The Joe Rogan Experience - September 01, 2017


Joe Rogan Experience #1006 - Jordan Peterson & Bret Weinstein


Episode Stats

Length

2 hours and 44 minutes

Words per Minute

175.36407

Word Count

28,900

Sentence Count

1,889

Misogynist Sentences

13

Hate Speech Sentences

40


Summary

Jordan Peterson and Brett Weinstein join host Alex Blumbergen to discuss the evergreen State College controversy, and why they think Hitler was even crazier than people think. They also discuss why the postmodernist mindset is so prevalent in the modern world, and what it means to be a "post-modernist" in a post-modern world. And, of course, there's a whole lot more to the story than that, including the fact that Jordan and Brett are suing Evergreen State, the college where the whole thing started. If you don't know who they are, then you're in for a real treat, because you're not going to want to miss this one! This episode was produced and edited by Matt Knost. Special thanks to our sponsor, Caff Monster Energy Drink, for making great tasting drinks with twice the caffeine and fueling the podcast. Logo by Courtney DeKorte. Theme by Mavus White. Music by PSOVOD, tyops, and tyops. All rights reserved. Please do not use this music in place of music on this episode unless otherwise specified. We do not own the rights to any of the music used in this episode. Thank you for any amount you decide to share it on your social media platforms. or suggest any other music you'd like us to use it in the next episode. We are working on making music for this episode or any other episode of the show. We thank you for all the support we get from you. Please rate, review, review and subscribe in iTunes, review us in iTunes. and share the episode on Apple Podcasts, Podchats, etc. etc. Thank you are a supporter of the podcast, etc., etc. etc. Thanks for listening and review and review, etc.. thank you. etc... - Matt, Matt, Alex, Alex and Brett and Alex, again, etc, etc etc. <3 - Thank you so much for all your support and support the podcast and all the love and support, love you all the best of your support, bye bye bye. - your support is so much, bye, bye! - P.M. <3 - Alex, bye - Matt and Brett, Kristy, Jake, AJ, and the gang, Sarah, and P.B. & P.A. - EJ, R.J.


