The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #958 - Jordan Peterson

00:00:04.000 Two.

00:00:05.000 One.

00:00:10.000 Boom.

00:00:11.000 Welcome back, Mr. Peterson.

00:00:12.000 Thank you.

00:00:13.000 How are you?

00:00:14.000 Not too bad.

00:00:15.000 How are you doing?

00:00:16.000 I'm doing good, man.

00:00:17.000 You look like... 0.55

00:00:19.000 A man who is dealing with a considerable amount of stress, but is handling it well.

00:00:24.000 Yeah, well, I hope that's true.

00:00:25.000 I think the first part of it's true.

00:00:27.000 I hope the second part is true.

00:00:28.000 I read that you were denied a grant for the first time in your history as an academic.

00:00:37.000 And you think this is all based on your outspoken and very public denouncing of the political correctness and of all this stuff that you've been going through over the past more than a year now?

00:00:52.000 I don't know, because I haven't got the full commentary on the grant yet.

00:00:56.000 I only found out that it was denied, and it takes the granting agency a while to send out the full report.

00:01:01.000 I've heard from other people.

00:01:02.000 I know some other people who I would consider relatively high-profile researchers who also didn't get funded this round.

00:01:09.000 So there might be multiple reasons, but I can't help suspect that the fact that the grant application concentrated on delineating the personality characteristics of politically correct belief might have had something to do with it.

00:01:22.000 Yeah, that's still a taboo subject.

00:01:25.000 It's fascinating that thinking and thinking and pondering and examining certain types of behavior would still be a taboo subject.

00:01:34.000 Yeah, it is amazing, all right, and becoming more taboo all the time, I would say.

00:01:38.000 I don't think the universities have...

00:01:40.000 I think they're getting worse still, and it'll be a while before they get better.

00:01:45.000 I shouldn't say that so globally, but it's certainly the case with the humanities and much of the social sciences.

00:01:50.000 Well, it seems globally.

00:01:51.000 I mean, not necessarily in terms of all the different subjects, but certainly in terms of what you teach and what you're involved in.

00:02:00.000 And it's just so...

00:02:03.000 I mean, I hate to use the word, but it's so regressive to put restrictions on the examining of thinking in a university.

00:02:12.000 I mean, it's kind of crazy.

00:02:14.000 I mean, what you went through in one of your most recent public speeches where they allowed these kids to be in the room with you with bullhorns and they were screaming.

00:02:28.000 Jamie, see if you can find the video of that.

00:02:29.000 What was the name?

00:02:30.000 McMaster.

00:02:30.000 That was at McMaster University.

00:02:32.000 Yeah.

00:02:33.000 And you were giving your speech, and there were supposed to be some other people involved.

00:02:37.000 They backed out, and you decided to continue on.

00:02:40.000 So you're standing there in front of these people that were there to hear you talk, and there's a group of kids with bullhorns, like literally, and shouting and yelling and chanting with signs in the room.

00:02:53.000 Just completely disrupting what you're doing, and they allowed this all to happen.

00:02:56.000 Mm-hmm.

00:02:56.000 Air horns as well.

00:02:58.000 So, yeah, and they were blowing air horns quite close to me.

00:03:00.000 That was the one thing I really objected to, because air horns actually happen to be quite loud.

00:03:05.000 Not only that, it's actually an assault on your ears.

00:03:08.000 It's very bad for your hearing.

00:03:09.000 Like, you're not supposed to be in a room with those without hearing protection. 1.00

00:03:13.000 They're supposed to be, like, for, like, scary things.

00:03:15.000 Like, play some of this, Jamie, so we can hear how crazy it is.

00:03:28.000 So they're yelling, shut him down, no freedom for hate speech.

00:03:33.000 And the hate speech thing has, like, the prince symbol.

00:03:39.000 Meets some sort of Martian language. 0.98

00:03:42.000 Like, what the fuck is that that they have on that no freedom for hate speech? 0.99

00:03:46.000 I guess it's a polygender symbol of some sort. 0.99

00:03:50.000 There's a fist in it.

00:03:51.000 But one of the things that was really not so good about all of that was that a lot of the people who were protesting were standing behind a hammer and sickle banner.

00:04:01.000 You know, which just absolutely amazes me, because I still haven't been able to quite figure this out.

00:04:06.000 I can't figure out why you couldn't do that with a Nazi symbol, but you can do that with a hammer and sickle. 0.68

00:04:12.000 You know, there's a reason.

00:04:15.000 Maybe it's because the Nazi doctrine was so explicitly racist, but God, it's not like the hammer and sickle wasn't equally murderous, or actually quite profoundly more murderous, as it turned out.

00:04:26.000 And how people cannot still know that is...

00:04:30.000 Beyond me.

00:04:31.000 And to rally behind a banner like that without realizing what they're doing.

00:04:36.000 Or, even worse, realizing it and still organizing themselves behind it.

00:04:41.000 Did you ask him?

00:04:43.000 No, there's no real communicating with people who are demonstrating like that.

00:04:47.000 They're in a kind of trance, you know?

00:04:49.000 And I went up to try to talk to a couple of them.

00:04:52.000 And...

00:04:54.000 But when you look at people who are in that state of mind, they're not looking at you as if you're a human being.

00:05:00.000 You know, you're the target of their conceptualizations.

00:05:03.000 You're the realization of their conceptualizations.

00:05:06.000 Of course, they didn't listen to anything I said.

00:05:08.000 Well, hardly anyone did, although I got to talk outside because I took everybody outside and then spoke out there for a while.

00:05:14.000 And when you were outside, were there still yelling and bullhorns and the whole deal?

00:05:17.000 Oh yeah, but what happened, I went outside and I stood on a couple of benches, and the people that wanted to hear kind of made a circle around me, and that more or less, by chance, pushed all the protesters to the back so that I could address the people that actually wanted to listen to what I was saying.

00:05:36.000 And so did you have a dialogue with them, or did you give a speech, and how did that work?

00:05:41.000 I didn't have a dialogue at all with the protesters.

00:05:44.000 I mean, with the people that came to see you?

00:05:45.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:05:46.000 That worked out okay once I got outside.

00:05:47.000 And I mean, I wasn't particularly upset with the fact that the protesters had showed up.

00:05:54.000 I mean, practically speaking, because...

00:05:57.000 I'm in this peculiar situation where if the protesters show up, that's good, and if they don't show up, that's good too.

00:06:03.000 It's good if they show up, because I have access to a YouTube audience, obviously, and then it gets filmed, and the films get put together, and that gets put online, and generally speaking, when the social justice types have come after me, they've done a pretty admirable job of discrediting themselves.

00:06:20.000 And so that seems to be all to the good.

00:06:22.000 And then if they let me speak, well, then I get to speak and I can put that on YouTube. 0.96

00:06:26.000 So it's a very strange situation for me, because as long as I don't do anything too stupid, or anything any stupider than I have done, let's say, I seem to come out okay. 0.67

00:06:36.000 And I'm certainly not counting on that continuing, and I'm not... 0.78

00:06:43.000 I'm surprised by it, but so far it seems to be working out.

00:06:47.000 So, you know, hooray!

00:06:49.000 Well, I think the way you handled it is admirable.

00:06:52.000 The way you kept your cool and just continued talking and didn't flip out and didn't give in, didn't succumb to the provocation.

00:07:02.000 It's because they're obviously provoking you, and they're obviously...

00:07:04.000 I just don't understand how the university allows them to do that, how they allow them to be in that room, first of all, with those air horns, which are really bad for anybody in that room who's near them.

00:07:14.000 It causes hearing damage.

00:07:16.000 Yeah, well, and the one person who was air horning me was really quite, I would say, let's say forward about it.

00:07:24.000 They were coming close enough to me to...

00:07:27.000 To do some damage.

00:07:30.000 But I have seen the odd person at those rallies that really isn't well put together.

00:07:38.000 I look in their eyes and I think, no, you're definitely here for the wrong reasons.

00:07:44.000 And I think it's more characteristic often of the guys that I see at the events rather than the women. 0.97

00:07:49.000 I mean, I'm not sure about that.

00:07:50.000 I'm obviously speculating.

00:07:51.000 Right.

00:07:52.000 You know, I have a reasonably good clinical intuition and some of the guys I see at those events, they're...

00:07:56.000 I don't know what their story is, man.

00:07:58.000 I don't know what they're up to.

00:08:00.000 I guess they're...

00:08:01.000 What are they trying to do?

00:08:02.000 Be allies of the women for their own nefarious purposes? 1.00

00:08:05.000 I mean, that's what it looks like to me, you know.

00:08:07.000 Well, there's certainly an issue with that.

00:08:09.000 It's a common thread with men, especially in the male feminist category, that they align themselves with these women as allies and as this...

00:08:20.000 They take this moral high ground and they're this person that's going to show other men how to do feminism and how to behave with women.

00:08:29.000 They're really just sort of...

00:08:31.000 They're mining the situations for social points.

00:08:35.000 Yeah, well, for social and sexual points, my guess.

00:08:38.000 Sexual, yeah.

00:08:38.000 Absolutely.

00:08:39.000 There's something seriously creepy about it.

00:08:41.000 I mean, I saw, too, that guy at the Berkeley, the recent Berkeley...

00:08:49.000 The guy who hit someone with a bike lock, remember, in a bag?

00:08:54.000 And he was hiding behind some women, and then he darted out and just nailed the guy with a bike lock, with what turned out to be a bike lock.

00:09:00.000 A guy was just hanging there talking.

00:09:01.000 He wasn't being violent.

00:09:02.000 He wasn't doing anything.

00:09:04.000 And by the way, that guy turned out to be a professor.

00:09:05.000 They found that guy.

00:09:06.000 Yeah, and so has that been verified, all of that?

00:09:09.000 There's photographs of him.

00:09:10.000 There's photographs of his face.

00:09:12.000 They compared his eyes to the professor's eyes. 0.98

00:09:15.000 They know that the guy was there, and then the guy aligns himself with Marxism, and he's this, like, communist-slash-socialist professor who's very adamantly against right-wing ideology and this kind of shit. 0.94

00:09:32.000 So, they're pretty sure that that's the guy. 0.89

00:09:34.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:09:35.000 Well, I kind of followed that, and I noticed all that.

00:09:37.000 I mean, as far as I'm concerned, watching what he did, that's the true face of those people.

00:09:42.000 It's assault.

00:09:43.000 I mean, he hit a guy with a deadly weapon.

00:09:44.000 Yeah.

00:09:45.000 I also thought it was Blackley comic, that it was a bike lock.

00:09:48.000 I mean, that just figures, you know.

00:09:52.000 Well, it's just the idea that you could just walk up to someone you don't like the way they think and hit them in the head with a metal thing.

00:09:58.000 It's so crazy and so delusional and so indicative of someone who looks at a person as the other.

00:10:05.000 You're not looking at it as a human being who disagrees with you.

00:10:08.000 Not only that, a young human being.

00:10:10.000 Talk about a lack of empathy.

00:10:12.000 I mean, you're expecting this 20-year-old guy or however old the guy was to get hit in the head.

00:10:17.000 You're expecting him to have his ideology down solid and not be influenced by peers or not be curious about what this argument is about.

00:10:25.000 The guy wasn't even yelling anything.

00:10:27.000 He was just standing there.

00:10:28.000 Yeah, well, that's kind of what I thought about the protesters at McMaster, too.

00:10:32.000 You know, it's partly why I don't get upset.

00:10:33.000 It's like I look at these kids that are out there protesting, you know, apart from the professional protester types, and I think, well, Jesus, they've been served so badly by the education system that it's absolutely beyond belief, you know.

00:10:45.000 They're basically being sent out as avatars of this...

00:10:49.000 Pathological post-modern movement by their professors who are themselves too cowardly to show up, generally speaking, and certainly aren't brave enough to debate me. 0.74

00:10:58.000 Or if they do show up, they're like this guy with a mask on hitting people in the head, who was a professor. 0.87

00:11:02.000 Yeah, well, they don't believe in dialogue.

00:11:04.000 You know, it's not part of the post-modern ethos to have a dialogue with people you don't agree with.

00:11:10.000 So you weren't able to talk to anyone that opposed you?

00:11:13.000 Not so far, not in any serious sense.

00:11:15.000 Were you able to talk to anyone that had the hammer and sickle sign and ask them, like, do you understand what this stands for?

00:11:22.000 What does this mean to you?

00:11:23.000 Like, what are you trying to project by having this sign?

00:11:27.000 Yeah, no, no, it wasn't possible at that venue.

00:11:30.000 I mean, like I said, whenever I got close to anybody that was protesting, there was no one-to-one human interaction, you know.

00:11:37.000 I mean, I can tell when someone's...

00:11:49.000 Well, that seems to me to be one of the weirder aspects of this The thing that you're going through, this series of altercations that you're going through, is the lack of discourse.

00:12:02.000 And there was this one that you went on television, we talked about the last time you were here, with this very bizarre, androgynous person that was saying there's no gender, there's no biological basis for gender, which is just complete insanity, and you shooting that down.

00:12:24.000 It's insanity for sure, but it's the kind of insanity that's going to have legal force very soon.

00:12:30.000 What is it specifically?

00:12:32.000 Well, with Bill C-16, which was the bill that I was complaining about, or criticizing, let's say, there's a variety of surrounding policy documents that are derived from the Ontario Human Rights Commission, and they indicate quite clearly that you're to regard biological sex,

00:12:50.000 gender identity, gender expression, and sexual proclivity as varying independently.

00:12:56.000 Which, of course, they don't.

00:12:57.000 By any stretch of the imagination, they're so tightly correlated that, well, you can't use correlation to imply cause or to infer causality.

00:13:06.000 But Jesus, when the correlations are above.95, you have to start wondering if there's actually not some causal link.

00:13:12.000 And it's absurd to me that we really even have to have that discussion.

00:13:16.000 But the notion, and this is being taught to school kids, this is mainstream doctrine, Joe.

00:13:23.000 I mean, look up the gender unicorn. 0.97

00:13:25.000 That's a fun thing to look up.

00:13:27.000 What is the gender unicorn? 0.99

00:13:28.000 The gender unicorn is this little happy symbol that's being marketed to children in elementary school, describing to them the fact that biological sex, gender identity, gender expression, and sexual proclivity vary independently.

00:13:43.000 They're going after them very young.

00:13:46.000 And so that's part of the school system now, in many, many places.

00:13:50.000 So in many ways it's sort of an indoctrination.

00:13:52.000 Yeah, you might say that, yeah.

00:13:54.000 The gender unicorn.

00:13:55.000 The gender unicorn, man.

00:13:56.000 Check that thing out.

00:13:57.000 Gender identity.

00:13:58.000 Female, woman, girl, male, man, boy, other gender. 0.69

00:14:02.000 Gender expression.

00:14:03.000 Feminine, masculine, other.

00:14:04.000 Sex assigned at birth.

00:14:06.000 Female, male, other.

00:14:08.000 Intersex. 0.99

00:14:09.000 Ooh, like aliens. 0.88

00:14:11.000 Physically attracted to men, women, other.

00:14:15.000 Another gender, S, emotionally attracted.

00:14:19.000 So what you do if you're a kid is you put a little marker there on the arrow to show where you're located on all those independent dimensions.

00:14:26.000 And obviously, if you look at the style of the gender unicorn, you can tell what sort of age it's aimed at, because that looks like it's aimed for, certainly not aimed at kids over, I would say, ten. 0.57

00:14:37.000 Yeah, why does a gender unicorn have a double helix DNA symbol where its penis or vagina should be? 1.00

00:14:43.000 That's to indicate that there's no such thing as biology, I presume. 0.93

00:14:48.000 But why?

00:14:50.000 That's how ironic.

00:14:52.000 Yeah, you might say so, yeah.

00:14:54.000 It's a weird place to put it, over the crotch of the unicorn.

00:14:57.000 Yeah, there's an indefinite number of weird things about that.

00:15:01.000 Yes, there's the gender-bred person. 1.00

00:15:05.000 That's a...

00:15:05.000 A gender-bred person has a male symbol, female symbol, and then a what-am-I all together with a circle.

00:15:15.000 Is that a hole?

00:15:16.000 It's not a hole.

00:15:17.000 Circle.

00:15:18.000 It's a strange, problematic place for the circle, I would say.

00:15:21.000 Very assumptive.

00:15:22.000 I would say so, yes.

00:15:23.000 I don't like that at all.

00:15:25.000 I feel triggered.

00:15:26.000 The whole thing is...

00:15:28.000 It's so bizarre, but what's even more bizarre is the lack of dialogue.

00:15:33.000 I feel like...

00:15:35.000 You're in a weird position where there's a tremendous amount of support for you outside of the academic system.

00:15:43.000 People like me, people like so many people that support your YouTube videos, so many people that read about you online.

00:15:49.000 You're experiencing all this backlash at like McMasters and these sort of things.

00:15:55.000 But people are not engaging you.

00:15:57.000 And the way they're keeping from engaging you is saying that you are demonstrating hate speech.

00:16:03.000 Yeah, well, there's hate speech, there's racism.

00:16:06.000 The reason I've been called a racist is because I complained, I criticized the University of Toronto's decision to use the Toronto chapter of Black Lives Matter as policy advisors.

00:16:16.000 And the reason I did that was because the two women who founded Black Lives Matter in Toronto, let's say they have questionable reputations and leave it at that. 1.00

00:16:29.000 And so apparently that makes me racist because... 0.77

00:16:32.000 You're not allowed to question them because they're black. 1.00

00:16:35.000 They have carte blanche. 0.97

00:16:48.000 Communicates cosmically so that you're spiritually enlightened.

00:16:51.000 That was one essential claim.

00:16:52.000 And the other one is embroiled in a lawsuit with the University of Toronto Students' Union for, essentially, she's been accused of embezzling with a couple cronies about $400,000 from the coffers of the Students' Union.

00:17:06.000 So I felt that perhaps those weren't the best people for the University of Toronto to be associating with when they're formulating their anti-racist policies.

00:17:15.000 Well, clearly that makes you racist.

00:17:16.000 Clearly.

00:17:17.000 Clearly.

00:17:17.000 Well, it's fascinating.

00:17:18.000 And transphobic as well.

00:17:20.000 Oh.

00:17:20.000 All together?

00:17:21.000 Yes.

00:17:21.000 In one little lump sum?

00:17:22.000 That's me, man.

00:17:23.000 Right there, just one thing?

00:17:24.000 Yeah.

00:17:24.000 But what's really fascinating about that is, like, you're not saying anything about black people.

00:17:28.000 You're saying about two individuals.

00:17:29.000 Two individuals that you're having very specific things.

00:17:32.000 Yeah, but you know everybody that makes up a group is the same.

00:17:35.000 Ah.

00:17:35.000 You see, you have to understand that.

00:17:38.000 Except men and women.

00:17:38.000 Right.

00:17:39.000 That's right.

00:17:40.000 Except men and women.

00:17:41.000 Because men and women can be anything.

00:17:42.000 Well, there's an interesting angle on the transsexual thing, too, because these activists, they stand out and claim that they're standing for oppressed communities, right?

00:17:51.000 And first of all, they identify the identity group that they're activating on the part of as a community.

00:17:59.000 And then they imply that it's a homogenous community.

00:18:02.000 And then they state that because they happen to be members of that community by their own admission, let's say, or by their own declaration, that's a better word, that they are now legitimate representatives of that community.

00:18:14.000 And one of the things that's been quite fascinating to me since this has occurred is that I've had a very, a comparatively large number of letters from transgender people, about 35 so far, and every one of those except one was positive. 1.00

00:18:27.000 They are not happy about, like, the...

00:18:30.000 My sampling of the trans community, which isn't It's not a random sample or anything like that, but 35 letters is a lot when the community of people is actually quite small.

00:18:43.000 And they're not happy at all.

00:18:45.000 They're not happy to be so publicly discussed now, because many of them would just assume have some privacy, and they're already having trouble fitting in.

00:18:53.000 They don't regard these people as legitimate representatives.

00:18:57.000 They're not homogenous in their political viewpoints.

00:19:01.000 You know, and they're not necessarily fans of the people who are playing gender-bender games, because many of the transsexuals who are, let's say, serious about it, you know, for lack of a better way of describing it, aren't happy that this has become a kind of a fad, essentially, 0.96

00:19:16.000 and that they're being used by the politically correct types to further their political agenda. 1.00

00:19:20.000 So that's quite cool, too, because...

00:19:23.000 It isn't obvious to me at all that the attitude that I have towards the situation is actually different in any genuine sense than the attitude that at least a substantial minority of the transsexual people themselves have.

00:19:37.000 And there's plenty of them on YouTube who are complaining about the social justice appropriation of their Well, I don't even know if they have a movement.

00:19:47.000 They're not a community, right?

00:19:49.000 I mean, they're not a community.

00:19:51.000 I mean, a community is in continual contact with one another.

00:19:55.000 They have something...

00:19:57.000 That directs their actions in common.

00:19:59.000 I mean, but, you know, on the postmodern end of the spectrum, if you have some identifiable group feature, then that means you're one of that group and that everything that you do indicates only that.

00:20:14.000 I mean, there are believers in race and gender.

00:20:18.000 And sex, they believe in the reality of those categories far more than anybody on the right, as far as I can tell.

00:20:25.000 So it's very peculiar and unnerving.

00:20:31.000 And widespread, and powerful, and all of those things.

00:20:34.000 It's very peculiar that they are not into labels unless it suits their purposes.

00:20:40.000 They're not into labels or into generalizing behavior unless it suits their purpose.

00:20:46.000 And also, another thing that's weird to me is that whenever something becomes an issue that becomes discussed, that becomes a hot-button issue, which clearly, transgender rights, Whether it's the North Carolina bill to keep transgender people out of the bathrooms that they identify with,

00:21:05.000 with whatever gender it is.

00:21:06.000 Whenever there's some sort of a hot button issue, there becomes this thing where a bunch of people seek attention through those issues.

00:21:15.000 And these people use whatever issue it is, it becomes like a part of their identity, like becoming an activist and really being very vocal about it.

00:21:28.000 Whereas the actual cause itself gets muddied in the cult of personality and it gets muddied in these personal wishes and ideas that the people who are seeking to get attention by communicating about these ideas sort of soak in.

00:21:45.000 You know, it just becomes a lot about human nature and human behavior more than it is about the actual issue itself.

00:21:53.000 Yeah, well, it's an opportunity.

00:21:54.000 Each of these hypothetically contentious issues is an opportunity for a certain kind of sterile drama to unfold.

00:22:01.000 And the drama is always the same.

00:22:03.000 I mean, you can see that in the demonstrations, say, with regards to my talks.

00:22:07.000 It doesn't matter what I'm talking about, and it actually doesn't matter what I've ever said.

00:22:11.000 All that matters is that There's an occasion and an excuse to trot out the ideology and to pathetically mouth the same unbelievably sterile and chaotic phrases.

00:22:26.000 I think the people at McMaster, the protesters, could only muster about three chants and two of them were seriously obscene, which I don't care about except that it's so mindlessly unimaginative They're operating at such a low level of intellectual effort and, 0.65

00:22:46.000 of course, egged on by their pathological postmodern professors who are hiding behind them like scared weasels.

00:22:55.000 Yeah, there's shut him down, that was the big one, racist, transphobic, homophobic, all these things without substance, because there's no... 1.00

00:23:03.000 Piece of shit was the other one that was quite... 1.00

00:23:05.000 Transphobic piece of shit, or just piece of shit? 1.00

00:23:07.000 That's right, yes, no, no, it was more specific, yes, it was more specific, which was, you know, rather flattering and all of that. 1.00

00:23:13.000 Yeah, well, you don't seem to have any hate towards trans people, at all.

00:23:19.000 No, I mean, from discussions I've had with you, both on and off the air, The idea of you being transphobic seems so inaccurate because you seem pretty accepting about anybody, whether it's a trans person, a gay person.

00:23:32.000 It's not the issue, is it?

00:23:34.000 Well, I'm more concerned about whether or not people are honest.

00:23:37.000 I mean, that's my fundamental orientation, or my fundamental concern.

00:23:44.000 I mean, I don't expect people to be 100% honest because, of course, who is?

00:23:49.000 I mean, that's a hell of a...

00:23:51.000 It's a high standard to hold anyone to, but all of that is smoke and mirrors, and I think the people who are after me know it.

