The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 377. This is for the Anonymous Online Trolls ｜ Dr. Gad Saad

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00:00:30.000 Hello, everyone watching and listening.

00:00:47.400 Today I'm speaking with my friend, Dr. Gad Saad, professor at Concordia University,

00:00:52.460 researcher, podcaster, and author of the new book,

00:00:56.240 The Sad Truth About Happiness, Eight Secrets for Leading the Good Life.

00:01:02.480 I'm here with my friend today, Dr. Gad Saad.

00:01:05.960 We've met a number of times.

00:01:07.560 I've got to say, Dr. Saad was one of the first and really one of the few academics who supported me

00:01:16.880 right at the beginning when I was embroiled in the first round of controversy that enveloped me 0.98

00:01:23.000 or that I stirred up, you know, or that our idiot government stirred up, 0.99

00:01:27.860 which is a more accurate description of the whole event. 0.98

00:01:31.260 Gad was one of the first people who had the courage or the chutzpah, I guess that's the word,

00:01:40.500 to interview me and to discuss my situation with me.

00:01:45.300 And, you know, he played that very, very straight.

00:01:47.540 And I don't think it was obvious to him at all at that point when he took that risk.

00:01:52.640 You know, he didn't know anything about me, really.

00:01:54.920 He could have easily decided, like so many people did, that I was just fundamentally reprehensible

00:01:59.200 and, you know, stayed on the safe side of the fence.

00:02:03.940 But I don't really think that's the sort of person he is.

00:02:06.780 And I think that's become more and more evident over the ensuing months and years.

00:02:12.100 And so I want to thank you again for that.

00:02:14.140 You know, it was a brave move, man.

00:02:15.340 One of the things I learned, you know, in the last six or seven years is that

00:02:20.280 courage is a very, very rare virtue, much rarer than I even thought.

00:02:25.740 You know, I'd studied totalitarian states for a long time, and I knew that people were

00:02:31.020 easily led into a state of pathological silence.

00:02:36.640 But I didn't understand how rapidly that could occur and how few people, even in a free society

00:02:42.240 with a long history of freedom, would be loath to speak and how rapidly that could occur.

00:02:50.020 You know, and then you do see people who stand up and say things that might get them in trouble

00:02:55.480 and some of them are just people who are unwise, right?

00:02:59.580 And who are willing to impulsively say what comes to mind.

00:03:06.820 And then there are other people, and they're much rare, who are thoughtful and who've carefully

00:03:12.880 considered what they have to say and are willing to say it anyways.

00:03:16.680 And you fell into that camp right away, and you've been pursuing that for a good long time.

00:03:21.720 And, you know, also with a sense of humor, which is, I think, a sign of mastery, by the

00:03:26.080 way.

00:03:26.280 You know, you just wrote a book called The Sad Truth About Happiness that's coming out

00:03:29.580 July 25th, I believe.

00:03:31.440 And, you know, it is the case that I think you're a credible observer on that front, because

00:03:36.780 you have this playful aspect that doesn't disappear even when you're dealing with serious

00:03:43.560 topics at some risk to yourself.

00:03:45.560 And so I think that makes you a credible observer on that front.

00:03:48.660 But anyways, I'm done complimenting you, so...

00:03:52.140 You could say one or two comments about how good my tan looks after spending two weeks

00:03:58.920 in Portugal, if you'd like.

00:03:59.880 It is.

00:04:00.020 It is very impressive.

00:04:01.300 I must say, you're positively glowing, sir.

00:04:03.520 And so now, anything else?

00:04:05.060 Is there anything else I need to add to that?

00:04:06.860 No, I'm just...

00:04:07.980 It's been a delight.

00:04:09.600 We'll finish with the reciprocal compliments, but it's been a delight forging a friendship

00:04:16.160 with you.

00:04:16.580 As you said, I think we got to know each other about seven years ago.

00:04:20.440 And, you know, of the ecosystem that we both navigate in, regrettably, many people turn 0.94

00:04:26.380 out to be cowards. 0.71

00:04:27.580 And you're certainly not one who exhibits any cowardice. 0.95

00:04:30.740 And so in that sense, we are truly simpatico.

00:04:33.360 And it's a pleasure and honor to be your friend.

00:04:35.920 Yeah, well, and we have areas of mutual interest as well.

00:04:39.480 You know, I've been interested in the psychology of entrepreneurship and of managerial and administrative

00:04:47.540 ability for that matter.

00:04:48.920 I spent a lot of time studying that and also very interested in evolutionary psychology

00:04:53.980 and biology.

00:04:54.940 And so we have those overlaps, which is quite interesting professionally.

00:04:57.980 And so I thought that's part of where we can go today, as well as talking about your book.

00:05:03.200 Let's start with your last book, The Parasitic Mind.

00:05:06.220 When was that published, Gad?

00:05:07.560 So it came out right in the midst of COVID.

00:05:12.300 October 2020 was the hardcover.

00:05:14.820 And then a year later, in October 2021, the paperback came out.

00:05:18.820 Yeah.

00:05:19.020 And how did it do and how is it doing?

00:05:22.120 Well, it's always difficult to be excited about how well it's done when you're speaking

00:05:27.400 to someone who sold 12 million copies of his last book.

00:05:30.820 So if we don't use you as a benchmark, then I think it did remarkably well.

00:05:35.740 Well, so I'm very happy with it.

00:05:38.420 But as I often tell my wife, it's done incredibly well, but not enough to give me an exit strategy

00:05:45.000 out of communist Quebec.

00:05:47.400 So it's done well.

00:05:49.620 But maybe I'm saying this in front of guys behind the line who are all proud to be Quebecers.

00:05:54.740 I love Quebec, but I'm not very happy about, as you might agree with the sort of socialist

00:06:00.680 communist ethos here.

00:06:02.200 I'm not a fan of the cold weather.

00:06:04.520 So hopefully the next book will offer me at least the option of having an exit strategy

00:06:09.240 if I choose to implement it.

00:06:11.720 Yeah.

00:06:11.960 Well, the university that you happen to inhabit also has a very pronounced left-wing tilt,

00:06:16.720 to put it mildly.

00:06:17.560 They do.

00:06:17.840 Yes, that's for sure.

00:06:19.280 It's amazing that you've been able to survive there at all.

00:06:21.420 So do you want to just familiarize people with the thesis of the parasitic mind?

00:06:26.020 Sure.

00:06:26.380 And then we'll turn to your new book, and then we'll talk a little bit more about evolutionary

00:06:30.160 biology and psychology, I think.

00:06:32.220 That sounds like a great plan.

00:06:33.880 So my last book, what I was trying to do is argue that in the same way that all sorts of

00:06:40.560 animals can be parasitized by neuroparasites, actual parasites that can go into an animal's

00:06:46.980 brain, altering its behavior to suit its reproductive interests, I argue that human beings can be parasitized

00:06:53.760 by another class of pathogens called idea pathogens.

00:06:58.180 And so these ideological parasites can then cause us to take positions that are truly maladaptive.

00:07:04.200 And so what I do in the book is I first describe many of these idea pathogens, postmodernism,

00:07:10.900 social constructivism, biophobia, cultural relativism, and a slew of other such parasites,

00:07:17.320 all of which were regrettably spawned in the university ecosystem.

00:07:23.440 Because to sort of borrow from George Orwell, it takes intellectuals to come up with some of 0.99

00:07:28.660 the dumbest ideas. 0.99

00:07:29.740 And so then what I do is I trace the spawning of these brain parasites, and then I offer 1.00

00:07:37.980 hopefully an effective mind vaccine against these parasitic ideas.

00:07:43.720 So that's the general thesis.

00:07:45.080 Okay, okay.

00:07:45.640 So let me delve into that a little bit.

00:07:47.940 There's a few things that I'd like to clarify on that front and get your opinion about.

00:07:51.980 So the first is, is that you could imagine something approximating a Darwinian race between sets

00:08:00.040 of ideas for memorability and communicability, right?

00:08:05.040 So for an idea to spread, it obviously has to be memorable, which means it has to be adapted

00:08:09.980 to the structure of human memory.

00:08:12.300 And there's a biological element to that.

00:08:14.140 But it also has to be charismatic enough so that the people who remember it will also communicate

00:08:21.580 it.

00:08:22.340 And so stories seem to fit into that category quite well.

00:08:26.160 We seem to be very fond of stories.

00:08:27.780 So you could imagine that there's a competition between sets of ideas, and it's sort of a detached

00:08:34.480 competition.

00:08:35.180 In some ways, it's the free Darwinian play of ideas that could occupy our cognitive space,

00:08:43.740 both in terms of memory and on the communicative front.

00:08:46.120 And so you could think about those ideas that come to the top of that as either having some

00:08:50.760 practical function or as actually serving as, in some ways, as genuine parasites in the

00:08:57.160 cognitive space.

00:08:58.120 But then there's another element to this too.

00:09:00.080 And I want to know what you think about this.

00:09:01.720 So, you know, I've been delving into the, since about 2016, psychologists have finally, in

00:09:09.860 their wisdom, determined that there is such a thing as left-wing authoritarianism.

00:09:14.700 And so that would be a web of ideas that are correlated in, in that if you have one, you're

00:09:21.820 likely to have the others.

00:09:23.120 You can identify that set.

00:09:24.800 I did some of the work on that, early work on that with one of my students, Christine

00:09:28.080 Brophy.

00:09:28.780 We found a set of progressive ideas and then a set of totalitarian leftist ideas that combined

00:09:35.500 the progressive ethos with the willingness to use fear and compulsion and force to implement

00:09:40.880 them.

00:09:41.740 Okay.

00:09:42.080 And so we found, we found the following predictors because we were curious is do this, does this

00:09:48.740 system of ideas exist or is it just a right-wing, you know, conspiracy delusion?

00:09:53.400 And the answer is there's clearly a set of coherent, statistically coherent left-wing ideas that

00:10:00.300 are allied with the willingness to use compulsion and force.

00:10:04.220 And we found four major predictors of the proclivity to have that idea set.

00:10:10.400 And the first predictor, and it was a walloping predictor, negative 0.45 if I remember correctly,

00:10:16.620 verbal intelligence and left-wing authoritarianism correlated more highly than verbal intelligence

00:10:23.200 and academic performance, right?

00:10:25.780 A stunning correlation. 0.94

00:10:26.920 So when you ask yourself, you know, how can people be daft enough to accept this relatively 0.90

00:10:33.640 reductionistic and simple-minded view of the world, everything is about power, one of the 0.96

00:10:38.400 answers to that is, well, they're not very verbally sophisticated, okay?

00:10:42.320 The second best predictor was being female.

00:10:45.480 The third best predictor was having a feminine temperament, independent of being female, right?

00:10:51.440 And the fourth best predictor was having ever taken even one explicitly politically correct

00:10:58.440 higher education course.

00:11:01.720 So now, since then, other people have developed analogous models of left-wing authoritarianism

00:11:10.120 and looked for other predictors.

00:11:11.700 And one of the most interesting predictors that has emerged is there's a very powerful relationship

00:11:18.660 between the dark tetrad personality characteristics, including malignant narcissism, and the proclivity

00:11:25.760 to hold left-wing authoritarian views.

00:11:27.860 In fact, the correlation between malignant narcissism and left-wing authoritarianism is 0.6,

00:11:35.840 which is so high that you could make the case, because the scales are somewhat unreliable,

00:11:41.180 you could make the case that they're not distinguishable on the measurement front.

00:11:44.900 Okay, I know this is a long-winded question, but I want to specify it exactly.

