The Joe Rogan Experience - #1006 - Jordan Peterson & Bret Weinstein

Episode Date: September 1, 2017

Jordan Peterson is a clinical psychologist and tenured professor of psychology at the University of Toronto. You can check out all Dr. Peterson's self-improvement writing programs at www.selfauthoring.com Bret Weinstein is a biology professor at Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA. Currently he is in the middle of an intense controversy that has been documented by the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and several other mainstream media outlets. Sign up for a free crash course on Evolutionary Thinking at http://bretweinstein.net/early

getting bigger, but the video part is getting to a larger percentage. Three, two, one. Gentlemen, we're live. Here we go. Jordan Peterson, Brett Weinstein, how are you guys? Doing very well. Thanks for coming in. Excited to be here. I'm excited to have you in.

Hey, should be fun. Look at you, you're spiffy. You make us look very schlubby. What are you doing? What can I say, man? You know, I only brought a limited number of clothes. Well, good move. You look great. And good to see you guys, both of you. And so whose idea was it to do this, first of all?

I think it was Brett's. Yeah, I saw a tweet of Jordan's about, or maybe it wasn't a tweet. I did see a YouTube clip that somebody tweeted. I don't know if it was you. Your perspective on Hitler and your argument was that he was actually even far worse than his reputation would lead us to believe. And it's funny. It harkens back to my first evolutionary project. As an undergraduate, I was working with Bob Trivers, who's one of the leading evolutionary minds of the 20th century. He was, I was lucky enough to have him as an undergraduate advisor. Pull this sucker right up to your face, because you're going to turn sideways because we're looking at each other next to each other. Yeah, yeah. Okay. So anyway, I did

a project with Bob on analyzing the Holocaust from an evolutionary perspective. I wanted to test the question about whether, you know, at the time it was commonplace for people to say that Hitler was crazy, and there was something that bothered me about that analysis. I think there's something actually dangerous that we dismiss somebody like Hitler as crazy before we understand actually what they're up to. So when I saw your video clip, I thought it would be worth having a discussion so that we could figure out what perspective makes sense. That sounds like an awesome topic. But before we get to that, I would really like to know what's going on with you

because you're at the center of this crazy controversy of Evergreen State College. You essentially left the area. You're suing the college now. So where do you stand now? We have not yet filed suit. And in fact say, from where I sit, as hard as this is to believe, it appears that the college has learned nothing from this episode and that it is doubling down on the same foolish sets of beliefs and assumptions that got it into trouble in the first place. So that is not a hopeful situation. No, and for anybody that's not aware of what this whole story is about,

you would either have to go back to Brett's podcast that we did a few months back, or please just Google Evergreen State University and Google Brett, and you will be blown away by the insanity. It's social justice warrior gone amok. The whole campus, kids patrolling the campus with baseball bats. I mean, the whole thing is just completely bananas. The president of the university being told by the children not to use his hands when he's speaking because it's a microaggression. So he puts his hands down.

The children start cheering and laughing. They don't realize they're being played. The whole thing is just some crazy grand game by the children. And I'm calling them children. I don't give a fuck how old they are to, to have power over people. I mean, essentially what this is all boiling down to,

and you really see it in that moment where they tell him to put his hands down and he does. And they, they laugh and cheer and think it's amazing. Well, you know, they're, they're educated to do that to some degree

because one of the tenets of the postmodernism that they're being spoon-fed is that there's nothing but power. That's the only thing that mediates relationships between people because there's no real world. Everything's a social construct and it's a landscape of conflict between groups. That's the postmodern world and the only actual means of expression

is power. That's why the postmodernists make the claim constantly that the patriarchy is a corrupt institution, because they look at hierarchical organizations, and they're stratified. Obviously, there's people at the top and people at the bottom. The only reason that there are people at the top is because they dominate by power. There's no philosophy of authority or competence. That's all gone. And if you're cynical about that sort of thing, and you should be, you might say that part of the reason that the only thing that the postmodernists believe in is power is because that helps them justify their arbitrary use of it under any circumstances whatsoever. And I think that's right. I think that's exactly what happens.

circumstances whatsoever and i think that's right i think that's exactly what happens so it's not surprising that that you see this manifested in the mob like behavior of the students it's right in accordance with everything they're being taught so well they're also being taught in this sort of any means necessary to uh to get over the establishment like the establishment is this horrible institution and they could justify pretty much anything yeah this is what like punch a nazi who's a nazi everybody that doesn't agree with you i mean it's essentially what's what's being said ad nauseum in in social justice warrior circles online and you see i've seen punch a nazi so many times i mean but when it came down to charlottesville there was very little punching of nazis you know the whole thing was like it's all it's all very insane we see real nazis

like those are real nazis you know like go fucking punch them please you know we've also i think don't even do that by the way right well i think we've already figured out everyone right from the right to the left everyone's figured out that wherever the Nazis went, that was wrong. We've all agreed on that. We're not going there anymore. And so when someone pops up and says, well, we should go there, it's like they're immediately identifiable. You can box them in. And if you have any sense, like many conservatives did in the aftermath of Charlottesville, they come out and say, well, in case it needs to be said again, we're actually not allied with those people.

Yeah, well, that was the most disturbing thing for many people about Donald Trump's reaction to it, that he didn't take a hard stance against these white supremacists showing up with tiki torches, walking through the street yelling anti-Semitic phrases or whatever. I don't know exactly what they're yelling. I've read a bunch of different things. But the whole thing was an abomination. I mean, it was a horrific thing to watch. And, you know, Donald Trump comes out and says there was horrible behavior on all sides. Yeah, well, I thought about that for a lot because I got tangled up with that in a strange way in Canada. I was supposed to appear on a panel, a panel discussing the suppression of free speech on university

campuses, which was then promptly cancelled by the university that was going to host it in the aftermath of Charlottesville, partly because one of the panelists was going to be Faith Goldie, who was the journalist that was covering Charlottesville and got the footage of the car and the damage. But we were targeted immediately afterward with the Nazi epithet, and Ryerson shut down the free speech panel. So it's coming up again in November 11th. You were targeted as Nazis? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

What happened was this person put up a Facebook page and used a swastika with a no, you know, like a circle with a line through it and said, no fascists, no fascists at Ryerson, essentially. But she used the swastika and she got a bunch of people rallied together to pressure the university administration into cancelling the event, which they promptly did. And then they had a celebration party the night of the event. And this is, here's something that was really interesting. So they got a couple, I think a couple of hundred people out to the celebration at Ryerson, and they were united under the banner of the hammer and sickle and were calling for revolution. And what was so interesting about that,

and I really mean technically that it was interesting, was that the mainstream media said virtually nothing about the fact that these let's call them counter protesters i don't know exactly how you'd term them had come out under this murderous symbol and that's made me think like i can't figure out why the swastika is an immediate identifier of a pathological personality and the hammer and sickle isn't there's actually a reason. It isn't just arbitrary. And I think maybe it's something like

the Nazi is the guy who knifes you in the alley and steals your wallet, and the communist is the white-collar criminal who takes your pension. And you're actually more afraid of the first person than the second person, because the damage they do is more proximal and emotionally recognizable.

But the second guy who takes your pension, is more proximal and emotionally recognizable. But the second guy who takes your pension, for example, he's perhaps even more dangerous. But there's a bloodiness about the Nazi symbol and an immediate emotional impact that the hammer and sickle just doesn't produce. And some of that's because people are badly educated historically. I think that's it. I think it's pure ignorance. Well, I don't think it's just ignorance. Do you think that the people that are wearing those Che Guevara t-shirts really understand the history of Che Guevara?

Or do you think he represents this sexy South American counter-protest character? A guy who stands up to the establishment as we know it. A guy who's wearing a beret, hiding in the jungle, fighting against the oppressive dictatorship of America. I mean, that's what they're looking at when they see that image. Well, the fact that historical ignorance plays a role in this is absolutely certain, and I think the romanticization of people like Che Guevara is exactly

I think you nailed that exactly. But I do think there's a deeper question here. It's like I was thinking in the aftermath of Charlottesville, many conservatives immediately divorced themselves from the Nazis. Ben Shapiro was a good example, right? And it was very much reminiscent of William F. Buckley divorcing himself from the John Birch Society back in the 1960s. The right wing seems, it seems to be easier for the right wing to draw a line around the Nazis and say, no, that's not us. Partly because the right wingers, conservatives are better at drawing

boundaries. But you know, let's say we wanted to draw a boundary around the radical leftists. Okay? Point to something. Well, on the right you say, well, you wore a swastika. Yeah, you're out of the club, man. On the left, well, you believe what's the smoking pistol? You believe in equity? It's like, that's

a smoking pistol as far as I'm concerned. But it doesn't have the same emotional punch as you wore a swastika to the protest. Yeah, you believe in equity and you refuse to define it. That would be the indicator to me. Right, but that's such a – there's no emotional punch in that. It's like, well, I'm not going to associate with you because you believe in equity. It's too complicated.

It's right. I do want to back us up here, though, because the – I think we underrate the danger of, and I think Nazis are a red herring. There is something that actually does threaten to reemerge, and Charlottesville is a version of it. But I think because we have a cartoon understanding of what that protest was actually about and how many people are actually involved, we don't really see why this is a dangerous and contentious issue. And I think the answer is an evolutionary one that hasn't been spelled out. And because it hasn't been spelled out, it's very hard to point to. I hate to keep interrupting you, but just get this right up to your face because it sounds good

to us, but the people listening online are going to have an issue. Is that have is that better yeah just when you turn to him just turn the thing with you okay yeah just get it always keep it a fist from your face that's the best uh sorry that's all right so explain what you mean by this so my point would be that what took place in germany in the 30s, was a particularly visible, well-documented example of a pattern that is much more common in human history. And because this pattern emerges as a result of certain features of the way evolution functions in the context of humans, it is actually always a danger that it will reemerge. And knowing what to do about it is not so simple until you've seen why it occurs and what it means. What I've been saying in lectures I've given on this is that tyranny is the end game of prosperity. And so there is a pattern in which you will go through a period of prosperousness in which it appears that that thing is defeated once and for all.

There's no reason for people to be going after each other in this particular way. And then at the point that that pattern peters out, it reemerges and people don't expect it. It flies under a different flag or something like that. And so I do think that looking at the tiny number of people who were doing what they were doing in Charlottesville and saying, the environments in which we all grew up that are going to become permissible again if we are not careful to recognize that that's that's the nature of history i think i think it's highly probable that that's going to occur i mean part of the reason that i landed in the political hot water that i landed in last year was because i was increasingly aware that this process of polarization was going to

take place and that the continual, in my estimation anyways, the continual clawing of new ground underneath the radical leftist rubric, especially in the universities, is starting to produce an extraordinarily dangerous counter position. And that was manifest, at least to some degree, in Charlottesvilleville and so i think you're right is that well i you don't want to be complacent say well we know who the nazis are and we're not going there and so the problem is solved the problem isn't solved there's all sorts of weird activity in the non-radical left space like on the other side of the radical left whatever that is and right now what it is is not obvious you know it's it's the radical left, whatever that is. And right now, what it is, is not obvious. You know, it's the alt-right, that's part of it. It's the Kekistanis, it's this peppy thing.

It's some of it's comedy, some of it's satire, some of it's serious, some of it's the inversion of identity politics, which is very dangerous. And it's maybe the most dangerous thing about Charlottesville, is that there's something extraordinarily dangerous about having people revert to identification with their racial identity. It's really not a good thing. Well, there's the reversion to their racial identity. There's basically an outbreak of tribalism, which explains what's going on on the far right. What's going on on the left is a bit of a new twist. What you have is a coalition of different tribal identities that aren't large enough to marshal a force on their own and so they're united and together they

are a formidable force but what's going to happen is that's that's an unstable entity at the point that that force gains power it's going to come apart as internal dynamics rip it up. So it's not actually a, a, a, a, it's not capable of restraining the version that recurs on the right, the version that does manifest as, as a white nationalism. That version is stable because it does represent an actual population that has an evolutionary basis for remaining cohesive. And I should point out, there's a danger when you hear an evolutionary biologist talk about evolutionary patterns. People often infer that if an evolutionary biologist is saying that something is a pattern that has evolved, that that's some kind of a

defense. And it is absolutely not. We call this the naturalistic fallacy. So evolution is an absolutely amoral process. It has produced the most marvelous features of human beings and the worst features. And we are in some sense obligated to pick and choose which features to honor and promote and which ones to tamp down. Something can have evolved as a virtue in some circumstances and still be of the type that, if magnified beyond its proper limits, becomes pathological. So let me tell you something I learned about Hitler, which really, I haven't recovered from my shock from this. So we've been looking at the relationship between political belief and personality.

And your political belief is strongly determined by your temperament. So liberal left types are high in trait openness, that's creativity, and low in conscientiousness. But you can fragment conscientiousness up into industriousness and orderliness. And the real predictor for conservatism is in orderliness, not industriousness. And you might think, well, that's no surprise. Right-wingers are more orderly, hence Hitler's call for order, let's say. But it's one thing to posit that and another thing to measure it. Now it's measurable. And it appears that orderliness is associated with sensitivity to disgust.

And this is actually a really big deal. It's a really big deal. So there's a paper that was published in PLOS One about three years ago looking at the relationship between the prevalence of infectious diseases and authoritarian political attitudes. And they did it country by country, and then within countries by state or province. And the correlation between the prevalence of infectious diseases and authoritarian-slash-right-wing political beliefs at the local individual level was 0.6.

And so I want to take this apart a little bit. Okay, so the idea is that this is part of what you might describe as the extended behavioral immune system and one of the problems with the interactions between groups of human beings in our evolutionary past was well exactly what happened to the Native Americans is you know they came out and shook hands with the Spanish conquistadors

and then within a couple of generations 90% of them were dead of smallpox and measles and mumps. And so it's been a truism in our evolutionary past that if you meet a group of isolated, if you're a group of isolated humans and you meet another group of isolated humans and you trade pathogens, there's a real possibility that you and everyone you know are going to be dead in no time flat. And so we have a disgust mechanism that produces this implicit, let's call it racial and ethnic bias that is part and parcel of the human cognitive landscape.

But the problem with that is that it's rooted in a disgust mechanism that actually serves a protective function. Now, when I was sorting this out, I was reading Hitler's Table Talk. And Hitler's Table Talk is a very interesting book. It's a book of his spontaneous mealtime utterances from 1939 to 1942. And I went through with this new knowledge, because people think of conservatives or fascists as afraid of those who are different. They're not afraid. They're disgusted.

And that's not the same thing, because you burn things you're disgusted by. And so it was terrifying to me to read it, because then I also thought, oh, well, disgust sensitivity is associated with orderliness, and you need order in a society in order to maintain it, and the Germans are very orderly, and that was actually a canonical part of their civilization and part of actually what makes them great and powerful. And that just had to tilt a little farther than necessary. And all of a sudden,

everything needed to get cleaned. And, you know, Hitler talked about cleanliness all the time, and he actually meant that. And so this thing that's emerging, you know, you talked about its biological basis, its evolutionary basis. It is. It's part of this deeply rooted disgust system that protects us from dangerous pathogens that can manifest itself and does manifest itself in the political realm. It's not good. So I don't know exactly how to tease this apart, but I agree with your point about there's an actual danger when populations meet like a literal pathogen danger

and that that is liable to have produced a certain instinctive fear of the other, which doesn't have to be limited to that one thing, but that's enough to generate a selective force that would cause a certain reluctance to meet. But I want to point out that at least in the West and probably universally, human beings, when they go to war, tend to dehumanize the other population. And, you know, so of course, calling the other population subhuman, vermin, whatever it is that human beings do. And my concern is that we are doing exactly this with the Nazis or de facto Nazis who are showing up on our screens at this point. That what we are doing is we are comforting ourselves by saying, well, that's a small outbreak of something that makes these people subhuman, justifies punching them or

whatever. And I'm not squeamish about there being a right to violence when somebody is threatening a way of life. So it's not that. But my concern is that if you take the pathogen model and you imagine that all those folks who showed up in Charlottesville, that that is a contagion and it needs to be isolated, then you will have the sense that as long as you do that, it's not going to show up somewhere else. Whereas what's, I think, the actual hazard is that that's actually a latent program that has served populations in past circumstances. It's indefensible, but it has served populations. And the populations that we come from have it, therefore, on reserve. And when certain characteristics show up in the environment, that program can emerge. And so my concern is that that's where we are in history.

