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.
00:01:16.000So anyway, I did a project with Bob on analyzing the Holocaust from an evolutionary perspective.
00:01:24.000I wanted to test the question about whether, you know, at the time it was...
00:01:28.000It was commonplace for people to say that Hitler was crazy and there was something that bothered me about that analysis.
00:01:34.000I think there's something actually dangerous that we dismiss somebody like Hitler as crazy before we understand actually what they're up to.
00:01:41.000So 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.
00:02:25.000But 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.
00:02:46.000No, 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.
00:02:59.000It's social justice warrior gone amok.
00:03:02.000The whole campus, kids patrolling the campus with baseball bats.
00:03:07.000I mean, the whole thing is just completely bananas.
00:03:10.000The president of the university being told by the children not to use his hands when he's speaking because it's a microaggression.
00:03:33.000I 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.
00:03:42.000Well, 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.
00:03:51.000That's the only thing that mediates relationships between people, because there's no real world.
00:03:56.000Everything's a social construct, and it's a landscape of conflict between groups.
00:04:03.000And the only actual means of expression is power.
00:04:08.000That'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.
00:04:16.000Obviously, there's people at the top and people at the bottom.
00:04:19.000The only reason that there are people at the top is because they dominate by power.
00:04:23.000There's no philosophy of authority or competence.
00:04:28.000And 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.
00:05:07.000Everybody that doesn't agree with you.
00:05:09.000I 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.
00:05:21.000I mean, but when it came down to Charlottesville, there was very little punching of Nazis.
00:05:25.000You know, the whole thing was like, it's all very insane.
00:05:28.000When you see real Nazis, like, those are real Nazis.
00:05:31.000You know, like, go fucking punch them, please.
00:05:37.000Well, 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.
00:05:55.000And 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.
00:06:05.000Yeah, 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.
00:06:19.000I don't know exactly what they're yelling.
00:06:21.000I've read a bunch of different things, but the whole thing was an abomination.
00:06:25.000I mean, it was a horrific thing to watch.
00:06:27.000And, you know, Donald Trump comes out and says there was horrible behavior on all sides.
00:06:32.000Yeah, well, I thought about that for a lot because I got tangled up with that in a strange way in Canada.
00:06:39.000I 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,
00:06:55.000who was the journalist that was covering Charlottesville and got the footage of the car and the damage.
00:07:17.000Yeah, 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.
00:07:32.000But 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.
00:07:41.000And then they had a celebration party the night of the event.
00:07:44.000And here's something that was really interesting.
00:07:47.000So they got a couple, I think a couple of hundred people out to the celebration at Ryerson.
00:07:52.000And they were united under the banner of the hammer and sickle and were calling for revolution.
00:07:57.000And 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.
00:08:12.000And that's made me think, like, I can't figure out why the swastika is an immediate...
00:08:19.000Identifier of a pathological personality.
00:08:27.000And 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.
00:08:37.000And you're actually more afraid of the first person.
00:08:39.000Then the second person, because the damage they do is more proximal and emotionally recognizable.
00:08:44.000But the second guy who takes your pension, for example, he's perhaps even more dangerous.
00:08:49.000But there's a bloodiness about the Nazi symbol and an immediate emotional impact that the hammer and sickle just doesn't produce.
00:08:57.000And some of that's because people are badly educated historically.
00:09:03.000Do 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?
00:09:13.000A guy who stands up to the establishment as we know it.
00:09:17.000A guy who's wearing a beret, hiding in the jungle, fighting against the oppressive dictatorship of America.
00:09:25.000I mean, that's what they're looking at when they see that image.
00:09:27.000Well, the fact that historical ignorance plays a role in this is absolutely certain.
00:09:32.000And I think the romanticization of people like Che Guevara is exactly...
00:10:18.000It'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.
00:10:26.000Yeah, you believe in equity and you refuse to define it.
00:10:49.000There is something that actually does threaten to reemerge, and Charlottesville is a version of it.
00:10:56.000But 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.
00:11:34.000So 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.
00:11:53.000And 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.
00:12:05.000And knowing what to do about it is not so simple until you've seen why it occurs and what it means.
00:12:13.000What I've been saying in lectures I've given on this is that tyranny is the endgame of prosperity.
00:12:21.000And 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.
00:12:29.000There's no reason for people to be going after each other in this particular way.
00:12:32.000And 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.
00:12:40.000And 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...
00:12:55.000I 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.
00:13:12.000I think it's highly probable that that's going to occur.
00:13:15.000I 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,
00:13:35.000especially in the universities, is starting to produce an extraordinarily dangerous counterposition.
00:13:41.000And that was manifest, at least to some degree, in Charlottesville.
00:15:07.000It's not capable of restraining the version that recurs on the right, the version that does manifest as white nationalism.
00:15:19.000That version is stable because it does represent an actual population that has an evolutionary basis for remaining cohesive.
00:15:28.000And I should point out, there's a danger when you hear an evolutionary biologist talk about Evolutionary patterns.
00:15:35.000People 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.
00:15:43.000We call this the naturalistic fallacy.
00:15:45.000So evolution is an absolutely amoral process.
00:15:48.000It has produced the most marvelous features of human beings and the worst features.
00:15:52.000And we are, in some sense, obligated to pick and choose which features to honor and promote and which ones to tamp down.
00:15:59.000Something can have evolved as a virtue in some circumstances and still be of the type that, if magnified beyond its proper limits, becomes pathological.
00:16:10.000So let me tell you something I learned about Hitler, which really, I haven't recovered from my shock from this.
00:16:16.000So we've been looking at the relationship between political belief and personality.
00:16:20.000Okay, and your political belief is strongly determined by your temperament.
00:16:24.000So liberal left types are high in trade openness, that's creativity, and low in conscientiousness.
00:16:29.000But you can fragment conscientiousness up into industriousness and orderliness.
00:16:33.000And the real predictor for conservatism is orderliness, not industriousness.
00:16:37.000And you might think, well, that's no surprise.
00:16:39.000Right-wingers are more orderly, hence Hitler's call for order, let's say.
00:16:43.000But it's one thing to posit that and another thing to measure it.
00:16:57.000So 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.
00:17:07.000And they did it country by country and then within countries by state or province.
00:17:11.000And the correlation between the prevalence of infectious diseases and authoritarian slash right-wing political beliefs at the local individual level was 0.6.
00:17:20.000And so I want to take this apart a little bit.
00:17:23.000Okay, so the idea is that this is part of what you might describe as the extended behavioral immune system.
00:17:30.000And 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.
00:17:46.000And 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.
00:18:02.000And 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.
00:18:14.000But the problem with that is that it's rooted in a disgust mechanism that actually serves a protective function.
00:18:19.000Now, when I was sorting this out, I was reading Hitler's Table Talk, and Hitler's Table Talk is a very interesting book.
00:18:25.000It'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.
00:18:41.000And that's not the same thing, because you burn things you're disgusted by.
00:18:44.000And 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.
00:19:01.000And that just had to tilt a little farther than necessary.
00:19:04.000And all of a sudden, everything needed to get cleaned.