00:11:48.660 All right, so the dark tetrad personality types, they show subclinical characteristics 0.99

00:11:58.440 of psychopaths, and psychopaths are predatory parasites. 0.97

00:12:05.360 And so we could imagine there's two forms of parasitism going on here. 0.98

00:12:09.800 There's the Darwinian competition between idea sets for memorability and communicability,

00:12:14.760 but then there's the proclivity for people who occupy the parasitical niche in the human

00:12:21.980 ecosystem, and that would essentially be psychopaths, to utilize ideas like the parasitical idea

00:12:29.480 sets that you described for their own truly parasitical purposes.

00:12:33.460 And then I want to decorate that with one more thing.

00:12:35.680 So you correct me if you're wrong here.

00:12:37.600 I think this is actually, especially because of the emerging virtualization of the world,

00:12:43.640 I actually think that there's an existential threat here, because parasitism is an unbelievably

00:12:49.400 deep problem, right? 0.82

00:12:51.000 Sex itself evolved to foil parasites.

00:12:54.120 And there's always been parasitical people, criminals and the like, and the most parasitical 1.00

00:13:00.800 of those are the psychopaths.

00:13:02.720 And we've evolved mechanisms to keep the parasitical predators under control.

00:13:08.400 A lot of them involve physical force.

00:13:10.900 And all of our evolved mechanisms for dampening down the parasite, the predatory parasites,

00:13:17.000 none of them work online.

00:13:18.420 And so I think our whole culture is enabling the predatory psychopaths on the criminal front

00:13:24.460 and on the sub-criminal front, right?

00:13:26.380 35% of net traffic is pornographic.

00:13:29.500 Online crime is rampant.

00:13:31.260 And then you have all the demon troll types, you know, who are polluting the political discourse,

00:13:36.560 and there's data on them too. 0.78

00:13:38.820 So if you're an online troll, you're much more likely to show all the dark tetrad traits, 0.87

00:13:43.380 narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and to top it all off, 0.98

00:13:47.840 sadism.

00:13:49.520 So please have at that set of ideas.

00:13:53.020 There's a lot of good stuff that you put in there.

00:13:55.540 So I'll try to take a couple of threads.

00:13:57.300 Number one, your first point about the battle between Darwinian ideas,

00:14:01.840 there's actually a whole field called evolutionary epistemology

00:14:05.560 that exactly speaks to what you're saying.

00:14:08.740 That idea.

00:14:09.460 So think back of Richard Dawkins when he introduced the concept of the meme

00:14:14.400 in his 1976 book, The Selfish Gene.

00:14:17.120 So there was a whole field that unfortunately hasn't lived up to its promise called memetic

00:14:21.080 theory that exactly tries to model what you said, which is there's a bunch of ideas floating

00:14:26.380 around and what is the Darwinian mechanism that allows some ideas to be selected versus

00:14:32.160 others that fail.

00:14:33.840 Now, in my book, and then I'll come in a second to some of the predictors that you spoke about

00:14:38.520 in terms of left-wing authoritarianism.

00:14:40.580 In my book, I basically argue that what is common to all of these parasitic ideas is they wish

00:14:49.560 to be free from the pesky shackles of reality, right?

00:14:55.540 So postmodernism, as we both commented on, is the ultimate granddaddy of all parasitic ideas

00:15:01.320 because it basically frees us from the pesky shackles of objective reality because it purports

00:15:07.120 that there is no objective truth. 0.81

00:15:10.200 Transgenderism frees me from the pesky reality of my genitalia. 0.99

00:15:15.000 Social constructivism frees me from the idea that there might be innate biological differences

00:15:19.940 between people.

00:15:20.640 So it really stems originally from the noble notion of seeking to maximize empathy, right?

00:15:28.280 So the idea starts off as a noble idea, but then it metamorphosizes into complete garbage

00:15:36.140 in the pursuit of that empathy to the detriment of truth, right?

00:15:40.740 So that's number one.

00:15:42.460 Number two, regarding your predictors, actually, I'm familiar with the study that you mentioned.

00:15:47.140 I think it was a thesis that you supervised, correct?

00:15:50.440 Yeah, that's right.

00:15:51.300 Right. So we actually looked, so I'm actually working right now with a graduate student myself

00:15:57.640 where we're looking, and we've actually looked at the thesis that you supervised with your

00:16:01.760 student. We're looking at another set of predictors that might interest you, Jordan.

00:16:05.820 And specifically, we're looking at morphological predictors of ideological positions that people

00:16:12.700 take.

00:16:12.980 Now, that's uniquely interesting because you might otherwise not think that your morphology

00:16:19.160 might be linked to the ideological positions that you take.

00:16:22.380 But it turns out, and I discussed this in The Parasitic Mind, that, for example, your likelihood

00:16:28.120 of supporting military interventionism is correlated to your upper body strength.

00:16:34.740 Not surprisingly, so now I'm talking about male subjects.

00:16:38.560 Male subjects who are stronger are more likely to support military interventionism.

00:16:45.300 Stronger men are more likely to be against egalitarianism.

00:16:49.920 I mean, enforced egalitarianism, right?

00:16:52.220 Yeah.

00:16:52.720 Taking from one.

00:16:53.720 And so that, to me, is uniquely interesting because...

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00:18:33.440 So there's a paper, I don't know if you guys know this, but there's a paper that was published

00:18:40.740 two months ago, something like that, looking at, they used facial averaging of activist types 0.51

00:18:50.840 on the left and then conservative types. You saw that. So the conservative...

00:18:54.340 Well, I was upset that I saw that paper because they're kind of, they're stealing some of our

00:18:59.280 thunder. Now, you might remember in the parasitic mind, although I remember, I think I first proposed

00:19:05.700 this theory to you in our first conversation when you came on my show. Remember, I talked about

00:19:09.660 male social justice warriors as sneaky fuckers. That's an actual term, right? 0.99

00:19:15.400 Yeah, yeah. 0.99

00:19:16.100 Well, sneaky fuckers is actually not a term that I came up with to be profane. It's actually a 0.99

00:19:21.440 zoological term that captures in nature the idea of kleptogamy, where you're trying to steal 0.53

00:19:29.200 mating opportunities. So for example, let's say you have a type of fish where there are two

00:19:34.160 phenotypes of a male, you know, of a male. There's the dominant physically imposing male,

00:19:39.940 and then there's a whole bunch of other males that actually pretend to be females so that they can

00:19:46.180 sneak by the dominant males and then have a surreptitious coupling opportunity with the 0.99

00:19:52.200 females. And that became known as the sneaky fucker mating strategy. And so in the parasitic 1.00

00:19:58.860 mind, I argue that male social justice warriors are instantiating a form of sneaky fucker strategy, 1.00

00:20:07.740 right? Look, I'm very sensitive. I hug trees. I cry when I watch Bridget Jones' diary. See, 0.99

00:20:15.080 I'm not, you don't have anything to be afraid of. And then hopefully that can allow me to

00:20:20.120 have access to some willing and available females. 0.57

00:20:23.260 So do you know their literature on orangutans? So, you know, there's two forms of male, well,

00:20:28.880 there's two forms of male orangutan in any given eco, like what would you say, roughly tribal

00:20:36.220 local ecology. So there's one form of male develops, he's like the quarterback orangutan.

00:20:46.960 He gets so big, he can't even really be arboreal. He has the huge fat pads around his face that make

00:20:52.200 him round, that makes his face round. And he's very physically powerful. And the females come to him

00:20:58.000 to mate. But then there are other male orangutans in the same area that for a long time, anthropologists,

00:21:04.800 primatologists thought were juveniles. But it turns out they're not juveniles. They're males who don't

00:21:10.480 undergo the complete transformation into the non-arboreal male. And they use exactly the mating 0.56

00:21:18.520 strategy that you described, right? So there's-

00:21:20.800 Exactly.

00:21:21.140 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:21:22.160 Well, that's why I was so, I'm always amazed that people get so triggered by your lobster analogy,

00:21:29.100 because the whole field of comparative psychology operates on the premise that we could learn a lot

00:21:35.720 about human cognition by studying our animal cousins. I mean, right? I mean, that's the whole

00:21:41.020 premise behind the tree of life. So I don't really see why someone would be so triggered by the fact

00:21:47.060 that you use the dominance hierarchies of lobsters to then make certain points about human society.

00:21:53.740 There's a whole field called comparative psychology that does that. So to me, the people who are coming

00:21:59.560 after you for those kinds of analogies between us and other animals are simply displaying their 0.75

00:22:07.700 ignorance, right?

00:22:08.620 Yeah, well, they're mad at me because if lobsters have hierarchies, it's pretty hard to blame hierarchy 0.83

00:22:13.980 on capitalism. You know, because we haven't discovered a sub-genus of capitalist lobster yet,

00:22:19.980 and it strikes me as highly unlikely that we will.

00:22:23.340 But let me ask you this. I mean, we're going off sort of our, but I mean, conversations are organic,

00:22:28.680 so this might be a good opportunity to talk about this. Why do you think that you trigger a lot more

00:22:37.320 animus than I do? Because one could argue that I actually, on any given Tuesday morning,

00:22:45.320 will tweet as many, if not more things that are quite, quote, controversial. And yet somehow I,

00:22:53.480 now obviously your platform is larger than mine, but even if we correct for that, even if we do it

00:22:58.460 per capita, there seems to be something. And by the way, I've been asked that many times when I appear

00:23:04.360 on shows because people know that we're friends and they'll ask me, you know, how come you don't get,

00:23:08.840 so let me turn it to you since we're now chatting. Do you have a theory as to why you are such a

00:23:15.620 polarizing figure? Whereas, you know, I might, one can argue, I take positions, you know, I mean,

00:23:20.960 I'll criticize Islam a lot more forcefully than you do. And yet somehow I don't trigger as much 0.95

00:23:27.260 animus. What do you, what do you think is the driving?

00:23:29.880 Maybe I annoyed people on more fronts simultaneously than you did partly. Well, so what happened? This is

00:23:36.840 a possible explanation. You know, when, when things first blew up around me in 2016,

00:23:41.920 I already had 200 hours of lectures on YouTube. And so, you know, I was pilloried as a right-wing

00:23:52.480 demon, essentially, by the sorts of people that we're discussing who like to do that sort of thing

00:23:58.180 to hide their own character, let's say. And then people looked me up online and went to my YouTube

00:24:05.040 channel and then found, you know, this extra hundreds of hours of content, which demonstrated

00:24:10.840 rather incontrovertibly that I wasn't the sort of person that I was being accused of being, but also

00:24:17.480 touched on all sorts of other topics that people might not have expected, like in the religious and

00:24:23.940 mythological domain, the psychoanalytic domain. And so, I think the fact that I had that storehouse of

00:24:31.140 lectures already stored up when, when, when the trouble emerged, expanded out my reach in a very

00:24:39.460 dramatic manner. And that's probably, you know, as the first occupier of that position in some ways,

00:24:46.360 because I was an early adopter of YouTube. I know you were too, but, you know, I think I got there a

00:24:50.760 little faster than you did and a little, a little broader. And so, I think that's probably a fair bit

00:24:57.420 of it, you know. I wonder also if, so like in my latest book now, which I guess we'll talk about

00:25:02.760 in a second, I also engage in prescriptive remedies. You know, here are some steps by which you can

00:25:08.640 increase your happiness. But historically, I've been much more of a descriptive psychologist, right?

00:25:14.280 I describe how things are. Now, in your case, by virtue of you also being, having been a clinician,

00:25:20.220 by definition, you engage in the ecosystem of prescriptions a lot more. And that I think

00:25:26.760 triggers people's ire because you're telling them how to behave. And by doing that, you're obviously

00:25:33.840 going to alienate people. Whereas I come along and I say, here are the evolutionary reasons why

00:25:38.760 there are differences between men and women. And I stopped, I stopped there. Whereas by you taking

00:25:44.960 the prescriptive jump, that probably augments the amount of animus that you receive. What do you

00:25:50.600 think of that? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think, I think that's a reasonable proposition as well. I also think

00:25:55.360 that, I think we could develop that line of, of, of hypothesis a little further too. I think that

00:26:02.660 many of the people who have an animus against me, and almost all those people are anonymous online

00:26:09.880 trolls, by the way, because I never encountered that, or virtually never in my, my actual life.

