I wanna welcome you to our

VIP reception with Dr. Jordan Peterson.

We're so glad to have you all with us.

I'll just be brief. I do want to especially thank Don Sebastiani

of Don Sebastiani and Sons for

very generously donating the wines that we have tonight for the reception, and I hope you'll enjoy them.

Dr. Peterson will be here momentarily to take photos

for all those who are interested.

Right afterward, we're going to have a Q&A session where you can personally ask

questions with him and have a conversation

so, please enjoy yourself and

Thank you again for joining with us

Thank you.

So my question is related to an interview you did with Camille Paglia

not long ago, and you were referring to Robert Sapolsky's

work about the zebras and how if the lions don't go after the zebras because they're

camouflaged into the herd, not the landscape.

And Sapolsky would put a red dot on a hunch and

The Lions would then go after that Zebra and I get that I believe that's true

But my question, how do the lions

communicate with each other to go after the one zebra with the red dot?

Well, I think the answer to that is that lions are a lot smarter than we think they are.

you know well, you think about it, you know like

hunting animals have to be very very intelligent when they hunt in packs

because they're obviously communicating with one another constantly and

they isolate an individual that's identifiable in some sense

and they seem to be able to determine

perhaps from its behavior, perhaps because of the behavior of the hunters

what that animal is.

But I mean, to be a predator means to manifest substantial intelligence

and I don't think we understand it very well at all.

(I agree, I think you're telepathic)

Yeah, well animals are strange, you know? You know how they can pick up your emotions

They're, they're very good at decoding nonverbal behavior

And so they're communicating through their posture and so forth, but I don't think we understand it very well at all

You bet. Another question?

Dr. B's here, a college professor here in California.

You said some things that are a little bit disheartening to me as an educator for our youth

who are bringing them up into this new society and

educating them to think deeply about what the meaning is for themselves as individuals.

How do you see

current

academics

as failing our students now?

Well, you know I really think Faculties of Education should probably just be burned to the ground

you know, I mean

They're failing them.

They're, they're failing.

The Faculties of Education in particular are failing them in a variety of ways

The first is that I've seen no evidence coming from the Faculties of Education that our understanding of how to educate children

more efficiently has progressed at all in the last 40 years.

In fact, I think it's gone backwards.

And a lot of the things the faculties of Education had pushed, like self esteem,

which actually doesn't exist because it's measured improperly,

like whole word learning for example

like multiple intelligences.

All these things have actually set the cause of Education back substantially

because they're not based on anything that's real

and then the introduction of... of

well, this... this very complex gender education to me is nothing but ideology it's being introduced

To children who are far too young and who have enough

confusion in their life without adding that additional dimension.

But most importantly I think that

The education system.

It doesn't teach kids to read well, it doesn't teach them to write well,

it doesn't teach them to think about thinking, so they can't think critically.

And it does almost nothing to help them understand that they have a character that they could develop.

You know, I mean this has been true for a very long time

and there's historical reasons for it. But, be very good, you know to

to have it. What what grade do you teach?

(Um, college)

College? Oh college.

Well even with the college kids

like no one's ever sat down with most of those kids

and asked them for example to write an essay of any length

and with any degree of seriousness on

who they would like to be and I don't mean career wise,

although that's part of it

and why to justify that.

It's an unbelievably useful exercise.

And so,

Especially if you're in the humanities, your job is to teach character development and

we just don't do that well.

We tend we tear everything apart and put nothing back together and it's a terrible thing for young people

so that's some of the

problems

Hi, Dr. Peterson

Another education question, we have a daughter who's in fifth grade in San Francisco.

She's in a private school because the public schools here are by and large abysmal

and

they are I recall

Hearing a lecture of yours where you said as soon as the school starts teaching your kids things like equity, diversity, and inclusion

pull them out. And our daughter's school is

deep and wide into that and there seems to be no escape.

So, my husband I agreed that we would do whatever you say tonight

So he said...

So his solution is that we just need to teach her

our values, our individual value system at home.

Well, I say let's think about pulling her out. So what do you say?

Um

How good are you at teaching her your individual values at home?

Like can you can you help her think it through? Is she confused by it?

Um, she is confused by it, but she's mostly rebelling and whenever I try to bring it up, she gets very angry.

And is she rebelling against your attempts to counter it, or is she? What's she angry about?

She's angry because she loves her friends at her school. She's afraid of us pulling her out and she's pretty defensive of her school.

Well, okay

So the first thing I would say is that I wouldn't give you advice because I don't know the particularities of your situation well enough.

I think that your...

Given what you just told me, your attempts to

provide her with the values that you can provide her with at home are probably her best long-term defense in any case.

It isn't obvious to me that you're going to find a place where this isn't a problem.

So, and she's in grade five?

