In this episode of the podcast, I sit down with climate scientist, writer, speaker, and podcaster Dr. Michael Bloomberg. We talk about what it's like to be a climate scientist and how to deal with climate change and climate change denial. We also talk about the science behind climate denial and climate denialism, and why climate change is a problem, not a solution. Finally, Dr. Bloomberg talks about his new book, "The Dark Side of the Moon" and why he thinks climate change isn't as bad as people think it is. If you're interested in learning more about climate change or climate denial, check out this episode and this book out of this series. It's a must-listen for anyone who's interested in climate change, climate change deniers, climate denialists, or climate change alarmists. You won't want to miss this one! The Dark Side Of The Moon is a podcast about climate, climate, and everything else. Hosted by Alex Blumberg. Produced in Los Angeles, CA. Music by Zapsplat and Ian Dorsch. Art by Jeff Kaale. Cover art by Matt Knost. We'd like to hear your thoughts on this episode. Send us your voice messages to sws@whatiwatchedtonight.co.uk and we'll get them on the show. Thank you for listening to the podcast. and sharing it on social media! We'll be looking out to you in the next episode. Thanks again, sws if you have any questions or suggestions, suggestions, comments, suggestions or thoughts on the podcast? or suggestions for future episodes? or any other good listening support us out there! or your thoughts/suggestions? Thanks for listening and suggestions? Please leave us on sws_@whatsup! and/or your thoughts or thoughts/experiences? :) - thank you! - sws=a&t=1s=3s=2s=4s=5s=1_3s&a&q=3t=8s=8c3q&a=3c3r&q&qid=4c3&s=9c3m=4t=3a3q=8e_3c4c4m=3m&q_3m3
00:00:11.000That state of intense concentration on that before you can really manage it I think there's mental endurance involved too because I think that we up I think there's mental endurance that comes with anything that you do on a day-to-day basis whether it's writing Whether it's doing podcasts,
00:00:31.000whether it's doing stand-up comedy, I think anything we have to think and manage complex ideas and manipulate your language and the way you're speaking and be able to engage in the dance between two people...
00:00:50.000I think you got to do it all the time.
00:00:51.000I think if you just do it every now and again, like especially like if you took time off of speaking to people, like if you hadn't talked to anybody in a long time and then you talk.
00:01:37.000Well, you know, it's like one of them is a climate change book and it's intense.
00:01:42.000And so it's requiring a lot of thinking.
00:01:44.000And then I have to, like, look at the criticisms of this guy and criticisms of the work and, you know, who believes that in 10 years Miami's going to be underwater?
00:01:54.000Who believes that this is probably hyperbole?
00:02:00.000And the reality is, you know, the world sort of always goes through these cycles of change, but human beings are definitely having an effect on it.
00:02:08.000But a small effect compared to cows and other things.
00:04:21.000There's another problem that bedevils climate modeling too, which is that as you stretch out the models across time, the errors increase radically.
00:04:32.000And so maybe you can predict out a week or three weeks or a month or a year, but the farther out you predict, the more your model's in error.
00:04:39.000And that's a huge problem when you're trying to model over a hundred years because the errors compound just like interest.
00:04:48.000In fact, it's already the case that even if the climate models are right, the error bars are so wide by 100 years out that we'll never be able to measure the effects of the changes we're making now.
00:04:58.000We'll never know if the changes we're making, you know, to save the climate actually worked.
00:07:22.000Okay, I'll give you $5 now, I'll give you $7.50 in two weeks.
00:07:26.000Or I'll give you $50 now, I'll give you $500 in 10 years.
00:07:30.000And so imagine you do that with all sorts of amounts, over all sorts of time frames.
00:07:36.000Then you can compute a discount curve, which is how much people devalue the amount a dollar is worth as it progresses out into the future.
00:07:46.000And what you generally find is that impulsive people discount the future more heavily.
00:07:51.000That's actually the definition of impulsive.
00:07:53.000And you might think, well, the impulsive people are wrong.
00:07:56.000It's like the ant and the grasshopper.
00:07:59.000You know, the grasshopper's fiddling all summer, and then he starves to death in the winter, and the good old ant who packed away the supplies, he's doing fine in the winter.
00:08:08.000He sacrificed the present to the future and isn't that sensible.
00:09:25.000Well, you're very unlikely to be robbed and pillaged unless you have wealth.
00:09:32.000Right, and so the ability to store wealth across time To decrease the risk of the catastrophes of future, that's the problem in some sense that civilization set out to solve.
00:09:45.000How can we stabilize things over a long term enough to make long term investing a reasonable proposition?
00:09:55.000So I worked on the UN committee that wrote the Secretary General's report on sustainable development.
00:10:00.000I worked on the Canadian subcommittee to be technically accurate.
00:10:04.000And I was by no means the head of that.
00:10:06.000I worked with the team that worked on that.
00:10:08.000But we edited and wrote and rewrote a fair bit of the document.
00:10:14.000And so I did a lot of work in the background, learning what I needed to learn to work on that committee with some degree of, what would you say, qualification.
00:10:24.000I read maybe 200 books on ecological development and economic development, the relationship between the two.
00:10:36.000And a lot of it was on oceanic management, because I did realize that one thing we're doing that's extraordinarily stupid on the ecological front is destroying all the marine life within 40 miles of the shores.
00:10:50.000And all the marine life is within 40 miles of the shores.
00:10:53.000Like, you think, the oceans, they're vast.
00:11:18.000You make marine protected areas, like national parks, that you need about 15% of the total coastal territory really protected.
00:11:26.000And that solves that problem, essentially.
00:11:29.000And then everybody has fish, because the fish, they don't just stay there, they move around.
00:11:33.000You can have your cake and eat it, too, with marine protected areas.
00:11:36.000But mostly what I learned, and this was really cool, was that this was so cool, and I really believe it's true.
00:11:43.000The fastest way to make the planet sustainably green and ecologically viable is to make poor people as rich as possible, as fast as we possibly can.
00:11:56.000Because the thing about poor people is that...
00:12:12.000When you're insecure on a day-to-day basis, you don't know where your next meal is coming from, you're not paying attention to the broader environment, that hated word, around you.
00:12:22.000And you can't even really worry about your children's future in some real sense, because it's like, no, no, you don't understand.
00:12:38.000If you can get resources to the poorest section of the population, as soon as they get to the point where they have some hope of a genuine future, especially for their children, they immediately become concerned about broader environmental considerations.
00:12:52.000And then the attempt to make the environment habitable and sustainable That comes up of its own accord at a grassroots level and spreads everywhere.
00:13:25.000If the politicians who were discussing environmental sustainability were serious, especially the left-wing ones, and I say especially because the left-wing ones always say, well, we care about the poor and dispossessed.
00:13:59.000And you're on the left, you think if you put limits on economic development, the rich will suffer.
00:14:03.000That runs contrary to every theory that your whole political philosophy is based on.
00:14:09.000You put limits to growth on, the poor stay poor or get worse.
00:14:12.000Doesn't matter because the planet has too many people on it anyways, which it most certainly does not.
00:14:17.000If you are serious about the environment, and even vaguely concerned about poor people, all of your policies would be devoted to making the poor rich as fast as possible.
00:14:28.000But that would violate the anti-capitalist presumption, let's say, that the reason for environmental degradation in the first place is, say, entrepreneurial and free market development, which it most certainly isn't, that's actually completely backwards, make poor people rich.
00:14:48.000It should have been about trying to generate as much energy as we possibly can to be distributed as widely as possible in the cheapest possible manner.
00:15:21.000We still have a weird idea of nuclear because of the several, you know, whether it's Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, there's been a few disasters.
00:15:30.000More people die every year from solar energy than die from nuclear.
00:16:07.000Well, that's not so good because, first of all, they cut down the trees and burn the trees.
00:16:12.000And second, if you're concerned about pollution, especially particulate pollution, especially indoors, which kills, I think, seven million children a year.
00:16:21.000Seven million children a year are killed by indoor particulate pollution.
00:17:32.000It hasn't polluted any water supplies?
00:17:34.000Look, everything pollutes something, and so the idea that there's any source of energy that we can derive that's not going to produce some pollutant as a consequence, that's the kind of nonsense you hear from people who say things like, net zero.
00:17:48.000We're going to hit net zero by 2050. It's like, no we're not.
00:18:41.000Yeah, but it's still almost all the inside.
00:18:43.000So that's outdoor outside air pollution.
00:18:44.000Yeah, but the outside air pollution is trivial.
00:18:45.000But let's just read it so that people understand what we're saying, because we can read this.
00:18:48.000Together household air pollution from cooking and ambient outside air pollution caused more than 50% of acute lower respiratory infections in children under 5 years of age in low and middle income countries.
00:19:18.000You went on these rants, so I want to bring you back to this idea of climate and environment.
00:19:25.000We should be concerned not just about particulate pollution, but shouldn't we be concerned about the effect that we're having on the CO2 that we're releasing in the atmosphere?
00:19:34.000Now, from what I've read, it has an impact.
00:19:37.000They don't exactly know what percentage of an impact it has, but it's most certainly something that we can reduce.
00:19:45.000What I've also read is that one of the problems is when people start talking about, like, electric cars, is that it's literally impossible for—there's not enough minerals.
00:19:56.000These conflict minerals they use for these batteries, there's not enough to give a car As many cars as we have in this country, as many cars as there are in the world that are mostly internal combustion engines, if we replace those with battery-powered cars, I don't think that's possible.
00:20:11.000Well, where are we going to get the electricity?
00:20:17.000But even if we did get the electricity from nuclear, which, by the way, is fairly clean.
00:20:22.000It's all in whether or not there's a disaster and whether or not they have these precautionary measures set in place to have systems That will be able to shut down the core when there is a disaster.
00:20:39.000And those were large-scale reactors, and they have small-scale reactors now, thorium salt reactors that are small and modular in some sense.
00:20:45.000And when those sorts of things happen, they shut down by themselves.
00:20:48.000But we should talk about it because those Fukushima, when, I mean, okay, let's look this up.
00:22:56.000But if you get a nuclear reactor from 2022, you know, all that advancement in technology and innovation, you're going to have a far better system.
00:23:36.000Okay, so what happens is that in any system that's hierarchical, and the left-wingers know this because it drives their whole philosophy, in any hierarchical system, when you stress the system, The disproportionate amount of that stress falls on the people who are in the lower rungs,
00:23:52.000because they're barely hanging on anyways.