00:26:15.840 Quite the contrary. I think they're very, very irritated that my simple-minded prescriptions, 0.79

00:26:23.460 like take some responsibility for yourself and don't play the victim because it's not good for you

00:26:28.840 or for anyone else. I think they're very, very annoyed that, first of all, I'm calling them out on

00:26:34.060 their hypothetically empathic virtue signaling attempts to escape from all possible responsibility,

00:26:41.700 which is exactly what they're doing. And second, they're very annoyed that the simple ideas that

00:26:47.060 I've been putting forward and the simple, somewhat conservative ideas in that they're traditional,

00:26:52.500 they're very annoyed that those work. And then they're also annoyed because I have this very deep

00:26:57.700 interest in religious issues that also, you know, grates on people to some degree. And this is

00:27:05.440 something you and I are going to talk about because it overlaps with our interest in mimetic ideas,

00:27:10.100 because religious ideas are mimetic ideas for better or worse, you know, and, and we can talk

00:27:15.780 about that. So, you know, and then I'm also, I think I'm also probably enabling, to the degree that

00:27:24.480 I'm enabling young men and, and speaking to them about the virtues of their ambition instead of

00:27:30.840 dismissing them as pathological, you know, patriarchal oppressors. That's also very annoying,

00:27:37.180 especially to the types of men that you're describing who want to sneak about in the background 0.98

00:27:42.140 and pretend to be virtuous and harmless, which is a pretty damn pathetic way of comporting yourself 0.99

00:27:47.360 in my estimation. Like I've watched those kinds of men operate in the protests against me, 0.98

00:27:53.160 you know, and so I can be surrounded by a mob of pretty decent screaming harpies and, you know, 1.00

00:27:58.820 they're annoying as can possibly be imagined. But when I look at the men that are with them,

00:28:03.140 they just make my blood run cold. Like those are, and that's with my clinical eye, those are not good

00:28:08.640 people. You know, they're hanging around those, those women who are doing the harpy thing. And 1.00

00:28:14.580 they're there as exactly the kind of parasitical predator that you're describing. And I can see that.

00:28:19.180 And they are not, they're not the sort of person that you would want anyone you cared for to come

00:28:24.480 to, to have any association with whatsoever. Plus, because they have to be sneaky fuckers in your 0.99

00:28:30.500 terminology, you know, they're bitter and resentful, and they're very likely to want to tear down 0.98

00:28:35.460 anything that approximates true accomplishment, because all those who have true accomplishment are

00:28:41.240 their genuine competitors. And that's partly why I think the radical left-wing authoritarians

00:28:46.440 go after merit so assiduously is that, you know, they're, they operate on a completely

00:28:51.520 non-meritorious basis. And it's in their best interest to present merit itself as a falsehood

00:28:57.420 to take out their sexual competitors. 0.93

00:29:00.760 What do you think is the, the main predictor of folks like you and I, who are willing to speak

00:29:09.720 our minds unencumbered by any shackles of political correctness? And maybe I'll start by answering

00:29:15.600 it for myself. I absolutely think it's an indelible part of your personhood. But if I were to give a

00:29:22.420 more vivid account of that, I always tell people when they ask me, you know, why do you take on

00:29:28.300 these risks and speak your mind? And then, as you know, Jordan, last year, I received some pretty

00:29:33.060 serious death threats and many, many years. And you were very kind to right away contact me.

00:29:39.000 Well, you get more flack on the Jewish front, eh? So like, I've got more flack, but I would say I

00:29:45.100 haven't got flack as serious as some of what's been levied against you. Like I've been fortunate

00:29:51.420 enough to escape that. Now, because I'm associating with all the evil Jews at the Daily Wire, I get some 1.00

00:29:57.600 anti-Semitic blowback, you know, but it hasn't, and I've watched a lot of that online and it's bloody 0.94

00:30:03.300 vicious. The anti-Semitic parasitical psychopaths are in a demonic class of their own. They're so- 0.99

00:30:12.480 They are.

00:30:13.340 Yes, yes. And so you've, so I have been targeted more frequently, but I think you've been targeted

00:30:20.560 more terrifyingly.

00:30:23.060 That is true. But to make the point about my unique situation in terms of why I take the risk,

00:30:29.880 I always argue that at the end of the night, when I put my head on the pillow,

00:30:34.340 it is important for me in order to be able to sleep well at night, to know that I did not modulate

00:30:40.840 my speech in any way and walk away from defending the truth. If I feel that I have done that,

00:30:48.520 then I would feel fraudulent and I would feel inauthentic. And one of the, probably the highest

00:30:55.140 ideals that I hold to, you know, close to my heart are freedom and truth. And so I speak not because

00:31:03.500 I'm, you know, trying to signal that I'm courageous. It's because I don't know how to be

00:31:08.600 anything else. So for example, it took me a lot of effort while I was on my Portugal vacation

00:31:14.460 to not jump in, you know, whenever I'd go on Twitter and see some idiot saying something, 0.97

00:31:19.600 my first instinct is to always come in, you know, with some correction. It's just an indelible part 0.98

00:31:27.300 of my personhood to speak the truth. And of course, in my forthcoming book, as you know,

00:31:33.580 we might talk about, I talk about authenticity and realness as a important pathway to happiness,

00:31:41.220 right? I mean, even, you know, the ancient Greeks, as you know, the Delphic maxim,

00:31:45.000 know thyself. And so I know myself and I know that I can't modulate my speak. So that's my answer

00:31:51.480 for why I can't hold back. And I always speak the truth. Is it the same for you? Would that exact

00:31:57.420 answer apply to you? What drives you to take the difficult positions that you take?

00:32:02.160 Well, I think, I think, you know, they say the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom. And

00:32:08.460 I think that what happened to me in the course of my studies is at least an analog of that. You know,

00:32:13.660 Gad, I started studying totalitarian atrocity when I was 13. You know, it's really been an obsession

00:32:21.120 of mine. And it was really a psychological obsession rather than a political one. So

00:32:26.880 I was always curious about the psychology of the perpetrator, right? What sort of person

00:32:35.440 would you have to be to do those sorts of things? Or what spirit would have to inhabit you? You know,

00:32:42.060 one of the things I learned, I learned a lot of things. I learned that it's easier to be that way

00:32:47.880 than you think. That you could enjoy it more than you might possibly imagine and that people do.

00:32:55.460 And that the true grip of the totalitarian state isn't top-down tyranny. It's everyone's willingness

00:33:03.620 to abide by the principles of the lie. And so the more totalitarian the state, the more every single

00:33:10.520 person in that state is gripped by the lie. And for me, that's indistinguishable from hell.

00:33:18.340 And I think I mean that practically and also metaphysically. And I learned that the willingness

00:33:25.880 of people to utilize their speech instrumentally was literally the pathway to hell. And so once I

00:33:33.520 actually understood that and understood it in a manner that made it an incontrovertible truth for

00:33:39.280 me, everything else became less frightening by contrast. It's like, so when I spoke out against

00:33:45.220 this idiot Bill C-16 back in 2016, which was the forerunner of much of the trouble we're seeing now, 0.99

00:33:51.900 especially on the gender insanity front. You know, on the one hand, there was the threat of me 1.00

00:33:57.800 putting my job on the line. And as it turned out, my clinical practice, and of course, making myself

00:34:03.200 unpopular with the government. And I thought, that's nowhere near as frightening to me as the

00:34:09.740 prospect of losing control of my tongue, because I know where that leads. That leads to the worst

00:34:14.480 place you can possibly imagine. And I know that. Like, I wouldn't even think for me that it's an axiom

00:34:20.540 of faith. It's like, no, I know how totalitarian states develop. They develop when people who have

00:34:27.400 something to say don't speak. And I don't want to go there.

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00:35:40.120 I think I've lived that reality having grown up. I mean, some of your viewers may not know my

00:35:50.240 personal history. Having grown up in the Middle East, having gone through the early parts of the

00:35:55.640 Lebanese Civil War, I always contextualize any threats that I might face in my job, which of course

00:36:03.660 are serious to what I faced when I grew up in Lebanon. And it's no surprise then that many of

00:36:10.780 the staunchest defenders of Western values end up being immigrants like myself, because we have sampled

00:36:18.680 from the wide buffet of possible societies. And we know that the Western experiment is not,

00:36:27.200 it's an outlier, right? It's an anomaly. And therefore, it typically takes people who did not

00:36:34.360 grow up in a Western tradition, who've escaped the hell holes from which they've escaped, to then be

00:36:40.800 able to say, hey, Westerners, don't take for granted the freedoms that you have. And so if you look at

00:36:48.820 many of the, you know, think of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, right? She can speak, you know, with a lot of

00:36:55.480 clarity and authority about some of these issues, precisely because she too has come from a similar

00:37:02.580 background to mine. And so-

00:37:04.300 Yonmi Park.

00:37:05.840 Yonmi Park is another fantastic example. We've both had wonderful chats with her. And, you know,

00:37:12.200 I don't know if you know Yasmine Mohamed, who didn't grow up. Do you know Yasmine Mohamed?

00:37:16.520 No, no.

00:37:17.740 She wrote a book. I think she grew up in Canada, but she had a very tough upbringing where she was

00:37:25.440 married to an Islamic extremist who forced her to wear the niqab and so on. And so I wonder also if

00:37:31.940 the fact that we come, we meaning myself and Ayaan and Yonmi and so on, we come from these societies

00:37:38.280 affords us a bit more leeway when we speak than someone like you, because, you know, you're the, 0.62

00:37:44.900 you know, evil Western white male, whereas, you know, we're quote, you know, brown people and so 0.98

00:37:50.820 on. And so we do have high victimology scores. So when we then play the oppression Olympics against 0.96

00:37:58.460 those who might be coming after us, we can always cash in our chips because as I've often joked,

00:38:05.860 but I'm being serious, that my victimology poker card is going to be higher than most people,

00:38:11.140 as will Yonmi Parks, as will Ayaan Mercy Ali. Whereas the fact that you don't have that currency

00:38:17.320 puts you at a distinct disadvantage in the victimology poker game, right?

00:38:23.220 Right, right, right. Well, yeah. So that might be one level of defense that I don't have automatically.

00:38:28.580 You don't have, exactly.

00:38:29.540 So, okay, so let, I want to delve a little bit more deeply into your observations about your

00:38:35.460 conscience. And I want to tie that into our discussion of memes and parasitic ideas, okay?

00:38:43.220 And I want you to, and I think for those of you who are watching and listening, Gad and I have had

00:38:50.020 some exchanges in the past with regards to our somewhat differing opinions about the utility of

00:38:54.720 Jungian ideas about archetypes. And I want to segue into that, given this particular issue,

00:39:01.520 I think it's a good entry point. So Gad, I've been reading the biblical corpus in great detail

00:39:07.840 in the last months. And of course, previous to that, because I'm writing a new book called

00:39:13.520 We Who Wrestle with God. And one of the things that I discovered in the analysis of that sequence

00:39:20.160 of stories was that there was a transformation at the time of Elijah, which is what makes him a

00:39:26.960 canonical prophet. There was a transformation in the conceptualization of what constituted

00:39:33.680 the highest animating principle, the ultimate deity, let's say, Yahweh in this particular case.

