Jordan Peterson on Why Hierarchy Matters

In the final episode of a four part series, Dr. Peterson explains how hierarchies can be organized to encourage people to succeed. He also breaks down the fundamental differences between men and women, and why recognizing these differences can help bring us all closer together.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
I mean a huge part of freedom is wanting unequal outcomes.
I don't want the same thing you do. I mean,
that's that's what makes me me, you know. And you
can say, well, that's out of the sphere of economics,
but most of the time it isn't, because virtually everything
has an economic value attached to it. Freedom is the
freedom to be different. Hi, I'm Dr Oz and this

(00:48):
is the Doctor Oz Podcast. He's been called an accidental
icon of the modern day philosophical movement. Dr Jordan Peterson's
work as a clinical psychology professor at the University of
Toronto is international recognition has profound and often controversial insights.
Freedom and equality two of America's core values. But are

(01:08):
they mutually exclusive? And if if they are, which was better?
Well they have to be defined, Like, if it's freedom
and equality of outcome, then they're mutually exclusive, that's for sure.
But if their freedom and equality before the law, for example,
which is a freedom predicated on the idea that each

(01:31):
person has an intrinsic worth that even the state must
bow to in some sense, must take into consideration, then
they build upon each other. They're they're they're they're they're
harmonious there you can't have one without the other, So
it depends on how they're defined. And equality of outcome, well,
that's a very bad idea for any number of reasons.

(01:51):
Equality of opportunity, I would say that's that's much more
in keeping with the classic idea of American freedom, which
is that you should have the untrammeled opportunity to become
what you could be. At least it shouldn't be you
shouldn't be opposed by arbitrary and prejudicial forces, because it's

(02:12):
not in anyone's interest for that to occur. It's not
in your interest, but it's also not in the interest
of the community because you have something to offer, and
if you're held down for arbitrary reasons and you can't
manifest your competence, then it's a It could be a
tremendous loss to the entire community. And so that's that's
a very bad idea. So if people are left to

(02:33):
be free, they'll have unequal outcomes, which will be quite
obvious that we're looking from the outside. It causes discomfort,
they'll even want them. I mean, a huge part of
freedom is wanting unequal outcomes. I don't want the same
thing you do. I mean, that's that's what makes me me,
you know. And you can say, well, that's out of
the sphere of economics, but most of the time it isn't,

(02:56):
because virtually everything has an economic value attached to it.
Freedom is the freedom to be different. I mean, it's
also the freedom to be the same, if that's what
you want. So what is the utopian society? What is it?
Deep down? We we we desire what's the ideal? Well, freedom,
freedom of opportunity seems to have something to do with it.
That the state is set up to let you become

(03:19):
what you could be, which which also includes becoming the
eyes and the voice of the state. Right, there's this
dynamism between the state and the individual that that's necessary.
And so that's part of what lurks in our notion
of what constitutes the optimal good. We want to we
want to be able to confront potential and to transform

(03:43):
it into order, and we want to be able to
confront tyrannical order and recast it into the order that's benevolent.
We want to do that for reasons of love, and
that would mean that we have the best in mind.
We would like things to be better. That's that's a
good definition of love. I would say, let's say, in

(04:05):
the in the philosophical or even the religious sense, let's
make being better. That's the number one claim. While you
do that with responsibility and truth. That's the way that
you serve the state, and the way that you recast
potential into order, and that gives your life need the
meaning that forestalls malevolence, and that keeps sorrel and suffering

(04:30):
to some degree at Bay. Dostievsky figured this out back
in the late eighteen hundreds. You know, he said, if
you gave people everything they wanted, he was talking about
materialist utopia, you get to have everything you want. Well,
he said, well, people, you know we're we've got this
inalienable element of insanity. In some sense, it's like original sin.

(04:50):
If you had everything you wanted all of a sudden,
you'd be like a petulant child, and you just smash
bits of it up just to see what new potential
you could make a rise so that you had something
compelling to do. Right. So Dostoevsky knew that utopia that
was only based on material comfort would be deeply unsatisfying

(05:11):
to people. And maybe that is because we're born adventurers, Like,
we're not built for peace, and we're not built for comfort.
Not precisely. It's nice when you when you need it,
you know, but we're built for adventure and we're built
for conflict. And that's as close to the utopias you're
gonna get in the world. So if people are able

(05:32):
to have their adventure, yeah, some we're going to succeed
in some areas better than others. How do you reward
competence and yet still protected this advantaged that that's the
eternal that's the eternal discussion of politics. I would say
it's always the problem because you you aim at solving
the problem and you produce a hierarchy, and the hierarchy dispossesses, right,

(05:53):
it rewards, but it also dispossesses, and the dispossession can
become extreme to the point where it's evening it counter
purposes to the hierarchy. So you need the discussion because
the right says we need the hierarchies and they're based
on competence and they're appropriate, and the left says, yeah,
but wait, they tend towards corruption and they dispossess, So

(06:15):
how do we deal with that? Well, is there a
way for a political group to solve that or is
that really going to be fought at the individual level?
How do you avoid the bitterness the instability that happens
when these obvious inequalities are present. That doesn't seem like
it's something that can be that outside me as an individual,

(06:36):
I personally have to find Well, I think that you
have to solve that spiritually for yourself, you know, to
come to terms of the fact that you're different and
that those differences are going to manifest themselves in various
forms of inequality. That can be very bitter and but
that's part of finding your way. But I think we've
done a pretty good job in many ways of dealing

