Why Young Women Are The Most Miserable They've Ever Been

Jordan Peterson argues the crisis tearing the Western world apart isn't political or economic — it goes far deeper. When science stripped meaning from the world, it left something worse behind: suffering with no purpose and no story to make sense of it. In this lecture, Jordan explains why your values determine what you see, why stories carry a truth science can't, and what it costs a person — and a culture — when they aim at the wrong things. He also breaks down the psychology behind Snow White and Sleeping Beauty, and why those stories grip us whether we understand them or not. If your ambition keeps stalling, your relationships keep failing, or life feels like it's missing something you can't name — this one's worth your time. This lecture was filmed in Miami, Florida, on March 24, 2025. Unlock the ad-free experience of The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast and dive into exclusive bonus content on DailyWire+. Start watching now: http://dwpluspeterson.com/yt ALL LINKS: https://feedlink.io/jordanbpeterson // LINKS // Peterson Academy https://petersonacademy.com Books - https://www.jordanbpeterson.com/books/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

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• 1:16Jordan B. Peterson?

  So I want to talk to you tonight about something that's crazily difficult. And I haven't lectured about this specifically for about 10 years. So that's quite a long time. So I was trying to recall today, yesterday, what I need to remember so that I can make this clear. And it's ridiculously important thing to make clear. So why does this have to be made clear? Well, you can see that there's a fracture in the Western world.

• 1:57Jordan B. Peterson?

  There's a fracture in the world as a whole, but it's particularly acute in the Western world. And that, the reason for that is fundamental. It's not political, it's not economic, it's far deeper than that.

• 2:17Jordan B. Peterson?

  You can make a case by definition, I suppose, that the deepest matters are religious matters. And I'm saying that as a matter of definition is that as you move down the hierarchy of depth towards the abyss itself, you approach the domain of the religious. You approach the domain of what's ultimately significant. And the culture war that we're embroiled in in the West that's tearing us apart and demoralizing us and encouraging us, tempting us to worship false idols and to build towers of Babel and to court the...

• 2:58Jordan B. Peterson?

  Court what? Court the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah and to tempt the flood. All of that's indicative of a problem that has made itself manifest at the most basic of levels. And so I want to describe, I want to try to lay out why I think that problem exists and how it's conceptualized. And then, I don't know if we'll get towards the conceptualize of a solution. Perhaps in my discussion with Pajjo, we'll do that. But I want to at least lay out the territory. And this is because the problem is so deep, this is a very difficult thing to do. And so, especially in 40 minutes.

• 3:41Jordan B. Peterson?

  And so we'll see how we, we'll see how we do. Okay, so the first thing you might ask yourself, and this is relevant to say Tammy's introduction is, why does stories play such an important role in human perception and communication? We find stories intrinsically compelling, so much so that we regard them as a form of entertainment. And that reflects the fact that there's something about them that's so valuable and significant that participating in a story, listening to a story, telling a story, reading a story, watching a movie

• 4:26Jordan B. Peterson?

  is intrinsically meaningful, right? And so that, and you can deride that as mere entertainment and, and think about it as a side effect of some more fundamental psychological phenomena. But that's a mistake. The reason it's, the reason the story is deeply meaningful is because it actually reflects in a manner that no other form can, something profound about the nature of reality itself and about our relationship to reality. And so, and so why is that? Why is that? See, and that's, that's our failure to understand that is part of the reason

• 5:11Jordan B. Peterson?

  that we're in this cultural crisis. It's a failure of conceptualization that stretches all the way back to the dawn of science and the Enlightenment itself. And the, the problem is

• 5:30Jordan B. Peterson?

  the, the scientific world, this is a good way of thinking about it. The scientific world is by design without value, without meaning, right? You hear, for example, constant claims on the part of scientific practitioners that science in its pristine form is value-free, right? And that every fact is to be considered as valuable in and of itself and that no fact is to be arbitrarily privileged over any other fact. And so the scientific enterprise begins with the removal of value from the world. Now, the problem with that is that you live by value, right? You need a reason to put forth effort.

• 6:15Jordan B. Peterson?

  You need a reason to make sacrifices. You need a reason to get up in the morning, especially if things are difficult for you in your life.

• 6:26Jordan B. Peterson?

  We can't, a world that's denuded of meaning is a world where no one has any motivation to do anything. Now, but it's worse than that in a way because you can make the positive significance of life disappear as a reality by criticizing it, but you don't have the same luck with the suffering part. And so you can tell yourself that in the final analysis, nothing is meaningful and that can make the world appear to be a hopeless and dismal place. But you can't tell yourself that your own pain and your own anxiety is equally meaningless or you can try to tell yourself that, but it's going to have zero effect

• 7:09Jordan B. Peterson?

  on the existential reality of your pain and suffering. And so if you remove value from the world, the paradoxical consequence is all that you leave behind in the world is suffering and confusion. And, and that's not a good thing, especially if you draw the conclusion that suffering and confusion is the ultimate reality of the world. And so obviously, I mean, that's, that's the conclusion that someone insanely depressed and anxious draws or even suicidal. And it's definitely the case that people who tilt towards a worldview that denudes the world of intrinsic significance do tend to fall

• 7:54Jordan B. Peterson?

  under the sway of serious depression and anxiety. And, well, and that's not all because if you're depressed and you're anxious and you're suffering in consequence of that, it's very easy to become bitter. And if you become bitter, it's easy to become vengeful. And if you become vengeful, well, the sky's the limit in terms of the terrible places you might go. And so there are genuine existential consequences to denuding the world of significance, of treating it as if it's, as if the notion of significance or value is somehow a delusional overlay on a more fundamental and primal material reality. And that is what we think, right?

• 8:36Jordan B. Peterson?

  I mean, even if you're a modern religious person, the presuppositions of reductionist materialist, the materialism, the idea that the world's made out of matter and dead matter is so much part of you that it's, and it's a self-evident axiom of the way you conduct yourself in the world. And maybe there's a religious overlay on that because you're still a believer. But you're a post-enlightenment scientific rationalist with a thin veneer of religious belief on the top of that. And that's, that's just not going to do the trick, folks. And you can tell that because we're very susceptible to possession by a variety of forms of pathological ideologies

• 9:21Jordan B. Peterson?

  and we're very weak in the face of external pressure in relation to our belief systems. And we tend towards a dismal nihilism or a immature hedonism. And none of that's going to do the trick. Like there's serious challenges, challenges facing us as individuals and as a society. And that kind of shallowness in relationship to value is counterproductive. Barely begins to describe it. It makes us weak and weak people are prone to the worst of temptations. And so this isn't good. And the other, a more fundamental, but you might say, oh, it doesn't matter

• 10:03Jordan B. Peterson?

  because we've pursued the truth and the truth is, as Nietzsche pointed out in the mid 1800s, God is dead and the scientific revolution killed our religious presuppositions and the world truly is a dead material place. And we just have to make the best of that. But you know, the, the, before we jump to that earth-shattering conclusion. See Nietzsche, when he said that, he knew what the consequence of that would be. He said that we would become radically susceptible to catastrophic nihilism and to invasion of our psychological space by a variety of utopian ideologies

• 10:46Jordan B. Peterson?

  and that the world would be awash in blood as a consequence of the demise of the structures of value that had oriented us previously. And so...

• 11:00Jordan B. Peterson?

  El problema con la proposición de que el mundo es realmente un lugar de materia muerta con una superficie de valor arbitrario encima de ello, el problema con ese punto de vista, aparte de los problemas existenciales que acabo de describir, no es verdad. En realidad, es una falsa visión de la estructura de la realidad y parte de lo que en realidad estamos luchando con en nuestra cultura. Y todos ustedes lo saben a cierto punto porque no estarían en esta conferencia si no tuvieran algún sentido de esto, es que

• 11:34Jordan B. Peterson?

  las proposiciones que nos han guiado a través de las revoluciones tecnológicas de la ciencia en los últimos cuatro siglos, no son correctas. No es el caso de que el mundo sea intrínsecamente un lugar de materia muerta y eso es todo, y que arbitrariamente sobreponemos un sistema de creencia o valor encima de eso. Y sabemos que eso no es verdad, en parte en consecuencia del esfuerzo científico mismo, porque, por ejemplo, hemos estado trabajando a nivel biológico en descubrir los misterios de la percepción, la percepción sobre la que tu idea de que el mundo es un objeto depende, y lo que hemos encontrado es que la percepción misma

• 12:19Jordan B. Peterson?

  no opera de la manera que te proyectarías si el mundo fuera solo un lugar de materia muerta y objetos. Y así, para ver un objeto tienes que percibirlo, obviamente, y si la percepción misma depende de procesos que no son simplemente materialistas, digamos, entonces toda la noción de que el mundo es fundamentalmente un objeto sin sentido se desmorona. Y esta es una conclusión antemana. Sabemos que no es así como funciona la percepción. Así que, por ejemplo, cuando estás mirando algo, cuando estás viendo algo,

• 13:04Jordan B. Peterson?

  cada mirada que haces depende de una acción. Así que no hay percepción en absoluto independiente de la acción, porque tienes que mover tus ojos para poder ver, y parte de eso es inconsciente porque tus ojos vibran, pero parte de eso es consciente porque estás dirigiendo tus ojos, y lo que diriges tus ojos hacia es indicativo de lo que estás prestando atención, y lo que estás prestando atención es indicativo de tu estructura de valor. Ahora, esto no es alguna hipótesis idónea. Hay fuerzas malevoles en el mundo que están haciendo un beneficio

• 13:45Jordan B. Peterson?

  a partir de su análisis de tus movimientos de ojos, porque eso es lo que hacen tus teléfonos, porque eso da a esas máquinas una ventana en tu estructura de valores y un medio de

• 14:00Jordan B. Peterson?

  controlar tu intención y tus acciones. Y así, no hay nada más valioso que tu atención, y las máquinas sofisticadas que llevas en tus manos, tus teléfonos, están observando cómo mueves tus ojos para que puedan averiguar lo que es importante para ti para que puedan capturar tu atención debido a su gran valor. Y así, la razón por la que te estoy diciendo esto es porque no quiero mover esto fuera del dominio de la abstracción superficial,

• 14:31Jordan B. Peterson?

  entendemos que la percepción depende de la atención, y que prestas, esto es lo crucial, prestas atención a lo que valoras. Correcto, ahora, si tu percepción del mundo depende de la atención y prestas atención a lo que valoras, entonces lo que percibes depende de lo que valoras. Y eso no es la proposición científica. La proposición científica es que el mundo se coloca a sí mismo como un conjunto de objetos y pones una estructura de valor encima de ellos y la percepción del objeto es primaria, y eso es incorrecto. El valorar es primario.

