The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #1769 - Jordan Peterson

00:00:11.000 That 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,

00:00:31.000 whether 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...

00:00:50.000 I think you got to do it all the time.

00:00:51.000 I 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.

00:01:00.000 Have you ever done that?

00:01:01.000 Where you haven't talked to anybody in a long time and then you talk to them?

00:01:04.000 It feels odd.

00:01:05.000 It feels awkward.

00:01:06.000 Because I think there's like a thing where you have to get used to it.

00:01:09.000 Yeah, I found that was particularly the case with the podcasts is that it's hard to do that sporadically.

00:01:15.000 Yeah.

00:01:16.000 You also lose that rhythm of preparation because you get it.

00:01:20.000 Well, I did.

00:01:20.000 I'm not sure.

00:01:21.000 How do you prepare for your podcast?

00:01:23.000 Like if you have an author come on.

00:01:25.000 I usually read their book.

00:01:26.000 When?

00:01:28.000 I have two books that I'm reading right now that are future people that are coming in February.

00:01:35.000 So a lot ahead.

00:01:36.000 Yeah.

00:01:37.000 Well, you know, it's like one of them is a climate change book and it's intense.

00:01:42.000 And so it's requiring a lot of thinking.

00:01:44.000 And 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?

00:01:54.000 Who believes that this is probably hyperbole?

00:01:58.000 And that it's a gross exaggeration.

00:02:00.000 And 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.

00:02:08.000 But a small effect compared to cows and other things.

00:02:13.000 It's like, it's hard to sort out.

00:02:15.000 The climate change one is a weird one.

00:02:17.000 Well, that's because there's no such thing as climate, right?

00:02:21.000 Climate and everything are the same word.

00:02:24.000 And that's what bothers me about the climate change types.

00:02:27.000 It's like...

00:02:28.000 This is something that bothers me about it, technically.

00:02:31.000 It's like, climate is about everything.

00:02:34.000 Okay, but your models aren't based on everything.

00:02:38.000 Your models are based on a set number of variables.

00:02:42.000 So that means you've reduced the variables, which are everything, to that set.

00:02:48.000 Well, how did you decide which set of variables to include in the equation if it's about everything?

00:02:53.000 And that's not just a criticism.

00:02:54.000 That's like, if it's about everything, your models aren't right.

00:02:58.000 Because your models do not and cannot model everything.

00:03:02.000 What do you mean by everything?

00:03:03.000 Well, that's what people who talk about the climate apocalypse claim in some sense.

00:03:09.000 We have to change everything.

00:03:11.000 It's like, everything, eh?

00:03:13.000 And it's the same with the word environment.

00:03:16.000 That word doesn't mean, it means so much that it actually doesn't mean anything.

00:03:21.000 Like when you say everything, in a sense, that's meaningless, right?

00:03:24.000 Because, well, what are you pointing to?

00:03:27.000 Well, I'm pointing to everything.

00:03:28.000 Well, what's the difference between the environment and everything?

00:03:33.000 There's no difference.

00:03:34.000 What's the difference between climate and everything?

00:03:37.000 Well, there's no difference.

00:03:39.000 So this is a crisis of everything?

00:03:41.000 It's like, no, it's not.

00:03:42.000 Or if it is, well, if it really is, then we're done, because we can't fix everything.

00:03:46.000 Well, specifically, what they mean specifically is what human beings are doing that's causing the earth to warm.

00:03:56.000 Right, right.

00:03:57.000 But you have to include all these factors in the models to determine that.

00:04:01.000 All these factors.

00:04:02.000 Well, what can you not include?

00:04:04.000 Well, then, by deciding what you don't include, you decide which set of variables are cardinal.

00:04:10.000 And you have to make that decision in some sense before you even generate the models.

00:04:14.000 This is a big problem.

00:04:15.000 It's partly...

00:04:16.000 It's not the only reason, but this...

00:04:21.000 There's another problem that bedevils climate modeling too, which is that as you stretch out the models across time, the errors increase radically.

00:04:32.000 And 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.

00:04:39.000 And that's a huge problem when you're trying to model over a hundred years because the errors compound just like interest.

00:04:46.000 And so at some point, it's all error.

00:04:48.000 In 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.

00:04:58.000 We'll never know if the changes we're making, you know, to save the climate actually worked.

00:05:03.000 We can't measure it.

00:05:04.000 The errors are too large 100 years out.

00:05:06.000 What do you mean by the errors?

00:05:06.000 Like, what errors?

00:05:08.000 Well, prediction error.

00:05:09.000 So, look...

00:05:11.000 Imagine that you're going to predict how your life goes.

00:05:14.000 Well, you can kind of do that.

00:05:16.000 You kind of know that tomorrow is going to be somewhat like today.

00:05:21.000 Okay, but how much is next year's day going to be like today?

00:05:26.000 Well, somewhat, but less certainly because you might get sick, for example.

00:05:32.000 And then over a five-year period, well, there's much more that has to be accounted for.

00:05:38.000 And so the probability that your prediction is correct decreases as you move forward in time.

00:05:43.000 That's why we discount the future, right?

00:05:45.000 So if you ask people, you want $5 an hour or do you want $5 in a month?

00:05:50.000 They're going to say, well, I want $5 now.

00:05:53.000 Well, you think, well, why is that?

00:05:55.000 Well, if I have it now, it's certain a month.

00:05:58.000 Well, there's a lag in there and anything could happen.

00:06:01.000 And you can play games with people this way.

00:06:03.000 And because people differ in the degree to which they discount the future.

00:06:08.000 Because how seriously to take the future is actually a near computationally impossible task to solve.

00:06:15.000 How seriously should I take the future?

00:06:17.000 Well, it depends on how uncertain things are.

00:06:19.000 How uncertain things are, are they?

00:06:21.000 Well, I don't know.

00:06:22.000 Classic example.

00:06:23.000 There's a chicken.

00:06:26.000 And the farmer goes out every day and feeds the chicken.

00:06:30.000 And the chicken thinks, man, I've got a good friend in this farmer.

00:06:35.000 And then one day it's dinner time.

00:06:36.000 And the chicken's the main course.

00:06:40.000 Right?

00:06:41.000 And so, the poor chicken used induction to derive certainty.

00:06:45.000 The farmer comes every day.

00:06:46.000 He didn't realize there was a massive flaw in his theory.

00:06:50.000 And one day that flaw reveals itself and everything falls apart.

00:06:53.000 Well, that makes sense when you're talking about chickens and farmers.

00:06:57.000 But when you're talking about human beings and CO2... Well, we could play a future discounting game.

00:07:03.000 So this is how this sort of thing is calculated, this discount curve.

00:07:05.000 So I could say, I'll give you $5 now or $5 in a week.

00:07:10.000 Which one do you want?

00:07:12.000 And people say $5 in a week.

00:07:14.000 Then I say, okay, I'll give you $5 now or I'll give you $10 in a month.

00:07:18.000 It's like, hmm, okay, $10 in a month.

00:07:22.000 Okay, I'll give you $5 now, I'll give you $7.50 in two weeks.

00:07:26.000 Or I'll give you $50 now, I'll give you $500 in 10 years.

00:07:30.000 And so imagine you do that with all sorts of amounts, over all sorts of time frames.

00:07:36.000 Then 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.

00:07:46.000 And what you generally find is that impulsive people discount the future more heavily.

00:07:51.000 That's actually the definition of impulsive.

00:07:53.000 And you might think, well, the impulsive people are wrong.

00:07:56.000 It's like the ant and the grasshopper.

00:07:59.000 You 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.

00:08:08.000 He sacrificed the present to the future and isn't that sensible.

00:08:12.000 Yeah, it's sensible.

00:08:13.000 You should save.

00:08:14.000 Except, well, what if it's 1920 in Germany, 1923, let's say, and you're in a period of hyperinflation.

00:08:21.000 It's like, Grasshopper won, because he spent all his money before it became worthless.

00:08:27.000 So should you save or not?

00:08:30.000 The answer is, it depends.

00:08:32.000 And then there's a further answer, which is, it depends on things that you actually can't predict.

00:08:39.000 And so it's actually a computationally impossible problem to figure out how much to discount the future.

00:08:44.000 It's actually impossible, which is why we vary so much in it.

00:08:47.000 Part of that reason is the magnitude of our prediction error increases the farther out we predict.

00:08:53.000 Yeah, but the grasshopper and the ant analogy doesn't work because they're based on food.

00:09:00.000 And the food that the ant supplied and stored and stocked away is still good. 0.90

00:09:07.000 Inflation doesn't mean jack shit to an ant, because they don't deal with currency. 0.97

00:09:11.000 Well, the other way an ant could follow up is... 0.97

00:09:13.000 But you know what I'm saying?

00:09:13.000 Well, fair enough.

00:09:14.000 But, you know, ant colonies also have wars.

00:09:18.000 And so it's just as possible that the ant will store up all this food and another ant colony will move in and that'll be the end of that.

00:09:23.000 And this is a huge problem.

00:09:25.000 Well, you're very unlikely to be robbed and pillaged unless you have wealth.

00:09:32.000 Right, 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.

00:09:45.000 How can we stabilize things over a long term enough to make long term investing a reasonable proposition?

00:09:52.000 Here's a positive spin-off of that.

00:09:55.000 So I worked on the UN committee that wrote the Secretary General's report on sustainable development.

00:10:00.000 I worked on the Canadian subcommittee to be technically accurate.

00:10:04.000 And I was by no means the head of that.

00:10:06.000 I worked with the team that worked on that.

00:10:08.000 But we edited and wrote and rewrote a fair bit of the document.

00:10:14.000 And 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.

00:10:24.000 I read maybe 200 books on ecological development and economic development, the relationship between the two.

00:10:31.000 200 books?

00:10:32.000 Oh yeah, yeah.

00:10:33.000 It was over about a two-year period.

00:10:36.000 And 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.

00:10:50.000 And all the marine life is within 40 miles of the shores.

00:10:53.000 Like, you think, the oceans, they're vast.

00:10:55.000 It's like, yeah, but they're empty.

00:10:57.000 Except where the sun can shine to the bottom, and that's the 40 to 200 miles, say, on the coastal shelves.

00:11:03.000 And we've, like, trawled those bare, like, seven times.

00:11:08.000 Isn't that wild?

00:11:08.000 It's a catastrophe.

00:11:09.000 But that was the only real environmental catastrophe that I encountered in all that work that I thought was both credible and addressable.

00:11:17.000 We know how to fix that.

00:11:18.000 You make marine protected areas, like national parks, that you need about 15% of the total coastal territory really protected.

00:11:26.000 And that solves that problem, essentially.

00:11:29.000 And then everybody has fish, because the fish, they don't just stay there, they move around.

00:11:33.000 You can have your cake and eat it, too, with marine protected areas.

00:11:36.000 But mostly what I learned, and this was really cool, was that this was so cool, and I really believe it's true.

00:11:43.000 The 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. 0.52

00:11:56.000 Because the thing about poor people is that...

00:11:59.000 Well, first of all, they live in...

00:12:01.000 They're not resource efficient.

00:12:03.000 They use a lot of resources to produce very, very little outcome.

00:12:06.000 And so that's a problem.

00:12:08.000 Slash and burn agriculture, for example.

00:12:10.000 But even more importantly...

00:12:12.000 When 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.

00:12:22.000 And 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.

00:12:29.000 Lunch is the future.

00:12:31.000 We don't have lunch.

00:12:32.000 We're hungry.

00:12:33.000 And that goes on for like a month.

00:12:34.000 We're dead.

00:12:35.000 That's the future.

00:12:37.000 So what happens?

00:12:38.000 If 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.

00:12:52.000 And then the attempt to make the environment habitable and sustainable That comes up of its own accord at a grassroots level and spreads everywhere.

00:13:03.000 And evidence for that is clear.

00:13:04.000 And so this is one of the things that really bothered me about COP26. And that was based in part on this...

00:13:11.000 What is that?

00:13:12.000 That was the big climate meeting in the UK just a few months ago.

00:13:16.000 You know, the one where all the COVID rules were suspended so the important people could talk about important things.

00:13:21.000 In any case, I thought...

00:13:25.000 If 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.

00:13:38.000 It's like, do you really?

00:13:40.000 When push comes to shove, it's like, is it the environment or poor people?

00:13:44.000 If your idea is that we have to limit growth to save the planet, If we limit growth, poor people starve.

00:13:51.000 Because whenever we put limits on economic development, who suffers?

00:13:55.000 The rich?

00:13:56.000 Are you really?

00:13:58.000 That's what you think?

00:13:59.000 And you're on the left, you think if you put limits on economic development, the rich will suffer.

00:14:03.000 That runs contrary to every theory that your whole political philosophy is based on.

00:14:09.000 You put limits to growth on, the poor stay poor or get worse.

00:14:12.000 Doesn't matter because the planet has too many people on it anyways, which it most certainly does not.

00:14:17.000 If 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.

00:14:28.000 But 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.

00:14:43.000 So what should a COP26 been about?

00:14:45.000 That's fairly straightforward.

00:14:48.000 It 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.

00:14:59.000 And what would that be?

00:15:01.000 Nuclear?

00:15:02.000 Well, I would say ultimately, likely nuclear.

00:15:05.000 And probably not fusion because it's so...

00:15:07.000 You know, fusion has always been a year away, 10 years away for the last 50 years.

00:15:13.000 We haven't managed it.

00:15:16.000 Nuclear, likely.

00:15:17.000 France managed that very effectively.

00:15:19.000 We can do it.

00:15:21.000 We 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.

00:15:30.000 More people die every year from solar energy than die from nuclear.

00:15:34.000 Who dies from solar?

00:15:37.000 Guess how you die from solar?

00:15:40.000 Sunburn?

00:15:41.000 No, you fall off the roofs when you're installing it.

00:15:43.000 Oh, that's gravity.

00:15:45.000 Yeah, gravity.

00:15:47.000 And that's a good example of unintended consequences.

00:15:51.000 Because systems are complex, and when you change them, you think only good things will happen.

00:15:55.000 It's like, well, you know.

00:15:57.000 Oh, so I was going to, you asked about energy.

00:15:59.000 Yeah.

00:15:59.000 There's also an environmental progression towards clean energy.

00:16:04.000 Yeah.

00:16:04.000 And so the poorest people burn wood.

00:16:07.000 Well, that's not so good because, first of all, they cut down the trees and burn the trees.

00:16:12.000 And second, if you're concerned about pollution, especially particulate pollution, especially indoors, which kills, I think, seven million children a year.

00:16:21.000 Seven million children a year are killed by indoor particulate pollution.

00:16:27.000 What?

00:16:28.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:16:29.000 How is that possible?

00:16:31.000 7 million?

00:16:32.000 Indoor particulate pollution, meaning from starting fires in homes, like to keep warm?

00:16:37.000 Yeah, without good ventilation systems.

00:16:39.000 Yes, exactly.

00:16:39.000 These people are poor.

00:16:41.000 Is that a real number?

00:16:42.000 Can you look that up?

00:16:42.000 Yes, that's a real number.

00:16:43.000 I need to know that that's a real number.

00:16:44.000 That seems insane.

00:16:45.000 That's good.

00:16:45.000 We should double check it.

00:16:46.000 7 million children die every year from indoor particulate pollution.

00:16:52.000 And so you want to burn wood.

00:16:54.000 Well, charcoal is better.

00:16:55.000 Coal is better than that in terms of pollution as well.

00:16:58.000 And then fossil fuels are better than coal.

00:17:01.000 And then natural gas is perhaps the cleanest of the fossil fuels.

00:17:04.000 And maybe, I don't know if you know this, but this is also, this is so funny too.

00:17:10.000 The United States has cut its carbon emissions 15% in the last 20 years.

00:17:14.000 It's gone down, not up, down.

00:17:16.000 Why?

00:17:18.000 Fracking.

00:17:19.000 Fracking.

00:17:20.000 Yeah, fracking.

00:17:21.000 Really?

00:17:22.000 This thing that environmentalists hate.

00:17:23.000 It's like, don't frack!

00:17:24.000 But it's a double-edged sword, right?

00:17:26.000 Because fracking has definitely polluted some water supplies.

00:17:30.000 Not really.

00:17:31.000 No?

00:17:32.000 It hasn't polluted any water supplies?

00:17:34.000 Look, 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.

00:17:48.000 We're going to hit net zero by 2050. It's like, no we're not.

00:17:51.000 Right, but fracking does have issues. 0.90

00:17:53.000 Okay, more than 90% of the world's children breathe toxic air every day.

00:17:57.000 Yeah, how many of them, Joe?

00:17:58.000 How many?

00:18:00.000 93% of the world's children under the age of 15 years, 1.8 billion children.

00:18:05.000 But this is about polluted air.

00:18:08.000 I don't think this is necessarily about indoor particulate pollution.

00:18:11.000 But that's all indoor.

00:18:13.000 Okay, it says World Health Organization estimates that...

00:18:16.000 Sorry, it's 600,000, so I must have been citing figures over a decade.

00:18:19.000 There is a part on here that says it lowers the life expectancy of up to 7 million people per year, but it doesn't say they all die.

00:18:26.000 Yeah.

00:18:26.000 Oh, okay.

00:18:27.000 Thank you for clarifying that.

00:18:29.000 They're talking about what, though?

00:18:31.000 They're talking about pollution, right?

00:18:33.000 Air pollution?

00:18:34.000 The second line there.

00:18:35.000 Together, household air pollution from cooking and ambient air pollution causes more than 50% of a cube.

00:18:40.000 But that's both things.

00:18:41.000 Yeah, but it's still almost all the inside.

00:18:43.000 So that's outdoor outside air pollution.

00:18:44.000 Yeah, but the outside air pollution is trivial.

00:18:45.000 But let's just read it so that people understand what we're saying, because we can read this.

00:18:48.000 Together 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.

00:18:59.000 Right, and read the next one too.

00:19:01.000 Air pollution is one of the leading threats to child health, accounting for almost 1 in 10 deaths in children under 5 years of age. 0.98

00:19:07.000 That's fucking wild. 0.97

00:19:08.000 Well, it's just poor children and the world has too many people on it anyway. 0.99

00:19:12.000 But you say that, you're being facetious.

00:19:15.000 Yeah, yeah, definitely.

00:19:18.000 You went on these rants, so I want to bring you back to this idea of climate and environment.

00:19:25.000 We 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?

00:19:34.000 Now, from what I've read, it has an impact.

00:19:37.000 They don't exactly know what percentage of an impact it has, but it's most certainly something that we can reduce.

00:19:43.000 Well, that's not so certain.

00:19:45.000 What 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.

00:19:56.000 These 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.

00:20:11.000 Well, where are we going to get the electricity?

00:20:13.000 Well, there's that.

00:20:14.000 Yeah, that's a big problem.

00:20:16.000 Fair enough.

00:20:17.000 But even if we did get the electricity from nuclear, which, by the way, is fairly clean.

00:20:22.000 It'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.

00:20:36.000 Fukushima didn't, right?

00:20:38.000 And that's part of the problem.

00:20:39.000 And those were large-scale reactors, and they have small-scale reactors now, thorium salt reactors that are small and modular in some sense.

00:20:45.000 And when those sorts of things happen, they shut down by themselves.

00:20:48.000 But we should talk about it because those Fukushima, when, I mean, okay, let's look this up.

00:20:53.000 When was Fukushima first online?

00:20:56.000 I want to say it was in the 1970s.

00:20:59.000 Is that correct?

00:21:00.000 Likely.

00:21:01.000 That's when most of the nuclear development took place?

00:21:03.000 I remember reading about it at the time and finding out that they couldn't shut it down.

00:21:08.000 I was like, what?

00:21:10.000 Okay, 67. Construction began 67. Commission date 71. Okay, so yeah, so 70s essentially.

00:21:18.000 Imagine getting a car from 1970 and expecting it to be compliant with whatever emission standards we have today.

00:21:27.000 You ever drive a car?

00:21:28.000 I'm an enthusiast.

00:21:29.000 I love old cars.

00:21:31.000 But I take them and I bring them to these craftsmen and they put modern brakes on them.

00:21:36.000 They put modern suspensions on them so you don't kill yourself driving them. 0.97

00:21:40.000 But if you drive an old car, like if you get a 1970 Pontiac and you just try to drive it around, the brakes are fucking terrible.

00:21:49.000 The steering, it's like you kind of have a rough estimate of where you're going. 0.98

00:21:52.000 You know, they're awful.

00:21:53.000 You take a 2022 Chevrolet, like a Corvette, and drive that.

00:21:59.000 My God, it's like telepathic.

00:22:01.000 I know, I know.

00:22:02.000 The acceleration is like time travel.

00:22:04.000 Yeah, new cars are so good.

00:22:05.000 Oh my God, they're so good.

00:22:07.000 Plus they have airbags and And the stereos are great.

00:22:10.000 The old stereos in those 60s and 70s cars, it was like listening to the end of two tin counts with a string between them.

00:22:17.000 Not just 60s and 70s.

00:22:18.000 You go into the 2000s, everybody used to buy aftermarket stereos.

00:22:23.000 You used to get a car and then you'd bring it to a place and get a stereo place.

00:22:27.000 Shout out to my friend Kenny Fong, Darkside Motors.

00:22:29.000 I would bring my cars to Kenny, and Kenny would hook me up with people that would do the stereo, fix the wheels, and all kinds of stuff.

00:22:37.000 You always had to do that.

00:22:38.000 But then car manufacturers realized, like, why are we leaving all this money on the table?

00:22:41.000 Let's just give them an option to have better stereos and better wheels and better suspension and all that jazz.

00:22:47.000 So they fixed that. 0.74

00:22:49.000 But my point is, anything from 1971 sucks. 0.81

00:22:54.000 Including the nuclear power reactors.

00:22:56.000 But 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.

00:23:06.000 Yeah, well, we're...

00:23:07.000 See, part of the problem...

00:23:09.000 I've been very curious about why the left-wing types, particularly, seem willing to sacrifice the poor to their utopian...

00:23:17.000 I don't think they're thinking that way.

00:23:18.000 I just don't think they played it all out.

00:23:21.000 Yeah, but when push comes to shove, that's what they do.

00:23:23.000 And it wouldn't take much thought to figure it out, because let's say you increase the cost of energy.

00:23:30.000 And that's the price you pay to move forward to a hypothetically green economy.

00:23:34.000 But you increase the price of energy.

00:23:36.000 Okay, 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,

00:23:52.000 because they're barely hanging on anyways.

00:23:53.000 So, you know, you get a 1% increase in unemployment.

00:23:58.000 You get a 5% increase in psychiatric hospitalizations.

00:24:01.000 Well, why?

00:24:03.000 It's because there's a bunch of people there who are right on the threshold of psychiatric hospitalization, and then they lose their job.

00:24:09.000 It's like, that's the end of that.

00:24:10.000 So 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,

00:24:26.000 in some sense, healthier birds get the best nesting spots.

00:24:30.000 They're closest to the food, they're sheltered from rain and wind and all of that.

00:24:33.000 So they're not psychophysiologically stressed.

00:24:36.000 And 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.

00:24:45.000 They always, that's the old saying, when the aristocracy gets a cold, the working class dies of pneumonia. 0.59

00:24:51.000 It's like, okay, so fine, increase energy costs.

00:24:54.000 Well, what happens?

00:24:55.000 A bunch of poor people fall off the map, like a bunch of them. 0.89

00:24:58.000 And the more you increase the energy costs, the more that happens.

00:25:02.000 And 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.

00:25:17.000 Except the left, the real hardcore leftists, they want to implement socialism.

00:25:23.000 And implementing socialism will solve a few of those problems.

00:25:26.000 Yeah, well, that's part of the issue, is that the pro-environment stance is contaminated by an anti-capitalist rhetoric.

00:25:36.000 Now, the problem with the socialists, so let's take this apart a little bit.

00:25:40.000 I mean, the socialists always point out something that's true.

00:25:45.000 And Marx pointed this out, but it wasn't Marx's discovery.

00:25:48.000 And he's like seriously wrong about it in an important way.

00:25:51.000 So Marx observed that money tends to aggregate in the hands of fewer and fewer people.

00:25:58.000 Okay, the first question is, is that true?

00:26:01.000 And 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.

00:26:15.000 Like, it's really, unbelievably true.

00:26:18.000 But then Marx said, that's capitalism.

00:26:21.000 That is not true.

00:26:23.000 And 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.

00:26:33.000 Well, yeah, let's change capitalism.

00:26:35.000 Unfortunately, the problem is so deep that changing capitalism won't change the problem at all.

00:26:41.000 And 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.

00:27:00.000 It's just that there were hardly any resources and almost everyone had nothing.

00:27:04.000 There was still a tiny fraction of people who were the privileged elite.

00:27:08.000 And so, you know, if you play Monopoly, what happens when you play Monopoly?

00:27:12.000 Everybody starts out equal and one... 0.97

00:27:15.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:27:15.000 And so you can actually model this problem with something as simple as a Monopoly game.

00:27:23.000 That's actually a fairly good model of how money distributes itself in the environment.

00:27:27.000 And 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.

00:27:34.000 So if you took 100 people, let's say give 100 people $10 each, and then they had to trade with each other.

00:27:40.000 If 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.

00:27:46.000 And so that's your game.

00:27:48.000 Heads gives you a dollar.

00:27:49.000 If you play that out, Till it concludes, what happens is some people lose, let's say they have $10, they lose 10 times in a row.

00:27:57.000 Well, then what happens?

00:27:59.000 At zero, well, they can't trade anymore.

00:28:03.000 So 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.

00:28:11.000 If 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.

00:28:21.000 And so, I'm a member of a...

00:28:25.000 Native Canadian family, West Coast Indian family, Native family.

00:28:30.000 And this particular culture had a tradition, the potlatch.

00:28:36.000 And they had the same problem in their culture.

00:28:39.000 And the problem was that some of the big chiefs, over some period of time, would end up with, like, all the stuff, all of it.

00:28:46.000 And that wasn't good because, well, for obvious reasons, you know, it would destabilize the society.

00:28:52.000 That's, in some sense, the least of the problems.

00:28:55.000 And so they evolved this mechanism.

00:28:57.000 They'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.

00:29:06.000 Right, right, and that was the potlatch.

00:29:08.000 Yeah, yeah, they had to do it.

00:29:10.000 Well, that's philanthropy, right?

00:29:12.000 People really looked very highly upon very wealthy people that engaged in a lot of philanthropy.

00:29:17.000 Yeah, well, and I haven't...

00:29:19.000 This might be a biased sample, but I don't think so.

00:29:23.000 And 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.

00:29:31.000 I 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?

00:29:42.000 They're not sitting around thinking, I need another super yacht.

00:29:45.000 Now, look, there's going to be people like that, you know, but I haven't met any of them.

00:29:50.000 Have you met Jeff Bezos?

00:29:51.000 No, I haven't.

00:29:52.000 I haven't met Bezos.

00:29:54.000 I bet he's got a couple of super yachts.

00:29:55.000 I'm sure he does.

00:29:56.000 I'm sure he does.

00:29:57.000 But I'm pretty happy about the fact that he's building rocket ships and that actually takes a lot of capital.

00:30:02.000 And the other thing, there's a couple of other things about capitalism that are worth thinking about.

00:30:09.000 All the evidence suggests that relatively free markets are the best way to make the absolutely poor richer.

00:30:16.000 That's not an inequality issue.

00:30:18.000 It's just that while they're not starving, and that's something.

00:30:21.000 We've lifted more people out of poverty in the last 15 years than in the entire course of human history.

00:30:26.000 Can I pause you for a second there?

00:30:28.000 Oh, one point that I forgot.

00:30:31.000 I've read this the other day that where Karl Marx is buried, they have to charge money because they have to maintain it.

00:30:37.000 Uh-huh.

00:30:38.000 Very funny.

00:30:38.000 And they need money to maintain it.

00:30:39.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:30:40.000 Make sure that's true.

00:30:41.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:30:41.000 Because it's hilarious.

00:30:42.000 I read that and it was like a meme and I was like, is that real?

00:30:44.000 My daughter once bought me a 50% off Karl Marx doll. 0.64

00:30:49.000 Which I thought was just ridiculous.

00:30:51.000 And she bought it for that reason. 0.61

00:30:52.000 That's adorable.

00:30:53.000 She told me it's so funny.

00:30:54.000 It was so funny.

00:30:55.000 Capitalism.

00:30:55.000 Yeah.

00:30:57.000 When 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.

00:31:16.000 Yeah.

00:31:16.000 I mean, it's one of the great contradictions.

00:31:19.000 Right. 1.00

00:31:20.000 To the progressives in America, that they complain about capitalism on a fucking iPhone. 0.99

00:31:27.000 Because if you knew where that iPhone was, if you went down to the factory where that iPhone was manufactured, you'd be heartbroken. 0.99

00:31:33.000 If you went further...

00:31:35.000 To where the minerals are dug out of the ground in the Congo, you'd be devastated.

00:31:39.000 That's the reality of capitalism.

00:31:42.000 That's the reality of sending jobs overseas.

00:31:44.000 The 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.

00:31:55.000 They 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.

00:32:06.000 Give them a great working environment.

00:32:08.000 Don't overwork them.

00:32:09.000 And now how much money do you have?

00:32:11.000 Because the amount of money that Apple has put aside, and obviously I'm an Apple fan.

00:32:16.000 I have an Apple phone right here.

00:32:18.000 I'm not picking on Apple.

00:32:19.000 But they are one of the richest companies that's ever existed on the face of planet Earth.

00:32:23.000 But how are they doing that?

00:32:24.000 One of the ways they're doing that is by paying people very little to make their products that they sell for a giant amount of money.

00:32:30.000 So what's the solution to that?

00:32:32.000 Is the solution to pay people a fair amount?

00:32:35.000 And if you do that, is the solution to pay people a fair amount in another country?

00:32:39.000 Or is the solution to pay people a fair amount here where we can regulate it?

00:32:43.000 Because we do manufacture some things here, but we manufacture way less than we used to because it costs too much money to do so. 0.99

00:32:50.000 But that word, too much, or that phrase, too much, is bullshit. 0.93

00:32:54.000 It's not that it costs too much. 0.99

00:32:55.000 It's just that it costs more, and they don't want to pay it.

00:32:58.000 They would rather just reap in profits, and the way they do that is on the backs of poor people.

00:33:03.000 Now, if you do that on the backs of poor people— We can take that apart a bit.

00:33:06.000 But here's my question.

00:33:08.000 If 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.

00:33:21.000 Then you'd have a complete change in those environments.

00:33:24.000 Okay, so we can take that apart a bunch of ways.

00:33:27.000 I mean, part of the advantage to manufacturing things where wages are relatively low is you give those countries a competitive advantage.

00:33:36.000 So 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.

00:33:56.000 So when we're talking about the free market, we should be careful about what we're talking about.

00:33:59.000 It's like you get to have choice about what you buy.

00:34:01.000 That's the central spirit of free market capitalism.

00:34:07.000 Exporting those jobs stopped a huge proportion of the Chinese from living in absolute privation and likely decreased the probability of a broad-scale war.

00:34:18.000 And it also brought the Chinese into the economy, which is a big deal. 1.00

00:34:22.000 The Chinese produce more engineers every year than Americans have engineers.

00:34:26.000 And so now we've unlocked an unbelievable amount of brain power.

00:34:29.000 And that's produced an insane technological revolution.

00:34:33.000 Now, I think it's unfortunate that a lot of that was done on the backs of the American working class.

00:34:39.000 And I think that the Democrats abandoning the working class when they were in that state of privation was a catastrophe of public policy.

00:34:47.000 And also part of the reason why Trump got elected.

00:34:50.000 But it isn't obvious to me that exporting those jobs Was a bad long-term decision.

00:34:58.000 Because, well, you want a world where 20 million Chinese are starving?

00:35:03.000 That's not good.

00:35:05.000 By any measure, right?

00:35:06.000 But is that the only way that they don't starve?