(06:56):
with the chronic problem of hierarchical inequality with our political systems,
you know, I mean we have in this particularly true
of the United States, but of many reasonably developed countries.
Are remarkable infrastructure. You know, everybody has electricity, everybody has
central heating, everybody has air conditioning, everybody has access to

(07:19):
as much information as there is. Like we've we've managed
to distribute scarce resources reasonably well. Given this overwhelming tendency
for hierarchies to form and for them to become rigid
and so. And you might say, well, what do we
do next? And I would say, well, the answer to
that is we sit down the conservatives and the liberals

(07:39):
and they have an argument about just exactly how to
split the spoils properties so that the competent get rewarded
and the dispossessed don't get unduly punished. And it's a
dynamic like it's the problem is it's a dynamic problem, right,
there's no permanent solution to it. I think part of
the problem though, is that some folks think it's unnatural

(08:00):
space that we're in. And I'm gonna touch on this
in a couple of different weeks. But if you don't
think that hierarchies are acceptable, which is I think felt
by some it does seem like, you know, if you
just want toyone to be happy, then maybe should all
sort of be thet same level, because then it all
be happier. It's just a simple thought. Then you want
to go back and look at the biology of of hierarchies,

(08:22):
and you've done some work at least brought to our
attention some work on things like lobsters, which I remember
when my son was a little boy, he'd watched the
lobsters crawling because he was born in Maine. He's a
loud actu duties of maniac people born in Maine or maniacs,
I think that's actually the word they use, petitar, but
the but you know, you can you can have lobsters
uh and and catch them and trapped them and if

(08:44):
you're born there. So he became a world expert on
lobsters and he would see these options following each other.
But you've tell them that story in a way that
involves looking at things like serotonin levels and lobsters and
the fact that they formed these hierarchies. Well, almost every
almost every creature forms a higher even if they're not
particularly social. Like the focus on the first chapter that

(09:05):
I wrote has been on the lobsters, and I think
it's because I wrote more about them. But songbirds have hierarchies,
chickens have hierarchies. Like there's it's very difficult to come
up with an animal that doesn't exist within a hierarchy.
And that's because there's competition for scarce resources. There has
to be some order placed on that because otherwise there's

(09:28):
continual conflict. Now the price of the hierarchy is that
some animals are much more successful reproductively than others. So
with songbirds, for example, that I'm not talking about the
ones that aggregate together like crows, that live socially. I'm
talking about the ones that live more in a more
solitary fashion. They have a mate, of course, but they
live in a more solitary fashion. When you hear them

(09:50):
singing in the spring, like rens do, for example, they're
staking their claim to a territory. The male is usually
doing that and the territory while the optimal ratory is
sheltered from the rain and the wind and the sun,
and is close to a food food source and far
from predators. And there's a hierarchy of shelters. Some of
them are better than others, and so the males compete

(10:13):
to occupy the shelters and so and the females check
out the males for their ability to provide in that manner,
and then they rear they're young, and then if in
any avian flu comes along, the birds die from the
bottom of the hierarchy upward, because the ones who have
the poorer shelters are more stressed psychophysiologically and that suppresses

(10:37):
their immune systems and so that they perish, and so
Like in the natural world, there's unbelievable competition for reproductive success,
and that competition emerges at least in part as a
consequence of hierarchies. Now, in the chapter I wrote, I
pointed out that human hierarchies aren't based on power. They

(10:58):
are when they're corrupt. Like animal hierarchies are often based
on sheer physical power. You know, although that it's not
that simple. It's not that case with chimps, and it's
not the case with a variety of complex animals. But
we can leave that aside. But human hierarchies, they're way
more sophisticated than that. Like in most of our functional

(11:19):
western hierarchies, competence is the determinant of movement upward. Now
that's corrupted often by a certain degree of prejudice and
a certain degree of inaccuracy and selection. But no one
thinks of plumbers, for example, a favorite example of mine
as composing a subset of the tyrannical patriarchy oppressive patriarchy.

(11:42):
If a plumber has a good business, it's because his
pipes don't leak. You don't have sewage in your house.
He treats his employees reasonably, his prices are decent, and
he treats his customers honestly, and so then he has
a business. And then there's a hierarchy of plumbers because
some plumbers are better at that the others. And it's
like everybody's happy about that because then they have plumbing

(12:04):
and it works and most of our you know. And
it's like I talked about Missaars therapists the same way.
It's like, do we have an oppressive patriarchy of massars therapists?
And if we don't, If all these little unique hierarchies
that we have, of people who are conducting themselves in
a business like manner, if each of those lack that

(12:24):
oppressive patriarchal um what what essence? Then? What do you
aggregate them together? All of a sudden it emerges. I
think people argue that there's a chrony capitalism. I'll use
that that there's dishonesty that perverts the hierarchy, so it
doesn't actually function as a meritocracy, doesn't actually let the
best person come to the top. They're never allowed to

(12:46):
get into the hierarchy. They can't cure the latter. It
happens all the time. How that happens all the time,
I mean, one of the dangers of order, so let's
call it hierarchical order, is that it becomes blind, power mad,
and corrupt, you know, and and stories about that reach
all the way back to ancient Egypt. They're one of
the primary Egyptians gods was Osiris, and he was basically

(13:09):
the god of the hierarchy, and he was willfully blind.
He had an evil brother, Seth, precursor to Satan etymologically,
and Seth was malevolent, and Kato sayers up into pieces
and destroyed him and then took over the kingdom. It's
just like the Lion King stories, the same story. And
so our hierarchies always have the tendency to deteriorate into blind,

