The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - July 31, 2025


567. Five Great Moments From Behind the Paywall

Topics
motherhood and career choices Bitcoin future and advice for Younger People crypto revolution UAP data processing initiatives legacy photos of UFOs
Hosted by
Jordan B. Peterson Mikhaila Peterson
Mentioned
Bitcoin Peterson Donald Trump David Sachs Ayaan Doug Robert F. Kennedy Jean Kirkpatrick Tucker Carlson Tulsi Gabbard Pierre Pauly Nigel Farage Scott Besson Brian Count Tim Phillips Helix Sleep HOMETITLELock.com Michaela Heinlein Satoshi and 7 more
566. The Meaning Of： There’s No Such Thing as a Dragon 570. How You Should Deal with Stress and Tragedy ｜ Answer the Call

Episode Stats


Length

59 minutes

Words per minute

149.3

Word count

8,928

Sentence count

632

Harmful content

Misogyny

5

sentences flagged

Toxicity

10

sentences flagged

Hate speech

17

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, we talk to a mom-to-be who had her first baby at 37 years old. She talks about the challenges of getting pregnant in your late 30s and early 40s, and how she and her husband, Doug, managed to have three kids in their late 40s.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
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00:01:23.300 So, Megan, how long have you been married?
00:01:31.440 17 years.
00:01:32.600 17 years.
00:01:33.620 And you said you had your children in your later 30s.
00:01:39.280 38, 40, and 42.
00:01:41.740 Right.
00:01:42.480 And that, how did that work for you?
00:01:45.620 I mean, you have three children, so obviously it worked pretty well.
00:01:48.040 But that is, you're pushing the envelope at that point.
00:01:51.200 My sister had her child children at later, at about that time too.
00:01:56.480 No, you're definitely pushing the envelope.
00:01:57.640 Yeah.
00:01:57.860 You get the big AMA on your chart, and then you make the mistake of asking what that means.
00:02:02.780 And it means advanced maternal age.
00:02:05.500 Right, right.
00:02:06.100 Which is, you know, when you're still in your 30s, you're not thinking of yourself as advanced age anything.
00:02:10.380 But, yeah, I was.
00:02:12.500 And, you know, as I said to you earlier, I met my husband when I was 35.
00:02:17.740 We got engaged.
00:02:19.860 I turned 36 a couple months later.
00:02:22.180 We got engaged a year after that, so I was 37.
00:02:25.480 And we got married when I was 37.
00:02:28.480 So, you know, it was a fast turnaround once I met my husband.
00:02:31.360 I had a shorter first marriage that ended in divorce.
00:02:35.220 We ended our relationship amicably and thankfully with no children because that's a whole sticky wicket, right, when you end a marriage and there are children involved.
00:02:43.380 So, anyway, then Doug and I met.
00:02:45.060 We got married pretty quickly, and we tried to have a baby very quickly because we saw that clock ticking, and we both really wanted to have children with each other.
00:02:52.540 To be honest, I wasn't feeling that urge prior to Doug.
00:02:55.680 In my first marriage, I kind of knew I didn't want to.
00:02:58.340 I just, I think I might have had a sense, like, this wasn't going to work out with all due respect to my first husband, who is a great guy.
00:03:04.900 And now I was happily married to another woman with kids of his own.
00:03:08.100 In any event, so my husband and I met.
00:03:09.920 We got married pretty quickly.
00:03:11.220 And pretty early on in that first year of trying, I went to the OB-GYN to see whether I was okay.
00:03:18.560 You know, just before we went down this exasperating path that everybody goes down in their mid-30s are women who wait. 1.00
00:03:24.460 And the eggs, as it turned out, were very youthful and fine.
00:03:27.880 My eggs were great, so I wasn't suffering from what you can suffer from at that age, for sure, 37, of, like, old eggs that are really not that fertile.
00:03:35.840 That's a very real risk you're taking.
00:03:38.060 To me, it wasn't even, like, on my mind because I wasn't really focused on children.
00:03:42.080 But I was glad to hear that the eggs were in great shape, but I, not to get too detailed, but I have what's called a T-shaped uterus.
00:03:48.020 It's basically just a smaller uterus.
00:03:49.740 And so the doctor said, that'll make it a little tougher for you.
00:03:53.120 Really, at any age, it would have.
00:03:54.880 And so I did use IVF for all three of my pregnancies, and it worked like a charm.
00:03:59.380 And I had three beautiful babies, and it worked out perfectly.
00:04:01.980 So, look, I'm lucky, and I realize that if children are important to you, and hopefully they are.
00:04:08.000 I mean, honestly, like, I, too, am alarmed about the birth rate.
00:04:11.500 We're not going to have a society if we don't start repopulating.
00:04:15.180 But anyway, if they're important to you, you definitely should know you're taking a risk if you wait.
00:04:20.540 And I think people need to be actively searching for partners, and we need to do better about helping connect them.
00:04:26.800 It's, like, one of my missions in life to, in my personal role as a human on this earth, be active about introducing men and women to each other who are single.
00:04:36.080 Like, I make it my mission.
00:04:37.400 My husband hates it.
00:04:38.480 But I just think it's part of our societal responsibility is to connect, especially good people with other good people.
00:04:46.020 And in my mind, like, good Christians with other good Christians.
00:04:49.320 And hopefully, you know, let them populate.
00:04:52.760 That's what happens next is up to them.
00:04:54.800 But we can't leave it all to Tinder.
00:04:57.440 You know, at some point, actual loving, caring human beings need to help forge relationships the way we used to.
00:05:02.940 So, in any event, we had the kids, and I left Fox so that I could spend more time with my children, who I was not seeing enough of.
00:05:10.220 And that was a career problem of mine and a personal regret.
00:05:14.680 But I rectified it, and things have been great ever since then.
00:05:18.000 So, what, as you pointed out on the YouTube side, you've had a unique and rare career, an archetypally desirable career, you might say.
00:05:33.360 And as you also pointed out, that is a situation that typifies a very small percentage of people.
00:05:39.820 And yet, you speak of your children with immense fondness, let's say.
00:05:47.880 And so, tell me how you would explain to a younger woman how your priorities changed in the aftermath of having a baby.
00:06:01.680 And what that experience was like, because it's the experiential aspect of it that I'm curious about, you know.
00:06:08.000 Because my sense is that we have a category that's something like generic baby.
00:06:16.980 But your own baby is not generic, right?
00:06:20.660 That's an individual right from the onset.