00:35:08.000 The only way they don't starve is if iPhones are manufactured there for pennies on the dollar?

00:35:13.000 Yes.

00:35:13.000 Really?

00:35:14.000 Well, no other solutions ever worked.

00:35:18.000 But that doesn't mean they can't work.

00:35:20.000 Yeah, it might.

00:35:20.000 If they work in America, it might?

00:35:22.000 Well, I don't know, Joe, because either...

00:35:25.000 Look, that's a good question, you know, but for me, the problem with utopian theories is that they're hypothetical.

00:35:36.000 So I like to look at what's actually worked.

00:35:40.000 And what's clearly worked is the introduction of free market principles into poor countries.

00:35:45.000 So for example, Africa has the fastest growing economies in the world, particularly sub-Saharan Africa.

00:35:51.000 That's really something.

00:35:52.000 And some of those countries are really getting on a reasonably solid footing.

00:35:57.000 And most of that's happened, almost all that's happened since the Berlin Wall fell.

00:36:01.000 And part of the reason for that is that that continent isn't being riven by a terrible conflict between the communists and the capitalists. 0.95

00:36:09.000 And 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. 0.80

00:36:19.000 They're letting markets flourish to at least a limited degree.

00:36:23.000 And 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.

00:36:41.000 Well, there isn't any hunger in the world anymore that isn't caused by political conflict.

00:36:47.000 Everyone has enough to eat.

00:36:49.000 In 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.

00:36:57.000 And so we're seeing diseases of affluence replace diseases of privation.

00:37:01.000 And you think, isn't that too bad, these Western diets?

00:37:05.000 And you know, fair enough, but you want to be fat or dead?

00:37:09.000 And fat's better. 0.55

00:37:11.000 And fat isn't optimal, let's say.

00:37:14.000 But it beats the hell out of dead.

00:37:16.000 How many people starve to death?

00:37:18.000 Now?

00:37:18.000 In the world.

00:37:19.000 Almost none.

00:37:20.000 Let's look that up.

00:37:21.000 Almost all those who do, do it because of political conflict.

00:37:24.000 Like it's purposeful starvation now.

00:37:26.000 So someone has put a blockade on ships and goods.

00:37:29.000 Yeah, to starve them.

00:37:30.000 As a political weapon.

00:37:32.000 When 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.

00:37:48.000 Right.

00:37:49.000 Detroit was one of the wealthiest cities in this country and hence one of the wealthiest cities in the world just a few decades ago.

00:37:56.000 It wasn't that long ago.

00:37:57.000 When they were in the height of their manufacturing, all the American automobiles were made in Detroit.

00:38:03.000 Cadillacs and Chevys and Fords and that was where everybody worked and then it was also where the union autoworkers Well,

00:38:23.000 Henry Ford did what you said that capitalists should do.

00:38:27.000 I 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.

00:38:36.000 And so he ramped up wages dramatically.

00:38:38.000 And that was partly part of his, you could say, self-interested vision, although I think that's an oversimplification.

00:38:45.000 It's like, well, if we want to sell our product, why don't we expand the consumer market?

00:38:48.000 Well, those people have to have some money. 0.83

00:38:50.000 That was Ford's notion. 0.98

00:38:51.000 When 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. 1.00

00:39:02.000 I go, really? 0.95

00:39:03.000 They go, yeah, these guys are auto workers.

00:39:06.000 Like, they don't want to see foreign cars that they don't make in their city.

00:39:11.000 It's a proud city that makes American cars.

00:39:14.000 So, like, there was a thing.

00:39:16.000 Yeah, well, they were responding to a real threat.

00:39:18.000 You were talking about old cars with me earlier.

00:39:20.000 So 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.

00:39:30.000 And 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.

00:39:37.000 They fell apart.

00:39:38.000 They rusted fast, but nothing rusted faster than a Japanese car in Canada.

00:39:42.000 Those bloody You could put them outside in the winter when there was salt in the road and watch them dissolve.

00:39:47.000 But 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...

00:39:58.000 It was the first Chinese trade fair in Canada.

00:40:01.000 So they had Chinese manufactured implements at this display.

00:40:06.000 It 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.

00:40:16.000 So with the Japanese, it's like their cars were junk to begin with. 1.00

00:40:20.000 Yeah, to begin with. 0.94

00:40:22.000 And then they got to be Toyota.

00:40:24.000 Yeah.

00:40:25.000 And just think what Toyota did.

00:40:26.000 You talked about how good cars are now.

00:40:28.000 Well, the net consequence of opening up that competition was the Japanese got their act together. 1.00

00:40:33.000 I mean, in the 80s, particularly, Japan got so powerful that everyone thought it would be the dominant world economy for like 10 years.

00:40:41.000 And they just went from nothing after World War II to like superstars in 40 years.

00:40:45.000 And it's really hard to see how that wasn't everyone's benefit.

00:40:49.000 Now, 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.

00:41:04.000 It 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. 1.00

00:41:15.000 But 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.

00:41:31.000 And it also raises another really complicated problem, which is when your economy switches to information and services, which is more complex cognitively.

00:41:42.000 To deliver.

00:41:43.000 What do you do with people who would have been really good at working class jobs, but aren't going to be good in the knowledge economy?

00:41:49.000 And the answer is, we don't know.

00:41:53.000 Which is not a very good answer.

00:41:55.000 And the idea that we could just somehow give them money.

00:41:58.000 You can't solve people's problems by giving.

00:42:01.000 I had a client who had a cocaine problem.

00:42:04.000 And he was rather intellectually limited, this client.

00:42:09.000 And would have agreed with that assessment, by the way.

00:42:11.000 I'm not being rude.

00:42:12.000 That's an adorable statement.

00:42:14.000 I'm going to use that from now on.

00:42:15.000 I've dealt with many people in my life who weren't going to university.

00:42:21.000 They probably weren't going through high school.

00:42:23.000 And it isn't because they didn't work hard.

00:42:25.000 Sometimes that was why.

00:42:26.000 But it was because, no, they couldn't do that.

00:42:29.000 They couldn't do it.

00:42:31.000 And so they struggled, man.

00:42:33.000 And this guy in particular, it was so interesting because he wasn't doing too bad when he had almost no money.

00:42:40.000 But he got a disability check because he'd been hurt at work.

00:42:44.000 And 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.

00:42:51.000 Then 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.

00:42:59.000 But more money, he would have just died sooner.

00:43:03.000 You need to be able to handle money.

00:43:05.000 It's a tremendously destabilizing technology.

00:43:08.000 Okay, now about that man, do you believe that that was a genetic situation or was that a situation of nurture?

00:43:14.000 Was the way he was raised?

00:43:16.000 Was the environment that he grew up in?

00:43:17.000 Oh, it was a couple of things.

00:43:18.000 I mean, he really liked alcohol.

00:43:21.000 And there's a huge biological contributor to that.

00:43:24.000 Some people...

00:43:25.000 I worked with a researcher in Montreal who had a monkey farm on St. Kitt's, green monkeys.

00:43:31.000 And he was interested in studying alcoholism.

00:43:34.000 And 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.

00:43:44.000 Well, they used something else other than water.

00:43:46.000 And most of the monkeys could take it or leave it.

00:43:50.000 I think?

00:43:53.000 I think?

00:44:09.000 And those are the monkeys that would become alcohol dependent if you gave them unlimited access.

00:44:14.000 Right, but you know the problem with those monkey studies, right?

00:44:17.000 Those monkey studies is the same as rat farm studies.

00:44:21.000 When they've done studies on rats, they've done studies with rats in cages with cocaine.

00:44:26.000 Yeah, these were monkeys in natural environments.

00:44:28.000 Natural environments, how so?

00:44:29.000 Yeah, we knew about that.

00:44:30.000 Well, they were housed in colonies.

00:44:32.000 Housed in colonies.

00:44:33.000 How large are these colonies and what kind of land are they on?

00:44:36.000 Well, okay, let's separate this.

00:44:38.000 It's very hard to get rats addicted to cocaine if they live in a natural environment.

00:44:42.000 Right. 0.84

00:44:42.000 If you put them in a cage and bore them to death. 0.84

00:44:44.000 Let'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.

00:44:55.000 Right.

00:44:56.000 And they wouldn't even engage in sex.

00:44:58.000 But 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.

00:45:06.000 And if you take these rats and you put them in a far larger environment with trees and everything that a rat normally has.

00:45:13.000 Like other rats, for example.

00:45:15.000 Yeah, like real normal, like a normal rat environment.

00:45:17.000 And then you give them cocaine, they're not interested.

00:45:19.000 They're only interested in it if you stress them out by putting them in cages.

00:45:24.000 Is that the same with these monkeys?

00:45:26.000 Imagine the natural rat environment there.

00:45:29.000 So now you have your rats in the natural environment.

00:45:32.000 Now imagine you gave them access to cocaine and you stressed them.

00:45:36.000 So what would happen is a certain percentage of the rats would start using cocaine in proportion to the amount of stress.

00:45:42.000 Like if you let a bunch of cats loose.

00:45:44.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:45:45.000 Exactly.

00:45:45.000 And maybe in that case, maybe they'd prefer alcohol or benzodiazepines because that would specifically alleviate anxiety.

00:45:52.000 And so it is the case.

00:45:54.000 And this was brilliant research showing that...

00:45:56.000 See, a lab rat is not...

00:45:58.000 A lab rat is actually a pretty good model of a human being for reasons we can go into later.

00:46:02.000 But...

00:46:03.000 An isolated lab rat who's been genetically bred is not that much like an actual rat.

00:46:09.000 And 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.

00:46:21.000 They wrestle.

00:46:22.000 They have very complex social environments.

00:46:25.000 They're not that interested in artificial forms of psychomotor stimulation if they're in a natural environment.

00:46:31.000 But some of them will still be more interested than others.

00:46:34.000 There's still that variability that's lurking in the background.

00:46:37.000 And with these monkeys, most of them wouldn't...

00:46:40.000 Take alcohol repeatedly, but a small percentage of them would.

00:46:44.000 And you see very much the same.

00:46:45.000 And all I'm saying, I'm not saying anything revolutionary here.

00:46:49.000 I'm saying, for example, if you experiment with 20 different drugs, you'll probably find the one for you, right?

00:46:56.000 And people react differently to pharmacological substances, and a huge part of the variation in that reactivity is genetically determined or genetically influenced.

00:47:05.000 So that's not a surprise.

00:47:07.000 It's not much more surprising than saying some people are born more anxious than other people.

00:47:15.000 Can I bring you back to this though?

00:47:16.000 What kind of an environment were those monkeys in?

00:47:18.000 Are they in a cage?

00:47:19.000 They were in a cage, but it was a large cage.

00:47:22.000 How big is large?

00:47:22.000 The cage wasn't stressing them.

00:47:23.000 How big is large?

00:47:24.000 Oh, these cages would have been...

00:47:26.000 See, the monkeys actually didn't mind being in the cage.

00:47:30.000 How do we know this?

00:47:31.000 Do we talk to the monkeys?

00:47:32.000 Oh, you can tell because they won't run out of it if you open the door.

00:47:36.000 So you say, what does a rat want?

00:47:40.000 Well, how do you know what a rat wants?

00:47:41.000 It's like, that's easy.

00:47:43.000 What will he work to obtain? 0.97

00:47:46.000 And so rats, we know what that rats like play.

00:47:49.000 It's like, how do you know rats like play?

00:47:50.000 Give them toys.

00:47:51.000 Well, you put two rats in a little arena where they can wrestle. 0.99

00:47:56.000 And 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.

00:48:07.000 Well, then you measure how many times they'll press the bar and how fast they'll press it, and then you can derive...

00:48:13.000 Insight, direct insight into how motivated they are, because motivation is directly proportionate to the willingness to expand energy, logically enough.

00:48:21.000 And you can do the same thing with drugs.

00:48:24.000 How hard will the animal work to obtain a given pharmacological substance is an indication of how rewarding that drug is to them.

00:48:30.000 Those studies have been done unbelievably carefully, and we know there's tremendous variation.

00:48:35.000 So you can have your cake and eat it too.

00:48:39.000 You 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.

00:48:50.000 And even in highly stressed human environments, not everybody becomes a cocaine addict or an alcoholic.

00:48:56.000 And then you might say, well, why do some people become cocaine addicts and some people become alcoholic?

00:49:00.000 And some of it is availability, but some of it is, well, they like alcohol better.

00:49:05.000 Or they like cocaine better.

00:49:07.000 Other people can take it or leave it.

00:49:09.000 And so, when you say, because you asked me, is it nature or nurture?

00:49:13.000 Right.

00:49:13.000 And that's where this argument stemmed from.

00:49:16.000 But I was talking also about his limited intelligence.

00:49:19.000 That seems to be completely independent of susceptibility to drug addiction.

00:49:23.000 Right, but you were talking about him being intellectually limited.

00:49:27.000 Yes.

00:49:27.000 Do you think that that intellectual limitation...

00:49:29.000 Made his life harder.

00:49:30.000 Is it genetic?

00:49:32.000 Yes.

00:49:33.000 It's not only genetic.

00:49:35.000 Mostly because you can really impair people by putting them in situations of deprivation.

00:49:41.000 And 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.

00:49:50.000 So 15 point IQ difference is the average difference between the typical high school graduate and the typical college graduate.

00:49:57.000 So 15 points is four years of university.

00:50:00.000 Roughly speaking, seven points in a generation is half the difference between a high school student and a college graduate.

00:50:06.000 And it's gone up seven points a generation every 15 years.

00:50:10.000 It's a lot.

00:50:11.000 And so is intelligence mutable?

00:50:13.000 Well, there's some evidence that it is.

00:50:17.000 Why did it happen?

00:50:19.000 Well, partly because there are far few extremely deprived people Even on the information front, some of this was the introduction of television. 0.98

00:50:30.000 You know, you hear, television makes people stupider. 0.96

00:50:32.000 It'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, 0.99

00:50:49.000 TV is way better than that.

00:50:52.000 And 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.

00:51:01.000 And a lot of that, a tremendous amount of that has happened all over the world in the last hundred years.

00:51:05.000 And that's a great deal for everyone because, well, that's that much more brain power that's available for everyone to benefit from.

00:51:13.000 Like it's unbelievably valuable and you can see the cascade in that part of our technological transformation.

00:51:20.000 It's so incredibly fast.

00:51:22.000 It's like, well, the Chinese are producing as many engineers every year as the Americans have engineers. 0.54

00:51:29.000 It's no wonder that things are accelerating at such a rate.

00:51:32.000 Now, they don't innovate at the same rate as the U.S. innovates, but they're not doing too bad.

00:51:37.000 And soon, you know, depending on how much they continue to flirt with totalitarianism, just think of all that billion people, all that creativity unleashed.

00:51:47.000 Man...

00:51:48.000 All that intelligence unleashed?

00:51:50.000 So that is the dance over there, right?

00:51:51.000 The 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.

00:52:04.000 It's the dance here, too, right?

00:52:06.000 In some sense, it's the eternal dance.

00:52:08.000 It's the eternal dance.

00:52:10.000 It's the part of the eternal dance between freedom and structure, even.

00:52:14.000 And that's a tough one, because there's no freedom without structure.

00:52:19.000 Like, 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.

00:52:28.000 So I say to them, so we're talking about freedom.

00:52:31.000 It's like, okay, freedom.

00:52:33.000 Freedom from constraint is freedom.

00:52:36.000 Alright, fine.

00:52:38.000 Let's play a game.

00:52:39.000 Do you want to play this game?

00:52:40.000 Sure.

00:52:41.000 Okay.

00:52:42.000 You move first.

00:52:45.000 What do you mean?

00:52:47.000 That's the game.

00:52:48.000 You can do anything you want.

00:52:50.000 You move first.

00:52:52.000 You think, that's not much of a game.

00:52:53.000 It's like, no, it's a complete, it's the perfect game.

00:52:56.000 You're absolutely free to do anything you want.

00:52:58.000 Okay.

00:52:59.000 Well, everybody does what you did.

00:53:01.000 You just sit there.

00:53:03.000 The right amount of rules for freedom is not zero.

00:53:06.000 Say, now I put a chessboard in front of you.

00:53:08.000 You think, oh my God, all the limitations.

00:53:11.000 I can't throw a basketball on the chessboard, which you certainly can't, not if you're playing chess.

00:53:16.000 But now you know, you move first, I move the pawn two spaces forward.

00:53:21.000 I see what you're saying.

00:53:22.000 Having some structure and some rules to follow gives people more of a path to go out.

00:53:29.000 To everything.

00:53:30.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:53:31.000 And I think this is modeled by music.

00:53:34.000 This is really worth knowing.

00:53:36.000 This almost took the top of my head off when I realized it.

00:53:41.000 And it took me about four months of thinking to figure this out.

00:53:43.000 Because 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.

00:53:56.000 You know, why bother if everything's going to disappear in a hundred years?

00:54:02.000 Who cares?

00:54:04.000 Life, you know, it's meaningless.

00:54:05.000 In the final analysis, life is meaningless.

00:54:07.000 Okay, well, you know, you can make a credible case for that.

00:54:10.000 Now, it's an upsetting case.

00:54:15.000 Because once you accept that, first of all, you're anxious and hurt by it.

00:54:19.000 So that's not so good.

00:54:20.000 And second, it kind of makes you aimless.

00:54:22.000 And that's part of nihilism.

00:54:24.000 It's like, you know, you're anxious and upset, but you're also aimless.

00:54:27.000 Because why bother?

00:54:28.000 And fair enough, but you can make a credible case for it.

00:54:32.000 But then I thought, well, when that gets out of hand, Maybe you're nihilistic because you're mortal and life ends in death.

00:54:41.000 So you're sort of nihilistic because of suffering.

00:54:44.000 And so then you become nihilistic as a logical response to that, and then what happens?

00:54:48.000 And then what you see is that nihilistic people definitely make suffering worse.

00:54:53.000 Definitely.

00:54:54.000 They make it worse for themselves, for sure.

00:54:57.000 But then they get bitter because their lives are so unbearable, and then they start to take it out on other people.

00:55:03.000 So if you are nihilistic, that's not neutral.

00:55:06.000 It gets bad real fast.

00:55:08.000 So then I thought, well, are there any antidotes to meaninglessness?

00:55:13.000 And rational antidotes are hard to come by because you can just say, well, who cares?

00:55:17.000 If in a thousand years we're all going to be dead, why get out of bed in the morning?

00:55:23.000 You can't really mount a rational case why that's not reasonable.

00:55:27.000 Now, I'm not saying it is reasonable, but I thought about music.

00:55:32.000 Music is a very strange art form.

00:55:34.000 I 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.

00:55:44.000 But 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.

00:55:53.000 It's like...

00:55:54.000 We got more nihilistic and less religious and all of that as our culture became more secular and more rational, more materialistic.

00:56:03.000 And at the same time the power of music as a cultural phenomena just grew and grew and grew and grew.

00:56:08.000 So music gives you the intimation of meaning.

00:56:13.000 Directly.

00:56:13.000 So I used to watch punk rockers.

00:56:15.000 I went to a Ramones concert once, which was really fun.

00:56:18.000 We 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.

00:56:32.000 Equipment!

00:56:33.000 It was so loud in there.

00:56:34.000 Like, I had to listen to the whole concert with my ears plugged, and I was still like three-quarters deaf for three days.

00:56:38.000 And 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.

00:56:49.000 And I thought, this is so cool.

00:56:50.000 We got all these nihilistic punks in here, like, half beating themselves up, dancing, and being taken in by this rough music.

00:57:01.000 That gave them, even in their aggressive nihilism, a sense of meaning.

00:57:05.000 I thought that was so cool.

00:57:06.000 So why does music do that?

00:57:09.000 That's a good question.

00:57:10.000 Because people think of music as a non-representational art.

00:57:13.000 It doesn't represent anything.

00:57:15.000 It's not like a drawing or a picture.

00:57:17.000 Or even dance where you can act something out.

00:57:20.000 Really?

00:57:20.000 Non-representational.

00:57:22.000 I don't agree with that.

00:57:23.000 What do you mean by music being non-representational?

00:57:26.000 Well, it's not a picture of anything.

00:57:28.000 Right, but it represents the feeling of the person who puts out the lyrics, the feeling of the person who composes the music.

00:57:34.000 True, it's got emotional content, that's fair enough, because there's unhappy music and there's happy music, minor keys and major.

00:57:41.000 Definitely, it plays on emotions, for sure.

00:57:44.000 But it still, it doesn't represent anything like a picture represents it, let's say, or a sculpture, that's all I mean.

00:57:50.000 Not that it's, I didn't say it was without content.

00:57:52.000 I see what you're saying, but you said representation.

00:57:54.000 Well, you could say it represents emotions, and fair enough, fair enough.

00:57:57.000 But I was thinking more like a picture of an actual thing.

00:58:00.000 Okay, so let's think about what music is.

00:58:05.000 First of all, it's a pattern.

00:58:08.000 So, non-pattern music is noise.

00:58:10.000 It's a pattern.

00:58:11.000 But then it isn't one pattern.

00:58:12.000 It'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.

00:58:27.000 And so, what's the world?

00:58:30.000 Well, the world is made of objects.

00:58:32.000 No, it's not.

00:58:33.000 It's made of patterns.

00:58:34.000 So, music is just like the world.

00:58:37.000 Because the world's made of patterns.

00:58:39.000 And then music has layered patterns that are all moving together in a harmonious manner.

00:58:46.000 And so what do you do when you hear that, especially if it's got a beat?

00:58:50.000 Well then you move your body.

00:58:51.000 And you want to, right?

00:58:52.000 The music calls to you to move your body.

00:58:54.000 So now you're moving your body in sync with the patterned layers of the world.

00:59:00.000 That's meaning.

00:59:01.000 And then there's more to it, so that's so cool.

00:59:03.000 Music is an analog of the structure of existence itself, and it calls to you to take part in that.

00:59:09.000 So 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.

00:59:29.000 That's unbelievably cool.

00:59:30.000 And birds dance.

00:59:32.000 It's not just human beings, you know.

00:59:33.000 So this is a deep thing.

00:59:35.000 And then music does something else, too.

00:59:37.000 It puts you on the border between chaos and order.

00:59:40.000 Because a boring song does exactly what you expect it to do, and gets dull very quickly.

00:59:47.000 And an unlistenable song is so random you can't follow it.

00:59:51.000 And so what you want is predictability, With a leaving of unpredictability.

00:59:57.000 And then that puts you right on the edge.

01:00:00.000 That's the zone of proximal development.

01:00:02.000 Vygotsky discovered that.

01:00:04.000 Like a Hendrix song.

01:00:05.000 Yeah, like a Hendrix song.

01:00:06.000 Well, any great music does that.

01:00:08.000 Yeah, but I mean, Hendrix has so much creativity inside the structure of the song, because there's these riffs that he'll do.

01:00:14.000 Right, right, right.

01:00:14.000 And everyone loves, oh man, I went to this bar in Nashville.

01:00:17.000 This band was playing Kelly's Heroes, a great guitarist, the best guitarist I've ever seen.

01:00:22.000 And they were playing old country music with a heavy blues rock twist.

01:00:26.000 So they do this great version of Ghost Riders in the Sky.

01:00:29.000 It's 15 minutes long.

01:00:30.000 And this brilliant guitarist just goes way out on a limb.

01:00:34.000 Everybody in the crowd, it was so fun to be there.

01:00:37.000 They're just thrilled to death because they're watching this man doing the same thing that surfers do.

01:00:41.000 He's like dancing on the edge of chaos and order in this virtuosic manner.

01:00:46.000 And everyone is so taken by that that it just lifts them out of the normality of their existence.

01:00:53.000 You know, they see this joy just transfuse them.

01:00:56.000 And that's because they got an intimation of genuine meaning.

01:01:01.000 And 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.

01:01:11.000 It's like it puts you directly in touch with the meaning that sustains you in life, directly.

01:01:16.000 And 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.

01:01:36.000 It's all a reflection of the same thing.

01:01:38.000 And that's real.

01:01:40.000 It's real, that meaning.

01:01:42.000 It's real also in what it imparts on other people.

01:01:46.000 It doesn't exist in a vacuum.

01:01:50.000 Even 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.

01:02:02.000 Well, you see that, you know, if you get lucky, you go to a...

01:02:05.000 I went to a Leonard Cohen concert, one of the ones he put on when he went on tour when he was old.

01:02:11.000 He lost all his money when he was in a Buddhist monastery.

01:02:14.000 Dangers of being in a Buddhist monastery, by the way.

01:02:16.000 Did he really?

01:02:17.000 He lost all his money?

01:02:18.000 Yes, his manager...

01:02:19.000 Stole his money?

01:02:20.000 Yeah, 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.

01:02:26.000 Did he get a new manager?

01:02:28.000 Yeah, it was an old friend of his as well.

01:02:29.000 It was really a catastrophe.

01:02:31.000 But 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.

01:02:38.000 He put out some songs like The Man Comes Around that are just unbelievable.

01:02:43.000 He wrote a book on St. Paul, by the way.

01:02:45.000 He did?

01:02:45.000 Yes, yes, he did.

01:02:46.000 On St. Paul?

01:02:47.000 Yes, yes, yes.

01:02:48.000 Yeah, yeah, so that's pretty interesting.

01:02:51.000 So, 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?

01:03:00.000 Well, it was.

01:03:00.000 It was a religious experience in the most fundamental sense.

01:03:04.000 And everybody in the audience was there, in the same place, at the same time, doing the same thing with him, you know?

01:03:11.000 And you know what that's like when you go to a great...

01:03:14.000 Well, that can happen to...

01:03:15.000 I'm sure it happens to you at your comedy shows.

01:03:18.000 When the whole audience is united and the stories are unrolling and everyone's focused on it, it's not exactly the same thing, but...

01:03:26.000 It's similar.

01:03:27.000 There's a hive mind. 0.77

01:03:28.000 Well, it's also...

01:03:29.000 The good comedians are right...

01:03:31.000 They're like musicians.

01:03:33.000 They're right on the border between order and chaos.

01:03:36.000 Because the place of maximal funny is when you're just about pushing it too far.

01:03:43.000 Right?

01:03:43.000 You think, oh, do I have to say this?

01:03:47.000 You know, do I have to say this?

01:03:49.000 Like, yeah, you have to say this.

01:03:51.000 Okay, I'm going to say it.

01:03:52.000 And everyone cracks up, and they crack up, you know, and it blows apart their sterile preconceptions.

01:03:58.000 That's part of cracking up, you know, when you laugh.

01:04:00.000 And it's so cool because...

01:04:03.000 It's the antidote to their totalitarianism.

01:04:06.000 Comedy.

01:04:06.000 And that's why you can tell anybody who goes after a comedian, it's like, oh yeah, I know who you are.

01:04:12.000 You're the king who can't stand the fool. 1.00

01:04:14.000 That's the tyrant. 1.00

01:04:15.000 So you reveal yourself.

01:04:17.000 Same as people who go after musicians or dancers.

01:04:19.000 Well, I think people are going after comedy for a different thing today.

01:04:23.000 Because they're going after comedy for a literal representation of what the words mean, if you put them in print.

01:04:29.000 And that's nonsense.

01:04:31.000 That's not what a comedian is doing.

01:04:33.000 Well, they're doing that because there are some things they believe that can't be made fun of.

01:04:38.000 Yeah, but really what they're doing is just looking for targets.

01:04:41.000 They're playing a game.

01:04:42.000 The rules of the game have been established.

01:04:45.000 Comedy violates the rules of the game.

01:04:47.000 Yeah, what are the rules?

01:04:48.000 Because comedy takes those things.

01:04:49.000 Well, there's a lot of things you can't joke about.

01:04:51.000 You can't joke about- Sacred things.

01:04:52.000 Yeah, there's protected classes now.

01:04:55.000 We all know where they are.

01:04:56.000 We don't even have to bring them up.

01:04:57.000 Whether it's trans people, gay people, people of color, Asian people, whatever those things are. 0.98

01:05:04.000 One thing you can mock relentlessly is white people. 0.99

01:05:08.000 Specifically white males. 0.97

01:05:10.000 Well they are pretty funny, you know. 1.00

01:05:11.000 Oh sure, we're ridiculous. 0.98

01:05:13.000 But there's a funny pejorative that people will say about a group of folks, they're primarily white males. 0.99

01:05:20.000 That's a pejorative.

01:05:22.000 It's my audience, that's what everyone says.

01:05:25.000 Oh, you're talking to those angry young white males.

01:05:28.000 But isn't that funny?

01:05:29.000 That that means something negative.

01:05:34.000 It's not funny.

01:05:35.000 It's horrible.

01:05:36.000 But 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.

01:05:46.000 Well, for a while, you know, because people kept coming and telling me that, you know, your audience is only angry white, young white men.

01:05:52.000 I thought...

01:05:54.000 I kind of approached that wrong to begin with.

01:05:56.000 I mean, I knew my audience was primarily male, as I suspect yours still is.

01:06:01.000 But then I looked at the YouTube stats and 70% of people who listen to YouTube were males.

01:06:06.000 So the fact that 70% of my audience was male was not an anomaly.

01:06:10.000 It was just a consequence of the technology.

01:06:12.000 What do you think that is?

01:06:13.000 Why are 70% of the people that watch YouTube male?

01:06:20.000 Women are more interested in fiction than non-fiction, and men are opposite to that. 0.98

01:06:25.000 So if you look at book buying preferences, for example, women tilt towards fiction, and men tilt towards women in fiction.

01:06:31.000 And 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.

01:06:41.000 So, women are reliably more interested in people, and men are reliably more interested in things.

01:06:46.000 Now, there's still overlap.

01:06:48.000 It's one standard deviation, which is a big difference.

01:06:51.000 But that isn't to say no women are interested in things, because some are, and no men are interested in people, because some are. 0.91

01:07:01.000 Like, I'm a man who's more interested in people than things.

01:07:04.000 That's why I'm a psychologist.

01:07:06.000 You know, I actually have a relatively feminine personality structure because I'm pretty high in negative emotion, and I'm pretty high in agreeableness.

01:07:13.000 And that's the typical feminine structure. 1.00

01:07:16.000 And 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.

01:07:23.000 And that's not true.

01:07:25.000 But you can definitely be a man with a feminine personality structure.

01:07:30.000 Like, 10% of men are as feminine in their personality as the average woman is. 0.52

01:07:36.000 And vice versa.

01:07:37.000 10% of women are as masculine in their personality as the average man is.

01:07:41.000 Now, you can move those boundaries around and say, well, it's 5% and 40 or something.

01:07:46.000 It doesn't matter.

01:07:47.000 But the point is, there's plenty of men who are as feminine in their personality as the average woman.

01:07:52.000 That doesn't mean they're in the wrong body.

01:07:54.000 It 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.

01:08:01.000 And we need to know this.

01:08:03.000 So what do you think is happening with trans people then?

01:08:07.000 Well, there's a lot of different kinds of trans people.

01:08:09.000 Okay, trans men.

01:08:10.000 Or, excuse me, trans women. 0.98

01:08:12.000 Men to female. 0.84

01:08:13.000 Well, then I would say it depends on what period of time you're asking that question about.

01:08:20.000 Right now, if you look at teenagers, for example, who want to switch genders, 95% of them are unbearably confused.

01:08:30.000 That's what's causing that.

01:08:31.000 And I think there's other reasons, too.

01:08:33.000 I think this is a conjecture.

01:08:36.000 When 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.

01:08:47.000 And I already kind of knew about that fluid identity crowd.

01:08:51.000 So when I was at Harvard, piercing and tattooing started to become a cultural rage.

01:08:58.000 And I was interested in, well, who's doing this?

01:09:00.000 Because I knew it was...

01:09:02.000 It was a practice that was limited to criminal subtypes and outcasts for a long time.

01:09:08.000 So, 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.

01:09:17.000 And if you were a prisoner, same thing.

01:09:19.000 But then all of a sudden it started to make its inroads into the popular culture.

