The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast


483. Woodstock for the Adventurous and Responsible ｜ Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying


Summary

Join us for a celebration on the 29th of September in Washington, D.C. where Brett Weinstein and Heather Hays will be hosting a celebration in honor of the founding of "Rescue the Republic" and a call-to-celebration of the current political situation, as well as a call to celebrate a new online university, Peterson Academy. Join us for an evolutionary, biological, and theological analysis of current political and theological trends, and a celebration of the movement that seems to be gathering itself around Donald Trump. This episode is sponsored by Leaffilters, America s No. 1 protection system for your gutters. Schedule your free inspection and get up to 30% off your entire purchase at LEAFFLOWER.COM slash Build. That s a FREE inspection and up to $30 in warranty details. Plus, a 20% discount plus a 10% senior or military discount. One discount per household. That's 20% off plus a $10 discount, plus an additional 10% discount, for a total of $20 off your total purchase of $100 or more. That's a total discount of $50 or more, plus a FREE in-home inspection and an additional $5 off the entire purchase when you sign up for a Leaf Filter membership! That s $20 or more with discount code: Jointherosistance.org at J.J.R.E.org/JRP. JRP. JRP is an acronym for Jointherosististance. . The JRP's mission is to protect, educate, and empower people in the political, cultural, spiritual, and political movements through the use of technology, knowledge, and information. We re-based on the principles and practices of the Judeo-based, non-instantiation, and social media-based learning practices. in the 21st century. The ultimate goal is to empower people to understand, understand, and use technology, so that they can have a better understanding of the world, so they can understand and apply it to their lives and use it in their everyday lives. to help change the world. It s a little bit more of what s a better world, not less of it, and more of it more of them, and they can be more like us, too. In this episode, we ll talk about the JRP s mission, and how to be better at being better at it.


Transcript

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00:01:29.520 Hello, everybody. I had the opportunity today to speak to Brett Weinstein and Heather Haying,
00:01:37.460 with whom I've had many discussions. Always a pleasure. We concentrated on two issues.
00:01:43.940 Today, and then branched out into many others. The first is Brett's plan to foment a celebration
00:01:54.300 in Washington, D.C. on the 29th of September. The movement is Rescue the Republic. The website is
00:02:04.880 www.jointheresistance.org. www.jointheresistance.org. On X, the handle is
00:02:15.260 atrescurepublic. Okay, so that's on the 29th of September. What is that? Well, that's what we discussed.
00:02:23.960 That was one of the main issues we discussed. It's a celebration. It brings together musicians and
00:02:29.300 comedians and speakers. What would you say? Of the alternative media? Of the alternative entertainment
00:02:37.600 enterprise? Of the alternative political system that seems to be gathering itself around Trump?
00:02:44.660 Kennedy will speak there. Tulsi Gabbard, for example. All the speakers haven't yet been identified. I'm
00:02:49.960 going to attend. So this is an invitation to all of you to come to that on the 29th. You can get,
00:02:57.120 as I said, you can get information at jointheresistance.org. So we talked about that.
00:03:03.400 We talked about, and then we talked more philosophically, scientifically about the
00:03:09.240 convergence that Heather and Brett and I all see between the advanced findings of evolutionary biology
00:03:18.800 and the proclamations, let's say, the historically grounded proclamations of the theologians and the
00:03:26.260 religious types. And that was associated with a conversation we also had about Peterson Academy,
00:03:33.040 this new online university that launched three weeks ago. Heather and Brett lecture there,
00:03:39.460 but so do a number of the figures on the more cognitive science and theological side who seem
00:03:45.580 to be integrally involved in this integration, this new integration. John Verveke and Jonathan
00:03:52.280 Pazio, perhaps first and foremost among them. And so we tangled all that together in our discussion.
00:04:00.160 And so join us for evolutionary biological slash theological analysis of the current political
00:04:09.300 situation, as well as something like a call to celebration, September 29th in Washington, D.C.
00:04:16.060 Well, it's good to see you too. Brad, I think the last time we spoke publicly was about five months
00:04:22.740 ago. We talked about the Darien Gap and postmodernism. And I know that, well, there's a variety of things
00:04:28.980 we have to talk about today. I wanted to open maybe just to congratulate you guys on your Peterson Academy
00:04:36.040 lecture, which is among the most popular offerings on the site. And so we launched that three weeks ago
00:04:43.340 with pre-enrollment. The formal launch was on September 9th. We have 31,000 students at the moment.
00:04:51.980 And so, and it looks like it's going extremely well. We're curating the social media part of it
00:04:58.680 carefully. We want to produce a social media network. I think we have produced it actually. That's very
00:05:04.440 positive, you know, without being naive and sentimental. And we're very careful about,
00:05:09.320 what would you say, rewarding the kind of behavior you might like to see if what you were trying to do
00:05:16.560 was promote university level civilized discourse. And we're hoping as well that the, because this is
00:05:24.280 an open question technologically, you know, like what are the preconditions for an iterable non-degenerating
00:05:30.420 social media game in the long, medium to long run? And the answer is nobody knows, right? Nobody knows
00:05:37.780 the answer to that question. So we're hoping that the fact that there's a substantial entry fee,
00:05:44.980 I mean, it's a reasonable fee and the price that we've set Peterson Academy at seems to be
00:05:50.540 very acceptable to the, to our students. We've, we've got positive feedback on that, but it's a high
00:05:57.440 enough bar as far as I'm concerned so that it'll screen out the bots and the trolls and the bad
00:06:02.900 casual corporate actors and the manipulators. And then, you know, we're also monitoring behavior
00:06:09.580 without being too heavy handed about it to make sure that, you know, the all caps crowd and the
00:06:15.800 derisive psychopaths don't get free reign, which seems to be what happens in a social media network
00:06:21.720 that's free. Anyways, we've got 20 courses up already. We've got 30 more in the pipeline,
00:06:29.020 like, like recorded already. And then we're sketching out a full two-year curriculum and that
00:06:34.240 looks, it all looks great. And your course has proved to be particularly popular. And so hooray for
00:06:42.080 that. Well, it's fantastic to see you, Jordan. Congratulations on launching Peterson Academy.
00:06:48.300 I mean, that's a huge accomplishment in and of itself. And we're very excited that our course
00:06:53.680 is apparently popular on the site. It's fascinating how you describe the social
00:06:58.820 media approach, which is not something I was otherwise aware of, but of course, I'm aware
00:07:03.200 of the social media landscape in general and how one has to negotiate these things. And it feels to me
00:07:08.480 like an amazing, I don't know if it's counterpoint or follow on to some of what we're trying to do
00:07:16.740 in the course that we have done for Peterson Academy so far, which is we're trying something
00:07:20.920 new. It's not what we do in that, I think we called it evolutionary inference course. It's not
00:07:25.260 something we've done before where we invited students to play what we're calling evolutionary
00:07:29.680 jeopardy, following from the observation that when you see an organism in the world,
00:07:35.060 they are manifesting evolutionary answers to ecological questions, conditions, constraints,
00:07:41.500 opportunities that you may not be aware of. And our job as biologists and also, you know,
00:07:47.700 as a psychologist in the human landscape is to figure out what the conditions, constraints,
00:07:52.900 opportunities, what the questions were that produced the thing that you've now got in front
00:07:57.000 of you. And so that's all assuming that you have an answer for which there is a plausible,
00:08:02.600 credible, not necessarily static, but consistent to some degree across time question that you are now
00:08:10.500 seeing the answer to. Whereas what you're trying to navigate with Peterson Academy and the social
00:08:15.260 media landscape is, oh my goodness, you know, is there a stable ecological condition, as it were,
00:08:24.640 that there is an answer to that can't be gamed, that can produce...
00:08:29.500 Yeah, well, that's exactly right. That's exactly right. Well, I actually think to some degree that
00:08:34.160 that the deeper you go into the philosophical hierarchy, the farther down the hierarchy you go
00:08:41.220 towards fundamental assumptions, the more what you're actually seeing are iterated attempts to
00:08:47.480 answer exactly that question. So the question would be something like, what's the optimal game
00:08:53.260 playable by the largest number of people, extending over the largest span of time, perhaps that
00:09:00.000 incrementally improves as you play it, right? And what are the preconditions for that? And one of the
00:09:06.600 things I've been thinking about with regards to the social media landscape is that what we're contending
00:09:13.000 with, with the big tech networks that are free, is the proclivity of attentional resources to be
00:09:20.440 parasitized by psychopathic predators, essentially. But by predatory parasites, which, by the way, is the
00:09:26.480 definition of a psychopath, the predatory parasites will game attentional resources if they have free
00:09:33.700 reign to do so, because they're extremely valuable. And so you need barriers of a variety of sort or
00:09:39.580 consequences with regards to that non-reciprocal behavior, or the system gets gamed entirely,
00:09:46.360 I believe, by the parasitical predators, and then it comes crashing down. Now, and I would also say,
00:09:52.600 possibly, that they're in favor of it crashing down in some deep way, because their mode of
00:09:58.640 reproduction, even short-term mating, let's say, short-term exploitative mating, is actually likely
00:10:04.420 more successful in extremely chaotic conditions. So now the issue would be, well, how do we set up a
00:10:10.640 communicative landscape that rewards truly reciprocal altruism, let's say, and that keeps the predatory
00:10:17.680 parasites at bay? And we actually don't know how to do that in virtual space, especially with the
00:10:23.460 anonymous types, because we can't reputation track them. Right, because it's impossible to do
00:10:28.300 iteration, because attention inherently looks at a short time horizon and goes, ooh, that feels good.
00:10:34.040 And with iteration, individuals who are actually interested in learning, in playing a part in this
00:10:40.680 ecosystem that you're creating, but don't know how to get out of their own way, they need iterative
00:10:46.780 feedback that is reward. And if individuals are kind of trying to do the right thing, but they're
00:10:53.320 anonymous in this space, there's no way to get the iterative feedback that will enable them to seek
00:10:58.900 the long-time horizon. Right, right. Oh, I hadn't thought about it so much as a decrement on the
00:11:04.780 reinforcement side, although I can see exactly what you mean by that, because they don't accrue the
00:11:11.240 reputational gains as a consequence of their anonymity that would come to a fair player in a normal
00:11:16.460 situation. But they also don't accrue the punishments, right, because you can't reputation
00:11:22.260 track them. And, you know, that actually brings up another issue that might be pathologizing our
00:11:29.400 social communication networks, which is that the algorithms don't know what time frame over which
00:11:37.800 to optimize attentional grip so that the game remains playable. And so what seems to be happening
00:11:44.100 at the moment is that we have the worst of hedonic gratification allied with the worst of
00:11:49.800 psychopathic enabling, and those two things go together. And so if the algorithms are maximizing,
00:11:57.040 what would you say, grip of attentional spans of 15 to 30 seconds, let's say, all they're going to do
00:12:03.040 is reward, they're going to reward short-term manipulation of attention in a manner that
00:12:11.520 doesn't iterate well across time. It's kind of like corporations focusing obsessively on quarterly
00:12:17.440 reports when they should be devoting at least some of the resources to thinking about whether or not
00:12:23.400 they're going to be around in 10 years. Now, the problem is, as you guys know, that the farther out in
00:12:28.340 time you attempt to plan for, the more likely your plans are to go astray because the error of your
00:12:34.660 predictions increases as you move out into time. But, so, I mean, these, go ahead, Brett.
