College Conservatism 2018: Charlie Kirk & Turning Point USA - VoiceTube: Learn English through videos!

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I'm here today with a new place trying out something new.
I'm talking to Charlie Kirk, and Charlie is a native of Chicago and he's been working building an organization in the U.
S.
To promote free speech on campus is for how long Now.
It's been six years now.
Okay, well, I'm gonna let you take it away and tell people exactly what you've been up to.
Sure.
So I started this organization called Turning Point Us Say, when I was 18 years old, took a very unusual path to it.
I decided to start this movement instead of going to college.
I saw something brewing in the States that I felt more instinctual than anything else.
That there was a countercultural kind of revolution that needed to happen on our college and high school campuses.
And I saw it through social media.
And I saw it from my local high school community that my generation is being so inundated with cultural Marxism and also economic Marxism.
But even worse was a cultural side of it and that my generation was yearning for a different perspective and political viewpoint, or at least ideological diversity and the capacity to have your viewpoints challenged, so it started as kind of a whim has ended up to be a quite large success.
When I started this organization, I had no idea what I was doing.
I had no political connections and no money, so that that was a good start.
So So what?
So you you started thinking about this when you were in high school?
That's right.
OK, so what happened in high school, and how did you come here?
These conclusions and what motivated you always loved history.
Economics on dhe of the more conservative persuasion.
My lifelong ambition.
I wanted to go to the United States Military Academy at West Point, which is a very difficult school to get into in the state.
So I got my congressional nomination, which is the first of a two step process.
And then I ended up being wait listed in denied on my senior year of high school, which totally shattered me, but ended up being the best thing that ever happened to me because it really made me reflect on who I was and what I wanted to d'oh!
And what I realized my motivation to go to the military Academy was that I was a patriot and I love my country, and I wanted to serve it in some capacity.
But I felt like the West was under attack, and I still feel that to this day.
So and so why do you think you developed a sense of patriotism and say, junior high and high school when that is increasingly lacking?
I would say we don't not only locking but seriously criticized.
What made you different?
It's difficult to say I definitely love my country based on my upbringing.
But primary.
My parents are generally center right people, and we're always taught, you know, patriotic values from a young age.
Read the Constitution, you know, around the dinner table, things like that.
But I'm disagreeable by nature.
And so in my parent, when my teachers would go out of their way to make anti American or anti patriotic statements and only made me reaffirm my own beliefs and digging deeper and want to challenge that even more, which I then sought out the great thinkers of the American founding, the Federalist Papers, the U.
S.
Constitution and down that rabbit hole.
I went to the great thinkers that created Western civilization, both intentionally and unintentionally, whether it be Aristotle and all the great, you know, enlighten, you know, thousands of years of writings that the Founding Fathers drew inspiration from.
And did you do that on your own?
That's correct.
It was auto didactic.
So is self taught in middle school as well.
But it was.
It was driven by this inspiration of.
I wanted to be able to effectively articulate my beliefs and values and ideas to a core of teachers that felt as if they had to indoctrinate me to hate America, hate free enterprise and hate free speech.
So I grew up in a rather generally liberal area, the northwest suburbs of Chicago and the teacher community.
For the most part, they were not trying to allow a free flow of ideas.
They were trying to impose a specific doctrine upon their students and being a disagreeable contrarian by nature.
I would always debate them, and I would find satisfaction in proving them wrong, As you know, as wrong right is, that might be that's just who I was.
That's what it always have been.
And then, by doing so, I sought out these books.
I set out these ideas, and I found Milton Friedman and I found individuals that that articulated what I knew to be true, and I only went down that path even further.
So what did that do for your social life?
Just out of curiosity, How are you?
How are your peers reacting to this?
Um so it's quite interesting you mention that throughout high school I was heavily involved in football and basketball and, you know, generally well liked individual.
Ever since my graduation of high school in my entrance into political and social activism, the hostility towards my heist from my high school community towards me has been extreme.
And I'm not trying to play a victim.
I'm fine with it.
I really those people were never my friends.
They just pretended to be them to be to be a such.
But it's amazing to me that you just have a different viewpoint on how the world should work, that people on the left will immediately ostracised you and categorize you differently.
And I always say, you know, I'm a conservative.
I don't look at people that are on the left any differently than I did.
I look at who they are is a character and as a person, and the politics are just layered.
On top of that, the left is completely different.
Is if you disagree with them, that's who you've become.
And I think that's one of the most cancerous and divisive aspects of modern political culture today.
Is that especially my generation, if you dare not be a leftist or dare not be a liberal than you're somehow less human or you're somehow less acceptable to them or you're immediately intolerant a racist or bigoted or home a phobic, which, of course, is untrue.