01:09:22.000 So we studied a group of early adopters of tattooing and piercing.

01:09:29.000 From the perspective of personality.

01:09:30.000 Like, who are these people?

01:09:32.000 And they were all highly creative people.

01:09:36.000 And creativity is a trait.

01:09:38.000 And all people who aren't creative, that's wrong.

01:09:41.000 In fact, most people aren't creative at all.

01:09:44.000 And I can explain that later, but they're not.

01:09:47.000 We developed a scale called the Creative Achievement Questionnaire, which assesses lifetime contribution to 13 different creative domains.

01:09:56.000 And your scores would range from zero, I have no training or talent in this area, to, I think it was eight.

01:10:03.000 I'm an internationally recognized expert in this area.

01:10:06.000 And so, 70% of people, if you sum their scores across all 13 domains, scored zero.

01:10:15.000 And I ask audiences, like, how many portraits have you painted?

01:10:20.000 Zero! 0.90

01:10:21.000 How many songs have you composed?

01:10:22.000 Zero! 0.90

01:10:23.000 How many plays have you written?

01:10:24.000 Zero! 0.90

01:10:26.000 How many recipes have you invented?

01:10:27.000 Let me stop you. 0.95

01:10:28.000 The tattooed types, they were high in creativity.

01:10:32.000 Okay.

01:10:32.000 And a lot of these people who are fluid in their identity are actually high in trade openness.

01:10:37.000 And they do have fluid identities.

01:10:39.000 And some of them are feminine men and masculine women.

01:10:43.000 So, yeah, but that doesn't mean that surgery is the cure for that.

01:10:48.000 That does not mean that.

01:10:51.000 Not at all.

01:10:52.000 Well, what do you think it means when someone is so attracted to the idea that they were born in the wrong body?

01:11:01.000 It means so much.

01:11:03.000 They're so compelled that they're willing to go through surgery to change God, it means all sorts of things.

01:11:07.000 I 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.

01:11:18.000 This is like Abigail Schreier's work in rapid onset gender dysphoria amongst women.

01:11:23.000 Yeah, well, that's a different thing, the rapid onset.

01:11:25.000 That's more like...

01:11:26.000 So 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.

01:11:38.000 I knew that because I knew the literature on psychological contagion.

01:11:42.000 And it stretches back like 500 years, that literature.

01:11:45.000 300 years.

01:11:46.000 It's all outlined in a book by Henri Ellenbergé called History of...

01:11:50.000 History of...

01:11:52.000 What's the name of the book?

01:11:55.000 History of psychoanalytic ideas, it doesn't matter.

01:11:57.000 It's Henri Alenbergier and it's his main work, if you want to look it up.

01:12:00.000 And so, psychological contagions are very common.

01:12:03.000 And so, one of them, for example, was the satanic ritual abuse accusations that emerged in daycares in the 1980s.

01:12:10.000 And 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. 0.74

01:12:19.000 And those fantasies propagated into the population.

01:12:22.000 So what does this have to do with creativity?

01:12:24.000 You were talking about creativity in people that are...

01:12:27.000 Well, okay, so you see people with blue hair, the blue-haired crowd.

01:12:31.000 Well, they're the same people that were doing tattooing and piercing, and they often are literally the same people because they have piercings.

01:12:36.000 It's like, well, they have mutable identities.

01:12:38.000 They're not stable in their identities.

01:12:42.000 They're creative.

01:12:44.000 Creative people, by definition, aren't stable in their identities.

01:12:47.000 That's what makes them creative.

01:12:49.000 Now, the downside of that is...

01:12:52.000 Creativity is a high-risk, high-return strategy. 1.00

01:12:57.000 Your new idea is probably stupid and wrong, and maybe it's fatal. 1.00

01:13:03.000 But now and then, it's unbelievably successful. 1.00

01:13:07.000 And also, now and then, our culture would die without it.

01:13:12.000 So we always have this problem, because we have to maintain stability.

01:13:17.000 Because otherwise everything degenerates into chaos.

01:13:20.000 But mere stability won't work because the future is different from the past.

01:13:25.000 Like technically different.

01:13:26.000 Different in a non-deterministic way.

01:13:28.000 It's actually different.

01:13:30.000 And so then we have to figure out, well how do we modify our memories or our traditions?

01:13:36.000 At a rate that enables us to keep up with the culture.

01:13:39.000 And 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.

01:13:49.000 So you think that a lot of what's going on with people that want to change their gender identity is creativity?

01:13:55.000 No, I don't think so.

01:13:57.000 I know so.

01:13:58.000 You know so.

01:13:59.000 Yeah, that's not all of it, but that's definitely part of it.

01:14:01.000 But 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.

01:14:14.000 Yeah, that's definitely the case.

01:14:16.000 This is males to females, right? 0.93

01:14:16.000 Yeah, well, it's confusing. 0.93

01:14:17.000 Look, I mean...

01:14:19.000 I 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,

01:14:38.000 say, three and five.

01:14:40.000 That'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.

01:14:49.000 So the fantasy play is imperative to develop your identity by trying out a bunch of different patterns of behavior and ways to be.

01:14:57.000 Yes, exactly.

01:14:58.000 So when my son was about...

01:15:02.000 Two.

01:15:03.000 His sister was about three and had a little gaggle of friends, and they used to dress him up like a fairy princess.

01:15:10.000 And 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,

01:15:27.000 a little fairy hat, and a wand, and a dress?

01:15:29.000 Is that okay?

01:15:30.000 And I talked to Tammy about it.

01:15:33.000 I said, the girls are dressing Julian up like a princess.

01:15:36.000 And it kind of I have qualms about it, but I'm not sure what to do.

01:15:44.000 Because he was having a good time and he was playing with the girls.

01:15:47.000 What qualms would you possibly have about that?

01:15:51.000 From my personal experience of having daughters, they think it's funny to put me in a dress.

01:15:57.000 It is funny.

01:15:58.000 Yeah, well, there was a dress that my wife was throwing out, and my daughters made me put it on. 1.00

01:16:03.000 They forced me to, and they took pictures of me.

01:16:05.000 Yeah, I bet they thought it was hilarious.

01:16:06.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:16:07.000 My daughter decorated me up like a woman one day in her makeup class.

01:16:11.000 Right, so what's wrong with that?

01:16:13.000 Nothing, right?

01:16:13.000 Well, that's what I... Just fun.

01:16:14.000 No, well, that's it.

01:16:15.000 That's what I concluded.

01:16:16.000 You know, I thought, well...

01:16:17.000 But why would you worry about anything else other than it being fun?

01:16:21.000 Well, probably because I had...

01:16:23.000 Why was I worried about it?

01:16:31.000 I suppose because I hope that his pathway towards adulthood would be...

01:16:37.000 Normal?

01:16:38.000 Yeah, sure, sure.

01:16:39.000 Normal biological male progression to...

01:16:42.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:16:43.000 And so I saw this playing, but then I thought...

01:16:45.000 I only had qualms for like about two hours.

01:16:48.000 I went and thought about it.

01:16:49.000 I thought, okay, what's going on here?

01:16:50.000 Well, he's playing with the girls.

01:16:53.000 Okay, should he play with girls? 0.61

01:16:55.000 Yes.

01:16:56.000 Yes.

01:16:56.000 Definitely.

01:16:57.000 He should play with girls. 1.00

01:16:59.000 Absolutely.

01:17:00.000 Adult males should play with women. 1.00

01:17:02.000 We should be able to play with people of the opposite sex.

01:17:06.000 So he's learning to play with the girls.

01:17:09.000 Good.

01:17:10.000 Is he enjoying it?

01:17:11.000 Yes.

01:17:12.000 Are they bullying him?

01:17:13.000 No.

01:17:14.000 Are the girls enjoying it?

01:17:15.000 Yes.

01:17:16.000 That's all good.

01:17:17.000 Okay, so what does it mean he's playing at being a girl?

01:17:21.000 Oh! 0.60

01:17:23.000 He's trying to understand what it means to be a girl.

01:17:26.000 Well, how do you understand that when you're three?

01:17:29.000 Or maybe when you're fifty?

01:17:31.000 You play at it.

01:17:33.000 Which means you allow that pattern of being to inhabit you.

01:17:37.000 And you experiment with it.

01:17:38.000 Now, a lot of older transgender types, the late onset types, they're playing. 1.00

01:17:46.000 They just don't know it.

01:17:48.000 Now, 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. 0.97

01:17:58.000 They need it.

01:17:59.000 What is the term, there is a term, for a man who derives a lot of sexual pleasure? 0.66

01:18:06.000 He's heterosexual, but he derives sexual... 0.91

01:18:08.000 I think it's autogynephilia. 0.76

01:18:09.000 Yes, that's it.

01:18:10.000 Yeah, but I think the sexual— Let's fully explain that.

01:18:13.000 Yeah, well, I don't think it does.

01:18:15.000 I think the reason they derive—because the question is, why do they derive sexual pleasure?

01:18:19.000 Finish the sentence.

01:18:20.000 You're not finishing the sentence.

01:18:21.000 Explain what we're saying.

01:18:22.000 Yeah, well, they derive sexual pleasure.

01:18:25.000 They would get turned on by seeing themselves in the clothes of women or feeling it. 0.69

01:18:29.000 But I think the sexual instinct is directing them towards personality expansion.

01:18:35.000 I look at it in Jungian terms.

01:18:37.000 So part of the process of personality expansion in the deep psychoanalytic sense is, first you're a persona, or first you're nothing.

01:18:48.000 Then you develop a persona, which is a way of presenting yourself in a socially acceptable way to the world.

01:18:54.000 And maybe you confuse yourself with your persona.

01:18:57.000 Now you've had conversations with people on your podcast who are stiff and you can't get a dynamic conversation going.

01:19:03.000 That's because they're acting out their persona.

01:19:06.000 You're not really talking to them.

01:19:07.000 You're talking to an act that they've constructed.

01:19:10.000 It's a puppet.

01:19:11.000 An act that they've constructed to make themselves socially acceptable to the world.

01:19:15.000 And sometimes.

01:19:15.000 Maybe sometimes it's just anxiety.

01:19:17.000 Yeah, 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.

01:19:28.000 Okay, so for the Jungians, the first step outside the persona was the shadow.

01:19:34.000 Jungians being Carl Jung. 0.97

01:19:35.000 Carl Jung, followers of Carl Jung, or students of better terminology, was discovery of the shadow.

01:19:42.000 Oh, I thought I was the good person here.

01:19:44.000 But it turns out that I've got, like, some darkness.

01:19:47.000 And you often see this with...

01:19:49.000 Imagine you have hyper-compassionate people who are dependent.

01:19:52.000 And they won't engage in conflict, so they're always oppressed.

01:19:56.000 And so, then when you talk to them, you find out they're really, really resentful, and they have a lot of fantasies of revenge.

01:20:03.000 Like, a lot.

01:20:04.000 And so then you work with them, and you think, okay, you have something to say and do here.

01:20:11.000 You've got some harsh words to say, maybe to your partner.

01:20:14.000 You've got some things to say to your boss.

01:20:17.000 You've got to spine up and say it.

01:20:20.000 And that's part of incorporating that, especially aggression.

01:20:23.000 So agreeable people, compassionate people don't like aggression.

01:20:27.000 But like, that's like not liking sex.

01:20:30.000 It's dangerous.

01:20:32.000 But it's necessary.

01:20:35.000 And so you want to integrate it.

01:20:36.000 And if you don't, it has its own life.

01:20:38.000 You know, you see people all the time who, they're so nice.

01:20:42.000 You can't even be in the same room with them.

01:20:44.000 They're that nice.

01:20:45.000 But they're resentful and passive-aggressive.

01:20:49.000 They take it out in all sorts of ways, partly because they're always unhappy.

01:20:53.000 They're often moralistically judgmental.

01:20:54.000 Because they're not saying what they have to say.

01:20:56.000 They've got to integrate that shadow.

01:20:58.000 So that was part of it.

01:20:59.000 The shadow consists of, in part, all the things about you that you've deemed morally unacceptable and failed to develop.

01:21:06.000 And so sometimes that's aggression, often.

01:21:09.000 Sometimes it's sexuality, often.

01:21:12.000 And so it'll manifest itself in impulsive, aggressive sexuality, say under conditions of alcohol intoxication, when it leaks out. 0.95

01:21:19.000 Aggressive, meaning like rough sex? 0.98

01:21:22.000 Yeah, forced. 0.99

01:21:24.000 Forced.

01:21:25.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:21:26.000 Definitely.

01:21:27.000 Forced.

01:21:27.000 So you mean like rape?

01:21:29.000 Well, or it doesn't have to go all the way to rape. 1.00

01:21:32.000 It can be like over-aggressive sexual compulsion in a dating situation.

01:21:40.000 So does that account for certain men that like violence in their sex?

01:21:46.000 Like they like abuse in their sex?

01:21:48.000 Yes. 0.97

01:21:49.000 Because 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. 0.93

01:22:00.000 No, it's not. 0.93

01:22:01.000 But it's really strange on the outside.

01:22:04.000 Definitely.

01:22:04.000 It's strange to those men, too, because it's often very unsettling for them to see.

01:22:10.000 You know, in the cloud of their niceness and their harmlessness, this deep, dark desire making itself manifest.

01:22:18.000 Do you remember that case of that Canadian broadcaster who was this guy who was like Really talks like this.

01:22:24.000 Very calm. 0.98

01:22:26.000 And then a bunch of women came out that dated him and said he beat the shit out of them. 1.00

01:22:29.000 And he would want to beat them up during sex. 1.00

01:22:33.000 Like, really beat them up. 1.00

01:22:34.000 Punch them in the face. 1.00

01:22:36.000 Yeah, well, you know, it's an open question how much assertiveness there should be in sex. 1.00

01:22:41.000 And the answer is zero.

01:22:43.000 No, I'm not saying in the least that that's acceptable.

01:22:46.000 Let me be absolutely clear here.

01:22:47.000 That's not acceptable at all.

01:22:49.000 That's not assertiveness.

01:22:50.000 No, it's not.

01:22:51.000 It's repressed.

01:22:56.000 It's what's repressed.

01:22:57.000 There's no clearer way of saying it.

01:22:59.000 It's like, look, many men are terrified of women.

01:23:02.000 Many.

01:23:03.000 And so that terror might manifest itself even in a relationship.

01:23:10.000 In the inability to ever let the partner know what they really want.

01:23:14.000 They're terrified for what reason?

01:23:16.000 Because of rejection?

01:23:17.000 Yeah.

01:23:18.000 And then the feelings of inadequacy that produces, often which are necessary.

01:23:23.000 They're necessary.

01:23:24.000 Right.

01:23:24.000 I was trying to explain this to a friend once.

01:23:26.000 We had a friend of ours who had developed what seemed to be like a real hate for women.

01:23:32.000 And he wasn't an attractive guy.

01:23:34.000 And so we were having this conversation.

01:23:35.000 And I said, imagine if all of your interactions with women hurt your feelings. 0.91

01:23:40.000 And you're not a very thoughtful and introspective person.

01:23:43.000 You would immediately associate women with negative feelings and you'd be angry about them.

01:23:47.000 And that's what's happening to that guy.

01:23:49.000 He got a bad roll of the dice in terms of his facial features and his genes.

01:23:54.000 It just wasn't that good.

01:23:55.000 And so he was not...

01:23:58.000 Girls were not interested in him. 0.56

01:23:59.000 So he had developed this anger.

01:24:01.000 And it was shocking.

01:24:03.000 Welcome to the human race.

01:24:04.000 Well, that's incels, right?

01:24:06.000 Yeah.

01:24:07.000 Well, it's not even incels.

01:24:09.000 It's like...

01:24:09.000 Okay, so I'll finish one thought because we were talking about transsexualism.

01:24:13.000 Yeah.

01:24:14.000 So the second stage of development in the Jungian sense is the integration of countersexual possibilities.

01:24:20.000 So I just watched Joachim Phoenix in Joker.

01:24:25.000 And he's a very charismatic actor and...

01:24:30.000 And I was thinking, well, God, because he carried that whole movie single-handedly.

01:24:34.000 It's a dark, dark movie, and it has to do with resentment.

01:24:36.000 This man who was forced to be nice by his mother, who turns out to be absolutely crazy and abused him like mad when he was a kid.

01:24:44.000 And then he becomes this role model for the dissemination of complete catastrophe into the entire society.

01:24:49.000 It's a story of Cain, in part.

01:24:51.000 But Phoenix really carries that, and part of the reason that he does that is because he creates a compelling character who's sympathetic.

01:24:57.000 Like, you can be sympathetic to him because he really did have a hard life, like, really hard.

01:25:02.000 But 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.

01:25:15.000 Every single thing he does in the entire movie is a dance.

01:25:19.000 Like, he's conscious of every single movement he makes.

01:25:21.000 Every turn of his head is conscious.

01:25:24.000 It's dance-like.

01:25:25.000 And you can't take your eyes off it.

01:25:27.000 And a lot of stellar performers had that ability to integrate, male performers had that ability to integrate that feminine grace into their masculine character.

01:25:36.000 You saw that with Bowie, David Bowie.

01:25:38.000 You saw it with Mick Jagger.

01:25:40.000 They're good examples.

01:25:41.000 A lot of those 70s glam rockers were gender benders, long hair, a lot of flashy outfits. 0.99

01:25:46.000 And 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.

01:25:59.000 That's Prince.

01:26:00.000 He's the best at camp on that.

01:26:01.000 Prince, sure, sure, sure, sure.

01:26:03.000 Sure.

01:26:03.000 And so, that's high-order integration.

01:26:06.000 And 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. 0.61

01:26:23.000 I'm sure you're familiar with Douglas Murray's work.

01:26:26.000 Yes, and Murray, who's very funny, who I like very much, and who's one of the most courageous people I've ever met.

01:26:32.000 Yeah, he's brilliant.

01:26:32.000 And he had an amazing point about civilizations collapsing, and that when they start collapsing, they become obsessed with gender.

01:26:42.000 And he was saying that you could trace it back to the ancient Romans, the Greeks, Yeah, Camille Pellet has made much of that.

01:26:50.000 I think probably it's not so much an obsession with gender, it's a disintegration of categories as a precursor.

01:26:57.000 So it's a marker for if categories dissolve, especially fundamental ones, the culture is dissolving because the culture is a structure of category.

01:27:09.000 That's what it is.

01:27:11.000 So, in fact, culture is a...

01:27:15.000 Structure of category that we all share.

01:27:19.000 So, we see things the same way.

01:27:21.000 That's why we can talk.

01:27:23.000 I mean, not exactly the same way, because then we'd have nothing to talk about.

01:27:26.000 But, roughly speaking, we have a bedrock of agreement.

01:27:31.000 That's the Bible, by the way.

01:27:35.000 So I just walked through the Museum of the Bible in Washington.

01:27:38.000 That was very cool.

01:27:39.000 It's a very cool museum.

01:27:40.000 So the structure, that's what the Bible provides.

01:27:42.000 Yeah, that's what I figured out.

01:27:43.000 I just figured this out this week.

01:27:45.000 So it was a cool thing to walk through because it's chronological.

01:27:51.000 They have one floor, which is the history of the Bible.

01:27:54.000 But it's not exactly that.

01:27:55.000 It's really what it is, is the history of the book.

01:28:00.000 Now, in many ways, the first book was the Bible.

01:28:03.000 I mean, literally.

01:28:04.000 Because at one point, there was only one book.

01:28:08.000 As far as our Western culture is concerned, there was one book.

01:28:11.000 And for a while, literally, there was only one book.

01:28:14.000 And that book was the Bible.

01:28:15.000 And then before it was the Bible, it was scrolls, and it was writings on papyrus.

01:28:20.000 But we were starting to aggregate written text together.

01:28:23.000 And it went through all sorts of technological transformations, and then it became...

01:28:28.000 Books that everybody could buy.

01:28:29.000 The book everybody could buy.

01:28:31.000 And the first one of those was the Bible.

01:28:32.000 And then it became all sorts of books that everybody could buy.

01:28:36.000 But all those books, in some sense, emerged out of that underlying book.

01:28:40.000 And that book itself, the Bible isn't a book, it's a library.

01:28:44.000 It's a collection of books.

01:28:46.000 And 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,

01:29:03.000 by the way.

01:29:04.000 And so I talked to him about that.

01:29:05.000 He said, you heard of the internet?

01:29:07.000 I said, yeah, Jim, I've heard of the internet.

01:29:09.000 He said, this is way more revolutionary than that.

01:29:14.000 So, in any case, we were talking about meaning in text because we were talking about translation and the problem of understanding text.

01:29:21.000 And Jim said...

01:29:23.000 The meaning of words is coded in the relationship of the words to one another.

01:29:27.000 And the postmodernists make that case, that all meaning is derived from the relationship between words.

01:29:32.000 That's wrong, because, well, what about rage?

01:29:36.000 That's not words.

01:29:37.000 And what about moving your hand?

01:29:38.000 That's not words.

01:29:39.000 So it's wrong, but part of it's right, because The meaning we derive from the verbal domain is encoded in the relationship between words.

01:29:49.000 So now then you think, well, let's think about the relationship between words.

01:29:54.000 Well, some words are dependent on other words.

01:29:56.000 Some ideas are dependent on other ideas.

01:29:58.000 The more ideas are dependent on a given idea, the more fundamental that idea is.

01:30:05.000 That's a definition of fundamental.

01:30:07.000 So now imagine you have an aggregation of texts in a civilization.

01:30:11.000 You say, which are the fundamental texts?

01:30:13.000 And the answer is, the texts upon which most other texts depend.

01:30:18.000 And so you put Shakespeare way in there in English, because so many texts are dependent on Shakespeare's literary revelations.

01:30:25.000 And Milton would be in that category, and Dante would be in that category, at least in translation.

01:30:30.000 Fundamental authors, part of the Western canon, not because of the arbitrary dictates of power, but because those texts influenced more other texts.

01:30:39.000 And then you think about that as a hierarchy, okay, with the Bible at its base, which is certainly the case.

01:30:47.000 Now, imagine that's the entire corpus of linguistic production, all things considered.

01:30:52.000 Now, how do you understand that?

01:30:55.000 Like, literally, how do you understand that?

01:30:57.000 The answer is, you sample it by reading and listening to stories and listening to people talk.

01:31:02.000 You sample that whole domain, you build a low-resolution representation of that inside you, and then you listen and see through that.

01:31:15.000 And so it isn't that the Bible is true.

01:31:18.000 It's that the Bible is the precondition for the manifestation of truth, which makes it way more true than just true.

01:31:27.000 It's a whole different kind of true.

01:31:29.000 And I think this is not only literally the case.

01:31:33.000 Factually, I think it can't be in either way.

01:31:36.000 It's the only way we can solve the problem of perception.

01:31:38.000 You said the precondition of the manifestation of truth?

01:31:42.000 Yeah.

01:31:42.000 What do you mean by that?

01:31:45.000 How do you know when what you and I are saying is true?

01:31:48.000 Well, it depends on what we're saying.

01:31:50.000 Not exactly.

01:31:51.000 You know this, Joe, the fact that you're so popular, this is a mystery.

01:31:55.000 And I've been tweeting about it while people have been attacking you.

01:31:58.000 Why is Joe Rogan so popular?

01:31:59.000 He's a gateway to the alt-rights.

01:32:01.000 Like, no, he's a psychedelic hippie. 1.00

01:32:03.000 That's a stupid hypothesis. 1.00

01:32:06.000 That's wrong. 1.00

01:32:07.000 Well, he's a propagandist.

01:32:09.000 It's like, no, Joe is an honest man.

01:32:15.000 And he actually says what he believes to be true.

01:32:18.000 But let's think about that.

01:32:20.000 Because that isn't exactly what you do.

01:32:23.000 You follow the conversation and you listen.

01:32:27.000 And you spontaneously manifest words that indicate your reaction.

01:32:34.000 And it isn't the words themselves exactly that are true, because you might be wrong and you might be right, right?

01:32:39.000 I mean, what do you know or what I know?

01:32:41.000 We're going to be wrong a bunch during this conversation.

01:32:44.000 But the process that we're manifesting in the discovery of truth and untruth, that's not wrong.

01:32:52.000 That's exactly right.

01:32:54.000 And you know when we're doing it, because it's so engaging.

01:32:57.000 The process that we're manifesting.

01:32:59.000 Meaning?

01:33:00.000 The mutual exploration of structures of truth through dialogue.

01:33:05.000 In good faith.

01:33:07.000 In good faith.

01:33:08.000 In good faith.

01:33:08.000 That's the most important thing.

01:33:11.000 Yes.

01:33:12.000 And then we could ask, well, what does in good faith mean?

01:33:15.000 Okay, so first of all, I can trust you.

01:33:19.000 And that's been my experience.

01:33:20.000 You've never played games with me.

01:33:22.000 We disagree.

01:33:23.000 That's fun.

01:33:24.000 I can trust you.

01:33:25.000 You don't play games.

01:33:27.000 I can talk to you.

01:33:29.000 You listen, and you say things.

01:33:30.000 We have a conversation.

01:33:31.000 It's real.

01:33:32.000 It's fun.

01:33:33.000 We fall into it.

01:33:34.000 The time flies by, right?

01:33:35.000 Yeah.

01:33:35.000 That's a cool thing.

01:33:37.000 That the burden of temporal mortality lifts in the face of genuine dialogue.

01:33:44.000 You think, well, there's a marker for paradisal meaning.

01:33:46.000 It's like a bit of transcendence of death right there and then.

01:33:49.000 You think, no, it's not.

01:33:50.000 It's like, yeah, yeah, you go for five years without a meaningful conversation and see if you're dead.

01:33:56.000 Because if you're not, you're sure going to want to be.

01:33:58.000 Well, it's akin to isolation.

01:34:01.000 I mean, you can be around people but not have a good conversation and you might as well be isolated.

01:34:07.000 You are isolated, in the presence of your own thoughts.

01:34:10.000 That's the problem if you are stuck somewhere where the only conversation that's available is with dull people.

01:34:17.000 Like 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.

01:34:24.000 Those 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.

01:34:37.000 So it'll inhibit your intellectual development, because you won't be interested in expanding ideas, and you may look to escape.

01:34:46.000 It inhibits not just your intellectual development, but the entire unfolding of your existence.

01:34:53.000 One 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.

01:35:11.000 Very cool story, because Abraham's like 80 years old, living in his father's tent.

01:35:15.000 Talk about failure to launch.

01:35:16.000 And God shows up one day and says, you have to leave everything you know and journey out into the unknown.

01:35:23.000 And you think, well, what is that?

01:35:26.000 Well, that's the call to adventure.

01:35:28.000 That's what it is.

01:35:30.000 And so, and what happens to Abraham is it's a bloody catastrophe.

01:35:33.000 Like, 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... 0.53

01:35:40.000 Man, he's thinking, things are pretty good in that tent.

01:35:44.000 But, well, he goes on this tremendous adventure, and then he's the forefather of, you know, biblically speaking, half the people on the planet.

01:35:53.000 He has this tremendous adventure.

01:35:56.000 Think, well, what do you set against the suffering of your life?

01:36:00.000 Well, the adventure of your life, that's what you said against it.

01:36:04.000 It's not safety.

01:36:05.000 Forget about that.

01:36:06.000 There's no safety for mortals, that's for sure.

01:36:09.000 And besides, safety?

01:36:12.000 That's what you want?

01:36:14.000 You don't want that.

01:36:15.000 You want adventure.

01:36:16.000 So then the question is, where's adventure to be found?

01:36:18.000 In exploitation.

01:36:20.000 Well, try it and see.

01:36:22.000 Hell is to be found in exploitation.

01:36:25.000 How about truth?

01:36:26.000 Who thinks adventure is to be found in exploitation?

01:36:28.000 Well, that's kind of the claim that everything's about power.

01:36:32.000 Everything's motivated by power.

01:36:34.000 Is that really what people say, though?

01:36:36.000 Who says that?

01:36:37.000 Well, the postmodernists all say that. 0.99

01:36:39.000 That's such a silly expression. 0.95

01:36:40.000 Yeah, but that is what... 0.91

01:36:41.000 What about love?

01:36:42.000 Is love motivated by power?

01:36:43.000 Yes.

01:36:44.000 That's why they distrust love.

01:36:45.000 Is art motivated by power?

01:36:47.000 Yes.

01:36:47.000 It's the mouthpiece of political ideology.

01:36:49.000 When you're making paintings, that's motivated by power?

01:36:51.000 Yes, because you want to climb up the socioeconomic status hierarchy.

01:36:55.000 By painting?

01:36:56.000 Play the stock market. 0.98

01:36:58.000 That's ridiculous. 0.99

01:36:59.000 You're just not very good at it. 0.99

01:37:00.000 Okay, what about music?

01:37:01.000 Same thing.

01:37:02.000 Motivated by power.

01:37:04.000 You bet.

01:37:04.000 Everything's motivated by power.

01:37:06.000 Well, that was the answer that came out of France in the 1970s, and that was the answer that all the universities accepted.

01:37:12.000 Why do you think that the whole cultural critique is patriarchal oppression?

01:37:16.000 Don'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.

01:37:35.000 They don't venture outside the prisons of their own imagination.

01:37:38.000 Or the echo chambers that exist in.

01:37:40.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:37:40.000 No, I think a tremendous amount of it.

01:37:42.000 I mean, this was Nietzsche's observation and Orwell's too.

01:37:45.000 A lot of that's motivated by resentment.

01:37:47.000 Tremendous amount of it.

01:37:48.000 I think that's 100% true.

01:37:49.000 And I think we should be very careful people aren't charitable.

01:37:53.000 Very careful of people who aren't nice.

01:37:56.000 There'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.

01:38:04.000 Well, that is the expression of power then. 0.94

01:38:06.000 Yes.

01:38:07.000 Yeah, I always think you think everything's about power.

01:38:10.000 It's like, that's a confession, buddy.

01:38:11.000 The problem with that is it also attacks your own perceptions of yourself.

01:38:17.000 Yes.

01:38:18.000 Because you know who you are, you know what you're doing, you know, if you're just doing that.

01:38:22.000 Yeah, 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?

01:38:29.000 It's crazy. 1.00

01:38:30.000 It's like, okay, you're a psychopath. 1.00

01:38:31.000 Right. 1.00

01:38:32.000 And even more when you're pretending not to be.

01:38:35.000 Exactly.

01:38:35.000 God, a dismal viewpoint.

01:38:36.000 What about friendship?

01:38:38.000 Like, is that power too?

01:38:39.000 It's all manipulation.

01:38:42.000 That's great.

01:38:43.000 That's a person who's never hung out with good buddies.

01:38:45.000 Yeah, that's for sure. 0.98

01:38:46.000 Ridiculous. 0.99

01:38:47.000 It's ridiculous. 0.99

01:38:48.000 The best part of friendships is laughing and joking around with each other. 0.90

01:38:52.000 Yeah, that's for sure.

01:38:53.000 That's the play.

01:38:54.000 For sure.

01:38:54.000 Absolutely.

01:38:55.000 It's the best part.

01:38:55.000 Yeah, well, so you know, if you're in a humorless group, what's going on.

01:38:59.000 But that's the same thing as killing the comedians.

01:39:02.000 It's the same thing.

01:39:03.000 That is an issue with people without humor.

01:39:04.000 It is a problem.

01:39:05.000 Because if they're not capable of generating it themselves, they resent it, for sure.

01:39:09.000 Well, that's another reason why I trust you.

01:39:11.000 I've watched your comedy specials.

01:39:13.000 It's like, oh yeah, he's funny.

01:39:15.000 He's actually funny.

01:39:16.000 Like, seriously funny.

01:39:17.000 Like, seriously funny.

01:39:19.000 Because you go very dark places very successfully.

01:39:24.000 And it's very funny to watch.

01:39:26.000 It's like, is he really going to do that?

01:39:28.000 Well, thank you.

01:39:29.000 Your Kardashian devil is like, that's one of the funniest things I've ever seen. 1.00

01:39:33.000 And it's dark.

