The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

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00:00:51.060 Welcome to the Jordan B. Peterson podcast. This episode was recorded on February 17th,

00:00:59.360 2021, and is featuring Brett Weinstein. Jordan and Brett discussed the events that led to Brett's

00:01:05.240 resignation from Evergreen State College, dealing with cultural controversy, today's political

00:01:10.160 landscape, paranoia created by having communities online, discordant opinion budgets, and more.

00:01:16.460 Brett Weinstein is a theoretical evolutionary biologist, host of Dark Horse

00:01:21.060 podcast, and a former professor at Evergreen State College.

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00:02:36.600 I have the pleasure today of speaking with Dr. Brett Weinstein, who I met about five years ago,

00:02:46.200 an evolutionary biologist who taught at Evergreen State College until political circumstances made

00:02:52.520 it impossible for that to continue. Brett served as the moderator for two discussions I had with Sam

00:03:03.200 Harris. Is that right? That is correct, too, in Vancouver. I think that was the first time we met

00:03:08.360 in person, wasn't it? I believe we met prior to that at a conference in Vancouver also, a Young

00:03:19.100 Libertarians conference. Oh, yes, that group and the UBC group, right. That was before. Yeah, well, and we

00:03:24.620 haven't spoken since when? Vancouver? Is that right? It must have been more recent than that. In fact,

00:03:33.620 I'm certain it was, but it's been quite some time. Well, so I thought it might be interesting for us

00:03:39.680 to catch up and to share that process of catching up on my YouTube channel. So, and Brett, you have a

00:03:47.720 YouTube channel and you have a podcast, which the image of which I believe is on the wall, the beautiful

00:03:53.800 wall behind you. That's your kitchen that's all done in cedar like that? No, that's one half of my

00:04:00.720 office that we, at the beginning of COVID, my son and I, my son produces our podcast and we built the

00:04:09.560 studio in this room, making runs back and forth to the hardware store and bugging out of the prior

00:04:17.040 space that we were in. So anyway, yes, we erected this in about two days and, you know, the sink

00:04:22.840 works and it's all, it's functional, but it's, it's basically my workspace in my office. It makes a

00:04:27.700 lovely background. You have some skulls back there too. Sure do. I have skulls in my office,

00:04:33.960 interestingly enough. What are they? Well, let's see. We have back there a bear and a seal and the

00:04:44.140 juxtaposition is important to Heather and to me because seals are actually bears. They evolved,

00:04:51.640 they returned to the sea and their skulls are extremely difficult to distinguish except for

00:04:57.820 the teeth. You can tell by the teeth, but otherwise a seal skull looks like a bear skull to an amazing

00:05:03.020 degree. And so which one is the seal? Uh, let's see. Yeah. Well, I'm going to, I would guess that

00:05:08.720 it's on the one on my right. The seal is the one closer to the plant. Yes. Okay. Cause I have a bear

00:05:14.260 skull, which looks more like the one on the left. So. Yep. So, um, when did you start your podcast?

00:05:23.340 Well, the podcast started, geez, I'm not good at remembering these things exactly, but the podcast

00:05:29.160 started must be about two years ago. And then it went through a radical transition at the beginning

00:05:39.020 of COVID where instead of just being a show that we taped, we moved it into this room and Heather and

00:05:46.200 I started doing weekly live streams, which, uh, we still do, or I still do, uh, separate discussions

00:05:52.040 with people. Um, but the weekly live streams have become a really important component. And what's the

00:05:57.260 live stream? What do you do on the live stream? Well, what we do is we point the evolutionary lens

00:06:02.900 at important topics, everything from the woke revolution to the fragility of civilization,

00:06:11.260 what future governance might look like, uh, basically whatever interests us. And, uh, it's

00:06:17.620 accumulated quite a following it's been, uh, you know, it's never something that we intended to do,

00:06:22.160 but it turns out that there, as you know, better than anyone, there's a huge hunger for people who

00:06:30.580 know something are willing to talk courageously in public and won't mislead you, right? We can all

00:06:38.520 be wrong, but, uh, it's rare enough that somebody will tell you explicitly what they think and why.

00:06:44.600 And, uh, you know, if you do that, it's amazing how many people will find you.

00:06:48.120 Yeah. Well, people do have some desire for the truth. Painful though, that might be. Yeah. And

00:06:54.540 you said you didn't expect to be doing this on a full-time basis. There's no doubt that life is

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00:09:49.760 Well, that's certainly true. And that actually brings me, you know, the way you introduced this

00:09:58.920 discussion didn't give me a chance to say by far the most important thing here, which is it is so

00:10:06.060 great to be talking with you, Jordan. We were so worried about you. And I'm sure you're getting that

00:10:12.480 message loud and clear, but at another level, it's probably hard to appreciate how profound your

00:10:20.340 absence from the discussion has been over the last year. And I know you've been to hell and back,

00:10:25.620 and we've been experimenting with hell on earth here while you were away, but it is really,

00:10:32.080 really good to be with you. And anyway, I think it's very important that that just be the baseline

00:10:37.820 for the conversation. Welcome back. Thank you. That's so nice of you. And people have been so

00:10:42.440 welcoming to me, you know, with the exception of the odd journalist, let's say, but online people

00:10:50.160 are so good to me that I can't believe it. It's, well, there's many things I can't believe.

00:10:55.940 That's certainly one of them. It's very nice to see you and you're looking well.

00:11:00.120 Thank you. You as well. Yeah. Well, that's deceiving, unfortunately, but.

00:11:05.200 Well, at least you're headed in the right direction. Can we say that?

00:11:07.820 That's, that's the theory. I'm, I'm able to work a bit. I'm working about two hours every three days

00:11:13.900 now, I would say, doing this sort of thing, which I also didn't expect to be doing as my major,

00:11:20.680 what, what will you say as my major occupation? My, my area of occupation has shrunk to a staggering

00:11:28.960 degree over the last two years. And that's been quite difficult to contend with.

00:11:34.560 Um, well, I hope it's temporary. Um, but I mean, from the outside.

00:11:41.300 I'm prepared enough so that I can't be as functional as I used to be, but I can't sit around and do

00:11:45.760 nothing because it drives me completely out of my mind to do nothing. I'm used to being occupied all

00:11:50.860 the time. And so, but I'm very happy that I'm able to do these discussions. And so far that's been going

00:11:57.120 well. So I'd like you to walk me through what's happened to you since the events in Evergreen

00:12:04.660 and, and bring everybody up to date on my end. So man, maybe you could start with what happened

00:12:10.360 at Evergreen, although I suspect many of the people watching this do know that, does that seem

00:12:16.120 reasonable? Sure. Um, yeah, we can, we can start there. I think we should, um, probably

00:12:23.200 err in the direction of being sparse with the details and, uh, see where it leads us.

00:12:31.000 So in 2017, I was teaching at Evergreen as was Heather, my wife, and she was literally Evergreen's

00:12:38.780 most popular professor. I wasn't too far behind. I was very popular as well. Our classes were

00:12:43.860 always over full and, uh, we accepted more people than we had to, and had to turn some away anyway.

00:12:50.300 And then in actually 2016, the new president of the college, George Bridges, began an initiative

00:12:58.060 or a set of initiatives surrounding diversity, equity, and inclusion. And these initiatives

00:13:04.480 included the empaneling of a committee that was supposed to look into, um, racism at the college,

00:13:13.000 its impacts, and to propose solutions. And as it became clear what they were alleging and proposing,

00:13:22.100 Heather and I became very alarmed. And I began to speak out at first in faculty meetings. And then

00:13:28.960 when the ability to speak out in faculty meetings became non-existent, I took to our faculty and staff

00:13:36.400 email list to talk about the threat to the college that was created by these initiatives. And that of

00:13:44.300 course brought about exactly what you would imagine, which were accusations that I was motivated by some

00:13:49.860 kind of, uh, racism or white supremacy or white fragility, or who knows what the accusations were

00:13:56.100 exactly. But, um, but in any case, I fought back anyway. And my sense was I had tenure and I was well-liked

00:14:05.300 and I was well-known at the college. I had been there for 14 years. And so I didn't think they had

00:14:09.920 the power to, uh, to get rid of me. And that gave me the ability to say what needed to be said about

00:14:16.040 these proposals. Well, the upshot is that ultimately protesters, 50 students that I had never met,

00:14:26.260 showed up at my classroom, accused me of racism, demanded that I either be fired or resign.

00:14:31.860 I told them I wouldn't. And, uh, riots broke out at the college in which, um, faculty and administrators

00:14:40.780 were kidnapped. I was apparently hunted car to car on campus by protesters. The police were stood down by

00:14:49.740 the college president. And, um, we were basically left to fend for ourselves with, um, student, uh, patrols

00:15:00.860 roving the campus with weapons, baseball bats and the like. So it was a chaotic scene. There was

00:15:08.140 a lot of interest in it because it was very colorful, but of course, most people back in 2017

00:15:14.980 dismissed this as, um, yes, an overreaction, but you know how college students are. And those of us

00:15:22.780 who saw it up close knew that that couldn't be the case, that it would ultimately spill out into

00:15:27.520 civilization. And, um, we of course were right. And now it's everywhere. We see it taking over

00:15:35.280 institution after institution in the U S and Canada. We see it making tremendous strides in

00:15:42.240 government and there's no telling where it ends.

00:15:46.000 And what is, I mean, I have a bunch of questions that come out of that. So I'm going to, I'll lay

00:15:52.020 out three. Why in the world did this bother you enough so that you took a stand, especially given

00:15:58.280 your political leanings, because you were, which I'm not criticizing, by the way, I'm just stating that

00:16:04.840 it isn't obvious to begin with why it would be you that would take a stand, say, rather than someone

00:16:10.620 else, but you did. And so I'm curious about why. And, um, what is it that you saw coming?

00:16:17.540 And what is this it that you're referring to? You've had a lot of time to be thinking about this

00:16:22.380 now it's been four years. And I mean, you're, and the other thing I want to ask you about is your

00:16:26.840 life was thrown completely upside down. You and your wife, you don't have your job at the university

00:16:31.860 anymore. Either of you, despite the fact that you were tenured professors, um, it's not an easy

00:16:36.660 thing to get another toehold in academia. Once you've been a tenured professor somewhere, especially

00:16:41.560 if you've gone through what you went through, because no hiring committee anywhere is going to

00:16:47.060 give you any consideration. Once you've been, um, once you've been tarred by scandal, regardless of

00:16:53.540 what your role in it was, they're far too conservative to ever do anything like that. And so, okay, so let's,

00:17:00.300 I don't know if I can remember the order in which I, I asked those questions, but the, I think the first

00:17:05.540 one was why in the world did you, why in the world were you compelled to, to object, to object? And

00:17:12.540 what is it that you were objecting to? Do you think? Well, it's a funny, a funny question for you to pose

00:17:19.220 to me because I have the feeling that the answer will be entirely native to you. I literally don't

00:17:27.200 believe I had any choice. People frequently ask me why I stood up. And my sense is if I think through

00:17:34.460 the alternative, I simply can't live with it. I can't sleep. Yeah, but that doesn't seem to bother

00:17:39.980 most people. So I don't get that. Like why, why you? Well, right. I mean, I guess that's the,

00:17:46.560 the thing I'm discovering. Um, so you alluded to my political leanings and you and I both know what

00:17:52.420 you mean by that. I'm a liberal and I would actually, I describe myself sometimes as a reluctant

00:17:58.820 radical. Um, by that, I mean that I believe we must engage in radical change if we are to survive

00:18:08.540 as a species, but I also know that radical change is very dangerous. And so it's not like, you know,

00:18:15.240 I find most people who would call themselves radicals feel like radical change is always called

00:18:20.880 for. And I don't, my, my sense is I hope to see change that makes civilization good enough that I

00:18:29.040 get to be a conservative, that I get to say, actually, we're doing so well that we have no choice,

00:18:34.920 but to preserve this. If we try to improve it, we'll mess it up. That's where I want to go.