But it's almost as if they view you as a sub species of them, which I'm experiencing every day and some of the categorizations thrown towards you.
It seems that in popular culture that remains consistent, So it's okay, So tell me about your organization.
Tell me its scope now and what should be doing, and then we can talk about how you built it, of course.
So we're on 1300 college and high school campuses across the States.
We have 100 and 15 people on full time staff, and last year we raised 10.5 $1,000,000 with 25,000 active donors and some big ones and some small ones with some of the, you know, largest, most successful American business people that have been investing in us.
And I just started it from nothing.
Just I travel 340 days a year on dhe, meeting with investors and business people, entrepreneurs that are worried that America's in a grave decline, and I'm able to present them with the strategy and a plan and a vision that can help turn that around.
No pun intended organizations called Turning Point USA.
And so we host the nation's largest annual gathering of young conservatives with 5000 students there.
This upcoming December, of which you're the most requested speaker off the charts, I might add, um, and the scope of the organization is dramatic and immense.
Well, we have a young Women's leadership Summit in June will have 1200 young ladies from across from all 50 states attend eyes that that's in June in Dallas, Texas, on DSO.
We'll host over 100 events a year off campus with over 250 student activists and leaders that we train towards what I like to call Maur.
Principle based activism things that you know created the West Free speech dialogue, free enterprise, private property rights, natural rights, really diving into the deep ideas.
Not this sort of social justice leftist activism that has taught from our lecture halls.
So the scope of the organization has really grown dramatically.
We're on a $15 million budget this year.
Um, and it's It's been quite an experience and a blessing, to say the least right place, right time with a great group of people and how many How many campuses now?
Ah, 1300 college and high school campuses represented throughout the states?
So what's happening at the high school level Chapter development?
It's quite interesting.
We have seen an explosion of high school interest and chapter development over the last a couple of years, especially because the activism that is so prevalent in our colleges has now seeped down into our high schools.
And so students that are finding my videos or finding Dave Rubin or Ben Shapiro Dennis Prager your content there now 14 15 and 16 and they seek out that content because they have to if they want to be able to defend their beliefs because it used to be that college used to be the only place that these ideas were really not the only place I should say.
But the main focus of the left was college is no more.
I mean, they're teaching the beginning stages of post modernism as early as freshmen years in high school, where there is no such thing as aspirin, Ontario as early as great one.
That's correct.
Yeah, that's right.
In Ontario, the Elementary Teachers Association.
That's not quite the right name, maybe santero teachersfederation I can't remember at the moment, but they've put in a put together a social justice curriculum from Great One to Grade eight, which even bends the study of literature itself in a social justice direction.
So they're so shameless that they're willing to band art to the purposes of political propaganda.
It's stunning.
It is.
It's quite remarkable.
So what do you expect from the high school chapters?
What do you what?
What is it that they're doing that you think is good and useful?
So it's It's a different strategy, and it's different.
Implementation of our step staff goes about when they deal with high school students.
The number one thing with high school students that high school chapters that we deal with.
He's trying to make it culturally acceptable to believe these conservative ideas.
So even if they meet weekly and bring in a guest speaker of a local, you know, political nature, they watch video.
It's much more of a camaraderie building activity in high school than in college.
And I say that because the mindset of being in high school is quite different in college, you're you're entering into kind of that rugged independence.
I want a rebel or conform to my parents ideology and high school.
You still are still very much anchored to your local and cultural institutions, your high school football team, your basketball team.
And so But we've here.
That's exactly right.
Where his college, by the dynamic of the geography of college, you break.
You try to break out of that, but we exploit we.
We try to hold them the high school chapters to a specific standard of at least meeting weekly, trying to go to some of our big national events, hosting guest speakers, debates and lectures.
So a great example is in the States There was that horrific shooting down in Parkland high school.
I'm gonna go down act, actually going down to MST um, the school where the shooting took place.
I'm going to give a speech on the Second Amendment.
Natural rights.
They're not allowing me on campus, but I'm doing it right across the streets.
That's one of the groups would have been that Tuesday coming up this Tuesday.
They say it's highly controversial, which I don't consider it to be.
The Second Amendment is, some would say, a controversial, um, you know things.
People that aren't in the States, but the First Amendment is controversy.
That's exactly that that I was going to say, is that the idea of natural rights doesn't shouldn't offend anyone, but unfortunately it does.
So that's one example of an event that I have on a high school kind of arena that I'm doing coming up okay, and then at the university level, you have few said 1500 over.
So 1300 is the number high school and college combined, So that's divided about 900 college 400 high school, and do you have any estimate for total membership?
