The New Media： My Experience and More (FS5sR1WytNQ)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=FS5sR1WytNQ

So our next speaker certainly does not need any introduction. He is the man you cornered by his seat. He is the man you cornered in the foyer. And he is the man you cornered outside the bathroom. So please put your hands together for Dr. Peterson. So I was kind of perplexed about what I was going to say today because I’m not a media expert by any stretch of the imagination. But I was speaking with Jonathan Pagio this morning because he’s staying in the same area B and B as my wife and I. And he suggested that I talk to you about my experiences with media over the last year. And I thought, well, that’s A, that’s something I know about. So it’s always good when you’re talking to people to talk to some talk about something that you know about. That’s actually a really good tip for public speaking, right? Well, it’s really true. You have to remember that you should know about three times as much about the topic as as you need to talk about the topic. And then you have places you can go and you can wander around a little bit and be a little spontaneous. So that’s really useful. And but then I also thought that makes sense because nobody knows anything about the situation with regards to the media now. And so we’re all feeling our way. And so because the technological transformations are so rapid and you know, they’re going to come one after the other in the next 10 years, I don’t think we can even imagine what’s coming down the pipes. And we’re all struggling to keep up. And you know, we don’t even know how much of the current state of more radical political polarization is actually a secondary consequence of technological transformations that we don’t understand because I was thinking today about, you know, about Facebook and about Twitter and about YouTube and about the idea that people are in an echo chamber. And I’m not really sure that’s the right metaphor. I think we might be in an amplifier rather than an echo chamber. You know, and I’ve thought for a long time that when I’m thinking about the effect of the individual, I read something that Solzhenitsyn said at one point, and I think he was citing an ancient Christian theologian who defined the universe as a place that whose circumference was nowhere and whose center was everywhere. And I really like that idea. And I think it’s actually relatively true from a technical perspective, like from a physical perspective. But Solzhenitsyn pointed out that each of us was to be regarded as a center of the cosmos and that we have the power that’s associated with that. And I’ve thought about that a lot because there’s something about it that’s either obviously true or it’s true enough so that we all act it out when we interact with each other because we treat each other like conscious beings who have a destiny and who have choices and who make choices that are important and who make choices that can be good or bad or even good and evil. We all act like that. So we act that out. And I was thinking that you can think of network models in that way, you know. You can think of human beings as like nine billion dots in a row and there’s no connections between the dots and then you’re sort of like a dust moat in the wind and who the hell cares what you think anyways and you don’t have any impact on things or you can recognize that you’re at the center of a networked system and that you know a thousand people or you will in your lifetime or perhaps more than a thousand people and then they know a thousand people so you’re separated by one person from a million and two people from a billion. And that’s a much better way to think. And we are seriously networked together and we’re networked together more now than we ever have been. And so one of the things that that might mean is that the choices you make are amplified and distributed not only far faster than they ever have been but with far more impact. And you know one of the things that Carl Jung pointed out was that he had this idea that when science that you know alchemy is the root of science in some sense it’s the dream-like substrate out of which science emerged and but alchemy was kind of a weird admixture of religious thinking and scientific thinking because those two things hadn’t been differentiated back when there were alchemists and Jung believed that what had happened in Europe at least first was that the scientific end of alchemy blew up and expanded at an exponential rate and that led to this advanced technological civilization that we have but that the moral dimension that was embedded in the religious symbolism didn’t develop at all and so we’re in this unstable situation where we’re far more technologically proficient than we are wise and that that’s actually a big problem because obviously the more powerful the tools you generate the more intelligent ethically you better be or things are going to really are going to go to hell in a hand basket very very rapidly you know and I had this thought I think I shared it a little bit last night that you know in the next five years six years we’re going to develop pretty viciously intelligent AI systems and that’s already happening you know I mean they’re monitoring YouTube and they’re monitoring Facebook and they’re monitoring Google and they’re trying to make ethical decisions these AI systems and the problem is is that the ethical presuppositions of the programmers are being embedded into the infrastructure of the net and that’s a hell of a thing to think because it means that for better or worse we’re building automated intelligences that reflect our own morality and we better be very careful about what our morality is if we’re going to automate it because automated systems are incredibly powerful so so that’s that’s kind of that’s where we’re at at least to some degree in terms of the new technological transformations in communication technology you know it puts each of us at the at the center of a wide web of connections and makes the consequences of our moral decisions much more immediately manifest to each of us it kind of begs the question too like how should you behave on Facebook and how should you behave on Twitter I think Twitter drives me a little bit crazy you know I’m on it a fair bit I’m not sure it’s a good thing and I tend to distribute things that are alarming let’s say in some sense maybe they are alarming ideological ideologically they’re disturbing and I was thinking about that today in preparation for this talk and I wasn’t really sure that was necessarily a good idea because there are a lot of alarming things happening all the time everywhere obviously and now we can share all of them always all the time and so that means that instead of hearing about one alarming thing a day you’re hearing about like 500 alarming things a day and so then you know what are you supposed to do about that is that does that indicate the state that there’s a state of emergency well you don’t know because you don’t know how to calibrate the information so I was thinking well maybe the right way to behave on Twitter is only to forward good things that are happening you know because there’s lots of good things that are happening but I actually don’t know the answer to that I have no idea and I don’t think anybody else does either I do know that there are studies with regards to Facebook that show that the more time that you spend on Facebook the more depressed you are and that it looks like it’s a causal relationship rather than just a correlational relationship and it seems to have something to do with the fact that Facebook is one of those platforms where everybody puts up an advertisement for their life right it’s like here I am with my new girlfriend in the Bahamas being happy and here I am on a mountain being happy and it’s like it’s not you like miserable with a cover over your head unable to get out of bed you don’t you don’t you don’t broadcast that you can think well I mean you’re presenting people with a falsely positive view of your life and then they compare their lives to it and they come up short and you think well that’s a kind of deception but by the same token you don’t stop random strangers on the street and tell them how miserable your life is right they don’t want to hear about that they they want to see a facade of normality in in you know just casual day-to-day interactions and so part of pro-social behavior is only to put what’s at least you know normative and good forward so it doesn’t matter I mean so I don’t think that’s necessarily deception but the mass consequence of that is something that we don’t understand at all and so well so with that sort of introduction I’m going to kind of walk you through my experience with social media and let’s say the old media for lack of a better word and I’ll try to give you a balanced account and to tell you well it’s to see if I can draw some conclusions about what’s happened I mean my life for the last year has been so busy that I haven’t had proper time to reflect on what’s been happening and even if I did I wouldn’t I’m not exactly sure I would be able to understand it anyways because it isn’t sure I’m not I don’t think I have a framework of reference within which to put it so I started working for this company called television tv Ontario about 15-16 years ago I had talked to a producer his name was Wodek Schemberg he’s an emigrate Polish Jew and a really smart guy and he phoned me up at the university and one of the things that distinguishes me to some degree from my colleagues is that I’ll talk to the press and that I’m actually not afraid of them or distrustful of them like a lot of my colleagues not all of them are like they’re critical of the press partly in an arrogant way and partly in a defensive way they say well they always get it wrong it’s like well first of all there isn’t a they and they don’t always get it wrong and you know they they’ll also shy away from the press as if they’re being intruded upon when the truth is generally speaking the ideas that they’re putting forward aren’t of sufficient interest to draw public attention anyways and so but I talked to Wodek for a long time and he invited me to go on a couple of shows and then then I ended up on tvO’s the agenda which is a pretty good public affairs show it’s one of the few I would say deep news shows left that are on normal broadcast tv and you know they go into issues in some depth although they fragmented that up a bit in recent years and I became a fairly common guest on those shows and people seem to like what I was saying which always surprised me I mean but but it was good because you know it must be pretty damn horrible to put yourself out in the public eye and face primary criticism for what you’re doing I