00:06:24.060 And so, and that's not well explained, especially to young women.
00:06:28.740 So, I'd like to hear your experience in that regard.
00:06:32.820 I mean, it's cliche, but it is a before and after moment in your life.
00:06:36.560 It is the before and after moment in your life.
00:06:39.500 And it's not just when you give birth.
00:06:41.400 It's when you find out you're pregnant.
00:06:43.780 And you have a human life growing inside of you.
00:06:46.620 That's when you become a mother. 0.86
00:06:48.260 I don't care if you're pro-life or not.
00:06:49.960 There's no disputing that's at least a potential life in you.
00:06:53.860 Even the pro-choicers have to admit that.
00:06:56.160 And that's when you become a mother.
00:06:57.520 That's when you start nurturing another human with your body and your energy and your chemistry and your aura.
00:07:05.820 All of it.
00:07:06.900 You know, your love, your faith, all of it starts nurturing that little being from that moment forward.
00:07:12.240 And for me, it was like, okay, so I had the babies.
00:07:14.820 I gave birth to the babies.
00:07:15.840 And then you have this extraordinary moment where, ideally, you breastfeed your child.
00:07:21.460 And that's, too, completely a Mother Earth moment where you are, like, back in connection with one of your core reasons for being.
00:07:30.160 Like, that nurturing.
00:07:31.600 That ability to nurture, grow, and take care of another human being to the point of independence.
00:07:40.320 Like, this is one of the first steps.
00:07:42.060 And here he is or here she is completely dependent on you, completely in need of you, and only you can solve it.
00:07:49.060 It's a beautiful feeling where you feel incredibly needed, important, and bonded to this incredibly beautiful creature who knows nothing other than love for you.
00:08:01.880 That's it.
00:08:02.700 They love the dads.
00:08:03.820 They put them on the dad's chest.
00:08:05.320 And the dad loves holding the babies.
00:08:06.660 But let's be honest, that baby only has eyes for his or her mother.
00:08:11.980 And there's just no fulfillment like that.
00:08:14.160 There's just nothing.
00:08:14.820 Well, that's the issue.
00:08:16.720 You know, I think that's the crucial issue.
00:08:18.940 Because, and this is a pathological reflection in part of the immaturity of our society, but also its consumerist element.
00:08:29.720 People look for meaning, significance, purpose in the pursuit of self-centered gratification.
00:08:42.180 Happiness, so to speak.
00:08:43.720 But that's not where you find it.
00:08:45.920 Now, it has to be that way.
00:08:50.580 Because, first of all, we have this immense dependency period.
00:08:55.400 And second, we're unbelievably social, right?
00:08:58.660 Like, you can punish psychopaths by putting them in solitary confinement.
00:09:03.440 That's how social human beings are.
00:09:05.140 You can take the most antisocial people and you can torture them by not letting them around other people.
00:09:11.860 Okay, so we're social to the core.
00:09:13.760 So what does that mean?
00:09:14.720 Well, it has to mean that we find our being in relationship to others.
00:09:22.240 And the relationship that you're describing is one of opportunity and necessity.
00:09:29.500 And that makes you important.
00:09:30.920 It's not just limited to the infancy years.
00:09:33.880 I mean, that's just the first experience upon arrival.
00:09:36.360 But I will say now, my children are 15, 14, and 11.
00:09:40.320 And it only gets better and more profound.
00:09:43.400 I mean, for some women, the toddler years are the peak. 1.00
00:09:46.700 And they're very sad when the kids age out of the toddler years.
00:09:49.480 For me, I was excited.
00:09:51.540 I couldn't wait until I could have conversations with them, you know, back and forth that were more meaningful.
00:09:56.020 And we're in that stage now.
00:09:57.260 And, you know, you just—whatever.
00:09:59.280 I went to see my daughter at a talent show.
00:10:01.400 And these girls were out there having the time of their lives. 1.00
00:10:05.040 Many of them were just being silly, happily and intentionally making fools of themselves, like in big costumes that bump into the other girls. 0.94
00:10:11.980 And then they fall down into fun music. 0.95
00:10:14.040 And I cried like a small school girl myself because it was this feeling of camaraderie and they were rooting for one another.
00:10:21.960 And you see your child get up there, whatever she's doing, and just give it her all.
00:10:26.120 Just stand in front of a microphone and try and ask the world to give her a shot, right, to give her a chance, to see what she can do.
00:10:34.720 It's just so bold and optimistic.
00:10:37.280 And so when you have children, you're around that bold optimism all the time.
00:10:42.740 Not like—whatever, your kids have vulnerable moments, too.
00:10:46.000 It's not all, you know, uniformly positive and wonderful.
00:10:48.800 But the vast majority is.
00:10:50.700 And so you're just immersed in such a happier, more promising world.
00:10:54.740 My whole outlook on life got more positive as a result of my children.
00:10:59.820 Right.
00:11:00.200 It brings into your life such positivity and promise and possibility and socialization for sure because you're going to be not just with your kids but with your kids' friends' parents and interacting at school.
00:11:11.160 And the same way a dog gets you out into the world times X by a child and then more and more children and you'll have even more and more of it.
00:11:19.620 So even though people know me as a career woman and I am and I love my career, as we talked about on the other part of the interview, I love my career.
00:11:27.660 It completely energizes me and excites me.
00:11:31.120 And some days coming out in front of this microphone is like a therapy for me.
00:11:34.340 Just the chance to say what's real and correct the record for people out there who are being misled.
00:11:40.320 There's zero competition.
00:11:41.980 If you said, MK, you can go back and live these same 54 years over again, but one thing's not going to happen, either your children or your career.
00:11:49.760 There's no decision to be made.
00:11:52.740 As much as I adore this career, it doesn't hold a candle to my motherhood, my relationship to my children, my family, the core five, as we call ourselves, and the experiences we've had together through these last 15 years since I was 16, technically, since I became a mother for the first time as I got pregnant with my eldest.
00:12:12.120 So I want, my thing is, Jordan, I want people to know that.
00:12:17.140 I want young women to know that.
00:12:19.000 They need to know that.
00:12:20.620 But I also, but I also want young women who feel that budding love for their career, whatever it is, whether it's journalism or it's as a doctor or whatever, whatever it is that's like really grabbing them, that that's okay too.