00:19:07.000And, you know, Hitler talked about cleanliness all the time, and he actually meant that.
00:19:11.000And so this thing that's emerging, you know, you talked about its biological basis, its evolutionary basis.
00:19:17.000It'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.
00:19:28.000I 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,
00:19:45.000but that's enough to generate a selective force that would cause a certain reluctance.
00:19:52.000But 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.
00:20:02.000And, you know, so, of course, calling the other population subhuman, vermin, whatever it is that human beings do.
00:20:10.000And 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,
00:20:40.000That 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.
00:20:54.000Whereas what's, I think, the actual hazard...
00:21:00.000That's actually a latent program that has served populations in past circumstances.
00:21:05.000It's indefensible, but it has served populations.
00:21:08.000And the populations that we come from have it, therefore, on reserve.
00:21:12.000And when certain characteristics show up in the environment, that program can emerge.
00:22:01.000And 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,
00:22:19.000and I think that's characteristic of human beings in general.
00:23:31.000Any 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.
00:23:40.000I mean, we're human beings, like you said.
00:23:42.000I think that is absolutely critical to discuss.
00:23:46.000Well, and it's also, there's another thing going on right now.
00:23:49.000I'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.
00:24:01.000And things in the future could be way better than they are right now, radically.
00:24:04.000And they could be way worse than they are.
00:24:07.000And the small decisions that people make are going to have outsized effects while they make them.
00:24:13.000Like, look at what happened with this guy in Charlottesville.
00:24:17.000I know he was surrounded by a coterie of deplorables, let's say, but it was one guy who decided to do something murderous.
00:24:24.000And that shifted the whole political landscape.
00:24:27.000And so what I see happening right now is that we're surrounded by these interactions between people that are positive feedback loops.
00:24:35.000And a positive feedback loop occurs when, if you do something, then it makes whatever caused that occur even in a greater way.
00:24:44.000So 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.
00:25:21.000I'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.
00:25:33.000And I think, well, yeah, I can understand that.
00:25:36.000Although 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.
00:25:46.000And it isn't obvious to me how to have a discussion about that without participating in the process of polarization.
00:25:53.000It's something I've been trying to figure out for the whole last year.
00:25:57.000I've been emphasizing the role of personal responsibility instead of ideological identification, right?
00:26:03.000Get 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.
00:26:14.000Take responsibility for that and try to put your life together.
00:26:17.000I don't see an alternative to that, but...
00:26:19.000It's been very difficult to avoid to do that and simultaneously to avoid becoming a participant in this process of polarization.
00:26:30.000It's what destabilized Germany in the 1920s and 30s, right?
00:26:33.000It was this ping-ponging back and forth between the radical left and the radical right.
00:26:38.000And 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.
00:26:58.000I 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.
00:27:09.000This 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.
00:27:24.000Well, first of all, there's a lot we can do.
00:27:28.000And 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.
00:27:35.000They're built into us also, in addition to this latent program.
00:27:39.000But 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.
00:28:01.000Open communication and debate, analyzing all the components of this issue completely objectively.
00:28:08.000Yes, 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.
00:28:19.000But 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.
00:28:27.000Yes, 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,
00:28:42.000and we can move forward rather than descend into civil war, which frankly looks more and more likely.
00:28:49.000And this issue with Google and YouTube, let's say, and these other Gigantic internet companies.
00:28:54.000You know, it isn't a matter of if they're going to produce automated bots that do pre-perceptual censorship.
00:29:05.000Well, he tweeted the other day that...
00:29:08.000And 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.
00:29:16.000You know, they want to get to the point where...
00:29:20.000The appalling video is not even put up.
00:29:23.000So 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.
00:29:30.000And so once you upload it, YouTube has access to it and they have access to its content.
00:29:34.000And they informed him that it would be demonetized before he published it.
00:30:21.000Well, and he's also making the claim that human beings have an intrinsic nature.
00:30:25.000And so now there's a new buzz phrase that goes along with that.
00:30:28.000And so that's that you're a biological essentialist.
00:30:31.000And 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.
00:30:39.000It's a core doctrine of the theory, and it's part of what makes it intensely totalitarian.
00:30:43.000Because then human beings are just putty for the molding, and that's part of the motivational drive for claiming the radical constructionist claim.
00:30:54.000Well, because we want to free people from prejudice and tyranny.
00:30:57.000It's like, no, that's not why you make that claim.
00:30:59.000You 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.
00:31:07.000And 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.
00:31:26.000And 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,
00:31:44.000they were wrecking their ability to think about how biology works.
00:31:49.000And 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.
00:32:02.000Because 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.
00:32:13.000But be deeply politically incorrect almost all the time.
00:32:18.000And so the idea that the truth of biology is actually going to become unexpressible and we're going to move ahead.
00:32:25.000We're going to sideline it so that we can move ahead with this ideological stuff.
00:32:31.000I mean, that is cutting off your nose.
00:33:08.000It 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.
00:33:25.000But 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.
00:33:55.000It explains all of the worst chapters in human history.
00:33:58.000And so, in some sense, what I'm getting at is that you want to understand that process.
00:34:04.000And 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,
00:34:20.000to recognize that our genes are up to things that we don't have any reason to honor.
00:34:25.000And we can basically take them out of the control position.
00:34:29.000But 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.
00:34:38.000Then we don't have the tools to diffuse racism.
00:34:42.000So 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,
00:35:47.000And 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.
00:35:56.000And I was pointing to that, saying, we don't want to do that.
00:36:09.000When you put things in the law, things happen.
00:36:11.000And 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.
00:36:22.000And biological essentialism is the new buzzword for Nazi, essentially.
00:36:30.000It's not that it's illegal to be a biologist.
00:36:32.000It's just illegal to be any good at it.
00:36:36.000Okay, well that's even more effective, I would say.
00:36:38.000So, 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.
00:36:53.000We're supposed to be moving past these things as we evolve.
00:36:56.000We're supposed to be looking people as being free to choose whatever gender they like.
00:37:01.000Free 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.
00:37:16.000You did a very good job of outlining the credible case against biological essentialism, because it can deteriorate into something like eugenics.
00:37:25.000There's a real danger, like a political danger, on the side of biological determinism.
00:37:30.000But 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.
00:37:52.000Most 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.
00:38:01.000But we can't do it if we don't discuss these things in honest terms.
00:38:04.000Well, a subset of males are biologically hyper-aggressive.
00:38:09.000You can identify them at two years of age.
00:38:41.000And if you socialize them properly, then they can become unbelievably useful.
00:38:46.000They're courageous, they're forthright, they're not going to back down from a challenge.
00:38:52.000There's all sorts of massive utility in that, and that's this proper interplay between the biological circuitry and the socialization.
00:38:58.000But, you know, with James Damore's memo, he's been accused of taking a biological essentialist route, which is not true.
00:39:07.000One 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.
00:39:36.000But 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.
00:39:50.000So 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.
00:40:26.000Okay, now, there's some problems with that.
00:40:28.000It'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.
00:40:35.000Okay, that doesn't equip women very well for dealing with aggressive men, because aggressive men and infants are not the same creatures.
