 So it seems to me that the battle between the individual and the collective is a battle that has been fought for virtually every society for all time. However, there does seem to me at least, and maybe it's just because I'm alive right now and doing what I do, that there's something unique about the battle at the moment. That the individual has been slammed so relentlessly and that we have ideas out there now that for for young people that they think that socialism is cool. I mean that seems to be coming back, right? I mean, these are ideas that I think are really crazy, but I'm happy to indulge in the discussion about them. Do you think there's anything unique about the battle between the individual and the collective right now, or is this just a repeating of what's gone on decades before? I think, I mean there's always something unique about each historical moment, but I think this is being a continuous argument for the last 130 years. Like as a technical philosophical argument, and of course it has roots that go back much farther than that. I don't see, I mean it is collectivism versus individualism. I think the fundamental polarizing force that's at work at the moment. And the issue with the collectivist types is whether or not they're collectivist because they care about the dispossessed, which is their fundamental claim. Or whether they're collectivist because they don't want to bear any of the responsibility that would go along with being a responsible individual. And I'm always skeptical of the saint-like moral claims that are put forth by people who are pushing a given ideology. And I'm skeptical about that on my part too. People who criticize my perspective say, look Dr. Peterson you're not, or maybe they call me something a lot less flattering than that. They say you're underestimating the degree to which systemic barriers make it impossible for people to move forward properly in the world. There's barriers to the progress that people can make even if they bear individual responsibility and those barriers are distributed unequally. And of course there's some truth in that because every system tends towards rigidity and tyranny. And no system does a perfect job of selecting among its people for pure competence. But there's a difference between saying that a system is somewhat corrupt, which is certainly the case with western systems. And the system is an absolutely corrupt tyrannical patriarchy with no hope of redemption whatsoever. It needs to be burned to the ground and reformulated. Those are really different. And it's also possible to be sensible and say well look, obviously the manner in which people are selected for success in our society is imperfect. But also to note, well imperfect compared to what exactly? Like to your hypothetical utopian perfection which you would self-generate if you were given ultimate power? Because that's really the comparison. Or to our societies in the past because we're doing a lot better now than we were. Or compared to every other society that's ever existed since the dawn of time by which standard we're doing so insanely well that it's actually almost unbelievable. And this is another thing that I've been trying to promote. I mean there's been at least a dozen books written in the last six or seven years by fairly serious scholars. And I would say distributed across the political spectrum pointing out that ever since the year 2000 things are getting better so fast that it's actually a miracle. And I can give you some quick facts. So the rate of absolute poverty in the world fell by 50% between the year 2000 and 2012. So that's a staggering achievement. It was three years faster than the most optimistic projections of the UN. So we actually beat an optimistic UN projection. So there are more, well that's absolutely beyond belief. There are more forests in the Northern Hemisphere now than there were 100 years ago. The child mortality rate in Africa is now lower than it was in Europe in 1950, which is just beyond belief. The fastest growing economies in the world are in sub-Saharan Africa. About 300,000 people, I can't remember if it's a day or a week but it doesn't matter although it would be better if it was a day obviously, are being plugged into the electrical grid. So increasingly people have universal access to fresh water. There's almost no country in the world now where starvation is a problem that isn't just a political problem, which is to say we have enough food for everyone and not only do we have enough food, we have the distribution systems that are actually getting that food to everyone. It's absolutely beyond belief and what's quite remarkable about that is it's quite obvious that individually, like that free market systems predicated on the idea of the sovereignty of the individual are the reason that that's happening. So the question is what the hell are the collectivists up to? What's the problem here? The problem seems to be a certain amount of ignorance, a certain amount of willful blindness, and a certain amount of discomfort with the fact that a fair bit of that wealth has been purchased at the price of a continuing inequality. We don't know how to generate wealth without also generating inequality. And I actually don't think that you can generate wealth without generating inequality. And that's something that's worth endlessly discussing. I think Iran might have a little sign to say about inequality. Since I wrote a book about that. I like to say in brief, inequality is a feature of freedom, not a book. It just comes with freedom. You're absolutely right. You cannot create wealth without inequality. And there's nothing wrong with inequality. There's nothing bad about inequality. There's nothing morally offensive about inequality. And in particular, given that what happens is that everybody's getting richer. Everybody gets richer. They just get richer at a different pace. And the reason they get richer at a different pace is because they're producing different quantities of value. The people who actually get very rich in a free market. Now we don't have a pure free market and all kinds of problems with the system we have. But in a free market, you only gain those values that you produce. Jeff Bezos is the richest person in the world because how many of you shop on Amazon? Everybody, right? So there's a reason he's produced values that have affected almost every human being on the planet. And that is why he is so wealthy. So the whole inequality debate is to try to drive people towards envy. The whole inequality debate is to try to undercut the idea of freedom. Because what they're really after is not reducing inequality. What they're really after is eliminating freedom. It's the same people who used to advocate for an ideology of communism or socialism. Now that's being discredited. So they have to call it something else. Joe Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize winner in economics, is not going to come out for communism. But in a sense, he views that as the moral ideal. You can't get there. It's rough. There's a little too violence. Too much blood for his taste. He's an economist after all. Right? So inequalities are nice disguise. So we want to reduce inequality. In my debates with people who talk about inequality, I say, but how much? Well, we'll know when we get there. Who will know? Who gets to decide? How are we going to vote? How much are we going to take? And why? Why just monitoring inequality? I mean, Dave's a good looking guy. It's not fair. Can I have some of that, Dave? It's a lot of hairspray, man. Trust me. I mean, how do we do that? You know, there have been experiments in trying to equal us. In the book, we give the example, of course, of the tragedy of the horrific tragedy of Cambodia and the Cameroons, where their attempt is to equalize. Not just on monetary issues, but on smarts. Well, the only way to do that is to kill the educated and the smart. On every other fact on who's a good farmer and who's a good forager for food, they killed them all. 40% of the population. So, yes, the whole, I mean, I get really upset when people even make an issue of inequality, because it shouldn't be an issue of inequality. And I think it's changed. I think in America, 50 years ago, and I'm not trying to be nostalgic because I know the dangers in that, it just, there wasn't this, nobody cared, right? Because there was this feeling that you earned it, you worked hard, you made it. There's also a feeling that, see, I'm not so sure people care as much about inequality as they care about inequalities of hypothetical trajectory. So, meaning that it isn't so bad if you're rich and I'm poor, if I believe that if I put my best foot forward, I might also, my life will improve across time, or even if mine doesn't, my children's life will. Because I think people are more interested, I think people vote their dreams rather than their realities, and the dream has to be intact. I do have a couple of things. Just one thing, I think that's true. But it's also true that people resent wealth when they think it's unearned. Yes. And I think the more, the more we move towards a centrally planned economy, the more we have cronyism, the more the real problems and the kind of the mixed economy that we have, we don't have pure capitalism, then the more they're suspicious of the people at the top, because indeed they see the people at the top schmoozing with the politicians, and that's what scares them. So, I think America has shifted partially because they're not sure that people have earned it, and partially because they've been bombarded with this message. You should envy them. It's immoral inequality. So, I think it's a combination, the combination of the dream, the justice of it, is it just for somebody to have that wealth because they've earned it, and this issue of they've just, there's been a shift in the morality and the mall perception. I think.