Transcript

00:00:00.000 Getting bigger, but the video part is getting to a larger percentage.
00:00:03.000 Three, two, one.
00:00:08.000 Gentlemen, we're live.
00:00:09.000 Here we go.
00:00:10.000 Jordan Peterson, Brett Weinstein.
00:00:11.000 How are you guys?
00:00:12.000 Doing very well.
00:00:13.000 Thanks for coming in.
00:00:14.000 Excited to be here.
00:00:14.000 I'm excited to have you in.
00:00:16.000 Hey, should be fun.
00:00:17.000 Look at you.
00:00:17.000 You're spiffy.
00:00:18.000 You make us look very schlubby.
00:00:20.000 What are you doing?
00:00:21.000 What can I say, man?
00:00:22.000 You know, I only brought a limited number of clothes.
00:00:25.000 Well, good move.
00:00:26.000 You look great.
00:00:27.000 And good to see you guys, both of you.
00:00:29.000 And so, whose idea was it to do this, first of all?
00:00:33.000 I think it was Brett's.
00:00:35.000 Yeah, I saw a tweet of Jordan's about...
00:00:39.000 Or maybe it wasn't a tweet.
00:00:40.000 I did see a YouTube clip that somebody tweeted.
00:00:42.000 I don't know if it was you.
00:00:44.000 Your perspective on...
00:00:46.000 On Hitler, and your argument was that he was actually even far worse than his reputation would lead us to believe.
00:00:55.000 And it's funny, it harkens back to my first evolutionary project.
00:01:00.000 As an undergraduate, I was working with Bob Trivers, who's one of the leading evolutionary minds of the 20th century.
00:01:07.000 I was lucky enough to have him as an undergraduate advisor.
00:01:09.000 Pull this sucker right up to your face because you're going to turn sideways because we're looking at each other next to each other.
00:01:15.000 Yeah, yeah.
00:01:15.000 Okay.
00:01:16.000 So anyway, I did a project with Bob on analyzing the Holocaust from an evolutionary perspective.
00:01:24.000 I wanted to test the question about whether, you know, at the time it was...
00:01:28.000 It was commonplace for people to say that Hitler was crazy and there was something that bothered me about that analysis.
00:01:34.000 I think there's something actually dangerous that we dismiss somebody like Hitler as crazy before we understand actually what they're up to.
00:01:41.000 So when I saw your video clip, I thought it would be worth having a discussion so that we could figure out what perspective Makes sense.
00:01:51.000 That sounds like an awesome topic.
00:01:52.000 But before we get to that, I would really like to know what's going on with you.
00:01:56.000 Because you're at the center of this crazy controversy of Evergreen State College.
00:02:02.000 You essentially left the area.
00:02:05.000 You're suing the college now.
00:02:07.000 So where do you stand now?
00:02:09.000 We have not yet filed suit.
00:02:12.000 And in fact, I can't talk about what took place inside the negotiation.
00:02:16.000 But we had our first sit down with the college yesterday.
00:02:20.000 This was an attempt to avert a suit.
00:02:25.000 But I will say, from where I sit, as hard as this is to believe, it appears that the college has learned nothing from this episode and that it is doubling down on the same foolish sets of beliefs and assumptions that got it into trouble in the first place.
00:02:42.000 So that is not a hopeful situation.
00:02:46.000 No, and for anybody that's not aware of what this whole story is about, you would either have to go back to Brett's podcast that we did a few months back, or please just Google Evergreen State University and Google Brett and you will be blown away by the insanity.
00:02:59.000 It's social justice warrior gone amok.
00:03:02.000 The whole campus, kids patrolling the campus with baseball bats.
00:03:07.000 I mean, the whole thing is just completely bananas.
00:03:10.000 The president of the university being told by the children not to use his hands when he's speaking because it's a microaggression.
00:03:17.000 So he puts his hands down.
00:03:19.000 The children start cheering and laughing.
00:03:21.000 They don't realize they're being played.
00:03:23.000 The whole thing is just some crazy grand game by the children.
00:03:28.000 And I'm calling them children.
00:03:29.000 I don't give a fuck how old they are.
00:03:31.000 To have power over people.
00:03:33.000 I mean, essentially what this is all boiling down to, and you really see it in that moment where they tell him to put his hands down, and he does, and they laugh and cheer and think it's amazing.
00:03:42.000 Well, you know, they're educated to do that to some degree, because one of the tenets of the postmodernism that they're being spoon-fed is that there's nothing but power.
00:03:51.000 That's the only thing that mediates relationships between people, because there's no real world.
00:03:56.000 Everything's a social construct, and it's a landscape of conflict between groups.
00:04:01.000 That's the postmodern world.
00:04:03.000 And the only actual means of expression is power.
00:04:08.000 That's why the postmodernists make the claim constantly that the patriarchy is a corrupt institution, because they look at hierarchical organizations, and they're stratified.
00:04:16.000 Obviously, there's people at the top and people at the bottom.
00:04:19.000 The only reason that there are people at the top is because they dominate by power.
00:04:23.000 There's no philosophy of authority or competence.
00:04:26.000 That's all gone.
00:04:28.000 And if you're cynical about that sort of thing, and you should be, you might say that part of the reason that the only thing that the postmodernists believe in is power is because that helps them justify their arbitrary use of it under any circumstances whatsoever.
00:04:41.000 And I think that's right.
00:04:42.000 I think that's exactly what happens.
00:04:45.000 So it's not surprising that you see this manifested in the mob-like behavior of the students.
00:04:50.000 It's right in accordance with everything they're being taught.
00:04:54.000 Well, they're also being taught in this sort of any means necessary to get over the establishment.
00:05:00.000 Like, the establishment is this horrible institution and they could justify pretty much anything.
00:05:04.000 This is what, like, punch a Nazi.
00:05:06.000 Who's a Nazi?
00:05:07.000 Everybody that doesn't agree with you.
00:05:09.000 I mean, it's essentially what's being said ad nauseum in social justice warrior circles, online, and you see, I've seen punch a Nazi so many times.
00:05:21.000 I mean, but when it came down to Charlottesville, there was very little punching of Nazis.
00:05:25.000 You know, the whole thing was like, it's all very insane.
00:05:28.000 When you see real Nazis, like, those are real Nazis.
00:05:31.000 You know, like, go fucking punch them, please.
00:05:35.000 Don't even do that, by the way.
00:05:37.000 Well, I think we've already figured out, everyone, right from the right to the left, everyone's figured out that wherever the Nazis went, that was wrong.
00:05:47.000 We've all agreed on that.
00:05:48.000 We're not going there anymore.
00:05:49.000 And so when someone pops up and says, well, we should go there, it's like they're immediately identifiable.
00:05:54.000 You can box them in.
00:05:55.000 And if you have any sense, like many conservatives did in the aftermath of Charlottesville, they come out and say, well, in case it needs to be said again, we're actually not allied with those people.
00:06:05.000 Yeah, well, that was the most disturbing thing for many people about Donald Trump's reaction to it, that he didn't take a hard stance against these white supremacists showing up with tiki torches, walking through the street yelling anti-Semitic phrases or whatever.
00:06:19.000 I don't know exactly what they're yelling.
00:06:21.000 I've read a bunch of different things, but the whole thing was an abomination.
00:06:25.000 I mean, it was a horrific thing to watch.
00:06:27.000 And, you know, Donald Trump comes out and says there was horrible behavior on all sides.
00:06:32.000 Yeah, well, I thought about that for a lot because I got tangled up with that in a strange way in Canada.
00:06:39.000 I was supposed to appear on a panel discussing the suppression of free speech on university campuses, which was then promptly cancelled by the university that was going to host it in the aftermath of Charlottesville, partly because one of the panelists was going to be Faith Goldie,
00:06:55.000 who was the journalist that was covering Charlottesville and got the footage of the car and the damage.
00:07:01.000 But...
00:07:04.000 We were targeted immediately afterward with the Nazi epithet and Ryerson shut down the free speech panel.
00:07:13.000 So it's coming up again in November 11th.
00:07:15.000 You were targeted as Nazis?
00:07:17.000 Yeah, what happened was this person She put up a Facebook page and used a swastika with a circle with a line through it and said, no fascists at Ryerson, essentially.
00:07:32.000 But she used a swastika and she got a bunch of people rallied together to pressure the university administration into cancelling the event, which they promptly did.
00:07:41.000 And then they had a celebration party the night of the event.
00:07:44.000 And here's something that was really interesting.
00:07:47.000 So they got a couple, I think a couple of hundred people out to the celebration at Ryerson.
00:07:52.000 And they were united under the banner of the hammer and sickle and were calling for revolution.
00:07:57.000 And what was so interesting about that, and I really mean technically that it was interesting, was that the mainstream media said virtually nothing about the fact that these, let's call them counter-protesters, I don't know exactly how you'd term them, had come out under this murderous symbol.
00:08:12.000 And that's made me think, like, I can't figure out why the swastika is an immediate...
00:08:19.000 Identifier of a pathological personality.
00:08:23.000 And the hammer and sickle isn't.
00:08:24.000 There's actually a reason.
00:08:25.000 It isn't just arbitrary.
00:08:27.000 And I think maybe it's something like the Nazi is the guy who knifes you in the alley and steals your wallet, and the communist is the white-collar criminal who takes your pension.
00:08:37.000 And you're actually more afraid of the first person.
00:08:39.000 Then the second person, because the damage they do is more proximal and emotionally recognizable.
00:08:44.000 But the second guy who takes your pension, for example, he's perhaps even more dangerous.
00:08:49.000 But there's a bloodiness about the Nazi symbol and an immediate emotional impact that the hammer and sickle just doesn't produce.
00:08:57.000 And some of that's because people are badly educated historically.
00:09:00.000 I think that's it.
00:09:00.000 I think it's pure ignorance.
00:09:02.000 Well, I don't think it's just ignorance.
00:09:03.000 Really?
00:09:03.000 Do you think that the people that are wearing those Che Guevara t-shirts really understand the history of Che Guevara, or do you think he represents this sexy South American counter-protest character?
00:09:13.000 A guy who stands up to the establishment as we know it.
00:09:17.000 A guy who's wearing a beret, hiding in the jungle, fighting against the oppressive dictatorship of America.
00:09:25.000 I mean, that's what they're looking at when they see that image.
00:09:27.000 Well, the fact that historical ignorance plays a role in this is absolutely certain.
00:09:32.000 And I think the romanticization of people like Che Guevara is exactly...
00:09:36.000 I think you nailed that exactly.
00:09:37.000 But I do think there's a deeper question here.
00:09:40.000 It's like I was thinking in the aftermath of Charlottesville, many conservatives immediately divorced themselves from the Nazis.
00:09:46.000 Ben Shapiro was a good example.
00:09:47.000 And it was very much reminiscent of William F. Buckley divorcing himself from the John Birch Society back in the 1960s.
00:09:54.000 The right wing, it seems to be easier for the right wing to draw a line around the Nazis and say, no, that's not us.
00:10:00.000 Partly because the right wingers, conservatives, are better at drawing boundaries.
00:10:04.000 But, you know, let's say we wanted to draw a boundary around the radical leftists.
00:10:08.000 Okay, point to something.
00:10:10.000 Well, on the right you say, well, you wore a swastika.
00:10:12.000 Yeah, you're out of the club, man.
00:10:13.000 On the left?
00:10:15.000 Well, you believe...
00:10:15.000 What's the smoking pistol?
00:10:17.000 You believe in equity?
00:10:18.000 It's like that's a smoking pistol as far as I'm concerned, but it doesn't have the same emotional punch as you wore a swastika to the protest.
00:10:26.000 Yeah, you believe in equity and you refuse to define it.
00:10:28.000 That would be the indicator to me.
00:10:30.000 Right, but that's such a...
00:10:32.000 There's no emotional punch in that.
00:10:33.000 It's like, well, I'm not going to associate with you because you believe in equity.
00:10:36.000 It's too complicated.
00:10:37.000 It's right.
00:10:38.000 I do want to back us up here, though, because...
00:10:42.000 I think we underrate the danger of...
00:10:46.000 And I think Nazis are a red herring.
00:10:49.000 There is something that actually does threaten to reemerge, and Charlottesville is a version of it.
00:10:56.000 But I think because we have a cartoon understanding of what that protest was actually about and how many people are actually involved, we don't really see why this is a dangerous and contentious issue.
00:11:08.000 And I think the answer is...
00:11:11.000 An evolutionary one that hasn't been spelled out.
00:11:15.000 And because it hasn't been spelled out, it's very hard to point to.
00:11:18.000 I hate to keep interrupting you, but just get this right up to your face.
00:11:21.000 It sounds good to us, but the people listening online are going to have an issue.
00:11:24.000 Is that better?
00:11:24.000 Yeah, just when you turn to him, just turn the thing with you.
00:11:27.000 Okay.
00:11:27.000 Yeah.
00:11:27.000 Just get it.
00:11:28.000 Always keep it a fist from your face.
00:11:30.000 That's the best.
00:11:30.000 Sorry.
00:11:31.000 That's all right.
00:11:32.000 So explain what you mean by this.
00:11:34.000 So my point would be that what took place in Germany in the 30s was a particularly Particularly visible, well-documented example of a pattern that is much more common in human history.
00:11:53.000 And because this pattern emerges as a result of certain features of the way evolution functions in the context of humans, it is actually always a danger that it will re-emerge.
00:12:05.000 And knowing what to do about it is not so simple until you've seen why it occurs and what it means.
00:12:13.000 What I've been saying in lectures I've given on this is that tyranny is the endgame of prosperity.
00:12:21.000 And so there is a pattern in which you will go through a period of prosperousness in which it appears that that thing is defeated once and for all.
00:12:29.000 There's no reason for people to be going after each other in this particular way.
00:12:32.000 And then at the point that that pattern peters out, It reemerges and people don't expect that it flies under a different flag or something like that.
00:12:40.000 And so I do think that looking at the tiny number of people who were doing what they were doing in Charlottesville and saying, well, we all agree that this is wrong, misses the fact that actually...
00:12:55.000 I think Trump is doing it cynically, but Trump was riding a wave, that there are ideas which are not permissible from the environments in which we all grew up, that are going to become permissible again if we are not careful to recognize that that's the nature of history.
00:13:12.000 I think it's highly probable that that's going to occur.
00:13:15.000 I mean, part of the reason that I... Landed in the political hot water that I landed in last year was because I was increasingly aware that this process of polarization was going to take place and that the continual, in my estimation anyways, the continual clawing of new ground underneath the radical leftist rubric,
00:13:35.000 especially in the universities, is starting to produce an extraordinarily dangerous counterposition.
00:13:41.000 And that was manifest, at least to some degree, in Charlottesville.
00:13:44.000 And so I think you're right.
00:13:47.000 You don't want to be complacent and say, well, we know who the Nazis are and we're not going there, so the problem is solved.
00:13:52.000 The problem isn't solved.
00:13:53.000 There's all sorts of weird activity.
00:13:56.000 In the non-radical left space, like on the other side of the radical left, whatever that is.
00:14:02.000 And right now, what it is is not obvious, you know.
00:14:05.000 It's the alt-right, that's part of it.
00:14:07.000 It's the Kekistanis, it's this peppy thing.
00:14:10.000 Some of it's comedy, some of it's satire, some of it's serious.
00:14:14.000 Some of it's the inversion of identity politics, which is very dangerous.
00:14:18.000 And it's maybe the most dangerous thing about Charlottesville, is that...
00:14:21.000 There's something extraordinarily dangerous about having people revert to identification with their racial identity.
00:14:29.000 It's really not a good thing.
00:14:52.000 And together, they are a formidable force.
00:14:55.000 But what's going to happen is that's an unstable entity.
00:14:58.000 At the point that that force gains power, it's going to come apart as internal dynamics rip it up.
00:15:04.000 So it's not actually a...
00:15:07.000 It's not capable of restraining the version that recurs on the right, the version that does manifest as white nationalism.
00:15:19.000 That version is stable because it does represent an actual population that has an evolutionary basis for remaining cohesive.
00:15:28.000 And I should point out, there's a danger when you hear an evolutionary biologist talk about Evolutionary patterns.
00:15:35.000 People often infer that if an evolutionary biologist is saying that something is a pattern that has evolved, that that's some kind of a defense.
00:15:41.000 And it is absolutely not.
00:15:43.000 We call this the naturalistic fallacy.
00:15:45.000 So evolution is an absolutely amoral process.
00:15:48.000 It has produced the most marvelous features of human beings and the worst features.
00:15:52.000 And we are, in some sense, obligated to pick and choose which features to honor and promote and which ones to tamp down.
00:15:59.000 Something can have evolved as a virtue in some circumstances and still be of the type that, if magnified beyond its proper limits, becomes pathological.
00:16:10.000 So let me tell you something I learned about Hitler, which really, I haven't recovered from my shock from this.
00:16:16.000 So we've been looking at the relationship between political belief and personality.
00:16:20.000 Okay, and your political belief is strongly determined by your temperament.
00:16:24.000 So liberal left types are high in trade openness, that's creativity, and low in conscientiousness.
00:16:29.000 But you can fragment conscientiousness up into industriousness and orderliness.
00:16:33.000 And the real predictor for conservatism is orderliness, not industriousness.
00:16:37.000 And you might think, well, that's no surprise.
00:16:39.000 Right-wingers are more orderly, hence Hitler's call for order, let's say.
00:16:43.000 But it's one thing to posit that and another thing to measure it.
00:16:48.000 Now it's measurable.
00:16:49.000 And it appears that orderliness is associated with sensitivity to disgust.
00:16:54.000 And this is actually a really big deal.
00:16:56.000 It's a really big deal.
00:16:57.000 So there's a paper that was published in PLAWS One about three years ago looking at the relationship between the prevalence of infectious diseases and authoritarian political attitudes.
00:17:07.000 And they did it country by country and then within countries by state or province.
00:17:11.000 And the correlation between the prevalence of infectious diseases and authoritarian slash right-wing political beliefs at the local individual level was 0.6.
00:17:20.000 And so I want to take this apart a little bit.
00:17:23.000 Okay, so the idea is that this is part of what you might describe as the extended behavioral immune system.
00:17:30.000 And one of the problems with the interactions between groups of human beings in our evolutionary past was Well, exactly what happened to the Native Americans is, you know, they came out and shook hands with the Spanish conquistadors and then within a couple of generations, 90% of them were dead of smallpox and measles and mumps.
00:17:46.000 And so it's been a truism in our evolutionary past that if you meet a group of isolated, if you're a group of isolated humans and you meet another group of isolated humans and you trade pathogens, there's a real possibility that you and everyone you know are going to be dead in no time flat.
00:18:02.000 And so, we have a disgust mechanism that produces this implicit, let's call it racial and ethnic bias that is part and parcel of the human cognitive landscape.
00:18:14.000 But the problem with that is that it's rooted in a disgust mechanism that actually serves a protective function.
00:18:19.000 Now, when I was sorting this out, I was reading Hitler's Table Talk, and Hitler's Table Talk is a very interesting book.
00:18:25.000 It's a book of his spontaneous mealtime utterances from 1939 to 1942. And I went through with this new knowledge, because people think of conservatives or fascists as afraid of those who are different.
00:18:38.000 They're not afraid.
00:18:39.000 They're disgusted.
00:18:41.000 And that's not the same thing, because you burn things you're disgusted by.
00:18:44.000 And so it was terrifying to me to read it, because then I also thought, oh well, disgust sensitivity is associated with orderliness, and you need order in a society in order to maintain it, and the Germans are very orderly, and that was actually a canonical part of their civilization, and part of actually what makes them great and powerful.
00:19:01.000 And that just had to tilt a little farther than necessary.
00:19:04.000 And all of a sudden, everything needed to get cleaned.
00:19:07.000 And, you know, Hitler talked about cleanliness all the time, and he actually meant that.
00:19:11.000 And so this thing that's emerging, you know, you talked about its biological basis, its evolutionary basis.
00:19:16.000 It is.
00:19:17.000 It's part of this deeply rooted disgust system that protects us from dangerous pathogens that can manifest itself and does manifest itself in the political realm.
00:19:26.000 It's not good.
00:19:28.000 I don't know exactly how to tease this apart, but I agree with your point about there's an actual danger when populations meet like a literal pathogen danger and that that is liable to have produced a certain instinctive fear of the other, which doesn't have to be limited to that one thing,
00:19:45.000 but that's enough to generate a selective force that would cause a certain reluctance.
00:19:51.000 To meet.
00:19:52.000 But I want to point out that, at least in the West and probably universally, human beings, when they go to war, tend to dehumanize the other population.
00:20:02.000 And, you know, so, of course, calling the other population subhuman, vermin, whatever it is that human beings do.
00:20:10.000 And my concern is that we are doing exactly this with the Nazis or de facto Nazis who are showing up on the On our screens at this point, that what we are doing is we are comforting ourselves by saying, well, that's a small outbreak of something that makes these people subhuman,
00:20:27.000 justifies punching them or whatever.
00:20:29.000 And, you know, I'm not squeamish about there being a right to violence when somebody is threatening a way of life.
00:20:37.000 So it's not that.
00:20:38.000 But my concern is...
00:20:40.000 That if you take the pathogen model and you imagine that all those folks who showed up in Charlottesville, that that is a contagion and it needs to be isolated, then you will have the sense that as long as you do that, it's not going to show up somewhere else.
00:20:54.000 Whereas what's, I think, the actual hazard...
00:21:00.000 That's actually a latent program that has served populations in past circumstances.
00:21:05.000 It's indefensible, but it has served populations.
00:21:08.000 And the populations that we come from have it, therefore, on reserve.
00:21:12.000 And when certain characteristics show up in the environment, that program can emerge.
00:21:17.000 Right.
00:21:35.000 And in the more intense situations, like in places like in Auschwitz.
00:21:38.000 So the question might be, well, if you were in Germany in the 1930s, could you be a concentration camp guard?
00:21:44.000 And the gut reaction to that is, no, those people are unlike me.
00:21:47.000 And that's the wrong response.
00:21:49.000 The right response is, those people were human, and I'm also human, and so that means that the Nazi is us.
00:21:56.000 That's what it means.
00:21:57.000 And who the hell wants to think that?
00:21:59.000 And no one will think that.
00:22:01.000 And I have thought that through, because I've thought through, for a variety of reasons, What the limits of my potential behavior are, and the limits of my potential, and maybe I'm more pathological than the average person, it's certainly possible, but I understand that the limits of my potential behavior are far beyond the bounds of what people would normally consider civilized,
00:22:19.000 and I think that's characteristic of human beings in general.
00:22:22.000 Well, I mean, you know, looking...
00:22:24.000 Oh, go ahead.
00:22:25.000 No, I was going to say, I think this is one of the things that really highlights the importance of having uncensored discussions.
00:22:31.000 Because we've already hit on so many hot topics to the point where you have to really clarify your position.
00:22:38.000 And when you're talking about this...
00:22:41.000 Sort of latent program in human beings and the necessity for it at one point in time.
00:22:47.000 All these things are very taboo to discuss today.
00:22:50.000 And this is a giant issue because what you guys are doing is talking about things objectively, reasonably, logically, and clearly.
00:22:59.000 But when you get to these sort of hysterical subjects, That's sort of forbidden today.
00:23:06.000 And there's a giant issue with that.
00:23:08.000 Because when you have forbidden discussions, you energize those topics.
00:23:13.000 And the topics grow in the absence of discussion.
00:23:17.000 In the absence of being picked apart and analyzing them for what their core components are.