01:39:33.000 You know, that's a good indication of that investigation of the shadows, right?

01:39:37.000 You went way in there.

01:39:39.000 What spirit is possessing this manifestation?

01:39:43.000 Satanic spirit crouching on a bedpost.

01:39:47.000 So funny.

01:39:48.000 I couldn't believe you did it.

01:39:49.000 It's really hilarious.

01:39:50.000 Well, I was trying to figure out a way to attack a sacred cow.

01:39:54.000 I know, and you did it.

01:39:56.000 You didn't get cancelled for it either, which is amazing.

01:39:58.000 What I did, I attacked myself.

01:40:00.000 Yeah.

01:40:00.000 Far more than I attacked that.

01:40:03.000 Yeah, well, that's...

01:40:04.000 That's what I did.

01:40:04.000 That's also the sign of someone who's got their sense of humor.

01:40:07.000 That's one thing I really like about English comedians in particular.

01:40:10.000 The English are really good at making fun of themselves. 1.00

01:40:12.000 Yes.

01:40:12.000 And the Monty Python troupe was particularly good at that.

01:40:15.000 Yeah, they were brilliant at it.

01:40:16.000 Well, it's...

01:40:18.000 The people who don't like comedy...

01:40:21.000 I mean, you cannot like comedy, but that means you don't like good conversation.

01:40:26.000 That means you don't like camaraderie.

01:40:28.000 Or you're incapable Yeah, it's the most important thing.

01:41:00.000 Absolutely.

01:41:00.000 Yeah, my favorite friends.

01:41:01.000 I'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.

01:41:13.000 That's part of the goal.

01:41:15.000 And 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.

01:41:24.000 And all we ever did when we hung out together, all of the status...

01:41:29.000 Jockeying was all funny.

01:41:32.000 Who's funny?

01:41:32.000 Who can say the most outrageous thing?

01:41:35.000 And take it, too.

01:41:36.000 Oh, you have to take it.

01:41:38.000 Oh, we take it.

01:41:39.000 So that's so fun.

01:41:40.000 And I missed that.

01:41:42.000 I found it was really characteristic, that culture of...

01:41:45.000 Healthy, working-class groups, affiliative groups.

01:41:49.000 And as I sort of climbed the intellectual ladder, I found that a lot of that fell away.

01:41:53.000 It does.

01:41:54.000 And I missed it a lot.

01:41:55.000 You know who's really good at it?

01:41:57.000 Sam Harris.

01:41:58.000 Sam Harris's lectures and his debates and his conversation, one of the things that really highlights them is his humor.

01:42:06.000 Like, he has a wonderful way of making things seem really silly with jokes.

01:42:13.000 And I talked to him about it once.

01:42:15.000 Like, there was one that I watched that I laughed really hard and I called him up.

01:42:18.000 I go, hey, dude.

01:42:19.000 I go, you could be a comedian.

01:42:20.000 Like, a real legit comedian.

01:42:23.000 Like, your takes on things are very funny.

01:42:26.000 Like, they're funny and clever and sneaky.

01:42:29.000 Murray's like that, too.

01:42:29.000 Yeah, he's got a great sense of humor, man.

01:42:32.000 Brilliant people are oftentimes, they're capable of anything.

01:42:36.000 And Sam, 100% could be a stand-up.

01:42:39.000 I 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.

01:42:47.000 And we were walking through Times Square.

01:42:49.000 And then in Times Square, there's these people dressed up like superheroes, say, and kids that have been hired to do this.

01:42:55.000 And Spider-Man ran up to me and he said, Are you Jordan Peterson?

01:42:59.000 And I said, Are you Spider-Man?

01:43:02.000 And that was pretty damn funny.

01:43:03.000 And then Douglas Murray, we were walking by and Douglas Murray said, I wish he would have asked me if I was Douglas Murray.

01:43:10.000 And so...

01:43:12.000 It was ridiculously funny.

01:43:14.000 He's very, very witty and it goes along with his courage.

01:43:17.000 You and Douglas Murray drinking at a Russian bar must have been awesome.

01:43:20.000 It was really good.

01:43:21.000 We had a blast in New York.

01:43:23.000 I'm sure.

01:43:24.000 It was ridiculously funny.

01:43:25.000 He's got this sparkling sense of humor that goes along with his insane courage.

01:43:30.000 He's very courageous.

01:43:32.000 I've met like 10 people.

01:43:33.000 I've met a lot of people in the last five years, and a lot of them have been the subject of unbelievably vicious attacks.

01:43:39.000 And out of that, I've seen emerge some unbelievably brave people like Brett Weinstein, for example, and his wife Heather.

01:43:45.000 They're unbelievably brave.

01:43:47.000 And Ayaan Hirsi Ali, she's like that.

01:43:49.000 But Murray is like...

01:43:51.000 Murray, that guy's got a spine of steel.

01:43:53.000 He certainly does, and he backs it up with consideration and thought.

01:43:57.000 He's thought these things through.

01:43:59.000 He's not being flippant.

01:44:00.000 He's not talking off the cuff.

01:44:02.000 He knows what he's saying, and he shuts people down in a pretty beautiful way.

01:44:08.000 So 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,

01:44:23.000 yeah.

01:44:24.000 So it's really starting to manifest itself in...

01:44:26.000 In all sorts of fascinating ways.

01:44:28.000 But 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.

01:44:39.000 A literary structure, in fact.

01:44:42.000 And 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.

01:44:53.000 It 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.

01:45:05.000 Well, then the question might be, well, what did we write down?

01:45:10.000 And the answer is, well, stories.

01:45:13.000 Well, what are stories?

01:45:15.000 Well, they're descriptions of people moving through time and space doing things.

01:45:20.000 Now, that isn't all they are, because they can be boring.

01:45:22.000 So they're interesting stories about, they're interesting descriptions of people moving through time and space.

01:45:27.000 Those are the ones that stick.

01:45:28.000 You bet.

01:45:28.000 Well, no one will listen to them otherwise, or write them.

01:45:30.000 They have to be interesting.

01:45:33.000 So that means that our sense of meaning orients us to certain types of stories.

01:45:37.000 Well, those are the ones that get written down and remembered.

01:45:40.000 And so we aggregated those stories across time.

01:45:42.000 Those were our first basic documents.

01:45:44.000 We're like a self-description.

01:45:45.000 What are we doing?

01:45:47.000 Well, here's what interesting people are doing.

01:45:49.000 Well, how do we know?

01:45:50.000 Well, because we're interested in them.

01:45:51.000 And so then you think, well, what's manifesting itself?

01:45:54.000 And that's that spirit of engagement.

01:45:56.000 And so, there's also a religious twist in this.

01:45:59.000 And so, you and I are engaging in dialogue.

01:46:02.000 That's dia-logos, right? 0.69

01:46:04.000 So it's the manifestation of the logos dually.

01:46:07.000 And what is that?

01:46:08.000 Well, it's the redemptive.

01:46:10.000 It's redemption in action.

01:46:11.000 That's what it is.

01:46:12.000 I mean, technically, that's what it is.

01:46:14.000 So imagine this.

01:46:15.000 You've got a bunch of worn-out ideas.

01:46:18.000 And they're blinding you.

01:46:19.000 And I got a bunch of worn out ideas and they're blinding me.

01:46:22.000 And if we stumble forward in our blindness, we will fall into a pit.

01:46:27.000 So what do we do about that?

01:46:28.000 Well, I talk to you about what you think and I listen because, man, maybe you know something that I don't that I need to know.

01:46:35.000 Yes.

01:46:35.000 Well, so how is that not a redemptive process?

01:46:37.000 Obviously it is.

01:46:38.000 And what's it signal? 1.00

01:46:40.000 Because it redeems you from your own totalitarian idiocy and the hell that leads to. 1.00

01:46:46.000 You just told me that. 1.00

01:46:47.000 You said, what happens if you're isolated for five years?

01:46:49.000 I think of more as expansive than redemptive.

01:46:53.000 That's fine.

01:46:53.000 I think of it more in terms, I mean, that's my personal experience in doing this podcast, which is...

01:46:58.000 It's not just expansive, though.

01:47:00.000 I agree with you.

01:47:01.000 It's expansive.

01:47:01.000 But it's not just that, because while you're expanding, you're also discarding.

01:47:06.000 Right?

01:47:07.000 Yeah, so that's part of it that makes it redemptive, right?

01:47:10.000 And there's a reason that in Revelation, Christ comes back with his sword to judge the elect and the damned. 0.92

01:47:16.000 There's a reason for that, because that's a symbol of the operation of the Logos.

01:47:20.000 And the Logos, even in dialogue, says...

01:47:24.000 That's an interesting point.

01:47:25.000 We'll keep that.

01:47:27.000 Let's focus on that.

01:47:28.000 Well, we can ignore that.

01:47:30.000 We can get rid of that.

01:47:31.000 We can junk that.

01:47:32.000 And 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.

01:47:40.000 That's the sword.

01:47:41.000 It's like, no.

01:47:43.000 No, not this.

01:47:45.000 And you get rid of most things, right?

01:47:47.000 You can't keep most things.

01:47:49.000 You have to put them aside.

01:47:51.000 Well, there's an old idea that Jung elaborated on that God rules with two hands, mercy and justice.

01:47:58.000 And the mercy is, well, let's let everyone flourish and welcome people and forgive them, all of that.

01:48:05.000 But justice is more, yeah, but let's do the right thing and leave what's wrong behind.

01:48:11.000 And that requires judgment, judiciousness.

01:48:14.000 I talked to Jimmy Carr about how he prepared for his comedy tour.

01:48:18.000 And maybe you do exactly the same thing.

01:48:20.000 And he said, stand-up comedy is the most dialogical of artistic enterprises.

01:48:26.000 And I thought, well, what do you mean?

01:48:27.000 Because you're just talking like I do on lectures.

01:48:30.000 I'm listening to the audience all the time.

01:48:33.000 He's making contact with them, watching how they're reacting.

01:48:36.000 I'm listening.

01:48:37.000 Carr said, well, I do a hundred shows before I go out on tour and I try out new material.

01:48:42.000 So he generates new material, a lot of it.

01:48:44.000 That's the creativity part.

01:48:46.000 Then he goes and tries it out in audiences.

01:48:49.000 And they either laugh or they don't.

01:48:51.000 And because he's brave and listens, he notices when he's not funny and he stops being not funny.

01:48:59.000 And 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.

01:49:08.000 And so that's dialogical and redemptive as well.

01:49:11.000 It's like, what jokes need to be told?

01:49:15.000 Well, our culture has some sacred cows.

01:49:17.000 Those are idols.

01:49:19.000 The idols that the Israelites worshipped in the desert, the golden calf, sacred cows.

01:49:24.000 They need to be punctured.

01:49:26.000 Why?

01:49:27.000 Well, because they're impeding our progress.

01:49:28.000 Well, how do we puncture them?

01:49:30.000 Well, one way is we show that we can transcend them.

01:49:33.000 And the Canadians are doing that all the time. 0.99

01:49:36.000 Here's something we can't laugh about.

01:49:38.000 Let's laugh about it.

01:49:40.000 Everybody breaks down.

01:49:41.000 Everybody cracks up.

01:49:43.000 You know, it's so cool when people laugh, they can't fight.

01:49:46.000 I 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.

01:50:02.000 We spotted him, of course, because as soon as you laugh...

01:50:05.000 All your muscular tension disappears.

01:50:07.000 And so that's so cool, Ace.

01:50:10.000 When you laugh, you can't fight.

01:50:12.000 You can't fight when you're laughing.

01:50:14.000 So how much laughing should we be doing?

01:50:16.000 It depends on how much fighting we want to do.

01:50:19.000 And maybe if we didn't want to do any fighting, we'd be laughing all the time.

01:50:23.000 That's how you said.

01:50:24.000 That cements your group of comrades together.

01:50:28.000 Well, you're not fighting.

01:50:29.000 What are you doing instead?

01:50:30.000 Playing.

01:50:31.000 Yeah.

01:50:32.000 Well, that's what we need to do, man.

01:50:33.000 We need to play.

01:50:34.000 All of us.

01:50:36.000 Yeah, well, I agree with that.

01:50:38.000 For sure.

01:50:39.000 There's a thing going on with stand-up where you're working with the crowd, too.

01:50:45.000 It's really interesting.

01:50:46.000 Tell me about it.

01:50:48.000 I'll have a bit, and I'll have the bit fully structured.

01:50:51.000 Yeah.

01:50:51.000 You 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.

01:51:10.000 And you learn through the crowd that you can't just write.

01:51:16.000 Sometimes you can.

01:51:17.000 Sometimes jokes come out in full form.

01:51:19.000 There's some jokes that I wrote that I literally wrote them down and then I did them on stage the exact way that I wrote them down.

01:51:26.000 And they always stayed that way.

01:51:27.000 I don't know why.

01:51:28.000 But some of them, they don't come that way.

01:51:31.000 They come like as a thing...

01:51:35.000 That you have to piece together.

01:51:38.000 Here you have some material.

01:51:40.000 You have some raw material.

01:51:41.000 And I guarantee you this could be a house.

01:51:43.000 But you're going to have to figure out what the layout is.

01:51:45.000 That's what happens when I'm lecturing.

01:51:47.000 Because I never give the same lecture twice.

01:51:49.000 And I don't use notes.

01:51:51.000 But I do the same thing.

01:51:52.000 I have a whole...

01:51:54.000 I think about it like jazz improvisation.

01:51:56.000 I have a whole bunch of stories that I know.

01:51:59.000 And I have a whole bunch of questions that I've investigated...

01:52:03.000 And what I try to do in a lecture, and that's what I do on the tour, is I have a question that I haven't investigated to my satisfaction.

01:52:10.000 Then I sit backstage and I think, okay, what question am I investigating?

01:52:15.000 It has to be one I actually want to investigate.

01:52:17.000 It can't be a lie.

01:52:18.000 This is a good hint for people who want to write essays.

01:52:21.000 Don't write an essay about a question that you don't want an answer to, because that's a lie.

01:52:26.000 And it'll be dull, and you'll hate it, and you'll hate writing, and you'll get a bad grade, and you'll get cynical, and you'll drop out.

01:52:31.000 It's not good.

01:52:33.000 So you've got to be a real question.

01:52:35.000 So, okay, this is a question.

01:52:37.000 I think it's worthy of pursuit.

01:52:38.000 I'd like to get farther with it.

01:52:40.000 Okay, here's a theory I know about that we could explore it with.

01:52:44.000 Here's another one.

01:52:45.000 Here's some examples of that that make good stories.

01:52:48.000 Here's another place I could go to investigate that.

01:52:51.000 So I have that in my mind, and then I go out and I'm watching.

01:52:54.000 I always watch single people in the audience.

01:52:57.000 One at a time.

01:52:58.000 The lights kind of interfere with that.

01:53:00.000 Because I like to be able to see the people at the back, but I can't.

01:53:02.000 So I watch the front people, and I see, is this landing?

01:53:08.000 Are the lights going on?

01:53:10.000 Because you can tell.

01:53:11.000 I think the thing that's most similar to what I'm doing in my book tour is stand-up comedy.

01:53:17.000 So you can tell if it's landing, people are nodding, and they're not fidgeting, and the crowd isn't rustling.

01:53:24.000 They're all focused, and some of them are looking like this.

01:53:28.000 And then you see someone who's kind of nodding off, and if there's a lot of them, that's a problem.

01:53:32.000 But if it's one guy, you don't look at him, look at someone else.

01:53:35.000 You know, maybe he had a bad day.

01:53:36.000 You don't take that personally.

01:53:38.000 And then the crowd, you said, informs you.

01:53:41.000 And inform is really an interesting term.

01:53:45.000 Information.

01:53:47.000 So 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,

01:54:12.000 and that's partly also why people love stand-up comedy.

01:54:15.000 That'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.

01:54:24.000 Have you had lectures that failed spectacularly?

01:54:27.000 No, but I've certainly had ones.

01:54:29.000 Oh, I certainly have felt that it might.

01:54:31.000 Because I'll go out on...

01:54:33.000 My thought tends to be quite tangential because I try to link lots of things together.

01:54:38.000 So then I'll go way out on a limb.

01:54:40.000 It's like I'm addressing this question.

01:54:42.000 Idea, idea, idea, idea, idea, idea.

01:54:45.000 Uh-oh.

01:54:46.000 I'm away from the tree and I don't know how to get back.

01:54:49.000 Right.

01:54:49.000 And 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.

01:54:59.000 Yeah.

01:55:03.000 Generally, 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.

01:55:16.000 You know, one of the things comedians often do...

01:55:19.000 Is they'll tell a joke early in the set.

01:55:22.000 And then quite a bit later in the set, they'll reintroduce the joke.

01:55:25.000 It's a callback.

01:55:26.000 Callback.

01:55:27.000 Callback.

01:55:28.000 Yeah, I do callbacks all the time in my lectures.

01:55:30.000 And people love that.

01:55:31.000 You're doing stand-up.

01:55:31.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:55:32.000 Well, people love that because it shows them that they've followed along.

01:55:37.000 Yeah.

01:55:37.000 And that we're in the same place.

01:55:39.000 Right.

01:55:39.000 And they love that.

01:55:40.000 They love that.

01:55:40.000 And it's just as satisfying as a punchline.

01:55:42.000 Yes.

01:55:42.000 And it is a punchline in some sense.

01:55:44.000 It's like, all this is related to...

01:55:48.000 This!

01:55:49.000 Yes.

01:55:49.000 Click!

01:55:50.000 Yeah.

01:55:50.000 Fun.

01:55:51.000 You can see lights go on all the time in the crowd.

01:55:53.000 It's such fun.

01:55:53.000 Yeah, people love that.

01:55:55.000 Yeah, well, and no wonder it puts them in the zone.

01:55:58.000 So here's a cool thing.

01:55:59.000 Vygotsky, Russian psychologist, studied the acquisition of language in children.

01:56:03.000 So he thought, how do children learn to speak?

01:56:05.000 Because no one teaches them.

01:56:07.000 They just learn.

01:56:09.000 It's a weird thing.

01:56:10.000 Even very intellectually impaired human beings learn to talk.

01:56:13.000 It's really deeply embedded in us.

01:56:15.000 So he looked at how parents talk to their children while they were developing language, and he found that parents...

01:56:22.000 Talk to children at a level that slightly exceeds their current level of comprehension.

01:56:27.000 And they do that without knowing they're doing it.

01:56:29.000 And so then you think, well, what are you doing?

01:56:31.000 Think what you're doing.

01:56:33.000 You've got the child and he knows some things.

01:56:36.000 But he doesn't know enough.

01:56:38.000 But you don't want to punish him and exclude him because he doesn't know enough.

01:56:41.000 But you don't want to leave him undeveloped.

01:56:44.000 So you speak to him, so he almost catches on.

01:56:47.000 And that way he gets something, but there's a horizon, right?

01:56:50.000 And the horizon keeps moving, moving, and so the child's right at that edge.

01:56:55.000 Vygotsky called that the zone of proximal development.

01:57:00.000 That's the zone.

01:57:03.000 That's the term.

01:57:05.000 So, 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.

01:57:12.000 Athletes are in the zone.

01:57:14.000 Everyone's like, oh my god, they're in the zone, isn't that cool?

01:57:17.000 It's like, yeah.

01:57:18.000 It's the precondition for cool.

01:57:21.000 It's like everything.

01:57:23.000 I 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,

01:57:44.000 not knowing where you're going with it.

01:57:45.000 It can't be too obvious.

01:57:46.000 One 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.

01:57:56.000 And oftentimes they come to the same punchline.

01:57:59.000 A little sooner.

01:58:00.000 Right, because if a person is going to write...

01:58:03.000 If the person is going to use too many words to describe something, oftentimes They're unskilled, right?

01:58:09.000 So their punchline will also be obvious.

01:58:12.000 And it's a real problem.

01:58:14.000 But that same punchline, even though it's obvious, would be effective if you hit it with an economy of words.

01:58:20.000 So that wonder is really an interesting thing.

01:58:25.000 Most of the things around us we don't attend to.

01:58:28.000 And that's because there's an infinite number of things around us.

01:58:31.000 Well, except maybe if we're on psychedelics, in which case we attend to everything.

01:58:35.000 Everything all at once.

01:58:35.000 Yeah, and that's too much.

01:58:36.000 And everyone says, oh, that was too much.

01:58:38.000 It's like, yeah, that is literally the definition of too much.

01:58:42.000 I never feel like it's too much.

01:58:44.000 Well, that's good.

01:58:44.000 Never?

01:58:45.000 No.

01:58:46.000 No, I feel like I can't handle it at the moment.

01:58:49.000 Okay, okay, that's fine.

01:58:50.000 Not even that I can't handle it.

01:58:52.000 I can't categorize everything.

01:58:54.000 Right.

01:58:55.000 Like, it's overwhelming in its possibilities.

01:58:59.000 Yeah. 0.97

01:59:00.000 But 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. 1.00

01:59:15.000 They're all bullshit. 0.99

01:59:16.000 And I live in this sort of confined, this restrained, narrow, carved pathway world because that's where I live all the time. 1.00

01:59:28.000 Sufficient.

01:59:29.000 Yeah, but then you have a psychedelic experience and it just Boom!

01:59:33.000 All that's gone.

01:59:34.000 That wonder that you described, that's like a fractional psychedelic experience.

01:59:39.000 So you say, well, they entrust you with their wonder.

01:59:42.000 It's like, yes, they do.

01:59:43.000 So when we're sitting in this room, most of the things that are going on around us, we're not attending to.

01:59:50.000 So basically, we perceive them as equivalent to zero.

01:59:55.000 So that's kind of interesting because everything around us is infinitely remarkable.

01:59:59.000 And yet we perceive everything as if it's zero.

02:00:03.000 Now the reason we do that is so that we can use our limited attention on a few things.

02:00:08.000 Yes.

02:00:08.000 So it's necessary, but it's also blinding.

02:00:11.000 Now, 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.

02:00:20.000 And that's a place of dancing. 1.00

02:00:22.000 It's a place where memory itself is updated.

02:00:25.000 And if you trust someone and you express that sense of wonder in the confines of that trust, then you are in fact...

02:00:34.000 You are in fact participating in the process that reveals the underlying complexity of the world to you, and then does literally inform you.

02:00:43.000 And you feel that, I've been very interested technically in the instinct of meaning, because what is meaning?

02:00:49.000 And is it illusory?

02:00:51.000 Because that's the fundamental question in some sense.

02:00:54.000 It isn't even is suffering real.

02:00:57.000 Is the meaning that keeps suffering at bay, is that real?

02:01:01.000 That's a more fundamental question.

02:01:02.000 And the answer to that is, it's not only real, it is the most real thing.

02:01:07.000 And you have an instinct that signals its presence to you.

02:01:11.000 And part of that manifests itself as wonder.

02:01:13.000 It's the openness to transformation.

02:01:15.000 Because it isn't even the new ideas that are redeeming.

02:01:19.000 It's the process of continually opening yourself up to the transformation of new ideas.

02:01:25.000 And that's signaled by wonder.

02:01:28.000 When you're talking about ignoring all the things around you, it made me think about sensory deprivation tanks.

02:01:34.000 I don't know if we've ever discussed this before.

02:01:36.000 I don't think so.

02:01:36.000 Have you ever done that?

02:01:37.000 Yes.

02:01:38.000 What did you think?

02:01:40.000 Well, I thought a bunch of the things that we just talked about.

02:01:43.000 You 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.

02:01:55.000 So 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.

02:02:04.000 And that can open these gates of imagination, for example.

02:02:08.000 You know this already because to some degree, imagine you want to go figure something out.

02:02:14.000 You usually go somewhere Where you can be by yourself.

02:02:17.000 You're not flooded by sensory information.

02:02:21.000 Maybe you go for a walk, maybe you go sit on your bed.

02:02:23.000 You kind of shield yourself from outside input.

02:02:26.000 And then, by concentrating, you open yourself up to this internal revelation that's otherwise blotted out by the external world.

02:02:34.000 And that really happens to a huge degree in the sensory deprivation tank, or can.

02:02:38.000 And 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.

02:02:48.000 It certainly is, because if that experience was achievable through a psychedelic, I think it'd be a very popular psychedelic.

02:02:55.000 If 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.

02:03:07.000 Yeah, 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.

02:03:17.000 Jung believed, for example, as Carl Jung, that we're always dreaming.

02:03:22.000 Always.

02:03:23.000 We just don't perceive it because the outer world blots it out.

02:03:26.000 And there's definitely truth in that.

02:03:28.000 So daydreaming, fantasy...

02:03:30.000 Well, even...

02:03:31.000 It's even deeper than that because, look, there's a thread of meaning that guides this conversation.

02:03:38.000 And neither of us know what it is.

02:03:42.000 We know when it manifests itself, because we get interested, right?

02:03:45.000 Think, 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.

02:03:55.000 But 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.

02:04:12.000 And that's technically true.

02:04:14.000 That's what's happening.

02:04:15.000 And 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.

02:04:24.000 And that's because that is the best thing we can do.

02:04:27.000 That's the Logos.

02:04:29.000 That's the Logos.

02:04:34.000 By definition.

02:04:36.000 When you have done sensory deprivation experiences, how many have you ever done?

02:04:40.000 About six.

02:04:41.000 Six of them?

02:04:41.000 Yeah.

02:04:42.000 Recent?

02:04:42.000 No, it's been ten years probably.

02:04:45.000 Do you think you would benefit from that?

02:04:50.000 It would depend on how I did it.

02:04:53.000 Conceivably.

02:04:53.000 Why haven't you tried to incorporate that into your life?

02:04:57.000 I have other things I do that are probably partial substitutes for it or reasonable substitute.

02:05:03.000 I do kundalini yoga in the morning with my wife.

02:05:06.000 I have for 20 years.

02:05:07.000 Not every day, but I'd say a third of the time and often for months on end.

02:05:14.000 And I've learned what that means.

02:05:17.000 So you know when you do those yoga poses?

02:05:19.000 That's not yoga.

02:05:22.000 That's training for yoga. 0.99

02:05:24.000 It's like, imagine that you go to a dance studio and they teach you moves.

02:05:27.000 That's not dancing.

02:05:28.000 Dancing is what you do on the stage after you've written your jokes.

02:05:32.000 And yoga is what you do with your body after you've mastered the poses.

02:05:37.000 Because it's all spontaneous.

02:05:38.000 And so, when my wife and I do kundalini yoga in the morning, it's a series of flexion exercises and breathing.

02:05:45.000 But mostly what it is is, so maybe one is rotation of the head.

02:05:51.000 Like that.

02:05:52.000 And then, but you're paying attention.

02:05:54.000 It's like, okay, oh, my back hurts there.

02:05:57.000 Okay, I'll move my head back and forth a little bit.

02:06:00.000 Relax.

02:06:01.000 Move my head.

02:06:02.000 Relax.

02:06:04.000 Okay, it doesn't hurt anymore.

02:06:05.000 Oh, that hurts.

02:06:07.000 Oh, got to explore there.

02:06:09.000 Let that go.

02:06:10.000 Let that go.

02:06:12.000 And you go through your whole body.

02:06:14.000 It's like, oh, I'm cramped there.

02:06:15.000 Oh, that hurts.

02:06:16.000 And what's so cool, it's like massage.

02:06:18.000 You know, if you're hurting and someone massages that, the pain goes away.

02:06:22.000 What the hell is going on there?

02:06:24.000 Facilitation of circulation, removal of toxins from that locale, but also the drawing of your reparative attention to that spot.

02:06:36.000 Well, yoga is like that.

02:06:37.000 It's like, oh, I'm out of alignment there.

02:06:40.000 Oh, I'm out of alignment there.

02:06:41.000 So 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.

02:06:58.000 Adam's aligned.

02:07:00.000 With 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.

02:07:13.000 That's the cosmic tree, by the way.

02:07:15.000 That's the tree the shaman climb up and down in the psychedelic experience.

02:07:19.000 That cosmic tree that unites levels of being.

02:07:21.000 We can climb that with our consciousness.

02:07:23.000 We do it all the time.

02:07:24.000 You know, if you're writing a book, you concentrate on the word or the paragraph or the whole chapter.

02:07:30.000 You 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.

02:07:38.000 In yoga, you're trying to get your body psychophysiologically aligned so communication between all those levels isn't interfered with unnecessarily.

02:07:48.000 And then that opens you up, in some sense, to the possibility of speech emanating from the depths.

02:07:55.000 That would be one way of thinking about it.

02:07:57.000 One 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.

02:08:08.000 I 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.

02:08:23.000 Have you ever had that?

02:08:25.000 No, but what I would say is that this process of alignment makes everything into the equivalent of a psychedelic experience.

02:08:37.000 Like everything.

02:08:38.000 Because Part of the manifestation of the truth is a consequence of the alignment of these levels.

02:08:49.000 It's like that's what we mean when we talk about someone having integrity or being authentic.

02:08:54.000 It's like they're the same all the way down.

02:08:56.000 And not only that, they're where they are completely.

02:08:59.000 So not only are they aligned internally, they're aligned with everything that's happening around them.

02:09:05.000 And you know this perfectly well.

02:09:07.000 It's your master at it because otherwise he wouldn't be where you are.

02:09:11.000 The fact that you can focus your attention almost completely on the current conversation means that the conversation becomes deep.

02:09:21.000 And that's obviously manifesting itself in a psychedelic way in your existence. 0.81

02:09:25.000 It's like, what the hell, Joe? 0.99

02:09:28.000 Who the hell are you? 0.99

02:09:30.000 You started this podcast just talking to people. 0.99

02:09:33.000 Zero production value.

02:09:34.000 You don't edit it.

02:09:34.000 You talk to people for three hours.

02:09:36.000 What kind of stupid business model is that? 1.00

02:09:39.000 That's insane! 1.00

02:09:41.000 Yeah, and look what's happened.

02:09:44.000 Yeah!

02:09:47.000 Yeah, it's pretty insane.

02:09:49.000 No, it's completely insane.

02:09:51.000 It's completely, utterly...

02:09:52.000 It's insane for me, and not me.

02:09:54.000 Like, people think I planned this.

02:09:56.000 That's what's hilarious.

02:09:57.000 Yeah, well, what's so cool about that, I think, is that, well, the best laid plans of mice and men, we all know that.

02:10:04.000 But, so, there's a doctrine in the Sermon on the Mount.

02:10:07.000 It's often viewed as a hippie sort of doctrine, right?

02:10:12.000 The problems of the day will take care of themselves.

02:10:14.000 Don't worry about the future.

02:10:16.000 That is not what that sermon says at all.

02:10:18.000 Not even a bit.

02:10:19.000 Not a bit.

02:10:21.000 It says, align yourself firmly with what is the highest.

02:10:27.000 So that's what you're committed to.

02:10:29.000 So what is the highest?

02:10:30.000 Well...

02:10:32.000 We can argue about that, but we don't have to argue that much.

02:10:35.000 Beauty?

02:10:36.000 Okay.

02:10:37.000 Yes.

02:10:38.000 Truth?

02:10:39.000 Sure.

02:10:39.000 Why not?

02:10:40.000 Courage?

02:10:41.000 Yeah, that's a good one.

02:10:42.000 How about love?

02:10:43.000 What's love?

02:10:44.000 The desire that everything will flourish, rather than the desire that everything will suffer.

02:10:50.000 So you aim at that.

02:10:51.000 Aim at the highest good you can conceive of.

02:10:53.000 So we'll call that God.

02:10:55.000 Because we've got to call it something.

02:10:56.000 And it's the integration of all things good.

02:10:59.000 That's by definition.

02:11:00.000 Do you believe in God?

02:11:01.000 Do you believe in the good?

02:11:03.000 Well, the integration of all things good.

02:11:05.000 That's the superordinate thing.

02:11:06.000 It's ineffable.

02:11:08.000 So that's God.

02:11:10.000 Aim at that.