It can't be isolated as a phenomena that's associated with the other. One of the things I've done for decades is teach my students a variant of that, which is something like, because I try to walk them through understanding, psychological understanding of what happened in Nazi Germany, and in the more intense situations, like in places like in Auschwitz. So the question might be,

well, if you were in Germany in the 1930s, could you be a concentration camp guard? And the gut reaction to that is, no, those people are unlike me. And that's the wrong response. The right response is, those people were human, and I'm also human, and so that means that the Nazi is us. That's what it means. And who the hell wants to think that?

And no one will think that. And I have thought that through, because I've thought through, for a variety of reasons, what the limits of my potential behavior are. And the limits of my potential, and maybe I'm more pathological than the average person, it's certainly possible, but I understand that the limits of my potential behavior are far beyond the bounds of what people would normally consider civilized. And I think that's characteristic of human beings in general. Well, I mean, you know, looking, oh, go ahead. No, I was going to say, I think this is one of the things that really highlights the importance of having uncensored discussions because we've, you've, we've already hit on so many hot topics to the point where you have to like really clarify your position. And when you're talking about this sort of latent program in, in, in human beings and the necessity for it at one point in time.

Like all these things are very taboo to discuss today. And this is a giant issue because what you guys are doing is talking about things objectively, reasonably, logically, and clearly. But when you get to these sort of hysterical subjects, that's sort of forbidden today. And there's a giant issue with that. Because when you have forbidden discussions, you energize those topics. And the topics grow in the absence of discussion, in the absence of being picked apart and analyzing them for what their core components are. And when we're talking about it from an evolutionary perspective, this is very, very important because these patterns are reemerging.

We do see that. And I think any one of us, given the wrong neighborhood, the wrong parents, the wrong life, we might have been one of those assholes with the tiki torches in Charlotte. I mean, we're human beings, like you said. I think that is absolutely critical to discuss. Well, and it's also, there's another thing going on right now. I've been trying to characterize the state of the sociological and psychological landscape that we all inhabit

right now. And I think we're in a position of radical instability. And things in the future could be way better than they are right now, radically. And they could be way better than they are right now radically and they could be way worse than they are and small decisions are going small the small decisions that people make are going to have outsized effects while they make them like look at what happened with this guy in charlottesville you know this was i mean i know he was surrounded by a coterie of of deplorables let's say but it was one guy who decided to do something murderous and that shifted the whole political landscape. And so what I see happening right now is that we're surrounded by these interactions between

people that are positive feedback loops, you know, and a positive feedback loop occurs when, if you do something, then it makes whatever caused that occur even in a greater way. And the polarization is like that. So I say something left-like, and you say something right-like, and that annoys me, so I get more left, and it annoys you, and you get more right, and all of a sudden we're at each other's throats. And that's happening everywhere, right?

It's very unstable. And what's to be hoped for is that we can pull back from that and discuss it. We can say, look, you know, under circumstance A, I could have been a communist inquisitor or a Nazi prison guard. I need to know that. And then I need to know, what were the situations that made that likely? And then I need to know, how should I conduct myself so that's less possible? And the only way we can figure that out is to have the kind of conversations that we're having right now. It's like, and this isn't them. I've been taken to task by some of my friends, for example, for using the social justice warrior terminology,

because they've said to me, well, you know, you're participating in this process of demonization and polarization. And I think, well, yeah, I can understand that. Although I'm also radically concerned about the fact that the universities, for example, are completely taken over by radical Marxists, essentially, and that they're driving this polarization. And it isn't obvious to me how to have a discussion about that without participating in the process of polarization. It's something I've been trying to figure out for the whole last year. You know, and I've been emphasizing the role of personal

responsibility instead of ideological identification, right? Get it into your head that you have the capacity for great evil and stop targeting, stop assuming that that's something that's manifesting itself only in the people that you disagree with politically. Take responsibility for that and try to put your life together. I don't see an alternative to that, but it's been very difficult to avoid to do that and simultaneously to avoid becoming a participant in this process of polarization. And it's a very dangerous process. It's what destabilized Germany in the 1920s and 30s, right?

It was this ping-ponging back and forth between the radical left and the radical right. And your point, Brett, that the radical right actually is more powerful once they get organized is a really good one because there's no fractionation. It's more stable. You bet. And they have all the guns. That's another thing to think about. Certainly.

In this country, the right is much better armed, and that's a very frightening fact. That's a terrifying thought. I mean, we've heard this many times recently about the Trump administration, about if he's impeached, that there will be some sort of a civil war. I believe Roger Stone said that. Like, this thought is so terrifying that we literally cannot do anything to stop some sort of physical confrontation with weapons if we disagree ideologically, that it's going

to happen. Well, first of all, there's a lot we can do. And in fact, you know, one of the other things about the evolutionary toolkit is that I believe we have exactly the tools for navigating this puzzle. They're built into us also, in addition to this latent program. But we are now in a very dangerous situation because, for example, if Google and other of these online Goliaths start deploying algorithms that decide what we get to talk about and see, then we cannot use the very tools that are necessary in order to escape and avoid something like civil war. Open communication and debate debate analyzing all the components of this issue completely objectively exactly taking the risks that are necessary with that and some of the risks are that if we have free and open communication that some

percentage of that communication is going to be reprehensible and deplorable but that yes but that but that the consequences of suppressing that are so much more dangerous than the consequences of allowing it that they're not in the same universe. Yes, we empower those terrible ideas by making them, I mean, electronically taboo. Yeah. And then the point is they're going to fester. Whereas if we discuss them, we can diffuse the ones that are terrible. We can spot the opportunities that we don't know we have. And we can move forward rather than descend into civil war which frankly looks more and more like this issue with

with google and youtube let's say and these other gigantic internet companies you know it isn't a matter of if they're going to produce automated bots that do pre-perceptual censorship they are doing that well to explain that's sad explain's sad, explain what happened with him. He tweeted the other day that, and I knew this was in the workings because I'd been looking at what YouTube and Google are planning with regards to their artificial intelligence sensors, let's say.

You know, they want to get to the point where the appalling video is not even put up. So, what happened, I hope I've got this exactly right, but Gad was in the process, you upload a video and then you publish it. And so once you upload it, YouTube has access to it, and they have access to its content.

And they informed him that it would be demonetized before he published it. There it is right here. We put it up on the board. There you go. YouTube thinks that my pointing to astounding hypocrisy is too triggering. There is nothing objectionable in my clip. Unbelievable. Yeah, and that one was a manual review, so I'm wrong about that. Although, how in the world they decided that they were going to manually review Gad's video is also...

I mean, how many videos are going up on YouTube? What the hell? Why are they manually reviewing his? And I mean, Gad Saad is not a radical, right? That's the thing. I mean, he's an evolutionary biologist, and that makes him a radical. Now it does, because he's a biological essentialist. Because he's questioning what's happening. And by questioning what's happening, you instantaneously get lumped into this right-wing hate group. Yeah. Well, and he's also making the claim that human beings have an intrinsic nature.

And so now there's a new buzz phrase that goes along with that. And so that's that you're a biological essentialist. And you see, so if you're a radical postmodern neo-Marxist, your theory is human beings can be anything that I want to make them into. It's a core doctrine of the theory,

and it's part of what makes it intensely totalitarian. Because then human beings are just putty for the molding. And that's part of the theory and it's part of what makes it intensely totalitarian because then human beings are just putty for the molding and that's part of the motivational drive for claiming the radical constructionist claim. There's no biological essence. Well why do you make that claim? Well because we want to free people from prejudice and tyranny. It's like no that's not why you make that claim. You make that claim because you want to justify your claim that there's absolutely nothing wrong with making over humanity in the image of your ideology and and and that's that that that was a well-documented intellectual argument that that that wove through what happened in communist russia for example

because the claim there explicitly was you wipe out the past there's no real biological identity you can mold the human of the future in the image of your perfectionistic ideology. And the Russians actually sidelined themselves effectively with respect to evolutionary theory, that basically they were so backward on a biological front that as they were deploying this very broken ideological toolkit, they were wrecking their ability to think about how biology works. And so what you're pointing to about evolutionary biologists, it's not just that we question. The content of evolutionary biology is absolutely the opposite of politically correct.

Yes, exactly. Because nobody tells the biota what's right and what's wrong, the biota does what it does. And those of us who look at it and attempt to understand what those patterns are can't help but be deeply politically incorrect almost all the time. And so the idea that the truth of biology is actually going to become unexpressible and we're going to move ahead. We're just going to, we're going to, we're going to sideline it so that we can move ahead with this ideological stuff. I mean, that is cutting off your nose.

That's already happening. Biology is racist and sexist. Well, if I might, biology, and we're going to have to go back here in order to collect a tool, but biology does create entities that have the potential for racism in them. In our genomes, we carry the potential for racism for Darwinian reasons. Sexism is a little different, right? It is. So I'm about to become very politically incorrect. Uh-oh. Yeah, I know. It is not possible for male genes to gang up on female genes because all of our genes spend half their time in male bodies and half their time in female bodies, which does not mean that civilization is fair with respect to sex and

gender. But it does mean that there's no biological basis for the evolution of a patriarchal force that subordinates women because whatever the patriarchy does, those who are part of the patriarchy become female in the next iteration and they suffer the consequences of it. This is not the case with race. Unfortunately, this is not a good thing, but it is a true thing. In a Darwinian sense, one population can gang up on another population, and it has happened again and again. It explains all of the worst chapters in human history. And so, in some sense, what I'm getting at is that you want to understand that process.

And once you understand what your genes are actually up to, and you understand that your genes, their objectives in the universe are not defensible, what your genes want cannot be defended in rational terms, then we become free to do something else, to recognize that our genes are up to things that we don't have any reason to honor. And we can basically take them out of the control position. But if we imagine that what our genes are up to must be all right, and therefore it can't include anything like racism, then we're just stuck. Then we don't have the tools to diffuse racism. So one of the things that happened when I made my video, so a year ago, complaining about Bill C-16 in Canada, and that was the one that instantiated transgender rights, one of the things I was pointing to, like my comments had nothing to do with transgender rights, but one of the things I was pointing to that was that Canada had built into the law

a social constructionist version of human identity, and that's actually the case. So, for example, now in Canada, here's a proposition which now has the force of law. There is no causal connection between biological sex, gender identity, gender expression, and sexual proclivity. Technically, it's illegal to make a claim that those things are causally linked, and the causal link claim is a biological claim. And not only is it a biological claim, it's a factual claim. Those four levels are so tightly linked causally that there's hardly any exceptions. There are exceptions. So because almost everyone whose biological sex is male considers themselves male, manifests themselves as male, and is heterosexual. So

they're linked. And the reason they're linked is, well, there's biological and cultural reasons, but it's now, in Canada, the proposition that they're independent is now law. And I was pointing that, saying, we don't want to do that. You don't understand. You've built social constructionism into the law. That means that now it's illegal to be a biologist. Well, and everybody said, oh, no, no, no, that's not happening. It's like, don't kid yourself. When you put things in the law, things happen. And we were accused not only of being Nazis, and that was part of the reason that this talk was shut down, but also of being biological essentialists. And biological essentialism is the new buzzword for Nazi, essentially.

Please do. I want to correct you. It's not that it's illegal to be a biologist. It's just illegal to be any good at it. Okay, well that's even more effective, I would say. So, is there concern that putting biology as fact

it will get in the way of civilization because we're supposed to be moving past all of these issues. We're supposed to be moving past these things as we evolve. We're supposed to be looking people as being free to choose whatever gender they like, free to choose whatever sexual orientation they like, free to express themselves in any way, and that by defining them by purely biological terms, we're essentially relying on the meat wagon to lead us through civilization rather than the mind. That's great.

You did a very good job of outlining the credible case against biological essentialism, because it can deteriorate into something like eugenics. There's a real danger, like a political danger on the side of biological determinism. But there's a danger in denying it as well, because then we can't use our rational minds to truly mitigate whatever issues that we would have with our biological urges. That's the irony of this. Yes. That actually, there is an argument to be made that we need freedom from our biology.

Yes. And we have the capacity to do it. Most creatures wouldn't. But the way human beings are constructed, we absolutely have the ability to be rational about these things and decide which things we want to bring into the future. But we can't do it if we don't discuss these things in honest terms. Well, a subset of males are biologically hyper-aggressive. You can identify them at two years of age. And they're the kids. If you put a bunch of two-year-olds together, there's a small subset. They're almost all males, about 5% of males, who will kick, hit,

bite, and steal. Okay, so that's their biological programming, let's say. But the vast majority of them are socialized by the time they're four years old so that's amazing yeah sure absolutely i mean it is yeah absolutely yeah and the thing about about boys like that is that if you socialize them properly it's quite a bit of work because they're very combative my son was like that and if you socialize them properly then they can become unbelievably useful. They're courageous. They're forthright.

They're not going to back down from a challenge. There's all sorts of massive utility in that, and that's this proper interplay between the biological circuitry and the socialization. But, you know, and with James Damore's memo, you know, he's been accused of taking a biological essentialist route, which is not true. One of the things James said is, look, there's credible evidence that there are biologically mediated differences between men and women at the level of temperament and interest that are actually large and profound. And I would say the science on that is sufficiently settled so that someone can come out and say that's scientifically credible. Now, that doesn't mean it's right, because the scientists could be wrong.

But what you can't say is that what James Damore said was scientifically uninformed. It was scientifically informed. But he also said, look, let's make the assumption, I'm paraphrasing slightly, but let's make the assumption that we want to, as a society, assumption, I'm paraphrasing slightly, but let's make the assumption that we want to, as a society, we want to extract maximum useful economic value from talented people. So one of the things we want to do is, if some of those people are women and some of them are men, we want to understand the actual differences between women and men, so that we can set up the workplace, so that both women and men can contribute to the maximum economically, that they can benefit as individuals and everybody can benefit socially so you can use the biological so i mean for example one of the things here's here's a biological problem on average women are more agreeable than men and

i think that's because agreeable people are they're self-sacrificing and i think as a woman you need to be wired to be self-sacrificing or you won't be able to tolerate taking care of infants that's my sense of it okay now there's some problems with that it's like let's say that a and you need to be wired to be self-sacrificing or you won't be able to tolerate taking care of infants. That's my sense of it. Okay, now there's some problems with that. It's like, let's say that a huge part of female wiring is tilted in the direction of the necessity of self-sacrifice for infant care. Okay, that doesn't equip women very well for dealing with aggressive men because aggressive men and infants are not the same creatures.

