in truth, it can’t just be, well, did I get what I want in the next second? That’s not faith. It’s like, no, I’m going to. This is the other thing, too, that you’ve got to understand, I think, is that without truth, you don’t have the adventure of your life. You see, because if you tell the truth, that means you’re revealing your being. That’s what you’re doing when you’re telling the truth. And when you reveal your being, then you’re living in the world. You’re there. You’re present, right? You’re… That’s being there, let’s say. That’s you. That’s your destiny. That’s your journey. That’s your adventure. That’s what’s going to justify your life. The adventure. It’s not going to be easy. And if you hide from your truth, well, then you hide from yourself. And then you’re not even there. And then who the hell are you? What are you? The puppet. You’re the puppet of some coward. You’re the puppet of some dictator or some second-rate philosopher, some idiotic idea or a bully you were afraid of in grade six. God only knows. But it’s not you living your life. And then you lose your life. And you lose your soul, too. So that’s what I’m afraid of. And so, you know, journalists, well, they try to take me down. It’s like, yeah, well, that’s annoying. And it usually takes me three days to recover. But compared to not having my life and not saying what I have to say, that’s nothing. It’s nothing. It’s minor inconvenience. And then generally, if you can just withstand it, you know, two weeks, you get mobbed. You guys might all need to know this. You’re going to get mobbed on social media. OK, so what do you do? Unless you did something wrong, don’t apologize. That’s the first thing, because then no one can come to your defense. So don’t apologize. Maybe you even double down carefully, carefully, not vengefully, right? Carefully. You say, no, that’s what I meant. And if you don’t like it too bad and you get mobbed, then you apologize. A different mob comes after you. That’s not helpful. And no one can defend you. If you can hold out for two weeks, you’ll win. Now, it’s a pretty brutal two weeks, because, you know, if you’re a reasonable person and a hundred angry neighbors show up at your door with pitchforks, you might be thinking there’s something wrong with you, you know? Like, you think that unless you’re psychopathic. And you think, well, maybe I made a mistake. And it’s easy to waver and to back down. And maybe you’re also afraid. But, you know, if you scoured your conscience and you’re careful and you said what you had to say, then leave it lie. And they’ll throw the people who are playing this game will throw everything they can at you for two weeks. And if it doesn’t stick, you’re done. And then the next time they try it, it doesn’t work as well as it did the first time. And by the 50th time they try it, like, as far as I can tell, carefully, the people who have enmity for me are out of ammunition. They’re done. I read hit pieces now and I think, oh, you just copied the hit piece from two months ago. It’s like, I’m perfectly habituated to that. They’re out of ammunition. And maybe, you know, like, someone creative could still come up with some more ammunition. Maybe that’ll happen at the Q&A. But it’s not bravery, man. It’s faith in the redeeming power of truth. And that’s different. I think that’s incredibly interesting and encouraging. Let’s come to a couple of questions. I’ll just preface them by saying there’s been a we actually did a bit of research on this. And one of the things that people say is they love hearing your stories and they love hearing you being open. And they love it when you connect personally with them. And somebody wanted to connect with you and Tammy. Tammy’s here with you. And they’re, I think, very conscious of the incredible timetable that you’re setting. So is Alastair there? You wanted to ask about how this works for you. It’s so great having opportunity for both of you in person. In a moment of uncharacteristic courage, close to two years ago, I got married. Again, a woman who on any objective measure completely outranks me. Congratulations. Thank you. Now, she’s very high on assertiveness and I’m very high on conscientiousness, which you will fully understand. And so we contend. We contend a lot and it’s good and we’re going somewhere good. And I’m very proud for what it’s worth. I’m aware and I imagine what your life is like. And I’m talking to you, Jordan, but Dave, I don’t want to exclude you either. And I imagine your life being one of constant exhaustion, exhilaration, and probably a fair bit of terror as well. And the word contending is one that you actually used a few days ago on a different platform in a different city. You’re talking to young people and you challenge them to marry a mate with whom they would contend. And I think of Tammy and I think of you and we don’t hear a great deal of Tammy, but you guys are, I’m sure, working really hard. You’re contending. You’re confronting all this stuff and you’re processing it. And I’m sure your marriage is strengthening. I trust it is. And I’d love some insight on that if you can speak to what you’re learning about marriage in this season of your life. Well, the first thing we’re doing is that Tammy is traveling with me. So that’s very helpful. And she’s paying attention. You know, so and we talk a lot about what is going on, but also a lot about our family because there’s complicated things going on in our family like there are in most families. And we do our best to communicate, you know, and she says what she thinks. And I say what I think. And we don’t always think the same thing, you know, but we do our best to listen. We do our best to assume that just because the other person has a different opinion doesn’t mean that they’re wrong, even though it would be lovely if they were. And then we try to