think that would be unbearable in some sense unless you were very very strongly constituted and then well that went on for a while and Wodek was running this series called Big Ideas which was actually quite prescient you know so he had lecturers come to Toronto and and he had all pretty much all the major public intellectuals in the world over a period of about five years or six years or so come and deliver bare bones lectures of this sort fundamentally and he taped them and put them on tv you know and and that was sort of unheard of the production quality was well high but not overproduced there weren’t multiple cameras and edits and and intelligent commentary from people in the background it was purely content driven you know and it actually got pretty popular on on itunes and you can still find the lectures there but tv couldn’t they they they they pulled the show even though their primary mandate from the government was to educate the public and this was a very low budget show with very high quality minds that people were actually watching and downloading a lot on itunes but they they didn’t seem to take the non-standard media with any degree of seriousness and you know that’s kind of a common human attribute which is that if you don’t know about something you don’t take it seriously right and it’s because if you don’t know about it well it’s just gray and fuzzy right you you have no differentiated knowledge so it’s easy to oversimplify it and i think part of the problem with the classical media let’s say trying to make a transition to the digital age is that they have no idea what the digital media is like i was watching an ms nbc clip the other day about this robot i think her name is sophia who who has a fairly advanced degree of artificial intelligence and who can manifest pretty realistic human facial emotions and it was a four-minute clip and had a 30-second ad at the beginning of it and you couldn’t skip the ad and i thought there’s a real arrogance on the part of the mba ms nbc people to put that on youtube because anybody who’s familiar with the youtube let’s say culture knows that well you get to put a 10-second ad on and then you get to skip it after five seconds if you want like you can’t ask people to pay 30 seconds of attention for four minutes of content it violates the norms and so it had only had about 12 000 views and that’s a really interesting example of marshall mcclellan’s idea that the medium is the message right as you build a new technological infrastructure and it’s sort of like the old thing because youtube is sort of like a tv network but it’s also not like a tv network at all partly for example because when you put something on youtube it’s permanent that’s way different than broadcast tv like it’s it’s seriously revolutionarily different and so and it’s also the case too that and this is a strange thing and i don’t think the classic media understands this either is that youtube people don’t like high production values in fact they’re very cynical about them and i think that’s because they’ve come to identify advanced editing and glitz as markers that the information is actually being manipulated which of course it is now for better or worse i mean editing doesn’t have to be manipulating but it certainly can be and so and besides that a lot of the more tech savvy people that watch youtube can duplicate those sort of special effects in their own home in half an hour so they’re not they’re they’re no longer markers of the kind of competence and technological prowess that would signal the sort of competence that you could trust so so what youtube viewers seem to like is basically ordinary people more or less trying to have an intelligent conversation about something confusing and important and the the attention span that people are willing to devote to that is actually quite remarkable for for a medium that was nothing but cute cat videos say five years ago the fact that like a lot of my lectures and like joe rogan’s podcast like three hours long it’s like what the hell people weren’t supposed to have that capacity to pay attention in this era of fragmented attention you know in rogan i don’t know if you know this or not he has 120 million downloads a month now so that’s 1.5 billion downloads a year and so the last time i saw him and that was with brett who just spoke i i asked him what it was like to be the most powerful interviewer the world has ever seen because i think he probably is if you think about it in sheer numbers i mean maybe walter cronkite back in the 60s had some comparable influence but he said i just don’t think about it and like what what the hell is he supposed to think about it because no one knows what to think about that and so he just has the conversations and posts them and away he goes but he has no idea what role he’s currently playing in society and we don’t have proper metrics for measuring it and we don’t understand it at all so anyways i did these big idea lectures with with wodak and and uh they were ranked on on uh the ddo channel and the five lectures or six lectures i did all ended up in the top 20 which really surprised me but was an indication that there was something about what i was talking about that for which there was a market and now there’s there’s some reasons for that i think you know when when i i wrote a book from 1984 to 1999 called maps of meaning and a lot of the things i talk about come out of all the reading i did during that period because i was reading an insane amount and thinking really non-stop 16 hours a day like the only way i could stop myself from thinking was to go work out with weights i couldn’t shut off my my concern with the issues that i was dealing with and i was spending about three hours a day writing and i did that every day for 15 years and that was the consequence that was the book and uh the writing also helped a tremendous amount because it helps clarify your thinking writing you know because actually you’re smarter when you write because you can externalize your thoughts and then you can you can use your working memory to analyze what you’ve written instead of remembering the thought and so you’re you’re externalizing your memory you can analyze what you thought you can refine it you can reorder it you can edit like mad with a word processor which is also a very new thing to editing is very difficult if you have to do that with pen and paper or with a typewriter it’s like forget it you you get your first draft and that’s it and so but what i was doing with maps of meaning was i was trying to solve a problem and the problem was it was the problem as far as i was concerned that underlie the conflict between the western world and the communist world essentially and that problem was well the reason it was a problem was because we were so highly armed even as we are now and of course that problem is manifesting itself once again with north korea that might render everything we’re talking about completely irrelevant right because we don’t know which catastrophe is the one most worth worrying about but i was interested in the conflict between the communist way of looking at the world and the western way of looking at the world and i think i actually had a post-modern concern with that because one of the things i was curious about was well the world is susceptible to a multitude of interpretations and opinions and the communist interpretation is one form of interpretation and the western capitalist democratic form of interpretation is another form of interpretation and is there any grounds on which you can determine that one of those is superior to the other or more correct than the other or is it a matter purely of opinion and social organization or maybe even warfare to determine who’s going to be the victor maybe there’s no other way of determining who’s going to be the victor than actual conflict it’s certainly possible and so i started to look underneath belief structures and i didn’t know you could do that really to begin with you know my first degree was in political science and i kind of wandered out of that when the professors kept insisting to me in the upper years of my studies that all the conflict between human beings was driven by economic disparity and i just never bought that because that’s like saying that people fight about what they value and for me that just begged the question of well yeah fair enough obviously it’s it’s it’s almost self-evident but the real question is why do they value what they value because human beings are quite a diverse lot and it’s not self-evident why we value some things rather than other things like if you’re starving to death it’s obvious that you’re going to value food but that’s a limit case you know it’s it’s not that interesting so it’s it’s too simplified so i didn’t find that a compelling explanation and i still don’t i think the economic explanation for for human conflict is is shallow and tautological even and then i started to read some people whose whose writings really gripped me and i think that’s an interesting phenomenon you know and i was studying psychology by this point i switched into psychology and um i was starting to read the psychoanalysts and i really got i really got interested in what they had to say partly from reading freud because i was really interested in his analysis of family dynamics and of dreams but more particularly from reading young and one of the things i learned from young which really has never ceased to shock me was his see he basically made a point and the the point was that you’re not master in your own house that there are forces that are are operating on you at an unconscious level that determine for example the direction of your attention so for example you know how sometimes you’ll read something it’ll really grip you and then you’ll read something else and you like you can’t even concentrate on it and you might say well i need to concentrate on this boring thing you know because an exam depends on it or a promotion and there’s just no damn way you you’re reading it and your attention flits all over the place and and you know you’re undisciplined and all that but but then you have this other thing and it just grips you like this and you think okay well what what’s doing that it’s not your will because your will would be the thing that would allow you to concentrate on whatever you chose to concentrate on it’s something underneath your will that’s actually directing your attention and you could say well it’s random but of course it’s not it’s maybe random if you have a serious case of schizophrenia but and i think in some sense that’s actually the definition of schizophrenia but it’s not random if you’re a functioning human being the thing that grips your attention and directs it to one place or another is something that’s