00:40:42.000So 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.
00:40:58.000Well, one of the consequences of that is that agreeable people don't make as much money.
00:41:02.000And 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.
00:41:12.000You have to be able to fight for an idea, too.
00:41:14.000But, so, there's something, this is a perfect test case.
00:41:19.000So, biologically speaking, there's a very good reason for certain kinds of wisdom to be biased in the direction of manifesting in females.
00:41:28.000Females, 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.
00:41:41.000And the fact that care in human beings takes so many years has resulted in menopause emerging.
00:41:47.000And 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.
00:42:06.000So women have a kind of farsightedness about lineage, and I don't think this has anything to do with human women, actually.
00:42:12.000This is a trait that we can see in females— Of other species.
00:42:22.000That is to say, a male can have many offspring in a lifetime.
00:42:26.000Many males have no offspring in a lifetime.
00:42:28.000And that high variance means that to the extent that there's wisdom that surrounds risk-taking, that has traveled historically along the male path.
00:42:37.000Now, in modern times, there's no reason that we can't look at these two kinds of wisdom and democratize them both.
00:42:45.000The 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.
00:42:55.000There's no reason that people have to continue...
00:42:58.000The 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.
00:43:06.000It's like that's not a helpful discussion.
00:43:08.000And, 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.
00:43:21.000But 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.
00:43:29.000Now it's conceivable that you could have an intelligent public policy or corporate policy discussion about what to do about that.
00:43:35.000Like, 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?
00:43:45.000And I'm not saying that's a good idea.
00:43:47.000I'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,
00:44:02.000which is obviously in everyone's best interest.
00:44:37.000Well, 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.
00:44:49.000I couldn't make heads or tails of it until I saw his original version.
00:44:52.000Yeah, 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.
00:45:05.000It's like those journalists who jumped on the story, did it either badly, You know, because they were incompetent, or they did it maliciously.
00:45:15.000And so now we could say, let's say things go really badly in the next year.
00:45:21.000Well then, each of those journalists might be able to sit at home and say, hey, I played a causal role.
00:45:28.000In 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,
00:45:44.000you know, pushing everything towards a state of chaos.
00:45:46.000It's like, people had better be on their toes, because we're in a situation that's radically unstable.
00:45:51.000And 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.
00:46:00.000That's another thing that we have to be very careful about.
00:46:04.000It's just very bizarre how quick people are to call someone a racist today.
00:46:09.000I mean, I've never seen anything like it in all my years.
00:47:07.000It'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.
00:47:18.000It's designed to cause your mind to throw an error.
00:47:24.000So 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.
00:47:33.000I've been doing every bit of investigation I can into its many manifestations.
00:48:05.000Well, because he's been following what's happening to me online.
00:48:08.000And I got associated with the frog in a major way.
00:48:12.000It's a crazy story, and I won't go into it.
00:48:14.000But I wore a frog hat on one of my videos that an Indian carver, a Native American carver, had given me.
00:48:20.000And 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.
00:48:29.000So the frog is the creature in their mythology that warns the society that things are out of kilter.
00:49:43.000Opposition is a real issue with people, right?
00:49:45.000Like 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.
00:49:53.000Instead 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.
00:50:02.000Okay, 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.
00:50:25.000You know, stay away from the ideological idiocies and oversimplifications and try to put yourself together.
00:50:30.000Because 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.
00:50:45.000I think that's our great discovery in the West.
00:50:48.000It'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.
00:50:55.000And so we abandon that pathway of divine individuality and revert to ideological identification of race or sex.
00:51:04.000And 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.
00:51:13.000So they'll shuffle off the responsibility.
00:51:15.000And if that means that, you know, we're dancing in the streets because everything's on fire, that'll be just fine.
00:51:21.000And that's another thing that's adding to the terrible danger that we're in right now.
00:51:38.000And I think that there is a real lack of struggle and understanding of struggle with a lot of people today.
00:51:46.000Not 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.
00:52:01.000You 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?
00:52:09.000And that's part of bearing the burden of being.
00:52:15.000So you can shrink from that, but if you shrink from that, the suffering increases and intensifies, and you become resentful and malevolent.
00:52:22.000The alternative is to move forward courageously.
00:52:28.000And that is the pathway forward, as far as I'm concerned.
00:52:31.000Well, I think it also has implications.
00:52:32.000You know, you're talking about it at the level of what is best for the individual.
00:52:36.000But 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.
00:53:30.000That'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.
00:53:39.000But 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.
00:53:50.000We inhabit the collective, and that's what's already known, what we can agree on.
00:53:53.000But the problem with that is that what we can agree on, what's already known, isn't sufficient.
00:53:59.000So 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.
00:54:09.000This is also a deep evolutionary truth.
00:54:13.000Which 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.
00:54:32.000The people at the center for whom things are working best aren't going to be the ones to innovate the new way.
00:54:37.000It's people for whom things are not quite working that are going to innovate new ways.
00:54:41.000And that's also true for a population of frogs or birds or plants or whatever.
00:54:45.000The ones that are not well situated are the ones where an experiment can pay off.
00:54:50.000That's why Hans Isaac, a psychologist, wrote a good book called Genius, and he was interested in what predicted high levels of creative success.
00:55:11.000If you're going to be creative, it's because you're tormented by a problem.
00:55:15.000And 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.
00:55:22.000But 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,
00:55:40.000it'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.
00:55:49.000Now, you could say, well, that's not unique to Christianity.
00:55:51.000I see the same thing in the Jewish Antithesis between the prophetic tradition, the prophet and the tradition.
00:55:59.000Because the prophet is always the lone voice, right, that comes out.
00:56:03.000It happens over and over in the Old Testament.
00:56:05.000A 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.
00:56:19.000And 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.
00:56:27.000And so, you know, what we have is sort of evolution authoring these texts in a way.
00:56:36.000Yes, well, that's a claim that I'm very, what would you call, that's something I believe to be fundamentally true.
00:56:43.000And I mean, I've started, see, because I'm interested in this idea of strengthening the individual, eh?
00:56:49.000When I wrote my first book, Maps of Meaning, it was about ideological conflict.
00:56:54.000And it was about whether or not there was any alternative to ideological conflict, because you could make a case that there isn't.
00:57:00.000There's right, and there's left, and there's a war, right?
00:57:02.000But there is a third way, and I think that is the way of the heroic individual, and I mean that technically.
00:57:07.000And 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.
00:57:21.000And that's what updates the collective landscape.
00:57:25.000And so, I started doing these biblical lectures.
00:57:28.000I'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.
00:57:38.000And 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.
00:57:51.000I don't believe that those are the claims that were made to begin with, so I think it's a non-starter.
00:57:56.000But 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.
00:58:05.000And many, many atheists have been responding very positively to them.
00:58:08.000I have people in my YouTube comments now that are calling themselves Christian atheists.
00:58:12.000Because they can understand what it is.
00:58:15.000I'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.
00:58:28.000And that you can think about that as a divine category of existence.
00:58:34.000And I've been trying to delineate how...
