The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 158. Minefields and the New Political Landscape | Bret Weinstein

Episode Date: March 15, 2021

This episode was recorded on 02/17/2021@Bret Weinstein and I discuss the events that led to his resignation from Evergreen State College, dealing with controversy, pair bonding, the new political landscape, paranoia created by having communities online, discordant opinion budgets, and more.Bret Weinstein is a theoretical evolutionary biologist, host of DarkHorse Podcast, and a former Professor at Evergreen State College.Find more Bret Weinstein on YouTube @Bret Weinstein, on Twitter @BretWeinstein on his website https://bretweinstein.net​For advertising inquires please contact: [e-mail]

Welcome to the Jordan B Peterson podcast. This episode was recorded on February 17th, 2021, and is featuring Brett Weinstein. Jordan and Brett discussed the events that led to Brett's resignation from Evergreen State College, dealing with cultural controversy, today's political landscape, paranoia created by having communities online, discordant opinion budgets, and more. Brett Weinstein is a theoretical evolutionary biologist, host of Dark Horse Podcast, and a former professor at Evergreen State College. This episode is brought to you by the Great Courses Plus. When I was in university, I learned more on the internet than I did in class.

Hands down, part of the way I learned was from online platforms that host courses like the Great Courses Plus. With the Great Courses Plus, you have unlimited access to thousands of video and audio lectures on hundreds of fascinating topics. Learn a new language, learn about the great philosophers like Nietzsche, or try critical business skills for success. The courses are taught by the best professors and top experts in their fields. The material is all extensively vetted and researched, and with the Great Courses Plus

app, you're free to watch, listen, and learn on any device at any time. Get started with the free month of unlimited access. Just visit our special URL, thegreatcoursesplus.com slash Peterson. That's a whole month to learn anything you want for free. So side up now, thegreatcoursesplus.com slash Peterson. I have the pleasure today of speaking with Dr. Brett Weinstein, who I met about five years ago, an evolutionary biologist who taught at Evergreen State College until political circumstances made it impossible for that to continue. Brett served as the moderator for two discussions I had with Sam Harris. Is that right?

Yeah, it's correct. I think I think that was when that was the first time we met in person, wasn't it? I believe we met prior to that at a conference in Vancouver also, a young libertarian. Oh, yes, that group and the UBC group, right? That was before. Yeah, well, and we haven't spoken since when Vancouver, is that right? I, it must have been more recent than that. In fact, I'm certain it was, but it's been quite some time. Well, so we, I thought it might be interesting for us to catch up and to share that process of catching up on my YouTube channel. So, and Brett, you have a YouTube channel and you have a podcast, which the image of which I believe is on the wall, the beautiful wall behind you. That's your kitchen that's all done in cedar like that? No, that's one half of my office that we at the beginning of COVID, my son and I, my son

produces our podcast and we built the studio in this room making runs back and forth to the hardware store and bugging out of the the prior space that we were in. So anyway, yes, we erected this in about two days. And, you know, the sync works and it's all functional, but it's basically my workspace in my office. It makes a lovely background. You have some skulls back there too. Sure do. I have skulls in my office, interestingly enough.

What are they? Well, let's see. We have back there a bear and a seal. And the juxtaposition is important to Heather and to me because seals are actually bears. They evolved, they returned to the sea and their skulls are extremely difficult to distinguish except for the teeth. You can tell by the teeth, but otherwise a seal skull looks like a bear skull to an amazing degree. And so which one is the seal? Let's see, I'm gonna have to figure out. I would guess that it's on the one on my right.

The seal is the one closer to the plant. Yes, okay, because I have a bear skull which looks more like the one on the left, so. Yep. So, when did you start your podcast? Well, the podcast started, geez, I'm not good at remembering these things exactly, but the podcast started must be about two years ago, and then it went through a radical transition at the beginning of COVID where instead of just being a show that we taped we moved it into this room and Heather and I started doing weekly live streams which we still do or I still do

separate discussions with people but the weekly live streams have become a really important component and what's the live stream what do you do on the live stream? streams have become a really important component. And what's the live stream? What do you do on the live stream? Well, what we do is we point the evolutionary lens at important topics, everything from the woke revolution to the fragility of civilization, what future governance might look like, basically whatever interests us. And it's accumulated quite a following. It's been, you know, it's never something that we intended to do, but it turns out that there, as you know, better than anyone, there is a huge hunger for people who know something