So women pay a price, being optimized to some degree for infant care, they pay a price that they're less, what would you call, prepared, that's one way of thinking about it, with dealing with hyper-aggressive and competitive men. Well, one of the consequences of that is that agreeable people don't make as much money. And the reason for that is to make money, you actually have to be disagreeable because you have to go to your boss and say, give me some bloody money or something you don't like will happen to you.

You have to be able to fight for an idea too. But so there's something, this is a perfect test case. So biologically speaking, there's a very good reason for certain kinds of wisdom to be biased in the direction of manifesting in females. Females, because they have the capacity to have fewer offspring in a lifetime than males, are obligated, as you say, to care in a particular way. And the fact that care in human beings takes so many years has resulted in menopause emerging. And menopause, essentially, when a woman is done producing new offspring, her interests in her evolutionary interests, which in this case, I think are honorable, become synonymous with the lineage, the population, because her offspring will either do well or do poorly based on the population that

they're in. So women have a kind of farsightedness about lineage. And I don't think this has anything to do with human women, actually. This is a trait that we can see in females of other species. So it's an ancient thing. Whereas males are high variants. That is to say, a male can have many offspring in a lifetime. Many males have no offspring in a lifetime. And that high variance means that to the extent that there's wisdom that surrounds risk-taking, that has traveled historically along the male path. Now, in modern times, there's no reason that we can't look at these two kinds of wisdom and democratize them both.

Right? The fact is there's no reason, if you're born female, that you can't tune into what has historically been male-biased wisdom and take advantage of that, and we should be encouraging this. There's no reason that people have to continue... The problem is that we can't actually have a reasonable discussion about it, because the discussion is often forestalled by the claim that, well, men and women are exactly the same. It's like that's not a helpful discussion about it because the discussion is often forestalled by the claim that men and women are exactly

the same. It's like that's not a helpful discussion. And with the agreeableness issue, I don't know exactly what should be done about that, but one of the consequences of it is that there's many reasons why there's pay differential between men and women and the issue itself is very complex. But we do

know that agreeable people overall make less money in the same positions. And it's because they don't negotiate on their own behalf very well now it's conceivable that you could have an intelligent public policy or corporate policy discussion about what to do about that like maybe maybe the rule is something like um you review male salaries once a year and female salaries every eight months or something like that, you know, and I'm not saying that's a good idea. I'm not saying that. I'm saying that if you take the facts on the ground into account, there are ways that you might be able to use them so that you could, and I'm not going to say level the playing field because I think that's an

appalling phrase, but maximize the possibility of economic contribution across the genders, which is obviously in everyone's best interest. But we're not going to do that. When someone like James Damore comes out, and he's no scientist. Well, he has some scientific training, but that wasn't his primary field of expertise. He came out and did a pretty credible job of summarizing the literature. He did it because he had been subject to mandatory diversity training and was asked to produce a response.

He didn't do it so it would go viral within the company or become public. And because he expressed his opinion, let's say imperfectly, he got fired. It's like, that's not good, man. That's not a good pathway. Well, it also wasn't good that his stuff was being republished without citations. That people were publishing it without the scientific papers that were sort of affirming some of the things that he was saying. I couldn't make heads or tails of it until I saw his original version.

Yeah, well, that goes back to the point I was making earlier about this being, this is an unstable time where people's individual ethical choices in some circumstances will have effects far beyond the local. It's like those journalists who jumped on the story, did it either badly, you know, because they were incompetent, or they did it maliciously. And so now we could say, let's say things go really badly in the next year. Well, then each of those journalists might be able to sit at home and say, hey, I played a

causal role in bringing about this state of murderous collapse because of my little ethical, my ethical lapse when I was covering the James Damore memo. You know, because of my own laziness and ideological rigidity, I was willing to play fast and loose with the truth, and now I've played a major causal role in, you know, pushing everything towards a state of chaos. It's like people have better be on their toes because we're in a situation that's radically unstable. And so it's time, it's a really good

time for everybody to be very careful about what they write and say and about their motives for tarring and feathering the opposition. That's another way of, another thing that we have to be very careful about. It's just very bizarre how quick people are to call someone a racist today. I mean, I've never seen anything like it in all my years. It's it's a strange time. You know, I got into it yesterday. Just I got bored and I started trolling with Pepe the frog. I started putting up the frog like with rainbows saying this seems like a frog that's really into gay rights. Like here's a frog that holding a lemon with a tart face like this is a frog that ate a lemon and he's reacting to it like how is this all racist like how is this like

anyone it's not like all these people that are creating this frog are coordinating anyone can make a meme with the frog and like a lot lot of the original feels good man cartoons that the guy created, those are applicable too. They're silly. A lot of them are really silly. Well, I think a lot of it was an intentional troll. Yes. So I read a story about Kekistan. You know, I was looking into it trying to figure out if it was really, you know, the menace to humanity that everybody claims it is.

And the story was preposterous. It was a, you know, it's a magical place where anti-Semites and Jews and atheists and religious people live in harmony, which is like, that's hard to even parse. It's designed to cause your mind to throw an error. cause your mind to throw an error. Yeah. Well, and that is what, so I think this is an excellent thing to talk about because I've been, because I've been, let's say, identified under many circumstances now with the alt-right. I've been doing every bit of investigation I can into its many manifestations. It's a very confusing place.

It's certainly not an organized place. And exactly what it is is by no means obvious. And the kekistan issue is a good case in point because mostly that's that's like a satirical realm where where where i don't know what it is it's like it's defensive humor in some sense like let me give you an example i gave my father a kekistani flag about three weeks ago and three weeks ago and and he's why did you do that well because he's been following what's happening to me online you know and and a lot and I got associated with

the frog in a major way and it's a crazy story and I won't go into it but I wore a frog hat on one of my videos that an Indian carver a Native American carver had given me and he had told me that the frog was in their culture a harbinger of environmental instability, because if the water's polluted at all, the frogs die first. So the frog is the creature in their mythology that warns the society that things are out of kilter. and I made this video about things being unstable. And I'd been identified with Kermit because my voice sort of sounds like Kermit the frog. And it actually does. So I've been making jokes about that. And so then I made this video with this frog hat and the frog that my carver friend made

actually had red lips. And then I made the video and as soon as I posted it, people said, that's Pepe. And I thought, I just about fainted, literally, because it never occurred to me that that was a connection. So anyways, I've been tangled in with this frog thing in this most absolutely insane and surreal manner.

But I've been, so and that got me into the Kekistani thing. And a lot of the people that I'm trying to address online are young men who are pushed, I would say, in a right-leaning direction by the movement of the radical left alienating. And then they're thinking, well, I'm certainly not that. Right. Well, then what am I? Well, maybe I by the movement of the radical left alienating and then they're thinking well I'm certainly not that right well, then what am I well? Maybe I'm the opposite of that Well is the opposite of the radical left the alt-right or is there a better opposite? Is there a different opposite that people could flee to and that's what well partly? That's what I'm trying to figure out, but but does it have to be opposite couldn't just be different well That's the thing is like Opposition is a real issue

with people right like what you were talking about before when people just ramp up their positions and get more ideologically based and they're doing it as a reaction to the other side instead of just being who they are instead of having some sort of a personal sovereignty they're literally reacting to the opposite side and changing who they are so okay so what i've been trying to do with my videos, and I think this is part of the reason that they've become so popular, in fact, I'm certain of it, is that I've been trying to agitate for the adoption of that personal responsibility

as an alternative to political ideology. It's like, get your act together, have a vision, straighten out your life, say what you think, you know, stay away from the ideological idiocies and oversimplifications and try to put yourself together. Because I think that I do believe at the most fundamental level, and I think this is the remarkable realization of Western civilization, is that the well-developed individual is the antidote to the tyranny of society and biology. I think that's our great discovery in the West. It's not like other cultures haven't had that idea in nascent form,

but it's been hyper-developed in the West, and I think it's right. And so we abandon that pathway of divine individuality and revert to ideological identification of race or sex. We're going to tear each other apart. And I think part of the, we're going to tear each other apart. And I think part of the reason we're motivated to do that, Joe, is because many people don't want to bear the responsibility of developing themselves as individuals. So they'll shuffle off the responsibility. And if that means that, you know, we're dancing in the streets because everything's on fire, that'll be just fine.

And that's another thing that's adding to the terrible danger that we're in right now. I think you're right. And I think that personal auditing program that you're a part of is gigantic. And people look at it as being separate from all these issues that we're dealing with culturally. But I don't think it is. I think you're absolutely right. And I think that there is a real lack of struggle and understanding of struggle with a lot of people today.

Not necessarily struggle financially, but I mean like physical struggle, spiritual struggle, understanding that you have to overcome difficult issues to really understand the true potential of your mind and your body. You have to not only overcome them, but you have to seek them out voluntarily and, what would you say, exalt in the fact that they exist, right? Yes. And that's part of bearing the burden of being. It's like being is a tragic state.

Human being is a tragic state. So you can shrink from that, but if you shrink from that, the suffering increases and intensifies and you become resentful and malevolent. Yes. So the alternative is to move forward courageously. That's the dragon motif, right?

That's the hero myth, essentially. And that is the pathway forward as far as I'm concerned. Well, I think it also has implications. You know, you're talking about it at the level of what is best for the individual. But we also have a problem, which is that these collectivist movements, whether they are, you know, white nationalists on the right or social justice warriors on the left, they cannot see forward. And what is missing is that actually the mechanism that allows us to discover new ways involves individuals who are capable of thinking independently.

And if you have multiple individuals who think independently about related matters, then they can pool that stuff. But if what we do is we force everybody to sign up for the same things that we all agree are true, there's no way of discovering what we don't yet know, because every great idea starts with a minority of one. So we have to have the freedom to be the only person who believes something and then to compel others that it's somewhere in the right neighborhood and for others to pick up that mantle. And so by subordinating... That's exactly why, you know, I mean, free speech has become an ideological issue and increasingly identified with the right and which is horrible. It's horrifying.

The right justification for free speech is what you just laid out, which is that in order for, like, the collective is a group of what's already known by definition. We inhabit the collective, and that's what's already known, what we can agree on. But the problem with that is that what we can agree on, what's already known, isn't sufficient. We still have problems. So people have to be out at the fringes, on the border between chaos and order, where they discover new things and communicate it back to the collective. And free speech does that. That's the mechanism. This is also a deep evolutionary truth, which is that all of the innovations that allow, whether we're talking about one creature learning to do some new trick that gives rise to a bunch of species that do the same trick, bunch of species that do the same trick, or whether we're talking about populations discovering a new way to live on Earth, all of these things proceed from the fringe, right? The people at the center for whom things are working best aren't going to be the ones to innovate the new way. It's people

for whom things are not quite working that are going to innovate new ways. And that's also true for a population of frogs or birds or plants or whatever. The ones that are not well-situated are the ones where an experiment can pay off. That's why Hans Eysenke, a psychologist, wrote a good book called Genius, and he was interested in what predicted high levels of creative success. And some of it's what you'd expect. IQ is one of them, and creative temperament is another. But losing a parent before the age of 10 was a nice predictor. And, you know, people think about creativity as if it's all sweetness and light. It's like, no bloody way, man.

If you're going to be creative, it's because you're tormented by a problem, right? And so if you're not in a position to be tormented by a problem, you're not going to put in the time and effort and take the risk necessary to be creative. So, but, you know, I've been trying to understand the evolutionary landscape out of which our most fundamental religious convictions emerge, and the idea that it is, by definition, the individual

that innovates, and that, by definition, therefore, it's the individual that's the savior of the collective. I mean, it's hard to imagine how you could find a biological restatement of an essential Christian presupposition that was more mapped one-to-one than that. Now, you could say, well, that's not unique to Christianity. I see the same thing in the Jewish antithesis between the prophetic tradition, the prophet, and the tradition.

Because the prophet is always the lone voice, right, that comes out. It happens over and over in the Old Testament. A lone voice comes out and challenges the king and says, look, you know, you're a blind tyrant, and nature is moving away from us and preparing her revenge, and you better watch the hell out because you're violating the intrinsic moral norms, and you're going to pay for it. That happens over and over.

And maybe there are 50 of them, and the one that gets recorded is the one that happened to be closest to right, because that's the population that gets through the bottleneck. And so, you know, what we have is sort of evolution authoring these texts in a way. Yes, well, that's a claim that I'm very, what would you call, that's something I believe to be fundamentally true. And I mean, I've started, see, because I'm interested in this idea of strengthening the individual. When I wrote my first book, Maps of Meaning,

it was about ideological conflict. And it was about whether or not there was any alternative to ideological conflict, because you could make a case that there isn't. There's right and there's left and there's a war, right? But there is a third way, and I think that is the way of the heroic individual, and I mean that technically.

And that involves the development of individual characters so that you can say what it is that you think, that you can articulate your experience properly, and that you can bring what it is that's unique to you into the collective landscape. And that's what updates the collective landscape. It's absolutely vital. And so I started doing these biblical lectures. I have done 12 of them now, walking through Genesis, and what I'm trying to do,

because I believe that the Bible is the documentation of the emergence of the idea of the divine individual. That's essentially what it is. And we have a very uneasy relationship with that collection of texts now, because we read them as if they're making claims about the objective nature of the world, and those claims seem to be false from a scientific perspective. I don't believe that those are the claims that were made to begin with, so I think it's a non-starter. But I've been trying to lecture about the stories in Genesis, for example,

in a manner that makes them accessible to people who are, well, to atheists, let's say. And many, many atheists have been responding very positively to them. I have people in my YouTube comments now that are calling themselves Christian atheists, because they can understand, they understand what it is I'm describing this idea that's emerged in the West, that consciousness is the mediator between chaos and order, and the order and the phenomena that generates experience. And that you can think about that as a divine category of existence. And I've been trying to delineate how the biblical stories lay out the pathway by which the divine individual should manifest him or herself in time, because that is what it is.

And I've been studying, for example, the Abrahamic stories, which I didn't know well. And the Abrahamic stories are really interesting. I mean, Abraham is called by God. And when Abraham is called by God, he's old. He's like one of these guys who's 40 years old

and has stayed in his mother's basement. That's Abraham. It's a little late for Abraham to be getting the hell out there in the world. And God basically says to him, leave your family and your friends and your place of comfort and journey into the land of the stranger. That's the call to adventure. And so Abraham does that. Now he's chosen by God. You think, well, everything goes well for Abraham.

That isn't what happens at all. The first thing he encounters is a famine, and to escape that, he flees into the tyranny of Egypt, where they try to steal his wife. It's like, beware of being called by God. You know, you'd think it'd be all sweetness and light after that. It's not that at all. And it's a very realistic story.

It's like, get the hell out of where you're safe. Into what you don't know. What are you going to find there? Well, your fortune. No, you're going to find the catastrophes of life. But if you keep yourself morally oriented and you make the right sacrifices, which is the Abrahamic story to a T, then you can transcend the catastrophe of being and prevail. I mean, it's...