what’s a deep instinct it’s a manifestation of what you called the self which is a very interesting idea so young thought it’s such a cool idea he thought that the mechanism that directed your attention in the present was your future self attempting to manifest itself in the present world so you might say well you have a potential and that potential is what you could be in time and in order for that potential to manifest itself it has to be palpable in the present and the way that instinct for further develop manifests itself in the present is by directing your attention towards things that are likely to increase your competence and further your growth right now and that’s just an unbelievable idea you know it’s like your your potential better self beckoning to you in the present amazing and i i really can’t think of a better explanation for it than that that’s a that’s a really good explanation but a very frightening one because it means in some sense that you’re that something as fundamental as your attention is more or less controlled by processes that are so deep that you don’t have a tremendous amount of voluntary control over them like you can interact with the forces to some degree but you know you’re not one of those creatures that can just tell yourself what to do life would be really easy if that’s what it was like right you’d it’s time to go to the gym three days a week two hours a day it’s like you know you’re superman in two years you’re going to eat properly and you know you’re not going to drink too much and you’re not going to take cocaine and all of these things you just tell yourself that and bang you quit and it’s kind of weird that it isn’t that way but it’s really seriously not that way anyways when i was looking at the difference between the communist system and the western capitalist system i started to get underneath the belief systems to find out what was there and you was extremely helpful and other thinkers that i’m sure you’ve heard me mention if you’ve listened to my lectures nichia and and dostoevsky and solzhenitsyn seemed to be the people who had dug deepest down into those subterranean levels and what i found i think was that the communist system was very was very shallow it was predicated on a set of rational assumptions that were generated by a handful of people with no real biological or historical rooting and i think that the fact that that was the case was part of the reason why when those ideas unfolded in real time they were so murderous they just weren’t imagine that you know carl marx was thinking well here’s the game that we’re playing and here are the rules and so that he laid out the rules explicitly and then people made societies that followed those rules and it turned out that that game didn’t work at all he just got it wrong and like seriously wrong whereas in the west the ideas emerged from a an unbroken historical process that stretches back probably to the beginning of of civilization say maybe maybe all the way back to africa who knows how how ancient these ideas are and there’s there’s an unbroken continuity of ideas that emerged up and that and they’re expressed in symbolic form and it’s on that symbolic platform which actually matches our biology and our behavior that our more articulated ideas rest upon and so i found that extremely useful and surprising i mean it wasn’t what i expected and and at the same time i i i was i was i had another problem that emerged while i was dealing with this and one was that i come to understand what group identity meant to people like you have to have a group identity because you live with other people and unless you have a shared identity jonathan talked about this a bit unless you have a central pole around which you’re all oriented it’s all chaotic and confused and and you’re in constant conflict and warfare it’s like that’s a bad thing you don’t you do not want that and you’re all confused individually and all of that that’s a state of chaos it’s unbearable but if you tighten up the group identity to to greater degree say like the nazis tried to do then the probability that you’ll come to blows with other groups reaches a almost a point of certainty right and so it seemed to me that human beings were damned if they did and damned if they didn’t on the on the one hand if you dropped your group identity then you fragmented and degenerated into chaos and if you gripped hard to your group identity then you you tilted towards totalitarianism and group conflict and then i thought well that was okay in the past to tilt towards group conflict because you know when we had sticks and swords we’d have a war and lots of people would get killed and lots of people would get hurt but the entire planet wouldn’t burst into flames right so you know this this this inborn dichotomy of of catastrophe that characterized human existence wasn’t something that could spiral into complete destruction and so we could get away with it but now in a thermonuclear age it’s like we can’t get away with it but that’s still what we’re like we’re still like that and so for months i thought oh my god i always believed that if you could get to the bottom of a problem you could solve it because that was sort of the definition of getting to the bottom of it you know solution would emerge and when i got to the bottom of it as far as i could go i thought oh it’s group identity and like group fostered warfare and catastrophe on the one hand and degenerate nihilism on the other it’s like well jigs up there’s no way out of that and i had a prophetic dream at that point which and i won’t tell you the details of that but it outlined a third path to me that that i had already picked up to some degree from reading jung and also eric noyman who is one of young’s great students and that was that had to do with the embodiment of the idea of the hero and the individual as the like the pathway of the courageous individual as the mediating force between the chaos of nihilism and the totalitarian totalitarianism of authority and authority authoritarian certainty that there was a third path and then i started to understand its relationship to religious thinking mostly to christianity partly because that’s my tradition you know in so far as i’m a western person say and i understood as well that it had something to do and that this was what was dramatized in the in the in the in the passion story in the new testament was that it had something to do with taking responsibility for malevolence because christ is archetypally the person who takes the world’s sins upon himself and what that means in some sense is that if you read about history you read about nazi germany you read about the soviet gulags you don’t read as a observer looking at what other people have done you read as the subject and the object of the history you’re both the person who was persecuted and the victimizer at the same time and you have to see both of those inside you as actual forces in order to understand history properly and of course that’s a very very terrifying thing to do it’s easier to take the part of victim in some sense even though that’s terrible right because who wants to be the victim of a concentration camp obviously but maybe that’s preferable ethically to being the perpetrator but when you’re reading about oschwitz you’re not reading about past history you’re reading about exactly what people are like and that’s a very terrifying thing and so one of the things you have to do if you’re going to take responsibility for the nature of your being is to take responsibility for the malevolence that’s truly part of human nature and that’s that’s part of the encounter with the shadow from the yungian perspective and you know one of yung’s proposition was that the human shadow reaches all the way down to hell and you know we’re used to thinking of religious language maybe even as outdated superstition but if you take that sort of statement seriously from a psychological perspective what it means in some sense is that the malevolence that resides inside you at least in potential is of the same sort as the malevolence that produces the worst things that human beings have ever done and so and i couldn’t see any way out of that argument i mean the more i read about the gulag system in the ussr and what happened in china and what happened in nazi germany the more it became evident to me that these weren’t top-down systems imposed by tyrants on an unwilling innocent population but decisions on the part of entire cultures to go down a certain road often the leaders were following which i would say was particularly the case with hitler which isn’t to deny him his criminal culpability but hitler was unbelievably good at letting the crowd tell him what to say you know he was a he was a mirror for the crowd and he was a good orator but he paid attention to the crowd and so when he said something that made everyone cheer you know their dark hearts would come out in the mob and cheer about something he said that was say dramatic or or vengeful well then he’d say more of that and the things that he said that were peaceful that produced no emotional reaction from the crowd he just said less of and so the crowd taught him over time exactly what to sell them and that that can be good in some sense if a leader does that carefully that that means he’s integrating what the crowd wants with his style of leadership but it can be terrible if the mob is the crowd and the mob is outraged and out for blood and that’s what happened in nazi germany and so you can’t blame it on hitler that’s just not reasonable it’s distributed through the entire population and it’s at the individual level of analysis that’s most significant and well so there’s malevolence that has to be contended with and then the other element is that you have to contend with the tragedy of life and that’s so in the in the passion of the christ did that in that story christ of course encounters satan in the desert and so that’s and is tempted there and so that’s the encounter with evil archetypally speaking and then the crucifixion itself is the encounter with the tragedy of life right it’s betrayal and death voluntarily accepted and so i understood that that was a symbolic representation of the logos and that that was the they what would you say the embodied manifestation of this heroic path that mediated between these two extremes that was really useful like that was a really useful discovery for me and because there was implications to it too and and profound implications that also seem to work out in relationship to what i was learning about clinical psychology so for example one of the things you do if you’re a clinical psychologist is you help people learn to encounter things that they’re afraid of in a controlled manner and they get less they don’t get less