come up with a negotiated solution that’s mutually acceptable, you know, and we discuss strategy as well. I mean, for example, when we started this tour, which was more than a year ago, we thought, you know, there’s a lot of competing things that you could think about a tour, especially when we had no idea how long it would be. Like, what was this? Was this a vacation? We were going to, you know, spectacular cities all over the world. Was it time for us to spend together? Like, what was it? What were we doing? And we spent two hours thinking. It’s like, no, this is work. We have a remarkable opportunity here, and we’re going to do the work. We’re going to hit as many cities as we can. And so what does that mean? It means we get the hell up in the morning. We make sure we’re packed. Our suitcases aren’t too full. We don’t carry anything that goes underneath the plane. We make sure that I don’t get hungry because then I can’t perform properly. We make sure that I’m at the theatre at the right point in time. And we make sure that our eye is focused on the fact that it’s a great privilege and it’s very unlikely that we can do this. And so we thought, okay, that’s the deal. And then we thought, well, and then we can take an hour or two here and there if we’re fortunate to see some of the city and to take a break and to do that when we can. And, you know, we’ve negotiated other details about exactly how intense the scheduling was going to be. But it’s a constant negotiation. And it is a contentious negotiation, which is good because these things are complicated. You know, and to think something complicated through, you need a good argument on this side and you need a good argument on this side. And then you got to have at her and see if you can come out with an even better argument as a consequence. And so that seemed to work. Now, there’s other advantages. It turns out that Tammy is very suited. I’m sorry I’m speaking for her, but she doesn’t have a microphone and actually prefers to stay in the background to some degree for various reasons. She’s very suited to a life like this. She’s quite stable emotionally. So she doesn’t suffer from a lot of anxiety. She likes to travel. She likes meeting new people. She likes the adventure. And she’s supporting what I’m doing. And so that’s working. And thank God for that. And then she also keeps an eye on what I’m doing and lets me know when it’s going well and when she thinks it needs improvement. And she helps me figure out where I’m going next. Because for the last two years, my schedule has been so busy that I don’t know what I’m doing next usually, maybe the next day. And so her job, because we’ve also parceled out jobs, is to make sure that I get wherever I’m going next on time and ready. And so far, that’s brought, I would say, incalculable benefits fundamentally. And because we agreed on it, we had our little constitution in place. We were able to handle the stress. Because I think we’ve been in a hundred and it’s damn near 150 cities in 350 days. And so it’s a very heavy traveling schedule. And the other thing too is I trust her. She tells me the truth. It isn’t necessarily what I want to hear. Well, you can tell that’s the truth, man. It’s what you don’t necessarily want to hear. But so she’s a very good counselor. And that’s turned out to be exceptionally helpful. And I’m like their son who refuses to leave. You know, I like it, Mark. You know, really nice. You know, it’s all right. I think we ought to give Tammy a round of applause. Dave, I think one for you comes from Monica Wilkie. It’s about dealing with difference. Thank you, John. Dave, I wanted to ask, is it possible to come to a resolution with someone who has different values to you? So, for example, if I have free speech as my highest value, and I’m talking to someone who believes that diversity and equality is a higher value, and therefore free speech should be quelled in order to achieve this, is it possible to reconcile these differences? I think it is. I think it is. The best example that I can give you, and I’m sure some of you have seen this, I’ve had a couple interviews and debates with Ben Shapiro. Now, Ben is an Orthodox Jew. He does not believe that gay people should be married. Well, he believes that being gay is a sin is the loose word for it, right? Now, Ben, my studio is in my home. I live with my partner in my home, obviously. Ben and I, we’re friends to a certain point. You know what I mean? You’ve got your best friend in life who knows you the way your husband or wife or partner knows you, and then you have sort of other tiers of friends. Ben will never, as long as we have this disconnect, last time I had him on when we discussed this, he said that it caught fire on the internet, he said he wouldn’t bake me a gay wedding cake, right? Or even come to an anniversary party because it would be celebrating something that he doesn’t believe in. And I remember when we were having the discussion, I thought, all right, well, here’s a really interesting moment. I can now berate him and I can demand that he acquiesce and put aside whatever his beliefs are so that he will believe what I want him to believe, even if I think it is the right thing. I mean, I think I’m a good person. I’m just doing my life as I see fit, right? Ben sees the world differently. So can we ever truly get through that? I would say yes, because what we agreed to, for what we were agreeing to disagree on, what we agreed to agree on was that it’s not the role of the government to decide who can get married. Now, he’s less thrilled with that than I am because I think that’s a perfectly fine position to take. He, you know, this you see this a lot with conservatives now where they, when you ask them about gay marriage, they’ll take the libertarian position. They weren’t taking it five years ago, but they