00:01:01.080Thank you guys for the invitation. I'm very much looking forward to it.
00:01:04.960It's very kind of you to accept. Let's get straight into the book.
00:01:08.140First of all, one of the themes that you've explored most of all in your last two books is, of course, order and chaos.
00:01:14.040And that tension that exists, I think, within societies, but also within individuals, between the safety and boredom of order and the danger and simultaneously excitement of chaos.
00:01:26.300What is a healthy balance and how does one get there at an individual level, but also at the level of society?
00:02:52.560You obviously have to eat and you have to drink.
00:02:55.680You have to regulate your temperature.
00:02:57.160There's these fundamental biological necessities.
00:02:59.920But you have to master the environment in order to do all of that.
00:03:06.080And then that leads you into the problem of security and exploration.
00:03:09.260And even if you look at it neurobiologically, the system, for example, that governs exploration is unbelievably archaic, ancient from an evolutionary perspective.
00:03:21.400It's half the hypothalamus, roughly speaking.
00:03:24.360And the hypothalamus is a very old brain area.
00:03:27.920It sits on top of the spinal cord, essentially.
00:03:30.520It's, in some sense, it's the master control system for motivation.
00:03:34.520It governs hunger and thirst and defensive aggression and temperature regulation and sexual arousal, these very, very fundamental attributes.
00:03:45.180But half of it is devoted to exploration.
00:03:48.020And in that system, there's a neurochemical system that emerges out of it, which runs on a neurochemical called dopamine.
00:03:55.220And all of the drugs that people like to abuse, like cocaine, for example, activates the dopamine system.
00:04:50.700It becomes so boring you don't even notice it.
00:04:52.620So, for example, if you're lecturing to people in any given room and you ask them to close their eyes and then you ask them to imagine the color of the wall on the right of them, most people can't remember.
00:05:06.400As long as the wall is standing, it doesn't matter what color it is.
00:05:09.200And right now, you and I, the three of us are talking and we're attending to the words.
00:05:14.460We're not attending to anything around us.
00:05:16.740You're not attending to the fact that the floor beneath you is stable.
00:05:21.700But it's stable because you can rely on the engineers.
00:05:24.820And the engineers are encapsulated within a legal system that has certain building standards.
00:05:29.680And the reason that that floor is stable is because you live in this unbelievably developed country where you can take such things for granted.
00:05:37.760And you can't help but be bored by that.
00:05:40.260In fact, if you weren't, you'd be attending to everything at once.
00:05:43.120And, well, that would be absolutely overwhelming.
00:05:47.080And, again, in our society, too, it's very, very hard not to take things for granted, right?
00:05:54.240And I've tried to train myself to do that, partly by reading a vast amount, I would say, about what happens in societies when they become too chaotic.
00:06:05.440You know, we don't expect to see a riot when we go outside.
00:06:08.980But the riot, in some sense, is the default condition.
00:06:13.020And we're so protected that we're so protected as modern Westerners, let's say, that we don't even know what the walls guard us from.
00:06:23.040And that's also a very typical narrative idea.
00:06:26.760So, in The Lord of the Rings, for example, the hobbits are protected by these warriors, the striders, who patrol the borders constantly.
00:08:32.460Just think about how difficult it is to set up a situation where you can reliably have temperature-regulated silence 100% of the time at night for your whole life.
00:08:47.340And, of course, unless you lose it, for some reason, you develop insomnia or you're in an unfortunate situation where you don't have that peace anymore, you won't even notice that that's a privilege.
00:09:49.840Thank God that I don't have to think about the damn floor.
00:09:54.100And, you know, you go to third world countries, badly run countries where the building standards are non-existent or the entire construction company infrastructure is corrupt.
00:10:05.600Well, then the earth shakes a little bit and you have to worry about the damn floor.
00:10:11.240So, Jordan, you use the word education.
00:10:14.540I think in the context of this conversation, this is something that I've been thinking about because one of the shocking things to me as someone who was born in the Soviet Union, I remember talking to my grandmother, still alive.
00:11:18.280But I don't see that happening, particularly with young people in the West these days.
00:11:21.900No, it was shocking to me that, so I lectured mostly to students about the Soviet Union, especially under Stalin, but certainly also under Lenin, about the horrors of the Soviet Union.
00:11:36.440I lectured about that in my personality class in the second year psychology course.
00:11:42.960And that was a valid enterprise because totalitarianism is a personality attribute in some sense as well as a social system.
00:11:50.640But it was often the first any of the students had heard of any of that, you know, which is to me was just absolutely, well, it's so outrageous that it's virtually unbelievable.
00:12:02.880Especially when you think that we put the entire planet at risk for 50 years, at risk of total annihilation because of what happened in the Soviet Union.
00:12:15.880And we're barely out of that if we're out of it at all.
00:12:19.320I mean, the Russians and the Americans still rattle sabers at each other.
00:12:22.900I think the possibility of anything other than an accidental nuclear exchange has decreased immensely since the mid-80s, let's say.
00:12:31.800But how is it that we could be so blind that we would forget to notify our young people that we fought?
00:12:42.980Like, the Second World War really didn't end until 1989.
00:12:47.520That isn't how the history books look at it yet, but that's the case.
00:12:51.700And it's just stunning that none of that is common knowledge.
00:12:57.140You know, there's a little bit more historical knowledge disseminated about what happened in Nazi Germany.
00:13:01.820But the deafening silence with regards to Maoist China, which is still an immense threat, not least in the form of North Korea and the Soviet Union, it's so remarkable that it's a kind of miracle.
00:13:18.060So, but it is the responsibility of the education system, as far as I can tell.