00:18:39.540 But what I'm discovering is that the bedrock of my liberalism is nothing like the underpinnings of

00:18:51.700 the so-called liberalism of most of the people on the left side of the political spectrum.

00:18:56.200 My liberalism comes from a sense that yes, compassion is a virtue, but that policy must be

00:19:04.820 based on a dispassionate analysis of problems. Um, it is based on an understanding that there,

00:19:13.020 that the magic of the West comes from a tension between those who aspire to change things from the

00:19:19.200 better for the better and those who recognize the danger of changing them at all. And, and so in any

00:19:26.440 case, I think the short answer is we look around the world and everybody makes arguments that sound

00:19:36.060 as if they come from first principles, but most people do not arrive at conclusions from first

00:19:42.300 principles. If they extrapolate at all, they don't do it very well. And that results in a severe

00:19:51.380 compartmentalization of thought. And that means that when confronted with, um, changes that threaten

00:20:02.040 a system on which we are dependent, most people don't recognize it. And if they do recognize it,

00:20:08.020 they wouldn't know what to do about it. So, uh, how can I, how can I put it in, in plain terms?

00:20:15.100 I had no choice because I was as if on a ship where somebody had proposed to fix our course through,

00:20:23.720 uh, a field of icebergs, um, and navigate based on some absurd theory with no grounding. In fact,

00:20:33.100 somebody had to object. And I was a little surprised at how few and far between the objectors were,

00:20:40.260 but, you know, if I'm to be totally candid about it, at the point that things went haywire

00:20:45.740 at Evergreen, I had watched video of you reacting to protesters in Toronto. And it had made so much

00:20:58.120 sense to me at a number of different levels. You know, I recognized you as somebody who knew that

00:21:03.820 although the initial proposals were arguably symbolic, that they were connected to things that

00:21:13.040 ultimately were very much about an exercise of power and a transfer of wellbeing, and that it was

00:21:19.300 therefore, um, you know, you felt obligated to stand up and say no, which resulted as you know, better than

00:21:27.480 anyone in you being mocked for overreacting. And then here we are years later, and it turns out that you saw

00:21:33.380 with absolute clarity what others couldn't even imagine. Yes, but I certainly didn't see what was

00:21:38.080 going to happen to me. Right. Well, you know, so. Right. I don't think it wasn't possible to see

00:21:48.700 what would happen with specificity. But I am I correct in, uh, seeing that you knew that something

00:22:00.000 very dramatic was likely to come from your standing on principle, and that that didn't provide any

00:22:07.960 license to do anything, but make that stand? I really can't say, you know, um,

00:22:17.100 it's a it's a while ago now. So that that's part of it. But so much has happened to me that's been so

00:22:22.940 strange in the last four years that I have very difficult time making any sense of it. I can't even

00:22:28.220 really think about especially the last two years. I can't really think about them in any consistent

00:22:34.480 and comprehensive way. I mean, my my family situation has been so catastrophic and my illness

00:22:40.560 and my wife's illness. It's just been although she recovered completely, thank God. It's just been

00:22:45.800 so utterly catastrophic that that my my thinking about it is unbelievably fragmented. Um, and I'm, I'm

00:22:55.560 struck dumb still to some degree, by, by all of what emerged as a consequence of me making the first

00:23:07.300 videos that I made, you know, I went downstairs, talked to my wife and my son, my son was living at

00:23:13.800 home at that time, temporarily. And I said, this piece of legislation is really bothering me because

00:23:19.460 it calls for compelled speech. And I looked at the background documents and something wasn't right.

00:23:27.260 And I said, I need to say something about they said, well, go for it, you know, we'll see what

00:23:30.940 happens. And all hell broke loose, and continues to break loose for that matter, which is one of the

00:23:37.940 things that's so bloody strange about it is it doesn't seem to end. And I would have thought when

00:23:42.680 it first started, I thought, well, you know, I'd be a flash in the pan for a week or something or two

00:23:47.840 weeks or a month or six months or a year or two years or, but it doesn't stop. And I really can't

00:23:54.920 understand that. It's, it's, it's beyond my comprehension. Now, I guess it's partly because

00:24:00.420 I continue to communicate my thoughts, to some degree, even talking to mainstream media, people,

00:24:08.840 although increasingly less, and perhaps not at all from here on in. I mean, I had an interview with

00:24:13.220 the London Times. Two weeks ago, three weeks ago, it was published. And, you know, it was just another

00:24:18.960 complete, absolute bloody nightmare for my family, my daughter in particular, because they took her to

00:24:25.860 task in an extraordinarily nasty way. And, you know, and the journalist who did the interview was

00:24:31.940 completely, she, you couldn't invent her. You know, not only the way she, she was, she was so deceitful

00:24:40.040 in what she did. But I learned more about her background afterward, as a consequence of another

00:24:44.620 journalist who wrote about her. And, you know, she's a very singular person, to say the least. And

00:24:52.840 so I did feel at the time, like you did, I guess, that I was more afraid of not speaking than I was

00:24:59.660 afraid of speaking. And I have something against being told what to say. It's like, I'll pay the price

00:25:05.740 for what I have to say. I'm not going to pay the price to say what you want me to say. You go say

00:25:11.300 it yourself, and see what the hell happens. And, you know, maybe that's just a kind of

00:25:17.480 incomprehensible stubbornness, in some sense.

00:25:21.180 Although I did, I think I did see what has, I did see the beginnings of what has unfolded since

00:25:32.040 then. Although I can't even really put my finger on what it is that's happening.

00:25:39.080 So, well, I wonder a little bit about, you know, in some ways, you know, there's nothing good about

00:25:46.180 why you were absent from the scene. But there may be something good about your having not been there

00:25:55.000 for every moment of it, and being able to come back to the discussion with something like fresh

00:26:00.040 eyes. Because a lot of this is developmental. And, you know, you say you're surprised that

00:26:08.460 this is continuing. And I must say, I'm having the same experience. I feel like I was picked up,

00:26:14.580 you know, my whole family was picked up by a tornado, and we haven't been put down. And,

00:26:18.820 you know, I sort of feel like we rejoined in the tornado during 2020. It was such a crazy year that

00:26:26.000 a lot of people whose lives were continuing in some normal fashion are suddenly aware that things are

00:26:31.420 wildly off kilter. But actually, this raises a question. I think one of the things that I know

00:26:39.740 from my own life, and, you know, I know, of course, a bit about your life, because of the fact that it's

00:26:47.060 public, and because I've met Tammy, and have had a chance to interact with you in that context as

00:26:53.560 well. But the question I have is, I wonder about the difference between a person who might think

00:27:06.680 the way you or I would think about bad policy and, you know, compelled speech and that sort of thing.

00:27:14.640 The difference between a person who might think such a thing in isolation, and a person who has a

00:27:19.180 proper familial context in which to actually check in. So in other words, I have the sense that in part,

00:27:27.520 the reason that I'm able to just simply describe things as they are and do so unflinchingly is because

00:27:37.060 my family understands the same puzzle, and they may have different elements that they see with

00:27:45.860 clarity. But there's no question I can, you know, I can go to Heather and I can say, you know, I ran into

00:27:50.980 this thing today. And here's what I'm concerned it implies. And we can have a rational discussion about

00:27:57.140 it without anybody accusing anybody of moral defects, or any of the things that have become so

00:28:02.300 common. And so, in your case, I know that you have a familial network that provides you that same

00:28:11.720 kind of reality check. And then I wonder, looking at the generation of people advancing the woke

00:28:20.320 revolution, and I see the failure of that very thing. And I can't help but wonder if it isn't

00:28:25.960 connected. In other words, the idea that pair bonding, that marrying and producing a family

00:28:34.180 has become something that most people don't even consider an essential part of life, it's not the

00:28:43.140 objective of the exercise, it's a choice that some people make at best, that that has left people

00:28:49.320 very isolated from any reality check, which makes them very vulnerable when they are threatened,

00:28:55.820 with an accusation like, you're a racist, you're a transphobe, that sort of thing.

00:29:02.180 Now, you definitely need in this book, this is my new book, by the way. And so it's coming out

00:29:08.120 March 2. And I sort of clung to this like a life raft over the last couple of years while I was writing

00:29:13.220 it. There's a section in here about sanity. You know, and it's a critique to some degree of

00:29:18.660 psychoanalytic thought, because the psycho, not that I admire the psychoanalysts tremendously, but

00:29:23.760 they tended to think of sanity as something that was organized inside your psyche, or let's say,

00:29:29.180 inside your brain, for that matter, or maybe even a reflection of healthy brain function.

00:29:34.360 But sanity is to large part outsourced. And what I mean by that is that if you're fortunate and you're

00:29:43.560 well socialized, other people find you acceptable enough to include you in their networks, and then

00:29:50.960 all you have to do is pay attention to the functioning of that network and regulate your

00:29:55.620 behavior as a consequence of the feedback you receive, and you more or less stay sane.

00:30:01.820 And so like, if you have a family, and you have friends, then they'll help you make sure that your

00:30:07.700 jokes are funny and not mean. Because they'll laugh when they're funny, and they'll raise an eyebrow when

00:30:12.820 they're mean. And then you can check in with that. And they'll help you figure out if you're dominating

00:30:17.380 the conversation too much. And they'll, they'll push and prod you as you do the same to them.

00:30:24.540 And everyone stays relatively organized. And when all this hit to begin with, I had quite a large

00:30:31.220 network of people, which expanded at some point to include people like you and the so called intellectual

00:30:37.860 dark web members. And they were helping me check in on my sanity all the time, you know, helping guiding

00:30:44.700 me guide me through the interview process and analyzing my errors and commenting when I did

00:30:51.440 something hypothetically right. And, and my family played an integral role in that. And so that was

00:30:56.560 extremely helpful. I never thought about that. As a precondition for, for saying what I said,

00:31:04.620 but I think there's something about that, that's right. It's certainly the case that I have

00:31:09.180 tremendously supportive parents. Still, they're both still alive, they're still tremendously supportive

00:31:17.900 at a very deep, deep level. And I think that that was a real gift that I had that many people don't

00:31:22.700 have. You know, I've been struck, one of the things that torments me constantly is, and I think it's

00:31:30.100 really hurt me to discover this, is I had no idea how deep the desperation was for people who lack

00:31:45.280 encouragement. It's just because every time I talk about this, it makes me tear up because of what I've

00:31:53.600 seen, I think, but all these people that I've met now, you know, I spoke when I went on my book tour,

00:32:01.720 which was an unbelievable event, unbelievably positive event, but also I would even say to

00:32:10.120 some degree, traumatic, traumatically positive, like it was just too much. I really loved it. But

00:32:15.520 to see the depth of hunger that people had for an encouraging word was unbelievably tragic. And for

00:32:25.960 people to come up to me repeatedly, over and over and over, hundreds, maybe thousands of times and say,

00:32:34.420 you know, I was in such desperate straits, looking for some encouragement, unable to find it. And then,

00:32:40.860 you know, I came across your lectures, I thought, Jesus, it's pretty thin gruel to feed a starving

00:32:46.580 population. I mean, I'm absolutely pleased beyond belief that people have found what I've done useful, but

00:32:53.620 that doesn't decrease the impact of the realization of just how hurt, how much hurt there is. And I, and it is hurt

00:33:09.100 that's ground in a lack of encouragement. I have that I've been encouraged my whole life.