00:23:58.000 Well, let's get through some of that, just to sort of establish it for people maybe that don't know.

00:24:03.000 Do you have any issue whatsoever with someone being transgender?

00:24:07.000 No, I don't have any issue with that.

00:24:09.000 What I have an issue with is that I don't like to see the postmodern neo-Marxists use the transsexual issue as a lever for pushing forward their political nonsense.

00:24:20.000 And I said that right from the beginning in the videos I made to begin with.

00:24:23.000 The reason I wouldn't use the words Z and Xur and all those other made-up words, however many there are now, is because I'm not willing to cede the linguistic territory to postmodern radicals.

00:24:35.000 I'm not doing that.

00:24:36.000 And they say, well, we're doing it on behalf of the oppressed transsexual people. 0.95

00:24:40.000 And I think, yeah, well, that's what you say, but there's no reason I should believe that.

00:24:44.000 I don't believe anything you say. 0.98

00:24:45.000 I think you're contemptible, cowardly, ideologically motivated, cult-like corrupters of the youth. 0.99

00:24:53.000 So why would I use your language? 0.99

00:24:55.000 Well, let's unpack that.

00:24:57.000 Because one of the things that I find fascinating is how few transgender people want to use those words.

00:25:03.000 The transgender people seem to want to identify with whatever gender they... 1.00

00:25:07.000 Like, if you are a male to female transgender person, you would prefer to be called a she.

00:25:12.000 Right.

00:25:12.000 Like Caitlyn Jenner, right?

00:25:14.000 Right.

00:25:14.000 And pretty much everybody calls the artist formerly known as Bruce Jenner, Caitlyn Jenner, right?

00:25:20.000 That's just...

00:25:22.000 If you had a look at how many people just openly accept it, it's pretty well accepted, right?

00:25:29.000 Most transgender people prefer that.

00:25:31.000 They prefer female to male. 0.99

00:25:34.000 They prefer to be a man now. 0.99

00:25:35.000 I'm a man now.

00:25:36.000 Okay, Bob. 0.98

00:25:38.000 Dick, whatever your name is.

00:25:40.000 There's not a lot of zzer talk. 1.00

00:25:42.000 Maybe I'm out of the loop?

00:25:43.000 No, you're not out of the loop.

00:25:44.000 The other thing is those are all third-person pronouns.

00:25:46.000 It's like, I'm not going to call you a third-person pronoun while we're sitting here.

00:25:49.000 I never would.

00:25:50.000 If I'm referring to you when I'm talking to someone else...

00:25:54.000 Call their name, right.

00:25:55.000 Well, I could use your name.

00:25:56.000 I might use he then, but I don't know...

00:25:59.000 Well, it's just all of it is palpably absurd.

00:26:02.000 I think it's always hard to get the level of analysis for this sort of issue correct.

00:26:07.000 You know, because the people who are pushing it forward say, well, we're against harassment and discrimination.

00:26:14.000 And they attribute all the moral virtue to themselves.

00:26:18.000 But then what I see is that they're utilizing a group, a very small minority group, who already have enough problems, in my estimation, for nothing other than straightforward political purposes.

00:26:30.000 I don't buy the...

00:26:33.000 The warm-hearted, you know, all-inclusive love that the people who are pushing this sort of thing forward claim to display.

00:26:41.000 I don't see that at all.

00:26:42.000 What I see mostly is resentment and the desire to undermine.

00:26:46.000 And I'm quite familiar with the postmodern philosophy, not as familiar as I could be, and also reasonably familiar with its underlying Marxism.

00:26:53.000 And there's nothing touchy-feely about any of that, I can tell you.

00:26:56.000 The best you can do with postmodernist philosophy is emerge nihilistic.

00:27:02.000 That's the best.

00:27:03.000 The worst case is that you're a kind of anarchical social revolutionary that's directionless, except that you want to tear things apart.

00:27:11.000 Or that you end up depressed, which I see happening to students all the time, because the postmodernists, like, rip out the remaining structures of their foundations, of their ethical foundations.

00:27:22.000 So just to be really clear, for anybody tuning in, your issues are absolutely not with someone who identifies with a gender other than their biological gender.

00:27:31.000 As long as they're not using that to promote a political agenda.

00:27:34.000 But I don't care about the gender thing.

00:27:36.000 It doesn't mean anything.

00:27:39.000 Well, it's a personal issue.

00:27:43.000 And I would also deal with it on an individual-to-individual basis.

00:27:50.000 Because it varies just as much as there are extremely masculine men, extremely feminine women, and there's a broad spectrum of human beings in between, and each one should be dealt with on an individual basis based on what they want.

00:28:02.000 But when you're talking about these made-up words, what it seems like is that some people are trying to push these made-up words and turn them mainstream.

00:28:13.000 Now the question is, what's the motivation behind that?

00:28:15.000 Is this a necessary thing?

00:28:17.000 Are there so many people that are of asexual or of some sort of...

00:28:23.000 I mean, what would be a Z or a Xur? 1.00

00:28:26.000 What is that supposed to be?

00:28:27.000 Is that supposed to be a male or a female?

00:28:29.000 Is it supposed to be asexual?

00:28:31.000 Or is it supposed to be a nonconformist?

00:28:34.000 I mean, what is it?

00:28:35.000 Well, it's supposed to be someone whose gender isn't specified.

00:28:40.000 Right, who's neither male nor female.

00:28:42.000 Or maybe, they say technically in the policy guidelines, is anywhere or nowhere on the spectrum.

00:28:49.000 And that's actually in the policy guidelines in Ontario.

00:28:52.000 Anywhere or nowhere?

00:28:53.000 Right.

00:28:54.000 And the nowhere, I mean, these are policies that are going to determine law, right, within which the law is going to be interpreted.

00:29:00.000 I don't even know what nowhere on the spectrum means.

00:29:03.000 I don't understand what that means.

00:29:05.000 Doesn't mean anything. 0.75

00:29:06.000 It's nonsense. 0.84

00:29:07.000 So you have...

00:29:09.000 So here's the options, right?

00:29:10.000 There's someone who identifies with the opposite gender of their biological birth.

00:29:17.000 So there's a man, for instance, who identifies as a woman.

00:29:21.000 Everyone's cool with that.

00:29:22.000 Whatever your name is, whatever you would like to be called, whether it's Wendy or Mike or whatever it is, that would be the noise that you want people to make with their mouth that means you.

00:29:33.000 That's it.

00:29:34.000 Right?

00:29:34.000 Now, whether you're a he or a she, outside of that, that's where things get squirrely.

00:29:39.000 So third person is the only issue.

00:29:41.000 The only issue is, like, say if we were talking to Jamie.

00:29:43.000 Jamie just decided to...

00:29:44.000 He's going to be Jamie now.

00:29:46.000 He's still Jamie.

00:29:47.000 Jamie's a girl's name, too.

00:29:48.000 I know a girl's name, Jamie.

00:29:50.000 So he could be Jamie.

00:29:52.000 And Jamie decides he's a woman. 0.85

00:29:54.000 And now he wants to be called she.

00:29:57.000 And we're like, okay.

00:29:58.000 Okay, she. 0.76

00:29:59.000 All right, Jamie.

00:30:00.000 Now you're she. 0.93

00:30:01.000 But when it gets to like zur and zee and the 78 different gender pronouns, it seems to a person outside of it, a person who's cisgendered, It seems pretty bizarre, and it seems pretty preposterous, 0.61

00:30:17.000 and it seems pretty indulgent, and it seems like there's something else going on.

00:30:21.000 Well, that's the thing.

00:30:22.000 It's the something else going on part that is what concerns me.

00:30:26.000 There is something else going on.

00:30:28.000 If there wasn't something else going on, a relatively obscure professor's amateurish YouTube videos on a relatively obscure piece of Canadian legislation wouldn't have had any effect, right?

00:30:41.000 It would have just disappeared.

00:30:43.000 But it didn't.

00:30:43.000 And that's because there's more going on than the straightforward issue surrounding the pronoun use, and everybody knows it, or everybody feels it, at least.

00:30:52.000 Well, what it seems like from someone who's outside of academia, someone like me, is it seems like you're pushing back against something that they are really trying hard to establish, and that it's some kind of control.

00:31:06.000 It's some kind of control...

00:31:08.000 With how people behave and communicate.

00:31:11.000 And it's not like a societal thing.

00:31:15.000 It's a very small, isolated group of people that seem to be trying to indoctrinate others into their ways.

00:31:22.000 And they're becoming very vocal and very angry and verbally violent about your opposition to their controlling the way that other people communicate about things.

00:31:33.000 Yeah, well, they don't like me poking holes in their ideology.

00:31:37.000 The post here, we could lay it out quickly, you know, because I've been thinking about how to communicate this properly.

00:31:43.000 And so the thing about the postmodernists, and I'm going to speak mostly about Jacques Derrida, because I'll consider him the central villain.

00:31:52.000 Now, he actually...

00:31:54.000 They make a point.

00:31:56.000 Explain who he is, please.

00:31:57.000 Well, he's a French philosopher, a French intellectual who became quite popular in the late 1970s and then was introduced to North America through the Yale Department of English.

00:32:06.000 And, of course, English literature is one of the disciplines that has become entirely corrupt.

00:32:10.000 And so Derrida was a Marxist to begin with.

00:32:16.000 But that fell out of favour because it turned out that Marxist political doctrine kept producing evil empires and even radical left French intellectuals were forced to admit that by the mid-1970s.

00:32:28.000 You know, they'd put their head in the sand for 20 years, 50 years really, thoroughly in the sand and made sure their ears were full too.

00:32:36.000 But by the mid-1970s, the evidence that that was the case was so overwhelming that even a French intellectual couldn't deny it anymore, and so they started to play sleight of hand with the Marxist ideas.

00:32:46.000 So instead of trying to promote the revolution of the working class against the capitalist class, let's say, they started to play identity politics and said, well, we can just separate everybody into oppressed versus oppressor, but we don't have to do it on economic grounds.

00:33:02.000 And we can call it power instead of economics.

00:33:05.000 So that was part of it.

00:33:06.000 And then the other thing, but the fundamental critique that Derrida focused on, this is really worth laying out, because the problem that he discovered, the postmodernists discovered, was discovered by a variety of other people at the same time in other disciplines.

00:33:22.000 So, for example...

00:33:24.000 Among the people who were studying artificial intelligence, since the early 1960s, it was always supposed that we'd be able to make machines that could move around in a natural environment without too much problem.

00:33:34.000 And the reason we could do that was because the world, in some sense, was just made out of simple objects.

00:33:39.000 There they are, and all you have to do is look at them and you see them, and that's vision.

00:33:43.000 And then the complex problem is not how to see or what to see, but how to act in reference to what you see.

00:33:49.000 But it turned out that...

00:33:51.000 The AI people ran into this problem essentially sometimes known as the frame problem.

00:33:56.000 And the frame problem is that there's almost an infinite number of ways to look at a finite set of objects.

00:34:02.000 So the fact that vision, for example, turns out to be way, way, way more complicated than anybody ever estimated.

00:34:11.000 In fact, you can't actually solve the vision problem until you solve the embodiment problem.

00:34:15.000 So an artificial intelligence that doesn't have a body can't really see, because seeing is actually the mapping of the world onto action.

00:34:23.000 And so that was figured out more or less by a robotics engineer called Rodney Brooks.

00:34:28.000 But what's at the bottom of this is the idea that any set of phenomena can be seen a very large number of ways.

00:34:35.000 So, like, there's a bunch of pens in front of me here.

00:34:37.000 You know, and when I look at them, my brain basically notes that they're a grippable object with which I can write.

00:34:43.000 So I see the function.

00:34:45.000 Like, if you look at a beanbag, you see a chair.

00:34:48.000 Not because it's got four legs and a seat in the back, but because you can sit on it.

00:34:52.000 And most of what we see in the world, we actually see functionally, rather than see as an object and then interpret the object and then figure out what to do.

00:35:00.000 So the function of the object constrains our interpretation.

00:35:03.000 But there's an endless number of interpretations.

00:35:06.000 So, for example, if I was going to paint that, you know, Paint on canvas this set of pens and try to do it in a photorealistic way.

00:35:13.000 I would be looking at tiny details of these objects, the multiple shades of red that are there and the multiple shades of white and black.

00:35:22.000 You know, I would decompose it in many ways.

00:35:25.000 And so the AI guys ran into this problem, which was that looking at the world turned out to be exceptionally complex.

00:35:31.000 And that's still being solved now.

00:35:34.000 Okay, in literature, the same thing happened.

00:35:37.000 What the postmodernists realized was that if you took a complex book, let's say the Bible, for example, or a Shakespeare play, there's an endless number of potential interpretations that you can derive from it because it's so complex and so sophisticated.

00:35:51.000 So imagine that Well, you can interpret the word, you can interpret the phrase, you can interpret the sentence, you can interpret the paragraph, you can interpret the chapter.

00:36:02.000 Let's say you have to interpret that within the confines of the entire work, then of the entire tradition, and then within the context of discussion that you're currently having, and all of those things affect how you're going to interpret the play.

00:36:17.000 So that their conclusion was, well, there's an infinite number of ways to interpret a text.

00:36:21.000 And then their conclusion was, well, there's an infinite number of ways to interpret the world.

00:36:26.000 And there's a way in which that's correct.

00:36:30.000 And so the next conclusion was, there's no right way to do it.

00:36:34.000 So you could do it any old way.

00:36:35.000 And then their next conclusion was, oh, and this is where the Marxism creeped up again.

00:36:40.000 Oh, people interpret the world in a way that facilitates their acquisition of power.

00:36:45.000 Now that's where the bloody theory starts to get corrupt.

00:36:48.000 Because, yes, a bit, but also no, right?

00:36:52.000 Because, and this is why they're wrong.

00:36:54.000 This is why they're wrong.

00:36:55.000 You see...

00:36:57.000 The world is complicated beyond our ability to comprehend.

00:37:01.000 So there is a very large number of ways you can interpret it.

00:37:04.000 But, but, you have to extract out from the world A game from your interpretation that you can actually play.

00:37:14.000 So if the lesson that you extract from Hamlet is you should kill your family and yourself, then we might say that that's not a very functional interpretation, right?

00:37:25.000 Because, first of all, people are going to object to that, right? 0.98

00:37:28.000 It ends your life.

00:37:29.000 It ends many people's lives.

00:37:30.000 People are going to object to it.

00:37:32.000 And it isn't a game that you can play over and over again in the world.

00:37:36.000 So when we're interacting with the world, you see, what we're trying to do is to extract out a set of tools that we can use to function in the world, because we're constrained by the world, so that we don't suffer too much, and so that the things that we need in order to continue can be provided.

00:37:52.000 And we need to extract those out in a way that other people will...

00:37:55.000 so that other people will cooperate and compete with us in a peaceful and maintainable way.

00:38:01.000 So then you think, well...

00:38:03.000 We have to extract out an interpretation that allows us to live and thrive over multiple periods of time in multiple environments while we're doing the same thing with other individuals who are motivated the same way.

00:38:16.000 So there's a tremendous number of constraints on our interpretations and the postmodernists don't care about that at all.

00:38:22.000 All they do is say, well...

00:38:23.000 No, no.

00:38:24.000 You can interpret the world any way you want.

00:38:27.000 All people are ever doing is playing power games based on their identity, and there's going to be no crosstalk between the power hierarchies.

00:38:35.000 It's not even allowed.

00:38:36.000 That's why they don't engage in dialogue.

00:38:39.000 See, just to talk to, like, let's say, if you're a postmodernist, just to have a discussion with someone like you, you know, a heterosexual, what do they call this, cisgendered male of power, you know, and white to boot, it's like, that's an evil act in and of itself, 0.54

00:38:55.000 because all you're doing by engaging in dialogue with that person is validating their power game.

00:39:00.000 That's all!

00:39:01.000 You see, and this isn't, this isn't, this is no aberration that these people don't engage in dialogue.

00:39:08.000 It's no aberration.

00:39:09.000 It's built right into the philosophical system.

00:39:11.000 They regard the idea that if you're in one power group and I'm in another, the idea that we can step out of that group, engage in a dialogue, have our worlds meet, and produce some sort of negotiated understanding.

00:39:28.000 No, that's part of your oppressive patriarchal game, that idea.

00:39:33.000 That whole idea is part of your game.

00:39:36.000 So, if I even engage in the dialogue, I'm playing your game, you win.

00:39:42.000 It's a complete assault.

00:39:44.000 People don't understand that postmodernism is a complete assault on two things.

00:39:49.000 One, it's an assault on the metaphysical substrate of our culture, and I would say that the metaphysical substrate looks something like a religious substrate, so it's a direct assault on that.

00:39:59.000 And the second thing it's an assault on is everything that's been established since the Enlightenment.

00:40:03.000 Rationality, empiricism, science, Everything.

00:40:07.000 Clarity of mind, dialogue, the idea of the individual, all of that is not only...

00:40:14.000 You see, it's not only that it's up for grabs.

00:40:16.000 That's not the thing.

00:40:18.000 It's to be destroyed.

00:40:21.000 That's the goal. 0.99

00:40:22.000 To be destroyed.

00:40:23.000 Just like the communists wanted, you know, wanted the revolution to destroy the capitalist system.

00:40:27.000 It's the same thing.

00:40:29.000 These people...

00:40:29.000 Now, you might say, well, does every social justice warrior activist know this?

00:40:33.000 It's like, well, no, of course not.

00:40:36.000 It's not any more than every Muslim knows the entire Muslim doctrine, or Islamic doctrine, or every Christian knows the entire Christian doctrine. 0.58

00:40:43.000 You know, it's fragmented among people.

00:40:46.000 But then when you bring them together, the fragments unite, and the entire philosophy acts itself out.

00:40:51.000 So you don't think that this is a nefarious plot by a few well-planned out individuals that have some sort of an agenda that they're going to promote this ideology and they understand what they're doing?

00:41:04.000 You feel like it's what you're saying, that there's a bunch of different factions, a bunch of different parts to this.

00:41:12.000 It could be a lot of it is that people feel disenfranchised socially.

00:41:18.000 They are empowered by their positions in universities and by these insulated environments and groups.

00:41:25.000 They're intoxicated by the power that they have over young people and shaping their minds.

00:41:32.000 And imposing their ideologies.

00:41:35.000 They receive feedback from these kids.

00:41:38.000 It builds up.

00:41:39.000 Everything strengthens.

00:41:40.000 They shore up the walls around them, and they push this forward.

00:41:43.000 And then when they have something like this speech that you gave at McMaster's, and they get to actually act, it unites them.

00:41:50.000 It unites them.

00:41:51.000 And this is what you're getting from this glazed-eye, you know, cod look that you described.

00:41:56.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:41:56.000 Well, it's as if...

00:41:57.000 It's like Richard Dawkins' idea of meme.

00:42:00.000 You know, if you imagine that in your neural structure Whatever ideas that you're manifesting are represented neuron by neuron, let's say, it's a web of neurons.

00:42:13.000 Not any one neuron has the entire idea set.

00:42:16.000 This is obviously an oversimplification, but you get the point.

00:42:19.000 There's a network from which the idea emerges.

00:42:22.000 Well, the meme idea is that an idea can rest upon multiple individuals as if each individual is a neuron.

00:42:30.000 And so, I mean, there are people who are more or less fully informed as to the nature of postmodern doctrine, and they're pushing it forward consciously and unconsciously.

00:42:43.000 They're consciously pushing it forward and acting it out.

00:42:47.000 And so there are individuals who are more representative of the entire set of ideas and individuals who are less representative.

00:42:53.000 But if you get them together in a group, the thing that animates them and unites them is the common set of ideas.

00:42:59.000 And those ideas were produced by the postmodern French intellectuals in the mid-70s, roughly speaking.

00:43:05.000 Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault...

00:43:09.000 Foucault was the person who famously pronounced that psychiatric diagnostic categories were primarily social in origin rather than biological.

00:43:17.000 And, you know, I read Foucault's work, I think it was Madness and Civilization, where he advanced that particular doctrine.

00:43:25.000 You can actually read Foucault, unlike Derrida and Lacan, but I just found what he was writing obvious.

00:43:31.000 I knew from my clinical training that psychiatric categories have a Heavy sociological construction, partly because psychiatry isn't a science.

00:43:41.000 Medicine isn't a science.

00:43:42.000 It's an applied science.

00:43:44.000 Those aren't the same thing at all.

00:43:45.000 You know, a pure science is a pure science.

00:43:48.000 It deals with scientific categories, like atoms.

00:43:52.000 But an applied science, well, it's a compromise between all sorts of different things.

00:43:57.000 And mental illnesses themselves are shaped by the social environment.

00:44:01.000 Even though often they have a biological root, the way they manifest themselves is clearly shaped by society and language.

00:44:07.000 I didn't find his work the least bit...

00:44:11.000 Surprising, I thought, well, really?

00:44:12.000 I mean, everyone who's a sophisticated medical professional, psychiatrist, psychologist, everyone knows that.

00:44:20.000 It's like, I mean, there's a book called Discovery of the Unconscious by a guy named Henri Allemberger that was written, I believe, in the 60s.

00:44:28.000 Great book on history of psychoanalysis.

00:44:30.000 And, like, he covers the shift in diagnostic categories across time.

00:44:34.000 It's self-evident.

00:44:36.000 So, anyways, there's all these French postmodernists.

00:44:39.000 They were all Marxists.

00:44:40.000 Most of them were student revolutionaries in France in the late 1960s, before that all fell apart.

00:44:45.000 And they did two things.

00:44:46.000 They pulled out this frame problem issue, the issue of multiple interpretations, and said, well, There's nothing that's canonical.

00:44:54.000 There's no overarching narrative.

00:44:55.000 There's no real interpretation.

00:44:57.000 And I already said why that's wrong.

00:44:59.000 And then the other thing they said was they did this sleight of hand.

00:45:03.000 So instead of the working class against the bourgeoisie, it was race against race or gender against gender.

00:45:10.000 Unbelievably divisive.

00:45:12.000 It's all they believe in is identity.

00:45:14.000 There's no individual, man.

00:45:15.000 That's gone with postmodernism.

00:45:17.000 This isn't an accident, all of this stuff.

00:45:20.000 It's not random.

00:45:21.000 It's driven by these ideas.

00:45:22.000 Like, ideas are always at war.

00:45:24.000 Always.

00:45:26.000 And we're in a war between these ideas.

00:45:29.000 I mean, Marxism, we already know, was a tremendously powerful doctrine, and this is its newest manifestation.

00:45:35.000 What is the motivation behind the individuals that are at the heart of this movement?

00:45:43.000 Well, I would say that The motivations are as complex as human motivations are in general.

00:45:50.000 But they seem to have solidified into a movement, right?

00:45:54.000 Well, I think the dangerous part of it is that it's almost like a scapegoat mentality.

00:46:00.000 It's almost like psychoanalytic projection.

00:46:02.000 That's another way of thinking about it.

00:46:04.000 It's like, one of the things that I've come to learn and one of the things I talk about a lot is that the battle between good and evil, so to speak, It isn't between states, and it's not between individuals precisely, although it manifests itself at those levels.

00:46:20.000 It's an internal battle, a moral battle that happens inside people, and so people have a broad capacity for malevolence and for benevolence.

00:46:29.000 And that's a terrible war for people, and it's a terrible thing to understand and realize.

00:46:34.000 In fact, often, when people realize their capacity for malevolence, if they're not prepared for it, they develop post-traumatic stress disorder.

00:46:43.000 So that happens to soldiers in battlefields.

00:46:45.000 So they go out, they're innocent guys, you know, naive guys, young guys, and they go out onto a battlefield and they get put in a really stressful situation and, you know, they step outside themselves and they do something unbelievably vicious and brutal, and then they're broken.

00:47:02.000 They can't take that manifestation of themselves and put it with, like, Iowa corn-fed, you know, nice guy.

00:47:12.000 And no wonder, because one is like a flesh-eating chimpanzee on a war rampage, and the other is, you know, a relatively well brought up and polite farm boy from the middle of the United States. 0.65

00:47:24.000 It's like, how in the world are you going to put those two things together?

00:47:27.000 Well, you can't.

00:47:28.000 That's post-traumatic stress disorder.