• 15:17Jordan B. Peterson?

  Ahora, no sabemos exactamente qué hacer de eso, y eso es parte de lo que quiero explorar contigo esta noche. Ahora, resulta que la forma en que describes el mundo de valor es muy diferente de la forma en que describes el mundo de objetos. Ahora, tenemos una tecnología para describir el mundo de objetos, y esa es la metodía científica, la descripción científica, nuestras teorías científicas, y eso nos permite obtener algo de compra en el mundo, ¿verdad? Estamos muy tecnológicamente poderosos en consecuencia de esta dominación. Pero el mundo de valor es descrito de una forma diferente, y parece que ese modo de descripción no es sólo menos real,

• 16:01Jordan B. Peterson?

  tiene que existir antes de que puedas comprender el mundo de objetos en absoluto. Y la metodía que usamos para describir el mundo de valor es la historia. Eso es lo que hace una historia. Ok, así que pensemos en esto por un minuto. Así que, vas a un cine, y ya describimos el hecho de que eso es un poco de un misterio. Es como, ¿qué diablos estás preparando? Usando tu tiempo, pagando dinero para ir a ver un cine. Y podrías decir, "Bueno, me gusta", y luego podría decir, "¿Te gusta un cine de terror, lo haces?"

• 16:42Jordan B. Peterson?

  ¿Verdad? Un cine de terror disgusta y te asusta, y eso es el antítesis del disfrute. Y así, ¿qué diablos estás haciendo allí? ¿Por qué te gustaría eso? Ahora, en realidad hay una razón, pero no es obvia, ¿verdad? No es la simple búsqueda del placer la que te lleva a perseguir la narrativa. Ok, es algo... La narrativa escribe una estructura de valor. Ok, ¿entonces cómo entiendes eso? Vas a ver un cine, vas a ver

• 17:14Jordan B. Peterson?

  un cine de James Bond, un cine de acción-adventura, eso va a estar bien. Y ves los personajes, tienes al héroe, el protagonista principal, que es James Bond en sus varias incarnaciones, y tienes al villano, porque siempre hay un villano o una cota de villanos, así que siempre hay bien contra el mal en películas como esa, y esa es la drama del viaje. Y luego inferes la estructura de valor del protagonista y el villano viendo lo que atienden y cómo actúan. Bien, y así, y lo haces de una manera muy profundamente embodied y inconsciente, de la misma manera que entiendes a otras personas.

• 17:55Jordan B. Peterson?

  Así que, por ejemplo, cuando estás hablando con otra persona, ves sus ojos, ¿verdad? Y la razón por la que ves sus ojos es porque quieres ver dónde dirigen su atención, y quieres ver dónde dirigen su atención para que sepas lo que es importante para ellos, y quieres saber lo que es importante para ellos para que puedas mimar eso con tu propio cuerpo. Eso es lo que haces. Cuando entiendes los objetivos de otra persona, puedes entender lo que consideran positivo, así que lo que los enciende, así de decirlo, lo que los motiva a avanzar, y eso es cualquier cosa que los move hacia su objetivo, y entiendes lo que es negativo para ellos, y eso es cualquier cosa que interfiere con su objetivo,

• 18:38Jordan B. Peterson?

  que los detiene, que los hace ansiosos, que les causa dolor. Y así, tan pronto como puedes inferir el objetivo de alguien, puedes mimar sus emociones usando tu propio cuerpo como una plataforma representativa, y así es como entiendes a la gente. Y así, si estás llegando a conocer a alguien en una fecha y estás teniendo una conversación, prestas atención a lo que la otra persona está prestando atención, verbalmente y no verbalmente, y luego, si prestas atención muy cuidadosa, puedes estar en sincronía, y puedes estar en la misma longitud de la onda, y lo que eso significa es que tus objetivos se unen, y luego tus emociones son las mismas, y luego entiendes a los demás. Y luego podrías decir, "Bueno, ¿es intrínsecamente

• 19:24Jordan B. Peterson?

  recompensante simplemente mimar a otra persona?" Y la respuesta a eso es, no, esa no es toda la historia. ¿Ves? Porque...

• 19:33Jordan B. Peterson?

  La façon dont vous orientez votre attention dépend de votre objectif. Et il faut s'efforcer et se ressourcer pour poursuivre un objectif. Et donc, l'une des choses que vous voulez vraiment comprendre dans le monde est : quelles sont les coûts et les conséquences de différents objectifs ? Et quel doit être votre objectif et ne pas être ? Ok, c'est ce que les histoires vous disent. Et donc, vous regardez James Bond et vous voyez qu'il sert roi et pays, qu'il est un genre de personnage courageux. Et puis, il arrange son attention en relation avec ces objectifs. Et puis, vous imitez cela pendant que vous le regardez. Et puis, vous obtenez une idée de comment cela fonctionne, comment ce cadre de valeur fonctionne.

• 20:16Jordan B. Peterson?

  Et vous le faites sans coût parce que si James Bond est tué, vous ne meurtes pas. Et donc, c'est l'avantage de la caractérisation narrative, c'est que vous pouvez jouer et jouer avec différents points de vue de valeur. Et vous pouvez explorer leur signification, pour mieux ou pour pire. Et vous pouvez le faire pendant que vous expérimentez toutes les émotions pertinentes et toutes les perceptions pertinentes. Mais si ça va très mal, ça vous énerve dans le moment, dans le film, et c'est tout. Et vous pouvez partir. Et donc, quand vous êtes dit une histoire, quand vous participez à une histoire, quand vous regardez un drame, quand vous écoutez quelqu'un d'autre dire sa histoire,

• 21:00Jordan B. Peterson?

  vous gagnez de l'insight dans les conséquences fonctionnelles d'une façon d'organiser le monde, d'une façon de prioriser le monde. Et vous pouvez l'utiliser pour vous orienter dans le monde d'une manière plus efficace. Et donc, vous savez que quand vous prenez vos enfants aux films, vous espérez qu'ils imiteront le héros et pas le vilain. Et vous voyez le vilain, et le vilain a des objectifs vilenesses. Il a envie de la maladie et de la douleur. Il veut que les autres souffrent. Il ne coopère avec personne. Il est narcissique au cœur. Il est ressentable et triste. Et cela se joue sur la scène. Et vous voyez cela spirer vers le bas. Et vous pensez : peut-être qu'il serait mieux de ne pas être lui. Et puis, vous voyez, d'une autre hand, vous voyez le héros. Et le héros est : qu'est-ce que le héros fait exactement ?

• 21:45Jordan B. Peterson?

  Eh bien, il ne fait certainement pas ce que le vilain fait, au moins ça. Et dans l'exemple de James Bond, il sert roi et pays de cette manière courageuse. Et donc, il y a une implication là. C'est une implication religieuse à bas niveau, vous pourriez dire. Que un héros est quelqu'un qui sert quelque chose qui est à l'extérieur de son propre être. Et vous pourriez peut-être suggérer que roi et pays n'est pas le plus élevé de tous les objectifs possibles. Mais vous pourriez dire : eh bien, c'est certainement mieux que le vilain. Et au moins, il n'est pas narcissique et centré sur soi. Et puis, vous pourriez dire : Eh bien, quel serait l'objectif du plus grand héros concevable ? Et ça serait le roi de tous les potentiels rois.

• 22:27Jordan B. Peterson?

  Et dès que vous commencez à demander et à enquêter à cette question, alors vous êtes certainement dans le domaine religieux. D'accord ? Donc, parce que vous commencez à vous demander quelque chose comme...

• 22:39Speaker 06

  Imaginez votre préféré. Diallez-le sur un max, mettez-le sur des stéroïdes, et puis ajoutez quelques éléments cinématiques. C'est le meilleur moyen pour décrire une conférence de l'Académie Peterson.

• 22:53Speaker 03

  J'ai fait l'université parce que je devais le faire. Je vais à l'Académie Peterson parce que je veux le faire. Je paye toujours l'université depuis dix ans. Et je me demande toujours le valeur que j'ai tiré de l'université.

• 23:02Speaker 06

  Dans les universités traditionnelles, beaucoup de fois, c'est juste assez sec. Ils ne donnent pas la même énergie que les professeurs de l'Académie Peterson.

• 23:09Speaker 03

  C'est une expérience complètement différente de l'apprendre de quelqu'un qui veut vraiment enseigner. Si vous êtes au bord de la rue à propos de ça, c'est le moment. Ce qui vous appelle, vous n'aurez pas d'réponse à moins que vous vous inscrivez et voyez pour vous-même. Vous avez l'opportunité de rechercher ce appel.

• 23:26Jordan B. Peterson?