00:12:41.780 That's not the only issue. And so this is an interesting discussion because it really,
00:12:47.320 in some sense, treads through some reasonably well-understood evolutionary ground and into a
00:12:54.600 landscape that is not politically understood to be analogous but should be. Many years ago,
00:13:01.100 when Game B was an active group of people meeting to discuss how to create good governance,
00:13:10.100 I focused on the question of how to prevent the evolution of corruption. And I had a hard time
00:13:17.280 persuading people that that was actually job number one. Their sense was, well, we don't even have a system
00:13:23.560 that could be corrupted yet. So let's deal with that later. And the key insight is, if you focus on it
00:13:32.080 later, you'll lose. Yeah, right. What you have to do is create a landscape of incentives that is
00:13:41.400 ruinous for those who attempt to corrupt it. And the reason that that is the key element is that if you
00:13:48.520 don't do that, what will happen is you will create an evolutionary arms race in which those who are
00:13:54.740 wishing to corrupt your system for whatever reason are seeking those quadrants where you can't detect
00:14:02.100 them. And even if you detect them in nine out of ten quadrants, they'll find the one that you don't,
00:14:07.100 and that's where they will evolve into the next phase of the game. If you want to prevent that from
00:14:12.340 happening, what you have to do is zero out their account so early that there's no evolutionary
00:14:18.040 feedback that makes them better at gaming the system over time. And so what you're talking about
00:14:22.960 in the online environment is there are really two elements to it. One, can you create a cost so that
00:14:30.060 there's not effectively an infinite ability to throw disposable accounts at a problem in order to find
00:14:38.840 the loophole? Yeah, right. Exactly. Exactly. Yep. That's free evolutionary experimentation with no
00:14:45.120 cost of illness, pain, or death. Well, why the hell wouldn't that proliferate like mad? Of course it
00:14:51.680 would. And wait till the AI systems get a handle on it. Right. Then we really lose control of it.
00:14:56.600 Oh man, that's for sure. So what we need, and I actually would predict that what we will see
00:15:02.120 across civilization as AI enables amoral actors at a new level is we will see the prioritization of
00:15:12.320 things that cannot be faked with the augmentation by AI. In other words, there will be a prioritization
00:15:21.100 of music in which it is not a repeat of something on the album, but it is something generated in real
00:15:30.880 time. And therefore that did not involve the consulting of AI. We will see, you know,
00:15:35.460 interactive comedy rather than somebody doing a five minute bit that could have been augmented
00:15:41.560 by AI. Live events. Live events. Exactly. Live events are going to become even more premium than
00:15:48.700 they are because they'll be the only things that people can see are actually real. I think that's
00:15:52.820 already happening, actually. Yeah. Go ahead. Go ahead, Heather. Sorry, but this is, I mean,
00:15:58.440 this is already the landscape in which we know that education works best, right? Low polish,
00:16:04.580 not reproducible exactly. Like you can, you can go in with a curriculum to a classroom in one year
00:16:11.080 and the next year with what you think is exactly the same curriculum. But if you're doing your job
00:16:16.400 as an educator and the students are of course different, it's not going to be the same course.
00:16:21.400 And, you know, this is, this is the mistake of textbooks, right? You know, textbooks are a useful
00:16:26.840 tool, but they are incredibly limited in terms of what they can actually offer a student who is
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00:17:45.700 Well, so one of the things we're wrestling with at Peterson Academy, obviously, is like, I see no
00:17:51.960 reason. I don't see much distinction, and maybe I'm wrong about this, but I don't see much distinction
00:17:58.260 between lecturing to a thousand people and lecturing to, say, a hundred thousand people. Like, once you
00:18:03.880 get past the expanse where it's seminar-like, somewhere past that, they become roughly equivalent.
00:18:12.740 Now, the problem with recorded lectures, like the ones that you guys offered, is that they take away
00:18:18.120 the dynamism of the interaction between the professors and the students in the moment, right?
00:18:24.640 And that's some of that transformation that you described. The benefit, of course, I think, is that
00:18:29.680 because we can curate that while there's reach and cost, those are major benefits, right? But there's
00:18:36.360 also the case that we can very carefully curate the lecturers so we can make sure that they're of the
00:18:41.220 highest possible quality. Now, what we want to do in addition to that is we want to set up a social
00:18:46.920 landscape. Like, one of the things we'd like to see at Peterson Academy is that the students,
00:18:51.540 once there's enough student enrollment, assuming that happens, that people do set up, what would you
00:18:58.800 say, social occasions like watch parties, you know, where 20 or 30 people could get together and watch a
00:19:04.500 lecture when it first emerges. And we're trying to also figure out how to incorporate, you could
00:19:10.280 imagine a three-day convention, for example, where we bring, you know, several thousand people
00:19:16.860 together or more than that with a dozen professors and run it for three days. And we want to flesh out
00:19:21.980 the social element. And that's partly why we concentrate a lot on the development of the
00:19:26.200 social media network too. So, because obviously what you get at university is the provision of
00:19:34.040 information in books and textbooks and lectures, but there's a peer component and a mentorship
00:19:42.580 component that's more difficult to duplicate online. But I don't think it's impossible, especially
00:19:48.620 because the universities have dropped the ball in that regard. They're not very good at actually
00:19:52.800 facilitating the social element in higher education. They're not good at fostering the development of
00:19:59.520 productive peer networks. They sort of let that happen by happenstance. So, I think we can do a
00:20:03.760 better job. And so, we're very, very cognizant of that particular problem. And, you know, it's a major
00:20:10.620 focus of address as we move forward. But we've got all sorts of things planned for in-person events. And
00:20:16.780 given that the cost of what we hope will develop into a full high-level university-equivalent
00:20:24.740 education, the cost is so low, we should be able to offer people relatively special experiences to
00:20:30.000 go along with it that will fill that vacuum. So, yeah. So, Brett, part of the solution to the
00:20:38.220 problem that you raised with regards to the proliferation of evolutionary actors, let's say,
00:20:44.060 in the pathological space is cost of entry, right? This is, it could be that free social media
00:20:52.380 networks are doomed from the outset. And I think there's got to be something to that. And tell me
00:20:58.060 what you think about that. Well, I do think there are ways to structure it that can solve the problem
00:21:04.440 without cost being the key element. Cost is useful, but of course, you don't really want to enable
00:21:11.380 anything that has effectively indefinitely deep pockets to be able to get around your barrier to
00:21:19.320 entry. In other words, if you're talking about, let's say, political dialogue on social networks
00:21:26.140 of consequence, if there are trillions of dollars at stake in a given election, then somebody might be
00:21:33.240 able to spend the millions or tens of millions to game your network, even though it doesn't make sense
00:21:39.500 from a profitability perspective for them to do it. So, you want to have a system that negates this.
00:21:46.960 And one way to do that is to use, to basically create a stigma for inauthentic behavior,
00:21:57.820 for parroting things, cutting and pasting things, consulting AI in some way that causes your comment to
00:22:06.680 be derivative. And so, Reddit is now completely gamed. There's no question about it. But it did have
00:22:13.280 a couple of elements that worked really well. Allowing users to essentially down-regulate that
00:22:21.540 which was not useful and up-regulate that which was insightful is, it's something that could be
00:22:28.380 resurrected. I think it was... If you can figure out, if you can figure out how to stop the down-regulation
00:22:33.680 from being gamed by collectives of activists, for example, right? Yeah, yeah. Well, at the moment,
00:22:41.240 you know, what we've done so far, and we're going to make this as transparent as possible as we move
00:22:46.240 forward, hey, with 30,000 students, we've had three bad actors. That's all. And our policy at the moment
00:22:53.640 is we're watching, you know, we're watching the social media interactions constantly to see what's
00:22:59.660 going on. Our policy at the moment is that if you're not playing fair, we just give your money
00:23:04.560 back. Now, that's not good enough. Like, I think there should be a system where it's three strikes,
00:23:09.740 and then there's actually something like an independent jury, and then there's an appeal
00:23:14.920 process, right? And that all has to be 100% transparent, because otherwise, the regulation
00:23:22.540 process becomes sensorial and will degenerate across time, even if you start with the best of
00:23:32.160 all possible motivations. But I also think, too, that having established the ground rules implicitly
00:23:39.980 already, and the fact that everybody's playing fair at the beginning, we're also setting the parameters
00:23:45.400 of expected behavior on the site. You know, one of the things we're kind of hoping for in the long
00:23:50.120 run is that you can imagine a net of communications that was composed of everything that was of the
00:24:01.180 highest quality. I mean, part of the problem with the free-for-all that's the internet right now is
00:24:06.280 that there's no hierarchy of curation. And so, it's an infinite library in some ways, but almost all of
00:24:14.720 it's not almost all of it, a large proportion of it is pointless junk, and a fair bit of it is
00:24:20.600 pathological beyond comprehension. And so, obviously, something needs to be done about that across time,
00:24:27.520 and it seems to me that one good approach is to build something parallel that emphasizes quality.
00:24:35.220 So... Well, I have a couple suggestions for you in this regard. One, I often have trouble
00:24:41.960 compelling people of this point also, but the key or one of them to making such a thing function if it
00:24:49.760 is a private space is very clear, simple rules at the door that allow for effectively complete
00:25:01.720 discretion in the enforcing of common sense measures. In other words, what you want is to say, look,
00:25:08.580 by signing up for this, you are agreeing to act in good faith. Here is what that means. You're allowed
00:25:15.320 to play devil's advocate, but you're not allowed to misrepresent your position or the reasons for it.
00:25:21.820 How will we adjudicate questions? Well, we will try to adjudicate them out in the open, but if there
00:25:28.960 are cases, which there will be where we can't, we will do it by a jury. It will be chosen by this
00:25:35.020 mechanism. Should we find problems with the jury mechanism? We have a council of people we believe
00:25:42.360 are of excellent character who will be the final arbiters, something like that. So that at the point
00:25:48.580 somebody says, you're censoring me, the answer is actually, here are the rules that you signed up
00:25:54.320 for. And this is not an end user license agreement that was designed for you to glaze over and click
00:25:59.460 yes. This was actually designed for you to read it, to understand it, and for it to change your
00:26:05.380 approach to the system itself. It was designed to impress you and invite you and cause you to be
00:26:11.860 deliberate. Larry Arnn does that at Hillsdale when all the undergraduates show up. And it isn't some
00:26:19.160 pro forma thing because Arnn is very involved with the undergraduates themselves directly. He's the
00:26:24.840 president of the university, and so he makes this a personal priority, and they have an honor code.