(13:33):
power seeking structures. And it's up to the people who
compose the hierarchies, who are individuals and awake and alert
and who can communicate, to identify when that's happening and
stop it, and to push the hierarchy back onto its
proper competent path. And so like the left says, the
radical left says, there's nothing but power that mediates the

(13:59):
relationship between people. Well, that's that's absurd. The reasonable left says,
power can corrupt hierarchies, and often does, and we should
be awake to that and do what we can so
that the meritocracy prevails, so that competence is rewarded property,
so that the dispossessed aren't set to zero so we

(14:20):
lose their talents, and so that there is actual possibility
for movement upward, you know. And the right says, you
don't mess around too much because the hierarchies aren't doing
too bad a job the way they already are. And
then there's constant chatter, and there has to be because
sometimes the world tilts too much towards order, and sometimes

(14:41):
it tilts too much towards chaos. It's like you're writing
on the back of a serpent. You know it's moving.
You don't know where you are, and the only way
you can tell is by talking with a bunch of people,
especially ones that don't agree with you. And then maybe
because you're blind, but you're blinded by your own biases,
it's like, well, where are we are? We? Is there
too much chao, users there too much order? Well, we
don't know. Well, we better talk honestly, carefully. That's the

(15:05):
political discussion. Figure out where we are. See if we
need to tap a bit to the right or we
need to tap a bit to the left, so that
you know, we can keep these forces in balance. I've
seen data that the majority of today's youth think socialism
offers a viable alternative to this until he's shifting back
and forth higher power structure. But what what would you

(15:27):
say to someone who's thinking, guys, let's just get off
that train and let's build another structure that works better. Well,
it depends to some. I would say, be very careful
about getting off a train that's actually moving and hoping
that you can build another one from scratch. And I
would say also that blowing up a train is seldom
lee is seldom a good way of producing a new train, right,

(15:51):
Mess with complex structures at your peril, and remember, with
humility and gratitude just exactly how much you have. That's
that's good advice for people in the West, because our
culture works pretty damn well. You know, it's not perfect
by any stretch of the imagination, but there isn't anything
else you can compare it to anywhere else in the world.

(16:13):
Or anywhere during any time in history where things were
basically better for people. Socialism, well, that has to do
with the distribution of wealth, right, and there are various
tacks that can be taken in that direction that are
whose utility is the subject of continual political debate. There

(16:34):
is some evidence that the Scandinavian countries functioned quite nicely.
They have some problems, but and they also have a
tremendous amount of wealth, and they're fundamentally market economies, which
are all things that have to be remembered. They have
flatter income distribution in the United States, and there seems
sometimes to be some advantage to that. I don't think
there is competitive in the long run, as the Americans

(16:55):
are with their steeper hierarchies, but they have lower crime
rates and so worth that are probably a consequence of
flattening out the hierarchy. The thing is is that what
you're trying to do is you've got two errors. You're
never going to get rid of both of them. One
error is going to be the hierarchy is too steep,
and the other errors that is going to be too flat.
And the argument about exactly how steep or flat the

(17:19):
hierarchy should be at any given point. Is is what
people need to be discussing constantly because it shifts and moves.
And I think that's the essence of political discussion about borders.
But we won't talk about borders at the borders later
what borders define hierarchies, So that that's part of the
way of looking at that. There's lots more will be

(17:41):
come back. Why do we have such deeply conflicting core
values given when we come from the same families, the
same communities. Never understood how they can be so different?
Ready be that the nurture element should influence it? I

(18:03):
always thought completely and it and it doesn't. I mean,
the nurture element of it seems to influence it far
less than we thought that. The genetic data pertaining to
nurture shows that the shared environment that people inhabit actually
has very little effect on their long term life outcome.
So that would be the fact that you grew up

(18:24):
in the same family. Now that might be partly because
if you're in a good family, the relationship you have
with your parents is so unique an individual that it
doesn't really generalize to the relationship that your siblings had
with your parents. You know, and so partly what you
might be doing in a good families actually maximizing the
genetic differences between your children because you're allowing them to

(18:46):
manifest themselves the way they are and encouraging that. You know,
with some exceptions, why are we so different, Well, we
were different because we we were. We're composed of biological
subsystems that have a substantial amount of variability in their
operation and though and there are reasons for that. The

(19:08):
reasons are that some configurations of these biological systems are
better suited for some environments, and some configurations are better
suited for some other environments. And when you're born, you
don't know which environment you're gonna be thrown into, so
you know, God rolls the dice and there you get
your temperament. And so the biological systems seem to aggregate

(19:29):
into five core differences. There's extra version. Extroverted people are
assertive and enthusiastic. They like groups, they like parties, they
are energized by people, whereas introverts are better on their own.
And there's people who are high or low in neuroticism.
That's the negative emotion dimension. Extra Version is a positive

(19:50):
emotion dimension, and people who are hiring neuroticism are more
sensitive to uncertainty and anxiety and emotional pain. And you
might say, well, why is that useful. In the answer
to that, I think it's two fold is that, first
of all, maybe you're going to be born in dangerous
times and you should be alert for predators, you know.