afraid they get braver so you actually act out the process of confrontation with tragedy voluntary confrontation with tragedy and that’s curative it doesn’t matter if you’re exposing them to their past or the present or things they’re worried about in the future as long as they decide to do it voluntarily they get stronger and better so you think well what’s the limit to that well the limit is to accept the limitations and catastrophes of your own mortality voluntarily and and that’s the potentially the proper pathway through life or at least it’s the least bad pathway through life which is something you know and then i think the same can be said fairly decisively for the willingness to grapple with with malevolence on a personal and individual level you know and so anyways i started to lecture about that and and and to lay out those ideas more and more clearly over the years as i’ve been lecturing and that’s what i did for tv ontario and i think that that’s why the lectures became popular because you know i’d put some words to ideas that people already knew and could revitalize a symbolic vocabulary that people had become divorced from and and that there was a hole in the culture exactly where those ideas needed to be and so people found that they were well people tell me when they come and talk to me they said well when you’re talking it’s like i already know what you’re saying but i don’t have the words for it it’s like well that’s exactly what our archetypal story is like is that you all know the story you just don’t know you know it or you know at a level that you can’t articulate but you still recognize it when you see it and you still act it out and you see it in other people but it’s really really good to have the words and that’s partly why you should be very careful about what you say and particularly careful about what you write now anyhow after the big ideas thing wodak came into my classes and taped maps of meaning and made 13 30 minute tv shows out of them and that was pretty interesting and they were broadcast and kind of evanescent because at that point they weren’t put on the web so their broadcast they pretty much disappear right and so so so so fine so and i got some degree of what would you say i got i was exposed my ideas were exposed to a large number of people tens of thousands of people as a consequence of that and that seemed to go pretty well and so then youtube came along and i thought well i don’t know what this is this youtube thing it you know the comments section makes you like what would you say wary about being human i would say generally speaking and you know there was a lot of well there were a lot of things that it would be easy to be contemptuous of on youtube like the canonical cute cat videos but i’m actually not so contemptuous of that or the interesting animal videos because i think they actually speak to a part of people that’s actually quite good we like cats we like dogs we think animals are kind of cool and you know we take a break and look at look at something that’s pleasant and cute and maybe that’s not so bad it’s not serious but it’s certainly not malevolent and that’s something so i thought okay well i’ll find these old videos i did for tv o and i’ll put them up on youtube and maybe i’ll just tape my classes and so i set up a because i have this theory that if it’s worth doing it’s worth doing badly which you know it’s true but it’s also true that if it’s worth doing it’s worth doing well you just need to know when to apply those two principles and if you’re loath to do something and procrastinating then sometimes it’s better to do it badly and i thought well i can’t get a whole production studio up and running and because i just don’t have the time i’ll get an ipad and learn to use it and get a lavalier mic and just set the thing up or maybe have a student film it and so i did that for a couple of years for my personality class and this maps of meaning class which is the class where i outlined the sorts of ideas that i just described to you and uh last april i noticed that i’d had a million views and about 15 000 subscribers you know and i thought huh million views hey that’s actually a lot of views it’s like if i i’ve never write a scientific paper that’s been read a million times no one has that just never happens right that happens zero times if it if you have a paper that’s cited you know someone else refers to it in one of their scientific papers a hundred times it’s like that’s a home run and a thousand times it’s like that’s a home run and a thousand times is a miracle so and then if you write a book you know there’s i think 1.2 million books published last year something like that and i think 500 of them sold more than a hundred thousand copies so that’s a sea of books right it’s an ocean of books and all of them fail really so so many of them fail that you might as well never write a book because the probability that it will fail is like 99.99 percent and that would be very depressing if it wasn’t the case that that’s the case for anything creative you ever do so it’s just baseline probability but i thought well if i wrote a book and it sold a million copies man i’d be out dancing in the street uh probably not but you know you get the idea so what does it mean to have a million youtube views well who the hell knows right i mean we don’t have metrics for that we don’t know what sort of influence that’s having we don’t know anything about that we don’t know whether we should take it seriously or or if it’s or who you’re talking to or anything but i thought well still it’s a million and that’s a lot and i thought well maybe this is this is more serious thing than i initially envisioned and then i really thought about it and i thought oh i get it here’s a hypothesis you know back in the medieval times and before if you wanted a book someone had to copy it by hand and so there weren’t many books and they were very expensive and so and then gutenberg came along and invented the movable type press and it was like poof books were inexpensive and everybody could have them and that like was that was a major revolution right within 400 years almost everyone in the western world and then very rapidly almost everyone in the entire world was literate and could read silently even which was something that before that was reserved for a very small number of people because most people read out loud when they read it all so that was a massive revolution and then i thought wait a minute maybe youtube is a gutenberg revolution because it allows the spoken word to have the same reach and longevity as a book for the first time in human history spontaneous speeches can reach an infinite audience for a for an unspecified duration of time well that’s a whole new thing that’s a that’s an entirely new thing and maybe it’s easier for people to listen than it is for them to read you know i mean i’d rather read than listen because i can read way faster than i can listen but people will listen to a youtube video at twice the normal speed sometimes more so you can circumvent that and then also with a youtube video if you convert it into a podcast let’s say which i’ll get to to a moment you all of a sudden have way more time than you used to have because you can listen to a podcast while you’re doing other things so you can do mundane the mundane things that you have to do from day to day like commute and so on but you can listen to a podcast and i’ve found that my students my young students are now listening to podcasts instead of music and that’s really something you know because music of course has been an unbelievably dynamic cultural force for maybe the the primary artistic cultural force for what maybe maybe since the 1950s anyways and that’s being supplanted to some degree by podcasts and that’s really something and then it also turns out that people have an appetite for long detailed podcasts that are deep and informative it’s like who the hell would have guessed that like no one it’s it just sort of came out of nowhere and so i thought well maybe this is worth taking seriously and then like at the same time i was interested in i’ve always been interested in entrepreneur types and creative types they’re high in this big five personality trait called openness and there are the people from whom all innovation flows but it’s very hard for creative people to monetize their creation because to monetize something you have to have the idea and then you have to translate it into a product and then you have to bring it to market and then you have to sell it and then you have to develop customer relationships and you and customer support and it’s like by the time you do all that if you’re the creative person you’re either you’ve either been bought out and shunted to the side or you’re dead so you don’t get to have the money you you produce the value but you can’t monetize it it’s a big problem that’s why it’s so frustrating to be a creative person often you know so i was looking around for ways that creative people could monetize their production online mostly because i’m like far too curious for my own good and my wife went off to visit her her her her father for about a week and i had a bunch of time i could stay up till three in the morning which i shouldn’t do and work and i found this site called patreon and patreon allowed you know how patreon works it allows people to make voluntary donations to support creative people who are basically usually making their work available for free which is i thought well that’s pretty interesting it’s appealing to the basic human desire for reciprocity like people actually don’t like getting something for nothing it kind of puts them in existential debt and so they people generally feel that if they’ve received something of value that they would like to give something of value back now not everyone but most people most people and i thought well what the hell i’ll set up a patreon account and see what happens so it took me about like six hours or something like that to figure out how to do it exactly and how to make a little uh what a banner on the youtube videos that was linked to the patreon account there was all sorts of little weird tricks that you had to learn behind the scenes and i thought well whatever we’ll see what happens and then at the end of that month i had about 50 60 subscribers and about 500 us a month and i thought huh that’s pretty interesting you know i don’t know what to make of it but i could take that money and increase the production quality um if that keeps happening and and i’ll just run this and keep seeing how it works so okay so that was pretty interesting and so i thought through what it meant what youtube meant that it was a gutenberg revolution and it deserved to be taken seriously and then i found this platform