00:26:31.740 And part of the honor code is that there is a code of behavior at Hillsdale, and it isn't the same as,
00:26:37.400 say, state universities. And there's a state university just down the street, so to speak,
00:26:42.280 and you're more than welcome to go there. But if you're going to go to Hillsdale, then
00:26:45.760 this is the code you're going to abide by. They have a 1% dropout rate in their first year.
00:26:51.720 Wow.
00:26:52.920 Right? Absolutely wow. And so we're going to write an honor code for Peterson Academy,
00:26:59.120 and it's going to be short, and we're going to hope that people read it and pay attention to it
00:27:03.460 carefully.
00:27:04.040 That's a great idea.
00:27:05.440 Yeah, yeah. Go ahead, Heather.
00:27:07.640 We actually, we did this within Evergreen. So Evergreen obviously was a deeply flawed institution,
00:27:13.660 but it had remarkable pieces within which we were able to do some remarkable things. And one of the
00:27:21.940 things that was required of professors in programs, these full-time programs that faculty taught and
00:27:27.680 that students took, was we had documents that were, strangely, there was a lot of religious overtone in
00:27:33.180 the language there called covenants. And every, the faculty in any given program wrote an original,
00:27:39.760 supposed to be, covenant for that program that all the students read and signed on to and agreed to.
00:27:45.680 And it was, you know, very much, you know, within a program at Evergreen, it was very much like what
00:27:49.740 you're describing as Hillsdale writ large. So within a program, we could say, you know, here are the
00:27:55.760 rules of engagement. Here is effectively my promises to you as faculty to students and what you are
00:28:01.980 promising to each other and to me in return. And there are plenty of other choices to go to within
00:28:06.540 the Evergreen, you know, ecosystem if this doesn't suit you. You know, you can go any number of other
00:28:11.220 places. And while, you know, Evergreen writ large, say, you know, in this case, the analogy being like
00:28:15.880 the higher ed universe, the higher ed system writ large, was deeply flawed and had, you know, a lot of
00:28:20.780 people leaving very quickly. Our programs didn't, right? This, you know, this, this worked
00:28:25.520 extraordinarily effectively. And, you know, I don't know, I'm, I'm pleased to hear that it's
00:28:31.440 working at Hillsdale. I'm excited to hear that you're trying to do it, that you're going to be
00:28:35.020 working on it at Peterson Academy. I don't know. I, my, my question is always one of scale, like to,
00:28:40.760 to what degree do the interpersonal, when I, when I can look you in the eye, you know, when I can look,
00:28:46.280 when we were teaching together, I can look our 50 students in the eye and know something
00:28:50.300 true about each of them within the first week, beyond their name, like something about each
00:28:55.160 one of them. Then we have a relationship such that the first time I have to say to you,
00:29:00.720 what were you doing? Or no, I think you're wrong. They don't mistake me for some, you know,
00:29:05.980 rando authoritarian who is just looking to get to the end of the, the quarter and to get my paycheck.
00:29:11.440 They know that I have something real about them, uh, in my, you know, in my head and my heart.
00:29:15.960 So that's, that's the thing that's not replicable at scale. Um, but, but maybe there are ways around
00:29:21.560 that. Well, we're going to find that out. I mean, so, so one of the things we might distinguish
00:29:29.020 conceptually is the difference between censorship and refereeing, right? I mean, nobody thinks of,
00:29:36.060 of a referee in a hockey game as a censor. And so, but he does forbid things. Okay. So then what's the
00:29:43.420 difference? Well, I think we outlined a lot of the differences. Like what we're, what we're doing
00:29:47.460 is best say in an education, in an iterable educational environment is best construed as
00:29:52.600 a sophisticated game. There has to be rules for the game. They have to be rules that make sense.
00:29:59.500 They have to be the rules that make the game playable in a manner that makes people want to
00:30:03.620 play it voluntarily. Right? So that's one of the, that's one of the hallmarks of a valid rule set
00:30:09.840 is people who abide by it voluntarily. And then the rules have to be known. And then there has to
00:30:15.520 be a mechanism that's clear and transparent for enforcing the rules. That's not censorship,
00:30:20.760 right? Because everybody, it's no more censorship than the referee's role in a game. And I do think
00:30:27.000 that that's the right analogy. I have two more suggestions for you in this regard. One is it will
00:30:34.340 be the lesson of civilization. In fact, is that it is effectively impossible to write that set of rules
00:30:40.780 and anticipate the way in which it will be gamed, especially if you have enabled actors that evolve
00:30:46.140 in response. The way to succeed is to leverage that same evolutionary force in the immunity of your
00:30:54.080 system. So if you, the simplest case would be that you deploy two related rule sets with a difference
00:31:02.200 that you don't know whether it will play positively or negatively, and you monitor the outcome. And
00:31:08.640 then you basically, you spawn the one that functioned better. And then an even more out there idea
00:31:16.160 is that you allow, you divide, you know, you could divide it into more than two. But let's say you
00:31:22.460 divided your population of participants into an A group and a B group. And you let the A group
00:31:32.040 govern B's landscape and the B group govern A's landscape. And you let the people within each of
00:31:39.040 the landscapes dictate whether or not the rules are working.
00:31:42.420 I cut, you choose.
00:31:43.380 Right. It's I cut, you choose.
00:31:45.380 Okay, I'll think about that. I'll think about that. What do you think of Musk's solution with
00:31:50.280 community notes? Because what he's really doing with that, you could say, is bringing the
00:31:55.100 possibility of distributed cognition to the problem of bad actors. And that it's, it's analogous as far
00:32:04.160 as I can see to a, to the free market solution of, of pricing. It's something like that. And so
00:32:10.400 it is that, well, what do you think? What do you think about that solution? It's more difficult to
00:32:17.000 game. Although Wikipedia had that and it's being gamed eventually, right?
00:32:21.080 Right. That's the thing. You need to enable a system that is capable of adapting faster than
00:32:26.080 those who are trying to game it.
00:32:27.740 Yeah. That's the parasite problem.
00:32:29.560 Right. So Musk's solution actually did work at first and increasingly doesn't. And the problem is
00:32:38.160 that it is too static and therefore gameable.
00:32:41.780 Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. So it also, it also defaults to what the majority
00:32:46.520 believes. Yeah. Yeah. Right. So, you know, the, the, the rare new insight will get disappeared by
00:32:52.460 such a, such an approach.
00:32:54.300 Right. Right. And that's a big problem. And that's actually the problem of populism. Right.
00:32:59.360 Yeah. Exactly. Is that, so, you know, I've been investigating the manner in which traditional
00:33:04.720 religious structures solve that problem. And what they do is that they have two axes of verification,
00:33:10.300 you could say. And one is appealed to the population that's now, say, but that has to be allied with
00:33:18.780 a vertical orientation, which is something like continual reference to the traditions of the past
00:33:25.300 that made iterable games possible.
00:33:27.660 It's lineage.
00:33:28.920 It's lineage.
00:33:29.680 Lineage. Lineage.
00:33:31.320 Lineage and the texts that the, that your ancestors wrote.
00:33:34.460 Well, it's half of lineage. That's the problem.
00:33:36.800 Uh, it doesn't, it doesn't look forward.
00:33:38.660 So in our last discussion, uh, Jordan, we talked about, uh, my version of, uh, the sacred
00:33:45.900 versus the shamanistic. And I know you have a, uh, a related but different version of it, but
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00:35:08.700 The orthodoxy that comes from the past has the virtue of having stood the test of time,
00:35:16.160 right, which is a not to be undervalued. That is a tremendously powerful indicator of validity of one
00:35:24.180 kind or another. But the other thing is predictive power. And what we do not want to do, and Heather
00:35:32.080 was just alluding to this, is you do not want to set up any system that says that because a perspective
00:35:39.140 is vanishingly rare, it is wrong.
00:35:43.380 Wrong. Yeah, right. Because sometimes that's wrong.
00:35:45.820 In fact, every great idea starts that way.
00:35:48.180 Exactly.
00:35:48.200 The last thing you want to do is frustrate the process that generates valid new ideas that change
00:35:53.980 everything.
00:35:54.180 Well, that's like eradicating beneficial mutations.
00:35:56.640 Right, exactly. So, what you want to do is-
00:35:58.720 Probably the same ratio too, honestly.
00:36:00.540 Yeah, right, right.
00:36:01.800 You need three axes where you were describing two, right? There's how it plays in the present,
00:36:08.400 there's how it references to what we understand from the past, and how well does it predict things
00:36:13.380 in the future. And we want to be specifically aware that something that successfully predicts
00:36:18.480 things in the future that nothing else predicts is likely to have a kind of validity, whether we
00:36:23.080 understand what it's based on or not.
00:36:25.120 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. All right. Let's turn our attention away from that problem
00:36:31.500 for a moment to what you guys are doing on the political landscape right at the moment.
00:36:37.900 And so, you have a rally planned in Washington on September 29th. And so, would you walk us
00:36:47.900 through, well, let's start with who's involved in exactly what this is and what its aims are,
00:36:54.280 and just tell the whole story.
00:36:56.860 Sure. And I will say I struggle with the terminology. This, to me, is post-political,
00:37:03.720 non-ideological. Yes, it's technically an event, but it's an event, or we are hoping it is an event
00:37:11.420 in the same way that Woodstock was a music festival. We are hoping, actually, that this is a moment
00:37:18.600 at which we first see a sea change in the way we conduct ourselves and interact with each other.
00:37:26.380 I think of it, actually, as hopefully the bookend that closes the era that opened with Woodstock
00:37:33.200 and opens the next era in which we recognize just how much we have in common, just how much we have
00:37:39.400 to lose if our system fails, which it seems to be doing in front of our eyes. The rally, the event,
00:37:46.520 is called Rescue the Republic. The idea was originally framed as save or defend the West. We recognize
00:37:59.180 the crisis is so charged within the U.S. that we decided to focus on the Republic, rescue the Republic
00:38:10.680 first in order to save the West. And, well, you asked who is involved. I'm going to undoubtedly forget
00:38:21.340 important people who have agreed to come speak on our behalf.
00:38:27.320 Well, where can people find the full list?
00:38:29.460 Ah, they can find all the information at jointheresistance.org. Jointheresistance.org. And they can
00:38:36.840 follow us on Twitter at RescueRepublic.
00:38:40.420 Okay. So, if you do miss anyone, that's where people can go for the additional information. And
00:38:44.860 we'll post that in the description of the video as well.
00:38:47.340 Yes.
00:38:47.600 Okay. So, fire away with regards to participants.