02:11:12.000 And then concentrate on the day.

02:11:15.000 And you'll get...

02:11:16.000 Not only...

02:11:17.000 You won't even get what you want.

02:11:18.000 Because what the hell do you know?

02:11:21.000 You'll get way more than you could possibly imagine.

02:11:25.000 And that's right.

02:11:26.000 That's the adventure of the truth.

02:11:27.000 It's like, you won't get what you want if you tell the truth.

02:11:31.000 But how do you know that you're right in what you want?

02:11:34.000 You don't.

02:11:35.000 So how do you operate when you don't know if you're right in what you want?

02:11:40.000 And the answer is, tell the truth.

02:11:44.000 Why?

02:11:47.000 Well, not least because it's the adventure of your life.

02:11:50.000 Like, think about it this way.

02:11:51.000 Imagine you conduct yourself in deceit.

02:11:53.000 You lie to yourself.

02:11:54.000 You manipulate other people to get what you want.

02:11:57.000 That's a form of lie.

02:11:58.000 It's instrumental manipulation.

02:11:59.000 It's psychopathic, Machiavellian.

02:12:01.000 It's like, well, that's how you should treat people.

02:12:03.000 It's like, no, you shouldn't.

02:12:04.000 Why not?

02:12:05.000 You won't get what you want.

02:12:07.000 Yeah, but you don't know what you want.

02:12:09.000 Okay, so given that...

02:12:10.000 Well, doesn't that entirely depend on what your endeavor is?

02:12:13.000 I mean, there's a lot of people in business that do lie and manipulate, and that's how they become successful.

02:12:19.000 I'm not saying they should.

02:12:20.000 No, I also don't think they become successful.

02:12:23.000 You don't think that there's a lot of success?

02:12:24.000 No, I think they drive around in their $60,000 Corvettes and their flashy blonde thinking about when they're going to cut their throat. 1.00

02:12:30.000 You don't think that Donald Trump has engaged in deception?

02:12:35.000 I didn't say that people don't engage in deception.

02:12:38.000 I said that they do not become successful by engaging in deception.

02:12:42.000 That doesn't mean they don't make a lot of money.

02:12:44.000 But there's a long history of businessmen who are total sociopaths, who've achieved immense wealth.

02:12:51.000 No.

02:12:52.000 No?

02:12:53.000 No.

02:12:54.000 You don't think so?

02:12:55.000 Psychopathy, no.

02:12:55.000 I wouldn't say I think that.

02:12:57.000 Okay, 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? 0.87

02:13:20.000 Yeah, well, that's the postmodern question, in some sense, in a small way.

02:13:26.000 But dictators.

02:13:26.000 Yeah, I know.

02:13:27.000 Look, I'm listening, man.

02:13:28.000 I get it.

02:13:29.000 Don't you think that dictators, like we don't even have to name them.

02:13:32.000 Partly why I'm obsessed with the story of Exodus.

02:13:35.000 But don't you think that there's many examples of quote-unquote successful dictators today?

02:13:42.000 No.

02:13:42.000 You don't think so?

02:13:43.000 No, because I don't think they're successful.

02:13:45.000 You don't think Kim Jong-un is a successful dictator?

02:13:47.000 Only if you think that ruling over hell constitutes success.

02:13:50.000 And you might say, and this is what Milton Satan did say, better to rule in hell than to serve in heaven.

02:13:56.000 Kim Jong-un, fine.

02:13:58.000 Yes, he's a ruler.

02:13:59.000 What's his domain? 0.89

02:14:00.000 Hell. 1.00

02:14:02.000 You're a psychopath. 1.00

02:14:03.000 You're successful. 1.00

02:14:04.000 You're ruling over hell.

02:14:05.000 I see what you're saying.

02:14:06.000 So not successful in that he doesn't engage in love and camaraderie and he doesn't have a full and balanced life.

02:14:16.000 Yeah, but he's got lots of money.

02:14:17.000 He's got lots of money and power.

02:14:19.000 And he's terrified people into kowtowing to him.

02:14:20.000 Good.

02:14:21.000 You want that?

02:14:22.000 Go ahead, man.

02:14:23.000 That's how you define success.

02:14:24.000 So I see what you're saying.

02:14:25.000 But success in that he's able to maintain that position.

02:14:33.000 Yeah, we'll see, man.

02:14:34.000 Hey, here's an example.

02:14:35.000 This is a prime example.

02:14:39.000 Our hierarchy is dominance hierarchy.

02:14:41.000 So one of my graduate students, I used the word dominance hierarchy for years.

02:14:44.000 He took me to task, former student, brilliant guy, slow to speak, but never says anything he hasn't thought through for like five years.

02:14:51.000 So when he talks, I listen.

02:14:53.000 He said, stop using the term dominance hierarchy.

02:14:56.000 Shocked me because it's like a term used in biology everywhere.

02:14:59.000 He said, why?

02:14:59.000 He said, it's full of implicit Marxist suppositions.

02:15:02.000 I thought, okay, I'll think about that for a while.

02:15:05.000 He said, here's the dominance hierarchy. 0.98

02:15:07.000 I strip you naked, put a choke chain around you and lead you around on the floor. 0.99

02:15:11.000 It's like that's dominant. 0.96

02:15:13.000 That's not what's happening in most human hierarchies and you know that because you have comrades you joke with, you play with.

02:15:20.000 You said that organizations that are functional aren't based on power.

02:15:24.000 What are they based on?

02:15:25.000 Well, not power.

02:15:27.000 So not dominance.

02:15:28.000 It's like, okay, I thought about that for about two years.

02:15:31.000 It's like, oh, that's a really fundamental criticism.

02:15:33.000 And I didn't realize that implicit Marxist presuppositions had been structuring biological thought.

02:15:38.000 And that's exactly right.

02:15:39.000 And so what's the proper hierarchy constituted by?

02:15:44.000 Well, it's not the expression of the will to power.

02:15:46.000 That's basically the admission that satanic forces rule the world.

02:15:50.000 It's the same idea.

02:15:52.000 Well, what rules?

02:15:54.000 Well, satanic forces rule hell, and yes, you can be successful as a hellish ruler. 0.94

02:16:01.000 Now, whether you can maintain that, Frans de Waal, world's greatest primatologist, studies chimpanzees.

02:16:08.000 They're tough, and they're male-dominant, unlike Bonobos.

02:16:11.000 They're male-dominant.

02:16:12.000 So they're patriarchal hierarchies. 0.95

02:16:15.000 Okay, rough, tough chimp can pound everybody flat, maintains the highest power through intimidation. 1.00

02:16:24.000 He's got preferential sexual access to the females. 0.99

02:16:27.000 He does that by chasing away the subordinates. 0.84

02:16:29.000 It's like, heaven, he's dominant.

02:16:31.000 What happens to him?

02:16:34.000 One 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.

02:16:47.000 That's what happens.

02:16:49.000 But it doesn't always happen.

02:16:51.000 Ah, yes, it does.

02:16:53.000 Genghis Khan.

02:16:55.000 It depends on what you mean by always.

02:16:57.000 Like, it's a time frame problem.

02:16:59.000 I mean, that guy...

02:17:00.000 Yeah, I know.

02:17:01.000 He's like progenitor of a third of the human race.

02:17:04.000 Yeah, I know.

02:17:05.000 I understand.

02:17:06.000 I 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.

02:17:13.000 Yeah.

02:17:14.000 He changed the carbon footprint of the planet Earth during his lifetime because he killed so many people.

02:17:20.000 Well, let's not underestimate the utility of oppression as a means to ruling hell.

02:17:25.000 We can agree on that.

02:17:27.000 But, I mean, you're asking an absolutely germane question.

02:17:30.000 In the book of Exodus, the Pharaoh is a tyrant.

02:17:34.000 But he's up against God.

02:17:37.000 And the Pharaoh loses.

02:17:39.000 And you might think, well, what does that mean?

02:17:42.000 Well, it's complicated.

02:17:43.000 It's a complicated story.

02:17:44.000 That's why it's been around for like 3,000 years.

02:17:48.000 And 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.

02:18:00.000 The Pharaoh is tortured by God.

02:18:03.000 Well, what's God?

02:18:06.000 Well, we said already, at least to some degree, God is the amalgamation of all that is good.

02:18:10.000 I'm not speaking religiously when I say that.

02:18:13.000 I'm speaking conceptually.

02:18:14.000 God is the union of all things that are good.

02:18:17.000 Okay, but that's not conceptual exactly, because that's also something that you exist in a relationship to and that you act out.

02:18:27.000 It's not just an idea.

02:18:29.000 Okay, 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.

02:18:38.000 It's truth.

02:18:39.000 It's the burning bush.

02:18:40.000 It's the psychedelic experience.

02:18:43.000 It's God against the Pharaoh. 0.61

02:18:46.000 The Pharaoh's a totalitarian, and he keeps imposing his edicts, running contrary to freedom, promoting slavery, let's say.

02:18:55.000 Well, the kingdom fractures and crumbles continually, continually, continually.

02:18:59.000 And you might say, well, time frame.

02:19:02.000 Time frame's a problem, man.

02:19:04.000 Maybe you can be a successful tyrant even over the course of your lifetime.

02:19:08.000 But maybe you doom your country to death. 0.99

02:19:11.000 You doom your country to hell.

02:19:12.000 Is that success?

02:19:14.000 It depends on what you mean success is, because these things do depend on definitions.

02:19:18.000 But all countries collapse.

02:19:21.000 All of them.

02:19:22.000 Every civilization that has ever existed has fallen apart.

02:19:26.000 No, I don't think so.

02:19:28.000 Which one's still around?

02:19:29.000 Ours?

02:19:30.000 Yeah, but we haven't been around that long.

02:19:33.000 I don't know.

02:19:34.000 You can trace...

02:19:35.000 We're falling apart right now.

02:19:36.000 You know this, Joe.

02:19:37.000 You can trace the religious experience, the religious revelation, the central religious revelation, back at least 25,000 years of continued transmission.

02:19:47.000 25,000?

02:19:48.000 Really?

02:19:49.000 Sure.

02:19:49.000 All the way back to the Stone Age shaman.

02:19:51.000 For sure.

02:19:53.000 For sure.

02:19:55.000 Is that 100% proven that they were experiencing altered states of consciousness and that they were imparting these lessons in a form of a religion?

02:20:11.000 100% is a lot.

02:20:12.000 Okay.

02:20:13.000 For certain?

02:20:14.000 I 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.

02:20:30.000 So it's multiple, it's called a multi-method, multi-trait construct analysis.

02:20:35.000 The idea is, if something's true, it will manifest itself in multiple different places with independent methodologies.

02:20:41.000 So it's like your senses do that.

02:20:44.000 Is this real?

02:20:45.000 Well, I can see it, I can hear it, I can touch it, I can taste it.

02:20:50.000 Five things say it's real.

02:20:52.000 Is this cup there, Joe?

02:20:54.000 Yes.

02:20:55.000 Okay, now you said it's real too.

02:20:57.000 Okay.

02:20:58.000 Real.

02:21:00.000 Now, is that finally real?

02:21:02.000 No.

02:21:04.000 But that's a different question.

02:21:06.000 It's real enough for the purposes.

02:21:08.000 Same thing here.

02:21:10.000 I think the idea that, like Jack and the Beanstalk, the magic beans climbing up the magic stalk to heaven, that's a shamanic tale.

02:21:18.000 We know some fairy tales are 15,000 years old.

02:21:22.000 That one's 100,000 years old?

02:21:25.000 Is it really?

02:21:25.000 We don't know!

02:21:27.000 Right, it's hard to clarify.

02:21:28.000 But that story, like Mircea Eliad wrote a book called Shamanism.

02:21:31.000 He's a great historian of religions.

02:21:33.000 And he looked at the commonality of shamanic experience across multiple cultures.

02:21:36.000 It's very stable.

02:21:38.000 He thought that psychedelic-induced shamanic practices were a corruption of the original tradition.

02:21:45.000 I don't think that's right.

02:21:47.000 I think it's wrong.

02:21:48.000 We had a conversation before the podcast started about Brian Muir Orescu's work and The Immortality Key, which is an amazing book.

02:21:55.000 And we were talking about that Sort of field of study that has emerged in Harvard now because of Brian's work and that they're now...

02:22:05.000 And Ruck, right?

02:22:07.000 Yeah, yes. 1.00

02:22:08.000 And Gordon Wasson and all these crazy bastards. 0.99

02:22:11.000 Yes, Gordon Wasson from Mexico from the 50s, right? 1.00

02:22:13.000 It was Life magazine.

02:22:14.000 Hey, let's discover psilocybin mushrooms.

02:22:16.000 Yeah.

02:22:16.000 Oops.

02:22:17.000 That is now being really...

02:22:21.000 It's not fringe anymore.

02:22:24.000 Yeah, it still is.

02:22:25.000 It is sort of, but...

02:22:26.000 Wait till it's not, man.

02:22:28.000 Yeah.

02:22:28.000 Well, 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.

02:22:37.000 Roland Griffith's work has helped that a lot, too.

02:22:39.000 The work he's done with psilocybin in the lab, which is really solid scientifically.

02:22:44.000 That's John Hopkins, right?

02:22:45.000 Yeah.

02:22:46.000 And also, who did the DMT work?

02:22:48.000 Rick Strassman.

02:22:49.000 Yes.

02:22:49.000 Poor Rick.

02:22:50.000 I love that guy.

02:22:51.000 Yeah, he had to stop doing it, really.

02:22:53.000 It's like, uh-oh.

02:22:54.000 Look what's happening.

02:22:56.000 All these people get shot out.

02:22:57.000 Well, he didn't know what to do with it.

02:22:59.000 He's a really traditional Biological, psychological researcher.

02:23:05.000 And 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.

02:23:12.000 It'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.

02:23:19.000 It's like, you were dreaming.

02:23:21.000 No, no, you don't understand.

02:23:22.000 I've dreamt before and this was not only real, it was the most real thing I've ever experienced.

02:23:27.000 He said, well, that's a Jungian archetype.

02:23:29.000 He said, well, no, it was, you don't get it.

02:23:32.000 It was more real than reality itself.

02:23:35.000 And every single person came back and said that.

02:23:37.000 And 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.

02:23:57.000 And good for him because he should be treading lightly in that domain just like the Johns Hopkins teams does.

02:24:04.000 They're very careful.

02:24:05.000 But it's such a tragedy that you can't talk about it.

02:24:09.000 Yeah, well, we're talking about it more than we did 10 years ago and much more carefully than we did in the 60s.

02:24:16.000 Yeah, well, there's no Timothy Leary guy that's telling everybody to tune in, turn out, and drop out.

02:24:21.000 I had his old position at Harvard.

02:24:23.000 Yeah?

02:24:23.000 No kidding.

02:24:24.000 Yeah, no kidding.

02:24:26.000 Isn't that something, eh?

02:24:27.000 Wow, that's pretty wild.

02:24:27.000 Yeah, that's for sure.

02:24:28.000 I knew people there that knew him.

02:24:30.000 Yeah, it was really something, I thought.

02:24:32.000 Oh, he taught personality at Harvard.

02:24:34.000 He had the same position as me.

02:24:36.000 The whole Kesey thing and the married pranksters, and I just think it was such an upheaval.

02:24:41.000 That's Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

02:24:43.000 Man, that's a great book.

02:24:44.000 It was such an upheaval of the current state of culture in the 1960s.

02:24:48.000 It's like the very definition of upheaval.

02:24:50.000 Instead of bringing people along, so many people were opposed to them.

02:24:55.000 Yeah, well, tune in.

02:24:56.000 Yeah.

02:24:57.000 Okay.

02:24:58.000 Turn on.

02:24:59.000 Yeah.

02:25:00.000 Okay.

02:25:01.000 Be better.

02:25:04.000 Yeah, that would have been better than Dropout.

02:25:05.000 Yeah, a lot better.

02:25:06.000 Yeah.

02:25:07.000 A lot better.

02:25:08.000 But I think they felt like...

02:25:08.000 That's why the hero, in the hero's journey...

02:25:11.000 So imagine you're taking psychedelics.

02:25:13.000 You're the hero.

02:25:14.000 Out there into the unknown.

02:25:16.000 To gather new information.

02:25:17.000 To confront the dragon.

02:25:20.000 The terrors of your imagination.

02:25:22.000 To bring back the gold.

02:25:24.000 To acquire the gold.

02:25:26.000 Okay, now what?

02:25:27.000 You got the gold.

02:25:28.000 Right, now what?

02:25:29.000 Share it with the community.

02:25:31.000 Right.

02:25:31.000 So when the hobbit comes back...

02:25:34.000 From his great trip, and that's also a retelling of the oldest story we know, The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit.

02:25:42.000 And Tolkien knew this.

02:25:44.000 I'm not making this up.

02:25:45.000 And he talked to C.S. Lewis a lot, who is a radical and extraordinarily well-informed Christian.

02:25:51.000 All of this is lurking in the background of that.

02:25:53.000 That's why that book had captured the imagination to such a degree.

02:25:57.000 It reintroduces shamanic-level religious preconceptions back into popular culture.

02:26:03.000 That's why it has that power.

02:26:05.000 Because how else do you account for it?

02:26:07.000 It has religious significance.

02:26:08.000 That's why everyone read it.

02:26:09.000 It's the definition of religious significance, that it was attractive enough that everyone read.

02:26:14.000 Well, 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.

02:26:24.000 It's the opposite of dropping out.

02:26:26.000 Timothy Leary let his unformed political preconceptions contaminate the sacredness of his experience.

02:26:34.000 And he warped the entire culture in doing so and pretty much put an end to psychedelic drug research for like 50 years.

02:26:42.000 Drop out?

02:26:43.000 No, no.

02:26:44.000 Man up!

02:26:46.000 Get your act together.

02:26:47.000 Get your act together.

02:26:49.000 Because 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.

02:26:59.000 Like, really?

02:27:00.000 Like, really?

02:27:02.000 And that's unbearable in some sense.

02:27:05.000 Don't you think that it was in response to the rigidity of the times, though, that, you know, you're dealing with...

02:27:11.000 No excuse.

02:27:11.000 I'm not saying it's an excuse.

02:27:13.000 But yes, it was.

02:27:13.000 The 1950s were, I mean, and then also dealing with the Korean War and then Vietnam...

02:27:19.000 There was so much to oppose from their perspective that society was almost impossibly flawed.

02:27:27.000 I got a good story for that.

02:27:29.000 I went and met Guy Ritchie when I was in the UK, so that was real fun.

02:27:32.000 Yeah, he's so hospitable.

02:27:34.000 He built these huge barbecues.

02:27:35.000 He's manufacturing these bloody things, same size as your table here.

02:27:39.000 He makes barbecues?

02:27:40.000 Copper top, yeah.

02:27:40.000 Really?

02:27:41.000 Yeah.

02:27:41.000 He wants everybody to gather around a fire so he can be hospitable.

02:27:44.000 So he built a bloody barbecue.

02:27:46.000 It took seven years to build the prototypes properly.

02:27:50.000 They're worth like $50,000.

02:27:52.000 And he's so hospitable.

02:27:54.000 Where do you buy a Guy Ritchie barbecue?

02:27:55.000 From Guy Ritchie.

02:27:56.000 Come on.

02:27:57.000 Yeah, there you go.

02:27:58.000 The gentleman. 1.00

02:27:59.000 Get the fuck out of here. 0.98

02:28:00.000 Yeah, so there's these braziers on both sides. 0.97

02:28:02.000 Outdoor grill table is now available.

02:28:03.000 You sit outside in the cold in his tent.

02:28:06.000 And there's cloth around the outside of the table so you can put your knees underneath and a stove in the middle.

02:28:11.000 Look at this craziness.

02:28:12.000 Yeah, that's where we were.

02:28:13.000 So it's a whole structure.

02:28:15.000 Yeah, and then he was roasting these huge steaks in this charcoal brazier and cutting them up and feeding them to us.

02:28:20.000 Wow.

02:28:20.000 And he wanted everybody to gather around the fire.

02:28:23.000 He's such a fucking interesting guy. 0.99

02:28:24.000 He is, man. 0.98

02:28:25.000 You know, he's a legitimate Brazilian jiu-jitsu black belt.

02:28:27.000 I didn't know that.

02:28:28.000 There's not a lot of them.

02:28:29.000 I mean, there's quite a few of them.

02:28:32.000 There's not a lot of them that are like a successful movie producer, director.

02:28:37.000 Well, it's like UFC fighter podcast geniuses.

02:28:40.000 He's not just a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu black belt.

02:28:44.000 He's a black belt under Henzo Gracie.

02:28:46.000 It's like one of the most esteemed schools in the world.

02:28:50.000 It's like the lineage is from the original source of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu.

02:28:55.000 I mean, he's from the Gracie family.

02:28:57.000 Right, right.

02:28:57.000 It's a very respected black belt.

02:28:59.000 You know, his characters in the movies, they ad-lib that dialogue.

02:29:04.000 What?

02:29:05.000 Absolutely.

02:29:06.000 I talked to Matthew McConaughey about this first.

02:29:09.000 He said, Richie, and then I asked Guy Ritchie about it.

02:29:11.000 He sets up the scenes and he has the story in mind.

02:29:15.000 And then he pays real attention to the context and he lets the actors ad-lib.

02:29:19.000 Well, that makes sense because it seems so organic.

02:29:22.000 No kidding.

02:29:22.000 And the dialogue is so sharp and witty and on point.

02:29:25.000 So I watched King Arthur.

02:29:28.000 And it's a chaotic movie.

02:29:31.000 He's trying to do a lot of things at once.

02:29:32.000 And I don't think that technically it's one of his most successful movies.

02:29:35.000 But there's parts of it that are extremely interesting.

02:29:38.000 And so one part is, this is very, very cool.

02:29:41.000 So when Arthur first grips the sword, he's blown off it.

02:29:48.000 Now, he can pull it out of the stone, because he's the guy.

02:29:50.000 He's the long-lost son of the rightful king.

02:29:54.000 Long lost.

02:29:55.000 You said, well, wasn't everybody opposing the tyranny of the times?

02:29:59.000 It's like, yeah, welcome to the world, man.

02:30:02.000 Welcome to the world.

02:30:03.000 We're all long-lost sons of the rightful king.

02:30:05.000 And the king's now a tyrant.

02:30:07.000 And don't we have to deal with that?

02:30:09.000 And the answer is, bloody well right we do.

02:30:12.000 So, Arthur...

02:30:13.000 Who'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.

02:30:24.000 He knows the world from the ground up, grabs the sword, he pulls it out of the stone, but he's blown right off it.

02:30:31.000 He 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. 0.51

02:30:42.000 So his uncle's a murderer. 0.96

02:30:44.000 His uncle's a murderer. 0.97

02:30:46.000 Well, so is your uncle. 0.97

02:30:48.000 And so is my uncle.

02:30:50.000 That's our historical guilt that the lefties weaponize all the time.

02:30:54.000 It's like the soil we walk on is soaked with blood.

02:30:57.000 And Arthur can't wield the sword that's his rightfully because he has visions of historical atrocity.

02:31:05.000 It's like, welcome to the world, man.

02:31:08.000 It's like, how do you know your masculine ambition isn't part of the world-destroying force?

02:31:11.000 Because, yes, it is. 0.60

02:31:14.000 So 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? 0.50

02:31:27.000 And the answer is, you probably will.

02:31:29.000 Because most people do.

02:31:31.000 You don't, but most people do.

02:31:32.000 And I know why.

02:31:33.000 Partly because they're reasonable.

02:31:35.000 If 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,

02:31:51.000 and 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! 0.97

02:32:00.000 And then you're a shell, right? 0.91

02:32:01.000 Another mob comes for you.

02:32:03.000 It doesn't work at all.

02:32:04.000 Do you think that this is a factor of this new way of communicating where everyone's communicating all at once?

02:32:13.000 It's not just these small groups of people that you're familiar with, that are in your tribe, or that you interact with from other tribes.

02:32:21.000 This is the whole...

02:32:22.000 This is like unprecedented volume of human beings.

02:32:25.000 I think that's part of it.

02:32:27.000 I mean...

02:32:29.000 I've almost stopped reading Twitter comments.

02:32:33.000 Almost?

02:32:34.000 Yeah, well...

02:32:35.000 Still hanging in there?

02:32:35.000 Yeah, and I'm not exactly sure why.

02:32:38.000 Some of it's like pathological curiosity.

02:32:42.000 I don't think it's good for you.

02:32:44.000 No, I don't think so either, but...

02:32:46.000 In any case...

02:32:50.000 Twitter really can be a cesspool, and people say things to me...

02:32:58.000 On Twitter, that they would never say to me face to face.

02:33:02.000 And they certainly say things about you that they would never dare to say face to face.

02:33:05.000 But I mean, not only because probably it wouldn't end well if they said something like that face to face.

02:33:12.000 That's part of it.

02:33:13.000 But also partly because people just don't do that face to face.

02:33:16.000 Well, you know what it is?

02:33:17.000 It's talk. 1.00

02:33:19.000 So, 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, 1.00

02:33:34.000 that's just talk, right? 0.99

02:33:36.000 Well, this is just talk, but it's written down.

02:33:38.000 The first person to say that to me is Louis C.K. He was talking to me about the way people talk on Twitter, because it's just talk.

02:33:43.000 People talk like that all the time.

02:33:45.000 But now, when you see it written, You think it is different than just talk.

02:33:49.000 Because it's not the way they would talk to you.

02:33:52.000 So if Ricky Gervais visited that assembly line, and he was talking to those guys, then they would have to...

02:33:58.000 Reflect on the fact that he's a human being.

02:34:00.000 Right.

02:34:01.000 He's right in front of him.

02:34:02.000 You 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.

02:34:10.000 You say the same thing if you're in your car, you know, and somebody cuts you off.

02:34:14.000 That's different. 1.00

02:34:14.000 Son of a bitch. 1.00

02:34:15.000 Well, it's kind of the same because there's a barrier between you. 1.00

02:34:18.000 Right, but you know why.

02:34:20.000 Do you know why they're so accelerated?

02:34:22.000 It's because of the speed the car's moving.

02:34:24.000 Your reactions have to be very quick.

02:34:26.000 Yeah, right.

02:34:26.000 So you're in a heightened state.

02:34:28.000 Right, right.

02:34:28.000 It's a completely different...

02:34:29.000 Like, people always want to say that, like, no.

02:34:31.000 If 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.

02:34:39.000 Yeah, yeah, that's true.

02:34:39.000 That's true.

02:34:40.000 It's a physiological...

02:34:41.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

02:34:42.000 It's a physiological condition.

02:34:43.000 Because you're reacting to potential emergencies.

02:34:45.000 You're going like this.

02:34:45.000 You're going 65 miles an hour.

02:34:47.000 You're like... 1.00

02:34:48.000 You fucking idiot! 1.00

02:34:49.000 What are you doing in front of me? 1.00

02:34:50.000 It's natural.

02:34:51.000 It's natural.

02:34:52.000 Yeah, that's a good point.

02:34:53.000 You have to learn to manage that.

02:34:55.000 And that's not disgust or talk to people.

02:34:57.000 People say don't get road rage.

02:34:58.000 But they don't tell you why you're getting road rage.

02:35:01.000 A 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.

02:35:09.000 Yeah, yeah.

02:35:10.000 Fair enough.

02:35:10.000 You're in a heightened state because of the speed.

02:35:12.000 That's very different than talking shit about Ricky Gervais if he's not next to you. 0.95

02:35:16.000 Right, but it might be akin to what's happening on Twitter because everything is happening very, very fast on Twitter. 0.99

02:35:21.000 It is, but it's also because people are addicts.

02:35:24.000 The 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. 0.94

02:35:31.000 They'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.

02:35:44.000 And it's 100% an addiction. 0.97

02:35:46.000 And the amount of interactions that they have that are negative, the amount of expressions they have that are negative are overwhelming.

02:35:53.000 That is an addiction.

02:35:54.000 It's an outrage addiction.

02:35:56.000 They're addicted to recreational outrage and the response to their recreational outrage. 0.56

02:36:01.000 It's constant and consistent.

02:36:03.000 It doesn't vary.

02:36:04.000 They're not learning anything.

02:36:05.000 They'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.

02:36:14.000 Imagine you do get a kick from that sort of spontaneous outrage, but when you manifest that in the real world, there's a cost.

02:36:23.000 And the cost is, look the hell out, because maybe you said it to the wrong person.

02:36:28.000 But you also can't get that many interactions in the regular world.

02:36:32.000 I like that.

02:36:33.000 I think that's very interesting that there's a hit.

02:36:37.000 Because the thing about anger, anger is a mix of two emotions.

02:36:41.000 It's negative emotion.

02:36:42.000 Yes.

02:36:43.000 But it's also positive.

02:36:44.000 It's approach.

02:36:45.000 Because if it wasn't, you couldn't fight when you were angry.

02:36:48.000 Let's talk about your own comments.

02:36:49.000 When you read your own comments, you could read many comments like, thank you, Jordan, that book is really aligned. 1.00

02:36:53.000 And then one will come in and go, you transphobic piece of shit. 1.00

02:36:57.000 You know, you're responsible for the death of thousands of children who killed themselves because they can't express their true gender identity. 1.00

02:37:04.000 And you'll see that one.

02:37:05.000 That won't have an effect on you.

02:37:06.000 That's the same as these other people.

02:37:08.000 These other people that are interacting, we are designed to seek out danger.

02:37:13.000 When danger comes our way, we're prepared to react to danger in a much different way than a friendly smile or a casual compliment.

02:37:22.000 Casual compliments and friendly smiles are nice, but danger is something you have to pay attention to.

02:37:27.000 That's the addiction of Twitter.

02:37:28.000 So 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.

02:37:38.000 The misrepresentation of your positions.

02:37:39.000 Yeah, that doesn't really make me angry.

02:37:41.000 What makes me angry is...

02:37:43.000 I think it's something like...

02:37:45.000 It's like casual insult.

02:37:47.000 That makes me angry.

02:37:48.000 And it's because I think...

02:37:55.000 That's a tough one, man. 0.72

02:37:56.000 It's just shitposting. 0.99

02:37:58.000 Yeah, but the problem with Twitter is that the price of being a prick has fallen to zero. 0.99

02:38:03.000 Yeah.

02:38:04.000 Okay, but that's not true in real life.

02:38:06.000 So 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.

02:38:15.000 Yes.

02:38:15.000 But the thing is, Ignoring psychopathic behavior does not make it go away.

02:38:22.000 Well, it goes away to you.

02:38:24.000 Yeah.

02:38:25.000 That's all that's important, Jordan.

02:38:27.000 You can't control the interactions of the seven and a half billion people on Earth, but you can control how you interface with them.

02:38:35.000 Yep.

02:38:35.000 That's the difference.

02:38:36.000 And 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. 0.99

02:38:45.000 I 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. 0.99

02:38:52.000 Yeah, yeah. 1.00

02:38:53.000 And I'll be like, hey bro, stop reading that shit. 1.00

02:38:54.000 And I'll tell them. 0.99

02:38:55.000 You 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. 0.99

02:39:07.000 Just stay the fuck out of the comments. 0.97

02:39:08.000 They never listen. 0.99

02:39:09.000 They never listen.

02:39:10.000 It's impulsive.

02:39:11.000 You want to know, you look at it.

02:39:12.000 You've got to learn how to...

02:39:13.000 Yeah, well, it's also the case that people, you know, it's not all bad that drives people to that too because... 0.96

02:39:20.000 Someone who's immune from social criticism is a psychopath.

02:39:24.000 And so you want to be open to feedback, you know?

02:39:28.000 And so I'm not discounting what you're saying, and Twitter in particular is hard to deal with.

02:39:34.000 I read YouTube comments, thousands and thousands of them.

02:39:37.000 But that's a different game.

02:39:39.000 It's more men. 0.85

02:39:40.000 Well, it's also way more...

02:39:41.000 It's also...

02:39:43.000 Almost all the comments on my YouTube channel are positive.