00:33:14.660 So, and that could easily be part of what

00:33:17.220 now, you know, I also thought somewhat calculate in a calculated way about this, like,

00:33:24.780 and I don't know how far this goes back, but I've, I also organized my life so that I was standing.

00:33:31.980 I had legs out in many directions, I had a clinical practice, I had a business, I had my

00:33:38.000 professorship, I had my writing. You know, I had multiple sources of income, pretty independent

00:33:44.940 areas. And so I, and I did that in part to maximize my capacity for freedom, I thought, well,

00:33:51.480 and this wasn't something I think I thought explicitly, you know, it was part of what unfolded

00:33:56.820 in my life across time. It wasn't easy to take me out. Although I've been taken out a lot,

00:34:05.700 like, far more than I thought might be possible. I can't separate that exactly from intrinsic health

00:34:14.080 problems, you know, but I, I, despite my, you know, I don't have, I, it isn't obvious to me that I can go

00:34:21.880 back to the university. I'm still employed there. I'm on leave. They would take me back.

00:34:26.400 I don't know if I can do it. I don't have my clinical practice anymore, which I really miss.

00:34:33.140 I love doing that. And that was 20 hours a week, you know, I, so that's a lot of time.

00:34:38.840 I finished writing this book, but I'm not writing right now. And so a lot of, I don't have any

00:34:45.780 pressing financial concerns. And so that's, that, of course, that's a huge privilege, a huge benefit.

00:34:50.820 And thank God for that. But despite me being distributed like that, I was still taken out

00:34:58.220 pretty hard. So, yes. Well, you, you know, I, I confess, I have wondered while you were

00:35:10.400 incommunicado over the last year, whether that was just Goliath's good fortune,

00:35:18.460 or if there might be something more to it, because you were such a singular voice at the point

00:35:23.880 that Tammy got sick. And then you did that. Obviously it was a tremendous blow to those of us

00:35:33.640 in intellectual dark web space in our ability to, to fight and to hold the line.

00:35:41.080 Um, but you clearly have been taken out in your words, um, deliberately multiple times and you

00:35:48.320 know how it comes about. I don't know. It's, it's my, it's amazing to me that it continues to happen.

00:35:53.720 And the thing, the thing that's so damn weird is that exactly the same thing continues to happen,

00:35:59.540 you know, and it was just replayed with this times article. Now I have thought,

00:36:04.020 I had a lot of interviews lined up for this book. And once the times article came out,

00:36:13.180 my, I reacted to it, my family reacted to it. And we, we dealt with it effectively. The same thing

00:36:18.480 happened that had happened to me before when journalists had written a hit piece about me,

00:36:23.060 it was extremely stressful because when it happens, you do not know which way it's going to go.

00:36:28.700 And, you know, you can get unlucky and a number of bad things can happen to you simultaneously.

00:36:35.260 All that has to happen is for that to happen once to exceed your capacity to deal with the

00:36:40.280 number of bad things and you're out. That's basically an accident. And I really think that's

00:36:43.920 what's happened. What happened to me in the last few years is that everything that happened socially

00:36:49.780 was unbelievably stressful, positive and negative. You know, the positive end of it was extremely

00:36:56.860 intense and, and, and amazingly compelling and interesting, but the negative end was really,

00:37:04.220 really stressful, you know, and I noticed what happens to people generally speaking. And I don't

00:37:09.560 think I'm making this up is, you know, I've watched the typical person who gets mobbed on Twitter

00:37:15.740 will get mobbed by 20 people and it'll last for two or three days. And they'll apologize like mad.

00:37:22.780 They're so stressed out. They retreat right away. And it's really hard on them, you know,

00:37:27.600 and that happened to me, like, I don't know how many times, a hundred times, 200 times.

00:37:33.780 And really publicly, you know, I've been called every bloody name in the book and that's been

00:37:38.820 really literally, I mean, I remember one day where I was called a Jewish shill and a Nazi the same day,

00:37:44.600 you know, by two competing publications. And I thought maybe they canceled each other out,

00:37:49.220 you know, but, but, and that's been very hard on my family, you know, and, and, and although they,

00:37:56.300 they're doing reasonably well under the circumstances, but then, you know, Tammy got sick

00:38:02.140 terribly and, and, and in a really nasty way. And then her, when the, her surgery was complications

00:38:09.680 multiplied and she was near death daily for months. And then this proclivity I had for depression

00:38:16.460 seemed to have become untreatable and that took me out. And so, and I'm still struggling

00:38:25.120 with that. You know, I get up, I can hardly stand up when I wake up in the morning. I feel so bad.

00:38:32.300 I can't believe I can be alive and feel that bad. I stumbled downstairs and I'm in the sauna for about

00:38:38.220 an hour and a half. And then I can stand up long enough to have a shower, which I do for about 20

00:38:43.740 minutes. And I scrub myself from top to bottom, trying to wake up. And then I can more or less

00:38:49.320 get upstairs and I eat. And then I go, I walk like 10 miles every day because I need to do that in

00:38:55.740 order to deal with this, whatever it is that's plaguing me. And I can get myself to the point

00:39:03.260 where by this time in the afternoon, I'm more or less functional, but then it repeats the next day.

00:39:08.600 And so, and it's so- My God, that's terrible.

00:39:13.620 It is. It's terrible. It's so terrible. It's so terrible that I can't think about it without

00:39:19.940 it being traumatic. So I have a hard time figuring out where to place my mind because this has been

00:39:26.020 happening. It's been happening every day really for two years. I think it's fair to say that every

00:39:31.640 single day of the last two years has been worse than any day I had previous to that.

00:39:38.600 Oh my goodness. And what a predicament you're in then, because I can hear, I would guess it anyway,

00:39:46.240 knowing you and knowing of you in the way that I do, but you're caught in this predicament where

00:39:52.700 that's really intolerable. And frankly, most people wouldn't tolerate it. But you also know that there

00:40:01.040 is, you know, both at the level of your family and at the level of those who admire you and listen to

00:40:09.040 you and are, you know, waiting to hear the little bits of affirmation that they need, the little bits

00:40:15.560 of guidance that they were unable to get in the world. You know how much good comes from your facing

00:40:23.380 that, uh, what sounds like a completely excruciating, um, existence. Yeah. It's perverse beyond

00:40:31.200 comprehensibility, which is sort of the hallmark of a traumatizing experience because it is exactly

00:40:37.540 that. And I, I, I look at it and I can't get my, I can't wrap my mind around it. It, well, and I,

00:40:44.400 and also that the, uh, the, my degree of exposure, I mean, you know, when I, when I decided to make

00:40:53.280 those videos, I was playing with YouTube and I was playing with fire. Like YouTube is fire in a way,

00:41:00.140 social media is fire in a way that is unimaginable. It's so powerful. YouTube will see, but YouTube

00:41:09.280 demolishes the printing press in terms of, of its long-term significance. I mean, because now

00:41:16.980 we can, now you can do with video and audio what you did with print and it's way easier.

00:41:23.580 You have access to a massive audience with no intermediaries whatsoever. And, you know, I,

00:41:30.000 and I, I don't know really how to grapple with that either, how to comprehend it.

00:41:37.400 Well, I mean, actually this brings me to one of the things I've been hoping to talk to you about

00:41:42.780 for the longest time. So I think there's a part of you that finds, um, you've always been very

00:41:50.580 gracious about it and, and welcoming, but finds my liberalism a bit paradoxical.

00:41:56.000 No, no, I don't look, look, I don't, I understand the catastrophe of the Pareto distribution.

00:42:06.000 I don't like it. You know, it, it, there is this proclivity for capital to accrue in the hands of

00:42:13.140 smaller and smaller numbers of people. It's just capital. It's all goods. You get this terrible

00:42:17.720 problem of distribution that that's like a natural law. And the fact that people object to that is

00:42:24.120 completely unsurprising. And the fact that if it goes unchecked, it destroys societies is that I

00:42:30.780 don't think that's a hypothesis. That's demonstrably self-evident. Um, so I don't find,

00:42:39.980 I especially don't find the concern, the compassionate concern for, for working class people and their

00:42:47.820 wellbeing, the least bit incomprehensible. It's the solutions that are the problem. It's

00:42:54.060 like, well, what should the solutions be? And well, that's, that's where things get very,

00:42:58.660 very complicated. It's not.

00:43:00.580 Well, perfect. And I, I'm, I'm sorry if I implied something that it wasn't, wasn't even my perception.

00:43:08.100 I think you are to an extent a conservative, but I find you, uh, if I listen to you, it's not a simple

00:43:16.740 kind of conservative.

00:43:17.500 I'm a conservative for the same reason you are. You already pointed out, like if you're a social

00:43:22.400 scientist and you don't understand the law of unintended consequences, you are not a very good

00:43:29.280 social scientist. I learned from my, my clinical research and from studying clinical research for

00:43:35.000 so long and publishing it too, is that you think your intervention is going to do what you think

00:43:39.920 it's going to do, but it isn't. It's going to do something else. And you, you have to build in,

00:43:46.680 if you, if you have a, uh, an intervention that you think is going to have beneficial results,

00:43:51.760 you have to build in an assessment to see if it has those results. And like, I talked to the woman

00:43:56.840 who headed the, um, um, the name of the, was done in, not in Cambridge, but in, in Massachusetts.

00:44:04.720 It was a longitudinal study of antisocial children. The first longitudinal study was done in a working

00:44:10.000 class neighborhood, just outside of Cambridge. I used to live there and I can't remember the name at the

00:44:13.960 moment, but in any case, this team intervened with kids that were likely to have, uh, uh, they came

00:44:22.480 for broken homes, broken neighborhoods, antisocial neighborhoods. This was done in the 1930s and they

00:44:27.800 intervened at the level of the child and at the level of the teachers and at the level of the parents

00:44:32.580 and ran this multiple year project to reduce risk for negative outcomes among this population,

00:44:40.840 randomly assigned, uh, participants to groups. And by all accounts from the participants,

00:44:48.520 the children, the parents, the teachers, and the professionals who were running the investigation,

00:44:54.260 it was a resounding success. They looked at the results and the intervention group did worse on

00:44:59.820 virtually every outcome measure. And they figured out later that the reason for that likely was that

00:45:04.840 they took the antisocial kids and grouped them together in summer camp. They took them out of the

00:45:09.640 city to put it in them in camp. They thought that would be a good intervention, but grouping them

00:45:14.100 together seemed to produce a competition for antisocial behavior. And it, it overwhelmed all

00:45:19.200 of the other interventions. Um, that was Joan McCord, famous study. And I talked to Joan McCord a lot

00:45:26.720 about that. And, but you see that all over the intervention literature is it's very hard to fix.

00:45:31.920 It's, it's very hard to define a problem correctly. It's very hard to define it, to develop an

00:45:37.280 intervention that's, that addresses that problem and only that problem. And then it's very hard to

00:45:42.500 get the intervention to do what you want it to. And that's what makes me conservative to the degree

00:45:46.660 that I am. So. Yep. No, I think that's, that's incredibly wise. I would add one thing to your list.