00:39:40.640 And this occurred when Elijah stood up against the prophets of Baal. And the prophets of Baal, 0.77

00:39:47.760 Baal was a nature god. And so you could imagine among primordial people, and there's certainly

00:39:54.240 echoes of this still within our own psyches, that extraordinarily awe-inspiring natural events

00:40:02.240 would produce a kind of religious apprehension. So that could be earthquakes or typhoons or

00:40:07.520 or tornadoes or thunderstorms. You know, these manifestations of quasi-cosmic force that

00:40:17.440 can in some ways, they definitely inspire awe and can bring you to your knees. Now, Baal was a nature god, 0.89

00:40:25.280 plain and simple. And so what that meant at that time was that the highest authority to which people

00:40:32.080 owed fealty was the authority that made itself manifest in the storm and in the earthquake and in the

00:40:37.840 thunder. Now, Elijah had an intuition. He was, what would you say, a uniquely isolated follower of Yahweh 0.90

00:40:48.720 at that time, because the Israelites, the Israelite king had married this woman named Jezebel and she

00:40:55.520 brought Baal worship into the Israelite society and attempted to obliterate the worship of Yahweh 1.00

00:41:03.520 as an enterprise and really reduced the ranks of the Yahweh supporters to almost nothing. To Elijah,

00:41:10.960 you might even say. Now, Elijah defeated the priests of Baal in a head-to-head competition,

00:41:18.080 which I suppose was the archaic equivalent of a debate. But then he had to run off because Jezebel 0.96

00:41:23.520 got wind of his victory and was going to kill him. And then he spent some time in a cave.

00:41:27.680 And when he was in the cave, he experienced an earthquake and he experienced a thunderstorm and

00:41:34.480 some of these magnificent displays of nature. But he had this intuition that whatever the ultimate

00:41:41.280 voice was, was a voice that spoke within and not externally. And so it's Elijah, it's in the book of

00:41:48.800 Elijah that you first find the phrase, the still small voice within essentially. And so what happened

00:41:56.160 was there was a transformation of the notion of the highest deity to something that was external and

00:42:02.400 a manifestation of the grand, what would you, the grandiosity of nature to this idea that no,

00:42:10.160 it was something akin to the voice of conscience within. And so the reason I'm bringing that up is

00:42:16.400 because it's a radical psychological transformation and a subtle one. But I also think, I want to know

00:42:21.520 what you think. You said that there are two things that give you abiding, that you have abiding faith in.

00:42:28.240 And one is the power of the word, right? You're a professor, you're a writer, you're a communicator,

00:42:33.520 you're a podcaster, and you are very careful in your selection of words. And not only,

00:42:39.120 so not only do you have faith in the word, let's say, but you also believe that your highest moral

00:42:48.480 obligation is to be guided by your conscience in the formulation of your words. Okay, so now you

00:42:56.960 could think of that, and this is where I want to know your opinion. As far as I can tell, one of the

00:43:04.000 the meme-like qualities of the biblical corpus is the increasingly sophisticated insistence,

00:43:12.400 as the stories unfold, that the highest animating principle is to be understood not as a manifestation

00:43:20.640 of the awe-inspiring power of nature, but in terms of something that is relational, that's

00:43:27.760 associated with the conscience, and that's tied to something like adherence to the spoken and

00:43:35.680 communicated truth. And so, and that that's become a very powerful meme in the West, right?

00:43:41.920 The dominant meme, you might say. And so, I'm wondering what you think about that. Like,

00:43:47.920 especially given your admission, let's say, that the principle that does animate your behavior,

00:43:54.000 for better or worse, is this fidelity to the accuracy of the word.

00:44:00.640 Right. So, I guess, I mean, there are several ways that I can answer this. One of which is that I don't

00:44:06.560 need to situate my pathological and obsessive defense of the truth in a supernatural cause. Having said that,

00:44:18.240 though, or in a supernatural, you know, reason, right? Having said that, though, as an evolutionist,

00:44:24.320 I'm fully aware that the default value of human beings is precisely to be moved by religion. In other

00:44:34.320 words, being a non-believer is certainly not the default value of humans. That often surprises people

00:44:42.800 because they often think that, given that I'm not particularly religious, that somehow I have a

00:44:49.040 built-in animus towards religion. To the contrary, I fully understand the functional value of religion.

00:44:56.560 But, and I can concede that point without necessarily believing that, you know, the specific

00:45:03.440 supernatural elements are true. I can see that there is great value in the moral stories and the

00:45:09.600 parables and the allegories that are taught. And so, a lot of the stuff that you might talk about,

00:45:14.400 or a lot of the stuff that, you know, the Jungian archetypes, I could completely situate them within

00:45:19.760 an evolutionary paradigm and fully agree with them. I think the main place where I might disagree with

00:45:26.320 some of the more religiously oriented folks is that I stop at simply recognizing their functional value

00:45:33.680 without necessarily believing in their veracity, the actual, right? So-

00:45:37.680 Okay, okay. So, let me ask you about that. So, let's take that apart very carefully, okay?

00:45:43.680 Because you said that you can take the stance that you've taken with no reference to the supernatural.

00:45:51.920 All right. So, let me delve into that and you can help me clarify my thinking on this, in this regard.

00:45:56.960 So, okay. So, the first, I'm going to make some, I'm going to offer some propositions.

00:46:01.760 The first is, is that you're strangely, and I don't just mean you, I mean human beings in general,

00:46:08.160 but also particularly you, you're strangely beholden to your conscience. And in some ways,

00:46:14.720 it operates as an autonomous entity, right? Because you know, you know this, your conscience will call

00:46:20.400 you on things. And you could say, well, my conscience is me. But then I would say, well,

00:46:26.960 if it's you, why the hell don't you get the pesky little thing under control 1.00

00:46:31.920 and bend it to your will instead of subordinating yourself to its claims?

00:46:38.800 And then I would say its claims because I think that you can make a credible case that

00:46:44.320 the voice of conscience within you is very much analogous to the voice of conscience within me,

00:46:52.000 let's say, but also within all people. And that in that manner, the person who does determine to

00:46:58.320 abide by their conscience is conducting themselves in accordance with something that, if not supernatural,

00:47:05.760 at least has to be given status as something transcendent. Like, let me decorate that a little bit.

00:47:12.480 You know perfectly well that when you're thinking something through, right? When you have a

00:47:16.720 pressing question on your mind, that you'll get flashes of intuition. And I don't really think

00:47:22.880 there's a hell of a lot of difference between intuition and revelation, technically speaking,

00:47:27.360 right? And it isn't obvious at all where those flashes of intuition come from. And I think that if

00:47:33.120 you're a genuine scientist, the voice of revelation within isn't really distinguishable from that

00:47:40.160 willingness to pursue the truth and the willingness to attend to the voice of conscience, right?

00:47:45.680 Because you're supposed to be pursuing the truth as a scientist and you lay yourself open to...

00:47:51.040 So can we separate transcendent and supernatural in some manner that's productive?

00:47:58.400 I'm not sure that I'm able to answer the precise question, but what I can

00:48:02.400 say is that our conscious, our morality is exactly what you would predict of a social species in a very

00:48:14.320 material way, right? Because, and I'm willing, and as a matter of fact, many ethologists and evolutionary

00:48:20.160 scientists have already made these arguments, that there is a very compelling scientific argument that can

00:48:26.240 explain the evolution of morality without situating it within some transcendent, you know, religious

00:48:33.520 framework. Because many of the religious folks will say, yeah, sure, evolution can explain why we have

00:48:39.200 opposable thumbs, evolution can explain why there are sex differences, but it can never explain morality.

00:48:46.560 And of course, many evolutionists, some of whom are incredibly accomplished thinkers,

00:48:51.120 have argued that there is nothing uniquely magical about the construct of morality. When you have a

00:48:57.520 social species, the most dangerous thing that, you know, humans have faced in our evolutionary history,

00:49:05.440 other than predators, is our conspecifics, is other people. We're walking through the savannah,

00:49:11.360 and here comes another group of folks that are unrelated to us. We don't know if they are friend or foe,

00:49:16.640 and that's why one of the reasons we've evolved coalitional thinking, right? Blue team versus red team.

00:49:20.800 And so it makes perfect sense when you have a non-solitary animal to evolve things like a conscience,

00:49:28.160 things like the emotions of anger, retribution, vengefulness, right? So all of these mechanisms,

00:49:36.080 whether it be morality or our emotional system, can be completely couched in an evolutionary adaptive

00:49:43.520 framework. But again, that said, I think that it makes perfect sense for an animal like us, who's

00:49:51.040 developed this big prefrontal cortex, who is regrettably aware of their mortality, to be uniquely

00:49:59.040 intoxicated by religion. Because religion offers us the ultimate pill for the most fundamental problem

00:50:06.080 which we face, which is the recognition of our mortality, right? If I have high cholesterol level,

00:50:11.520 and if we agree that, let's say, having bad cholesterol is bad for you, although, of course,

00:50:16.000 that's debated, then I can go see my physician, he can give me a statin, and my cholesterol scores

00:50:22.000 will drop. Unfortunately, there is no pill for my mortality fear other than the religious solution,

00:50:30.560 right? And so to me, as a functional analysis, it makes perfect sense for us to be susceptible to

00:50:39.040 believe in religion. Now, I don't think, and here I'm going to link up to, I saw that you've recently

00:50:44.720 been having some spicy exchanges with Richard Dawkins. I don't think I'm nearly as,

00:50:52.880 I don't exhibit as much animus towards religion as does, let's say, Richard Dawkins. Again, I think

00:50:58.880 because I'm coming from the perspective that there are very clear evolutionary reasons why we evolve to be

00:51:05.120 believers. And so, and oftentimes, this assuages some of the anger that the religious folks might

00:51:13.600 feel towards me, because they actually see that I don't have a built-in hatred towards religion. As

00:51:19.360 a matter of fact, just as a side note, it might interest you to know that.

00:51:22.240 Hey, everyone, real quick before you skip, I want to talk to you about something serious and

00:51:28.000 important. Dr. Jordan Peterson has created a new series that could be a lifeline for those battling

00:51:33.440 depression and anxiety. We know how isolating and overwhelming these conditions can be, and we

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00:51:43.360 experience helping patients, Dr. Peterson offers a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this

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00:52:12.800 you deserve. There are two fundamental ways by which evolutionists can study religion. There is what's

00:52:22.800 called the adaptation approach and the exaptation approach. So maybe I could take a minute or two to

00:52:29.120 address them. The adaptation approach is why would religion have ever evolved? What survival or mating

00:52:38.240 advantage would be conferred would be conferred on those who are religious as opposed to those who are

00:52:43.360 not religious? And the top argument that's been proposed is one by David Sloan Wilson, the evolutionary

00:52:50.880 biologist who actually he wrote a great book called Darwin's Cathedral, which if you haven't read it, Jordan,

00:52:56.240 I think you'd enjoy it. He uses a group selectionist argument to argue that religious group as

00:53:04.080 compared to non-religious groups are going to have greater likelihood of surviving because religion

00:53:10.160 affords you greater cohesion, communality, cooperation. And so that would be one approach to

00:53:18.320 situating an evolutionary understanding of religion. The exaptation approach, many of your viewers may not

00:53:24.640 be familiar with that term. An exaptation is a byproduct of evolution. So for example, if I say,

00:53:31.760 why do humans have the color of the skeleton that they have, that itself was not adaptive,

00:53:37.840 it's a byproduct of evolution. Now the top guy for the exaptation approach of religion is an

00:53:46.000 evolutionary anthropologist named Pascal Boyer, who basically argued that religion piggybacks on neural

00:53:56.000 systems that evolved for other reasons. And hence, it's a byproduct. So even if you are someone who

00:54:03.760 is not very religious, but you are grounded in evolutionary theory, you can fully understand why

00:54:09.600 it is so easy for most people to be religious rather than non-religious, if that makes any sense.