00:12:33.140 You know, I worry about the conservative movement not making room for those women who've got that thing that I had, which is like, I've got to do this.
00:12:42.340 This is amazing.
00:12:43.280 I love it, you know, and I am a better person and actually I'm a better mother too for the fact that I did become a journalist and I did all the things that I've done over the past whatever years before I had them.
00:12:53.840 So I, my, my main point in speaking like to young conservative women today is, yes, valuing motherhood and understanding it alone is a valid choice and a really fulfilling one.
00:13:07.340 But if you are somebody like I was, who does feel a fire lit under them to pursue a career, that's okay.
00:13:15.660 These are questions that take cultures thousands of years to answer.
00:13:21.280 During Answer the Call, I take questions from people just like you about their problems, opportunities, challenges, or when they simply need advice.
00:13:29.220 How do I balance all of this grief, responsibility?
00:13:32.320 How do you repair this kind of damage?
00:13:34.180 My daughter, Michaela, guides the conversations as we hopefully help people navigate their lives.
00:13:40.600 Everyone has their own destiny.
00:13:42.640 Everyone.
00:13:45.660 Well, let's talk about two things or three things maybe.
00:13:50.780 I want to know what you see happening on the government policy side.
00:13:55.820 You were at the Bitcoin conference in Las Vegas.
00:13:58.920 There are political figures there.
00:14:01.100 Pierre Pauly of in Canada has indicated some interest in Bitcoin.
00:14:04.240 Nigel Farage in the UK.
00:14:06.060 Trump in the United States.
00:14:07.360 I'm wondering what you think is going to happen at the state level in relationship to Bitcoin.
00:14:13.740 They haven't made it illegal, for example.
00:14:16.920 So, that's a good thing.
00:14:18.020 And I know that countries that have tried to go to war, so to speak, with Bitcoin have seen damaging consequences for their currency, which I think is extremely interesting and telling.
00:14:28.480 Then I'd like to know what you see for the future in relationship to Bitcoin, let's say, over a five or 10-year period.
00:14:35.360 And I'd like to know what your advice would be for young people, practically speaking, in relationship to ensuring their financial future.
00:14:43.800 All great questions.
00:14:46.200 I think the last 10 months have been extraordinary for Bitcoin and the entire crypto ecosystem.
00:14:52.180 An inflection point was in Nashville last July when Donald Trump, the presidential candidate, showed up, gave a speech, embraced Bitcoin, embraced the community, told everybody that if he was elected, the United States government would never sell their Bitcoin.
00:15:10.760 And, in essence, endorsed it as apex property and legitimate property that he respected.
00:15:17.640 The entire crypto industry and the Bitcoin community were extremely active.
00:15:22.640 And there are a lot of people that think that they tipped the election in favor of the red sweep.
00:15:28.400 They were definitely very significant actors in November.
00:15:32.440 And so, November 5th, there was a red sweep.
00:15:34.320 The House, the Senate, and the White House went Republican.
00:15:39.120 What followed next is an orange cabinet.
00:15:41.840 And orange is the color of Bitcoin.
00:15:43.860 I'm wearing an orange tie.
00:15:45.340 What that means is Robert F. Kennedy is a Bitcoin believer.
00:15:49.280 Tulsi Gobbard in Intelligence is a Bitcoin believer.
00:15:53.460 Atkins at the SEC is a Bitcoin believer.
00:15:55.960 Scott Besant at the Treasury is a Bitcoin believer.
00:15:58.600 Brian Contez at CFTC is a Bitcoin believer.
00:16:02.140 The president is a Bitcoin believer.
00:16:04.300 He created a cabinet position for David Sachs, as the crypto czar, who is a Bitcoin believer.
00:16:09.640 And so, what you saw was the administration flipped from being—I would say, before this administration, they grudgingly accepted Bitcoin and were hostile to everything else.
00:16:23.440 And Bitcoin was accepted under protest because they couldn't stop it.
00:16:26.660 And then, after November 5th, the administration moved aggressively.
00:16:32.460 They established an executive order to develop a digital assets policy.
00:16:37.480 When was that?
00:16:38.380 When was that executive order?
00:16:40.160 I guess it must have come a month after.
00:16:42.300 Well, sometime in the last hundred days, I guess, or thereabouts.
00:16:45.500 It came in the first quarter.
00:16:46.580 Yeah, okay.
00:16:47.580 And they established a strategic Bitcoin reserve, okay?
00:16:50.640 And the most important thing that happened is David Sachs went on public record saying the Trump administration recognizes Bitcoin as the one decentralized crypto network in the world, an asset without an issuer, digital gold, a commodity, special.
00:17:13.720 That's very, very important to unlock.
00:17:17.020 A commodity, an asset without an issuer, has legal superiority, ethical superiority.
00:17:24.640 A public company can capitalize on a commodity.
00:17:28.240 Under the SEC 40 Act, a public company cannot capitalize on securities.
00:17:32.800 You can't have more than 40% of your balance sheet invested in securities.
00:17:36.060 So, a commodity means it's like soybeans or gold or land, and no one actor can manipulate it, and that makes it global property.
00:17:47.100 So, that only happened just in the past few months.
00:17:51.160 But what's happened since is you could say the United States has gone from being very regressive to being the most progressive digital assets nation in the world.
00:18:04.460 And the agenda of the United States is to normalize the use of digital currencies, digital tokens, digital securities, and digital commodities on digital exchanges trading 24-7, 365.
00:18:18.360 And that that'll be Bitcoin-based.
00:18:20.200 Yeah.
00:18:20.300 Do you think that that—
00:18:21.020 And Bitcoin is the base layer.
00:18:22.660 It is the reserve asset or the capital base of the entire crypto economy.
00:18:26.720 Okay, when these other—when other jurisdictions are speaking—I'm thinking about the WEF types in particular—when they're speaking about digital—central bank digital currencies, they're generally not thinking about—they're not proposing that that's going to be founded on a Bitcoin standard.
00:18:44.060 Yeah, that is viewed as anathema by the crypto community.
00:18:48.660 But here we get to this basic philosophical observation, which is, do I want all of the money and power in the world to be controlled centrally by one banker or one politician who will then decide what I can buy, what I can do, what I can think?
00:19:06.800 Yeah, that sounds like a bad idea.