Who the hell doesn't want to hear that? So we're treading kind of close to the argument you got into with Sam Harris about the nature of truth. And since I heard that, I've been sort of itching to have this conversation with you because I think there's a way of viewing this that will actually perhaps reconcile the two points of view. But there's a bitter pill that comes along with it. So here's my argument. We tend to think of intellect as having evolved because knowing what's true gives you an advantage. But there's actually nothing that says that the literal truth is where advantage lies. And so I have a category that I call literally false, metaphorically true. These are ideas that aren't true in the factual sense, but they are true enough that if you behave as if they were true, you come out ahead of where you would be if you behaved according to the fact that they're not true. So let me give you a couple of trivial examples that won't be controversial. Porcupines can throw their quills. Not true. However, if you live near porcupines and you imagine that porcupines can throw their quills, you'll give

them some space. If you don't, you may realize that they can't throw their quills, get really close to one, and it may wheel around and nail you with a porcupine quill, which can be extremely dangerous because they are microscopically designed to move in from where they puncture you over time, and they can puncture a vital organ or you can get an infection. So the person who believes that a porcupine can throw their quills has an advantage that isn't predicated on the fact that this is actually a literal truth, advantage that isn't predicated on the fact that this is actually a literal truth, right? Another one might be people say everything happens for a reason, right? Well, unless you're talking about physics as the reason, everything doesn't happen for a reason. However, if you are the kind of person who believes that everything happens for a reason, and then some terrible tragedy befalls

you, you may be on the lookout. Well, what's the reason that this happened? Maybe it's supposed to open some opportunity, and you won't miss that opportunity the way somebody who was preoccupied with their misfortune would. So literal falseness, but metaphorical truth is actually, I would argue, the category under which religious truth evolves. category under which religious truth evolves. Now the problem, the bitter pill that I mentioned, is that I've heard you say that the truths that are captured in the religious version of things are basically like, you know, there's an individual truth and then there's a truth of your family and there's a truth of the population that you're living in, and these things are all encoded in these doctrines, which is true. And you would expect it to be because the doctrines are carried along in the population.

The problem is, what I hear you arguing, and you tell me if I have it wrong, is that we should therefore expect the encoded metaphorical truths in these religious traditions to be morally right. But there's nothing that actually says it will be morally right, because there are metaphorical truths that might in fact be reprehensible, but nonetheless effective. And so what I would argue, the overarching point here would be that you're right, that the documents that contain these descriptions of things are full of things that are true in some sense that is not literal scientific truth, nor was that their purpose. What isn't true is that those things are inherently up to date. inherently up to date and see I would okay I mean first of all the first thing about that is that a discussion like that and this is also what happened with Sam Harris takes me to the very limits of my intellectual ability and so even

in discussing it I'm going to make all sorts of mistakes because because it's treacherous territory but I would say my understanding of the great myths has that observation built into it so one of the archetypes is that of the of the tyrannical father which is the archetype by the way that possesses the minds of people who accuse western society of being patriarchal they're possessed by a singular archetype and that's the archetype of the tyrannical father they don't see that there's a tyrannical father and a wise king because there there is. You can't even point that out. But anyways, in some of our oldest stories, there's a representation of the dead past. So let me give you an example that everyone knows about. The story of Pinocchio is the story of the

individualization of Pinocchio. He starts out as a puppet. He's a marionette. He's a wooden head. He's a liar. And he's pulled by forces that he does not understand. Right, okay, so... But he has a good father.

That's Geppetto. And so he's got a good... And Geppetto wishes that he becomes a real individual. And so... And he knows that that's an impossible wish. He wishes on a star that his son could become an actual individual, knowing full well that that's an impossible wish. He wishes on a star that his son could become an actual individual, knowing full well that that's unlikely and impossible. So Geppetto's a good king. So, but the story's also about Geppetto, because what happens is that when

Geppetto loses Pinocchio, loses his son, which you could think about as the active, dynamic, attentive force of youth, then he ends up stultified in the belly of a whale, which is a symbol of chaos, at the bottom of the ocean. And then Pinocchio has to rescue him. So I would say, there is an instantiation of evolutionarily accumulated wisdom in the great stories of the past.

But they're still dead. And it requires the union. This is why in Christian theology the Godhead has a tripartite structure. This is part of the reason. There's God the Father, but the Father's dead. The Father was right a hundred years ago or a thousand years ago and is still partly right, but he's dead.

He can't participate in the updating of the process, so you need an active force. Now, the active force is the same thing that generated those stories across time, right? So it's the same thing, except it's also alive in the present. And so your moral duty, and this is another thing that happens in Pinocchio, is to rescue your dead father from the belly of the whale. And that's partly what I'm trying to do with these biblical

lectures, because your objection is correct. The reason it's correct is because even if the solution was correct, the landscape has changed. And it's changed incrementally or in a revolutionary way. We don't know. And so those old truths are at best partial and at worst blind.

But that doesn't mean you can just say, like Mao did during the Cultural Revolution, well, let's just destroy the past. It's like, no, that would be like saying, well, you don't need a body anymore because your body is the collected wisdom of the evolutionary process across three and a half billion years. I absolutely agree. Because the stories are not literal, it's impossible to know whether they, well, not impossible, but very difficult to know whether or not the truth that is contained metaphorically is still relevant, if it's been inverted and it's now absolutely false. inverted and it's now absolutely false or uh so carl jung talked about this a lot hey and and one of the things he said was that your moral duty is to realize the archetype in the in the confines of

your own life and so you say well there's an archetype of perfection that pervades the west and for the for the sake of argument i'm going to call that christ the christ image it's something like that that's the archetypal image now we have a story about what Christ's historical life was like. Well, you can't have that life, because you would have had to be in the Middle East 2,000 years ago. That's not your life. But what you can do is take the archetype, and you can manifest it within the confines of your own life.

And what that does is force you to undergo the difficult process of updating the ancient wisdom. And you don't just forego it. You can't, or you can, but you'll pay a massive price. And part of that will be social disintegration. Because the past is alive enough so that those of us who inhabit its corpse aren't clawing each other to death while we're feeding, right? That's the critical issue. Now, it's not alive enough because the bloody thing could fall apart at any moment,

and we need to be awake and alert in order to keep it updated and maintained. Well, not only that, but the greatest hazards to us in the present are only partially going to be dealt with in these texts. And that's my biggest concern, is that if we take Dawkins dismissing religion as mind virus, this is very dangerous because it neglects the truth that you're talking about. And it prevents us from getting to a conversation in which we can talk about the fact that religious texts, religions are not mind viruses. They are adaptations to past environments. They do contain a kind of truth that isn't necessarily literal and is in general not literal. But

none of them, no ancient religion is up to date for Google's algorithms being the hazard to civilization that it probably is. We need to figure out how to navigate where the ancestral wisdom is simply not up to the current challenges. Okay, so let me modify that slightly, because I think it's true and not true. The stories are erroneous in detail and right in pattern. So, for example, there's an idea that one of the things that the mythological hero does is stand up against the tyranny of the state. Now, you don't have to specify the nature of the tyranny of the state in order for that to be a truth that's applicable across different contexts.

And I would say what's happened with the great religious myths is that they operate at a level of abstraction, such that the abstract entities are applicable in every single environment. I'll give you an example of that. abstract entities are applicable in every single environment. I'll give you an example of that. It is extremely useful to represent the phenomenology of your experience as a domain of chaos and order. That works in every single environment for every person. And so the domain of order, I can describe it technically, you're in the domain of order when your actions produce the result you desire. And you're in the domain of chaos when they don produce the result you desire and you're in the domain of chaos

when they don't and then and then i could say well your task is to straddle the border between those two domains because you don't always want to be where everything that you're doing is working because you don't learn anything and you don't want to be where nothing you're doing is working because it's overwhelming you want to be stable and dynamic at the same point. And the Taoists do that very nicely, because they have a chaos-order conceptualization of the phenomenological landscape. And their claim is, the point of maximum proper being

is right at the center of the border between chaos and order. And I think that's true across contexts. So I don't think that truth ages. Some of them don't. But the question really is one of at what point is there so much legacy code that taking the package is more harmful than it is beneficial? And at what point are, you know, if God were writing today, I'm pretty convinced the first commandment would be thou shalt not enrich uranium. It would make sense as the number one commandment. It's not there because uranium wasn't a concept at the point that the thing was written, nor was the hazard

of enriching it obvious. And so the fact that it isn't mentioned tends to de-emphasize it as a risk. tends to de-emphasize it as a risk. And so I guess the question is, is it possible, I mean, is it possible that by recognizing that these traditions carry huge amounts of ancestral wisdom forward, but that that wisdom is certain to be so incomplete that it doesn't address modern questions, that we can be liberated to move forward and to honor those traditions for bringing us here, but to recognize that we actually have to move forward with something more potent and up-to-date, which is not easy because you can't just take the scientific truth of the moment and implement it. A lot of it isn't even right. Yeah, it's also not that easy to rewrite a fairy tale. You know, and some of these fairy tales that people are trying to rewrite in

modern times are perhaps 15,000 years old. And people think, well, we can just update that so that the modern version will be better. It turns out that that's very, very difficult. And there's another, I'm going to play devil's advocate against my own position here, you know, because I say, well, the religious texts encode profound and evolutionarily determined truths that are universal okay which religious texts right right because well because you might say well all of them but then that means that obscures the important differences between the traditions and i'm by no means certain that all of them do you know so i'm going to stick my neck way the hell out, because why not? It isn't obvious to me that Islam does,

because it's very difficult for me to see that the totalizing nature of Islam doesn't make it unique among religions. So now, good, so well, there's that out on the table. If you don't mind, but isn't the issue using the word truth? Because we can say we could use tradition and wisdom and we're okay. But as soon as we start saying truth, then we run into problems. I mean, and even when you're talking about porcupines, where you're talking about, would you say metaphorical truth versus, look, it's not true.

It's real simple. Just don't go near the porcupine. Teach the kid to not go near the porcupine because porcupine quills are dangerous. They get stuck in you. They're really dangerous. Can they throw it at you? No, they cannot. But just stay clear of them because you don't want them to somehow or another get in touch with your body. There's no truth in that they can throw their quills at you. You benefit from being particularly aware of the dangers of their quills. But if you tell a kid that they can throw their quills, and so therefore the kid stays clear of them, he has a faulty assumption in his head.

You're lying to them for their own protection. That's not good. I wouldn't do it. And I think the same thing can be said of everything happens for a reason. Well, here's the problem. We don't know if everything happens for a reason. Maybe when you die, you go to some auditing room, and they go, well, here's the problem. We don't know if everything happens for a reason. Maybe when you die, you go to some auditing room, and they go, well, you know,

it's all just a part of some gigantic algorithm that you're impossible, it's impossible for you to understand due to your limited processing power of the human brain. You're dealing with some Simeon sort of complex geometry that's really just designed to keep your body moving and keep you alive and spread your genetics so that you can eventually evolve to the point when you're a god well first of all i i have

kids i wouldn't tell them that a porcupine i'm sure you wouldn't but how but why use the word truth though because well the question is why do people tell you that a porcupine can throw its quilts i don't i don't think they do oh they do well if they do they don't know any better right or they're liars right and so all i'm saying is that actually that is likely to be the product of selection. In other words, that those people who had encoded that they do throw their quills have an advantage. It's not the way I would do it. And for exactly the reason that you point out, which is if you give a child the wrong model of a porcupine, I don't know whether a porcupine is liable to be the gateway to some more important question. But if it were, you've just steered the kid wrong.

Well, here's part of the problem, and this is a really big problem. There's two things, I guess, that were brought up by what you described. And the first is the terminology of truth. Now, Harris's claim with regards to my utilization of truth was that I was absconding with the definition of truth and in false manner. But he was wrong, because the idea of truth is much older than the idea of objective truth. And the original notion of truth wasn't objective true. It was like the arrow flies straight and true, right? And it meant something like reliably on its way to the appropriate destination, something

like that. And when Christ said, I am the truth and the way, what, I can't remember the other one. Yes, yes. The truth he was talking about wasn't an objective truth. So Sam's idea that I had somehow, you know, taken the idea of truth that was actually objective all along and done something crooked with it is just wrong. It's wrong. Well, so truth can have multiple definitions.

Well, that's the issue. And that's exactly what we're trying to get at here. It's like, to me, there's two kinds of truth. And they may be commensurate. You may be able to stack them on top of one another. But now and then they dissociate. And this is actually what Brett was referring to as well. So, and this is where it gets so complicated that I can barely manage it. There's the truth that manifests itself in the manner in which you act. And there's the

truth that manifests itself as a representation of the objective world. And sometimes both those truths are stacked on top of each other. And sometimes they're not. So, like, I could give you a piece of wisdom that would work well if you acted it out, that carried within it an inaccurate representation of part of the objective world. And you could say, well, maybe that's actually

the case with the biblical stories, because if you read them as science, they don't read well. So, let's take malaria as a good example. Malaria. The root of the word is mal-aria, bad air, right? Malaria is not transmitted by bad air. It's transmitted by mosquitoes that live in places where you might think the air is bad. So the point is, it's part of the way there. Yeah, that's a good one. And that also gets, see, there's another weird distinction here that I was trying to draw with Sam, but that's a really tricky one.

And we augured in because we started to talk about pragmatism, but there's also something like the truth of a description and the truth of a tool. And my sense is that people's fundamental truths are tool-like. We use them to function properly in the world. like. We use them to function properly in the world. And you could say, well, a sharp axe is more true than a dull axe. And actually, you can use the word true in that sense. That actually is an appropriate use of the word. There are tool truths and there are objective fact truths. Now, and in the optimal circumstance, those map onto each other. But we're not smart enough often to make them map onto each other because we're not smart enough often to make them map onto each other because we just don't know enough and there are lots of truths that we have that portray the objective world improperly that are still true is the problem using the term true

when sometimes you should use the term fact like like yes one plus one is two that is a fact one plus one is two is also true you throw some water on a match that is and it'll go out that's a fact, one plus one is two is also true. You throw some water on a match, that is, and it'll go out. That's a fact. Yes. Well, as I see it, at least, there is this overarching truth, the one that Sam Harris was pointing to, the one I think you're pointing to also, and the one I'm imagining we all subscribe to. Sure. Right. There is the testable truth that reveals itself in the laboratory or in a careful experiment in the field. And that really is the testable truth that reveals itself in the laboratory or in a careful experiment in the field. And that really is the top level truth. But then there are the truths you can't speak yet.

So let's take the word filth from the Old Testament. Filth means shit. You're not supposed to shit in camp because God finds it offensive. in camp because God finds it offensive. Now, the problem is the germ theory of disease doesn't come about for thousands of years after that truth was written. That truth keeps you from infecting people long before you can ever explain that there are microbes that grow in human shit that are a particular danger to your population. So the point is, would you rather be held back to the place where you can actually describe the literal underpinnings of what's going on? Or do you want to be liberated

to say something that actually results in an improvement in health before, you know, literally thousands of years before anybody had any idea that it was microbes at the root of this? Yes. And you need to figure out, so an elaboration of that would be something like human beings needed to figure out how to act without dying before they could understand the nature of the world well enough to justify that. Right. And you'd be crazy now that we do have the germ theory of disease to amplify that original crude version of the truth or that crude approximation of what you need to believe in order to behave safely There's no reason for that truth to to be promoted. In fact, you don't hear people describing this part of

The the Old Testament is true. It's not relevant, right? And this is probably all why dietary restrictions were in the Old Testament as well shellfish red tide Eating pigs trichinosis. There's a lot of issues that go along with that. Yeah, well, there is some intermingling, perhaps, of hygienic concerns with also the desire for the groups to distinguish themselves from other groups. Right? Because you can unite your group quite tightly by dietary restrictions.