00:45:53.260 It's not just that it's hard to get an intervention to do what you want it to do. It is that it is hard

00:46:01.860 to get it to do what you want it to do. And at scale, these things also tend to evolve. So even

00:46:07.840 if you did manage to solve. Right. And so the, the, the problem of unintended consequences

00:46:14.440 coupled with the problem of perverse incentives and therefore bad policy that is effectively

00:46:19.820 corruption is a very frightening problem. And so I do think we are caught in a basically damned if

00:46:26.160 you do damned, if you don't scenario, we can't stay here. And you know, you're, I agree with you,

00:46:32.720 the, um, social media for lack of a, uh, a better term for it is going to dwarf the printing press

00:46:42.100 for various reasons. Some of them because it's so easy, but also because it's of a fundamentally

00:46:48.660 different nature, right? When you're reading a book, it may be that somebody writes something

00:46:53.840 that's bad for you to absorb, but you know, you're reading a book because the experience

00:46:58.840 of it, the, uh, the perception of it is of a book. Whereas, um, social media increasingly

00:47:04.820 fools the mind into, you know, the interaction you and I are having is more or less a face-to-face

00:47:10.920 interaction, but a lot of interactions that look like face-to-face interactions don't have

00:47:15.460 these characteristics. And at best, the impact on the mind is arbitrary. So, you know, we're watching

00:47:21.280 things like amplifiers of threat. And, you know, this goes back to the thing we were discussing

00:47:27.760 earlier.

00:47:28.200 But look, with Twitter, for, here's a good example of unintended consequences. It's like,

00:47:32.420 what don't we know? Okay. We don't know what regulates human communication. We know that if you

00:47:39.840 restrict the bandwidth, people don't understand each other as well, but we don't know how communication

00:47:46.120 functions. It's too complicated. Okay. So we absolutely don't know what happens to communication

00:47:51.480 at a large scale when you restrict people to 140 or 280 characters and then put them in a network

00:47:58.740 with millions of other people. We have no idea. And it could be that you, you tremendously bias the

00:48:04.880 discourse towards impulsive anger. It looks like that if you look at Twitter. I mean, and because

00:48:11.260 it's 140 or 280 characters, you can whip something off very quickly. And so it's almost as if the

00:48:16.900 technology is implicitly commanding you to be impulsively aggressive. And then we don't know

00:48:22.160 what it means when only those people who are motivated to be impulsively aggressive that day are those that

00:48:28.280 are communicating. And then when you only see those communications, even though, you know, 10,000 people

00:48:33.320 might read your tweet, only a hundred who are irritated for some reason respond. We don't know

00:48:39.140 any of that. And, and, and we completely underestimate the power of the technology because it looks

00:48:45.360 harmless. It just sits there on your phone and doesn't do anything. And so, you know, God only knows

00:48:51.680 what kind of tower of Babel that is. So, right. And not only that, but, um, the fact that the algorithm

00:48:59.980 changes and we don't get any notice of it, not only do we not have access to whatever the algorithm's

00:49:05.480 content is, but we don't know when it changes, which means it's impossible for us to even track

00:49:10.560 the impact of our own behavior because we can't run a controlled experiment.

00:49:14.760 It's like predicting the stock market. It's an illusion that you're dealing with the same thing

00:49:19.320 every day. It's complete illusion. And then of course, we don't know, you know, the algorithms

00:49:24.940 increasingly have a life of their own and increasingly they're governed by artificial intelligence.

00:49:29.300 And, and it, it builds in, it builds in, it derives implications that we don't even understand.

00:49:35.800 And, and as you pointed out, it all changes so quickly that we can't keep up with it in any

00:49:40.420 event. So, yes. So, right. So, so then the, the conversation, and I'm, I'm certain it's

00:49:48.600 going to take, uh, multiple tries for us to get there. Uh, hopefully we'll have the opportunity

00:49:54.620 for multiple discussions, but the question is, all right, you're a conservative, but you're

00:50:01.500 a wise conservative that understands the importance of liberalism, understands the necessity of

00:50:06.680 tension between the desire not to mess things up with unintended consequences and the desire

00:50:11.760 to solve problems that are actually solvable. And I would argue the necessity to solve certain

00:50:16.220 problems, which will be fatal if we don't solve them. Um, but the, the, the combination, in other

00:50:24.480 words, I think there's a new dialogue that has to happen. Those conservatives who understand the puzzle

00:50:29.440 need to get together with those liberals who understand the puzzle and figure out what the

00:50:34.800 new insights are, because we are somewhere so novel that if there's one thing we can say,

00:50:41.320 it's that our system is unstable and it is putting us in great jeopardy, which means that even if your

00:50:47.340 impulses are conservative and you point out correctly that I have some conservative impulses,

00:50:53.060 even if your impulses are conservative, um, we aren't anywhere, right? We're, uh, we're on a precipice

00:51:00.940 in a windstorm. And at some level, we have to make enough progress relative to the fundamental

00:51:07.400 instability of the system and the fundamental, you know, here, let me take an example. Um, the point you

00:51:16.920 make about social media and the human psyche, you could make exactly the same point about

00:51:24.500 pharmaceuticals and physiology that we know very little about the way the body actually works.

00:51:32.320 Yeah, I could sure make that case. All right. Yeah, I'll, I'll bet you can. The, the hell you've been

00:51:38.140 through makes this point very clearly, but you know, I'm constantly struck by the fact that our

00:51:44.100 narrative about medicine proceeds from an entirely false premise, which is that we know a great deal

00:51:51.580 about the body and have all of these useful interventions. What we have is a lot of interventions

00:51:56.180 where sometimes we know what one of their effects is. We very rarely understand why the spectrum

00:52:02.900 of, uh, you know, collateral consequences are what they are. And all of these systems are linked

00:52:09.120 together and nobody is tracking the long-term implications of anything. So we, we have this

00:52:15.860 sort of obsessive focus on the things that you can detect on very short timescales and almost a

00:52:21.740 studied ignorance of what the same, uh, pharmaceuticals or procedures do to us long-term.

00:52:30.260 Right. And we then, you know, I suspect if you did these statistics properly, I suspect that,

00:52:35.460 that medicine independent of public health kills more people than it saves. I suspect if you,

00:52:43.340 if you factor in phenomena like the development of superbugs in hospitals, for example,

00:52:47.980 that overall the net consequence of hospitals is negative. Now that's just a guess and, but it's,

00:52:54.220 and it could easily be wrong, but it, it also could not be wrong. And that is a good example or

00:53:00.520 that's where my thinking about what we don't know has taken me with regards to the critique of what we

00:53:06.340 do. The fact that it's even plausible is a stunning. Well, you know, medical error is the third leading

00:53:12.800 cause of death, you know, and that doesn't take into account the generation of superbugs, for example.

00:53:21.040 The generation of superbugs, or, you know, if you're thinking broadly about it, um, let's,

00:53:28.340 I don't know where you stand on this issue, but I have been, um, tracking the lab leak hypothesis for

00:53:35.980 COVID and it is very distressing to me that as much as it's an unsettled question, the evidence

00:53:43.060 for the lab leak gets stronger over time. All of the competing hypotheses fall one by one and are

00:53:49.120 replaced by some alternative that hasn't yet been falsified, but that's very ominous to me. And if

00:53:55.260 this is the case, if this was a bug that was modified in the lab through gain of function research and

00:54:02.780 escaped, then you have to add that to the balance sheet with respect to the costs of medical errors,

00:54:11.480 because it looks like if this was an escapee from the Wuhan lab, that it was an escapee from experiments

00:54:19.000 designed to create a vaccine to protect us from future coronaviruses. So we can't say that with

00:54:25.800 specificity, but if we look at the circumstantial evidence of what was being studied, how it was being

00:54:30.760 studied and what the likely purpose of those investigations were, then this is, you know,

00:54:36.680 the mother of all self-inflicted wounds. And it is, uh, downstream of naive thinking about the cost

00:54:45.640 benefit ratio of enhancing the infectivity of, uh, viruses.

00:54:51.560 I know, I did know that, that that's something that you've been tracking and pursuing. I don't have

00:54:59.480 an opinion about it because I don't know enough about it to have an opinion. Um, so I'd also,

00:55:07.080 with regards to conservatism, you know, I don't know if approaching how people should deal with the

00:55:15.740 problems in their lives from a psychological perspective, the viewpoint of a clinical psychologist,

00:55:19.760 I wonder if that kind of automatically makes you conservative in some way, because my locus of

00:55:25.480 concern has always been the individual. And so, and, and individual wellbeing and, you know,

00:55:31.420 being trained as a behavioral psychologist, I always took as my unit of analysis, the enhancement of

00:55:37.800 wellbeing of health, let's say at the individual level and maybe translated into political. And when

00:55:44.360 that's translated into the political landscape, maybe that looks something like conservatism.

00:55:47.980 I don't know. I mean, I never thought about this. I never thought about what I was doing in

00:55:53.020 political terms to begin with. Like even my initial statement about Bill C-16 and compelled

00:55:58.540 speech wasn't supposed to be something specifically political. I just thought the political had escaped

00:56:03.620 its boundaries. It's like, no, you don't get to infringe on free speech. You're no longer in the

00:56:09.140 political realm at that point. That's a different realm. Get the hell back where you belong.

00:56:13.060 That's how it looked to me. But you know, everything, that's another thing that's very

00:56:18.680 peculiar about our culture at the moment. It's almost impossible to have a discussion about

00:56:25.140 anything and have the coverage not be politicized. And I think that's partly a function of how the

00:56:31.840 media, the legacy media work, because they tended to view everything through a political lens.

00:56:36.960 And also a consequence of this insistence, and this, I think, comes primarily from the radical

00:56:42.240 left, that everything is political. And I don't buy that. It's like, you can say that everything

00:56:49.580 has a political aspect, but that's a completely different claim than everything is political,

00:56:55.580 which is a totalizing claim. And I also, as a social scientist, don't like totalizing claims,

00:57:01.200 because most things are multivariate complex. And so, well, so...

00:57:08.440 Yeah. I think we can prove that you can politicize everything, but not everything is political.

00:57:16.800 And that the tendency to view everything in political terms destroys our ability to properly

00:57:23.160 navigate questions on which we actually ought to have alignment. And this is a very disturbing

00:57:30.380 pattern to see every question, including COVID itself, turned into a team sport. Because that is,

00:57:42.360 of course, sabotaging exactly the ability to reason through our various options, and then to get us to

00:57:49.640 move in a coordinated direction to actually address the pandemic. And in some sense, I suspect we are

00:57:59.660 headed to having to accept COVID as a permanent fact of the landscape, when that was not a foregone

00:58:09.500 conclusion, that in effect, our politicizing of this issue is going to leave us with a bug that we

00:58:15.500 can't ever get rid of.

00:58:16.560 Why do you think that? I mean, I've been hoping that, and watching Israel in particular, there seems

00:58:23.080 to be some indication that they've got the vaccinations ramped up to the point where

00:58:26.880 they're having some effect on the rate of transmission of the virus, which is a positive

00:58:31.520 thing. And, you know, I keep hoping that the vaccines are, there's enough of them, and they're

00:58:38.080 getting out there fast enough so that we might be able to keep the bug under control. You're not so

00:58:43.480 optimistic about that, apparently.