It's difficult to say so to give you an idea.
We had 3000 students attend our annual meeting last year, and we had over 14,000 applications on DSA.
Membership is well beyond that, but it's definitely the tens of thousands are total data list is in the hundreds of thousands.
We have over 1,000,000 Facebook followers.
I have 1/2 1,000,000 followers on Twitter memberships, a very difficult thing to pinpoint we don't want to define.
That's correct.
We don't want to be like the Air P where you have seven million people in your mailing list and you pretend they're all members.
But we're very much more into the quality of leadership than the quantity of leaders.
So that's the one thing I'd rather have, Ah, 100 dedicated, principled, movement driven student leaders than 1000 that are just kind of lackluster in her there for the the free pizza or pop.
And what are you hoping for from the university chapters s?
Oh, that's much more disruptive.
We want to challenge the status quo head on and do everything we possibly can to try to change the trajectory of our organ of our generation.
And so our organization offers that in a lot of different ways, whether it be offering guest speakers on campus such as myself.
This last week I spoke with University, California, Berkeley and University, California, Los Angeles, UC Berkeley and U.
C.
L.
A.
One day after the other, we had a packed house, every seat filled.
We had a lot of protesters, a lot of opposition.
Hundreds of thousands of people watched the live stream.
That live stream will hit a 1,000,000 people on kind of going retroactive use happening right now throughout this next week.
And you said you were there with Reuben.
That's great.
Dave Rubin and Candace Owens.
So Candace Owens works for us.
She's our communications director.
Okay?
Yes, sir, Candace is a superstar.
In fact, she just got a nice shot out from Kanye West saying, I love the way Candace Owens thinks, which honestly, is a It's hard even put into words the significance of a rap artist like him singling out a conservative minded pundit like Candace.
I think there's a seismic shift happening in America in the black community.
That is gonna be a generational ideological civil war, in the words of Candace.
So and so we went to UC Berkeley in U.
C L.
A.
What's interesting about Candace Owens is she uses identity politics against the left.
And so truth is, truth should be color blind, and any individual should be able to say what they want to say despite their skin color.
Their gender, unfortunately, is not the case on a college campus.
So I'll say something.
It might trigger the audience, but Candace will say that, and they're perfectly okay with that, and that shouldn't be the case.
But that just shows how.
But it must be harder for her.
On the contrary, Sorry to be conservative and black without a doubt and the thief societal punishment she receives for that is horrific.
Like what?
What's happening?
Well, the things that they mean the words they called her I wouldn't even repeat on camera.
But you know, the nice ones are Uncle Tom, right?
You know Kun things of that nature.
She has a very just the harsh backlash for what she believes in, what she feels because how dare she stray away from the ideological monopoly that the left has on the black community and for those that people that don't know that might be watching internationally, the Democrat Party receives 96 97% of all black voters in America, despite the Democrat policies having the worst impact on the black community.
And so Candace is tryingto wake up that community.
And so we're happy to have her as our communications director and help enhance her her her vision to try thio least that people think differently.
So, yeah, I'm gonna talk to Warren Farrell later today.
And he just wrote a book called The Boy Crisis.
And in There he talks a fair bit about the pernicious effect of fatherlessness.
And that's something that I'm very interested in Ontario.
We have as part of standard political policy that all families are equal.
You know, when the idea there is that respect should be given to familial units, regardless of their structure.
And you know, there's something to be said for that because people have to struggle through life the best they can, whether they're single parents or or regardless of how they put their family together.
But the empirical data on the catastrophe of fatherlessness is extraordinarily solid and deep, and it seems to be something in principle.
That's a particular playing for the black community.
That's current, I guess.
I'm wondering, too, like with the conservative approach to that.
Are have you guys focused on the problems of fatherlessness?
And what what's your take on that without it?
Without a doubt, I fight a pinpoint one societal trend that has harmed the black community.
Most would be the rise of single motherhood in the U.
S.
So to give a number, just thio.
So people understand.
On the single motherhood rate in the 19 sixties, about 18% of black community not 77% 77% of US blacks will grow up never knowing their father there is no there's no rational argument that that is healthy for a society.
And the reason for that?
There is an article in the Atlantic Monthly just two weeks ago showing that which is which is marked notable, right, because it is like the Atlantic is a right leaning magazine.
Anything but yeah, yeah, and you know, I mean, they could be evenhanded when they're at their best.
And they reviewed the new evidence that was presented in this research paper, which I also read, showing that if you look out those few locals where poor black people and poor white people do approximately as well.
If you track them over a reasonable amount of time, the thing that characterizes the high functioning, poor, poorer places is the presence of fathers.
