The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 555. How the Internet Is Breaking Our Brains ｜ Sam Harris

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00:00:28.120 across generations. I'm increasingly worried that we have effectively rendered ourselves

00:00:34.760 ungovernable based on the way we have shattered the information landscape. This is a consequence

00:00:40.180 of hyper-connectivity and stunning ease of communication. You can just go down a rabbit

00:00:47.040 hole and find endless confirmation that's fairly anonymized. We have to ground our perceptions

00:00:53.780 in an axiomatic framework. The old norms that the gatekeepers, I mean, for all their faults,

00:01:00.840 they had standards. I don't trust anything the New York Times prints at all. The gatekeeping

00:01:05.820 institutions have also revealed themselves as catastrophically flawed. The antidote to that,

00:01:13.300 to the failures of institutions, is not new standards. It's really to apply the old standards.

00:01:23.780 I've spent a lot of time over the years speaking with Sam Harris. We've spoken publicly half a dozen

00:01:41.800 times and privately far more than that. We're coming at the same problems, I would say, from quite

00:01:47.860 different perspectives and establishing some concordance over time. Today, we went down the

00:01:53.440 rabbit hole of rabbit holes, I suppose, discussing the fragmentation of the narrative landscape

00:02:00.080 on the social media front and what that means for cultural incoherence, weakness, demoralization,

00:02:08.140 deceit, self-deception, and inability to understand one another. And so join us as we attempt to clarify

00:02:17.560 the catastrophe of infinite plurality. Well, Mr. Harris, it looks like it's time for our

00:02:25.200 approximately annual conversation. Yeah, nice. You're the clock that ticks once a year.

00:02:32.000 Yeah, well, I suspect that's more than enough. So tell me what you're thinking about lately, Sam,

00:02:39.800 on the intellectual side and what you're doing. Well, it is actually relevant to the chaos in our

00:02:46.200 politics at the moment. I'm increasingly worried that we have effectively rendered ourselves

00:02:54.980 ungovernable based on the way we have shattered the information landscape. And I think independent

00:03:01.860 media of the sort that we're indulging now is part of that problem. I mean, I don't know if you're

00:03:07.880 aware of it or not, but I've been fairly vociferous in criticizing some of our mutual friends. And

00:03:13.640 in my case, some may be former friends, but fellow podcasters and people in independent media. And

00:03:21.420 I just think they've been part of this shattering. And it's been fairly obvious. And the cases are

00:03:30.900 different. But many people have been quite irresponsible in the way that they have

00:03:35.420 platformed people uncritically and let them spread truly divisive and dangerous misinformation.

00:03:43.240 I mean, I'm thinking especially of in the aftermath of October 7th and the global explosion of

00:03:49.180 anti-Semitism. We've had some very big podcasts like Tucker's and Joe's platform Holocaust deniers and

00:03:57.840 revisionists. And it's been quite insane out there. And it's just, I mean, that's just one piece of it.

00:04:04.140 I mean, you can talk about COVID or Trump or Ukraine or, I mean, any, pick your ugly object

00:04:11.620 out there. There's just a radical divergence of opinion into these echo chambers we build for

00:04:20.300 ourselves. And it seems to be very difficult to cross political lines. I mean, it's somehow deeper than

00:04:30.300 politics, actually. So anyway, I'm increasingly worried about that. And, you know, I'm trying to

00:04:37.180 hold up my side of the conversation in ways so as to cross those lines. But it's, I'm just noticing

00:04:42.180 that it's, it's, in many cases, it's proving impossible. Yeah, okay. Well, that's, I am aware

00:04:49.940 of that. It's actually part of the reason I thought it would be useful for us to talk today.

00:04:53.520 Okay. So I want to think about how to respond to that to begin with. Well, I think the first thing

00:05:01.360 that we should probably note is that this is a consequence of hyper-connectivity and stunning ease

00:05:11.140 of communication, right? So, I mean, it's, it's obviously the case that the

00:05:18.420 landscapes of communication that once held us together for better or worse are now so multiplicitous

00:05:26.660 that they're new, they're new, they're numberless. And so that, so what does that mean? I think what it

00:05:34.100 means in part, and this is where I think our conversation might get particularly interesting, is that

00:05:39.460 we don't have a shared story anymore. And I think a culture, I think a culture is literally a shared

00:05:49.160 story. And a story is a structure. This is, you know, being part of our ongoing discussion for a

00:05:54.840 very long period of time, right? This, the relationship between the perceptual framing that

00:06:01.860 is constituted by a story and, let's say, the domain of objective facts, right? This is a very thorny

00:06:08.620 problem. But it seems to me that you have a culture when people share the same story or the

00:06:15.960 same stories. They have the same shared reference points. And with an infinite landscape of

00:06:23.240 communication, that fragments indefinitely. And then no one, see, Sam, let me tell you,

00:06:30.400 I might as well, just to annoy you, just to get, just to get the ball rolling. I spent a lot of time

00:06:36.980 thinking about the story of the Tower of Babel. And there's two stories in Genesis that describe how

00:06:43.840 things go wrong. And one story is the flood, and that's the consequence of absolute chaos bursting

00:06:52.360 forth, essentially. But the Tower of Babel is a story about both totalitarianism and fragmentation.

00:07:00.960 So what happens is the engineers get together, because that's who it is. It's the city builders,

00:07:07.560 the tool makers, those who create weapons of war, the city builders, the engineers, they get together

00:07:14.460 and they build these towers for the aggrandizement of the local potentates. So there was competition in

00:07:23.700 the Middle East of that time to build the highest tower for the glory of the local ruler. And that

00:07:31.600 presumption, so you can think about that as misaligned aim on the sociological front. The consequence of

00:07:39.620 this misaligned aim is a kind of, what? Because the aim of the culture is wrong. Words themselves lose

00:07:50.160 their meaning. That's what happens in the story, right? Everybody ends up speaking a different

00:07:54.820 language, and then the towers fall apart. So it's because the stories are, the story that's being

00:08:02.760 told is one of human self-aggrandizement. That's part of it. And the culture pathologizes and then

00:08:12.140 disintegrates. And so I see that happening in our culture. There's a technological element of it, 0.96

00:08:20.500 obviously, that technological utopians are driving this. The transhumanists are driving this. 0.99

00:08:28.080 And we're aiming at the wrong goal. And the consequence of that is that our language is

00:08:34.100 falling apart and we don't share the same reference points. That's part of what's happening. So I'm

00:08:39.900 curious about what you think about that, you know, how that fits in with your concern, your emergent

00:08:45.880 concern. Like, when you say fragmentation, Sam, what is it that you think is fragmenting? Because

00:08:54.160 it's not the objective view of the world precisely, although the scientific enterprise even seems to

00:09:02.120 be shaky and corrupt and falling apart in many ways. Well, so I agree with that. I

00:09:09.880 I think the analogy to Babel is quite apt. You know, I don't think bringing Doge into Babel would

00:09:17.840 have helped much. I think it is technological. Yeah, I mean, there's just the fact that there's

00:09:24.640 because of the, I think largely this is a story of social media, but it's really the internet

00:09:29.800 generally because of the information technology we have built. People can find endless confirmation

00:09:39.200 of whatever their cherished opinion is. And it's no longer, there's some cultural immune system that

00:09:52.500 has been lost, right? Like if you usually, if you had to go to the physical conference out in the real

00:09:58.420 world to meet the other people who were sure they had been, who were sure they've been abducted by UFOs,

00:10:05.300 well, then you'd be meeting these people. You would see the, the obvious signs of, of dysfunction in

00:10:11.560 their lives. And you would, there'd be more friction to the maintenance of this, this new conviction,

00:10:19.440 just based on the, the, the collision with other ancillary facts that have social relevance to you.

00:10:27.440 But online, again, this even precedes social media. This, this is true of the internet back in the late

00:10:33.520 nineties. You can just go down a rabbit hole and find endless confirmation that's, that's fairly

00:10:39.700 anonymized, right? You don't, you know, the, the, uh, 20 minute documentary that blew your mind and

00:10:46.520 convinced you that, that the World Trade Center towers were brought down by the, you know, the Bush 0.98

00:10:51.220 administration. Um, uh, you didn't know that that was made by some 18 year old in his mother's 0.67

00:10:59.860 basement and you didn't have to know that you were just looking at the product online. But if you had

00:11:04.540 had to meet this person, all of a sudden you, you'd realize that this is the, the, the, the maintenance

00:11:09.840 of this fiction becomes quite a bit harder. Um, so we're living now, I think in the second generation

00:11:16.220 of that moment where the, it really is bottomless. I mean, the, the, the, the, the ocean of misinformation

00:11:23.400 and half truth, uh, and misunderstanding is bottomless and the tools we have built to rectify

00:11:31.420 misunderstandings and to spot lies and to, um, be, be better truth seekers are there, but

00:11:39.680 they have been, um, there is, in some sense there's just, this is asymmetric warfare. They're

00:11:46.760 no match for the, the, um, the information waste product that get, that can be produced

00:11:57.160 more quickly. Right. I mean, this is just the, the old problem.

00:12:00.380 Well, it's easier to produce noise than signal, obviously.

00:12:03.840 Yeah. Or, or pseudo signal. Yeah. I mean, there's so much that purports to be signal. Right. I mean,

00:12:09.560 you, I mean, and, and again, this is, this is probably, uh, socially more inconvenient for you

00:12:16.600 than it is for me, but I mean, many of your bedfellows or former bedfellows, uh, are, are

00:12:23.100 the, the principal, uh, parts of this problem. I mean, they're the, they're the gods and goddesses

00:12:29.660 on this landscape. I'm thinking of someone like Candace Owens, who's, you know, quite literally

00:12:34.100 trafficking in blood libels now on her incredibly popular podcast. I mean, she's just gone berserk 0.98

00:12:40.700 as far as I can tell. And, um, yet what is the, what, what is the style of conversation

00:12:47.380 that would disconfirm all of that for her audience? At this point, I don't know, because I think what,

00:12:53.940 what's happened is we've, we've trained up a culture of people or, or cultures of people,

00:12:58.900 uh, they simply don't care about facts really. They, they, they want a story that aligns with their,

00:13:08.940 uh, on some, on, in some sense, their confirmation bias. I mean, they, they, they have certain things

00:13:13.840 they want to believe. There's certain ideas they like the taste of, and then they just want people

00:13:18.980 catering to that appetite. And, and there's a good business in that. Well, part of that, I think, is

00:13:26.840 the consequence of the fact that we have to ground our perceptions in an axiomatic framework. And

00:13:36.600 I mean, this has been my concern with the primacy of the story right from the beginning. And I think

00:13:42.900 the deeper question is, a deeper question is, you know, is there some, uh, is there some necessary

00:13:52.580 structure to that fundamental axiomatic framework? You know, the, the postmodernist claim was that

00:13:59.340 the postmodernist claim, the fundamental postmodernist claim is that there is no uniting metanarrative,

00:14:05.260 right? The post, we live in the postmodern world. Now the postmodern world is a place of local truths

00:14:10.480 and the post, the French intellectuals, that's, they, they not only decided that they decided that

00:14:16.140 that was, uh, necessary and an improvement. And now we see the consequences of that. We're in a

00:14:22.260 landscape of infinite narratives. And the question is what, how do you, how do you, um,

00:14:29.240 how do you define a rank order of narratives such that some are valid and some are invalid?