So, back to your point about terminology. You know, we could do something like fact and wisdom. You know, you say truth, that's the overarching category, and then that divides into fact and wisdom. And what you want, optimally, is you want the facts and the wisdom to be one-to-one, but often they're not. And if you find wisdom where the facts aren't laid right out, you don't just get to throw away the wisdom, which is what I think happens in the case of people like Dawkins and Harris. And Harris makes another sleight-of-hand move, which I don't like, which is that he thinks, so let's say, except for just a second, the wisdom-fact distinction,

he would say, well, the fact is the thing, and the wisdom is a second-order derivation of that. You can ground the wisdom in the fact, and I don't believe that. And I don't think that he has any real justification for that claim. And this is something I never got. What do you mean by grounding the wisdom in the fact? He thinks if you know the facts clearly enough, you'll know how to act. Well, that's not necessarily true. Well, there's a huge... There's ways to act that are within your best interest, and then there's ways to act that are

within the interest of all the people around you but may might not serve you that well well there's also a distinction is where ethics come right or where the consequences are delayed yes some number of generations or something like yes well that's a big problem and right so so sam acts as if the process of mapping facts onto action is simple if we just got the facts right. But it's the weakest part of his argument. And we never ever got to that for a variety of reasons. But part of the reason it's weak is, okay, well, there's like an infinite number of facts, man. So let's say you're standing in front of a field and you're looking at the field. The field does not tell you how to walk through it. There's a million ways through the field. And no matter how many facts about the

field you aggregate, you're not going to be able to determine the appropriate path by aggregating those facts. So that's a problem that I don't think Sam is willing to take seriously. And well. Well, I think there are two problems tangled up here. One of them is, there's a question of, is one individual supposed to have all of the facts and navigate based on that, sort of the rationality community version of things? Or does, you know, the practical truth is we can't all be experts in everything. And so we have to go along with, you know, guides to our behavior that are approximate and that's inherent. And then there's a question about civilization. Civilization should be guided by our best understanding of what's actually true,

but with an understanding that we don't have a complete map of a lot of stuff. And so I think what you're pointing at is that there is wisdom that has been handed to us that is not such that we can just simply say, oh, here's the nugget at the center of it and we need to preserve that thing because we don't necessarily know what it's doing, which is, you know, this is dangerous because some of what it's doing may not be acceptable. Well, and think about, let's look at the wisdom end of things for a minute. And you talked, you alluded a little earlier to like iterations

and about the fact that things are iterated across time, and that something that works now might fail dreadfully in a month or two months. So here's what something has to be like to be wise, let's say. Well, first of all, let's say it would be good if it was in accordance with the facts, but we'll leave that aside for now. It has to work, if you operate according to the wisdom principle, whatever it is, it has to work in the world. But then it has to work, if you operate according to the wisdom principle, whatever it is, it has to work in the world. But then it has to work in a world that allows you to maintain your relationships with people in the world. So it's all of a sudden, this wisdom thing is something that's not only constrained by,

let's call it objective reality, but it's constrained by the necessity of a social contract, a functional social contract. So you're only able to, you're only allowed to put forward actions in the world that would be of benefit to you if they simultaneously don't undermine the structure within which you live. Okay, and then there's a game theory element to that, which is, well, if it's wise, then it works in the world. So that'd be the constraint of objective reality. But then it works for you now, and the you that'll be in a week,

and the you that'll be in a month, and it works for you and your family, and it works for you and your family and society, and it works in a way that those things all line up to be iterated across time. And so this is actually also the solution, and I'd really like to hear what you think about this. I think this is the solution to the postmodern conundrum. Because the postmodernists, bless their hearts, so we'll give the devil his due, say, well the problem is there's an infinite number of interpretations of a finite set of facts. And the right response to that is, uh oh, that's true, that's true, that's not good. And that's why the postmodernists say, well you can't agree on a canonical interpretation of a great piece of literature,

because the number of potential interpretations are infinite. And so then they say, well, why should we settle on any one interpretation then? Why should we privilege one over another? And then they say, well, that's all power games. And so that's a... You've got to take that seriously. But what they missed, and this is a big deal,

it's a big deal, I think, is this idea of ethical constraint. It's like, yes, there's a big deal, I think, is this idea of ethical constraint. It's like, yes, there's a landscape of potentially infinite interpretations, but hardly any of them will work in the real world. And hardly any of them will work in the real world in a way that doesn't get you killed by other people or doom you because of your own stupidity to failure across time. And so, the landscape of interpretation is almost infinite, but the landscape of applicable interpretation, functional interpretation, is unbelievably constrained.

And I think that constraint system is what we regard as ethics. It's something like that. Well, at some level, stories continue through time for a reason. You know, good stories continue for a long, you know, the Odyssey is with us for some reason. And we, so there is a scientific reason or a scientifically investigatable reason why the Odyssey has been durable. We may not know it, but it's in principle, it's a question you could investigate. So I guess at the end of the day, the problem with the postmodernists is that they have a point. The point is perception gets in the way of anything we wish to do objectively. But that point only takes you so far.

That's why they turn to Marxism, as far as I can tell. Because what happens with the postmodernists is they say, oh, there's an infinite number of interpretations. And then the human part of them goes, okay, well, what am I supposed to do next then, since there's an infinite number of choices? And the postmodernist says, well, my theory can't account for that. And then they say, well, back to Marxism. And so that's why I think there's this unholy alliance between the postmodernists and the neo-Marxists,

because postmodernism is a dead end from the perspective of applicable wisdom. It leaves you bereft and nihilistic. And that's not good because people can't exist without a purpose. And so they sneak the Marxism through the back door and jump into this power landscape for the reasons that we discussed earlier. You really think that it's because of an infinite number of possibilities interpreting things? Because I've always felt

that it was really just a response to capitalism. They feel that capitalism is a very negative aspect of our culture and society and that there's got to be some sort of an alternative. Marxism is a clearly defined alternative that other people have subscribed to in the past. You can point to it. It's a structure that's already set up and it's romanticized. And I think they adopted for that reason because it has the socialist aspects attached to it and they looked at socialism as some sort of a thing that regards equality and, you know, it's some sort of an egalitarian approach.

Well, it's... Okay, so we'd have to take two things apart. We'd have to take Marxism slash Neo-Marxism and post-modernism apart. So we could do that historically. And I would say that although there is a reason for postmodernism, which is the reason we just discussed, the landscape, the infinite landscape of interpretation problem, it's a real problem. If you look at it historically, postmodernism actually grew out of Marxism. And so what happened is that the Marxists laid out their theory about the human social environment

being composed of a power struggle between the privileged and the underprivileged, right? The rich and the poor in its initial phases. And that's a story that's partially true, and it's got a lot of motive power. Like, the motive power is the romantic motive power that you just described. I get to be on the side of the oppressed. I get to be a warrior for what's right. There's the resentment element, which is that son of a bitch has more than me, so let's

cut him off at the knees, which manifested itself brutally in the Soviet Union. And then there's the ideological totality issue, which gives people a sense of security. That took a vicious hit by the late 1960s because the murderousness of Marxism had been clearly laid out as a doctrine.

And that opened the door to this move by mostly French intellectuals to develop the postmodern philosophy, which has these advantages which we described, but also to use that as a screening tactic for allowing Marxism to transform into identity politics. And so it's hard to disentangle all the motivations that are going on in there, but there's something about it that's truly intellectually pathological, because you don't get to be a postmodernist and a Marxist. You actually technically cannot be both of those things at the same time. And the fact that most people are both of those things at the same time, raises the specter of just exactly what

their motivation is. And then I would say it's this resentment-driven anti-capitalism. There's reasons to criticize capitalism, obviously, but it's this underground resentment-driven anti-capitalism that I think is one of the fundamental motivators. Well, if I can add a couple things. The risk of alienating my last few friends. In for a penny, man. Yeah, I guess. So here's the thing. What's up with Marxism is, A, there's a lot in Marx's critique of capitalism that's actually right. And so that kind of gets you through the door once you start looking at the analysis. And then there's the prescription, which is toxic, but it's not obvious why it's toxic.

In other words, it's a pretty good story that doesn't happen to function. And so people gravitate to it because the story is moderately compelling. It's not game theoretically functional or stable or viable. And it does descend into this kind of you know inevitable grave violence and So we know that now historically it's not just a theoretical issue We've now seen enough of it to know that as a fact But nonetheless the fact that there are people telling the story to kids who don't yet know what to do with something that sounds Like it might be true is very dangerous.

If you don't mind, break it down as to why it goes bad. Well, I mean, it's sort of a tired critique, but I happen to think it's about right, which is that it just does not take account of what a human being is and what makes society function. Spoken like a true fascist biological essentialist. That wasn't very nice, Peterson. I think that is. Well, I think it might be related back to... Okay, so let's go back to the idea

that Marx had something to say. Okay, and we could clarify that a little bit. So here's a problem. This is the problem that seems to emerge as the function of some really fundamental force that we don't quite understand. And that's this phenomena that I've been referring to as the Pareto distribution. Okay, so here's the situation. If you look at any creative endeavor that human beings engage in, so that would be an endeavor where there's

variability in individual production. It doesn't matter what it is. Here's what happens. People compete to produce whatever that is. And almost everybody produces zero. They lose completely. A small minority are a tiny bit successful. And a hyper minority are insanely successful. insanely successful.

And so the Pareto distribution and the Pareto distribution is the geometric graph representation of that phenomena. And so here's how it manifests itself. If you have 10,000 people, 100 of them have half the money. So the rule is the square root of the number of people under consideration

have half of whatever it is that's under consideration. So this works everywhere. So if you took 100 classical composers, 10 of them produce half the music that's played. And then if you take the 10 composers and you take 1,000 of their songs, 30 of those songs, which is the square root of 1,000,

roughly speaking, are played 50% of the time. And so there's this underlying natural law, which is expressed as the Matthew Principle, which is from a New Testament statement. The statement is, to those who have everything, more will be given, and from those who have nothing, everything will be taken. It's a vicious statement, but it's actually,

here's one of those places where it's actually empirically true. This happens everywhere. And so what Marx observed was that capital tended to accumulate in the hands of fewer and fewer people. And he said that's a flaw of the capitalist system. That's wrong. It's not a flaw of the capitalist system. It is a feature of every

single system of production that we know of, no matter who set it up and how it operates. And so now we have a problem, because what happens is as soon as you set up a domain of production, and you need to because you need things to be produced, then you instantly produce a competition, and the spoils go disproportionately to a tiny percentage of people. So then, well, so what? Well, so the rest of the people starve, or the system becomes unstable

because everybody's mad. It's like, that's a big problem. Okay, so how do human beings fix that? Well, the first thing we did was diversify the number of productive games. So you don't get to be NBA basketball star, but you can run a podcast. It's a completely different competitive landscape. So we can fractionate the production landscape, and then people who aren't successful in one domain might be successful in others. That's human creativity. We're really good at that. But the problem with that is you still get a positive correlation among the successful people. You know, so because you're so successful, for example, with your podcast and your YouTube videos, your connection network is insane, insanely powerful, right?

insanely powerful. Right? So you still have this tendency for what's useful and good to be what? Distributed, let's call it, inequitably. And it's got the power of a physical law. In fact, there are people, they call themselves econophysicists. No one knows that there's a field, econophysicists, econophysics, and they use the same mathematical equations that represent the propagation of molecules into a, gas molecules into a vacuum to describe the manner in which money distributes itself in an economy. Okay, so Marx pointed to a fundamental issue, but he said, well, that's a fault with capitalism. It's like, no, it isn't. It's something way more pernicious than that, and it's something like, well, when one good thing happens to you, it makes you a little more powerful and attractive.

And so that fractionally increases the possibility that another good thing will happen to you. And then that spirals out of control. And you get people who have, well, they have all the money. Or they have all the podcast downloads. You're in that position. You know, what is it, 1.2 billion? Like, what the hell? But it's to those

who have more, and it's not because there's something oppressive about you. It's because you rode the wave of the Pareto distribution, and it threw you way the hell up into the stratosphere. And we don't know what to do about that. Like, should you be sharing your podcast views with the

oppressed and downtrodden? I mean, well, you've got a few billion, you could spread the damn things around. It's not fair that you're the only one that's being listened to. You know, it's the same argument. And it's a compelling argument, because why the hell should you have all that power? If you call it power, you could call it authority or competence. But isn't that a different argument? Because no one's asking anyone to download anything in specific no one's no one's compelling anyone to download anything specific you could download whatever you want and if you put more effort and more time and more focus into your work whatever it would be whether

it's a podcast or your youtube videos or whatever people enjoy it they gravitate towards it and then over time it exponentially increases the amount of people that are exposed to it. Well, this is why I think that the, and this is the other problem with the Marxist perspective, is that, and the postmodernists in particular, like, they conflate power, competence, and authority. Unfairly. Now, your point, it's sort of the point of free marketers. You're saying, well, look, all I'm doing is offering a product. I'm not compelling anyone. It's a quality product, or at least as far as the market is concerned, it is. If it turns out that everyone wants that, well, what's wrong with that?

And I'm not disagreeing with that argument in the least. But the problem is it doesn't fix the problem. Like the problem with money, let's say. The problem is that if you let a monetary system run, all the money ends up in the hands of a very few of a very small number of people and you're saying this is also With any sort of creative and any creative endeavor man now. What is wrong? I think the real issue would be to maximize potential output or Maximize the amount of successful people you'd have to figure out what's don't concentrate on what people are doing right? Concentrate on what people are doing right concentrate on what people are doing wrong

Like what why what are the people doing wrong that are failing whether in any creative? That's why we put together sort of just give me one minute all that's partly why we put together the future authoring program Because we were trying to figure out what made people successful and one of the things that makes people successful is they specify a target And then aim at it, right? Because if you're all over the place, we do know in a relatively functional society like ours, we know what predicts success. IQ and conscientiousness are the biggest predictors of success. Now, there's a genetic lottery thing going on there that's kind of rough, but it does say that smart people who work hard are disproportionately likely to succeed. And then you might also say, well, you want to remove the impediments smart people who work hard are disproportionately likely to succeed.

And then you might also say, well, you want to remove the impediments from people who have those capabilities so that they can move forward. And one of the predictors of success as well is to decide what your success is going to be and then work hard in that direction. And that actually works. So I think that is a very useful thing to do. And that's, well, like I said, that's partly why we've been working in that direction. But there's other problems that it still doesn't solve. Like one of them is, if you don't have any money, it's really hard to get some. Like once you have some, it's not so hard to get some more. But if you're at zero, Jesus, man, you're in the reverse situation.

You're poor. You don't have anything. No one wants to talk to you. You can't get out of it because you're too poor to get out of it. You're penalized by the economic system because you can't even afford to start playing the game. You're stuck at zero. You're stuck at zero. And you can't get out. And the revolutionary types, they go to the people who are stuck at zero

and they say, hey, you're stuck at zero. Why don't you burn the whole goddamn thing to the ground? Right. Because maybe in the next iteration you won't be stuck at zero. And for young men, that's a hell of a call. Right. Because they're already, let's call them expendable, biologically. And that makes them more adventurous and risk-taking.

If someone says, and maybe that's why they wear the Che Guevara t-shirt, it's like, hey, I'm stuck at zero. Well, I'd rather be with the romantic who's burning the whole thing to the ground than to just, you know, to stay locked in my immobile position. Right, but that zero is where massive amounts of creativity come from because of that struggle. Massive amounts of innovation, massive amounts of people who have visions because you're not living off of some sort of trust fund. You know, you have real risk and real danger,

and you have a real concern about your future. Whereas someone who has no concerns whatsoever, and their future is carved in stone, they can do whatever they want and buy a new Ferrari every year, they're not going to have nearly the amount of motivation as the poor person. Yeah, well, that may be why family fortunes tend to only last three generations. Yes. And, you know, you're saying, well, why don't you take a look at the advantages of zero?