02:39:46.000 Really?

02:39:46.000 It's like 99%.

02:39:47.000 That's interesting.

02:39:48.000 Unless we're talking about political issues.

02:39:50.000 I've found that YouTube comments were the first things I stopped reading because they were so negative sometimes.

02:39:58.000 We'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.

02:40:14.000 They were just casual disagreements between people that sometimes are clunky.

02:40:17.000 Right, right.

02:40:19.000 Well, I've been fortunate with the YouTube channel in particular because it has become a very, very positive place.

02:40:27.000 And so I'm very happy about that.

02:40:29.000 I'll give you an example.

02:40:30.000 I was going to say something, but let me finish my thought.

02:40:32.000 Because what I was going to say, what I realized is, I don't need to read those, and those don't necessarily represent truth.

02:40:40.000 But what they do represent is someone having a clunky reaction to my clunky reaction.

02:40:46.000 And maybe they've drawn all sorts of conclusions, and they've decided to look at it in the least charitable way.

02:40:55.000 I can choose whether or not I let that affect me.

02:40:59.000 And the best way to not let that affect me is to not read it.

02:41:02.000 And the best way to make sure that I'm not immune to criticism is my own self-criticism, which is ruthless.

02:41:10.000 I'm very introspective, and I'm a horrible critic of myself.

02:41:14.000 Well, you're also talking to people all the time.

02:41:16.000 Yes.

02:41:16.000 And if you don't manage that properly, you're going to be punished in the discussion.

02:41:23.000 Yes.

02:41:23.000 And you're going to be punished afterward because people won't listen to it.

02:41:27.000 Well, also, I'll be punished because I'll hate myself.

02:41:29.000 I'll be angry at myself for my poor handling of any sort of verbal situation.

02:41:34.000 But 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.

02:41:48.000 All of them.

02:41:49.000 All of them are face to face. 0.94

02:41:51.000 Even though this podcast is reaching fucking millions of people.

02:41:56.000 All of my interactions with people are face-to-face, and it's a much healthier way to communicate with people.

02:42:01.000 Yeah, 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...

02:42:13.000 It's at least 75,000.

02:42:19.000 Like, at least.

02:42:20.000 It might be way more than that, but it's definitely at least that.

02:42:24.000 There's been three that weren't positive.

02:42:26.000 And weirdly enough, there's only been three that weren't extremely positive.

02:42:33.000 They're so positive that it's almost unbearable.

02:42:36.000 Because one of the things that's very strange now, I don't know what happens to you when you're out on the street.

02:42:43.000 What happens?

02:42:44.000 Come with me.

02:42:45.000 Tell me what happens.

02:42:46.000 Let's go out tonight.

02:42:46.000 We will.

02:42:47.000 It's fucking wild. 0.98

02:42:48.000 Yeah, so tell me what happens to you. 0.99

02:42:50.000 I get mobbed.

02:42:51.000 It's weird.

02:42:51.000 Okay, and how often have you had a negative interaction?

02:42:54.000 Very, very, very, very rare.

02:42:57.000 Most people are friendly.

02:42:58.000 Even most people, if they didn't like me before for whatever reason, they say hi, I say hi to them.

02:43:03.000 Yeah.

02:43:03.000 And we usually go, oh, he's just a person.

02:43:05.000 Just a person.

02:43:06.000 And I'm a nice person.

02:43:07.000 I'm very nice.

02:43:08.000 I go out of my way to be nice.

02:43:10.000 It's something I practice.

02:43:11.000 I practice martial arts.

02:43:13.000 I practice being nice because I think it's valuable.

02:43:15.000 It's not just valuable to me.

02:43:16.000 I think it's valuable to the people I encounter.

02:43:19.000 I think I have a responsibility to the way people react to me.

02:43:22.000 And if I misstep, it bothers me a lot.

02:43:25.000 Well, 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.

02:43:35.000 And the reason they approach you is because you're an idol of sorts, because otherwise they wouldn't hold you in esteem.

02:43:41.000 And that is even the case if they're negatively attracted to you in some sense, right?

02:43:46.000 And 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.

02:43:57.000 Well, more importantly, the way they feel could have been avoided.

02:44:01.000 Yes, absolutely.

02:44:02.000 You could have done a better job in interacting with them, and then, you know, sometimes people come up to you and...

02:44:09.000 Look, one of the things that I've done when I've met famous people that I really admired is I've been awkward and clunky.

02:44:14.000 Very likely to be the case.

02:44:15.000 And 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.

02:44:24.000 You bet. 0.99

02:44:25.000 And then you're like, duh, that guy was a dick. 1.00

02:44:27.000 And then it's fun to say that guy was a dick. 1.00

02:44:29.000 Oh, yeah. 1.00

02:44:29.000 It's fun. 1.00

02:44:30.000 It's exciting.

02:44:31.000 Yeah, well, it's also an expression of your profound sense of betrayal.

02:44:35.000 Yes.

02:44:35.000 Because you're kind of hoping when you go up to the person that They're the real thing.

02:44:39.000 Yes.

02:44:40.000 And then you get burned, and you're really betrayed by that.

02:44:43.000 Like, it's a deep betrayal.

02:44:45.000 I spent a lot of time in my clinical practice working with people who are socially awkward.

02:44:52.000 I've analyzed social awkwardness at the level of detail.

02:44:57.000 And 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.

02:45:05.000 And I always shake their hands, and I always look at them, and I always ask them their name.

02:45:12.000 And no matter how awkward they are, they can almost always remember their name.

02:45:20.000 And so, once they say their name and they look back at me, 95% of that awkwardness goes away.

02:45:27.000 Yeah.

02:45:28.000 And then, so I can put them at ease instantly, and then we can have a little, a real interaction.

02:45:32.000 Not long, because otherwise I would only be doing that.

02:45:36.000 And that always goes wonderfully, and it's amazing.

02:45:40.000 But I think it was hard on me.

02:45:42.000 It's hard on me in a way, because...

02:45:46.000 A lot of the people who come up to me are emotional.

02:45:49.000 And so it's weird.

02:45:50.000 My 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?

02:46:00.000 Like there's no defenses.

02:46:01.000 They come up to me.

02:46:02.000 Like they're people I know, which is very weird.

02:46:05.000 Yeah, I'm sure it is.

02:46:06.000 Same exact thing.

02:46:06.000 Yeah, yeah.

02:46:07.000 And so you really have to handle that carefully because they have made themselves vulnerable in that moment.

02:46:12.000 And you've had an impact on their lives.

02:46:14.000 Yes.

02:46:14.000 I'm sure your work has shaped a lot.

02:46:16.000 A lot of the people that are very happy to see you, you've had a personal impact on their lives.

02:46:21.000 Yeah, and it's been a positive one. 0.96

02:46:23.000 So wouldn't I be the ultimate bloody fool to do anything to put any sort of twist in that at all? 0.97

02:46:28.000 Because wouldn't that be a catastrophe? 0.97

02:46:31.000 But human interactions are messy, and sometimes things go clunky.

02:46:34.000 Yeah, well, my wife has got good at this, and I have a good team around me, and they help me manage this.

02:46:41.000 Because we try really hard to make sure that all these interactions go well.

02:46:45.000 As well as they possibly can.

02:46:48.000 And it is really wonderful because it's really something to be received as a friend by strangers everywhere.

02:46:55.000 And you think, back to this idea of success.

02:46:58.000 You talk about these successful, power-mad, psychopath types.

02:47:02.000 That is what happens when they walk down the streets.

02:47:04.000 Like, people are plotting murder or they always are lying to them.

02:47:08.000 Like, everywhere they go, it's literally hell.

02:47:10.000 Saddam Hussein at the mall.

02:47:11.000 You bet, you bet.

02:47:12.000 Or Stalin, who got hyper-paranoid. 1.00

02:47:15.000 Everyone's a liar. 1.00

02:47:17.000 Everyone's a liar. 1.00

02:47:18.000 Well, yeah, everyone lies to you. 0.90

02:47:19.000 Everyone.

02:47:20.000 You have no friends.

02:47:21.000 They are terrified of you.

02:47:22.000 Not a single word anyone has ever said to you for the last 40 years was honest.

02:47:27.000 He's got a bias control group.

02:47:29.000 Yeah, and he created it.

02:47:31.000 So how's that for Hale?

02:47:32.000 What was it like for you?

02:47:34.000 Because you have a very weird experience in life.

02:47:38.000 It's very weird.

02:47:40.000 There's not a lot of people like you.

02:47:41.000 Where you were a university professor and then all of a sudden you were famous.

02:47:45.000 And you were famous in your late 40s.

02:47:48.000 And really famous.

02:47:49.000 Not just famous, but famous as a worldwide...

02:47:54.000 Depending 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,

02:48:13.000 prejudice— What did Eric Dyson call you? 0.95

02:48:15.000 A mean, angry white man? 0.99

02:48:17.000 Yeah, a mean, angry white man. 0.97

02:48:20.000 Hilarious. 0.98

02:48:20.000 Yeah, yeah. 0.98

02:48:21.000 You're not mean at all. 0.95

02:48:22.000 That's what's dumb about that statement. 0.90

02:48:24.000 You're not mean at all. 0.98

02:48:25.000 I am white.

02:48:26.000 Actually, that's a lie, too.

02:48:27.000 I'm kind of tan.

02:48:29.000 And he was actually not black. 1.00

02:48:31.000 If you're tan, what the fuck am I? Because I'm darker than you. 1.00

02:48:34.000 Yeah, yeah. 1.00

02:48:34.000 That's ridiculous. 1.00

02:48:35.000 But neither of us are white. 0.97

02:48:36.000 Well, I'm Italian.

02:48:37.000 And he was brown, not black.

02:48:39.000 Well, isn't that weird?

02:48:41.000 Yeah, it's really weird.

02:48:42.000 The black and white thing is so strange because the shades are so...

02:48:45.000 Tan and brown.

02:48:45.000 There's such a spectrum of shades of people.

02:48:47.000 Unless 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. 1.00

02:48:59.000 Even the term black is weird.

02:49:02.000 And when you use it for people that are literally my color...

02:49:06.000 It becomes very strange.

02:49:08.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

02:49:10.000 This is true.

02:49:11.000 So, you were asking me what it was like- What is it like to be you? 0.89

02:49:16.000 Like, 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, 0.90

02:49:31.000 and 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. 1.00

02:49:43.000 Xanax is a motherfucker. 0.99

02:49:45.000 And 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. 1.00

02:50:01.000 And sober people who get on Xanax all of a sudden start drinking. 0.99

02:50:05.000 He said it's super common.

02:50:07.000 He said that it's one of the most difficult drugs to get off of.

02:50:11.000 He said, and this is something that Dr. Carl Hart, who's, I love him to death, he's brilliant.

02:50:16.000 He speaks so openly and honestly about drugs and, you know, the guy's a professor at Columbia.

02:50:23.000 He said that there's two drugs that will kill you when you get off of them.

02:50:27.000 He goes, it's alcohol and benzodiazepine. 1.00

02:50:29.000 Those are the two that if you just quit, you'll fucking die. 0.99

02:50:33.000 Or you wish you would. 0.99

02:50:34.000 Meanwhile, they're handing those things out like Tic Tacs.

02:50:36.000 Yeah.

02:50:37.000 Well, they were regarded as a safe substitute for barbiturates, and you could easily overdose on barbiturates, especially with alcohol.

02:50:43.000 Well, when did they know?

02:50:45.000 When did they know?

02:50:46.000 When was it in the literature, the difficulty of detoxing yourself from these?

02:50:52.000 Very recently.

02:50:54.000 Really?

02:50:54.000 Yeah.

02:50:55.000 Jesus Christ.

02:50:56.000 And when did they start being handed out?

02:51:00.000 20 years ago. 1.00

02:51:02.000 Fuck! 1.00

02:51:03.000 More. 1.00

02:51:04.000 So what happened?

02:51:05.000 People just stayed on them?

02:51:09.000 Often.

02:51:09.000 I have one good friend that takes it every day and takes it oftentimes with alcohol, which I know you're absolutely not supposed to do.

02:51:17.000 There's not a damn thing I can do about it.

02:51:19.000 This is a friend that I love to death and I just go, I put my hands up and I go, there's nothing I can do.

02:51:25.000 And he's been on it for more than 10 years.

02:51:28.000 Yeah, well, I started taking them because I was ill.

02:51:30.000 Yeah.

02:51:31.000 You know, and they helped because I couldn't sleep.

02:51:34.000 I couldn't sleep at all.

02:51:35.000 I don't know.

02:51:36.000 I don't know.

02:51:38.000 I still really don't know what happened to me.

02:51:40.000 You couldn't sleep.

02:51:42.000 An anti-anxiety medication.

02:51:45.000 This is one of the things that I wanted to talk to you about.

02:51:47.000 This is why I brought up the fame thing.

02:51:49.000 How much of the pressure of being attacked by all these different people and having these people write these horrible articles about you.

02:52:01.000 I know you read that stuff, which is different from me.

02:52:04.000 I don't read stuff about me.

02:52:06.000 And I think that's helped me tremendously.

02:52:08.000 And that, like, my gauge of how I deal with people is...

02:52:12.000 Tucker Carlson doesn't read things about him either.

02:52:15.000 You can tell.

02:52:16.000 You can tell by the way he communicates.

02:52:18.000 He seems free.

02:52:19.000 You know, there's a burden that people carry around when they read things about themselves.

02:52:24.000 Like, Eric Weinstein has that burden sometimes.

02:52:27.000 You know, when people read...

02:52:28.000 Yeah, well, part of the reason...

02:52:30.000 So, did I read things about me?

02:52:32.000 Well, yeah, but...

02:52:34.000 That wasn't what was stressful, exactly.

02:52:37.000 Although it was.

02:52:38.000 It's a multitude of things.

02:52:41.000 I've had a history of depression, and that runs in my family, and that probably stems back for me right to the time when I was a kid.

02:52:47.000 And I think when I really got sick in 2016, it was partly a manifestation of that.

02:52:53.000 But at the time, my job was threatened, like, actually.

02:52:57.000 And my clinical practice was threatened.

02:53:01.000 And the Canadian Revenue Agency was after me all at the same time.

02:53:05.000 And they were after me because of a mistake they had made, which they admitted three months later.

02:53:09.000 And the college was after me because of a vindictive client who came after me with a pack of lies, but because they were so...

02:53:15.000 And basically, I... I emerged from that unscathed, but that was by no means obvious that that was going to be the case.

02:53:23.000 I was accused of sexual misconduct.

02:53:25.000 And the evidence?

02:53:26.000 When I was dealing with this client I would turn my wedding ring around.

02:53:31.000 You'd spin it?

02:53:33.000 Well, I play with it.

02:53:34.000 Right.

02:53:34.000 And that was sexual misconduct?

02:53:36.000 Yeah, well, to her it was a signal of some dark underlying desire that I wasn't...

02:53:40.000 that was polluting our therapeutic relationship.

02:53:43.000 I've been doing that with you the whole conversation.

02:53:45.000 Yeah.

02:53:45.000 I have this silicone wedding ring.

02:53:48.000 Yeah, well, I'm going to report...

02:53:49.000 I'd report you if you had...

02:53:50.000 Stick my finger in there.

02:53:51.000 Yeah, exactly.

02:53:52.000 I do that all the time.

02:53:52.000 Yes, well, there you go.

02:53:54.000 It's really bad.

02:53:55.000 And if there was a college that governed the behavior of reprobates like you, I would definitely report...

02:53:59.000 No, don't do that.

02:54:00.000 That's terrible, Jill.

02:54:00.000 I do this.

02:54:01.000 I stretch it out.

02:54:01.000 No, that's...

02:54:02.000 It's Freudian to the extreme, although I don't know what turning it means.

02:54:06.000 How can stretching a silicone wedding band be Freudian?

02:54:09.000 Well, you're putting your finger in the little hole.

02:54:12.000 It's rubber. 0.99

02:54:12.000 What kind of vaginas are you dealing with? 0.99

02:54:14.000 Rubber is, you know, that's good. 0.99

02:54:16.000 Anyways, we don't have to go there.

02:54:17.000 So that was all you had done, was play with your wedding ring.

02:54:21.000 Yeah.

02:54:22.000 And I really helped her a lot.

02:54:25.000 Well, 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.

02:54:35.000 Well, 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.

02:54:50.000 I 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.

02:54:57.000 I knew these people.

02:54:59.000 You 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.

02:55:08.000 So you can't be distracted in a clinical session.

02:55:11.000 And 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.

02:55:20.000 And 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.

02:55:30.000 And my life was pretty stressful, and I thought, okay, I'm much better.

02:55:34.000 I'm just going to leave this be.

02:55:35.000 This is working.

02:55:36.000 I'm not going to muck with it, because I could barely go back to work.

02:55:39.000 And was it a low dose?

02:55:41.000 Yeah, yeah.

02:55:42.000 I couldn't even feel it.

02:55:43.000 Oxanax?

02:55:43.000 Really?

02:55:44.000 Yeah, it was a low dose.

02:55:45.000 So it alleviated the anxiety, but it didn't affect your cognitive performance, or it didn't affect the way...

02:55:51.000 Well, it didn't affect it as much as how sick I was.

02:55:54.000 Like, that really affected it.

02:55:55.000 So sick meaning depressed?

02:55:57.000 No, no, no.

02:55:58.000 You mean when you say you're sick?

02:55:59.000 No, no.

02:56:01.000 When it hit...

02:56:04.000 If I stood up, my blood pressure was really low.

02:56:07.000 If I stood up, I'd faint.

02:56:08.000 I was fainting five or six times a day.

02:56:10.000 When are we talking about here?

02:56:11.000 2016. Okay, so this was when all the pressure from all these different sources was coming at you.

02:56:18.000 Yeah.

02:56:18.000 And that was making you sick.

02:56:20.000 So it was physically...

02:56:22.000 No, yeah, that was part of it.

02:56:23.000 I 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.

02:56:31.000 Because I've had a lot of immunological problems.

02:56:33.000 But this was also when you got on this diet, which has been very beneficial, right?

02:56:38.000 When did you get on the diet?

02:56:39.000 Seems to be.

02:56:41.000 Yeah, it was around the same time.

02:56:43.000 2016, 17. Part of my weird life.

02:56:47.000 Yeah, 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.

02:56:57.000 Yeah, 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.

02:57:05.000 Yeah, but it's okay.

02:57:06.000 Partly because I'm not an authority.

02:57:07.000 But it's your personal experience.

02:57:08.000 Yeah, yeah, well...

02:57:09.000 So your personal experience in just this...

02:57:11.000 Well, my wife has a lot of immune problems, and some of them are quite serious.

02:57:15.000 And I have a number of immune problems, and some of them are quite serious.

02:57:19.000 And our daughter got both of them and was really affected by it.

02:57:24.000 And she told her mom...

02:57:26.000 This is Michaela.

02:57:27.000 She 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.

02:57:35.000 And the only reason she could stay awake was because she was taking Ritalin, because otherwise she would have just slept literally all the time.

02:57:41.000 Jesus.

02:57:42.000 And she said, you know, mom, I was dying.

02:57:52.000 And slowly, you know, which is not a pleasant way to die.

02:57:55.000 As a teenager?

02:57:56.000 Yeah, it was terrible.

02:57:58.000 I mean, she had to have her ankle replaced as a teenager, right?

02:58:01.000 Yeah, and then re-replaced like three years ago.

02:58:04.000 And this is all...

02:58:04.000 No general anesthetic.

02:58:06.000 This is all...

02:58:07.000 Because she can't be on general anesthetic?

02:58:09.000 She didn't want it to...

02:58:11.000 Yes.

02:58:12.000 Spinal.

02:58:12.000 But they still had to do all the hammer and sawing while she was...

02:58:15.000 I had my knee done that way.

02:58:16.000 Yeah, yeah.

02:58:16.000 I watched it.

02:58:17.000 Uh-huh.

02:58:18.000 Because I figured I was only going to have one knee surgery.

02:58:21.000 I should see it.

02:58:23.000 That's not true.

02:58:23.000 I had three.

02:58:24.000 Oh, yeah.

02:58:25.000 But I thought it was true at the time.

02:58:27.000 I thought I was only going to have one knee reconstruction.

02:58:30.000 Uh-huh.

02:58:31.000 Yeah, so I started getting better in September, and I'm not sure why.

02:58:35.000 But let's go back to this.

02:58:36.000 So 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.

02:58:47.000 But also, you eliminated all these inflammatory foods.

02:58:51.000 Well, I seem to have recovered from all the inflammatory conditions.

02:58:57.000 So I had very bad gum disease, which is not good for your cardiovascular system, by the way.

02:59:01.000 What is gum disease?

02:59:02.000 What do you mean?

02:59:03.000 Well, your gums recede and they bleed.

02:59:05.000 And it happens when people age, that's the theory.

02:59:08.000 Right.

02:59:09.000 And I had three surgeries to control it because, you know, your gums will recede all the way and then you lose your teeth.

02:59:15.000 It's like, it's not good.

02:59:16.000 Right.

02:59:16.000 And plus, you're way more likely to have heart trouble because of it, because it indicates a systemic infection.

02:59:21.000 Yeah.

02:59:21.000 And so I had that for like 20 years and that's incurable.

02:59:25.000 And it's completely gone.

02:59:27.000 Completely gone meaning the gums came back?

02:59:29.000 No, because they never quite grow back, but there's no inflammation and no bleeding.

02:59:35.000 That's all gone.

02:59:36.000 And no irritation.

02:59:38.000 Interesting.

02:59:38.000 So that's interesting.

02:59:39.000 I have psoriasis, and that's gone.

02:59:41.000 And 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.

02:59:56.000 And that's pretty much gone completely.

02:59:59.000 I 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.

03:00:11.000 The sides of my legs were quite numb for like two decades.

03:00:15.000 Sides of your legs were numb?

03:00:17.000 Were you having back pain?

03:00:19.000 No.

03:00:20.000 No back pain?

03:00:21.000 No.

03:00:21.000 None at all?

03:00:21.000 No, no back pain.

03:00:23.000 But that went away.

03:00:24.000 So now they were hard.

03:00:25.000 They got hard and rigid and kind of old because you see that in older people that their muscles start to rigidify and so forth.

03:00:32.000 And that's all gone completely.

03:00:33.000 That's completely flexible again.

03:00:37.000 And you've been on this diet now for...

03:00:40.000 Five years.

03:00:41.000 Five years?

03:00:42.000 Yeah.

03:00:42.000 And it's just meat.

03:00:44.000 Yes, although there were times when I was eating some other things, but that didn't seem to work very well.

03:00:48.000 What other things were you trying?

03:00:50.000 Low-carb vegetables, primarily.

03:00:53.000 Like greens, mushrooms?

03:00:55.000 Did you eat mushrooms?

03:00:56.000 No, it was mostly greens.

03:00:57.000 Any fruit?

03:00:59.000 Some, yeah.

03:01:00.000 I miss fruit a lot.

03:01:01.000 I miss a lot of things, but c'est la vie.

03:01:03.000 So when you introduced fruit, that was an issue? 0.52

03:01:09.000 I was still really sick in August, and I was eating some more things because I thought, oh, Christ, I'm so goddamn sick that I don't care.

03:01:19.000 I'm going to get something positive somewhere.

03:01:22.000 So I started to eat some other foods, but my daughter convinced me to stop that entirely again, and a number of other things happened.

03:01:32.000 I started to feel better in the mornings when I woke up for like two years.

03:01:38.000 It took me like four or five hours before I could stand up.

03:01:43.000 And this is coming off of benzodiazepine?

03:01:46.000 It's hard to say.

03:01:48.000 I don't know what happened because like I said, I was sick when I started taking them.

03:01:52.000 So do you think a lot of this is pressure?

03:01:57.000 I really don't know, Joe.

03:01:59.000 You know, when you get sick and you don't know what it is, you actually don't know.

03:02:03.000 But it seems like stress, right?

03:02:05.000 Yeah, my mother and my sister were worried when I decided to go on tour again.

03:02:08.000 We decided to plan this tour back when I was still literally so sick I couldn't stand up.

03:02:13.000 And we thought, we're going to live like this is going to come to an end.

03:02:17.000 So we planned this tour.

03:02:20.000 My mother and sister were quite worried about it because they thought that the tour, the last tour, was part of what stressed me out.

03:02:26.000 But I don't believe that.

03:02:27.000 I really liked it.

03:02:29.000 I thought it was a really affirming experience.

03:02:32.000 It was intense, but I'm not interested in sitting around relaxing.

03:02:38.000 I don't even know how to do that, really.

03:02:40.000 Even if I have time off, I don't relax.

03:02:43.000 Well, enjoyment and stress, they're often the same thing.

03:02:48.000 Not if you're doing what you love.

03:02:49.000 But even if, no.

03:02:50.000 I know, it can be too much.

03:02:52.000 Yeah, but what do you do instead?

03:02:53.000 What do you do instead?

03:02:54.000 Like, relax?

03:02:55.000 What does that mean?

03:02:56.000 I have a pontoon boat.

03:02:58.000 I go out on my lake.

03:02:59.000 We look at the sunset.

03:02:59.000 I love that.

03:03:00.000 I'm not saying you should do anything different.

03:03:02.000 I know.

03:03:02.000 But I'm saying physiologically, enjoyment and stress often come hand to hand.

03:03:08.000 Yeah.

03:03:08.000 Because some of the things that you enjoy doing are challenging.

03:03:11.000 And challenging things create physiological stress.

03:03:14.000 Yeah, they don't.

03:03:16.000 They don't?

03:03:16.000 No.

03:03:17.000 In fact, there's a whole literature on this.

03:03:19.000 Imagine that you...

03:03:20.000 Challenging things, challenging things don't.

03:03:22.000 Not if they're voluntary.

03:03:24.000 Okay, what if you like to fight?

03:03:26.000 Okay, one of the things that I noticed when I was young, when I was competing, is I was always getting sick.

03:03:32.000 Yeah.

03:03:32.000 Even though I loved doing it.

03:03:33.000 I loved fighting, but I was always nervous.

03:03:36.000 Yeah, but you're taking a fair bit of physical...

03:03:38.000 No?

03:03:39.000 No, that's not what it was.

03:03:41.000 It was...

03:03:42.000 Look, in excess of anything can push you beyond your limits.

03:03:46.000 I'm just saying that there's a tax.

03:03:49.000 There's a thing that you're doing, right, when you're interacting with thousands and thousands of people.

03:03:53.000 You're expressing controversial viewpoints that are often criticized.

03:03:57.000 You're reading articles that are written about you.

03:03:59.000 There's a stress that comes with doing this thing that you love that's undeniable.

03:04:05.000 Yes.

03:04:06.000 And 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.

03:04:15.000 And hopefully Tammy's helped me with that, or my whole family and my friends, everybody around me has helped me with that a lot.

03:04:20.000 Tremendous amount.

03:04:21.000 And hopefully I'm more and more able to separate the wheat from the chaff.

03:04:24.000 And I do more artistic things now than I had been for a long time.

03:04:29.000 Like what?

03:04:29.000 Oh, I've been writing a bunch of music.

03:04:31.000 We recorded a bunch of music.

03:04:32.000 Five songs.

03:04:34.000 Really?

03:04:34.000 Do you sing?

03:04:35.000 No, I do character voices.

03:04:37.000 Character voices?

03:04:38.000 I wouldn't call it singing.

03:04:39.000 What does that mean?

03:04:40.000 Yeah.

03:04:40.000 Want to play some of it?

03:04:43.000 The music is very dramatic.

03:04:45.000 Do you want to send this to Jamie and he'll play it?

03:04:47.000 The music is very dramatic.

03:04:50.000 I could give you a taste of it.

03:04:52.000 We need a taste.

03:04:53.000 Okay, okay.

03:04:54.000 I'll give you a taste.

03:04:56.000 So I wrote these books.

03:04:56.000 I feel like I should get drunk before I hear this.

03:04:58.000 I wrote these books called An ABC of Childhood Tragedy.

03:05:00.000 Oh boy.

03:05:01.000 And they're really dark poems.

03:05:04.000 For children?

03:05:05.000 No, definitely not.

03:05:06.000 Oh, okay.

03:05:07.000 Absolutely, 100%.

03:05:08.000 Decidedly.

03:05:11.000 Thoroughly, comprehensively, not for children.

03:05:15.000 Right.

03:05:16.000 They're very dark.

03:05:17.000 And 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. 0.99

03:05:29.000 Brilliant, brilliant artist.

03:05:31.000 And when I was really sick in January and trying to figure out what I could do, Tammy said, you remember those poems you wrote?

03:05:38.000 And they're the sort of poems you read.

03:05:40.000 They're like four stanzas long.

03:05:41.000 You read them and you laugh and then you hate yourself for laughing.

03:05:44.000 And I wrote them when I was in the midst of pretty intense clinical experiences.

03:05:50.000 I'm not sure exactly why.

03:05:53.000 To blow off some steam...

03:05:56.000 But there was more to it than that, and I don't know all of what it is.

03:05:58.000 I'm kind of working at the juncture between black comedy and beauty.

03:06:04.000 It's a weird space.

03:06:06.000 And Yulia's drawings are unbelievably beautiful and deep.

03:06:10.000 She's so good at this.

03:06:11.000 And so I sent her these terrible poems I wrote that are comical and horrible.

03:06:18.000 And I said...

03:06:21.000 Tammy thought it would be good for me to...

03:06:23.000 Because I thought about getting them illustrated.

03:06:25.000 I said, do you want to take a look at these and see if you're interested?

03:06:27.000 And then she sent me back these stunningly beautiful illustrations.

03:06:30.000 And then she produced one every three days for like three months.

03:06:34.000 And these...

03:06:34.000 I'll show you...

03:06:35.000 I'll show you them.

03:06:36.000 And maybe you can post one if you want.

03:06:38.000 And so...

03:06:39.000 And then we thought, well, that's fun.

03:06:41.000 That was fun and very worthwhile.

03:06:43.000 And then...

03:06:44.000 Like there are all these Depression-era children and they're all beautiful, beautiful children.

03:06:49.000 And they're all pathos.

03:06:51.000 Her drawings are full of pathos and sorrow for their suffering.

03:06:55.000 So they're very deep and dark and beautiful.

03:06:58.000 All of that at once with these terrible black comedy poems.

03:07:02.000 And then we thought, well, it'd be fun to figure out how to...

03:07:06.000 Market this, which is just communication.

03:07:08.000 Well, why don't we write some music?

03:07:10.000 And so it turns out I can write verse.

03:07:11.000 I wrote a whole screenplay, which we've also recorded three songs for it called The Water of Life, which is a fairy tale.

03:07:16.000 And I want to make a musical out of it.

03:07:18.000 And so that's quite fun.

03:07:19.000 And so we've written and recorded three songs for it already.

03:07:22.000 So this is what you were doing when you were recovering from this service?

03:07:26.000 Yeah, 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.

03:07:51.000 So he'd write the music and I wrote some of it, but he wrote most of it and he played almost all of it.

03:07:56.000 And we had a band involved for one part and we'll do that some more.

03:08:00.000 And so he'd write the music and then I'd write the lyrics.

03:08:03.000 And then I'd send...

03:08:04.000 And then we'd record it.

03:08:06.000 I'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.

03:08:16.000 And, 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...

03:08:28.000 I love that.

03:08:28.000 It's so fun.

03:08:29.000 So that helped you, just having some sort of a creative expression helped you?

03:08:34.000 Yeah, it helped a lot.

03:08:35.000 How long did it take you to recover from the benzos?

03:08:42.000 Well, when I finally...

03:08:43.000 Two years.

03:08:46.000 And I haven't fully recovered, but I was also sick.

03:08:50.000 You haven't fully recovered?

03:08:50.000 No, my left hand is quite numb.

03:08:54.000 And was way more numb.

03:08:55.000 Both hands and my feet were, like, completely numb.

03:08:59.000 And I was in, like, excruciating pain for two years.