00:23:22.000 And when we're talking about it from an evolutionary perspective, this is very, very important.
00:23:26.000 Because these patterns are re-emerging.
00:23:29.000 We do see that.
00:23:31.000 Any one of us, given the wrong neighborhood, the wrong parents, the wrong life, we might have been one of those assholes with the tiki torches in Charlotte.
00:23:40.000 I mean, we're human beings, like you said.
00:23:42.000 I think that is absolutely critical to discuss.
00:23:46.000 Well, and it's also, there's another thing going on right now.
00:23:49.000 I've been trying to characterize the state of the sociological and psychological landscape that we all inhabit right now, and I think we're in a position of radical instability.
00:24:01.000 And things in the future could be way better than they are right now, radically.
00:24:04.000 And they could be way worse than they are.
00:24:07.000 And the small decisions that people make are going to have outsized effects while they make them.
00:24:13.000 Like, look at what happened with this guy in Charlottesville.
00:24:17.000 I know he was surrounded by a coterie of deplorables, let's say, but it was one guy who decided to do something murderous.
00:24:24.000 And that shifted the whole political landscape.
00:24:27.000 And so what I see happening right now is that we're surrounded by these interactions between people that are positive feedback loops.
00:24:35.000 And a positive feedback loop occurs when, if you do something, then it makes whatever caused that occur even in a greater way.
00:24:42.000 And the polarization is like that.
00:24:44.000 So I say something left-like, and you say something right-like, and that annoys me so I get more left, and it annoys you and you get more right, and all of a sudden we're at each other's throats.
00:24:52.000 And that's happening everywhere, right?
00:24:54.000 It's very unstable.
00:24:56.000 And what's to be hoped for is that we can pull back from that and discuss it.
00:25:01.000 We can say, look, you know, under circumstance A, I could have been a communist inquisitor or a Nazi prison guard.
00:25:07.000 I need to know that.
00:25:08.000 And then I need to know what were the situations that made that likely.
00:25:12.000 And then I need to know how should I conduct myself so that's less possible.
00:25:15.000 And the only way we can figure that out is to have the kind of conversations that we're having right now.
00:25:19.000 It's like, and this isn't them.
00:25:21.000 I've been taken to task by some of my friends, for example, for using the social justice warrior terminology, because they've said to me, well, you know, you're participating in this process of demonization and polarization.
00:25:33.000 And I think, well, yeah, I can understand that.
00:25:36.000 Although I'm also radically concerned about the fact that the universities, for example, are completely taken over by radical Marxists, essentially, and that they're driving this polarization.
00:25:46.000 And it isn't obvious to me how to have a discussion about that without participating in the process of polarization.
00:25:53.000 It's something I've been trying to figure out for the whole last year.
00:25:57.000 I've been emphasizing the role of personal responsibility instead of ideological identification, right?
00:26:03.000 Get it into your head that you have the capacity for great evil and stop assuming that that's something that's manifesting itself only in the people that you disagree with politically.
00:26:14.000 Take responsibility for that and try to put your life together.
00:26:17.000 I don't see an alternative to that, but...
00:26:19.000 It's been very difficult to avoid to do that and simultaneously to avoid becoming a participant in this process of polarization.
00:26:28.000 And it's a very dangerous process.
00:26:30.000 It's what destabilized Germany in the 1920s and 30s, right?
00:26:33.000 It was this ping-ponging back and forth between the radical left and the radical right.
00:26:38.000 And your point, Brett, that the radical right actually is more powerful once they get organized is a really good one because there's no fractionation.
00:26:45.000 It's more stable.
00:26:46.000 You bet.
00:26:47.000 And they have all the guns.
00:26:48.000 That's another thing to think about.
00:26:50.000 Certainly.
00:26:51.000 In this country, the right is much better armed, and that's a very frightening fact.
00:26:55.000 That's a terrifying thought.
00:26:58.000 I mean, we've heard this many times recently about the Trump administration, about if he's impeached, that there will be some sort of a civil war.
00:27:07.000 I believe Roger Stone said that.
00:27:09.000 This thought is so terrifying that we literally cannot do Anything to stop some sort of physical confrontation with weapons if we disagree ideologically, that it's going to happen.
00:27:24.000 Well, first of all, there's a lot we can do.
00:27:27.000 Sure.
00:27:28.000 And in fact, you know, one of the other things about the evolutionary toolkit is that I believe we have exactly the tools for navigating this puzzle.
00:27:35.000 They're built into us also, in addition to this latent program.
00:27:39.000 But we are now in a very dangerous situation because, for example, if Google and other of these online Goliaths start deploying algorithms that decide what we get to talk about and see, then we cannot use the very tools that are necessary in order to escape and avoid something like Civil War.
00:28:01.000 Open communication and debate, analyzing all the components of this issue completely objectively.
00:28:08.000 Yes, and taking the risks that are necessary with that, and some of the risks are that if we have free and open communication, that some percentage of that communication is going to be reprehensible and deplorable.
00:28:19.000 But that the consequences of suppressing that are so much more dangerous than the consequences of allowing it, that they're not in the same universe.
00:28:27.000 Yes, we empower those terrible ideas by making them electronically taboo, and then the point is they're going to fester, whereas if we discuss them, we can diffuse the ones that are terrible, we can spot the opportunities that we don't know we have,
00:28:42.000 and we can move forward rather than descend into civil war, which frankly looks more and more likely.
00:28:49.000 And this issue with Google and YouTube, let's say, and these other Gigantic internet companies.
00:28:54.000 You know, it isn't a matter of if they're going to produce automated bots that do pre-perceptual censorship.
00:29:00.000 They are doing that.
00:29:02.000 Well, it's explained dead sad.
00:29:03.000 Explain what happened with him.
00:29:05.000 Well, he tweeted the other day that...
00:29:08.000 And I knew this was in the workings because I'd been looking at what YouTube and Google are planning with regards to their artificial intelligence sensors, let's say.
00:29:16.000 You know, they want to get to the point where...
00:29:20.000 The appalling video is not even put up.
00:29:23.000 So what happened, I hope I've got this exactly right, but Gad was in the process, you upload a video and then you publish it.
00:29:30.000 And so once you upload it, YouTube has access to it and they have access to its content.
00:29:34.000 And they informed him that it would be demonetized before he published it.
00:29:39.000 There it is right here.
00:29:39.000 We put it up on the board.
00:29:41.000 There you go.
00:29:42.000 YouTube thinks that my pointing to astounding hypocrisy is too triggering.
00:29:45.000 There is nothing objectionable in my clip.
00:29:49.000 Unbelievable.
00:29:50.000 Yeah, and that one was a manual review, so I'm wrong about that.
00:29:53.000 Although, how in the world they decided that they were going to manually review Gad's video is also...
00:29:59.000 I mean, how many videos are going up on YouTube?
00:30:01.000 What the hell?
00:30:02.000 Why are they manually reviewing his?
00:30:04.000 And I mean, Gad's side is not a radical.
00:30:06.000 Right?
00:30:06.000 Not at all.
00:30:07.000 That's the thing.
00:30:07.000 I mean, he's an evolutionary biologist, and that makes him a radical.
00:30:10.000 Now it does, because he's a biological essentialist.
00:30:13.000 Because he's questioning what's happening.
00:30:15.000 And by questioning what's happening, you instantaneously get lumped into this right-wing hate group.
00:30:21.000 Yeah.
00:30:21.000 Well, and he's also making the claim that human beings have an intrinsic nature.
00:30:25.000 And so now there's a new buzz phrase that goes along with that.
00:30:28.000 And so that's that you're a biological essentialist.
00:30:31.000 And you see, so if you're a radical postmodern neo-Marxist, your theory is human beings can be anything that I want to make them into.
00:30:39.000 It's a core doctrine of the theory, and it's part of what makes it intensely totalitarian.
00:30:43.000 Because then human beings are just putty for the molding, and that's part of the motivational drive for claiming the radical constructionist claim.
00:30:51.000 There's no biological essence.
00:30:52.000 Well, why do you make that claim?
00:30:54.000 Well, because we want to free people from prejudice and tyranny.
00:30:57.000 It's like, no, that's not why you make that claim.
00:30:59.000 You make that claim because you want to justify your claim that there's absolutely nothing wrong with making over humanity in the image of your ideology.
00:31:07.000 And that was a well-documented intellectual argument that wove through what happened in communist Russia, for example, because the claim there explicitly was, you wipe out the past, there's no real biological identity, you can mold the human of the future in the image of your perfectionistic ideology.
00:31:26.000 And the Russians actually sidelined themselves effectively with respect to evolutionary theory, that basically they were so backward on a biological front that as they were deploying this very broken ideological toolkit,
00:31:44.000 they were wrecking their ability to think about how biology works.
00:31:49.000 And so what you're pointing to about evolutionary biologists, it's not just that we question The content of evolutionary biology is absolutely the opposite of politically correct.
00:32:01.000 Yes, exactly.
00:32:02.000 Because nobody tells the biota what's right and what's wrong, the biota does what it does, and those of us who look at it and attempt to understand what those patterns are can't help.
00:32:13.000 But be deeply politically incorrect almost all the time.
00:32:18.000 And so the idea that the truth of biology is actually going to become unexpressible and we're going to move ahead.
00:32:25.000 We're going to sideline it so that we can move ahead with this ideological stuff.
00:32:31.000 I mean, that is cutting off your nose.
00:32:33.000 That's already happening.
00:32:34.000 Biology is racist and sexist.
00:32:36.000 Well, if I might, biology...
00:32:41.000 And we're going to have to go back here in order to collect a tool.
00:32:44.000 But biology does create entities that have the potential for racism in them.
00:32:52.000 In our genomes, we carry the potential for racism for Darwinian reasons.
00:32:58.000 Sexism is a little different, right?
00:33:01.000 So I'm about to become very politically incorrect.
00:33:04.000 Uh-oh.
00:33:05.000 Yeah, I know.
00:33:06.000 Uh-oh.
00:33:08.000 It is not possible for male genes to gang up on female genes because all of our genes spend half their time in male bodies and half their time in female bodies, which does not mean that civilization is fair with respect to sex and gender.
00:33:25.000 But it does mean that there's no biological basis for the evolution of Of a patriarchal force that subordinates women because whatever the patriarchy does, those who are part of the patriarchy become female in the next iteration and they suffer the consequences of it.
00:33:42.000 This is not the case with race.
00:33:44.000 Unfortunately, this is not a good thing, but it is a true thing.
00:33:48.000 In a Darwinian sense, one population can gang up on another population.
00:33:53.000 And it has happened again and again.
00:33:55.000 It explains all of the worst chapters in human history.
00:33:58.000 And so, in some sense, what I'm getting at is that you want to understand that process.
00:34:04.000 And once you understand what your genes are actually up to, and you understand that your genes, their objectives in the universe are not defensible, what your genes want cannot be defended in In rational terms, then we become free to do something else,
00:34:20.000 to recognize that our genes are up to things that we don't have any reason to honor.
00:34:25.000 And we can basically take them out of the control position.
00:34:29.000 But if we imagine that what our genes are up to must be all right, and therefore it can't include anything like racism, then we're just stuck.
00:34:38.000 Then we don't have the tools to diffuse racism.
00:34:42.000 So one of the things that happened when I made my video a year ago complaining about Bill C-16 in Canada, and that was the one that instantiated transgender rights, one of the things I was pointing to, like my comments had nothing to do with transgender rights, but one of the things I was pointing to was that Canada had built into the law a social constructionist version of human identity,
00:35:03.000 and that's actually the case.
00:35:05.000 So for example, now in Canada, here's a proposition which now has the force of law.
00:35:11.000 There is no causal connection between biological sex, gender identity, gender expression, and sexual proclivity.
00:35:19.000 Technically, it's illegal to make a claim that those things are causally linked.
00:35:24.000 And the causal link claim is a biological claim.
00:35:27.000 And not only is it a biological claim, it's a factual claim.
00:35:30.000 Those four levels are so tightly linked causally that there's hardly any exceptions.
00:35:35.000 There are exceptions.
00:35:37.000 So, because almost everyone whose biological sex is male considers themselves male, manifests themselves as male, and is heterosexual.
00:35:45.000 So, they're linked.
00:35:47.000 And the reason they're linked is, well, there's biological and cultural reasons, but it's now, in Canada, the proposition that they're independent is now law.
00:35:56.000 And I was pointing to that, saying, we don't want to do that.
00:35:58.000 You don't understand.
00:35:59.000 You've built social constructionism into the law.
00:36:01.000 That means that now it's illegal to be a biologist.
00:36:05.000 Well, and everybody said, oh, no, no, no, that's not happening.
00:36:07.000 It's like, don't kid yourself.
00:36:09.000 When you put things in the law, things happen.
00:36:11.000 And we were accused not only of being Nazis, and that was part of the reason that this talk was shut down, but also of being biological essentialists.
00:36:22.000 And biological essentialism is the new buzzword for Nazi, essentially.
00:36:27.000 Please do.
00:36:29.000 I want to correct you.
00:36:30.000 It's not that it's illegal to be a biologist.
00:36:32.000 It's just illegal to be any good at it.
00:36:36.000 Okay, well that's even more effective, I would say.
00:36:38.000 So, is there concern that putting biology as fact, it will get in the way of civilization because we're supposed to be moving past all of these issues.
00:36:53.000 We're supposed to be moving past these things as we evolve.
00:36:56.000 We're supposed to be looking people as being free to choose whatever gender they like.
00:37:01.000 Free to choose whatever sexual orientation they like, free to express themselves in any way, and that by defining them by purely biological terms, we're essentially relying on the meat wagon to lead us through civilization rather than the mind.
00:37:16.000 That's great.
00:37:16.000 You did a very good job of outlining the credible case against biological essentialism, because it can deteriorate into something like eugenics.
00:37:25.000 There's a real danger, like a political danger, on the side of biological determinism.
00:37:30.000 But there's a danger in denying it as well, because then we can't use our rational minds to truly mitigate whatever issues that we would have with our biological urges.
00:37:41.000 That's the irony of this.
00:37:43.000 Actually, there is an argument to be made that we need freedom from our biology.
00:37:49.000 And we have the capacity to do it.
00:37:52.000 Most creatures wouldn't, but the way human beings are constructed, we absolutely have the ability to be rational about these things and decide which things we want to bring into the future.
00:38:01.000 But we can't do it if we don't discuss these things in honest terms.
00:38:04.000 Well, a subset of males are biologically hyper-aggressive.
00:38:09.000 You can identify them at two years of age.
00:38:11.000 And they're the kids.
00:38:12.000 If you put a bunch of two-year-olds together, there's a small subset.
00:38:14.000 They're almost all males, about 5% of males, who will kick, hit, bite, and steal.
00:38:20.000 Okay, so that's their biological programming, let's say.
00:38:23.000 But the vast majority of them are socialized by the time they're four years old.
00:38:28.000 That's amazing.
00:38:29.000 Yeah, sure, absolutely.
00:38:30.000 I mean, it is.
00:38:31.000 Yeah, absolutely.
00:38:32.000 And the thing about boys like that is that if you socialize them properly, it's quite a bit of work because they're very combative.
00:38:40.000 My son was like that.
00:38:41.000 And if you socialize them properly, then they can become unbelievably useful.
00:38:46.000 They're courageous, they're forthright, they're not going to back down from a challenge.
00:38:52.000 There's all sorts of massive utility in that, and that's this proper interplay between the biological circuitry and the socialization.
00:38:58.000 But, you know, with James Damore's memo, he's been accused of taking a biological essentialist route, which is not true.
00:39:07.000 One of the things James said is, look, there's credible evidence that there are biologically mediated differences between men and women at the level of temperament and interest that are actually large and profound.
00:39:19.000 And I would say...
00:39:21.000 The science on that is sufficiently settled so that someone can come out and say that's scientifically credible.
00:39:27.000 Now that doesn't mean it's right because the scientists could be wrong.
00:39:30.000 But what you can't say is that what James Damore said was scientifically uninformed.
00:39:35.000 It was scientifically informed.
00:39:36.000 But he also said, look, let's make the assumption, I'm paraphrasing slightly, but let's make the assumption that we want to, as a society, we want to extract maximum useful economic value from talented people.
00:39:50.000 So one of the things we want to do is if some of those people are women and some of them are men, we want to understand the actual differences between women and men so that we can set up the workplace so that both women and men can contribute to the maximum economically so that they can benefit as individuals and everybody can benefit socially.
00:40:06.000 So you can use the biological...
00:40:08.000 So, I mean, for example, one of the things...
00:40:10.000 Here's a biological problem.
00:40:12.000 On average, women are more agreeable than men.
00:40:15.000 And I think that's because agreeable people, they're self-sacrificing.
00:40:19.000 And I think as a woman, you need to be wired to be self-sacrificing or you won't be able to tolerate taking care of infants.
00:40:24.000 That's my sense of it.
00:40:26.000 Okay, now, there's some problems with that.
00:40:28.000 It's like, let's say that a huge part of female wiring is tilted in the direction of the necessity of self-sacrifice for infant care.
00:40:35.000 Okay, that doesn't equip women very well for dealing with aggressive men, because aggressive men and infants are not the same creatures.
00:40:42.000 So women pay a price, being optimized to some degree for infant care, they pay a price that they're less, what would you call, prepared, that's one way of thinking about it, with dealing with hyper-aggressive and competitive men.
00:40:58.000 Well, one of the consequences of that is that agreeable people don't make as much money.
00:41:02.000 And the reason for that is to make money, you actually have to be disagreeable, because you have to go to your boss and say, give me some bloody money, or something you don't like will happen to you.
00:41:11.000 Like, I'll leave.
00:41:12.000 You have to be able to fight for an idea, too.
00:41:14.000 But, so, there's something, this is a perfect test case.
00:41:19.000 So, biologically speaking, there's a very good reason for certain kinds of wisdom to be biased in the direction of manifesting in females.
00:41:28.000 Females, because they have the capacity to have fewer offspring in a lifetime than males, are obligated, as you say, to care in a particular way.
00:41:41.000 And the fact that care in human beings takes so many years has resulted in menopause emerging.
00:41:47.000 And menopause, essentially when a woman is done producing new offspring, Her interests in—her evolutionary interests, which in this case I think are honorable, become synonymous with the lineage, the population, because her offspring will either do well or do poorly based on the population that they're in.
00:42:06.000 So women have a kind of farsightedness about lineage, and I don't think this has anything to do with human women, actually.
00:42:12.000 This is a trait that we can see in females— Of other species.
00:42:18.000 So it's an ancient thing.
00:42:19.000 Whereas males are high variance.
00:42:22.000 That is to say, a male can have many offspring in a lifetime.
00:42:26.000 Many males have no offspring in a lifetime.
00:42:28.000 And that high variance means that to the extent that there's wisdom that surrounds risk-taking, that has traveled historically along the male path.
00:42:37.000 Now, in modern times, there's no reason that we can't look at these two kinds of wisdom and democratize them both.
00:42:45.000 Right?
00:42:45.000 The fact is there's no reason if you're born female that you can't tune into what has historically been male-biased wisdom and take advantage of that, and we should be encouraging this.
00:42:55.000 There's no reason that people have to continue...
00:42:58.000 The problem is that we can't actually have a reasonable discussion about it because, you know, the discussion is often forestalled by the claim that, well, men and women are exactly the same.
00:43:06.000 It's like that's not a helpful discussion.
00:43:08.000 And, you know, with the agreeableness issue, I don't know exactly what should be done about that, but one of the consequences of it is that There's many reasons why there's pay differential between men and women and the issue itself is very complex.
00:43:21.000 But we do know that agreeable people overall make less money in the same positions and it's because they don't negotiate on their own behalf very well.
00:43:29.000 Now it's conceivable that you could have an intelligent public policy or corporate policy discussion about what to do about that.
00:43:35.000 Like, maybe the rule is something like you review male salaries once a year and female salaries every eight months or something like that, you know?
00:43:45.000 And I'm not saying that's a good idea.
00:43:46.000 I'm not saying that.
00:43:47.000 I'm saying that if you take the facts on the ground into account, there are ways that you might be able to use them so that you could, and I'm not going to say level the playing field because I think that's an appalling phrase, but maximize the possibility of economic contribution across the genders,
00:44:02.000 which is obviously in everyone's best interest.
00:44:05.000 But we're not going to do that.
00:44:06.000 When someone like James Damore comes out, and he's no scientist.
00:44:10.000 Well, he has some scientific training, but that wasn't his primary field of expertise.
00:44:14.000 He came out and did a pretty credible job of summarizing the literature.
00:44:18.000 He did it because he had been subject to mandatory diversity training and was asked to produce a response.
00:44:25.000 He didn't do it so it would go viral within the company or become public.
00:44:28.000 And because he expressed his opinion, let's say imperfectly, He got fired.
00:44:33.000 It's like, that's not good, man.
00:44:35.000 That's not a good pathway.
00:44:37.000 Well, it also wasn't good that his stuff was being republished without citations, that people were publishing it without the scientific papers that were sort of affirming some of the things that he was saying.
00:44:49.000 I couldn't make heads or tails of it until I saw his original version.
00:44:52.000 Yeah, well, that goes back to the point I was making earlier about this being This is an unstable time where people's individual ethical choices, in some circumstances, will have effects far beyond the local.
00:45:05.000 It's like those journalists who jumped on the story, did it either badly, You know, because they were incompetent, or they did it maliciously.
00:45:15.000 And so now we could say, let's say things go really badly in the next year.
00:45:21.000 Well then, each of those journalists might be able to sit at home and say, hey, I played a causal role.
00:45:28.000 In bringing about this state of murderous collapse, because of my little ethical, my ethical lapse when I was covering the James Damore memo, you know, because of my own laziness and ideological rigidity, I was willing to play fast and loose with the truth, and now I've played a major causal role in,
00:45:44.000 you know, pushing everything towards a state of chaos.
00:45:46.000 It's like, people had better be on their toes, because we're in a situation that's radically unstable.
00:45:51.000 And so it's a really good time for everybody to be very careful about what they write and say, and about their motives for tarring and feathering the opposition.
00:46:00.000 That's another thing that we have to be very careful about.
00:46:04.000 It's just very bizarre how quick people are to call someone a racist today.
00:46:09.000 I mean, I've never seen anything like it in all my years.
00:46:11.000 It's a strange time.
00:46:14.000 You know, I got into it yesterday, just, I got bored, and I started trolling with Pepe the Frog.
00:46:19.000 I started putting up the frog, like, with Rainbow saying, this seems like a frog that's really into gay rights.
00:46:25.000 Like, here's a frog holding a lemon with a tart face.
00:46:28.000 Like, this is a frog that ate a lemon, and he's reacting to it.