00:58:45.680 No, I'm not. Because for one thing, I know that it's, you know, it's been obvious from the

00:58:53.280 beginning, it was going to evolve. And that the key to managing its evolving out of our control

00:59:00.560 was limiting the number of people who had it and limiting their ability to spread new variants

00:59:06.820 around the globe. And we've done a terrible job of this. Somehow, you know, a year in, it is only

00:59:12.400 beginning to be, it is only beginning to dawn on us that new mutants that are harder for our immune

00:59:19.440 systems to recognize are essentially a certainty. And that the key to ever regaining control is to

00:59:29.120 ensure that when these things arise somewhere, they don't immediately find their way around the

00:59:34.640 globe. So I guess what I would say is, I think we tend to, you know, even the idea of compromise in a

00:59:46.240 political sense is the wrong approach with something like COVID. We should have been much more

00:59:52.320 aggressive earlier on, so that our total level of compromise with respect to civil liberties could

00:59:59.600 have been much less. In other words, if early on, we had engaged in a really intense six week lockdown,

01:00:07.760 and we had ramped up our capacity to test for COVID with precision, so that after six weeks,

01:00:18.080 basically, the idea of six weeks would be, it's very hard to control COVID inside of a household,

01:00:23.040 it tends to bounce around, but that it will tend to burn itself out in most households within something

01:00:29.440 like a six week period. That if we had engaged in that, and then used track and trace to find and

01:00:37.600 control outbreaks following such an intense lockdown, we might not have had to deal with a full year of

01:00:43.600 the half-assed measure. And the sense is, or the sense that I have, is that we're getting, you know,

01:00:52.320 maybe it's a Pareto distribution, maybe it's we're suffering 80% of the harm of lockdowns and getting 20%

01:00:58.960 of the value that we might get for having, you know, not gone the full distance. And, um, unfortunately,

01:01:08.240 I think the prerequisite to our behaving rationally is having a, um, having our experts completely

01:01:18.880 liberated from market forces, from political dynamics and, uh, free to tell us what it is that we need to

01:01:26.800 know and, uh, then getting on the same page and having a proper rubric for evaluating what has

01:01:34.320 worked and what hasn't. And instead, what we've had is a thoroughly politicized discussion from the get

01:01:40.880 go in which even our countermeasures are, uh, fought over on the basis of, you know, if you, you know,

01:01:49.200 why is it that, uh, you know, a Trump voter is much more likely to be a mask skeptic? A question of

01:01:55.120 masks is an empirical question. It shouldn't have anything to do with your political leanings. And

01:01:59.280 yet it undeniably does, uh, in, in North America. And that has, has robbed us of the kinds of controls

01:02:08.640 that we might otherwise have instituted. I wanted to ask you, we, you talk, I'm going to bring the

01:02:16.000 discussion, if you don't mind back to something that we were touching on earlier, that your initial

01:02:20.240 objection when you were at Evergreen to whatever it was that was developing in the background.

01:02:25.520 And now we've had four years to see whatever it is manifesting itself. And so you, what is it,

01:02:32.960 what is it that's happening? Do you think in our politicized landscape? I mean, well, um,

01:02:39.680 I have a guess and it's, it's right up your alley. It's something I I'm intending to explore,

01:02:44.160 um, at greater length, but the basics are this, I suspect.

01:02:53.680 You and I, I think would share the opinion that, um, psychological development is among the most

01:03:01.680 important phenomena for understanding human beings. And it is underrated. We tend to look at the behavior

01:03:08.480 of adults and study it, but we should spend more time thinking about how those adults ended up the

01:03:14.800 way they did in order to, to really understand them. And I think for, uh, you know, for each generation,

01:03:26.560 you have a developmental landscape and what the governing forces are in that developmental landscape

01:03:32.400 has a lot to say about both the insights and the blind spots of the people who emerged from it.

01:03:38.000 And so, um, I would say that for Americans of my generation, I'm a Gen X, uh, the market played too

01:03:48.640 much of a role developmentally, and it has created a kind of lens through which we can't help, but look,

01:03:56.480 it has, you know, commodified things in a way that is quite unhealthy. You were born when?

01:04:03.360 I was born in 1969. Okay. Um, for millennials and maybe even more so for Gen Z, I suspect that there is a

01:04:18.000 pivot to something else. And many people, you know, uh, Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff have certainly

01:04:23.520 talked about, um, iGen, the internet generation. But what I suspect is really going on is that if you

01:04:31.360 are sufficiently plugged into the internet early enough, there comes a point at which the,

01:04:41.680 your persona on the internet takes primacy. It is more important than your actual physical

01:04:48.960 life persona. Jesus, it's worse than that. It's worse than that. I would say from personal experience,

01:04:56.400 there is more of me on the internet than there is in me.

01:05:02.080 My electronic avatars are far more powerful than me personally, you know, and I can watch this because

01:05:11.840 I've been away for a year and a half and yet my internet presence has steadily

01:05:18.640 increased during that time. And I, I look online now and it's

01:05:26.720 700 million views, something like that.

01:05:30.320 So now, now imagine that as the developmental environment for children. Now here's, here's the

01:05:37.600 connection I want to draw. My contention is that the online landscape is postmodern,

01:05:47.920 right? That if we were just to simply describe it, the rules, the physics of online life are postmodern.

01:05:54.800 Because it's abstracted from the environment.

01:05:57.440 Right. So for example,

01:05:58.480 It's like living in a dictionary. If I decided tomorrow that I was a woman,

01:06:04.960 right? I could change my internet presence such that I would present in a female way. I could say,

01:06:16.080 hey, anybody who doesn't treat me as female is a jerk. And the point is I have transitioned completely.

01:06:22.400 Right. Now, obviously there's no such thing in the physical world. You can transition, you can take

01:06:29.840 hormones or blockers, you can get surgeries, but no, um, no man has ever become a woman and reproduced in

01:06:40.800 a female way. Right. So the point is the physical world has all kinds of constraints that come from

01:06:49.440 physics and biology, which do not translate to the online world. And for people like you and me,

01:06:54.640 for whom the online world is an add on world, we think, well, obviously real life is the important

01:07:02.160 one. And then the online thing has some interface with it, which is frightening, but we understand

01:07:07.200 how they relate. But if you reverse these two things, then what you get is a generation

01:07:12.720 that it's problem solving mind says, actually, of course you can transition. You can transition.

01:07:21.040 And then it is everybody's obligation to live by who you've told us you are. And anybody who doesn't

01:07:26.880 is a bad person. And what has to be true for that to be the case, right?

01:07:32.000 You know, I had a, I had a fantasy a long while ago that people would end up wearing glasses

01:07:37.600 glasses like the Google glasses that would be illegal to take off and that you'd be mandated

01:07:44.880 to see what people wanted you to see. It was their right to be presented to you in the manner that they

01:07:51.760 chose to present themselves. You know, and I'm not saying that's a particularly brilliant vision,

01:07:56.320 but it's very much in keeping with what you're describing. So.

01:08:00.000 Yep. I think it's, I think it's close. But if you imagine then that an online world in which

01:08:09.840 effectively we can all be equal tomorrow, as long as we say that that's the objective and we can all

01:08:16.320 present as we want and others can be forced to adhere to it or be thrown off of whatever discussion,

01:08:22.640 then all of this begins to make a great deal of sense. And so I'm wondering if we are not in effect

01:08:27.840 in a kind of civil war between those for whom the real world has primacy and those for whom the

01:08:37.120 online world has primacy. And if that's not the fundamental nature of the battle.

01:08:43.200 Well, I think it could be the, the fundamental nature of a part of the battle. I mean, part,

01:08:48.000 obviously part of what's going on is whatever this unbelievably rapid

01:08:52.560 rate of technological transformation is doing to us. I mean, my, my daughter and, and some people

01:09:00.640 of approximately her age. So late twenties are helping me with manage social media, let's say.

01:09:10.720 She's noticed that people five years younger than her have advantages in understanding the newly

01:09:16.160 developed forms of social media that she's already outside of. And so that process of being hooked

01:09:21.840 into the web and that being the determining factor for your worldview is probably accelerating. I mean,

01:09:29.600 it's going to accelerate, obviously it's going to accelerate because the web is becoming more and more

01:09:33.040 dominant and machines are becoming more and more intelligent. So they abstract themselves away from

01:09:38.320 the world. And then the question is, well, what's the consequence of that abstraction? But it's funny that

01:09:44.320 that it's postmodern, that doesn't, there's more going on with whatever it is that's happening

01:09:54.160 than, than technological transformation. But you think that's the fundamental driving factor?

01:09:59.360 Well, I think there are a lot of ways you can look at it. Obviously, I don't think this is a real

01:10:05.200 battle. Obviously the internet runs on hardware in the real world and everybody, you know, when the power goes out

01:10:14.560 we are all reduced to our biological self. So I don't think there is actually anything to fight

01:10:19.520 over. One of these worlds has primacy and the other is an add-on and this is not debatable. But my point

01:10:27.360 is really about the mental confusion that arises from, for most people. I mean, if you think about the lives that

01:10:35.280 most people are living, right, most people at best are working a job in which they trade their labor for

01:10:46.160 money that they get to spend on goods or relatively generic adventures. And the part of their life that

01:10:56.160 is interesting and compelling is, you know, the internet over which they range freely and engage

01:11:02.800 in battle and, you know, they fall in love increasingly and whatever else they do. And so

01:11:10.400 my point is that that is a distortion developmentally. It misleads the mind into misunderstanding

01:11:17.280 what is necessary. If you take the postmodern rules of the internet and you now impose them on politics in

01:11:26.720 the real world, you get crises. You get the basic structure of civilization coming apart in front of

01:11:36.160 our eyes, which I really believe that it is, right? With the homelessness crisis in the US, for example,

01:11:43.040 is jaw dropping. And we have a particularly acute crisis on the West Coast in the US that appears to

01:11:50.960 be the result of people being utterly compelled of their own political beliefs to an extent that even

01:11:58.960 as those beliefs are failing around them visibly, they just double down. So imagining that people who think

01:12:08.400 the internet has primacy are now exerting a force to correct the real world in the direction of their

01:12:16.880 naive internet understanding of things are in danger of crashing the aircraft. And in some sense, people like

01:12:28.480 you and me are responding to what they're saying about how we should restructure the real world and

01:12:34.960 saying, that doesn't make sense. It won't work. It is going to put us in grave danger. It is going

01:12:41.840 to disrupt essential things. And, you know, there are those who can hear us, and we are popular with

01:12:48.480 those who can hear us. And then there are those who regard our pointing out the obvious as a danger

01:12:56.480 to their program who are intent on silencing. And I thought about this obsession with identity from a

01:13:04.960 developmental perspective, too. And I thought this insistence by a loud minority that their determination of

01:13:18.560 their identity take primacy is, first of all, it's wrong, technically, I think, because an identity isn't

01:13:28.240 merely what you feel you are. An identity is way more complicated than that, as any decent social

01:13:33.440 constructionist should already know. An identity is a role, a set of complex roles that you negotiate with

01:13:42.080 other people so that you can thrive across a very long span of time. And it can't be something that

01:13:48.800 you impose on other people because then they won't cooperate with you. Now, you might say that you

01:13:53.680 have a right to impose certain aspects of it on other people. And you could have a reasonable debate

01:13:58.880 about that. But identity is definitely not merely what you feel it is. And it's certainly not merely what

01:14:05.200 you feel it is moment to moment. That identity is actually much more like that of a three or four

01:14:11.680 year old child. And I mean this technically, it's not an insult. So when you're a child, you pick up one

01:14:19.600 identity after another and play with them. So for example, my granddaughter, who's about three at the

01:14:24.960 moment, if you ask her who she is, she has two names, a first name and a second name. And her dad calls

01:14:30.000 her by her second name, and her mom calls her by her first name. So she's Ellie or Scarlett. And she's

01:14:34.640 fine with either of those. But she's also Pocahontas. And if you ask her whether she's Ellie or

01:14:40.560 Scarlett or Pocahontas, she will say Pocahontas. And she has said that for eight months. It's amazing.