00:38:50.620 Okay. And I will also say that there are people who are in the process of agreeing to come who aren't
00:38:59.140 listed yet. So, stay tuned. Even somebody who's not listed today, maybe tomorrow.
00:39:03.440 So, we have Bobby Kennedy coming to speak. We have Tulsi Gabbard. We have Laura Logan. Heather
00:39:13.600 and I will be speaking. We have Russell Brand. We have Matt Taibbi. We have Jamie Doerr.
00:39:24.580 Rob Schneider.
00:39:25.680 Rob Schneider. We have...
00:39:28.440 Several musicians.
00:39:29.980 Yeah. We have Skillet coming. We have Five Times August, who was a tremendous voice during
00:39:36.600 the COVID madness. We have Tennessee Jet coming. Deepak. Boy.
00:39:47.000 Are they going to play? Any of these people going to play as well as talk?
00:39:49.820 Yeah. We have speakers. We have comedians. And we have musicians.
00:39:56.100 Great. Great. Great. That's a good approach, that multimodal approach. And that does make
00:40:01.800 it different than the standard, let's say, political rally. Right? And I think partly
00:40:06.960 what that does, we did that a bit at this ARC, Alliance for Responsible Citizenship Meeting
00:40:11.420 in London. You know, I was very insistent on the musical and artistic element. And I think
00:40:16.380 it's because the propositional has to be surrounded by the imagistic and aesthetic. That's more like
00:40:23.940 the domain of dream. Right? It's like the way that I look at cognitive architecture is that
00:40:29.700 there's a propositional landscape, which we've actually modeled pretty well now, I would say,
00:40:34.300 with large language models. But outside of that, there's an imagistic, aesthetic, and dreamlike
00:40:39.360 landscape. That's the landscape of the imagination. And outside of that is the embodied procedural
00:40:45.300 realm. Right? And a full event covers all three of those domains. You can't assume that the
00:40:52.040 propositional alone is going to carry it. And I think it's partly because the propositional is
00:40:56.460 easier. In some ways, it has flaws and it's easier to, it's easier to dement it and, and capture it
00:41:04.540 than it is to capture the imagination and, and the procedural landscape. Anyways, if you flesh it out
00:41:11.020 with those additional sources, it's also a much richer experience for the people that are involved.
00:41:16.180 So that's, it's more, it's more engaging, it's more fun. And that's not trivial if the fun isn't,
00:41:22.800 you know, that short-term hedonic, immediate gratification that we were describing earlier.
00:41:27.020 If it's allied with something like upward striving, it's much more profound and, and impactful
00:41:33.340 occurrence. And integrated and more human and more holistic. Because what you're calling propositional,
00:41:39.440 I might call, you know, features of the enlightenment, of the rational, of the logic,
00:41:46.020 of the logical, of the analytical. Whereas we have sort of lateral to that, but no less important
00:41:52.900 narrative and art and creativity. And by sort of moving between these two spaces, we have the
00:42:01.080 opportunity for discovery that we may not have in either place.
00:42:04.160 Yeah, definitely.
00:42:04.680 And also the, what you're calling the propositional, what I think of as sort of the, you know, the,
00:42:08.740 the fruits of the enlightenment, um, are, are easily made into reductionist tenets, uh, that
00:42:16.200 then become metrics that are quantifiable and numbers are necessary and important for us to
00:42:21.780 understand our world, but they are not sufficient and they can be made to seem sufficient. And that's
00:42:26.320 one of the lessons I think of COVID. Um, and frankly, to some degree of this political moment we're
00:42:30.940 living in too, that, uh, you throw enough, uh, these are the numbers, don't worry about it. I'm
00:42:36.180 the expert, just trust me at people. And many of them kind of go, okay, yeah, I'm just, I'm just
00:42:41.520 not educated enough to understand that. You've got the numbers, you're the expert, we'll go with that.
00:42:46.980 Well, it's also possibly the case that that also accounts for maybe why the democratic tradition or
00:42:55.480 the republican tradition works, you know, is because intellectuals are propositional experts,
00:43:01.260 but that doesn't make them wise. And wisdom, I suspect, has something to do with the alignment
00:43:06.800 between the propositional and the imaginistic and the procedural. So it's an embodied, it's an embodied,
00:43:14.460 uh, quality and it's a quality of the imagination. There's, there's no shortage of people who aren't
00:43:20.520 educated and who aren't very articulate, who can still tell the difference between right and wrong.
00:43:24.760 And they can do it pretty unerringly. I mean, dogs can do that to some degree, right? I mean,
00:43:30.040 they're not so bad at sniffing out pathological character, but they can't propositionalize it.
00:43:36.360 You know, I mean, and dogs are very good at identifying boundaries between different
00:43:40.480 territories and determining what's a threat and what's not. And so my point is there are other
00:43:47.200 forms of intelligence that aren't propositional and, and it's, it's very easy for those who have the
00:43:53.300 advantage in the propositional space to assume that they're superior in terms of their grip on,
00:43:59.320 on knowledge, even outside their specialized domains, but that they're also wiser and more
00:44:03.920 moral. And there's no correlation between cognitive ability and conscientiousness, eh? Zero.
00:44:09.960 There's no correlation between intelligence, intelligence looks like it's orthogonal to all
00:44:16.340 the personality traits. And so it's a funny thing, eh, that there's no relationship between general
00:44:21.100 cognitive ability and wisdom or morality. So if you're really smart, you can go bad, very badly,
00:44:27.040 very, very badly.
00:44:28.220 Well, I wonder, I wonder if that's going to hold up. Actually, there are reasons to imagine that you
00:44:33.780 might start seeing a correlation between intelligence, the fly and the ointment being how good are you at
00:44:41.440 actually measuring that? We have proxies for measuring your capacity to succeed, but to succeed in
00:44:46.800 an amoral system, maybe it's not such a good proxy for intelligence. But back to the earlier point,
00:44:53.740 I want to point to something that Tom Stoppard said about, about humor. He said,
00:45:03.740 laughter is the sound of comprehension. And right, that's good.
00:45:10.220 My point would be that the comedians, this will become less and less true the more they leverage
00:45:18.620 AI to figure out what people will laugh at. It will become a self-referential land of nonsense.
00:45:24.500 But for the moment, while AI is decidedly not funny, and it's really terrible at being funny so far,
00:45:30.460 the comedian is traversing an edge between what we are conscious of and what we are barely conscious
00:45:43.280 of. And when the comedian delivers a joke that causes the room to erupt in laughter,
00:45:48.980 the comedian has found something that everybody in the room is aware of, but they are not aware that
00:45:54.620 everybody else is aware of it. And so the room comes to understand itself as of like mind,
00:45:59.820 all at once, right? That's an extremely powerful, very ancient property.
00:46:06.080 Often of like mind about something forbidden. I think of that as, that's often the translation
00:46:11.520 of the procedural or imaginistic into the explicit, because that's, the comedian gives words,
00:46:17.340 gives words to something inchoate. It's like it's already, it's captured in the relationship
00:46:24.080 between the ideas that already exists, right? And then the comedian puts his finger on it,
00:46:28.540 just like someone who coins a word does, you know, how all of a sudden words pop up and we need them.
00:46:33.800 And they'd spread like mad because they've specified something that was a gap in our
00:46:39.540 propositionalization and everyone recognizes it. It's implicit. Yeah. And, and, and it's funny too,
00:46:45.880 eh? Because this is a strange thing is that it isn't obvious at all that that spot,
00:46:51.480 that capacity for spontaneous laughter can be gamed, you know? I mean, you can get,
00:46:58.240 are there cruel forms of laughter? There are, but, but it's such an unconscious response,
00:47:04.420 right? It's pre, it's, you laugh despite yourself often. Yeah.
00:47:09.120 You certainly laugh before you think about whether you should laugh. And so there's something,
00:47:13.680 if you think about whether you should laugh, then you will commit a humor sin, which is laughing at
00:47:22.520 the wrong moment. It's interesting that there's a cost to laughing when the punchline hasn't been
00:47:27.960 delivered or after, you know, everybody else is laughing and it's like, you're trying to cover the
00:47:32.940 fact that you're really not, you're not one of us. Yeah. That inappropriate laughter has been,
00:47:38.920 has been pointed out as like, that's one of the things that comes up as a critique of Kamala Harris
00:47:44.500 consistently, right? Is for better or for worse, she's tarred with the brush of inappropriate
00:47:51.980 laughter. And you're, you're pointing out that that's the gaming of something that's an
00:47:57.080 evolutionarily designed marker of, of something like cognitive integrity. Laughter itself has been
00:48:04.060 gained. And I would say that actually one of the most troubling inventions that human beings have
00:48:10.320 devised is going to sound preposterous, but one of the most trouble, laugh track. Yeah. Yeah. No
00:48:15.320 kidding. And the idea that you can be induced to believe that something was humorous, that you did
00:48:23.140 not find humorous on your own actually starts leading the population in the direction of believing
00:48:30.700 things very deeply that they would never have accepted in the first place. So it may be used
00:48:36.240 just to sell, you know, deodorant and cereal on some trivial sitcom, but the capacity to induce humans
00:48:44.040 to come to conclusions they wouldn't otherwise reach by making it sound as if they were in a room full of
00:48:49.720 people laughing in agreement, that's a very troubling thing. Right, right, right. Heather?
00:48:54.760 To go back to your, your quote from Stoppard, the brilliant Tom Stoppard, laughter is the sound of
00:49:01.420 comprehension. Is that it? I think, I agree, but I think in your telling of the story of what happens
00:49:09.400 as comedians talk, actually conflates two things, both of which are important. And we've been talking
00:49:15.860 about the individual coming to consciousness. The comedian says something in the individual brain,
00:49:20.740 they go, oh, I didn't know. That was subconscious until now, and now it's explicit. Now it's
00:49:26.060 conscious. I didn't know. Silly me.
00:49:30.000 Silly me, or oh God, he can see that, or, you know, whatever it is. But then there's also the
00:49:36.540 population level. And you alluded to this in what you said, but I think it's no less important than
00:49:41.800 maybe exactly what, you know, a rally, for instance, is meant to do, and exactly what we need right now.
00:49:47.540 And, you know, I'm sure you experienced this, Jordan. We certainly experienced this,
00:49:51.400 where people will come up to us and say, you know, thank you for saying the things that you say.
00:49:57.920 I don't feel alone. I, you know, I don't, I don't, I didn't know.
00:50:02.560 Or that I couldn't say.
00:50:03.820 I couldn't say. I didn't, I had come to understand this, but I thought I was the only one in the
00:50:09.860 universe. And so, you know, taking it back to comedy in a group of anonymous people, a large
00:50:17.880 group of anonymous people, if everyone laughs at the same moment, not only did that maybe bring
00:50:23.600 yourself to consciousness at that thing at that moment, or maybe you already knew it, but if
00:50:27.560 everyone laughs, you know, I am not alone. I am in sync. We are synchronized. We are seeing the
00:50:36.200 same things. The lens. Even with regard to the unspeakable. Even with regard to the unspeakable.