00:23:53.000So, you know, you get a 1% increase in unemployment.
00:23:58.000You get a 5% increase in psychiatric hospitalizations.
00:24:10.000So even among birds, even among birds that don't live in strict hierarchy, so non-social birds, not ones that hang about in flocks like crows, the birds will move into an environment, any environment, and the more Able,
00:24:26.000in some sense, healthier birds get the best nesting spots.
00:24:30.000They're closest to the food, they're sheltered from rain and wind and all of that.
00:24:33.000So they're not psychophysiologically stressed.
00:24:36.000And so then when any kind of avian flu comes through, let's say, to challenge the bird population, the birds die from the bottom up.
00:24:45.000They always, that's the old saying, when the aristocracy gets a cold, the working class dies of pneumonia.
00:24:51.000It's like, okay, so fine, increase energy costs.
00:24:55.000A bunch of poor people fall off the map, like a bunch of them.
00:24:58.000And the more you increase the energy costs, the more that happens.
00:25:02.000And so if the price we have to pay to move towards a sustainable environment is increased energy costs, and it isn't, that's a policy decision, it doesn't have to be that way, the absolutely 100% inevitable consequence of that will be that you sacrifice the poor.
00:25:17.000Except the left, the real hardcore leftists, they want to implement socialism.
00:25:23.000And implementing socialism will solve a few of those problems.
00:25:26.000Yeah, well, that's part of the issue, is that the pro-environment stance is contaminated by an anti-capitalist rhetoric.
00:25:36.000Now, the problem with the socialists, so let's take this apart a little bit.
00:25:40.000I mean, the socialists always point out something that's true.
00:25:45.000And Marx pointed this out, but it wasn't Marx's discovery.
00:25:48.000And he's like seriously wrong about it in an important way.
00:25:51.000So Marx observed that money tends to aggregate in the hands of fewer and fewer people.
00:25:58.000Okay, the first question is, is that true?
00:26:01.000And the answer is, not only is that true, it's so true that you can model the distribution of money in a population using equations derived from physics.
00:26:23.000And it's actually an underestimation of the problem, because if the problem of inequality, which is an actual problem, was as simple as, let's change capitalism.
00:26:35.000Unfortunately, the problem is so deep that changing capitalism won't change the problem at all.
00:26:41.000And in fact, in most of the places where it's being attempted, especially the more radical forms of communism, let's say, rather than socialism, because we can distinguish the two, and should, it's important to do so, in countries that became communist, It wasn't like a small percentage of the people still didn't own all the resources.
00:27:00.000It's just that there were hardly any resources and almost everyone had nothing.
00:27:04.000There was still a tiny fraction of people who were the privileged elite.
00:27:08.000And so, you know, if you play Monopoly, what happens when you play Monopoly?
00:27:15.000And so you can actually model this problem with something as simple as a Monopoly game.
00:27:23.000That's actually a fairly good model of how money distributes itself in the environment.
00:27:27.000And you can blame that on capitalism, but you can get the same, you can get exactly the same result if you have people trade because they flip a dice.
00:27:34.000So if you took 100 people, let's say give 100 people $10 each, and then they had to trade with each other.
00:27:40.000If I, you flip a coin and I flip a coin, and if it's, we flip a coin, if it's heads, you get a dollar.
00:27:59.000At zero, well, they can't trade anymore.
00:28:03.000So what happens is that people lose at different rates, but if you lose enough, even if it takes you 100 trades to lose all your money, as soon as you hit zero, you're done.
00:28:11.000If you play that out to its conclusion, even though it's random, completely random, the trading, one person ends up with all the money, and everyone else ends up with zero.
00:28:57.000They'd have these big celebrations that rich people would put on where status was determined by how much of that wealth you would give away.
00:29:06.000Right, right, and that was the potlatch.
00:29:19.000This might be a biased sample, but I don't think so.
00:29:23.000And if it is, it's biased towards entrepreneur conservative types who you would think in the parody sense would be the least likely to do this.
00:29:31.000I haven't met anyone who has a vast fortune whose primary concern isn't What the hell can I do with all this money that's beneficial as fast as possible?
00:29:42.000They're not sitting around thinking, I need another super yacht.
00:29:45.000Now, look, there's going to be people like that, you know, but I haven't met any of them.
00:30:57.000When people start talking about capitalism, and we talk about capitalism uplifting poor people, one of the issues that a lot of people have in this country is when you ship jobs overseas and you ship companies start manufacturing things overseas for essentially pennies on the dollar.
00:31:42.000That's the reality of sending jobs overseas.
00:31:44.000The cure to that is a more even distribution of wealth within the company, meaning that The company would have to, and I'm not picking on Apple like any company, name them.
00:31:55.000They would have to pay the people that work there a decent living wage with great benefits and health insurance and dental and all the stuff that people want and need in order to feel secure and safe.
00:32:06.000Give them a great working environment.
00:33:08.000If you really wanted to make these other countries, like third world countries, and raise them up and really increase the economy, what you would do is pay people in third world countries where you have these plants the same amount that you would have to pay them in America.
00:33:21.000Then you'd have a complete change in those environments.
00:33:24.000Okay, so we can take that apart a bunch of ways.
00:33:27.000I mean, part of the advantage to manufacturing things where wages are relatively low is you give those countries a competitive advantage.
00:33:36.000So part of the reason that there aren't millions of people starving in China is because even the Chinese communists woke up enough to realize that if they opened up their economies, that free market Free market is nothing different than allowing unrestricted choice among consumers in some sense.
00:33:56.000So when we're talking about the free market, we should be careful about what we're talking about.
00:33:59.000It's like you get to have choice about what you buy.
00:34:01.000That's the central spirit of free market capitalism.
00:34:07.000Exporting those jobs stopped a huge proportion of the Chinese from living in absolute privation and likely decreased the probability of a broad-scale war.
00:34:18.000And it also brought the Chinese into the economy, which is a big deal.
00:34:22.000The Chinese produce more engineers every year than Americans have engineers.
00:34:26.000And so now we've unlocked an unbelievable amount of brain power.
00:34:29.000And that's produced an insane technological revolution.
00:34:33.000Now, I think it's unfortunate that a lot of that was done on the backs of the American working class.
00:34:39.000And I think that the Democrats abandoning the working class when they were in that state of privation was a catastrophe of public policy.
00:34:47.000And also part of the reason why Trump got elected.
00:34:50.000But it isn't obvious to me that exporting those jobs Was a bad long-term decision.
00:34:58.000Because, well, you want a world where 20 million Chinese are starving?
00:35:52.000And some of those countries are really getting on a reasonably solid footing.
00:35:57.000And most of that's happened, almost all that's happened since the Berlin Wall fell.
00:36:01.000And part of the reason for that is that that continent isn't being riven by a terrible conflict between the communists and the capitalists.
00:36:09.000And most of the reason the eradication of that conflict has been beneficial is because they're not doing unbelievably stupid and counterproductive things at the policy level.
00:36:19.000They're letting markets flourish to at least a limited degree.
00:36:23.000And that's making, that's, people aren't, you know, there's, I talked to some people, I was in Washington for a week, last week, and I talked to some people who are working with a UN committee that's prime goal is the eradication of hunger.
00:36:41.000Well, there isn't any hunger in the world anymore that isn't caused by political conflict.
00:36:49.000In fact, it's so interesting that one of the emerging problems, especially among the poor all over the world, is that they have too much to eat.
00:36:57.000And so we're seeing diseases of affluence replace diseases of privation.
00:37:01.000And you think, isn't that too bad, these Western diets?
00:37:05.000And you know, fair enough, but you want to be fat or dead?
00:37:32.000When you're talking about the prosperous areas that have prospered because they brought in the market and these companies have shipped these jobs over to these places and allowed these people to flourish, the flip side is Detroit.
00:37:57.000When they were in the height of their manufacturing, all the American automobiles were made in Detroit.
00:38:03.000Cadillacs and Chevys and Fords and that was where everybody worked and then it was also where the union autoworkers Well,
00:38:23.000Henry Ford did what you said that capitalists should do.
00:38:27.000I mean, when Ford was pressed on how much he paid his workers, because he paid them a lot, he said, I want to pay them enough so that they can afford a car.
00:38:36.000And so he ramped up wages dramatically.
00:38:38.000And that was partly part of his, you could say, self-interested vision, although I think that's an oversimplification.
00:38:45.000It's like, well, if we want to sell our product, why don't we expand the consumer market?
00:38:48.000Well, those people have to have some money.
00:38:51.000When I was a kid, I had friends that had done gigs in Detroit when I was just starting out doing stand-up, and they were like, whatever you do, don't go to Detroit with a fucking Japanese car, because they will fuck your car up.
00:39:16.000Yeah, well, they were responding to a real threat.
00:39:18.000You were talking about old cars with me earlier.
00:39:20.000So one of my friends in the little town I grew up in, this was back in the mid-70s, had a Dodge Colt, and it was one of the first Japanese cars.
00:39:30.000And that thing was a real piece of junk in a sea of pieces of junk, because cars in the mid-70s, they were not good.
00:39:38.000They rusted fast, but nothing rusted faster than a Japanese car in Canada.
00:39:42.000Those bloody You could put them outside in the winter when there was salt in the road and watch them dissolve.
00:39:47.000But what was very interesting about that, I saw this with the Chinese too, because in Alberta, I went to Edmonton, I think this would be 1975 about...
00:39:58.000It was the first Chinese trade fair in Canada.
00:40:01.000So they had Chinese manufactured implements at this display.
00:40:06.000It was really interesting because it was like walking back into 1945 or 1950. We looked at all these things and we thought, oh, that looks like exactly like what Grandpa was using on the farm, you know, 40 years ago.
00:40:16.000So with the Japanese, it's like their cars were junk to begin with.
00:40:26.000You talked about how good cars are now.
00:40:28.000Well, the net consequence of opening up that competition was the Japanese got their act together.
00:40:33.000I mean, in the 80s, particularly, Japan got so powerful that everyone thought it would be the dominant world economy for like 10 years.
00:40:41.000And they just went from nothing after World War II to like superstars in 40 years.
00:40:45.000And it's really hard to see how that wasn't everyone's benefit.
00:40:49.000Now, to your point, When you open up competition internationally, especially in manufacturing, you pose a tremendous threat to the current working class in your country, a tremendous immediate threat.