00:47:30.000 And to treat that, my experience with post-traumatic stress disorder is that you have to teach people a philosophy of evil, of good and evil, because otherwise they can't recover.

00:47:40.000 And I've had, by the way, in the last four months, I've had two letters from soldiers with PTSD, and I met two personally, who said that watching my lectures had brought them back together.

00:47:53.000 Because they couldn't understand what they had become before looking deeply at their malevolence.

00:48:02.000 Now, so I would say, with regards to this movement, this postmodern movement, The malevolent aspect of it, there's a couple of them.

00:48:10.000 One, it's unbelievably authoritarian.

00:48:13.000 I got a letter today from a university student in Italy.

00:48:16.000 I don't know what university, but she'd been having kind of a flame war on Facebook with the social justice warrior.

00:48:23.000 And at the end, she recommended that this particular social justice warrior seek out a local mental health counseling unit and put a link to it in the exchange. 0.98

00:48:34.000 And then she got a letter from the university.

00:48:37.000 I guess the other person, the SJW type, turned her in.

00:48:41.000 But she got a letter from the university saying that that violated university policy and constituted harassment, and that she should seriously consider retracting it.

00:48:50.000 And that, you know, future employers might be looking at what she posted, and it was inappropriate to put that on a public site.

00:48:57.000 And it's like, I thought...

00:48:59.000 Wow, how could you be so clueless, as an administrator say, to think that your monitoring of your students' private utterances You're monitoring it at an institutional level,

00:49:14.000 and your intervention and threat at an institutional level is less dangerous than letting two students, you know, troll each other on a public social forum.

00:49:26.000 It's just, I just, I don't know what to think about it.

00:49:29.000 It's just unbelievable.

00:49:30.000 It happened, and it's happening all over the place, this sort of thing.

00:49:34.000 And so there's the authoritarian element to it, which is a hatred of...

00:49:38.000 I think it's a hatred of competence, because competence produces hierarchies that aren't based on power.

00:49:44.000 I think it's a hatred of clear intellect.

00:49:48.000 A hatred of clear intellect?

00:49:50.000 How so?

00:49:51.000 What do you mean by when you say clear intellect?

00:49:53.000 Well, you have a clear intellect, as far as I'm concerned.

00:49:56.000 I think that's why you're so popular.

00:49:57.000 It's because you pay attention and say what you see.

00:50:03.000 And you're not too concerned about doing anything other than that.

00:50:06.000 I mean, of course you have an agenda, because everyone has an agenda.

00:50:09.000 You can't help but have an agenda if you're alive.

00:50:11.000 But you can temper the agenda.

00:50:14.000 Like, you can be Clued in enough to try to listen and learn and watch and pay attention to what your own senses are telling you and try to articulate that.

00:50:23.000 And that's what the logos is, technically speaking.

00:50:27.000 And the reason I'm bringing this up is because Jacques Derrida described Western culture...

00:50:33.000 In a famous phrase, he described it as phallogocentric.

00:50:37.000 P-H-A-L logo, L-O-G-O centric. 0.83

00:50:41.000 Phallogocentric.

00:50:42.000 And it needs to be brought down.

00:50:43.000 Well, the phallus part, that's male.

00:50:46.000 The logo part, that's logos.

00:50:48.000 Now, that's partly logic, because the word logic comes from the word logos.

00:50:52.000 But logos is a deep, much, much older concept than logic.

00:50:56.000 Like, logos is...

00:51:00.000 It's essentially a theological concept, and that's where things get complicated, but you could describe it as As the manifestation of truth in speech.

00:51:10.000 And the postmodernists, they don't like any of that.

00:51:13.000 So foul logocentrists would be the ultimate mansplaining. 1.00

00:51:17.000 Yes, exactly.

00:51:18.000 Like any man who expresses or tries to correct a woman in any way becomes a mansplainer.

00:51:25.000 Or maybe to correct anything in any way.

00:51:28.000 Particularly where the Ted Cruz, Sally Yates testimony that's been going on in America...

00:51:36.000 It's pretty fascinating.

00:51:37.000 No, no, I'm not aware of that.

00:51:38.000 I saw an example of that in an Australian congressional debate where a guy was accused of mansplaining by one of his colleagues and really tore a strip off her quite nicely.

00:51:47.000 Yeah.

00:51:48.000 So what's happening in the States?

00:51:49.000 Well, Yates has just been pretty brilliant.

00:51:52.000 She was fired by the Trump administration because she rejected this idea of...

00:51:58.000 What was the very specific thing was about restricting immigration, about shutting down different people that are trying to come into the United States.

00:52:08.000 And she had this debate with Ted Cruz where she, you know, just brilliantly shut him down with, you know, her knowledge of the Constitution and knowledge of what is and what is not legal or should or should not be allowed to happen.

00:52:23.000 And she was fired for it and he was grilling her.

00:52:25.000 And his...

00:52:27.000 Yeah, he's a very smart guy, Ted Cruz.

00:52:29.000 Although I don't agree with him, and I agree more with her, the way it was going down, this debate was described as mansplaining, because it was a man talking to a woman.

00:52:38.000 It's just a recent example.

00:52:40.000 Yeah, well, I also read about something like that with regards to the Supreme Court, because somebody did an analysis showing that the female Supreme Court justices spoke less than the male Supreme Court justices, and immediately attributed that to sexism, because you know how oppressed female Supreme Court justices are. 1.00

00:53:00.000 So, I still want to get back to this, that the hatred or the dislike of clear thinking, do you think that this comes from people, I'm not even sure I completely wrap my head around this, but do you think this is from someone with,

00:53:16.000 they understand that their logic is muddy?

00:53:19.000 They understand that their imposing of this muddy logic is illogical in some sort of a way?

00:53:25.000 I think they feel it.

00:53:27.000 They feel it?

00:53:27.000 They feel it rather than think it.

00:53:29.000 I mean, that's the other thing is that there isn't a lot of clear thinking on the side of the social justice types because a lot of what they're doing is reacting at an emotional level.

00:53:38.000 Yeah, well, the best personality predictor of Of politically correct belief, because we've done this study, although it's not published yet, is trait agreeableness.

00:53:49.000 And agreeableness, I would say, the best way to think about it is that it's the maternal dimension.

00:53:53.000 That's an oversimplification, but not much of one.

00:53:56.000 And so anybody that...

00:53:58.000 And the maternal viewpoint is something like anybody who's part of my in-group Is an infant in trouble and anyone who's outside of it is a predatory snake.

00:54:08.000 It's something like that.

00:54:10.000 And so you're seeing that manifest itself in a political doctrine.

00:54:13.000 Well, you're clearly seeing that today with what's going on with these, like say, the Berkeley Milo rally, where people who are on the left, who you would think of as being pro-woman, 0.94

00:54:29.000 pro-anti-violence, are more than capable of committing violence against women who support Trump, because then they categorize them as Nazis, and we're supposed to punch Nazis.

00:54:42.000 And I mean, there's been a bunch of instances where you've seen video footage of people getting pepper sprayed and hit with sticks because they were wearing the wrong...

00:54:51.000 It wasn't even a Make America Great Again hat.

00:54:54.000 It was actually a Make Bitcoin Great Again hat.

00:54:56.000 There's a very famous video of a girl getting pepper sprayed.

00:54:59.000 Yeah, I think I've seen that one. 0.99

00:55:00.000 It's fucking crazy. 0.98

00:55:01.000 And by the left... 0.99

00:55:03.000 And by people who are supposed to be, you know, quote unquote, progressive, and people who are supposed to be pro-women's rights, you know, anti-violence against women, anti-domestic violence, but yet they have no problem doing it to this other person, because this person becomes the other, because they're on the other side.

00:55:19.000 Yeah, well, I was talking about this line between good and evil that runs down people's hearts.

00:55:25.000 It's a terrible fault line, and it can be shocking to see that it's the case.

00:55:30.000 And so it's much more convenient for people to divide the world into the righteous and the damned, let's say, and then to... 0.59

00:55:38.000 To persecute the damned.

00:55:40.000 Well, it's convenient, too, because whatever resentment and hatred and bitterness you have in your heart, and you have plenty of that, generally speaking, if you're a social justice type, because you regard yourself as oppressed.

00:55:52.000 And that's a great starting point for resentment and hatred, to be a victim.

00:55:58.000 We know that one of the precursors to genocide, and I'm not saying at all that we're near that state, I'm not saying that, but one of the precursors to genocide in a genocidal state or in a pre-genocidal state is the acceptance of victim status by the eventual perpetrators.

00:56:15.000 Because the idea is, well, we're innocent, we're being persecuted, and those people are going to get us, so eventually that becomes, well, we'll get them first.

00:56:23.000 So you have a target for all your resentment and your hatred, and it's a justifiable moral target.

00:56:29.000 And so all the part of yourself that you don't recognize as contributing to whatever problem you think now pollutes the world...

00:56:36.000 You can ignore all that.

00:56:38.000 You're on the side of the good.

00:56:39.000 There's no moral effort required.

00:56:40.000 And then you have someone to conveniently hate and hit and hurt.

00:56:45.000 And all the while you can look at yourself in the mirror and say, I'm on the side of the good. 0.97

00:56:50.000 I'm just punching Nazis. 0.96

00:56:51.000 Right. 0.99

00:56:52.000 Or hitting them with bike locks while you dart out behind a woman who's conveniently standing in front of you.

00:57:00.000 Is there an evolutionary origin for what we were talking about in regards to a soldier being able to commit these horrible atrocities in the name of war to these people that are able to look at someone who has a differing ideology as the other and attack them as almost like a subhuman?

00:57:21.000 Is there some sort of an evolutionary origin for this disassociative sort of thinking and behavior?

00:57:27.000 That some people seem to...

00:57:29.000 I mean, it seems like a very common thing throughout history.

00:57:33.000 Sure, anything that isn't part of your dominance hierarchy is a snake.

00:57:37.000 It's that.

00:57:38.000 And it actually makes sense from an evolutionary perspective.

00:57:42.000 I mean, first of all, we are tribal primates, right?

00:57:47.000 And our optimal group size seems to be something like 250. We can keep track of about that many social relationships, and that's...

00:57:54.000 That's also...

00:57:55.000 Dunbar's number.

00:57:56.000 That's right, exactly.

00:57:57.000 And that's correlated with brain size, right?

00:57:59.000 Yeah.

00:57:59.000 So, alright.

00:58:01.000 And so you might say, well, why that size?

00:58:03.000 And then you might say, well, a hierarchy has to be optimized for two functions. 0.99

00:58:08.000 And one is, well, you want to be able to climb the damn thing. 0.89

00:58:11.000 So if it's really, really big, the probability that you're going to climb it is really low. 0.98

00:58:15.000 And if it's too small, well, who cares if you climb it?

00:58:17.000 So you want it somewhere that's big enough to climb and powerful enough to make the climb worthwhile.

00:58:25.000 And so there's some optimization there.

00:58:28.000 Now, so you might think of everything within that hierarchy as explored territory.

00:58:33.000 And the reason for that is that explored territory...

00:58:38.000 Is where, when you do something, you get what you want.

00:58:43.000 So think about the conditions under which the limits of your knowledge manifest themselves.

00:58:49.000 I mean, there's all sorts of things you don't know.

00:58:51.000 You know, a trillion things.

00:58:53.000 But you're not sitting there, like, torturing yourself to death because there's a trillion things you don't know.

00:58:58.000 But then if you go out in the world and you act something out, and the outcome isn't what you desired, then that registers an error.

00:59:04.000 So let's say you're at a party and you tell a joke.

00:59:07.000 And no one laughs.

00:59:08.000 Well, the party...

00:59:10.000 See, think about what happens to the space around the party.

00:59:14.000 When you tell the joke, the second before you tell the joke, you're in one place.

00:59:18.000 And the second after you tell the joke, when there's an awkward silence and everybody's looking embarrassed, you are no longer in the same place.

00:59:24.000 You've stepped outside the protective embrace of that particular hierarchy, and you've made yourself an alien.

00:59:31.000 And the thing that people use to process the alien is the snake detector, the serpent detector, the dragon detector.

00:59:40.000 And it's always been that way because anything that's outside the hierarchy is a threat.

00:59:44.000 Any stranger, any strange idea, any animal manifestation, any noise, any spirit, it's a threat to the integrity of the dominance hierarchy, and in many, many ways.

00:59:58.000 So, for example...

00:59:59.000 It's deeply rooted because that was your question.

01:00:02.000 What's the evolutionary basis?

01:00:03.000 There's a great paper published in a journal called PLOS1 about five or six years ago looking at something absolutely terrifying in my estimation which was there's this idea that part of what motivates the authoritarian end of political conservatism so let's say the right-wing fascist end is associated not with fear but with disgust.

01:00:26.000 Disgust is an entirely different emotion.

01:00:29.000 And so these researchers did this fascinating study where they went to a number of different countries and also looked at states within the same country, looking at the relationship between the prevalence of infectious disease and authoritarian attitudes at the individual level.

01:00:43.000 The higher the infectious disease rate, the more authoritarian the political views.

01:00:47.000 And the correlation was really high.

01:00:49.000 It wasn't like 0.1.

01:00:50.000 It was 0.7.

01:00:51.000 It's one of the highest correlations between two phenomena I've ever seen in the social sciences.

01:00:56.000 And you might say, well, why?

01:00:58.000 Well, here's one reason.

01:01:00.000 I said that the strange idea and the stranger and the pathogen, let's say, are all the same thing.

01:01:05.000 Well, it's all because they're external threats to the structure of the dominance hierarchy.

01:01:09.000 You know, when the Spaniards came to the New World, 95% of the natives died.

01:01:15.000 They died from smallpox, they died from measles, they died from mumps, they died from chickenpox.

01:01:20.000 Because you don't know what the hell is coming at you when you let something new inside the dominance hierarchy.

01:01:26.000 Whether it's an idea or a disease, you know, words are a virus.

01:01:29.000 I think that was Laurie, no, that was that heroin addict author. 0.99

01:01:35.000 Burroughs? 0.96

01:01:35.000 Burroughs, yeah, that was his phrase. 0.96

01:01:37.000 Laurie Anderson made a nice video about that.

01:01:39.000 Words are a virus.

01:01:41.000 And so we respond to them with the same circuitry that we use to detect pathogens.

01:01:46.000 And I'll tell you something even more frightening when we were working this out, because it's associated with this trait called orderliness, which is actually a good predictor of right-wing political belief.

01:01:55.000 I went back and looked at Hitler's Table Talk. 0.76

01:01:57.000 It's a book, Hitler's Table Talk, and he wrote that...

01:02:01.000 It was derived from notes that were taken by his secretaries between 1939 and 1942 when he was eating dinner and spontaneously expounding on the structure of reality.

01:02:12.000 He was very open, Hitler, a very creative person, but also extremely orderly. 0.97

01:02:18.000 And I looked at the metaphors that he was using to describe the Jews and the gypsies and all the other people that he burned and destroyed and it was all pathogen, it's all pathogen metaphor.

01:02:28.000 The Aryan race is a body. 0.99

01:02:30.000 It's a pure body.

01:02:31.000 The blood is pure. 1.00

01:02:32.000 The Jews are rats or insects or lice or disease. 1.00

01:02:36.000 And so are the gypsies and everyone else. 1.00

01:02:38.000 And they need to be eradicated and burned out, essentially. 0.98

01:02:41.000 And here's something even more frightening. 0.82

01:02:43.000 So when Hitler first took over Germany, he was kind of a public health freak.

01:02:51.000 He also washed his hands a lot every day.

01:02:53.000 And he was also a worshipper of willpower.

01:02:55.000 So he was a really orderly guy.

01:02:57.000 And he started this public health campaign in Germany, and he put together these vans that would go around, like, screening people for tuberculosis, which, you know, was a perfectly fine idea.

01:03:08.000 But then they started a beautification program of the factories, because he didn't like how messy the factories were in Germany.

01:03:13.000 So he had people clean them up, you know, sweep them out and plant flowers out front and fumigate them for rats and insects, right?

01:03:22.000 Parasites. 0.85

01:03:22.000 Oh, and the Jews were always compared to rats and insects as well. 0.85

01:03:26.000 They used Zyklon B to do the insecticide. 0.77

01:03:29.000 Well, Zyklon B, that was the gas that was used in the death camps.

01:03:34.000 So it went like pathogen, insect, rats. 0.95

01:03:37.000 Then it went into the asylums, you know, so that people who were mentally deficient, they were like parasites and rats. 1.00

01:03:44.000 And then it was Jews and gypsies and parasites and rats. 1.00

01:03:47.000 They were using Zyklon B and not Zyklon A? I believe they were using Zyklon B. I don't know. 0.94

01:03:53.000 I know that the gas was Zyklon.

01:03:56.000 Zyklon A was the gas that was formulated with a very extreme smell so that people would smell it and know because it was extremely toxic.

01:04:05.000 Zyklon B, it all came from Fritz Haber.

01:04:07.000 Haber was the...

01:04:08.000 The guy who created the Haber method of extracting nitrogen from the oxygen that we use for fertilizer today.

01:04:13.000 Haber created Zyklon A and made it extremely toxic smelling so that you would know to avoid it.

01:04:21.000 Zyklon B, that whatever element was removed from the smell so that it would be used in gas chambers, they'd have no idea that they were being gassed.

01:04:31.000 Haber, who was a Jew, ironically, did not know that his Zyklon A was eventually going to be used on his own people.

01:04:37.000 Yeah, well, I suspect they probably use Zyklon A doing the fumigations, you know, but the thing is, is that, well, so, you know, you said what's the biological basis, and the biological basis is that, like, we're basically wired in some sense also for the domain of order or the domain of chaos.

01:04:56.000 That's another way of thinking about it.

01:04:58.000 The domain of order, once again, is where you are when what you're doing is working.

01:05:04.000 Because, you see, because our environment isn't just natural, it's also social.

01:05:09.000 So not only do you have to deal with the vagaries of the natural world properly so that it gives you what you're aiming at.

01:05:14.000 That's how you know if you're right.

01:05:16.000 It gives you what you're aiming at.

01:05:17.000 But you have to do it in a way that other people approve of and support.

01:05:21.000 That's a very tight constraint.

01:05:22.000 We talked about that as a constraint on the interpretation of the world.

01:05:26.000 But then, now and then, something happens to disrupt that stability.

01:05:30.000 So that's like the white circle, that's the black circle in the white serpent in the yin-yang symbol.

01:05:35.000 You know how the white one, that's order. 0.96

01:05:38.000 The white one has a black dot in it, and that's because chaos can come pouring through into order at any moment.

01:05:43.000 And you have a circuit that detects that, and that's the same circuit that detects snakes or predators.

01:05:48.000 And obviously, why wouldn't it be?

01:05:51.000 An intruding force, an intruding force has to be responded to right now.

01:05:56.000 Right, so there's a need for a demand, an instantaneous response.

01:06:01.000 Instantaneous.

01:06:01.000 And almost, like you were saying of those kids, like almost an unhuman, or a disassociative, sort of the ability to act almost as if, like something other than a person, without reason or logic.

01:06:15.000 Yes, well that's dehumanization, right.

01:06:17.000 The thing is, another thing that's so funny is that We think that the natural response to looking at a human being is humanization, and that isn't right.

01:06:28.000 Like, the default person, in some sense, isn't human.

01:06:32.000 The default member of your tribe is human.

01:06:34.000 I mean, most tribes around the world, the name for their tribe is the people, implying that they're the people, and all those other things out there are barbarians, right?

01:06:43.000 They're forces of chaos.

01:06:45.000 They're the stranger.

01:06:46.000 They bring disease and trouble.

01:06:48.000 Now, I don't want to be too bleak about it, because This is the basic debate between conservatives and liberals, to some degree, is the conservatives take the stranger equals pathogen route more frequently, and they're less attracted to the idea of,

01:07:05.000 or they were conventionally, that trade with the foreigner has benefits that outweigh the...

01:07:16.000 The risks.

01:07:17.000 And generally speaking, liberals have the opposite attitude.

01:07:21.000 But that's because those two things are both true.

01:07:24.000 One is that, man, it's really useful to trade with strangers because they have all sorts of cool things you don't have.

01:07:30.000 But B, well, it might be real dangerous because you don't know what those things are infected with.

01:07:35.000 Like, realistically speaking, let's say, but then also metaphorically speaking.

01:07:40.000 You know, here's an example of how...

01:07:43.000 How an object can be a virus.

01:07:46.000 Think about the automobile.

01:07:49.000 Like if you wanted to introduce something into a communist country that screamed the paramount status of the individual, you couldn't possibly create something that broadcast that more clearly than a car.

01:08:04.000 Right, the car is driven by one person, the person is completely autonomous, they're completely sealed off, they don't need any state support or sanction whatsoever to move around in the car.

01:08:15.000 It's like, if you wanted to rescue the communists from their collective pathology, the best thing to do would be to Parachute in automobiles, because the automobile just screams individual autonomy.

01:08:30.000 And so when you get an artifact from a foreigner, you don't know what that's contaminated with, let's put it that way. 1.00

01:08:39.000 And so we have a circuit for dealing with that, and it's the thing that associates the foreigner with...

01:08:48.000 The force that eats the sun when it sets at night.

01:08:51.000 That's the most archaic way of thinking about it.

01:08:53.000 But it's the snake or the predator.

01:08:56.000 So, and what do you do with a snake or a predator?

01:08:58.000 Man, you burn it. 0.99

01:08:59.000 You kill it. 1.00

01:09:01.000 You crush it. 0.99

01:09:02.000 It's like there's a destructive force that comes along with that that's absolutely, well, it's morally righteous. 0.98

01:09:08.000 Because, yeah, you know, if it's a poisonous snake and it's threatening the village, obviously you kill it.

01:09:15.000 And then you're celebrated for it.

01:09:17.000 So, in a sense, the same dehumanizing force that allows people to act that way in war also allows people to disassociate between anyone who doesn't agree with their ideology in a school setting, in a university,

01:09:33.000 like what happened at McMaster's.

01:09:34.000 Yeah, that's why I don't like ideologies, because the ideology divides the world into those safely ensconced within our dominance hierarchy and serpents And so, that's dangerous.

01:09:49.000 And the reason that this doctrine that I described about the line between good and evil running down the individual's heart...

01:09:55.000 I mean, I got that particular line mostly from Alexander Solzhenitsyn, but it's also an idea that's been developed intensively in the West for thousands and thousands of years.

01:10:06.000 I mean, maybe it's been developed since far before...

01:10:10.000 We invented the stories in Genesis because, of course, the serpent.

01:10:14.000 See, in Genesis, of course, Genesis is like a paradise, right?

01:10:17.000 So you can think about it as a well-functioning hierarchy.

01:10:20.000 It's also a balance between chaos and order.

01:10:23.000 It's got walls and it's a garden.

01:10:25.000 So, but there's a snake that pops its head in.

01:10:28.000 And that's the same as that, as I said, that black dot inside the white serpent in the yin-yang symbol.

01:10:34.000 It's that no matter how, it doesn't matter how perfect the environment is set up, something that doesn't fit is going to make its way inside.

01:10:44.000 It's one of the oldest stories of mankind.

01:10:46.000 And you see, the thing that makes itself manifest inside in the Genesis story is a snake.

01:10:53.000 Now, that snake turns out to be Satan, which is like, how the hell does that happen?

01:10:57.000 It's a snake.

01:10:57.000 Like, where does that come from?

01:10:59.000 It's not actually in the biblical writings to any degree.

01:11:01.000 It's part of the surrounding mythology.

01:11:03.000 Well, it's partly because people started to figure out that the worst snake wasn't a snake.

01:11:09.000 The worst snake was the snake that was inside a person.

01:11:13.000 Because a malevolent person is way more of a threat than just a snake.

01:11:17.000 Like a snake wants to bite you and it wants to eat you and all of that.

01:11:20.000 And they were hell on our extremely primordial ancestors.

01:11:25.000 But the human race has been trying to figure out where the threat is forever.

01:11:30.000 Well, first of all, it was external, right?

01:11:32.000 It was all external.

01:11:33.000 It was the snake.

01:11:34.000 It was the barbarian. 0.86

01:11:35.000 But then it got localized to some degree inside the individual.

01:11:38.000 It's like, that's a bad person.

01:11:39.000 That person has a snake in them.