That's exactly right.
And they said that not only the researchers claim that not only was that good in the immediate family have your father around, but in neighborhoods where having fathers around is the norm, every boy in particular does better in the neighborhoods.
That's right, and every crime goes down wth.
The likelihood of not going to prison obviously goes down.
But the interesting questions we have to ask why.
So we as conservatives always try to ask, What is the reason this is happening?
And where is the left?
I don't always think they go through that, or they ignore it willingly.
The reason is because the great society that was passed by Lyndon Baines Johnson in the 19 sixties, where the U.
S.
Government literally subsidized single motherhood where if you got married, you lost your government check and it still exists to this day in the states where the idea and the intention was, well, let's try to help single mothers.
Okay, that's fine.
I don't think anyone doesn't doesn't want to help single mothers.
The problem is, as soon as you get married, you lose that check because it was a program designed for single motherhood.
And so when you incentivize bad behavior, you get more of it.
And that's exactly what you've seen in the States.
You couple that with a disastrous public education system run by public sector teacher unions that have no accountability, protected by 10 year and really embrace mediocrity, its highest form with failing urban cities with Democrat mayors that have no grasp of free enterprise or how to properly run any sort of organization, let alone a massive municipality or city.
That's why you have the black community failing so much.
The final point, I'll say, is this in the States, the two poorest communities by race, if you will, are the two communities that received the most government assistance per capita, the Native American community and the African American community, and so we can draw a a direct correlation and distinction between the rise, the welfare state in America and actually the decline of the black community.
Native American community.
And but the solution of that is black fathers.
And we always say black fathers matter.
But there seems to be an employment issue, too, And I mean, that's a complicated problem because you know that the employment market for people who are less skilled has bean, I would say in decline, especially on the male end of the distribution.
And one of the stats that feral sites is that, um, 3/4 of women will not consider seriously dating an unemployed man.
Where is 1/3 of men would have a problem dating an unemployed woman?
So there's obviously a gender bias there, and I think there's a reason for that.
I should.
I think, that it's grounded in.
It's grounded in both rationality and evolutionary biology.
The evolutionary biology element is that women across cultures tend to mate across and up hierarchies.
Let's say that's right, and the reason for that, I think, is that they're logically and this is where the logic comes in, as well as the biology.
They're looking for a partner that can be of substantial economic utility practical utility when they put themselves in the vulnerable position of having a child s O.
Then you also have This additional problem is if the employment situation tanks in any serious way than men become less desirable as partners.
And your claim, I guess, in part, is that by filling that void, the government actually contributes to the problem rather than than addressing it.
Exactly.
That's tight.
And I supposed to, with the high rates of incarceration for black people in the United States have a negative feedback loop where you get more of that bad behavior.
So the black fathers go to prison, so not there to raise the kids.
The kids go to gangs so they'll end up either dead in prison, hopeless or completely directionless.
The black single mothers who want to continue to do what's right for the community have left with very few choices.
Have more kids, right?
Right, so it's a negative feedback loops you have.
You have bad behavior, reinforcing more bed behavior subsidized by the government.
Then you have the complete destruction of what used to be a somewhat civilized portion of American life, which, if you look at the worst areas in America, it's the inner cities predominantly with the African American community and so that the final.
The interesting point is, how on earth is it that black people today their grandfathers lived a better life in their father's was America?
Is America more racist today than it was in the 19 sixties?
Absolutely not.
America's become significantly less racist.
But if you look to the American left or the social justice warriors of the academic in the neo Marxist, they pinpoint racism is the significant driving force toe.
Why black people are doing poorly in American that well, that's a That's a problem, too, that I've talked about with regards to gender inequality and pay.
It's like what?
You've been wonderful.
Yeah, well, there's a lot of different reasons for difference.
If you analyze difference is an important attributes by group.
Whatever your group measure is, you're gonna find that there's a dozen contributors you know, just to pick a multi varied analysis to use your quote.
Yeah, well in The thing is, is that you can you can attribute a certain amount of the difference in success between groups, too.
Let's call it racial attitudes or ethno centrism on the part of the dominant group.
It's complicated because in the US Asians do spectacularly well.
Jews do well, Nigerians do pretty damn well.
Black immigrants do quite well.
That's correct.
So So it's much more complex than a simple racial analysis would indicate.
And the problem, I guess, in part with the group fostered analysis, is that people make the claim that a single factor prejudice, essentially is the cause of all the problems.
And then that has the additionally pernicious effect of blanketing everyone who isn't in the oppressed group that's being spoken for at the moment as oppressors.
And also and this is an even more pernicious element.