00:54:14.720 Okay. Okay. So let me address a number of the things that you just said. The first comment I might

00:54:24.640 want to make, and you tell me what you think about this. Gad, I don't think that it's

00:54:31.120 unreasonable from a narrative perspective to frame you as someone possessed by the same

00:54:39.680 spirit that made itself manifest in the prophetic tradition. Now, and this makes sense to me, partly

00:54:46.000 because of your cultural heritage and the way that you approach ideas. But I also think that it's true

00:54:52.000 in a more than merely passing sense, you know, because one of the things that you see that constantly

00:54:59.120 characterizes the prophetic tradition in the Old Testament is that people like

00:55:04.320 Jonah. So I just took the story of Jonah apart for this book that I'm writing. And so it's very cool,

00:55:10.400 Gad. So this is the proposition in Jonah, right? Jonah is just minding his own business.

00:55:16.720 And God makes himself manifest to Jonah in the form of a call from conscience. That's the simplest way to

00:55:25.120 think about it. And he tells Jonah, there's this city up near you called Nineveh, which is full of 1.00

00:55:31.520 foreigners that hate you and that are your enemy. But they're deviating from the desirable path. 1.00

00:55:38.080 And I'm thinking about wiping them out. But I think you should go up there and say what you have to

00:55:45.200 say on the off chance they'll listen so that they tap themselves back onto the straight and narrow and

00:55:52.480 don't reap divine retribution. And Jonah, being a very sensible person, says, yeah, I don't think I'll

00:56:00.880 do that. It doesn't sound like a great deal for me. It's me who's a foreign Jew against 120,000 of my

00:56:09.120 enemies. Why the hell do you think they'll listen to me? I don't really care if they're saved anyways.

00:56:15.040 How about I just go in the other direction? So he rejects this call to speak right now. He's on a boat

00:56:21.840 getting the hell out of there. And the sailors, the storms come and the waves rise, and now the ship

00:56:29.840 is in danger. That's the first hint in the story that by refusing to speak when you're called upon,

00:56:36.320 you put the ship itself in danger. That could be the ship of state, right? Now the sailors are kind

00:56:41.040 of superstitious, and they think someone on this boat is on the outs with God or with their gods.

00:56:47.520 We better find out who it is so we can rectify this situation. So they go interrogate all the

00:56:53.040 passengers. And Jonah admits that he has defied a direct order. And so he basically tells the sailors,

00:57:02.320 who were somewhat loath to do this, by the way, to throw him into the ocean where he's going to drown.

00:57:08.000 And you might think, okay, so what does that mean? Well, this is what it means to me is that if you're

00:57:12.640 called upon to speak and you stay silent, then you're going to put the ship in danger and at the

00:57:18.880 great peril of your own life. So now they throw him in the ocean. You think, well, that's about the

00:57:23.600 worst thing that could happen to poor Jonah because now he's way the hell away from shore and he's going to

00:57:27.520 drown. That isn't the worst thing that happens because the next thing that happens is that

00:57:32.240 some horrible demon from the abyss itself rises up from the bottom of reality and takes him in its

00:57:38.240 jaws and pulls him down to hell. And I say hell because that's how Jonah describes it. And it's

00:57:43.840 also a type of the harrowing of hell that is laid out in the gospel stories much, much later. And so

00:57:51.680 this is my sense of what that story means. And I think this is something particularly relevant

00:57:57.520 to the experience of the Jews, let's say in the 20th century, is that if you're called upon to speak

00:58:04.400 and you reject that call, not only do you put the ship in danger and your life, but then you're going

00:58:11.120 to be like, what would you say? The jaws of hell itself are going to close around you and take you to

00:58:16.480 the bottom, the very, very bottom of things. And I do think that's what happens to states when the

00:58:22.080 people in the states don't speak. So Jonah is down in hell for three days in the belly of this whale,

00:58:29.520 this dragon whale. And, you know, he has a chance to think and he decides, well, you know,

00:58:35.760 maybe I should have said something when I was called upon to say something. And he repents and the whale

00:58:41.040 spits him out and then he goes to Nineveh and he talks to all the foreigners who are his enemies 1.00

00:58:46.720 and they actually listen and God decides not to destroy them. Now, you know, that in that story,

00:58:52.560 the spirit of your ancestors and mine is portrayed as the voice that calls from within to stand up and

00:59:02.000 say what you have to say, even to those who would want to destroy you, even to those who have habitually

00:59:08.400 been your enemies. And that if you don't do that, well, you, you bring the forces of death and hell

00:59:14.960 against yourself and everyone else. And so, well, there's, see, that's not exactly a, what would you

00:59:21.120 say, a testament to the existence of the supernatural, but it is definitely the testament to the existence of

00:59:29.680 something transcendent that you have moral obligation to. And so, well, so...

00:59:36.240 Yes. Yeah, no, I, I, I buy all of that. That's precisely why when people ask me, well, how can you

00:59:44.160 be so attached to your religious identity and not be much of a believer? It's precisely for the reasons 1.00

00:59:50.320 that you said, which is, I come from a very long line of, uh, of thinkers. Uh, there are cultural

00:59:58.400 values that come with being Jewish that I'm very proud of. Uh, I don't know if you saw it just on a

01:00:04.960 slightly, uh, a note of levity. Have you seen Jordan, the, the Dutch AI group that put together their best

01:00:14.880 rendition of what Jesus would look like? Have you seen that image? No, no, I haven't. Where would I

01:00:20.880 find that? Uh, well, that image, it turns out, looks hauntingly like the guy that you're speaking

01:00:28.000 to right now, right? And I mean, it's literally shocking. So if you take that image that the AI

01:00:32.960 Dutch researchers came up with and you take it, now I'm not, I'm not engaging in, in a delusion of

01:00:38.560 grandeur saying that I'm Jesus, but what I'm saying is that there is a lot to be proud of in the

01:00:44.000 heritage that I come from. I'll tell you a quick story, personal story that speaks to that kind of

01:00:48.800 Jewish ethos that I discussed in my last book in the parasitic mind. Uh, when I was talking about, 1.00

01:00:57.120 you know, the differences between, uh, values of one culture and another that, which by the way,

01:01:02.080 speaks to your point about personal responsibility and so on. So after I had finished, uh, so I did a

01:01:08.560 undergrad in mathematics and computer science and then an MBA at McGill. I'm saying this not to

01:01:14.800 flaunt my CV because it's relevant to the story. And so after I had finished my MBA, I, my goal was

01:01:20.400 always to continue, you know, do a PhD, behavioral science and so on. But one of the places I had been

01:01:25.440 accepted to for my PhD was University of California, Irvine. And my brother at the time lived in Southern

01:01:30.000 California. He was a very, very successful entrepreneur. And he was trying to convince me,

01:01:35.280 having just finished my MBA to take a couple of years, put on the proverbial suit, work with him

01:01:40.960 a few years, get some experience. And then of course, go back and, you know, pursue my PhD. But

01:01:45.440 I was really not interested in that. I always knew that I wanted to be an academic. Well, when I returned

01:01:50.640 home to Montreal and my mother had caught wind of the fact that my brother was trying to convince me to

01:01:57.520 stop my studies for a few years, she takes me to a side room. She says, come, I want to speak to you.

01:02:03.120 It seemed like an ominous thing that she wants to talk to me. I said, well, what's up, mom?

01:02:07.200 She said, well, I hear that you're thinking of not continuing with your PhD. And before I could

01:02:12.800 even assuage her fears, she said, well, do you want people to know you as somebody who dropped out of

01:02:19.280 school? So for her, for the standards of excellence of my family, having a degree in mathematics and

01:02:26.720 computer science and an MBA, and then not going on and doing your PhD would, would bring shame to the

01:02:34.320 family, would be a, a manifestation of having dropped out of school. Now, of course I didn't do

01:02:39.600 my PhD to, to please my mother, but it gives you a sense of, right. You're speaking as the clinician

01:02:48.080 that you are. And so, right. And so, and so that gives you a sense of the importance that,

01:02:57.520 you know, learning has, it's really a pathological desire for, that is instilled within you from the

01:03:05.680 youngest of age to be a learned person. And so I can be incredibly proud of that heritage because it is a

01:03:13.760 real material heritage. It's a real sociological reality, cultural reality to be from that long

01:03:20.800 tradition of Jews. Again, without necessarily buying into every single element of the supernatural. 0.67

01:03:27.360 So for example, even if I were to concede that God exists, I can't imagine that the ruler of the

01:03:35.360 universe cares about whether you light the Shabbat candles at 821 or 822. But I can promise you that 0.75

01:03:44.640 if you go to some of the Hasidic neighborhoods in Montreal, where there are very Orthodox Jews,

01:03:49.680 they would argue that no, no, God absolutely cares at the exact minute when you, so, so in that sense,

01:03:58.320 I could be very, very much tied to my religious heritage without necessarily caring about some of the

01:04:04.960 the ritualistic elements. Okay. So, so I want to tell you about a study that someone brought to my

01:04:10.720 attention about six months ago. It's not a very old study and it's a really remarkable study. And in

01:04:17.440 fact, I think it's revolutionary. So it turns out, you know, that when, when DNA molecules are damaged,

01:04:23.920 they can repair themselves and they generally do that with spectacular accuracy, but the accuracy varies.

01:04:28.880 Okay. So imagine this, imagine that there's a hierarchy of genes and that some genes are so

01:04:37.440 fundamental that if they vary even a trifle, the organism that they produce will be non-viable.

01:04:45.680 And then imagine that there are other genes, like the ones that code for eye color, where there can

01:04:49.280 be tremendous variability with virtually no consequence. Now, there might be minor consequences,

01:04:54.160 like maybe, maybe blue-eyed blondes have a sexual advantage over those who aren't blue-eyed and 1.00

01:04:59.360 blonde, you know, because of attractiveness, but all, but, but having brown eyes or darker hair

01:05:05.600 doesn't make you unviable, right? Now, it turns out that there is a relationship between the accuracy

01:05:13.120 of DNA repair mechanisms and the canonical status of the genes that are being repaired is the more

01:05:21.040 fundamental the gene is to the morphology upon which existence itself depends, the closer to 100%

01:05:29.360 accuracy the repair mechanisms manage. Okay. So, so that means there's a core set of genetic axioms,

01:05:38.720 you might say, that don't vary with mutation. And there's a peripheral set that are allowed to vary,

01:05:45.520 you might say, as experimental variations on the adaptational landscape. Now, I think there's an

01:05:55.520 analog between that and conceptualizations, let's say means, is that there are some axioms, some

01:06:05.520 conceptual axioms that have to remain utterly unchanged across time. And then there is a host of

01:06:15.360 more peripheral propositions that can vary substantively with, with, with no disadvantage

01:06:24.160 and maybe some advantage because of the variability. And I think also that we regard the canonical

01:06:31.920 axioms as deep and profound, and we're affected if they move, where we're willing to abide by,

01:06:41.040 to allow and even to enjoy variation on the fringe. And so I'm wondering, you tell me what you think

01:06:47.200 about this with regard to what you claim is that, you know, you said that you're unwilling to adhere to

01:06:54.960 the more gay un distinctions that are made on the religious front. And some of those might involve, 0.61

01:07:01.520 right. The propositions of the existence of something supernatural

01:07:06.480 and inexplicable in its fundamental nature. But, but it also seems to me that for you, that's allied

01:07:14.240 with an unshakable faith in certain axiomatic presuppositions, some of which we already discussed,

01:07:20.560 which is like, is it incorrect for me to say that your attachment to the communicated truth

01:07:28.800 is most appropriately conceptualized as adherence to an unshakable axiomatic faith? Like, I don't

01:07:38.960 understand how, I don't understand how it isn't. So if you don't think it is, then help me understand.