00:46:32.000 Like, how is this all racist?
00:46:34.000 Like, how is this, like, anyone...
00:46:36.000 It's not like all these people that are creating this frog are coordinating.
00:46:40.000 Anyone can make a meme with the frog.
00:46:42.000 And, like, a lot of the original Feels Good Man cartoons that the guy created, those are applicable, too.
00:46:49.000 They're silly.
00:46:50.000 A lot of them are really silly.
00:46:51.000 Well, I think a lot of it was an intentional troll.
00:46:53.000 Yes.
00:46:54.000 So I read a story about...
00:46:57.000 I was looking into it, trying to figure out if it was really the menace to humanity that everybody claims it is.
00:47:04.000 And the story was preposterous.
00:47:07.000 It's a magical place where anti-Semites and Jews and atheists and religious people live in harmony, which is like, that's hard to even parse.
00:47:18.000 It's designed to cause your mind to throw an error.
00:47:22.000 Yeah.
00:47:23.000 Well, and that is what...
00:47:24.000 So I think this is an excellent thing to talk about because I've been, let's say, identified under many circumstances now with the alt-right.
00:47:33.000 I've been doing every bit of investigation I can into its many manifestations.
00:47:37.000 It's a very confusing place.
00:47:39.000 It's certainly not an organized place.
00:47:41.000 And exactly what it is is by no means obvious.
00:47:44.000 And the Kekistan issue is a good case in point because mostly that's like a satirical realm where...
00:47:54.000 I don't know what it is.
00:47:55.000 It's defensive humor in some sense.
00:47:57.000 Let me give you an example.
00:47:58.000 I gave my father a Kekistani flag about three weeks ago.
00:48:03.000 Why did you do that?
00:48:05.000 Well, because he's been following what's happening to me online.
00:48:08.000 And I got associated with the frog in a major way.
00:48:12.000 It's a crazy story, and I won't go into it.
00:48:14.000 But I wore a frog hat on one of my videos that an Indian carver, a Native American carver, had given me.
00:48:20.000 And he had told me that the frog was, in their culture, a harbinger of environmental instability, because if the water's polluted at all, the frogs die first.
00:48:29.000 So the frog is the creature in their mythology that warns the society that things are out of kilter.
00:48:36.000 It's the canary in the coal mine.
00:48:38.000 It's the canary in the coal mine.
00:48:38.000 So I wore this frog hat and I made this video about things being unstable.
00:48:43.000 And I'd been identified with Kermit because my voice sort of sounds like Kermit the frog.
00:48:47.000 And it actually does.
00:48:48.000 So I've been making jokes about that.
00:48:49.000 And so then I made this video with this frog hat.
00:48:52.000 And the frog that my carver friend made actually had red lips.
00:48:55.000 And then I made the video, and as soon as I posted it, people said, that's Pepe.
00:48:59.000 And I thought, I just about fainted, literally, because it never occurred to me that that was a connection.
00:49:03.000 So anyways, I've been tangled in with this frog thing in this most absolutely insane and surreal manner.
00:49:09.000 But I've been...
00:49:10.000 So that got me into the Kekistani thing.
00:49:12.000 And a lot of the people that I'm trying to address online are young men...
00:49:21.000 Right.
00:49:36.000 Well, partly that's what I'm trying to figure out.
00:49:38.000 But does it have to be opposite?
00:49:40.000 Couldn't it just be different?
00:49:41.000 Well, that's a good question.
00:49:43.000 Opposition is a real issue with people, right?
00:49:45.000 Like what you were talking about before, when people just ramp up their positions and get more ideologically based, and they're doing it as a reaction to the other side.
00:49:53.000 Instead of just being who they are, instead of having some sort of a personal sovereignty, they're literally reacting to the opposite side and changing who they are.
00:50:02.000 Okay, so what I've been trying to do with my videos, and I think this is part of the reason that they've become so popular, in fact I'm certain of it, is that I've been trying to agitate for the adoption of that personal responsibility as an alternative to political ideology.
00:50:17.000 It's like, get your act together.
00:50:20.000 Have a vision.
00:50:22.000 Straighten out your life.
00:50:23.000 Say what you think.
00:50:25.000 You know, stay away from the ideological idiocies and oversimplifications and try to put yourself together.
00:50:30.000 Because I think that, I do believe, at the most fundamental level, and I think this is the remarkable realization of Western civilization, is that the well-developed individual is the antidote to the tyranny of society and biology.
00:50:45.000 I think that's our great discovery in the West.
00:50:48.000 It's not like other cultures haven't had that idea in nascent form, but it's been hyperdeveloped in the West, and I think it's right.
00:50:55.000 And so we abandon that pathway of divine individuality and revert to ideological identification of race or sex.
00:51:03.000 We're going to tear each other apart.
00:51:04.000 And I think part of the reason we're motivated to do that, Joe, is because many people don't want to bear the responsibility of developing themselves as individuals.
00:51:13.000 So they'll shuffle off the responsibility.
00:51:15.000 And if that means that, you know, we're dancing in the streets because everything's on fire, that'll be just fine.
00:51:21.000 And that's another thing that's adding to the terrible danger that we're in right now.
00:51:26.000 I think you're right.
00:51:26.000 And I think that personal auditing program that you're a part of is gigantic.
00:51:31.000 And people look at it as being separate from all these issues that we're dealing with culturally.
00:51:35.000 But I don't think it is.
00:51:37.000 I think you're absolutely right.
00:51:38.000 And I think that there is a real lack of struggle and understanding of struggle with a lot of people today.
00:51:46.000 Not necessarily struggle financially, but I mean like physical struggle, spiritual struggle, understanding that You have to overcome difficult issues to really understand the true potential of your mind and your body.
00:52:01.000 You have to not only overcome them, but you have to seek them out voluntarily and, what would you say, exult in the fact that they exist, right?
00:52:09.000 And that's part of bearing the burden of being.
00:52:11.000 It's like being is a tragic state.
00:52:13.000 Human being is a tragic state.
00:52:15.000 So you can shrink from that, but if you shrink from that, the suffering increases and intensifies, and you become resentful and malevolent.
00:52:22.000 The alternative is to move forward courageously.
00:52:25.000 That's the dragon motif, right?
00:52:26.000 That's the hero myth, essentially.
00:52:28.000 And that is the pathway forward, as far as I'm concerned.
00:52:31.000 Well, I think it also has implications.
00:52:32.000 You know, you're talking about it at the level of what is best for the individual.
00:52:36.000 But we also have a problem, which is that these collectivist movements, whether they are, you know, white nationalists on the right or I think we're good to go.
00:52:54.000 I think we're good to go.
00:53:06.000 I think we're good to go.
00:53:21.000 I think we're good to go.
00:53:30.000 That's exactly why, you know, I mean, free speech has become an ideological issue and increasingly identified with the right, and which is horrible, it's horrifying.
00:53:39.000 But the right justification for free speech is what you just laid out, which is that in order for, like, the collective is a group of what's already known by definition.
00:53:50.000 We inhabit the collective, and that's what's already known, what we can agree on.
00:53:53.000 But the problem with that is that what we can agree on, what's already known, isn't sufficient.
00:53:58.000 We still have problems.
00:53:59.000 So people have to be out at the fringes, on the border between chaos and order, where they discover new things and communicate it back to the collective.
00:54:06.000 And free speech does that.
00:54:08.000 That's the mechanism.
00:54:09.000 This is also a deep evolutionary truth.
00:54:13.000 Which is that all of the innovations that allow whether we're talking about one creature learning to do some new trick that gives rise to a bunch of species that do the same trick, or whether we're talking about populations discovering a new way to live on Earth, all of these things proceed from the fringe.
00:54:31.000 Right?
00:54:32.000 The people at the center for whom things are working best aren't going to be the ones to innovate the new way.
00:54:37.000 It's people for whom things are not quite working that are going to innovate new ways.
00:54:41.000 And that's also true for a population of frogs or birds or plants or whatever.
00:54:45.000 The ones that are not well situated are the ones where an experiment can pay off.
00:54:50.000 That's why Hans Isaac, a psychologist, wrote a good book called Genius, and he was interested in what predicted high levels of creative success.
00:54:57.000 And some of it's what you'd expect.
00:54:59.000 IQ is one of them, and creative temperament is another.
00:55:02.000 But losing a parent before the age of 10 was a nice predictor.
00:55:06.000 And, you know, people think about creativity as if it's all sweetness and light.
00:55:09.000 It's like, no bloody way, man.
00:55:11.000 If you're going to be creative, it's because you're tormented by a problem.
00:55:15.000 And so if you're not in a position to be tormented by a problem, you're not going to put in the time and effort and take the risk necessary to be creative.
00:55:22.000 But you know, I've been trying to understand the evolutionary landscape out of which our most fundamental religious convictions emerge and the idea that it is by definition the individual that innovates and that by definition therefore it's the individual that's the saviour of the collective I mean,
00:55:40.000 it's hard to imagine how you could find a biological restatement of an essential Christian presupposition that was more mapped one-to-one than that.
00:55:49.000 Now, you could say, well, that's not unique to Christianity.
00:55:51.000 I see the same thing in the Jewish Antithesis between the prophetic tradition, the prophet and the tradition.
00:55:59.000 Because the prophet is always the lone voice, right, that comes out.
00:56:03.000 It happens over and over in the Old Testament.
00:56:05.000 A lone voice comes out and challenges the king and says, look, you know, you're a blind tyrant and nature is moving away from us and preparing her revenge and you better watch the hell out because you're violating the intrinsic moral norms and you're going to pay for it.
00:56:18.000 That happens over and over.
00:56:19.000 And maybe there are 50 of them and the one that gets recorded is the one that happened to be closest to right because that's the population that gets through the bottleneck.
00:56:27.000 And so, you know, what we have is sort of evolution authoring these texts in a way.
00:56:36.000 Yes, well, that's a claim that I'm very, what would you call, that's something I believe to be fundamentally true.
00:56:43.000 And I mean, I've started, see, because I'm interested in this idea of strengthening the individual, eh?
00:56:49.000 When I wrote my first book, Maps of Meaning, it was about ideological conflict.
00:56:54.000 And it was about whether or not there was any alternative to ideological conflict, because you could make a case that there isn't.
00:57:00.000 There's right, and there's left, and there's a war, right?
00:57:02.000 But there is a third way, and I think that is the way of the heroic individual, and I mean that technically.
00:57:07.000 And that involves the development of individual characters so that you can say what it is that you think, that you can articulate your experience properly, and that you can bring what it is that's unique to you into the collective landscape.
00:57:21.000 And that's what updates the collective landscape.
00:57:23.000 It's absolutely vital.
00:57:25.000 And so, I started doing these biblical lectures.
00:57:28.000 I've done 12 of them now, walking through Genesis, and what I'm trying to do, because I believe that the Bible is the documentation of the emergence of the idea of the divine individual.
00:57:36.000 That's essentially what it is.
00:57:38.000 And we have a very uneasy relationship with that collection of texts now because we read them as if they're making claims about the objective nature of the world, and those claims seem to be false from a scientific perspective.
00:57:51.000 I don't believe that those are the claims that were made to begin with, so I think it's a non-starter.
00:57:56.000 But I've been trying to lecture about the stories in Genesis, for example, in a manner that makes them accessible to people who are, well, to atheists, let's say.
00:58:05.000 And many, many atheists have been responding very positively to them.
00:58:08.000 I have people in my YouTube comments now that are calling themselves Christian atheists.
00:58:12.000 Because they can understand what it is.
00:58:15.000 I'm describing this idea that's emerged in the West that consciousness is the mediator between chaos and order and the phenomena that generates experience.
00:58:28.000 And that you can think about that as a divine category of existence.
00:58:34.000 And I've been trying to delineate how...
00:58:39.000 How the biblical stories lay out the pathway by which the divine individual should manifest him or herself in time.
00:58:46.000 Because that is what it is.
00:58:48.000 And I've been studying, for example, the Abrahamic stories, which I didn't know well.
00:58:55.000 And the Abrahamic stories are really interesting.
00:58:57.000 I mean, Abraham is called by God.
00:59:00.000 And when Abraham is called by God, he's old.
00:59:02.000 He's like one of these guys who's 40 years old and has stayed in his mother's basement.
00:59:06.000 That's Abraham.
00:59:07.000 It's a little late for Abraham to be getting the hell out there in the world.
00:59:10.000 And God basically says to him, leave your family and your friends and your place of comfort and journey into the land of the stranger.
00:59:16.000 That's the call to adventure.
00:59:17.000 And so Abraham does that.
00:59:19.000 Now he's chosen by God.
00:59:20.000 You think, well, everything goes well for Abraham.
00:59:22.000 That isn't what happens at all.
00:59:23.000 The first thing he encounters is a famine.
00:59:25.000 And to escape that, he flees into the tyranny of Egypt where they try to steal his wife.
00:59:29.000 It's like, beware of being called by God.
00:59:32.000 You know, you'd think it'd be all sweetness and light after that.
00:59:35.000 It's not that at all.
00:59:36.000 And it's a very realistic story.
00:59:37.000 It's like, get the hell out of where you're safe.
00:59:39.000 Into what you don't know.
00:59:41.000 What are you going to find there?
00:59:42.000 Well, your fortune.
00:59:43.000 No, you're going to find the catastrophes of life.
00:59:47.000 But if you keep yourself morally oriented and you make the right sacrifices, which is the Abrahamic story to a T, then you can transcend the catastrophe of being and prevail.
00:59:59.000 I mean, it's...
00:59:59.000 Who the hell doesn't want to hear that?
01:00:03.000 So we're treading kind of close to the argument you got into with Sam Harris about the nature of truth.
01:00:10.000 And since I heard that, I've been sort of itching to have this conversation with you because I think there's a way of viewing this that will actually perhaps reconcile the two points of view, but there's a bitter pill that comes along with it.
01:00:27.000 So here's my argument.
01:00:32.000 We tend to think of intellect as having evolved because knowing what's true gives you an advantage.
01:00:40.000 But there's actually nothing that says that the literal truth is where advantage lies.
01:00:44.000 And so I have a category that I call literally false, metaphorically true.
01:00:50.000 These are ideas that aren't true in the factual sense, but they are true enough that if you behave as if they were true, you come out ahead of where you would be if you behaved according to the fact that they're not true.
01:01:01.000 So let me give you a couple of trivial examples that won't be controversial.
01:01:07.000 Porcupines can throw their quills.
01:01:10.000 Not true.
01:01:11.000 However, if you live near porcupines and you imagine that porcupines can throw their quills, you'll give them some space.
01:01:19.000 If you don't, you may, realizing that they can't throw their quills, get really close to one, and it may wheel around and nail you with a porcupine quill, which can be extremely dangerous because they are...
01:01:29.000 Microscopically designed to move in from where they puncture you over time and they can puncture a vital organ or you can get an infection.
01:01:36.000 So the person who believes that a porcupine can throw their quills has an advantage that isn't predicated on the fact that this is actually a literal truth, right?
01:01:45.000 Another one might be people say everything happens for a reason.
01:01:50.000 Right?
01:01:51.000 Well, unless you're talking about physics as the reason, everything doesn't happen for a reason.
01:01:56.000 However, if you are the kind of person who believes that everything happens for a reason, and then some terrible tragedy befalls you, you may be on the lookout.
01:02:05.000 Well, what's the reason that this happened?
01:02:06.000 Maybe it's supposed to open some opportunity, and you won't miss that opportunity the way somebody who was preoccupied with their misfortune would.
01:02:13.000 So...
01:02:14.000 Literal falseness but metaphorical truth is actually, I would argue, the category under which religious truth evolves.
01:02:24.000 Now the problem, the bitter pill that I mentioned, Is that I've heard you say that the truths that are captured in the religious version of things are basically like, you know, there's an individual truth and then there's a truth of your family and there's a truth of the population that you're living in and these things are all encoded in these doctrines,
01:02:46.000 which is true.
01:02:47.000 And you would expect it to be because the doctrines are carried along in the population.
01:02:52.000 The problem is, what I hear you arguing, and you tell me if I have it wrong, is that we should therefore expect the encoded metaphorical truths in these religious traditions to be morally right.
01:03:09.000 But there's nothing that actually says it will be morally right, because there are metaphorical truths that might, in fact, be reprehensible, but nonetheless effective.
01:03:18.000 And so what I would argue the overarching point here would be that You're right that the documents that contain these descriptions of things are full of things that are true in some sense that is not literal scientific truth nor was that their purpose.
01:03:36.000 What isn't true is that those things are inherently up to date.
01:03:42.000 See, I would...
01:03:43.000 Okay, I mean, first of all, the first thing about that is that a discussion like that, and this is also what happened with Sam Harris, takes me to the very limits of my intellectual ability.
01:03:53.000 And so, even in discussing it, I'm going to make all sorts of mistakes, because it's treacherous territory.
01:04:00.000 But...
01:04:01.000 I would say my understanding of the great myths has that observation built into it.
01:04:07.000 So one of the archetypes is that of the tyrannical father, which is the archetype, by the way, that possesses the minds of people who accuse Western society of being patriarchal.
01:04:17.000 They're possessed by a singular archetype, and that's the archetype of the tyrannical father.
01:04:21.000 They don't see that there's a tyrannical father and a wise king, because there is.
01:04:26.000 You can't even point that out, but anyways.
01:04:32.000 In some of our oldest stories, there's a representation of the dead past.
01:04:37.000 So let me give you an example that everyone knows about.
01:04:42.000 The story of Pinocchio is the story of the individualization of Pinocchio.
01:04:45.000 He starts out as a puppet.
01:04:46.000 He's a marionette.
01:04:47.000 He's a wooden head.
01:04:48.000 He's a liar.
01:04:49.000 And he's pulled by forces that he does not understand.
01:04:53.000 Right, okay, so...
01:04:54.000 But he has a good father.
01:04:55.000 That's Geppetto.
01:04:56.000 And so he's got a good...
01:04:57.000 And Geppetto wishes that he becomes a real individual.
01:05:01.000 And he knows that that's an impossible wish.
01:05:03.000 He wishes on a star that his son could become an actual individual, knowing full well that that's unlikely and impossible.
01:05:08.000 So Geppetto's a good king.
01:05:10.000 But the story's also about Geppetto, because what happens is that when Geppetto loses Pinocchio, loses his son, which you could think about as the active, dynamic, attentive force of youth, then he ends up stultified in the belly of a whale, which is a symbol of chaos, at the bottom of the ocean,
01:05:26.000 and then Pinocchio has to rescue him.
01:05:27.000 So I would say...
01:05:29.000 There is an instantiation of evolutionarily accumulated wisdom in the great stories of the past, but they're still dead.
01:05:37.000 And it requires the union.
01:05:40.000 This is why in Christian theology, the Godhead has...
01:05:44.000 A tripartite structure.
01:05:45.000 This is part of the reason.
01:05:46.000 There's God the Father.
01:05:47.000 But the Father's dead.
01:05:49.000 The Father was right a hundred years ago, or a thousand years ago, and is still partly right, but he's dead.
01:05:53.000 He can't participate in the updating of the process, so you need an active force.
01:05:58.000 Now, the active force is the same thing that generated those stories across time.
01:06:03.000 So it's the same thing, except it's also alive in the present.
01:06:07.000 And so your moral duty, and this is another thing that happens in Pinocchio, is to rescue your dead father from the belly of the whale.
01:06:13.000 And that's partly what I'm trying to do with these biblical lectures, because your objection is correct.
01:06:19.000 The reason it's correct is because even if the solution was correct, the landscape has changed.
01:06:25.000 And it's changed incrementally or in a revolutionary way.
01:06:28.000 We don't know.
01:06:29.000 And so those old truths are at best partial and at worst blind.
01:06:34.000 But that doesn't mean you can just say, like Mao did during the Cultural Revolution, well, let's just destroy the past.
01:06:40.000 It's like, no, that would be like saying, well, you don't need a body anymore.
01:06:43.000 Because your body is the collected wisdom of the evolutionary process across three and a half billion years.
01:06:49.000 I absolutely agree.
01:06:49.000 Because the stories are not literal, it's impossible to know whether they, well, not impossible, but very difficult to know whether or not the truth that is contained metaphorically is still relevant, if it's been inverted and it's now absolutely false, or...
01:07:02.000 So Carl Jung talked about this a lot, and one of the things he said was that your moral duty is to realize the archetype in the confines of your own life.
01:07:12.000 And so you say, well, there's an archetype of perfection that pervades the West, and for the sake of argument, I'm going to call that Christ, the Christ image.
01:07:21.000 It's something like that.
01:07:22.000 That's the archetypal image.
01:07:23.000 Now, we have a story about what Christ's historical life was like.
01:07:27.000 Well, you can't have that life because you would have had to be in the Middle East 2,000 years ago.
01:07:34.000 That's not your life.
01:07:36.000 But what you can do is take the archetype and you can manifest it within the confines of your own life.
01:07:41.000 And what that does is...
01:07:43.000 Force you to undergo the difficult process of updating the ancient wisdom.
01:07:47.000 And you don't just forego it.
01:07:50.000 You can't.
01:07:50.000 Well, you can, but you'll pay a massive price.
01:07:52.000 And part of that will be social disintegration.
01:07:54.000 Because it's...
01:07:55.000 The past is alive enough so that those of us who inhabit its corpse aren't clawing each other to death while we're feeding.
01:08:04.000 Right?
01:08:04.000 That's the critical issue.
01:08:06.000 Now, it's not alive enough because the bloody thing could fall apart at any moment.
01:08:09.000 And we need to be awake and alert in order to keep it updated and maintained.
01:08:13.000 Well, not only that, but the greatest hazards to us in the present are only partially going to be dealt with in these texts.
01:08:21.000 And that's my biggest concern, is that if we take Dawkins dismissing religion as mind virus, this is very dangerous because it neglects the truth that you're talking about.
01:08:33.000 And it prevents us from getting to a conversation in which we can talk about the fact that religious texts, religions, are not...
01:08:41.000 Mind viruses.
01:08:42.000 They are adaptations to past environments.
01:08:44.000 They do contain a kind of truth that isn't necessarily literal and is in general not literal.
01:08:50.000 But none of them, no ancient religion is up to date for Google's algorithms being the hazard to civilization that it probably is.
01:09:00.000 We need to figure out how to navigate where the ancestral wisdom is simply not up to the current challenges.
01:09:07.000 Okay, so let me modify that slightly.
01:09:09.000 Because I think it's true and not true.
01:09:11.000 The stories are erroneous in detail and right in pattern.
01:09:16.000 So, for example, there's an idea that one of the things that the mythological hero does is stand up against the tyranny of the state.
01:09:23.000 Now, you don't have to specify the nature of the tyranny of the state in order for that to be a truth that's applicable across different contexts.
01:09:31.000 And I would say what's happened with the great religious myths is that they operate at a level of abstraction.
01:09:38.000 Such that the abstract entities are applicable in every single environment.
01:09:42.000 I'll give you an example of that.
01:09:44.000 It is extremely useful to represent the phenomenology of your experience as a domain of chaos and order.
01:09:53.000 That works in every single environment for every person.
01:09:56.000 And so the domain of order, I can describe it technically.
01:09:59.000 You're in the domain of order when your actions produce the result you desire.