And I really believe that this is part of the fundamental motivation of the pathological left is that there's a war on the idea of competence itself.
You know, because if you take someone who's worked hard and and being productive and being useful and admirable in all the ways that you might hope someone waas and then you tell them that the only reason that they've been successful is because of their skin color.
Let's say in this systemic racism, next characterizes the society than what you do is undermine the entire idea that competence itself might be the basis of hierarchy and that way.
And I really think that that that desire to undermine the idea that hierarchies can be based on competence is associated with the deep Marxism that's associated with the radical left.
And I can't think of an idea that's more pernicious than that.
That's right.
And I have to tell you, Jordan a CZ.
You know, I've been doing this not for a long time, but I've been doing it for at least in, you know, equivalent.
You know, six years of college activism and organizing and your video on post modernism and, you know, Marxism.
I remember exactly where I was.
I was driving in University of Michigan just a couple months ago, and I literally my car, I said.
I finally get it.
I finally understand what is motivating these people, the philosophy behind it.
And it was an hour and 1/2 video where you really dissected postmodernism and it's exactly it's exactly what you just said.
They want the death of the individual, the death of logos, that any sort of success could be attributed to some sort of arbitrary prejudice exactly right.
The equation of success Start purchase.
I can't explain to you how significant that was, and I also think that's tied in with what you might describe as that.
Let's say the decline of boys, assuming that that sort of thing is is reasonable.
If you tell boys that the pate, first of all, that society is a patriarchy, which it isn't if you tell them that and then you say, Well, not only is it a patriarchy to corrupt patriarchy, it's a corrupt, destructive, racist prejudice patriarchy and that anyone who succeeds and it is, therefore corrupt, prejudice and racist.
Because that's how you would succeed in hierarchy like that.
Then what you do is you associate in the minds of people who might participate in the project.
The idea that any success whatsoever is actually a moral flaw, and I've seen that happen to lots of people, had a friend in particular who bought that line, and he had other problems as well.
But he really believed that active engagement with the world, any pursuit of success on his part for him and for his family and for his community.
But let's say for him to begin with was merely was merely engagement in the process by which the entire world is being destroyed and brought to isn't to its knees.
He really believed that, and it really many things destroyed him.
But that was certainly one of the things that destroyed him.
And you know, there's no differentiation in history is obviously a bloody nightmare, and there's no way around that.
But there it's necessary to differentiate between activity that is good and activity that is evil and to state that all activity that supports the patriarch and God.
I can't stand it that we even have to use that language.
It's but it's It is more widespread on universities than people realize you understand it.
But for most parents, there is a concerted effort to delegitimize and, I would say, destroy the idea of the white Christian mail.
In North American schools, especially the male aspect of it, were taught from the beginning stages that there is a patriarchy.
It's rigged against women when in reality the numbers show men are former likely to commit suicide.
Men are not living as long as women.
Men are much more likely to go to prison, much more likely to declare bankruptcy, much more likely to be killed at work.
That's exactly right.
Women are graduating in college in record numbers.
Women 14 in the last 15 years have dominated in the math.
I've got more master degrees and more PhDs than men.
Um, there's another interesting staff to that you never hear discussed by feminists, and it actually drives me.
It's one of the many things that drives me to distraction.
Let's say, is that, men?
Let's except for a moment that all that on average, men make more money than women, although the reasons for that, as we've already discussed, are extraordinarily complicated.
Um, women spend the last time I looked something approximating 75 to 80% of the consumer dollar, its exact, and you can make a riel.
At least you can pose it as a question.
It's like, Well, who has the economic upper hand?
Is that the person who makes the money?
Or is it the person who spends the money?
And I think that's a real question, because most of the men that I know that our worst their salt, it's like the competitive guys.
Often they're out for money because that's the way they keep score The competition you really see that in places like law firms worth career, everyone's heavily competitive and they're always They always have an eye on the bonus because they're trying to climb up the hierarchy in large part from a biological perspective that's actually to make them attractive to women.
So.
But if if the if men are generating men are are motivated to earn heavily to be attractive in part which is certainly part of it, and to take their place in the male hierarchy and to succeed there, then it also means that Ah, huge part of their motivation is to distribute the money and, you know, to distribute it to who, well, at least in principle, to their wife and their kids.
I mean, if you if you're a man of any utility and you meet another man who's fundamentally oriented in a selfish direction, who's hoarding his money without any concern for how it might be utilized, who's spending it all on?
Let's call them juvenile adolescent impulsive pleasures, refusing to share.
It's not like that someone that you admire, it's someone you have contempt for right away.
And so if you ever meet someone who's like the stereotype of the successful patriarchal male.
Then he's not somebody that fills you with admiration.