(20:11):
And and there's another reason to Women tend to have
higher scores and negative emotion than men. And I think
there's three reasons for that. I think they become sexually
vulnerable at puberty, and that's when the temperamental differences kick in.
They're smaller physically, so the world is actually more dangerous.
But most importantly, I think that women's nervous systems are

(20:32):
not optimized for women. I think they're optimized for woman
infant die ads because you have to be very threat
responsive and sensitive to negative emotion if you're going to
take proper care of an infant. And I say so,
I think women pay a price, the price of increased
susceptibility to depression and anxiety for their heightened sensitivity to

(20:55):
the distress of infants. And so well, that's how it is.
You know. You might say, well, those differences in negative
emotion are socio cultural. But that's wrong because if you
look at the egalitarian societies of Scandinavia, for example, in
Northern Europe, the differences between men and women in these
traits is actually larger than it is in the rest

(21:17):
of the world. So what seems to happen is that
as you remove the socio cultural constraints for men and women,
the genetic differences maximize, and so that that's a very
complicated problem, and no one's come to terms with that,
And just to be cleared, the benefit of people having
such diametrically opposing views within a society, besides making us

(21:38):
angry at each other, is well, you know who knows
who's right and who's wrong. It's like, let's say you
have an employee who isn't turning out very well, and
you have an agreeable manager, because that's another dimension associated
with compassion and politeness. You have a disagreeable manager, and
the disagreeable manager says, we've got to get rid of

(21:58):
this person. They're pulling every one's performance down. We're not
going to meet our targets this term because of it.
We've given them, let's say, several chances and um, it's
not an appropriate business decision to continue. And the agreeable
person says, you're failing to take the context into consideration. Um,

(22:19):
the person is dealing with a like a parent who
has Alzheimer's and a spouse who's got an alcohol problem,
and they're doing their best to continue working. And if
we fire them, then we're going to send a message
to all of our other employees that were not carrying.
It's like, well, who's right. Well, you don't know who's right.
You need that diversity of opinion, you know, because either

(22:41):
of those stories could be correct, and sometimes one of
them is correct, and sometimes the other is correct, and
so part of the diversity is and and it's part
of the way that human beings are able to fit
into so many niches is that many the answer to
the problems that are posed by many situations are far
from obvious, and that a diversity of opinion is actually

(23:04):
necessary to address them properly. Even we live in a
world where you'll hear one of those stories and not
the other. You only hear the story about the missed
target or the guys Alzheimer's mom. You will hear both stories.
And as we begin to make decisions based to only
hearing one part of the story, we get more and
more angry at the folks who don't agree with us.
So with this, for example, the Trump election other similar

(23:26):
elections that we've seen around the world teach us about
what's going on. Well, I would say what the Trump
election taught us primarily was that it was dangerous two
for the Democrats to abandon the working class in favor
of identity politics. And this has to do with identity

(23:47):
politics is is essentially predicated on the idea that your
fundamental nature is determined by some obvious group characteristic your sex,
your ethnicity, your race, your gender, that's another one that's
been added, and that you're fundamentally an avatar of that group.

(24:08):
And that wasn't a position because of its radical anti individualism.
I would say, that wasn't a position that was popular
among Americans. And so Trump squeaked by at least in
part because of that. Uh. That and the fact that
I think that the classic Democrats, the working class types,
felt abandoned by the Democrat move towards identity polics tis

(24:35):
as opposed to their their their general work for the
working class. And with that decision now we have other
issues that are coming to the forefront. Maybe they were
there all along, but things like immigration. Yeah, this issue
of borders, which has been much more divisive than I thought,
because we've had challenges to immigration policy for a long time,

(24:56):
but most of us don't see the other side outvious equation. Yeah,
explain why borders themselves are so important to our societies,
and not just the United States, but around the world.
Countries are making decisions that things seemingly fly in the
face of what's in their best interests as an individual
to vote for a government that will support that borders issue. Well,

(25:16):
how big a territory do you think you can manage?
That's a big part of the that's the Tower of
Babel problem. You know, if you you can easily make
an organization so large that it can no longer govern itself,
it starts to fractionate from within, and and that's a
that's a major permanent problem, and I think it's the
problem that the European Economic Community is suffering from. It's

(25:37):
very hard as your organization scales, it's very difficult to
have it not fragment and fracture within. It's very difficult
to not have its lower strata alienated from its top strata.
So so so there's a there's a gigantism problem with
the idea of border border free world. Let's say it's

(25:59):
like one world, one government. What exactly does that mean?
That's a steep hierarchy with very few people in charge,
very difficult to organize that. So that I mean, the
UN hasn't been able to manage it in four years
of trying. And so part of the advantage of a
border is that you can take this relatively secluded space
and organize it half reasonably so that people who exist

(26:22):
within it can exist, you know, in a certain amount
of harmony. Now, the price you pay for that is
that you exclude people. Well, that's the price you play
for boarders. It's the price you pay for hierarchies. And
you can argue about the cost of exclusion, and you
should argue about it. But the solution shouldn't be, well,
we don't need borders. It's like it's not thought through.

(26:43):
You have walls in your bedroom, you have walls in
your house, you know, sometimes you have walls in your community.
At least you have demarcations, right, and so everyone already
understands that we have to exist within spaces that are
somewhat protected and defined metaphorically so important. I mean, when
these kinds of topics become majored dividers in our politics,

(27:04):
it's often more than the issue itself. So what are
they saying that we're missing. I mean, there's again a
people have been elected only on the issue of immigration. Yeah. Well,
the thing is, there's two there's two ways of looking
at the foreigner. One is as a source of contamination.
That would be physiological contamination and also moral or or

(27:27):
or philosophical contamination. So the physiological contamination would be bearers
of illness. So there's a great study. There's a couple
of great studies published a few years ago showing this
was amazing studies and showing that the higher the rate
of transmissible disease in the state or country studied, the

(27:49):
more likely the culture was to be authoritarian at that
level of analysis, and that held within countries, between the
provinces in the countries and across countries, and the core
ation wasn't small and so and it's been historically the
case that when isolated human populations mixed, there is always
the problem of the transmission of illness that happened with