01:10:04.000 And you're in the domain of chaos when they don't.
01:10:07.000 And then I could say, well, your task is to straddle the border between those two domains because you don't always want to be where everything that you're doing is working because you don't learn anything.
01:10:17.000 And you don't want to be where nothing you're doing is working because it's overwhelming.
01:10:21.000 You want to be stable and dynamic at the same point.
01:10:24.000 And the Daoists do that very nicely because they have a chaos order conceptualization of the phenomenological landscape.
01:10:31.000 And their claim is the point of maximum proper being is right at the center of the border between chaos and order.
01:10:38.000 And I think that's true across contexts.
01:10:41.000 So I don't think that truth ages.
01:10:44.000 Some of them don't.
01:10:45.000 But the question really is one of, at what point is there so much legacy code that taking the package is more harmful than it is beneficial?
01:10:58.000 And at what point are, you know, if God were writing today, I'm pretty convinced the first commandment would be, thou shalt not enrich uranium.
01:11:07.000 It would make sense as the number one commandment.
01:11:09.000 It's not there because uranium wasn't a concept at the point that the thing was written, nor was the hazard of enriching it obvious.
01:11:16.000 And so the fact that it isn't mentioned tends to de-emphasize it as a risk.
01:11:22.000 And so I guess the question is, is it possible, I mean, Is it possible that by recognizing that these traditions carry huge amounts of ancestral wisdom forward, but that that wisdom is certain to be so incomplete that it doesn't address modern questions,
01:11:44.000 That we can be liberated to move forward and to honor those traditions for bringing us here, but to recognize that we actually have to move forward with something more potent and up to date, which is not easy because you can't just take the scientific truth of the moment and implement it.
01:12:02.000 A lot of it isn't even right.
01:12:03.000 Yeah, it's also not that easy to rewrite a fairy tale.
01:12:07.000 You know, and some of these fairy tales that people are trying to rewrite in modern times are perhaps 15,000 years old, and people think, well, we can just update that so that the modern version will be better.
01:12:16.000 It turns out that that's very, very difficult.
01:12:18.000 And there's another, I'm going to play devil's advocate against my own position here, you know, because I say, well, the religious texts encode profound and evolutionarily determined truths that are universal.
01:12:29.000 Okay, which religious texts And you might say, well, all of them, but then that obscures the important differences between the traditions.
01:12:39.000 And I'm by no means certain that all of them do.
01:12:43.000 So I'm going to stick my neck, weigh the hell out, because why not?
01:12:46.000 It isn't obvious to me that Islam does.
01:12:49.000 Because it's very difficult for me to see that the totalizing nature of Islam Doesn't make it unique among religions.
01:12:57.000 So now, good.
01:12:58.000 So, well, there's that out on the table.
01:13:00.000 If you don't mind, but isn't the issue using the word truth?
01:13:04.000 Because we can use tradition and wisdom, and we're okay.
01:13:08.000 But as soon as we start saying truth, then we run into problems.
01:13:11.000 I mean, and even when you're talking about porcupines, where you're talking about...
01:13:16.000 Would you say metaphorical truth versus...
01:13:18.000 Look, it's not true.
01:13:19.000 It's real simple.
01:13:20.000 Just don't go near the porcupine.
01:13:21.000 Teach the kid to not go near the porcupine because porcupine quills are dangerous.
01:13:26.000 They get stuck in you.
01:13:27.000 They're really dangerous.
01:13:28.000 Can they throw it at you?
01:13:29.000 No, they cannot.
01:13:30.000 But just stay clear of them because you don't want them to somehow or another get in touch with your body.
01:13:34.000 There's no truth in that they can throw their quills at you.
01:13:38.000 You benefit from being particularly aware of the dangers of their quills.
01:13:43.000 But if you tell a kid...
01:13:45.000 That they can throw their quills and so therefore the kid stays clear of them.
01:13:49.000 Here's a faulty assumption in his head.
01:13:51.000 You're lying to them for their own protection.
01:13:54.000 That's not good.
01:13:55.000 I wouldn't do it.
01:13:56.000 I think the same thing can be said of everything happens for a reason.
01:13:59.000 Well, here's the problem.
01:14:00.000 We don't know if everything happens for a reason.
01:14:02.000 Maybe when you die, you go to some auditing room and they go, well, you know, it's all just a part of some gigantic algorithm that you're impossible.
01:14:10.000 It's impossible for you to understand due to your limited processing power of the human brain.
01:14:15.000 You're dealing with some Simeon sort of complex geometry that's really just designed to keep your body moving and keep you alive and spread your genetics so that you can eventually evolve to the point when you're a god.
01:14:26.000 Well, first of all, I have kids.
01:14:29.000 I wouldn't tell them that a porcupine can throw its quills.
01:14:31.000 I'm sure you wouldn't, but why use the word truth, though?
01:14:34.000 Well, the question is, why do people tell you that a porcupine can throw its quills?
01:14:39.000 I don't think they do.
01:14:40.000 Oh, they do.
01:14:40.000 Well, if they do, they don't know any better.
01:14:42.000 Right.
01:14:43.000 Well, they're liars.
01:14:43.000 Right.
01:14:44.000 And so all I'm saying is that actually that is likely to be the product of selection.
01:14:49.000 In other words, that those people who had encoded that they do throw their quills have an advantage.
01:14:56.000 It's not the way I would do it, and for exactly the reason that you point out, which is if you give a child the wrong model of a porcupine, I don't know whether a porcupine is liable to be the gateway to some more important question, but if it were, you've just steered the kid wrong.
01:15:12.000 Well, here's part of the problem, and this is a really big problem.
01:15:16.000 There's two things, I guess, that were brought up by what you described.
01:15:19.000 And the first is the terminology of truth.
01:15:22.000 Now, Harris's claim with regards to my utilization of truth was that I was absconding with the definition of truth in a false manner.
01:15:29.000 But he was wrong, because the idea of truth is much older than the idea of objective truth.
01:15:34.000 And the original notion of truth wasn't objective true.
01:15:38.000 It was like the arrow flies straight and true.
01:15:41.000 And it meant something like reliably on its way to the appropriate destination, something like that.
01:15:47.000 And when Christ said, I am the truth and the way, I can't remember the other one.
01:15:51.000 Yes, yes.
01:15:52.000 The truth he was talking about wasn't an objective truth.
01:15:55.000 So Sam's idea that I had somehow, you know, taken the idea of truth that was actually objective all along and done something crooked with it is just wrong.
01:16:04.000 It's wrong.
01:16:05.000 So truth can have multiple definitions.
01:16:08.000 Well, that's the issue.
01:16:10.000 And that's exactly what we're trying to get at here.
01:16:13.000 To me, there's two kinds of truth.
01:16:16.000 And they may be commensurate.
01:16:19.000 You may be able to stack them on top of one another, but now and then they dissociate.
01:16:22.000 And this is actually what Brett was referring to as well.
01:16:28.000 And this is where it gets so complicated that I can barely manage it.
01:16:32.000 There's the truth that manifests itself in the manner in which you act.
01:16:37.000 And there's the truth that manifests itself as a representation of the objective world.
01:16:42.000 And sometimes both those truths are stacked on top of each other, and sometimes they're not.
01:16:46.000 So, like, I could give you a piece of wisdom that would work well if you acted it out, that carried within it an inaccurate representation of part of the objective world.
01:16:55.000 And you could say, well, maybe that's actually the case with the biblical stories, because if you read them as science, they don't read well.
01:17:03.000 So let's take malaria as a good example.
01:17:06.000 Malaria.
01:17:06.000 The root of the word is mal-aria.
01:17:09.000 Bad air.
01:17:10.000 Right?
01:17:11.000 Malaria is not transmitted by bad air.
01:17:13.000 It's transmitted by mosquitoes that live in places where you might think the air is bad.
01:17:16.000 So the point is it's part of the way there.
01:17:19.000 Yeah, that's a good one.
01:17:20.000 And that also gets...
01:17:22.000 See, there's another weird distinction here that I was trying to draw with Sam, but that's a really tricky one.
01:17:27.000 And we augured in because we started to talk about pragmatism.
01:17:30.000 But there's also something like the truth of a description and the truth of a tool.
01:17:36.000 And my sense is that people's fundamental truths are tool-like.
01:17:40.000 We use them to function properly in the world.
01:17:43.000 And you could say, well, a sharp axe is more true than a dull axe, and actually you can use the word true in that sense.
01:17:50.000 That actually is an appropriate use of the word.
01:17:54.000 There are tool truths and there are objective fact truths.
01:17:58.000 Now, in the optimal circumstance, those map onto each other.
01:18:02.000 But we're not smart enough often to make them map onto each other because we just don't know enough.
01:18:06.000 And there are lots of truths that we have that portray the objective world improperly that are still true.
01:18:12.000 Is the problem using the term true when sometimes you should use the term fact?
01:18:17.000 Yes.
01:18:18.000 Like, one plus one is two, that is a fact.
01:18:20.000 One plus one is two is also true.
01:18:22.000 You throw some water on a match, and it'll go out.
01:18:26.000 That's a fact.
01:18:27.000 Yes.
01:18:27.000 Right?
01:18:29.000 As I see it, at least, there is this overarching truth, the one that Sam Harris was pointing to, the one I think you're pointing to also, and the one I'm imagining we all subscribe to.
01:18:40.000 Sure.
01:18:40.000 There is the testable truth that reveals itself in the laboratory or in a careful experiment in the field.
01:18:45.000 And that really is the top-level truth.
01:18:48.000 But then there are the truths you can't speak yet.
01:18:50.000 So let's take the word filth from the Old Testament.
01:18:56.000 Filth means shit.
01:18:58.000 Right?
01:18:58.000 You're not supposed to shit in camp because God finds it offensive.
01:19:04.000 Now, the problem is the germ theory of disease doesn't come about for thousands of years after that truth was written.
01:19:11.000 That truth keeps you from infecting people long before you can ever explain that there are microbes that grow in human shit that are a particular danger to your population.
01:19:21.000 So the point is, would you rather be Held back to the place where you can actually describe the literal underpinnings of what's going on?
01:19:29.000 Or do you want to be liberated to say something that actually results in an improvement in health before, you know, literally thousands of years before anybody had any idea that it was microbes at the root of this?
01:19:42.000 Yes, and you need to figure out, so an elaboration of that would be something like, human beings needed to figure out how to act without dying before they could understand the nature of the world well enough to justify that.
01:19:52.000 Right, and you'd be crazy, now that we do have the germ theory of disease, to amplify that original, crude version of the truth, or that crude approximation of what you need to believe in order to behave safely.
01:20:08.000 There's no reason for that truth to be promoted.
01:20:11.000 In fact, you don't hear people describing this part of the Old Testament anymore because it's not relevant.
01:20:17.000 And this is probably all why dietary restrictions were in the Old Testament as well.
01:20:21.000 Shellfish, red tide, eating pigs, trichinosis.
01:20:25.000 There's a lot of issues that go along with that.
01:20:28.000 Yeah, well, there is some intermingling, perhaps, of hygienic concerns with also the desire for the groups to distinguish themselves from other groups, right?
01:20:36.000 Because you can unite your group quite tightly by dietary restrictions.
01:20:40.000 So, back to your point about terminology.
01:20:43.000 You know, we could do something like fact and wisdom.
01:20:48.000 You know, you say truth, that's the overarching category, and then that divides into fact and wisdom.
01:20:52.000 And what you want, optimally, is you want the facts and the wisdom to be one-to-one, but often they're not.
01:20:58.000 And if you find wisdom where the facts aren't laid right out, you don't just get to throw away the wisdom, which is what I think happens in the case of people like Dawkins and Harris.
01:21:06.000 And Harris makes another sleight-of-hand move, which I don't like, which is that he thinks, so let's say...
01:21:12.000 Except for just a second, the wisdom-fact distinction.
01:21:16.000 He would say, well, the fact is the thing, and the wisdom is a second-order derivation of that.
01:21:20.000 You can ground the wisdom in the fact, and I don't believe that.
01:21:23.000 And I don't think that he has any real justification for that claim.
01:21:28.000 And this is something I never got...
01:21:29.000 What do you mean by grounding the wisdom in the fact?
01:21:32.000 He thinks if you know the facts clearly enough, you'll know how to act.
01:21:35.000 Well, that's not necessarily true.
01:21:37.000 There's ways to act that are within your best interest, and then there's ways to act that are within the interest of all the people around you that might not serve you that well.
01:21:46.000 And that only distinction is where ethics come from.
01:21:49.000 Right, or where the consequences are delayed for some number of generations or something like that.
01:21:53.000 Yes, well that's a big problem.
01:21:55.000 So Sam acts as if the process of mapping facts onto action is simple if we just got the facts right.
01:22:03.000 But it's the weakest part of his argument, and we never ever got to that for a variety of reasons.
01:22:08.000 But part of the reason it's weak is, okay, well there's like an infinite number of facts, man.
01:22:14.000 So let's say you're standing in front of a field and you're looking at the field.
01:22:17.000 The field does not tell you how to walk through it.
01:22:20.000 There's a million ways through the field.
01:22:22.000 And no matter how many facts about the field you aggregate, you're not going to be able to determine the appropriate path by aggregating those facts.
01:22:30.000 And that's a problem that I don't think Sam is willing to take seriously.
01:22:37.000 Well, I think there are two problems tangled up here.
01:22:39.000 One of them is there's a question of, is one individual supposed to have all of the facts and navigate based on that, sort of the rationality community version of things?
01:22:52.000 Or does, you know, the practical truth is we can't all be experts in everything, and so we have to go along with, you know, guides to our behavior that are approximate, and that's inherent.
01:23:03.000 And then there's a question about civilization.
01:23:06.000 Civilization should be guided by our best understanding of what's actually true, but with an understanding that we don't have a complete map of a lot of stuff.
01:23:16.000 And so I think what you're pointing at is that there is wisdom that has been handed to us that is not such that we can just simply say, oh, here's the nugget at the center of it and we need to preserve that thing because we don't necessarily know what it's doing.
01:23:29.000 Which is, you know, this is dangerous because some of what it's doing may not be acceptable.
01:23:35.000 Well, and think about, let's look at the wisdom end of things for a minute.
01:23:38.000 And you talked, you alluded a little earlier to, like, iterations and about the fact that things are iterated across time and that something that works now might fail dreadfully in a month or two months.
01:23:48.000 So here's what something has to be like to be wise, let's say.
01:23:53.000 Well, first of all, let's say it would be good if it was in accordance with the facts, but we'll leave that aside for now.
01:24:00.000 It has to work, if you operate according to the wisdom principle, whatever it is, it has to work in the world.
01:24:07.000 But then it has to work in a world that allows you to maintain your relationships with people in the world.
01:24:12.000 So it's all of a sudden, this wisdom thing is something that's not only constrained by, let's call it objective reality, but it's constrained by the necessity of a social contract, a functional social contract.
01:24:23.000 So you're only allowed to put forward actions in the world that would be of benefit to you if they simultaneously don't undermine the structure within which you live.
01:24:34.000 Okay, and then there's a game theory element to that, which is, well, if it's wise, then it works in the world.
01:24:39.000 So that'd be the constraint of objective reality.
01:24:41.000 But then it works for you now, and the you that'll be in a week, and the you that'll be in a month, and it works for you and your family, and it works for you and your family and society, and it works in a way that those things all line up to be iterated across time.
01:24:56.000 And so this is actually also the solution.
01:24:59.000 I'd really like to hear what you think about this.
01:25:01.000 I think this is the solution to the postmodern conundrum.
01:25:04.000 Because the postmodernists, bless their hearts, so we'll give the devil his due, say, well, the problem is there's an infinite number of interpretations of a finite set of facts.
01:25:14.000 And the right response to that is, Uh-oh.
01:25:18.000 That's true.
01:25:19.000 That's true.
01:25:20.000 That's not good.
01:25:21.000 And that's why the postmodernists say, well, you can't agree on a canonical interpretation of a great piece of literature.
01:25:26.000 Because the number of potential interpretations are infinite.
01:25:28.000 And so then they say, well, why should we settle on any one interpretation then?
01:25:32.000 Why should we privilege one over another?
01:25:33.000 And then they say, well, that's all power games.
01:25:36.000 And so that's a...
01:25:37.000 You've got to take that seriously.
01:25:38.000 But what they missed, and this is a big deal, it's a big deal, I think, is this idea of ethical constraint.
01:25:45.000 It's like, yes, there's a landscape of potentially infinite interpretations, but hardly any of them will work in the real world.
01:25:51.000 And hardly any of them will work in the real world in a way that doesn't get you killed by other people or doom you because of your own stupidity to failure across time.
01:26:00.000 And so, the landscape of interpretation is almost infinite, but the landscape of Applicable interpretation, functional interpretation is unbelievably constrained.
01:26:10.000 And I think that constraint system is what we regard as ethics.
01:26:14.000 It's something like that.
01:26:15.000 Well, at some level, stories continue through time for a reason.
01:26:19.000 You know, good stories continue for a long, you know, the Odyssey is with us for some reason.
01:26:24.000 And we, so there is a scientific reason or scientifically investigatable reason why the Odyssey has been durable.
01:26:32.000 We may not know it, but in principle, it's a question you could investigate.
01:26:36.000 So I guess at the end of the day, the problem with the postmodernists is that they have a point.
01:26:42.000 The point is perception gets in the way of anything we wish to do objectively.
01:26:47.000 But that point only takes you so far.
01:26:49.000 That's why they turn to Marxism, as far as I can tell, because what happens with the postmodernists is they say, oh, there's an infinite number of interpretations.
01:26:56.000 And then the human part of them goes, okay, well, what am I supposed to do next then, since there's an infinite number of choices?
01:27:05.000 And the postmodernist says, well, my theory can't account for that.
01:27:08.000 And then they say, well, back to Marxism.
01:27:10.000 And so that's why I think there's this unholy alliance between the postmodernists and the neo-Marxists.
01:27:15.000 It's because postmodernism is a dead end from the perspective of applicable wisdom.
01:27:20.000 It leaves you bereft and nihilistic.
01:27:23.000 And that's not good because people can't exist without a purpose.
01:27:26.000 And so they sneak the Marxism through the back door and jump into this power landscape for the reasons that we discussed earlier.
01:27:33.000 You really think that it's because of an infinite number of possibilities interpreting things?
01:27:37.000 Because I've always felt that it was really just a response to capitalism.
01:27:40.000 They feel that capitalism is a very negative aspect of our culture and society and that there's got to be some sort of an alternative.
01:27:47.000 Marxism is a clearly defined alternative that other people have subscribed to in the past.
01:27:52.000 You could point to it.
01:27:53.000 It's a structure that's already set up and it's romanticized.
01:27:58.000 And I think they adopt it for that reason, because it has the socialist aspects attached to it, and they looked at socialism as some sort of a thing that regards equality and some sort of an egalitarian approach.
01:28:11.000 Okay, so we'd have to take two things apart.
01:28:14.000 We'd have to take Marxism slash neo-Marxism and post-modernism apart.
01:28:19.000 So we could do that historically.
01:28:21.000 And I would say...
01:28:23.000 Although there is a reason for postmodernism, which is the reason we just discussed, the infinite landscape of interpretation problem.
01:28:31.000 It's a real problem.
01:28:32.000 If you look at it historically, postmodernism actually grew out of Marxism.
01:28:37.000 And so what happened is that the Marxists laid out their theory about the human social environment being composed of a power struggle between the privileged and the underprivileged, right?
01:28:51.000 The rich and the poor in its initial phases.
01:28:54.000 And that's a story that's partially true, and it's got a lot of motive power.
01:28:58.000 Like, the motive power is the romantic motive power that you just described.
01:29:02.000 I get to be on the side of the oppressed.
01:29:03.000 I get to be a warrior for what's right.
01:29:06.000 There's the resentment element, which is, that son of a bitch has more than me, so let's cut him off at the knees, which manifested itself brutally in the Soviet Union.
01:29:13.000 And then there's the ideological totality issue, which gives people a sense of security.
01:29:18.000 That took a vicious hit.
01:29:20.000 By the late 1960s, because the murderousness of Marxism had been clearly laid out as a doctrine.
01:29:25.000 And that opened the door to this move by mostly French intellectuals to develop the postmodern philosophy, which has these advantages which we described, but also to use that as a screening tactic for allowing Marxism to transform into identity politics.
01:29:43.000 And so, like, it's hard to disentangle all the motivations that are going on in there, but there's something about it that's truly intellectually pathological, because you don't get to be a postmodernist and a Marxist.
01:29:55.000 You actually technically cannot be both of those things at the same time.
01:29:59.000 And the fact that most people are both of those things at the same time Raises the specter of just exactly what their motivation is.
01:30:07.000 And then I would say it's this resentment-driven anti-capitalism.
01:30:11.000 There's reasons to criticize capitalism, obviously.
01:30:14.000 But it's this underground resentment-driven anti-capitalism that I think is one of the fundamental motivators.
01:30:20.000 Well, if I can add a couple things.
01:30:23.000 The risk of alienating my last few friends.
01:30:26.000 In for a penny, man!
01:30:28.000 Yeah, I guess.
01:30:29.000 So here's the thing.
01:30:30.000 What's up with Marxism is, A, there's a lot in Marx's critique of capitalism that's actually right.
01:30:38.000 And so that kind of gets you through the door once you start looking at the analysis.
01:30:42.000 And then there's the prescription, which is toxic.
01:30:46.000 It's a pretty good story.
01:31:05.000 You know, inevitable grave violence.
01:31:07.000 And so we know that now, historically, it's not just a theoretical issue.
01:31:11.000 We've now seen enough of it to know that as a fact.
01:31:14.000 But nonetheless, the fact that there are people telling the story to kids who don't yet know what to do with something that sounds like it might be true is very dangerous.
01:31:26.000 If you don't mind, break it down as to why it goes bad.
01:31:29.000 Well, I mean, it's sort of a tired critique, but I happen to think it's about right, which is that it just does not take account of what a human being is and what makes society function.
01:31:42.000 Spoken like a true fascist biological essentialist.
01:31:46.000 That wasn't very nice, Peterson.
01:31:50.000 I think that is...
01:31:51.000 Well, I think it might be related back to...
01:31:54.000 Okay, so let's go back to the idea that Marx had something to say.
01:31:58.000 Okay, and we could clarify that a little bit.
01:32:00.000 So here's a problem.
01:32:01.000 This is the problem that seems to emerge as the function of some really fundamental force that we don't quite understand.
01:32:08.000 And that's this phenomena that I've been referring to as the Pareto distribution.
01:32:13.000 Okay, so here's the situation.
01:32:15.000 If you look at any creative endeavor that human beings engage in, so that would be an endeavor where there's variability in individual production.
01:32:23.000 It doesn't matter what it is.
01:32:25.000 Here's what happens.
01:32:26.000 People compete to produce whatever that is, and almost everybody produces zero.
01:32:32.000 They lose completely.
01:32:34.000 A small minority are a tiny bit successful and a hyper minority are insanely successful.
01:32:42.000 And so the Pareto distribution is the geometric graph representation of that phenomena.
01:32:50.000 And so here's how it manifests itself.
01:32:55.000 If you have 10,000 people, 100 of them have half the money.