  Oui, donc vous comprenez ça, d'accord ? Vous comprenez ça. Vous voyez comment cela fonctionne. Et donc, cela nous donne aussi un peu d'insight dès le départ dans le domaine religieux chrétien, par exemple. Parce que vous pouvez imaginer un film sur un roi. Et puis, vous pouvez imaginer dix films sur dix rois. Et puis, vous pouvez imaginer qu'il y a quelque chose qui est commun à tous ces rois, à la mesure qu'ils sont des bons rois. Et puis, vous pouvez faire un film sur juste le plus grand des rois. Et cela commencerait à avoir une importance religieuse épuisante. D'accord ? Parce que vous porterez quelque chose comme l'essence de la kingship elle-même. D'accord ? Ou l'essence du hérosisme lui-même. Et les histoires religieuses, pratiquement par définition, spirent autour de ce point de fin et essayent de le spécifier.

• 24:11Jordan B. Peterson?

  Comment devriez-vous vous comporter dans le monde ? Maintenant, vous voyez, c'est la même question. Et c'est aussi ce que vous découvrez quand vous regardez un film, même si vous ne le savez pas. Vous découvrez : quel est l'adoration de cette personne ? Maintenant, nous pensons : qu'est-ce que nous pensons que l'adoration est ? Eh bien, parce que nous sommes des matérialistes profonds, nous n'avons pas une bonne prise sur ça. Nous pensons que ça signifie... Je ne sais pas, ça signifie chanter un hymne dans une église. Et ça signifie ça à un certain degré. Et ça signifie les rituels qui vont avec une pratique religieuse. Ça pourrait signifier se mettre à genoux quand vous prêchez, par exemple. Mais vous voyez, ce que vous adorez est ce que vous célébrez. Et ce que vous adorez et célébrez est ce que vous portez au plus haut degré.

• 24:57Jordan B. Peterson?

  Et donc, vous voyez, donc, adorer est de subjuger soi-même à votre objectif. Je veux dire ça comme une définition. C'est ce que vous voulez comprendre. C'est que chaque fois que vous bougez vos yeux, même si vous ne le savez pas, vous adorez quelque chose. Et ce que vous adorez est le but de votre vision, même si vous ne savez pas ce que votre vision est. Donc, voici un exemple. Imaginez que vous êtes sur une date. Et vous pouvez adorer le stand de nuit. Dans ce cas, vos yeux vont faire quelque chose de complètement différent que ce qu'ils vont faire si vous évaluez votre partenaire de date comme une femme ou un mari potentiel. D'accord ? Vous pouvez... Vous savez évidemment ça. Et si vous jouez tous deux le stand de nuit,

• 25:41Jordan B. Peterson?

  eh bien, peut-être qu'il n'y aura pas de désaccord sur ce que les yeux devraient faire. Mais si l'un d'entre vous joue le stand de nuit et l'autre joue "Je souhaiterais être marié", alors ce n'est pas une date qui va très bien. Et toute la langue corporelle le indiquera. Et puis, vous pourriez dire : eh bien, vous pouvez voir qu'il y a différents

• 26:00Jordan B. Peterson?

  objets d'adoration dans ces deux approches. Parce que l'un adore la gratification sexuelle hénistique à court terme à tout prix, sans aucune relation ou responsabilité. Et l'autre adore le mariage comme la fondation de... Quoi ? La relation appropriée entre les hommes et les femmes et la fondation de la société. Ce sont des choses très, très, très différentes. Et ces différentes... Vous voyez, c'est le gros. Ces différents objectifs structurent vos perceptions. Vos objectifs structurent vos perceptions. Et donc, étant donné ça, vous voyez, c'est pourquoi la vision scientifique du monde dans ses propositions fondamentales sont incompltes.

• 26:43Jordan B. Peterson?

  Parce que ce n'est pas un axiom de la science du monde. Le monde scientifique suppose que les faits sont morts, qu'ils sont tous égaux. Vous les regardez neutralement comme scientifiques. Et la science de la perception indique que vous ne pouvez pas regarder quoi que ce soit neutralement. C'est impossible. Vous devez inhabiter un cadre de valeur parce que vos valeurs déterminent votre pattern d'attention et votre pattern d'action. Et vos perceptions sont attentes et d'action préduites. Il n'y a pas d' escape du problème de valeur. Maintenant, nous ne savons pas ce que faire avec ça exactement parce que je ne suis pas un postmoderniste. Je ne pense pas... Je ne vais pas prétendre qu'il n'y ait pas de tel ou tel fait comme le fait scientifique. D'accord ?

• 27:26Jordan B. Peterson?

  Et que de quelque façon tout est à la main parce que le monde de la valeur est réel. C'est un erreur et c'est erroné. Mais par le même moyen,

• 27:38Jordan B. Peterson?

  les fruits de l'entente scientifique seront dépendants de l'objectif du scientifique. Et nous savons déjà ça parce que vous allez aux films et vous voyez le scientifique maléfique. C'est comme : combien de scientifiques maléfiques sanglés devez-vous voir avant de vous y accrocher ? C'est comme : les scientifiques maléfiques produisent de la science maléfique. Et donc, comment peut-on être si l'entente scientifique elle-même est sans valeur ? Parce qu'un scientifique maléfique peut produire de la science bonne. Parce que quel est le problème ? Tout le monde sait que ce n'est pas le cas. Et vous pouvez certainement voir que... Vous pouvez certainement voir un danger terrible dans l'entreprise scientifique. Parce que nous savons tous que si la puissance technologique

• 28:22Jordan B. Peterson?

  que notre point de vue scientifique nous fournit est mal utilisé, alors le ciel nous aide. Vous savez, j'ai lu un livre une fois écrit par un ex officier du KGB. Et il parlait de scientifiques dans l'Union Soviétique. Et leur but était de produire un hybride entre Ebola, qui est...

• 28:45Jordan B. Peterson?

  Un hybride entre Ebola et les chèvres. Et donc, c'est une question scientifique parfaitement valide. Juste comme la recherche de fonctionnement à Wuhan, vous pourriez dire. Et donc, sérieusement !

• 28:58Jordan B. Peterson?

  Et nous avons vu ce qui s'est passé comme conséquence de cette entente de valeur préduite. D'accord ? Et nous avons fermé le monde pour deux ans à cause de ça. Et on a transformé toute l'Occident en un état totalitaire. C'est vrai ? Donc, surveillez les objectifs de vos scientifiques. Et puis, vous pourriez penser : eh bien, quels devraient être ces objectifs ? D'accord ? Eh bien, c'est le problème de la narration. Quel devrait être votre objectif ? Ok, donc...

• 29:27Jordan B. Peterson?

  I want to lay out for you too. Tammy told the story of Snow White for a particular reason and I want to lay out for you partly how narrative in its most fundamental way characterizes the world of value. So let's say, you know, I remember once when I was a kid, I went to a drive-in and I saw a Burt Reynolds movie and I don't remember what it is, Smokey and the Bandit I think and Burt Reynolds was zipping around in some fast car and being a cool dude and when all the teenagers drove out of the parking lot at the end of the drive-in, they were all spinning their tires and like racing down the highway and it's like they're imitating, they were imitating Burt Reynolds and you know, fair enough and and

• 30:11Jordan B. Peterson?

  what, you see what that's how we develop our patterns of value. We develop our patterns of value through imitation. That's a good way of thinking about it. So you imitate your father for example, you you imitate your father, you imitate even more particularly the spirit of your father. So here's a way of thinking about it. So imagine that you're a little boy and you're inviting a little girl to play house and you say to her, "Do you want to play house?" And she says, "Yes," which is a good start to the game because she has to say yes, or it's not a game, in case you didn't notice when you were three and

• 30:50Jordan B. Peterson?

  and so then you might say, "Well, the boy who now is going to play the father is imitating the father." Right? But imitation, like if I was imitating you, I'd sit with my legs crossed like this. Right? That's a direct imitation. I'm using my body to precisely duplicate what your body is doing. But you see, if you watch little kids play, that's not what they do. They do something way more sophisticated. So a three-year-old or a four-year-old has watched his father operate as father, so with the goals and names of a father, over many different episodes and he's watched fathers and adult men in movies and he's seen fathers in books and

• 31:31Jordan B. Peterson?

  what he does is he pulls out an abstraction of what constitutes the father, not be the spirit of the father, that's a good way of thinking about it. He pulls out an abstraction of what the father is from all of those examples and then he plays that in the pretend game. And so he's possessed by the spirit of the father. Okay, so one way that the world of value that characterizes human society is transmitted from generation to generation is through imitation of the spirit of the father. Okay, now if you're thinking at all, if you're paying attention at all, you can see that there's a very, very thin line between that and, well, you might say both Jewish and Christian

• 32:14Jordan B. Peterson?

  forms of worship because what you're enjoying to do as a Jew or a Christian, there's other religions that are oriented in the same, towards the same paternal end, is that you're called upon to imitate the spirit of the benevolent father. Now that's not all, like in Catholicism for example, you have Mary who's an example of the spirit of the benevolent feminine and that's a different thing, but part of what the religious process is doing in its complex narrative is abstracting out the essential spirit of celebration and worship and utilizing

• 32:56Jordan B. Peterson?

  character and personality to produce a pattern that can be, that can be imitated. Right now, you see, the girl who's playing with the boy, she knows this because if the boy who's playing with house with her imitates the spirit of the benevolent father properly, then she'll enjoy the game and then she'll want to play another game with him and then they'll become friends. And so the test for whether or not his imitation of the spirit of the benevolent father is valid is whether the girl will continue the game. And if you can't see the relationship between that and your marriage, you're just not trying. Right? So

• 33:39Jordan B. Peterson?

  because that's exactly, that's exactly what you're both aiming for in your marriage, whether you know it or not. Your your wife is trying to encourage within you your embodiment of the spirit of the benevolent masculine, yes, and you are attempting to encourage the same development in her with regards to the feminine. And those are two cardinal ways of characterizing the world of value. That's a good way of thinking about it and so so I'll give you an example of that. So I already made allusion to the fact that Christ in the Christian tradition is the King of Kings and so you could think about him as the

• 34:24Jordan B. Peterson?