(28:10):
the Black plague, right, it happened with the decimation of
the Native Americans in the western hemisphere that we figured
we might have lost them as a consequence of the
contact with Europeans. So there's danger and encountering the foreigner.
And so the conservative types who are more discussed sensitive
and more orderly, more wall focused, they think, look, let's say,

(28:32):
let's say are on the side of caution. Things are
pretty good here, minimal contact with the stranger. Um, it's
safer route. And the liberals say, yeah, yeah, that's all
well and good. But look, without some new ideas, we're
gonna get all stagnant here and tyrannical, and we're gonna
fall behind. And so we better open the borders so
that we can have a free flow of ideas, so

(28:53):
that everybody can become richer and smarter. And they're also right.
But the problem is they're both right, yes, right, they're
both right. Is there's the viral problem, so to speak,
and that can be physiological as well as in ideological
and intellectual. Of course, of course, ideas sweep we look
what happened to to the Soviet Union when the Marxist

(29:14):
ideas came sweeping through her Mao's China for that matter.
I mean, ideas have a viral quality and they're not trivial.
And so the border, the tall border people think hey, caution,
and the permeable border people think, yeah, well your caution
is just going to cause stagnation. And the issue is

(29:35):
it's again, it's the same problem. Um, they're both right.
It's a problem with temperaments in general is that it
depends on the circumstances. So you have to have an argument,
is this the time to open the borders or to
shut them? Essentially, you want both, You actually want both
those groups fighting over because the truth is not going
to either end of that, that's right, and because the

(29:55):
truth is going to continue to vary. So what has
allowed political leaders have been able to offer a one
extreme to succeed. Well. I think part of what happened
in the Trump election was that the level of general
distrust in in American society rose substantially because of political polarization,

(30:15):
and I think that was part of what drove the
the desire for the wall is that as distrust rises
and uncertainty rises, the requirement for predictable order necessarily increases.
I get it. That's why you mentioned the viruses. The
big countries with lots of infections in them, whether it's
ideological or true viral, they tend to get more conservative

(30:38):
towards of their wall maps. Yes, yeah, they get out
and they get out their terrant. And the correlation is
not trivial in these papers. The correlation that's and that's
the indicator of the strength of the relationship between the
two variables. It was up to point six. It was
the determining factor, you know. And well, I mean, why
would that be. Well, let's say that some of the
diseases are transmissible through sexual contact. Act so what do

(31:00):
you do about that. Well, obviously what you do about
that is you clamped down on sexual freedom. That's going
to be part of a the authoritarian ethos. And sometimes
that is what you do because there are viral forces
of foot and it's time to batten down the hatches
and to isolate yourself. But other times, well it's time

(31:22):
to open up because there's new things to learn. And
so it is part of the eternal debate between the
liberal types and the conservative types. And you can never
say that's why the the utopia in American politics is
the politics. It's not the liberals winning and it's not
the conservatives winning, because the Conservatives will win for a

(31:43):
while and then they'll be wrong, and then the liberals
will take over and they'll be all right for a while,
and then they'll be wrong. It's the dynamic and and
it's the it's the dynamic that's mediated by free the
free speech of sovereign individuals that keeps the interplay between
the opposition centering us on the best approximation of reality

(32:05):
we can manage, manage. It's a dynamic process. It's also
partly the problem with the idea of political utopia, because
you think, well, now the problem solved. It's like, no,
the damn problems never solved because the ground keeps shifting
underneath your feet, so you the problem. The solution is
to dance. The solution is to surf right, and you

(32:29):
maintain your stability that way. But it's not because it's permanent.
More questions after the break. Jordan peers in a Spark
controversy by arguing the differences between men and women were real.

(32:50):
Why do you feel it's so important for us to
recognize that? And it's an intimidating area you wanted into.
I didn't really spark controversy. It was the people who
disagreed with me that sparked controversial because I happen to
be right about that, so and it was never controversial.
I mean, psychologists have known for decades that that men
and women differ on a variety of dimensions, including temperamentally.

(33:14):
Now they're more the same than they are different, So
the curves overlap more than they diverge. But a lot
of selection for various employment opportunities, for example, happen at
the extremes of distribution. So even if the overlap between
the populations is substantial, if there if the men and
women are offset to some degree along some dimension, that

(33:36):
can make a walloping difference. Men tend to be less empathetic.
Yea more of them were in prison, like fifteen to one,
ten to one, And it's because men and men are
more disagreeable than women. And it's not a huge difference.
If you take a woman out of a population of population,
randomly in a man and you said, well, who's who's

(33:57):
less agreeable, and you bet on the man would be
right sixty of the time. So it's not like n
of the time, it's six the extremes. Yeah, well that's
the problem if you then But then if you go
out to like you take the one in a hundred
persons who's most disagreeable, they're all men, and those are
the ones that are in prison. So because it's the
best predictor of imprison is not a great predictor, by

(34:19):
the way, but it's the best personality predictor. So even
though the differences in the middle aren't great, at the
extremes are often where the selection takes place, and that
this makes a difference. Like, look, the biggest differences in
occupational choice in the world are in Scandinavia. So what's happened.
The Scandinavians have pursued a policy of equality of opportunity,

(34:41):
radical equality of opportunity for for decades, and you could
argue that they've done that quite successfully, like most of
the West. I meant, the proportion of men and women
in the workforce is approximately equal. It's a massive shift
towards egalitarianism that's occurred in the last fifty years, say
forty years, So a huge part of equalization has emerged