01:32:58.000 So the rule is the square root of the number of people under consideration have half of whatever it is that's under consideration.
01:33:04.000 So this works everywhere.
01:33:06.000 So if you took 100 classical composers, 10 of them produce half the music that's played.
01:33:11.000 And then if you take the 10 composers and you take 1,000 of their songs, 30 of those songs, which is the square root of 1,000, roughly speaking, are played 50% of the time.
01:33:22.000 And so there's this underlying natural law.
01:33:25.000 Which is, it's expressed as the Matthew Principle, which is from a New Testament statement.
01:33:30.000 The statement is, to those who have everything, more will be given, and from those who have nothing, everything will be taken.
01:33:36.000 It's a vicious statement, but it's actually, here's one of those places where it's actually empirically true.
01:33:42.000 This happens everywhere.
01:33:43.000 And so what Marx observed was that capital tended to accumulate in the hands of fewer and fewer people.
01:33:48.000 And he said that's a flaw of the capitalist system.
01:33:51.000 That's wrong!
01:33:52.000 It's not a flaw of the capitalist system.
01:33:54.000 It is a feature of every single system of production that we know of, no matter who set it up and how it operates.
01:34:00.000 And so now we have a problem, because what happens is, as soon as you set up a domain of production, and you need to because you need things to be produced, then you instantly produce a competition, and the spoils go disproportionately to a tiny percentage of people.
01:34:16.000 So then, well, so what?
01:34:18.000 Well, so the rest of the people starve, or the system becomes unstable because everybody's mad.
01:34:23.000 It's like, that's a big problem.
01:34:24.000 Okay, so how do human beings fix that?
01:34:26.000 Well, the first thing we did was diversify the number of productive games.
01:34:30.000 So you don't get to be NBA basketball star, but, you know, you can run a podcast.
01:34:36.000 It's a completely different competitive landscape.
01:34:38.000 So we can fractionate the production landscape and then people who aren't successful in one domain might be successful in others.
01:34:45.000 That's human creativity.
01:34:46.000 We're really good at that.
01:34:47.000 But the problem with that is you still get a positive correlation among the successful people.
01:34:52.000 You know, so because you're so successful, for example, with your podcast and your YouTube videos, your connection network is insane, insanely powerful.
01:35:01.000 So you still have this tendency for what's useful and good to be distributed, let's call it, inequitably.
01:35:12.000 And it's got the power of a physical law.
01:35:15.000 In fact, there are people, they call themselves econophysicists.
01:35:18.000 No one knows that there's a field, econophysicists.
01:35:21.000 And they use the same mathematical equations that It represents the propagation of gas molecules into a vacuum to describe the manner in which money distributes itself in an economy.
01:35:34.000 Okay, so Marx pointed to a fundamental issue.
01:35:37.000 But he said, well, that's a fault with capitalism.
01:35:39.000 It's like, no it isn't.
01:35:41.000 It's something way more pernicious than that.
01:35:43.000 And it's something like, well, when one good thing happens to you, it makes you a little more powerful and attractive.
01:35:48.000 And so that fractionally increases the possibility that another good thing will happen to you.
01:35:52.000 And then that spirals out of control, and you get people who have, well, they have all the money, or they have all the podcast downloads.
01:36:00.000 You're in that position.
01:36:01.000 You know, what is it, 1.2 billion?
01:36:04.000 Like, what the hell?
01:36:07.000 But it's to those who have more...
01:36:09.000 And it's not because there's something oppressive about you.
01:36:11.000 It's because you rode the wave of the Pareto distribution and it threw you way the hell up into the stratosphere.
01:36:18.000 And we don't know what to do about that.
01:36:21.000 Like, should you be sharing your podcast views with the oppressed and downtrodden?
01:36:25.000 Well, you've got a few billion, you could spread the damn things around.
01:36:28.000 It's not fair that you're the only one that's being listened to.
01:36:31.000 You know, it's the same argument.
01:36:32.000 And it's a compelling argument, because why the hell should you have all that power?
01:36:37.000 If you call it power, you could call it authority or competence.
01:36:39.000 But isn't that a different argument?
01:36:40.000 Because no one's asking anyone to download anything specific.
01:36:45.000 No one's compelling anyone to download anything specific.
01:36:47.000 You could download whatever you want.
01:36:49.000 And if you put more effort and more time and more focus into your work, whatever it would be, whether it's a podcast or your YouTube videos or whatever, if people enjoy it, they gravitate towards it.
01:36:59.000 And then over time, it exponentially increases the amount of people that are exposed to it.
01:37:04.000 Well, this is why I think that the, and this is the other problem with the Marxist perspective, is that, and the post-modernists in particular, like, they conflate power, competence, and authority, unfairly.
01:37:17.000 Now, your point, it's sort of the point of free marketers.
01:37:20.000 You're saying, well, look, all I'm doing is offering a product.
01:37:22.000 I'm not compelling anyone.
01:37:23.000 It's a quality product, or at least as far as the market is concerned, it is.
01:37:27.000 If it turns out that everyone wants that, well, what's wrong with that?
01:37:30.000 And I'm not disagreeing with that argument in the least, but...
01:37:34.000 But the problem is it doesn't fix the problem.
01:37:38.000 Like the problem with money, let's say.
01:37:40.000 The problem is that if you let a monetary system run, all the money ends up in the hands of a very small number of people.
01:37:47.000 And you're saying this is also with any sort of creative endeavor?
01:37:49.000 Any creative endeavor, man.
01:37:51.000 Now, what is wrong?
01:37:52.000 I think the real issue would be to maximize potential output or maximize the amount of successful people.
01:38:00.000 You'd have to figure out, don't concentrate on what people are doing right.
01:38:04.000 Concentrate on what people are doing wrong.
01:38:06.000 What are the people doing wrong that are failing in any creative endeavor?
01:38:11.000 That's partly why we put together the Future Authoring Program, because we are trying to figure out what made people successful.
01:38:20.000 And one of the things that makes people successful is they specify a target and then aim at it.
01:38:26.000 Because if you're all over the place, we do know, in a relatively functional society like ours, we know what predicts success.
01:38:32.000 IQ and conscientiousness are the biggest predictors of success.
01:38:36.000 Now, there's a genetic lottery thing going on there that's kind of rough, but it does say that smart people who work hard are disproportionately likely to succeed.
01:38:44.000 And then you might also say, well, you want to remove the impediments from people who have those capabilities so that they can move forward.
01:38:51.000 And one of the predictors of success as well is to decide what your success is going to be and then work hard in that direction.
01:38:58.000 And that actually works.
01:38:59.000 So I think that is a very useful thing to do.
01:39:02.000 And that's, well, like I said, that's partly why we've been working in that direction.
01:39:06.000 But there's other problems that it still doesn't solve.
01:39:10.000 Like one of them is, if you don't have any money...
01:39:14.000 It's really hard to get some.
01:39:16.000 Like once you have some, it's not so hard to get some more.
01:39:19.000 But if you're at zero, Jesus man, you're in the reverse situation.
01:39:25.000 You're poor.
01:39:26.000 You don't have anything.
01:39:27.000 No one wants to talk to you.
01:39:28.000 You can't get out of it because you're too poor to get out of it.
01:39:31.000 You know, you're penalized by the economic system because you can't even afford to start playing the game.
01:39:36.000 You're stuck at zero.
01:39:37.000 You're stuck at zero.
01:39:38.000 And you can't get out.
01:39:39.000 And the revolutionary types, you know, they go to the people who are stuck at zero and they say, hey, you're stuck at zero.
01:39:44.000 Why don't you burn the whole goddamn thing to the ground?
01:39:47.000 Because maybe in the next iteration you won't be stuck at zero.
01:39:50.000 And for young men, that's a hell of a call.
01:39:53.000 Because they're already, let's call them expendable, biologically, and that makes them more adventurous and risk-taking.
01:39:59.000 If someone says, and maybe that's why they wear the Che Guevara t-shirt, it's like, hey, I'm stuck at zero.
01:40:04.000 Well, I'd rather be with the romantic who's burning the whole thing to the ground than to just, you know, to stay locked in my immobile position.
01:40:11.000 Right, but that zero is where massive amounts of creativity come from because of that struggle.
01:40:17.000 Massive amounts of innovation, massive amounts of people who have visions because you're not living off of some sort of trust fund.
01:40:25.000 You know, you have real risk and real danger and you have a real concern about your future.
01:40:31.000 Whereas someone who has no concerns whatsoever, and their future is carved in stone, they can do whatever they want and buy a new Ferrari every year, that they're not going to have nearly the amount of motivation as the poor person.
01:40:42.000 Yeah, well, that may be why family fortunes tend to only last three generations.
01:40:46.000 Yes.
01:40:47.000 And, you know, you're saying, well, why don't you take a look at the advantages of zero?
01:40:51.000 And one of the advantages there is that you're driven by brute necessity, and that can really be motivating.
01:40:57.000 Yes.
01:40:57.000 And that's, I think, why the children of first-generation immigrants often do so well.
01:41:02.000 They're driven by necessity.
01:41:04.000 And it's so...
01:41:07.000 Yes, agreed.
01:41:08.000 However, I would still say, you know, the zero issue is there are levels of absolute privation that are so intense that all the goodwill in the world won't get you out of zero.
01:41:19.000 Right.
01:41:19.000 If you're living in a third world country in some very small village with no way out whatsoever, that is the zero of zero.
01:41:26.000 You're in Tanzania, on the river, people are getting eaten by crocodiles in your village, you're fucked.
01:41:32.000 Zero is like a magnet.
01:41:34.000 It just holds you there.
01:41:35.000 Yeah, it's a black hole.
01:41:36.000 Having a little, very little, maybe that motivational state that's actually generative.
01:41:41.000 Right, there's a difference.
01:41:42.000 And what's really bizarre is those people in that village might be happier than the people who live in a gated community in Beverly Hills.
01:41:50.000 Well, I wanted to come back to this.
01:41:52.000 Your point about whether we should be concentrating on what you're doing right versus what you're doing wrong.
01:41:58.000 Both of those will work, and you should actually be doing both of them simultaneously.
01:42:02.000 You'll maximize faster.
01:42:04.000 But the real problem is that the system in which we concentrate on what you're doing right and what you're doing wrong, and supposedly you get paid for some integration of those things, Is that we don't understand what we are wired to produce evolutionarily,
01:42:23.000 right?
01:42:23.000 We think, we all operate based on the idea that we're pursuing some state of happiness or satisfaction and, you know, we think we know what's going to get it for us and maybe it's inventing something and then you'll be happy.
01:42:38.000 But it's a trap.
01:42:41.000 The fact is what we are wired to do is to discover opportunities and then When we discover an opportunity, it benefits the population that we come from and we turn that discovery into either more mouths to feed or more consumption and we restore the state of privation.
01:42:58.000 We restore the state in which people don't have enough.
01:43:01.000 And so if you really wanted to fix this problem, if you wanted to address the problems that communism thinks it's solving but fails to, you have to engineer around this feature of human beings.
01:43:16.000 We pursue new opportunities, and as soon as we find a new opportunity, instead of figuring out a way to stabilize the benefits so that it results in a stable sense of satisfaction, for example, we fall all over ourselves to turn it into more of the same, because, of course,
01:43:31.000 that's how we got here.
01:43:32.000 Can you give me an example of what you mean by this?
01:43:34.000 Sure.
01:43:35.000 So let's look at something like the...
01:43:40.000 Let's imagine an ancient farmer.
01:43:45.000 An ancient farmer has a piece of land, and that piece of land will support a certain number of people with the level of technology that the farmer is utilizing.
01:43:53.000 Somehow the farmer ends up either thinking of or discovering, by watching somebody else, a wheel.
01:44:01.000 Now that farmer has a technology that allows him or however many people are working that farm to produce that much more food with no more labor because the wheel allows you to transport more, for example, at one time.
01:44:13.000 So now that same piece of land can support more people because it can be more efficiently farmed.
01:44:19.000 That could be stabilized as a kind of success.
01:44:24.000 In other words, you could turn the extra surplus into a kind of persistent success.
01:44:33.000 Luxury.
01:44:33.000 Yeah, a luxury.
01:44:34.000 But I mean, I don't even...
01:44:35.000 luxury is a little bit too trivial sounding.
01:44:37.000 You could turn it into a space where you use that to investigate important stuff.
01:44:43.000 Or you could turn it into more mouths to feed.
01:44:46.000 In which case, as soon as you've produced those extra mouths that are now consuming the output of that farm, now the level of, you know, fear of starvation is right back where it was.
01:44:58.000 And so...
01:45:00.000 So that's more money, more problems.
01:45:02.000 Yeah, essentially.
01:45:03.000 I mean, you know, well, it used to be that we produced more people.
01:45:06.000 Now we produce a greater quest for consumption.
01:45:10.000 Right.
01:45:10.000 But if we were smart, what we would do is we would think about the problem of how to take the gains that come from not being bumped up at the limits of a system and turn them into what we value, right?
01:45:23.000 Well, we've done some of that.
01:45:25.000 I mean, because...
01:45:26.000 So we've done some of that because as...
01:45:33.000 What do they say?
01:45:33.000 A rising tide lifts all ships.
01:45:35.000 And there's certainly some truth in that.
01:45:36.000 The overall standard of living has gone up so stupendously since 1895 that it's an absolute miracle.
01:45:42.000 So we've done some of that.
01:45:44.000 So there's another issue, back to Marx, let's say.
01:45:47.000 There's another issue that we can't contend with.
01:45:51.000 And one of those might be, well, imagine that in order for society to progress, you have to allow the individual to compete in a relatively untrammeled space so that they can innovate.
01:46:02.000 And then imagine that one of the consequences of that innovation is that you get these Pareto distributions developing because the innovator, or the one who's second in line to the innovator, whatever, ends up with the bulk of the spoils.
01:46:14.000 So you might say, there's a cost to be paid in inequality for innovation.
01:46:22.000 And then you could also say, well, too much inequality destabilizes things, which seems to be quite clear.
01:46:27.000 So there's room for an intelligent conversation about that, right?
01:46:31.000 Because the lefties say, uh-oh, too much inequality.
01:46:34.000 And they need to be listened to, because the evidence is quite clear.
01:46:37.000 If you let the inequality ramp up enough, the whole system destabilizes.
01:46:40.000 Because the people at the bottom think, fuck it, we'll just...
01:46:44.000 We'll just flip the system upside down.
01:46:45.000 No one wants that.
01:46:47.000 Like, right-wing conservatives don't want that.
01:46:49.000 Because you could make a Republican argument and say, don't let the inequality in your neighborhood get out of hand, because the crime rate will skyrocket.
01:46:56.000 And the empirical evidence on that is overwhelmingly strong.
01:46:59.000 Inequality drives crime.
01:47:01.000 Now, you can argue about why, but the fact that it does, that's not disputable.
01:47:05.000 So we could have an intelligent discussion between the left and the right, and the discussion would go something like this.
01:47:11.000 You need innovation.
01:47:12.000 You pay for innovation with inequality.
01:47:14.000 But you need to bind inequality because if it's too intense, then things destabilize.
01:47:18.000 It's like, okay, we can agree on that.
01:47:19.000 We've got the parameters set.
01:47:21.000 Now we have to start thinking very carefully through how to do the redistribution issue, and we don't know how to do that.
01:47:27.000 So you might say, well, we have a guaranteed annual income for people, which I think is a horrible solution, by the way, but it addresses the right problem.
01:47:34.000 The problem is that we're hyperproductive, but the spoils go to those at the top, and some of those resources need to be funneled down to the people who have zero, so that they have an opportunity to at least get to the point where they can innovate, and so the whole bloody thing doesn't wobble and fall.
01:47:51.000 And I would say, in some sense, that's what the political discussion is about.
01:47:55.000 But we've skittered off into these radical oversimplifications, which is something like, well, if you have more than another person, you're an oppressor, and you're evil.
01:48:05.000 And if you have less, it's because you're virtuous and victimized.
01:48:09.000 And that's just a non-starter.
01:48:10.000 So you think that there's a real problem with something like universal basic income?
01:48:15.000 You think it's a horrible idea?
01:48:16.000 Well, I think the idea that the solution is a basic income is not a good idea because I think the problem is deeper than that.
01:48:23.000 I don't think the fundamental problem is that people don't have enough money.
01:48:27.000 I think the fundamental problem is that human beings in some sense are beasts of burden and if they're not given, if they're not provided with a place where they can accept social responsibility, social and individual responsibility in an honourable manner, they degenerate and die.
01:48:43.000 That's the opiate crisis in the West right now.
01:48:46.000 Men who are men don't need money.
01:48:51.000 They need function.
01:48:52.000 And we've got a problem.
01:48:54.000 One of the problems is, for example, here's an ugly stat.
01:48:56.000 I think I told you this once before.
01:48:58.000 It's illegal to induct anyone into the armed forces if they have an IQ of less than 83. And the reason for that is the Armed Forces, despite having every reason to draw the contradictory conclusion, has decided that there isn't a single thing that you can be trained to do in the military if you have an IQ of less than 83 that isn't positively counterproductive.
01:49:20.000 That's 10% of the population.
01:49:23.000 And we're producing a culture that's very cognitively complex.
01:49:27.000 Like, what the hell are you going to do if you can't use a computer?
01:49:30.000 Like, if you can use a computer, you're at least in the game.
01:49:32.000 If you can really use one, you're hyper-powerful.
01:49:35.000 If you're not literate enough to use a computer, you're at zero.
01:49:40.000 Ten percent of the population.
01:49:41.000 The conservatives say, well, there's a job for everyone if they just worked hard enough.
01:49:45.000 It's like, ah, no, and increasingly no.
01:49:48.000 And the liberals say, well, everyone's basically the same, and you can train anyone to do anything.
01:49:52.000 It's like, no, you can't.
01:49:55.000 I want to go back to the inequality point here, because if you look at this biologically, actually, I think it reveals a lot.
01:50:02.000 Why are we, I mean, we know from careful study that people are motivated by the degree of inequality more than they are the absolute level of well-being that they have.
01:50:16.000 And there's a very good, it's tragic, but a very good evolutionary reason for this, which is if you are working on some piece of land and your neighbor has the adjacent piece of land and they're doing twice as well as you, it's because they know something you don't.
01:50:31.000 Right?
01:50:32.000 And so becoming focused on what they're doing that you're not doing is a rational thing to spend your time on.
01:50:39.000 So you can figure out what it is that they know that you don't.
01:50:41.000 In the modern environment, this is a catastrophe.
01:50:44.000 Because who are your neighbors?
01:50:45.000 Well, you've got some box sitting on the wall of your living room that has a totally artificial portrait of other people.
01:50:52.000 Who may be much wealthier than you, and it's broadcasting in as if you're looking in their window, right, in the adjacent house.
01:50:59.000 And so you think, you're being triggered to think that you're doing something wrong that you might fix, when in fact the solution may not be, first of all, the person on the other side of that screen may not be for real, but even if they are, they're not living in the same environment as you.
01:51:14.000 The technology is interfacing with our brains badly.
01:51:19.000 So we have the perception of massive inequality.
01:51:23.000 Economically, we do have massive inequality.
01:51:25.000 You're arguing that the solution to this involves some sort of massive redistribution?
01:51:30.000 A solution.
01:51:32.000 A solution.
01:51:32.000 But nonetheless, redistribution is wildly unpopular for various reasons.
01:51:37.000 And so what we've got now is a situation...
01:51:42.000 This is speculative, but what's really happening is that austerity is being used as a threat to keep people who would otherwise rebel against the inequality in line.
01:51:52.000 And my fear about this is that this is exactly the conditions that are going to trigger that Tribal population against population mayhem that we were talking about at the beginning of this conversation.
01:52:07.000 That when people have the sense that the burst of growth that they were experiencing is now over, the natural response is to turn on those who are not as powerful and take their stuff.
01:52:19.000 That this is a totally indefensible, but nonetheless biological pattern of history.
01:52:25.000 And that if we want to avoid that, we have to stop sending the signals that trigger us to imagine that we've just run to the limit of the opportunity that we had discovered, and it is now time to look and see who can't defend their position.
01:52:39.000 How are we sending these signals?
01:52:40.000 Well, by...
01:52:43.000 Basically, failing to provide enough well-being that people's perception of the inequality is reduced to a tolerable level.
01:52:53.000 That's the argument for universal basic income, right?
01:52:56.000 It's certainly a strong one.
01:52:59.000 It's also a good argument for equality of opportunity, right?
01:53:02.000 Because people are actually not as resentful about the success of others as you might expect.
01:53:09.000 They're resentful about it if they feel that the game is fixed.
01:53:13.000 But they're also willing to consider the game long term.
01:53:16.000 So lots of people will say, look, I'm stuck at Not zero.
01:53:19.000 I'm stuck at one.
01:53:20.000 But my kids might make it to four.
01:53:22.000 And that's good enough.
01:53:23.000 And that's been the American dream, right?
01:53:25.000 And that's a really high power antidote to inequality.
01:53:29.000 It's like, well, yeah, there's some inequality.
01:53:31.000 We need it to keep the generative mechanism going.
01:53:34.000 But the game is fair and you can play it too.
01:53:36.000 And there's some reasonable probability that either you or someone you love will be successful.
01:53:40.000 So...
01:53:41.000 So it has to be a straight game.
01:53:43.000 And that's why ethics is so important to keep this landscape stable.
01:53:46.000 People can't play crooked games.
01:53:48.000 And the rich shouldn't be fixing the game if they want to hold on to their money.
01:53:51.000 And the problem is that some of them, although not all, some of them are fixing the game.
01:53:58.000 And no one's happy about that.
01:53:59.000 And no wonder.
01:54:01.000 And I guess that was evidenced to some degree by the 2008 collapse, because it seemed...
01:54:09.000 And I'm just as uninformed as the next person, so I'm capable of commenting on this.
01:54:16.000 It seems from the outside.
01:54:18.000 That the rich disproportionately benefited from the re-stabilization of the economic system.
01:54:23.000 And people are not happy about that.
01:54:25.000 And they shouldn't be happy about that because it indicates that there's something fundamentally rotten about the game.
01:54:30.000 So you could say, well, maybe people can tolerate necessary inequality if the game isn't rigged.
01:54:34.000 And so that's why everybody has to act in a manner that indicates that the game isn't rigged.
01:54:39.000 And that means they can't rig it.
01:54:40.000 That's really what it means.
01:54:43.000 So, we're also being driven into this inequality corner by, I would say, by the postmodernists and the neo-Marxists, because they say, this is the pernicious thing, they say, well, the reason that some people have more than others is because every hierarchy is based on arbitrary power,
01:54:59.000 and they're all oppressors.
01:55:01.000 And the reason they have the money is because they stole it from you.
01:55:05.000 And there's some truth in that, because there are some criminals.
01:55:09.000 But when you get to the point where you fail to distinguish the productive people from the criminals, which is exactly what happened in the 1920s in the Soviet Union, you better bloody well watch out, because when you radically make things egalitarian, you're going to wipe out all your productive people,
01:55:24.000 and then you're going to starve.
01:55:26.000 And so that's one of the doom-end scenarios that awaits us if this idiot process of polarization continues.