  central pattern of sovereignty to which all sovereigns who are genuine have to bow. Right? And you know you don't want a king or a president who believes that he's on top of everything. Right? That's a tyrant. That's a tyrant. If your leader, despite his position of authority, is beholden to a principle that's transcendent, that that is beyond him and upward aiming, then he's someone who's serving the, he's mimicking the benevolent spirit of the father instead of allowing himself to become possessed by power. And that means that he's the sort of sovereign that you can trust, just like if you're doing that in your household,

• 35:08Jordan B. Peterson?

  then you're not a tyrant as a husband or a father. Okay, and that's all nested inside narrative and developed in character. And so we, we use character and story to portray the world of value and that's what teaches us how to direct our attention and to organize our actions. Right now, and if you understand that, you can also see how that unites us socially because if your vision of what constitutes the benevolent masculine is the same as mine, then we can understand each other and we can work together. Not only can we work together, we can

• 35:49Jordan B. Peterson?

  we can compete peacefully because we could assume something like we're playing the same game because we have the same aim and we can let the better man win and that would be good for both of us because that way we'd learn a bit more about who the better man is and maybe we could imitate that and both improve. And so the, that

• 36:16Jordan B. Peterson?

  that union of aim, upward aim, brings peace even to competition, productive peace even to competition. That's a very useful thing to know with regards to masculinity because men tend to be very competitive and you could make a case that competition per se is a manifestation of the oppressive patriarchy, so that's the negative masculine. And that's true if the competition is for power, but it's not true if the competition is the maximization of the proper aim. And then you have to ask yourself, "Well, what's the proper aim?" And we've touched on that a little bit and it's something like whatever's represented by concepts like the King of Kings or the

• 36:59Jordan B. Peterson?

  spirit of the benevolent father. And so that's how God is characterized, for example, often in the Old Testament. He's the, he's the God of Abraham and Isaac, right? He's the spirit of benevolent masculinity as it makes itself manifest across the generations in the world. And it's up to the individual man, like Abraham or Jacob, any of the biblical heroes, to ally themselves with that spirit, to invite it through prayer and worship, to possess them, to sacrifice everything that isn't appropriate along the way and then to develop upward. Right? And that, the narrative that's laid out in the biblical corpus describes that

• 37:42Jordan B. Peterson?

  spiraling upward process and it culminates in the idea that the ultimate upward aim, that's the spirit of the King of Kings, is something like the voluntary spirit of self-sacrifice that mature families and communities are founded upon. And so that would mean that as a mature man who's worth his salt, so to speak, it's not all about you and your pleasure in the most narrow of senses, but that you're in service to the future and to your wife and to your children and to the community and the city and the state and, right? Right, right. And the thing that's so wonderful and remarkable about that is that

• 38:26Jordan B. Peterson?

  imagine that really what you want is to make your dreams come true and you might say, "Well, if I want to make my dreams come true, I will pursue what's in my self-interest." But you'll find that if you do that, you become a narcissistic pretender and people do everything they can to distance themselves from you. And if you take the opposite tack and you say, "I don't, I'm not going to live for my narrow self, I'm going to find myself in service to the future, my wife, my children, my community, my state, my nation, under God, let's say, then everything that you need and want will come to you." Right? And see, your nation knows this.

• 39:07Jordan B. Peterson?

  That's a very strange thing about the United States because you guys have got this more right than any other people in the world and maybe more than any other people in the world ever have, which is that if you can pursue the spirit of benevolent self-sacrifice without envy, then you can produce a land of abundance and that's exactly right. And that, that ability, the ability to do that should be the highest of aims. Okay, so, right, okay.

• 39:41Jordan B. Peterson?

  And you can, you can see,

• 39:45Jordan B. Peterson?

  you can see how that's dramatized in narrative, obviously, because the self-sacrificing hero is the mainstay of an action-adventure movie or a romantic adventure. I mean, was it the last James Bond where he ends up sacrificing himself to the woman he loves and society at large on an island? Right? Yeah, well, that motif of voluntary self-sacrifice, well, that's obviously deeply Christian, obviously, although there are radical precursors to the idea, for example, in the Jewish scriptures and throughout the Old Testament, the idea that sacrifice pleases God and that there's an ultimate form of sacrifice

• 40:25Jordan B. Peterson?

  that's ultimately pleasing. And that's, that's all, then you might say, well, is that true? And the answer to that is something like, well, it's not true from the narrow materialist reductionist perspective, but that's because that is forbidden from the beginning when you're playing that game. But it is true if you're trying to figure out, for example, how you bring peace to your household and meaning to your life and productive abundance to your society. All those things seem relevant and so serving that kind of relevance also seems to be something like serving the truth or maybe the essence of serving the truth. And that's not the same viewpoint that underlies the scientific enterprise as such.

• 41:09Jordan B. Peterson?

  Now, what that shows is not that the scientific enterprise is correct and the religious enterprise or the narrative enterprise is wrong, but that the scientific enterprise is radically incomplete in its current form and prone to spiral badly sideways if it isn't encapsulated within the proper structure of value. And I think we're at a point where we know that. Okay, so that's, that's a quick outline of two different ways of looking at the world, right?

• 41:43Jordan B. Peterson?

  The object world and the world of value. And the way things seem to be constituted is that the world of value is the foundation, proper foundation for the world of objects, not the other way around. Is that unless you're an ethically self-sacrificing scientist, the truths you discover will serve malevolent purposes rather than

• 42:11Jordan B. Peterson?

  producing abundance and peace. Right? And so what that means is that the aim of the scientist is the paramount issue with regards even to the productivity of science itself. Yeah, and that seems to be, I just cannot see for a moment how that can be disputed. And even if it is disputed, we bloody well know it because you can see the motif of science gone wrong permeate our movies. The Terminator series is a good example of that, for example, which we're likely to live out in our lifetime because we're foolish enough not to pay attention to our own warnings, you might say. You know, the Chinese surveillance system is called Skynet. It's literally called Skynet.

• 42:53Jordan B. Peterson?

  700 million closed-circuit TV cameras, full-gate analysis. Those systems can assess where you are and who you are, even if you mask yourself. And when the engineers were called on that, the Chinese engineers were called on that, "Why do you name it Skynet? Didn't you see the Terminator series?" They said, because they're engineers and nerds, they said, "Of course, we saw the Terminator series. We're building the good Skynet." Which is of course exactly what the engineers in the Terminator movies thought. Right? And so if your good is defined by the tenants of the Chinese Communist Party, you're not going to build the good Skynet.

• 43:38Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, so I wanted to talk to you a little bit about the, I talked to you a little bit about the positive masculine and the way it's portrayed in narrative and in movies. And I wanted to tell you a bit about the negative masculine and the positive and negative feminine. And Tammy touched on that a little bit with her discussion of Snow White. But there's only so much you can do in 40 minutes. And so I think what I'll do, I'll do that with the discussion with Jonathan because he's very good at that sort of thing. Because the characters can go right and go wrong. And male characters can go right and go wrong and female characters can go right and wrong. And there's a pattern to that. And our deep stories like Snow White, which is a cultural phenomenon

• 44:22Jordan B. Peterson?

  and has to be hit the target squarely to work even as a commercial product, our, our cultural, our pop cultural narratives are reflective of the disorder of our ethical systems. That's a good way of thinking about it. So I'll talk with Jonathan about that and we'll walk through that and see if we can get that straight. For now, I think I'll just reiterate, so hopefully we'll make this clear. So that

• 44:53Jordan B. Peterson?

  there's two problems you have to solve in the world. This is another way of thinking about it. You have to know what the world's made of, right? But that's not enough. You have to know how to orient yourself in the world. You have to know how to navigate. And to navigate, you have to prioritize. You have to establish a destination, an aim. That's the promised land, you might say, assuming you're, assuming you're aiming up. Or the shining city on the hill or the heavenly Jerusalem. Those are all abstractions of the idea of the proper aim. And if your aim's appropriate, the world shows itself as a pathway forward. And the person who walks that pathway to the proper aim, that's the hero. And the hero is characterized in drama and narrative, right?

• 45:37Jordan B. Peterson?

  As an example to imitate, right? And you need to know that because you have to walk through the world. If you were just a passive recipient of sense data,

• 45:50Jordan B. Peterson?

  value-free sense data, which is sort of the ideal scientist from the Enlightenment perspective, well, then if you didn't have to navigate and you were just a passive recipient, then value wouldn't be necessary. But because you're a limited perceiver and everything has a cost and you can only do so many things, you have to prioritize. You have to do one thing rather than the other. And you have to organize all the things you're going to do towards some end. And the organization towards that end determines the manner in which the world makes itself manifest to you. And that's a terrifying thing to understand too, you know? One of the things you can ask yourself very seriously is that if

• 46:33Jordan B. Peterson?

  the sacrifices you're making aren't being met by appreciation from yourself, others, or God, so to speak, it's very possible that there's something pathologically wrong with your aim. Right? And that's very, very, that's a terrible thing to contemplate, you know? Especially when your failures appear to be radically arbitrary, but

• 46:59Jordan B. Peterson?

  but it's a hopeful realization as well. Because if the reason that the world's in disorder around you is because your aim is pathological, then you have some hope of fixing it. If the world itself is just turned against you, well, you know, too bad for you. You're, there's nothing left for you. But if you could get on your knees and figure out why the hell you're wrong and stupid,

• 47:21Jordan B. Peterson?

  that's a big book, that, then

• 47:26Jordan B. Peterson?

  you know, then you'd have the possibility of rectifying it, moving, moving forward effectively. And since there's no limit to your ignorance, if you admit to that ignorance, there's no limit to what you could learn. If you take the humble attitude that there's no limit to what you can learn in consequence of facing your error, then you'll walk the self-correcting pathway up to the shining city on the hill. That's exactly right, yeah, so.

• 47:56Jordan B. Peterson?