00:58:39.000How the biblical stories lay out the pathway by which the divine individual should manifest him or herself in time.
00:59:43.000No, you're going to find the catastrophes of life.
00:59:47.000But 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.
00:59:59.000Who the hell doesn't want to hear that?
01:00:03.000So we're treading kind of close to the argument you got into with Sam Harris about the nature of truth.
01:00:10.000And 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.
01:00:32.000We tend to think of intellect as having evolved because knowing what's true gives you an advantage.
01:00:40.000But there's actually nothing that says that the literal truth is where advantage lies.
01:00:44.000And so I have a category that I call literally false, metaphorically true.
01:00:50.000These 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.
01:01:01.000So let me give you a couple of trivial examples that won't be controversial.
01:01:11.000However, if you live near porcupines and you imagine that porcupines can throw their quills, you'll give them some space.
01:01:19.000If 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...
01:01:29.000Microscopically designed to move in from where they puncture you over time and they can puncture a vital organ or you can get an infection.
01:01:36.000So 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?
01:01:45.000Another one might be people say everything happens for a reason.
01:01:51.000Well, unless you're talking about physics as the reason, everything doesn't happen for a reason.
01:01:56.000However, 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.
01:02:05.000Well, what's the reason that this happened?
01:02:06.000Maybe it's supposed to open some opportunity, and you won't miss that opportunity the way somebody who was preoccupied with their misfortune would.
01:02:14.000Literal falseness but metaphorical truth is actually, I would argue, the category under which religious truth evolves.
01:02:24.000Now 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,
01:02:47.000And you would expect it to be because the doctrines are carried along in the population.
01:02:52.000The 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.
01:03:09.000But 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.
01:03:18.000And 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.
01:03:36.000What isn't true is that those things are inherently up to date.
01:03:43.000Okay, 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.
01:03:53.000And so, even in discussing it, I'm going to make all sorts of mistakes, because it's treacherous territory.
01:04:01.000I would say my understanding of the great myths has that observation built into it.
01:04:07.000So 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.
01:04:17.000They're possessed by a singular archetype, and that's the archetype of the tyrannical father.
01:04:21.000They don't see that there's a tyrannical father and a wise king, because there is.
01:04:26.000You can't even point that out, but anyways.
01:04:32.000In some of our oldest stories, there's a representation of the dead past.
01:04:37.000So let me give you an example that everyone knows about.
01:04:42.000The story of Pinocchio is the story of the individualization of Pinocchio.
01:05:10.000But 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,
01:06:49.000Because 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...
01:07:02.000So 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.
01:07:12.000And 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.
01:08:06.000Now, it's not alive enough because the bloody thing could fall apart at any moment.
01:08:09.000And we need to be awake and alert in order to keep it updated and maintained.
01:08:13.000Well, not only that, but the greatest hazards to us in the present are only partially going to be dealt with in these texts.
01:08:21.000And 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.
01:08:33.000And it prevents us from getting to a conversation in which we can talk about the fact that religious texts, religions, are not...
01:09:09.000Because I think it's true and not true.
01:09:11.000The stories are erroneous in detail and right in pattern.
01:09:16.000So, 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.
01:09:23.000Now, 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.
01:09:31.000And I would say what's happened with the great religious myths is that they operate at a level of abstraction.
01:09:38.000Such that the abstract entities are applicable in every single environment.
01:09:44.000It is extremely useful to represent the phenomenology of your experience as a domain of chaos and order.
01:09:53.000That works in every single environment for every person.
01:09:56.000And so the domain of order, I can describe it technically.
01:09:59.000You're in the domain of order when your actions produce the result you desire.
01:10:04.000And you're in the domain of chaos when they don't.
01:10:07.000And 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.
01:10:17.000And you don't want to be where nothing you're doing is working because it's overwhelming.
01:10:21.000You want to be stable and dynamic at the same point.
01:10:24.000And the Daoists do that very nicely because they have a chaos order conceptualization of the phenomenological landscape.
01:10:31.000And their claim is the point of maximum proper being is right at the center of the border between chaos and order.
01:10:38.000And I think that's true across contexts.
01:10:45.000But 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?
01:10:58.000And 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.
01:11:07.000It would make sense as the number one commandment.
01:11:09.000It'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.
01:11:16.000And so the fact that it isn't mentioned tends to de-emphasize it as a risk.
01:11:22.000And 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,
01:11:44.000That 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.
01:12:03.000Yeah, it's also not that easy to rewrite a fairy tale.
01:12:07.000You 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.
01:12:16.000It turns out that that's very, very difficult.
01:12:18.000And 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.
01:12:29.000Okay, which religious texts And you might say, well, all of them, but then that obscures the important differences between the traditions.
01:12:39.000And I'm by no means certain that all of them do.
01:12:43.000So I'm going to stick my neck, weigh the hell out, because why not?
01:12:46.000It isn't obvious to me that Islam does.
01:12:49.000Because it's very difficult for me to see that the totalizing nature of Islam Doesn't make it unique among religions.
01:14:00.000We don't know if everything happens for a reason.
01:14:02.000Maybe 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.
01:14:10.000It's impossible for you to understand due to your limited processing power of the human brain.
01:14:15.000You'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.
01:14:44.000And so all I'm saying is that actually that is likely to be the product of selection.
01:14:49.000In other words, that those people who had encoded that they do throw their quills have an advantage.
01:14:56.000It'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.
01:15:12.000Well, here's part of the problem, and this is a really big problem.
01:15:16.000There's two things, I guess, that were brought up by what you described.
01:15:19.000And the first is the terminology of truth.
01:15:22.000Now, Harris's claim with regards to my utilization of truth was that I was absconding with the definition of truth in a false manner.
01:15:29.000But he was wrong, because the idea of truth is much older than the idea of objective truth.
01:15:34.000And the original notion of truth wasn't objective true.
01:15:38.000It was like the arrow flies straight and true.
01:15:41.000And it meant something like reliably on its way to the appropriate destination, something like that.
01:15:47.000And when Christ said, I am the truth and the way, I can't remember the other one.
01:15:52.000The truth he was talking about wasn't an objective truth.
01:15:55.000So 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.
01:16:19.000You may be able to stack them on top of one another, but now and then they dissociate.
01:16:22.000And this is actually what Brett was referring to as well.
01:16:28.000And this is where it gets so complicated that I can barely manage it.
01:16:32.000There's the truth that manifests itself in the manner in which you act.
01:16:37.000And there's the truth that manifests itself as a representation of the objective world.
01:16:42.000And sometimes both those truths are stacked on top of each other, and sometimes they're not.
01:16:46.000So, 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.
01:16:55.000And 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.
01:17:03.000So let's take malaria as a good example.
01:18:29.000As 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.
01:18:58.000You're not supposed to shit in camp because God finds it offensive.
01:19:04.000Now, the problem is the germ theory of disease doesn't come about for thousands of years after that truth was written.
01:19:11.000That 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.
01:19:21.000So 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?
01:19:29.000Or 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?
01:19:42.000Yes, 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.
01:19:52.000Right, 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.
01:20:08.000There's no reason for that truth to be promoted.