You're looking for someone who and the people.
I know that being successful financially that I've admired and there's been many of them have done amazing things.
They've produced technologies that air world changing often, you know, and but they're hyper concerned with what it is that they're going to do with their money and how it should be well spent and where it would do the most good.
And I don't want a whitewash.
I don't want a whitewash our society.
But the idea that people are fundamentally motivated by the sorts of selfish motivations that Onley accrue benefit to them and no one else is.
It's a preposterous claim, and I just don't see any evidence whatsoever that that's the case.
I agree, and one of the other components of it that is taught in our schools, which one of the top things I have to dispel is the idea that just because someone gets rich, someone got poor the zero sum game.
And so there's an idea that has penetrated the minds of youth in America.
I can't believe this guy has a 1,000,000 bucks.
He must have stole it from some house.
Wrong.
You had to create value in order to get that money and fame.
Or at least some people do that, like you could say and should say that.
You know, in every hierarchical enterprise of any scale, there's going to be a fractional criminal element without a day.
Maybe you could say, Well, it's 5% of the sum total of the activity, and the problem with criminal part of it is that it tends not to be very self sustaining, you know?
So you here.
While there's lots of psychopaths in business, it's like, Yeah, but they can't know.
Incidentally, they do, and they otherwise they have to move from place to place because their reputations followed them around.
And your reputation is actually quite fragile.
And so you could say well amongst the pool of people who are wealthy, there's an element that have obtained that wealth through through means that aren't admirable, sure, for reasons that aren't socially beneficial, But to then and say, then say because of that existence of that small fraction of people, which is actually ineradicable right, you can't have a certain amount of freedom without a certain amount of criminality.
I think the America America is a really good example of that.
To say that that means that everyone who's being successful is a thief.
It's like you have to be very careful when you make a claim like shop, because it also means that if you're successful, then you're a thief.
That's a hell of, AH value structure to adopt, and I would make the argument that the mark of the free market system forces you to be a better person.
It forces you to tell the truth and create a better product and treat your customers well and to be responsive when something goes wrong or toe lower your price or to improve the mechanism of which you are interacting with the the well.
It's not like customers aren't demanding and they don't have a choice, you know.
And that's another.
That's another example of a different kind of cognitive problem, Let's say, is that people are taught people aren't taught that comparing what we have to their hypothetical politically, politically ideologically motivated utopia is actually a bad idea, you know, because it's just isn't difficult to take a look at a system like our system and say, Well, look at all the problems it has compared to a hypothetical system that doesn't have any problems at all.
It's like, Well, yeah, there's problems.
There's, You know, we've taken like, 99% of the fish out of the ocean, and and you know, the degree to which our current level of economic activity is truly sustainable without alteration is at least debatable, even though I don't think it's nearly as terrible as people make out make it out to be.
But I don't think it's disputable that our current socioeconomic structures are the most productive and the most free structures that have ever been produced by people anywhere in the world.
And one of the things you can say about capitalism and free enterprise and and the Western stress on individuality is that even though it does produce inequality, a all systems produce inequality and without any real distinction between the right and the left, by the way, because it's a new book called um The Great Leveler by Walter Seidel, who I'm going to be talking to.
Later this month, he did an analysis empirical analysis, trying to figure out if you if you grouped governments by right wing philosophies, say, or by left wing philosophy and then you calculated inequality coefficient.
Would the left wing organizations be characterized by reduced inequality?
And the answer was no.
There's no evidence that they are and what that points to, and this is something very fundamental.
It's far more fundamental than than political is that inequality is the rule in cooperative slash competitive organisations.
You can't pause it of value without producing a hierarchy, right?
Cause you pause it, Val, you say this is worth doing.
Everyone says, Yeah, this is worth doing well, then what happens automatically is that it turns out that some people are better at doing it than other people, no matter what it is, I'm gonna get better and better at it like the great principle you're about to, and then they start getting better at it.
So the problem is, is that without with if you're gonna positive value, which you have to do if you're gonna act and immediately you create a hierarchy and you also build into the value claim the claim that a is better than be, you also build into that.
The idea that if a is better than be than people who are doing better at a should be differentially rewarded compared to people who who aren't, there's no way around that if you're gonna play the game and so if you're stuck with inequality.
But there isn't any evidence that that social engineering policies are really very good at dispensing with inequality, which is a fundamental political problem, and no one really knows what to do about it but criticizing the entire society.
I mean, think about the West, and this is increasingly true all over the world is that it's generating.
Our approach generates a tremendous amount of wealth forever.
I mean, it even happened in China, you know, despite their exceptionally totalitarian leanings.