00:41:04.000It might be a long-term benefit because it stabilizes international relations between countries that might otherwise go to war, in which case it would be working class people that would be being slaughtered like mad.
00:41:15.000But it's no doubt that, to me, there's almost no doubt that The freeing of trade worldwide and the benefits that that produced were paid for disproportionately by the American working class.
00:41:31.000And it also raises another really complicated problem, which is when your economy switches to information and services, which is more complex cognitively.
00:42:33.000And this guy in particular, it was so interesting because he wasn't doing too bad when he had almost no money.
00:42:40.000But he got a disability check because he'd been hurt at work.
00:42:44.000And every time he had a disability check, he was gone for three days on a cocaine and alcohol binge, and he'd just drink up all his money.
00:42:51.000Then he'd end up in a ditch somewhere, like really 80% dead, and then eventually dead, because eventually it was that kind of behavior that killed him.
00:42:59.000But more money, he would have just died sooner.
00:43:25.000I worked with a researcher in Montreal who had a monkey farm on St. Kitt's, green monkeys.
00:43:31.000And he was interested in studying alcoholism.
00:43:34.000And he would capture monkeys in the wild and bring them to his compound and then allow them to access a pretty sweetened mixture of rum and water.
00:43:44.000Well, they used something else other than water.
00:43:46.000And most of the monkeys could take it or leave it.
00:44:42.000If you put them in a cage and bore them to death.
00:44:44.000Let's explain that to people what we're talking about because there are studies that were done where initially people thought that cocaine was so addictive that if you gave it to rats, they would just take the cocaine until they died.
00:44:58.000But then they realize that if you take these rats, that when you were doing this, you're taking these rats in these highly stressed out environments, you're putting them in cages, nothing's natural.
00:45:06.000And if you take these rats and you put them in a far larger environment with trees and everything that a rat normally has.
00:46:03.000An isolated lab rat who's been genetically bred is not that much like an actual rat.
00:46:09.000And when Skinner did all his studies on lab rats, not only were they isolated, which rats never are in the real world because they're communal and social, they play, they laugh.
00:46:45.000And all I'm saying, I'm not saying anything revolutionary here.
00:46:49.000I'm saying, for example, if you experiment with 20 different drugs, you'll probably find the one for you, right?
00:46:56.000And people react differently to pharmacological substances, and a huge part of the variation in that reactivity is genetically determined or genetically influenced.
00:47:51.000Well, you put two rats in a little arena where they can wrestle.
00:47:56.000And then the next time that they know they can go into the arena, so maybe do it a couple of times so they learn that, then you can make them press a bar to open the door to get into the arena.
00:48:07.000Well, then you measure how many times they'll press the bar and how fast they'll press it, and then you can derive...
00:48:13.000Insight, direct insight into how motivated they are, because motivation is directly proportionate to the willingness to expand energy, logically enough.
00:48:21.000And you can do the same thing with drugs.
00:48:24.000How hard will the animal work to obtain a given pharmacological substance is an indication of how rewarding that drug is to them.
00:48:30.000Those studies have been done unbelievably carefully, and we know there's tremendous variation.
00:48:35.000So you can have your cake and eat it too.
00:48:39.000You can say, look, under most normal and natural conditions, it's not that easy to addict animals to an addictive substance, but there's still a percentage of them that are more susceptible to that than others.
00:48:50.000And even in highly stressed human environments, not everybody becomes a cocaine addict or an alcoholic.
00:48:56.000And then you might say, well, why do some people become cocaine addicts and some people become alcoholic?
00:49:00.000And some of it is availability, but some of it is, well, they like alcohol better.
00:49:35.000Mostly because you can really impair people by putting them in situations of deprivation.
00:49:41.000And so one of the things that's happened over the last century is the mean IQ has gone up seven points per generation, which is a lot, like it's really a lot.
00:49:50.000So 15 point IQ difference is the average difference between the typical high school graduate and the typical college graduate.
00:49:57.000So 15 points is four years of university.
00:50:00.000Roughly speaking, seven points in a generation is half the difference between a high school student and a college graduate.
00:50:06.000And it's gone up seven points a generation every 15 years.
00:50:19.000Well, partly because there are far few extremely deprived people Even on the information front, some of this was the introduction of television.
00:50:30.000You know, you hear, television makes people stupider.
00:50:32.000It's like, no, it makes smart people who could have been even smarter if they would have read Shakespeare stupider than they would have been if they read Shakespeare if they're watching TV. But if you're a deprived kid and sitting in the crib with no one paying attention to you for like three years,
00:50:52.000And so if you give people access to information and access to enough food, let's say, you pull up the bottom end of the cognitive distribution tremendously.
00:51:01.000And a lot of that, a tremendous amount of that has happened all over the world in the last hundred years.
00:51:05.000And that's a great deal for everyone because, well, that's that much more brain power that's available for everyone to benefit from.
00:51:13.000Like it's unbelievably valuable and you can see the cascade in that part of our technological transformation.
00:51:22.000It's like, well, the Chinese are producing as many engineers every year as the Americans have engineers.
00:51:29.000It's no wonder that things are accelerating at such a rate.
00:51:32.000Now, they don't innovate at the same rate as the U.S. innovates, but they're not doing too bad.
00:51:37.000And soon, you know, depending on how much they continue to flirt with totalitarianism, just think of all that billion people, all that creativity unleashed.
00:51:50.000So that is the dance over there, right?
00:51:51.000The totalitarianism versus innovation, versus giving people the freedom and also removing the fear of that totalitarian government so they have the ability to take risks.
00:52:10.000It's the part of the eternal dance between freedom and structure, even.
00:52:14.000And that's a tough one, because there's no freedom without structure.
00:52:19.000Like, I used to play a game with my students when we were talking about Jean Piaget, who was very interested in the development of morality through games.
00:52:28.000So I say to them, so we're talking about freedom.
00:53:36.000This almost took the top of my head off when I realized it.
00:53:41.000And it took me about four months of thinking to figure this out.
00:53:43.000Because when I was in graduate school at McGill, I was really interested, I became really interested in the reality of evil, and I was very interested in the viability of nihilistic beliefs.
00:53:56.000You know, why bother if everything's going to disappear in a hundred years?
00:55:34.000I had a great journalist friend of mine, he said to me the other day, he said, all art aspires to the condition of music, which I thought was great.
00:55:44.000But music, you think about the revitalizing effect music continues to have in our culture, especially among young people, and that's really, really been the case since the beginning of the 60s.
00:56:15.000I went to a Ramones concert once, which was really fun.
00:56:18.000We were up in the second floor of this theater in Montreal, and the Ramones were playing on stage like a hundred feet away with their huge stadium.
00:56:34.000Like, I had to listen to the whole concert with my ears plugged, and I was still like three-quarters deaf for three days.
00:56:38.000And beneath us, on the stage, sort of, in front of the stage, there was a flat place, and all these punks were down there smashing into each other and doing this really rough dance.
00:58:12.000It's multiple patterns layered on top of one another in a harmonious manner and in a manner that indicates, in some sense, communication between all the patterned layers because they have to go together.
00:59:01.000And then there's more to it, so that's so cool.
00:59:03.000Music is an analog of the structure of existence itself, and it calls to you to take part in that.
00:59:09.000So maybe you dance by yourself, or maybe even better, you dance with someone else, and so then you both bring your bodies into this patterned relationship with this multi-layer harmony together in a spontaneous way, indicating that you can both play and are therefore potentially trustworthy future mates.
01:00:30.000And this brilliant guitarist just goes way out on a limb.
01:00:34.000Everybody in the crowd, it was so fun to be there.
01:00:37.000They're just thrilled to death because they're watching this man doing the same thing that surfers do.
01:00:41.000He's like dancing on the edge of chaos and order in this virtuosic manner.
01:00:46.000And everyone is so taken by that that it just lifts them out of the normality of their existence.
01:00:53.000You know, they see this joy just transfuse them.
01:00:56.000And that's because they got an intimation of genuine meaning.
01:01:01.000And it's not amenable to rational criticism, which is the thing that I thought that struck me as so miraculous about music and why it has this element of salvation.
01:01:11.000It's like it puts you directly in touch with the meaning that sustains you in life, directly.
01:01:16.000And it shows you what that would be, which is something like to observe the harmonious interplay of the patterns of being stacked on top of one another, and then to bring yourself into alignment with that, Which is what yogis strive to do and what disciplined athletes strive to do and what we celebrate in athletics.
01:01:36.000It's all a reflection of the same thing.
01:01:50.000Even though people can play beautiful music when no one's around, it's not the same as playing beautiful music in front of people because there's a thing that happens when people interact with that music.
01:02:02.000Well, you see that, you know, if you get lucky, you go to a...
01:02:05.000I went to a Leonard Cohen concert, one of the ones he put on when he went on tour when he was old.
01:02:11.000He lost all his money when he was in a Buddhist monastery.
01:02:14.000Dangers of being in a Buddhist monastery, by the way.
01:02:20.000Yeah, so he had to go back on tour, which turned out to be a great thing because he made way more money on that tour than he did, I think, in his whole life.
01:02:31.000But he got better and better as he got old, kind of like Johnny Cash, you know, because Cash got damn near transcendent just before he died.
01:02:38.000He put out some songs like The Man Comes Around that are just unbelievable.
01:02:43.000He wrote a book on St. Paul, by the way.
01:02:48.000Yeah, yeah, so that's pretty interesting.
01:02:51.000So, Cohen, when he came onto the stage, everybody gave him a standing ovation, and then he played his sets, and it was like a religious experience, you know?
01:05:36.000But it's a horrible generalization, because you're taking an enormous group of people and you're looking at their ethnic background and their gender, and then you're dismissing them.
01:05:46.000Well, for a while, you know, because people kept coming and telling me that, you know, your audience is only angry white, young white men.
01:06:13.000Why are 70% of the people that watch YouTube male?
01:06:20.000Women are more interested in fiction than non-fiction, and men are opposite to that.
01:06:25.000So if you look at book buying preferences, for example, women tilt towards fiction, and men tilt towards women in fiction.
01:06:31.000And if you want to know why that is, it's because the most reliable difference that psychologists have ever found between men and women, the biggest difference, is interest.
01:06:41.000So, women are reliably more interested in people, and men are reliably more interested in things.