  And those are the ideas. Those ideas are coded in our deep narratives. And you see, we don't understand that. And the scientific mind dispenses with all that and proclaims that the world's a value-free place and that narrative is nothing but delusion and superstition. And that's wrong enough to make all of us sick, disunited, and unhappy. Right?

• 48:22Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, well, that seemed to make a certain amount of sense, I hope. And even though it's very, very complicated. And I think what I'll do now is I'll invite Jonathan to come out and, and offer what he has to offer and we'll continue this discussion, so.

• 48:43Jordan B. Peterson?

  How are you feeling?

• 48:46Jordan B. Peterson?

  That's a lot.

• 48:48Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, like I said, I haven't done that for a long time, you know? It's like 2016 or something like that. And so it was fun to go back and revisit that and see if I could get a little clearer. Because it's nice to get something a little clearer every time you revisit it, you know? And so, did that happen today? I think I got the explanation for why the value structures have to be characterized more clear than I did when I was lecturing for Maps of Meaning, for example. So I think I understand that in a manner that's more compressible, so. All right, so. Okay, so I want to, I want to start and I also went to see the Snow White movie.

• 49:28Jordan B. Peterson?

  And I guess. A way to resume what Jordan is saying is to ask yourself the question, "Why was it so boring?" Like, "Why was it inane? And why is it that no one cares about it?" Right? And so, what Jordan is trying to portray is that stories are not infinitely malleable. That unlike... In accordance with the kind of postmodern world, we are saying that there is a overlay of value that brings the world of facts together. The postmodern say that too. But the postmodern think that that world that is overlaid is arbitrary and that it is only a sense of force and a sense of power.

• 50:11Jordan B. Peterson?

  But what we're trying to say is that actually the order of attention, the hierarchy of attention, is objective. And the reason why you know it's objective is because the Snow White movie is boring, because no one likes to watch it. What I mean is that no one cares, right? This idea that Jordan is talking about, where it is that you put your attention on something that reflects a universal structure of values, and that's what makes people care about it. Now, you can push on that, right? You can push on it towards extremes. It is possible, because we do have in us a desire for exploration, right? So, you can push on that and create horror stories, do this type of pushing into the margins.

• 50:53Jordan B. Peterson?

  But at some point, if you don't order the story in the proper way, people just stop paying attention, right? Because no one will pay to watch propaganda. Well, it isn't even exactly that people stop paying attention. It's that their attention isn't gripped, right? Because you know, you might think, "Well, you could go to Snow White and you could feel sorry for Disney, because they spent a quarter of a billion dollars on this movie." And so, you'd expect it to grip your attention, but it doesn't. And that's so weird. You see, this is the crucial thing here with regards to Jonathan's comments about the reality of the value structure, you see? Because if you had any sense

• 51:37Jordan B. Peterson?

  and you could control what you thought was important, you'd think, "Well, I spent..." You know, you bring your family. "I spent fifty dollars going to this movie. God damn it, I'm gonna enjoy it." And that just doesn't work, right? You cannot force yourself to care about a movie that you don't care about. It has to entrench you, right? It has to grip you. Now, the question is, "Why does it grip you?" See, and this is an unbelievably important question. This is exactly the same question that the religious types grapple with when they talk about the issue of calling. You know, there are things in the world that attract your attention. Now, sometimes those are pathological things, and you know, you should get your act together and straighten up. But it's not...

• 52:22Jordan B. Peterson?

  It's very common that it's your destiny calling to you. It's the next step on your journey calling to you. It's your higher purpose calling to you. And if you have the courage to attend to that calling, then you magically transform. That's how it works. And everyone knows that. And so, then, when the narrative deviates from the pattern, no one cares. It's because it doesn't call you anymore. It doesn't call you because it doesn't reflect the transcendent pattern. That's it. And it's insane. Like, we've been told now for decades that the idea of the story of a princess that finds her prince is ridiculous and, you know, it's passé and it's antiquated.

• 53:08Jordan B. Peterson?

  That is literally how the world continues to exist. Like, a woman and a man coming together, and getting it coming together, and then, that is how the world continues to exist. The idea that that is ridiculous and inane and passé is the dumbest thing in the world. You can have all the political ideology and revolutions you want. If you have no people, you have no world, right?

• 53:31Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, well, and you can have a narrative that's bent enough that you proclaim that a world without people would be a better world. Right, and there's a villainous narrative for you. You know, and you can make everybody guilty about the fact that they want to get married and have children, because children are part of the force that's devouring the damn planet. And then, you might ask exactly whose aim underlies that narrative, as you should. And so, and we're in a situation where that's literally the case. Like, was the New York Times last year talked about the morality of limiting the number of children that you bring into the world because of the planetary burden that you're placing on, I don't know what, the goddess of nature, some damn thing? So...

• 54:15Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, but I think that it's encouraging now. Like, actually, this, to me, this most recent version of Snow White is actually hopeful, right? And the reason why it's hopeful is because when you watch it, you can see that they went way too far. And they're actually trying to backtrack, and they're trying to fix it. And it ends up in this jumbled, confused mess. But you can feel that they're trying to fix it, which means that it feels like we're at the end, we're at the nadir of this type of ideological storytelling. And that hopefully, it's all uphill from there. So, you know...

• 54:51Jordan B. Peterson?

  So, the original trailer for the Snow White movie,

• 54:56Jordan B. Peterson?

  back then, that was a year and a half ago or something like that, they decided they were gonna replace the dwarfs with like a diversity crowd. And that, see, there's an unbelievable arrogance in that. Because, especially for storytellers, because there's actually reasons that those dwarfs were who they were. So, I can go through the reasons. So, in the original Grimm Brothers' fairy tale, the dwarfs are partial manifestations of the positive masculine. So, they don't have names. So, they're not stellar individual men. But they're men who work hard to do the things that are necessary. So, they're miners. And they keep a clean house. And so, this is very different than this new Snow White,

• 55:41Jordan B. Peterson?

  because they're like messy little rats in the Snow White movie. And the woman, who's like this progressive princess, has to come in and clean house for them. No, she tells them what to do. Yes, she tells, that's true. She tells them how to clean their house. Yes, that's true, Jonathan, that's true. In the original, the dwarfs kept a good house. And now, the Snow White, the princess, is getting away from the evil queen. Okay, so, whether you know it or not, that's what all the young women in your country are trying to do right now. They're trying to get away from the evil queen, who is attempting to feed them poisoned apples so that they're infertile and unattractive. And it's working. And so, you can't mock with that story.

• 56:25Jordan B. Peterson?

  And it's partly because there is a negative feminine, you might say, and we could flesh it out a little bit. And so, the negative feminine is the older woman who, instead of being a mentor to a young woman, is holding on desperately to her primarily sexual attractiveness and the power that confers on her to be envious of the upcoming generation, including her own daughters, and to hurt them so that she maintains control. And that's an eternal story, man. And you see that reflected in all sorts of psychological investigations. So, for example, one of Freud's primary discoveries was the pathology of the Oedipal mother in the pathological family.

• 57:10Jordan B. Peterson?

  And so, one of the conundrums that human beings have is that we have a very lengthy dependency period, right? Far more than any other creature. Like, your kids are autonomous maybe when they're eighty, eighteen, or forty. And so, they're unbelievably dependent. And what that means is that there is very little that's more important than mother, maternal love, especially for very little kids. But it also means that because that force is so powerful and children are so dependent on it, if it pathologizes and overextends itself, it's literally a world-destroying force. And so, the Oedipal story in the Freudian world

• 57:51Jordan B. Peterson?

  is the mother who's a little too close to her son in particular. And you can imagine a situation like that arising, where there's a lot of tension between the father and the mother. And the mother turns inappropriately to her son as a source of support and attention. And because she desperately needs that, she sabotages his attempts to become independent and attractive. And this is exactly, by the way, what's portrayed in the Disney movie Sleeping Beauty. You remember that Prince Philip is caught in a dungeon by the evil queen. And she basically tells him that, although he wants to go find Sleeping Beauty and like have a life, she's going to lock him in the dungeon till he's laughably old.

• 58:37Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, and then these fairies come along. They're the benevolent feminine, and they get rid of his chains, and they encourage him to leave. And he escapes, and she turns into this horrible dragon that breathes fire, like she's the force of nature itself gone pathologically wrong. And she stands in his way, and he has to fight his way through her. He uses the Sword of Truth and the Shield of Virtue to overcome the dragon that the evil queen turns into. And then, he hacks his way through the thorns and finds Sleeping Beauty and wakes her up. And you can't mess with that story, because it's always happening. And it has to happen, because otherwise, the prince doesn't meet the princess. And the princess stays unconscious and asleep.

• 59:21Jordan B. Peterson?

  And the evil queen rules. And the dragon emerges and burns everything to the ground. And it's strange that we don't know this when we're watching the movies, but it doesn't matter, because they grip us, right? And they grip us by our most fundamental presuppositions, right? And if you deviate from that, everyone's bored and you can spend a quarter of a billion dollars and it doesn't make a bloody bit of difference.

• 59:49Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, we started with, you know, Dustin Hoffman being seduced by his girlfriend's mother in The Graduate in the late sixties, early seventies, I think it was. Bit provocative, bit enticing. And at the end of that, if you follow that line, you end up with, I'm sorry, I'm gonna say the word, but you end up with MILFs. You know, it's like you end up with like these old ladies, old, what do they call them? Like the cougar, cougars or whatever. Like completely degenerate world of women in their 50s, you know, acting like they are still little starlets, you know? And that's really, like, that brings about total chaos in our society.

• 1:00:30Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, it's also the case, it's also the case frequently that it's, oh god, we're gonna get in such trouble here. It's that, like, there is a developmental course that's appropriate to the propagation of life. And so what you want as you age, if you're a man or a woman, is, well, you start out young and you have your romantic adventure with one another and you have no children. And then you have children and then all of a sudden it's not about you anymore. It's about them. And then if you sacrifice for them and they grow up courageous and attractive, they find their own mates and then they have children and then your role is grandparent.