01:07:44.480 Right. So, so for example, now let's bring in, say my, my math background. In mathematics,

01:07:51.920 there are axiomatic truths, right? So take, for example, the transitivity axiom. If I prefer car

01:07:58.080 A to car B, and I prefer car B to car C, it must be that I prefer car A to car C. If I don't, then

01:08:05.280 that's called an intransitive preference. And therefore I'm, I'm committing a violation of rationality.

01:08:10.720 Those are axiomatic mathematical truths. But there are also empirical truths, right? If I

01:08:17.040 throw a person off a 100 store story building, 100 times out of 100, I'll know exactly what will

01:08:24.240 happen because there's a thing called gravity. So in other words, I can pursue truth without,

01:08:31.920 and as you said, universal truth that is invariant to time or place. And those truths,

01:08:38.320 while we may couch them in a supernatural cause, I can completely adhere to them without them being,

01:08:44.960 you know, co-opted with a, with a supernatural element. So for example, in the parasitic mind,

01:08:50.800 I hope we'll have a chance to talk about my forthcoming book soon. We can actually talk about

01:08:54.800 it in the context of religiosity and happiness. If you'd like, that could be a good segue. But in my

01:09:00.560 last book, I, in chapter seven, I talk about how to seek truth. And I, I offer the epistemological

01:09:07.360 approach called nomological networks of cumulative evidence. And I think we had discussed that privacy,

01:09:13.920 privacy, right? So the idea there is that if I want to demonstrate to you, Jordan, that there is a

01:09:20.480 unshakable universal truth, what would be the data that I would need to amass and present to you

01:09:27.040 for you to start coming around to me. And the way that you do that, if you're building a

01:09:31.520 nomological network of cumulative evidence, is you come up with data that, that is across cultures,

01:09:38.000 across eras, across species, across methodologies, across theoretical frameworks. And if all of these

01:09:45.760 triangulate to demonstrate that your phenomenon is universal, then you're well on your way to having

01:09:51.840 built a rather unassailable, unassailable argument. And so notice that I've been able to do that without

01:09:58.160 ever requiring some higher supernatural authority to contextualize that truth. And so again, I'm very,

01:10:07.280 very open to the idea that people need religion. I think religion in most cases serves more benefits

01:10:16.320 than, than, than, than, than costs. Although I wouldn't have left Lebanon were it not for religion, 0.99

01:10:23.120 right? Because it is specifically religious hatred that caused me to leave Lebanon, right? It wasn't

01:10:31.440 feasible in the mid seventies when the Lebanese civil war broke out to be Jewish in Lebanon, because

01:10:37.040 Lebanon is exactly what happens to a society that is completely organized along identity politics lines.

01:10:44.560 So it's particularly dismaying that the progressives in the West wish to

01:10:49.760 model that from which I escaped in Lebanon. But in that case, the reason why we had to leave Lebanon

01:10:56.080 is exactly due to religion, because somehow our religious heritage was no longer possible to, to

01:11:03.440 hold, to practice in Lebanon, and we left. So I kind of have an ambivalent relationship with religion.

01:11:08.800 All right. So, so let me ask you, okay, let me ask you a couple of things about that. So,

01:11:13.600 the first question might be,

01:11:17.120 and this is something that we both grappled with as academics, you know, the universities have become

01:11:22.480 very corrupt. Now, you could argue on the one hand that that corruption is just an extension of the

01:11:29.040 intellectual enterprise as such. Or you could argue that the corruption that's made itself manifest in

01:11:36.080 the universities is a, is a parasitical excrescence on the core enterprise, the intellectual enterprise

01:11:45.520 of the universities. Okay. Now on the religious front, the same issue emerges, right? The question is,

01:11:52.880 is that when, you know, you already pointed out earlier that the parasitical predator types can

01:11:59.520 utilize strategies of empathy, let's say, to, to amplify their attractiveness on the sexual front,

01:12:07.920 right? So they can co-opt something that emerged for other reasons and bend it to their own purposes.

01:12:15.280 So is it, so what do you think is more reasonable? Like, do you think that on the religious front that

01:12:22.320 the danger you were exposed to in Lebanon is a merely a consequence of the fact that the religious 1.00

01:12:27.200 enterprise itself is flawed and will produce this multiplicity of competing and often murderously

01:12:33.520 competing claims? Or is it reasonable to assume that something analogous happens on the religious front

01:12:40.000 and that the fundamental conflict is a consequence of the predatory parasites twisting 0.96

01:12:46.640 fundamentally axiomatic and necessary religious claims to their own devices and, and sowing discord as a 0.95

01:12:52.640 consequence? Well, I can't be so charitable as to give religion a free pass because many of the religious

01:13:00.240 narratives, certainly in the Abrahamic faiths, are precisely us versus them, right? So, so there is no way to 0.96

01:13:09.520 misinterpret some of the teachings in many of these books, whether it be Deuteronomy, so the Old Testament,

01:13:16.880 whether it be in certain Christian doctrines, and certainly when it comes to Islamic doctrines, it is very

01:13:23.760 difficult to quote misread or mistranslate. And it's certainly difficult to tell someone who's, who Arabic,

01:13:30.800 Arabic is their mother tongue, that I'm misunderstanding what is being communicated, let's say, in some

01:13:36.960 elements of, you know, the Islamic faith. My point here is not to uniquely bash Islam because, as I said,

01:13:42.880 all Abrahamic faiths have a us versus them mentality. So I think what happened in Lebanon is not

01:13:52.240 some human co-opting of otherwise benign and loving religious narratives. Let's put it another way, and

01:14:00.480 again, this you may not like because I'm borrowing from Richard Dawkins, and I know that you've been having a

01:14:04.720 little tiff with him. Richard Dawkins famously said that the difference between an atheist and a very

01:14:12.000 staunch believer is really very minimal. If we assume that there are 10,000 gods, the very religious

01:14:19.280 person is an atheist on 9,999 gods, but is very fervently a believer in one, whereas the non-believer atheist is a

01:14:29.840 non-believer on 10,000. So there's only a difference of 9,999 to 10,000. That strikes me as a pretty compelling

01:14:37.040 argument. Let me put it another way. In The Consuming Instinct, which was one of my earlier books in 2011, I had a whole

01:14:43.440 chapter where I was talking about the thought experiment of what might happen if an extraterrestrial

01:14:51.120 being came to earth shopping for the one good faith. And what I did there, I mean, some people might think

01:14:58.080 that I was, you know, being facetious, but actually I was being deadly serious. I said, take every single

01:15:04.160 issue that you could think of from the most consequential to the most banal, and I can find you two

01:15:10.880 religions that purport the exact opposite prescription. Does God want you to eat prosciutto?

01:15:19.120 Yes, if you're Catholic, absolutely no, if you're Jewish or Muslim. What's God's view on homosexuality? I can give you 0.94

01:15:27.840 some that are totally okay with it, some that are not. I mean, literally, I give a million. So how can you then argue for a

01:15:34.980 specific religion when on any given point I can find two religions that are perfectly contradictory?

01:15:41.620 Okay, okay, okay. So I think I have an answer to that that you might find at least interesting. So I

01:15:48.500 forgot that in your book you laid out the rationale for nomological networks. Let me just develop that a

01:15:53.780 little bit, and this is your new book. Okay, so the idea of a nomological network is akin to the idea of

01:16:01.780 sensory quintangulation. Let's call it that. And so everyone knows that we have five senses.

01:16:10.180 Now, each of those senses uses a qualitatively different strategy of measurement,

01:16:17.060 right? Somewhat independently evolved. And so our proposition as embodied biological organisms is that

01:16:25.620 if something manifests itself simultaneously in the domains covered by the five dimensions of our senses,

01:16:33.220 it's real, right? So what's real? You can taste it, you can touch it, you can see it, you can hear it, you can feel it.

01:16:40.020 If you can do all five of those, then there's a pretty damn good chance that it's real.

01:16:46.580 Now, actually, that turned out not to be real enough. And that's partly why the development of language

01:16:55.620 had some adaptive utility. Because you and I can communicate, I can use your five senses transmitted

01:17:06.500 to me through the linguistic domain to calibrate my five senses, and then we can do that en masse.

01:17:12.820 And to a large degree, that's what science does. All right, so you take multiple independent sources

01:17:18.420 of measurement. And if they converge, then you assume that there's something there. Fair enough so far?

01:17:25.460 Yeah, I'm with you. Okay, okay. I would say, from what I've been able to understand,

01:17:32.500 that that's what the Jungians did in their archetypal analysis. Now, you can debate, as the postmodernists

01:17:40.180 have, about whether or not what they found was spurious. But in my Maps of Meaning book,

01:17:46.740 what I tried to do was to take what the Jungians had discovered by constructing a nomological network

01:17:53.060 of cross-cultural mythological analysis. And I tried to beat that against the measurement techniques

01:18:00.740 of behavioral psychology and neuroscience. And I found, at least I claimed in that book, to have found

01:18:07.380 like a substantive, non-trivial, and surprising degree of overlap. So let me, and I think this is

01:18:14.500 relevant to your book on happiness. Now you tell me what you think about this, because happiness doesn't

01:18:19.380 just mean transitory hedonic joy. And you certainly don't think that, because that isn't how you live.

01:18:25.780 So the core element of the hero archetype is the injunction that you should advance courageously

01:18:36.500 in the face of threat, if said threat stands as an obstacle between you and a valid goal.

01:18:43.380 Yes.

01:18:43.780 Right, right. And so that's different than rabbit mythology, which would be when you see a wolf freeze.

01:18:51.700 The human myth is, no, no, when you encounter a threat, you explore it until you master it.

01:18:59.460 Okay. And as far as I can tell, all the variants of hero mythology are basically that, right? It's the

01:19:04.180 dragon fight, is that you find the terrible predator, and that's what a dragon is. It's an emblem of the

01:19:10.500 predator. And you encounter that voluntarily, and as a consequence, you get the virgin, so that's on the

01:19:16.180 sexual front, and you get the gold, and that's on the material front. And so, and you know, the Jungians,

01:19:22.260 to their credit, and I really do think to their credit, pointed out that that underlying narrative,

01:19:29.060 structure, makes itself manifest cross-culturally in a multitude of forms. Now, unfortunately, to

01:19:36.660 understand that, you have to throw yourself pretty deeply into that body of research, right? And it's

01:19:41.540 pretty arcane, and Jung thought symbolically, and so he's not a particularly, he's not a thinker who's

01:19:49.620 particularly amenable to people whose primary mode of thought is rational rather than pattern recognition.

01:19:56.180 Right, right, right. So, but, like, I do think the Jungians used a nomological network,

01:20:01.780 and I think that the core religious doctrine that they converged on was something like the universal

01:20:07.380 validity of the hero myth, and the redemptive quality of that courageous advancement in the

01:20:13.940 face of the unknown. And so, that's a place where you could, because your question was, well,

01:20:19.780 there's all these competing religious claims, right? And I'd say, well, there's no way I can

01:20:25.620 offer a contrary perspective to that viewpoint, given the multitude of contradictory religious claims.

01:20:31.620 But then I would say there's a hierarchy of claims, and some of them are more central.

01:20:36.420 And there is a convergence at the level of what claims are most central, and I think the convergence

01:20:42.020 is analogous to your proposition that you should abide by the truth in your communicative,

01:20:47.860 in your exploration and your communicative enterprise. And I think that's associated with

01:20:51.860 the kind of happiness that you're writing about in your new book, right? A kind of deep happiness.