01:11:41.000 And then the idea kind of came out, this is so cool, the idea is that, well, the snake that's inside bad person A and the snake that's inside bad person B is somehow the same.

01:11:51.000 So that's where the idea of an articulated morality starts to come from, is there's an equivalence of evil across individuals.

01:11:59.000 So then the idea of evil itself starts to become abstracted at the same time that the idea of good does.

01:12:04.000 Well, evil gets associated with Satan, and Satan gets associated with the snake.

01:12:09.000 It's...

01:12:10.000 It's mind-boggling.

01:12:11.000 I mean, these are how these...

01:12:12.000 See, we were chimps, for Christ's sake.

01:12:15.000 You know?

01:12:16.000 It took us a long time to develop up, say, an ideal.

01:12:19.000 Just to say the word an ideal implies a counter-ideal.

01:12:23.000 Say, well, those things were embodied way before they were ideas.

01:12:26.000 And after they were embodied first, not as bad, but as a bad thing or a bad person.

01:12:33.000 Bad had to be extracted out of that.

01:12:35.000 And even that was extracted as a drama first.

01:12:39.000 You know, it's like the bad guy in a movie.

01:12:41.000 He isn't a bad guy.

01:12:42.000 He's a composite bad guy.

01:12:44.000 You know?

01:12:45.000 He's a literary bad guy.

01:12:47.000 And the good guy isn't just a good guy.

01:12:49.000 He's a literary good guy.

01:12:50.000 He's a hero.

01:12:51.000 He's got way more heroic attributes than the typical person.

01:12:54.000 And that's where abstract ideas are born.

01:12:57.000 So anyways, back to your question, you said...

01:13:01.000 What's the evolutionary basis for that sort of disassociative behavior and thinking?

01:13:07.000 Yeah, so I'm afraid that that was a big rabbit hole, man.

01:13:10.000 No, it's a great rabbit hole, and it makes a whole lot of sense that there's an actual...

01:13:13.000 And I knew you probably knew this, which is why I asked you.

01:13:17.000 I knew you had an answer, rather.

01:13:18.000 That there is some sort of an evolutionary basis for that ability that people have to look at someone as the other.

01:13:26.000 You bet.

01:13:27.000 Well, also, how the hell are you going to respond in war if you don't have that?

01:13:30.000 Right.

01:13:31.000 And that was always an issue with people, with invading tribes, and like you said, with other external threats, whether it was animals or insects or snakes or anything that could kill you.

01:13:42.000 Yeah, well, I mean, in a primordial situation, I mean, guys are in warrior mode a good part of the time, and modern people don't even know what that's like.

01:13:50.000 That's why they go out and they go into warrior mode and they get post-traumatic stress disorder, because it's so unlike the way they configure themselves that...

01:13:58.000 That they can't even bridge the gap between the two identities.

01:14:02.000 And just for sake of clarity, I think for some folks, post-traumatic stress disorder has actually come from not just that, but also from the threat of being attacked.

01:14:13.000 From what I understand, people like special ops people, people like Rangers and Navy SEALs and the like, are less likely to develop post-traumatic stress disorder because they're acting.

01:14:27.000 Versus reacting that whereas people that are on that are going on like Patrol and then they get blown up like those people apparently have a far more likely issue with post-traumatic stress disorder because they're constantly worried about these external threats and Then they when they come back to civilization they have a very difficult time Getting back to baseline.

01:14:48.000 Yeah, they're in prey mode Yes.

01:14:49.000 Really, in a very serious way.

01:14:51.000 Yes.

01:14:52.000 Yeah.

01:14:52.000 So it's not just acting, but it's also reacting, that the reacting issue sometimes is even more problematic for the individual than the acting mode.

01:15:01.000 Yeah, well, there's a funny dichotomy there, because very frequently, if you're going to When you encounter a stress, it's best to do it voluntarily, because you use a whole different circuit, use the approach circuit.

01:15:12.000 And so, I mean, that sounds paradoxical, what you just said, because I said that, you know, people often observe themselves doing something and get post-traumatic stress disorder.

01:15:20.000 And then you said, well, yeah, but if people act, they're less likely to.

01:15:23.000 But that's part of a more general phenomenon, which is that in the face of a stressor, You're better off, psychophysiologically, to act voluntarily.

01:15:33.000 You're either going to be the thing that advances on the anomaly, or it's prey.

01:15:40.000 That's roughly the way to think about it.

01:15:42.000 And to be a prey animal is a terrible thing, because it's doom, it's paralysis.

01:15:48.000 Like, literally speaking, it's like in the Harry Potter series with the basilisk, right?

01:15:52.000 You look at the basilisk and it turns you to stone.

01:15:54.000 Well, why?

01:15:56.000 Well, because that's what happens to a prey animal when a horrible predator looks at it.

01:16:00.000 It's frozen.

01:16:01.000 It's turned to stone.

01:16:02.000 That's Medusa with all her snakes, right? 1.00

01:16:05.000 She looks at you, man.

01:16:06.000 Mother Nature looks at you.

01:16:08.000 Like, the devouring part of Mother Nature opens her eye on you.

01:16:12.000 It's like you're paralyzed.

01:16:13.000 That's an old, old story.

01:16:15.000 That is a really interesting thing that I never considered, that Medusa does have this head of snakes, and she looks at you, she turns you into stone, and that is the biggest issue with people.

01:16:25.000 It's not fight or flight.

01:16:27.000 People think it's fight or flight.

01:16:28.000 It's fight, flight, or freeze.

01:16:30.000 The freeze thing is very common with people, and I've seen it.

01:16:33.000 I've seen it with people that just, they don't know what to do when they're in a stressful situation, and instead of reacting, they freak out.

01:16:40.000 Yep.

01:16:40.000 Yeah, they freak out or they freeze, you know.

01:16:43.000 They just lock up.

01:16:44.000 Yeah, well, you can see that if we go back to that example of, say, someone tells a joke, maybe they're kind of socially anxious and they finally manage to mumble out a joke and it falls flat.

01:16:53.000 It's like, to freeze in the face of that is a very common reaction.

01:16:57.000 You know, the person will freeze, then often they'll break into tears and run.

01:17:01.000 So, well, if they're socially anxious, that's exactly what's going to happen.

01:17:05.000 Now, they also know that they've been turned into a predator, let's say, a snake predator by the whole community, and that's very shaming.

01:17:13.000 And so, that is dumped on top of them.

01:17:18.000 I mean, socially anxious people are afraid of that all the time, that they're going to be regarded by the group as an outcast or a pariah, right?

01:17:24.000 And it's very hard on people.

01:17:27.000 And the paranoid amongst them are always thinking that people are talking about them and trying to make them the other.

01:17:32.000 Right.

01:17:33.000 Right.

01:17:33.000 Yeah.

01:17:34.000 Yes.

01:17:34.000 A very uncomfortable state of mind.

01:17:37.000 Yeah, I think this is a very important subject.

01:17:40.000 And in explaining it this way, I think for the open-minded, whoever is willing to listen to this, who maybe might have opposed some of your ideas before, I think they'll get a better understanding of what's really dangerous about this lack of dialogue and this lack of engaging and this shutting you out and making you the other,

01:17:59.000 as it were.

01:18:00.000 Yeah, well, I mean, it's what postmodernism is fundamentally concerned about.

01:18:04.000 They don't believe there's any other way of operating in the world than that.

01:18:07.000 You see, and this is one of the things that I think Western civilization has contributed so brilliantly to the expansion of knowledge in the world.

01:18:19.000 What's the cure for the inadequacies of the group?

01:18:23.000 Well, you might say it's the perfect state.

01:18:26.000 So one of the ways...

01:18:27.000 I'm going to do a series of lectures on the Bible starting May 16th, and for reasons that I outlined to some degree when I was talking about Genesis a little bit earlier.

01:18:36.000 But in the Old Testament, for example, the Israelites are always trying to make their peace with God.

01:18:41.000 So they're trying to live in the world without getting walloped constantly by natural events and by invading forces.

01:18:48.000 Which they attribute to God's will.

01:18:49.000 Yes, yes.

01:18:50.000 Whatever's beyond their understanding in some sense.

01:18:52.000 They're more sophisticated than merely...

01:18:54.000 This, but whatever's beyond their understanding.

01:18:57.000 But they're kind of conceptualizing being as such and trying to figure out how to deal with it.

01:19:02.000 And one of the hypotheses they come up with is something like, well, you can bargain with it.

01:19:07.000 And the thing is you can.

01:19:08.000 That's one of the things that's so cool.

01:19:10.000 And partly the reason you can bargain with reality is because the reality that you encounter as you move forward in time is partly the world, but partly the abstract social system.

01:19:22.000 And so, you can bargain with the future abstract social system all the time.

01:19:27.000 You do that every time you make a promise.

01:19:29.000 You do it every time you sacrifice one thing for another.

01:19:32.000 You know, so you forego an impulsive temptation, and that gives you a moral claim that you can redeem in the future.

01:19:39.000 That happens all the time.

01:19:40.000 That's what money is, for God's sake.

01:19:42.000 And, you know, we discovered the future at some point.

01:19:45.000 As I said, we were chimpanzees at one point.

01:19:47.000 We discovered the future.

01:19:48.000 Then we discovered that you could bargain with the future, as if it was a person.

01:19:52.000 That's amazing!

01:19:53.000 It's amazing!

01:19:54.000 And that's partly where the idea of God as a personality came from.

01:19:57.000 I should flip that.

01:19:59.000 That idea that you could bargain with the future came out of the idea that God was a personality.

01:20:05.000 Because the God as a personality idea came first.

01:20:08.000 But it was a developmental stage on the way to even being able to say the future.

01:20:15.000 You know, we have no idea how...

01:20:17.000 It's like a six million year path from chimpanzee to self-aware human being.

01:20:23.000 You know, and we have no idea where these unbelievably sophisticated ideas that we have come from, like the idea of sacrifice.

01:20:29.000 Do you know how much blood was spilled before human beings were able to sacrifice abstractly instead of killing something?

01:20:37.000 We had to act out, God enjoys you killing something because he's happy with the blood.

01:20:43.000 We had to act that out for God, who knows, 20,000 years, 100,000 years, before we got anywhere near the idea that you could do that abstractly.

01:20:53.000 So, when I look at these old stories, I look at them like an evolutionary biologist.

01:20:58.000 Now, I'm not trying to reduce them in any way, because what we don't understand about evolution, that could make a very thick book.

01:21:05.000 And there's other strange things about religious phenomenology that we don't have a clue about.

01:21:10.000 You know, like the fact that the drugs often called entheogens or psychedelics can reliably produce mystical experiences.

01:21:17.000 Like, no one has any idea what to make of that.

01:21:19.000 You can just discount it.

01:21:21.000 It's like, yeah, well, you know, they're drugs.

01:21:23.000 Yeah, sure.

01:21:24.000 People have been using the things for, who knows, 50,000 years, 150,000 years.

01:21:29.000 They might be the source of all our religious ideas.

01:21:32.000 I'm not saying that they are, but they could well be.

01:21:36.000 And so, why do we have a capacity for mystical experience?

01:21:40.000 Who knows?

01:21:42.000 It's associated with the sense of awe.

01:21:44.000 It's associated with the same feeling that you get when you listen to particularly dramatic music.

01:21:48.000 Or when something moves you deeply and, you know, the hair on the back of your neck stands up.

01:21:54.000 You know what that is?

01:21:55.000 That's piloerection. 0.79

01:21:56.000 That's the same thing that happens to a cat when it looks at a particularly big dog.

01:22:00.000 It's awe!

01:22:02.000 You feel that when there's a swell of music, awe, the hair stands up on the back of your neck.

01:22:07.000 It's like you puff up just like a cat, except, you know, like a bald cat.

01:22:12.000 What do you make of this idea that, well, not the idea, but the reality that these entheogens closely mimic human neurochemistry?

01:22:20.000 No, they do.

01:22:21.000 There's absolutely no doubt about that.

01:22:22.000 But what do you think the reason for that is?

01:22:25.000 Well, part of the reason is that we share an evolutionary pathway with all these things that we eat, you know, plants and fungi and, you know, look...

01:22:34.000 We're linked evolutionarily to every form of life on the planet.

01:22:40.000 Serotonin in lobsters has the same effect on lobsters as it does on human beings.

01:22:46.000 So if you up their serotonin levels artificially, the lobster stands up more erect and stronger and is much more willing to fight.

01:22:53.000 And if you decrease the serotonin in the lobster's nervous system, then it gets all depressed and runs away and hides.

01:22:59.000 Think about that.

01:23:01.000 I mean, we split off from lobsters about 350 million years ago, and they still live in dominance hierarchies.

01:23:06.000 That's how old the dominance hierarchy is.

01:23:09.000 That's older than trees.

01:23:11.000 It's older than flowers.

01:23:13.000 It's permanent, right?

01:23:14.000 We've evolved for the hierarchy.

01:23:16.000 And the spirit of the hierarchy, that's the Old Testament God.

01:23:20.000 That's at least part of it.

01:23:21.000 The spirit of the hierarchy.

01:23:24.000 So these things are...

01:23:25.000 Well, they're mind-boggling to me, which is partly why I'm investigating them.

01:23:28.000 But all of our wiring is conditional on that.

01:23:31.000 So, and I mean, women use the dominance hierarchy to select mates. 1.00

01:23:35.000 So, it's so strange because, you know, people think of evolution from a natural selection perspective.

01:23:40.000 Almost always.

01:23:41.000 But sexual selection plays a huge role.

01:23:43.000 So here, I'll lay out something wild for you, okay?

01:23:46.000 So, we know that...

01:23:49.000 You have twice as many female ancestors as male ancestors.

01:23:53.000 Now, people have a hard time with that, but you could imagine that, roughly speaking, that would happen if every single woman had one baby and only every second man fathered a child. 0.59

01:24:03.000 So for men, it would be you either have two kids or zero.

01:24:07.000 Well, that's basically what it is on average across time.

01:24:10.000 If you're a man, you have two children, maybe with two different women, or zero. 0.65

01:24:14.000 If you're a woman, everyone has one. 1.00

01:24:16.000 That's how it averages out.

01:24:17.000 So there's more...

01:24:20.000 Disparity of success among men, and that's very common in the animal kingdom, by the way.

01:24:24.000 Now the question is, how do women select their mates? 1.00

01:24:28.000 Now, unlike female chimps, female humans are choosy maters. 1.00

01:24:32.000 Female chimps will mate with any chimp They go into heat. 1.00

01:24:36.000 They'll mate with any chimp. 1.00

01:24:37.000 The dominant males are more likely to mate with them, but that's because they chase away the subordinates.

01:24:41.000 It's not because the females exercise choice. 1.00

01:24:43.000 Human females exercise choice. 1.00

01:24:45.000 And that's one of the things that differentiated us from chimpanzees.

01:24:48.000 But how do they do it?

01:24:50.000 Well, they look at the male dominance hierarchy.

01:24:53.000 And that's where the men are competing.

01:24:55.000 Now, you could say they're competing for power.

01:24:57.000 But that's a pretty corrupt way of looking at it.

01:24:59.000 Like, they're competing for, let's say, influence.

01:25:03.000 They're competing for leadership.

01:25:05.000 And so, in some sense, the people at the top of the hierarchy, if their men are elected by the other men...

01:25:10.000 Now, I know there's brutes and there's predators and all of that, but I'm talking on average across time.

01:25:16.000 It's like the men organize themselves, and there are influential men that rise to the top, and the women take them. 0.97

01:25:23.000 Now you think about that.

01:25:25.000 What that means is that over the millions of years that a dominance hierarchy with those properties existed, so let's say since we split from chimps, let's say that's six million years.

01:25:35.000 That means that the male dominance hierarchy is the environment that pushes the mating male to the top.

01:25:42.000 So that means the male that's most likely to take precedence in the male dominance hierarchy is the one most likely to leave a genetic contribution.

01:25:51.000 So that means that the male dominance hierarchy is a selection mechanism mediated by the female. 0.88

01:25:57.000 So what that means is that as we've moved forward through six million years of time, men have become more and more well adapted, not only to the presence of the male dominance hierarchy, but to the ability to move up it.

01:26:10.000 And that's the central spirit, you could say, in some sense.

01:26:13.000 That's the central spirit of the individual.

01:26:14.000 The individual is the thing that can move up dominance hierarchies.

01:26:18.000 It's the thing that's at the top.

01:26:20.000 It's the eye at the top of the pyramid.

01:26:22.000 And it's been selected for.

01:26:24.000 And then what's happened is that we've watched, so we get better and better and better for biological reasons, culturally mediated.

01:26:32.000 At figuring out how to climb across a set of dominance hierarchies so we can leave a genetic contribution.

01:26:38.000 That's what's happened to human beings.

01:26:40.000 Now imagine that that's happened for six million years.

01:26:43.000 So now imagine that we started to watch that because we're curious creatures.

01:26:47.000 We're always trying to figure out who we are.

01:26:49.000 And then, as we watched that, we started to tell stories about what the people who could climb the hierarchies were like.

01:26:56.000 Those were heroes.

01:26:57.000 That's where hero mythology came from. 0.96

01:26:59.000 And the biggest hero is the person who will go out and kill the snake.

01:27:02.000 Well, unsurprisingly. 0.60

01:27:04.000 Because that was a big hero, man.

01:27:06.000 And maybe when we were living in trees, that was a hero.

01:27:09.000 So the big hero is the person who goes out, slays the dragon, gets the gold, brings it back to the community and distributes it.

01:27:16.000 He's also the person most likely to go up the dominance hierarchy.

01:27:20.000 He's the person most likely to find the virgin, right? 0.81

01:27:22.000 Because it's a virgin that you free from the dragon and you get to claim her.

01:27:27.000 Right?

01:27:28.000 And so the dominance hierarchy is a mechanism that selects heroes and then breeds them.

01:27:34.000 And so then we watch that for six million years.

01:27:37.000 We start to understand what it means to be the hero.

01:27:40.000 We start to tell stories about that.

01:27:41.000 And so then not only are we genetically aiming at that with the dominance hierarchy as a selection mechanism mediated by female choice, but our stories are trying to push us in that direction.

01:27:52.000 And so then we say, well, look, that person's admirable.

01:27:55.000 We tell a story about him and we say, this person is admirable.

01:27:58.000 We tell a story about him and this person is admirable.

01:28:01.000 And at the same time we talk about the people who aren't admirable.

01:28:04.000 And then we start having admirable and non-admirable as categories.

01:28:08.000 And out of that you get something like good and evil.

01:28:11.000 And then you can start to imagine the perfect person.

01:28:14.000 That would be not only...

01:28:16.000 It would be you take ten admirable people and you pull out someone who's meta-admirable.

01:28:21.000 And that's a hero.

01:28:22.000 That becomes a religious figure across time.

01:28:24.000 That becomes a savior, a messiah across time, as we conceptualize what the ideal person is.

01:28:31.000 And in the West, here's how we figured it out.

01:28:34.000 We said the ideal person, the ideal man, is the person who tells the truth.

01:28:37.000 And what that means is that's the best way of climbing up any possible dominance hierarchy.

01:28:42.000 In the way that's most stable and most lasting.

01:28:45.000 That's the conclusion of Western culture. 0.60

01:28:47.000 So in a sense, psychologically, when you're talking about postmodernists and their rejection of these classic male structures, what they're doing is realizing that they're not going to compete in the classic, as stated, male hierarchy, so they're creating their own version of it.

01:29:03.000 Sure, that's the creative element, sure.

01:29:05.000 Well, we asked earlier, what's the motivation of these pathological guys who are out there, like, bolstering up the feminists?

01:29:12.000 Yeah, well, you know...

01:29:14.000 They don't compete any other way.

01:29:15.000 They don't compete.

01:29:16.000 They figured out how to compete.

01:29:18.000 They compete as allies, let's say.

01:29:20.000 Mm-hmm.

01:29:21.000 Very sneaky.

01:29:23.000 Yeah.

01:29:24.000 Wow.

01:29:24.000 Sneaky.

01:29:25.000 Yeah.

01:29:25.000 And that's how everybody always describes them, too.

01:29:28.000 I mean, it's almost like I avoid doing it because it just almost feels gross to label them like that.

01:29:35.000 But that is the way you think of male feminists. 1.00

01:29:37.000 You think of them as sneaky.

01:29:40.000 Yeah.

01:29:42.000 It's creepy.

01:29:43.000 And discriminatory towards classic male behavior.

01:29:47.000 Yeah, well, no wonder.

01:29:49.000 They haven't got a hope of competing in that hierarchy.

01:29:52.000 Wow.

01:29:54.000 That's deep.

01:29:54.000 That is deep.

01:29:56.000 This is going to be hurtful to a lot of people.

01:30:00.000 There's a lot of people listening to this right now, very upset.

01:30:02.000 Yeah, well, you know, you asked earlier why the postmodernists don't like blunt speech.

01:30:07.000 Yeah, that's why.

01:30:08.000 Well, that's why, man.

01:30:09.000 You know, it's like the truth is something that burns.

01:30:12.000 It burns off dead wood.

01:30:14.000 And people don't like having their dead wood burnt off often because they're like 95% dead wood.

01:30:19.000 And I'm not being, believe me, I'm not being snide about that.

01:30:24.000 It's no joke.

01:30:25.000 When you start to realize how much of what you've constructed of yourself is based on deception and lies, that is a horrifying realization.

01:30:33.000 And it can easily be 95% of you.

01:30:36.000 Things you say, things you act out.

01:30:40.000 Well, you see that in Pinocchio, which I often discuss. 0.97

01:30:44.000 Pinocchio, when he gets corrupt as he matures, he first learns to lie, and then he becomes a braying jackass on Pleasure Island. 0.91

01:30:52.000 And he's threatened by the underground authoritarians, right? 0.98

01:30:55.000 They're going to sell him to the salt mines.

01:30:57.000 It's like, yeah, that's for sure.

01:30:59.000 It's exactly right, man. 0.99

01:31:01.000 So then you figure out you're a brain jackass and you're lying all the time. 1.00

01:31:05.000 That's a terrible realization. 1.00

01:31:06.000 And then all that needs to be burnt away.

01:31:09.000 And people don't like that.

01:31:12.000 Now, you've been embattled in this conflict for quite a long time, and I've got to imagine that the way you look at the world, the way you see things many, many steps ahead, do you see any sort of a logical conclusion to this process?

01:31:28.000 Do you see any light at the end of the tunnel, or do you see...

01:31:34.000 And impossible to avoid conflict.

01:31:37.000 What do you see when you look at this whole thing long term?

01:31:42.000 Well, I would say I can't look at it long term.

01:31:45.000 And the reason for that is that, and this is why I get a kick out of all the keck. 0.99

01:31:49.000 Kekistan, boys.

01:31:51.000 You know, I do believe that we're in a period of chaos.

01:31:53.000 What's a Kekistan? 1.00

01:31:55.000 Oh, Kek is a mythological country that's ruled by chaos. 1.00

01:31:58.000 By the god Kek, who's a frog. 0.99

01:32:00.000 Who's a frog, as it turns out.

01:32:03.000 I don't know about this.

01:32:05.000 Oh, well, you need to look them up.

01:32:06.000 That's a big internet thing.

01:32:08.000 Kekistan.

01:32:08.000 Yeah?

01:32:09.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:32:10.000 A big internet thing?

01:32:11.000 All I know about the frog is the frog, the Trump frog, Peppy the frog who is apparently so distraught that his frog has been used to align with...

01:32:21.000 Yes, he killed him off. 0.72

01:32:21.000 Yeah, he killed him off. 0.72

01:32:22.000 But good luck, he didn't. 1.00

01:32:23.000 That's stupid because that's not going to work. 0.99

01:32:27.000 The people who were using Peppy... 0.99

01:32:29.000 I haven't got this story quite right, but I'll get it mostly right.

01:32:32.000 The people who were using Peppy as a meme...

01:32:35.000 There it is.

01:32:36.000 Yeah, that's it.

01:32:37.000 Republic of Kekistan.

01:32:38.000 This is hilarious.

01:32:40.000 So they used this symbol, K-E-K, to replace L-O-L. And the reason they did that was because K-E-K in Korean means L-O-L. And so it was just this little joke.

01:32:51.000 Kek.

01:32:51.000 K-E-K. Well, then somebody found out, these were people who were using Pepe, remember?