for for monetization for creative people and the two things were married and that was april last year and then at the same time i was writing a book which is called 12 rules for life and some of you may have uh or there’s some flyers that are going to be distributed that tell you about the book but in any case i was writing this chapter in the book called don’t bother children when they’re skateboarding and it took me deep into the polarization of society because i wasn’t very happy about the fact that children are over protected and that adventurous children like skateboarders for example are often shut down when they’re manifesting their bravery and their stupidity often but that’s not always distinguishable from bravery right because you that’s like the trickster figure that jonathan was talking about earlier you know and it’s not always that easy to segregate the people who take unrealistic unreasonable risks from those who are courageously extending their competence into the unknown and so anyways for reasons i won’t tell you about that took me deep into the into the political polarization landscape with with the you know with the increasing tension between the left which i think has become increasingly totalitarian in the right and and also with what seems to be something like an assault on well jonathan called it the logos which i think is exactly right which i think is a reflection of niches death of god and an assault on masculinity which is often now seen as toxic or part of the oppressive patriarchally part patriarchy etc etc and so this was kind of making my blood boil while i was while i was writing this you know because you get tangled up in that and it it’s kind of emotionally distressing and i saw the spread of these sorts of radical leftist ideas through campus and i thought we’d killed all that off back in the 1990s you know there was a spike of political correctness in about 92 and i was in boston at that point and and and it kind of got pushed back and it disappeared and i thought well that’s good that’s gone and then the economy boomed like mad in the u.s and people had other things to concern themselves with and then all of a sudden you know three years ago or so it was like wow this is back with a vengeance it’s like we ain’t seen nothing yet and so that was bothering me and then in my clinical practice i had a couple of clients who had been bullied into poor states of mental health by social justice warrior types at three different workplaces and they were quite different people you know some of them more left-leaning some of them more right-leaning but all had the same story as they were sensible people and now they were required to do things at their workplace that they just couldn’t tolerate doing you know like sensitivity training or unconscious bias training or here’s one story god this woman east this woman that i was working with this is the stupidest story i wouldn’t even believe it except she showed me all the emails she worked at this large bureaucracy we’ll leave it at that and the the people at the bureaucracy would make presentations with those you know those boards that you can set up that have big pads of paper on them well those pads of paper that you can flip are called flip charts okay and so but somebody got it into their head and this was the manager of this of this particular client that flip was a racist term because apparently you can call Filipinos flip i didn’t know that and and so flip chart is actually insulting to Filipinos and so and so then she showed me this string of like 30 emails that had gone back and forth within her company from the management and a bunch of people you know the gen the typical suspects who are all concerned about this and they ended up banning the word flip chart and you know she was coming to talk to me saying look this is actually driving me crazy i can’t believe this is that people are spending their time doing this and that we’re required to assent to it as if it isn’t insane which of course it is it is and so um then then i got wind of bill c16 and uh i’d been looking into the ontario human rights commission already at that point and uh i wasn’t very happy with the ontario human rights commission i think they’re it’s fascist organization masquerading under the guise of compassion which is very very typical and and very intelligent like if you’re going to be a power hungry authoritarian who wants sensorial control the best way to allow yourself to be able to look at yourself in the mirror without screaming is to wear a mask of compassion which is exactly what i think is happening and bill c16 came out and it purported to add transgender rights to the list of protected rights in the canadian human rights code and in the criminal code and like it was one of those trojan horses that brett weinstein just talked about you read the legislation it’s only two paragraphs long you think oh yeah canadians are being nice to people who you know are in a strange category and get oppressed that’s that’s the surface of it but then i went back and i read because they said on the federal website that it would be interpreted in accordance with the policies developed by the ontario human rights commission so i went read those policies and i thought man first of all they were completely incoherent they were extraordinarily poorly written they were philosophically appalling and they couldn’t have been designed to get more people in trouble if that would have been the purpose of the design so for example if you’re a business owner they’re not they’re not pro-capitalist let’s put it that way if you’re a business owner you are as responsible for the utterances of their of your employees as if you were uttering them yourself if the employees utterance caused offense whether or not they meant the offense and whether or not there was any offense taken on the part of the person that was being offended it was like my god really that’s really the that’s really the rule and that was like one of and there was another rule in there which was that the ontario human rights commission could suspend jurisprudential tradition in pursuit of their goals it was like clause 13a you know just 13a it’s just a little clause we can ignore all legal precedent so i was reading this and i thought what the hell this is absolutely insane and then at the same time the university hr department and equity right equity that’s that’s that’s you hear that word your someone utters that word and you know they’re ideologically possessed so you move away from them right you move away from them because equity is a terrible it’s a terrible word it’s one of those words that masquerades as compassion it is a dreadful terrible word so anyways the hr and equity department had decided that you know the university was rife with systemic racism and that implicit in our unconscious biases and that all the h and all the staff hr staff would have to undergo mandatory unconscious bias retraining well then i thought okay okay right now come on really first of all you’re using the implicit association test right and actually tell you a little bit about that test but i’ll only tell you a little bit to use a test to diagnose an individual the test has to pass certain standards of reliability which means it measures the same thing within the same individual the same way across time because it’s like otherwise you have a ruler that’s made out of rubber it’s not helpful right it has to produce the same results with repeated administrations and it has to predict behavior in a way that’s consistent and with some degree of power okay well the iat is not reliable not nearly reliable enough to be used as a diagnostic instrument and it’s not particularly valid it predicts a little bit of behavior but not much like a fragment of behavior maybe enough to even have a significant effect from from time to time but it’s a small fraction like so your unconscious biases which are actually indistinguishable from your perceptions or maybe even your in-group favoritism and people are characterized by in-group favoritism which is why we like our families and it’s not easily distinguishable from your from your reaction to novelty as well because your your implicit racial prejudice under some conditions is indistinguishable from your preference for familiarity over novelty so like the psych the the psychological community is by no means united on what the implicit association test means by no means and it has plenty of severe critics and even the people who have produced it admit that it shouldn’t be used for diagnostic purposes wink wink wink so and then there is no evidence whatsoever that unconscious bias retraining especially if it’s mandatory first of all reduces unconscious bias which you can’t measure very well anyways or has any positive effect on explicit behavior and so i thought the the attempt by the hr department to make that mandatory was an unwarranted intrusion on the civil rights of the employees using pseudoscience as a mask and so i was thinking about these things at like two in the morning and i thought i can’t sleep and and i learned when i can’t sleep to go right and this time i thought now i’m not going to write this down i’m going to make youtube videos instead and see what happens yeah so i sat in front of my computer and i made these like low quality videos and the content was pretty good i laid out why i was irritated about bill c16 and talked about the background you know context of the legislation and and then i made another one telling the hr department at the university that what they were doing was completely unwarranted and that they had no business doing it whatsoever and that they should stop and so then i released the videos and i thought then i went to sleep uh and you know the reason i made the videos was because i wanted to think these things through right so so like i’m doing on stage right now i’m thinking things through it’s like something was bothering me and so i was trying to lay out the arguments and trying to figure out why it bothered me and to put a logical you know to to arrange it in a logical manner and to try to communicate it and you do that partly because you think well this is bugging me and here’s what i think it is is like is it bugging you too and how about you and if it isn’t bugging any of you well then i’m probably crazy but if it’s bugging all of you too then you know maybe there’s something here and so that’s why you have to be able to speak freely right because you have to be able to bumble around with your thought and formulate things and then see how other people respond to it and they’ll criticize you or maybe agree with you and you get to modify what you’re thinking and so and plus i was experimenting like i often do i was experimenting with youtube it’s like well