01:07:06.000You know, I actually have a relatively feminine personality structure because I'm pretty high in negative emotion, and I'm pretty high in agreeableness.
01:07:13.000And that's the typical feminine structure.
01:07:16.000And that's an interesting discussion to have, too, because, you know, we have this idea in our culture that you can be a woman born in a man's body.
01:07:47.000But the point is, there's plenty of men who are as feminine in their personality as the average woman.
01:07:52.000That doesn't mean they're in the wrong body.
01:07:54.000It just means that men and women are more alike than different, even though they are different, and that there's huge range within both genders.
01:08:36.000When the trans teenagers came after me when I opposed Bill C-16 in Canada on compelled speech grounds, I spent quite a bit of time watching them.
01:08:47.000And I already kind of knew about that fluid identity crowd.
01:08:51.000So when I was at Harvard, piercing and tattooing started to become a cultural rage.
01:08:58.000And I was interested in, well, who's doing this?
01:09:02.000It was a practice that was limited to criminal subtypes and outcasts for a long time.
01:09:08.000So, for example, if you worked in the circus, you were likely to be tattooed, you know, and you toured around the circus and that was a kind of carny life and it was an outsider life.
01:09:17.000And if you were a prisoner, same thing.
01:09:19.000But then all of a sudden it started to make its inroads into the popular culture.
01:09:22.000So we studied a group of early adopters of tattooing and piercing.
01:11:03.000They're so compelled that they're willing to go through surgery to change God, it means all sorts of things.
01:11:07.000I knew a kid in Toronto who was on the autistic spectrum and a lot of the people who were manifesting serious issues with gender identity are on the autistic spectrum.
01:11:18.000This is like Abigail Schreier's work in rapid onset gender dysphoria amongst women.
01:11:23.000Yeah, well, that's a different thing, the rapid onset.
01:11:26.000So part of the reason I objected to Bill C-16 to begin with was because I knew full well as a clinician that as soon as we messed with fundamental sex categories and changed the terminology, we would fatally confuse thousands of young girls.
01:11:38.000I knew that because I knew the literature on psychological contagion.
01:11:42.000And it stretches back like 500 years, that literature.
01:11:55.000History of psychoanalytic ideas, it doesn't matter.
01:11:57.000It's Henri Alenbergier and it's his main work, if you want to look it up.
01:12:00.000And so, psychological contagions are very common.
01:12:03.000And so, one of them, for example, was the satanic ritual abuse accusations that emerged in daycares in the 1980s.
01:12:10.000And that was a consequence of women going into the workforce en masse, leaving their children with strangers, and starting to have pathological fantasies about it, especially if they were borderline schizophrenic.
01:12:19.000And those fantasies propagated into the population.
01:12:22.000So what does this have to do with creativity?
01:12:24.000You were talking about creativity in people that are...
01:12:27.000Well, okay, so you see people with blue hair, the blue-haired crowd.
01:12:31.000Well, they're the same people that were doing tattooing and piercing, and they often are literally the same people because they have piercings.
01:12:36.000It's like, well, they have mutable identities.
01:12:38.000They're not stable in their identities.
01:13:30.000And so then we have to figure out, well how do we modify our memories or our traditions?
01:13:36.000At a rate that enables us to keep up with the culture.
01:13:39.000And the answer to this is, in part, we let creative people play multiple games on the fringe and some of them are radically successful and then we copy them.
01:13:49.000So you think that a lot of what's going on with people that want to change their gender identity is creativity?
01:13:59.000Yeah, that's not all of it, but that's definitely part of it.
01:14:01.000But there are for sure a lot of people that transition, and there has been work on this that shows that if they didn't transition, they wanted to transition at one point in time, and then they eventually wound up becoming gay men.
01:14:19.000I also think, by the way, that part of what we're seeing in late adolescence, with this insistence on the primacy of felt identity, is the re-emergence of suppressed fantasy play that should have taken place at between,
01:14:40.000That's been suppressed by the imposition of technological artifacts like television and phones and by the absence of free play among children who are hyper-supervised.
01:14:49.000So the fantasy play is imperative to develop your identity by trying out a bunch of different patterns of behavior and ways to be.
01:15:03.000His sister was about three and had a little gaggle of friends, and they used to dress him up like a fairy princess.
01:15:10.000And this didn't happen for, like, years, it happened for a couple of weeks, you know, and he was playing along, and I went down there, and I'm a northern Albertan, you know, and so the gender roles there were fairly finely defined, and I was watching this, I thought, Is it really a good thing that he's got wings on,
01:15:27.000a little fairy hat, and a wand, and a dress?
01:17:48.000Now, there are often people who have kind of a rigid identity, and part of their escape from that rigid identity is to develop some of the characteristics that are typical of the opposite sex.
01:19:17.000Yeah, sure, it can be anxiety too, but then often, under anxious conditions, people will revert to their persona, because it's a well-rehearsed set of routines, and that they know is socially acceptable.
01:19:28.000Okay, so for the Jungians, the first step outside the persona was the shadow.
01:21:49.000Because there's a subset of men that like to hit women during sex, and a lot of them turn out to be these kind of male feminist types, which is really strange.
01:24:51.000But Phoenix really carries that, and part of the reason that he does that is because he creates a compelling character who's sympathetic.
01:24:57.000Like, you can be sympathetic to him because he really did have a hard life, like, really hard.
01:25:02.000But Phoenix is an extraordinarily charismatic person, partly because he's so unbelievably—he's masculine in his features and carved, but he's so graceful.
01:25:15.000Every single thing he does in the entire movie is a dance.
01:25:19.000Like, he's conscious of every single movement he makes.
01:25:27.000And a lot of stellar performers had that ability to integrate, male performers had that ability to integrate that feminine grace into their masculine character.
01:25:41.000A lot of those 70s glam rockers were gender benders, long hair, a lot of flashy outfits.
01:25:46.000And they did show, and they weren't exactly androgynous, that's not the right way to think about it, is they manifested a higher order integration of masculine and feminine, and that made them charismatic.
01:26:03.000And so, that's high-order integration.
01:26:06.000And I would say that part of the compulsion between adult-onset transsexuality of the autogynephalic type is a consequence of the sexual instinct manifesting self as a guide to the integration of personality across the sex divide.
01:26:23.000I'm sure you're familiar with Douglas Murray's work.
01:26:26.000Yes, and Murray, who's very funny, who I like very much, and who's one of the most courageous people I've ever met.
01:26:32.000And he had an amazing point about civilizations collapsing, and that when they start collapsing, they become obsessed with gender.
01:26:42.000And he was saying that you could trace it back to the ancient Romans, the Greeks, Yeah, Camille Pellet has made much of that.
01:26:50.000I think probably it's not so much an obsession with gender, it's a disintegration of categories as a precursor.
01:26:57.000So it's a marker for if categories dissolve, especially fundamental ones, the culture is dissolving because the culture is a structure of category.
01:28:46.000And so, what I figured out was, partly because I was talking to my brother-in-law, Jim Keller, who's The world's greatest chip designer and has now designed a chip that's as powerful as the human brain, which is optimized for artificial intelligence learning,
01:30:07.000So now imagine you have an aggregation of texts in a civilization.
01:30:11.000You say, which are the fundamental texts?
01:30:13.000And the answer is, the texts upon which most other texts depend.
01:30:18.000And so you put Shakespeare way in there in English, because so many texts are dependent on Shakespeare's literary revelations.
01:30:25.000And Milton would be in that category, and Dante would be in that category, at least in translation.
01:30:30.000Fundamental authors, part of the Western canon, not because of the arbitrary dictates of power, but because those texts influenced more other texts.
01:30:39.000And then you think about that as a hierarchy, okay, with the Bible at its base, which is certainly the case.
01:30:47.000Now, imagine that's the entire corpus of linguistic production, all things considered.
01:34:01.000I mean, you can be around people but not have a good conversation and you might as well be isolated.
01:34:07.000You are isolated, in the presence of your own thoughts.
01:34:10.000That's the problem if you are stuck somewhere where the only conversation that's available is with dull people.
01:34:17.000Like if you have a job and the people at the job are like your friend who was on cocaine and alcohol and wound up dying from it.
01:34:24.000Those kinds of people, if you're only around them, it can severely limit the way you express yourself and the way you see the world and the amount of stimulation you get out of interacting with people.
01:34:37.000So it'll inhibit your intellectual development, because you won't be interested in expanding ideas, and you may look to escape.
01:34:46.000It inhibits not just your intellectual development, but the entire unfolding of your existence.
01:34:53.000One of the things that I hope to talk to people a lot about on this tour is the idea that I did a series on Genesis that became quite popular, and one of the stories I analyzed was the story of Abraham.
01:35:11.000Very cool story, because Abraham's like 80 years old, living in his father's tent.
01:35:30.000And so, and what happens to Abraham is it's a bloody catastrophe.
01:35:33.000Like, the first thing he runs into is a war, and then he goes into a totalitarian state, Egypt, and they try to steal his wife, and it's like...
01:35:40.000Man, he's thinking, things are pretty good in that tent.
01:35:44.000But, well, he goes on this tremendous adventure, and then he's the forefather of, you know, biblically speaking, half the people on the planet.
01:37:06.000Well, that was the answer that came out of France in the 1970s, and that was the answer that all the universities accepted.
01:37:12.000Why do you think that the whole cultural critique is patriarchal oppression?
01:37:16.000Don't you think that that is done a lot by people that have not taken those chances, that that diminishing of effort by calling a painter or a musician and saying that those people are motivated by power These are from career intellectuals who don't venture outside of the universities.
01:37:35.000They don't venture outside the prisons of their own imagination.
01:37:49.000And I think we should be very careful people aren't charitable.
01:37:53.000Very careful of people who aren't nice.
01:37:56.000There's people that make a career just insulting and shitting on people all the time, and they never can look at things from that person's perspective.
01:38:04.000Well, that is the expression of power then.
01:38:18.000Because you know who you are, you know what you're doing, you know, if you're just doing that.
01:38:22.000Yeah, well, what attitude do you have to yourself if you believe the only true expression of human existence is to be found in the will to power?
01:41:01.000I'm going to New York, so I'm going on a 40-city tour, which is going to be, I hope, playful and fun, you know, as well as serious, because we're trying to maintain a spirit of play while we undertake it.
01:41:15.000And I'm inviting some old friends from high school to join me in New York, and they were this group of people that I knew who were competitive comedians, essentially.