And one of the advantages there is that you're driven by brute necessity. And that can really be motivating. Yes. And that's, I think, why the children of first-generation immigrants often do so well. Yes. You know, they're driven by necessity. And so, yes, agreed. generation immigrants often do so well. Yes. You know, they're driven by necessity. Yeah. And it's so, yes, agreed.

However, I would still say, you know, the zero issue is there are levels of absolute privation that are so intense that all the goodwill in the world won't get you out of zero. Right. If you're living in a third world country in some very small village with no way out whatsoever, that is the zero of zero you're in tanzania on the on the river people are getting eaten by crocodiles in your village you're fucked yes zero is like a magnet yeah it just holds yeah it's a black hole having a little very little maybe that motivational state that's actually uh generative right there's

a difference and then what's really bizarre is those people in that village might be happier than the people who live in a gated community in Beverly Hills. Well, I wanted to come back to this. Your point about whether we should be concentrating on what you're doing right versus what you're doing wrong. Both of those will work and you should actually be doing both of them simultaneously. You'll maximize faster. But the real problem is that the system in which we concentrate on what you're doing right and what you're doing wrong, and supposedly you get paid for some integration of those things, is that we don't understand what we are wired to produce evolutionarily, right? We think we all operate based on the idea that we're pursuing some state of happiness or satisfaction. And, you know, we think we know

what's going to get it for us. And maybe it's inventing something and then you'll be happy. But it's a trap. The fact is, what we are wired to do is to discover opportunities. And then when we discover an opportunity, it benefits the population that we come from. And we turn that discovery into either more mouths to feed or more consumption. And we restore the state of privation. state in which people don't have enough. And so if you really wanted to fix this problem, if you wanted to address the problems that communism thinks it's solving but fails to, you have to engineer around this feature of human beings where we pursue new opportunities. And as soon as we find a new opportunity, instead of figuring out a way to stabilize the benefits so that it results in a stable sense of satisfaction, for example, we fall all over ourselves to turn it into more of the same because, of course, that's how we got here. Can you give me an example of what you mean by this? Sure.

So let's look at something like the – let's imagine an ancient farmer. let's imagine an ancient farmer. An ancient farmer has a piece of land and that piece of land will support a certain number of people with the level of technology that the farmer is utilizing. Somehow the farmer ends up either thinking of or discovering by watching somebody else a wheel. Now that farmer has a technology that allows him or however many people are working that farm to produce that much more food with no more labor because the wheel allows you to transport more for example at one time so now that same piece of land can support more people because it can be more efficiently farmed that could be stabilized as a kind of success. In other words, you could turn the extra, the surplus into a kind of persistent luxury. Yeah, a luxury. But I mean, I don't even, luxury is a little bit

too trivial sounding. You could turn it into a space where you use that to investigate important stuff. Or you could turn it into more mouths to feed, in which case, as soon as you've produced those extra mouths that are now consuming the output of that farm, now the level of, you know, fear of starvation is right back where it was. And so... So that's more money, more problems. Yeah, essentially. I mean, you know, well, it used to be that we produced more people. Now we produce a greater quest for consumption. Right.

But if we were smart, what we would do is we would think about the problem of how to take the gains that come from not being bumped up at the limits of a system and turn them into what we value. Right. Well, we've done some of that. I mean, because, so we've done some of that because as, what do they say? A rising tide lifts all ships. And there's certainly some truth in that. The overall standard of living has gone up

so stupendously since 1895 that it's an absolute miracle. So we've done some of that. So there's another issue, back to Marx, let's say. There's another issue that we can't contend with. And one of those might be, well, imagine that in order for society to progress, you have to allow the individual to compete in a relatively untrammeled space so that they can innovate. And then imagine that one of the consequences of that innovation is that you get these Pareto distributions developing because the

innovator, or the one who's second in line to the innovator, whatever, ends up with the bulk of the spoils. So you might say there's a cost to be paid in inequality for innovation. And then you could also say, well, too much

inequality destabilizes things, which seems to be quite clear. So there's room for an intelligent conversation about that, right? Because the lefties say, uh-oh, too much inequality. And they need to be listened to, because the evidence is quite clear. If you let the inequality ramp up enough, the whole system destabilizes, because the people at the bottom think, fuck it, we'll just flip the system upside down. No one wants that. Like, right-wing conservatives don't want that.

So, because you could make a Republican argument and say, don't let the inequality in your neighborhood get out of hand because the crime rate will skyrocket. And the empirical evidence on that is overwhelmingly strong. Inequality drives crime. Now, you can argue about why, but the fact that it does is that's not disputable. So we could have an intelligent discussion between the left and the right, and the discussion would go something like this. You need innovation, you pay for innovation with inequality, but you need to bind inequality because if it's too intense, then things destabilize. It's like, okay, we could agree on that. We've got the parameters set. Now we have to, now we have

to start thinking very carefully through how to do the redistribution issue, and we don't know how to do that. So you might say, well, we have a guaranteed annual income for people, which I think is a horrible solution, by the way, but it addresses the right problem. The problem is that we're hyperproductive, but the spoils go to those at the top, and some of those resources need to be funneled down to the people who have zero, so that they have an opportunity to at least get to the point where they can innovate and so the whole bloody thing doesn't wobble and fall. And I would say in some sense that's what the political discussion is about.

But we've skittered off into these radical oversimplifications, which is something like, well, if you have more than another person, you're an oppressor and you're evil. And if you have less, it's because you're virtuous and victimized. And that's just a non-starter. So you think that there's a real problem with something like universal basic income? You think it's a horrible idea? Well, I think the idea that the solution is a basic income is not a good idea because I think the problem is deeper than that.

I don't think the fundamental problem is that people don't have enough money. I think the fundamental problem is that human beings in some sense are beasts of burden and if they're not given, if they're not provided with a place where they can accept social responsibility, social and individual responsibility in an honorable manner, they degenerate and die. That's the opiate crisis in the West right now. Like men need men who are men. Don't need money. They need function.

And we've got a problem. One of the problems is, for example, here's an ugly stat. I think I told you this once before. It's illegal to induct anyone into the armed forces if they have an IQ of less than 83. anyone into the armed forces if they have an IQ of less than 83. And the reason for that is the armed forces, despite having every reason to draw the contradictory conclusion, has decided that there isn't a single thing that you can be trained to do in the military if you have an IQ of less than 83 that isn't positively counterproductive. That's 10% of the population.

And we're producing a culture that's very cognitively complex. Like, what the hell are you going to do if you can't use a computer? Like, if you can use a computer, you're at least in the game. If you can really use one, you're hyper-powerful. If you're not literate enough to use a computer, you're at zero. 10% of the population. The conservatives say, well, there's a job for everyone if they just worked hard enough. It's like, ah, no, and increasingly no.

And the liberals say, well, everyone's basically the same and you can train anyone to do anything. It's like, no, you can't. I want to go back to the inequality point here, because if you look at this biologically, actually, I think it reveals a lot. actually, I think it reveals a lot. Why are we, I mean, we know from careful study that people are motivated by the degree of inequality more than they are the absolute level of well-being that they have. And there's a very good, it's tragic, but a very good evolutionary reason for this, which is if you are working on some piece of land and your neighbor has the adjacent piece of land and they're doing twice as well as you, it's because they know something you don't. Right. And so becoming focused on what they're doing that you're not doing is a rational

thing to spend your time on. So you can figure out what it is that they know that you don't. In the modern environment, this is a catastrophe. Because who are your neighbors? Well, you've got some box sitting on the wall of your living room that has a totally artificial portrait of other people who may be much wealthier than you, and it's broadcasting in as if you're looking in their window, right, in the adjacent house. And so you think, you're being triggered to think

that you're doing something wrong that you might fix, when in fact the solution may not be. First of all, the person on the other side of that screen may not be for real. But even if they are, they're not living in the same environment as you. The technology is interfacing with our brains badly. But so we have the perception of massive inequality. Economically, we do have massive inequality. You're arguing that the solution to this involves some sort of massive redistribution.

Well, a solution. A solution. But nonetheless, redistribution is wildly unpopular for various reasons. And so what we've got now is a situation. This is speculative. is a situation, this is speculative, but what's really happening is that austerity is being used as a threat to keep people who would otherwise rebel against the inequality in line. And my fear about this is that this is exactly the conditions that are going to trigger that tribal population against population mayhem that we were talking about at the beginning of this

conversation. That when people have the sense that the burst of growth that they were experiencing is now over, the natural response is to turn on those who are not as powerful and take their stuff. That this is a totally indefensible, but nonetheless biological pattern of history. a totally indefensible but nonetheless biological pattern of history. And that if we want to avoid that, we have to stop sending the signals that trigger us to imagine that we've just run to the limit of the opportunity that we had discovered and it is now time to look and see who can't defend their position. How are we sending these signals? Well, by basically failing to provide enough well-being that people's perception

of the inequality is reduced to a tolerable level. That's the argument for universal basic income, right? Certainly a strong one. It's also a good argument for equality of opportunity, right? Because people are actually not as resentful about the success of others as you might expect. They're resentful about it if they feel that the game is fixed. But they're also willing to consider the game long term. So lots of people will say, look, like, I'm stuck at not zero, I'm stuck at one. But my kids might make it to four. And that's good enough.

And that's been the American dream, and that's that's a really high power Antidote to inequality. It's like well. Yeah, there's some inequality We need it to keep the generative mechanism going but the game is fair and you can play it too And there's some reasonable probability that either you or someone you love will be successful So that so it has to be a straight game and that's why ethics is so important to keep this landscape stable people can't play crooked games and the rich shouldn't be fixing the game if they want to hold on to their money and the problem is is that some of them although not all some of them are fixing the game and no one's happy about that and no wonder you know and

and i guess that was evidenced to some degree by the 2008 collapse, because it seemed, and I'm just as uninformed as the next person, so I'm capable of commenting on this, it seems from the outside that the rich disproportionately benefited from the restabilization of the economic system. And people are not happy about that. And they shouldn't be happy about that, because it indicates that there's something fundamentally rotten about the game. So you could say, well, maybe people can tolerate necessary inequality if the game isn't rigged. And so that's why everybody has to act in a manner that indicates that the game isn't rigged. And that means they can't rig it. That's really what it means.

And so we're also being driven into this inequality corner by, I would say, by the postmodernists and the neo-Marxists, because they say, this is the pernicious thing, they say, well, the reason that some people have more than others is because every hierarchy is based on arbitrary power, and they're all oppressors. And the reason they have the money is because they stole it from you. And there's some truth in that because there are some criminals.

But when you get to the point where you fail to distinguish the productive people from the criminals, which is exactly what happened in the 1920s in the Soviet Union, you better bloody well watch out because when you radically make things egalitarian, you're going to wipe out all your productive people and then you're going to wipe out all your productive people, and then you're going to starve. And so that's one of the doom end scenarios that awaits us if this idiot process of polarization continues. And what I find reprehensible about the universities, and you're tangled up right up to your neck in this, is that the universities are actively agitating to produce people who believe that all inequality is due to oppression and power. And that's just, well, first of all, it's technically wrong.

But why is that? You guys both operate in that system. Well, here's the problem. As far as I know, nobody has properly studied the question of what fraction of the economy is actually crooked, rent-seeking, right? Not productive. And I fear that the answer to that question is that it's an awful large fraction of the economy. Not because of some conspiracy, but because opportunity is finite, but con games aren't. And so anybody who can find a mechanism for transferring wealth from somebody else for doing nothing finds that mechanism. And that thing is ever-present.

Whereas discovering the next big thing that's actually productive is, you know, something that goes along and fits and starts. And so if we were, I mean, really, you've described it very well. We've got a battle between two caricatures of what's true, right? Either the market is wonderful and it's producing great stuff with very little corruption, or everything that makes people unequal is the result of corruption. Both of these things are wrong, right? Markets are marvelous engines for figuring out how to do something really well. They're brilliant at this, right? And so people who see that fall in love with it, understandably, because they're so good at it. But what they're terrible at is telling you what you should want or what you should do, right? If people tell markets,

here's what we would like to accomplish. And then the markets tell us, well, how do we accomplish that best? That would be a very viable system that would not result in massive rent seeking, resulting in everybody feeling that all of their misfortunes are the result of a rigged game, which is so massively rigged that when they check, they see, yes, that is actually large, large, to a large extent what we're suffering from. But they want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. And so they want to throw out markets entirely, which, you know, would be a terrible mistake. You asked, Jill, why this has happened in the universities.

And, like, that, I think it's one of these runaway positive feedback processes. You know, the universities start to tilt hard to the left in the universities. And like that, I think it's one of these runaway positive feedback processes. You know, the universities start to tilt hard to the left in the 60s. And that just went out of control. And now we're at the point where that's the dominant force. And why is probably another manifestation of one of these Pareto principles. It was like, well, at some point, there's enough lefties hired hired so that the probability that they're only going to hire people equally as left or greater starts to reach 100%. And then you iterate that across a couple of generations and you get no conservatives, which is more or less the situation, say, in the humanities and most of the social sciences.

And it sort of looks like a conspiracy, but it doesn't mean that anyone is actually planning it, although there are conscious attempts also to silence conservative voices, let's say. And then that's also driven by this postmodern ethos, neo-Marxist ethos, I would say, that says that all of the right, the moral right, is on the side of the left. And so it's the combination of those two things. There's more things. I often think comically that if you paid sociology professors three times as much, the probability that they would be anti-capitalist would decline

precipitously. Like, I think a lot of it's driven, because there's a lot of smart people in academia, and they're underpaid relative to their intelligence. So, and that doesn't make them happy. So they get bitter and resentful about that. And they think, well, there's these goddamn bankers who are hauling in $20 million a year, and here I am, hardly struggling, but here I am struggling comparatively, and that's the issue, is comparatively on $100,000 a year or $120,000 a year. I look at that and I think, well, whatever. It doesn't matter. But my colleagues

are often angry with me because I do work with the business school. You know, and I also have a business. I'm not anti-capitalist in the least. But I, it's just dumbfounding to me because they'll come up to me and say, well, are you so sure that you should be working with the business school? And I think, what bloody planet are you from to posit a question like that? It's all businessmen are evil. It's like, really? That's the level of your sophistication? This is really an argument that's been presented to you, that businessmen are evil?

Well, they don't come out and say that, but they certainly question my motivations, for example, in forming ties with the business school. Like, what do they say about it? They say exactly that. They question my ethics about forming ties with the business school. But they don't give you any reasons? The reason is supposed to be self-evident, Joe. So let's give this argument its due. I mean, I don't buy this argument, but nonetheless, let's not caricature it. Yes, that's good. the other individual has some limit to what they will do. Well, then there's no question who wins. If we give this experiment a long enough period, the individual who will do anything will out

compete the individual with moral limits because... Doesn't it depend on what the game is, though? No. Because if people find out that you have no moral limits, then they're going to remove themselves from your market. Unfortunately not. No? I know it seems like that.

And in any given round, that's true. Okay. But to the extent that what you're saying is to the extent that people police, um, their purchasing and they will, you know, they will stop using Uber if Uber is ethically compromised, for example. Um, well then the point is, well, what's the game? The game is to figure out which things are being monitored and not do any of the unethical things that are being monitored, but to do all of the unethical things that aren't being monitored. And so the individual who is perceiving which things they can get away with has an advantage. That's the psychopath advantage. Well, I don't even want to call it the psychopath advantage, right? What this is is that a market will train you to do this if it is unregulated.