01:20:11.000In fact, you don't hear people describing this part of the Old Testament anymore because it's not relevant.
01:20:17.000And this is probably all why dietary restrictions were in the Old Testament as well.
01:20:21.000Shellfish, red tide, eating pigs, trichinosis.
01:20:25.000There's a lot of issues that go along with that.
01:20:28.000Yeah, well, there is some intermingling, perhaps, of hygienic concerns with also the desire for the groups to distinguish themselves from other groups, right?
01:20:36.000Because you can unite your group quite tightly by dietary restrictions.
01:20:40.000So, back to your point about terminology.
01:20:43.000You know, we could do something like fact and wisdom.
01:20:48.000You know, you say truth, that's the overarching category, and then that divides into fact and wisdom.
01:20:52.000And what you want, optimally, is you want the facts and the wisdom to be one-to-one, but often they're not.
01:20:58.000And 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.
01:21:06.000And Harris makes another sleight-of-hand move, which I don't like, which is that he thinks, so let's say...
01:21:12.000Except for just a second, the wisdom-fact distinction.
01:21:16.000He would say, well, the fact is the thing, and the wisdom is a second-order derivation of that.
01:21:20.000You can ground the wisdom in the fact, and I don't believe that.
01:21:23.000And I don't think that he has any real justification for that claim.
01:21:37.000There'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.
01:21:46.000And that only distinction is where ethics come from.
01:21:49.000Right, or where the consequences are delayed for some number of generations or something like that.
01:21:55.000So Sam acts as if the process of mapping facts onto action is simple if we just got the facts right.
01:22:03.000But it's the weakest part of his argument, and we never ever got to that for a variety of reasons.
01:22:08.000But part of the reason it's weak is, okay, well there's like an infinite number of facts, man.
01:22:14.000So let's say you're standing in front of a field and you're looking at the field.
01:22:17.000The field does not tell you how to walk through it.
01:22:20.000There's a million ways through the field.
01:22:22.000And 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.
01:22:30.000And that's a problem that I don't think Sam is willing to take seriously.
01:22:37.000Well, I think there are two problems tangled up here.
01:22:39.000One 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?
01:22:52.000Or 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.
01:23:03.000And then there's a question about civilization.
01:23:06.000Civilization 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.
01:23:16.000And 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.
01:23:29.000Which is, you know, this is dangerous because some of what it's doing may not be acceptable.
01:23:35.000Well, and think about, let's look at the wisdom end of things for a minute.
01:23:38.000And 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.
01:23:48.000So here's what something has to be like to be wise, let's say.
01:23:53.000Well, 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.
01:24:00.000It has to work, if you operate according to the wisdom principle, whatever it is, it has to work in the world.
01:24:07.000But then it has to work in a world that allows you to maintain your relationships with people in the world.
01:24:12.000So 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.
01:24:23.000So 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.
01:24:34.000Okay, and then there's a game theory element to that, which is, well, if it's wise, then it works in the world.
01:24:39.000So that'd be the constraint of objective reality.
01:24:41.000But 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.
01:24:56.000And so this is actually also the solution.
01:24:59.000I'd really like to hear what you think about this.
01:25:01.000I think this is the solution to the postmodern conundrum.
01:25:04.000Because 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.
01:25:14.000And the right response to that is, Uh-oh.
01:25:38.000But what they missed, and this is a big deal, it's a big deal, I think, is this idea of ethical constraint.
01:25:45.000It's like, yes, there's a landscape of potentially infinite interpretations, but hardly any of them will work in the real world.
01:25:51.000And 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.
01:26:00.000And so, the landscape of interpretation is almost infinite, but the landscape of Applicable interpretation, functional interpretation is unbelievably constrained.
01:26:10.000And I think that constraint system is what we regard as ethics.
01:26:49.000That'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.
01:26:56.000And 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?
01:27:05.000And the postmodernist says, well, my theory can't account for that.
01:27:08.000And then they say, well, back to Marxism.
01:27:10.000And so that's why I think there's this unholy alliance between the postmodernists and the neo-Marxists.
01:27:15.000It's because postmodernism is a dead end from the perspective of applicable wisdom.
01:27:53.000It's a structure that's already set up and it's romanticized.
01:27:58.000And 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.
01:28:11.000Okay, so we'd have to take two things apart.
01:28:14.000We'd have to take Marxism slash neo-Marxism and post-modernism apart.
01:28:32.000If you look at it historically, postmodernism actually grew out of Marxism.
01:28:37.000And 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?
01:28:51.000The rich and the poor in its initial phases.
01:28:54.000And that's a story that's partially true, and it's got a lot of motive power.
01:28:58.000Like, the motive power is the romantic motive power that you just described.
01:29:02.000I get to be on the side of the oppressed.
01:29:03.000I get to be a warrior for what's right.
01:29:06.000There'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.
01:29:13.000And then there's the ideological totality issue, which gives people a sense of security.
01:29:20.000By the late 1960s, because the murderousness of Marxism had been clearly laid out as a doctrine.
01:29:25.000And 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.
01:29:43.000And 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.
01:29:55.000You actually technically cannot be both of those things at the same time.
01:29:59.000And the fact that most people are both of those things at the same time Raises the specter of just exactly what their motivation is.
01:30:07.000And then I would say it's this resentment-driven anti-capitalism.
01:30:11.000There's reasons to criticize capitalism, obviously.
01:30:14.000But it's this underground resentment-driven anti-capitalism that I think is one of the fundamental motivators.
01:31:07.000And so we know that now, historically, it's not just a theoretical issue.
01:31:11.000We've now seen enough of it to know that as a fact.
01:31:14.000But 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.
01:31:26.000If you don't mind, break it down as to why it goes bad.
01:31:29.000Well, 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.
01:31:42.000Spoken like a true fascist biological essentialist.
01:32:15.000If you look at any creative endeavor that human beings engage in, so that would be an endeavor where there's variability in individual production.
01:33:06.000So if you took 100 classical composers, 10 of them produce half the music that's played.
01:33:11.000And 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.
01:33:22.000And so there's this underlying natural law.
01:33:25.000Which is, it's expressed as the Matthew Principle, which is from a New Testament statement.
01:33:30.000The statement is, to those who have everything, more will be given, and from those who have nothing, everything will be taken.
01:33:36.000It's a vicious statement, but it's actually, here's one of those places where it's actually empirically true.
01:33:52.000It's not a flaw of the capitalist system.
01:33:54.000It is a feature of every single system of production that we know of, no matter who set it up and how it operates.
01:34:00.000And 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.
01:34:47.000But the problem with that is you still get a positive correlation among the successful people.
01:34:52.000You know, so because you're so successful, for example, with your podcast and your YouTube videos, your connection network is insane, insanely powerful.
01:35:01.000So you still have this tendency for what's useful and good to be distributed, let's call it, inequitably.
01:35:12.000And it's got the power of a physical law.
01:35:15.000In fact, there are people, they call themselves econophysicists.
01:35:18.000No one knows that there's a field, econophysicists.
01:35:21.000And 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.
01:35:34.000Okay, so Marx pointed to a fundamental issue.