01:32:56.000 It's a frog.

01:32:57.000 Then people found out that Kek was an Egyptian god. 0.76

01:33:00.000 And he was a frog.

01:33:01.000 And he was between categories. 0.93

01:33:03.000 Sort of like a transsexual, by the way. 1.00

01:33:05.000 He was between categories.

01:33:07.000 And so now they have this Republic of Keck, and it's ruled by this Egyptian god, whose name is Keck, who's a frog. 0.94

01:33:14.000 Hold on, go back.

01:33:15.000 Go back.

01:33:15.000 Don't keep changing this.

01:33:16.000 Jamie's doing this in the background while you're talking, but look at this.

01:33:20.000 There's a frog with a Make America Great Again hat.

01:33:24.000 And he's got, like, a tombstone.

01:33:27.000 It says, those who served in the meme war, 2015 and 2016. We are the gods of the great meme war.

01:33:33.000 We are the shit posters. 0.99

01:33:35.000 The Legion of Keck. 1.00

01:33:36.000 We are the internet.

01:33:37.000 The death of the normies.

01:33:40.000 Lulz and Keck.

01:33:41.000 We are one. 1.00

01:33:42.000 What in the fuck is going on? 1.00

01:33:44.000 That is the question. 1.00

01:33:45.000 And that's the question you asked me.

01:33:47.000 And my answer was, I don't know.

01:33:49.000 We're in a period of chaos.

01:33:52.000 We're in a period of chaos, and in a period of chaos, the time horizon shrinks because the outcome is uncertain.

01:33:58.000 Well, this seems to be truly embracing chaos.

01:34:01.000 I mean, just that statement, the frog, the Donald Trump thing with the hat on. 0.99

01:34:05.000 This is one of the things that seems to me to be a reoccurring feature in this whole chaos ballet that we're watching play out, is that people are enjoying the fact that Donald Trump sucks as a president. 0.98

01:34:20.000 They don't feel threatened by it. 0.98

01:34:22.000 They like it. 1.00

01:34:22.000 And they don't like it because they want to burn this motherfucker to the ground and torch this thing and, like a phoenix, we'll rise from the fire. 1.00

01:34:30.000 No. 1.00

01:34:30.000 No, it's not that. 1.00

01:34:31.000 It's that they are enjoying that it's falling apart. 0.98

01:34:35.000 This is why we are the shitposters. 0.91

01:34:37.000 Do you know what shitposting is? 0.91

01:34:39.000 Yeah.

01:34:39.000 Jamie, explain shitposting.

01:34:41.000 You're really good at explaining it.

01:34:42.000 Yeah.

01:34:44.000 Posting for, like, literally no reason other than to get someone mad.

01:34:47.000 It's almost like trolling, but it's like a separate level of trolling.

01:34:50.000 Right?

01:34:51.000 That's a good way to say it.

01:34:52.000 Yeah, that's a good way to say it.

01:34:52.000 Provocation for its own sake.

01:34:54.000 Jamie's the first person to tell me about shitposting.

01:34:57.000 I wasn't aware.

01:34:58.000 Until about what?

01:34:59.000 A year ago?

01:35:00.000 Yeah, I think it was, yeah.

01:35:01.000 Probably around about pre-election time.

01:35:03.000 I did not know.

01:35:04.000 So, I mean, there's rules for operating in chaos, right?

01:35:07.000 Because that's when you're in the belly of the beast or the belly of the whale, and you're underwater.

01:35:11.000 You're in the underworld.

01:35:12.000 You're in the underworld in chaos.

01:35:13.000 And so that's a really cool thing to know, Joe.

01:35:15.000 So imagine that...

01:35:17.000 The normal world of mankind is inside that dominance hierarchy where everything is going well.

01:35:22.000 Because nothing abnormal is happening.

01:35:24.000 You're getting what you need and you want and your conscious knowledge suffices, right?

01:35:29.000 Okay, but then something tilts and that structure no longer works.

01:35:32.000 So where do you end up?

01:35:34.000 You end up in the underworld.

01:35:35.000 That's what happens when your partner of 20 years has a long-term affair and you find out about it.

01:35:42.000 It's like you thought you knew where you were.

01:35:44.000 But you didn't.

01:35:45.000 And now that you've found out, you don't know where you are.

01:35:49.000 Well, when you don't know where you are, you're in the underworld.

01:35:52.000 Right, and that's where the unconscious forces play.

01:35:55.000 Those are the gods.

01:35:56.000 That's why there's gods in the underworld.

01:35:58.000 And people go to the underworld all the time.

01:36:01.000 It's chaos and fear and depression, hopelessness and imaginativeness.

01:36:05.000 It's everything.

01:36:06.000 It's chaos.

01:36:06.000 And this realm is terrifying to people.

01:36:08.000 Terrifying and promising.

01:36:10.000 Terrifying and promising, because dragons have gold.

01:36:13.000 Because it's always, the unknown has two things.

01:36:16.000 Just like the future.

01:36:18.000 It's like, look out, it'll do you in.

01:36:20.000 And look out, it offers everything to you.

01:36:23.000 That's the underworld.

01:36:24.000 That's why the hero always goes into the underworld to find a cave full of gold that's guarded by a dragon.

01:36:30.000 In The Hobbit, literally.

01:36:31.000 Yeah, and that's Beowulf, right?

01:36:34.000 That's the oldest story of mankind.

01:36:36.000 It's really our oldest story.

01:36:38.000 And so the underworld is chaos.

01:36:41.000 It's chaos, and down there there's all sorts of play of possibility.

01:36:44.000 And the reason the frog was the guardian of chaos is because the frog is this thing that doesn't fit into categories, you see, because it's partly water, it's partly land.

01:36:54.000 It's tadpole, yet it's adult, right?

01:36:56.000 So it's like a fish, and then it's like an animal.

01:36:58.000 It doesn't fit.

01:37:00.000 And it's things that don't fit that blow apart the categories.

01:37:03.000 Well, that's what the transsexuals do to the category of gender, for example. 1.00

01:37:07.000 And that puts you in this state of chaos. 0.93

01:37:09.000 It puts you in this state of chaos.

01:37:12.000 And that's what we're in now.

01:37:13.000 We're in a state of chaos.

01:37:14.000 So what are the rules for operating in a state of chaos?

01:37:17.000 Well, as far as I can tell, the fundamental rule when operating in chaos is tell the truth.

01:37:23.000 So, for example, if you...

01:37:24.000 For the people that want to navigate this successfully.

01:37:27.000 Yep.

01:37:27.000 All you've got, that's what you've got, as a shield and a weapon.

01:37:32.000 And...

01:37:35.000 And that's the guidepost.

01:37:36.000 That's the way through.

01:37:37.000 And you see that in hero stories all the time, you know?

01:37:40.000 So, it's allegiance to the truth, but the truth is a strange thing.

01:37:45.000 It's a very strange thing.

01:37:46.000 Often the hero in a story has to assimilate their dark side before they're capable of telling the truth.

01:37:53.000 Right?

01:37:53.000 In The Hobbit, for example, he has to become a thief.

01:37:57.000 Right.

01:37:57.000 Because he has to get tough.

01:37:59.000 That's the thing.

01:38:00.000 That's also the thing about telling the truth, is that it's not for the naive.

01:38:05.000 Not at all.

01:38:07.000 And partly it's because it burns off dead wood.

01:38:10.000 It's partly because it hurts people's feelings.

01:38:11.000 It's a sword.

01:38:14.000 So, you have to be a warrior.

01:38:18.000 Wow.

01:38:18.000 A truth warrior.

01:38:21.000 In this time of chaos.

01:38:23.000 Right.

01:38:24.000 What emerges from this?

01:38:25.000 Right.

01:38:28.000 Sometimes it's catastrophe.

01:38:30.000 That's the thing about these categories.

01:38:31.000 They're real.

01:38:32.000 They're real.

01:38:34.000 And, you know, the optimists that I hear say, well, the pendulum swings and then it swings back.

01:38:39.000 And I think, yeah, well, sometimes it takes a hundred years to swing back and it takes a hell of a lot of people out on the way.

01:38:45.000 And sometimes it never swings back at all.

01:38:48.000 So, you know, sometimes people go out to fight a dragon and it just eats them or it burns them.

01:38:53.000 And that's the end of that.

01:38:55.000 Right.

01:38:55.000 And, like, we're in an unstable period of time at the moment, in a transition period of some sort.

01:39:01.000 I can't put my finger on it, but I know that that's partly why what I've been saying has been resonating with people, because obviously it's not about pronouns.

01:39:10.000 Well, it is.

01:39:12.000 It is, except...

01:39:14.000 Language turns out to be about a lot more than like you can't take a little thing Like the desire to transform pronouns and think that that's a little thing.

01:39:23.000 It's not a little thing.

01:39:24.000 It's also your disagreement with this use of these New gender pronoun words they're trying to force on people has opened up this discussion where you can Enlighten people on your very deep understanding of human psychology.

01:39:41.000 It's not just simply This gender pronoun disagreement.

01:39:45.000 You're transphobic. 1.00

01:39:47.000 You're a racist. 1.00

01:39:48.000 You're a transphobic piece of shit. 1.00

01:39:50.000 It's this opportunity now because of this. 1.00

01:39:53.000 I mean, essentially, they fucked with the wrong dude. 0.68

01:39:57.000 I mean, to say it the right way because your understanding of this is...

01:40:03.000 I'd like a t-shirt like that.

01:40:03.000 Yeah, it's not shallow in any sense of the word.

01:40:06.000 I mean...

01:40:07.000 To engage you in this battle of rhetoric, it allows you to expose your very deep understanding with the problems that are going on right now with human beings in general.

01:40:20.000 Well, it looks like that to me because what happens, as far as I can tell, with my YouTube channel, say, is that people are often pulled in because of the social justice warrior stuff.

01:40:31.000 But then they see I have all these other videos and they're curious about me, partly because people are calling me names.

01:40:37.000 And so then they watch a video or two and they think, hmm, I haven't heard that before.

01:40:42.000 And then they watch a bunch of them.

01:40:43.000 And then they write me and say, man, that was really helpful.

01:40:46.000 And I say, thanks, I'm really happy about that, because I am.

01:40:50.000 Are you in an unmanageable position now, though, as far as responding to people?

01:40:54.000 Oh, I try to respond to people, but I can't.

01:40:57.000 Yeah, it's not possible.

01:40:57.000 No, it's not possible.

01:40:59.000 I would imagine, over the last few months, it must be just overwhelming.

01:41:03.000 Yeah, well, I've given up trying to keep up on my email.

01:41:08.000 My wife helps me with that, and I've had some other people help me.

01:41:10.000 But, you know, what I do is I look, and I try to say thank you to people and write them a couple of lines when I have a moment, but, you know, because I can't get to all of it.

01:41:20.000 They just come in by the thousands.

01:41:21.000 Yeah, right.

01:41:23.000 And it's too bad because people are writing me very heartfelt, long letters.

01:41:28.000 They're often brilliant, frequently, like amazing letters telling me, you know, their experiences with the authoritarian left or...

01:41:36.000 Or the way they've been, you know, cornered in one way or another or how starting to clean up the room changed their life.

01:41:44.000 That's quite fun because it's something I always tell people to do instead of going out and protesting.

01:41:48.000 Jesus, I just can't stand that.

01:41:50.000 Cleaning up the room?

01:41:51.000 Yeah.

01:41:52.000 Meaning?

01:41:53.000 Well, my sense is that if you want to change the world, you start from yourself and work outward because you build your competence that way.

01:41:59.000 It's like, I don't know how you can go out and protest the structure of the entire economic system if you can't keep your room organized. 0.89

01:42:06.000 Yeah, isn't that an issue with people, though, that they always want to enact some sort of control over the outside world when their inside is all fucked up? 0.55

01:42:14.000 Yeah, well, it's also...

01:42:15.000 Those are the people that are the most adamant about it?

01:42:16.000 Well, I think there's some truth in that.

01:42:20.000 I think there is truth in that.

01:42:21.000 I mean, people try to change the outside world for lots of ways, but many of those ways aren't just pure good.

01:42:27.000 But, you know, I've thought about...

01:42:29.000 Well, I made a video which was called Message to Millennials, where it was called How to Change the World Properly.

01:42:35.000 A bit on the pretentious side, I suppose.

01:42:38.000 But I was trying to produce something that was a counterposition to this idea that what you should do is go out and fix up other people.

01:42:46.000 You know, that's just not right.

01:42:47.000 There's a New Testament line about that, something about, you know, not worrying too much about the log in your neighbor's eye, or about the speck in your neighbor's eye when you have a log in your eye.

01:42:57.000 It's like, yes, no kidding, but, you know, do you really want to face that?

01:43:02.000 And so, what I've thought about is that, well, what you start to do is you start to tell and act out the truth locally.

01:43:09.000 Like within the domain of your actual competence, you know, because the world presents itself as a series of puzzles, some of which you're capable of solving and some of which you're not.

01:43:19.000 And you have many puzzles in front of you that you could solve, but you choose not to.

01:43:25.000 You know, those are the things that weigh on your conscience.

01:43:28.000 It's like, you know, I should really do this, but you don't.

01:43:30.000 It's like, so I had this idea a long time ago, because the world is a pretty dreadful place.

01:43:34.000 I thought, well, what would the world be like if people stopped avoiding the things they knew they should do?

01:43:40.000 You know, because the question is, how much are we contributing to the fact that Life is an existential catastrophe and a tragedy.

01:43:48.000 How much is our own corruption contributing to that?

01:43:52.000 That's a really worthwhile question.

01:43:54.000 Things you leave undone because you're angry, you're resentful, you're lazy, you have inertia.

01:43:59.000 Well, you consult your conscience and it says, well, you know, that place over there could use a little work.

01:44:05.000 It's the same as working on yourself.

01:44:07.000 And so you clean that up because you can.

01:44:09.000 And then things are a little clearer around you.

01:44:12.000 And you're a little better off because you've practiced a bit.

01:44:15.000 And so you're a little stronger.

01:44:17.000 And then something else manifests itself and says, well, maybe you could, like, take a crack at fixing me up, too.

01:44:22.000 So you decide to do that.

01:44:23.000 And then that gets a little bit more pristine.

01:44:25.000 You know, and soon...

01:44:27.000 And it's humble because you're not exceeding your domain of competence.

01:44:32.000 You know, it's like, don't be fixing up the economy, 18-year-olds.

01:44:36.000 You don't know anything about the economy.

01:44:38.000 It's a massive, complex machine beyond anyone's understanding.

01:44:42.000 And you mess with it at your peril.

01:44:44.000 So, and can you even clean up your own room?

01:44:47.000 No.

01:44:48.000 Well, you should think about that.

01:44:51.000 You should think about that.

01:44:53.000 Because if you can't even clean up your own room, who the hell are you to give advice to the world?

01:44:59.000 That's a very, very important thing for people to hear.

01:45:02.000 It's a very important thing for people to hear.

01:45:05.000 So many times, I mean, here's a perfect example that people will understand and be able to resonate with.

01:45:11.000 It'll resonate with them, rather. 0.97

01:45:13.000 When you see people that have a lot of inspirational memes on, like, Instagram and Facebook, they're almost all fucked up.

01:45:23.000 L. Ron Hubbard was completely insane and was self-diagnosing and One of the things he was trying to do I mean if you read Lawrence Wright's book going clear he was clearly trying to fix himself in creating this religion this Religion that was a lot of it based on self-help principles that he took from other sources That you see from a lot of these people that are like,

01:45:49.000 I mean, there's legitimately motivational people that find great benefit in being an example, a powerful, strong example, and they find great comfort in showing people their methods that they've used in order to improve their life,

01:46:08.000 like your own self-auditing system that you're promoting.

01:46:12.000 So it's not that it's all not real or, you know...

01:46:20.000 No, it's not like there's no way that people can improve themselves.

01:46:23.000 Quite the contrary.

01:46:25.000 People can improve themselves, I think, to a degree that we don't understand.

01:46:29.000 You know, because a human being...

01:46:31.000 For better or worse, is something potential as well as something actual.

01:46:35.000 And that's really weird, that idea of potential, because it's not actually measurable or tangible, but we seriously believe.

01:46:42.000 It's something like the idea of spirit.

01:46:45.000 Potential.

01:46:46.000 Yeah, but people believe in it, you see.

01:46:48.000 Because I might say, well, you're not living up to your potential.

01:46:51.000 And you might disagree, but you would definitely understand the statement.

01:46:54.000 And you think, well, what is this potential?

01:46:57.000 It's not actual.

01:46:59.000 It's not real.

01:47:16.000 But it is, isn't it?

01:47:17.000 And oftentimes you see that after initial success.

01:47:20.000 You'll see some amazing motivation early in their career, then initial success, and then self-sabotage after the fact, not realizing their potential.

01:47:31.000 Obviously, they've hit some sort of a frequency where they resonate with people that appreciate them.

01:47:36.000 Authors you see that with, musicians, comedians, all sorts of people that create things.

01:47:42.000 And then they're not living up to their potential because they've allowed the demons to take over the inner workings of their mind.

01:47:50.000 And again, there's a lot of sincere people that are motivational people that I follow.

01:47:55.000 I think there's a lot of people out there that take great pleasure in expressing to other people the things that have benefited them.

01:48:04.000 So I don't want to sell them short.

01:48:07.000 This is part of the reason I like the psychoanalysts, Freud and Jung.

01:48:11.000 And I would say particularly Jung, because I haven't read anyone I regard as deeper than Jung.

01:48:17.000 He's terrifying, truly terrifying.

01:48:19.000 But here's one of the things that differentiates him from the typical self-help person.

01:48:23.000 I really love this.

01:48:25.000 He believes that the pathway to completion as a human being is through the embodiment of the monster.

01:48:37.000 Embodiment of the monster.

01:48:38.000 That's the discovery of the shadow.

01:48:40.000 You see, so Jung didn't believe that you could be a good person until you realized your capacity for evil.

01:48:46.000 I don't mean acted it out in the world.

01:48:47.000 But understand that it's possible.

01:48:49.000 Well, not only understand it, but then to bring it under your control.

01:48:53.000 You see, because there's a big difference between someone who's naive and is a good person.

01:48:59.000 They're a good person because they can't not be.

01:49:02.000 They're like a domesticated house cat.

01:49:05.000 There's nothing...

01:49:06.000 They don't even have the capacity to be bad.

01:49:08.000 So there's no morality in that.

01:49:11.000 The morality comes when you're a monster and you can control it.

01:49:15.000 And that's the Jungian encounter with the shadow.

01:49:17.000 So Jung said, for example, that the roots of the shadow go all the way down to hell.

01:49:21.000 And what he meant by that is that...

01:49:23.000 Well, you can think about it literally.

01:49:25.000 You can think about it metaphorically.

01:49:26.000 Well, just think about it metaphorically.

01:49:28.000 It's like...

01:49:29.000 If you start to understand who you are, then you understand the Nazis. 0.82

01:49:35.000 And who wants to understand the Nazis? 0.99

01:49:38.000 You know, I can understand sex criminals. 0.99

01:49:41.000 I can understand them.

01:49:43.000 Right.

01:49:44.000 I can understand Nazis. 0.99

01:49:45.000 And the reason for that is because I can see that as an aspect of myself.

01:49:50.000 Truly.

01:49:52.000 But one of the things that's so interesting, and it's terrifying to realize that, which is why it's terrifying to realize the shadow, which is why people don't do it, It's no wonder they don't do it.

01:50:01.000 You know, it's a horrible thing to realize that you're human, and what being human means.

01:50:08.000 Like, angel, like Christ to Satan, that's the human being.

01:50:13.000 And you might say, well, those aren't real.

01:50:16.000 It's like, okay, well, they're figments of the imagination that the human race constructed to describe themselves.

01:50:21.000 Fine!

01:50:23.000 Does that make it less frightening?

01:50:25.000 I don't think so.

01:50:27.000 So, it doesn't make it any less frightening if you take those two extremes seriously.

01:50:32.000 And you might say, well, who's going to take the Christ extreme seriously? 0.52

01:50:35.000 It's no problem, man.

01:50:37.000 Dispense with it.

01:50:38.000 You try getting rid of the other side. 0.98

01:50:40.000 See how you do with that.

01:50:42.000 So, Jung's idea that you find so compelling was essentially that one has to understand their potential for horrific behavior, that it almost exists in all of us, that it's a facet of just the human experience.

01:51:00.000 Well, look, I know partly why you're so popular. 0.98

01:51:03.000 It's because you're a monster. 0.97

01:51:06.000 I mean, look, I watched what you did to the Kardashians and Jenner on your comedy show, man. 0.99

01:51:12.000 You did this whole gargoyle thing.

01:51:14.000 Yeah, you remember.

01:51:15.000 You laugh.

01:51:16.000 Yeah, see, you can even laugh about that.

01:51:17.000 I mean, it was horrifying to behold.

01:51:19.000 You were crouched up on the back of this chair like a...

01:51:22.000 It's horrifying to do.

01:51:23.000 Oh, yeah.

01:51:23.000 I couldn't believe you did it.

01:51:24.000 Well, the problem with doing it is... 0.98

01:51:27.000 This is gonna sound fucked up, but while I'm doing it, I'm not thinking I'm doing a comedy sketch. 0.98

01:51:33.000 This is what's fucked up about it. 0.99

01:51:35.000 While I'm crouched there, I'm thinking like a demon. 0.98

01:51:39.000 That's the reason why I do it that way.

01:51:41.000 The reason why I do it...

01:51:43.000 I'm very flexible, right?

01:51:47.000 So it's one of the reasons why I do it in almost...

01:51:49.000 Because I want it to be in an almost...

01:51:54.000 In a way that you don't imagine human beings moving.

01:51:58.000 You know that you it's like it confuses the mind because it's not standard human movement and Then on top of that the way I'm thinking and it's like Explosive like when he yells out nonsense and I say he because I don't think of it as me I really think it's it sounds so pretentious, 0.99

01:52:16.000 but while I'm doing that my brain goes into another place You can't do that unless you're a monster It's a fucked up bit. 0.95

01:52:28.000 I'm very happy when I retired it, by the way. 0.98

01:52:30.000 I was really quite taken.

01:52:33.000 I was very impressed by it.

01:52:34.000 I mean, I thought it was hilarious to begin with, but the fact that you would go there, I thought that was really interesting.

01:52:40.000 And comedians are like that, because they go into dark places.

01:52:43.000 They're tricksters.

01:52:44.000 They're a mediator between the normal world and the world of the gods. 0.98

01:52:48.000 They're tricksters.

01:52:49.000 So it was very funny to watch you do that.

01:52:52.000 And I wondered how far you would let yourself get into it.

01:52:54.000 But I think part of the reason that you're appealing to people, if you don't mind me saying this, you know, I'm not trying to be forward particularly, but I thought about it a lot, is that you're a tough guy.

01:53:08.000 And you tell the truth.

01:53:09.000 But it's both of those together that's what's doing it.

01:53:11.000 Because, you know, people don't look at you and think, like, holier-than-thou preacher.

01:53:18.000 That isn't what they think.

01:53:19.000 They think, tough guy, who's trying to figure things out.

01:53:24.000 Like, right on.

01:53:25.000 That's good.

01:53:26.000 That's a good...

01:53:27.000 You're a good figure for the times.

01:53:29.000 Because this whole war against the phallogocentrism, you know, calls forward people who are like you, if we're lucky. 0.64

01:53:37.000 And those are guys who have this warrior end.

01:53:39.000 Because, you know, you're a fighter.

01:53:41.000 So, and if you're going to be a fighter, you have to want to win.

01:53:45.000 And you have to want to hurt people.

01:53:46.000 I mean, not for the sake of hurting them.

01:53:48.000 That's what makes you different than an evil person.

01:53:51.000 But you have to have that capacity.

01:53:52.000 You have to develop that.

01:53:54.000 And that's the step on the way to enlightenment, weirdly enough, because that isn't what people think.

01:53:59.000 Well, I definitely think that truth is a valuable commodity in this very bizarre time.

01:54:05.000 And I think that's also one of the reasons why you're very popular, is that you have stuck your neck out in a world that does not encourage it, nor...