01:55:34.000 And what I find reprehensible about the universities, and you're tangled up, right up to your neck in this, is that the universities are actively agitating to produce people who believe that all inequality is due to oppression and power.
01:55:48.000 And that's just, well, first of all, it's technically wrong, but it's dangerous.
01:55:52.000 But why is that, though?
01:55:53.000 You guys both operate in that system, so what...
01:55:58.000 Here's the problem.
01:55:59.000 As far as I know, nobody has properly studied the question of what fraction of the economy is actually crooked, rent-seeking, right?
01:56:10.000 Not productive.
01:56:11.000 And I fear that the answer to that question is that it's an awful large fraction of the economy, not because of some conspiracy, but because opportunity is finite, but con games aren't.
01:56:25.000 And so anybody who can find a mechanism for transferring wealth from somebody else for doing nothing finds that mechanism.
01:56:32.000 And that thing is ever-present.
01:56:34.000 Whereas discovering the next big thing that's actually productive is, you know, something that goes along and fits and starts.
01:56:41.000 And so if we were, I mean, really, you've described it very well.
01:56:45.000 We've got a battle between two caricatures of what's true.
01:56:51.000 Either the market is wonderful and it's producing great stuff with very little corruption, or everything that makes people unequal is the result of corruption.
01:57:01.000 Both of these things are wrong.
01:57:03.000 Markets are marvelous engines for figuring out how to do something really well.
01:57:09.000 They're brilliant at this.
01:57:11.000 And so people who see that fall in love with it, understandably, because they're so good at it.
01:57:15.000 But what they're terrible at is telling you what you should want or what you should do.
01:57:20.000 Right?
01:57:20.000 If people tell markets, here's what we would like to accomplish, and then the markets tell us, well, how do we accomplish that best?
01:57:27.000 That would be a very viable system that would not result in massive rent seeking, resulting in everybody feeling that all of their misfortunes are the result of a rigged game, which is so massively rigged that when they check, they see, yes, that is actually, to a large extent,
01:57:43.000 what we're suffering from.
01:57:45.000 But they want to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
01:57:47.000 And so they want to throw out markets entirely, which, you know, would be a terrible mistake.
01:57:55.000 It's a...
01:57:58.000 You asked, Jill, why this has happened in the universities.
01:58:02.000 I think it's one of these runaway positive feedback processes.
01:58:05.000 You know, the universities start to tilt hard to the left in the 60s.
01:58:09.000 And that just went out of control.
01:58:11.000 And now we're at the point where that's the dominant force.
01:58:16.000 Why is probably another manifestation of one of these Pareto principles.
01:58:21.000 It was like, well, at some point there's enough lefties hired so that the probability that they're only going to hire people equally as left or greater starts to reach 100%.
01:58:30.000 And then you iterate that across a couple of generations and you get no conservatives, which is more or less the situation, say, in the humanities and most of the social sciences.
01:58:39.000 And it sort of looks like a conspiracy, but it doesn't mean that anyone is actually planning it, although there are conscious attempts also to silence conservative voices, let's say.
01:58:48.000 And then that's also driven by this postmodern ethos, neo-Marxist ethos, I would say, that says that all of the right, the moral right, is on the side of the left.
01:58:57.000 You know, and so it's the combination of those two things.
01:59:00.000 There's more things.
01:59:01.000 I think, I often think comically that if you paid sociology professors three times as much, the probability that they would be anti-capitalist would decline precipitously.
01:59:12.000 Like, I think a lot of it's driven, because there's a lot of smart people in academia, and they're underpaid relative to their intelligence.
01:59:20.000 So, and that doesn't make them happy, so they get bitter and resentful about that, and they think, well, there's these goddamn bankers who are hauling in $20 million a year, and here I am, hardly struggling, but here I am struggling comparatively, and that's the issue, is comparatively, on $100,000 a year,
01:59:37.000 $120,000 a year.
01:59:39.000 You know, I look at that and I think, well, whatever.
01:59:42.000 It doesn't matter.
01:59:43.000 But there's a, like, my colleagues are often angry with me because I do work with the business school.
01:59:49.000 You know, and I also have a business.
01:59:51.000 I'm not anti-capitalist in the least.
01:59:53.000 But it's just dumbfounding to me because they'll come up to me and say, well, are you so sure that you should be working with a business school?
01:59:59.000 And I think, what bloody planet are you from to posit a question like that?
02:00:04.000 It's all businessmen are evil.
02:00:05.000 It's like, really?
02:00:06.000 That's the level of your sophistication?
02:00:09.000 This is really an argument that's been presented to you that businessmen are evil?
02:00:13.000 Well, they don't come out and say that, but they certainly question my motivations, for example, in forming ties with the business school.
02:00:19.000 Like, what do they say about it?
02:00:20.000 They say exactly that.
02:00:22.000 They question my ethics about forming ties with the business school.
02:00:26.000 But they don't give you any reasons?
02:00:28.000 The reason's supposed to be self-evident, Joe.
02:00:31.000 Well, so let's give this argument its due.
02:00:34.000 I mean, I don't buy this argument, but nonetheless, let's not caricature it.
02:00:40.000 Yes, that's good.
02:00:42.000 In an absolutely free market, which is not what we have, but we have something that tends in that direction.
02:00:49.000 In an absolutely free market, if you compete two individuals, one of whom is completely amoral, will embrace any opportunity if it makes a profit, no matter what it is, and the other individual has some limit to what they will do.
02:01:03.000 Well, then there's no question who wins.
02:01:05.000 If we give this experiment a long enough period, the individual who will do anything will out-compete the individual with moral limits.
02:01:13.000 Doesn't it depend on what the game is, though?
02:01:14.000 No.
02:01:15.000 Because if people find out that you have no moral limits, then they're going to remove themselves from your market.
02:01:21.000 Unfortunately not.
02:01:22.000 No?
02:01:23.000 I know it seems like that, and in any given round, that's true.
02:01:27.000 Okay.
02:01:27.000 But to the extent that what you're saying is to the extent that people police their purchasing and they will, you know, they will stop using Uber if Uber is ethically compromised, for example.
02:01:41.000 Well, then the point is, well, what's the game?
02:01:42.000 The game is to figure out which things are being monitored and not do any of the unethical things that are being monitored, but to do all of the unethical things that aren't being monitored.
02:01:52.000 And so the individual who is perceiving Which things they can get away with has an advantage.
02:01:57.000 That's the psychopath advantage.
02:02:00.000 Well, I don't even want to call it the psychopath advantage, right?
02:02:03.000 What this is, is that a market will train you to do this if it is unregulated.
02:02:09.000 And the best that the ethically restrained person can do is compete dead even.
02:02:17.000 They have no way of getting ahead because the person that is completely free, the amoral Like tech people.
02:02:45.000 Right.
02:02:45.000 Tech people who have skyrocketed as a result of having innovated the next big thing have not been through the markets training them to discover the landscape of what isn't being monitored that you can make a profit.
02:02:59.000 That's one of the fascinating things about tech people in general is that these gigantic tech corporations almost all lean left.
02:03:04.000 Well, the gigantic tech corporations lean left.
02:03:07.000 That's true.
02:03:08.000 On the other hand, I mean, I hate to say it, but think about how Google started, right?
02:03:13.000 Don't be evil.
02:03:15.000 I think they actually meant that.
02:03:17.000 And the thing is, don't be evil is what it sounds like when you haven't been trained by the market to have to do whatever you have to do to beat your competition.
02:03:26.000 You've just come up with the great search engine and suddenly you're on top of the world.
02:03:31.000 But, over time, what happens?
02:03:34.000 That entity is now exposed to competition from a bunch of other entities that increasingly will find an advantage in being freer to do ethically questionable stuff.
02:03:45.000 And so what it does is it forces an entity like Google to evolve in the direction of amorality.
02:03:52.000 So now, don't be evil.
02:03:53.000 It kind of happened with China and Google.
02:03:55.000 Yeah.
02:03:55.000 Because Google wanted to expand into China.
02:03:57.000 And so, you know, they had to make a deal with the devil, so to speak.
02:04:01.000 Right.
02:04:01.000 They had to accept censorship.
02:04:03.000 They will find ways to rationalize everything because to not rationalize that which their competitors can avail themselves of would be to perish.
02:04:11.000 One of the issues was there was all sorts of fake Google going on, just like they have fake Apple stores in China.
02:04:18.000 They don't have the same sort of copyright laws that we have, and you can essentially plagiarize anything you want.
02:04:24.000 Brett, you also said that I shouldn't make a straw man of the anti-business argument of my peers.
02:04:29.000 And there's another way that I shouldn't make a straw man of it.
02:04:33.000 Like, despite the fact that I'm not anti-capitalist, I don't believe that every entity is a business either.
02:04:39.000 And one of the things that has happened to universities that has actually pathologized in a number of dimensions, but...
02:04:45.000 They've also pathologized along the business dimension as the administrators have become increasingly trained or drawn from the ranks of business managers.
02:04:53.000 Because a university is actually not a business.
02:04:56.000 It's like a church isn't a business.
02:04:58.000 There are organizations that aren't businesses that you can't just cram into the free market structure willy-nilly.
02:05:04.000 And so my colleagues also object to the To the transformation of the university into a business entity run by profit-seeking MBAs.
02:05:12.000 And they should object to that because that's not what the institution is for.
02:05:16.000 So there are reasons for them to be skeptical, say, of my association with the business school that aren't merely a reflection of a simplistic anti-capitalist ideology.
02:05:25.000 Oh, there are lots of things that are not I think?
02:05:51.000 Markets are wonderful, but there's certain things they shouldn't be allowed to touch, and there are certain things that they shouldn't do, like tell us what to want, right?
02:05:59.000 There's no magic principle by which a market knows what's healthy and what, you know, you might crave but shouldn't have.
02:06:06.000 Well, that also then brings us back to another part of the conservative liberal left dilemma, which is, well, you know, To direct the market means to impose the heavy hand of the state and its potential pathologies on the market,
02:06:23.000 but to leave it alone completely means that it wanders randomly through an indeterminate landscape.
02:06:30.000 And I guess part of the issue there, too, is it's sort of like, well, how do we How do we properly balance foresight and planning, which you'd think would have some role in the construction of large-scale states?
02:06:44.000 It's like, well, what do we want the landscape to look like?
02:06:47.000 How do we balance that with the sort of comprehensive computations that the market allows?
02:06:52.000 And, of course, the answer to that is we have political discussions about it all the time that are untrammeled so that we can adjust the ratio between those two things as necessary.
02:07:01.000 So, again, that's an argument on the side of free speech, right?
02:07:06.000 Yeah, I mean, really, it couldn't be more important.
02:07:08.000 The real answer is that both failures are frightening.
02:07:12.000 Right.
02:07:12.000 Right?
02:07:12.000 You really don't want a state nannying you and over-regulating the market and taking the magic out of it.
02:07:20.000 And you don't want the completely unregulated landscape where the market, you know, starts probing the minds of your children and figuring out how to sell them things that they don't have any ability to resist.
02:07:31.000 Right?
02:07:31.000 You need to figure out what that path is.
02:07:34.000 And it's not easy, but...
02:07:36.000 You can't do it in a landscape where you can't talk about the questions.
02:07:38.000 And this brings us to censorship, doesn't it?
02:07:40.000 Because this is a real issue with the marketplace of free ideas.
02:07:44.000 When you're talking about whether it's Google or YouTube or whoever might be imposing their own morality and their own ideas on what you should and should not be able to discuss and what should and should not be monetized, you're essentially imposing these limits I've read once,
02:08:03.000 and it's a very good point, that freedom breeds inequality.
02:08:06.000 Because you're free to put as much effort as you'd like into something, and you're going to get unequal results.
02:08:13.000 And that if you are truly free, in a free world, some people are going to do far better than others, and just based on their own input, just based on their effort, just based on the amount of focus and dedication they have, it is very unequal.
02:08:26.000 You know, I know many people that are far more dedicated than other people that I know, and they do better.
02:08:32.000 Yeah, well, that's well buttressed by the empirical literature, because, well, I mentioned earlier that the two best predictors of long-term success are intelligence and conscientiousness.
02:08:42.000 And what intelligence is probably something like the number of credible operations that you can manifest in a given period of time.
02:08:50.000 It's something like speed.
02:08:51.000 Now, it's not only that, but speed's a big part of it.
02:08:54.000 So if what you're doing is working and you can do it faster, that works better.
02:08:58.000 Okay, that's pretty damn straightforward.
02:09:01.000 And the next thing is, well, conscientiousness.
02:09:03.000 Well, conscientiousness would be something like how many of those cycles of effort are devoted to that specific task?
02:09:10.000 And it turns out that if there's a relationship between the effort and task success, more effort is better.
02:09:16.000 And so I can give you some indication of the power of that.
02:09:20.000 So if you have good measures of conscientiousness and IQ... You can predict someone's success in a competitive landscape with a correlation of about 0.6.
02:09:28.000 And what that would mean is, imagine that you tried to pick people, you just said, randomly, you're going to be a success in the top half of the successful people, say, and you're going to be in the bottom half.
02:09:39.000 You'd have a 50% chance of making that selection correctly if you did it randomly.
02:09:46.000 If you did it informed by the results of a good cognitive test and a conscientious test, you'd be right 85% of the time.
02:09:53.000 So you could say with 85% accuracy which of two people would be more likely to be in the top 50%.
02:09:59.000 So it's a whopping effect, and it's actually some validation for the essential integrity of our system, because we hope, given that it's essentially an open meritocracy, that smarter, hardworking people would do better.
02:10:12.000 And they do.
02:10:13.000 Now other factors apply.
02:10:15.000 Well, lots of factors apply.
02:10:17.000 I mean, for one thing, wrapped up in IQ is a big question, which is how much of the differences in IQ that exist is democratizable.
02:10:27.000 That is to say, how much of this is the result of environments that aren't enriching, or there's lead in the water, or who knows what.
02:10:35.000 Not enough vitamins.
02:10:36.000 Right.
02:10:36.000 My sense, actually, my intuition based on what I know biologically is that a huge fraction, maybe all of it, but a huge fraction of differences in IQ is actually, could be generalized.
02:10:49.000 And that's part of equal opportunity.
02:10:51.000 It's not an equal opportunity.
02:10:53.000 See, I'm way more pessimistic about that.
02:10:55.000 And that's partly because...
02:10:57.000 I mean, maybe, because I'm interested in the amelioration of differences.
02:11:02.000 So, for example, that's why I built this future authoring program.
02:11:05.000 It's like, hey, if we can figure out how to make people more effective, well, let's do it.
02:11:10.000 So I scoured the literature on IQ enhancement, and it's bloody dismal, man.
02:11:16.000 It's rough.
02:11:16.000 It's very, very difficult to put together a cognitive training program.
02:11:20.000 Like, some things have worked in a major way.
02:11:23.000 Like, the fact that people aren't starving has wiped out, has moved the bottom of the IQ distribution way up over the last hundred years.
02:11:31.000 That's been like a walloping success.
02:11:33.000 But a lot of the things that we hoped would work, like Head Start's a good example of that.
02:11:38.000 You know, Head Start was part of the American War on Poverty, and the idea was you'd give...
02:11:42.000 You know, deprived kids leg up early before they hit school and start training them cognitively earlier.
02:11:51.000 And the hope was that you'd get a Pareto thing going where they'd be a little smarter in kindergarten and then they'd do a little better in grade one and that would make them do even more better in grade two.
02:12:01.000 More better.
02:12:02.000 Do better in grade two.
02:12:03.000 But what happened What happened was that the kids who went through Head Start actually did get a cognitive jump on their competitors, but all the other kids caught up by grade 6. And by grade 6, there was absolutely no effect whatsoever of the training program left.
02:12:18.000 Now, Head Start did have a couple of benefits.
02:12:20.000 One was fewer teenage pregnancies and fewer dropouts.
02:12:24.000 But that was probably because the kids who got into Head Start were either socialized better or that some fraction of them were removed for some time from extremely toxic environments just while they happened to be at Head Start.
02:12:37.000 But it didn't produce the cognitive improvements that everyone, right and left, were equally hoping for.
02:12:43.000 Yeah, but this is in some sense...
02:12:47.000 It's very much an uncontrolled experiment, right?
02:12:49.000 Absolutely.
02:12:50.000 Because A, Head Start starts late.
02:12:52.000 Yep.
02:12:53.000 And B, it doesn't insulate you from all of the stuff that comes along with growing up in the deprived neighborhood.
02:13:00.000 Oh, absolutely.
02:13:01.000 We really don't know what the truth is of...
02:13:06.000 Of human IQ. And there are some results that suggest some things that are not hopeful.
02:13:12.000 On the other hand, some of them just simply run afoul with the biological realities of intelligence.
02:13:20.000 Well, here's a good example of the lack of malleability.
02:13:23.000 I mean, there's a couple of things.
02:13:24.000 The first is that we may already be at a point of diminishing returns in terms of It's eliminating individual differences in IQ because everyone has central heating, everyone has air conditioning, everyone has enough food, everyone has access to an infinite pool of information.
02:13:40.000 So you could say even if you're in a deprived environment but you're smart, the intellectual landscape is wide open to you.
02:13:47.000 Now, I'm not saying that's the case, but you can make a case for that.
02:13:50.000 But the more dismal end of the biological research on IQ shows things like if you take identical twins at birth and you put them in, Adopted out families that the IQ of the adopted out twins is much closer, A,
02:14:05.000 to the original biological parents than to the adoptive parents, and B, almost perfectly correlated with one another, and that correlation increases as the separated twins age.
02:14:15.000 So let's say you had a twin, you were both adopted out at birth.
02:14:20.000 We test your IQs at four.
02:14:21.000 They're fairly close.
02:14:23.000 They're closer to your biological parents than your adoptive parents, but then we test you every year until you're 60. By the time you're 60, no matter how long you've been separated as an identical twin, your IQ score is so much like your twin's IQ score that it's as if the same person was being tested twice.
02:14:40.000 And that's a really complicated one because you think, well, as twins travel through the environment and accrue different Experiences, their IQs should diverge.
02:14:51.000 Like, obviously.
02:14:52.000 That's not what happens.
02:14:54.000 They converge.
02:14:55.000 So there are a lot of places to critique that.
02:14:58.000 For one thing, there aren't very many identical twins raised apart.
02:15:01.000 It's a small sample.
02:15:03.000 This is definitely true.
02:15:04.000 Do those identical twins raised apart carry with them whatever effects there were from before they were born?
02:15:12.000 Sure, and they look the same.
02:15:13.000 And so if they've been damaged by an environment that was unhealthy for their mother when she was pregnant, then they would carry that through and it would show up as...
02:15:31.000 I think?
02:15:44.000 An environment in which we can say anything, that we can advance any argument and test it.
02:15:50.000 It doesn't mean that that argument is protected, but that any argument can be advanced and then challenged, that that is inherent to navigating.
02:15:57.000 And the other thing that I think we would agree on is that equality of opportunity is nothing but good.
02:16:04.000 Right.
02:16:04.000 A fair game with equality of opportunity.
02:16:06.000 A fair game with equality of opportunity.
02:16:08.000 And I guess one thing I would add, I don't know if we would agree on this, but you were talking about the fact that, I forget which thing exactly, but that a system based on merit produces inequality because people will...
02:16:22.000 Freedom.
02:16:23.000 Yeah, that freedom produces inequality.
02:16:24.000 That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it doesn't mean that we are obligated to ride it all the way down.
02:16:31.000 The fact is we could make people safe to fail so that you are encouraged to attempt to do something highly valuable.
02:16:41.000 And if it doesn't work out, then the point is you're not homeless.
02:16:46.000 This would be the argument for something like universal basic income, that your needs are taken care of, your food, your shelter, and now you're free to pursue any ideas that you might have that you would ordinarily be saddled down by your issues with food.
02:17:03.000 There is some evidence of that actually happening in Canada.
02:17:07.000 Now, these are multi-variable problems, and so I'm not claiming that this is true, but it's suggestive.
02:17:14.000 The rate of entrepreneurial activity in Canada is actually higher than in the United States.
02:17:19.000 And one reason for that appears to be the fact that if you're 25, 27, let's say, and you have a family, you can quit your job and start a startup and you don't lose your health care.
02:17:31.000 Right?
02:17:32.000 And so, now, you know, the issue of universal healthcare is obviously a very thorny one, and it's not like the Canadian system works perfectly.
02:17:39.000 But it doesn't work too badly, and we've been able to manage it for about 50 years.
02:17:44.000 You know, we have...
02:17:44.000 There's artificial scarcity in the system, and the delay times are longer than they would be if you flew to the Mayo Clinic and bought your healthcare.
02:17:53.000 Like, I would say, at the high end, the American healthcare system is better than the Canadian healthcare system.
02:17:59.000 But I would say at the middle and at the low end, the Canadian health care system is clearly preferable and it's also cheaper, which is quite interesting because you would expect, especially if you're a free market type, that, you know, I know the health care system in the U.S. is not precisely free market,
02:18:14.000 but it is more so than it is in Canada, yet Americans pay a substantially higher proportion of their overall, devote a higher proportion of their overall GDP to personal health care that Canadians do.
02:18:25.000 And the stats are similar if you look at other There's a great piece on that by Adam Ruins Everything.
02:18:35.000 Have you ever seen that television show?
02:18:36.000 It's really interesting.
02:18:37.000 He breaks down pretty much a lot of different subjects, but breaks down the American healthcare system to pretty much where it went wrong.
02:18:46.000 And I just encourage anybody to go watch it because it just shows how they elevated the price of all sorts of different things.
02:18:52.000 Make up for, you know, lack of profits.
02:18:55.000 And it's a really fascinating little piece.
02:18:58.000 We are already almost three hours into this.
02:19:02.000 So we haven't talked about Hitler.
02:19:04.000 Oh my goodness.
02:19:05.000 Well, we kind of have.
02:19:06.000 We kind of did.
02:19:07.000 We kind of have.
02:19:07.000 But let me just...
02:19:09.000 Do you want to lay out your argument about Hitler and then I'll respond to it and...
02:19:14.000 I don't know if I do want to.
02:19:16.000 I mean, I actually think that I should stop, because I'm kind of at the limits of...
02:19:22.000 I'm at the point where the probability that I will say something stupid is starting to increase, and I would rather not, because just saying the things that I'm trying to say that aren't stupid is dangerous enough.
02:19:32.000 Yes, this isn't the topic where you want to make that kind of error.
02:19:35.000 Yes, yes.
02:19:35.000 So I would say maybe...
02:19:36.000 Boy, is there a more charged subject...
02:19:39.000 It's funny that it's charged, because as you point out, we're pretty much all in agreement about it, right?
02:19:44.000 I mean, you find someone who's not, and they're instantly ostracized from society.