00:19:08.420 Or do I want all of the money and the power of the world to be held by individuals apart from a corporation or a bank or a government where they have privacy, where they have sovereignty, where they have dignity, where they have power?
00:19:26.520 You know, my author, Heinlein, he said, you know, an armed society is a polite society, right?
00:19:33.480 And the idea is, you know, a hundred people have guns in the room and, you know, you watch your step, you know, and you show civility.
00:19:42.140 Well, the significance of Bitcoin is, for the first time in the history of the human race, we have found a way to tightly bind economic energy to the individual, cryptographically bind it.
00:19:55.800 If you know a secret in your head, it could be a billion dollars of power.
00:20:00.500 Thinking about fantasy, I know it, I can cast a billion dollars spell.
00:20:07.240 It's profound.
00:20:08.380 If you want to go back a hundred million years, the big breakthrough for mammals was when they could bind organic energy to their frame, and we call that fat, right?
00:20:19.700 If you have fat cells, you can eat a lot and go without food for 30 days.
00:20:24.220 Take away the fat, you're a type 1 diabetic.
00:20:27.080 You know, you last a few days, you're dead.
00:20:28.700 And so this idea that I can bind organic energy is what makes human beings.
00:20:33.660 This idea that I could bind cryptographic, cryptographically bind economic energy, that gives sovereignty to the individual.
00:20:42.560 But you know what?
00:20:43.880 Eight billion people could have their own energy, but also 400 million companies.
00:20:49.020 And the traditional central banking system of the CBDC and fiat currency is there's one bank, you know, the U.S. Reserve that controls everybody, and then there's a hundred big banks.
00:21:03.860 And if they give you permission, you're allowed to do stuff.
00:21:06.840 And if they take away your permission, you can't.
00:21:08.780 I think the Trump family ran into that when they got debanked.
00:21:12.940 All the crypto people ran into it.
00:21:15.200 There was the Canadian trucker example.
00:21:17.500 Oh, God.
00:21:18.100 You do something we don't like, we turn off your oxygen.
00:21:22.020 And with no court intervention whatsoever, right?
00:21:25.180 No trial, nothing.
00:21:26.900 Yeah.
00:21:27.080 And if you look at the history of Austrians, they all lamented that the money is broken, and that is the source of so many of our economic ills.
00:21:36.300 And if you look at the history of libertarians, they say government intervention, government policy, and medicine, and commerce, and foreign policy, and domestic policy, and monetary policy, and education policy is generally counterproductive, iatrogenic.
00:21:51.200 It does more harm than good.
00:21:53.200 They both understood the problem.
00:21:55.700 They both had a philosophy, less government, more civil liberties, more economic liberties, more freedom.
00:22:04.440 We took a shot at that in the United States during the Revolutionary War, and we did it with the Constitution, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
00:22:12.700 We found out in 2020 that sometimes your rights get suspended because they're inconvenient to someone with more power than you.
00:22:20.200 But the truth is your civil rights have been suspended every 30 years for the last 30,000 years by someone, and that's the story of civilization, rights being suspended for the normal by the more powerful.
00:22:35.880 The crypto revolution and the Bitcoin ethos is Satoshi found a way to give power back to the people by combining cryptography with semiconductors, with the Internet.
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00:24:06.320 Was it Watson or Crick who proposed an extraterrestrial origin for DNA because he couldn't understand how it could have possibly evolved?
00:24:17.160 I don't remember which of the two co-discovers of DNA it was, but...
00:24:22.320 Well, there's two interesting papers that came out.
00:24:24.360 One was looking at the half-life of DNA complexity as a Moore's Law equivalence.
00:24:34.060 So, you know, Moore's Law.
00:24:35.560 Right, right, yeah, I saw that paper, yeah.
00:24:37.880 And where if you extrapolate in a straight line back to the time at which DNA would have first been evolved, it actually goes back about 12 billion years ago, between 9 and 12 billion years.
00:24:58.440 And yet Earth has only been around for 4 billion years.
00:25:01.560 So, it basically means that we got a jumpstart because it came from somewhere else.
00:25:07.240 And people say, well, how could it come from somewhere else?
00:25:09.720 Well, I said, just look at your watch if it's made of metal.
00:25:14.060 Every piece, every atom in that metal came from an exploded star several billion years ago that coalesced in a cloud and, you know, created the planetary ring that eventually became Earth.
00:25:27.460 So, you are made of star stuff.
00:25:30.220 You are made of exploded materials.
00:25:33.280 Now, what's interesting about life is that the core components of life are what?
00:25:42.040 Carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and hydrogen.
00:25:45.940 Just that.
00:25:48.080 Those four things are the majority of what you are made of.
00:25:52.000 They were all like the first elements that were available in the universe after the so-called Big Bang.
00:25:59.960 Right?
00:26:00.280 They were the first iteration of the evolution of the elements.
00:26:04.100 It wasn't until multiple stellar explosions later did you get the heavier elements.
00:26:10.900 So, life in its most simple form could have happened within a few billion years of the start of the universe as we think of it.
00:26:22.200 So, there's plenty of time for things to get around.
00:26:27.220 So, I don't – that to me is that first question is not is it here, it's can it be here?
00:26:35.280 So, yes, the answer is it can be here.
00:26:37.420 Now, the question is, is what is here, you know, manifesting itself in a way that it cares about humans in the first place?
00:26:49.020 Right?
00:26:50.520 I mean, people, you know, the Hollywood trope is they're here to take our planet or to take some natural resource from our planet.
00:26:59.300 I think that if anything that we see is a manifestation of its capabilities, we are the least of its concerns.
00:27:10.880 If anything, we're, you know, we're a, you know, we're a zoo.
00:27:17.980 I just came back from Africa three weeks in Africa going to the various nature preserves there.
00:27:22.960 So, if anything, it's just – they're just watching what we were – what they were billions of years ago.
00:27:31.020 And they have other concerns.
00:27:32.600 That's how I like to think about it.
00:27:34.680 You know, just because I don't worry people – I was on Tucker Carlson once and he says, does it worry me?
00:27:42.480 Why should it worry me?