suddenly, now that they realize it’s the law of the land in the United States and it’s just the easy way out, it’s like, well, you know, I don’t really care about gay marriage. It’s anyone can get into any contract that they want to. It’s the easy way out. I don’t mind letting them slide on that because we’re equal. We made it. So it’s OK now. So I don’t know that you can ever. Well, let’s put it this way. I think there are issues that you will have existential, profound differences with people that you will not be able to get over. But that doesn’t mean you have to cut them out of your life. And as I said to Ben last time we talked about this, I hope that we’ll remain friends to whatever degree our friendship is for the next, let’s say, 50 years. And I’m a little older than him. But when I’m 92 and he’s 37 or whatever it is, or 37, sorry, when he’s 87, math was not my thing. But when I’m 92 and he’s 87, that maybe the long game would have worked here. And he’ll look back and go, you know, Dave, you probably were right. I suspect I will get him on this one. So I would say just generally try to be try to be as tolerant as the other people say they are. They’re not really that good at it. They just talk about it a lot. But if you actually try to do that and realize that the world is not designed to bow to you and that you can show people you’re a little bit better, I just I’m a firm believer that that is what we’ll ultimately get there. But no, you can’t get everyone right there and it’s for you to judge what relationships you want to be in. Thank you. I think to bring it home, then a question that I think is very important and probably troubling or goes to the heart of something that’s troubling a lot of people now. Rochelle on the men in the Me Too era. I know it’ll bring it home at that point. But Rochelle, where’s Rochelle? Here, right here. I just want to be clear. I’ve never had a Me Too incident with a woman. That’s really good. You like that one? Yeah. First of all, thank you very much for being here and helping us to wake up. I really appreciate it. So my question is as a redeemed progressive, what is the key to empowering men in the Me Too age while maintaining healthy boundaries and strong behavioral expectations? Well, as the redeemed progressive, as I said. Well, no one’s born guilty. No one’s born guilty. If you haven’t raped anybody and you haven’t accosted anybody and you haven’t done anything untoward, then you have nothing to be guilty about. I mean, this is the consistent theme that we’ve talked about here about why you should judge people as an individual and not as a collective. But they’ve created a situation now where people are now being born with original sin. Oh, you’re a white, heterosexual, usually Christian male. You are the worst thing that exists. I mean, it’s the essence of bigotry. You’re prejudging, right? So that’s prejudice. You’re looking at someone and you’re prejudging them. And you think that you know everything that they’re not only about but capable of. So I would say the further we can get away from that, how do you negotiate those relationships? Well, if you’ve done something bad, it’s on you. I mean, Jordan addressed this already. It’s on you to figure out how to make penance for that, I suppose. But if you haven’t done anything, and most people haven’t, that’s why. This idea, believe all women. Well, that’s what it’s like saying believe all men, believe all midgets. Believe all, I mean, it just doesn’t. Not midgets. Not midgets. Now you’re going to get us in trouble. Yeah, for sure. See, you just walked into it. Yeah, you did it to yourself this time. But I mean, really. I think they’re called little people. Little people. Believe all little people. But really, I mean, you could just take the reverse. So they say believe all women. Well, now just do the other way. Or believe all men. Does that sound right? Of course you shouldn’t believe all men. You shouldn’t believe all women. And by the way, every time that this happens, with one of these people saying believe all women, then the accusation gets turned on them, like our governor Gavin Newsom in California, or when it happened with Cory Booker, or a series of these guys. And then suddenly they go, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait for evidence. When it was Kavanaugh, no, believe all women. So it’s just a ridiculous, untenable way of holding a position. And if you’re not guilty of something, I mean, the fact that this is happening to young people in the West, especially young white men, that they’re walking around feeling like they’ve done something when they’ve done nothing, what a recipe for a disaster and the type of totalitarian society that we’ve been talking about up here. It’s also reflective of a technical problem, I would say. We’ve had relatively reliable birth control since 1960. That’s not very long. And we underestimate the unbelievable technological triumph of birth control. It’s the hydrogen bomb. It’s the transistor. It’s a major league transformation in human interaction. Women are now free from involuntary reproduction. That’s never been the case in the entire history of the planet. We don’t know exactly what to do about that. So the first idea in the 60s was, hell, let’s party. And you could see why. It’s like the rules for not engaging in promiscuous sexual intercourse seemed to have vanished. So we had a couple of decades of experimentation. It’s like, well, how’d that go? Little heart on the family, I would say. That’s not so good for kids. AIDS. That wasn’t a plus. Could have killed us all. And it mutated, particularly to take advantage of promiscuous sex, because viruses are very tricky things. So it turns out that sex is a little bit more complicated than we thought. Well, it actually turns out that it’s a lot more complicated than we think. And now it’s 50, 60 years later. And we’re trying to sort this out. It’s like, well, when is it OK to have sex? Exactly. And when is it not OK to have sex? And what does it mean that it’s OK? And what does consent mean? And the answer to that is, well, we never used to have to think these things through, because the rule was, don’t have sex until you get married. That was the rule. Now that isn’t the rule. OK, so what’s the rule? Well, we’re not having a conversation about the rule. We’re waiting till someone does something that seems like it might be untoward, and then mobbing them, and trying to extract the rule out that way. And it’s not a very effective way of doing it. You know, you want to decrease campus rape? That’s easy. Get re-alcohol. No one has that conversation. It’s like, I did my PhD work on alcohol. 