00:50:42.200 And so, right away, that gives you a momentum and an opportunity for action that maybe you did not
00:50:48.340 know was possible before. So, I think that's an additional. The individual and the population
00:50:53.200 are not the same. Oh, absolutely.
00:50:55.120 And I think comedy potentially activates both.
00:50:58.580 Yeah, it's the power. It's the power of the room or the population that comes to understand
00:51:03.720 itself as aligned. And I would point out, it's a little harder to describe this with respect to
00:51:10.500 music. And I would say music has been radically distorted by technology, beginning at the player
00:51:19.620 piano. But the ability to listen to music and have it be the same, no matter how many times you play it,
00:51:26.120 is a very unnatural way for music to exist. Music used to be a living entity. Even, you know,
00:51:32.860 a tribe that was singing the same song that had been sung a thousand times, it was different every
00:51:38.020 single time. And it was therefore capable of adapting to the changing mood of the people who
00:51:42.620 were participating in it. So, what we moderns who are drenched in music all the time, we don't even
00:51:49.660 notice it sometimes. It's soundtracking some story we're watching and we're not thinking about the
00:51:54.020 fact that there's music. But what we miss being so thoroughly surrounded by music is the incredibly
00:52:02.260 powerful and rarefied experience when the band or whatever it is, the musician or the band,
00:52:10.340 is actually in some indescribable way tied into the audience. And the room is electric and
00:52:21.620 every, is synced and everybody is feeling a powerful emotion and they know they are feeling
00:52:28.140 it together, right? And they are being stimulated by the same thing and they are feeling the same
00:52:32.800 way. And even if you record that thing and you play it for somebody and you say, look at how great
00:52:37.300 this was, they don't get the same feeling of discovery that that room had. And it's, it's like
00:52:42.760 the comedy and it's, it's important. And it's part of why Rescue the Republic is structured around,
00:52:47.820 you know, yes, the propositional, it has to be there. We have to articulate what it is
00:52:53.040 that we fear and what it is that we hope. But comedy and music are much deeper mechanisms of
00:53:01.640 conveying the sense of unity, which is really what this is about. It's not a political rally. This is
00:53:07.280 about the unity movement, discovering that actually we value Western civilization. We fear that it is coming
00:53:15.280 apart and we are going to put our differences aside in order to participate in protecting it
00:53:21.000 from what threatens it and putting it back on the course that was, that we were set upon by the
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00:54:20.560 I have a friend, Greg Hurwitz, who started this messaging organization called
00:54:26.580 Us colon the story or U.S. colon the story, either way. And he's been doing a lot of sophisticated
00:54:35.120 polling. And he's identified a very large number of statements where there's above 85% agreement among
00:54:42.880 Americans. You know, and this is actually tied into this psychopathic manipulation story that we
00:54:48.800 started with, because you could imagine that, tell me what you think of this hypothesis, is that
00:54:53.880 we've got three to 5% psychopathic actors in any given population. Okay, now the question is,
00:55:00.740 how do they maneuver? And the answer is, well, they use language in a purely instrumental manner.
00:55:06.200 So they're only after their own advancement. And even in a non-interable way, they're only after
00:55:13.160 their own advancement. So they'll use whatever words are around to gain that end. So that now you
00:55:19.400 can imagine that the most contentious elements of the political discourse then are going to be
00:55:23.740 hijacked by the psychopaths. Psychopaths on the left, they're going to game, they generally game
00:55:28.900 compassion as far as I can tell. And the psychopaths on the right, they gain group identity. At the
00:55:35.320 moment, they're probably gaming free speech. And they put themselves forward as avatars of these
00:55:41.420 moral virtues, but it's completely illusory because they're just manipulating. And then what they make
00:55:48.180 it, they make it appear that the political divide is much greater and much more intense than it is.
00:55:53.660 And that tends to polarize. And so, you know, we know that things started to come unglued around
00:56:00.780 2014, 2015, something like that seems to be the real onset of this, this malaise that grips us at
00:56:08.200 the present time. I don't think it's chance at all that that was about the same time when these
00:56:13.240 mass scale social media communication networks emerged and allowed the psychopaths free reign.
00:56:19.600 So, I mean, Greg's polling data is quite marked because even on the most contentious issues,
00:56:25.480 for example, abortion, there's widespread American agreement on the essential parameters of the laws.
00:56:32.160 And so, okay. Now, I want to ask a more personal question. You and I, the three of us, we've been
00:56:37.700 going back and forth to some degree about this event in Washington. And since talking to you,
00:56:45.500 especially on the X Live, which we could also discuss the spaces, yeah, the spaces,
00:56:52.320 you know, that reignited my interest in attending. And so, I want to know two things. I want to know
00:56:58.460 what will your people, the speakers, be doing? And what is it you think that if I showed up,
00:57:05.240 what do you think I could add to the discussion specifically?
00:57:08.560 The second question is both easier and harder to answer. You will bring what you bring and it will
00:57:16.140 be powerful and will catalyze the event in ways that nobody else can do it. So, rather than tell you
00:57:25.680 what you should bring, I'm much more interested to figure out what you think you should bring.
00:57:28.880 But with respect to the former, we are going to articulate effectively the eight pillars,
00:57:39.780 which we believe are things that all patriotic Americans would easily agree to. These are things
00:57:47.140 that are jeopardized by what we call industrial complexes. And by framing the argument,
00:57:56.120 you know, there's a practical, what will happen on the day of the event. And then there's a much
00:58:02.520 larger picture about what it stands for. Most people will not be able to make it to DC.
00:58:08.800 But having this picture articulated and watching Americans recognize exactly what you've just
00:58:16.300 described, right? And Greg Hurwitz' effort is excellent. But I would point out, we also have an
00:58:21.220 earlier version of this, the Hidden Tribes Report from somewhere 2018, I think, suggested that there
00:58:29.280 was a vast, what they called, exhausted middle of people who agreed on almost every important thing
00:58:36.520 that is being drowned out by these fringes that have polarized us, even over things that we are not
00:58:42.960 in disagreement about. So, go ahead.
00:58:46.460 Well, so, Brett's been one of the prime, one of the three prime organizers of this. And I am,
00:58:51.720 I have been invited. So, I don't know nearly as much about the event. But is it okay to describe
00:58:56.380 what you mean by the industrial complexes? Because as I understand it-
00:59:00.080 Are those the mythological giants? That's what it looks to me.
00:59:05.160 Well, I will say, we have been, I won't even say wrestling, because I'm not sure there's even any
00:59:10.620 disagreement about it. But even for somebody like me, who is fundamentally secular in my understanding
00:59:18.120 of the universe, it is pretty clear that there is something that is reasonably described as a
00:59:24.880 spiritual dimension to the battle that we are engaged in. Not only does the opposition appear
00:59:30.880 to be playing with demonic tropes for reasons I can scarcely imagine, but there is a recognition
00:59:38.840 of this being a historical moment in the making one way or the other. And that something well beyond
00:59:52.360 our well-being as a modern people is at stake. Our ability to continue is at stake. And so,
01:00:01.480 I don't know how well that answers the question.
01:00:04.820 What do you make of the fact that as a secular thinker, this is the corner that you found yourself
01:00:11.220 pushed into? See, I noticed something in my clinical practice over the years, that as the pathology
01:00:19.560 that my client was embroiled in increased in intensity and severity, the language necessary to
01:00:27.700 encapsulate what was occurring became increasingly religious. And you could think about that, I think
01:00:35.500 you can think about that technically to some degree, is that there are levels of hell, as Dante pointed
01:00:41.960 out. And maybe there's something that unites all forms of misery at the bottom, all forms of unnecessary
01:00:49.300 misery, let's say, at the bottom. And then you can be suffering from manifestations of that
01:00:55.880 psychopathology at different degrees. But then you could imagine that there's an evolved
01:00:59.840 language for dealing with those different levels of severity, upward as well as downward, and that
01:01:07.080 we recognize the language that properly deals with the most severe situations as religious.
01:01:14.360 There's no difference, in my estimation, there's no difference in the true sense between what's
01:01:20.880 religious and what's deep. Now, that still leaves the mystery of deep, but it moves us further in our
01:01:28.620 understanding. Let's put it this way. I'm pretty sure I can explain why there appears to be a spiritual
01:01:38.760 dimension to the battle that we are in, in perfectly dry, secular, materialist terms, without difficulty,
01:01:47.580 in fact. I don't think it needs to be done, though. You know, at some level, we can say that those
01:01:54.200 religious terms are responsive to the critical battles and turning points in history, and they have
01:02:02.560 encoded something very deep about how the population that got through those predicaments
01:02:10.200 understood itself. And that we should probably be tapping into those, those toolkits, which frankly can
01:02:18.680 go, you know, hundreds of years without being needed, and so they are not the stuff that is familiar. We have
01:02:24.900 to reach into something that goes beyond the regular toolkit. I can say that in secular terms, but I guess my
01:02:30.740 point would be, I actually find no need to do it at the moment. The point is actually, you know, the last thing
01:02:37.520 you want in, if you were on a battlefield, and you were fighting a battle for your survival, that is not
01:02:45.520 the time for somebody to be talking about, you know, the conservation of energy and the kinetics and
01:02:53.420 blah, blah, blah. The point is, that's the time to figure out how to defeat your enemy in the most practical
01:02:59.400 terms that you can. There are other times to describe, you know, the trajectory of the missiles and
01:03:05.680 the way the aerodynamics might be optimized.
01:03:09.360 I think, if I may, I feel like you're conflating
01:03:12.160 secular with
01:03:15.180 reductionist rationality.
01:03:17.900 No.
01:03:18.420 Because I think we need narrative, for sure.
01:03:21.600 But if I may try to steel man the position that maybe
01:03:25.340 we shouldn't entirely go into the religious and spiritual
01:03:28.880 narratives here in trying to, you know,
01:03:31.820 reunify the republic, it's that many of the people who can't see,
01:03:37.020 who are seeing pieces of it,
01:03:38.880 but are still sort of blinkered by,
01:03:41.420 you know, the, especially the political party to which they have always belonged and cannot imagine going anywhere else,
01:03:48.080 proudly understand themselves to be not religious.
01:03:51.420 And, you know, we aren't religious, we are secular, we are evolutionary biologists with a deep respect for religion, and that doesn't seem to offend most secular people.
01:04:05.220 But if all of our stories are inherently spiritual-seeming or religious-seeming, that will make it easier to dismiss us, I think.
01:04:13.560 We've been wrestling with exactly that issue with ARC.
01:04:16.820 So, we have a,
01:04:17.980 I have a proposition for you that's analogous,
01:04:20.440 I would say, to the idea of minimal necessary force.