01:20:56.020 Yes. Right. I mean, I agree largely with all that you've said about the universal myths that the

01:21:03.300 Jungians talk about. And again, there have been many studies from an evolutionary perspective that look,

01:21:08.020 for example, that if I want to study female sexuality, the best way to study it is to do a 0.81

01:21:16.020 archetypal analysis of the male hero in romance novels. And it turns out that the male hero in romance

01:21:23.220 novels is the exact same guy in every single romance novel that has ever been written. I mean,

01:21:29.060 to the point that you would think it's been plagiarized. He is tall, to my detriment, since

01:21:34.180 I'm not tall. He wrestles alligators on his six pack and wins. He is a surgeon and a prince. He's

01:21:42.900 reckless in his behavior, but he can only be tamed by the love of one woman. And so I just described

01:21:49.140 beauty and the beast. Exactly. And so these archetypal narratives are universal precisely

01:21:58.020 because they are an indelible part of human nature. And that manifestation exists independently of

01:22:04.740 whether you believe in the supernatural origin of those stories or not. But if I can just quickly

01:22:10.340 segue into my forthcoming book. So I do talk about religiosity and happiness in my forthcoming book,

01:22:17.780 and you and many other folks who are very pro-religion will be happy to know that the research shows,

01:22:25.620 and I know that you probably know this, that there is a moderate correlation between religiosity and

01:22:31.220 happiness. Meaning that on average, people who are more religious tend to manifest higher happiness

01:22:38.820 scores. But we can discuss why that is. Now, I argue that that doesn't mean though that if you're not

01:22:44.820 religious, you can't find your way to mount happiness. And I can couch it in a divine language. 0.69

01:22:53.380 So you and I are right now engaging in an intoxicating conversation that is truly divine, right?

01:23:00.100 Friendships are divine, as Aristotle said, and as I describe in my book. The love that you have for

01:23:05.940 your children and your wife is a form of divine love. Having purpose and meaning in your chosen

01:23:14.420 profession, I talk about that in the book. I basically argue that the two most important

01:23:18.420 decisions that either make you happy or incredibly miserable is choosing the right spouse and choosing

01:23:24.900 the right profession. If you make those two choices correctly, you're well on your way to being a happy.

01:23:30.180 That was Freud's observation, right? Work and love. That was his prescription for a meaningful

01:23:34.660 existence. Exactly. And look, and he said it 100 years ago, and I've said it today, precisely because

01:23:41.940 they are universal truths to our earlier point. You know, one of the things that I did in this book is

01:23:47.060 really delve into the, you know, the ancient Greeks, you know, Epictetus and Seneca and Marcus Aurelius.

01:23:55.940 And here I want to point to a quip that my fellow Lebanese friend Nassim Talib once told me,

01:24:03.860 which turns out to be hauntingly true. He once was teasing me that he said, I don't know what you

01:24:10.660 study in psychology, Gad, because everything that there is to know about human nature,

01:24:14.980 the ancient Greeks have already said. And now he was, he was quipping me, he was teasing me.

01:24:19.700 Uh, but as I started delving into that literature, I said, I think Nassim might be right because I

01:24:26.980 would get some, I would get some insight, for example, about the link between cognitive behavior

01:24:33.300 therapy and some, some other, you know, mechanism of, you know, happiness and so on. And then I find

01:24:40.580 out that Epictetus had made that exact point over 2000 years ago. So, so I think that there are these

01:24:47.060 universal truths that exist, whether it is in how we seek happiness or in, in any other domain of

01:24:53.860 human import that are universal precisely because they are an indelible part of our human nature. I

01:24:59.220 mean, that's why I love evolutionary psychology so much because it is very difficult to have powerful

01:25:04.580 explanations of human behavior void of an evolutionary understanding of our species. And so it always amazes

01:25:10.900 me that people exhibit an animus to evolutionary psychology. What else could it be? Like, where did your brain

01:25:16.340 come from if you take it outside of the purview of evolutionary theory? So one of the things that

01:25:21.700 I talk about in the book that speaks to your very kind introduction at the start, where you talked

01:25:26.180 about me having a sense of humor, I have, I have a whole chapter on, I call it life as a playground.

01:25:31.380 And I basically argue that even the most serious pursuits, for example, the pursuit of science is a form

01:25:40.180 of play. It's the highest form of play, right? Because in the same way that you try to solve a

01:25:45.220 1,000-piece puzzle by putting the pieces together, well, what is science? It's drawing links between

01:25:51.620 a whole bunch of variables that heretofore you didn't know were linked together. So the whole

01:25:56.180 endeavor of science is a form of orgiastic higher-order play, right?

01:26:01.060 Yeah, if it's done right.

01:26:02.580 If it's done right.

01:26:04.420 And so that's, by the way, one of the reasons why I have the sense of humor that I have is because I

01:26:11.460 think it's a very, very powerful way to communicate very serious things. Some people will say, oh,

01:26:17.780 but aren't you abasing yourself as a serious professor by donning that pink wig or by self-flagellating

01:26:25.220 because you're mocking that you're friends with Jordan Peterson? No, because mockery is actually

01:26:31.620 a astronomically powerful way to demonstrate certain forms of lunacy, right? That's why

01:26:38.820 dictators will usually try to eradicate the satirists first. They don't go after the guys 1.00

01:26:44.580 with the big muscles. They go after the guys with the sharp tongues and the stinging pen because those

01:26:50.420 are the ones that are the biggest threat. So Gad, you might be interested in this. So

01:26:55.620 I spent a lot of time studying Jak Panksepp's work on play. And he detailed out the neurophysiology

01:27:03.540 of play to a greater degree than any other scientist that I know. And Panksepp conceptualized play

01:27:12.820 really, I would say, as the state of highest possible neural integration.

01:27:18.260 Because play only emerges when all competing, motivating, and emotional systems have been

01:27:26.740 satiated and put aside. So if you're able to enter into a state of play, that's actually an

01:27:34.020 indication that you've mastered the domain in which you're exploring so thoroughly that no other competing

01:27:40.740 motivations whatsoever can emerge to disrupt that. You know, and laughter eradicates muscular

01:27:49.780 tension. When I used to work out with my friends, we used to make jokes when people were bench pressing,

01:27:55.220 and as soon as they laughed, they couldn't hold the weight anymore, which was a good part of the joke.

01:28:00.100 But, you know, I've spent a lot of time in my last tour laying out the idea to my audiences that the

01:28:07.540 antithesis of tyranny is play. Tyranny is a spirit of sorts, right? It's a malevolent spirit. And you

01:28:14.420 might say, well, what the hell's the opposite of that? And I don't think it's joy. And I don't think

01:28:19.460 it's like the absence of fear or pain. I think it's literally play. And so I think you're dead on in that,

01:28:26.660 in the allying of the spirit of play with the highest form of happiness. It's really something to aim for.

01:28:33.300 You're exactly right. And actually, so to link play with our earlier discussion about, you know,

01:28:39.860 choosing the right spouse. So as you know, Jordan, you know, one of the fundamental rules,

01:28:46.660 universal rules for a happy marriage is the birds of a feather flock together, Maxim. So there are sort

01:28:52.500 of two competing ideas, opposites attract versus birds of a feather flock together. Now, if you're

01:28:57.060 interested in a short term sexual dalliance, then opposites attracts might perfectly, might work

01:29:01.700 perfectly well. I may be introvert, you're extrovert, you may bring me out of my, you know, sexual

01:29:07.220 shyness, but that's for a short term, you know, dalliance. But for short, for long term relationships,

01:29:14.740 it is birds of a feather flock together, at least on things like life goals, values, belief systems,

01:29:21.940 it's not at all opposites attract. Now that principle of birds of a feather flock together applies

01:29:27.620 specifically to playfulness. And there's very, very interesting research, which if you're not

01:29:35.380 familiar with, I'd be happy to send you some links that looks at how people who assort on their adult

01:29:44.580 playfulness scores tend to have happier marriages. And I give several examples.

01:29:49.140 Oh, I'd like to see that. Yeah, I'd like to see that.

01:29:50.980 Yeah, I'll be, I'll be happy to send you that. Okay.

01:29:52.980 And so for example, one of the things that makes, I mean, I know you've met my wife a few times,

01:29:57.540 and you know that we have a very strong relationship, we've been together for 23 years,

01:30:01.380 is that we're constantly in play mode, right? She can rib on me. And so, you know, so for example,

01:30:07.220 I'll walk into the room, you know, I'll, you know, engage in some kind of faux grandiosity,

01:30:12.420 showing off my muscles. And then she'll say something like, oh, we might need to fortify the

01:30:18.820 base of this house, because I don't think your ego fits in this house anymore, right? So that's a

01:30:24.020 very fun, right? And we're constantly engaging in this kind of play. We're very, very good friends with

01:30:30.100 each other. Now, of course, you can't always predict a priori when you're choosing to marry someone,

01:30:35.540 whether you score perfectly, compatibly on all of these things. But trying to find someone who

01:30:41.460 shares your life mindsets is certainly a prescription for leading a happy marriage.

01:30:47.700 Right, right. So that you can play together. Maybe that's why Eve was made out of Adam's rib. 0.95

01:30:53.780 Perhaps. There you go. Bring it in the religious narrative. Wonderful. Some of the other things

01:30:58.340 that I talk about is I talk about, so I argue that the most fundamental universal law that is most

01:31:07.700 ubiquitous is something that Aristotle had already talked about in his Nicomachean ethics book,

01:31:14.740 the golden mean, right? Too little of something is not good. Too much of something is not good. And the

01:31:20.260 sweet spot lies somewhere in the middle, right? Which mathematically is referred to as the inverted U,

01:31:25.700 right? Somewhere in the middle is the top. And I demonstrate in one of the chapters that whether

01:31:30.820 it be at the neuronal level, the individual level, the economic level, the societal level,

01:31:38.740 the same pattern of the inverted U manifests itself across countless domains. So for example,

01:31:45.860 how much alcohol should you consume? That follows an inverted U. How much fish should you consume? That

01:31:51.460 follows an inverted U. How intense your exercise should be? That follows an inverted U. And on and

01:31:58.260 on and on. So the challenge is to try to find where your sweet spot is. And if you can find that,

01:32:04.500 you're well on your way to happiness. Another thing that I talk about in the book is how to

01:32:09.300 assuage the threats of regret at the end of your life. So, and here I talk about my former professor

01:32:17.620 of psychology at Cornell, Thomas Gilovich, who's a pioneer of regret theory. He argued that there

01:32:23.300 are two sources of regret, regret due to actions and regret due to inactions. So I regret that I cheated

01:32:29.380 on my wife and now my marriage is over. That's a regret due to action. Versus regret due to inaction

01:32:35.140 is I always wanted to be a artist, but I became a pediatrician because my dad was a pediatrician.

01:32:41.380 And it turns out that people's most looming regret are those of inaction, right? The what if,

01:32:48.180 I wish I would have done. And so I basically-

01:32:50.900 Gad, do you think that's the same thing that befalls people when they hold their tongue,

01:32:56.100 when they have something to say? Because that's a form of inaction that could easily result in regret.

01:33:01.780 Isn't that the same thing?

01:33:03.700 That's exactly right. Exactly right. And that's why, by the way, to use my earlier argument about when I put

01:33:08.900 my head on the pillow and I need to feel that I didn't walk away from defending the truth,

01:33:13.860 I would be regretful if I did that. If I held my tongue and did not weigh in on Twitter to some inane

01:33:22.580 BS that someone, then I would be very regretful and therefore I live a life, some might argue, of

01:33:28.900 obsessive authenticity. And I say obsessive because sometimes I'm authentic to a fault. I can't hold my

01:33:35.300 tongue if it means that I'm doing it for careerist reasons because then I feel as though I'm being

01:33:42.340 inauthentic, right? And so, but that makes me happy because then my personhood has no fissures. I don't

01:33:49.940 feel like a fraud. I feel real. And for better or worse, then I present myself to the world with full

01:33:56.020 confidence and happiness.

01:33:58.580 Gad, how do you, you know, how do you, Twitter's a good example, you know, because

01:34:04.900 you're very active on Twitter. I don't know if you're as active as I am on Twitter, but we have

01:34:08.980 a pretty, it's a close battle. And I think our style of interaction on Twitter is analogous.