50% of the people who are murdered are drunk. And 50% of the people who kill them are drunk. And almost all the date rape situations are consequences of excess intoxication. But yet, there’s a party culture on campuses, and anything goes. And you also have this strange thing, especially on the radical left, which is unbelievably paradoxical, where absolutely every form of sexual expression imaginable is 100% permissible, because sex is fine. But it’s so dangerous that while you’re dancing with someone at a Princeton mixer, you have to ask them two or three times if it’s OK for you to continue. And that’s actually the case, by the way. I’m not making that up. It’s like, well, both of those things can’t be true. Now, what’s happening, I think, on the me too end of things and the affirmative consent end of things is the old sexual taboos are reasserting themselves. The idea that we can extract sex out from emotional intimacy, and especially emotional intimacy, I would say, psychological intimacy, maybe even from long term relationship, is I don’t believe it’s a tenable idea. I don’t think we can do it. And a lot of what we’re seeing is the backlash against that. It’s like, well, I feel used. Because one of the things that’s happening on the really radical end of the anti-sexual abuse movement is the idea that, well, if you have intercourse with someone and then you regret it the next day, that’s evidence that it wasn’t consensual. Well, it is, in a sense, evidence that it wasn’t consensual, because it’s evidence that you didn’t bloody well think it through, right? It was good for last night, but it’s not good for today. It’s not very wise. The question is, well, what constitutes consent? And we need to have a very serious conversation about that, like under what circumstances is it acceptable to give consent? But we’re not mature enough to have that conversation. We want it both ways. We want to be able to do whatever we want, with whoever we want, whenever we want, with no consequences. And we want there never to be any trouble about consent. It’s like, well, no, that’s not going to happen. I don’t think that sex works very well outside of committed relationships. I don’t think there’s any evidence that it does. There’s a strong proclivity across cultures for the social enforcement of long-term monogamy. And there’s reasons for that. And I think you deviate from that at your peril. So now, if you want to deviate from that, there’s all sorts of reasons to do it. And I can understand why people are interested in adventure and all of that. But my sense also as a clinician is, you only really get to try out about five people in your life. You have to make a decision pretty damn quick. You know, like between 20 and 30, there’s a lot of things to get straight, and long-term mate is usually one of them. And most of the time, people should be more careful with their sexual behavior when they’re young, especially when they’re drunk, than they are. And I just think it’s so interesting that all of the taboo reconstruction is coming from the radical left. It’s not what you’d expect at all. You’d think it’d be the damn right-wing Christians complaining about sexual immorality. It’s like, no, it’s the radical lefties. You have to have signed consent before making any physical move. And then that’s so what? Really, who thought that up? That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. You know how awkward that would be? You’re supposed to be able to do a little bit of non-verbal reading, right? I mean, that’s part of romance. You ever see a movie where the two people who are dating exchange consent notes? Like, that doesn’t happen. So it’s an unrealistic solution. But I think the real solution is that, despite the fact that we have reliable birth control, we’re going to have to relearn what the acceptable rules of propriety are with regards to sexual relationships. One of the things I often tell my young clients is, don’t do anything physically with anyone that you wouldn’t talk to them about. Because if you’re too damn embarrassed to talk about it, well, maybe it’s a little premature in the relationship to actually do it. And then there’s harm in it. You know, there’s emotional harm in it on both parties. There’s the cheapening of both parties. So, well, so it’s going to take us a long time to sort this out. But hopefully we can do it in a serious manner and it won’t be merely a matter of mobbing those who seem to have made an error. So. Well, Jordan and Dave, you’ve given us unbelievably generously of your insights, of your ideas, of your experience, of your wisdom, and you’ve done it with immense warmth and humanity. I can’t thank you enough. Thank you enough. And I think all of these good Australians would agree with me. Nope. Thank you, guys. Thank you, thank you very much. See ya, all right? Okay. I guess that’s about that,ushi? Yeah. Åh, over and again, we’re all in on this. Thank you. Are very good writers. Thank you automated. It has been a Francis Donahue, females our