01:14:47.040 It's been that persistent. In a child of that age, it's quite remarkable. But what she's doing

01:14:53.440 is playing, you know, and girls will play to be boys at that age, and boys will play to be girls. And

01:14:59.680 they play with multitudinous identities, and then they settle into one. So then the question is,

01:15:06.480 what if you disrupt that play? That's fantasy play. And then another question might be, well,

01:15:11.840 what if you disrupt it with technology? Not that technology itself is producing a message that's

01:15:18.640 counter to that, but that the fact that children are on technology all the time means they're not

01:15:25.120 engaging in that kind of identity establishing fantasy play. And then you might say, well,

01:15:29.840 maybe what you see happening in that case is that it bursts out in late adolescence.

01:15:34.960 And the insistence there that my identity is what I say it is, is actually that the scream in some

01:15:40.880 sense of an organism that hasn't gone through that egocentric period of play where they are

01:15:48.880 in a fictional sense exactly the way they define themselves. You can't tell my granddaughter,

01:15:54.160 who's three, that she isn't Pocahontas. It's stupid to tell her that because she means it in

01:15:59.440 an experimental sense. And all you're doing is interfering with her fantasy play. And so

01:16:04.480 I see a fair bit of this as delayed fantasy play with the kind of pathology that comes up when you

01:16:13.440 delay a necessary developmental stage. Now that could be wrong, you know, when probably is, but

01:16:20.560 still, it looks to me like that's part of what's happening. It's very strange to see this insistence.

01:16:28.240 Like, I just, I just, it's so conceptually unsophisticated. The, the, even the hypothesis

01:16:34.240 that identity is only what you feel that it is. And the intense insistence that that be the case

01:16:42.720 is also another mystery. It's like, why is it that it's a foregone conclusion that other people have

01:16:49.520 to go along with your self-definition? So I think, uh, first of all, that's fascinating and that fits

01:16:56.640 rather exactly with what I'm getting at. And I suspect it is adding a dimension where I was vague

01:17:03.680 about the developmental pathway, but you're absolutely right that a child can take on an

01:17:12.400 identity and effectively within limits, they are allowed to assert that identity and adults will

01:17:17.680 play along with it. Encourage it. Right. Now the, the thing is there's a process. I'm more familiar with

01:17:25.920 the, you know, the male side of this because I, you know, I went through boyhood and, and being a

01:17:33.280 young man. But if you have a misunderstanding about how you present in the world, so you assert that

01:17:41.440 you are one way, then your peers will, you know, if your peers are nice, they will poke fun at you in

01:17:49.600 order to reveal to you what it is that you actually present as so that you can adjust your self-image.

01:17:56.400 Right. And that's part of, that's part of healthy socialization. That's what happens. That's it.

01:18:01.040 Once you pull out of that egocentric stage where you're playing with yourself, then you have to

01:18:08.080 integrate other people into your play. And then it's a, then it's a negotiation. Otherwise you're not

01:18:13.360 accepted by your peers. And so that's another thing that's very interesting is that it is

01:18:18.160 precisely those children who aren't accepted by their peers that insist that their self-definitions

01:18:25.360 rule. And then the, what, one of the things that's kind of terrifying about that is if you know the

01:18:30.880 child antisocial literature, there's a, there's a percentage of children that are quite aggressive

01:18:35.680 at the age of two, almost all of them are male. Almost all of them are socialized out of the

01:18:43.360 regression by the time they're four. The, the percentage that isn't become persistent lifetime

01:18:49.680 offenders. If they're not, if their behavior isn't rectified by the time they're four, which means

01:18:55.120 if they're not transformed into children that are acceptable to their peers, there's no intervention

01:19:01.280 that is being evident in the literature that will reverse that. So I, this is, this is both frightening

01:19:11.280 and it's making me happy in the sense that I believe that the model that we are wrestling to the surface

01:19:17.680 here is accurate and it doesn't fit what most people are expecting is going on. And I think there's a lot

01:19:24.720 of power in understanding it this way, but what you are effectively saying is that there's a period in which

01:19:31.760 self-definition is identity in some sense. And then there is a period of correction at which your

01:19:39.600 uh, insistence on who you are meets everyone's else's insistence on who you are and you then learn

01:19:45.600 who you actually are. And that thing better be a pretty good match for the world, but then yeah,

01:19:50.880 it better be all right. Right. And so I have argued as a, as an evolutionist that the,

01:19:55.760 I would say the, uh, the job of a parent is to mirror the environment the child will mature

01:20:04.160 into so that when they get there, they have the software that is an appropriate match for it.

01:20:08.400 And a lot of, uh, mental health issues come down to a mismatch between the software that your

01:20:13.680 developmental environment produced and the environment you actually live in. And that can

01:20:17.280 happen. That's why you shouldn't be nicer to your children than the world is. In fact,

01:20:21.200 you're doing them a disservice. That's the devouring mother from the psychoanalytic perspective.

01:20:26.400 Right. And this gets into some very uncomfortable territory. What, you know,

01:20:30.080 what does good, if you're a slave, if you're born into slavery and you produce children,

01:20:35.040 how should you parent them? Should you protect them from, you know, all of the implications

01:20:41.360 of slavery? Presumably not. Let's go through this stage idea again, because there's three stages,

01:20:45.280 I think. There's, there's the, the egocentric stage where the child is manifesting multiple

01:20:51.200 identities, self-defined and playing. Then, then that's under the protection of parents. The parents

01:20:57.040 put up a walled enclosure, so to speak, within which the child can do that experimentation.

01:21:03.120 Then the child meets the world of peers. That happens between the ages of four and the ages of

01:21:08.800 17, 18, something like that. And that's when your identity has to expand to include others in a

01:21:17.360 cooperative and negotiated way. You have to manage competition and cooperation, and your identity

01:21:23.400 becomes socialized. And then there's a stage beyond that, I would say, where you kind of pop out of that

01:21:30.220 socialization and you're no longer necessarily a member of the group. It's like a self-actualized

01:21:35.500 person. That's, although I don't like that phrase, the self-actualization theorists thought to some

01:21:42.780 degree in this manner, once you're done with your apprenticeship, you can become post-apprentice and

01:21:48.280 then you can take control of your own destiny to some degree independently of your peers. So hopefully

01:21:55.180 you can get to there. But, and so that's part of the answer to the slavery conundrum. You know,

01:22:00.540 you should be a good member of your group, but you shouldn't only be that.

01:22:05.260 Well, I think there are two different questions. The slavery issue is the very uncomfortable idea

01:22:11.020 that if a parent is supposed to mirror the adult environment that a child will have to get along in,

01:22:17.260 then a person whose children will mature into an arbitrary environment needs to understand that it's an

01:22:24.140 arbitrary environment rather than being protected from it, right? In order to, you know, to properly

01:22:29.900 avoid running afoul of the arbitrary authorities in a slave environment, one has to be developmentally

01:22:36.700 brought into how you navigate below the radar, how you, you know, how you play that game. And so anyway,

01:22:43.040 you would expect the parenting to look very different. And, you know, this idea that childhood is,

01:22:48.100 you know, a, uh, a joyous time where you should be free of all of those adult influences is exactly

01:22:54.500 wrong. It's prep, it's preparation. So, um, though, now if we take this model that I think you and I are

01:23:02.340 agreeing on here about the fact that the, and I, I like your point here, um, that there are three stages.

01:23:10.660 You've got, you've got, I assert my identity independent of the world, then the world and I negotiate over

01:23:17.540 what my actual identity is. And then I'm not an apprentice anymore. And I get to be who I am in the adult

01:23:23.020 world, having been informed by that process. And you imagine that you've got generations now, one and a half of

01:23:30.860 them maybe, for whom the online environment was so compelling and so much the source of most of their affirmation,

01:23:36.660 that its rules have become sacrosanct to them. And those rules really do look like,

01:23:44.980 you know, there it's a, it's a childish world, right? You join some community of people, you tell

01:23:51.840 them who you are. There are rules about them having to respect who you've told them. You know, it is,

01:23:56.600 if I say I'm Pocahontas, who are you to say I'm not? Right. And, um, that in some ways.

01:24:03.760 Well, the answer to that question in the real world is I'm someone you have to get along with

01:24:09.000 in repeated interactions, but that may not be the case at all online. That constraint's gone.

01:24:15.040 Right. You may be able to, you can just pick up and move to the next community.

01:24:18.500 And that's another thing we should talk about, because another thing that's happening online

01:24:22.280 is that I've, I've detected this recently, is that the online environment is also making

01:24:29.040 everyone acutely paranoid. And I think the reason for that is that everyone, it's easy for our

01:24:35.940 thinking to go to, to go astray. And as we talked about earlier in this discussion, other people tap

01:24:43.560 you back into shape and you're, you're surrounded by a kind of random assortment of other people in

01:24:50.000 the real world because you didn't select them. So because it's random, it's, it provides you with

01:24:56.180 what is in essence, relatively unbiased feedback information, but online, you can choose your,

01:25:03.600 your compatriots. And it's likely to be the case that at your weakest point, psychologically,

01:25:11.060 you choose the least demanding compatriots. And so your craziest ideas are the least likely to be

01:25:17.720 challenged. All right. So there's so many interesting threads here. One of them, I, I, my guess is

01:25:26.160 you and I will fall out in the same place here. But if you give me a choice between a community

01:25:31.760 that, uh, believes everything I believe and one in which people believe very different things,

01:25:40.980 I'm not going to choose the one in which people believe the things I believe, because for one thing,

01:25:47.800 it's the end of growth. It's deathly boring.

01:25:51.260 I want to object slightly.

01:25:53.180 Okay.

01:25:53.880 I've had, and you've had this experience too. I've had the experience of being in an environment where

01:25:58.800 a very large number of people don't agree with me vociferously. And what I would say is a little of

01:26:04.460 that goes a long way. Even if you're a courageous thinker, I'm not going to put myself in that category,

01:26:10.740 but if even, even if you're someone who wants to be able to tolerate dissent, there's a limited

01:26:20.040 amount of dissent that you actually can tolerate. You are going to seek out an environment where

01:26:24.720 most people agree with you, but some people don't some of the time. And it's kind of like listening

01:26:30.140 to music. You'll like music that's optimally different from what you are enjoying right now,

01:26:36.620 right? If it's exactly the same, it's boring. If it's too different, you can't hear it.

01:26:41.140 There's a, there's a, there's an amount of novelty that you can tolerate, but it's not that large.

01:26:47.860 And so even people who have been trained to look for evidence that disproves their own theories,

01:26:55.400 they're only going to be able to tolerate a tiny bit of that at a time. It's too destabilizing.

01:27:00.460 It's too destabilizing. Well, all right. So I want to link this back up to what you said

01:27:06.400 before about the three stages. So my experience as a scientist is that my most valuable characteristic

01:27:18.300 is the ability to be, to be completely indifferent to the prevailing wisdom on a given point.

01:27:26.600 Right. And I think this is- No, no personal stake in it.