01:04:24.380 I think that can be
01:04:25.500 propagated into other
01:04:27.980 domains of conceptualization
01:04:29.920 effectively. Minimal necessary
01:04:31.940 emotion in political
01:04:34.020 discussions, that's helpful.
01:04:35.340 But then I would also say, like, the gospel
01:04:37.600 injunction to render unto Caesar
01:04:39.520 and differentially render unto God
01:04:42.360 is also appropriate, because my rule of thumb is
01:04:45.020 not to use religious language to
01:04:47.300 explicate anything that can be explained without it.
01:04:50.760 Like, it should be reserved for those situations where there isn't any other language that appears to suffice.
01:04:56.140 Like, for me, for example,
01:04:58.540 the horrors of the
01:04:59.980 Auschwitz camp guard who enjoyed
01:05:02.160 his occupation was best
01:05:04.180 described in the language of good and evil.
01:05:07.020 There wasn't anything else
01:05:08.080 that seemed to suffice.
01:05:09.880 Now, there are lesser
01:05:12.100 sins, you might say, that
01:05:13.600 that you can speak about in a much more secular
01:05:15.960 and maybe a causal and reductionistic
01:05:18.080 way. But, but there are
01:05:20.180 there are situations
01:05:22.180 where only the religious
01:05:24.280 language should be utilized.
01:05:25.900 And I would say also, perhaps reserved
01:05:28.260 for those circumstances,
01:05:30.160 because otherwise it gets cheapened.
01:05:32.000 And that's perhaps precisely why
01:05:34.060 you don't cast pearls before swine,
01:05:36.240 let's say, right?
01:05:37.520 You save the heavy guns for when they're
01:05:39.760 necessary.
01:05:41.100 So, and there's another issue that we're skirting around here to some degree, which is
01:05:45.280 also exceedingly complex, right?
01:05:47.620 Because, Heather, you made reference to the necessity of narrative.
01:05:52.000 You see, I think one of the things the postmodernists got right, like fundamentally and profoundly right, and this is partly why we have this culture war raging, is because as despicable as they are in many regards, as nihilistic and as Marxist as they are in many regards,
01:06:09.000 the postmodernists, the postmodernists put forward the proposition that our fundamental frames of perceptual reference were narrative in structure.
01:06:17.340 And so we seem to have this situation where we have a narrative mode of apprehension, and a scientific mode of apprehension, but that the narrative mode is more fundamental.
01:06:31.400 I think the scientific is nested inside the narrative, and I don't think that that can be, I don't think that there's any way of altering that.
01:06:41.480 Now, I think the postmodernists went wrong.
01:06:44.380 Like, they got the problem right.
01:06:47.160 We live in a narrative.
01:06:48.220 I think, actually, that a narrative is a description of the structure that we use to organize our perceptions.
01:06:58.220 So that means even the perceptions that you use as a scientist are prefigured by this underlying narrative.
01:07:06.160 There are narratives that work well with the scientific endeavor, like the idea, the a priori narrative idea that the universe is pervaded by a logos that is intelligible, right?
01:07:17.620 That's a starting point for the scientific endeavor, and that investigating that logos is beneficial.
01:07:23.900 That's another narrative.
01:07:25.420 And when you have those two, you can begin the scientific enterprise.
01:07:30.060 But I think what the postmodernists did wrong was, after having discovered that we saw the world through a narrative,
01:07:37.720 they leapt to the essentially Marxist presupposition that that narrative was necessarily and inevitably one of power.
01:07:45.420 That's right.
01:07:45.700 And I think that's technically wrong.
01:07:48.180 I mean, partly for the reasons we talked about at the beginning of this podcast is psychopaths play the power game,
01:07:54.500 and they've never been successful enough to get above about 5% of the population.
01:08:00.780 Like, it is a local minima, power, but it's not an optimized game.
01:08:05.880 And I think what we've done in the West is we've actually figured out a good way of distributing an optimized game that isn't based on power,
01:08:13.400 even though it can be corrupted by power, in a way that everyone can play and in a self-sustaining and self-improving manner.
01:08:20.080 It doesn't mean the power critique is irrelevant because I think when those systems degenerate, one of the primary ways they degenerate is in the direction of power and compulsion.
01:08:30.680 We saw that during COVID, for example.
01:08:32.880 We see that with these gigantic monstrosity amalgams of state and corporation that are tromping around the world, you know, destroying people underfoot.
01:08:44.620 Those are the industrial complexes.
01:08:46.440 Yes, exactly, exactly.
01:08:47.740 Oh, and with regards to the tilt towards the demonic, so imagine this.
01:08:52.120 I think that's actually easily explainable.
01:08:55.100 So, you know, the large language models have basically showed us that you can map ideas and their associations.
01:09:02.680 And so that's essentially what they do, is they calculate the statistical regularity between words, but also between phrases and sentences and paragraphs.
01:09:10.740 And it's incredibly computationally complex, but they're pulling out the pattern of the logos, let's say.
01:09:17.740 But then you can think, associated with that complex, this is what the psychoanalysts like Jung really put their finger on, and really, especially Jung, there's like a cloud of images and dramas that are also statistically associated with those webs of ideas.
01:09:35.700 And so then you imagine, if you allow a certain set of, a certain complex of ideas to inhabit you, if you invite that in, what comes along is a whole imaginative landscape that's part and parcel of the domain of your imagination that you don't fully comprehend.
01:09:52.220 Like, that's the invitation of something that's been classically regarded as possession.
01:09:57.780 And it's the right way of thinking about it.
01:10:00.080 You know, you're, I think you're inevitably possessed by the spirit that characterizes your most fundamental aim.
01:10:06.620 I don't think there's any way around that.
01:10:08.540 And that's a terrifying thing to understand, if you actually understand it.
01:10:12.720 I've been thinking about prayer in that regard, you know.
01:10:14.980 So, this is a strange idea, but let me elaborate and tell me what you think about this.
01:10:21.780 So, what you do when you call in a large language model is you call, you put forward a call to make a form of knowledge that's implicit in the statistical relationships between the ideas, explicit.
01:10:36.780 Okay, but what you make explicit, in that manner, is dependent on your aim.
01:10:42.620 It's dependent on the question you ask.
01:10:44.240 So, you could say that with a large language model, they game them, so they're politically correct, but independently of that, that the answer you get will be dependent on the question that you ask.
01:10:54.920 So, then you could say, well, the answer you get is dependent on the spirit of the question that you ask.
01:11:00.020 I think the same thing that happens to us in relationship to our own unconscious is that the answer you get, the revelatory answer you get when an idea emerges in the phenomenological landscape, you get an answer from the spirit you call upon by the spirit of your question.
01:11:23.740 So, think, this has a very weird implication.
01:11:27.940 I'm very curious about what you guys think about this, and I'm not saying that this is definitive, but it means, in a way, that if you strove, strived to gather information in the manner that was aiming at the highest possible good, right, truly,
01:11:47.860 then the revelations that you receive from the unconscious are going to be in that spirit, and what that means, this is such a weird thing.
01:11:58.080 I don't know what to make of it.
01:11:59.460 It means that you could call upon God, and he would answer even if he didn't exist, and then I think, well, this is weird because there's an insistence in almost all religious,
01:12:09.420 in deep religious representations of the divine, is that whatever the divine is, is neither real nor non-real, right?
01:12:18.580 It transcends those categories, and yeah, and so, well, I've walked myself into that logical corner, and I can't see any way out of it.
01:12:28.240 It's a very peculiar thing to contemplate, you know, because you can imagine, so, and you know that you do this when you're trying to generate hypotheses as a scientist, right?
01:12:36.720 If you're a real scientist, you sit and you think, okay, what's my wish?
01:12:41.920 What's my prayer?
01:12:43.040 I hope that I can evaluate this landscape of data, that be the perceptual landscape.
01:12:49.080 I hope I can negotiate it in the spirit of truth, not being contaminated by my ambition, my desire to raise myself in the esteem of my colleagues,
01:12:58.640 to take revenge on people who criticized my ideas in the past, to show pridefully that I'm intelligent.
01:13:05.300 I want to move all those spirits out of the inquiry landscape, and I want to generate a hypothesis that's in the spirit of the truth.
01:13:13.600 And I think the better you are at clearing your head, so to speak, the more likely you are to do that.
01:13:19.040 So, anyways, I will leave that to you guys.
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01:14:58.520 So much to respond to there.
01:15:01.680 Let me just go to the last point first, and then I was thinking exactly this, that many years ago when people were claiming that what we needed was more diversity in science because that would solve the problems that they saw in science.
01:15:14.860 You know, more diversity of sex and race and such.
01:15:17.680 The answer that I quickly arrived at was that should not affect the answers that we are getting, but it would affect the questions that are being asked.
01:15:28.520 Because scientists get to choose the questions that they are asking precisely in the way that you are saying.
01:15:35.580 And the scientific process is the best way we have, inefficient and flawed as it is, to arrive at answers that no matter who was asking the questions, they get to the same answers.
01:15:45.300 And so, like, how is it that we can recognize what our interests are as much as possible and say, okay, I'm going to, whether or not you're asking God or, you know, something else or trying to do scientific inquiry, I'm going to recognize that this is me asking a question.
01:16:04.760 And that I come with my own biases and perceptual history and senses, and there's no getting around that.
01:16:12.840 I can try to understand it as much as possible, but the question will, at the end of the day, come from me or from you or from you.
01:16:19.180 And then we can apply tools, you know, enlightenment tools, if you will, by which to answer the question that I came up with in a way such that you then, or you or you or you or you, could ask the same question that I came up with and get the same answer.
01:16:34.760 Right, right.
01:16:35.160 But the question itself changes based on who is asking.
01:16:38.540 Well, so you're pointing to, I think, something that's scandalous in relationship to our analysis of the scientific process within the scientific domain.
01:16:47.860 Now, Thomas Kuhn popped out of this a little bit, and there's been other people working on it.
01:16:53.920 But, you know, when I was a graduate student, there was a lot that was taught to me with regards to scientific method and data analysis and ethical rigor in relationship to those.
01:17:05.440 But the issue of hypothesis generation was just treated as a given.
01:17:11.260 And this is really a strange thing, because it's not only half of the scientific endeavor, it's more like 80%.
01:17:18.360 It's necessary, if not sufficient.
01:17:20.980 Well, and also, geniuses ask the right questions, right?
01:17:25.980 I mean, it's a big deal.
01:17:27.160 And, see, you made a case for the postmodernist critique of science in some way, because—and where science was weak was on the rationale for hypothesis generation.
01:17:38.080 Now, you know, there are people who say, well, it's just algorithmic.
01:17:41.200 You read the research literature, and you can figure out the next incremental step.
01:17:45.380 And that's actually true.
01:17:46.620 You can often figure out the next incremental step, but that doesn't make you the kind of genius that leaps the field forward.