00:14:36.620 You know, the idea of misinformation is obviously predicated on the notion that

00:14:40.180 certain narratives are invalid. And that seems self-evident to me. Um, I wouldn't exactly call

00:14:47.000 myself a fan of the direction that Candace Owens has decided to walk down, but I'm not going to say

00:14:51.720 anything more about her. Um, and, and so, you know, what I've been trying to struggle with is,

00:14:58.100 and this has been the basis of many of our discussions in, in the final analysis is what

00:15:04.980 is the proper grounding for a narrative framework? And I mean, you're, my understanding of your

00:15:11.740 position is that, um, that that's why you've turned right from the beginning to the world of

00:15:18.840 objective fact, uh, so to speak. But the problem is, is that there's a lot of facts and which ones to

00:15:26.980 prioritize and which ones to ignore is a very thorny question. And, you know, one of the things you

00:15:33.540 referred to obliquely was that, well, when you and I were young, cause we're about the same age,

00:15:39.560 I think you're four years younger than me. Um, we had narratives that united us as a culture.

00:15:45.800 There was a certain, well, there were fewer people, there was more ethnic homogeneity,

00:15:54.780 um, at least in the local environments in the world. There was, there were, um, information

00:16:01.980 brokers that were extraordinarily powerful. The universities, the newspapers, the, uh, the TV

00:16:10.340 stations, the radio stations, and they weren't very easy to get access to, and they had gatekeepers.

00:16:18.020 And at least some of the time, those gatekeepers seemed meritorious as well as arbitrary.

00:16:25.080 And, you know, it, it could easily be that the fragmentation of the landscape is a consequence

00:16:31.460 of technological revolution. And also perhaps of the, well, you, you had pointed to the

00:16:40.980 irresponsibility of the participants in that landscape.

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00:18:01.440 I mean, I think it's also, or even more primarily that they're,

00:18:05.200 they're flooded with information and very, finding it very difficult to keep up.

00:18:10.860 Well, they're also just not disposed to function by the old norms that the gatekeepers, I mean,

00:18:16.860 for, for all their faults, that they had standards, right? I mean, the New York Times-

00:18:21.700 But Sam, those, those, those, I agree with you. And, but I also would say that those institutions,

00:18:29.480 the gatekeeping institutions have also revealed themselves as catastrophically flawed in the last

00:18:37.760 five to 10 years. I mean, I'm interested in your take on this. Like you brought up October 7th and

00:18:44.020 the rise of antisemitism. And I've been tracking that with a couple of friends of mine. And we've been

00:18:49.580 spending a lot of time fighting it off in all sorts of ways, some of which are public and some of which

00:18:58.200 aren't. And I'm appalled by it. What's happened in Canada on the antisemitic front since October 7th

00:19:06.660 is something I never thought I'd see in my lifetime. It, it embarrasses me to the core. My,

00:19:12.420 are my goddamn government came out the other day, that those bloody liberals, and they talked in the 1.00

00:19:19.480 aftermath of October 7th about combating Islamophobia, as if that's Canada's problem, which it isn't. 0.99

00:19:26.740 And so, but, and then, you know, you saw what happened across the, the, the United States and Canada

00:19:33.980 with regard to the universities, Columbia University in particular, and their absolute

00:19:40.380 silence and complicitness while these terrible demonstrations were going on. Not that I think

00:19:47.980 that the demonstrations themselves should have been, well, we can talk about that.

00:19:53.020 Um, letting terrorist radicals take over the universities doesn't strike me as a very good

00:19:59.300 solution. So, so I'm curious about what you think about that because, well, so, so like,

00:20:06.360 I think the gatekeepers have abandoned the gates. Like, I don't trust the new, I don't trust anything

00:20:11.640 the New York Times prints at all. I think they're reprehensible. The universities, I think, are beyond

00:20:17.760 salvaging. I can't see how they can be fixed. Anyways, man, lay it out. Tell me what you think.

00:20:23.000 I think those, all the way up until those last two statements, I can sign on the dotted line. I

00:20:28.660 think the, the, um, all of these institutions have embarrassed themselves in recent years. And for,

00:20:34.720 for the reasons that I think you and I would fully agree about, um, you know, starting, this became

00:20:40.040 most obvious during COVID, uh, but it's, you know, the October 7th is, is, uh, uh, more of the same,

00:20:47.000 but I would just point out that the, the antidote to that, to, to, to, to the failures of institutions,

00:20:53.460 uh, is not new standards. It's, it's really to apply the old standards. I mean, we, we need the

00:21:01.160 institutions. Spoken like a true conservative. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Fine. Well, I mean, so it's,

00:21:07.000 no, no, but, but, but the antidote, the antidote to fails or failures of science say, you know,

00:21:12.060 or scientific fraud is, is, is not something other than science. It's, it's just more science,

00:21:17.700 real science, good science, science, scientific integrity. And so it is with journalism or any

00:21:22.900 academic discipline or any, anything that purports to be truth-seeking, we have standards

00:21:27.000 and they, and then we, there's nothing wrong with our standards. What's, what's dangerous about

00:21:32.380 the current information landscape where we have just this, this contrarian universe where anything

00:21:38.780 that is outside the institutions is considered to have some kind of primacy, right? Where everyone

00:21:44.480 is kind of a citizen journalist, a citizen scientist, where you just, you just kind of flip the mics on

00:21:50.000 and talk for four hours. And that's good enough. What's, what that's selecting for are the people who

00:21:56.580 have no standards to even violate, right? I mean, these are, these people are, are incapable of

00:22:02.100 hypocrisy. I mean, that was one, the one thing that's good about the New York Times and Harvard 0.86

00:22:06.960 and any other institution you would point to that has, has, you know, obvious egg on its face

00:22:12.700 at the moment is that at a minimum, they're capable of, of, of being shamed by their own hypocrisy.

00:22:20.320 And the people who aren't in the, the, the, I would agree with you that there's been some

00:22:23.980 institutional capture where we have people in those institutions who just shouldn't be there,

00:22:28.140 right? But there, but we would make that judgment again, by reference to these old

00:22:32.820 standards of, of academic or journalistic integrity. But Candace Owens just doesn't have

00:22:38.320 that, right? And I, you know, I'm sorry to beat up on her exclusively. I can, I can move to other

00:22:42.060 names if you want, but I mean, she's, she's not, it's not, it's the reason that I don't,

00:22:48.280 the reason that I'm not inclined to discuss her isn't because I agree with what she's doing.

00:22:52.960 It's because I think the best way to deal with what she's doing is not to discuss her.

00:22:56.980 Notice her. Okay. But I could say the same thing about Tucker Carlson, right? And you might,

00:23:01.840 whether you agree with me or not, this is my view of him, that he's not in the truth-seeking

00:23:06.780 journalistic integrity business. He's in the, he's, he's got some other political project

00:23:12.000 that entails spreading a fair amount of misinformation quite cynically and, and, and consciously

00:23:17.680 and smearing lots of people. And in the case of, you know, I don't know how deep his anti-Semitism

00:23:23.600 runs, but in the case of, of that particular topic, midwifing a, a very misleading conversation

00:23:29.880 with an amateur historian who he considers the greatest historian working in America today,

00:23:36.140 Daryl Cooper, the podcaster. And, you know, the opinion expressed, again, this is like,

00:23:42.920 this is at the highest possible level in our information ecosystem to the largest audience.

00:23:47.680 You know, few historians in human history have ever had a bigger audience than Daryl Cooper had on

00:23:53.560 Tucker's podcast, and then quickly followed by his appearance on Joe Rogan's podcast, right?

00:23:58.700 And on that podcast, he spread the lie that, you know, the, the, the recycled, you know, David Irving

00:24:04.500 point that, you know, the Holocaust is not at all what it seemed and, you know, and you wouldn't believe

00:24:11.560 it, but the, the Nazis really never intended to kill the Jews. They just, they just rounded up so many

00:24:16.740 prisoners in their concentration camps and found that, that they just didn't have enough food during

00:24:21.080 winter to feed them. And they just were put in this just impossible situation. And, and might,

00:24:26.560 might it not seem more compassionate to euthanize these starving prisoners in the end,

00:24:31.300 right? I mean, that, that's how they, they, they, they accidentally stumbled into the final solution,

00:24:35.700 right? That's, that's what he spread again to the largest possible audience. And in Tucker's case,

00:24:42.580 you had a very, I would say, you know, sinister midwifing of, of that conversation. In Joe's case,

00:24:49.920 he just doesn't know when he's in the presence of recycled David Irving and is, and is just happy

00:24:56.160 to have a conversation with a podcaster of whom he's a great fan. And, but yet he's still culpable

00:25:02.900 for not having done enough homework to adequately push back about what's being said to his, again,

00:25:08.960 to his audience, which is the largest podcast audience on earth. So it's, it's journalistically,

00:25:15.580 and I know Joe doesn't consider himself a journalist. He's considered himself a comedian

00:25:19.260 who's just having fun conversations. Great. But what, what that is tantamount to at this moment,

00:25:25.080 especially in the context of the worst eruption of antisemitism we've ever seen in our lifetimes

00:25:30.840 globally, that's tantamount to taking absolutely no, no responsibility for the, the kind of

00:25:37.320 information that is flowing unrebutted into the ears of your audience, right? That's why I got angry

00:25:42.940 at, at Joe, right? And I love Joe. Joe is a great person. He's completely in over his head on topics

00:25:49.120 of that sort. And it has a consequence. It has an effect.