01:41:24.000And all we ever did when we hung out together, all of the status...
01:42:39.000I was walking through New York Times Square with Douglas Murray about a month ago, and we had gone to an opera and we were on the way to this unbelievably fun Russian bar.
01:42:47.000And we were walking through Times Square.
01:42:49.000And then in Times Square, there's these people dressed up like superheroes, say, and kids that have been hired to do this.
01:42:55.000And Spider-Man ran up to me and he said, Are you Jordan Peterson?
01:44:02.000He knows what he's saying, and he shuts people down in a pretty beautiful way.
01:44:08.000So I went to Cambridge and Oxford in December after I had been disinvited, and that's a whole interesting story in and of itself, because there's a real free speech movement developed at Cambridge and centered on the School of Divinity that's so interesting,
01:44:28.000But I tested out some of the ideas that I talked to you about today, about the idea that we have to look at the world through an ethical structure, not an objective structure.
01:44:42.000And I developed a little bit more when I was talking to you today, because I hadn't realized at that point that this literary structure was composed in part of the relationship between foundational texts, and that the Bible was by definition at the bottom of that.
01:44:53.000It has to be, technically, because—I'll go back to that for a minute—because imagine that as we moved forward through time, at one point we had no books at all, we had no writing.
01:45:05.000Well, then the question might be, well, what did we write down?
01:47:32.000And it's this constant, part of it's mercy, because let's keep what's good, because we want everyone to flourish, but part of it's judgment.
01:48:51.000And because he's brave and listens, he notices when he's not funny and he stops being not funny.
01:48:59.000And so the audience just tells him what's funny, and then he collects that across a hundred instances, and then that's funny and verified by the audience, and he goes out and tells those jokes.
01:49:08.000And so that's dialogical and redemptive as well.
01:49:11.000It's like, what jokes need to be told?
01:49:15.000Well, our culture has some sacred cows.
01:49:43.000You know, it's so cool when people laugh, they can't fight.
01:49:46.000I used to go work out with Jim Keller, this chip designer, and we did this for years, and one of our jokes was, you know, we'd be striving to bench press whatever we were managing at the time, 175 pounds, like it's really straining, and then we'd crack a joke, and that was always funny.
01:50:02.000We spotted him, of course, because as soon as you laugh...
01:50:51.000You know, I'll write it out and then I try to go on stage and on stage I'm informed by the feeling that I have interacting with the crowd to take it to a different place, to take the subject to a different place, to abandon parts of it that just don't feel organic to me.
01:51:10.000And you learn through the crowd that you can't just write.
01:53:47.000So now you're looking at the crowd and you're looking at their eyes in particular and their face and their eyes tell you what they're focused on so what they think is important and their face tells you how they're reacting and then you glance around the crowd and then you get a sense of the whole crowd and you map that onto your body and that gives rise to a set of intuitions that allows you to communicate because otherwise you couldn't communicate and that's listening although you're doing it with your eyes but you're still listening And that does inform this dance,
01:54:12.000and that's partly also why people love stand-up comedy.
01:54:15.000That's partly why they like my lectures, is because they don't know what's going to happen, and neither do I, and it could fail at any moment.
01:54:24.000Have you had lectures that failed spectacularly?
01:54:49.000And then sometimes that'll happen mid-lecture, and I think, then I get self-conscious, then I forget everything I'm talking about, and then that can be real awkward.
01:55:03.000Generally, so far, knock wood, if I pause, I can recreate the argument, and then I can figure out where I was headed, and then I can think, oh yes, that's why I made that point, and then I can go back.
01:55:16.000You know, one of the things comedians often do...
01:55:19.000Is they'll tell a joke early in the set.
01:55:22.000And then quite a bit later in the set, they'll reintroduce the joke.
01:57:05.000So, when you're in the zone, which you love to be in, and you know when you're in it, and so does the audience, so does everybody, they're in the zone, man.
01:57:23.000I think what's going on with comedy at least I can speak to that I've never really done any lectures but that with comedy what's happening is there's it's kind of a mass hypnosis and the audience is trusting you with their thoughts if your thoughts are clean enough meaning if they're they're precise enough that someone can follow you with wonder Like,
01:57:44.000not knowing where you're going with it.
01:57:46.000One of the worst things a comic can do is have too many words to set up a premise and to set up a punchline, because then it allows the person to formulate their own punchline.
01:57:56.000And oftentimes they come to the same punchline.
01:59:00.000But one of the things that I love the most about psychedelics is that it informs me of that—just by existing, it informs me that all of my notions— Of reality itself are bullshit.
02:00:08.000So it's necessary, but it's also blinding.
02:00:11.000Now, when you start to wonder about something, what you're actually doing when you wonder about it is freeing your perception from the constraints of memory.
02:00:22.000It's a place where memory itself is updated.
02:00:25.000And if you trust someone and you express that sense of wonder in the confines of that trust, then you are in fact...
02:00:34.000You are in fact participating in the process that reveals the underlying complexity of the world to you, and then does literally inform you.
02:00:43.000And you feel that, I've been very interested technically in the instinct of meaning, because what is meaning?
02:01:40.000Well, I thought a bunch of the things that we just talked about.
02:01:43.000You know, what happens is that in a sensory deprivation tank, You become increasingly sensitive to less and less because there's almost nothing going on.
02:01:55.000So the threshold for perception, you get more and more and more sensitive as you're trying to pick up signal where there's no signal.
02:02:04.000And that can open these gates of imagination, for example.
02:02:08.000You know this already because to some degree, imagine you want to go figure something out.
02:02:14.000You usually go somewhere Where you can be by yourself.
02:02:17.000You're not flooded by sensory information.
02:02:21.000Maybe you go for a walk, maybe you go sit on your bed.
02:02:23.000You kind of shield yourself from outside input.
02:02:26.000And then, by concentrating, you open yourself up to this internal revelation that's otherwise blotted out by the external world.
02:02:34.000And that really happens to a huge degree in the sensory deprivation tank, or can.
02:02:38.000And I think that is akin in many ways to, and people have made this case many times, is that it's analogous to a psychedelic experience, and I think that's technically true.
02:02:48.000It certainly is, because if that experience was achievable through a psychedelic, I think it'd be a very popular psychedelic.
02:02:55.000If the experience of having no sensory input and being able to be alone with your thoughts, like completely without The influence of even gravity on your body and the seat or the floor on your feet, you don't feel any of it.
02:03:07.000Yeah, you start to get, because you've eliminated all that external stimulation, you allow yourself to become aware of things happening that would otherwise be in the background.
02:03:17.000Jung believed, for example, as Carl Jung, that we're always dreaming.
02:03:42.000We know when it manifests itself, because we get interested, right?
02:03:45.000Think, oh, that's interesting, and then, you know, I say something, you think it's interesting, and you nail it with a bunch of words, and then I pick up some of the words, and I think, that's interesting, and I nail it with a bunch of words.
02:03:55.000But there's this thread, it's the golden thread, that leads you out of Ariadne's maze, by the way, and that's part of the redemptive process, is By following that manifestation of spontaneous interest, truthfully, we participate in this process that revitalizes our perceptions.
02:04:15.000And then what's even more cool than that is that there's nothing we can experience that we would rather do than that if it's happening intensely.
02:04:24.000And that's because that is the best thing we can do.
02:06:41.000So what you're doing, and this is akin to stacking the chakras, which is the same as a musical experience, is imagine that to get that process of optimal self-revelation right, you have to be aligned.
02:07:00.000With the molecules above them, the molecules aligned in the cells, the cells aligned in the musculature, the muscles aligned in the body, the body aligned with the environment, broadly speaking, all stacked up.
02:07:24.000You know, if you're writing a book, you concentrate on the word or the paragraph or the whole chapter.
02:07:30.000You know, and when we're conversing, I could concentrate on each word or the phrase or the sentence or the context, or I could look around the room, up and down these levels of analysis.
02:07:38.000In yoga, you're trying to get your body psychophysiologically aligned so communication between all those levels isn't interfered with unnecessarily.
02:07:48.000And then that opens you up, in some sense, to the possibility of speech emanating from the depths.
02:07:55.000That would be one way of thinking about it.
02:07:57.000One of the things that people who do Kundalini talk about is that they are able to achieve psychedelic states and psychedelic states that ordinarily are achieved through drugs.
02:08:08.000I have many friends who have done Kundalini and for whatever reason I never have but they have said that through it with long-term commitment to practice they can achieve these bizarre states where they have hallucinations.
02:12:57.000Okay, what about oil sheiks that have had slaves and have treated people like total garbage, had people assassinated for criticizing them, heads of state of these bizarre countries where you do have these oligarchs that are running the military and they're in charge of massive amounts of currency?
02:13:20.000Yeah, well, that's the postmodern question, in some sense, in a small way.
02:16:34.000One day he has a bad day, and two subordinate males that he hasn't really been attending to and has been harassing quite a lot jump him, and they castrate him, and they tear him to pieces.
02:17:06.000I mean, he was successful being a dominator for his entire life and was responsible for the death of somewhere between 50 and 70 million people.
02:17:44.000That's why it's been around for like 3,000 years.
02:17:48.000And why it's the fundamental narrative, for example, it was the narrative that black Christians really identified with in the United States, which is something that's really worth thinking about, the fact that that's the case.
02:18:29.000Okay, so God is that spirit that calls to Abraham to have the adventure of his life instead of languishing in his father's tent, so it's called to adventure.
02:19:37.000You can trace the religious experience, the religious revelation, the central religious revelation, back at least 25,000 years of continued transmission.
02:19:55.000Is that 100% proven that they were experiencing altered states of consciousness and that they were imparting these lessons in a form of a religion?
02:20:14.000I think – I can only say what I've concluded by looking in as many places I could possibly look, ranging from the theological, through the literary, through history, through the scientific – The biochemical, all of that, trying to stack all that up.
02:20:30.000So it's multiple, it's called a multi-method, multi-trait construct analysis.
02:20:35.000The idea is, if something's true, it will manifest itself in multiple different places with independent methodologies.
02:22:28.000Well, it is right, and there's a lot of people that still aren't aware, but at least in academia, at least in Harvard, it's now being pursued with sincerity.
02:22:37.000Roland Griffith's work has helped that a lot, too.
02:22:39.000The work he's done with psilocybin in the lab, which is really solid scientifically.