00:27:43.500 I can't do anything about it in the first place.
00:27:44.940 And if they were going to do anything about us, they would have done it, you know, more recently.
00:27:49.160 But what's interesting, though, is – and for your viewers – go look up where most of the UAPs are actually seen.
00:27:57.220 They're seen around our nuclear aircraft carriers and they're seen around our nuclear facilities.
00:28:02.380 Why?
00:28:02.760 Because maybe that's the one thing we can do that might hurt them in some way.
00:28:08.880 And if we're about to break out into the local galactic arm and, you know, and we're a bunch of angry monkeys, maybe they want to basically keep an eye on what the angry monkeys are up to lately and what they can and can't do.
00:28:20.220 Are those areas more surveyed?
00:28:24.460 Perfect question.
00:28:25.240 I mean, is –
00:28:25.680 Yes, so maybe it's an observer bias.
00:28:30.620 But because they're more observed with credible camera systems, right, and with credible observers, then it's more – you know, then it's more credible.
00:28:47.840 Here's an interesting thing that happened.
00:28:49.240 So, about two years ago, we pushed to what we call open the filters on the – you know, so the U.S. defense system has a number of sensors.
00:29:03.260 And as it turned out, when somebody looked, it turned out that our sensors are only – because we're collecting so much data – are so narrowly focused.
00:29:13.300 We're looking for signatures of rockets, signatures of planes.
00:29:20.100 And there's a lot of other information that's being collected, but it's being dumped in the garbage immediately.
00:29:24.340 So, we pushed to say, you know what, maybe there are capabilities of some of our, you know, near-level adversaries that we need to pay attention to, like hypersonic rockets from Putin.
00:29:38.800 So, let's open the filters, and guess what they found?
00:29:41.920 The first thing they found were the Chinese balloons.
00:29:43.660 So, the Chinese had found a loophole in our sensor systems. 0.61
00:29:50.740 But because we in the UAP community said, you need to open your sensors, maybe something's missing, the first thing they found were those Chinese balloons, and they closed the loophole.
00:30:01.600 So, you know, for all one wants to say that this lobbying has no effect, it actually had a perfectly good outcome that prevented the Chinese from overflying these, you know, quiet drones, which were basically just high-altitude balloons with sensor systems.
00:30:24.160 But all of that data is still there waiting to be processed, and so I'm part of other initiatives to get some of the data processed in a secure manner to look for signatures of UAP.
00:30:42.520 But, you know, you don't even have to wait for me.
00:30:44.700 Just look at what this guy Tim Phillips has been saying publicly.
00:30:47.780 And what even Sean Kirkpatrick, the former head of Arrow, has said is that, yes, he's the one who talked about the Mosul orb.
00:30:58.160 We're seeing these things all over the planet.
00:31:00.920 And the orbs, are they – is that a standard sighting?
00:31:03.780 Yes.
00:31:04.260 It's relative – well, I mean, it's relatively frequently reported by the military as well as by individuals, you know, the public.
00:31:14.800 But I have less – I don't have less faith in it, but it's so much more easily discredited, and these days, especially with AI.
00:31:23.920 But here's an interesting one.
00:31:27.460 So there are several – let's call them legacy photos of UFOs going back 50 or so, 60 years.
00:31:37.640 And somebody noticed that these – in these legacy photos, there's, of course, the central UFO.
00:31:47.900 But there are three or four round orbs in each of these pictures.
00:31:55.380 So that leads to an interesting problem, right?
00:31:59.340 Here you have things that some people claim were hoaxes, and yet they – even though nobody had even thought of it before, they thought to put these orbs in them.
00:32:10.960 Or you have these multiple pictures, each of which have a central UFO, but then they have these orbs.
00:32:17.220 It's almost like a signature of authenticity.
00:32:18.860 And so it's these kinds of things that get me – that I just – as a scientist, I hate a problem that can't be solved.
00:32:31.860 And so my mind is like always, okay, how do I solve it?
00:32:34.540 How do I solve it?
00:32:35.780 How do I – you know, how do I get there?
00:32:37.160 But then one of the other attributes that I think of myself as having is that I hate to see opportunity lost.
00:32:48.000 And so the unprocessed data, the unrealized potential of what these things might mean, I've done enough for humanity with the technologies that I've developed for patients and whatever.
00:33:04.480 So in my spare time, if you will, this is something that none of my colleagues are interested in, or at least fewer previously than they are today, that it's like, well, gee, a grain of silicon changed our civilization.
00:33:25.480 Our civilization is based on silicon and germanium.
00:33:28.200 Imagine if any of this stuff is real, it represents thousands of technology revolutions.
00:33:34.620 If we can just scrape one new idea off the top, what could we do with it?
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00:34:57.080 I've been thinking a lot about foundational principles and I wrote in my last book a lot about sacrifice and that catalyzed a realization for me, which was that, well, this is what I want to run by you.
00:35:12.480 So, Judaism is predicated on the philosophy of upward sacrifice.
00:35:21.100 So, you aim at the good, which would be the opposite of hell, let's say, and then you swear, vow, to shed everything that's not in keeping with that aim.
00:35:35.520 So, that's sacrifice.
00:35:38.520 And so, and you could sacrifice on behalf of your well-being, your own well-being.
00:35:44.680 That would be an abandonment of a kind of narrow hedonism.
00:35:47.080 You could sacrifice for your marital partner, for your family, for your community, for your nation, for then what?
00:35:58.100 Then what's above that?
00:35:59.180 The spirit of your nation, let's say, or the spirit of the upward aim of your nation, it taps out in some transcendent good.
00:36:08.360 Christianity extends that by making, it stunned me, this realization, by making voluntary self-sacrifice in the face of death and hell the foundational principle.
00:36:20.780 And then that's laid out in the architecture, as you have the crucifix at the center, on the altar, in the center of the church, at the center of the town.
00:36:33.060 We've acted out the idea that voluntary self-sacrifice is the proper foundation of the world for 2,000 years without making it explicit, right?
00:36:44.000 Because it didn't need to be made explicit, because it already was explicit.
00:36:48.020 Well, we acted it out, at least, and that was sufficient, right?