00:25:52.460 Well, you know, one of the, one of the problems, I suppose, in some ways, Sam, is that in this new

00:26:01.700 information landscape, we're all in over our heads. Yeah, but some of us are alert to that

00:26:09.160 possibility and worried about it and taking steps to course correct and, and notice our errors and

00:26:14.860 apologize for those errors. Okay. Okay. Well, let's, let's also, let's also try to make a distinction

00:26:20.000 here, you know, I'm, I mean, there is a distinction that's important to make between

00:26:26.340 accidentally wandering into pathological territory, you know, and, and causing disruption

00:26:35.080 because of the magnification of your voice. And there's a big difference between that and exploiting

00:26:43.520 the fringe for your own self-aggrandizement. And there's plenty of the latter online. And I'm,

00:26:52.860 I've been concerned for some substantial amount of time that online anonymity also drives that. I mean,

00:27:00.880 you talked about the utility of embodied interaction in separating the wheat from the chaff,

00:27:08.620 right? So one of the things you see online is, as you pointed out, if you have a crazy idea,

00:27:13.960 you can find 300 other people who have even a crazier idea of the same sort, and you can get

00:27:19.980 together with them, which you couldn't have done 20 years ago, because there's only one of them per

00:27:24.500 hundred thousand scattered all around the world, but they can aggregate together quite quickly online.

00:27:30.400 The, the, the places that females gather online, for example, are rife with that kind of pathology and 1.00

00:27:36.780 all sorts of psychogenic epidemics spread, um, without any barrier whatsoever in consequence,

00:27:44.460 because young women in particular are susceptible to psychogenic epidemics. And so that's a huge

00:27:50.760 problem. It's also the case that in real world conversation, um, if I'm talking to you, you know,

00:27:59.300 it's me and I have to live with the consequences of what I've said to you. Um, assuming we ever meet

00:28:06.020 again, and I have to live with the fact that other people hear about it as well, but if I'm, if I'm

00:28:10.760 anonymous, then I can say whatever the hell I want. I can gather the, um, the fruits of that, and I can

00:28:19.460 dispense with any of the responsibility. And so my sense is that online connectivity magnifies our voice

00:28:27.340 to a degree that it's virtually impossible to be responsible enough to conduct ourselves appropriately

00:28:34.640 because the reach is just so great. And anonymity, anonymity literally, um, gives the edge to the

00:28:44.920 psychopaths, predators, and the parasites. And this is a huge problem. You know, as a biologic, we could 0.98

00:28:50.580 think about it as biologists for a moment, Sam. I mean, I would say two things when the cost of

00:28:56.580 communication is zero, the parasites swarm the system, right? Because the communication is a resource

00:29:04.500 and abandoned resources attract parasites. And what is it now? 50% of internet communication is bots.

00:29:14.720 And a huge part of the reason for that is that communication is free, but it's not free, right?

00:29:19.720 Because you have to attend to it. It actually has a cost. So the price of free is the wrong price.

00:29:26.000 You know, let me give you an example of this. Just tell me what you think about this. You know,

00:29:31.080 one of the things I've done recently with my daughter and, and, and her husband, mostly,

00:29:37.980 and a bunch of professors is start this Peterson Academy. And we have an online social media

00:29:44.240 element to that, which tracks about 15,000 regular users. And we keep a pretty close eye on it.

00:29:53.480 And we refunded the money of 10 of our students, because they were causing trouble on the social

00:30:02.660 media platform. 10 out of 15,000. That's all. And it markedly improved in their absence.

00:30:10.900 And so, you know, there's, there's, there's an interesting dynamic there. You know,

00:30:15.960 we don't know what online anonymity does. We don't know what free communication does when the actual

00:30:22.600 price isn't zero. It's, it's certainly serves the parasites extraordinarily well. And we don't, 0.93

00:30:32.780 we, we are learning that bad information is easier to generate and spread than good information,

00:30:38.760 right? These, none of this is personal, right? None of this really, I know we've already talked

00:30:44.620 about the fact that all of this, all of this, what would you say, edgy conversation can be monetized

00:30:53.380 and used to attract attention towards bad actors. Let's leave that aside. I agree with that completely.

00:31:00.000 I think it's appalling, but there are structural problems here that are even deeper.

00:31:03.620 You know, and I think, well, anonymity is a huge problem, but then also I think, well,

00:31:09.440 what the hell are we going, what, what, what kind of world would we define and live in rapidly if

00:31:15.580 every bloody thing that you had to say online was verified with a digital identity? I mean,

00:31:21.220 they've taken a lot of steps in that direction in China. That doesn't look very good to me.

00:31:25.680 Well, I think the structural problems run even deeper because I agree with, I agree with everything

00:31:31.140 you said about the effect of free and the effect of anonymity. And I, you know, I draw two lessons

00:31:35.880 from your, your experience with your online forum. One is that having, having it behind a paywall

00:31:42.700 made it, made it much cleaner than it otherwise would have been. You only found 10 people you had

00:31:48.120 to kick out to clean the whole thing up. But the other point is that those 10 people can have,

00:31:54.280 really have an, an outsized toxic influence on a, on a, a larger culture. So, I mean, that's,

00:32:01.080 I think we, we want social media platforms that, that draw that kind of lesson, but it's not just

00:32:07.540 anonymity and it's not just, uh, people who are grifting or, you know, are otherwise incentivized to

00:32:13.960 be liars or, or, um, uh, spreaders of misinformation. There are people who, with reputations,

00:32:23.080 you, you would think they would want to protect. I mean, people with real, like the, the, the biggest

00:32:28.200 possible reputations and the biggest possible careers who in the presence of social, social media

00:32:35.320 have gone properly nuts. And I, I would, you know, put as patient zero for this, uh, contagion,

00:32:43.960 uh, Elon Musk, right? I mean, Elon has, you know, I've witnessed a complete unraveling

00:32:49.720 of the person I knew, and I believe I knew him fairly well, uh, under the pressure of

00:32:57.080 extraordinary fame and wealth, but, but really, you know, kind of weaponized by his addictive

00:33:04.040 entanglement with Twitter. I mean, he was so addicted to Twitter that he needed to buy it

00:33:09.200 so that he could just live there. Right. I mean, that, that was, Twitter was his whole life

00:33:14.480 before, uh, anyone heard about his impulse to, to buy it or anyone heard about his concern about the,

00:33:20.400 the, the woke mind virus. I mean, before COVID, he had gone off the deep end into, into Twitter

00:33:26.840 being everything. Um, how do you, how do you know this? Like, I'm not, I know, I know, I know this,

00:33:32.880 I know this because I was his friend at the time and I, um, I was there, you know, in his close,

00:33:43.360 very close social circle when, you know, Twitter was causing obvious problems for his life and his

00:33:49.360 businesses. When he would tweet, you know, you know, 420, you know, funding, funding secured,

00:33:55.120 um, right. You know, and the SEC, you know, raised his, raised the offices of Tesla and seizes

00:34:01.040 everyone's computer. Right. I mean, that, that was, he was get, he was, he was screwing up his life

00:34:05.960 through Twitter and yet it was unthinkable that he would get off of it. So, so potent a drug was it

00:34:14.160 for him. Let me ask you about that. Let's speak, think about this biologically again. One of the ways

00:34:21.020 you could define addiction is as the pursuit of positive emotion that's bound to us a very short

00:34:29.760 timeframe. So you get addicted when you optimize positive emotion over a very short timeframe.

00:34:35.980 So, so for example, um, the addictive propensity of cocaine is dependent on the dose, but also the

00:34:45.000 rate of administration. So the reason that snorted cocaine or injected cocaine is more potent than

00:34:52.420 the same dose of, um, um, like swallowed cocaine is because it crosses the blood brain barrier faster

00:34:59.160 and raises the dopaminergic pitch quicker. So there's a rate and, and also there's the, the, the, the reward

00:35:07.580 component appears to correlate subjectively not with the peak in, in actual pleasure of the, the, the resulting

00:35:18.160 stimulus, but in the peak of the expectation that the pleasure is about to arrive.

00:35:23.700 Yeah. Yeah. Well, the dopaminergic system is an expectation system and cocaine. Okay. So now,

00:35:29.180 so here's what we have with social media, with, with the bots, with the, with the AI algorithm

00:35:35.580 optimizers, right? So this is what's happening. You can see it happening to YouTube too, is that

00:35:39.940 the systems are optimized to grip attention, but the battle is for the, for shorter and shorter,

00:35:49.960 what would you say? For shorter and shorter durations of attentional focus. So the battle

00:35:56.120 is not only for attention, but for the shortest possible amount of information that will grip the

00:36:01.620 maximum amount of attention. Now the AI systems are using reinforcement learning to determine how to

00:36:08.520 optimize that. And that's driving that fragmentation. Like you can see it on YouTube

00:36:12.760 because YouTube is tilted more and more towards shorts like TikTok, right? These fragmentary bursts

00:36:19.500 of maximally attractive information. And they could capitalize on rage because rage has a positive

00:36:25.100 emotion element. Now I want to put this in, in, to the context of what you said about Twitter

00:36:29.780 and you and I could have a conversation about X and, and Twitter that's personal as well. So you said,

00:36:36.460 you know, Elon got hooked on X and, and, um, enough to buy it. And so let's, let's assess that

00:36:44.880 situationally and biologically. Now I've spent quite a bit of time on X. In fact, it's the social media

00:36:51.860 platform that I've used personally the most. It's the one I'm most familiar with. Um, and I would say

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00:38:15.980 Um, yeah. Hasn't it at various points, uh, convinced you that you should no longer use it?

00:38:20.760 Haven't you gotten on and off? Multiple times, multiple, multiple times, multiple times.

00:38:25.620 I learned that lesson exactly once, but it really did stick. I have not looked back.

00:38:29.960 Yeah. Well, that's partly what I want, that's partly what I want to talk, what I, what I want to talk to

00:38:33.420 you about. I mean, so part of it is, you know, I get a lot of my podcast guests and my ideas for

00:38:39.860 podcast guests from X from, because I follow about 2000 people, but, um, I'm very extroverted and

00:38:49.000 there's an element of impulsivity that goes along with extroversion. I'm very verbally fluent. And so

00:38:54.520 I can think up new ideas in no time flat and I'm likely to say them. And so it's very easy for me

00:39:01.400 if I'm on X to react to a lot of things. Yeah. And so foot, foot, meat, mouth. Well, that, but it's

00:39:10.300 weird. It's a weird thing because some of the things that some of my impulsive moves, so to speak,

00:39:17.000 which have got me in quite a lot of trouble, I'm not the least bit unhappy about, you know, um, I got,

00:39:24.320 you cannot believe how much flack I got for, um, tweeting out something arguably careless on October

00:39:32.900 8th. What was that? I, I, I, not being on Twitter, I'd never saw that. What was the, what was it?