• 1:01:12Jordan B. Peterson?

  It's not, it's not competitor for the attention of the virile young man. And you'd only want that if you hadn't had your life, right? Because then you're, see, there's, the evil queen wants to hang on to her youth and beauty for a reason. And I'm not trying to say that, like, every older woman who's trying to look attractive is falling into that pit. I'm, I'm just saying that there's a desperation that comes from not following the appropriate pattern properly and it becomes pathological. It's like being the oldest guy at the frat party. It's like, when you're 18 and you're at a frat party, it's like, no problem, because you're 18. But if you're 40 and you're at the frat party, people should be wondering just who the hell you are

• 1:01:56Jordan B. Peterson?

  and why you think you're 18. Because a 40-year-old, an 18-year-old 40-year-old is a pretty ugly sight. Much less a 13-year-old 40-year-old. Oh my god. Right, and so it's everything in its place, right? And so, and you, you can see in these narratives, the evil queen narratives, you can see, ah, in for a penny, in for a pound. You can see exactly what's happened in the universities too, because they're, they're basically, they've become, they're basically, they've basically been taken over by evil queen types who are poisoning the young women. And, you know, I, I'm not saying this lightly. We bloody well know that the most miserable people

• 1:02:37Jordan B. Peterson?

  in the United States are liberal women between the 18 and, 18 and 34. And, and, you know, here's, here's the dreadful, here's the dreadful thing. Like, you'd hope that education would illuminate and enlighten and free, but what's happened in the universities is that the more educated, educated, the more poisoned apples the young women have been fed, the more unconscious and miserable they've become. And this is, and that's because they've fallen under the sway of the evil queen. And so then you might ask yourself, because this is all about how the women are going wrong, you might ask, where the hell are the men? And that's a really good question too.

• 1:03:21Jordan B. Peterson?

  And so, because they're not standing up and saying enough of this.

• 1:03:28Jordan B. Peterson?

  And so, the, the story, when you see the roles, especially in fairy tales, when you see the roles of the feminine and the masculine, you know, you, you realize that these are really, they're archetypes, obviously, but they play a structural role. And if you think about it, you know, to bring it back almost to the beginning, when you talk about science, there is this sense, even in the scientific endeavor, there is a sense in which there is this union, you could say, of masculine and feminine that is productive, you know? And so you have, and you really have to reduce it to its elements. It's difficult because people get, take it personal. It's like, all of us are more than our gender. All of us are more than our sex, right?

• 1:04:11Jordan B. Peterson?

  But when we have sex together and we produce a child, that's what we are, right? That's the reality of, of that moment. And there's a, there's a reality to that, which is that the woman provides the body for the child, right? The man provides necessarily for the pregnant woman that has the baby in, in her, in her belly. The man will provide protection, will provide, you know, sustenance, will protect her because of that moment, will provide direction for the family. And that is how the scientific endeavor works as well. You have a body, you have facts, and then you have a vertical. You have a reason why you're looking at the facts, right? There's a reason why you care about certain facts and not others.

• 1:04:54Jordan B. Peterson?

  And that gathers it towards a productive scientific endeavor. You know, when you are, it's really very similar to the prince coming and kissing Snow White. Because when you're doing science, you, you're not studying everything at once. That's not possible. You have to select something and you have to bind it and bring it together. And that the attention that you give to that, that circle, let's say, bound together amount of facts is productive towards. Well, and so, that, that plethora of valueless facts is, to, to further your metaphor, it's, that's the chaos that's potentially productive. Potential, to avoid the problem. It's potential, it's potential, right, exactly that.

• 1:05:39Jordan B. Peterson?

  And then the act of prioritizing is the act of the, of the, what do you call that? The fructifying logos, that's the right way of thinking about it. Use the image, you have the seed that is placed in the earth. Yeah. Right, the seed is bodyless purpose or bodyless pattern. And the earth is a body without a pattern, right? So in the seed is the whole tree, but the tree is nothing without the body. So the seed falls, goes into the earth and the earth provides a body for the seed and then you have a new tree. It's the pattern of everything, it's the pattern of life. But it is also the pattern of the sexual union.

• 1:06:23Jordan B. Peterson?

  And, and especially in the narrative form. Especially the one you see in the fairy tales, or you see in the Bible, you see in the mythology. Now, you see, you might say, if you're a scientific materialist, you'd might say, well, that's ridiculous symbolism and spiritualist nonsense. But then, see, the most famous reductionist, materialist atheist alive today is Richard Dawkins. And Richard Dawkins wrote a book where he claimed that, and this is a pure biological claim as far as he was concerned, that an organism could not survive in an environment unless it was a microcosm of that environment. Okay, so now that's a very interesting claim because it means that the organism itself reflects the entire structure.

• 1:07:07Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, we see, we see the very essence of human survival is the dynamic between masculine and feminine. And if that's the fundamental biological reality and the fundamental biological reality has to be a microcosm or a reflection of the environment, then you have to conclude that the masculine element of the environment and the feminine element of the environment are the superordinate principle. I mean, this is Dawkins' own argument. I tried to make that case to him when I talked to him, like, two months ago, three months ago. But it, he, he knew what I meant, but we never got anywhere with the discussion. You know, because it's very annoying to be proved wrong by your own ideas. Yeah.

• 1:07:51Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, right, right, seriously, seriously, and. Yeah, he couldn't deal, he couldn't deal with the consequences of what that meant and how it does ultimately do what you proposed at the outset, which is that the narrative structure precedes the scientific endeavor almost just necessarily, you know? In the scientist, in the things we care about, in the way we decide what to study, in the way that people fund certain studies rather than others, in every single way that science happens. It has to be framed within the narrative of the hierarchy of values. Yeah, well, and it's, if you know anything about scientists, like the actual science, first of all, most scientists aren't scientists, they're just functionaries.

• 1:08:34Jordan B. Peterson?

  And so, and that's partly because you need a lot of functionaries. The functionary to genius ratio has to be pretty high for anything to work. So I'm not complaining about that. Look, there has to be beginner scientists, like graduate students and so forth, and the science they do isn't very good, but they have to learn. And there has to be scientists who kind of publish, but nothing real useful, but they teach and, and then there's people who are real scientists and there aren't very many of them, but they do a lot of work. And those scientists, see, they're not pursuing money because if they were pursuing money, they wouldn't be scientists because it's not a way to make a lot of money. So then you might say, well, what are they pursuing? And the answer is, well, what the true scientists are pursuing is what calls to them.

• 1:09:18Jordan B. Peterson?

  They have a religious commitment to their object of inquiry. And what's the nature of the commitment? This is worth studying. Yeah. Right, this interests me, this engages me. I would voluntarily spend all my time chasing this. Chasing what? You know, Barbara McClintock, I think that was her name. She studied the genetics of corn coloration in Indian corn for like 30 years, something like that. And she was kind of an outsider. Everybody thought, what the hell's with this crazy broad? Studying like variations in color in corn? And she made a discovery that was foundational to a number of cancer cures. You know, and so, everything's a mystery and if you, if you study it enough, you get to the bottom of things.

• 1:10:00Jordan B. Peterson?

  And the genuine scientists are called by a burning bush. That's the right way of thinking about it and it motivates them. And it's something that's, it's a manifestation of a superordinate value system that precedes them even because they chase it. They don't pick what they're interested in, it picks them. And then they devote their life to it. And that's not in the scientific model, it's completely, it's prior to it. And so what else is prior to it? You have to believe the universe is intelligible. Well, what's the proof of that? You have to believe that attempting to understand the universe is positive. Well, maybe it is and maybe it's not. You have to understand, assume that you could understand

• 1:10:45Jordan B. Peterson?

  and that there's communal value in that. And those are all a priori commitments before the scientific endeavor even gets off the ground. And then you have to assume that pursuing what interests you is justification for your sacrifices, right? And so, that's all part of the narrative in which science is embedded. And if that narrative is upward oriented in the proper manner, then science becomes a productive enterprise. Otherwise, it becomes like Dr. Evil and nuclear annihilation. Right, same data. Indeed. All right, I want, I want. I think we're gonna bring Tammy out, but I wanna, I wanna make a shameless call to all of you,

• 1:11:27Jordan B. Peterson?

  which is that, right now, in Hollywood, in the world of storytelling, everything is shaking. We can feel like the model of this kind of ideological propaganda-type stories are falling apart. But now, we all need...

• 1:11:46Jordan B. Peterson?

  You, everyone here in this room has something very precious, and that is your attention. And so, we all have to be deliberate about what it is we give our attention to. What it is we... And so, we, we can criticize and we complain about how bad the stories are, but we also have to move into a new form of storytelling. We have to be able to move towards better stories. And so, I'm gonna, if you are interested, I, myself, and my team, we are rewriting the fairy tales right now. We're doing it in a mode that is celebratory, that is trying to elevate them to the highest level that we can. And so, if you're interested in that, we wrote a version of Snow White called Snow White and the Widow Queen, and we're hoping to prove Hollywood wrong. We're trying to prove to them that if you tell these stories beautifully,

• 1:12:31Jordan B. Peterson?

  with the type of honor and the type of celebration, that that is actually the stories that matter, and it's the stories that people will care for. So, thank you for that little...

• 1:12:45Jordan B. Peterson?

  So, you know, I'll just, I'll just put a capstone on what Jonathan just said. If you understand that there's no difference between what you worship and what you pay attention to, if you actually understand that, you'll be a lot more careful with what you do with your attention. Right? Because what you're doing with your attention goes all the way up, all the way up, or all the way down. Right? So, beware. And that's especially true, given these machines that you're gonna be increasingly interacting with, because they will take you wherever your attention...

• 1:13:20Jordan B. Peterson?

  They will take you towards whatever you orient your attention toward. And so, be careful. That's for sure. Okay, Tam, let's come out, have you come out and...