02:22:57.000Well, he didn't know what to do with it.
02:22:59.000He's a really traditional Biological, psychological researcher.
02:23:05.000And he said, well, we'll measure people's heart rate and we'll check their psychophysiological responses and, you know, we'll see what this DMT does.
02:23:12.000It's like, and then all these people came back from the experience and said, hey, I got shot right out of my body and I went into a domain where I met alien beings.
02:23:35.000And every single person came back and said that.
02:23:37.000And so, I read The Spirit Molecule, which is a very interesting book, and by the end of it, Strassman is, well, he kind of got shell-shocked, like our whole culture did, when it discovered LSD. Well, he had to be very careful in his depictions, too, because he can't talk about personal experiences because he wants to be taken seriously as an actual researcher.
02:23:57.000And good for him because he should be treading lightly in that domain just like the Johns Hopkins teams does.
02:26:09.000It's the definition of religious significance, that it was attractive enough that everyone read.
02:26:14.000Well, when The Hobbit comes back, it's like all the heroes who come back from that journey Share what they have with the community and integrate it.
02:26:49.000Because you get an intimation in states like that of, first of all, the fact that things are infinitely more than you could possibly realize, including you.
02:30:13.000Who's got his eyes open and he's born in straightened circumstances and has to grow up street smart and his friends are all funny and they engage in witty repartee.
02:30:24.000He knows the world from the ground up, grabs the sword, he pulls it out of the stone, but he's blown right off it.
02:30:31.000He can't wield it because he has visions of his evil uncle who conspired with Feminine forces of chaos and killed his father, murdered his father and his mother.
02:31:14.000So then, why, when I accuse you of racism and so forth, and your white privilege and your masculine privilege, like, why don't you just wander off in a corner and feel terrible and apologize?
02:31:35.000If 30 people come after you and say, you're a racist tyrant, and there's 30 of them, you go home and you think, 30 people think I'm a racist tyrant, and like, I got my flaws, man, and I might be a little racist, because we all have in-group preferences,
02:31:51.000and I shoot my mouth off sometimes, and I haven't always been the way with women that I should be, and maybe I've mistreated some people, and maybe I did it too much, and Sorry!
02:33:19.000So, if you are working on an assembly line, and you're next to some other guy, and he brings up Ricky Gervais, and you're like, fuck that guy, that guy's a piece of shit, and he starts saying all these horrible things about the guy,
02:34:02.000You would never say the things that you, even if he was not an imposing, threatening person, but you would never say the things that you would say to that guy when Ricky's not there.
02:34:10.000You say the same thing if you're in your car, you know, and somebody cuts you off.
02:34:29.000Like, people always want to say that, like, no.
02:34:31.000If people were stationary and they were in cars and they looked over at each other, they would never talk to each other the way they do when they're driving fast.
02:34:58.000But they don't tell you why you're getting road rage.
02:35:01.000A lot of you're getting road rage is just your physiological response to the fact that you're going fast and your body's required to make very quick movements.
02:35:10.000You're in a heightened state because of the speed.
02:35:12.000That's very different than talking shit about Ricky Gervais if he's not next to you.
02:35:16.000Right, but it might be akin to what's happening on Twitter because everything is happening very, very fast on Twitter.
02:35:21.000It is, but it's also because people are addicts.
02:35:24.000The real problem with a lot of what's going on on Twitter and I there's a bunch of people that I follow on Twitter They don't have anything to do with me.
02:35:31.000They're just negative people and I don't even follow them follow them I bookmark their page and then I go visit them because they're so fucking crazy and I see them 12-13 hours a day tweeting It's straight madness.
02:36:05.000They're not They're growing and expanding the way they communicate with people and becoming better human beings and more kind human beings who are addicted to outrage.
02:36:14.000Imagine you do get a kick from that sort of spontaneous outrage, but when you manifest that in the real world, there's a cost.
02:36:23.000And the cost is, look the hell out, because maybe you said it to the wrong person.
02:36:28.000But you also can't get that many interactions in the regular world.
02:36:49.000When you read your own comments, you could read many comments like, thank you, Jordan, that book is really aligned.
02:36:53.000And then one will come in and go, you transphobic piece of shit.
02:36:57.000You know, you're responsible for the death of thousands of children who killed themselves because they can't express their true gender identity.
02:37:28.000So the kind of comment that you described where someone will say, I don't agree with your views and you're hurting all these people, those comments don't make me angry.
02:37:38.000The misrepresentation of your positions.
02:37:39.000Yeah, that doesn't really make me angry.
02:38:04.000Okay, but that's not true in real life.
02:38:06.000So the question is, if someone's being a thoughtless prick to you on Twitter, I mean, maybe one, and maybe this is the proper answer, is that you should just ignore it.
02:38:36.000And if you continue to interface with people who 1 out of 10 is going to say something fucked up to you, and that's going to hurt your day, it's going to hurt your feelings.
02:38:45.000I have friends that will go on Twitter all day long, comics, and they'll read comments about them, and then you'll see them at the club, they'll be a fucking wreck.
02:38:55.000You know, I'll do podcasts with comics and they'll say something that's fucked up or they'll go a little too far or they'll talk over people too much and I'll tell them afterwards, like, don't read the comments.
02:39:07.000Just stay the fuck out of the comments.
02:39:48.000Unless we're talking about political issues.
02:39:50.000I've found that YouTube comments were the first things I stopped reading because they were so negative sometimes.
02:39:58.000We're so disproportionately angry about takes on certain subjects and the way they would exaggerate interactions with people and make it seem like these were horrible, aggressive exchanges when they weren't.
02:40:14.000They were just casual disagreements between people that sometimes are clunky.
02:41:23.000And you're going to be punished afterward because people won't listen to it.
02:41:27.000Well, also, I'll be punished because I'll hate myself.
02:41:29.000I'll be angry at myself for my poor handling of any sort of verbal situation.
02:41:34.000But in doing that, I have become much happier, I've become much nicer, because it's made me think of all of my interactions, like the way I interact with people, all of them are person to person.
02:41:51.000Even though this podcast is reaching fucking millions of people.
02:41:56.000All of my interactions with people are face-to-face, and it's a much healthier way to communicate with people.
02:42:01.000Yeah, well, all the interactions I have with people face-to-face, I might as well say all, because I've had, like, I don't know how many interactions with strangers in the last five years, but it would be at least...
02:43:16.000I think it's valuable to the people I encounter.
02:43:19.000I think I have a responsibility to the way people react to me.
02:43:22.000And if I misstep, it bothers me a lot.
02:43:25.000Well, the other thing about being in a position like the one you occupy is because people know you in a way that you don't know them when they approach you.
02:43:35.000And the reason they approach you is because you're an idol of sorts, because otherwise they wouldn't hold you in esteem.
02:43:41.000And that is even the case if they're negatively attracted to you in some sense, right?
02:43:46.000And so the problem with those interactions is that if you make a mistake, That person will never forget it for the rest of their life, and they will tell everyone about it.
02:43:57.000Well, more importantly, the way they feel could have been avoided.
02:44:15.000And if you're awkward and clunky, especially when I was younger, and you catch someone who's tired, maybe someone who's jet-lagged or hungover, you can have a bad interaction.
02:44:45.000I spent a lot of time in my clinical practice working with people who are socially awkward.
02:44:52.000I've analyzed social awkwardness at the level of detail.
02:44:57.000And one of the things I do when people come up to me, because they're often awkward, and they'll say things like, oh, you know, I'm fanboying or something like that.
02:45:05.000And I always shake their hands, and I always look at them, and I always ask them their name.
02:45:12.000And no matter how awkward they are, they can almost always remember their name.
02:45:20.000And so, once they say their name and they look back at me, 95% of that awkwardness goes away.
02:45:50.000My life is so weird because wherever I go, it's like being surrounded by old friends because I'll go down the street and everybody says hi, you know, or they come up to me in this friendly way and open, eh?
02:47:49.000Not just famous, but famous as a worldwide...
02:47:54.000Depending on who you ask, either you're a voice of reason and rationality and personal responsibility, or you're a voice of intolerance and bigotry and anger and hateful— Sexual oppression,
02:48:13.000prejudice— What did Eric Dyson call you?
02:48:45.000There's such a spectrum of shades of people.
02:48:47.000Unless you're talking to someone who is like 100% African from the darkest place where they're not wearing any clothes all day and they've developed all that melanin to protect themselves from the sun.
02:49:11.000So, you were asking me what it was like- What is it like to be you?
02:49:16.000Like, what is it like to- and then I know you've gone through a lot of shit, and this latest thing with getting off of the benzodiazepine, That to me was a real shocker, because first of all, I had no idea that you were taking it,
02:49:31.000and then to find out that it's that difficult to get off of, and then to hear from other people that have tried to get off of it how difficult it is, and then to realize how many people around me have an issue with that stuff.
02:49:45.000And I didn't know what a motherfucker it was until I talked to a friend who is a counselor at a drug rehab center where he was saying that that is one of the ways that people get locked back into drinking and doing drugs is a psychiatrist will prescribe Xanax.
02:50:01.000And sober people who get on Xanax all of a sudden start drinking.
02:54:25.000Well, unfortunately, when you're dealing with people that are extremely troubled, oftentimes they look for external reasons why they're troubled and they find oppressors.
02:54:35.000Well, she was also angry with me because when all this blew up around me, it interfered with my clinical practice and she had come to rely on our weekly meetings and so she was angry about being abandoned and it was really sad because I didn't want to abandon my clients.
02:54:50.000I had to stop my clinical practice, which was also very upsetting to me because I had like 20 clients and I knew these people, man.
02:54:59.000You know, I'd fold them through thick and thin and then all of a sudden so many things piled up around me that I found when I was in a clinical session that I was distracted.
02:55:08.000So you can't be distracted in a clinical session.
02:55:11.000And so, anyways, what emerged from that, and it was in the middle of the winter, and I have seasonal affective disorder, I couldn't sleep at all for quite a long time.
02:55:20.000And I went to my doctor and I said, I can't sleep, and he gave me a sleeping medication and an anti-anxiety drug, and I took a little bit of the anti-anxiety drug, and I could sleep.
02:55:30.000And my life was pretty stressful, and I thought, okay, I'm much better.
02:56:23.000I think what it did was it stressed me enough so that I was susceptible, more susceptible to whatever was wrong with me in the first place.
02:56:31.000Because I've had a lot of immunological problems.