(35:05):
as a consequence of equality of opportunity. Doctrines. But one
of the things that happens is that as you remove
the socio cultural restrictions on men and women, the biological
differences maximize. And so this is why apparently there there
are comparative shortage of female engineers in Scandinavian and a

(35:26):
comparative shortage of male nurses. Oh yes, more in Scandinavia. More.
The difference is like, the more egalitarian society, the less
likely women are to enroll in stam fields period. And
that's and that's not you know, people have accused me
of of pseudoscience, which I find very annoying for for

(35:48):
a variety of reasons, mostly because the studies that have
demonstrated this are large scale studies, international studies with thousands
or hundreds of thousands of participants, conducted by primarily left
leaning psychologists who did not expect this outcome. And we're
not happy about it, you know. So how do you

(36:08):
know your science is trustworthy? Well, how about when you
don't like the result and then you replicate it and
there it is again, and then you still don't like it,
so you're replicated again, and then it comes up again,
and then some other teams who don't want it to
be true, study it and replicated and it happens to
be the case, and so well, and then it opens
up a host of questions. It's like, you lay open

(36:30):
equality of opportunity for men and women. It means they
make different choices, and those choices have economic consequences. For example,
because the stem fields pay more than the non stem fields,
partly because they're scalable. It's like, well, then what do
you do do you do you not want to offer
individual men and women the choice of of occupation because
it produces these inequalities of outcome, So then then and

(36:54):
if not, because you want the outcomes to be equal,
then what are you going to do? Are you going
to start to like really put the clamps down on socialization,
You're really going to start to socialize little boys like
little girls and vice. First, you're gonna punish little girls
for their for their doll preference. You're gonna punish little
boys for their wheeled thing preference, which, by the way,
you can also elicit in higher primates. So how totalitarian

(37:19):
are you going to get about the fact that you
want the outcomes to be equal? If you've already opened
up the equality of opportunity space. It's like men and
women are different in all sorts of ways and and temperamentally.
The biggest difference that's been identified is actually an interest.
So men are more interested in things by and large,

(37:39):
and women are more interested in people by and large,
and that makes a huge difference and occupational choice, and
that makes a quite a large difference in pay in
the pay gap. And you know, the pay gap also
isn't really between men and women. It's between men women
and mothers, right, because women pay a big price for motherhood,

(38:00):
an economic price, and it's we could certainly have a
perfectly reasonable discussion about whether or not that's equitable and fair.
The problem is we don't know what to do about it.
Because if you're in a profession and you take yourself
out of your profession for five years to take care
of your children, then you're not going to be on
the top of your profession anymore. And no one knows

(38:20):
what to do about that. You know, maybe you could
maybe you pay women to stay home with their children,
or maybe you subsidize daycare, or we don't know. It's
complicated to raise children. It's a big problem, and there's
an economic price to be paid for it. But these
differences are real, and they're the big and they're bigger
in the egalitarian societies. And this this like the Scandinavians are,

(38:43):
they have to reckon with this. I talked about this
a lot when I went to Scandinavian. You guys are
pursuing too opposite goals and they're working at counterposition to
one another. You're maximizing equality of opportunity, you're increasing inequality
of outcome. They're causally linked. What are you going to

(39:06):
do about it? Oh, it isn't happening. It's like, no,
that's the wrong answer. It's happening. Even the London Times
said that the studies showing these effects are among the
most well replicated and well established findings in all of
the social sciences. And that's true, so so so understanding
the economic issues, they're also the emotional issues between men

(39:28):
and women. What should women be telling men about the
desires their needs? Were in the Me too movement? And
I'm cognisant of the fact with two guys on stage here,
so this is not an area that either of us
should profess to know at from a personal level. But
there's probably information that men need from women to be
able to process what their desires are. Now, well, that's

(39:50):
it's such a deep that's a deep and troublesome question.
And I mean, one of the things that's really remarkable
as far as I'm concerned, is that I would say,
roughly speaking, that it was the left that run that
was at the forefront of the sexual revolution in the nineties,
and that short of that was we've got good birth control.

(40:11):
Maybe it's a free for all, and you know, maybe
it could have been, but there were some negative consequences
of that, AIDS let's say being one of them. Um,
there is a deterioration the family structure that was arguably
associated with that. There were costs to be paid, and
then there was more subtle costs, which is that I

(40:33):
turned out you probably couldn't just detach sex from the
rest of life and treated as something that was merely fun,
because it's an intimate act and it involves emotion and
it implies commitment, and it can't be pulled out of
the person as an independent entity. And so the sexual
taboos are coming back. And what's so interesting about that

(40:56):
is there mostly coming back on the radical left, which
is exactly where the sexual revolution came from to begin with,
and it's because I think it's because you cannot regulate
sex properly outside of the context of long term, stable,
monogamous relationships. It's as simple as that. You you try
to move outside of that, and you're in trouble. And

(41:17):
we're in trouble. You know that we don't know the
rules governing sexual interactions between men and women. You know,
one rule that sort of applies is probably if you're married,
you can have sex, and that's generally okay. But even there,
you know, the consent rules have got more complex because

(41:41):
not obvious. For example, in California, it seems obvious to
me now that in California that if you have sex
with your wife or she has sex with you, and
either of you are intoxicated, that's rape because you have
to give consent, and you can't give consent unless you're intoxicated.
If you're so, if you're intoxicated, yeah, yeah, if you're yes,

(42:02):
if you're intoxicated. So that seems a bit on the
not sustainable side of reality. So with that in mind,
there's a bunch of very biblical interpretations religious around the
role of the men and the woman. Perhaps the most famous,
of course, Adam and Eve and come on over here.
There's a painting by Martin Allen's called Waiting for Eve.