01:35:37.000But he said, well, that's a fault with capitalism.
01:36:49.000And 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.
01:36:59.000And then over time, it exponentially increases the amount of people that are exposed to it.
01:37:04.000Well, 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.
01:37:17.000Now, your point, it's sort of the point of free marketers.
01:37:20.000You're saying, well, look, all I'm doing is offering a product.
01:37:52.000I think the real issue would be to maximize potential output or maximize the amount of successful people.
01:38:00.000You'd have to figure out, don't concentrate on what people are doing right.
01:38:04.000Concentrate on what people are doing wrong.
01:38:06.000What are the people doing wrong that are failing in any creative endeavor?
01:38:11.000That's partly why we put together the Future Authoring Program, because we are trying to figure out what made people successful.
01:38:20.000And one of the things that makes people successful is they specify a target and then aim at it.
01:38:26.000Because if you're all over the place, we do know, in a relatively functional society like ours, we know what predicts success.
01:38:32.000IQ and conscientiousness are the biggest predictors of success.
01:38:36.000Now, 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.
01:38:44.000And then you might also say, well, you want to remove the impediments from people who have those capabilities so that they can move forward.
01:38:51.000And 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.
01:39:39.000And the revolutionary types, you know, they go to the people who are stuck at zero and they say, hey, you're stuck at zero.
01:39:44.000Why don't you burn the whole goddamn thing to the ground?
01:39:47.000Because maybe in the next iteration you won't be stuck at zero.
01:39:50.000And for young men, that's a hell of a call.
01:39:53.000Because they're already, let's call them expendable, biologically, and that makes them more adventurous and risk-taking.
01:39:59.000If someone says, and maybe that's why they wear the Che Guevara t-shirt, it's like, hey, I'm stuck at zero.
01:40:04.000Well, 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.
01:40:11.000Right, but that zero is where massive amounts of creativity come from because of that struggle.
01:40:17.000Massive amounts of innovation, massive amounts of people who have visions because you're not living off of some sort of trust fund.
01:40:25.000You know, you have real risk and real danger and you have a real concern about your future.
01:40:31.000Whereas 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.
01:40:42.000Yeah, well, that may be why family fortunes tend to only last three generations.
01:41:08.000However, 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.
01:42:04.000But 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,
01:42:23.000We 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.
01:42:41.000The 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.
01:42:58.000We restore the state in which people don't have enough.
01:43:01.000And 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.
01:43:16.000We 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,
01:43:45.000An 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.
01:43:53.000Somehow the farmer ends up either thinking of or discovering, by watching somebody else, a wheel.
01:44:01.000Now 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.
01:44:13.000So now that same piece of land can support more people because it can be more efficiently farmed.
01:44:19.000That could be stabilized as a kind of success.
01:44:24.000In other words, you could turn the extra surplus into a kind of persistent success.
01:44:35.000luxury is a little bit too trivial sounding.
01:44:37.000You could turn it into a space where you use that to investigate important stuff.
01:44:43.000Or you could turn it into more mouths to feed.
01:44:46.000In 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.
01:45:10.000But 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?
01:45:44.000So there's another issue, back to Marx, let's say.
01:45:47.000There's another issue that we can't contend with.
01:45:51.000And 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.
01:46:02.000And 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.
01:46:14.000So you might say, there's a cost to be paid in inequality for innovation.
01:46:22.000And then you could also say, well, too much inequality destabilizes things, which seems to be quite clear.
01:46:27.000So there's room for an intelligent conversation about that, right?
01:46:31.000Because the lefties say, uh-oh, too much inequality.
01:46:34.000And they need to be listened to, because the evidence is quite clear.
01:46:37.000If you let the inequality ramp up enough, the whole system destabilizes.
01:46:40.000Because the people at the bottom think, fuck it, we'll just...
01:46:44.000We'll just flip the system upside down.
01:46:49.000Because 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.
01:46:56.000And the empirical evidence on that is overwhelmingly strong.
01:47:21.000Now we have to start thinking very carefully through how to do the redistribution issue, and we don't know how to do that.
01:47:27.000So 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.
01:47:34.000The 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.
01:47:51.000And I would say, in some sense, that's what the political discussion is about.
01:47:55.000But 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.
01:48:05.000And if you have less, it's because you're virtuous and victimized.
01:48:16.000Well, 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.
01:48:23.000I don't think the fundamental problem is that people don't have enough money.
01:48:27.000I 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.
01:48:43.000That's the opiate crisis in the West right now.
01:48:58.000It'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.
01:49:55.000I want to go back to the inequality point here, because if you look at this biologically, actually, I think it reveals a lot.
01:50:02.000Why 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.
01:50:16.000And 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.
01:50:45.000Well, you've got some box sitting on the wall of your living room that has a totally artificial portrait of other people.
01:50:52.000Who may be much wealthier than you, and it's broadcasting in as if you're looking in their window, right, in the adjacent house.
01:50:59.000And 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.
01:51:14.000The technology is interfacing with our brains badly.
01:51:19.000So we have the perception of massive inequality.
01:51:23.000Economically, we do have massive inequality.
01:51:25.000You're arguing that the solution to this involves some sort of massive redistribution?
01:51:32.000But nonetheless, redistribution is wildly unpopular for various reasons.
01:51:37.000And so what we've got now is a situation...
01:51:42.000This 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.
01:51:52.000And 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.
01:52:07.000That 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.
01:52:19.000That this is a totally indefensible, but nonetheless biological pattern of history.
01:52:25.000And 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.
01:54:43.000So, 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,
01:55:01.000And the reason they have the money is because they stole it from you.
01:55:05.000And there's some truth in that, because there are some criminals.
01:55:09.000But 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,
01:55:26.000And so that's one of the doom-end scenarios that awaits us if this idiot process of polarization continues.
01:55:34.000And 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.
01:55:48.000And that's just, well, first of all, it's technically wrong, but it's dangerous.
01:56:11.000And 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.
01:56:25.000And so anybody who can find a mechanism for transferring wealth from somebody else for doing nothing finds that mechanism.
01:56:34.000Whereas discovering the next big thing that's actually productive is, you know, something that goes along and fits and starts.
01:56:41.000And so if we were, I mean, really, you've described it very well.
01:56:45.000We've got a battle between two caricatures of what's true.
01:56:51.000Either 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.
01:57:20.000If people tell markets, here's what we would like to accomplish, and then the markets tell us, well, how do we accomplish that best?
01:57:27.000That 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,
01:58:11.000And now we're at the point where that's the dominant force.
01:58:16.000Why is probably another manifestation of one of these Pareto principles.
01:58:21.000It 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%.
01:58:30.000And 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.
01:58:39.000And 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.
01:58:48.000And 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.
01:58:57.000You know, and so it's the combination of those two things.
01:59:01.000I 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.
01:59:12.000Like, 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.
01:59:20.000So, 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,
01:59:53.000But 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?
01:59:59.000And I think, what bloody planet are you from to posit a question like that?
02:00:42.000In an absolutely free market, which is not what we have, but we have something that tends in that direction.