00:36:51.480 It was sufficient, but now it seems to me that we have to be conscious of it.
00:36:54.940 And there's alternative foundations, power, but it's unstable, pleasure, but it devours itself.
00:37:04.300 Faithlessness, that's nihilism and antinatalism, cannot be sustained.
00:37:08.260 And so, okay, so, then one further issue.
00:37:13.900 One of the sticking points between Islam and Christianity, let's say, is conceptions of the death of Christ and the resurrection, right?
00:37:23.180 That's the primary sticking point.
00:37:24.660 Christ is that Jesus is a central figure in Islam, just as he is in Christianity, but there's a deep theological mismatch.
00:37:35.620 Yes.
00:37:35.900 It isn't obvious to me that in the Islamic world that the spirit of voluntary self-sacrifice upward is the foundation.
00:37:45.860 It looks to me more like it's something approximating power.
00:37:49.100 Now, I say that with trepidation, because I've been watching the UAE and Saudi Arabia and the signatories of the Abraham Accords warn the West about radical Islamism, 1.00
00:38:00.080 which they seem to regard as a form of dangerous psychopathy.
00:38:03.680 And it seems to me that it would be a wonderful thing if the Islamic world, the sane Islamic world, could formulate a definition of psychopathic Islamism that would be applied universally and adopt. 0.98
00:38:18.100 We're not going to do it in the West. 0.98
00:38:19.440 We're too damn weak, as far as I can tell.
00:38:22.080 Look at the UK. 0.94
00:38:23.560 We won't draw boundaries in the UK.
00:38:27.260 We won't draw boundaries in Canada or on the university campuses.
00:38:31.700 We're too guilt-ridden.
00:38:33.860 Yes.
00:38:35.040 Well, as I see it, and as you know, I've written about this for many years, principally in the strangest half of Europe.
00:38:41.120 What I've seen happening in our era has been two things happening simultaneously.
00:38:47.080 One is the guilt-ridden societies that have effectively sloughed off their faith structure, which happens in the Jewish world as well.
00:39:05.280 There's a movement within Judaism, mainly sort of reformed Judaism, and what I call spilt Judaism, which is something called tikkun olam,
00:39:13.540 which is effectively that the end point of Judaism is sort of social justice.
00:39:19.180 It's effectively for non-believing Jews who would see themselves as Jews, or Jews, but who they…
00:39:29.000 Cultural Jews. 0.77
00:39:29.740 Cultural Jews, but that they can express their Judaism by a support for the downtrodden and so on. 0.75
00:39:36.580 There's lots of good to be said for that, but it's just that on its own it's shallow.
00:39:41.580 The question, Douglas, is how do you support the downtrodden?
00:39:44.920 And the answer to that is not necessarily by economic means.
00:39:48.660 I don't believe that.
00:39:50.160 It's just as we talked about on the other podcast, is that economic incentives don't increase the birth rate.
00:39:56.560 Why?
00:39:57.040 Because people do not live by bread alone.
00:39:59.760 Yes.
00:40:00.440 Right.
00:40:02.800 Exactly.
00:40:03.940 In Christianity, in what T.E. Hume might have called spilt Christianity, you get it in the language of human rights and so on.
00:40:13.300 But again, it doesn't understand the water in which it's been swimming.
00:40:18.300 So, this has been the case for, you might say, 200 years in the West.
00:40:24.520 You might draw the line at different dates.
00:40:27.180 But the interesting thing to me, which is the dangerous moment for our societies, is when these forms of very weak, sort of spilt religion, encounter a religious fervor that is not weak, is not guilt-ridden, loves the fact that we are.
00:40:48.000 It's very keen to push it on us where it advantages it, and which, in the House of Islam, has, to put it quite frankly, not got its house in order. 0.98
00:40:59.960 There are those who've told me for a quarter of a century.
00:41:03.260 As evidenced by the almost complete absence of functional societies in the Islamic world.
00:41:10.820 That's one piece of evidence.
00:41:12.560 I would add one.
00:41:13.160 It's a big one.
00:41:13.940 It's a big one.
00:41:14.540 I'd add one on the more personal level, which is, why is it that even in every Western society where there are Muslim reformers who are outspoken as reformers and who are the most virulent opponents of the death cult, jihadists and extremists, even the not at the moment violent but Islamist movements within their midst, why is it always the reformers who are at risk? 0.77
00:41:40.300 You mean like Ayaan?
00:41:41.760 Like Ayaan.
00:41:42.520 Filified by the feminists as well. 1.00
00:41:47.400 Of course.
00:41:47.780 You'll get a double whammy because you're seen.
00:41:49.680 Something to see.
00:41:50.260 Because you're seen, among other things, as bringing the problem because you identified the problem.
00:41:54.460 So you're bringing the problem.
00:41:55.440 We wouldn't have the problem if you hadn't identified it.
00:42:00.000 Endless, I mean, I think I have a pretty good grasp of the extraordinarily brave individuals who in Western countries, never mind in Muslim countries, 1.00
00:42:11.000 who have put their head above the power of it and been shot at a hell of a lot, sometimes quite literally.
00:42:16.240 Why is it the case if the House of Islam is in any decent order that it would be that way round? 1.00
00:42:25.080 Why would it be that again and again the men of violence keep on being able to say, we have the truth on our side?
00:42:36.880 Right.
00:42:37.140 Now, there are countries that have pushed this worst interpretation of Islam for centuries.
00:42:45.320 There are specific strains.
00:42:48.840 But we have seen in our own day that this can also be reversed.
00:42:51.980 Because the House of Saud in the 1990s was pumping Wahhabist ideology. 0.89
00:42:59.280 Yep, yep, yep.
00:42:59.780 Now, if you speak to the Saudis, they will sometimes admit privately that what happened was that after the Iranian revolution,
00:43:07.840 the Khomeinist Shiite revolution in 1979 in Iran, the Saudis got spooked and realized they needed a Sunni fundamentalism equal to it.
00:43:16.280 And they drew up the Wahhabist tendencies are always there. 0.95
00:43:19.900 And then they pushed that around the world.
00:43:22.300 Oh, yeah.
00:43:23.300 There's a bulwark.
00:43:24.360 Since 9-11, the Saudis started to get some pressure on that from the West and others.
00:43:31.180 But that had always been there.
00:43:33.300 But they can diminish it.
00:43:34.780 They can suppress it.
00:43:37.260 They can, instead of propagandizing for the worst versions of Islam, they can try to do something different. 0.94
00:43:42.240 You see that, I would argue, in the Emirates.
00:43:45.900 You see a very dangerous example of a 1980s, 90s-era Saudi Arabia in Qatar at the moment. 1.00