01:27:32.220 Well, I may even have a personal stake. I may come up with an idea that compels me that it's

01:27:38.800 probably right, a hypothesis. And I may advance it and have every single one of my peers say,

01:27:45.800 that's garbage. And my sense is not one of, oh crap, I've said something bad. My sense is,

01:27:52.740 well, wouldn't that be delightful? If I'm as right as I think I am,

01:27:55.700 then the fact that everybody else doesn't get this makes it even better. Right. So my point is,

01:28:03.120 that's not normal. I know that's not normal. And it's not normal for evolutionary reasons that are

01:28:07.960 easy to understand. It takes a lot of training to accomplish that.

01:28:11.760 Yes. Or a developmental environment that rewards it. Right. Sure.

01:28:15.760 If you have, if you have the right experience. But then again, you know, you said yourself,

01:28:19.460 again, at the beginning of this conversation, think about the preconditions for that is that

01:28:24.500 in order to open yourself up to that sort of criticism, you have to be supported in all sorts

01:28:30.460 of ways, you know, and even a, so when I'm functioning as a scientist, I am trying to disprove my

01:28:36.960 presuppositions. No, I'll test them. It's like something, something manifests itself in an

01:28:42.620 experiment. Then I designed three or four experiments to see if I can make that effect go

01:28:46.300 away. And I do that because I don't want to propagate nonsense. And I don't want to pursue

01:28:50.360 nonsense in my own career. But in order to tolerate that, think about how we set up the system is

01:28:55.880 you have to be a tenured professor to do science

01:28:59.280 or have the equivalent position in a research lab. But

01:29:04.720 your economic situation is stabilized. Your social status is stabilized. Like you're protected on 50

01:29:12.260 fronts and then you can open the door and say, okay, let's have some novelty come my way.

01:29:18.180 And, and, and that, that's assuming that you're at a point where you can tolerate any novelty at all.

01:29:23.680 You know, and more curious, more open, more emotionally stable, more intelligent people

01:29:28.540 are more compelled by novelty and can handle it better. But still our, our ability, our ability

01:29:34.580 to handle it is pretty low. And we will find environments that mostly reflect back to us what

01:29:41.520 we want most, most comforting. Well, actually, this, this is, this is fascinating. I wonder if there's

01:29:50.260 not effectively a budget for discordant interactions. And, you know, if we go back to

01:30:00.420 what we were definitely about it at the beginning of the conversation, the fact that not only do Heather

01:30:07.820 and I have a great relationship, but we also speak the same language scientifically. So, you know,

01:30:13.180 it's a kind of across the board sounding board and ability to, you know, I feel no vulnerability

01:30:22.520 there because there's no place where our worldviews aren't compatible. And, you know, I could say

01:30:30.920 similar things about, about Eric. So what that means is that my budget for discordant interaction

01:30:38.840 is probably larger when I get to the outside world, um, because I haven't spent it at home or in the

01:30:48.960 context of family or friends. And, you know, you spend, it is definitely a budgetary phenomenon. You

01:30:54.340 spend, like, you produce a unit of psychophysiological preparation for every unit of uncertainty. And the size

01:31:02.340 of that unit of expenditure varies with your trait neuroticism, because that's like evolution's

01:31:09.300 guess at how dangerous the environment would be. It varies with your position in this, in the dot,

01:31:14.220 in the, in the social hierarchy, because if you're at the top where you're protected, the consequence

01:31:20.240 of an error is attenuated compared to what it would be at the bottom. And that's why social position

01:31:26.300 modulates serotonergic output. So the higher you are in the hierarchy, the more serotonin dampens your

01:31:34.520 negative emotion to uncertain events. And that's in keeping with your, with your actual fragility.

01:31:40.940 Neuroticism determines it. Social hierarchy determines it. Intelligence determines it to some

01:31:46.020 degree, because you're a more effective problem solver if you have a high IQ. So, but you do pay for

01:31:53.860 uncertainty, because if something's uncertain, you don't know what to do. And so you have to prepare

01:31:58.280 to do everything. And that's unbelievably costly, psychophysiologically. It ramps your cortisol

01:32:03.440 production up, and it, it starts to eat away from future reserves. It's definitely a budgetary process.

01:32:11.420 So. Yep. Um, all right. So I want to, I want to see if there's something more, um, with respect to

01:32:23.660 this model in which for people whose developmental environment has been, uh, internet first and who

01:32:34.240 have wrongly encoded the lesson that my identity is mine to define and that those who would challenge

01:32:43.720 it are enemies rather than people doing me a favor of giving me information that I don't have about

01:32:49.320 myself. They are enemies to be challenged and driven out. Um, then this interfaces with those of us for

01:32:58.740 whom the internet is not our primary, uh, developmental experience in the following way. And I, I'm using the,

01:33:07.400 um, the case of trans ideology simply because it's the clearest case biologically. But if you take the

01:33:17.880 rules of trans and I actually believe probably these ought to be the rules online, which is you can

01:33:25.860 present as whatever you want, and by and large, people should just simply treat you that way. And

01:33:31.000 you also, by the way, online have the tools to do that so that you're not creating, uh, uh, some kind

01:33:39.020 of unresolvable, um, paradox. But if we then say, okay, the online rules are that there's no such thing

01:33:47.940 as sex because a man can become a woman simply by, uh, showing up as one. And then we say, whatever

01:33:57.240 must be true in the real world in order for those rules to be the rules everywhere, we are going to

01:34:03.500 make those things true. Therefore, it must be the case that biology was wrong about sex. And what's

01:34:12.980 more that, um, because simply saying that you, uh, are female is sufficient to put you fully in that

01:34:23.760 category, then therefore whatever, um, morphology and physiology you happen to have at the point that

01:34:31.240 you make that assertion is consistent with being female. And we have the absurd discussion that we

01:34:36.400 now see so regularly about, um, basically, you know, female penises and things like this.

01:34:44.680 And so those of us with real world primacy are constantly saying, you can't rewrite the rules

01:34:52.500 of civilization around simple claims and isolation, like all you have to do to be female is say that

01:34:57.780 that's what you are. Um, and that, that battle is one that is now ironically going to be lost in the

01:35:06.420 real world as a result of the fact that actually political power is accumulating in the hands of

01:35:12.900 those who subscribe to the online rules. So the, the, the identity issue is, I mean, it forces us to,

01:35:21.620 to, uh, one of the things I've found so, so challenging about all of this is that

01:35:27.640 these challenges to fundamental assumptions force you to make arguments for things you actually

01:35:34.440 don't know how to argue for. So for example, what does it mean to be female? Well, I don't know

01:35:42.120 because no one's actually ever asked me that question. They just act being female and I act

01:35:46.760 being male, whatever that means. And we don't ever sit down and lay out the explicit assumptions. Now

01:35:51.620 you do that to some degree when you're arguing with your wife about who's going to do what,

01:35:56.060 when, and maybe with your mother and when, with your sister, you have local discussions when,

01:35:59.980 when roles come into conflict, but you never list the axioms that you're using to do your

01:36:06.580 perceptual categorization. And so then when you're forced to defend your presumption, you don't know

01:36:12.200 how to do it because you don't have the arguments at hand. So to be female, I mean, means something

01:36:18.980 like, and I'm going, what do you do? I had a discussion with one of my students, former students

01:36:28.360 today. We're trying to help people develop this. We're trying to develop this program that helps

01:36:33.140 people identify and then accomplish important life tasks. And it forced me to think about something I've

01:36:43.720 thought about over years. What are the important life tasks? Like, okay, so you should get educated

01:36:48.920 to the, to the approximate level of your intelligence. You should be employed gainfully,

01:36:56.740 have a job, or maybe if you're lucky, a career. You need an intimate relationship. You should have

01:37:02.960 some friends. You need a family. You need to regulate the world of temptation, drug and alcohol use,

01:37:08.600 that sort of thing. You have to take care of your health. You need to make some use, productive use

01:37:13.500 of your time outside of work. So there's eight things. Maybe there's more, but that's sort of

01:37:18.780 eight. And maybe you don't need to be fully accomplished along all of those eight, but they're

01:37:25.000 pretty important and they're not a bad start. And if you can come up with a better list, more power to

01:37:29.960 you. But well, let's take one. You're going to have a family, an intimate relationship and a family.

01:37:34.800 Well, the classical way of doing that is that someone's male and someone's female and they get

01:37:39.640 together and they have children and then they have grandchildren. And that's like a third of your life

01:37:45.380 or a quarter of your life or a fifth of your life. I don't care. It's some non-trivial portion of your

01:37:50.900 life. And that identity, male and female, is a precondition to that route through life. And then you

01:37:56.680 have children and they mean something to you and they give you something to do and you have grandchildren

01:38:00.700 and it's the same thing. So by playing out male and female, it's sort of like you've now occupied 25%

01:38:07.260 of your time productively. That's the role. Okay, let's say we blow that apart. Well, then what?

01:38:14.220 What are we supposed to do then? Because you can't pretend that into existence. And that's the

01:38:20.340 postmodern element of this. This is the refusal of the real world. It's like, okay, we'll make identity

01:38:25.820 entirely mutable. But what are the trans kids that came after me in the first demonstration against

01:38:34.080 me? I said, you think I'm your enemy, but I'm not. And the reason I said that being a clinician was

01:38:40.220 because I thought, well, you're adopting an identity that there is no rules for. What the hell are you

01:38:47.440 going to do with that? You're inviting so much trouble into your life, you can't even possibly

01:38:54.200 imagine it because you won't know what to do. And people won't know how to treat you. And so where

01:39:00.340 does that leave you? Now, you might say, well, I'm so distraught about the discordance between my

01:39:06.960 psychological state and my biological reality that that pales in comparison. And maybe there are

01:39:12.420 situations where that's the case. But man, an identity that doesn't solve the problem of how you're

01:39:20.880 going to live isn't an identity. I don't know what it is, but it's not an identity.

01:39:28.420 Yep. And I don't even know how people would change the rules exactly to make that work.

01:39:35.880 So I agree with you wholeheartedly that effectively, our identities are means to an end.

01:39:46.560 And there are conservation laws that apply to the system as a whole. And unfortunately,

01:39:53.960 and this is actually essentially the core argument of the book that Heather and I

01:40:00.520 have just completed. But the core argument is we are living in a period of evolutionary hyper novelty,

01:40:10.580 where human beings are actually the species for which we have the best tools to deal with novel

01:40:18.220 circumstances that our ancestors did not know anything about, but that the rate of change has

01:40:22.960 become so high that there is no conceivable way for us to keep up with it. And what we are effectively

01:40:29.400 watching- Even in principle.

01:40:30.120 Even in principle. Even in principle. The very fact that you can say the environment that we live in

01:40:38.280 is not the one that we were born into, that's way too fast. You may be able to make a discreet jump.

01:40:45.100 Human beings are capable of moving from one habitat to another and figuring out one time what the rules

01:40:52.040 of the new habitat are. But a habitat that is constantly in motion and has become utterly arbitrary

01:40:58.580 with respect to even the most fundamental characteristics is not something to which

01:41:05.500 we can be well adapted, which is causing us to be-

01:41:08.000 Sounds like a powerful argument for conservatism.

01:41:10.920 It is.

01:41:11.880 Yeah, I know. I understand. Well, I do understand. I do understand that. That is,

01:41:15.760 to the degree that I'm conservative in my outlook, that is the reason. It's like, look,

01:41:22.160 I've kept up, you know, like I've transformed myself multiple times over the years. And I was

01:41:28.580 taken out by this illness and it isn't obvious to me that I can catch up again. I've caught up a lot.