01:54:15.000 Academia not only does it not encourage it encourages the exact opposite encourages you to stick your head You know in in the books and just to in in some way shape or form go with the tide like whichever way it is and you know get your tenure and Just yeah,

01:54:30.000 well, it's intellectual pride.

01:54:32.000 Yeah, you know, but I don't consider myself an intellectual precisely.

01:54:35.000 What do you consider yourself?

01:54:38.000 What is an intellectual if you're not?

01:54:41.000 How about nobody?

01:54:42.000 Well, see, because my ideas aren't disembodied.

01:54:46.000 I act them out.

01:54:48.000 So it kind of makes me romantic in some sense.

01:54:51.000 Well, I don't live in my head, exactly.

01:54:53.000 I do to some degree, but...

01:54:55.000 What does an intellectual do, then?

01:54:58.000 Do you think of it as a pejorative?

01:55:00.000 When you think of the term intellectual, do you think of it as a limited person?

01:55:04.000 Well, it's a funny thing.

01:55:05.000 In this book called Thus Spake Zarathustra, Nietzsche has his Zarathustra come down from a mountaintop after being enlightened, and he sees this.

01:55:13.000 He goes into the public square, and there's this little tiny being there, like an inch high, and it has a gigantic ear on it.

01:55:21.000 And it's talking, and people are gathered around listening.

01:55:24.000 And that was sort of Nietzsche's metaphor for an intellectual.

01:55:28.000 It was like, mostly little except...

01:55:31.000 Maybe the rational faculty or something like that expanded to monstrous dimensions, unbalanced in that manner, and prone to become the subject of totalitarian ideology.

01:55:43.000 That's the worship of the rational mind that the Catholic Church always warned against.

01:55:48.000 You know, it's not like the Catholic Church.

01:55:50.000 Of course I have to say this, but I won't even say it.

01:55:53.000 You don't need to.

01:55:54.000 No, that's right.

01:55:55.000 That's right.

01:55:55.000 But the point is, they had a warning, and the warning was that the rational mind liked to fall in love with its own creations.

01:56:01.000 Ah.

01:56:02.000 Right?

01:56:03.000 So, the term intellectual, the problem is that it identifies one aspect, and it...

01:56:12.000 It sort of defines one aspect of behavior and thinking.

01:56:16.000 Only one.

01:56:17.000 Yeah, it's the intellect.

01:56:18.000 It's not a balance.

01:56:18.000 Well, what happens is it's like the intellect is raised to the status of highest God.

01:56:24.000 That's the right way to think.

01:56:26.000 See, the God idea, here's another way of thinking about it that's quite cool.

01:56:29.000 I learned this from Jung.

01:56:31.000 And you can take it for what it's worth.

01:56:35.000 The highest ideal that a person holds, consciously or unconsciously, that's their God.

01:56:42.000 It functions in precisely that manner.

01:56:45.000 And people might say, well, I don't believe in God.

01:56:47.000 It's like, well, it depends on what you mean.

01:56:49.000 And I'm not being foolish about that.

01:56:52.000 It's like, we're very complicated creatures, and we're run by all sorts of very strange things down there in the unconscious, you know.

01:56:59.000 And the Greeks thought we were the playthings of the gods because we serve lust, we serve thirst, we serve hunger, we serve rage.

01:57:08.000 You know, and those things all transcend us.

01:57:11.000 So that's why they were gods.

01:57:13.000 You know, rage, that's the war god.

01:57:15.000 Well, why is it a god?

01:57:16.000 Well, it exists forever.

01:57:18.000 It exists in all people.

01:57:20.000 It takes them over and directs their behavior.

01:57:22.000 It's a god.

01:57:23.000 Well, you can quibble about the details.

01:57:26.000 No, it's not a god.

01:57:28.000 Okay, fine.

01:57:28.000 It's a psychological force.

01:57:31.000 Right.

01:57:31.000 Do people get too hung up on that one word?

01:57:33.000 Well, they don't really...

01:57:35.000 We have to think about it functionally to some degree.

01:57:38.000 We have to think about what that idea means.

01:57:41.000 I mean, we've had that idea forever.

01:57:43.000 It isn't just some superstition.

01:57:45.000 Jesus.

01:57:46.000 We've got to be more sophisticated than that, man.

01:57:49.000 Right.

01:57:49.000 You know, and that's partly...

01:57:51.000 Well, this is partly what I think is unfortunate about the new atheists, let's say, is they don't take the damn problem seriously. 0.98

01:57:59.000 They think, well, Christianity, that's just a bunch of superstition. 0.98

01:58:02.000 It's like, really?

01:58:05.000 No.

01:58:07.000 Sorry.

01:58:07.000 That's just not deep enough, man.

01:58:10.000 So, what it really is, is the accounts of people trying to work out the issues of being human.

01:58:18.000 Let me give you another example.

01:58:20.000 This is so cool.

01:58:21.000 This is so cool.

01:58:23.000 Northrop Frye, who is a biblical scholar at the University of Toronto, this was one of his elucidations of the structure of the Bible.

01:58:31.000 So the Bible's actually a story, which is weird because it's a whole bunch of different books written by a whole bunch of different people, edited kind of willy-nilly over thousands of years and then assembled, you know, by committee.

01:58:42.000 It's a really strange book, but it has a narrative structure.

01:58:46.000 And that sort of emerged as a collective decision across these thousands of years.

01:58:51.000 So, the Old Testament, here's the rough story in the Old Testament.

01:58:57.000 Israel is sort of a middle power, and it rises to power.

01:59:03.000 So, and domination.

01:59:05.000 And then a prophet arises and says, look, you guys, you're all successful now.

01:59:10.000 You're starting to get corrupt.

01:59:11.000 You're not paying attention to the widows and children.

01:59:13.000 You're not running your state according to the superordinate principle.

01:59:18.000 You might say, well, the superordinate principle doesn't exist.

01:59:21.000 It's like, okay, keep running it that way and see what the hell happens.

01:59:26.000 That's what the prophet says, usually at the risk of his life.

01:59:28.000 He says that to the king.

01:59:30.000 It's like, fine!

01:59:31.000 You don't believe in God?

01:59:32.000 You don't believe in the superordinate principle?

01:59:34.000 Let's say that, the superordinate ethical principle?

01:59:36.000 No problem.

01:59:37.000 Keep doing what you're doing.

01:59:38.000 Let's see what happens.

01:59:39.000 Well, what happens is Israel gets wiped out.

01:59:41.000 You know, and then for generations it's enslaved, or its population is being destroyed, and then it's sort of...

01:59:48.000 Climbs back up to power.

01:59:50.000 And then it gets powerful for a brief period of time, and it gets corrupt, and a prophet comes up and says, remember that superordinate principle that you made a covenant with?

01:59:59.000 You're not paying any attention to it anymore.

02:00:01.000 You better look the hell out.

02:00:02.000 And everyone ignores it, and bang!

02:00:04.000 So it's order, corruption, chaos.

02:00:10.000 Order, corruption, chaos.

02:00:12.000 That happens six times now.

02:00:14.000 So there's an idea behind it.

02:00:16.000 The idea, because the state keeps rising, there's an idea that emerges out of that, that the aim is the perfect state.

02:00:23.000 That's a utopian dream that arises out of that, let's call it, learned process over thousands of years.

02:00:30.000 If we could only get the state perfect, if we could only get the state perfect, well let's say like the state of Israel, or the Russian state, the communist state, if we could only bring utopia in at the political level, our problems would be solved.

02:00:43.000 Well, then what happens is there's a transition in conceptualization.

02:00:48.000 That happens with the New Testament.

02:00:50.000 And the New Testament conceptualization is, wait a minute, the state isn't salvation.

02:00:56.000 The individual is salvation.

02:01:00.000 Now you say, well, we're going to just throw that out, are we?

02:01:03.000 That was a hell of a discovery, man.

02:01:06.000 And then there's more to it.

02:01:08.000 It's not only is the individual salvation.

02:01:10.000 It's the truthful individual that's salvation.

02:01:13.000 You think of how difficult a concept like that is to develop.

02:01:16.000 If there's anything less self-evident than that.

02:01:20.000 You know, because you think, well, who's going to run the dominance hierarchy? 0.97

02:01:23.000 It's like the biggest bloody monster with a club. 0.69

02:01:26.000 It's like, no, it turns out those are unstable. 0.98

02:01:29.000 Those societies are unstable.

02:01:31.000 They don't work.

02:01:31.000 They collapse into chaos.

02:01:33.000 They get corrupt.

02:01:34.000 They lose sight of the superordinate principle, whatever that is.

02:01:39.000 The stable solution is the individual that tells the truth.

02:01:42.000 And it's taken us forever to figure that out.

02:01:45.000 And that's partly what the postmodernists are after.

02:01:48.000 That's their anti-phalogocentrism.

02:01:50.000 That's why they skitter off and hide in their ideology.

02:01:53.000 They're afraid to come out.

02:01:55.000 They're afraid to be seen.

02:01:56.000 They're afraid to speak, because they have nothing to say.

02:02:00.000 So...

02:02:01.000 We have to get sophisticated about this stuff, or we're going to throw it away without understanding it.

02:02:07.000 It's unbelievable.

02:02:10.000 It's the story upon which Western civilization is founded.

02:02:19.000 That's why Nietzsche said when God was dead that everything would collapse into chaos.

02:02:23.000 He didn't say that triumphantly.

02:02:25.000 He knew what was going to happen.

02:02:27.000 So did Dostoevsky.

02:02:28.000 That's why I admire those people so much.

02:02:30.000 They knew what was coming.

02:02:33.000 So what I've been trying to do, and I've been guided in large part by Jung, because he was the first.

02:02:38.000 See, Jung took Nietzsche's problem seriously.

02:02:40.000 Nietzsche said, look, we're losing our faith.

02:02:42.000 We're losing our ability to relate to this superordinate ethical principle.

02:02:47.000 And he actually blamed Christianity for killing itself with the sort of truth that it had produced.

02:02:52.000 He said, so we're going to lose this, and it's big trouble.

02:02:55.000 Make no mistake about it, because our whole society is founded on those principles.

02:02:58.000 We get rid of the animating spirit at the base of it, we're going to lose all of it.

02:03:03.000 So, Nietzsche thought, well, we're going to have to become superhuman to manage it.

02:03:07.000 That's where his concept of the overman comes from, or the superman, which the Nazis sort of pulled off and parodied, I would say.

02:03:15.000 Now, Jung, you see, Jung was a student of Nietzsche's, not directly, but very much influenced by him.

02:03:20.000 Jung thought that Nietzsche was wrong, that we couldn't create our own values.

02:03:24.000 Because, look, it's so hard to create your own values.

02:03:27.000 Like, let's say you're kind of an overweight guy and you decide to go to the gym for your New Year's resolution.

02:03:33.000 It's like you don't.

02:03:34.000 You go twice and then you stop, and it's because you can't create your own values, right?

02:03:39.000 It's hard.

02:03:39.000 You're not your own slave.

02:03:41.000 You can't just tell yourself what to do.

02:03:43.000 You have a nature.

02:03:45.000 And so Jung's idea was, well, that we had to go back to the mythology.

02:03:48.000 We had to go back to the stories.

02:03:50.000 We had to go back into the underground, unconscious chaos and lift out what we had forgotten.

02:03:56.000 And that's what he was trying to do with his psychology, and he's done it very effectively.

02:04:01.000 Very, very effectively.

02:04:02.000 He was a revolutionary thinker, but very difficult to understand.

02:04:06.000 And so I've been working with Jung's ideas for a long time, trying to, I would say, Make them more rational and articulate.

02:04:16.000 And believe me, that's no critique.

02:04:18.000 Because every time I go back to Jung, which I do from time to time, thinking I've kind of mastered him, I learn a bunch of stuff that I didn't know.

02:04:27.000 So what I've been trying to do is to resurrect...

02:04:30.000 God...

02:04:31.000 I'm trying to resurrect the dormant logos, I suppose, if you have to put it that way.

02:04:36.000 That's what I'm trying to do.

02:04:38.000 And it's mostly in men.

02:04:40.000 And they're starving for it.

02:04:42.000 Why mostly in men?

02:04:43.000 I don't know.

02:04:44.000 That just seems to be what's happening.

02:04:46.000 Like, about 90% of my viewers on YouTube are men.

02:04:49.000 But then when I go speak publicly, it's all men. 1.00

02:04:52.000 What the hell are they doing coming to hear somebody speak?

02:04:54.000 Men don't do that, right? 0.97

02:04:56.000 Women do that. 1.00

02:04:58.000 And then I talk to them about truth and responsibility and their eyes light up because it's like no one ever mentioned that before.

02:05:04.000 It just boggles my mind.

02:05:07.000 I'm asking because I feel like that is a gigantic theme today.

02:05:13.000 That men searching for some sort of reason or some sort of, I guess, without a better word, path.

02:05:23.000 Some sort of path.

02:05:25.000 I mean, it seems to be very, very prevalent today.

02:05:28.000 In almost all walks of life, men feel disenfranchised with this world that they find themselves stuck in.

02:05:37.000 Well, there's a reason that superhero movies are so popular.

02:05:40.000 You know, that's polytheism.

02:05:42.000 That's the return of polytheism, for all intents and purposes.

02:05:45.000 I mean, what the hell are those things?

02:05:47.000 They're demigods, obviously.

02:05:48.000 One of them's Thor, for God's sake.

02:05:50.000 I mean, how more obvious could it be?

02:05:52.000 Right.

02:05:53.000 You know, and so you might say, well, who's the leader of the demigods? 0.66

02:05:56.000 Because that's the person you really want to follow.

02:05:58.000 Right.

02:05:59.000 Right?

02:06:00.000 Yeah.

02:06:00.000 Yeah, well, the evolutionary answer to that is, well, the evolutionary answer to that, as far as the Christian route went, was Christ.

02:06:08.000 But there's been lots of embodiments of that.

02:06:10.000 For the Mesopotamians, it was Marduk.

02:06:12.000 Marduk was the savior figure.

02:06:15.000 He had eyes all the way around his head, and he spoke magic words.

02:06:18.000 That's what made him different from all the other gods.

02:06:21.000 And he was elected by all the other gods to be their king.

02:06:25.000 And then he went out and fought Tiamat, who's a great dragon.

02:06:28.000 And made the world out of her pieces.

02:06:30.000 One of his names was, he who makes ingenious things out of the combat with Tiamat.

02:06:35.000 Well, that's what human beings do, is they go out into the unknown, into chaos, and they make ingenious things out of it.

02:06:41.000 That's what we do.

02:06:43.000 And so that, he's the found, Marduk was the founder of Mesopotamian civilization.

02:06:48.000 And you could think about all those tribes came together to make Mesopotamia.

02:06:51.000 They all had a god.

02:06:53.000 And so then those gods went to war.

02:06:56.000 And out of that war of gods, a metagod emerged.

02:06:59.000 That was Marduk.

02:07:00.000 And Marduk is one of the sources for the figure of Christ.

02:07:03.000 That happened all over the place.

02:07:04.000 Like, you see the admirable man.

02:07:06.000 Then you see ten admirable men, and you think, wow, those guys have something in common.

02:07:11.000 That's what you remember about them, you see?

02:07:13.000 You remember the heroic things they've done.

02:07:15.000 Because they stick in your memory.

02:07:16.000 Because they fit the pattern.

02:07:18.000 And then you start telling the story about the heroic things that a bunch of them did.

02:07:21.000 It all amalgamates together.

02:07:23.000 And then you come out with your culture hero, your god.

02:07:26.000 Then there's like 50 tribes.

02:07:28.000 They each have their own gods.

02:07:29.000 Well, what are you going to do then?

02:07:31.000 The gods go to war over centuries.

02:07:34.000 And then they elect a new god, Marduk, in the case of the Mesopotamians. 0.77

02:07:38.000 And he's the thing that goes out and fights the dragon of chaos and makes the world.

02:07:43.000 It's like, yeah, that's exactly what he is.

02:07:46.000 You do that with truth.

02:07:48.000 Because truth introduces you to chaos.

02:07:50.000 Why do you think, though, it's so much of an issue with males as opposed to females in our society?

02:07:55.000 Maybe females already have enough to do. 1.00

02:07:58.000 Really, really.

02:07:59.000 Maybe men have to take this on voluntarily. 0.96

02:08:02.000 That's what it looks like to me.

02:08:04.000 Because you can screw around until you're 50. You can still have a family.

02:08:09.000 You've got time.

02:08:11.000 And you can sit down and do nothing if you want.

02:08:15.000 You can do it.

02:08:17.000 But you shouldn't, because it's horrible to do that.

02:08:20.000 And people who do it know it.

02:08:22.000 Like, it's meaningless.

02:08:23.000 Well, it's a funny thing about meaninglessness.

02:08:26.000 There's no such thing.

02:08:27.000 When people say their lives are meaningless, that isn't what they mean.

02:08:30.000 They mean, I'm in pain and anxious all the time.

02:08:35.000 That's what they mean.

02:08:35.000 Those are meanings, man.

02:08:37.000 You don't get neutral.

02:08:38.000 You know, I'm just sitting around, I'm not feeling anything.

02:08:41.000 It's like, no, sorry, that doesn't happen.

02:08:43.000 Right, so when you say, do nothing, that your life is meaningless if you're doing nothing.

02:08:49.000 What do you mean by doing nothing?

02:08:51.000 Well, by not accepting any responsibility, by not lifting a great load, by not acting out the archetype of the hero.

02:08:57.000 That's what people are.

02:08:58.000 That's what men are, if they're anything.

02:09:01.000 They're mythological heroes, if they're anything.

02:09:03.000 Through some path, whatever it be.

02:09:05.000 There's lots of paths.

02:09:06.000 I mean, so look, there's an old medieval idea.

02:09:08.000 This is the idea of the imitation of Christ.

02:09:11.000 This is something that Jung elaborates on a lot.

02:09:13.000 He believed, this is one of the things that he said, was that the proper goal of a Christian, roughly speaking, is to enact the The meta-pattern of Christ's life in their own, to make it their own story. 0.65

02:09:29.000 And so, what did he mean by that?

02:09:31.000 Well, part of it is, see, one of the things that characterizes the mythological figure of Christ, let's say, is that he takes on the burden of mortality voluntarily.

02:09:41.000 He accepts it as a precondition of existence.

02:09:45.000 And we have to do that because otherwise we get resentful.

02:09:48.000 Like, life is hard.

02:09:49.000 Make no mistake about it.

02:09:50.000 People's lives are tragic.

02:09:52.000 You know, if you pick a random person off the street and you ask them about their life, man, usually there's things that have happened.

02:09:58.000 You know, they just beggar the imagination.

02:10:00.000 It's no wonder people are angry and resentful and bitter.

02:10:04.000 But the way out of that is to accept it.

02:10:07.000 To accept your mortality, and that helps you transcend it.

02:10:10.000 That's partly what the crucifix symbol means, because it was accepted voluntarily.

02:10:16.000 You have to accept your death voluntarily.

02:10:18.000 That's part of the path of the hero.

02:10:21.000 It's a very difficult thing to do, obviously, obviously.

02:10:24.000 What's your alternative?

02:10:26.000 Yeah, obviously.

02:10:29.000 I think people are constantly searching for that thing that you just described the thing of meaning you know having meaning in this life and That meaning has a different definition for everybody I mean everybody's meaning is dummy your meaning might be very different than mine or Jamie's I mean you kind of have to have your own path and I think that's also a One of the reasons why people are so confused is because you're thrust into an early age,

02:10:52.000 into a very rigid system of education, and then of jobs, and then of career structure, where you're in this place, and most people don't feel like that's what they're supposed to be doing.

02:11:05.000 And we feel very alienated by the very structure of society that we are embedded in.

02:11:10.000 Of course, of course.

02:11:11.000 Well, one of the There's two primary masculine mythological figures, and one is the wise king, and the other is the king who devours his own son.

02:11:21.000 That's the patriarchy that the feminists are always talking about. 1.00

02:11:26.000 Well, of course, it's always there. 0.54

02:11:27.000 So society is a destructive force.

02:11:29.000 It doesn't care about you as an individual.

02:11:31.000 It needs you to be part of society.

02:11:33.000 It needs you to adopt the norms and to squelch your peculiar individuality and to be a cog and to be socialized and, you know, to hem yourself in and control yourself and not be impulsive.

02:11:45.000 Yeah, it's a tyrant.

02:11:46.000 But the thing is, society isn't only a tyrant.

02:11:50.000 That's the thing.

02:11:51.000 It's like, how about a little gratitude in there?

02:11:53.000 Well, you know, people have a hard time with this because we like it when a thing is only one thing.

02:11:59.000 But society is always two things.

02:12:01.000 It's the thing that alienates you, and the thing that's your benevolent father.

02:12:06.000 Always, no, you know, it tilts, sometimes it tilts harder towards the tyrant, and that's not so good.

02:12:11.000 But that's an archetypal reality.

02:12:14.000 So, you know, what do you have to contend with in life?

02:12:16.000 This is why these are archetypal realities, because everyone has to contend with them.

02:12:20.000 You have to contend with yourself and the adversary that's inside you, that seems to oppose your every movement.

02:12:28.000 The fact that you're not, that you just can't move forward smoothly through life without being in conflict with yourself.

02:12:34.000 So there's the hero and the adversary on the individual level.

02:12:37.000 And then on the social level, there's the wise king and the tyrant.

02:12:40.000 You're always going to run into that.

02:12:41.000 I don't care if you're a Bantu tribesman or a, you know, New York lawyer.

02:12:47.000 All those things you're going to run into.

02:12:49.000 And then in the natural world, you're going to run into the destructive element of nature, right?

02:12:53.000 That's the gorgon.

02:12:54.000 You let that thing get a glance at you and you're one, like, frozen puppy.

02:12:58.000 But also there's the benevolent element of nature.

02:13:01.000 That's feminine. 0.98

02:13:01.000 That's Mother Nature. 0.98

02:13:02.000 Both of those extremes.

02:13:05.000 And that's the world.

02:13:07.000 That's the archetypal world.

02:13:08.000 And it's because it's eternal as far as human beings are concerned.

02:13:12.000 Those things are always there.

02:13:13.000 That's our true environment.

02:13:15.000 It's not these things we see around us.

02:13:17.000 They're lasting no time.

02:13:19.000 These other things last forever.

02:13:21.000 And that's what we're adapted to.

02:13:23.000 We're adapted to the things that last forever.

02:13:27.000 But yet we go through this finite life searching for meaning.

02:13:32.000 Well, and it's funny to note where meaning seems to locate itself.

02:13:37.000 You want a meaning that justifies the suffering.

02:13:41.000 It's something like that.

02:13:42.000 That's a transcendent meaning.

02:13:44.000 It's like, this is hard, but it's worth it.

02:13:47.000 Okay, so what do you do?

02:13:48.000 Pick something worth it.

02:13:50.000 Right?

02:13:50.000 That's partly what I try to get people to do with that future authoring program.

02:13:54.000 To say, okay, look, here's a place to start.

02:13:57.000 You got your miserable self right now. 0.85

02:14:00.000 It's like three to five years out. 0.93

02:14:03.000 Imagine what your life could be like if you had what you would give yourself if you were taking care of yourself.

02:14:10.000 What would life be like?

02:14:11.000 Just come up with an idea even about that.

02:14:15.000 And so then people do that.

02:14:17.000 And then they write out a plan to attain it.

02:14:19.000 And then the college kids are like 30% more likely to stay in university if they do that, especially if they're men.

02:14:26.000 Because men need a purpose.

02:14:28.000 I think women have a purpose. 1.00

02:14:31.000 Now they have two purposes, you know, they're going to have a family.

02:14:33.000 That's a major purpose, man.

02:14:35.000 Like, just give birth.

02:14:36.000 That's no joke.

02:14:38.000 And then you're devoted to something for like 20 years.

02:14:40.000 You got your adventure right there.

02:14:43.000 Yeah, but a lot of women find great offense in someone saying that, especially a man saying that, mansplaining that a woman's purpose is to breed, right?

02:14:51.000 I mean, isn't that a giant issue that a lot of women have? 1.00

02:14:53.000 I didn't say that was the only purpose.

02:14:55.000 I know, you didn't.

02:14:57.000 Oh, yeah, people have an issue with it, but it's like, grow up.

02:15:00.000 You know, if you're a sophisticated person, as far as I'm concerned, how many important things are there in life?