00:15:52.580My first degree was actually in political science, but I soon found that I was much more oriented towards Dostoevsky, let's say, than Tolstoy.
00:16:02.060I like Tolstoy, but Tolstoy is basically a sociologist, right?
00:16:05.540He writes about these wide swaths of sociological occurrences, sort of at the level of society.
00:16:15.520But I like Dostoevsky because he got inside people's heads.
00:16:19.660And that's what I was really interested in.
00:16:21.520It wasn't how the concentration camps were set up politically or even what ideology motivated them,
00:16:28.260but what was the guard thinking when he pushed people to the right rather than the left?
00:19:22.720And look, the thing that we should make clear here, Jordan, is when we laugh at that, we're laughing at ourselves from 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago, whenever it was for each of us.
00:19:33.100We know that we can laugh at the idea that students don't know anything because we were once students who didn't know anything.
00:19:38.760Absolutely. Well, and it's not like I don't take undergraduates seriously.
00:20:38.240And part of that was pure economic calculation, right?
00:20:41.140Because Harvard has a huge endowment, and it has that endowment because it's so good at treating its undergraduates properly and selecting them as well.
00:20:50.160So it's a great deal for Harvard, especially if you're thinking over decades.
00:20:54.000But that's the right way to treat undergraduates.
00:20:57.060It's not as 18-year-olds who knew nothing but as future incredibly competent adults.
00:21:03.660But that still, having said all that, when you're 18, you haven't had a child.
00:21:12.220It's unlikely that you've engaged in the kind of long-term intimate relationship that requires adult-level compromise over, let's say, the years.
00:21:24.640You haven't worked, or if you have, minimally, and often not at all.
00:21:30.200You certainly haven't started a business.
00:22:13.880And he was a little older when he went back to university.
00:22:15.920And he was a cynical, compassionate optimist.
00:22:21.760And he ended up working with, like, the worst delinquents in Canada.
00:22:24.600And he could really do that well because he was a tough guy.
00:22:27.820And he told me one day, you just don't know anything.
00:22:33.740Like, you have this theory, which was a socialist theory.
00:22:36.160But it certainly wasn't mine, although I knew it, and I could say it, and I could argue for it, and win the arguments for that matter.
00:22:43.880He said, that doesn't explain the world.
00:22:46.920And I'd already kind of figured that out.
00:22:49.020I noticed that I worked on this board, Board of Governors, for this little college I went to.
00:22:55.060And all the people on the Board of Governors had been appointed by the government, and the government was conservative.
00:23:01.500And so they were all small businessmen who'd done well on the frontier of Canada, essentially, because it was in this town called Grand Prairie, which was pretty new.
00:23:11.300A lot of them were immigrants because Alberta is an immigrant province.
00:24:19.760So I figured I'd try to see if I could learn something before I dared to do anything political.
00:24:25.220But doesn't that speak to another quality, which is humility, which is something that frequently, in a lot of our young people, they're, you know, that are lacking as well.
00:24:36.520That ability to look in on oneself and realize that they don't know the answers.
00:24:41.940The fact that you may have this confidence, you may be bright, you may have the ability to articulate, you may be able to win arguments.
00:27:10.200But, so, it's such an arrogant claim that it hasn't been tried properly.
00:27:14.600It's, so, but having said that, like, it's not, I understand the motivation for, like, the desire for an egalitarian distribution of valuable resources.
00:29:04.800It's a hole that's really hard to climb out of.
00:29:07.560And it's not good for society to have a lot of people at 0.
00:29:12.420So, there's this propensity for people to fall off the end and to degenerate down to 0.
00:29:20.060And another propensity for resources to aggregate in the hands of a very, very small number of people.
00:29:25.020And look, it doesn't matter what dimension you measure that on.
00:29:29.460So, if you look up among basketball players, you look at successful, you know, number of points scored.
00:29:36.920There's a few people way out on the extreme.
00:29:39.200If you look at number of records sold, records produced, songs written, popular songs written.
00:29:45.780It's like five composers account for 95% of the classical repertoire.
00:29:52.400But it's only 5% of the music they wrote that's played.
00:29:57.920And so, you see that happening in two ways there.
00:30:01.040And the problem with that is that it produces this radical inequality in society.
00:30:07.300And that's really unsettling because you have a mechanism that's very deeply embedded within you that runs, as far as we can tell, on serotonin, a fundamental brain chemical.
00:30:19.920And the degree to which serotonin regulates your negative emotion is dependent on your status within the group that you strive for status within.
00:30:33.500And what that means is that if you're on the bottom end of the status hierarchy, you're much more prone to negative emotion.
00:30:43.840And that actually hurts you physically.
00:32:25.600Lots of them can't because we understand people have different IQs and different genetic basis and different experiences and childhood and whatever.
00:32:32.680And on the other hand, you've got people on the left who say, well, inequality is intolerable.
00:32:39.060But as you say, the systems that they try to apply in order to address that don't work and don't make any sense and create terrible outcomes.
00:36:20.040So, there's about as many people with an IQ of 82 or lower as there are of people who are capable of doing well in an institute of higher education.
00:36:34.360So, and among that population, those who work harder are going to do better.
00:36:38.540But, but, in a cognitively complex environment, they're at a marked disadvantage.
00:36:48.600And the conservatives can't deal with that.
00:36:50.820They don't know what to do about that.
00:36:52.520And fair enough, you know, it's like, it's a very hard problem.
00:36:55.340And the liberals, they say, the liberals take the opposite tack, which is even more annoying in my estimation.
00:37:01.240It's like, well, you can train anyone to do anything.
00:37:03.600And that's, that's so wrong that, that it's hard to even know where to begin.