01:17:54.340 That's what I call brick-in-the-wall science.
01:17:56.360 If you want to continue building the wall that we already have, then you can maybe put another brick in that wall of scientific understanding.
01:18:02.860 But if it turns out the house that you're building is on the wrong foundation, you'll never get there that way.
01:18:07.600 Yeah, exactly.
01:18:09.240 Or you'll build a Tower of Babel, because that's what that story's about.
01:18:13.040 Yeah, exactly.
01:18:13.760 And so, there are levels of revolution—there are revolutionary levels in hypothesis generation.
01:18:22.440 And the great geniuses are better at identifying patterns at a more fundamental level.
01:18:27.120 And that's not something that you can predict algorithmically merely as a consequence of mastery of the relevant literature, even though that's helpful.
01:18:35.360 And I think that's—Heather, I think that's associated with trait openness.
01:18:39.220 Because—well, and openness, by the way, does not predict scientific productivity.
01:18:44.900 We did a study.
01:18:45.820 It's zero.
01:18:46.400 The correlation is zero.
01:18:48.180 Conscientiousness does, and that's brick-in-the-wall science.
01:18:50.980 But so, imagine this.
01:18:52.080 So, imagine a neurological network where there's a probability that any given—this is a function.
01:18:58.980 There's a probability that any given idea will activate another idea.
01:19:02.300 Okay, so that would be like fluency.
01:19:04.780 The more fluent you are, the more ideas are activated whenever you're fed an idea.
01:19:09.300 But then there's distance from the original idea.
01:19:12.800 And you can calculate this as statistical improbability.
01:19:15.860 And there are tests of creativity that do this.
01:19:18.100 So, the open people are more likely to leap to divergent associations with any given idea.
01:19:25.420 And the more open they are, the more divergent those are going to be.
01:19:28.660 And the more divergent they are, the more probability of them being wrong, but also revolutionary.
01:19:35.480 Right?
01:19:35.720 And so—right, right.
01:19:37.120 And so, that's really what we see as creativity.
01:19:39.620 And it's something like—maybe it's something akin to mutation probability.
01:19:43.580 Like, the high-open people mutate their ideas not only much more frequently, but also much more radically.
01:19:50.940 And, Brett, I read a paper a while back that a friend of mine sent me showing that there's a hierarchy of mutational repair in the genome.
01:20:00.760 Hmm, absolutely is.
01:20:02.220 Absolutely is.
01:20:02.760 Yeah, so that's—
01:20:03.140 And it is adaptively scheduled.
01:20:05.900 Right.
01:20:06.240 So, that's very much akin to what we were discussing earlier about the notion that there are foundational ideas that are established by tradition.
01:20:13.020 With a penumbra of variation around them.
01:20:16.260 And so, it turns out that the more deadly a mutation would be to a given gene, the more likely it is that that particular gene will be repaired with 100% accuracy if it mutates.
01:20:28.180 And so, that also—that's a way different view than the simpler—
01:20:34.000 Of course.
01:20:34.380 What would you say?
01:20:35.360 Yes, way—it's way different.
01:20:37.240 It's radically different.
01:20:38.080 Again, experimentation occurs on the fringes, which is why we've had this body plan for, what, how long has it been?
01:20:44.840 60 million years?
01:20:46.460 Is that right?
01:20:47.280 Mammals?
01:20:47.840 90, 100 million years-ish.
01:20:49.880 Yeah.
01:20:50.340 Yeah, and when was the base where this basically symmetric—it's even older than that, right?
01:20:54.500 Oh, 500 million.
01:20:55.880 Yeah, yeah, exactly.
01:20:56.920 Yeah.
01:20:57.020 So, and it's variations on a theme from 500 million years.
01:21:00.980 Yeah, yeah.
01:21:01.660 All right.
01:21:01.840 So, the question is, what's fundamental and what can be varied without cost?
01:21:06.340 You're killing me, Jordan.
01:21:07.600 You have said in the last 15 minutes, you've said 51 things that each need a podcast unto themselves to explore.
01:21:18.980 So, I want to go back to a few of them if I can recall what they were, because they're really important.
01:21:24.300 One thing, just as an opener, I find it very interesting.
01:21:32.660 You often speak about your experience of religion, and I have a very interesting reaction to it, which is, I come from the opposite starting place, and I almost never hear you say anything that strikes me as wrong.
01:21:48.200 So, I have the sense that we are converging on a perspective, and I want to talk a little bit—and so, the thing that you said—
01:21:54.860 That's happening at Peterson Academy, by the way.
01:21:56.920 We have a bunch of thinkers who are doing exactly that, and it is this new convergence.
01:22:01.720 As you would hope.
01:22:03.360 It's sort of the best indicator that you are on the right track.
01:22:08.440 Either you're telling yourself a foolish story, and everybody's converged on it, or you've discovered something real, and that means it doesn't matter where your starting point is, you'll land there.
01:22:16.360 So, your point about God doesn't need to exist to answer prayers, I've long believed this.
01:22:24.060 It's such a horrible thing to say.
01:22:25.600 No, it's not.
01:22:26.880 And in fact, I wonder if you will remember that I said something like that to Sam Harris in the debate where I moderated between you two.
01:22:37.780 He laughed about the idea of a prayer answering God, and I gave him an evolutionary account of how that could work.
01:22:49.020 In effect, I believe my example would have been something like, were you to pray before going to bed about some problem that you thought needed a divine intervention in order to remedy it,
01:23:04.360 that would likely prime you to dream about that problem and potentially to wake with some insight about it, which, frankly, waking with insights is a known phenomenon.
01:23:15.060 So, that is one way in which prayer could actually manifest in an improvement in the world that does not require there to be an external being.
01:23:22.660 So, let's just take that as a stem.
01:23:26.940 The thing I most want to go back to is you're talking, you laid out a principle, and your principle was that you should not invoke religious terminology or descriptions where they are not necessary.
01:23:45.880 That is to say, we can explain many things without resorting to those tools, and they should be reserved for—
01:23:51.300 It's part of not using God's name in vain, by the way.
01:23:55.000 Now, here's the point I want to make to you, and frankly, there's a part of me.
01:24:00.180 I know that you and me and Richard Dawkins need to have this conversation, and I am sorry to say that he has become cowardly in old age and refuses to have the conversation.
01:24:11.740 That's a tragedy because I believe a tremendous amount of productive insight would come from that conversation.
01:24:20.500 He is going to talk to me, eh?
01:24:22.600 He is going to talk to me, but—and I had proposed you as an interlocutor, but he picked another gentleman who might do a credible job.
01:24:30.060 Yeah, we need better than credible here.
01:24:32.140 And I will tell you that if you go back into Dawkins' catalog, you will find that he did—I've forgotten the name of it—but he did a documentary, basically, an atheist, new atheist documentary.
01:24:45.980 And there's a scene in it that struck me rather profoundly.
01:24:50.740 The scene is Richard Dawkins is talking to a religious authority, and they are having a pitched argument about the logic of the universe.
01:25:03.740 And it becomes quite clear if you watch this that Richard Dawkins knows he is winning this argument.
01:25:11.080 But so does the other guy.
01:25:12.760 They are each winning to their own audience.
01:25:15.720 And what they are doing is they are missing the opportunity to actually discover anything.
01:25:19.520 And my concern is I know Richard Dawkins' tradition because I've read many of his books.
01:25:26.320 I consider him a mentor of mine, and I come from the same tradition.
01:25:33.180 So Richard Dawkins is very close to seeing something important that he hasn't seen yet that actually makes his own work vastly more important than it has yet been understood to be.
01:25:43.060 I agree with that. Absolutely.
01:25:44.520 But anyway, let's put him aside for the moment.
01:25:46.380 The issue that I think is so important is imagine a continuum from the perfectly literal to the perfectly metaphorical.
01:26:04.540 And let us say that religions, longstanding religions that have stood the test of time, are very close to the end of the continuum where they are perfectly metaphorical.
01:26:16.260 And that our best cases, the places where we've been most effective at understanding phenomena that we now have a great predictive model of, we're very close to being perfectly literal about.
01:26:32.560 And then most things exist somewhere in between, right?
01:26:38.240 Biology, for example, we do not have a perfectly descriptive model because complexity and because the process of time erasing evidence has caused us to have a much cruder understanding of biology than we do, for example, of chemistry or physics.
01:26:58.520 Right? We're earlier in the study of it.
01:27:28.500 In your science textbook.
01:27:30.240 But your science textbook doesn't admit that that's what it's doing.
01:27:32.900 That's right. That's right.
01:27:33.980 And so—
01:27:34.500 That was the role that Jung thought dreams played, by the way.
01:27:37.480 Tech, that's exactly his theory of dream.
01:27:39.680 And I would say that what you described as that greater ability to see across larger gaps.
01:27:47.020 The point is the dream apparatus, which I would tell you has to be logically a product of adaptive evolution.
01:27:53.760 It has served our ancestors to have it.
01:27:55.760 It plays this function where it is allowed to violate any rule it wants to, to explore a possibility.
01:28:03.100 And presumably many of those little explorations land on nothing.
01:28:06.800 And occasionally one of those explorations lands on a transcendent connection that if your waking mind was free to make those connections at all times, you'd be in big trouble.
01:28:16.280 Okay, okay. So, I want to modify my statement about the unreality of God for a moment with regard to what you just said.
01:28:26.200 Okay, so now imagine this.
01:28:28.520 Imagine that the revelation that you've been praying for when you're oriented towards the highest good makes itself manifest.
01:28:36.820 And then let's say it's valid.
01:28:39.820 Okay, so it's the valid issue that becomes of crucial interest here.
01:28:45.660 Because if I have a revelation that's valid, that means I can act it out in the world and it will have the predictive power of the future that you described.
01:28:54.300 It'll be efficacious in the world.
01:28:56.400 You know how you can strike while the iron is hot?
01:28:58.620 That's what you're trying to do in Washington.
01:29:00.740 You think it's the right time.
01:29:02.300 You know how you can aggregate a lot of information?
01:29:05.060 You can have a sense of timing.
01:29:07.280 It's the right thing at the right moment.
01:29:09.700 Okay, so now imagine that that speaks of the underlying harmony of being itself, right?
01:29:15.600 And so, here's a weird thing to add to that initial statement is that even if God is not real in the way that we just described,
01:29:24.880 the revelations that emerge from that source are deeply real because they speak of the relationship between the individual and the social community and the natural world in a manner that's practically realizable and exactly timed.
01:29:42.040 And so, this is, I think, why it's reasonable to think about God in terms beyond the real and the non-real is because there is that element of non-reality.
01:29:51.900 It's something that you conjure into existence as a consequence of your quest, but it's also the voice of what's truly deepest because otherwise it would have no purchase in the world.
01:30:04.240 And so, you know, there's an ancient line of Jewish speculation that proposes that God and man are, in a sense, twins, that they each call the other into being and in a genuine manner.