01:34:14.980 So I have a couple of questions for you there. It's like, how do you protect yourself against using

01:34:20.740 your, what would you say, your charismatic forthrightness? That's a good way of thinking

01:34:25.460 about it. How do you protect yourself against using that egotistically and for instrumental gain?

01:34:29.940 I mean, you have a wife that pokes fun at you and that's helpful, but, and how do you know you're

01:34:34.260 doing that? And how do you know when you're poking and prodding to be authentic that you're not,

01:34:41.780 you know, you're not mouthing off and going too far and showing off and, and, and, you know,

01:34:46.260 engaging in an ego display on that front? How, how, how do you, do you think you always keep

01:34:51.460 yourself in check and how do you do it if you do it successfully?

01:34:54.980 That's, that's an amazing question because I've struggled with that conundrum when two

01:35:00.740 important values within me conflict with one another. So on the one, so let me give you an example.

01:35:08.260 I may have a good friend who's spouting nonsense on Twitter. Okay. And because of my

01:35:15.860 values, maybe my middle Eastern values, you know, you don't go after a friend. So I'll hold my tongue

01:35:20.980 for a while, but then I start, there's that voice in my head that says, but wait a minute,

01:35:25.860 if you hold your voice and don't correct that person, if you think that they are uttering gibberish,

01:35:33.060 then you're being inauthentic. That's exactly what happened. Not that I wish to bring him back to the

01:35:37.700 forefront, but that's what happened between Sam Harris and me, because we were on very friendly terms.

01:35:43.460 We got along very, very well. We we've gone out to dinner. I'd been on his show. And for about four

01:35:49.300 or five years, I kept completely quiet about his, you know, Trump hysteria, because I felt that I,

01:35:55.300 I owed him because I knew him. I had to have kind of a higher standard of restraint. But then at one

01:36:02.340 point I felt that my being restraining in my interactions with him, I was being inauthentic to

01:36:09.780 the truth. And therefore I went after him and I thought was a playful way, but he didn't take

01:36:14.980 well to it. And regrettably, I guess, I presume that we're no longer friends now, which is a real

01:36:20.420 shame. And so I struggle with that exact issue. But I think the fact that I struggle with it is

01:36:26.180 itself a form of ultimate humility, right? Because if I didn't struggle with it, if I was always self-assured

01:36:33.940 in everything that I did without having the back voice in my head telling me, are you doing the right

01:36:38.420 thing, then I would never engage in these auto-corrective behaviors. So I don't have

01:36:42.580 a definitive answer. I do struggle with that issue. Is it always best to tell the truth,

01:36:47.780 or should you hold your tongue once in a while? It's a tough one to navigate.

01:36:51.460 Well, how much do you think, how much of a role do you think the social connections that you have

01:36:56.260 play in helping regulate your behavior? Like, you have a good relationship with your wife. Like,

01:37:00.820 are there, are the people in your family, the people that you're close to, are they keeping an eye on

01:37:05.220 you and giving you a whack when they think that you've stepped out of line?

01:37:08.900 Well, certainly my wife is very good at doing that because in her case, she sees the fact that

01:37:15.300 I might get angry at some insane thing that's being said on Twitter. And then she'll kind of

01:37:22.180 come in because she'll see me like having, you know, kind of shaking my head on my laptop. She says,

01:37:27.060 okay, what are you upset at now? Who said what? And then she'll try to kind of come in and say,

01:37:31.940 why don't we go out for a walk? Or why don't we play with our children? And so that's another

01:37:37.700 thing that makes choosing the right spouse so important because they recognize your behavioral

01:37:43.460 traps. They recognize where you might falter and they make you a better person. And I hope I also

01:37:50.900 offer that to her. And so it turns out to be a beautiful symbiotic relationship. And I see

01:37:56.340 how you interact with your wife. You share a similar love of your wife.

01:38:00.580 Yeah. You know, and I think we like, we used to play together as kids,

01:38:04.260 say like we were childhood friends and that's true. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And, and you know,

01:38:08.660 what's really been interesting, Gad, and this is really a form of miracle as far as I'm concerned.

01:38:13.300 And I, I think it's because both of us passed so close to death in the last few years. I mean,

01:38:19.060 Tammy almost died every day for about eight months. It was really quite awful. And I was out of commission

01:38:24.340 for two and a half years. You know, when we, when we came back together, we were pretty alienated from

01:38:30.740 one another because I really hadn't been around for two years and she had been recovering from her

01:38:35.220 terrible illness and to some degree in isolation. And, you know, we dive, our pathways had diverged to

01:38:40.580 some degree. And I was still quite sick when I came back home, you know, and what saved us was

01:38:47.460 the habit of play that we had established over decades, you know, and we came together again

01:38:53.300 in the field of play and that reunited us very quickly. And the thing that's been so miraculous

01:38:59.300 about this and it, it really has been a staggering revelation to me is that that spirit of play has

01:39:08.580 magnified itself now to such a degree that when I'm with her and we're in a playful mood, I can see

01:39:16.660 her across in some ways, I can perceive her across the whole span of the time that we spent together

01:39:22.500 right from, you know, 1969 to now. And it's like, I'm playing with that person that I've always

01:39:29.060 known, you know, and that's actually deepened as we've got to know each other over the decades,

01:39:35.220 that's got more and more profound and also more and more like a return to the state of mind that

01:39:41.860 we had when we were young kids, eight years old, you know, playing together as friends.

01:39:47.300 And that's really, it's an amazing thing. It's certainly one of the best things that's ever

01:39:51.860 happened to me in my whole life. So, you know, and Eve, the word Eve, I learned this from Ben Shapiro,

01:39:57.060 the word Eve means beneficial adversary, right? It means something like optimal partner in play.

01:40:03.460 That's fine. Oh, I didn't know that either. Yeah, isn't that cool? That's so cool.

01:40:08.260 That is very, very cool. Yeah. So, so the, you know, one of the things, one of the reasons why I

01:40:13.620 wrote this book, I never thought that I would write a happiness book. I thought that Jordan Peterson had

01:40:18.260 already occupied that niche. But the reason why I wrote the book is because a lot of people would write

01:40:22.660 to me and say, how is it that you always are able to present yourself to the world as happy? And, and

01:40:28.820 there, and of course, about 50% of your happiness comes from your genes. That can't be controlled. Some

01:40:34.500 of us have a sunny dispositions. Some of us have a more gloomy disposition, and that's fine. But the

01:40:40.020 good news is that there's still 50% up for grabs, right? So even if 50% of your genes is coming, of your

01:40:45.780 happiness is coming from your genes, there is another 50% that the choices that you make, the

01:40:50.580 mindsets that you adopt that can either increase the likelihood of happiness or decrease it.

01:40:55.940 And so I thought, you know what? I'd never thought about the idea of writing a book of happiness,

01:40:59.780 but tons of people are approaching me with, you know, asking, soliciting advice. Why don't I take

01:41:04.820 a shot at it? And that's what led to my latest book. Well, you know, maybe to, to, to tie this back to

01:41:10.180 the way that we opened our conversation, you know, maybe one of the reasons too, that has protected you

01:41:15.460 to some degree against being pilloried too extensively, except in those serious cases that

01:41:21.780 we discussed, is the fact that you've been markedly good at maintaining that playful

01:41:28.740 mien through all of your interactions, right? And that you are willing to put yourself forward,

01:41:34.420 you know, on a fairly, on a fairly regular basis, even in an absurdist guise with your fright wig and

01:41:41.940 your self-flagellation whip. And, and so, you know, I think that good humor has also been

01:41:47.460 a really good, it's not a defensive shield, you know, because that, that, that, that's like

01:41:52.580 something you're hiding behind. You're not hiding.

01:41:55.220 And it takes humility, right? And it takes supreme self-confidence, right? Because

01:42:00.820 someone could look at that and say, my God, this guy's looking like a buffoon. And so it takes a 0.98

01:42:05.380 lot of courage to your earlier point, to be able to put yourself in that position, right? I remember

01:42:10.580 the, one of the first times that I, I know we've both been on Jordan, on Joe Rogan's show many times,

01:42:16.260 one of the nicest compliments that he gave me, he said, you know, you're, you're really cool because

01:42:20.180 you're not like many other professors who take themselves too seriously, right? So, so I can be

01:42:25.620 austere and professorial when I need to be, when I'm speaking at Stanford, and I can be a complete

01:42:30.180 joker when the occasion demands it. And so, and, and one doesn't diminish from the other. You can both

01:42:35.460 be a serious person and an incredibly playful person. That's certainly a path to happiness.

01:42:40.260 Oh yeah. Yeah. You bet that that's an optimized path to happiness, right? That look,

01:42:44.420 that's a really good place to stop. And so your book is coming out in late July. That's the

01:42:50.020 sad truth about happiness. You said it comes out on July 25th. And so those of you out there who

01:42:55.780 are pouting way miserably and wretchedly might want to go pick up that book and see if you can pick up

01:43:00.020 a tip or two. And also, you know, as we discussed, Gad wrote the parasitic mind, and that's definitely a

01:43:06.020 book worth picking up if you haven't done that already. So you could, you know, buy both, what the

01:43:10.820 hell, you know, and then you can free him from the terrible shackles of the communists at Concordia

01:43:15.940 University. And that'd be an addition. From your lips to God's ear. No kidding, eh? So look,

01:43:20.980 thank you very much for talking to me today. It's always a pleasure to talk with you. I hope we see

01:43:25.300 each other in Montreal in person at some not too distant point in the future. That seems highly

01:43:30.180 probable. For those of you watching and listening on YouTube, thank you very much for your time and

01:43:35.300 attention. I hope you appreciated the conversation as I did. To the Daily Wire Plus folks for facilitating

01:43:41.780 this conversation. That's much appreciated. The film crew here in Toronto, that's appreciated as well.

01:43:47.620 I'm going to take Gad over to the dark side, the Daily Wire Plus side, behind the paywall.

01:43:54.740 And we're going to talk about more autobiographical and personal issues, I would say. That's generally

01:44:01.540 the tenor there. And so if you want to join us there, please, please feel welcome and invited. We

01:44:08.020 certainly appreciate your patronage. And otherwise, Gad, thank you very much for talking to me today.

01:44:14.020 Thank you, sir. Cheers.

01:44:15.540 Yeah. And good luck with the launch of your book, man. I hope that you rip up the bestseller charts

01:44:20.260 and that the New York Times is forced to put you in its list.

01:44:25.380 Thank you so much, Jordan. Such a pleasure to talk to you. And please stay in touch. I might be coming

01:44:30.420 down to Florida at some point soon. Are you going to be in Florida anytime soon?

01:44:33.860 Are you coming down to do some lectures for Peterson Academy?

01:44:37.540 I am. The only decision is whether it's going to be in Toronto or Florida. I'm discussing it

01:44:42.580 with your people. So that's on the roster, I think, for August. So I'll reach out to you.

01:44:48.340 What are you going to lecture on?

01:44:50.100 Well, so that's the thing. Of course, it could be the happiness book or evolutionary psychology

01:44:56.340 or the parasitic mind. My penchant is to go with the happiness stuff, if only to time it with the

01:45:02.660 current book. But we'll see. I'm open to all possibilities.

01:45:05.220 Well, you could do three sets of lectures and then you wouldn't have to choose.

01:45:08.420 That would be great.

01:45:08.820 Yeah, that would be good. Okay. Well, look, hopefully we'll see you there or we'll see you

01:45:12.500 in Montreal or we'll see you in Toronto.

01:45:14.980 Thank you, Jordan. Take care.

01:45:16.020 You bet, man. You bet. Talk to you soon. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.

01:45:26.340 Bye-bye.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - July 27, 2023

377. This is for the Anonymous Online Trolls ｜ Dr. Gad Saad

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