02:56:33.000But this was also when you got on this diet, which has been very beneficial, right?
02:56:47.000Yeah, the cure to a lot of your woes was to eliminate processed foods and eliminate sugar and bread and pasta and all those different things.
02:56:57.000Yeah, I hate to talk about it because I don't really recommend this to people, you know, because I'm not a dietician and I'm not really that interested in it, in a sense, you know.
02:57:27.000She told her mom, when she was starting to come out of a bit, she said, Michaela was only staying awake six hours a day in her late teenage years.
02:57:35.000And the only reason she could stay awake was because she was taking Ritalin, because otherwise she would have just slept literally all the time.
02:58:36.000So the meat diet, the all-meat diet, you lost weight, and that alone, getting rid of excess body fat, oftentimes will help with a lot of things.
02:58:47.000But also, you eliminated all these inflammatory foods.
02:58:51.000Well, I seem to have recovered from all the inflammatory conditions.
02:58:57.000So I had very bad gum disease, which is not good for your cardiovascular system, by the way.
02:59:41.000And I had peripheral uveitis, which caused my right eye to be full of floaters because there's inflammation on the bottom producing tissue production, and that would fill the aqueous liquid in my eye, and I could see all these floaters all the time.
02:59:56.000And that's pretty much gone completely.
02:59:59.000I lost 50 pounds in seven months and now I weigh exactly what I weighed when I was 23. I don't have an ounce of excess body fat.
03:00:11.000The sides of my legs were quite numb for like two decades.
03:04:06.000And I've had to parse that apart carefully to decide what was particularly stressful that I could let go of and how and maintain the rest of it.
03:04:15.000And hopefully Tammy's helped me with that, or my whole family and my friends, everybody around me has helped me with that a lot.
03:05:17.000And I had my illustrator for Beyond Order, who I really like, Julia Fogra, Julia Fogra, Juliet, Who's an Eastern European, got a dark side.
03:07:19.000And so we've written and recorded three songs for it already.
03:07:22.000So this is what you were doing when you were recovering from this service?
03:07:26.000Yeah, it was great because it really worked out nicely because when I was so ill I had something to look forward to because I knew Yulia was going to send me a beautiful image and I didn't know what it was going to be and then we assembled it into a book and then I started working with this musician Marshall Tully who I really like and who's a good arranger and he can play all sorts of instruments and he's got a great musical sense and So we started working on music together.
03:07:51.000So he'd write the music and I wrote some of it, but he wrote most of it and he played almost all of it.
03:07:56.000And we had a band involved for one part and we'll do that some more.
03:08:00.000And so he'd write the music and then I'd write the lyrics.
03:08:06.000I'd send the music and lyrics to Yulia, and she'd generate a bunch of images, and so then we made a bunch of videos out of it, set to music, which we'll release on YouTube in, like, fall of this year.
03:08:16.000And, you know, that was part of marketing for the book, but then it turned into its own complete enterprise, and so we're going to put out an album of all these songs, and so that's...
03:09:28.000It started to get worse about the same time that Tammy went into the hospital, because she was fighting her way through, you know, catastrophic cancer at the same time when this started to happen.
03:09:47.000I think it made me, again, it made me more susceptible to something that was already happening.
03:09:53.000So whatever this illness has that's plagued my family, my father, my grandfather, multiple cousins, and a lot of immunological problems on my mother's side too.
03:10:03.000I have a cousin whose daughter died of immunological problems, the same ones that Michaela had.
03:10:09.000And this is all mitigated somehow or another by this only eating meat diet?
03:10:26.000Well, Michaela was invited to Oxford to debate, and that was fun because I was invited about the same time, so we got to go there and speak on the same night, which was really cool, you know, because how unlikely is that, right?
03:10:37.000Does she have a background in nutrition?
03:11:03.000Well, because she's become a well-known advocate, I suppose, of a carnivorous diet as an investigative tool for chronic, untreatable disease.
03:14:53.000We encountered it two days before the debate, but it had been published very recently, like within the last three weeks or something like that.
03:15:00.000Did she have time to go through the entire study and get all the relevant information?
03:15:05.000Yes, time enough for her section of the debate.
03:15:07.000She only spoke for about 10-12 minutes.
03:15:11.000But I really am hoping that this debate is released soon because one of the people on the other side who was rallying against meat delivered the most preposterously unsatirizable politically correct rant That I'd ever seen anyone deliver anywhere by a factor of about five.
03:16:05.000Which is a dangerous territory to wander into, that analogy.
03:16:10.000And she said that she compared the husbandry of animals to slavery, which is also a place that you wander into with real care when you choose your metaphors.
03:16:21.000And she said the reason we're bombarded with images of sexy chickens and sexy cows is because we feminize our farm animals before devouring them.
03:17:22.000It's like they're sitting in the audience and she'd make a point about meat and how appalling the human race was, especially the men, especially the white men, impressive, patriarchal, racist, white, supremacist.
03:17:37.000Meat is a white supremacist exercise, by the way.
03:18:05.000If they release it, I think it will be a cultural moment, because it was the point, at least it was the point in my life, where the politically correct argument reached an apogee that cannot be exceeded.
03:18:19.000It was like, that is as absurd as it can possibly get in every possible way in ten minutes.
03:18:30.000And everyone, well, the audience was full of vegans, and so they were on the side of the anti-meat people, and so they kind of gave her a pass, although a lot of people walked out during her, whatever it was she was doing.
03:18:41.000But I did feel bad for her while I was convulsing, because...
03:18:46.000I really did because I thought, oh my god, you're so crazy.
03:18:51.000And there's no way that you can bring that set of presuppositions to bear in a real human relationship and have it go anything but terribly wrong.
03:18:58.000And so that means that you're completely isolated and all your so-called friends are never...
03:19:05.000Offering you any corrective feedback whatsoever, right?
03:19:08.000They're just feeding into this terrible ideological mess you've wandered into.
03:19:13.000And so it was painful at the same time, which is partly why it was sweating.
03:20:04.000I tell you, I'm not exaggerating this.
03:20:08.000I've never heard a speech like that in my life.
03:20:12.000In its own way, it was like an ultimate work of art.
03:20:16.000It was just something beyond comprehension.
03:20:20.000Every trope, every politically correct trope you could possibly imagine was magnified beyond its normal range of reference and then applied in this utterly scattershot.
03:21:23.000It was very civil, although it was stacked to some degree because a couple of the people on Michaela's side damned the freedom to eat meat with faint praise.
03:21:34.000And I have my suspicions that it was staged that way.
03:22:04.000It's just not natural at all in order to cultivate.
03:22:07.000Yeah, and Mick talked about sustainable agriculture.
03:22:12.000And made that case as well, that our relationship with animals that we devour can be made as humane as possible and that's acceptable and perhaps even desirable in a broader moral framework.
03:22:25.000And a woman, I wish I could remember her name, autistic professor at the University of Chicago who revolutionized the treatment of animals in the slaughterhouse industry, She made the case that the animals that we eat don't suffer a humane death in nature.
03:24:32.000Forming phrases, organizing them into sentences, sequencing the sentences and paragraphs, sequencing the paragraphs into the chapter and then chapter into books if you're going that far.
03:24:42.000But so it's a hierarchical enterprise.
03:24:44.000And so when you write, you have to get the word right and the phrase right and the sentence right and the sentence order right.
03:24:49.000And you shouldn't do all that at once because you can't because it's too hard.
03:24:53.000So you write a rough first draft that's twice as long as the thing you're trying to write, and then you edit.
03:24:59.000You shorten the sentences, you pick the right words, you pick the right phrases, you rewrite the sentences.
03:25:03.000So we built in tools to guide people through this process to help them conceptualize their essay at the level of the word and the phrase and the sentence and the paragraph.
03:25:12.000And to build those ideas of multi-level editing into the process, and then we've tested it on a lot of people, and we have a nice, elegant user interface, and we're hoping that...
03:25:22.000Because one of the things I've learned is that words are power.
03:25:55.000We really want to pull young men into...
03:25:59.000Using this product because they're the hardest market to target with such things and the most in need of it and part of that is Engaging them in an honest dialogue about what exactly writing is it's like there's no difference between writing and thinking and There's no difference between thinking and not failing So you let your thoughts die instead of you and That's thinking.
03:26:25.000You test everything you do before you implement it.
03:26:29.000And writing is a massive aid to that process.
03:26:32.000And so if young men, in particular, were taught properly about writing and thinking, they would come to view those as like arrows in their quiver.
03:27:17.000And so that's SA. And like I said, I think if you go to my website or to SA.app, SA.app or to my website, you can sign up for that.
03:27:27.000We're going to do a beta release, test it broadly to make sure it doesn't fall apart under use pressure and before we release it completely.
03:27:35.000But we're very excited about that because...
03:27:38.000How to teach people to write is a really hard academic problem to solve.
03:27:42.000And the idea of building the writing tools into the software, if we got it right, maybe could at least in part address that problem.
03:28:04.000So there's that, and it's the book and the music and the screenplay and this essay app.
03:28:11.000Oh yeah, I'm going to be chancellor of a university, Ralston College, in Savannah.
03:28:18.000And I also started this thing that we're going to launch called the Peterson Academy, where I'm going to get all the great lectures I know to make courses.
03:28:27.000That'll be a free, that'll be a universally accessible university.
03:28:31.000It won't be free because I run things on a for-profit model for all sorts of reasons.
03:28:35.000Efficiency not being foremost among them.
03:28:38.000I recorded two courses for this when I was in Nashville.
03:29:53.000It's like out of the tyrant's grasp into the desert.
03:29:58.000And so you think, why don't people want to challenge their own preconceptions?
03:30:02.000It's like, yeah, it's out of the tyranny into the desert.
03:30:05.000And the worse the tyranny, the worse the desert.
03:30:09.000So if you've been tormenting yourself with tyrannical preconceptions and totalitarian obligations and you decide to drop it, or maybe you're shocked out of that by trauma, you don't go to paradise.
03:32:04.000Go make an image of a snake in bronze and make an image of a stick, like a staff, and put the snake on the staff and then stick it in the ground.
03:32:13.000And then have the Israelites go and look at the snake.
03:32:16.000And then the snakes won't bite them anymore.
03:34:43.000And so you can either have experienced that or you're talking out of your ass.
03:34:49.000So if you say, do you think those people thousands of years ago could have had a shamanic experience where they saw the double helix pattern of DNA? Yeah.