She is, and by the way, my husband keeps whispering "I told you so" in my...

Well one of the prerogatives of being married at least from time to time.

So I would, I think...

It's pretty...

You could try the values move for a good while before you do anything more radical, you know

There's something to be said for minimal necessary force

and you don't want to set up any more rebellion on her part than is absolutely necessary.

I don't know if that'll be sufficient, but hopefully it will.

It's helpful. Thank you.

Yep, you bet. You bet.

Hi

Um, how do...

As a student at this university, how do I...?

I mean it's hard to me to sometimes...

I mean, I see the university like crumble like everyday

Like in all this ideology like had and I just find it hard to like

How do I keep myself like motivated or like... like... like...?

Finding it meaningful to continue and like...

Well your best bet in university is you at least have the chance to read.

You know, and what you need to do is to I have a list of books on my website

which you may know about or may not you could go read all those books.

(I've been reading all of them)

Good good. Well, the thing is that the best thing you can do if you're inundated by foolish

teaching is to go read all the books that people have thought have, are great

because lots of them are great and then you can make your peer group the people who wrote those books and

hopefully that'll be enough so that you'll be a lot more than you were and that would be something but

You have the opportunity to do that

even if you're not encouraged to do it, you can do the reading

and I don't know of any better...

That, and I would also say to write, you know, write. Read something great, write about it.

Get your thoughts in order.

That will help straighten you and you might as well read the best since it's there and it's free.

Which is also something quite remarkable. I don't know anything better than that

Dr. Peterson a lot of what you say really resonates with me

and so I listen to it quite a bit, but sometimes I feel as though

You take the position that these people who are concerned about

sexism, racism, and other kinds of discrimination are a bunch of whiners

and I wonder what you really feel about that and how you would address that issue.

Oh, I think it's true.

A lot. And I mean it's not that I don't think that there are forms of arbitrary prejudice that are counterproductive

obviously that's the case and I think that that's

detrimental to everyone.

I mean, we, it would be wonderful to build a society where people were invited and encouraged to participate

based on their level of skill in relationship to the required tasks, right?

That's what we'd want. And there are arbitrary barriers. But to... but the

the victim culture that's been generated on the university campuses is not only

unwarranted in my estimation given how much better things are, say in the United States,

on the sexism and racism front than say 50 years ago, or 40 years ago, or 30 years ago, or 20 years ago.

There's been unbelievable improvement and not only that, the emphasis on

microaggressions and safe spaces and...

and an interference with freedom of speech are

definitely making students less resilient rather than more resilient.

And every psychotherapist worth his salt knows that

because the way that you help people overcome their anxieties is by exposing them

voluntarily to things that they neither, things that they're afraid of and are disgusted by.

and it's the core... it's the core...

apart from getting your story straight, it's actually the core of all successful psychotherapies

and so by protecting students,

there's just, there's there isn't anything you can do that would make them less resilient than what's being done in the universities.

And Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff in their book "Coddling of the American Mind" laid that out pretty nicely.

The American Psychological Association and the American Psychiatric Association should have put out statements in this regard years ago

Because everyone knows if they're trained properly that this is just not how you go about doing it.

It doesn't mean...

That doesn't mean that if you're concerned with arbitrary discrimination, that that somehow makes you whiny.

Like I don't, I don't believe that because discrimination is real and it's... it's... it's pointless. It's harmful

(How do we address it?)

How do we address it? I think...

(As a society)

Well, I think, I think we are addressing it first of all because we're much less

prejudiced than we were like at any other point in known history.

So that's the first thing is that things have improved at a rate

That's so dramatic that it's almost unbelievable.

But, the way I think that we improve it is that we crush it out inside our individual souls.

You know for me, this is, that's why I concentrate on the individual.

Organizing ourselves into tribes and, and, and making that our paramount identity and then

teaching students that the appropriate way to view history is as the battleground between identity groups is just a reversion to tribalism

and that's like whenever a society reverts to tribalism, all that happens is that violence breaks out there's because obviously

because

Tribal groups are violent and if you can't speak between your tribes because they're so clearly different

Demarcated and there's no communication, all there is left is violence.

And so I just don't see that as...

I mean even if the people... let's let's give

50% of the people who are complaining about discrimination

They're do as people who are genuinely concerned.

Their solution is inappropriate.

All it's going to do is cause more trouble

and the idea that you know, there shouldn't be a uniting narrative

I think that's completely absurd because it's a uniting...

we're all here. We're all peaceful at the moment.

Despite our pathologies because there's a uniting narrative, everyone knows what they're doing here

And so everyone acts in a manner that allows everyone to predict each other. And that's why we're peaceful, because we're all half crazy.

You know, and there's lots of times we're not peaceful.

You need those uniting narratives and they have to be super-ordinate to the group identity.

And...