02:00:49.000In 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.
02:01:03.000Well, then there's no question who wins.
02:01:05.000If we give this experiment a long enough period, the individual who will do anything will out-compete the individual with moral limits.
02:01:13.000Doesn't it depend on what the game is, though?
02:01:27.000But 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.
02:01:41.000Well, then the point is, well, what's the game?
02:01:42.000The 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.
02:01:52.000And so the individual who is perceiving Which things they can get away with has an advantage.
02:02:45.000Tech 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.
02:02:59.000That's one of the fascinating things about tech people in general is that these gigantic tech corporations almost all lean left.
02:03:04.000Well, the gigantic tech corporations lean left.
02:03:17.000And 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.
02:03:26.000You've just come up with the great search engine and suddenly you're on top of the world.
02:03:34.000That 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.
02:03:45.000And so what it does is it forces an entity like Google to evolve in the direction of amorality.
02:04:03.000They will find ways to rationalize everything because to not rationalize that which their competitors can avail themselves of would be to perish.
02:04:11.000One of the issues was there was all sorts of fake Google going on, just like they have fake Apple stores in China.
02:04:18.000They don't have the same sort of copyright laws that we have, and you can essentially plagiarize anything you want.
02:04:24.000Brett, you also said that I shouldn't make a straw man of the anti-business argument of my peers.
02:04:29.000And there's another way that I shouldn't make a straw man of it.
02:04:33.000Like, despite the fact that I'm not anti-capitalist, I don't believe that every entity is a business either.
02:04:39.000And one of the things that has happened to universities that has actually pathologized in a number of dimensions, but...
02:04:45.000They've also pathologized along the business dimension as the administrators have become increasingly trained or drawn from the ranks of business managers.
02:04:53.000Because a university is actually not a business.
02:04:58.000There are organizations that aren't businesses that you can't just cram into the free market structure willy-nilly.
02:05:04.000And so my colleagues also object to the To the transformation of the university into a business entity run by profit-seeking MBAs.
02:05:12.000And they should object to that because that's not what the institution is for.
02:05:16.000So 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.
02:05:25.000Oh, there are lots of things that are not I think?
02:05:51.000Markets 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?
02:05:59.000There's no magic principle by which a market knows what's healthy and what, you know, you might crave but shouldn't have.
02:06:06.000Well, 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,
02:06:23.000but to leave it alone completely means that it wanders randomly through an indeterminate landscape.
02:06:30.000And 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?
02:06:44.000It's like, well, what do we want the landscape to look like?
02:06:47.000How do we balance that with the sort of comprehensive computations that the market allows?
02:06:52.000And, 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.
02:07:01.000So, again, that's an argument on the side of free speech, right?
02:07:06.000Yeah, I mean, really, it couldn't be more important.
02:07:08.000The real answer is that both failures are frightening.
02:07:12.000You really don't want a state nannying you and over-regulating the market and taking the magic out of it.
02:07:20.000And 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.
02:07:36.000You can't do it in a landscape where you can't talk about the questions.
02:07:38.000And this brings us to censorship, doesn't it?
02:07:40.000Because this is a real issue with the marketplace of free ideas.
02:07:44.000When 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,
02:08:03.000and it's a very good point, that freedom breeds inequality.
02:08:06.000Because you're free to put as much effort as you'd like into something, and you're going to get unequal results.
02:08:13.000And 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.
02:08:26.000You know, I know many people that are far more dedicated than other people that I know, and they do better.
02:08:32.000Yeah, 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.
02:08:42.000And what intelligence is probably something like the number of credible operations that you can manifest in a given period of time.
02:09:01.000And the next thing is, well, conscientiousness.
02:09:03.000Well, conscientiousness would be something like how many of those cycles of effort are devoted to that specific task?
02:09:10.000And it turns out that if there's a relationship between the effort and task success, more effort is better.
02:09:16.000And so I can give you some indication of the power of that.
02:09:20.000So 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.
02:09:28.000And 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.
02:09:39.000You'd have a 50% chance of making that selection correctly if you did it randomly.
02:09:46.000If you did it informed by the results of a good cognitive test and a conscientious test, you'd be right 85% of the time.
02:09:53.000So you could say with 85% accuracy which of two people would be more likely to be in the top 50%.
02:09:59.000So 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.
02:10:36.000My 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.
02:11:33.000But a lot of the things that we hoped would work, like Head Start's a good example of that.
02:11:38.000You know, Head Start was part of the American War on Poverty, and the idea was you'd give...
02:11:42.000You know, deprived kids leg up early before they hit school and start training them cognitively earlier.
02:11:51.000And 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.
02:12:03.000But 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.
02:12:18.000Now, Head Start did have a couple of benefits.
02:12:20.000One was fewer teenage pregnancies and fewer dropouts.
02:12:24.000But 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.
02:12:37.000But it didn't produce the cognitive improvements that everyone, right and left, were equally hoping for.
02:13:24.000The 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.
02:13:40.000So you could say even if you're in a deprived environment but you're smart, the intellectual landscape is wide open to you.
02:13:47.000Now, I'm not saying that's the case, but you can make a case for that.
02:13:50.000But 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,
02:14:05.000to 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.
02:14:15.000So let's say you had a twin, you were both adopted out at birth.
02:14:23.000They'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.
02:14:40.000And that's a really complicated one because you think, well, as twins travel through the environment and accrue different Experiences, their IQs should diverge.
02:15:13.000And 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...
02:15:44.000An environment in which we can say anything, that we can advance any argument and test it.
02:15:50.000It doesn't mean that that argument is protected, but that any argument can be advanced and then challenged, that that is inherent to navigating.
02:15:57.000And the other thing that I think we would agree on is that equality of opportunity is nothing but good.
02:16:04.000A fair game with equality of opportunity.
02:16:06.000A fair game with equality of opportunity.
02:16:08.000And 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...
02:16:23.000Yeah, that freedom produces inequality.
02:16:24.000That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it doesn't mean that we are obligated to ride it all the way down.
02:16:31.000The fact is we could make people safe to fail so that you are encouraged to attempt to do something highly valuable.
02:16:41.000And if it doesn't work out, then the point is you're not homeless.
02:16:46.000This 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.
02:17:03.000There is some evidence of that actually happening in Canada.
02:17:07.000Now, these are multi-variable problems, and so I'm not claiming that this is true, but it's suggestive.
02:17:14.000The rate of entrepreneurial activity in Canada is actually higher than in the United States.
02:17:19.000And 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.
02:17:32.000And 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.
02:17:39.000But it doesn't work too badly, and we've been able to manage it for about 50 years.
02:17:44.000There'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.
02:17:53.000Like, I would say, at the high end, the American healthcare system is better than the Canadian healthcare system.
02:17:59.000But 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,
02:18:14.000but 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.
02:18:25.000And the stats are similar if you look at other There's a great piece on that by Adam Ruins Everything.
02:18:35.000Have you ever seen that television show?
02:19:16.000I mean, I actually think that I should stop, because I'm kind of at the limits of...
02:19:22.000I'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.
02:19:32.000Yes, this isn't the topic where you want to make that kind of error.