let’s see what happens well that was quite something so well the first thing that happened was there was a big demonstration like an anti-peterson demonstration so i had my own demonstration and that was in front of the building i worked at and not too many people came but they were people the people who came were calling me the sorts of names that eric was called or the brett was called you know i was a bigot in a tram and i was a racist oh i was a racist because the hr department at the university had taken advice from black lives matter in formulating these policies and black lives matter in toronto was led or established by two women who i thought were reprehensible and had nothing to do with their race like i don’t care who you are you can be reprehensible and they were reprehensible in my estimation and there was plenty of documented evidence for that and so i said well why they’re reprehensible and they were reprehensible in my estimation and there was plenty of documented evidence for that and so i said well why the hell are we taking advice on our hr policies from from these people it’s like when did that become acceptable and so that that’s why i was a racist so and and and so you know all of these accusations were thrown at me and i thought about that a lot in the last year it’s like what was that reasonable and it’s actually kind of reasonable in a weird way because canada is a stable country and has been for a long time it’s pretty peaceful and things work pretty well and so if you pop your head up and say something stupid and reprehensible is going on the canadians say no this is canada you’re you’re crazy and which is the right response right and so then they throw a bunch of things at you that might match the kind of crazy you are and if one of them sticks then well then they can ignore you and and you know i’m i’m obviously being a bit facetious and it’s not like the people who are doing this to me didn’t know exactly why they were doing it and it isn’t like they were weren’t trying to bring me down and destroy me because they certainly were and then 200 faculty members and and graduate students and the like from the disciplines that you’d expect wrote a petition saying that i had made the university an unsafe place and uh and then there was a counter demonstration that the these students who decided to support free speech set up and they asked me to speak and lauren southern to speak and a couple other people and they had an open mic session so that anyone could speak and it was out in front of the same building and there was quite a few people at that there was about 200 people and and i went out there and then there was some bad guys there you know there were just your typical students who were confused and squawking away and chanting but peppered among them were the types of people who were seriously looking for trouble and i can i’m a clinical psychologist i’ve worked with all sorts of people i can identify people like that they’re not very common thank god but there were plenty of them at that rally and they it could have been any kind of rally where the possibility for trouble was emerging and they would have been the type that was going to be there so i was keeping my eye on them and they were blasting white noise and they were unplugging our pa systems and and stealing the mic and and you know just behaving in a manner that should have been shut down by the university authorities but wasn’t but the university authorities were taken off guard by all of this and they didn’t really know what to do and they weren’t really unaware of the underlying legal transformations that were going on in our society and anyways they unplugged the mic and so then i talked very loudly about the necessity for free speech and that was recorded and went online and then i left and i came back about two hours later to talk to the cops and to see if anything i didn’t was hoping that nothing you know of any significance no one was hurt so i wanted to go talk to the cops and see if it all went okay and i went talk to them and then when i came back this group of trans activist protesters who claim to be speaking for the trans community which doesn’t exist there is no trans community they’re not a homogenous group they don’t all think the same way and besides you don’t become the spokesman for a person by claiming that you’re the spokesman just because you happen to share some of the attributes of that group but we’re so guilty about the treatment of minorities that we’re willing to regard anyone who plays that particular card as worthy of listening to and that’s a big mistake because you know there’s valid representation and invalid representation anyways they surrounded me and videotaped the exchange and was one particularly noisy person there who was quite dismissive and insulting and i tried to have a conversation and the first thing this person said was that peterson what do you think about the nazis that were at your rally and i thought you know you have to really look hard in canada to find a nazi they’re just there just aren’t that many of them you know so so i i thought it was preposterous to begin with and i said well i don’t you know what do you want me to say it’s like welcome nazis it’s no it’s like i said i don’t like nazis you know and and she said well what about you know the fact that they were here and i said well i can’t control who happens to appear somewhere and it was all it was all false none of that was true at all it wasn’t even a little bit true but you know it’s an easy weapon to to haul out and so they she he no well i’m not being smart about that it was like this was a trans person and i don’t know exactly i couldn’t figure out how to refer to we’ll say her and i got held for that too and i tried to have a conversation and it was just she was just blaring non-stop ideological like nonsense at me you know it just it just hurt because i like to talk to people you know but i really do not like having ideological slogans blared at me i did really i find it i find it i don’t know exactly how what how i find it but it’s like it’s like it’s like really loud white noise it’s something like that or maybe it’s worse than that’s like static it’s like really loud static it’s jagged and i i said look you know like quit that it’s like i can’t i’d like to talk to you but i can’t tolerate that i can’t i’d like to talk to you but i can’t tolerate that you know what slogan means slogan is derived from two welsh words sluegg and garm and it means battle cry of the dead so that’s really worth thinking about man the next time you want to like have a slogan on your t-shirts just remember who you’re standing for it’s like you’re the skeletal army of zombies come to life and and they’re possessing you right it’s their words you’re mouthing it’s nothing alive and it’s not something that likes life it’s a horror show that’s what a slogan is anyways they videotaped all this and they’re going to put it online to show what a reprehensible creature i was so they did and that didn’t work i have things being viewed about three and a half million times and the positive comments outnumber the negative comments like 99 to 1 something like that and so that was an interesting case of that inversion that jonathan was talking about you know how everything’s upside down and so they tried one tactic and it just flipped on them completely and so but but here’s here’s something to think about like if one person who is nominally supporting me at that rally would have done anything stupid whatsoever that was captured on videotape i would have been sunk right and so we’re in this situation where the actions of specific individuals have a determining effect far beyond what we’re accustomed to you saw that in charlottesville where that guy ran somebody over with a car and it was like political polarization in the u.s. increased instantly by 10 percent right and and that’s part of the i said like social media isn’t an echo chamber it’s an amplifier and so well so i was very fortunate and then this person also said that she had watched all my youtube videos and i looked at her because that was ridiculous because there was like 200 of them online by that point like you some people i presume have now watched all 200 of them but it’s like 500 hours of content so i knew that that was complete rubbish and uh i basically said as much and anyways it went well for me and it didn’t go so well for the protesters and then the university and so that was my first encounter with youtube and its tendency to amplify and and also what the tight rope line is when these sorts of things happen you know and for a whole year it’s not quite so bad now although it’s just about as bad i lived an absolute terror of ever of two things ever saying the wrong thing even if it was clipped out of context right or having something unearthed that i said before that was the wrong thing even if it was taken out of context now luckily and this was kind of unique i already had 260 videos 200 videos up and so when i was being accused of all these things i could say well you know have at her there’s 500 every single word i’ve said to students in the last 20 years has been recorded if you want to find some nazi propagandists like have at her man good luck to you and of course it was not only false it was it was antithetical to the truth because i’ve been teaching people about nazi atrocities for 30 years and trying to help people understand how it was that it would be likely had they been in nazi germany that they would have been on the side of the nazis and not on the side of the jews you wouldn’t have been the hero you would have been the perpetrator statistically speaking and that you really need to understand that so i was fortunate i was protected by that backlog of information and so that was really good and then the university did another thing that reversed you know they wrote me a letter saying you know all these people are complaining you’re making the campus an unsafe place you have to and you might be violating our code of conduct and the law and i thought i didn’t know what to make of that letter i told them to take the letter back because i said look if you’re going to go after me because i actually like the university of toronto so if you’re going to go after me you should go after me correctly and this this document is actually untrue in that it contains sins of omission because you may have got letters from the staff saying what a reprehensible person i was but you also got 15 000 signatures on a petition and hundreds of letters from people supporting me and you didn’t say anything about that in the letter so how about we you know you write a letter that says well some people aren’t very happy with you and other people are but we’ve decided that what you’re doing