00:39:39.940 I think I said, get, give him hell Netanyahu. Yeah. Yeah. Right. So that took like eight months 0.98

00:39:48.220 of cleanup work to deal with. Seriously. It was not, it was, and, and, but, but, but, but, and,

00:39:55.740 well, and I got kicked off X. Yeah. You're not going to get any dispute from me about that. I mean,

00:40:00.840 Netanyahu, just to, just to close the loop on that, Netanyahu is, is obviously a very polarizing

00:40:05.760 figure and probably a fairly corrupt figure. And he's, he's got lots of problems that have

00:40:11.400 implications for Israeli politics, but I'm not convinced that even the perfect prime minister

00:40:16.480 who has no optical problems, judge from our side, would have waged this war any differently. I mean,

00:40:23.140 I just don't, I don't know what, what they, they should have done differently, uh, at every stage

00:40:27.960 along the way. And I don't know that any other prime minister would have, uh, taken a different

00:40:31.980 path. Well, the situation to me looks like, and you tell me what you think about this and then

00:40:36.320 we'll go back to the, to the, to the problem of AI optimization of grip of short-term attention and

00:40:44.760 the manner in which X in particular falls into that category. So my sense with, with the situation

00:40:50.660 Israel was, has been right from the beginning that Iran in particular would and has set up the 0.99

00:40:59.640 situation. So if every single Palestinian was sacrificed in the most torturous possible manner

00:41:06.160 to irritate, annoy and destroy Israel and agitate the Americans, that would be 100% all right with 1.00

00:41:14.380 Iran. I think someone once said that the, the mullahs in Iran will fight Israel to the last Arab.

00:41:21.620 I think that's the line that I, yeah, yeah. Captures that. Yeah. Well, that's exactly, okay. That,

00:41:25.240 well, that's exactly, that's exactly how it looks to me. And so I look at that situation and I say,

00:41:30.060 well, I think, well, like what, what do you do in a situation like that? That's moral. If you're

00:41:36.440 Israel anyways, I don't want to go down that rabbit hole too deeply, but that's, but that's, yeah. Yeah. 1.00

00:41:41.660 Yeah. Well, but that, but okay. But so I've had this like complex relationship with X and some of it's

00:41:48.960 been real useful because I follow a lot of people there and I keep an eye on the main streams of the

00:41:53.920 culture and I extract out my podcast guests and I can see where the real pathology is emerging

00:41:59.600 and I can keep an eye on it. And the price of that is that, you know, now and then I stick my foot in

00:42:05.020 it in a major way. And sometimes that's good and sometimes it's not. And, and now I've sort of built

00:42:11.560 a variety of fences around me that are part of my organization that, you know, there are, there,

00:42:18.980 they're kind of these intermediary structures that we've been talking about that put a lag in

00:42:26.740 between what I read and how I respond, you know, well, that that's one, well, you know, and, and

00:42:33.260 this is part, it's the destruction of those things that we're starting to, you and I are starting to

00:42:38.680 talk about here because, you know, it's, there's never been a time in human history where you could

00:42:44.760 publish your first pass opinion about anything to 20 million people in one second, right? No one

00:42:54.760 could ever do that. And, and we're not, we're not, we're not neurologically constructed to live in a

00:43:03.180 world where you can yell at 10 million people whenever you want about anything.

00:43:08.640 Yeah. The problem for me is that, so what's happened now going back to this, this core topic

00:43:14.260 of, of what, what in particular is wrong with X and the time course at which people are reacting

00:43:21.700 to information and producing information in turn. Um, there's a lot wrong with that. And it's what,

00:43:30.740 what it's done to our culture and it was what it's done to specific people. I mean, I, again,

00:43:34.700 Elon for me is the, is the enormous, the, the 800 pound canary in the coal mine is that it has, 0.67

00:43:41.420 you know, it's effectively made them behave like psychopaths. I'm not saying that, I mean,

00:43:46.980 if you look, if you just look at X and this is what, what convinced me to get off of it, you,

00:43:51.560 you would think there were many more psychopaths in the world than there are. In fact, I was seeing

00:43:56.980 people who I knew in any, every other context would be psychologically normal or at least normal

00:44:03.260 enough behave like a psychopaths to me, toward me, in front of me. Uh, and in some cases,

00:44:10.820 these are people I actually knew. There's some people I, in some cases I, the people I had,

00:44:14.000 had dinner with and I knew what I was seeing on X was, was, was, would have been impossible

00:44:20.680 across the table from me at dinner. Um, right, right, right. And so that's, that's an interesting,

00:44:27.860 interesting definition of, of a pathological sub-environment, isn't it? Like you can tell

00:44:33.620 a family is pathological when the rules that apply in the family don't generalize to the outside world.

00:44:41.380 And, and you're, you're, you're making, you're, you're pointing out that the, the game dynamics of

00:44:47.660 Twitter have that aspect. Yeah.

00:44:51.360 It's that the game that's being played in Twitter doesn't suit the world well. It's not an iterable

00:44:58.000 game in the world. And, and, and it, it could easily be the fact that it maximizes for short-term

00:45:04.140 emotional reactivity is exactly what gives it that psychopathic edge, because the definition of a

00:45:11.920 psychopath in many ways is the person who will sacrifice the future and you for immediate

00:45:18.280 gratification, right? That, that, that's the pathology of the, of psychopathy is a form of

00:45:25.280 extended immaturity. Yeah. Well, there, there, there's a lot of aggressive immaturity on display

00:45:31.460 on X. And again, Elon is one of the primary offenders. I mean, so I mean, the, the, the one

00:45:37.680 instance for me that made this especially clear and the, and the role played by X especially clear

00:45:44.640 was when he, um, when he jumped up on stage during one of these, these campaign events,

00:45:49.960 or I forget if it was campaign or, or, um, I guess the, uh, the, the election already been

00:45:55.660 won, but some, some event with Trump and Elon, you know, quite famously, quite infamously did

00:46:01.640 what prepared, appeared to be a Nazi salute twice to the crowd, um, and got a reaction from

00:46:09.640 much of the world of, of, of horror and, and, um, uh, insult. And now, honestly, you know,

00:46:17.380 as his former friend and as somebody who just imagines he, he, his worldview has not, you

00:46:22.980 know, fully, um, uh, disintegrated into, um, uh, a tissue of, of, uh, weird internet memes.

00:46:31.240 Um, it's, it was impossible for me to believe that he was sincerely announcing his, his solidarity

00:46:40.820 to, to, to, with the project of Nazism by, by making those salutes, right? So I, I didn't

00:46:46.220 view those as Nazi salutes, even though just ergonomically they were in fact Nazi salutes.

00:46:53.200 Um, I just thought, okay, I don't know what he's doing, but the idea that he's picking this

00:46:58.820 moment to say, I'm a Nazi seems frankly impossible. So, um, uh, I was, I was interested to see what

00:47:07.600 he was going to do in response to the controversy, what he did in response. I mean, and, and again,

00:47:12.660 this controversy is coming in a, in a context that doesn't look at all good for my very, um,

00:47:20.420 charitable interpretation of his behavior, because it's in a context where he's funding the far

00:47:25.100 right party in Germany, uh, assuring us that there's absolutely nothing wrong with that

00:47:30.200 party. Whereas the party does in fact contain whatever Nazis there are to be contained in

00:47:35.180 Germany. Uh, not that it's only a Nazi party, but it is in addition to everything else. It's 0.66

00:47:39.780 got the Nazis. Um, it's, uh, he's, he's playing footsie with lots of, you know, fairly, um, aggressive

00:47:49.380 anti-Semites on his own platform. He's with great fanfare. He had brought back Nick Fuentes and Kanye

00:47:55.160 and these people are, you know, anti-Semites, if not actual Nazis. Um, so he's, he, he is facilitating

00:48:03.960 a very unhappy, uh, recrudescence of anti-Semitism on the platform he owns. Uh, and now he's doing Nazi 0.64

00:48:13.640 salutes in public. So what is a, what is a genuinely not, not anti-Semitic well-intentioned

00:48:21.460 person who cares about his reputation and is still capable of embarrassment do in the aftermath of

00:48:27.600 this? Well, it would have been just trivially easy for him to have said something totally sensible,

00:48:35.100 uh, and, and apologetic that would, would have been honest and would have taken the sting out

00:48:42.780 of the moment perfectly. He could have said, listen, I know how that looked. I don't know what

00:48:47.480 I was doing up there. I was just, you know, captured by the energy of the moment. Obviously

00:48:51.840 I was not doing a Hitler salute. I'm not a Nazi. I've got no, uh, no interest in, in amplifying

00:48:59.520 their message on X or anywhere else. If you're a Nazi, please don't follow me. I hate your whole

00:49:04.560 project. Uh, you're completely, you're completely wrong about everything, right? End of tweet, right?

00:49:10.220 He did nothing like that. All he did was troll his audience, making Nazi jokes and puns on

00:49:18.540 X that I, so you can fault his character for that. But what, but what I also think we should

00:49:25.260 fault is the medium itself, right? This is the way his brain is conforming to the technology.

00:49:32.280 Yes. Well, look, you, you know, you know, the fundamental attribution error is like the

00:49:38.440 one thing social psychologists have discovered that's actually valid. That's a bit of an

00:49:43.240 exaggeration, but, but the fundamental attribution, yes, a dozen things. The fundamental attribution

00:49:50.020 or error is the proclivity to attribute to character what's actually a consequence of

00:49:54.600 the situation. You know, in these, we, we should be very careful. And I think we are at the moment,

00:50:00.240 be very careful to assure that our first presumption is that it's the pathology of the technology.

00:50:06.080 That's the fundamental driver. And that people are swept along in it.