00:43:54.520 Which, although putting out a very materialistic pro-Western face, certainly with a lot of money to pump into the West and pollute a lot of people, are playing with... 0.99
00:44:03.700 Money our idiot industry gives them. 1.00
00:44:05.600 Absolutely. 1.00
00:44:06.480 But they are not just playing with, but pumping out the same type of Islamist... 0.96
00:44:11.740 Back to the universities.
00:44:13.160 Back to the universities.
00:44:14.140 The same ideology that the Saudis were pumping out in the past. 0.99
00:44:19.980 But I would come back to this central thing, which is that the big problem for Islam, as a faith, is, can they deal with this problem within the House of Islam or not?
00:44:31.460 Well, that's a very old problem, you know.
00:44:35.020 It goes back... 0.99
00:44:35.740 Peripats are defined as predatory parasites. 0.99
00:44:38.300 And the problem of parasitism is so profound that sex itself evolved to deal with it.
00:44:44.960 So, one of the measures of the robustness of a system is its ability to contend with predators and parasites.
00:44:54.620 And if the system is overwhelmed by those forces, then it's become pathological.
00:45:00.440 But it does go back to the roots.
00:45:02.560 And I always get myself into trouble when I say this, but I say it anyway because it's true. 0.97
00:45:07.980 Everybody in the West who looks at this problem can identify endless examples in our own history and in the Western past where religious fundamentalism has erupted and gone very badly wrong.
00:45:21.500 The history of Europe shows that.
00:45:23.380 But if you ask a Christian today, or even in the 16th century in Europe, if you throw them a verse like,
00:45:37.120 He who is without sin casts the first stone, you have got the texts on your side.
00:45:44.440 You have got Jesus on your side.
00:45:48.040 And if you want to talk about voluntary self-sacrifice for the highest possible good, you do have the Christ on your side.
00:46:01.860 So, it sounds like the findings from the genetic research, correct me if I'm wrong, are complex like the genetic findings in relationship to intelligence.
00:46:15.320 That there's a plethora of contributing factors.
00:46:19.880 There's no simple one-to-one correspondence between a genetic marker.
00:46:25.460 It's more like a symphony of notes than a single causal factor.
00:46:31.860 So, I mentioned over 100 rare genetic variants.
00:46:37.040 So, that already tells our listeners that autism isn't a single gene.
00:46:41.460 It's polygenic.
00:46:42.520 But when we factor in the common genetic variants or variation in the population, where autistic and non-autistic people may simply differ in the frequency of particular forms of a gene and the combinations of those genes,
00:46:58.680 we may be talking about hundreds or thousands of genes.
00:47:01.500 So, very complex.
00:47:02.580 And even then, we know that even if you have identical twins, where one is autistic, the other one may not be.
00:47:11.340 And even though they share all of their genes, that must mean that there are some non-genetic factors that also play a role in autism.
00:47:20.460 So, genes operate in an environment.
00:47:22.400 And it's the interaction between genes and environmental factors that may be changing brain development, for example.
00:47:31.660 Are there differences in androgen exposure prenatally in the twins, the identical twins who differ in expression of autism?
00:47:40.940 Do we know?
00:47:41.620 That's a great question.
00:47:42.680 I mean, back in 2015, our group was the first to demonstrate that autistic people are exposed to higher levels of prenatal testosterone.
00:47:54.200 And then later, we found oestrogens too, prenatal oestrogens.
00:47:58.000 So, in all likelihood, the hormonal environment in the womb that the baby is exposed to is interacting with the inherited genetic predisposition that the fetus or the baby is born with.
00:48:15.820 So, it's a gene-hormone interaction.
00:48:18.560 But that's just the kind of beginning of the research.
00:48:21.460 I mean, you're asking, you know, would it be possible to look at discordant twins, where one is autistic and the other one isn't, to see whether hormones might explain, hormone exposure might explain why they're not both autistic.
00:48:37.120 You know, those kinds of experiments or studies could be done, but they're challenging because twins themselves are quite a rare occurrence.
00:48:46.300 I think it's like one in 80 in the population.
00:48:49.100 You know, autism itself is not completely rare, but it's only like 2% or 3% of the population.
00:48:56.780 So, it's kind of looking for needles in haystacks.
00:48:59.720 Right.
00:49:00.220 And what do you make of the claims that, well, certainly rates of diagnosis of autism have skyrocketed?
00:49:09.180 Now, my understanding as a clinician is that decreases in the diagnosis of other so-called developmental disorders account for at least some of that.
00:49:21.000 So, many people who would have been classified using the archaic terminology of mental retardation are now shunted into the autism category.
00:49:31.580 And so, I can't make heads or tails out of the claims that the prevalence of autism is increasing.
00:49:42.720 What do you think about that?
00:49:45.340 Yeah.
00:49:45.540 So, if we just take the prevalence data from the year 2000 up to today, so that's the last 25 years, the prevalence of autism has increased over 800%.
00:49:59.920 So, that's massive.
00:50:01.860 So, when I started in this field, autism was considered relatively rare.
00:50:06.460 All the textbooks back in the 80s said that autism was 4 in 10,000, and today it's 1 in 30, right?
00:50:15.460 So, you know, our listeners would be quite reasonably asking, what is causing the increase in the prevalence?
00:50:24.940 I don't think it's just the explanation you gave, which is that people that we used to call learning disability or having a learning disability or an intellectual disability, we no longer use words like retardation because they're stigmatizing.
00:50:43.620 You know, is it simply that they've been reclassified as autistic?
00:50:48.040 That turns out not to be the explanation because the rate of autism in autistic people with a learning disability or an intellectual disability hasn't increased that much over 25 years.
00:51:01.720 Rather, it's the other group, autistic people without a learning disability.
00:51:07.040 And that can be explained because back in the mid-90s, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, DSM, that's the American Psychiatric Association's classification system, they introduced a new diagnosis of Asperger's syndrome.
00:51:25.560 That was DSM-IV.
00:51:27.440 You might remember that.
00:51:28.860 But, you know, suddenly there was a new diagnosis that was available, Asperger's syndrome, which was basically autism without...