02:19:49.000 Right.
02:19:50.000 I mean, anybody who has an argument about Genghis Khan, I mean, there's a really fascinating take on this by Dan Carlin from Hardcore History, where he's talking about the amount of time that has passed since a horrible atrocity.
02:20:02.000 And that there are people that will argue that Genghis Khan, who killed 10% of the world's population, changed things so badly that it literally lowered the carbon footprint of the human race while he was alive.
02:20:14.000 Killed some untold number of millions of people and was responsible for their deaths.
02:20:19.000 People look to him and they find all sorts of positive things to attribute to his reign.
02:20:24.000 Opening up trade with China, opening up trade routes, all these different things that people have attributed to him, and that someday someone may do the same thing about Adolf Hitler.
02:20:37.000 Right now, that is impossible.
02:20:39.000 He certainly made that job very difficult with all of the documentation, especially the films.
02:20:46.000 Yes.
02:20:48.000 But let's just say the argument that I want to level, I want to be really careful to do this so that it can't be misinterpreted by anybody.
02:20:55.000 I'm going to enjoy watching this.
02:20:57.000 Are you?
02:20:57.000 Okay.
02:20:59.000 If I'm cornered, will you come out?
02:21:02.000 No way, man.
02:21:03.000 The knives are going out.
02:21:04.000 Oh, no.
02:21:06.000 Okay.
02:21:06.000 So my argument from all those years ago in my paper that I did for Bob Trevers that I mentioned at the beginning was Was that Hitler was a monster, as we all know.
02:21:18.000 But he was a rational monster.
02:21:21.000 That the program that he deployed was not what he said, mind you.
02:21:26.000 What he said was wrong in many places, especially where it gets near Darwinism.
02:21:31.000 It's just all tangled and broken.
02:21:33.000 But what he did was rational from the point of view of...
02:21:50.000 And so my point is this is the danger that we are in if we allow ourselves to imagine that Genocidal impulses are more or less gone from the world because we've all agreed that they're a bad thing.
02:22:08.000 And the point is that they exist in a latent program.
02:22:12.000 And at a point when you have austerity as a result of usually a...
02:22:19.000 An opportunity that has run its course and has resulted in the population growing to fill that opportunity.
02:22:25.000 And suddenly there's nowhere to go because the opportunity has all been absorbed.
02:22:29.000 The tendency of people is to figure out who, what other population is weak.
02:22:35.000 And if that population is across a border, then there's some excuse for war.
02:22:39.000 And if the population is within the border, then it's a genocide.
02:22:42.000 But the point is that is an ever present danger for us.
02:22:46.000 I want to clarify one thing.
02:22:48.000 Because this argument was sort of phrased as, we have a disagreement about Hitler.
02:22:52.000 And I would like to point out that I don't actually disagree with anything that you just said.
02:22:57.000 If I remain relatively silent, I don't want it to be seen that the fact that I'm disagreeing with you means, or that there is a disagreement, means that it's a disagreement about any of that.
02:23:09.000 I think the disagreement was something like, I said that Hitler was even more evil than we thought he was.
02:23:14.000 And I think, correct me if I'm wrong, you're pointing out the danger of assuming that you can put Hitler in a, he was just a monster box, and don't think about it anymore.
02:23:25.000 And I would say I agree absolutely with that.
02:23:28.000 I mean, I've studied Hitler a lot, and there's a bunch of things that you can't say about him.
02:23:33.000 You can't say he was stupid.
02:23:35.000 You can't say he was without artistic talent.
02:23:39.000 You can't say that he was a poor organizer.
02:23:41.000 You can't say that he wasn't charismatic.
02:23:44.000 You can't say that he did wonders for Germany's economy in the first part of his reign.
02:23:50.000 And so it's very necessary if you're dealing intelligently with a true monster that you give the devil his due.
02:24:00.000 Yeah.
02:24:01.000 So I think the thing that I saw in your video was, your argument was that as he was losing, instead of putting the genocide on pause and...
02:24:13.000 Winning.
02:24:14.000 And winning the war.
02:24:15.000 And winning, that he ratcheted up the genocide.
02:24:18.000 Yeah.
02:24:18.000 I don't know if it would really be.
02:24:19.000 I don't think it's necessarily fair to say that it was him that did that, although I think he had a hand in it.
02:24:24.000 It does appear to me that that's what happened.
02:24:27.000 Right.
02:24:27.000 And my point would simply be, and again, I couldn't possibly be less sympathetic with the individual.
02:24:36.000 My point is simply that from an evolutionary point of view, if your objective is coldly to increase the number of genomes that are spelled the same way that yours are on Earth, that A... He did enslave those Jews who were most fit to work in service of the German war machine,
02:24:55.000 right?
02:24:55.000 That's what those camps, and not all of the camps were work camps.
02:24:59.000 But, you know, Auschwitz, for example, was both a work camp and a death camp.
02:25:03.000 And so there was this tendency to enslave.
02:25:08.000 So let me ask you a question about this, because, you know, I think you have to make a pretty tenuous biological argument to say that there's evolutionary utility in increasing the number of your kinsmen, unless they're very close.
02:25:21.000 But here's a slight variation of that.
02:25:23.000 You tell me what you think about this.
02:25:26.000 Is it reasonable to presume that a decent survival strategy is to homogenize your environment with regards to, under some conditions, to homogenize your environment with regards to racial or ethnic differences, to decrease the probability that you and yours are going to be killed?
02:25:43.000 Oh, yeah.
02:25:44.000 Again, no defense of this, but you are right, that to the extent that there's another population that's distinct, that that population, even if it is small and Okay, okay.
02:26:02.000 Okay.
02:26:28.000 Okay, so all I'm arguing What Hitler did was go after a population inside his border that was more distantly related to the people who were his constituents.
02:26:46.000 And then he went, obviously, after Eastern Europe and sought the future of Germany in Russia.
02:26:53.000 And it took 12 million Russians to turn around the German war machine.
02:26:59.000 I mean, those are military deaths.
02:27:01.000 There were vastly more civilian deaths.
02:27:02.000 But the point is, He did not succeed in doing what he set out to do, but he also didn't fail in the sense that he took a bunch of resources that belonged to a population that was more distantly related, and he got rid of those people.
02:27:21.000 And by getting rid of them, increased the amount of resource that was available to Aryans.
02:27:26.000 This has nothing to do Genes are not interested in figuring out which genes are superior.
02:27:33.000 All of the language about German superiority is nonsense.
02:27:37.000 However, genes are very interested.
02:27:40.000 I mean, they're obviously genes they don't think, but they act as if they are interested in replacing alternative spellings.
02:27:47.000 Okay, and so part of the reason that you're walking through this, just so that the track of this remains self-evident, Is to caution people against, to alert people to the fact that the sorts of programs that Hitler both ran and elicited from people are lurking in our,
02:28:06.000 let's say, in our genome, in our set of biological possibilities.
02:28:10.000 And we have to be very awake to that fact on an ongoing basis.
02:28:14.000 They are lurking in our genomes, which does not mean that we as adults have this as a possibility.
02:28:19.000 Many people will not go along with this.
02:28:21.000 Other people have it lurking to be triggered.
02:28:24.000 And I think, you know, what worries me is that Trump, I think very cynically, Utilized this lurking program in order to gain office.
02:28:34.000 That he played upon the fact that certain people were waiting to hear those noises.
02:28:38.000 And what he said about Charlottesville, you know, again, he did not go after the white nationalists.
02:28:48.000 Did you see the white nationalist response?
02:28:50.000 No.
02:28:51.000 Yeah, the daily storm had, is that what it's called?
02:28:54.000 One of the white nationalist papers had a breakdown of what Trump did, and that essentially at the end they were saying, he didn't go after us, he didn't target us, this was very good.
02:29:03.000 He was very clear that it was all sides, and that he never once targeted us, he didn't say anything bad about us.
02:29:09.000 And then they said, God bless Trump at the end of it.
02:29:12.000 There's a real tricky issue there about truth, you know, because my free speech, the free speech panel that I was a part of was cancelled.
02:29:22.000 I had to make comments in the Canadian media about Charlottesville.
02:29:26.000 And so I really had to think about what Trump said because the fact that there is reprehensible behavior on both sides of the extremes of the distribution is true.
02:29:38.000 However, Truth is a tricky thing because you have to take the temporal context into account.
02:29:44.000 You know, because I would say you can imagine that there are white lies and black truths.
02:29:49.000 A black truth is when you use the truth in a way that isn't truthful, just like a white lie is when you use, when you lie in a way that isn't harmful.
02:29:58.000 You can use the truth to wound and hurt and what that really means is that you've misused the truth and so it's actually a complex form of lie.
02:30:05.000 But what Trump did wrong, this is independent of whether or not he was actually engaging in manipulation or deceit, was he failed to specify the time and the place for the utterance because what he should have come out and done was said, I unequivocally denounce the white supremacist racism that emerged in Charlottesville.
02:30:28.000 Yes.
02:30:28.000 And then he should have shut up.
02:30:29.000 And then two weeks later, he could have said, well...
02:30:32.000 Would we look at the political landscape as a whole, perhaps commenting on Berkeley, he could have said, it's pretty obvious that there are reprehensible individuals acting out at both ends of the extreme, but the Charlottesville week wasn't the week to make that point.
02:30:47.000 So, and you know...
02:30:50.000 Why he did that?
02:30:52.000 Well, it could be just ineptness, because it was a very tricky week to exactly get things right.
02:30:57.000 I don't think so.
02:30:58.000 I think, actually, we can look at what he did during the election, and I think we should expect that he would do exactly what he did.
02:31:05.000 Well, fair enough.
02:31:06.000 I think there's...
02:31:08.000 There's a wink and a nod to them always.
02:31:11.000 Neo-Nazis and white supremacists applaud Donald Trump's response.
02:31:14.000 See if you can see the actual, does it show the actual text of what they wrote?
02:31:19.000 A quote from the editor here, right there.
02:31:24.000 I have reason to mention anything to do with us.
02:31:27.000 Reporters were screaming at him and the white nationalism when he just walked out of the room.
02:31:31.000 Huh.
02:31:33.000 Right.
02:31:33.000 There was an actual article that they wrote on one of those websites.
02:31:39.000 Trump's comments were good.
02:31:40.000 That's it.
02:31:41.000 He didn't attack us.
02:31:42.000 Just said the nation should come together.
02:31:43.000 Nothing specific against us.
02:31:45.000 He said that we need to study why people get so angry and implied that there was hate on both sides!
02:31:51.000 So he implied that the Antifa are haters.
02:31:54.000 I mean, so that energized them, in a way.
02:31:59.000 I mean, there's no secret that they support him.
02:32:01.000 You know, my friend Alonzo Bowden has a very funny quote.
02:32:04.000 He's a comedian.
02:32:04.000 He goes, not all Trump supporters are racist, but all racists are Trump supporters.
02:32:09.000 It's a great quote.
02:32:11.000 And there's political power in that, whether or not Trump is a racist or whether it's the wink and the nod to that side that is the only wink and the nod that they're getting.
02:32:22.000 Yeah, or even insufficient denunciation, which was kind of what did in...
02:32:27.000 There's a Canadian journalist named Faith Goldie who got fired from Rebel Media for being accused of being too cozy with Daily Stormer types.
02:32:38.000 She did a podcast with Crypto.
02:32:40.000 And I listened to the podcast very carefully.
02:32:42.000 She was actually one of the people that was supposed to be a panelist on this free speech talk.
02:32:46.000 So that put us in a real bind.
02:32:49.000 But...
02:32:49.000 Well, what happened in the podcast?
02:32:51.000 Well, what happened was, in my estimation, was that she didn't properly fulfill her role as critical journalist.
02:33:00.000 It was sort of like a discussion with your friendly neighborhood neo-Nazi.
02:33:05.000 And what I mean by that is she didn't ally herself with any of the purported aims of the neo-Nazi people she was talking to.
02:33:15.000 But I think she failed to...
02:33:18.000 She didn't criticize them sufficiently.
02:33:20.000 She didn't ask the tough questions.
02:33:24.000 And that was a fatal error.
02:33:29.000 I mean, she got fired from rebel media, and it's going to have terrible repercussions for her, although she may land on her feet.
02:33:35.000 And Rebel Media is very conservative as well, right?
02:33:38.000 Certainly by Canadian standards, yeah.
02:33:40.000 Yeah, that's right.
02:33:41.000 Rebel Media imploded in the aftermath of Charlottesville because of what Faith Goldie did with the Daily...
02:33:49.000 It wasn't even the Daily Stormer.
02:33:51.000 It was a group called Crypto, but they're associated with the Daily Stormer.
02:33:55.000 So she went on there, which I think you could make a case that That's okay as a journalist.
02:34:02.000 You can go talk to neo-Nazis.
02:34:03.000 But the question is, how do you talk to them?
02:34:06.000 And the answer to that is, you point out their agenda.
02:34:11.000 You don't allow them to masquerade as friendly, innocent people.
02:34:17.000 You can't do that.
02:34:18.000 And so I would say, she damned herself by insufficiently criticizing the villains.
02:34:24.000 It was something like that.
02:34:26.000 I'm sure you are familiar with Louis Theroux?
02:34:29.000 No, I'm not, actually.
02:34:30.000 Louis Theroux, the documentarian.
02:34:31.000 Do you know him from England?
02:34:32.000 Fascinating guy.
02:34:33.000 Fantastic.
02:34:34.000 Like, one of the best.
02:34:35.000 And one of the things that he's done is, well, he's interviewed a ton of different people, but one of the great ones that he did was the Westboro Baptist Church.
02:34:44.000 And he sort of embedded himself with them and was very congenial and very, like, kind and unthreatening and stayed with them for long periods of time, like weeks on end.
02:34:57.000 And got them to eventually, like, expose who they were and understand from, like, the point of view of an insider, in a sense, without necessarily condemning them, but just constantly asking questions,
02:35:13.000 but being very, very polite about it.
02:35:16.000 Not like a bunch, not like a lot of serious, like, confrontational criticism, rather, but a very friendly, sort of polite, British way of discussing things.
02:35:27.000 And he's particularly good at embedding himself.
02:35:30.000 He did it with Scientology, he's done it with a bunch of different groups.
02:35:34.000 He embeds himself and just sort of...
02:35:36.000 Right, so there's a justification for attempting that sort of thing, clearly.
02:35:41.000 And I really had to think this through, because, well, what happened with our talk was, it was so Hall of Mirrors-like.
02:35:47.000 It was a talk about free speech talks being shut down on campus that was shut down by a campus.
02:35:55.000 And it was a panel of people who purport to support free speech who knocked someone off the panel because of something wrong.
02:36:02.000 Well, not precisely that she said, but it's close enough to make the irony rather palpable.
02:36:07.000 It is.
02:36:08.000 So I had to go through what happened with Faith very carefully to figure out what the right ethical pathway was, you know.
02:36:15.000 But I listened to the podcast very carefully.
02:36:17.000 I listened to it with my son, and we talked about it a lot.
02:36:20.000 And our conclusion was that she had failed to...
02:36:26.000 She didn't ask enough tough questions.
02:36:29.000 One would have done it, even, maybe.
02:36:31.000 Two would have done it for sure.
02:36:33.000 But the discussion was too cordial.
02:36:37.000 And it could have even been cordial, to your point, because maybe that would have led to more discussions.
02:36:42.000 But it should have been cordial with one snake bite.
02:36:45.000 You know, that would be enough.
02:36:46.000 But is she required to make that snake bite?
02:36:48.000 I mean...
02:36:48.000 Well, it depends on what you mean by required.
02:36:50.000 Well, but my thought is, like, to find out what these people really want and really, like, we're really trying to achieve.
02:36:57.000 Sometimes you don't have to be confrontational with them.
02:36:59.000 You just got to allow them to be comfortable.
02:37:01.000 Look, And Kamau Bell did that really great on his CNN show with the KKK. He sort of just allowed them to be themselves, and they became more and more comfortable with him the more time they spent with him to the point where they're actually joking around with him.
02:37:13.000 But you got to see that the ugliness was so obvious and evident.
02:37:18.000 And without him confronting them on it, without him yelling and arguing, you got to see it from him just being friendly and joking around with them.
02:37:25.000 Now, nobody would ever accuse a black man like Kamau Bell with being a sympathizer with the KKK. He was in this inarguable position.
02:37:35.000 Like, no one could accuse him of it.
02:37:37.000 This woman, I'm assuming, is white.
02:37:39.000 That's where the problem lies.
02:37:41.000 One of many problems.
02:37:42.000 Yeah, if she was a black woman in the very same situation, like Oprah was in the past, like Oprah interviewed the KKK in the past, and she was never accused of being somehow or another a sympathetic person to them.
02:37:56.000 Right.
02:37:56.000 And somehow we have to raise the threshold of offense.
02:38:01.000 There are lots of ways to contribute to the conversation.
02:38:04.000 One of them may be to embed yourself and actually allow the world to see people who are doing something abhorrent in the way that they see themselves so you can understand.
02:38:15.000 Just being there asking questions.
02:38:17.000 What are you going to change them?
02:38:20.000 Being critical to them, just getting in arguments with them.
02:38:23.000 You might be able to see something from that, from their response to rational discussion about their issues.
02:38:29.000 This brings us down a whole other rabbit hole, which maybe we could talk about at some point in the future, because this is a really interesting topic.
02:38:36.000 Part of the reason that I've been accused of being on the far right, say, or on the alt-right, It's because I've talked to people, talked with people who perhaps have, are closer, what would you say, have an association network that might be more closely allied with that than people are comfortable with.
02:38:54.000 But my attitude has been too, and I don't want to talk about this in much detail because it's really complicated, but the anti-left spectrum, let's say, It's very confused and it could easily tilt very rapidly into the hard right anti-left,
02:39:12.000 which is the danger that you were describing.
02:39:14.000 And partly what I'm hoping is that I can talk to people who might conceivably be on that developmental pathway because they're tired of being accused of implicit racism, let's say, and say, look, You can be anti-radical left without falling all the way into the far right,
02:39:32.000 and here's how you might do it.
02:39:33.000 But that means I have to talk to them, and then if I talk to them, that means I risk association with them, and that risks being tainted.
02:39:40.000 It's a very tricky line to walk.
02:39:42.000 Well, it's also one of the big problems with this hard stance of the left, of the hard left, like this Pepe the Frog thing.
02:39:52.000 I mean, one of the things that I tweeted was some guy that called me, you just admitted you're a Nazi, because I posted a meme that someone had created of me as Pepe the Frog, and apparently there's Pepe the Frog of everybody.
02:40:04.000 And so this guy was like, well, you just admitted you're a Nazi.
02:40:07.000 And I'm like, see, this is a part of the problem.
02:40:10.000 And this creates a massive blowback.
02:40:13.000 People are getting angry because that fraud, for the most part, is used humorously.
02:40:17.000 Actually, you used the phrase defensive humor when you were talking.
02:40:21.000 And it really is.
02:40:22.000 And I think, I mean, this is...
02:40:24.000 I didn't mean to interrupt you, Joe, but there's something about the idea that the effectiveness of this meme is that it tangles people with no sense of humor in knots.
02:40:36.000 And that's a huge part of why those things are generated.
02:40:39.000 That's why they like it.
02:40:40.000 That's exactly right.
02:40:41.000 They love it.
02:40:42.000 Yeah.
02:40:42.000 Yeah.
02:40:43.000 Yeah, I mean, I'm fearing that I'm saying something about this frog and that there's going to be something that's going to emerge that I should know about, that somehow I'm admitting something.
02:40:52.000 But all I'm saying is what I see is a lot of people using it to taunt people who can't figure out.
02:40:58.000 I think that's the vast majority of it.
02:41:00.000 I do believe that.
02:41:01.000 And I think the same thing about the Kekistani types is that That's almost all humor.
02:41:06.000 Yeah, and there's a massive problem with pushing back against that and calling those people Nazis and racists, and especially when they're just using humor, and especially when it's very clear if you look at all the memes online, and I went thoroughly through Google to find them.
02:41:20.000 There are some abhorrent ones.
02:41:22.000 There are some horrible ones.
02:41:23.000 There are some ones that are with Nazi uniforms.
02:41:26.000 There's some anti-Jew ones.
02:41:28.000 There's some horrific ones.
02:41:30.000 Most of them are not that.
02:41:32.000 Most of them.
02:41:33.000 The vast majority of them are humorous.
02:41:35.000 And again, these people are not coordinating.
02:41:38.000 So if one person decides to make a Mickey Mouse racist meme, which by the way, a lot of the early Mickey Mouse cartoons, you could just take a screenshot.
02:41:47.000 And they're fucking tremendously racist.
02:41:50.000 Right.
02:41:50.000 Because dealing with the sign of the times.
02:41:52.000 I mean, images of black people that were extremely cartoonish.
02:41:56.000 You know, giant lips, black faces, the whole deal.
02:42:00.000 Horribly racist.
02:42:01.000 You could say Mickey Mouse is fucking racist.
02:42:03.000 Don't go to Disneyland.
02:42:04.000 No one's saying that, right?
02:42:05.000 But they could.
02:42:06.000 And this is the slippery slope.
02:42:08.000 You start with the frog, you know?
02:42:10.000 And, you know, first they came for Pepe, and I didn't say anything.
02:42:13.000 Yeah, well, if the frog is racist, you start wondering what isn't racist.
02:42:16.000 Exactly.
02:42:16.000 Because it's a bloody cartoon frog.
02:42:18.000 Well, you can make a cartoon about everything that has ever existed and make that racist.
02:42:24.000 It doesn't mean that the frog is racist.
02:42:26.000 This is where it's crazy.
02:42:27.000 It's like, what percentage of people are making the frog racist?
02:42:31.000 And then for the Southern Poverty Law Center to say that this is a symbol of hate now, this frog, well, guess what?
02:42:37.000 You just back these fucking people up against the wall and you shored their offenses because now they're realizing, oh, well, these people are mad.
02:42:44.000 They're not just mad like angry, but mad like insane.
02:42:48.000 Like, you're not looking at this thing rationally at all.
02:42:50.000 You're saying that a frog, where 99% of the memes are just humorous or silly, now the frog is a hate symbol.
02:42:58.000 Not only a hate symbol, but Nazi white supremacist.
02:43:02.000 I mean, they're just drawing up...
02:43:06.000 We're good to go.
02:43:33.000 I mean, goddamn, to call that all hate when sometimes it's hate.
02:43:37.000 By who?
02:43:38.000 By whoever the fucking people are that did that hateful thing.
02:43:42.000 Those are the people that are hateful, not the other ones that are using that frog for humor.
02:43:47.000 I mean, the fact that this is an argument at all just shows how lost we are in these ideological arguments, this left versus right extreme end of the spectrum on one end of the field throwing rocks at the far end of the field.
02:44:02.000 Yeah.
02:44:02.000 Most of us are in the middle somewhere.
02:44:04.000 It's hopeless if we cannot have discussions in the middle.
02:44:07.000 About a frog.
02:44:08.000 Yeah.
02:44:09.000 About a cartoon frog.
02:44:10.000 A cartoon frog!
02:44:12.000 I mean, Jesus Christ.
02:44:14.000 It's so weird.
02:44:15.000 That's a nice conclusion.
02:44:16.000 Yeah, it might be.
02:44:17.000 It might be.
02:44:18.000 Listen, this was a lot of fun.
02:44:20.000 It always is.
02:44:20.000 This is great.
02:44:21.000 And I'm glad you guys came up with this idea, and I'm glad we had the time to do it.
02:44:24.000 Yeah, me too, man.
02:44:25.000 Thanks for the invitation.
02:44:27.000 My pleasure.
02:44:29.000 Jordan Peterson, what is your Twitter handle again?
02:44:32.000 Jordan B. Peterson, yep.
02:44:34.000 And Brett Weinstein.
02:44:35.000 Brett Weinstein on Twitter.
02:44:38.000 Weinstein, I've been saying Weinstein.
02:44:39.000 It doesn't matter.
02:44:40.000 You're not the first.
02:44:40.000 Is it interchangeable?
02:44:41.000 Sorry.
02:44:42.000 Sorta.
02:44:42.000 Sorta.
02:44:43.000 All right.
02:44:44.000 But thank you, guys.
02:44:45.000 Really appreciate it.
02:44:46.000 A lot of fun.
02:44:46.000 Yep.
02:44:47.000 Good to see you again.
02:44:47.000 Bye, everybody.