(42:25):
And before I let you give me your first impressions
of this, you know you've got you know, that's probably
Adam down there waiting. The apples have all shriveled up
while I was waiting for Eve to come into his life.
But it reminded me of this great poem by Mark Twain,
which folks, you want to take, you know, a little
time and look through. It's called The White There was
called Eaves Diaries, Adams at Eve's Diary, and the final
line has always resonated me with me. And Adam said it,

(42:47):
he said wherever, wherever, wheresoever she was, there was Eden. Yeah. Well,
if I look at this painting, I think, first of all, well,
the tree is often a symbol of the psyche. And
this tree is not in good shape. It's it's gray
and dying. It's kind of serpentine in its appearance, and
all the apples are are fading, and and this person

(43:10):
down here is featureless and not paying attention and downcast
and well obviously not thriving. Is the same color, for example,
as the tree waiting. Well, you could read it a
variety of ways. Is that what he needs is right
in front of him if he would only look. That's
one interpretation. Another reason that this is absolutely vital to

(43:34):
color and life and happiness, and he hasn't discovered it
for one reason or another. Eve hasn't come along to
point it out to him. That would be that would
be part of it. And I think that's right. I mean,
I read a Pew research study, I think it was
Pew Research a couple of weeks ago, asking people what
was important in their life, you know, and and this

(43:55):
is relevant because we tell women, young women, We tell
young women all sorts of lies, especially when they're around
nineteen or twenty. And one of the lies is that
career is going to be the most important part of
their life. And that's a lie because career isn't the
most important part of most people's lives. So seventy six
percent of Americans, if I remember the stat correctly, regard
their intimate and family relationships has the most meaningful part

(44:18):
of their life. And I believe that's correct across the
life span. You know, it's your your intimate partner, your
your your family, your children in particular, and I think
that's especially true as you get older. And yet the
narrative is career is all, even though the patriarchy is oppressive,
which is so contradictory. Um men and women, there isn't

(44:45):
that much. There isn't that much to life in some sense.
You know, you need to do something productive that you
can exchange with other people. So that's your job or
your career, that that's your obligation. You need an intimate partner,
you need a family. That that's life. And if and
if you miss out on any of those one of
those three things, then there's a hole in your life.

(45:07):
And you might be able to fill it, like you
might be able to have such a stellar career that
the fact that you're alone is justifiable. But that's rare, man,
I've seen that with very very few people. The gentleman
in the painting, he's lost because he hasn't found his partner,
he hasn't found someone to twine, to intertwine his life with.
He hasn't found his counterbalance as well, because the other thing.

(45:30):
I wrote about this a fair bit in in my
twelve Rules for Life book and in the chapter called
Don't let your children do anything that makes you dislike them.
You know you're not very well put together, let's say,
like the typical person. And neither is your provisional romantic partner.
But with any luck, the two of you are biased

(45:51):
and ignorant and blind in different ways. And so you
put yourself together, and you bind yourself together, and you
decide that you're going to be one superordinate entity that's
better than both of you. And then you exchange your
viewpoints in conflict and and in negotiation, and you you

(46:14):
improve each of you, and hopefully what that does is
turn the two of you into one person, one being
sane enough to raise decent children. It's something like that,
and you need that to complete you. There's an old idea,
you know, that Eve was taken out of Adam, and
that that meant that the original human being was hermaphroditic right,

(46:38):
and that what happens when man and women are united
is the original being created by God is reconstituted. And
there's a nice symbolism that goes along with that, because
it's predicated on the idea that that intense bond that
characterizes monogamy is necessary for mutual, spiritual and psychological development.

(46:59):
And I think that's right. I think it's the right
long term solution. It's the right solution for children clearly
because children do much better in intact too, parent families
much better. Um. But it's also right because well, it's
one of the things that keeps you saying, it's one
of the things that gives your life depth. It's it's

(47:21):
one of the things that you can aspire to, right
because people think, well, you you find who you love
and then you live happily ever after. It's like, no,
if you've been married for forty years, man, that's an accomplishment.
Like you've battled through some hard times, right, you stuck
together through thick and thin. It's an aspiration to maintain
an anogous relationship. You say, well I'm not happy, it's like,

(47:42):
oh god, it's like, no kidding, you're not happy. It's
like life's not for happiness, that's not how it works.
And you're there to maintain that relationship. It's a challenge
for you. It's a wrestling match, you know, and then
the community is there to kind of cheer you on
and say, we look, we know this is if that's
where you get married in a church with a bunch

(48:03):
of people around you say I'm going to take this
foolish leap, and everybody says, they clap at you, and
they know it's going to be hard, but they're there
to support you because they know that just the love
that's there isn't enough. You need everything behind you. You
need the society behind you, you need you need traditional
morals behind you. You need the political system and the
economic system behind you. And and then you produce the

(48:26):
right structure, which is a monogamous structure, long term monogamous structure,
and then sexuality is properly regulated. And I think that
everything outside of that is a delusional, adolescent dream. That's
what it looks like to me. We feel a lot
of questions from young people, and many are struggling trying

(48:49):
to figure out how to focus on a better tomorrow.
What advice would you give them? Well, I think the
first advice might be to assume that you could have
a better tomorrow and that you could have something to
do with that. And the second bit of advice I
would give is take stock, no, take a look at yourself,