00:50:10.500 That's, that's my account of what has happened to Elon almost in its entirety. I think, I think,

00:50:17.260 you know, Twitter has, you know, he, he is the, the, the greatest living casualty of what Twitter does

00:50:25.300 to someone who becomes properly engorged by it. And that's, yeah. So, but what, and, and one of the

00:50:33.740 reasons why I got off, frankly, was apart from my own misadventures on the platform, which were

00:50:38.260 nothing like Elon's, I, I looked in the kind of the funhouse mirror of what was happening to him

00:50:47.020 in his life. And I thought, you know, here's a, here's a very smart guy who's got much better

00:50:52.140 things to do than fuck up his life in this way. And yet he can't seem to stop. How much, how much 0.80

00:50:59.020 am I like him? How much, how much is there this component of addiction and dysregulation and, and

00:51:05.280 failures of impulse control and a need to just, you know, get, get my thoughts out on a time course

00:51:13.260 of seconds rather than more carefully, you know, over the course of days. I mean, cause it was so,

00:51:19.960 and, and, and, and so then I yanked it for that reason. And the one thing I found is that when you

00:51:24.260 don't have it as an outlet, right, when you literally can't publish that quickly, then things have to

00:51:31.320 survive a much larger informational half-life. So then there's this thing online that happened that

00:51:38.140 I'm tempted to react to, it has to survive until I do my next podcast, which might not be for three

00:51:44.020 or four days. Right. And so, and, and, and, you know, obviously 90% of the things I thought I had

00:51:49.120 to react to don't survive that, that time course. Yeah. You know, I made a deal with my wife

00:51:54.220 going sideways, I think with a fair degree of accuracy and that disrupts me emotionally now and

00:52:10.140 then. And I made a deal with my wife several years ago that I can't complain about anything I won't

00:52:17.460 write about. Right. Well, that's, well, it's the same thing and it, it bears on the same issue that

00:52:24.660 you're describing is that if it's not important enough to, to write about, then you should ignore

00:52:34.260 it. Right. You're not actually, it's not significant enough. It's not significant enough to sacrifice some

00:52:41.780 genuine time and thought. You, you shouldn't be commenting on it. And that, that's, that's,

00:52:49.380 that's kind of a maturity, but it's also, it's a, it's a weird thing because it's not exactly like,

00:52:57.500 it isn't something that people had to contend with previously because you couldn't publish

00:53:02.200 immediately. There was, there were barriers of cost and difficulty and gatekeepers and, and distribution.

00:53:09.320 And so that wasn't something you had to think up for yourself. Like, how do I put a lag in my life

00:53:16.900 before I communicate with a million people or 5 million people? And so you're, you're basically

00:53:22.360 building these inhibitory structures out of whole cloth. And, and now you, you pulled out of Twitter

00:53:31.300 a long, quite a while ago now, it's a couple of years ago. Yeah. Right. Okay. So two and a half

00:53:37.220 years, something like that. Yeah. Well, it was actually, it was actually right when Elon took it

00:53:40.720 over, but it wasn't because he took it over. I mean, that, the timing there was, was fairly

00:53:45.360 accidental. I was, I was getting ready to pull the plug. And then I just saw how much chaos was being

00:53:52.920 introduced into his life around it. And I just thought, all right, this is, this is a sign.

00:53:56.680 And so I, I yanked it. And I mean, one of the benefits, apart from just this introducing this

00:54:06.080 different time course into my life by which I, I interact with information, I just don't like,

00:54:13.300 you know, there's this, there's this phrase, you know, that Twitter isn't real life. And then

00:54:17.300 at a certain point, many of us realize, okay, that's, that's too sanguine a thought because

00:54:23.080 we're noticing people get, you know, losing their reputation so fully that, you know,

00:54:27.000 they get on an airplane, like the, I think it was the Justine Sacco incident where she got on an

00:54:31.020 airplane and then half the world was tweeting about her and she, she arrived and at her destination

00:54:35.620 only to find that she had been properly canceled and lost her job, et cetera, et cetera. Um, so,

00:54:41.020 so obviously Twitter can, you know, whether you're on it or not, it can, it can,

00:54:44.160 under the right circumstances or the wrong ones become real life. But the truth is given the

00:54:49.580 platform I've built, given the, the, I mean, I just frankly, how lucky I've been to find an

00:54:54.400 audience and to build up, you know, a readership and a podcast listenership, Twitter really isn't

00:54:59.660 real life for me. Right. And like, I, I, like I'm still, Elon still attacks me on Twitter by name.

00:55:04.640 And I find out I'm trending on Twitter, you know, years after I've left and it matters not at all for

00:55:11.060 my life. It matters not at all for my business. Nothing happens. Right. And yet if I were on Twitter,

00:55:17.620 there would be this illusion of emergency, right? If I was on there looking at it and looking at the,

00:55:24.360 you know, looking at the biggest, literally the biggest bully on Twitter has just punched me in

00:55:28.680 the face and I'm seeing the aftermath of it, the temptation to respond to that and to make it to,

00:55:35.780 and to, and to feel that not only do I have to respond there, but I have to respond on my podcast.

00:55:40.020 And, and then now this is how I'm spending my week because this thing just happened on Twitter.

00:55:44.320 Um, it would be almost impossible not to be taken in by that and not to, not to be just convinced of

00:55:52.320 the necessity of it because all of this is really important. I mean, we're talking about millions of

00:55:57.420 people. Like, I mean, like literally there, there, there are videos, um, denigrating me for things I've

00:56:05.360 never said or believed that Elon has amplified and these videos have 50 million views. Right. And I'm,

00:56:13.580 I just happened to be lucky enough to have built a life and a career where that matters not at all.

00:56:19.100 Right. But for somebody else finding themselves in that situation, I can, I can well imagine, all right,

00:56:25.700 this is just, this is the destruction of my reputation in a way that matters. And.

00:56:29.680 Well, that's what it looks like. Sure. And, and like you said, it's virtually impossible to, to, to resist

00:56:36.640 that temptation. I mean, who are you to deny the, um, impact of the opinion of 50 million people? You know what I

00:56:44.960 mean? I mean, it, that, that looks like an insane pride in a way to ignore that. But the point that you're making

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00:58:17.140 Well, it's very easy to ignore it when it actually isn't making contact with my views.

00:58:24.700 Right? It's like if I had said something—

00:58:25.440 Right, but it's hard to see that it isn't, like, because it's so—it appears so powerful.

00:58:30.440 You know, we've found as a social media platform that Twitter is the worst of all social media

00:58:37.460 platforms for sales conversion.

00:58:39.860 Yeah, I can imagine.

00:58:41.160 In our experience.

00:58:41.920 That's because you're next to some, you know, somebody getting beaten to death in a liquor

00:58:48.480 store. I mean, like, when I go on Twitter, since I don't have an account, I'm not, you know, so I

00:58:53.640 have a naive account. It's not following anyone, and I almost never click anything. So I really see

00:58:59.460 this pure algorithm when you just kind of just look at the homepage scroll and—or as pure as it gets.

00:59:05.980 I mean, maybe it's got some information on me based on my, you know, IP address or something. But

00:59:10.220 if I ask myself, what is this algorithm trying to get me to be or to believe? 1.00

00:59:17.180 Honestly, I can tell you that it is trying to get me to be a racist asshole, right? And a fan of 1.00

00:59:25.820 Elon's, right? So it's given me a lot of Elon, and then it's given me a lot of, like, black teenagers 1.00

00:59:32.060 beating up white—you know, a single white teenager or people of color robbing stores and getting shot 1.00

00:59:39.040 in the face. I mean, it's just, like, 4chan-level awfulness, and then the occasional, you know, 0.98

00:59:46.000 unlucky brand advertising to me in that context. I mean, it's just—it's a monstrosity of a platform

00:59:53.200 from which to actually try to sell things. So it's—but yes, if I were on Twitter following 2,000 smart

01:00:03.680 people as you are and feeling that they are curating for me, you know, the best of their

01:00:11.680 information diet, I would have a—I know what that experience is like, because that's what I was

01:00:15.680 doing. That's why I was on it for, whatever, 12 years and couldn't convince myself to get off it.

01:00:20.400 It seemed like a professional necessity. It seems—it seemed so good in the sense—the incoming stuff was

01:00:28.160 so good because, again, I had chosen who to follow, and all these people were reading great articles and

01:00:33.120 forwarding them and having great short takes on them. And it was—all that stuff was great, but I

01:00:38.400 have managed to get a surrogate of that in the way I find information otherwise. And what I don't have

01:00:49.360 is the emergency. Like, I mean, the ruined vacation where somebody, you know, like somebody, some genius

01:00:55.440 over at the New York Times has called me a racist, and now I have to, you know, spend the rest of my

01:01:02.080 vacation with my family trying to figure out how to respond to this. I've tweeted back at them and

01:01:09.760 blah, blah, blah, blah. It's escalated, and now we've just nuked each other. And—

01:01:15.360 And it looks real.

01:01:17.040 Yeah, it looks real, but it feels real, and it is real if you spend your time that way. I mean,

01:01:22.160 that's the thing. If you spend your time that way, which I did for years, it is real. It is the

01:01:27.840 substance of your life. It is the manner in which you—it's the thing you bring back to the

01:01:33.040 conversation with your wife, you know, five minutes later, or five hours later, more likely.

01:01:38.480 And it's in your head. And just, it was a ghastly use of attention. That's what I finally realized.

01:01:47.200 Well, you made an illusion when you were talking about what you regard as the unfortunate effect of

01:01:53.840 X on Elon and maybe on other users, so let's assume that, that you were afraid that the sort of things

01:02:03.040 that you were seeing happening to others, more than merely Elon, let's say, in your estimation,

01:02:10.160 were also happening to you. And so, what do you think, in retrospect, what do you think it was doing

01:02:19.440 to you? You just talked about the effects on your family on vacations. I've experienced a fair bit

01:02:24.960 of that. I understand exactly what you're saying. And it does seem like the world's burning, and you

01:02:30.160 better do something about it right now. And it's no wonder it seems that way, because it's lots of

01:02:35.600 people, and generally in our normative ecosystems, if lots of people appear to be upset with you or

01:02:43.440 around you, you should pay attention. But Twitter isn't the real world. We don't know what the hell it is,

01:02:49.120 you know? It looks more and more like a world of demonic bots, and God only knows what that world is.

01:02:54.560 But what did you see, especially now that you've been away for a while, what elements of your

01:03:01.520 character do you think were pathologized and that were brought to the forefront? Because of this.