02:19:50.000I 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.
02:20:02.000And 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.
02:20:14.000Killed some untold number of millions of people and was responsible for their deaths.
02:20:19.000People look to him and they find all sorts of positive things to attribute to his reign.
02:20:24.000Opening 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.
02:20:48.000But 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.
02:21:06.000So 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.
02:21:33.000But what he did was rational from the point of view of...
02:21:50.000And 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.
02:22:08.000And the point is that they exist in a latent program.
02:22:12.000And at a point when you have austerity as a result of usually a...
02:22:19.000An opportunity that has run its course and has resulted in the population growing to fill that opportunity.
02:22:25.000And suddenly there's nowhere to go because the opportunity has all been absorbed.
02:22:29.000The tendency of people is to figure out who, what other population is weak.
02:22:35.000And if that population is across a border, then there's some excuse for war.
02:22:39.000And if the population is within the border, then it's a genocide.
02:22:42.000But the point is that is an ever present danger for us.
02:22:48.000Because this argument was sort of phrased as, we have a disagreement about Hitler.
02:22:52.000And I would like to point out that I don't actually disagree with anything that you just said.
02:22:57.000If 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.
02:23:09.000I think the disagreement was something like, I said that Hitler was even more evil than we thought he was.
02:23:14.000And 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.
02:23:25.000And I would say I agree absolutely with that.
02:23:28.000I mean, I've studied Hitler a lot, and there's a bunch of things that you can't say about him.
02:24:01.000So 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...
02:24:27.000And my point would simply be, and again, I couldn't possibly be less sympathetic with the individual.
02:24:36.000My 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,
02:24:55.000That's what those camps, and not all of the camps were work camps.
02:24:59.000But, you know, Auschwitz, for example, was both a work camp and a death camp.
02:25:03.000And so there was this tendency to enslave.
02:25:08.000So 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.
02:25:21.000But here's a slight variation of that.
02:25:23.000You tell me what you think about this.
02:25:26.000Is 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?
02:25:44.000Again, 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.
02:26:28.000Okay, 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.
02:26:46.000And then he went, obviously, after Eastern Europe and sought the future of Germany in Russia.
02:26:53.000And it took 12 million Russians to turn around the German war machine.
02:27:01.000There were vastly more civilian deaths.
02:27:02.000But 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.
02:27:21.000And by getting rid of them, increased the amount of resource that was available to Aryans.
02:27:26.000This has nothing to do Genes are not interested in figuring out which genes are superior.
02:27:33.000All of the language about German superiority is nonsense.
02:27:40.000I mean, they're obviously genes they don't think, but they act as if they are interested in replacing alternative spellings.
02:27:47.000Okay, 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,
02:28:06.000let's say, in our genome, in our set of biological possibilities.
02:28:10.000And we have to be very awake to that fact on an ongoing basis.
02:28:14.000They are lurking in our genomes, which does not mean that we as adults have this as a possibility.
02:28:19.000Many people will not go along with this.
02:28:21.000Other people have it lurking to be triggered.
02:28:24.000And I think, you know, what worries me is that Trump, I think very cynically, Utilized this lurking program in order to gain office.
02:28:34.000That he played upon the fact that certain people were waiting to hear those noises.
02:28:38.000And what he said about Charlottesville, you know, again, he did not go after the white nationalists.
02:28:48.000Did you see the white nationalist response?
02:28:51.000Yeah, the daily storm had, is that what it's called?
02:28:54.000One 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.
02:29:03.000He was very clear that it was all sides, and that he never once targeted us, he didn't say anything bad about us.
02:29:09.000And then they said, God bless Trump at the end of it.
02:29:12.000There'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.
02:29:22.000I had to make comments in the Canadian media about Charlottesville.
02:29:26.000And 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.
02:29:38.000However, Truth is a tricky thing because you have to take the temporal context into account.
02:29:44.000You know, because I would say you can imagine that there are white lies and black truths.
02:29:49.000A 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.
02:29:58.000You 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.
02:30:05.000But 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.
02:30:29.000And then two weeks later, he could have said, well...
02:30:32.000Would 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.
02:32:11.000And 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.
02:32:22.000Yeah, or even insufficient denunciation, which was kind of what did in...
02:32:27.000There's a Canadian journalist named Faith Goldie who got fired from Rebel Media for being accused of being too cozy with Daily Stormer types.
02:34:35.000And 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.
02:34:44.000And 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.
02:34:57.000And 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,
02:35:16.000Not 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.
02:35:27.000And he's particularly good at embedding himself.
02:35:30.000He did it with Scientology, he's done it with a bunch of different groups.
02:36:48.000Well, it depends on what you mean by required.
02:36:50.000Well, but my thought is, like, to find out what these people really want and really, like, we're really trying to achieve.
02:36:57.000Sometimes you don't have to be confrontational with them.
02:36:59.000You just got to allow them to be comfortable.
02:37:01.000Look, 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.
02:37:13.000But you got to see that the ugliness was so obvious and evident.
02:37:18.000And 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.
02:37:25.000Now, nobody would ever accuse a black man like Kamau Bell with being a sympathizer with the KKK. He was in this inarguable position.
02:37:42.000Yeah, 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.
02:37:56.000And somehow we have to raise the threshold of offense.
02:38:01.000There are lots of ways to contribute to the conversation.
02:38:04.000One 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.
02:38:20.000Being critical to them, just getting in arguments with them.
02:38:23.000You might be able to see something from that, from their response to rational discussion about their issues.
02:38:29.000This 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.
02:38:36.000Part 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.
02:38:54.000But 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,
02:39:12.000which is the danger that you were describing.
02:39:14.000And 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,
02:39:42.000Well, 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.
02:39:52.000I 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.
02:40:04.000And so this guy was like, well, you just admitted you're a Nazi.
02:40:07.000And I'm like, see, this is a part of the problem.
02:40:24.000I 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.
02:40:36.000And that's a huge part of why those things are generated.
02:40:43.000Yeah, 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.
02:40:52.000But all I'm saying is what I see is a lot of people using it to taunt people who can't figure out.
02:40:58.000I think that's the vast majority of it.
02:41:01.000And I think the same thing about the Kekistani types is that That's almost all humor.
02:41:06.000Yeah, 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.
02:41:33.000The vast majority of them are humorous.
02:41:35.000And again, these people are not coordinating.
02:41:38.000So 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.
02:42:27.000It's like, what percentage of people are making the frog racist?
02:42:31.000And then for the Southern Poverty Law Center to say that this is a symbol of hate now, this frog, well, guess what?
02:42:37.000You 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.
02:42:44.000They're not just mad like angry, but mad like insane.
02:42:48.000Like, you're not looking at this thing rationally at all.
02:42:50.000You're saying that a frog, where 99% of the memes are just humorous or silly, now the frog is a hate symbol.
02:42:58.000Not only a hate symbol, but Nazi white supremacist.
02:43:38.000By whoever the fucking people are that did that hateful thing.
02:43:42.000Those are the people that are hateful, not the other ones that are using that frog for humor.
02:43:47.000I 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.