is too risky and you know you should stop but they wouldn’t take it back so i read it online and that’s what’s interesting too because now if something happens to you it doesn’t have to be secret i didn’t even comment on it except maybe with raised eyebrows from time to time i just read it and say you draw your own damn conclusions here and so and i was actually i wouldn’t say secretly happy about it because i wasn’t because my job was at risk and and that wasn’t all that was at risk but my job certainly was but i had said when i made the video criticizing bill c16 that the act of making the video was probably illegal and then the university came out and said what you’re doing is probably illegal and so my claims which the press the press was very divided about this and they thought well maybe i was being too radical in my claims but then the university came out and said well you’re probably violating the law and you should shut up and i said ha i told you that that’s how this law was constructed and so and then they did it again but and i know how hr departments works it’s like one letter it’s like shut the hell up second letter is we told you once already to shut up third letter says we told you twice you didn’t so like now you’re in trouble and then the fourth letter is see you later and if you’re a tenured faculty member and you break the law that’s sufficient to be not a tenured faculty member so they were gearing up to do this and and uh well then well to say that well man that was really something then what happened was there were reporters at our house for like four months lined up just all the time literally eight hours a day there were reporters coming in and reporters going out there’s about 250 newspaper articles published in canada about this over about a two and a half month period and that didn’t count the podcasts and the radio shows and the tv coverage and like it just it went absolutely it was absolutely insane i’ve never seen anything like it and see i was trying to figure out what was going on at that point because my sense when i made the videos was this had nothing to do with transgender rights this is indicative of a deep war of ideas and this is just the latest manifestation of that deep war of ideas maybe it was a war at a philosophical level or even a war at a theological level which i actually i actually think it’s such a deep war that it is a war at a theological level and that was sort of the level at which i was going after it and i believe that subsequent events demonstrated that that was the case because what should have happened i always think of counterfactuals you know if a client comes into my office and the first time i see them and they’re all upset because they couldn’t find a place to park and they’re late and they’re all apologetic and i think okay well now i know something about you because you could have come in here and said why the hell didn’t you tell me where the parking was i’m late or or you could have said thought to yourself well this is my time anyway so i don’t have to apologize so you run these counterfactuals that helps you understand the world better and i thought well what should have happened was that you know i made these videos two in the morning to 15 minutes long there’s a little flurry of interest and then it’s like on to the next thing but that is not what happened that didn’t happen even a little bit what happened was so opposite from that that i i still don’t know what to make of it and of course this is part of it the fact that i’m here talking to all of you people and and so and then what happened was that the press flipped and came on my side so 200 canadian newspapers there’s a consortium came out and said well we support peterson and then a huge number of mainstream journalists like the powerful independent mainstream journalists barbara k antonella what’s antonella’s last name i can never remember names it’s so embarrassing margaret wenta conrad black um that crazy new fee he goes on cbc at night uh what’s his name rex murphy yeah they all came out on on my side because what what they did they did their journalistic homework and they went and read the things i read and they found out that if anything i was understating the catastrophe that was written into the ontario human rights commission website so for example one of the catastrophes was they wrote in a social constructionist view of gender identity that’s law in canada now and like it’s hard to say exactly how significant that is if you don’t know what it means is maybe is that to have a view that biology is the primary determinant of gender identity is now illegal now i don’t know that for sure and you can say well maybe that’s alarmist but hey i know how ideas unfold across time you know you have an idea you put it in the law the law is a living thing it’s got lots of tentacles nobody knows how it unfolds you throw something new in there you don’t even know what it is you’re throwing in you know you’re throwing you throw a demand that a social constructionist view of gender identity is now legally true so what do you do with all the evolutionary biologists like like brett who say uh no that’s wrong it’s partly socially constructed like everything is among human beings and so anyways the journalist went and wrote read that and um they thought oh well this guy first of all isn’t any of those things that he’s being accused of one of the funniest days of my life was i went to this lecture um where i was being accused of like being a racist and a transphobe and a bigot and all of these things and the same day literally the same day there were 30 people in my house on the third floor and about 15 of them were from this native tribe uh quack quack a walk they live on northern tip of northern vancouver and i’d established a relationship with a carver there named charles joseph who recently had a huge totem pole erected in front of the montreal museum of fine art i’d established a working relationship with him he was a residential school survivor and i’d been buying a bunch of his art and i built a replica a modern replica of a quack quack big house on my third floor with his help and filled it with totem poles and all these things and he brought a bunch of his people to the to toronto and had induction ceremony and i was inducted into their tribe and that was the same day it was like what do you make of that it’s it’s such a so surreal you know to go from one of those worlds to the other and and i had many surreal days like that anyways then i had this debate at the university which the university graciously decided to host and i talked a lot to the dean and we kind of came to some terms and they basically decided that they would leave me alone and i had a terrible catastrophe of health in december i just it was absolutely unbearable i don’t exactly know what happened but i could barely get it get going to teach in january it was very shaky for for like two months but i but it it went forward and and the students were very welcoming and inviting so that was very good but then all of this crazy background media explosion didn’t quit at all it just kept snowballing and snowballing and snowballing and you know and then i was talking to people gad sad was one of the early people who interviewed me you know and i’m going to be speaking with him at on november 11th in toronto and i’m actually quite afraid of that because i think the radicals who shot us down at ryerson i know full well they’re planning to come out in full number and i really don’t i’m really concerned about that and if you know anybody who’s going and who’s purportedly supporters let’s say of what we’re doing i really would like you to encourage them to like keep the keep themselves in control it’s like i know there might be agent provocateurs in the crowd because these people are certainly capable of that but i don’t want anything stupid to happen now we’re not going to cancel it because because we’re not canceling it and that’s that but i don’t want anything stupid to happen it would be better if it didn’t so anyways i talked to gad sad and then a whole bunch of other youtubers and then i got to be aware of this whole youtube universe that you know that that uh jonathan was talking about and that’s been an unbelievably bizarre experience because it is the case that there’s nothing really uniting us in some sense we’re very different people like i’m very different than than joe rogan for example and i was on this show called h3 h3 the other day and he’s this crazy israeli clown comedian you know and and uh dave rubin’s a married gay guy and you know and well and gad sad is a lebanese refugee basically there’s nothing about us that’s the same except something is uniting us and we all kind of know about each other now and we’re all communicating and and i don’t know what that means exactly um i don’t know what that means and then at the same time so that’s all been extremely strange this multiplication of of voice that the internet provides you know for better or for worse and i think that is what it is it’s a it’s a moral amplifier and i also think that these ai systems that we’re building are moral amplifiers and and they’re they’re going to be moral amplifiers to a degree that we can’t even imagine even knowing how much facebook and twitter and so forth are moral amplifiers so we bloody well better be careful because we’re building super intelligent machines and they’re going to be patterned on us so so we have to watch our step and that’s basically what i’ve been telling people you know because i’ve been trying not to be political about this in some sense i think it’s a degeneration because i’m more philosophically minded and it’s it when when things become political around me it’s like i’m at the wrong level of analysis i’m not facing things properly but i’ve also found that and this has been a strange thing too see i’ve been talking to people about responsibility and truth and and religious topics as well now for really intensely for the last year really for my whole career but really intensely for the last year and one of the things that’s strange and this is another way the world is upside down is that after being fed a non-stop diet of freedom and rights for 60 years people are starving to death for a diet of constraint and responsibility and who the hell would have ever thought that was saleable you know and i have people coming up to me all the time lots it already happened many times today they say well you know you’ve talked about responsibility i’ve been listening to your youtube videos it’s really straightened out my life i now have a purpose i’m not nihilistic and when i talk to people about responsibility and rights especially young men and my audiences are mostly young men man you can hear a pin drop you think well