01:03:09.440 Yeah, I considered myself a fairly careful user of it. I mean, I was not at all like Elon. I was

01:03:17.520 not addicted to it in that way. I was not tweeting hundreds of times a day. I think I averaged something

01:03:24.480 like three tweets a day over the course of my use of it. And that would come in spurts. I mean,

01:03:30.880 so I would not tweet for three days and then send out a dozen tweets, you know, because it was some hot

01:03:36.720 topic. I was always fairly careful so that I, I honestly don't think I ever said anything on the

01:03:46.240 platform that I regretted, right? I mean, if I ever made a mistake, I apologize for it. But I was,

01:03:51.520 I never, you know, I treated it like writing. I treat, I was aware I was publishing in that channel,

01:03:58.320 however quickly and impulsively I was, you know, I'm a much, I'm enough of a writer and an academic

01:04:05.520 to feel like, okay, this is yet another occasion where embarrassment is possible and you don't want

01:04:10.160 that. So I never, I'm not, I don't remember ever really screwing up on the platform. And yet what

01:04:19.040 happened there was, I mean, I can honestly say that for a decade, the worst things in my life,

01:04:28.000 and in some sense, the only bad things in my life came from Twitter, came from my interaction with

01:04:34.320 Twitter. I mean, apart from like a family, you know, family illnesses, you know, that's leaving

01:04:39.040 something, leaving that aside. My life was so good. And yet I had this, you know, digital serpent

01:04:47.520 in my pocket that I would consult a dozen times a day, 20 times a day, maybe 100 times a day. So I,

01:04:54.240 again, I might've only posted once or twice, but if something was really, you know, if the news cycle

01:05:00.320 was really churning, I might be looking at this, this, this, my consulting of this, this news feed,

01:05:06.480 effectively, um, was interrupting my day, you know, not just every hour, but maybe every five

01:05:14.960 minutes of many hours, right. Or for 10 minutes of that hour. And, and, um, so it was segmenting

01:05:22.080 my day, however good that or productive that day was, or should have been, I was constantly chopping

01:05:29.440 it up by how I was engaging with this scroll. Um, again, mostly consuming, but, you know,

01:05:34.960 often in response to the one or two things I had put out. Um, yes, there was a dopaminergic, uh,

01:05:40.960 component to that. Obviously, you know, I said something that I thought was clever,

01:05:44.080 that was perceived as clever by my fans, you know, and perhaps to the detriment of my enemies. And,

01:05:49.360 you know, that, all of that seemed, you know, exactly what it, what I wanted in the moment,

01:05:53.840 but even when it was at its best, right. Even when there was just good information coming to me and

01:06:01.520 I was responding happily with good information back, even the, even the non-toxic version of it

01:06:09.920 was a, a style of, of, of, was frag, was, was intrinsically fragmenting of my life. You know,

01:06:18.320 it's like, I, I, like, I don't pick up, I don't, I don't read a book that way. I don't,

01:06:21.520 I don't have a book that I pick up for two and a half minutes and then I put down and then try to

01:06:27.200 have a conversation with my kid and then say, okay, hold on one second and pick up the book again.

01:06:31.680 It's like, that's not how you, that's not, not how anyone reads a book. Right. Um, and yet Twitter,

01:06:38.800 far too often became that sort of thing in my life. Right. Right. And it's like a parasite.

01:06:43.920 It's like, it parasitizes the exploratory, um, instinct. It's something like that. Right.

01:06:50.160 Because, and, and maybe, look, you know, for a long time, I didn't have a, a cell phone. I was

01:06:58.800 a late adopter of cell phones and I didn't watch the news probably really from like 1985 till about

01:07:06.480 2005. I had cut myself off from news sources. I didn't read newspapers. And the reason that I didn't

01:07:13.920 do that was because I realized. A few things happened in there. Did you catch 9-11? Did that,

01:07:17.840 did you miss that? Well, the, you know, I used to read, for example, I would read some credible

01:07:22.880 magazines like The Economist when, when I still was credible because I don't really think it is

01:07:27.520 anymore. But wasn't that amazing? Isn't it amazing to consider that magazines like Time and Newsweek

01:07:33.280 and they could, could wait a week, like could expect that their audience would wait a week

01:07:39.360 to be informed about the news of that week? That just seems extraordinary to me now.

01:07:43.440 Well, well, well, the, my conclusion about that was that if it isn't important in a week,

01:07:49.520 Yeah. It's not important. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Right. And so, and so I substituted these longer

01:07:56.800 lag time news aggregators for TV in particular, or radio. It's like, if it's today's news, it's not news.

01:08:06.080 Maybe if it's not important in a month, it's not news. Right. And that's part of that, that,

01:08:10.800 that intelligent filtering. And I guess part of the reason that X is dangerous and social media is

01:08:19.040 dangerous, X in particular, is that, you know, that proclivity to forage for information is an,

01:08:28.560 is in general an extremely useful instinct, right? It's the instinct to learn.

01:08:33.360 But what, what we're learning, you might say that the shorter the period of time over which the

01:08:40.480 information is relevant, the more like pseudo information it is. And so then any system that

01:08:48.160 optimizes for the grip of short term attention is going to parasitize your learning instinct with

01:08:55.840 pseudo information. Yeah. So it's also the algorithms are going to maximize that.

01:09:00.720 The half-life is one thing, but also the, the culture that, that is informing these algorithms,

01:09:07.360 you know, that the, the, the actual human behavior that the algorithms are, are, you know, skimming and,

01:09:13.280 and, and, and boosting is increasingly a, a, a bad faith style of conversation. I mean, it's just people

01:09:23.360 are so many people, especially the anonymous people are, are in the misinformation business. I mean,

01:09:29.760 they will just cut together a clip that is designed to mislead. And that is the clip that will get

01:09:37.040 spread to the ends of the earth. Well, it's maybe, is it designed to mislead or is it designed to

01:09:43.280 optimize their particular grip on short term attention for their own grad, for their own

01:09:49.200 aggrandizement? Like that, like the, the psychopathic move. And let's say that it's facilitated by these

01:09:55.840 short term attention aggregators that are, that, that, that are driven by bots that are learning how to do

01:10:04.000 this. The, like the psychopathic proclivity, the narcissistic proclivity is going to say whatever puts

01:10:10.880 you at the center of attention, whatever it is. Now, if you're governed by some kind of ethos that is

01:10:18.960 outside of attention seeking, then that's a different story. But the game, if the game is that

01:10:29.040 the machine optimizes for short term attention, then it's going to reward all the players that are doing

01:10:35.200 whatever it takes to grip short term attention. Yeah. But, but the thing is, but people, you know,

01:10:41.520 whatever it takes though, is to get somebody seeming to say something totally outrageous.

01:10:48.880 And in context, in context, it might've made perfect sense, but, or at least be, be a very

01:10:55.520 different point than the one that's being advertised by the clip. But the clip, shorn of context, is just,

01:11:02.560 is calculated to, to mislead in that the, the, the person who has edited that clip knows that

01:11:09.840 the, the naive viewer is, can only draw one conclusion from the, from the, the utterance as presented.

01:11:16.880 Right. And, and, and they're not, and that not, even if they're, you know, well-intentioned and

01:11:21.200 fairly alert, alert to this problem, almost no one is going to go back to the original podcast and

01:11:27.920 look at the, the, the comment in context. I mean, this just happened to, to Rogan, I believe, I think

01:11:33.120 he had Bono the, you know, the singer for U2, U2 on his, um, podcast. And, um, uh, Bono said something

01:11:43.840 critical of Elon, I believe. And this got chopped up in a clip that was just, it made it look like

01:11:50.800 Joe really disagreed with Bono and, and was, and was critical of him. And, and so, and the clip just

01:11:57.760 got exported as like, look at, you know, look at Bono getting owned by Joe Rogan or whatever. But

01:12:03.360 that's not what, that's not what the conversation was at all. Right. Like, like, like Joe conceded,

01:12:07.920 you know, had most, most of the point that, that Bono was making. Um, it was just, it was false. It was,

01:12:14.000 it was a false picture of what happened there. And the, the person who makes that clip just knows that,

01:12:20.240 that if, if they, if they frame it as a, as a smackdown, people are going to love to see that.

01:12:25.840 And it doesn't matter that they're lying about what happened and, and damaging people's reputations

01:12:30.720 in the process. Yeah. Well, and that's especially true if they're anonymous and their reputation bears

01:12:36.480 no consequence of their lies. You know, well, the other thing that's happening, I don't know how much

01:12:41.520 this is happening to you, but, and this is another example of the parasite problem. So increasingly,

01:12:49.440 um, my voice and my image are being used, not exactly in the way that you're describing,

01:12:58.240 although that's happening a lot. Yeah. I'm selling, I'm selling cognitive

01:13:01.920 enhancers somewhere as an AI version of myself. Okay. Okay. Well, that, that's happening a fair

01:13:08.240 bit too. And, and sometimes worse than cognitive enhancers, but it's the worst thing that's happening

01:13:13.520 now is that these sites that are operating under my name, using my image and my voice are providing

01:13:26.160 pseudo philosophical content and pseudo psychological insight as if it's me. And so it's, it's, it's,

01:13:37.120 it's, it's like what I've said has been put through a filter of stupidity and reorganized in my voice. 0.99

01:13:47.280 And this is happening constantly. Like YouTube has already taken 65 channels down that are doing this. 0.97

01:13:56.320 And so this is another example of that parasite problem, right? You store up a reputation and then

01:14:03.120 the parasite swoop in and pull off the attention that the reputation has garnered and monetize it.

01:14:11.680 And they can escape into the ether because they do it anonymously. And so like this is going to become

01:14:17.280 a stunning problem. I mean, it's, it's, it's a big problem. I can see that it, you know, the,

01:14:23.520 the perfect version of it is, is at most a year away. I mean, it might only be a couple of months

01:14:28.880 away. We've experimented with this on our side too. Just like, for instance, in my meditation app,

01:14:36.400 waking up, we're now experimenting with translation to other languages. And, you know,

01:14:41.440 they've got, AI has got me speaking 22 languages perfectly in my voice. And it really sounds like

01:14:47.920 me speaking those languages. And the translation from what we can tell so far is, is fairly impeccable.

01:14:54.400 So we're going to roll out a, you know, a Spanish version of the app, uh, in the not too distant

01:14:58.800 future just to see what happens. But it's like, it's, it's, it's getting, it's getting too good.

01:15:04.240 So I think what the, the, the lesson that, that, that consumers of information who care to have real

01:15:11.680 information are going to have to learn is that you can't trust if you're, if you're looking at Jordan

01:15:16.960 Peterson on YouTube, you simply cannot trust that it really is Jordan Peterson, unless it's coming

01:15:26.000 through one of one channel that, you know, you can trust, which is so no, we're back to the age of

01:15:31.600 gate. Ironically, we're back to the age of gatekeepers, right? It's not on your channel or Joe Rogan's

01:15:38.480 channel or, you know, Chris Williamson's channel. Uh, if it just purports to be them, but on somebody

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01:16:28.780 delivered. Yeah. Well, it might also be Sam that the real solution to that is payment. Like if it's,

01:16:38.400 the rule is going to be, maybe this is the rule, the rule is going to be, if it's free, right. If it's free,

01:16:45.280 it's a lie. Right. Yeah. That's the world we're rapidly moving into. And, and, or if it's.