00:51:37.040 Autism without a learning or intellectual disability, autism without a language disability or delay.
00:51:44.660 And suddenly that diagnosis became available to people in the general population.
00:51:50.680 Prior to that, we tended to diagnose autism with an intellectual disability.
00:51:56.680 Right.
00:51:56.900 You know, what you, in our previous conversation, you referred to as more severe autism.
00:52:02.900 In the U.S., they're using a term called profound autism to describe, you know, individuals who were autistic, but who've also got many other disabilities, like intellectual disability and language disability and motor disabilities.
00:52:19.680 But the real increase seems to be in people whose IQ is in the average range or above, but who are seeking a diagnosis of autism.
00:52:29.560 That's where the increase has come from.
00:52:32.560 And I think that's because of things like social media.
00:52:37.100 If we think about what's happened over the last 25 years, the internet has really taken off and social media has really taken off.
00:52:45.880 People can learn about autism.
00:52:48.420 25 years ago, autism was still not very well known about.
00:52:52.800 There's been this huge increase in awareness and recognition, and particularly amongst people without a learning disability, who might start thinking, hmm, I wonder if I'm autistic, or I wonder if my child's autistic.
00:53:06.920 So there's been kind of just an interest in pursuing a diagnosis if a child is maybe having social and communication difficulties, or even in an adult who was overlooked in their childhood, never received a diagnosis at the age when it might have been particularly useful.
00:53:27.880 Well, but they struggled right through their teens, but they struggled right through their teens, and have made it into adulthood, but feeling, I've never really felt like I've fitted into social groups.
00:53:37.940 I've always had difficulty making friends.
00:53:40.940 But maybe those are individuals who show the other side of autism, the very positive side of autism, which is that laser focus on understanding how things work, understanding systems.
00:53:54.660 So they may be doing very well in music, or drawing, or chess, or activities, or domains that are very predictable and highly structured and rule-governed, even if they find it very stressful to have a conversation.
00:54:13.960 So is there a generalist-specialist dichotomy there as well?
00:54:18.140 Is it that the—because it seems to me that the systemizer types, their advantage is derived from a proclivity to hyperspecialize.
00:54:30.560 And you could think of social intelligence in the way that we've defined it, with its focus on high-order abstraction in the social domain and a tendency to—what?
00:54:48.240 To operate in the social world primarily.
00:54:51.320 It looks like a social-slash-generalizer proclivity compared to a thing-oriented—
00:54:58.560 Yeah, and that's also that systemizer-empathy dichotomy.
00:55:07.560 How is that associated with interest in people and interest in things?
00:55:11.900 Yeah, I mean, it broadly splits along those lines.
00:55:15.600 Yeah, yeah, okay, okay.
00:55:16.880 Yeah, so someone who's a systemizer, who wants to understand systems, has a preference for the specific.
00:55:25.980 We talked a little bit about this in the first segment.
00:55:29.800 You know, if you're trying to build a bow and arrow, imagine when you were a kid and you were fascinated on, could I make a bow and arrow?
00:55:37.780 It's this specific bow and arrow.
00:55:40.180 Why does the arrow fly further if I have a, you know, a bow that's longer or shorter?
00:55:48.200 So you're trying to vary the parameters to try and make a new tool.
00:55:53.100 But it's this specific one.
00:55:54.720 You don't want to generalize it to all bows and arrows.
00:55:57.600 It's just this particular one.
00:55:58.980 And, you know, so when we think about autistic people, they do prefer detail rather than generalities.
00:56:08.440 And it's, you know, and these different kinds of brains or minds, it's not that one is better and one is worse.
00:56:15.380 We need people in the population who are good at the detail.
00:56:20.300 You know, that's, you know, that's why the cameras that are, you know, we're talking through right now.
00:56:24.880 That's why they work is because the engineers have made sure that every component are fine-tuned in this particular system to work.
00:56:34.360 You know, engineers famously say that when they're developing a new tool, they put it on repeat a million times to make sure it works reliably.
00:56:44.620 Think of a plane taking off and landing.
00:56:47.920 A million takeoffs and a million landings happen without anything going wrong.
00:56:53.060 And that's how they, so that's the standard that engineers want.
00:56:56.860 For this very specific plane, you know, will it repeat the operation a million times?
00:57:04.660 Reliably.
00:57:05.060 Reliably.
00:57:05.840 Yeah, well, you can see there that that proclivity to be sensitive to abnormality, to anomaly, is actually very useful in that regard because it has to work.
00:57:18.140 Well, many of our systems are like this.
00:57:20.380 They work so reliably that it's truly a kind of miracle.
00:57:26.660 I mean, in a reasonable country, the lights are on essentially 100% of the time, right?
00:57:34.240 Your car doesn't blow up 100% of the time.
00:57:38.100 Your natural gas fittings and pipes don't ever leak.
00:57:42.000 It's not 99.99%.
00:57:44.060 It's way better than that, right?
00:57:46.220 So engineers will accept a failure rate of one in a million, and that's considered to be near perfect.
00:57:54.700 And that's when they'll release something into the market as being safe and reliable.
00:58:00.000 Whereas if you take something like empathy, where I'm trying to figure out what you're thinking,
00:58:07.140 at best, all I can do is a guess.
00:58:12.300 You know, I can guess that Jordan is feeling a little bit tired.
00:58:16.560 I can guess that Jordan is interested in what I'm saying.
00:58:20.700 But these are just guesses because other people's mental states are not transparent.
00:58:25.260 I can use your facial cues, I can use your body language, I can listen to your words, but I'll never know for certain.
00:58:32.940 Whereas in the world of systemizing, I can know for certain, I've checked all of the variables,
00:58:39.660 that this particular tool will work, you know, 999 times out of 1,000.
00:58:47.880 Or, you know, there'll only be one failure per million.
00:58:52.380 So there's a, you know, so specificity and understanding a system can lead to control over the system.
00:58:59.840 In the world of human relationships, there's very little control.
00:59:04.320 There's too many unknowns.
00:59:06.100 And it may be that that's why many autistic people find the social world too confusing.
00:59:17.880 Thank you.