01:41:33.840 And I've watched my peers, my high school classmates, my university classmates, and I've seen people

01:41:40.840 who don't have one transformation in them. They're people who, they adapt to the high school environment

01:41:46.240 and that's it. That's where they are for the rest of their life. They peak at 17, they're done.

01:41:50.960 They don't change. Then I've seen people who can manage one transformation.

01:41:54.280 I've seen people, much rarer, who can manage two or three. But after that, it's like,

01:42:01.020 it's, it gets massive drop off in probability with every demand for transformation.

01:42:07.920 And now, like I find myself now, I have to rely on my son for doing some of my technological chores.

01:42:13.260 And I hate that because I stayed on top of it for so long, but I got sick and I fell out. And

01:42:17.980 it isn't obvious to me that I can clamber back in. It's very difficult.

01:42:23.040 Well, if you'll take some advice from a friend, and I'm not even sure,

01:42:27.840 I'm not sure I even have it fully formulated, but the thing you described earlier in the conversation,

01:42:36.340 the amount of effort it takes for you to get to the point where you can be productive in the day,

01:42:44.400 the amount that is riding on your doing it, the number of people who are listening to you and who

01:42:53.060 basically need your influence in their life. And, you know, in some sense, it, you know, it is,

01:43:03.860 it's, it's a mythological story. And I know you will have spotted that a thousand times over,

01:43:09.960 but just the Herculean effort, the tremendous amount that's riding on it and the degree to which

01:43:16.160 you're, you're paying some, uh, inhuman price in order just to continue playing your role is

01:43:23.540 profound. And so the advice to the extent that I have.

01:43:26.800 I don't see how you can see that. It shocks me that you say that. I mean, that isn't to say I.

01:43:34.860 You disagree?

01:43:35.680 No. It seems like that from inside here.

01:43:40.020 Well, I mean, I think, you know, uh,

01:43:43.060 but I can, but I can't, having said that, I still can't believe it.

01:43:48.000 So what I think I would do in your shoes and what I hope you will do is you will,

01:43:55.040 you know, I don't think there's anything about that story that isn't right. I think you're,

01:44:00.080 you're reporting honestly how hard it is. And I know because I've seen it in person,

01:44:05.680 and everywhere else I've seen the effect that you're having on people. And I know how important

01:44:10.680 it is in keeping them out of trouble and steering them in the right direction and giving them hope.

01:44:15.460 And so what I would hope is that instead of reinventing yourself again, or updating yourself,

01:44:26.020 that you would figure out what the efficient way of showing up in the world in that role is and

01:44:38.020 trim away.

01:44:40.020 I hope that's why we're having this conversation.

01:44:43.520 I seem to be able to do this so I can do this. And so that's what I'm doing.

01:44:48.940 And I have this book coming out and we'll see how that goes.

01:44:52.120 But I mean, I think, you know, I know your audience, and they will,

01:44:59.100 they'll accept you any way you can show up for them. And I think, you know, the key thing is to

01:45:05.800 figure out how to get out of the predicament of having to go through that Herculean struggle every

01:45:09.960 day.

01:45:10.560 Yeah, well, it's beyond, I've been struggling with it for two years, I can't get out of it. I can't,

01:45:14.820 well, I mean, I'm out of it to some degree, I'm living at home again, I'm not in the hospital.

01:45:19.300 But the reason I'm not in the hospital is because there's nothing that can be done for me in the

01:45:24.100 hospital. Like, there's no point in me going to a hospital, it will just make it worse.

01:45:28.800 When I wake up in the morning, like any sensible person would go to the emergency room and say,

01:45:32.760 look, this is there's just, this just isn't possible. But it's irrelevant, because all that

01:45:38.400 will happen, and I've been in like four hospitals. So I know all that happens is I'm made much worse.

01:45:43.940 And so I live in 15 minute increments, fundamentally.

01:45:51.840 Wow. Well, I hope you can detect how many people are rooting for you.

01:46:01.460 It's mind boggling. It's life preserving that fact. And I can't believe it, even after this last

01:46:09.500 London Times interview, the amount of support that came pouring in is just unbelievable. I can't,

01:46:17.960 I can't wrap my head around it. I don't get it. Well, but there it is, you know, there it is. But

01:46:24.840 I mean, it makes sense, you know, because those of us who have been on your team or paying attention

01:46:29.940 to you for the last several years, know who you are. And I think, in some sense, your enemies

01:46:39.380 know what you are, they know that a voice like yours carries a tremendous amount of weight,

01:46:45.480 that their fictions will not survive in the context of a countervailing force like that. And so

01:46:52.440 that's why they come after you the way that they do. But, you know, the fact is, people are getting

01:47:00.300 wiser over time, they're recognizing what an attack looks like, you know, at some level,

01:47:06.680 they vary a little bit aesthetically, but the overall picture is the same.

01:47:12.480 There's a new one planned, apparently. So the next thing, yeah, the next thing, this is something

01:47:17.980 that hasn't happened yet, but is apparently coming, a financial expose of my, I don't know,

01:47:26.900 economic existence. So, you know, which will be accompanied by claims that I'm exploiting everyone.

01:47:33.260 And, well...

01:47:35.920 Yes, they're going to come after you for succeeding and for people doing, you know,

01:47:41.700 what they can in order to get you to keep going.

01:47:44.880 I live such a sybaritic existence. I drink sparkling water and nothing else, ever. And I eat nothing but

01:47:52.700 meat, ever. And so my luxuries, this is so... It's so absurd. My luxuries have been

01:48:02.080 high-end toothpicks and sparkling water.

01:48:05.740 Well, I sometimes wonder when I look at attacks on you, if the idea is this. There are a certain

01:48:18.000 number of people who haven't spent any time listening to you yet. And if they did, they would

01:48:24.160 quickly gather that you're not what your enemies are portraying you as. So the idea is there has to

01:48:31.140 be a constant stream of suggestions that there's something deeply wrong with you in order to get

01:48:38.680 people not to check in with that question. You know, it's like, you know, Julian Assange, right?

01:48:46.220 The number of things that have been said about Julian Assange that would make you think, well,

01:48:50.440 I don't know what's going on there, but...

01:48:52.280 Something is going on. Yes, right.

01:48:54.140 Right. And so the idea is it has... The stink that they create around you or Julian Assange or

01:49:00.400 another figure that they regard as very dangerous has to be sufficient to drive most people away from

01:49:06.360 even checking for themselves. And I don't think it's working in your case, but I do think that that's...

01:49:12.480 Well, so far, it doesn't seem to... But, you know, there's always the possibility that it'll be the

01:49:16.620 next one that'll work. And it's not like I have any shortage of things wrong with me.

01:49:20.640 There are things wrong with me, you know? Now, whether they're ethical things or not,

01:49:25.140 that's a whole different question. But, like, nobody has a... Nobody has a... What?

01:49:31.460 No one has an untrammeled conscience, that's for sure. So... And I'm not too worried about the

01:49:37.260 economic attack. I mean, I'll just make my... If it gets out of hand, I'll just make all my finances

01:49:42.000 public. I mean, I've never made any apologies for being an evil capitalist. So...

01:49:50.640 I think, actually, all the things I've done, I've tried to use market forces to modify because

01:49:56.060 I think it's a really good source of feedback. You know, like, I've produced these

01:50:00.580 processes to help people plan and assess their personalities. And, you know, we thought about

01:50:07.420 giving them away for free, but free is actually a really bad price. And once you start making things

01:50:12.700 and starting to put them out in the environment, you find out very rapidly that pricing is very complex,

01:50:18.080 and you have to get the price right, and free is not the right price. First of all,

01:50:24.080 if people will only use it if it's free, it might actually not be any good. And that's a signal.

01:50:32.560 So, why not use that signal? That's how it's appeared to me. And then you have to

01:50:37.700 make the thing sustain itself, so it has to generate some income.

01:50:41.520 And, anyhow, that, from what I've heard, that's the next thing that's going to happen.

01:50:50.120 So, if you, we should stop pretty quick, I guess, although I'm really enjoying this,

01:50:56.500 and we will definitely do it again. I would really like that. I had a very fun conversation

01:51:01.220 with you. It's so nice to talk about what are essentially scientific hypotheses. I miss that

01:51:07.120 so much, because I don't have my graduate students anymore. Your life has changed dramatically.

01:51:19.000 If you could have taken a route, I guess I'm asking, you know, would you do it again?

01:51:25.220 And I do, but I don't want to ask that in a cliched way. And maybe it's a stupid question,

01:51:30.260 because you just don't know, but are you okay? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, on the one hand,

01:51:37.900 if I think about it logically, would I do it again? In a heartbeat. There are a few things I

01:51:42.980 might do slightly differently, but I'm not even compelled. You know, I think it went pretty well

01:51:50.420 in light of what the forces in play were. But, you know, the thing that we've lost

01:51:58.240 is security, right? The fact is, the world... I mean, people might, you got a settlement from

01:52:06.480 the university, but that was a trivial proportion of your future, your mutual future earnings. It was

01:52:14.300 nothing. It was enough so you didn't starve to death immediately, but that was all.

01:52:18.660 Right. You know, and if I'm honest about it, we were forced to move out of our home to a

01:52:26.460 different city. We uprooted our children's lives, which was quite disruptive. But I really don't feel

01:52:37.160 there was any choice. I don't, you know, if I think about it as a matter of choice, I cannot

01:52:44.260 find the circuit that would have done anything differently. And I'm not... All I can say is our

01:52:52.540 lives are full of purpose. And we're doing fine. The absence of security is something I think about

01:53:01.100 a lot. But yes, I would say there wasn't any choice, nor should there have been. And I'm not

01:53:11.060 sorry I made the choices I did in the slightest.

01:53:16.500 Well, you look good, man. And you look, if you don't mind me saying, you look different than you

01:53:21.720 did when I saw you before.

01:53:23.780 Well, I'm older now.

01:53:24.700 Well, but there's a... I've noticed this in my clinical clients, when they integrate their

01:53:32.360 aggression, their face is hardened. And they look determined all of a sudden, instead of

01:53:39.240 questioning. And you look like that more than you did. Now, some of that's from getting older,

01:53:45.100 but not all of it. It's...

01:53:47.660 Well, I think, you know, if I'm understanding you correctly, it's probably a lot about

01:53:53.100 you know, getting catapulted into the big leagues and learning to play that role. It's, you know,

01:54:04.180 it's trial by fire. But certainly, it's been fascinating. And I'm looking forward to seeing

01:54:12.040 what comes next.

01:54:15.500 Famous last words.

01:54:19.120 Yeah, that's ominous coming from you, Jordan.

01:54:21.300 Look, it was great to see you. Say hi to Heather for me.

01:54:25.960 I sure will. And Jordan, I...

01:54:27.340 Be nice to talk to her, too.

01:54:29.720 I can't tell you how relieved we were to hear that Tammy had recovered and that you were back. And I

01:54:37.960 know it's a rough road, but hang in there, brother. We need you. And there are so many people who are

01:54:46.580 just thrilled that you've come back from hell to rejoin the battle.

01:54:56.140 All right. So, soon we'll talk again.

01:54:59.340 Great. Be well, Jordan.

01:55:00.640 We'll see you.

01:55:18.420 Bye.

01:55:19.020 Bye.

01:55:19.300 Bye.

01:55:29.040 Bye.

158. Minefields and the New Political Landscape ｜ Bret Weinstein

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