what’s going on there that’s so weird it’s like it’s this it’s this crazy inversion it’s the the least saleable thing possible has become the thing that’s most in demand say like have a hard life do something difficult get yourself get your act together quit blaming other people assume that you’re the problem start small with like non-heroic activities don’t broadcast it in public right pick up something heavy and assume that you’re contributing in some important manner to the destiny of the world and like let your soul quake when you understand what that means and everybody’s thinking yes that’s exactly what i want to hear it’s exactly what it’s like what the hell you know and then there’s these biblical lectures and i thought i thought this is another upside down thing i thought okay as i put business plans together before and you know i know how you evaluate a business plan so here’s the business plan i’m going to lay out sixty thousand dollars to rent a theater for 12 weeks and i’m going to deliver a series of lectures on the bible and that’s a profit generating enterprise do you want to invest it’s like you know get this guy needs anti-psychotic medication and he needs it quickly and so so i thought well i’m doing this because i want to walk through these stories and the reason i want to walk through these stories is because they’re foundational stories i understand that there there are foundational stories for better or for worse and we can’t get rid of them without getting rid of the foundation and that’s a bad idea so at least we better understand them before we dispense with them you know and that goes for me too and so i started doing that and they’re ridiculously popular like they always sell out the the audience is dead silent when and and the the atmosphere of the room is really really positive not in that namby pamby you know wretched harmless way but in the sort of charged energy looking for a good thing to do way and the questions are really intelligent and so and and deep too and so that’s really cool and then you know i released them on the net and the most popular video i have ever made is an introduction to the idea of god which is the intro to this biblical series and it’s got like 850 000 views and and then i get all these like jonathan said he’s got all these atheists supporting him he’s a bloody orthodox icon carver it’s what the hell’s up with that and like a tremendous number of the people who are writing me and commenting on youtube are also atheists they’re saying well you know i’m an atheist committed atheist and but i’ve been really interested in what you’ve been saying about these religious stories and so that’s another indication of the fact that everything’s upside down and so and i’m going to keep making those biblical videos because i’ve been trying to sort through my priorities and i don’t know what my priorities are because my life is completely surreal like i it’s like i’m in a it’s like i stepped into a parallel universe you know and so i’ve been trying to figure out well what should i be doing and one thing i do know is that i’m going to continue with those biblical lectures because i think they might be the most significant thing that i’m doing okay and then i’ll just close and say well you know with my colleagues i’ve also been working on these programs that help people get their lives together like the self-authoring suite for example which some of you might be familiar with and of course one of the things that’s been a consequence and we’ve done research on especially the future authoring program really helps people you know if you give it to university students especially the ones that don’t know what they’re doing and are kind of alienated they’re way more likely to stay in university and they get much better grades so that’s really cool and so the the internet these new communication channels has also made it possible to deliver reasonably high quality psychological interventions that are devoted to helping people improve their lives and straightening themselves out at extremely low cost or extraordinarily widely and so now thousands and tens of thousands of people have done those programs now and so i get letters all the time from people saying this has really helped me and you know i was on the verge of suicide and this brought me back from the brink and like it’s really nice to get letters like that you know and here’s something else that’s interesting you know people have been assuming that i’ve been deluged by hate mail you know so they’re feeling kind of sorry for me and like i’ve like had five pieces of hate mail in the last year and that’s it so like i don’t understand that it’s i don’t know what it is maybe the sjw types don’t have the energy to pen a hate letter although they certainly seem to but for some reason although they’ll come out and protest like they did at mcmaster they’re they’re not they’re not really directly going after me with with those sorts of channels of communication someone spectacularly reprehensible just littered my neighborhood i actually know who it is littered my neighborhood with community safety warnings you know claiming that i was well you know the general satan himself in various manifestations essentially and one of the things that was so funny if you find these sorts of things funny is that they have this picture of me that’s the background of the poster like i’m looking really aggressive hey yelling like like really like i’m gonna bite a child and so that’s the that’s that’s the community safety warning rights look out for this man and here’s here’s the way they play fast and loose with the truth so that picture was from that free speech rally i told you about and the reason that i’m yelling is because the same people because i know who did it the same people were the ones who took the microphone in the pa system and so the only way i could communicate with the crowd was to yell and so i look kind of aggressive and i was kind of irritated today it’s like what the hell white noise you’re blasting me with white noise and you’re taking the amps and no one’s doing anything about it it’s like i’m not going to stop talking because you’re because of your dopey tricks and so i was you know reasonably fired up and and i had to talk really loudly because there was white noise blaring and so that’s the picture that they used to show the demonic side of jordan peterson and that’s such a lie that’s the lies embedded right in the poster it’s like the only thing you could find that would make me look reprehensible is an action that i took as a direct consequence of your misbehavior in a public forum but they don’t care they don’t care or maybe they do care and maybe they’re happy that at the base of the poster is a is there an extraordinarily deceptive falsehood you know they’re happy about that so all right so let’s sum up you know i’m not going to make a case for the antipathy of the old media to the new media because i’ve actually been treated pretty well by the old media and i can tell you that the canadian journalists the ones that you respect are very much afraid for their personal safety for their reputation and for their livelihood and so they’re actually quite brave margaret went is a good example of that but so are the other people that i listed christy blatchford is another one and it’s an antonella still didn’t get it anyways so it’s not like they’re high and mighty people who have a tremendous amount of power who are like misusing their status they’re not they’re they’re walking on eggshells all those media empires are crumbling crumbling like mad the globe and mail is crumbling cbc is crumbling they can’t get anybody to watch any of their stuff online because they don’t understand the the the the ethos but like i don’t see it as a polarization exactly between the old media and the new media i just see it as we’re in the brave new world of instantaneous permanent verbal communication and no one has any idea what that means and so it’s producing all these strange phenomena like these new youtube stars that have really come out of nowhere and and and people are attracted to them because of their rawness and their and their unedited quality you know when jill rogan posts posts posts a video it’s every bit of it’s posted so you you get to make up your own mind about what you’re going to conclude and so that seems to be a really good thing so maybe that means that free speech is alive and well you know and maybe it’s even flourishing who knows so i can’t draw any real conclusions about where we’re at with regards to media except the one i started with which which is and it’s sort of related to this message of personal responsibility which is uh your voice is amplified far beyond what it ever has been in the past for every single one of us and it can get amplified if you’re not careful it can get amplified way more than you’d ever hope or suspect like you know if you make the wrong mistake in your life at some point you could be the next viral video you know and that’s pretty terrifying thought and it’s no wonder people are anxious about all of that but i do think it amplifies your effect on the world and so it’s all the more reason to get your act together and to be careful with what you say and be careful with what you do because now we’re at a point in history where the fact that you’re intimately connected with the rest of mankind let’s say present and future is manifest almost instantaneously and we need to take that seriously and hopefully we can take it seriously enough so that we ramp the polarization back you know and figure out how to communicate with one another and put things straight again at a deep level so that we can move towards a positive future because we could have one you know like things are shaky and chaotic right now and strange and surreal on multiple dimensions but we’re also on the cusp of a technological revolution the likes of which no one can even conceive and maybe things could become incredibly much better if we’re if we walk carefully and think carefully and orient ourselves properly and and and so that’s what i hope that we all do and that’s what i’m trying to promote when i do my videos and all of that so and that seems to people seem to find that useful and they actually seem to be doing it and i think that’s better than engaging in the polarized wars and trying to be right and win the arguments and all of that because i just don’t think that that’s going to work so so be careful and be awake and pay attention to what you say and clean up your rooms and that’s good enough thank you thank you so much phenomenal all right great so our next thing will be the q a panel we will get that going as soon as possible but for the moment we are millennials and we do want some group pictures so bear with us