• 1:13:35Jordan B. Peterson?

  Hi.

• 1:13:41Jordan B. Peterson?

  Ready? Ready. Okay.

• 1:13:48Jordan B. Peterson?

  What's your take on the heated political situation between the US and Canada?

• 1:14:00Jordan B. Peterson?

  There's a little bit more. How can we work to keep the friendship going between our two great nations?

• 1:14:12Jordan B. Peterson?

  Do you want, do you wanna start? Sure, I'll start. The first thing that you have to know is that most of you really don't want Canada to join the United States. I'm just saying, the next elections will not be great if that happens. And so, that's the first thing. I think the second thing that I'd like to say is, you know, we're watching, it's hard to tell, like Donald Trump, he, there's something that he wants. He hasn't yet completely revealed what that is. He's just, he's pushing and prodding, he's making everything shake, and at some point, it will become clear what he wants. My intuition is that what he wants is for Canada to get its act together, you know, militarily, economically, and you know...

• 1:14:57Jordan B. Peterson?

  And so, I think that that's what he wants. And if that's what he wants, then I'm all for it, you know? But if, but if there's a darker aspect to it, which is, if it is this just kind of America trying to find someone to bully to make itself look strong, then I don't see that playing out well, you know, in the long term, so... Yeah, well, you know, Trump is a mystery, and I suspect, I suspect to some degree even to himself, and as we all, well, as we all are, right? As we all are. And he's a complex character, and he's playing a very complex role. So, I'm not saying any of this lightly, you know? And I do believe that there's a part of him that

• 1:15:42Jordan B. Peterson?

  is hoping that your northern neighbor gets its act together, even if he's primarily indicating that by contempt. Because like, well, I think one of the most productive ways of viewing what Trump is doing without being naive is by observing that he couldn't be dismissive and contemptuous of Canada if the groundwork for that hadn't been laid. And it has been laid, I can say that as a Canadian, and it's been laid in a bunch of ways. The last 10 years of Trudeau government have been appalling. We were as rich as you were 10 years ago. In fact, we had a slight advantage.

• 1:16:24Jordan B. Peterson?

  And now, you make, you produce a dollar for every 60 cents we produce. That's not good. And the prognosis for Canada is worse performance over the next 40 years. We've become almost entirely reliant on your country for our fossil fuel production, because we're too clueless to build pipelines across our country, east to west. And when the leaders of Germany and Japan, I can't say this without it hurting my heart, when the leaders of Germany and Japan came to Trudeau, when the Russians started saber rattling in the Ukraine, they both asked him for untrammeled access to Canadian liquid natural gas for like the next 40 years,

• 1:17:09Jordan B. Peterson?

  and he told both of them within the same month that he couldn't make a business case for that. And Trump signed a billion-dollar deal, a trillion-dollar deal, this month, that should have been Canada's and could have been. And so, and then our country, our leader Trudeau, who has...

• 1:17:30Jordan B. Peterson?

  You know, he's done some terrible things. He locked down Canadians' bank accounts, which was utterly unforgivable. That was the most totalitarian thing I've ever seen a Western Democrat leader do.

• 1:17:43Jordan B. Peterson?

  And then he also, he's a WF puppet to the core, and he also has told Canadians for 10 years that the country has absolutely no national identity of any value, except that of colonial patriarchal oppressor, essentially. And now, Trump says, "Well, you've got a pretty pathetic country there. Why don't you just be one of our states?" One! How insulting is that? It's like, how about 10 of your states? Not one. You deserve one. It's like, "Oh, just one?" It's like, and, and what Canadians do, they don't go, "Oh, you know, what the hell are you talking about? Look at us, like, you know, we're together." They go, "Quit picking on us."

• 1:18:27Jordan B. Peterson?

  It's like, that's pretty sad, you know? Because it should be just laughable. But the problem is, and this is what Trump's trying to figure out, it's not laughable. It's not laughable. The, uh, the leader of a foreign country says, "I don't think your country should exist." And the people in the country go, "Well, that's unfair." That's the best defense they can come up with. And so, and our military in Canada is in, oh my God. Like, your military is suffering under, you know, after 15 years of DEI idiocy, but you should see ours. Our bloody soldiers have to buy their own boots. And really, that's, that's the truth. And so, you know, there's some well-deserved contempt. Some contempt towards that is well-deserved.

• 1:19:11Jordan B. Peterson?

  And Trump is a bull in the china shop. And I think he was very careless in his comments about Canada. And he made a big mistake, because he, the Liberal Party in Canada, so that's the Trudeau Party, they were dead in the water a month ago, dead. The party was gonna cease to exist, because Trudeau's been such a disaster. And Trump came out and, you know, saber rattled and threatened Canada, and Canadians like to feel all virtuously anti-American. And so, now the Liberals are riding high. And so, that was careless. I mean, unless Trump's goal is truly to destabilize the country, because that'll happen if we elected Liberals again. You know, Carney, who's now Canada's Prime Minister, he's a net-zero advocate, man.

• 1:19:54Jordan B. Peterson?

  And like on a major scale, he was governor of the Bank of England. Every stupid idea of the last 20 years has Mark Carney's name stamped on it, on the international scene. He loves diversity, equity, and inclusivity. He's a, a central planning WEF mainstay. He was UN climate envoy, and he thinks that 3/4 of the world's fossil fuels have to stay in the ground. And that's, that's like, the Canadian economy is like mostly a natural resource economy. And, oh, so, I'm actually, I gotta say, I'm happy that Trump tromped around like a madman. And I think he made a big mistake politically,

• 1:20:36Jordan B. Peterson?

  because I'm not happy with the fact that the Liberals are back riding high in the polls. That's quite the cataclysm. And I think he's gonna be a sorry man if Carney gets elected, because Carney will do absolutely everything he can to undermine everything Trump does on the international scene. And he will do that effectively, because he has the connections. So, that's not good strategically. But I'm thrilled that he maybe woke the country up a little bit and forced it to get its attentional priorities straight. Maybe. We'll see. So, so, yeah. Yeah, right. Vote Pierre. That's right. Yeah, yeah. Or else. Right.

• 1:21:23Jordan B. Peterson?

  It's nice of you Americans to notice, by the way.

• 1:21:28Speaker 02

  Well, here we are on stage and everything.

• 1:21:30Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:31Speaker 02

  Hopefully, they noticed. You have stated that you cannot think of a single negative interaction with your mother.

• 1:21:41Speaker 02

  How does one become a mother whose children remember them so fondly?

• 1:21:49Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, do you think that you... I mean, my mom and dad had some trouble in their marriage, primarily because my dad suffered from depression, and that made things difficult for my mom, and genuinely so. And it's not like my dad was happy about that, but... Apart from experiencing secondhand difficulties in their marriage, did you ever have any negative interactions with my mom?

• 1:22:12Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:22:14Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, so, and she's... My mom was her mother-in-law, so think about that.

• 1:22:21Jordan B. Peterson?

  So, why was that? Well... Oh, my God, I'll tell you a funny story. It's such a stupid story, but it's my mother in a nutshell. Oh, my God. I can't believe this popped into my head. I went to Manhattan 20 years ago with Julian, my son, and he was singing at Carnegie Hall. He was singing in this choir.

• 1:22:43Speaker 02

  Charisine.

• 1:22:43Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, yeah. He was singing songs that a Canadian composer had set to poetry that was written by kids in a concentration camp in Nazi Germany. And we went to Carnegie Hall and to the UN to hear his choir. And I asked my mother and her sister to come to Manhattan, and she was always up for an adventure. So, they had never been to Manhattan. And they were pretty thrilled about that. And we got to go see Julian at Carnegie Hall and at the UN, which was like, that was cool. And we were in Manhattan. And my sister, who's a bit of a troublemaker and has good sense of humor, decided that she would take my mother and her sister, both of whom are somewhat sheltered farmgirls, to a drag club. And it was a Chinese restaurant.

• 1:23:28Jordan B. Peterson?

  This was before the whole, you know, everything that's happened in the last 15 years. So, it was a joke. And it was this Chinese restaurant that had this big, black drag queen as the emcee. And like, girls were going there with their stagettes to have a time, you know? And so, we went to this restaurant, and there was this huge, black drag queen there. And, uh... And my poor aunt, who's even more naive and sheltered than my mother, just sat there the whole time like this.

• 1:24:03Jordan B. Peterson?

  It was the combo... But they have good senses of humor, both those women. And anyways, this black drag queen came along and got a look at my mom. And my mom had like, snow-white hair and was a very fair person. And the drag queen said, "You are the whitest person I've ever seen." And my mother got like, she kind of blushed, and she was kind of laughing. And the black drag queen said, "I bet you make a mean apple pie." And my mom said, "Oh, yeah, yeah, I actually do."

• 1:24:32Jordan B. Peterson?

  It was so funny, because those two people, like, you couldn't believe they were both part of the same species. They were so, they were so far apart. And they had a fun time, and it was a funny interaction. But that was my mother. Like, she was up for an adventure, and she was a sheltered person in a way. But she was no pushover, and she was very good-natured and hospitable, and she could laugh at herself, and she was a delight to be around. And it is the case, like, if I... When the day she died, I was in a helicopter flying over the Grand Canyon. We were in, we'd done a show in Las Vegas, you know? For a couple of years, I was banned in Las Vegas.

• 1:25:17Jordan B. Peterson?

  Isn't that good? I'm so happy about that. It's like, gambling, mafia, murder, prostitution, no problem. But Peterson, no way.

• 1:25:37Jordan B. Peterson?

  So, I definitely regard that as an accomplishment. Anyways, we were flying over the Grand Canyon, and I had traveled quite a bit with my mom on tour as well. And we did that partly because we knew that she would have been up for that adventure. And I spent the whole day thinking about her. And I really, and still, even since then, like...

• 1:25:58Jordan B. Peterson?