01:30:18.400 And I think this mode of conceptualization sheds some light on that in a manner that's, you know, somewhat comprehensible.
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01:31:30.540 Just dial pound 250 and say the keyword baby.
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01:31:35.420 Or go to preborn.com slash Jordan.
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01:31:40.400 All right, can I try two things on you as long as we're deep down this rabbit hole?
01:31:50.100 And this is a point I have been trying to make to Richard Dawkins, which he cannot hear.
01:31:55.860 The ancients had no idea about genes.
01:31:59.640 They couldn't, nor would it have helped them to.
01:32:02.020 They don't understand that they are suffering from a kind of delusion, which is about the significance of self.
01:32:13.880 Self is a very temporary instantiation of lineage.
01:32:20.280 Evolution does not care about the self because the self is disposable.
01:32:24.560 The lineage either continues or fails to continue.
01:32:27.760 And evolutionary success is not how much you reproduce.
01:32:31.060 It's how far into the future your lineage is capable of making.
01:32:36.260 That's the story of Abraham, by the way.
01:32:38.680 You're telling me.
01:32:40.140 Yeah, okay, okay.
01:32:41.900 So here's my point.
01:32:44.340 Is heaven real?
01:32:47.760 Yes and no.
01:32:49.500 We have no evidence that there's a place.
01:32:51.320 On the other hand, if you live so as to get into heaven, what it will do, for reasons that a sociologist, at least a good sociologist, would easily recognize,
01:33:05.620 is it will place your kin and your descendants in an excellent position relative to each other to get into the future.
01:33:13.720 Do you live on after death?
01:33:15.280 Yes, you do.
01:33:16.440 You live on in lineage, right?
01:33:19.460 It's not the individual, so it's a modification of the reality.
01:33:23.860 But the point is, how much difference is there between the idea of living on after you die in the way that any biologist would recognize that a successful individual did
01:33:33.780 and living on after you die in some storybook form that's much easier to convey to a child or to an uninitiated person, right?
01:33:43.700 My point is that life after death does exist, and every biologist agrees.
01:33:49.420 They just don't put it in those terms.
01:33:50.820 So, the question is, why are we allowed to draw – where in that continuum from the fully descriptive and material to the fully metaphorical,
01:34:06.380 are we allowed to draw the line and say, here is where we have stopped being analytical if it's a continuum?
01:34:12.680 It is a continuum, and the place where I fault my colleagues the most is that they do not understand, they do not acknowledge the degree to which even the models that we have inside of biology are largely metaphorical.
01:34:28.180 Not because we won't ultimately know how biology works, but because we don't know yet, and, you know, even just to look back into the recent history of biology,
01:34:38.360 you can see that it is a question of replacing approximate stories, metaphorical stories, with literal stories,
01:34:45.700 and that doesn't break down when we get out towards what is obviously an adaptive tendency of human beings to believe in a spirit realm.
01:34:54.880 Yeah. Well, look, I think that's a good place to stop.
01:34:58.420 I don't want to stop because there's 50 things that we could continue to talk about.
01:35:02.700 I think one of the things we should do at some point, possibly, probably publicly, is I'd like to do a lecture on Abraham and then have you guys comment.
01:35:13.420 Because, you know, I think, too, Brett, one of the reasons that when you listen to me speak about religious matters,
01:35:19.500 that you don't immediately, you know, come to the conclusion that I'm making an error is because,
01:35:25.080 and I really tried that in my new book, is I try not to say anything on the religious domain that I can't simultaneously justify on the biological and evolutionary side.
01:35:34.540 And what's so exciting is they dovetail.
01:35:37.520 And they inform each other in a manner that's extremely useful.
01:35:41.740 They can both be used as, what would you say, sources of inspiration, definitely.
01:35:47.040 And when you get that conjunction, it's super powerful.
01:35:50.000 Go ahead, Heather.
01:35:50.420 Just one of the things we say is that all true stories must reconcile.
01:35:53.860 Yeah.
01:35:54.420 So that's what you're saying.
01:35:55.720 I think that's the monotheistic hypothesis.
01:35:59.000 Like, in the Old Testament, God is characterized in a multitude of variable manners, and they're quite different, you know, ranging from peacemaker, let's say, to warrior.
01:36:09.320 But there's an underlying insistence that properly conceptualized all that stems from a fundamental transcendent unity.
01:36:16.000 And I think scientists assume that implicitly.
01:36:18.760 They wouldn't be constantly trying to unify their damn theories if it wasn't the case.
01:36:22.840 And I do think that Dawkins is missing a stellar opportunity here because he was that far away with his conception of memes.
01:36:30.800 Right.
01:36:31.300 He just didn't take it the next step.
01:36:34.060 The irony is there's one bitter pill for Richard Dawkins.
01:36:41.020 He made a small error in his presentation of memes that he has never gotten over.
01:36:47.400 If he can accept that bitter pill, the rest of what he laid out becomes vastly more significant in the story of human evolution than he gives it credit for.
01:36:58.960 He sees—
01:36:59.960 What's the bitter pill?
01:37:01.600 The bitter pill is in chapter 11 of The Selfish Gene, where he presents the concept of memes for the first time.
01:37:10.420 He says that memes are a new primeval soup.
01:37:17.780 He sees it as a new evolutionary realm where creatures are beginning to form.
01:37:24.960 That's not what it is.
01:37:26.860 It is actually a solution.
01:37:29.920 It is a solution that has evolved in the space of genes that does the genes bidding more effectively than they can because it can adapt so much more rapidly because memes can move horizontally.
01:37:43.660 Well, it's not a lateral solution.
01:37:45.800 It's downstream.
01:37:46.580 Yep.
01:37:47.160 Right, right.
01:37:47.940 It's also faster and incorporates virtual death because you can kill a meme without killing its host.
01:37:55.160 Right.
01:37:55.720 This is a major—this is a major improvement.
01:37:58.500 Right.
01:37:58.680 You get to be wrong and change, and you don't just die.
01:38:03.020 Like, that's a big deal because then you can be wrong 10,000 times instead of once.
01:38:07.340 Yes, and it is the answer to why human beings are so transcendently capable.
01:38:16.800 So, the fact that he's presented a model that really is the core of what is special about humans, and yet he thinks that the idea that the song Happy Birthday is a meme is a good example rather than Catholicism, for example.
01:38:32.900 Yeah, pesky Catholicism.
01:38:36.720 Yes, yes.
01:38:37.840 Well, all right.
01:38:38.860 Well, that was fun.
01:38:41.060 That was fun.
01:38:41.980 I think maybe what we'll do on the Daily Wire side—I told you I had an insane idea that I wanted to talk to you about.
01:38:47.880 I think maybe we'll do that there.
01:38:49.600 We're going to do it as a game because it's a joke, this idea.
01:38:53.660 But that doesn't mean that I know what the idea is, you know, in its essence, and I don't know—that doesn't mean I know what its significance is for one way or another.
01:39:08.000 So, well, with that teaser, for everybody who's watching and listening, to join us on the Daily Wire Plus side, I think we'll bring this to a close.
01:39:16.080 Do you want to just tell everybody to close off the website and the X handle for this rally in this event?
01:39:25.040 What are we going to call it?
01:39:26.260 What's the term?
01:39:28.260 Event?
01:39:28.980 Rally?
01:39:29.700 Rally, I think.
01:39:30.280 Yeah.
01:39:30.920 Happening?
01:39:31.540 There's got to be a better word.
01:39:34.440 This mind-blowing moment in history.
01:39:38.200 Celebration.
01:39:38.920 Celebration is a good one.
01:39:40.700 Yeah, Celebration is a good one.
01:39:42.620 It's called Rescue the Republic.
01:39:44.540 The website is jointheresistance.org.
01:39:48.820 The Twitter handle is rescuerpublic.
01:39:52.560 And can I make one final pitch?
01:39:56.020 Hey, fire away.
01:39:57.440 Okay.
01:39:58.680 The reason that it is so important to show up is because we actually, in this upcoming American election,
01:40:06.580 are faced with something that has effectively declared war on our Constitution and a brand new coalition that does not look like anything that has existed politically in our lifetime, certainly, or probably ever.
01:40:21.240 And that thing has to win decisively to overcome any capacity to cheat and in order to become a durable movement.
01:40:32.860 And so, the point is, this is the place to become visible physically.
01:40:42.180 It's undeniable.
01:40:43.380 Either the news will fail to report it, in which case we will know something about what side they are on, or they will report it in some way, hopefully, honestly.
01:40:51.080 But if they don't, we'll be able to see their distortion, and that will tell us what has taken place.
01:40:57.200 This is not MAGA.
01:40:58.440 It contains MAGA, but it contains many other factions, and it is truly powerful.
01:41:04.660 All signals suggest people are putting aside every important ideological difference and standing shoulder to shoulder to defend effectively our lineage and its ability to continue into the future.
01:41:16.880 All right. Well, that's a very good place to end.
01:41:20.040 Thanks to both of you and to everybody who's watching for their time and attention to the film crew here in Scottsdale.
01:41:27.860 We'll move over to the Daily Wire side, and I can tell you my crazy idea, because it's very comical as far as I'm concerned.
01:41:34.680 It's ridiculously comical.
01:41:36.560 All right. All right. Good.
01:41:37.840 So, all right.
01:41:38.640 So, thank you, everybody, for watching and listening, and thanks again, Heather and Brett.
01:41:44.740 It's very good to see you guys.
01:41:47.080 Great seeing you.
01:41:47.820 Thank you.
01:42:00.280 Hey, everyone.
01:42:01.340 Real quick before you skip, I want to talk to you about something serious and important.
01:42:05.560 Dr. Jordan Peterson has created a new series that could be a lifeline for those battling depression and anxiety.
01:42:11.320 We know how isolating and overwhelming these conditions can be, and we wanted to take a moment to reach out to those listening who may be struggling.
01:42:19.240 With decades of experience helping patients, Dr. Peterson offers a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way in his new series.
01:42:27.020 He provides a roadmap towards healing, showing that while the journey isn't easy, it's absolutely possible to find your way forward.
01:42:34.420 If you're suffering, please know you are not alone.
01:42:37.580 There's hope, and there's a path to feeling better.
01:42:40.260 Go to Daily Wire Plus now and start watching Dr. Jordan B. Peterson on depression and anxiety.
01:42:46.640 Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve.
01:42:50.120 Thank you.
01:42:50.480 Thank you.
01:42:50.740 Thank you.
01:42:52.720 Thank you.
01:42:52.940 Thank you.
01:42:53.040 Thank you.
01:42:53.180 Thank you.
01:42:54.020 Thank you.
01:42:54.600 Thank you.
01:42:54.820 Thank you.
01:42:55.440 Thank you.
01:42:55.760 Thank you.
01:42:56.260 Thank you.
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