And the best that the ethically restrained person can do is compete dead even. They have no way of getting ahead because the person that is completely free, the amoral business actor, has the ability to do anything that the constrained actor has. Doesn't this depend entirely upon what the battlefield is? Not really. There's sort of one exception, and that exception is people who have done something that has suddenly put them in a powerful position, right? Like tech people.

Right, tech people. Right. Tech people who have skyrocketed as a result of having innovated the next big thing have not been through the markets training them to discover the landscape of what isn't being monitored that you can make a profit. That's one of the fascinating things about tech people in general is that these gigantic tech corporations almost all lean left. Well, the gigantic tech corporations almost all lean left. Well, the gigantic tech corporations lean left. That's true. On the other hand, I mean, I hate to say it, but think about how Google started, right? Don't be evil. Right.

I think they actually meant that. Right. Right. And the thing is, don't be evil is what it sounds like when you haven't been trained by the market to have to do whatever you have to do to beat your competition. You've just come up with the great search engine and suddenly you're on top of the world. But over time, what happens? That entity is now exposed to competition from a bunch of other entities that increasingly will find an advantage in being freer to do ethically questionable stuff. And so what it does is it forces an entity like Google to evolve in the direction of amorality. So now don't be evil. It kind of happened with China and Google.

Yeah. Because Google wanted to expand into China. And so, you know, they had to make a deal with the devil, so to speak. Right. They had to accept censorship. They will find ways to rationalize everything because to not rationalize that which their competitors can avail themselves of would be to perish.

One of the issues was there was all sorts of fake Google going on, just like they have fake Apple stores in China. They don't have the same sort of copyright laws that we have, and you can essentially plagiarize anything you want. And, Brett, you also said that I shouldn't make a straw man of the anti-business argument of my peers. And there's another way that I shouldn't make a straw man of it. Like, despite the fact that I'm not anti-capitalist, I don't believe that every entity is a business

either. And one of the things that has happened to universities that has actually, they've pathologized in a number of dimensions, but they've also pathologized along the business dimension as the administrators have become increasingly trained or drawn from the ranks of business managers, because a university is actually not a business. It's like a church isn't a business. There are organizations that aren't businesses, that you can't just cram into the free market structure willy-nilly. And so my colleagues also object to the transformation of the university into a business entity run by profit-seeking MBAs. And they should object to that, because that's not what the institution is for.

So there are reasons for them to be skeptical, say, of my association with the business school that aren't merely a reflection of a simplistic anti-capitalist ideology. Oh, there are lots of things that have no immunity to contact with the market, right? What has happened to the university system is that markets have pushed it in all kinds of directions that are not healthy for the mission of the academy. And this is also true, you know, journalism isn't well done in a market either, right? Journalism done in a market ends up telling you what you want to hear, not what you need to know. So anyway, markets are wonderful, but there's certain things they

shouldn't be allowed to touch. And there are certain things that they shouldn't do, like tell us what to want, right? There's no magic principle by which a market knows what's healthy and what, you know, you might crave but shouldn't have well that also then brings us back to another part of the conservative liberal left dilemma which is well you know to direct the market means to impose the heavy hand of the state and its potential pathologies on the market but to leave it alone completely means that it wanders randomly through a through an indeterminate landscape and and i guess part of the issue there too is it's sort of like well how do we how do we how do we properly balance for foresight and planning which you'd think would have some role in in the construction

of large-scale states it's like well what do we want the landscape to look like? How do we balance that with the sort of comprehensive computations that the market allows? And, of course, the answer to that is we have political discussions about it all the time that are untrammeled so that we can adjust the ratio between those two things as necessary. So, again, that's an argument on the side of free speech. Yeah. I mean, really, it couldn't be more important. The real answer is that both failures are frightening. Right. You really don't want a state nannying you and over-regulating the market and taking the magic out of it. And you don't want the completely unregulated landscape

where the market starts probing the minds of your children and figuring out how to sell them things that they don't have any ability to resist, right? You need to figure out what that path is. And it's not easy, but you can't do it in a landscape where you can't talk about the questions. And this brings us to censorship, doesn't it? Because this is a real issue with the marketplace of free ideas. When you're talking about whether it's Google or YouTube or whoever might be imposing their own morality and their own ideas on what you should and should not be able to discuss and what should and should not be monetized you're essentially imposing these limits these look I've read once and it's a very good

point that freedom breeds inequality. Because you're free to put as much effort as you'd like into something, and you're going to get unequal results. And that if you are truly free in a free world, some people are going to do far better than others. And just based on their own input, just based on their effort, just based on the amount of focus and dedication they have. It is very unequal. I know many people that are far more dedicated than other people that I know, and they do better. Yeah, well, that's well buttressed by the empirical literature, because while I mentioned earlier that the two best predictors of long-term success are intelligence and conscientiousness, and what intelligence is probably something like the number of credible operations that you can manifest in a given period of time.

It's something like speed. Now, it's not only that, but speed's a big part of it. So if what you're doing is working and you can do it faster, that works better. That's pretty damn straightforward. And the next thing is, well, conscientiousness. Well, conscientiousness would be something like, how many of those cycles of effort are devoted to that specific task? And it turns out that if there's a relationship between the effort and task success, more effort is better. And so I can give you some indication of the power of that. So if you have good measures

of conscientiousness and IQ, you can predict someone's success in a competitive landscape with a correlation of about 0.6. And what that would mean is, imagine that you tried to pick people, you just said, randomly, you're going to be a success in the top half of the successful people, say, and you're going to be in the bottom half, you'd have a 50% chance of making that selection correctly if you did it randomly. If you did it informed by the results of a good cognitive test and a conscientious test, you'd be right 85% of the time. So you could say with 85% accuracy, which of two people would be more likely to be in the top 50%.

So it's a whopping effect, and it's actually some validation for the essential integrity of our system, because we hope, given that it's essentially an open meritocracy, that smarter, hardworking people would do better. And they do. Now, other factors apply. Corruption, for example. Lots of factors apply. I mean, for one thing, wrapped up in IQ is a big question, which is how much of the differences in IQ that exist is democratizable. That is to say, how much of this is the result of environments that aren't enriching or there's lead in the water or who knows what. Not enough vitamins. Right. My sense, actually, my intuition based on what I know biologically is that a huge fraction, maybe all of it, that a huge fraction maybe all of it but a huge fraction of differences uh in iq

is actually um could be generalized and that's part of equal opportunity it's not an equal opportunity see i'm way more pessimistic about that and that's partly because i mean maybe because i spent a lot of because i'm interested in the amelioration of differences you know so for example that's why i built this future authoring program. It's like, hey, if we can figure out how to make people more effective, well, let's do it. So I scoured the literature on IQ enhancement, and it's bloody dismal, man. It's rough. It's very, very difficult to put together a cognitive training program.

Like, some things have worked in a major way. Like the fact that people aren't starving has wiped out, has moved the bottom of the IQ distribution way up over the last hundred years. That's been like a walloping success. But a lot of the things that we hoped would work, like Head Start's a good example of that. You know, Head Start was part of the American War on Poverty, and the idea was you'd give, you know, deprived kids a leg up early before they hit school, and start training them cognitively earlier. And the hope was that you'd get a Pareto thing going, where they'd be a little smarter in kindergarten,

and then they'd do a little better in grade one, and that would make them do even more better in grade two, more better, do better in grade two. But what happened, what happened was that the kids who went through Head Start actually did get a cognitive jump on their competitors, but all the other kids caught up by grade six. And by grade six, there was absolutely no effect whatsoever of the training program left. Now, Head Start did have a couple of benefits. One was fewer teenage pregnancies and fewer dropouts. But that was probably because the

kids who got into Head Start were either socialized better or that some fraction of them were removed for some time from extremely toxic environments just while they happened to be at Head Start. But it didn't produce the cognitive improvements that everyone, right and left, were equally hoping for. Yeah, but this is, in some sense, it's very much an uncontrolled experiment, right and left, were equally hoping for. Yeah, but this is, in some sense, it's very much an uncontrolled experiment, right? Absolutely. Because A, Head Start starts late. Yep.

And B, it doesn't insulate you from all of the stuff that comes along with growing up in the deprived neighborhood. Oh, absolutely. We really don't know what the truth is of human IQ. And there are some results that suggest some things that are not hopeful. On the other hand, some of them just simply run afoul with the biological realities of intelligence. Well, here's a good example of the lack of malleability. I mean, there's a couple of things. The first is that we may already be at a point of diminishing returns

in terms of eliminating individual differences in IQ because everyone has central heating, everyone has air conditioning, everyone has enough food, everyone has access to an infinite pool of information. So you could say even if you're in a deprived environment but you're smart, the intellectual landscape is wide open to you. Now, I'm not saying that's the case, but you can make a case for that. But the more dismal end of the biological research on IQ shows things like if you take identical twins at birth and you put them in adopted-out families, that the IQ of the adopted-out twins is much closer it's much closer a to the

original biological parents than to the adoptive parents and be almost perfectly correlated with one another and that correlation increases as the separated twins age so let's say you had a twin you were both adopted out at birth we test your IQs at four they're fairly close they're closer to your biological parents than your adoptive parents but then we test you IQs at four, they're fairly close. They're closer to your biological parents than your adoptive parents. But then we test you every year until you're 60. By the time you're 60, no matter how long you've been separated as an identical twin, your IQ score is so much like your twin's IQ score that it's as if the same person was being tested twice.

And that's a really complicated one because you think, well, as twins travel through the environment and accrue different experiences, their IQs should diverge. Like, obviously, that's not what happens. They converge. So there are a lot of places to critique that. For one thing, there aren't very many identical twins raised apart. It's a small sample. This is definitely true. Those identical twins raised apart carry with them whatever effects there were from before they were born, for example. Sure, and they look the same. And so if they, you know, if they've been damaged by an environment that was unhealthy for their mother when she was pregnant, then they would carry that through and

it would show up as a similar IQ later in life. So one really wants to see that this is true on the positive side, not just the negative side. So anyway, I'm not saying that there's nothing to it. I'm really saying I think we don't know. It's very early in this conversation already are that an environment in which we can say anything, that we can advance any argument and test it. It doesn't mean that that argument is protected, but that any argument can be advanced and then challenged, that that is inherent to navigating. And the other thing that I think we would agree on is that equality of opportunity

is nothing but good. Right. a fair game with equality of opportunity. A fair game with equality of opportunity. And I guess one thing I would add, I don't know if we would agree on this, but you were talking about the fact that, I forget which thing exactly, but that a system based on merit produces inequality because people will-

Freedom. Yeah, that freedom produces inequality. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it doesn't mean that we are obligated to ride it all the way down, right? The fact is we could make people safe to fail, right?

So that you are encouraged to attempt to do something highly valuable and if it doesn't work out, then the point is you're not homeless. This would be the argument for something like universal basic income, that your needs are taking care of your food, your shelter, and now you're free to pursue any ideas that you might have that you would ordinarily be saddled down by your issues with food.

Well, there is some evidence of that actually happening in Canada. Now, these are multivariable problems, and so I'm not claiming that this is true, but it's suggestive. The rate of entrepreneurial activity in Canada is actually higher than in the United States. And one reason for that appears to be the fact that if you're 25, 27, let's say, and you have a family, you can quit your job and start a startup and you don't lose your health care. Right?

And so now, you know, the issue of universal health care is obviously a very thorny one. And it's not like the Canadian system works perfectly. But it doesn't work too badly. And we've been able to manage it for about 50 years. You know, we have, there's artificial scarcity in the system, and the delay times are longer than they would be if you flew to the Mayo Clinic and bought your health care. Like, I would say that at the high end, the American health care system is better than the Canadian health care system. But I would say at the middle and at the low end, the Canadian health care system is clearly preferable, and it's also cheaper, which is quite interesting.

Because you would expect, especially if you're a free market type, that, you know, I know the health care system in the U.S. is not precisely free market, but it is more so than it is in Canada. Yet, Americans pay a substantially higher proportion of their overall, devote a higher proportion of their overall GDP to personal health care that Canadians do. And the stats are similar if you look at other, you know, quasi-socialized medical systems. There's a great piece on that by Adam Ruins Everything. Have you ever seen that television show? It's really interesting. He breaks down pretty much a lot of different subjects, but breaks down the American health care system to pretty much where it went wrong.

And I just encourage anybody to go watch it because it just shows how they elevated the price of all sorts of different things to sort of make up for a lack of profits. And it's a really fascinating little piece. We are already almost three hours into this. So we haven't talked about Hitler. Oh, my goodness. Well, we kind of have. We kind of did.

We kind of have. But let me just, do you want to lay out your argument about Hitler and then I'll respond to it? I don't know if I do want to. I mean, I think, I actually think that I should stop because I'm kind of at the limits of,

I'm at the point where the probability that I will say something stupid is starting to increase and i would rather not because just saying the things that i'm trying to say that aren't stupid is dangerous enough yes this isn't the topic where you want to make that kind of yes yes so i would say maybe is there a more charged subject it's funny that it's charged because as you point out we're pretty much all in agreement about it right i mean you know you find someone who's not and they're instantly ostracized from society It's funny that it's charged because, as you point out, we're pretty much all in agreement about it, right? I mean, you find someone who's not and they're instantly ostracized from society. Right.

I mean, anybody who has an argument about Genghis Khan, who killed 10% of the world's population, changed things so badly that it literally lowered the carbon footprint of the human race while he was alive, killed some untold number of millions of people, and was responsible for their deaths. People look to him, and they find all sorts of positive things to attribute to his reign. Opening up trade with China, opening up trade routes, all these different things that people have attributed to him, and that someday someone may do the same thing about Adolf Hitler.

Right now, that is impossible. He certainly made that job very difficult with all of the documentation, especially the films. But let's just say the argument that I want to level, I want to be really careful to do this so that it can't be misinterpreted by anybody. I'm going to enjoy watching this. Are you? Okay. If I'm cornered, will you come out?

No way, man. The knives are going out okay so my argument from all those years ago in in my uh my paper that i was did for bob trevers that i mentioned at the beginning was that hitler was a monster as we all know but he was a rational monster that the program that he deployed was not what he said, mind you. What he said was wrong in many places, especially where it gets near Darwinism. It's just all tangled and broken. But what he did was rational from the point of view of increasing the amount of resource that was dedicated to producing members of his population. And so my point is, this is the danger that we are in if we allow ourselves to imagine that genocidal impulses are more or less gone from the world because we've all assumed,

we've all agreed that they're a bad thing. And the point is that they exist in a latent program. And at a point when you have austerity as a result of usually an opportunity that has run its course and has resulted in the population growing to fill that opportunity, and suddenly there's nowhere to go because the opportunity has all been absorbed, the tendency of people is to figure out who, what other population is weak. And if that population is across a border, then there's some excuse for war. And if the population is within the border, then it's a genocide. But the point is that is an ever-present danger for us.

I want to clarify one thing. I mean, because this argument was sort of phrased as we have a disagreement about Hitler. And I would like to point out that I don't actually disagree with anything that you just said. Because if I remain relatively silent, I don't want it to be seen that the fact that I'm disagreeing with you means, or that there is a disagreement means that it's a disagreement about any of that. I think the disagreement was something like, I said that Hitler was even more evil than we thought he was. And I think, correct me if I'm wrong,

you're pointing out the danger of assuming that you can put Hitler in a, he was just a monster box and don't think about it anymore. And I would say I agree absolutely with that. I mean, I've studied Hitler a lot. And there's a bunch of things that you can't say about him. You can't say he was stupid. You can't say he was without artistic talent. You can't say that he was a poor organizer.