02:15:10.000 Well, one of them is family.

02:15:13.000 It's as simple as that.

02:15:14.000 Now you might say, well, family isn't the end-all solution.

02:15:16.000 It's like, yeah, well, thanks for pointing that out, you know.

02:15:19.000 I've dealt with plenty of pathological families.

02:15:21.000 But it's a huge part of life.

02:15:24.000 You have a mother and a father.

02:15:25.000 You have children.

02:15:25.000 It places you in the world.

02:15:28.000 And any society that...

02:15:29.000 Look, there's a reason societies worship the virgin mother and the child.

02:15:33.000 It's because societies that don't die And so people say, well, you know, that relationship between mother and child isn't the only thing.

02:15:41.000 Okay, fine.

02:15:42.000 It's still a sacred thing.

02:15:44.000 And you miss it.

02:15:45.000 You miss it.

02:15:46.000 If you're female, you miss that at your peril. 0.99

02:15:48.000 Now, that doesn't mean there aren't women who shouldn't miss it. 0.96

02:15:50.000 Because maybe they have another purpose that transcends that.

02:15:54.000 But that's rare.

02:15:55.000 It's very, very rare.

02:15:57.000 And I would caution any women listening, if they're young, not to be deluded into the idea that their career will be of such high quality that itself evidently trumps having a family. 0.68

02:16:09.000 You have to have a hell of a career before that's the case.

02:16:14.000 So...

02:16:16.000 Don't you think that's unique to the individual though, that some people just, they'll be more satisfied, I mean, depending on what they're doing artistically or creatively or whatever it is?

02:16:26.000 Yeah, you can't make rules for the exceptional.

02:16:28.000 Right.

02:16:29.000 You know, they do what they're going to do.

02:16:30.000 Those are open, maybe those are open people.

02:16:32.000 They have genius level IQ. Like, they're spectacular in some manner.

02:16:36.000 And so, there's a reason they're going to step outside the norm.

02:16:39.000 They're shapeshifters. 1.00

02:16:41.000 No problem.

02:16:42.000 There's always going to be people like that and we need them.

02:16:44.000 How do they know when they're that?

02:16:46.000 Well, telling the truth is a good start, because then you don't fool yourself about who you are.

02:16:52.000 You know, that's another, one of the things I tried to think through is why you should tell the truth.

02:16:57.000 So it's not self-evident, man.

02:16:59.000 A smart kid, the smarter the kid, the earlier they learn to lie.

02:17:02.000 Lying is very powerful, because you can manipulate the world with your language, and then you can get what you want lots of times, or escape from things that you don't want, so why not lie all the time?

02:17:13.000 Well, I think the reason is, there's a bunch of reasons, but one of them is that you can't trust yourself if you lie.

02:17:18.000 And there's going to be times in your life where you have no one to turn to except you.

02:17:22.000 And so if you've stuffed yourself full of lies, then you're going to be in a crisis one day, and you're going to have to make a decision, and you're going to decide wrong.

02:17:29.000 And you're going to be in real trouble.

02:17:30.000 Because you won't have the clarity of mind necessary to make the proper judgment. 0.99

02:17:34.000 Because you've filled your imagination and your perception with rubbish. 0.98

02:17:39.000 Hmm. 0.89

02:17:40.000 So, and if you really think that through, you see, there's this old idea in the Old Testament that fear of God is the beginning of wisdom, and I kind of understand what that means.

02:17:49.000 Because one of the things, say, we do with the Future Authoring Program, we offer people a little heaven.

02:17:53.000 It's like, okay, construct your ideal.

02:17:57.000 Aim at it.

02:17:58.000 Come up with a plan.

02:17:59.000 You're going to modify the plan?

02:18:00.000 No problem.

02:18:01.000 You're going to do a bad job of it?

02:18:02.000 No problem.

02:18:03.000 Just do it.

02:18:05.000 Okay, so then now you've got a goal.

02:18:06.000 It's now your approach systems, technically speaking, the positive emotion systems that motivate you are engaged because they're engaged in relationship to a goal.

02:18:15.000 And the more transcendent the goal, the more they're engaged.

02:18:18.000 But that's not good enough.

02:18:20.000 It's great to run towards something you like, but it's even better to run away from something that terrifies you.

02:18:25.000 So then we ask people, okay, so here, think about this real carefully.

02:18:29.000 Take all your faults and your inadequacies and your hatred for life, all of that, And then imagine that gets the upper hand.

02:18:37.000 And then think about where you could be in three to five years.

02:18:40.000 Everyone knows, hey?

02:18:42.000 Some people know they'd be a street person.

02:18:44.000 Some people know they'd be an alcoholic. 0.96

02:18:45.000 Some people know they'd be a prostitute or a drug addict. 0.89

02:18:48.000 Like, everybody's got their own little hell they could descend into with a fair degree of rapidity and a fair bit of enjoyment. 0.97

02:18:54.000 And people know that.

02:18:55.000 And so I say, well, delineate that out too.

02:18:58.000 So you know where you're headed when you fall off the path.

02:19:01.000 And so then you're running away and running towards?

02:19:04.000 It's like, yes.

02:19:05.000 Well, that's heaven and hell.

02:19:07.000 And you need it.

02:19:08.000 And they're real.

02:19:09.000 They're as real as anything that you can...

02:19:11.000 It depends on what you mean by real, I suppose, but...

02:19:16.000 They're as real as you make them.

02:19:18.000 How about that?

02:19:19.000 And people can make hell pretty real.

02:19:22.000 People do seem to construct these pitfalls for themselves.

02:19:26.000 I mean, self-sabotage is one of the most common things that you find in people that are struggling.

02:19:33.000 I mean, you would think that someone who is struggling, the last thing they'd want to do is help themselves towards their own demise.

02:19:42.000 But it's super common.

02:19:45.000 Yeah, well, I thought about that, too.

02:19:47.000 And so you tell me what you think about this.

02:19:49.000 Because if you talk to people, they say, well, I want to have a meaningful life.

02:19:53.000 Generally, people want that.

02:19:55.000 But then you think, well, then why aren't you?

02:19:58.000 And then you think, well, what does it mean to have a meaningful life, exactly?

02:20:01.000 And then you think, well, maybe it means that you have to take on responsibility.

02:20:05.000 Because your sacrifices have to be worth something, right?

02:20:08.000 It has to have some meat, what you're aiming at.

02:20:12.000 It has to be something that can elevate your worm-like self to the level of tolerability.

02:20:19.000 You know, you can say, well, yeah, I've got all these flaws, but look at what I'm trying to do.

02:20:23.000 That's the real ground of self-respect.

02:20:26.000 Well...

02:20:32.000 I'm off the track with the question.

02:20:34.000 Ground of self-respect.

02:20:35.000 I can't remember what you asked me.

02:20:38.000 So, we'll have to go to a different topic.

02:20:43.000 How did we get on this?

02:20:46.000 You asked about the evolutionary basis of...

02:20:49.000 That was a long time ago.

02:20:52.000 I know, it's a rabbit hole that just doesn't disappear.

02:20:54.000 But where were we just now?

02:20:57.000 Remember where we were just now?

02:21:00.000 No, sorry.

02:21:01.000 I'm distracted by something else that's happening right now.

02:21:03.000 I'll let you know.

02:21:04.000 What is it?

02:21:05.000 Comey just got fired by Trump a little bit ago.

02:21:08.000 And Twitter is ablaze about what's going on right now.

02:21:14.000 I'm sure it's a little off topic.

02:21:16.000 But, I mean, you want to talk about a figure.

02:21:19.000 Oh, I know.

02:21:20.000 We were talking about men.

02:21:21.000 We were talking about men and what motivates them.

02:21:24.000 And so then I was talking about the fact that When I'm speaking publicly now, most of my audience is men and that their eyes light up.

02:21:32.000 So we were talking about the necessity of taking on the burden of a responsibility.

02:21:38.000 Because people, not only should we be acting out the archetype of the hero, but we should be carrying a weight while we're doing it.

02:21:46.000 Because we're like pack animals.

02:21:49.000 We're not happy without a weight.

02:21:51.000 And I do think it's something like... 0.96

02:21:55.000 You have to justify your miserable existence.

02:21:57.000 Do you think, and this is my theory about that, I believe that there are certain human reward systems that we have ingrained in us and that have allowed us to survive this long.

02:22:08.000 And that these reward systems, a lot of them entail overcoming struggle.

02:22:13.000 Because struggle was inexorable.

02:22:16.000 It was a massive part of existence.

02:22:19.000 And that without struggle, our body is almost like, well, how come we're not overcoming something?

02:22:25.000 Yeah, right.

02:22:25.000 So it's almost like a trick.

02:22:27.000 Like you have to trick your body and you trick your brain and trick your humanity, your very existence, into having some sort of a purpose in order to be at a baseline.

02:22:37.000 Yeah, well, I'm more...

02:22:38.000 Does that make sense?

02:22:38.000 Well, yes, it does make sense, but I don't think it's a trick.

02:22:43.000 Here's why.

02:22:45.000 Because I think there is something irreducible about suffering.

02:22:48.000 I think it speaks for itself as a reality, an unquestionable reality.

02:22:54.000 Nobody says to a child that's in severe pain that it isn't going to matter in a million years.

02:23:00.000 Right.

02:23:01.000 The pain trumps everything.

02:23:04.000 So then it seems to me that attempts to alleviate suffering trump everything.

02:23:08.000 So if you want a responsibility, it's like, there you got one.

02:23:11.000 Try arguing your way out of that.

02:23:13.000 It doesn't matter.

02:23:14.000 Fine.

02:23:15.000 Your suffering doesn't matter then.

02:23:17.000 That's for sure.

02:23:18.000 None of the suffering matters?

02:23:20.000 You're going to go down that road, are you?

02:23:22.000 You know what the face of someone who says that no suffering matters looks like?

02:23:28.000 It's not pleasant.

02:23:30.000 So there's no neutral position with regards to that.

02:23:35.000 So you see the world is full of unrequited suffering, let's say, and who knows how much of it is unnecessary.

02:23:40.000 Certainly the stuff you create seems to be unnecessary, especially if you create it purposefully, and people are doing that all the time.

02:23:46.000 So if you need a burden, it's like, how about dampening down the unnecessary suffering a little bit?

02:23:53.000 How about trying hard to do that for the rest of your life?

02:23:56.000 See if that'll do it.

02:23:58.000 And God only knows how far you'd get.

02:24:01.000 You might get a long ways, man.

02:24:03.000 When people talk about meaning, though, when you talk about suffering and this idea, what is going on in the mind that desires this difficult pursuit?

02:24:17.000 What is going on?

02:24:18.000 Why is that a part of being a person?

02:24:20.000 Why is it a part of...

02:24:22.000 Of your ultimate happiness to have these obstacles to overcome and these character developing moments, character building episodes in order for you to manage life and to get through life with the most amount of happiness.

02:24:38.000 There's a story about this, I think it's a frog and a scorpion.

02:24:41.000 Yeah, I like that story.

02:24:42.000 You know the story?

02:24:43.000 Tell it, please.

02:24:44.000 Yeah, well the frog, the scorpion, you know, convinces the frog to give him a ride across the river and the frog says, well, you're a scorpion.

02:24:51.000 It's like, you know, I'm not going to do that because you're going to nail me with your tail.

02:24:56.000 And the scorpion says, no, no, if I do that...

02:24:58.000 When we're in the river, we'll both drown, so why would I do that?

02:25:02.000 So the frog agrees to ferry the scorpion across, and they get halfway out, and the scorpion stings him.

02:25:07.000 And the frog turns to him with his dying breath and says, why'd you do that?

02:25:10.000 And the scorpion said, well, it's in my nature.

02:25:13.000 And that's the answer to your question, is that it's in our nature.

02:25:16.000 That's what an archetype is.

02:25:17.000 We're...

02:25:18.000 The hero archetype is the story of men.

02:25:21.000 Right, but do you think that that nature is because that is how we survived?

02:25:25.000 How over the millions of years we evolved from lower hominids to being a human being is that we needed to have the mechanisms in our very existence to overcome struggle.

02:25:38.000 Then all of a sudden...

02:25:39.000 Joe, maybe we chose it, you know...

02:25:41.000 You think?

02:25:41.000 Well, I mean, I think it is part of the evolutionary process, but look...

02:25:46.000 The thing about sexual selection or the mechanisms that we talked about, say, whereby the dominance hierarchy is the selection mechanism for the transfer of genetic material, there's a choice in that.

02:25:56.000 Like, if a group of guys gets to get together and a leader emerges, someone everyone respects, it's like an election.

02:26:02.000 Everyone voted on it.

02:26:04.000 We chose that particular type of person.

02:26:06.000 Well, who is that?

02:26:07.000 Well, that's the heroic type.

02:26:08.000 Human beings have chosen that.

02:26:10.000 And then the women think, oh, look, a heroic type. 0.94

02:26:12.000 It's like they grab him before someone else gets him.

02:26:15.000 Hmm.

02:26:16.000 And so that's been going on forever.

02:26:18.000 So did we choose it?

02:26:19.000 Well, the action of our choice across millennia selected it.

02:26:24.000 These are things evolutionary psychologists, biologists don't think about.

02:26:28.000 They don't think about the role that consciousness played in determining who survived and how and why.

02:26:34.000 It's been going on for a long time.

02:26:37.000 Well, they certainly know about sexual selection by female choice, you know, but the full implications of that haven't been thought through.

02:26:44.000 Like, I've just really started to grapple with the idea that the male hierarchy is a sexual selection device.

02:26:51.000 It's like the men are voting on, well, who, which of us deserves to go sleep with a woman? 0.98

02:26:55.000 It's like, well, you don't. 0.99

02:26:56.000 You're kind of a weaselly little snake, so, you know, not you. 0.95

02:26:59.000 It's like, oh, Joe. 0.96

02:26:59.000 Joe looks like quite the guy. 0.96

02:27:01.000 Let's put him at the top of the hierarchy.

02:27:04.000 That's what men have been doing with each other forever.

02:27:08.000 Isn't there more to it than that?

02:27:10.000 There's a lot to that, because the question is, who is it that they're electing?

02:27:14.000 But is it really just about sexual selection?

02:27:18.000 That's a good question, Joe.

02:27:20.000 Freud thought so.

02:27:21.000 Like, it's half about that, let's say.

02:27:26.000 Half.

02:27:26.000 Well, you know, there's the survival of the individual and the survival of the species.

02:27:31.000 So those are the two things.

02:27:33.000 But even with that sexual selection, even with that Say if a person does rise to the top of the social hierarchy in that small Dunbar's number of 250 people, is that enough?

02:27:50.000 Does that person still need purpose?

02:27:51.000 Do they still need something, some difficult struggle in order for them to feel fulfilled?

02:27:56.000 For most of human history, that just wasn't a problem.

02:27:59.000 Because you had struggle constantly, right?

02:28:02.000 Man, yes, absolutely.

02:28:03.000 Is that a problem today?

02:28:04.000 Is that the problem our lack of problems?

02:28:06.000 Sure.

02:28:07.000 It's something Kierkegaard pointed out like 150 years ago.

02:28:10.000 He said there'll come a time when everything has been done so well for everyone that the only felt lack will be for lack itself.

02:28:18.000 Are you concerned because of that and because you're very acutely aware of this issue?

02:28:22.000 Are you concerned with this potential future that we have in front of us with artificial intelligence and virtual reality and this need to live in a world that's not real?

02:28:31.000 Like, I mean, how many kids today listening to this exist for a massive amount of their day watching video games, playing video games?

02:28:39.000 Yeah, playing the archetypal hero online.

02:28:41.000 Yes, yes.

02:28:41.000 I had a friend...

02:28:43.000 This is a classic story.

02:28:45.000 I'll never forget this statement that he said to me.

02:28:47.000 He was one of the managers of the Comedy Store.

02:28:49.000 He was a very nice guy, but he was addicted to video games, which I have been in the past.

02:28:54.000 I was addicted to video games for a couple of years.

02:28:57.000 I'd play them all the time.

02:28:58.000 I loved them.

02:28:58.000 They were so much fun.

02:28:59.000 But this guy, he had it bad.

02:29:02.000 I had a career while I was doing it.

02:29:04.000 I managed to figure it out that this was a massive waste of my time and get through.

02:29:08.000 He didn't.

02:29:09.000 And when one day he was...

02:29:13.000 Like I mean pale like he hadn't been outside in days and he was hanging out in the back of the Comedy Store and we were talking and he was addicted to I think it was EverQuest which is this crazy role-playing game that you just do and you just people would play it 18 hours a day and He said something I'll never forget.

02:29:31.000 He said I'm so successful in the video game world and so unsuccessful in the real world that And he was sitting there shaking his head, and I was like, wow.

02:29:43.000 In the real world, he was very unfulfilled, couldn't find a girlfriend, was struggling financially.

02:29:51.000 In the video game world, he was like some warlock.

02:29:54.000 He was out there slaying dragons, and he found...

02:29:58.000 Great reward in that video game world.

02:30:02.000 I'm very concerned that we will literally almost be like in The Matrix, plugged into some artificial electronic thing, which I think these video games that people are playing all day long, they're a precursor to that.

02:30:15.000 Don't get me wrong, if you have great self-control, they're very enjoyable, they're fun, They're great social time with you and your friends.

02:30:21.000 You get together, you play, and you have a great...

02:30:23.000 As long as you're actually being productive and active in everyday life, I don't really think they're a problem.

02:30:28.000 But my concern is that they are a precursor and that we are seeing the beginning steps to this artificial world that we'll be embedded in in the very near future.

02:30:39.000 Well, you know, we decided already that we're in a period of chaos.

02:30:43.000 Yeah.

02:30:43.000 And, you know, part of the reason I'm loathe to make any predictions is, I mean, that's one of the reasons.

02:30:49.000 It's like, how many things need to be going sideways at the same time?

02:30:52.000 Right.

02:30:53.000 Lots of things are going sideways.

02:30:55.000 I have no idea what's going to happen.

02:30:57.000 I mean, we're building autonomous cars.

02:30:59.000 70, like, that's the biggest employment category.

02:31:03.000 Driver.

02:31:04.000 Yeah.

02:31:05.000 So, what then?

02:31:07.000 But why worry about that?

02:31:09.000 There's 20 other things that are happening that are just as revolutionary.

02:31:12.000 So what's going to happen?

02:31:14.000 Who knows?

02:31:16.000 I have no idea.

02:31:17.000 I think maybe I know how to steer the boat.

02:31:20.000 You know, that's all.

02:31:22.000 You try to tell the truth, and maybe you'll get through it, and act it out as well, because what else do you have?

02:31:28.000 Isn't that another fantastic sign of chaos?

02:31:32.000 I mean, I say fantastic, not in a positive way, but that Donald Trump is our president now, the president who has had the biggest problem with the truth.

02:31:42.000 That we've ever experienced.

02:31:43.000 We've never experienced a president like this where we know that he has a problem with the truth.

02:31:48.000 And it's open.

02:31:51.000 It doesn't seem to faze us.

02:31:53.000 He has an unstructured problem with the truth.

02:31:56.000 He was...

02:31:58.000 Preferred as a candidate to someone who had a structured approach to untruth.

02:32:02.000 Right.

02:32:02.000 Right?

02:32:03.000 So it's like pick your type of lie.

02:32:05.000 Right.

02:32:05.000 You can pick the ideology, power aiming lie.

02:32:08.000 Or a new kind of lie.

02:32:10.000 Or, yeah, a more personal lie, say, if you're going to be cynical about it.

02:32:14.000 Well, a new kind of lie, too, that didn't fit the standard structure that we're accustomed to and felt very disenchanted with.

02:32:22.000 Yeah, or maybe a nakedly self-serving lie.

02:32:25.000 It's like, oh, thank God, that's such a relief after the totalitarian ideology lies. 1.00

02:32:32.000 Oh, God, when you say it that way, it's so fucked up. 0.99

02:32:37.000 That's obviously it, though. 0.99

02:32:39.000 Yeah, well, that's definitely part of it.

02:32:40.000 And I mean, lots of people did.

02:32:41.000 I know people went into the voting booth and their hand was hovering over Hillary, you know, and it was shaking and they thought, oh, to hell with it, Trump.

02:32:48.000 Wow.

02:32:49.000 And so, you know, it's a sentiment that I can appreciate.

02:32:52.000 Yeah.

02:32:53.000 And so here we are.

02:32:55.000 But that's only the tiny, that's only the tail end of the dragon.

02:32:59.000 I mean, there's...

02:33:01.000 Who knows?

02:33:02.000 Who can look ahead?

02:33:03.000 This is a strange time we're in.

02:33:05.000 Maybe it's associated with Kurzweil's prognostications, you know?

02:33:09.000 I mean, he talked about the consequence of an ever...

02:33:17.000 We're good to go. 0.99

02:33:34.000 I mean, if you just go back to the beginning of the 20th century to today, I mean, it's fucking, it's unbelievable. 0.89

02:33:41.000 Yeah, well, you know, in 1895, the average person in the West lived on a dollar a day, in today's dollars. 0.88

02:33:47.000 In 1895, yes, really.

02:33:49.000 In today's dollars.

02:33:51.000 Yeah, yeah.

02:33:51.000 Wow.

02:33:52.000 Yeah, wow.

02:33:53.000 No kidding.

02:33:55.000 No kidding.

02:33:55.000 Well, that's the other thing that people, when they find out how little the rest of the world lives on, they find out that the top 1% of the world makes about $34,000 US. Yeah, well, it depends.

02:34:06.000 I know if you're, you know, for many people, someone who's rich is someone who has more money than them.

02:34:11.000 Right.

02:34:12.000 Right?

02:34:12.000 Which is one of the things I really find funny about the, like, the radical left protests on the campus.

02:34:17.000 It's like, down with the 1%.

02:34:19.000 It's like, hey, sunshine, you're part of the 1%.

02:34:22.000 You're just, you're actually a baby one-tenth of 1% or maybe one-one-hundredth of 1% or you're just angry because you're not there yet.

02:34:30.000 But you will be when you're 40. And you know it and so does everybody else.

02:34:36.000 Regarding yourself properly as a fledgling member of the elite, you want to have it both ways.

02:34:41.000 You want to be a fledgling member of the elite and champion of the underprivileged.

02:34:46.000 So how narcissistic can you get?

02:34:49.000 You want to have all the benefits of having all the benefits, and you want to have all the benefits of having none of the benefits.

02:34:54.000 Because just all the benefits isn't enough for you.

02:34:57.000 One thing that's a reoccurring subject that I find incredibly fascinating, and it keeps coming up, and it's been brought up even more so lately because of artificial intelligence and automated vehicles and all these different things that are happening, is there going to be an erosion of jobs.

02:35:14.000 And a subject keeps reoccurring, and that's universal basic income.

02:35:18.000 The idea of giving people.

02:35:21.000 Giving everyone a certain amount of money, whether it's $12,000 or $18,000.

02:35:26.000 What are your thoughts on that?

02:35:29.000 I don't know what to think about that.

02:35:32.000 You know, it certainly would require a revolution in the way people considered their lives.

02:35:39.000 What do people do with leisure time?

02:35:43.000 What should you do with it?

02:35:45.000 Well, leisure time, it's like, what is leisure time exactly?

02:35:48.000 Is it sitting in a closet like a discarded android?

02:35:52.000 I mean, that's often how people respond when they retire.

02:35:56.000 Right, but would they have to retire or would they have their needs taken care of as far as food and shelter and then be able to pursue something that they actually enjoy and are interested in because the job that they were stuck in doesn't exist anymore?

02:36:07.000 Well, that's the question.

02:36:08.000 And I would say at the moment the data aren't great.

02:36:13.000 You know, what happens to a lot of men who are unemployed, now they've, let's say, they've had that thrust upon them involuntarily, but most people who we would be talking about would be in that situation, is that, you know, they get depressed, they sit on the couch, they develop chronic pain problems,

02:36:29.000 they start taking...

02:36:31.000 Opiates for the pain problems, and then soon they're hooked. 0.89

02:36:35.000 Like, it's not a pretty...

02:36:36.000 I mean, I know that everyone isn't doing that, but lots of people are doing that, man.

02:36:40.000 Right.

02:36:41.000 Yeah, but that's unemployment. 0.87

02:36:42.000 Is it kind of a different thing?