And so what happens with the lefties is that they say, well, inequality is a consequence of the West in the consequence of capitalism, which is palpably false claim and say well, because it produces inequality than it's a corrupt system.
It's like no every system produces inequality, but hardly any also produce wealth that's correct and mobility and and reward for creativity, entrepreneur activity and risk taken.
That's that's something that the free market system is quite unique at, and where is a more neo Marxist view?
How do you get rich and a socialist?
Can you run for political office?
That's true.
Exploitation is you run on the best intentions of the public while implementing what you believe to be the best socially engineered construct.
Look at Venezuela mean the leaders are doing just fine.
Meanwhile, people are dying.
It's a complete 13,000% inflation, so on and so forth.
So I have a question for you, and I've watched hundreds of hours of your content on the Internet and you've opened up my mind in ways I cannot describe.
You've made me a better speaker.
You made me a better lecture about her person.
More organized more.
Um, I can draw a direct corollary to our organization's budget and everything from when I first interact with your content.
Because I never heard anyone describe the reality of life.
Life is suffering.
What are you gonna do about it?
It's just so bluntly and so directly but with struggle up the damn.
That's exactly right with a road map to deal with that because And don't tell you some cool.
Of course.
No, no, no, no, no.
No problem.
We have this program.
It might be something.
The future off your organization.
Yeah, I've used it with people.
Have that with drug.
Huh?
Uh, Well, we we have a fairly new study that came out last year.
Um, from Mohawk College, just a junior college, um, with the vocational element.
And the kids came in during the summer in their orientation and spent just on our writing out their life plan, right?
How How they what they would like to have in their life across six standard dimensions.
Intimate relationship, family education.
Um, care of their own mental and physical health strategies for dealing with temptation, like drug and alcohol use, um, useful application of their time outside of outside of their obligations.
So the question is, it's like it's it's it's sort of predicated on a New Testament principle, I would say in part, which is you know, if you could have what you wanted by asking what?
What would you ask?
Asking.
You shall receive exact knocking.
You will answer it in Matthew.
Yeah, exactly.
It's in Matthew.
And And the idea there, I think from a psychological perspective is is that while you're not going to get what you want, unless you know what it is and you're not going to hit a target unless you aim for it course.
And you can't even organize your perceptions in relationship to the world unless you have a goal.
Okay, so you write down what you think you might want to need in order to stand your life.
And then you write for a while about how what your life could be like in 3 to 5 years.
If you put your if you what, What your vision would be for your life.
3 to 5 years.
And then you write a counter vision, which is an analysis of where you might be in 3 to 5 years if you let all your bad habits take the upper hand and then you write a plan, okay?
And it takes a long time to do a really good job of that.
But it turns out that you could do a bad job of it in about an hour.
And so we had the kids at Mohawk do it for an hour when they came in for their summer orientation.
and it knocked the dropout rate for young men down 50%.
And so I thought it just just blew me away because it's sad, you know, I thought, Just look at that.
If you get young guys to sit down and think for an hour about what they would like their life to be, it decreases the probability that they'll drop out of college by 50% in Helmand kind of correlation.
It's just stunning.
And we have three studies demonstrate that was the biggest effect I've seen it.
I I'm dealing currently with one of my best high school buddies.
That was an opioid since a huge problem in America.
And I'm guessing here in Canada it is as well known as well versed in it.
And I sat him down and I did the future authoring program and it changed his life.
And, you know, and I made him watch all your videos and yeah, became hooked on it and it saved.
There's no opiates, probably.
Well, yeah, you saved his life.
I can say that And you changed my life.
I wouldn't say you say, because I wasn't in that same dire condition.
But the number one thing I said to him, I said, Listen, buddy, and I can use his name to protect his privacy.
I said, Your whole life, you've been seeking freedom.
It's like, Yeah, that's whatever I've been told I said Things in life that give you meaning will come from responsibility.
And that's that's what Click one of the things that you said that really clicked with me.
Yeah, that's a good thing to know, man.
We have inundated, especially young men.
Go seek freedom.
Go.
Do you want how you want to do it when you want to do, which is fine.
There's nothing inherently wrong to that when you're young.
But if you really want meaning, if you want satisfaction, you want direction.
It's the stuff that has consequence.
It's family work.
Freedom is freedom.
We're not teaching young men intentionally.
That's the other thing I wanted to get to.
But go right.
I think it's intentional.
I think it is, too, because it's part and parcel of the idea that the productive activity of young men and this also goes for the masculine, symbolically masculine activity of young women, by the way.
But the productive activity of young men is indistinguishable from the force that gives rise to the to the crushing tyranny of the patriarchy.