  I think the one memory that stands out, and this is typical of my mother too, is my sister and me and my little brother, I was probably about 10, and he was about 5, and she was about 7. We were orangutan-ing around the house and causing trouble and making noise and torturing my poor mother. And she took out a wooden spoon, and she whacked one of us with it, and it broke. And so, we laughed, and she burst into tears. And then, you know, we felt like absolute wretched, nasty, horrible little savages, which is exactly what we were for, you know, bothering our mom to the point where she actually got upset. And like, that's my memory of a negative interaction with her. So, that's pretty good.

• 1:26:43Jordan B. Peterson?

  So, yeah, yeah. And that's... She was a very hospitable person and, uh...

• 1:26:52Jordan B. Peterson?

  A very self-sacrificing person, and maybe to a fault. Although, you know, when push came to shove and she had to stand up for herself, she went out and had herself a career once her kids hit school. And she got a pretty decent position in our town. She ran the library at the local college, and she set her career in order. And so, she was a successful wife and a successful mother, and she had a successful career, and she was a lot of fun to be around. And so, you know, two thumbs up for my mom.

• 1:27:29Jordan B. Peterson?

  Do you want anything to say about her?

• 1:27:31Speaker 02

  I love her.

• 1:27:33Jordan B. Peterson?

  Why?

• 1:27:34Speaker 02

  She was a good mom. I love her.

• 1:27:37Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, she supported us and played with us and was brave, and came along with us for fun. And she was just a great person.

• 1:27:48Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, and she was a good grandmother.

• 1:27:50Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. Yeah, Julian loves her. I mean, good memories, all good memories.

• 1:27:56Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:27:57Speaker 02

  So, what are your thoughts on underage drinking?

• 1:28:02Jordan B. Peterson?

  I was an expert at it.

• 1:28:08Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, I grew up in northern Alberta, and I don't know how to explain northern Alberta to you.

• 1:28:16Jordan B. Peterson?

  Do you ever watch the Trailer Park Boys? Yeah, well, that's eastern Canada. But western Canada has its version, and it's even more, whatever the hell that is, than eastern Canada. And Fairview was like that a lot. And it was dark and cold for much of the year. Like, the year I went to college, it was 40 below for 38 days in a row. Right? Well, so, of course, you drink.

• 1:28:49Jordan B. Peterson?

  What are my thoughts? It's a bad idea to drink when you're a teenager, really. Alcohol is a very destructive drug, and it's very addictive, especially for people who enjoy it, and I really enjoyed it. And you learn how to socialize only when you're intoxicated, and all your friends drink. And a lot of my friends became like, not-good alcoholics. And it's amazing, we didn't die on the backroads, because we used to drive around drunk all the time, way the hell out in the middle of the prairie in the dark of night. And the poor bored policemen out in that northern outpost would chase us around. And that was their job, chase stupid drunk teenagers. And our job was to avoid the cops and not die, and mostly, we did that.

• 1:29:36Jordan B. Peterson?

  It was, it was, it was too much, really. And alcohol's a bad, alcohol's a bad drug, you know? So, alcohol's the only drug we know that actually makes people more aggressive, chemically. Half of people who are murdered are drunk. Half the people who murder them are drunk. There'd be almost no domestic physical abuse if it wasn't for alcohol. Like, it's a major contributor to heart disease and cancer. Like, it's, it's bad news, and it's a bad idea when you're young. Because I started drinking when I was probably 13, something like that. And you structure your social life around it. Took me a long time to even figure out that you could have a social life without drinking like, 30 beer.

• 1:30:20Jordan B. Peterson?

  And so, better not to do it. Now, it's tough, eh? Because you don't want to be completely sheltered. And one of the things that's happened to young people now is they don't date, they don't go out with their friends, they don't drink. And you might think, well, that's an improvement. It's like, no. Doing nothing isn't an improvement over breaking some rules. But...

• 1:30:51Jordan B. Peterson?

  Alcohol's a bad drug, and your life is a lot... Like, you know, we travel a lot. We... I'll tell you one more thing about that. We travel a lot, Tammy and I. We've been on the road for eight years, and we've gone to like, I don't know, 600 cities. Like, we've traveled a lot. And in most of those cities, we meet people for dinner and lunch. And they're often cultural leaders of one sort or another. And sometimes, they'll have a drink or two. And after two drinks, they all get less impressive. You know, and like, I don't drink anything, and neither does Tammy. And partly because what we're doing is high stakes, and there's no room for error at all. But it's noticeable. And so, I would also say, if you have something that's important to do,

• 1:31:36Jordan B. Peterson?

  alcohol is not improving your performance. So, better, better to step lightly.

• 1:31:52Speaker 07

  You've said that children need to understand that malevolence exists in the world. At what age should you go about that? And how should it be explained?

• 1:32:04Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, you probably do that mostly with stories. You know, I was talking to my son. He's reading his grand, his son, who's only four. He's reading his son, Harry Potter. And that's pretty rough for a four-year-old. But this little guy is, he's pretty verbally proficient. And he's got a long attention span. And he can handle a complex story. And, you know, I exposed my kids to relatively rough narrative material, pretty young. And I taught them to watch the hero, right? So, you know, because it's scary. Disney movies are scary. Lord of the Rings is scary. Harry Potter is scary. And so what do you do about that? You can shelter your kids from it, or you can teach them to keep their eye on the hero.

• 1:32:49Jordan B. Peterson?

  And that's what you want to teach them in their life, right? Is like, keep your eye on the hero. He'll get through it. And so then you teach them to be brave and resourceful and courageous instead of sheltering them. And if you don't shelter them, then the evil queen doesn't inhabit your house. And that's very, very important because she's also malevolent. So, and how do you know when, when you should do that with your children? Well, you gotta know, you gotta get to know them. You know, some kids, some kids are very hard to frighten. And other kids are very easy to frighten.

• 1:33:33Jordan B. Peterson?

  And so you gotta watch your kid. And so if, if it's too much, you think, well, that was a little too much. And you wait for a while. And, you know, you gotta, well, this is what you do when you're playing with your kids is you, you push them, you know, like a good game with a kid is a game on the edge. You know, if you're a father, you know this, you're, you're playing with your kids physically, wrestling with them and throwing them in the air. And, you know, it's so interesting, even little kids, little tiny kids, you know, like my son-in-law, I watch him now. He's got this little guy who's about a year old. And my son-in-law's a pretty big guy. He's about six, six.

• 1:34:16Speaker 07

  I don't know.

• 1:34:17Jordan B. Peterson?

  He's a pretty big guy.

• 1:34:18Speaker 07

  He's bigger than I am.

• 1:34:19Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah. And, you know, he throws this baby up in the air. And it's like, I'm thinking, wow, what's that like to be that baby? It's like, you know, you're like, you're 30 feet off the ground and a giant is throwing you in the air. And that's pretty exciting. And he loves it. This kid's pretty, you know, rangy kid and not easily scared. And so, but if the kid's laughing and having a good time, then that's not too much. And if he's like crying in terror and your wife is like hitting you with a frying pan, then probably you've pushed the limit a bit. And so you can figure that out. If, if it's not fun, then it's too much, you know? And, but it's tricky because the most fun is right on the edge of disaster. Right? So that's where it's most fun.

• 1:35:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, I've always thought that fairy tales, especially, there's something like, I don't know how to say it, like trauma preparation for children. And that's why when people tell me, I don't like telling these fairy tales to my kids because there's like a big bad wolf that's eating the child. There's all these horrible things. I'm like, you know, the big bad wolf is an imagistic, you know, story. And the child can take it in. You don't have to tell them about the horrible rapist that's hiding in the dark. You tell them the story of a big bad wolf and it prepares the child so that when they encounter real situations of danger, they have that spider sense already in them. And they can recognize opportunities, sometimes it's not just negative, opportunities as well.

• 1:35:50Speaker 03

  But then also the negative aspects of, of our possible story.

• 1:35:54Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah. Yeah, your job is not to protect your children from serpents. Your job is to teach them how to handle serpents, right? And so, yeah.

• 1:36:06Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right? And that's, that's a tough game. That's, that's very hard. And, and you have to be awake to play that game properly. And your children want to see that in you. They want to see that their father in particular, but also their mother, has the courage to contend with the terrible forces of the world. And they want to see that the father in particular, but also the mother, if she's playing her role properly, has faith in their ability to prevail and adventure. And so, and that's, so that's why you have to offer your children to the world. That's what Abraham does with Isaac when he's offering him upward. It's like you have to offer your children, God, you have to offer your children to be

• 1:36:50Jordan B. Peterson?

  destroyed by the world. Or you're the destructive force. Right? So, and the thing is, this is what happens in the story of Abraham, is that Abraham is willing to offer his son to God and God gives him his son back. And what does that mean? Well, if you, if you're parents and you offer your children to the world, they'll become competent and courageous and adventurous. And they'll like you and want to have a relationship with you. And then you'll get them back. And so that's a good deal.

• 1:37:25Jordan B. Peterson?

  Kids are tough. Yeah, kids are tough. And, and, and you can teach them a lot. And they can surprise you with how brave they are. And that's what you want. You want your kids to surprise you with how brave they are. And you want to encourage that. And that takes some risk. So you do that within the confines of love, right? And you want to make it a game. And then it's okay. No force, right? Or minimal necessary force. Okay, good. Thank you, everybody.

• 1:38:00Jordan B. Peterson?

  Lovely to see you.

• 1:38:11Jordan B. Peterson?

  Thanks, Cam.

• 1:38:12Speaker 07

  You're welcome.

• 1:38:13Jordan B. Peterson?

  Thank you, Jonathan.

• 1:38:14Speaker 07

  Thank you, Jonathan. It's been great.

• 1:38:19Jordan B. Peterson?

  Thank you all very much for coming.

• 1:38:21Speaker 07

  Thank you.

• 1:38:21Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yep. Good night.

• 1:38:23Speaker 07

  Good night.

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