03:09:06.000 Like, pain at levels that I didn't even know was possible.

03:09:09.000 All the time?

03:09:10.000 Or on occasion?

03:09:11.000 No!

03:09:12.000 This is one of the things that was terrible about it, is that it was really, really bad in the morning.

03:09:17.000 And did it start right after you got off of the Xanax?

03:09:22.000 No, but it got way worse.

03:09:24.000 So it just started showing up eventually?

03:09:28.000 Yeah.

03:09:28.000 It 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.

03:09:40.000 So this was additional stress?

03:09:42.000 Yes.

03:09:43.000 And that heightened everything?

03:09:45.000 Well, it certainly didn't help.

03:09:47.000 I think it made me, again, it made me more susceptible to something that was already happening.

03:09:53.000 So 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.

03:10:03.000 I have a cousin whose daughter died of immunological problems, the same ones that Michaela had.

03:10:09.000 And this is all mitigated somehow or another by this only eating meat diet?

03:10:13.000 I don't know.

03:10:14.000 It certainly is for Michaela.

03:10:16.000 And for you as well?

03:10:16.000 Well, I don't know that for sure.

03:10:18.000 I know what the diet has done.

03:10:22.000 Explain this.

03:10:23.000 You were telling me about this study that was recently done.

03:10:26.000 Oh, yeah, yeah.

03:10:26.000 Well, 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?

03:10:37.000 Does she have a background in nutrition? 1.00

03:10:39.000 No.

03:10:40.000 Well, yes, but...

03:10:41.000 Yes, because she's done her research, but not technically, no.

03:10:46.000 No, she had a background in trying not to die.

03:10:49.000 And trying not to be in agony and trying not to have all her bones deteriorate.

03:10:53.000 But I was confused as to why they would ask her to go to Oxford to debate.

03:10:58.000 The topic was, we should move beyond meat.

03:11:02.000 Right, but why her?

03:11:03.000 Well, because she's become a well-known advocate, I suppose, of a carnivorous diet as an investigative tool for chronic, untreatable disease.

03:11:15.000 That's a good way.

03:11:16.000 So imagine, here's the rationale, Joe.

03:11:18.000 Imagine there's something really wrong with you, like really wrong, and nothing's helping.

03:11:24.000 Okay, what might be causing it?

03:11:28.000 Well, something complex you don't understand.

03:11:31.000 Okay, what complex things are you doing?

03:11:34.000 You're eating a lot of different things.

03:11:38.000 Okay, so how about elimination diets do this?

03:11:40.000 How about you simplify it?

03:11:41.000 So Michaela tried a bunch of elimination diets, but they were dopey.

03:11:44.000 It's like, why eliminate this and not this?

03:11:46.000 There was no rationale.

03:11:47.000 And so she wanted to find out, how much can I eliminate and still survive?

03:11:52.000 How can I bring it down to the simplest possible thing?

03:11:56.000 And it turns out that you can pretty much live on meat.

03:12:01.000 Weirdly enough.

03:12:02.000 Not just live, but thrive.

03:12:04.000 Well, you know, people debate about that, but certainly some people seem to thrive compared to how they were.

03:12:09.000 What about supplements?

03:12:11.000 No.

03:12:12.000 No?

03:12:12.000 No vitamins?

03:12:13.000 No.

03:12:14.000 Does that seem ideal?

03:12:16.000 Because I would feel like you don't have to do that.

03:12:17.000 Like I said, I'm not promoting this.

03:12:19.000 You don't have to just eat the meat.

03:12:21.000 You can eat meat and get all of your micronutrients and all of your minerals and vitamins and Seems like you don't need them.

03:12:29.000 It isn't even obvious you need vitamin C. Now I'm going to get killed for that.

03:12:34.000 Apparently, there's some indication that you only require vitamin C if you eat carbohydrates.

03:12:39.000 Really?

03:12:40.000 Well, you know, don't take anything I'm saying as gospel, because what the hell do I know?

03:12:46.000 But does she eat organ meat? 1.00

03:12:47.000 No.

03:12:47.000 Because that's the healthiest of all.

03:12:49.000 No, she eats lamb. 0.95

03:12:50.000 That's it?

03:12:51.000 Yes.

03:12:52.000 Just lamb?

03:12:53.000 No.

03:12:54.000 Salt.

03:12:56.000 What?

03:12:56.000 But lamb and salt, not beef anymore?

03:13:00.000 No.

03:13:00.000 Okay.

03:13:02.000 No.

03:13:03.000 Tammy eats only lamb, too.

03:13:05.000 Wow.

03:13:06.000 Why lamb?

03:13:08.000 It's more of a game meat.

03:13:10.000 They both seem to manifest fewer immunological symptoms if they only eat lamb.

03:13:18.000 Yeah, Tammy has some serious immunological problems as well. 1.00

03:13:22.000 But they're very well controlled.

03:13:24.000 Now, how did the Oxford debate go?

03:13:28.000 Oh, God, I hope they release it soon.

03:13:30.000 Yeah?

03:13:31.000 Oh, she did very well, but she wasn't the star.

03:13:35.000 She did very well.

03:13:36.000 And oh, yeah, just before she debated, a study was released that was published by Harvard epidemiologists.

03:13:41.000 I think they were epidemiologists.

03:13:43.000 They did a retrospective analysis of 2,400 people who were on the carnivore diet for six months.

03:13:50.000 It was the only scientific paper I've ever read.

03:13:52.000 It was published by Oxford University Press, by the way.

03:13:54.000 It's in a high-quality medical journal.

03:13:55.000 The study's no joke.

03:13:57.000 And you might argue about the validity of retrospective self-report, but if it's carefully done, it can be valid.

03:14:02.000 And it's a good initial foray into investigation.

03:14:06.000 It's not a definitive study, because you'd need at least a randomized trial.

03:14:10.000 That's harder.

03:14:11.000 But anyways...

03:14:13.000 It was the only scientific paper I ever read where the surprise of the authors was evident in the manner in which they wrote.

03:14:18.000 Because what they showed was that radical weight loss first.

03:14:24.000 So that was pretty much experienced by all the participants.

03:14:28.000 90% reduction in all self-reported disease symptoms.

03:14:32.000 All.

03:14:34.000 Enhanced well-being and decrease in suffering.

03:14:38.000 And...

03:14:44.000 Yeah, that pretty much covered the territory.

03:14:46.000 So she introduced this during the debate?

03:14:49.000 Yes.

03:14:49.000 So it came out the week of the debate?

03:14:52.000 It came out two days.

03:14:53.000 We encountered it two days before the debate, but it had been published very recently, like within the last three weeks or something like that.

03:15:00.000 Did she have time to go through the entire study and get all the relevant information?

03:15:05.000 Yes, time enough for her section of the debate.

03:15:07.000 She only spoke for about 10-12 minutes.

03:15:10.000 There were three people on her side.

03:15:11.000 But 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.

03:15:35.000 She just about made me convulse.

03:15:38.000 And part of it was sympathy, you know, because it was so over the top.

03:15:42.000 It was so utterly...

03:15:58.000 Why misogyny? 0.68

03:16:00.000 Because it's a female cow? 1.00

03:16:05.000 Which is a dangerous territory to wander into, that analogy.

03:16:10.000 And 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.

03:16:21.000 And 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. 1.00

03:16:31.000 Hold, please.

03:16:32.000 Are we bombarded with images of sexy chickens? 0.93

03:16:37.000 Oh, sexy chickens and pigs. 1.00

03:16:38.000 It wasn't cows. 0.83

03:16:40.000 Well, pig cows, you know how sexy they are, so that's forgivable. 1.00

03:16:43.000 Miss Piggy? 1.00

03:16:44.000 She's our only one.

03:16:45.000 Is that bombarded?

03:16:46.000 Is this woman on a Miss Piggy rampage? 1.00

03:16:48.000 Sexy chickens. 1.00

03:16:49.000 What fucking sexy chickens are there? 1.00

03:16:52.000 Hey, man, you tell me. 1.00

03:16:54.000 That sounds crazy.

03:16:56.000 Oh, you wait.

03:16:57.000 I'm praying they'll release it.

03:16:59.000 This will go viral.

03:17:00.000 This is like Kathy Newman on steroids. 1.00

03:17:02.000 I mean it.

03:17:03.000 It was something, man.

03:17:05.000 I was sweating.

03:17:06.000 I was really, really, really.

03:17:08.000 It was like being hit.

03:17:09.000 And there were two people who helped craft her speech, and they were sitting in the audience.

03:17:14.000 And while she was on this unbelievable rant, It was just jaw-droppingly miraculous.

03:17:20.000 And they kept yelling genocide. 0.97

03:17:22.000 It'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. 0.98

03:17:37.000 Meat is a white supremacist exercise, by the way. 0.96

03:17:40.000 Where was she from?

03:17:40.000 Was she in English?

03:17:42.000 Yes, yes.

03:17:43.000 She'd written a book on this, and that's why they invited her.

03:17:45.000 But then I get the English accent with it, too.

03:17:48.000 Yeah, yeah.

03:17:49.000 And then her compatriots were randomly yelling, genocide!

03:17:53.000 It's like, genocide!

03:17:54.000 Genocide!

03:17:54.000 It's like, what?

03:17:56.000 Yes, we think that's bad.

03:17:58.000 We think that's bad.

03:17:59.000 We've already established that.

03:18:00.000 But that was so...

03:18:01.000 It was like theater of the absurd.

03:18:03.000 It was so...

03:18:05.000 If 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.

03:18:19.000 It was like, that is as absurd as it can possibly get in every possible way in ten minutes.

03:18:26.000 It was theater of the surreal.

03:18:30.000 And 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.

03:18:41.000 But I did feel bad for her while I was convulsing, because... 0.97

03:18:46.000 I really did because I thought, oh my god, you're so crazy. 1.00

03:18:49.000 You're so utterly crazy. 0.99

03:18:51.000 And 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. 0.99

03:18:58.000 And so that means that you're completely isolated and all your so-called friends are never...

03:19:05.000 Offering you any corrective feedback whatsoever, right?

03:19:08.000 They're just feeding into this terrible ideological mess you've wandered into.

03:19:13.000 And so it was painful at the same time, which is partly why it was sweating.

03:19:17.000 But it was...

03:19:19.000 Yeah, it was something, man.

03:19:20.000 I think I discovered the book.

03:19:22.000 Yeah, that's it.

03:19:22.000 That's it.

03:19:23.000 The pornography of meat.

03:19:25.000 Yeah, well, there you go.

03:19:25.000 You got your dancing hamburger there.

03:19:27.000 Eat me.

03:19:27.000 Oh, my God.

03:19:29.000 Late night menu, Friday and Saturday.

03:19:31.000 Oh, my God.

03:19:33.000 But I defy you.

03:19:34.000 I defy you to find a depiction of a sexy chicken.

03:19:38.000 Yeah, where are the sexy chickens at? 1.00

03:19:40.000 Yeah, see if you can. 0.94

03:19:41.000 There, the sexual politics of meat.

03:19:43.000 Oh, this is what she writes. 0.99

03:19:44.000 So it's like all sex and meat. 0.99

03:19:46.000 Yeah. 0.98

03:19:47.000 Yeah.

03:19:48.000 So, living amongst meat-eaters.

03:19:50.000 And look at the woman in this sort of sexy pose here. 1.00

03:19:55.000 Yeah, but she's surrounded by plants, Joe, and so that makes it okay, apparently.

03:19:59.000 Okay.

03:20:00.000 Yeah, that was her, all right.

03:20:02.000 Yeah, it was something, man.

03:20:04.000 I tell you, I'm not exaggerating this.

03:20:08.000 I've never heard a speech like that in my life.

03:20:12.000 In its own way, it was like an ultimate work of art.

03:20:16.000 It was just something beyond comprehension.

03:20:20.000 Every trope, every politically correct trope you could possibly imagine was magnified beyond its normal range of reference and then applied in this utterly scattershot.

03:20:30.000 It was like...

03:20:32.000 She brought every ideological tool in the playbook randomly to this issue. 0.83

03:20:39.000 Imagine if it's all performance art. 0.99

03:20:41.000 At the end of the day, she's like, I was just fucking around. 0.99

03:20:44.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah. 0.98

03:20:45.000 Well, then it would be funny and remarkable.

03:20:47.000 Well, that's like Titania McGrath, right?

03:20:49.000 Yes!

03:20:49.000 But Titania McGrath couldn't have held a candle to her.

03:20:52.000 She would have demolished. 0.82

03:20:54.000 No, no, no, no.

03:20:56.000 No, they weren't even in the same league.

03:20:58.000 No, Titania, at least, has a facade of reasonableness.

03:21:02.000 Have you met Andrew?

03:21:03.000 Yes.

03:21:03.000 Yeah, he's great, too.

03:21:04.000 He is.

03:21:05.000 I really like him.

03:21:05.000 I love him.

03:21:06.000 Yeah, yeah.

03:21:06.000 He's very, very funny.

03:21:08.000 He's brilliant.

03:21:08.000 And very, very smart.

03:21:09.000 He's fucking so good. 0.99

03:21:10.000 And multi-talented. 0.99

03:21:11.000 That character's so good.

03:21:11.000 It is.

03:21:12.000 It is.

03:21:12.000 But she's obsolete.

03:21:15.000 She's obsolete. 0.91

03:21:17.000 Yeah.

03:21:17.000 So how did the vegans react to the pro-carnivore position?

03:21:22.000 Oh, it was very civil.

03:21:23.000 It 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.

03:21:34.000 And I have my suspicions that it was staged that way.

03:21:37.000 How so?

03:21:38.000 Well, they were...

03:21:40.000 They basically said, every reasonable person thinks that eating meat is bad and immoral, but we should still let people do it.

03:21:48.000 On her side?

03:21:49.000 Yeah.

03:21:50.000 Why would they say that?

03:21:51.000 Why'd they say it's bad and immoral?

03:21:53.000 What about having the argument that monocrop agriculture is immoral?

03:21:58.000 Yeah, that was part of Michaela's argument. 0.77

03:22:02.000 It's responsible for so much death.

03:22:04.000 It's just not natural at all in order to cultivate.

03:22:07.000 Yeah, and Mick talked about sustainable agriculture.

03:22:12.000 And 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.

03:22:25.000 And 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.

03:22:44.000 They're all torn apart by carnivores.

03:22:48.000 None of them died of old days.

03:22:50.000 Yes, yes, yes, yes.

03:22:53.000 So I've been working on these books.

03:22:54.000 I have some other projects, too, that I'm working on.

03:22:58.000 I have a new book that I'm working on called We Who Wrestle With God.

03:23:01.000 And I outlined some of the ideas we talked about today.

03:23:04.000 And I'm interested in the weaponization of guilt and how to deal with that.

03:23:08.000 Why it's possible and how to protect yourself against it and what we should do in face of the fact that we walk on soil soaked with blood.

03:23:16.000 You know, how do we atone for that because we have to or we get guilty about it and then we're exploitable even by ourselves.

03:23:25.000 I have an app coming out.

03:23:27.000 In a month or two, hopefully a month, called Essay.

03:23:31.000 And I've been working on that with my son Julian and some other people for four years.

03:23:37.000 And it stemmed out of our project to sort of universalize the university, which was too big for me to manage when I got sick.

03:23:44.000 And sort of we narrowed it in scope because we wanted to teach people how to write.

03:23:48.000 And that's really hard to scale because you usually learn to write by having people...

03:23:53.000 Read what you've written and critique it, and that's very labor-intensive and expensive.

03:23:57.000 So we built a writing program, like a word processor, that has built-in conceptual tools that aid in the conceptualization of an essay.

03:24:09.000 So imagine when you're writing, first of all, you have to pick a good question because you want to answer it.

03:24:14.000 It has to be a genuine intellectual enterprise.

03:24:17.000 And so the kids are never taught that.

03:24:20.000 And so pick something important that you want to explore.

03:24:24.000 And then, okay, so what are you doing when you're writing?

03:24:28.000 Choosing words.

03:24:32.000 Forming 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.

03:24:42.000 But so it's a hierarchical enterprise.

03:24:44.000 And so when you write, you have to get the word right and the phrase right and the sentence right and the sentence order right.

03:24:49.000 And you shouldn't do all that at once because you can't because it's too hard.

03:24:53.000 So you write a rough first draft that's twice as long as the thing you're trying to write, and then you edit.

03:24:59.000 You shorten the sentences, you pick the right words, you pick the right phrases, you rewrite the sentences.

03:25:03.000 So 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.

03:25:12.000 And 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...

03:25:22.000 Because one of the things I've learned is that words are power.

03:25:28.000 No.

03:25:28.000 Wrong.

03:25:29.000 Words are authority.

03:25:31.000 Words are legitimate authority.

03:25:34.000 And so, without having your words in order, you have no legitimate authority.

03:25:40.000 And that's the last thing you want, unless all you want is irresponsibility, but that isn't going to work out for you anyway.

03:25:47.000 And so, the pathway to success for virtually everyone is facilitation of their capacity to communicate.

03:25:54.000 And so we're hoping...

03:25:55.000 We really want to pull young men into... 0.78

03:25:59.000 Using 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.

03:26:25.000 You test everything you do before you implement it.

03:26:28.000 That's thinking.

03:26:29.000 And writing is a massive aid to that process.

03:26:32.000 And 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.

03:26:44.000 So...

03:26:46.000 Or shields in their combat.

03:26:49.000 Or the means by which they aggregate their allies.

03:26:52.000 Or even more importantly, the means by which they serve themselves and the world properly.

03:26:58.000 And like, really?

03:27:00.000 No moral overlay on top of this.

03:27:02.000 Well, you know, you're a communicator.

03:27:04.000 Like, you're a comedian.

03:27:05.000 You're a master of words.

03:27:06.000 You're a master of wit.

03:27:08.000 You're a master of listening.

03:27:10.000 That's why you're successful in this weird, radical way that's completely unpredictable.

03:27:14.000 And it's also the pathway to adventure.

03:27:16.000 Get your words in order.

03:27:17.000 And 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.

03:27:27.000 We'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.

03:27:35.000 But we're very excited about that because...

03:27:38.000 How to teach people to write is a really hard academic problem to solve.

03:27:42.000 And the idea of building the writing tools into the software, if we got it right, maybe could at least in part address that problem.

03:27:54.000 It's a massive problem.

03:27:55.000 It's a massive problem, right?

03:27:56.000 Most people come through university now without learning how to write.

03:27:58.000 And that means they don't know how to think.

03:28:00.000 And that means they don't know how to talk.

03:28:02.000 It's not good.

03:28:04.000 So there's that, and it's the book and the music and the screenplay and this essay app.

03:28:11.000 Oh yeah, I'm going to be chancellor of a university, Ralston College, in Savannah.

03:28:18.000 And 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.

03:28:27.000 That'll be a free, that'll be a universally accessible university.

03:28:31.000 It won't be free because I run things on a for-profit model for all sorts of reasons.

03:28:35.000 Efficiency not being foremost among them.

03:28:38.000 I recorded two courses for this when I was in Nashville.

03:28:41.000 One on Jean Piaget, nine hours.

03:28:44.000 I got way deeper into his thought than I'd ever been able to at the university.

03:28:47.000 And then I recorded an updated version of my Maps of Meaning course.

03:28:51.000 I compressed it from 40 hours to nine, which took me like 40 years to do.

03:28:57.000 40, 35 years to do.

03:28:59.000 And I got way deeper into that too.

03:29:01.000 I realized some things about the Exodus story.

03:29:03.000 There's a scene in there in the Exodus story where God sends poisonous.

03:29:07.000 This is so cool.

03:29:08.000 It's so stunning.

03:29:09.000 I'll tell you a little bit about it if you don't mind.

03:29:11.000 It's so cool, Joe.

03:29:13.000 I can't believe it can possibly be true.

03:29:16.000 So, Moses leads his people out of the tyranny, right?

03:29:21.000 But weirdly enough, they don't go to the Promised Land.

03:29:24.000 This is very weird.

03:29:25.000 They go into the desert.

03:29:27.000 Well, why?

03:29:29.000 Well, we're all, say, prisoners of our own tyrannical misconceptions and misperceptions, psychologically and socially.

03:29:37.000 So let's say we free ourselves from those.

03:29:42.000 Well then, we're nowhere.

03:29:46.000 At least we were guided by that.

03:29:47.000 That's why people have nostalgia for tyranny.

03:29:49.000 It's like, at least we had enough to eat then.

03:29:51.000 At least we knew who we were then.

03:29:53.000 It's like out of the tyrant's grasp into the desert.

03:29:58.000 And so you think, why don't people want to challenge their own preconceptions?

03:30:02.000 It's like, yeah, it's out of the tyranny into the desert.

03:30:05.000 And the worse the tyranny, the worse the desert.

03:30:09.000 So 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.

03:30:21.000 You go to the desert.

03:30:22.000 Maybe that's even worse.

03:30:24.000 So no wonder people don't do it.

03:30:27.000 So now, the Israelites are out in the desert.

03:30:29.000 You think, why are they there for 40 years?

03:30:30.000 And maybe it's because it takes three generations to recover from tyranny.

03:30:34.000 You're in the desert, man.

03:30:36.000 And so, the Israelites start worshipping idols.

03:30:40.000 It's ideology.

03:30:40.000 It's the same thing.

03:30:42.000 And that's why.

03:30:43.000 Because they don't have anything to orient themselves.

03:30:44.000 Because they're not tyrannized anymore.

03:30:46.000 And they get all fractious and they fight with themselves.

03:30:49.000 And Moses...

03:30:51.000 Has to spend like all day judging their conflicts because otherwise they're at each other's throats.

03:30:56.000 And anyways, they turn to false idols.

03:30:58.000 And so God isn't very happy about this.

03:31:01.000 And he sends poisonous snakes in there to bite them.

03:31:05.000 So it's like...

03:31:07.000 Out of the tyranny, into the desert.

03:31:09.000 Now we're fractured by ideologies.

03:31:12.000 Now the poisonous snakes come.

03:31:14.000 And so the poisonous snakes are biting them and biting them and biting them. 0.99

03:31:18.000 And they finally break down and go to Moses and say, look, you want to have a chat with God and get him to call off the damn snakes? 0.97

03:31:28.000 And Moses says, yeah, okay. 0.99

03:31:30.000 And so he goes and talks to God.

03:31:31.000 And God says, this is weird.

03:31:36.000 This is one of those impossibly weird stories.

03:31:38.000 You think this is either insane or it's true.

03:31:41.000 Because that's the only options.

03:31:43.000 It's not boring.

03:31:44.000 It's not predictable.

03:31:45.000 It's either insane or it's true.

03:31:47.000 Okay.

03:31:48.000 And maybe we can start by thinking it's insane.

03:31:51.000 But whatever.

03:31:52.000 Moses talks to God and God...

03:31:54.000 God could just call off the snakes, right?

03:31:56.000 That's what you'd expect him to do.

03:31:57.000 But that isn't what happens.

03:32:01.000 He says...

03:32:04.000 Go 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.

03:32:13.000 And then have the Israelites go and look at the snake.

03:32:16.000 And then the snakes won't bite them anymore.

03:32:19.000 You think, what the hell is...

03:32:21.000 That's the same symbol physicians use.

03:32:22.000 Why do you think that that would be insane or true?

03:32:27.000 Well, what does it mean?

03:32:28.000 What the hell does that mean?

03:32:30.000 Like, what's he up to?

03:32:31.000 What does many of the stories from the Bible mean?

03:32:33.000 Well, that's what we're trying to figure out.

03:32:34.000 Jesus coming back from the dead, walking on water, Moses parted in the Red Sea.

03:32:39.000 We're not going to be able to get all there, but we can get to this one.

03:32:41.000 Okay.

03:32:42.000 The Caduceus.

03:32:44.000 Yeah, same symbol.

03:32:46.000 You know the links to that in Mesopotamia, the ancient Sumerians?

03:32:51.000 Yeah, and it's a snake that sheds the skin.

03:32:54.000 It was the symbol of medicine.

03:32:54.000 Yeah, I know.

03:32:55.000 It's a symbol of transformation.

03:32:56.000 They also think it might have had roots in the double helix of DNA. That's what the wacky conspiracy theorists...

03:33:02.000 Yeah, I know.

03:33:03.000 And they go deep down the rabbit hole of the Anunnaki. 1.00

03:33:05.000 Richard Dawkins stripped my skin off when I went to Oxford to talk to him about that.

03:33:10.000 He said, you said that under some conditions shamanic people might be able to see DNA. It's like, that's complete nonsense.

03:33:17.000 Nah, he doesn't know.

03:33:18.000 The problem with Richard Dawkins is he's had zero psychedelic experiences.

03:33:22.000 If you have psychedelic experiences, you see all kinds of iconography from ancient Egypt, you see hieroglyphics, you see geometry.

03:33:31.000 Yeah, but is that true or insane?

03:33:33.000 But it doesn't matter if it's true or insane.

03:33:35.000 It's repeatable.

03:33:37.000 You could have it over and over.

03:33:39.000 I mean, people who take mushrooms and people who take dimethyltryptamine have these kind of images.

03:33:45.000 They happen all the time.

03:33:46.000 Yeah.

03:33:47.000 It's not uncommon.

03:33:48.000 So the idea that it's impossible for those people from thousands of years ago to actually see the double helix pattern of DNA says who?

03:33:57.000 Well, I'm glad you said it and not me.

03:33:59.000 Me!

03:33:59.000 I'll say it!

03:34:00.000 Look at Richard Dawkins is a brilliant man, but he stands on this foundation of a lack of experience.

03:34:09.000 The lack of experience of psychedelics.

03:34:11.000 And he's been tempted to do it before under clinical settings.

03:34:16.000 He's talked about it, but he's never done it.

03:34:18.000 So the idea that that's preposterous.

03:34:21.000 Everything when you're on psychedelics is preposterous.

03:34:24.000 But they're real. 0.99

03:34:26.000 Not real in the sense of you can put it on a scale, but real in the sense of if I give you DMT, you will fucking go there. 0.98

03:34:33.000 You will go there just like everybody goes there. 0.99

03:34:36.000 And if you try to hang on, good luck, you're gonna get shot through a cannon to the center of the universe.

03:34:42.000 And that's just how it goes. 1.00

03:34:43.000 And so you can either have experienced that or you're talking out of your ass. 0.99

03:34:49.000 So 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. 0.99

03:34:59.000 Yeah, and you can too.

03:35:01.000 You can too.

03:35:03.000 And it's not just because you know what the double helix pattern of DNA is, because you can also see souls.

03:35:09.000 You can also see the very components.

03:35:12.000 They're talking just like the conservative that everyone thinks you are.

03:35:15.000 Yeah, that's me, bro.

03:35:16.000 Let's go back to this story.

03:35:18.000 Okay.

03:35:19.000 So, you have to go look on the snake.

03:35:23.000 Yes.

03:35:24.000 Okay.

03:35:25.000 Here's the doctrine from all fields of psychotherapy.

03:35:29.000 Okay.

03:35:30.000 Look at what you're terrified of, and you will get braver. 1.00

03:35:35.000 Unless what you're terrified of is a pack of wolves and they're going to fucking eat you. 0.98

03:35:39.000 Yeah, 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... 1.00

03:35:45.000 You'll realize you're fucked. 1.00

03:35:48.000 Unless you have guns. 1.00

03:35:49.000 Okay, so the classic therapeutic treatment for terror...

03:35:54.000 And the poisoning that terror induces is exposure, voluntary exposure.

03:35:57.000 Okay, so the pattern there is Face what you're most afraid of, and you will be free.

03:36:07.000 Okay.

03:36:08.000 That makes sense.

03:36:09.000 Voluntarily.

03:36:09.000 Now, that's a doctrine of psychotherapy now.

03:36:12.000 Right.

03:36:13.000 Okay.

03:36:13.000 So, now, that's weird.

03:36:15.000 That's weird.

03:36:16.000 So, God doesn't chase away the snakes.

03:36:18.000 He makes everyone braver.

03:36:20.000 Okay, because that's better than being safe.

03:36:23.000 Bravery is better than safety.

03:36:24.000 It's a more reliable cure for terror.

03:36:28.000 Okay, now, that's cool.

03:36:29.000 But this is even more cool.

03:36:33.000 In the Gospels, Christ says that he has to be lifted up like the serpent in the desert.

03:36:38.000 You think, what the hell does that possibly mean?

03:36:42.000 Because, well, that's a snake first on a stick.

03:36:45.000 And Christ is comparing himself to a snake on a stick?

03:36:51.000 Okay, so what can this possibly mean?

03:36:54.000 Well, I was thinking about that in relationship to imagery of the crucifix and the story that surrounds it.

03:37:00.000 So Jung thought that the passion story was archetypal because it's a limit story, like this debate at Oxford.

03:37:11.000 You cannot write a more tragic story.

03:37:13.000 It's impossible, technically.

03:37:15.000 Why?

03:37:16.000 Well, because it's a story of the aggregation of everything that people are afraid of.

03:37:22.000 So, there was no death more painful than crucifixion.

03:37:25.000 That's why the Romans invented it. 1.00

03:37:26.000 It was to punish political miscreants.

03:37:28.000 It was a slow, agonizing death by suffocation, essentially, and dehydration and exposure.

03:37:36.000 It's extraordinarily painful. 0.99

03:37:38.000 Okay, so, that sucks. 0.96

03:37:40.000 That's pain, man. 0.92

03:37:41.000 Plus, you know it's coming.

03:37:42.000 That's part of the story.

03:37:44.000 Plus, your best friend betrayed you into it.

03:37:47.000 Plus, your people turned against you.

03:37:49.000 Plus, they're led by a tyrant who doubts truth.

03:37:52.000 Plus, you're a victim of the Roman Empire.

03:37:54.000 Plus, you're completely innocent.

03:37:56.000 Plus, everybody knows it.

03:37:58.000 Plus, 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.

03:38:07.000 And you're young.

03:38:09.000 And you've done no wrong.

03:38:10.000 And all you've done is help people.

03:38:12.000 So it's a limit story.

03:38:14.000 Okay, so then you think, we've been looking at that limit story for 2,000 years, in the image and in the story.

03:38:22.000 What are we doing?

03:38:24.000 Well, you're supposed to visit the stations of the cross, let's say.

03:38:27.000 Okay, here's the idea.

03:38:28.000 You hear the crucifixion story, and you play with it.

03:38:32.000 Who are you?

03:38:35.000 Maybe if you're female, you're Mary, and why is that?

03:38:38.000 It's the pieda.

03:38:38.000 Because you have to offer your children to the destruction of the world.

03:38:42.000 That's female courage. 1.00

03:38:44.000 That's the mother that doesn't hold her child back. 0.99

03:38:47.000 It's like, go out.

03:38:48.000 To what? 1.00

03:38:49.000 Eventually your death and destruction. 1.00

03:38:51.000 Go out. 1.00

03:38:53.000 Leave me.

03:38:54.000 Be in the world.

03:38:55.000 That's feminine courage, man, to let her baby go.

03:38:59.000 You're Pilate.

03:39:01.000 You doubt truth.

03:39:02.000 But you'll go along with the crowd.

03:39:05.000 You're Judas because you betray your best friend.

03:39:10.000 You're the mob. 1.00

03:39:11.000 You're the criminal. 1.00

03:39:12.000 All of that, that's you. 0.82

03:39:15.000 You look on all those things that you hate and are terrified by.

03:39:20.000 That's not a snake.

03:39:21.000 It's like the worst of all possible snakes everywhere.

03:39:25.000 That's what you're looking at.

03:39:28.000 What do you see?

03:39:30.000 You see death, you see destruction, pain, terror, tyranny, frailty, betrayal.

03:39:37.000 Look harder.

03:39:38.000 Look harder.

03:39:40.000 Look harder.

03:39:41.000 What do you see?

03:39:43.000 The death and resurrection.

03:39:46.000 You look far enough into the abyss, you see the light.

03:39:51.000 Well, that's the story.