It's like, well, and that also gives young men a moral excuse not to engage in life.
It's like, well, you know, productive activity.
I see it all the time.
I've been told I'm a horrible person my whole life.
What use is this to me?
I'm gonna go play video games in my basement.
Yeah, I've been told from all my teachers, my parents that you know it's rigged.
You know that I'm a horrible individual because I'm a man and it really diminishes, Ah, men that might want to succeed.
And I see it happen all the time.
Yeah, well, it gives an excuse to the useless part of men that don't want to succeed because it's easy to sit around.
I mean, it isn't because of the long term consequences of that are just absolutely devastating.
Yes, you see, So when we have a discussion about freedom, you know, we might also say, Well, the freedom is I think this is right.
It's for its freedom to pick your poison.
It's freedom to pick your responsibility.
That's good.
You might say, Well, there's There's a set of weights in front of you that you have to pick up in order to stand yourself because that's the other thing I think about human beings.
Well, you know, we conscientiousness is a trait, and we don't have an animal model for conscientiousness.
In fact, we don't understand conscientiousness it all from from from a psychological or Darwinian perspective.
Well, that's that's more complicated because, um, conscientious men tend to do better, and so they're gonna be more successful.
But but we don't have a model for what conscientiousness is.
But but conscientiousness is, at least in part, this the the necessity to carry a load for yourself and for other people, or to suffer guilt and shame as a consequence.
And so that's that seems built in especially to conscientious people.
Now, conscientious people tend more tend to be more conservative because that's one of the predictors of conservatism.
But it could easily be that freedom is the freedom to choose your yoke.
Let's say and and then you choose the weight that you have to carry so that you can justify your miserable existence to yourself so that you can go to bed at the end of the night and you can think, Look, I did what I needed to do to set things right today, and I don't have to carry the existential weight around off my failure and uselessness.
As a consequence, the existential psychologists in the 19 fifties who emerged out of the chaos of World War Two were very much very much concentrated on the idea of existential guilt.
You know that you old you owed being a ransom for your existence and the way that you paid that ransom was to work for the betterment of being.
I mean, it's a very ancient idea, but But it is the one idea, I think, that gives people the self respect, not self esteem, the self respect that's necessary to carry them through terrible times and to use a story that people are familiar with.
When I'm asked, what what is Jordan Peterson done for your members of people?
You know, I say he hasn't to stop acting like Peter Pan, so I think they can actually be a man and not a boy.
Peter Pan stories a really interesting one because Peter Pan Pan means everything right.
Technically, that's what Pat means.
And Peter Ban wants to be a child because a child could be anything.
Could be everything, right?
So what you have in childhood is that a plethora of potential and the problem with growing up is that you have to sacrifice that that pan potential for a defined actuality, right?
That's that's that's to grow up and become something instead of staying potentially anything.
Now the problem with Peter Pan is that he looks into the world in and seize Captain Hook as his role model, right?
And so that's his model for for adulthood, and Hook is terrified of death.
That's the crocodile is chasing him with the clock in his stomach, and the crocodile already has a piece of them.
It's got a taste of him, and so Hook is constantly chased by the dragon of Chaos.
Essentially, that's already got a taste of him and because Hook is terrified of his own mortality and terrified in general, he's a tyrant.
And so Pan looks at, Harkin says, Well, if that's adulthood, I'd rather stay king of the Lost Boys.
That's exactly right.
And so, yeah, it's a very powerful story which is why people still tell it 100 years later.
That's correct.
But what I see, at least from my experience, is that the that idea of staying a boy is idolized and is more culturally acceptable in America than ever has been.
And it's almost as if that you ask a young man that is generally on the direction towards hopelessness and just kind of what you bring men out of it is.
They look towards that MTV VH one lifestyle of being able to do whatever you want to do, how you want to do it, get extraordinarily drunk, have no responsibility, be with women all day long.
What happens you get for a couple of years, you end up a horribly miserable person.
And so, but here's my question is, Yeah, you don't want to be the oldest guy at the frat party.
No, that's correct.
No, that's pretty dismal, but here's my clears.
My distinction, though, is that in some ways it's the women that are embracing the masculine archetype in some ways that are being successful.
I mean, they're they're being extraordinarily responsible in there.
They're feeling a lot of these positions quicker than men can't.
I mean, they're and they're graduating and higher rates of college and they're declined.
The declining motherhood are there, at least suspending it throughout the West, which is you could argue for either ways.
There's reasons through that.
But I guess my question is why I think that the expression of the masculine spirit in women isn't denigrated like women don't get accused of contributing to the patriarchy, even when they take positions in society that you would think are fully patriarchal know and which is a strange thing.