02:36:44.000 I don't know.

02:36:44.000 Well, my thought is that unemployment, if you've got something like universal basic income...

02:36:49.000 We're talking about a complete revolution in the way society is structured, right?

02:36:54.000 Because if...

02:36:56.000 Automation does come along, and artificial intelligence does come along, and it really is a situation where a lot of the things that people do to occupy their time in order to feed themselves and shelter themselves, they don't exist anymore.

02:37:06.000 It's unnecessary.

02:37:07.000 So you're not talking about unemployment like, Bob, you're not a good enough lawyer, you've been fired, and now you're like, God, I'm a failure, I'm depressed, I am unemployed.

02:37:16.000 We're not talking about that.

02:37:17.000 We're talking about literally society as we know it having a complete reset.

02:37:23.000 Yep.

02:37:24.000 Yeah, well, I have no idea what to say about that.

02:37:27.000 I don't either.

02:37:27.000 That's why I asked you.

02:37:28.000 Well, look, I mean, there are people...

02:37:31.000 Here's the optimistic end.

02:37:34.000 I'll speak as a determinist.

02:37:36.000 I'm not a determinist, but I'm going to speak that way anyway.

02:37:39.000 So, there are lots of people who are creative.

02:37:42.000 They're high in trade openness from the Big Five perspective.

02:37:45.000 They're going to go do creative things.

02:37:47.000 But there are lots of people who aren't creative.

02:37:50.000 So I don't know what they're going to do because it isn't going to be creative things.

02:37:53.000 Why are people creative and non-creative?

02:37:57.000 Are there people that it's never been nurtured in them?

02:38:01.000 That they have the potential to be creative?

02:38:03.000 You don't think so?

02:38:04.000 No?

02:38:05.000 No, the literature is pretty clear on that.

02:38:07.000 I mean, the traits are highly heritable.

02:38:09.000 They're modifiable, but if you're really non-creative, it's like it ain't going anywhere for you.

02:38:14.000 And the reason for that is creativity isn't, like, it's not all sweetness and light, man.

02:38:20.000 I mean, the reason there are non-creative people is because creative people often died.

02:38:25.000 They're out doing like screwy things.

02:38:26.000 They attract attention from people they shouldn't attract attention from, like the authorities.

02:38:32.000 You know, creative people are revolutionary.

02:38:34.000 Well, tyrants don't really like revolutionaries.

02:38:37.000 There's lots of reason not to be creative.

02:38:39.000 Even now, like creative people, it's hard to monetize your creativity.

02:38:43.000 Artists have a hell of a time surviving, right?

02:38:46.000 And...

02:38:49.000 So, creativity as such is a double-edged blessing, for sure.

02:38:54.000 And part of the reason that lots of people aren't creative is because it's a lot, let's think about it from an evolutionary perspective, is because it's a hell of a lot easier not to be decked out in bright colours when the predators come along.

02:39:06.000 You want to stay camouflaged against the herd like a zebra.

02:39:09.000 You don't want to stand out.

02:39:11.000 I'll tell you a little story about that.

02:39:13.000 I think I got this from Robert Sapolsky, and if I didn't, I apologize.

02:39:17.000 So let's say you're a biologist, you go to study some zebras.

02:39:21.000 People think, well, those zebras are camouflaged because they have black and white stripes.

02:39:25.000 Well, no, that's not camouflaged.

02:39:27.000 The lion is camouflaged.

02:39:28.000 It's golden.

02:39:29.000 It looks like the grass.

02:39:30.000 You can see a zebra like 15 miles away.

02:39:33.000 It's black and white.

02:39:34.000 Okay, so you're looking at some zebras, and you think, yeah, I need to look at one zebra to figure out what it's doing, because I'm trying to understand zebras.

02:39:40.000 So you look at a zebra, and then you take some notes, and you look up, and you think, oh God, which zebra was that?

02:39:45.000 Because the camouflage is against the herd.

02:39:47.000 Just the idea that the camouflage is against the herd, that's such a useful idea to have in your mind, that camouflage is against the herd.

02:39:55.000 So you go up to the zebra in your jeep and you've got a stick with a rag on it and you put a nice daub of red paint on the zebra's haunch or you clip its ear like with a cattle clip.

02:40:04.000 And the first thing that you know, you get the hell out of there and the lions kill it.

02:40:09.000 Because they can identify the thing that stands out and organize their hunt around it.

02:40:14.000 And so that's why there aren't creative people.

02:40:16.000 I think that is Sapolsky, and I think it was an ear clip.

02:40:19.000 I remember this discussion.

02:40:21.000 Yeah.

02:40:22.000 It's also the edge detection.

02:40:26.000 There's a type of pattern, a camouflage pattern, called ASAT. And ASAT camouflage doesn't look like trees.

02:40:36.000 You know, when people think of...

02:40:37.000 Pull up ASAT pattern.

02:40:39.000 First light.

02:40:41.000 L-I-T-E. Yeah, that's a military camouflage pattern.

02:40:46.000 All season, all terrain.

02:40:47.000 It's not necessarily military.

02:40:49.000 Canadians developed that, and you Yankees stole it. 1.00

02:40:51.000 Congratulations.

02:40:52.000 Yes, it's one of our more impressive...

02:40:53.000 I feel like we're all one.

02:40:54.000 I don't believe in borders.

02:40:55.000 It's actually for animals.

02:40:57.000 There you can see ASAT. Oh, oh, oh.

02:41:00.000 Animals can't, they only see in black and white, like prey animals like deer, and it's edge detection that they're looking for.

02:41:10.000 And these things, the hard lines of the black and the brown and the lighter colors, it throws off the, that's fusion, that's a different color.

02:41:19.000 That's a different type of camo.

02:41:20.000 But the ASAT is what we're talking about, which is right above it.

02:41:23.000 That leg.

02:41:24.000 Right there.

02:41:26.000 Bam.

02:41:27.000 Yeah.

02:41:27.000 That's it.

02:41:28.000 And I'm also wrong.

02:41:29.000 Canadians didn't invent this.

02:41:30.000 It was the other stuff, the military stuff.

02:41:32.000 Oh, they've invented a bunch of stuff, I'm sure.

02:41:34.000 Yeah.

02:41:35.000 I'll give you guys that.

02:41:36.000 I'm a fan of Canada, man.

02:41:37.000 I love it.

02:41:38.000 I really do love Canada.

02:41:39.000 I think people up there are just so much nicer.

02:41:42.000 I've struggled to try to figure out why.

02:41:44.000 I've thought about it many, many times.

02:41:46.000 But I think people in general in Canada are... 0.93

02:41:49.000 I always say there's 20% less douchebags in Canada. 1.00

02:41:52.000 I mean, there's assholes everywhere you go. 0.99

02:41:54.000 But I feel like Canada, for whatever reason, people are extremely polite. 1.00

02:41:57.000 Yes, yes.

02:41:58.000 What is that?

02:41:59.000 Well, I don't know.

02:42:01.000 See, I'm not convinced of it, because I often think the same thing when I come down to the U.S. That people are more polite?

02:42:06.000 Well, that their level of customer service, for example, is better.

02:42:11.000 But I think one of the differences between Canada and the U.S. is like...

02:42:15.000 All of Canada, in some sense, is like the Midwest of the United States.

02:42:19.000 So we don't have this extreme culture that characterizes the U.S. with the great lows and the great highs.

02:42:27.000 We're like elevator music compared to a full symphony.

02:42:31.000 And there can be some really tragic parts of a symphony.

02:42:35.000 If you want peace order and good government, that's our constitutional credo, then Canada is your place.

02:42:41.000 But it's a middle-class, middle-of-the-road society, and that has some benefits.

02:42:46.000 It's nice and welcoming and not too experimental and Kind of calm and secure.

02:42:53.000 And those are good things.

02:42:54.000 I don't think it's a place that is great at dealing with excellence.

02:42:59.000 That's interesting.

02:43:00.000 Do you feel like excellence is suppressed because people don't like when someone stands out too much?

02:43:06.000 Yeah.

02:43:07.000 I think that's true everywhere, but I think it's more true of Canada than it is of the U.S. I think it's celebrated a lot in the U.S. I mean, I think there's always going to be some resistance, especially from people that don't feel like...

02:43:19.000 People always measure themselves against someone.

02:43:21.000 If there's someone who's out there as just, you know, some genius in some form or another, there's always going to be people that measure themselves against that person and find themselves coming up short.

02:43:31.000 Yes.

02:43:32.000 And so they try to attack.

02:43:33.000 That individual, someone who has just catastrophic success in some sort of a way.

02:43:38.000 Yeah, well, I think that's another reason for people to be enemies of clear thought as well, because clear thought is a good pathway to success.

02:43:46.000 And so if you can go after people who think clearly, it's another way of keeping the dominance hierarchy nice and flat for your delectation, let's say.

02:43:55.000 So that's the enemy of competence element that I see as part of the social justice warrior movement.

02:44:00.000 Right, right.

02:44:02.000 And the extreme lack of financial success and, yeah, and even creative success.

02:44:09.000 Well, and even the insistence that hierarchies are always based on power.

02:44:12.000 It's like the hierarchy of neurosurgeons is not based on power.

02:44:16.000 Or, yeah, it is, obviously.

02:44:18.000 You know, hierarchies are based to some degree on power.

02:44:20.000 We don't have to be juvenile about it.

02:44:22.000 But, you know, the best neurosurgeons actually know how to do surgery.

02:44:26.000 That's not just a power thing, right?

02:44:28.000 The best farmers, hey, they grow food.

02:44:32.000 So, there's no appreciation for actual, the real world.

02:44:35.000 Well, there's no real world in postmodernism anyway, so that doesn't matter, but there's no appreciation for competence or the fact that there is individual difference in competence, even though they're always talking about diversity.

02:44:46.000 And there's a downplaying of competition and the importance of competition.

02:44:49.000 Oh, definitely.

02:44:49.000 Oh, yes.

02:44:50.000 Yes.

02:44:50.000 Well, that's...

02:44:51.000 Yes.

02:44:51.000 And that's something that's particularly, I think, hard on men because men compete.

02:44:56.000 Yeah.

02:44:56.000 And they compete partly because women like winners.

02:44:58.000 I mean, that's part of the reason.

02:45:00.000 So...

02:45:01.000 And you're shamed for that in this postmodernism...

02:45:06.000 Oh, yeah.

02:45:07.000 Well, you know, the schools increasingly are non-competitive places.

02:45:10.000 It's like, for a guy, that means, well, let's tune out and go watch video games, because, like, if I can't win at this, why should I play?

02:45:17.000 Well, to cooperate, it's like, well, you know...

02:45:20.000 Fair enough, man, but I'd actually like to try to win at something.

02:45:24.000 Oh, well, how evil can you get?

02:45:26.000 Well, it's toxic masculinity, Jordan. 1.00

02:45:28.000 That one drives me fucking crazy. 0.99

02:45:31.000 Like, what does that mean? 1.00

02:45:33.000 Toxic masculinity.

02:45:35.000 Toxic, it has nothing to do with masculine or feminine. 0.67

02:45:37.000 If something's toxic, it's toxic.

02:45:39.000 There's no toxic masculinity.

02:45:41.000 If someone's evil, they do something horrible, if they're Genghis Khan or Adolf Hitler, that's not toxic masculinity.

02:45:48.000 That's an evil person.

02:45:50.000 It has nothing to do with the masculine or feminine.

02:45:53.000 Yeah, well, you know, it depends on what your political agenda is.

02:45:55.000 I mean, men are more likely to be the type of person that does something awful in terms of dominating or war or violence.

02:46:04.000 It's almost in our nature in some way because of all the things we discussed before.

02:46:09.000 Well, we're more likely to do something that's really evident.

02:46:13.000 There's plenty of bullying that goes on behind the scenes among women. 1.00

02:46:16.000 Absolutely.

02:46:17.000 You know, it can't manifest itself in naked physical aggression, and I actually think that's hard on women in some ways. 1.00

02:46:22.000 I mean, my daughter, for example, is always mad at my son because, like, not chronically, but...

02:46:30.000 You know, he'd have a dispute with one of his friends, and maybe it would get physical.

02:46:35.000 And then that'd be the end of it, and they'd be friends again.

02:46:38.000 You know, there was a way of bringing it to a conclusion.

02:46:41.000 And without that, then things can smolder on forever.

02:46:45.000 And that's really rough, you know.

02:46:48.000 Sometimes the simplest solution is a fight.

02:46:51.000 Often.

02:46:51.000 And, you know, I'm not...

02:46:54.000 You're not advocating violence.

02:46:56.000 I know what you're saying.

02:46:57.000 I know, but I'm embarrassed that I would even think that I have to, you know, put some little quote marks around what I'd say.

02:47:03.000 You're talking about the developing person, too.

02:47:05.000 You're talking about young people.

02:47:06.000 It is an issue, this simmering and stewing of disputes where they never come to a head and they never get resolved.

02:47:14.000 Yeah, yeah.

02:47:15.000 It's a terrible thing.

02:47:16.000 It's a terrible thing.

02:47:17.000 That's part of hell, for sure, to have these things that are just grinding away at you all the time.

02:47:23.000 You know, it's not...

02:47:24.000 It's definitely not.

02:47:25.000 It's not a good place to be in and good motivations don't come out of it, that's for sure.

02:47:30.000 You've made some statements and we've had some conversations about your role in academia and that you might not necessarily be in structured academia forever, that this might be an issue,

02:47:47.000 like that this is coming to a head.

02:47:49.000 Do you feel that way now?

02:47:50.000 Well, I think what happened was the university reacted towards me because a bunch of people got irritated and organized in their irritated way and said that I was a bad person and something should be done about me.

02:48:05.000 And there was enough of them, so the university thought they needed to react to that pressure.

02:48:10.000 That's a charitable way of interpreting it, but reasonable.

02:48:14.000 But then a bunch of people wrote the university and said, wait a second, I agree with what that guy's doing, you should leave him alone.

02:48:21.000 And not only people from the general populace, but...

02:48:24.000 Soon after I posted the original videos, like the press was kind of ambivalent about me for a while.

02:48:30.000 In the first two weeks or three weeks, say, after I released those videos and there were the protests.

02:48:35.000 But then they started to look into what I was doing and they thought, oh, it turns out that, you know, freedom of speech actually happens to be quite important to journalists too.

02:48:44.000 And they came out like really radically...

02:48:48.000 In support of me, some of the major journalists in Canada and the whole post media system, which was about 150 or 200 newspapers.

02:48:56.000 And so the university had a reason to back off.

02:49:01.000 And maybe they were happy to back off.

02:49:03.000 I mean, the dean I was negotiating was, you know, he wasn't a bad guy.

02:49:07.000 He was an older guy.

02:49:08.000 I think he's in his 70s.

02:49:09.000 Just responding to pressure.

02:49:10.000 Yeah, and he didn't want a bunch of trouble, and he wanted the problem to go away.

02:49:16.000 And that's what you do want for problems to do.

02:49:19.000 But anyways, all this public support I got gave the university a reason.

02:49:24.000 To leave me the hell alone.

02:49:26.000 So they decided to do that.

02:49:27.000 And partly, I suppose, I was always reasonable during the negotiations, because I'm a reasonable person.

02:49:32.000 And so, you know, when they met me, they realized that I wasn't the particular kind of monster that I had been accused of being.

02:49:40.000 Right.

02:49:40.000 And so the universities left me off.

02:49:43.000 And then, so I was, I had a, like, a health crisis in December that More or less rectified itself by the beginning of January, but I wasn't sure that plus what had happened to me because of these videos and all the crazy response to them.

02:49:58.000 I wasn't sure I was in a sufficiently together position to go back lecturing in January.

02:50:04.000 I didn't even know for a while until December if I was going to be, let's say, allowed to continue to lecture.

02:50:09.000 This was very uncertain.

02:50:11.000 But I decided that it was better to get back on the horse, so to speak.

02:50:16.000 And so I started lecturing and the students were very welcoming.

02:50:20.000 So thank God for that.

02:50:22.000 What is it like now when you're in school?

02:50:23.000 Is it a completely different experience than before your notoriety exploded?

02:50:29.000 Well, there's lots of things that are different about it.

02:50:31.000 I mean, there are lots of people who come to my classes just to sit in the classes.

02:50:37.000 There's people who are stopping me all the time in the hallways and wanting to introduce themselves, and that happens a lot in public, in the strangest situations, so I'm rather unused to that.

02:50:48.000 The feeling at the university, well, I haven't processed any of that yet.

02:50:52.000 I mean, I would say I'm about seven months behind in my understanding of my own life.

02:50:57.000 You know, because things happened, so many things happened from September to now, that I haven't had time to think about any of them.

02:51:07.000 You know, it's just, it's been a continual, an absolutely continual...

02:51:16.000 Treadmill of trying to keep up with the requests for speaking and the email and I'm supposed to be making these YouTube videos because I have people who are supporting me for doing that so I'm trying to keep that up and then I'm trying to go speak when people invite me but not all the time because of course that's a lot of travel and so I'm trying to recalibrate my life I'm trying to figure out okay I got 10 million views on YouTube well what am I supposed to do with that piece of information?

02:51:44.000 I've got 250,000 subscribers!

02:51:48.000 So, what does that mean?

02:51:50.000 What does that mean for what I should be doing?

02:51:52.000 Maybe I should be doing nothing but making YouTube videos for them.

02:51:55.000 Right.

02:51:55.000 I don't know.

02:51:56.000 It's a tremendous audience.

02:51:57.000 I can't figure it out.

02:51:57.000 It's unbelievable.

02:51:59.000 It's unparalleled.

02:52:01.000 Yeah, just, I mean, think about it in terms of, is there any other academic that has ever done anything remotely like that, where you have 250,000 subscribers on YouTube in a relatively short amount of time, and then millions and millions of views on your videos.

02:52:15.000 I know.

02:52:16.000 I don't know.

02:52:16.000 I mean, well, and it's ill-defined territory, right?

02:52:19.000 Because who knows what YouTube is?

02:52:21.000 Right.

02:52:21.000 I mean, you know, your presence...

02:52:25.000 I don't know what you make of your presence.

02:52:27.000 I mean, you told me, I think, that you're getting something like 70 million downloads a month?

02:52:31.000 It's more than like 120 now.

02:52:33.000 Okay, so you're getting a billion downloads a year.

02:52:37.000 Something like that.

02:52:38.000 More than that.

02:52:39.000 So what...

02:52:41.000 Right. 0.90

02:52:42.000 So what the hell?

02:52:43.000 So I could ask you, what do you make of that?

02:52:45.000 Like, are you the most powerful interviewer on the planet?

02:52:49.000 Or are you the most powerful interviewer that the planet has ever seen?

02:52:53.000 Because it...

02:52:54.000 Well, the numbers would suggest so.

02:52:57.000 Nobody's had...

02:52:57.000 Who has a billion of anything?

02:53:01.000 No one.

02:53:02.000 You know, it's never happened.

02:53:05.000 So what the hell?

02:53:06.000 So what are you doing?

02:53:06.000 And why is it working?

02:53:07.000 And where are all these people?

02:53:09.000 And...

02:53:10.000 Well, what I do is just keep doing it.

02:53:13.000 That's all I do.

02:53:14.000 I just do what I do.

02:53:15.000 And I don't think too much about it.

02:53:17.000 I enjoy it.

02:53:17.000 I try to talk to people like yourself that I really enjoy talking to.

02:53:20.000 Or the guy before you was a bow hunter.

02:53:25.000 Which I enjoy talking to him too.

02:53:27.000 Very, very different conversation.

02:53:29.000 Tomorrow I'm talking about a guy who's a debunker or talking to a guy who runs a site called Metabunk.

02:53:36.000 We're going to talk about people that believe the earth is flat.

02:53:38.000 Literally.

02:53:39.000 We're going to spend about two hours debunking the flat earth theory that is all over the internet.

02:53:45.000 I don't know if you realize that.

02:53:46.000 Yes, I've seen it.

02:53:49.000 Rabid, anti-intellectual vibe that's going on today. 0.95

02:53:55.000 And this is this flat earth theory.

02:53:57.000 It's no wonder, you know, it's no wonder because many of the prominent intellectual types have become prisoners of their own imagination.

02:54:05.000 You know, and this is partly what breeds that terror of intellectualism.

02:54:10.000 There's something about it that's...

02:54:13.000 We don't want to get too far away from our bodies.

02:54:17.000 We don't want to get too far away from our souls.

02:54:19.000 That's another way of thinking about it.

02:54:21.000 And, you know, there is this idea that, as I said before, that the Catholics always warned about is that the rational mind falls in love with its own productions, or even more, that it tries to elevate its productions to the status of God.

02:54:35.000 And that's, I mean, that's really what Milton was warning about, at least in some sense, in his book Paradise Lost.

02:54:41.000 You know, these utopias are human creations and then people fall prey to them.

02:54:45.000 It's like idol worship.

02:54:47.000 It really is very much like idol worship.

02:54:49.000 And it's no wonder people get skeptical of the intellectuals because they're producing these utopias that are fake, that they inhabit.

02:54:58.000 They're almost like the abstract equivalent of video games.

02:55:03.000 I think you're right about that, but I also think there's something else going on.

02:55:06.000 I think people are aware of this chaos that we described earlier, and they're terrified, and they're clinging to nonsense because of that terror.

02:55:14.000 And they're embedding themselves in these fruitless pursuits, chasing their own tail.

02:55:20.000 Hey, I'm on board with that, man.

02:55:22.000 That chasing your own tail, that's a symbol of chaos.

02:55:25.000 Chaos is the dragon that eats its own tail.

02:55:27.000 So that came spontaneously to mind when you thought about that.

02:55:31.000 It's because it's a downward spiral, man.

02:55:34.000 Yeah, and the thing is that as you retreat from the chaos into your own little prison, You get weaker and weaker and the prison gets smaller and smaller and the chaos gets bigger and bigger.

02:55:44.000 It's really an ugly pathway and you get more and more bitter and resentful and much more afraid of having your prison walls breached.

02:55:51.000 It's a downward spiral.

02:55:53.000 And much less interested in pursuing the truth or any sort of objective reasoning and much more interested in Confirmation bias to the extreme.

02:56:04.000 That's right.

02:56:05.000 That's exactly what happens.

02:56:06.000 I detailed out that process in my book, Maps of Meaning.

02:56:10.000 Exactly that.

02:56:11.000 It's this feedback loop, eh?

02:56:13.000 Because the weaker you are, the thicker the walls have to be.

02:56:17.000 But the thicker you make the walls, the less challenge you face and the weaker you get.

02:56:22.000 So then the walls have to get thicker, and then you get weaker, and the walls have to get thicker.

02:56:26.000 And it's not a pretty picture, man.

02:56:30.000 So...

02:56:33.000 Hmm.

02:56:34.000 Yeah, that's what I think too.

02:56:35.000 Yeah.

02:56:37.000 Because...

02:56:37.000 And on that note, we just did three hours.

02:56:41.000 We just did it.

02:56:42.000 This is my favorite podcast of all time.

02:56:44.000 Oh.

02:56:44.000 I just want to tell you.

02:56:45.000 Well, thank you.

02:56:46.000 Thank you.

02:56:46.000 It was awesome.

02:56:47.000 Could I say it was my favorite podcast of all time?

02:56:50.000 I have a much smaller domain of podcast comparisons.

02:56:54.000 We did...

02:56:55.000 This is like number 900 and what?

02:56:57.000 What is it?

02:56:59.000 958. I think you touched on some things that made me think in a very unique way today.

02:57:06.000 So thank you very much for that.

02:57:08.000 I'm going to listen to this one a couple of times.

02:57:09.000 Well, thank you very much for both occasions.

02:57:12.000 I mean, you provided a tremendous boost to my presence.

02:57:15.000 So whatever comes of that is to be blamed partly on you.

02:57:20.000 Alrighty.

02:57:21.000 Thanks, brother.

02:57:22.000 You bet.

02:57:23.000 Really appreciate it.

02:57:23.000 Really good.

02:57:24.000 Thank you.

02:57:25.000 Jordan Peterson, ladies and gentlemen.

02:57:26.000 See you tomorrow.

The Joe Rogan Experience - May 09, 2017

Joe Rogan Experience #958 - Jordan Peterson

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