You can't say that he wasn't charismatic. You can't say that he did't charismatic. You can't say that he did wonders for Germany's economy in the first part of his reign. And so it's very necessary if you're dealing intelligently with a true monster that you give the devil his due. Yeah. So I think the thing that I saw in your video was your argument was that as he was losing, instead of putting the genocide on pause and winning and winning the war, winning that he he ratcheted up the genocide. Yeah. I don't know if it would really be. I don't think it's necessarily fair to say that it was him that did that, although I think he had a hand in it. It does appear to me that that's what happened. Right. And my point would simply be, and again, there, I couldn't possibly be less sympathetic with the individual. My point is simply that from an evolutionary point of view, if your objective is coldly to increase the number of genomes that are spelled the same way that yours

are on earth, that A, he did enslave those Jews who were most fit to work in service of the German war machine, right? That's what those camps, and not all of the camps were work camps, but, you know, Auschwitz, for example, was both a work camp and a death camp. And so there was this tendency to enslave. So let me ask you a question about this. Because, you know, I think you have to make a pretty tenuous biological argument to say that there's evolutionary utility in increasing the number of your kinsmen. Unless they're very close. But here's a slight variation of that. You tell me what you think about this.

But unless they're very close. But here's a slight variation of that. You tell me what you think about this. Is it reasonable to presume that a decent survival strategy is to homogenize your environment with regards to, under some conditions, to homogenize your environment with regards to racial or ethnic differences to decrease the probability that you and yours are going to be killed? Oh, yeah. Again, no defense of this, but you are right that to the extent that there's another population that's distinct, that that population, even if it is small and has little power now, might not be small and have little power later. And so undoubtedly that program is there too. But I would say that the

tendency to believe that evolution only functions at the level of kin when you're talking about very close relatives, I believe, is an error. That is the result of the fact that evolutionists early on wished to operationalize fitness. And it's very hard to operationalize fitness across population level differences. And so they built a definition that is about immediate kin, but there's no logical reason to imagine that that peters out at the edge. Okay. So all I'm arguing is that what Hitler did was go after a population inside his border that was more distantly related to the people who were his constituents. And then he went, obviously, after Eastern Europe and sought the future of Germany

in Russia. And it took 12 million Russians to turn around the German war machine. I mean, those are military deaths. There were vastly more civilian deaths. But the point is, I mean, those are military deaths. There were vastly more civilian deaths. But the point is, he did not succeed in doing what he set out to do, but he also didn't fail in the sense that he took a bunch of resources that belonged to a population that was more distantly related, and he got rid of those people. And by getting rid of them increased the amount of resource that was available to Aryans. This has nothing to do, genes are not interested in figuring out which genes are

superior. All of the language about German superiority is nonsense. However, genes are very interested. I mean, they're obviously genes they don't think, but they act as if they are interested in replacing alternative spellings. that Hitler both ran and elicited from people are lurking in our, let's say, in our genome, in our set of biological possibilities. And we have to be very awake to that fact on an ongoing basis. They are lurking in our genomes, which does not mean that we as adults have this as a possibility. Many people will not go along with this.

Other people have it lurking to be triggered. And I think, you know, what worries me is that Trump, I think very cynically, utilized this lurking program in order to gain office, that he played upon the fact that certain people were waiting to hear those noises. And what he said about Charlottesville, you know, again, he did not go after the white nationalists. Did you see the white nationalist response? No.

Yeah, the Daily Storm had, is that what it's called? One of the white nationalist papers had a breakdown of what Trump did, and that essentially at the end they were saying, he didn't go after us, he didn't target us, this is very good. He was very clear that it was all sides, and that he never once targeted us, he didn't go after us he didn't target us this is very good he was very clear that it was all sides and that he never once targeted us didn't say anything bad about us and then they said god bless trump at the end of it there's a real tricky issue there about truth you know because um i was because my free speech the free speech panel that i was a part of was cancelled i had to make comments in the Canadian media about Charlottesville.

And so I really had to think about what Trump said, because the fact that there is reprehensible behaviour on both sides of the extremes of the distribution is true. However, truth is a tricky thing, because you have to take the temporal context into account. You know, because I would say, you can imagine that there are white lies and black truths. A black truth is when you use the truth in a way that isn't truthful, just like a white lie is when you lie in a way that isn't harmful.

You can use the truth to wound and hurt, and what that really means is that you've misused the truth, and so it's actually a complex form of lie. But what Trump did wrong, this is independent of whether or not he was actually engaging in manipulation or deceit, was he failed to specify the time and the place for the utterance. Because what he should have come out and done was said, I unequivocally denounce the white supremacist racism that emerged in Charlottesville. Yes. And then he should have shut up.

And then two weeks later, he could have said, well, would we look at the political landscape as a whole, perhaps commenting on Berkeley? He could have said, it's pretty obvious that there are reprehensible individuals acting out at both ends of the extreme. But the Charlottesville week wasn't the week to make that point so and you know why he did that well it could be just ineptness because it was a very tricky week to exactly get things right i don't think so i think actually we can look at the uh what he did during the election and I think we should expect that he would do exactly what he did. Well, fair enough. I think there's...

There's a wink and a nod to them always. Would neo-Nazis and white supremacists applaud Donald Trump's response? Yeah. See if you could see the actual... Does it show the actual text of what they wrote? A quote from the editor here, right there. He recently didn't mention anything to do with us reporters were screaming at him in the white nationalism he just

walked out of the room huh there was an actual article that they wrote on one of those websites Trump's comments were good he didn't attack that's it he didn't attack us just said the nation should come together nothing specific against us.

He said that we need to study why people get so angry and implied that there was hate, dot, dot, dot, on both sides, exclamation point. So he implied that the Antifa are haters. I mean, so that energized them in a way. And there's no secret that they support him. You know, my friend Alonzo Bowden has a very funny quote. He's a comedian. He goes, not all Trump supporters are racists, but all racists are Trump supporters. It's a great quote. And there's political power in that, whether or not Trump is a racist or whether

it's the wink and the nod to that side that is the only wink and the nod that they're getting. Yeah, or even insufficient denunciation, which was kind of what did in... There's a Canadian journalist named Faith Goldie who got fired from Rebel Media for being accused of being too cozy with Daily Storm

or Type. She did a podcast with Crypto. And I listened to the podcast very carefully. She was actually one of the people that was supposed to be a panelist on this free speech talk. So that put us in a real bind. But what happened in the podcast? Well, what happened was, in my estimation, was that she didn't properly fulfill her role as critical journalist. It was sort of like a discussion with your friendly neighborhood neo-Nazi. And what I mean by that is she didn't ally herself with any of the purported aims of the neo-Nazi

people she was talking to, but I think she failed to criticize them sufficiently. She didn't ask the tough questions, you know. Now, and that was a, well, it was a fatal error. I mean, she got fired from rebel media, and it's going to have terrible repercussions for her, although she may land on her feet. And rebel media is very conservative as well, right? Certainly by Canadian standards, yeah. Yeah, that's right. Rebel media imploded in the aftermath of Charlottesville because of what Faith Goldie did with the Daily... It wasn't even the Daily Stormer, it was a group called Crypto, but they're associated with the Daily Stormer. So she went on there, which I think you could make a case that that's okay as a journalist, you can go talk to-nazis but the question is how do you talk to them and the answer to that is you point out their agenda you don't allow them to masquerade as friendly as friendly innocent people you can't do that and so i would say she damn she damned herself by insufficiently criticizing the villains. It was something like that.

I'm sure you are familiar with Louis Theroux. No, I'm not, actually. Louis Theroux, the documentarian. Do you know him from England? Fascinating guy. Fantastic. Like, one of the best. And one of the things that he's done is, well, he's interviewed a ton of different people,

but one of the great ones that he did was the Westboro Baptist Church. a ton of different people, but one of the great ones that he did was the Westboro Baptist Church. And he sort of embedded himself with them and was very congenial and very kind and unthreatening and stayed with them for long periods of time, like weeks on end, and got them to eventually expose who they were and understand from the point of view of an insider in a sense, without necessarily condemning them, but just constantly asking questions, but being

very, very polite about it. Not like a bunch, not like a lot of serious confrontational criticism, rather, but a very friendly, sort of polite, British way of discussing things and he's particularly good at embedding

himself, he did it with Scientology he's done it with a bunch of different groups he embeds himself and just sort of so there's a justification for attempting that sort of thing clearly, and I really had to think this through because what happened with our talk

was it was so hall of mirrors like it was like it was a talk about free speech talks being shut down on campus that was shut down by a campus and it was a panel of people who purport to support free speech who knocked someone off the panel because of something, well, not precisely that she said, but it's close enough to make the irony rather palpable. It is. So I had to go through what happened with Faith very carefully to figure out what the right ethical pathway was, you know. But I listened to the podcast very carefully. I listened to it with my son, and we talked about it a lot.

And our conclusion was that she had failed to she had failed to she didn't ask enough tough questions one would have done it even maybe two would have done it for sure but it was that the discussion was too cordial and it could have even been cordial to your point because maybe that would have led to more discussions yeah but it should have been cordial with one snake bite you know that would be enough required to make. But it should have been cordial with one snake bite. That would have been enough. But is she required to make that snake bite? Well, it depends on what you mean by required. But my thought is to find out what these people really want and we're really trying to achieve.

Sometimes you don't have to be confrontational with them. You just got to allow them to be comfortable. And Kamau Bell did that really great on his CNN show with the KKK. them to be comfortable. And Kamau Bell did that really great on his CNN show with the KKK. He sort of just allowed them to be themselves and they became more and more comfortable with him the more time they spent with him to the point where they're actually joking around with him. But you got to see that the ugliness was so obvious and evident.

And without him confronting them on it, without him yelling and arguing, you got to see it from him just being friendly and joking around with them. Now, nobody would ever accuse a black man like Kamau Bell with being a sympathizer with the KKK. He was in this inarguable position. No one could accuse him of it. This woman, I'm assuming, is white. That's where the problem lies.

One of many problems. Yeah, if she was a black woman in the very same situation like Oprah was in the past, like Oprah interviewed the KKK in the past, and she was never accused of being like somehow another sympathetic person to them. Right. And somehow we have to raise the threshold of offense. There are lots of ways to contribute to the conversation one of them may be to embed yourself and actually allow the world to see yes people who are doing something

abhorrent in the in the way that they see themselves so you can understand it rather than being there asking questions right you don't necessarily have to be really cute what are you gonna change them i mean being critical to them i mean just getting in arguments with them i mean you might be able to see something from that from their response to like rational discussion about their issues this brings us down a whole other rabbit hole which maybe we could talk about at some point in the future because this is a really interesting topic you know like part of the reason that I've been accused of being on the far right say or on the alt-right is because I've talked

to people talked with people who perhaps have, are closer, what would you say, have an association network that might be more closely allied with that than people are comfortable with. But my attitude has been too, and I don't want to talk about this in much detail because it's really complicated, but the anti-left spectrum, let's say, is very confused, and it could easily tilt very rapidly into the hard right anti-left, which is the danger that you were describing. mental pathway because they're they're tired of being accused of implicit racism let's say and say look you can be anti-radical left without falling all the way into the to the far right and here's how you might do it but that means i have to talk to them and then if i talk to them that means i risk association with them and that risks being tainted it's a very tricky line to

walk well it's also one of the one of the big problems with this hard stance of the of the left It's a very the Frog of everybody. And so this guy was like, well, you just admitted you're a Nazi. And I'm like, see, this is a part of the problem. And this creates a massive blowback. People are getting angry because that frog, for the most part, is used humorously. Actually, you used the phrase defensive humor when you were talking. And it really is. And I think, I mean, this is, I didn't mean to interrupt you, Joe, but there's something about the idea that the effectiveness of this meme is that it tangles people with no sense

of humor in knots. And that's a huge part of why those things are generated. That's why they like it. That's exactly right. They love it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, I'm fearing that I'm saying something about this frog and that there's going to be something that's going to emerge that I should know about that somehow I'm admitting something. But all I'm saying is what I see is a lot of people using it to taunt people who can't figure out. I think that's the vast majority of it. I do believe that. And I think the same thing about the Kekistani types is that that's almost all humor. Yeah. And there's a massive problem with pushing back against that and calling those people Nazis and racists. And especially when they're just using humor and especially when it's very clear if you look at all the memes online. And I went thoroughly through Google to find them. There are some abhorrent ones there are some horrible ones there are some ones that are with the nazi uniforms there's some there's some anti-jew ones there's some horrific ones most of

them are not that most of them the vast majority of them are humorous and if and again these people are not coordinating so if one person decides to make a mickey mouse racist meme which by the way a lot of the early Mickey Mouse cartoons, you could just take a screenshot, and they're fucking tremendously racist. Right. Because dealing with the sign of the times. I mean, images of black people that were extremely cartoonish.

You know, giant lips, black faces, the whole deal. Horribly racist. You could say Mickey Mouse is fucking racist. Don't go to Disneyland. No one's saying that, right that right but they could and this is the slippery slope you start with the frog you know and you know first they came for peppy and I didn't say yeah well if the frog is racist you start wondering what isn't racist cartoon frog well you can make a cartoon about everything that has ever

existed and make that racist it doesn't mean that the frog is racist. This is where it's crazy. It's like, what percentage of people are making the frog racist? And then for the Southern Poverty Law Center to say that this is a symbol of hate now, this frog, well, guess what? You just back these fucking people up against the wall and you shored their offenses because now they're realizing, oh, well, these people are mad. They're not just mad like angry, but mad like insane.

Like you're not looking at this thing rationally at all. You're saying that a frog where 99% of the memes are just humorous or silly. Now the frog is a hate symbol. Not only a hate symbol, but Nazi white supremacist. But Nazi white supremacist. I mean, they're just drawing up all of the space between their preposterous perspective and the nightmare at the other end of the spectrum. And the point is almost all of us live in that intermediate space. So, yeah, it's almost all thoughts live in that intermediate space.

And there's a variability of all thoughts. You know, there's flexibility of all ideas. And when you're talking about something that's extremely humorous, you're talking about a humorous frog. I mean, goddamn, to call that all hate when sometimes it's hate. And by who? By whoever the fucking people are that did that hateful thing. Those are the people that are hateful, not the other ones that are using that frog for humor. I mean, the fact that this is an argument at all just shows how lost we are in these ideological arguments,

this left versus right extreme end of the spectrum on one end of the field throwing rocks at the far end of the field. Yeah. Most of us are in the middle somewhere. It's hopeless if we cannot have discussions in the middle. of the field. Yeah. Most of us are in the middle somewhere. It's hopeless if we cannot have discussions in the middle. About a frog. Yeah. About a cartoon frog.

A cartoon frog. I mean, Jesus Christ. It's so weird. Well, that's a nice conclusion. Yeah, it might be. It might be. Listen, this was a lot of fun. It always is.

Yeah, this was great. And I'm glad you guys came up with this idea, and I'm glad we had the time to do it. Yeah, me too man thanks for the invitation my pleasure really good to meet you Jordan Peterson what is your Twitter

handle again? Jordan B. Peterson and Brett Weinstein Brett Weinstein on Twitter Weinstein I've been saying Weinstein it doesn't matter

you're not the first is it interchangeable? sorry sorta alright but thank you guys really appreciate it a lot of Sort of Alright But thank you guys Really appreciate it A lot of fun

Yep Good to see you again Bye everybody Jesus Christ