03:39:53.000 That's the connection between those stories.

03:39:55.000 And the unbelievably strange thing is, is that connection exists.

03:39:59.000 It's like, there's the strange story of the serpent in the desert, and we know that story's 3,000 years old, something like that.

03:40:06.000 We know that.

03:40:07.000 And then we know perfectly well that Christ said that his image was allied with that snake.

03:40:14.000 That's written down.

03:40:15.000 And even if you don't believe in the historical reality of Christ, someone still made that connection.

03:40:21.000 And did they know everything we were talking about today, explicitly?

03:40:25.000 What do you think they did know?

03:40:27.000 What do you think?

03:40:28.000 I mean, we were talking about this before, that the roots of these religious experiences almost certainly come from some sort of transcendent experience.

03:40:38.000 Well, when Eliot had mapped out the shamanic experience, he laid out the pattern.

03:40:46.000 So shaman die, they're reduced to a skeleton.

03:40:52.000 They're reduced to dust.

03:40:54.000 And then they climb the axis that unites heaven and earth and enter the kingdom of the ancestors and the gods.

03:41:04.000 They have a paradisal experience and they come back and share it.

03:41:10.000 That's a death and resurrection.

03:41:12.000 That's what they experience.

03:41:14.000 So what does that mean?

03:41:16.000 I don't know what it means, but that's what happens.

03:41:19.000 And then we know from Murescu's book, people can read it and make up their own bloody minds.

03:41:25.000 Do your investigation.

03:41:26.000 It was probably the origin of democracy.

03:41:29.000 It was the origin of Greek culture.

03:41:32.000 The Eleusinian Mysteries?

03:41:33.000 And was that a psychedelic experience?

03:41:35.000 It's like, come up with a better hypothesis.

03:41:37.000 Good luck!

03:41:38.000 Well, there's physical evidence now.

03:41:39.000 Yeah, yeah.

03:41:40.000 Because of mirror rescue.

03:41:41.000 All these ethnobotanists.

03:41:43.000 Yeah, they know.

03:41:45.000 And botanical archaeologists.

03:41:47.000 Yeah, they're messing about with ergot.

03:41:49.000 Yeah.

03:41:49.000 And psilocybin.

03:41:50.000 God only knows how long.

03:41:51.000 I mean, how long have they...

03:41:52.000 And then there's DMT in the Amazon.

03:41:56.000 I mean...

03:41:57.000 There's a massive shamanic tradition, and it stems back way into the Stone Age, and that's its pattern.

03:42:03.000 Well, 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.

03:42:15.000 The 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.

03:42:22.000 Right.

03:42:23.000 We know that the people who were going to approach it purified themselves before they dared do it.

03:42:30.000 You know, we know that a good psychedelic experience will drag you through your sins.

03:42:35.000 That's known as a bad trip.

03:42:41.000 So 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.

03:43:00.000 So what does it mean?

03:43:02.000 Who knows, man?

03:43:03.000 How fascinating.

03:43:04.000 This 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.

03:43:14.000 That took me like 30 years to figure out.

03:43:17.000 Because there's also the idea that the hero goes into the abyss to rescue his father from the belly of the beast.

03:43:24.000 But that's the same idea, right?

03:43:26.000 You 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.

03:43:38.000 That's the case.

03:43:40.000 That is the case.

03:43:41.000 If you look into the depths of evil and suffering, what you see is not the finality of evil and suffering.

03:43:48.000 You see the victory of the spirit that Obtains victory over that.

03:43:57.000 And then you might think biologically, well, how could it be any different, Joe?

03:44:00.000 That's the spirit of life.

03:44:02.000 Life is mortal suffering.

03:44:04.000 It's like, but we live.

03:44:06.000 What's the spirit of victorious life if it's not...

03:44:11.000 The benevolent Father who overcomes the catastrophe of suffering.

03:44:15.000 Like, what else could it possibly...

03:44:16.000 Even if you think about this just as an instinct.

03:44:18.000 It's like you're threatened by what's worse than death.

03:44:21.000 And there are plenty of things worse than death that you can be threatened by.

03:44:25.000 And yet you have a revelation that enables your transcendence of that.

03:44:30.000 Well, what could it be other than the Spirit that overcomes death in some fundamental sense?

03:44:37.000 Now, how fundamental?

03:44:39.000 Look, think about it this way.

03:44:43.000 Maybe we're running at 10% capacity, us human beings.

03:44:47.000 I don't mean we use 10% of our brain.

03:44:49.000 That isn't what I mean.

03:44:50.000 I mean, we're not fully committed to the enterprise.

03:44:53.000 So let's say here's the enterprise.

03:44:56.000 Let's make everything better and better as fast as we can for everyone.

03:45:00.000 Like, full, flat, bloody out, 100% committed.

03:45:04.000 No resentment.

03:45:05.000 Well, what's stopping us from being committed to the enterprise?

03:45:08.000 Like, when you say we're not committed to the enterprise, is that what it is, really?

03:45:11.000 Oh, some.

03:45:12.000 Don't you think it's like individual desires for achievement instead of, like, thinking in terms of the greater good of the group?

03:45:19.000 Well, no, no, no, I think that can be...

03:45:23.000 That's a minor impediment in some sense.

03:45:25.000 But we're not working in cooperation.

03:45:26.000 Well, that's individual desires for their own personal achievement versus the greater good of everybody.

03:45:33.000 Yes, but I would say that's not the worst problem.

03:45:37.000 But isn't that like the origins of the good concepts of socialism, the good concepts of people working together?

03:45:44.000 Like that's the origins of it.

03:45:46.000 It's like if we all just work together, if we all just shared, what it doesn't take into account is human nature, right?

03:45:52.000 Yeah, sure.

03:45:53.000 That's fine.

03:45:54.000 And I also think that, look, if you have kid A and kid B on the playground, and they're both selfish, they don't play very well together.

03:46:01.000 Right.

03:46:01.000 And 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.

03:46:13.000 Even sexually, for all you pornography addicts, by the way. 0.84

03:46:17.000 Oh! 0.60

03:46:17.000 Yeah, so in any case, it's a form of... 0.60

03:46:20.000 But at least the people who are selfishly achieving value achievement You can get way...

03:46:28.000 Look, I'll tell you a story.

03:46:31.000 Someone wrote to me two months ago, and Warren Farrell wrote The Boy Crisis.

03:46:35.000 We had a conversation about boys who aren't encouraged and how bitter they can become for all sorts of different reasons.

03:46:44.000 And somebody wrote us who was planning to shoot up high school.

03:46:48.000 And he'd written a 53-page manifesto.

03:46:51.000 And he was in touch with the last person who shot up a high school.

03:46:54.000 They were corresponding.

03:46:55.000 Because it's a competition, you know, that shooting up high schools, that's a competition.

03:46:59.000 It's a very, very dark competition.

03:47:01.000 You have to do a lot of brooding over evil before you want to emerge victorious in that competition.

03:47:09.000 That's like months of pathological fantasizing that you nurse and nurse.

03:47:15.000 And it's all resentment-driven.

03:47:18.000 And so...

03:47:19.000 That's way worse than just a bit of a warped desire to achieve.

03:47:24.000 It's like Heath Ledger's Joker.

03:47:28.000 He wasn't a criminal.

03:47:30.000 Criminals you can trust, man. 0.97

03:47:32.000 It's like they want your car.

03:47:33.000 So do you.

03:47:34.000 You've got lots of common ground.

03:47:36.000 It's the guy who wants to burn your car that...

03:47:39.000 That's a whole different level of mayhem.

03:47:42.000 And you think, how do people get there?

03:47:45.000 Well, their lives have no positive meaning.

03:47:49.000 Abuse.

03:47:50.000 Resentment.

03:47:51.000 Rejection.

03:47:52.000 But 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.

03:48:04.000 He's good looking.

03:48:05.000 He's successful.

03:48:06.000 He works hard.

03:48:07.000 He's a really good person.

03:48:08.000 He gets everything and deserves it.

03:48:11.000 The Harvard students were very annoying in that way when I was there.

03:48:16.000 They had these positions of privilege, let's say.

03:48:19.000 It's a very terrible way of conceptualizing, but we'll give the devil a stew. 0.98

03:48:23.000 And 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. 0.98

03:48:32.000 But they weren't. 0.94

03:48:35.000 They were smart, attractive, hard-working, talented, athletic, polite, cooperative.

03:48:44.000 They were great.

03:48:47.000 And so how annoying is that?

03:48:50.000 If you've rejected all of that.

03:48:53.000 How annoying is that?

03:48:55.000 Well, so that's Cain and Abel.

03:48:56.000 So Cain goes to God to crab and complain.

03:49:00.000 You know, what's going on?

03:49:02.000 Abel makes these sacrifices and you reward him and I make a sacrifice and I don't get anywhere.

03:49:08.000 And that's the complaint of everyone bitter.

03:49:10.000 I made all these sacrifices and God rejected them. 0.99

03:49:14.000 It's like, yeah, that sucks.

03:49:17.000 Well, so God says to Cain, I had to look at a bunch of different translations to kind of get this right. 0.99

03:49:23.000 God says something like, sin crouches at your door like a predatory, sexually aroused animal. 0.75

03:49:34.000 It wants to have its way with you. 0.87

03:49:37.000 And you invited it in and let it have its way with you.

03:49:42.000 And it's this great metaphor because That kind of evil, that's creative.

03:49:49.000 That's creative.

03:49:51.000 It's like inviting a vampire in.

03:49:53.000 It's like, invite that in.

03:49:56.000 Say, inhabit me.

03:49:58.000 Then 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.

03:50:07.000 Read the writings of the Columbine kids if you want to find out about this.

03:50:11.000 I mean, it's crystal clear.

03:50:13.000 They're the judges of the human race.

03:50:15.000 They want to eradicate being itself.

03:50:17.000 They are out for revenge against God.

03:50:19.000 Like, this stuff is biblical.

03:50:21.000 They're also on psychotropic medications.

03:50:24.000 Yeah, yeah, well, there's all sorts of problems.

03:50:28.000 I'm talking specifically about this, but lots of people on psychotropic medications don't shoot up high schools.

03:50:34.000 Right, but under the right conditions, people that are on, I mean, I don't know what kind of psychotropic medications they were on, but...

03:50:41.000 Some of them act as there's a way where you take them where it makes everything okay.

03:50:49.000 It alleviates consequence.

03:50:52.000 It alleviates the feeling of whatever you're doing being wrong.

03:50:59.000 Yeah, that didn't happen in the Columbine case.

03:51:03.000 They knew it was wrong.

03:51:05.000 No, no.

03:51:06.000 What are you saying?

03:51:07.000 No, no, they were doing it because it was wrong.

03:51:10.000 Right.

03:51:10.000 They didn't just...

03:51:11.000 No, but that's different, right?

03:51:12.000 Wrong is the wrong word then.

03:51:13.000 No, no, it isn't.

03:51:14.000 It's exactly right.

03:51:15.000 They were out to do the maximal amount of harm in the minimal amount of time.

03:51:19.000 But they felt it was the thing to do and they didn't think that there was something that they shouldn't do.

03:51:26.000 No, they thought it was...

03:51:26.000 No, no.

03:51:27.000 No, no.

03:51:28.000 No, no, no.

03:51:29.000 Because they did it.

03:51:29.000 It's like the Joker.

03:51:31.000 Right, but they did it.

03:51:32.000 They thought it was something they should do.

03:51:34.000 No.

03:51:35.000 But they did it.

03:51:36.000 Yes.

03:51:36.000 So they thought it was something they should do.

03:51:38.000 No.

03:51:39.000 What are you saying?

03:51:40.000 I'm saying they decided...

03:51:42.000 Listen, but they wanted to do it.

03:51:44.000 Yes.

03:51:45.000 And they did it.

03:51:46.000 Yes.

03:51:46.000 So it was something they should do.

03:51:47.000 No.

03:51:49.000 No, they did it because it was the worst thing they could think of.

03:51:52.000 Right, which is what they should do, because they wanted to do the worst thing they could do.

03:51:56.000 Yes, they wanted to do, we can agree on that.

03:51:58.000 Yes, that's what I'm saying.

03:51:59.000 But I'm saying being under the influence of psychotropic drugs, it's like the question of causality, right?

03:52:06.000 It wasn't because their conscience was alleviated by the drugs.

03:52:09.000 They knew that what they were doing, they'd already planned to die.

03:52:14.000 Right.

03:52:14.000 Well, so then here, ask yourself this.

03:52:16.000 If you plan to die, Why not just save everybody the trouble and die first? 0.99

03:52:22.000 Because you're angry. 0.99

03:52:23.000 Because you want revenge.

03:52:24.000 Yeah, you want revenge.

03:52:25.000 But you want revenge against the innocent.

03:52:27.000 Do these drugs that change your state allow you to do things that are impossible to do without them?

03:52:36.000 No.

03:52:36.000 Some horrific acts that you don't think so?

03:52:40.000 No.

03:52:40.000 I don't think that was...

03:52:41.000 So is it...

03:52:42.000 There's a question.

03:52:43.000 Yeah.

03:52:44.000 This comes up.

03:52:45.000 This is why I'm asking you this.

03:52:46.000 And you're a good person to ask this.

03:52:48.000 The 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.

03:53:03.000 These drugs are not causing these actions.

03:53:05.000 Right.

03:53:06.000 Yes.

03:53:06.000 That's what you think?

03:53:08.000 Yes.

03:53:08.000 In all cases?

03:53:24.000 But there's no straightforward pathway from the use of such drugs to that level of atrocity.

03:53:29.000 But you know that there's a direct correlation that almost all school shooters are on psychotropic drugs.

03:53:37.000 Yeah, but they're all depressed, so that's not surprising.

03:53:39.000 And they're not exactly depressed.

03:53:42.000 They're nihilistic.

03:53:44.000 They're nihilistic in a way that manifests itself as a kind of depression that would elicit psychotropic medication.

03:53:51.000 But it's not depression precisely. 0.98

03:53:54.000 I 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. 0.79

03:54:03.000 And they just felt like nothing mattered. 0.98

03:54:06.000 Everything was fine.

03:54:07.000 Nothing mattered.

03:54:08.000 There are people who report emotional blunting of that sort on antidepressants.

03:54:12.000 If you are tortured and angry and furious, then you're put on something where it doesn't matter.

03:54:19.000 Nothing matters. 1.00

03:54:19.000 I don't give a fuck. 1.00

03:54:20.000 You think it'll alleviate conscience? 0.99

03:54:21.000 Yes.

03:54:22.000 No.

03:54:22.000 No way?

03:54:24.000 Like I said, zero of anything is pushing too hard.

03:54:29.000 So 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.

03:54:45.000 Right, but the proportion of people who commit atrocious acts while they're on those medications is extraordinarily high.

03:54:53.000 Right, but I don't believe that that's involved in the causal pathway.

03:54:58.000 Is that because you have personal experience with these drugs?

03:55:02.000 That would be part of it, but that's not the primary.

03:55:05.000 I say that's a tiny fraction of it because I wouldn't generalize from that.

03:55:09.000 Do you still have personal experience with these drugs?

03:55:12.000 No.

03:55:13.000 Are you on any kind of medication anymore?

03:55:14.000 Yes, a small amount of one medication.

03:55:16.000 What is it?

03:55:18.000 I'm not going to discuss that.

03:55:19.000 Okay.

03:55:22.000 No, I don't believe that that's...

03:55:25.000 Because these particular crimes we're talking about, they're a very specific kind of crime.

03:55:30.000 No, I'm not saying that the drugs cause those crimes.

03:55:33.000 You're saying that maybe they dampen the voice of conscience.

03:55:36.000 Yes.

03:55:37.000 Or also alleviate the anxiety of committing them.

03:55:41.000 Yeah.

03:55:42.000 Alleviate the anxiety of following through with something.

03:55:45.000 No, it's not obvious that that's the case.

03:55:46.000 If you look at the effect of these drugs on motivation and emotion has been pretty well delineated.

03:55:53.000 And they do dampen negative emotion.

03:55:57.000 But for most depressed people, that's really good because they are suffering from a pathological excess of negative emotion.

03:56:04.000 And some of that does manifest itself in the form of harsh, superego-like conscience, Analogues.

03:56:15.000 So, here's how a depressed person would think.

03:56:19.000 Maybe they have an argument with their wife about who's supposed to take out the garbage.

03:56:25.000 Trivial, in some sense.

03:56:27.000 It's like...

03:56:29.000 Oh man, I didn't take out the garbage again.

03:56:31.000 I never do anything around the house properly.

03:56:34.000 That's just an indication that I never do anything at all properly.

03:56:37.000 People who do nothing at all properly, they're not very good people.

03:56:41.000 I've never really been good at that sort of thing in the past, in the present. 0.98

03:56:45.000 I'm probably going to keep fucking up like this into the future. 0.98

03:56:48.000 I'm a terrible person. 1.00

03:56:50.000 I should die. 1.00

03:56:53.000 That's too much negative emotion, right? 0.99

03:56:55.000 It just blows every level out.

03:56:57.000 And they go right from the trivial mistake to the suicidal thought.

03:57:02.000 And one of the things that antidepressants do is bolster their resistance to that propagation of catastrophe.

03:57:11.000 Because that's like, that's hallmarks of depression.

03:57:13.000 And you're talking specifically about SSRIs?

03:57:16.000 Yes.

03:57:17.000 Yes.

03:57:19.000 So, no, I don't believe that they make...

03:57:22.000 There'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.

03:57:31.000 I know no literature that indicates that.

03:57:34.000 And people are very interested in such things.

03:57:35.000 It would be studied.

03:57:36.000 Yeah, people are interested in that correlation.

03:57:38.000 Yes.

03:57:38.000 But that doesn't mean that there's no single person to whom that ever happened.

03:57:44.000 Right.

03:57:44.000 Got it.

03:57:45.000 But that isn't...

03:57:47.000 That's not a behavioral consequence of SSRIs or even of serotonin itself.

03:57:53.000 Because 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.

03:58:05.000 And the consequence of that is that...

03:58:08.000 Threatening things become less threatening.

03:58:10.000 Well, they should, because the higher you are in a hierarchy, the less dangerous it is.

03:58:15.000 Right.

03:58:16.000 And 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.

03:58:31.000 That'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.

03:58:47.000 You might say, well, the professor on stage gets taken aback and is destabilized because his theory has been...

03:58:55.000 Challenged, and he uses the theory to protect himself against anxiety.

03:58:58.000 It's kind of a terror management idea.

03:59:00.000 That isn't what happens.

03:59:02.000 Not exactly.

03:59:03.000 It's close, man.

03:59:04.000 It's real close.

03:59:05.000 What happens is, the young faculty member comes in using his claim to valid knowledge as an indicator of his suitability for that position.

03:59:18.000 So I'd say, I know a bunch of things that are useful.

03:59:22.000 That I can use in trade.

03:59:24.000 And because of that, I'm justified in occupying this position. 0.97

03:59:30.000 And so, then the student stands up and says, You're a fraud. 0.96

03:59:37.000 You don't deserve that position.

03:59:39.000 And 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.

03:59:49.000 Now, there can be some of both, right?

03:59:51.000 But the reason that people don't like to lose faith is because it undermines their moral claim to their position.

04:00:00.000 And people hate that.

04:00:01.000 And no wonder, because that's a severe threat. 1.00

04:00:04.000 You're a fraud. 0.89

04:00:06.000 To have that revealed means that the system could validly take away your position. 0.98

04:00:14.000 Well, the terror management theorists regard your theory as a defense against death anxiety.

04:00:22.000 But your position is actually a defense against death.

04:00:25.000 Not just death anxiety.

04:00:27.000 It's like that's your space in the culture.

04:00:31.000 That's why people don't stone you.

04:00:32.000 That's why you're a valid member of society.

04:00:34.000 That's how you make your living.

04:00:35.000 That's not an illusion.

04:00:37.000 That is actually the structure that defends you against catastrophe. 0.87

04:00:41.000 And 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, 0.70

04:00:57.000 oppressor, part of this patriarchal system.

04:00:59.000 You have no moral claim whatsoever to the position you occupy.

04:01:04.000 Well, that just strips people, you know, especially if they're good people.

04:01:08.000 They think, oh, I need a moral claim to this position.

04:01:12.000 Well, it's also often disingenuous because all they're trying to do is silence you.

04:01:16.000 All they're trying to do is defuse you.

04:01:18.000 No, no.

04:01:19.000 They're also trying to hurt and destroy you. 0.99

04:01:21.000 Destroy you.

04:01:21.000 But they're also trying to stop you from being a valid member of the conversation.

04:01:27.000 Oh, definitely.

04:01:28.000 And 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.

04:01:37.000 Yes, most likely.

04:01:39.000 We are four hours in here.

04:01:42.000 So I think we should probably wrap this bad boy up and bring it home.

04:01:47.000 Tell everybody where they can.

04:01:49.000 Your website is jordanpeterson.com.

04:01:51.000 Jordanbpeterson.com.

04:01:52.000 Jordanbpeterson.com.

04:01:53.000 Yeah, and you can look up the essay app at essay.app or on my website.

04:01:57.000 And if you go to my website, you can find my list of recommended books.

04:02:01.000 There's a hundred there.

04:02:03.000 Don't tweet it, Jordan, because he's not going to read it, right?

04:02:05.000 Yeah, I hope not.

04:02:07.000 Yeah, I hope not.

04:02:09.000 And your podcast is still available on YouTube?

04:02:12.000 Yeah, and Spotify.

04:02:13.000 And Spotify, yeah.

04:02:14.000 Okay.

04:02:14.000 Yeah, and there's lots of good discussions on YouTube.

04:02:18.000 If 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.

04:02:30.000 Yes.

04:02:31.000 And it is our intent, and it's a pleasure and a privilege to do it, and we try to live up to that responsibility.

04:02:36.000 And thank you, man.

04:02:39.000 Thank you.

04:02:39.000 It's so good to see you.

04:02:40.000 Always.

04:02:41.000 Always good to see you.

04:02:42.000 I'm looking forward to dinner, too.

04:02:43.000 And also, congratulations on your success.

04:02:46.000 Thank you.

04:02:47.000 Like, 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.

04:03:11.000 And these aren't fringe political figures.

04:03:14.000 These are people who've had stellar political careers.

04:03:16.000 And that's what they tell me, point blank.

04:03:20.000 And the same thing is happening in the United States.

04:03:24.000 And you're an antidote to that.

04:03:27.000 All by yourself.

04:03:28.000 I know you have help.

04:03:29.000 I know you have help.

04:03:30.000 And you have people around you.

04:03:32.000 But it's a testament to your...

04:03:36.000 Integrity, man.

04:03:38.000 And good for you.

04:03:40.000 It's something.

04:03:42.000 So, keep it up.

04:03:45.000 I will.

04:03:46.000 It's something.

04:03:48.000 It's an odd place, man.

04:03:50.000 I know.

04:03:50.000 It's all by accident.

04:03:52.000 That's the oddest part about it.

04:03:53.000 Yeah, well, sort of.

04:03:54.000 I know.

04:03:55.000 It's not by design, but it's not by accident.

04:03:59.000 Well, being where I am is by accident.

04:04:01.000 Yeah, that is by accident.

04:04:03.000 It is not by design.

04:04:04.000 It is by accident.

04:04:07.000 I 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.

04:04:20.000 It's very strange.

04:04:22.000 Yeah, but wouldn't it be something if that was the way it is?

04:04:26.000 Well, it wouldn't be so unique then.

04:04:30.000 Or maybe there'd be just more unique everywhere.

04:04:33.000 That would be nice.

04:04:35.000 Everybody else, pick up the slack.

04:04:38.000 I've had visions of that sort of thing.

04:04:40.000 We're each called to a unique destiny, and it's not unique.

04:04:44.000 It's like, well, the world's inexhaustible, and so we could each have a unique destiny.

04:04:48.000 Well, 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.

04:05:07.000 You bet.

04:05:08.000 And that will...

04:05:09.000 I'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...

04:05:18.000 They're very articulate.

04:05:19.000 They don't say like.

04:05:21.000 They weigh their words.

04:05:24.000 They're witty.

04:05:25.000 They listen intently.

04:05:27.000 And they're aiming up.

04:05:29.000 And they're just lights.

04:05:30.000 It's like, oh man, you're going places.

04:05:32.000 You're going places.

04:05:33.000 Well, intellectual curiosity is now, because I think of long-form podcasts, it's attractive. 0.95

04:05:40.000 Where it was thought of as something akin to daydreaming or mental masturbation. 0.83

04:05:46.000 You bet, you bet. 0.92

04:05:47.000 Effect intellectualism.

04:05:49.000 Exactly.

04:05:49.000 Yeah, yeah.

04:05:50.000 It's the opposite of that, man.

04:05:51.000 It is, in many ways, the opposite of that.

04:05:54.000 And it's also a viable opportunity for a career.

04:05:56.000 Yeah.

04:05:57.000 And all you have to do is be interesting.

04:05:59.000 Yeah.

04:06:00.000 It'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.

04:06:11.000 And he managed it now and then, but finally was overcome by the demons that possessed him, let's say.

04:06:21.000 You 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.

04:06:30.000 And I tried to tell him that the idea that those positions were beneath him was his own blindness.

04:06:39.000 Because there was an infinite amount of possibility everywhere.

04:06:42.000 So, like, I worked in restaurants and I had lots of working class jobs, like 30 of them.

04:06:47.000 Like, lots.

04:06:48.000 And I really liked working in restaurants.

04:06:49.000 I was a dishwasher.

04:06:51.000 I loved it once I got good at it.

04:06:53.000 And the reason I loved it is I was a kid, 14, and...

04:06:56.000 I got treated as an adult because I worked hard, you know.

04:07:00.000 And I loved that, man.

04:07:01.000 That was so great to be treated as an adult, a legitimate contributor.

04:07:05.000 You bet, you bet.

04:07:06.000 And then because I worked hard and was interested, the cook in the first restaurant who was a German chef, he taught me to cook.

04:07:15.000 Then 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.

04:07:38.000 There 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.

04:07:48.000 I 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.

04:08:02.000 Everything in the world was in that restaurant.

04:08:06.000 If 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.

04:08:15.000 And every single one of them quit.

04:08:19.000 So it's like they were in the same restaurant.

04:08:22.000 Yeah.

04:08:23.000 I had a very similar experience when I was young.

04:08:26.000 I worked at a place called Newport Creamery.

04:08:28.000 I was a short order cook.

04:08:30.000 Did you like it?

04:08:32.000 Yeah.

04:08:33.000 I enjoyed it.

04:08:34.000 I made friends with the people that worked there and hung out with them.

04:08:38.000 We had fun times together.

04:08:40.000 It taught you that you had a long shift.

04:08:43.000 Yeah.

04:08:44.000 It taught you the value of hard work.

04:08:46.000 There was something to it.

04:08:47.000 Yeah. 0.97

04:08:47.000 Scrubbing the grill and all the shit that you had to do and clean up before you could leave for the night. 0.97

04:08:52.000 Yeah, because I was little, man. 0.99

04:08:54.000 I was little.

04:08:55.000 The 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.

04:09:06.000 Yeah.

04:09:06.000 And I could fit.

04:09:07.000 It was so annoying because I could hardly get out, you know?

04:09:09.000 But they also used to drop me behind the big grill and to clean out the grease behind it.

04:09:15.000 Like, that's one filthy job, man.

04:09:17.000 That's a filthy job.

04:09:18.000 And I was the only one who could fit.

04:09:19.000 And so I was off to...

04:09:20.000 Yeah, yeah.

04:09:22.000 So, but... 0.99

04:09:23.000 There's value in shitty jobs. 0.98

04:09:25.000 There really is. 0.98

04:09:26.000 There's value in struggle.

04:09:27.000 You learn.

04:09:28.000 You learn and then it sucks at the time.

04:09:30.000 Well, and you know, those working class jobs... 0.98

04:09:33.000 They were fun in a way.

04:09:34.000 Now, I had fun with my colleagues at Harvard.

04:09:37.000 They were fun.

04:09:38.000 They joke.

04:09:39.000 We had fun in our faculty meetings.

04:09:40.000 That was back when you were allowed to joke?

04:09:42.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

04:09:43.000 But I liked those meetings because the faculty at Harvard at that time, at the 90s, they had a good attitude towards meetings.

04:09:49.000 That was pre-internet.

04:09:50.000 That's why.

04:09:50.000 It was like...

04:09:52.000 We're here to get this done as fast as we possibly can.

04:09:54.000 And if you have something intelligent to say, say it.

04:09:56.000 And if you're funny, that's okay too. 1.00

04:09:57.000 But otherwise, shut up. 0.98

04:09:58.000 And if you object, we'll put you on a committee and you can do the work outside the meeting. 0.99

04:10:02.000 I bet it's a lot different now.

04:10:03.000 It certainly might be.

04:10:04.000 I bet there's a lot of self-indulgent nonsense going on.

04:10:06.000 So Ellen Langer was there at the time.

04:10:09.000 She was a famous social psychologist and she had a vicious wit. 0.80

04:10:12.000 And Ellen's role was the meeting would progress and then she'd say something completely different.

04:10:16.000 Completely outrageous!

04:10:17.000 And everyone would laugh, and then we'd have the meeting some more, and then she'd say something else.

04:10:20.000 Completely outrageous!

04:10:22.000 And there was a real sense of humor.

04:10:23.000 And 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.

04:10:37.000 It was fun.

04:10:37.000 And I didn't experience that much in the intellectual realm once I was a faculty member, but I did there.

04:10:43.000 But in those working-class jobs, Like, that humor and camaraderie...

04:10:48.000 Gets people through.

04:10:49.000 Yeah, well, and it's so core to it, and it elevates the entire experience beyond the relative...

04:10:56.000 Basicness of the job.

04:10:58.000 Yes, sure.

04:10:59.000 And 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.

04:11:10.000 And a lot of what we did was pretty dissolute.

04:11:12.000 A 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. 0.93

04:11:21.000 Kind of nihilistic to the core. 0.98

04:11:23.000 Lot of drugs.

04:11:25.000 Not so fun.

04:11:26.000 But going to work, that was fun.

04:11:31.000 It gave you purpose.

04:11:33.000 And it gave me a community of productivity, you know?

04:11:38.000 So that was good.

04:11:40.000 And that's there in front of you.

04:11:41.000 You have a lowly job.

04:11:43.000 It's like this.

04:11:44.000 Hey, man, people are boring.

04:11:46.000 Everyone I talk to is so boring.

04:11:47.000 It's like... 0.89

04:11:49.000 Maybe it's you.

04:11:50.000 No, no, for sure it's you. 0.92

04:11:52.000 If 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. 0.85

04:12:02.000 And so if you're surrounded by people who are dull, try listening more.

04:12:07.000 They start telling you their story?

04:12:08.000 People are so weird.

04:12:10.000 Even so-called simple people, it's like, think people are simple.

04:12:15.000 You try building one.

04:12:16.000 They're not so simple.

04:12:18.000 Even people that, you know, wouldn't register in some sense on any normal social barometer.

04:12:24.000 You sit one of those people down and you have them tell you their life story?

04:12:29.000 Oh my God.

04:12:30.000 It's so interesting that it's, like, it's traumatically interesting.

04:12:34.000 I gotta wrap this up.

04:12:35.000 Alright, man.

04:12:35.000 I'm very sorry, but we...

04:12:37.000 Oh, you gave me four hours, Joe.

04:12:39.000 It was a lot of fun.

04:12:40.000 More.

04:12:40.000 Four and fifteen minutes now.

04:12:42.000 Alright, thank you, Jordan.

04:12:43.000 I appreciate you very much.

04:12:44.000 Hey.

04:12:44.000 Thank you.

04:12:45.000 The feeling's mutual.

04:12:46.000 Alright.

04:12:46.000 Bye, everybody.

04:12:47.000 See ya.

The Joe Rogan Experience - January 25, 2022

Joe Rogan Experience #1769 - Jordan Peterson

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