01:16:51.900 Except someone's going to be able to create, I mean, until you find them and stop them, someone will create

01:16:57.620 the fake Jordan Peterson Academy that has a paywall, right? That looks like you, sounds like you. And,

01:17:05.580 you know, it's only, it's only $5 a month. Uh, and so they'll, they'll monetize that way and that'll,

01:17:11.240 that'll still be the problem. Has that been happening with your, with your meditation app,

01:17:16.220 with your, with your enterprise yet? Not, not that I'm aware of. No. I mean, I just think, uh,

01:17:21.780 I'm just aware of seeing short clips of me seeming to, to hawk, uh, you know, psychotropics that,

01:17:31.080 that, uh, I, I've never heard of. Um, and that's just an AI version of my voice. It's real footage

01:17:37.100 of me stolen from somebody's podcast and then an AI, uh, work over of that, you know, that turns

01:17:44.860 into an, like an Instagram ad. Yeah. Well, I talked to some lawmakers in DC about a year and a half ago

01:17:51.580 about the fact that this was going to happen, hoping that they would, well, it takes a long time

01:17:56.720 to take notice and, and takes action. But, you know, it's essentially the digital, it's the digital

01:18:02.820 equivalent of kidnapping. Like, I think people should, people should be put in prison for a long

01:18:07.500 time for stealing your digital identity and monetizing it. Like it is very much akin to

01:18:13.620 kidnapping because what they're doing is they're draining the value out of your reputation.

01:18:20.640 That's essentially the game, you know? And so, so what, what's happened to your life? You,

01:18:26.120 you, you, you, you, you, there's a couple of, there's a couple of things I'd like to investigate

01:18:30.460 here first. You know, the, the first I said, I'd like to return to something that you and I talked

01:18:35.000 about that, that we beat, that we wandered around a fair bit in our previous conversations. You know,

01:18:41.820 you had, um, partly because you were concerned about the distinction between good and evil,

01:18:48.100 and don't let me put words into your mouth, you were hoping to find a, um, objective basis for

01:18:55.340 morality, a way of grounding morality in, in, in the objective world. And I have a thought about

01:19:00.400 that that's relevant to our current conversation. You know, so tell me if you accept this proposition.

01:19:07.600 Part of the pathology of Twitter is that it operates by game rules that not only don't apply

01:19:15.260 in the real world, but that when exported to the real world, pathologize it. Is that fair?

01:19:20.660 Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So, so, okay. Okay. Right. Okay. So, so here's a way of, of, I think,

01:19:28.020 bridging the, a gap between the way you've been thinking about the world

01:19:31.780 from the moral perspective and the way I've been thinking about it. So, you know, I've always been,

01:19:40.220 I've understood that you had a very deep concern about moral judgment and that your attempt to

01:19:54.180 provide a scaffolding of objectivity for morality was grounded in that even deeper concern. And I

01:20:02.180 thought that I could understand why you did that. And I, I didn't agree with the conclusions that you

01:20:08.580 had drawn, but I agreed with the overall enterprise and it struck me recently. And I think we've already

01:20:18.840 obliquely made reference to the, to it in our conversation, that there's another way of

01:20:25.300 conceptualizing this relationship between morality and objective fact. And that it, that might be,

01:20:34.640 it might be more fruitful to, to look into the realm of something like, well, it's like theory of

01:20:42.140 iterability. It's, and generalizability. It's, it's maybe a variant of something like game theory.

01:20:50.480 Like imagine that. So let me give you an example, Sam. And it's a pretty famous example. You know,

01:20:56.280 those trading games where behavioral economists sit people down and say, two people, they say,

01:21:02.180 I'll give you a hundred dollars. You have to make an offer to the, okay. Yeah. So the finding across

01:21:07.960 culturally is that people generally approximate a 50%, 50, 50 split, right? Yeah. And they're,

01:21:16.060 and they're highly, they're, they're, they're not game theoretic with respect to unfair trades. Like

01:21:22.440 they don't want, they don't want to accept unfair trades, even when it would just narrowly be to their

01:21:27.160 advantage to accept them. Exactly. Exactly. Okay. Okay. And that's true, even if they're poor. So if,

01:21:33.440 if you put a poor person in a situation where they have to accept an unfair trade, that would be to

01:21:39.080 their immediate economic benefit. They seem even less likely to accept it. Now, the, I think the right

01:21:44.940 way to construe that is that if you and I engage in an economic trade, we're doing two things at the

01:21:50.680 same time. The first is what the classical economists would say is we're trying to maximize our short,

01:21:58.400 our gain, let's say. But the problem with that notion is that we aren't playing one game or while

01:22:06.900 we're playing one game, we're also setting ourselves up to play a very large and unpredictable sequence

01:22:12.460 of games. Those are happening at the same time. And so we don't want to just optimize for gain in the

01:22:18.440 single game. We want to optimize our status as players in a large series of unpredictable gains,

01:22:25.380 games. And so we want to put ourselves forward as fair players so that people line up to play other

01:22:31.920 games with us. Okay. So then imagine that the hallmark of morality is something like

01:22:41.300 generalizable iterability across contexts. Right? Because this would allow for, and so you could

01:22:51.620 think about a truly moral system is the most playable game. And an immoral system augurs in.

01:22:59.520 And like when we've seen, we're talking about this to some degree with regard to X, because our

01:23:04.880 proposition is that fundamentally, because it's optimizing for short-term attention grip, and it

01:23:12.020 benefits the psychopaths and the short-term gain accruers, the parasites, and perhaps the predators,

01:23:20.000 that it's fundamentally a non-playable game. And that if its consequences generalize outside the world of

01:23:28.000 X, that it pathologizes the environment. And the reason for that is it's not optimally iterable.

01:23:33.920 And so the pattern of object, the pattern of morality that would be grounded in the objective

01:23:39.000 world isn't in the world of objective fact. It's in the world of optimized iterability across people

01:23:46.180 and contexts. Well, I would just say that there are some set of objective facts that subsumes that

01:23:53.460 picture, right? I mean, the world is the way it is. The social world of social primates such as

01:24:00.780 ourselves is the way it is. It admits of certain possibilities, and certain other things are

01:24:06.020 impossible, given the kinds of minds we have. Our minds could change in all kinds of ways. They

01:24:10.900 could change by being integrated with technology. They could change by, you know, genetically being

01:24:16.800 manipulated at some point in the future. There's this landscape of possible experience that the right

01:24:24.620 sort of minds could navigate. And we're someplace on that landscape, and we're trying to find our way.

01:24:31.300 And so I view morality as a, at bottom, a navigation problem, right? And it's got this iterative quality

01:24:37.360 that you describe. It's, the question is, it's always, you know, where can we go from here? Where

01:24:45.720 should we go from here? Where should we go from here, given all the possible places we might go from

01:24:51.760 here, both individually and collectively? Okay. Well, you know, the reason that I got obsessed with

01:24:57.900 stories to begin with, Sam, was because I realized 30 years ago that a story was a description of a

01:25:08.940 navigation strategy. That's what a story is. And so then the question is, okay, let's see if we can

01:25:18.420 formalize this a bit more. The story has to, let's say an optimized story has to iterate and improve.

01:25:28.220 So for example, if you construe your marriage properly, it exists stably, but that's not as

01:25:37.360 good as it could get. It could exist stably and improve as it iterates. And then you can imagine

01:25:43.720 that there's a small world of games that are playable in the actual natural and social world

01:25:51.440 that improve as they iterate. And those are, those games, pointers to that game, those games are moral

01:25:59.720 pointers. And I think that that's what the core of the religious enterprise dives into and elaborates

01:26:09.200 upon. I think that's what makes it the religious enterprise is that it deeply assesses. So, I mean,

01:26:17.680 if you imagine this, imagine that your proposition, the proposition you laid out is accurate, is that

01:26:23.780 the fundamental concern is navigation. How do we get from point A to point B? Well, a story, you can

01:26:33.600 think about this and tell me what you think, but I believe that a story is a description of a navigation

01:26:38.220 strategy. If you go see a movie, you infer the aim of the protagonist and you adopt his perceptual

01:26:45.940 frame and his emotional perspective. That's how perception works. And then you can imagine that there

01:26:51.620 are depths of games. Some are shallow and short-term games that maximize for short-term gain and to hell

01:27:01.320 with everything else are shallow. And games that are sophisticated can be played in many situations

01:27:07.840 with many players. They take the future into account and they improve as you play them. And there's a

01:27:15.180 hierarchy of value in consequence of that, that, that, that is obliquely associated with the world of

01:27:22.280 fact. Cause it has to operate in the world of fact, but that isn't fundamentally derived from like data

01:27:30.000 that's directly associated with the facts. Well, not, not operationally, but, but potentially so it's

01:27:38.000 just not, not in fact, it's just, that's just not, I'm never claiming when I say that there are,

01:27:44.380 there are objective truths to, to all of these questions that those objective truths will be

01:27:49.460 delivered by some guy holding a clipboard, wearing a white lab coat. Uh, but there are things we just

01:27:55.120 know to be true. And it would take a lot of explaining to, to, to get to the, to the bottom

01:28:01.740 of how we know them to be true. But I mean, just very, they're very simple claims. Um, we just, we know

01:28:09.000 that, uh, life in, um, you know, the, the best, uh, and most refined and most ethically, you know,

01:28:20.440 positive, some, uh, developed world context, right. You know, you and me and our most conscientious

01:28:27.800 friends at the, um, the nicest resort, uh, after having done a great day's work, we're enjoying a

01:28:34.840 great meal, uh, and, uh, talking and creatively and positively about how to improve the world.

01:28:40.480 We know that's a better game than, you know, trying to find some child soldiers to, to torture

01:28:47.380 the neighbors in some malarial hell hole, uh, you know, in the, you know, sub-Saharan Africa, 0.97

01:28:54.420 uh, and, um, so that we can extract, you know, the, the, um, you know, some heavy metals, uh, you

01:29:02.940 know, the, the, the, the extraction of which is polluting the environment and, and causing 0.86

01:29:07.840 the, the, uh, the, the, the life expectation to be 30 years lower than it is in where we

01:29:14.060 live. Right. I mean, so like there's, there are different, they're fundamentally discordant

01:29:18.480 human projects that are available to some very lucky people and unavailable to others.