(49:09):
figure out where your weaknesses are, figure out where you're procrastinating,
where you're not living up to your responsibilities. Consult your
conscience and see if you can straighten yourself out piece
by piece, and you think you could have it better tomorrow.
You could grow up, you could be a functional adult,
You could be a contributing member of society. As old
fashioned as that sounds, but he said, it's a noble goal,

(49:30):
especially when you're the eyes and the and the mouth
of the state. So have some optimism because you're courageous,
have some trust in people because you're courageous, assumed that
tomorrow could be better than today, and then pay attention
to your conscience and put yourself together. We're just playing
a truth fit into this because converting chaos into something

(49:54):
beautiful as in essence that we all love uh and
that brings us ultimately joy many seek. It's only got
to come if we tell the truth, which is hard
to do when you're fifteen years old and people around
you don't like that. Well, it's really hard when you're
fifteen because your primary goal when you're fifteen is to
fit in, and it's necessary goal because you have to
learn to fit into society. You know, you have to

(50:15):
learn society's rules before you can break them, for example,
but you don't want to fit into the point where
you violate your own sense of integrity. And you can
tell that again, because your conscience will plague you. You know,
you'll feel that you haven't been true to yourself, for example,
that you're that, and and the color will go out
of things, and then you have to ask yourself. It's like, well,

(50:37):
is the game I'm playing my game? Is it someone else's?
And you can ask yourself more specific questions, you know,
it's like what sort of person would I like to
be in three months? What do I want from my friends? Like?
What sort of people should I be associating with? How
am I going to deal if I was dealing intelligently
with temptations that beset me um pornography used for example,

(50:58):
or drug or alcohol. You it's like, well, if I
was treating myself properly, like a reasonable person who was
caring for myself, what what what exactly would be my
stance on such things? You know? And I think, well,
total abstinence seems to me and to be an unreasonable goal.
And it's not even obvious that it's healthy, because most
adolescents need to experiment to mature properly. But you might

(51:21):
want to have like a bit of a conscious goal
in mind. You know, like there's there's nothing so great
about being an alcoholic at twenty four. So some some
some meditation on character development, which is something our schools
seem to do a very poor job of. I would
say part of having a goal in life is to

(51:41):
be able to see it. It's a fine line between
a vision and hallucination. And you have a self offering
program which is a fairly thoughtful way of getting people
to write that exactly what it's going to look like
a couple of years from give us a short version
of that tool people that measure, because these teams may
be able to do themselves. So, you know, we asked people,
it's at self offering dot Com. We ask people, well,

(52:03):
if you could have the friends you wanted, what would
that look like? If you could have the career that
you wanted, what would that be? If you could use
your time outside of work productively and meaningfully? What would
that look like? How should you take care of yourself
mentally and physically? How do you deal with temptations in
the way that I just described? Um, How do you
educate yourself properly? So those are warm up questions, and

(52:25):
then we ask people to write for fifteen minutes about
what their future could look like at some point down
the road. It's three to five years for older people,
but it can be shorter for younger people. You get
what you want, You can have what you want to
need if you were take care of yourself. What would
that look like if you could have it? Well, now
you have a vision, right, and then we have them

(52:46):
write a counter vision. It's like, okay, you've got some
bad habits. Let's say they take you out in five years.
How what sort of hell does that look like? And
and how could you circumvent that? And then they have
something to avoid. And then we asked them to write
a bit of a plan to put their vision into practice.
It's like, okay, you've you've got a sense of what
life would be like if it was worth living. How

(53:06):
are you going to keep yourself on track? How are
you going to implement it? And so we've done that
work with college students mostly and especially with the males.
It seems to work extraordinarily well. But the overall effect
is that it decreases dropout rates from university by about
yeah yeah, yeah, trade school even more decrease and drop

(53:30):
out among males, especially ones who weren't doing that well
in high school. So it don't have to do the
things you're speaking to. We need a little mental resilience.
I mean that healthcore we focused a lot on. And
you can get mental resilience by playing sports and failing
or being in the theater failing and not whining, not whining,
failing nobly, failing noble, right, define that? Explain that? Well,

(53:52):
sometimes you win and then you win graciously, and sometimes
you lose, and then you lose nobly. It's like it
wasn't your turn to win, and perhaps you didn't deserve
to win, and maybe there's something for you to learn,
and you know, and and mostly what there is for
you to learn is how to fail nobly. That's a victory. Man.
It's like with games, you gotta you gotta think about games.

(54:15):
You're playing a game and the goal is to win,
but you're not playing a game. You're playing a series
of games. And a series of games isn't the same
as a game. And so what you don't want to
win the game, you want to win the series of games. Okay,
so how do you win the series of games? Well,
you do that by being a good player, by being
by being a good sport. Right, there's an ethic in that.

(54:35):
It's like, it doesn't matter whether you win or lose,
it matters how you play the game. But what in
the world does that mean, because you're supposed to try
to win. Well, yeah, but you're winning a series of games,
and so you want to be the person that invites
you to play. You want to be the person that's
always invited to play, to play the most games possible.
And so that means you have to be noble in victory.

(54:56):
You have to be humble in victory, and you have
to be noble in defeat. That's a start. You have
to be a team player so that you build your
team and and don't take all the glory for yourself.
And people see that iterated across time. That's a that's
an excellent That's an excellent thing to know from an
ethical perspective, is that you're trying to win the set
of all possible games, and you do that by being

(55:17):
a good sport. It's a fundamental ethic. There's something very
deep about it, and what these what these folks to
win the game of life is what this gets you.
Thank you very much. Dr Beers, my pleasure.