03:35:30.000Look at what you're terrified of, and you will get braver.
03:35:35.000Unless what you're terrified of is a pack of wolves and they're going to fucking eat you.
03:35:39.000Yeah, well, look, it's not like there aren't real dangers, but look, if you're threatened by a pack of wolves and you go out and study them...
03:37:58.000Plus, they choose a criminal to be released from this experience instead of you, even though they know he's a criminal and they know you're innocent.
03:40:28.000I mean, we were talking about this before, that the roots of these religious experiences almost certainly come from some sort of transcendent experience.
03:40:38.000Well, when Eliot had mapped out the shamanic experience, he laid out the pattern.
03:40:46.000So shaman die, they're reduced to a skeleton.
03:41:57.000There's a massive shamanic tradition, and it stems back way into the Stone Age, and that's its pattern.
03:42:03.000Well, you know, what university was it in Israel, in Jerusalem, that made the connection between the burning bush and Moses and DMT because of the acacia tree.
03:42:15.000The acacia tree, which is rich in DMT, and they made this connection, like, most likely— No, we don't know what was in the Ark of the Covenant.
03:42:41.000So what do we make of the fact that the shamanic experience, which is replicable cross-culturally and which dominated the human landscape for at least 20,000 years, we know that it involves a death and a resurrection and an entry into paradise and a reunion with the ancestors.
03:43:04.000This is way past my knowledge, but I know that connection that I just told you about between the story in the New Testament and that story in Exodus.
03:43:14.000That took me like 30 years to figure out.
03:43:17.000Because there's also the idea that the hero goes into the abyss to rescue his father from the belly of the beast.
03:43:26.000You go down, and I thought, I knew this the last time I went to lecture two, is like, You look into the abyss long enough and you see the spirit of the Benevolent Father manifesting itself.
03:46:01.000And so you could say, well, their selfishness, which is like a narrow self-centeredness, makes it impossible for them to cooperate, and then they can't even play very good games, because it's actually more fun to play with other people than to play with yourself.
03:46:13.000Even sexually, for all you pornography addicts, by the way.
03:47:52.000But also, see, when God, when Cain slays Abel, when Cain gets jealous of Abel in the biblical story, and no wonder, because Abel is like, He's everybody's golden boy.
03:48:11.000The Harvard students were very annoying in that way when I was there.
03:48:16.000They had these positions of privilege, let's say.
03:48:19.000It's a very terrible way of conceptualizing, but we'll give the devil a stew.
03:48:23.000And it's like you'd hope that they'd be whiny, spoiled, self-centered, narcissistic brats, because then at least you could hate them in good conscience for their success.
03:49:58.000Then you toy with it and toy with it, and you let the fantasies of revenge build in your head until it inflates you into something that's indistinguishable from demonic.
03:50:07.000Read the writings of the Columbine kids if you want to find out about this.
03:52:48.000The question of whether or not it causes something or the fact that they're on these drugs because they've been so tortured by life that they needed these drugs.
03:53:03.000These drugs are not causing these actions.
03:53:54.000I had a friend who was on, I think it was on Zoloft, and their take on it was that they lost a whole year of their life, where they just didn't give a fuck about anything.
03:54:03.000And they just felt like nothing mattered.
03:54:24.000Like I said, zero of anything is pushing too hard.
03:54:29.000So I wouldn't rule out The possibility of idiosyncratic responses, but these drugs are extraordinarily widely used, antidepressants, and the proportion of people who commit atrocious acts on them is infinitesimally small.
03:54:45.000Right, but the proportion of people who commit atrocious acts while they're on those medications is extraordinarily high.
03:54:53.000Right, but I don't believe that that's involved in the causal pathway.
03:54:58.000Is that because you have personal experience with these drugs?
03:55:02.000That would be part of it, but that's not the primary.
03:55:05.000I say that's a tiny fraction of it because I wouldn't generalize from that.
03:55:09.000Do you still have personal experience with these drugs?
03:57:19.000So, no, I don't believe that they make...
03:57:22.000There's no evidence, for example, that they make psychopaths worse or that they tilt people into kind of psychopathic behavior because they decrease negative emotion.
03:57:31.000I know no literature that indicates that.
03:57:34.000And people are very interested in such things.
03:57:47.000That's not a behavioral consequence of SSRIs or even of serotonin itself.
03:57:53.000Because then you'd also have to say that raising someone's serotonin level, which does make them more calm, by the way, like less prone to negative emotion, because as you move up a hierarchy, you produce more serotonin.
03:58:05.000And the consequence of that is that...
03:58:08.000Threatening things become less threatening.
03:58:10.000Well, they should, because the higher you are in a hierarchy, the less dangerous it is.
03:58:16.000And so, partly, you can destabilize people by threatening their position in a hierarchy, because you dysregulate the structure, you dysregulate their claim to valid occupation of that position, and then you destabilize their nervous systems.
03:58:31.000That's partly, say when, let's say, you see this in academia, A new young faculty member comes in for a job talk and lays out his theory, and an upstart graduate student puts up his hand and pokes a hole in the idea.
03:58:47.000You might say, well, the professor on stage gets taken aback and is destabilized because his theory has been...
03:58:55.000Challenged, and he uses the theory to protect himself against anxiety.
03:58:58.000It's kind of a terror management idea.
03:59:05.000What happens is, the young faculty member comes in using his claim to valid knowledge as an indicator of his suitability for that position.
03:59:18.000So I'd say, I know a bunch of things that are useful.
03:59:39.000And it's the specter of the loss of the position, the hierarchical position, that's destabilizing, not the threat to the integrity of the belief system.
03:59:49.000Now, there can be some of both, right?
03:59:51.000But the reason that people don't like to lose faith is because it undermines their moral claim to their position.
04:00:37.000That is actually the structure that defends you against catastrophe.
04:00:41.000And part of what the mob does is come up to people continually, especially from the left, but the right can do it too, and they certainly have done it, if you look back at any reasonable stretch of history, but the left comes up and says, you're a white supremacist, racist,
04:00:57.000oppressor, part of this patriarchal system.
04:00:59.000You have no moral claim whatsoever to the position you occupy.
04:01:04.000Well, that just strips people, you know, especially if they're good people.
04:01:08.000They think, oh, I need a moral claim to this position.
04:01:12.000Well, it's also often disingenuous because all they're trying to do is silence you.
04:01:16.000All they're trying to do is defuse you.
04:01:28.000And they're trying to undermine the idea of merit itself because maybe they're not living particularly meritorious lives and so the light shines on them in their darkness.
04:02:14.000Yeah, and there's lots of good discussions on YouTube.
04:02:18.000If you like long-form discussions, I find people that I want to talk to, and they'll say yes, and then we have as interesting a conversation as I can manage, and maybe I share that with Joe, and that's our intent.
04:02:47.000Like, I've had senior political figures in Canada now tell me, This is so awful that they cannot say what they have to say in our current political situation because they cannot find a single media source in the entire country that they regard as trustworthy and reliable.
04:03:11.000And these aren't fringe political figures.
04:03:14.000These are people who've had stellar political careers.
04:03:16.000And that's what they tell me, point blank.
04:03:20.000And the same thing is happening in the United States.
04:04:07.000I could not have imagined a world where just talking to people about whatever subject matter is their area of expertise and asking questions and being curious could be that popular.
04:04:38.000I've had visions of that sort of thing.
04:04:40.000We're each called to a unique destiny, and it's not unique.
04:04:44.000It's like, well, the world's inexhaustible, and so we could each have a unique destiny.
04:04:48.000Well, one thing that does happen, that I hope does happen, and I didn't mean to set out to create a kind of a format or to pioneer a kind of a format, but what I do hope is that the people who enjoy it, and I know this is the case, they're starting to do their own thing that's similar.
04:05:09.000I've met some unbelievably impressive young men who are doing this, and one of the things that just stuns me about interacting with them is that...
04:06:00.000It's the only opportunity for a career in any real sense because even if I tried to teach a friend of mine this and he eventually committed suicide For a variety of reasons.
04:06:11.000And he managed it now and then, but finally was overcome by the demons that possessed him, let's say.
04:06:21.000You know, he was a very smart man, but he hadn't made much of his education, and so he was in positions he felt were beneath him.
04:06:30.000And I tried to tell him that the idea that those positions were beneath him was his own blindness.
04:06:39.000Because there was an infinite amount of possibility everywhere.
04:06:42.000So, like, I worked in restaurants and I had lots of working class jobs, like 30 of them.
04:07:06.000And then because I worked hard and was interested, the cook in the first restaurant who was a German chef, he taught me to cook.
04:07:15.000Then I was a short order cook and I was like 15 and that was really fun because it was fun to work in the kitchen and the place was full of jokes and tricks all the time and I learned how to cook and I learned how to handle the domestic environment and clean and put things in order but also to work with people and I had really good friendships with those people and that fostered all sorts of opportunities for me.
04:07:38.000There was an infinite amount of possibility in that dishwashing job Because I wasn't in a bloody box with people pushing dishes in through a slot.
04:07:48.000I was in this dynamic environment where people were trying to be hospitable, which is really, really hard, you know, on a mass scale under a lot of pressure, because restaurants can be high-pressure jobs because of the rushes that go with it.
04:08:02.000Everything in the world was in that restaurant.
04:08:06.000If you had eyes to see it, like dozens of my friends, I think it was literally dozens, came to that restaurant to get a job as a dishwasher.
04:08:55.000The bartender from next door, I was really mouthy and he'd come over now and then and he'd say something and I'd mouth off in some spectacularly horrible way and he used to stuff me in the ice machine.
04:10:23.000And among my colleagues, Jill Hooley and Richard McNally and Brendan Marr, who knew Timothy Leary, we had meetings of the Personality and Psychopathology subdivision, and it was really fun.
04:10:59.000And when I look back on my adolescent life, there wasn't a lot to do in this small town when it was 40 below for like three months of the year.
04:11:10.000And a lot of what we did was pretty dissolute.
04:11:12.000A lot of those teenage parties were pretty goddamn dim places, you know, in the dark, the music so loud no one could talk, everybody too drunk.
04:11:52.000If you listen to people, I learned this in my clinical practice, if you listen to people, they are so goddamn interesting, you can hardly even stand it.
04:12:02.000And so if you're surrounded by people who are dull, try listening more.