01:29:23.480 Uh, and, and luck is by no means, um, evenly distributed in this world. Um, so there are better

01:29:31.820 and worse games, right? By any, any measure of better, uh, you, you want to, you know,

01:29:37.400 ethically better, artistically better, entrepreneurially better, economically better. It's just to have,

01:29:43.820 you know, better, better, better with respect to the health outcomes, et cetera, et cetera.

01:29:48.440 So we're all trying to play the best game we can be a part of. We're all trying. I mean,

01:29:53.820 some, some people, I take that back. Many of us are, we're all trying to play the best game

01:30:00.820 we, we, we, we can think of as best, but one of the, the, um, the consequences of my argument is

01:30:10.000 that it's possible to be wrong. It's possible to actually have false beliefs about what is in fact

01:30:15.840 better or worse. Yeah. Like you can be confused. Well, I also, you can be confused. I also think

01:30:19.760 you're insufficient. You're insufficiently pessimistic too, Sam, I think, because I don't think everyone

01:30:25.480 is trying to play the best possible game. I think that there are truly negative games where,

01:30:32.120 well, no, but people are being rewarded in some way, you know, like the, the, the sadist

01:30:37.820 whose favorite game is to just see, to cause the suffering in others and, and enjoy that suffering.

01:30:45.580 The fact that he enjoys their suffering, right? That's, that's a problem with him, right? He's a,

01:30:51.720 you know, he's a, a neurological monster of a sort. Um, and he's, he's confined to being the sort of 0.71

01:31:00.060 mind that finds that very, um, uh, low level game more rewarding than the, than the game I just

01:31:09.540 advertised at the resort with us being creative and productive and, and, and, you know, positive some.

01:31:15.300 Yeah. Well, that's the man who wants to rule over hell, Sam. Right. Right. Yeah. So I'm not saying

01:31:21.020 that doesn't exist. Yeah. Okay. Fine, fine, fine, fine, fine, fine, fine. But my point is that there

01:31:26.760 are, there's, we're obviously living in a, a, a realm where there are better and worse outcomes by any

01:31:33.920 definition of better and worse that, that makes sense. Uh. Even from within the confines of the games

01:31:40.260 that you're describing. Yeah. Right. Because one of the ways of deciding that a game is

01:31:44.900 counterproductive is that if you play it, it doesn't produce the result that it intends.

01:31:49.760 Right. Right. So, so that's another kind of universal hallmark of moral judgment. Like

01:31:54.920 if you're aiming at something and your strategy doesn't get you there, either your strategy is

01:32:00.100 wrong or your aim is off by your own definition. Right. There's no relativizing your way out of that.

01:32:06.520 And then we can say, well, there's a hierarchy of games that, that expand and improve as you play

01:32:14.220 them. And there's a hierarchy of games that degenerate as you play them, even by your own

01:32:19.800 standards of degeneration. Yeah. And, and the, and the games, the more refined games actually

01:32:26.280 refine you as a player. I mean, they, they, they, you get, you get changed by the game you play,

01:32:32.420 uh, you know, to, to your advantage or to your disadvantage. And it makes you more or less

01:32:37.700 capable of playing any specific game. So, I mean, this is, this is what learning, this is what

01:32:43.800 education is. This is what skill learning is. This is what, you know, interpersonal skill learning

01:32:49.140 amounts to. This is what the difference between having good relationships versus bad relationships,

01:32:54.180 uh, being in a good culture where it's institutions, um, incentivize you to be your effortlessly to be

01:33:03.060 the best possible version of yourself, as opposed to, you know, you having to be some kind of moral

01:33:07.260 hero, just to be just not a psychopath. I mean, this is what's so, so, um, important about incentives

01:33:14.340 and about contexts like, like, like Twitter that, that incentivize the wrong things. What we want,

01:33:20.660 I mean, we don't want to have to take on the burden of rebooting civilization ourselves based on our

01:33:30.180 own native moral intuitions every single hour of every single day. That's for sure, Sam. That's for

01:33:36.980 sure. We need systems that make it easy for strangers to collaborate effortlessly in high trust

01:33:46.100 environments, right? I mean, this is like, we need to offload all of our moral wisdom into institutions

01:33:53.540 and to systems of incentives such that you would have to be a very bad person indeed, not to see the

01:34:00.500 wisdom of being a peaceful, honest collaborator with the next person you meet, right? In this,

01:34:06.420 given the nature of the system, what, what, you know, whereas, I mean, if you look, I mean,

01:34:10.020 just to sharpen this up because that can sound very abstract, if you take a, a, an actually normal,

01:34:16.260 decent person who just wants to be, be good and have positive, some relationships with, with everyone

01:34:22.260 he meets, you put that person in a maximum security prison in the United States, that person will be

01:34:28.820 highly incentivized to join a gang that has, you know, has the requisite color of his skin, right? And be,

01:34:37.300 essentially a, a monster because that's the only way to survive in that context, right? To, to,

01:34:42.980 to not join a gang, to not join a racist gang is to be the victim of everyone, right? So what you

01:34:48.900 have in a, in a maximum security prison is a system of terrible incentives that, where you have to be

01:34:54.980 some kind of, you know, self-sacrificing saint to opt out of, of, of ramifying this awful system of

01:35:02.580 incentives further. We, we want the opposite of that in, in, in situations that we control and in

01:35:11.700 institutions that we build. And, you know, what, the thing that's so disturbing to me about this

01:35:18.100 contrarian moment is that so many people have gotten the message, and this is really most explicit since

01:35:27.220 COVID, they've gotten the message that, that we don't need institutions. We don't want institutions.

01:35:32.500 We just, we just need to burn it all down. And we're just going to navigate by substack newsletter

01:35:40.340 and podcast. And that's just not going to work, right? We're just, we, we can't be all contrarian all

01:35:48.100 the time. We need, we need institutional knowledge. Intermediary institutions. Yeah.

01:35:54.260 That work. Yeah. So whether we have to build new ones or perform exorcisms on our old ones,

01:35:59.780 that might, you know, that might be a different answer depending on the case, but there's no

01:36:04.260 question we need institutions that, that are better than most individuals and that may, and that make

01:36:10.740 most individuals, uh, uh, live up to norms that they themselves didn't invent and, uh, would, you know,

01:36:20.100 under another system of incentives would struggle to emulate.

01:36:25.220 All right. I'm going to bring it in to land, Sam. I think what we're going to do on the Daily Wire

01:36:29.540 side, I want to talk to you, I think for half an hour about the anti-Semitic landscape on the left

01:36:37.940 and the right. And I want to go down those rabbit holes and explore them with you. So that's for

01:36:42.820 everybody watching and listening. I think that's what we're going to do on the Daily Wire side.

01:36:46.020 And because you, you made some comments earlier about your concerns about the right-wing parties

01:36:52.660 in Europe, for example, and the Nazis that are hiding there. And, um, I've seen no shortage of 0.88

01:36:58.340 right-wing anti-Semitism rear its ugly head, let's say in, in, on X, for example. But I also want to

01:37:05.380 talk to you about the same, uh, pathology emerging on the left, because there's no shortage of

01:37:10.900 unbelievable anti-Semitism on the left. And we should sort that out a little bit. And so that's

01:37:16.260 what we'll do on the Daily Wire side. Um, uh, Sam, every time we talk, I think we get a little bit,

01:37:24.340 well, we understand each other a little bit better. You know, I, I think there's something

01:37:28.660 very fruitful for us to continue discussing in, in relationship, well, to a number of the things

01:37:34.020 you discussed today about the necessity for intermediary institutions. That's the principle

01:37:39.780 of subsidiarity. It's an ancient principle of Catholic social, um, what would you say, social

01:37:45.300 philosophy. You have to have intermediary institutions. They're the alternative to tyranny and slavery.

01:37:51.620 Um, the idea that there's a harmony between individual development and proper institutions

01:37:57.220 that has to be established. You know, you can't be a, it's very difficult to be a good person in an

01:38:02.020 entirely pathological social situation. Um, and then this idea that there's a hierarchy of games,

01:38:09.940 because part of what interest got me interested to begin with in the religious world, let's say,

01:38:16.740 was because I started to understand what constituted the religious as the structure of the depth of games.

01:38:25.700 It's by definition. I'm not talking about what people think about as superstitious

01:38:31.940 belief. I have that. That's not the issue. The issue is that there's a hierarchy of game

01:38:40.420 from shallow to deep, from counterproductive to productive, um, from unplayable to iterative,

01:38:48.260 and that that's a real world. And there's a reason for that, that I think is allied with your

01:38:54.500 desire, lifelong desire to investigate the object, the objective grounds of the moral world.

01:39:02.660 Yeah. I mean, there's a convergence there.

01:39:04.980 One thing I would add to that is that also by definition on my account, the, whatever's true

01:39:11.140 there, whatever's truly sacred, you know, the true spiritual possibility has to be deeper than,

01:39:19.060 than, than culture. And it certainly has to be deeper than the, the accidents of, of ancient

01:39:27.300 cultures being separated from one another based on linguistic and geographical barriers, right?

01:39:34.260 So it can't be-

01:39:35.700 No, no dispute about that.

01:39:37.540 Yeah. It can't be that Eastern Orthodox 1.00

01:39:39.540 Christianity is the real answer versus Hinduism being, you know, the, the real answer. Because, 1.00

01:39:45.220 I mean, one, they're, they're incompatible answers at the surface level. Uh, whatever the, whatever

01:39:51.220 deep truth they may be in touch with, that is something we have to understand in a 21st century

01:39:57.140 context that is, that is deeper than, than provincialism. That's my, my argument against

01:40:02.740 religious sectarianism of any kind.

01:40:04.980 We definitely have a, we definitely have much to discuss the next time we talk.

01:40:10.420 All right. So for everybody watching and listening, join us on the Daily Wire side,

01:40:14.900 because we'll go down the anti-Semitic rabbit hole. And that'll give Sam and I a little bit,

01:40:20.580 a little bit of time as well to discuss the political, which we haven't, you know,

01:40:25.940 which we've conveniently circumvented in a sense, but we had other things to talk about. So join us there.

01:40:32.420 Thank you to the film crew here today in Scottsdale. Thanks, Sam. It's always a pleasure to talk to you.

01:40:36.820 Yeah. I'm glad you're doing well. It's real good to see you, man. Yep.

01:40:48.980 Bye.

01:40:55.140 Bye.

01:41:01.460 Bye.

01:41:02.180 Bye.

01:41:02.900 Bye.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - June 12, 2025

555. How the Internet Is Breaking Our Brains ｜ Sam Harris

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