are willing to talk courageously in public and won't mislead you, right? We can all be wrong, but it's rare enough that somebody will tell you explicitly what they think and why. And, you know, if you do that, it's amazing how many people will find you. Yeah, well, people do have some desire for the truth, painful though that might be. Yeah, and you said you didn't expect to be doing this on a full-time basis. There's no doubt that life is full of all sorts of twists and turns that you don't expect. Well, that's certainly true, and that actually brings me, you know, the way you you introduced this discussion didn't give me a chance to say, by far, the most important thing

here, which is it is so great to be talking with you Jordan We were so worried about you and I'm sure you're getting that message Loud and clear, but at another level. It's probably hard to appreciate How profound your absence from the discussion has been over the last year And I know you've been to hell and back and we've been experimenting with hell on earth here while you were away, but it is really, really good to be with you. And anyway, I think it's very important that that just be the baseline for the conversation. Welcome back. Thank you. That's so nice of you. And people have been so welcoming to me,

you know, with the exception of the odd journalist, let's say, but online people are so good to me that I can't believe it. It's, well, there's many things I can't believe. That's certainly one of them. It's very nice to see you and you're looking well. Thank you. You as well. Yeah. Well, that's deceiving, unfortunately, but well, at least you're headed in the right direction. Can we say that? That's the theory. I'm able to work a bit. I'm working about two hours every three days now, I would say, doing this sort of thing,

which I also didn't expect to be doing as my major... What will you say is my major occupation, my area of occupation is shrunk to a staggering degree over the last two years. And that's been quite difficult to contend with. Well, I hope it's temporary, but I mean, from the outside. I'm prepared enough so that I can't be as functional as I used to be, but I can't sit around and do nothing because it drives me completely out of my mind to do nothing. I'm used to being occupied all the time. But I'm very happy that I'm able to do these discussions and so far that's been going well.

So I'd like you to walk me through what's happened to you since the events in Evergreen and bring everybody up to date on my end. So, man, maybe you could start with what happened at Evergreen, although I suspect many of the people watching this do know. Does that seem reasonable? Sure, yeah, we can start there. I think we should probably air in the direction of being sparse with the details and see where it leads us.

So in 2017, I was teaching at Evergreen as was Heather, my wife, and she was literally Evergreen's most popular professor. I wasn't too far behind. I was very popular as well. Our classes were always over full and we accepted more people than we had to and had to turn some away anyway. And then in actually 2016, the new president of the college, George Bridges, began an initiative or a set of initiatives surrounding diversity, equity and inclusion.

And these initiatives included the impaneling of a committee that was supposed to look into racism at the college, its impacts and to propose solutions. And as it became clear what they were alleging and proposing, Heather and I became very alarmed. I began to speak out at first in faculty meetings, and then when the ability to speak out in faculty meetings became non-existent, I took to our faculty and staff email list to talk about the threat to the college that was created by these initiatives.

That of course brought about exactly what you would imagine, which were accusations that I was motivated by some kind of racism or white supremacy or white fragility, or who knows what the accusations were exactly. But in any case, I fought back anyway, and my sense was I had tenure, and I was well liked, and I was well known at the college. I'd been there for 14 years. And so I didn't think they had the power to get rid of me and that gave me the ability to say what needed to be said about these proposals. Well, the upshot is that ultimately protesters, 50 students that I had never met showed up at my classroom, accused me of racism, demanded that I either be fired or resign. I told them I wouldn't, and riots broke out at the college in which faculty and administrators

were kidnapped. I was apparently hunted car to car on campus by protesters. The police were stood down by the college president. And we were basically left defend for ourselves with student patrols roving the campus with weapons, baseball bats, and the like. So it was a chaotic scene. There was a lot of interest in it because it was very colorful. But of course, most people back in 2017 dismissed this as, yes, an overreaction.

But you know how college students are. And those of us who saw it up close knew that that couldn't be the case. That it would ultimately spill out into civilization. And we, of course, were right. And now it's everywhere. We see it taking over institution after institution. In the US and Canada, we see it making tremendous strides in government. And there's no telling where it ends. And what is, I mean, I have a bunch of questions that come out of that. So I'm going to lay out three.

Why in the world did this bar that you enough so that you took a stand, especially given your political leanings? Because you were, which I'm not criticizing by the way, I'm just stating that it isn't obvious to begin with why it would be you that would take a stand, say, rather than someone else, but you did. And so I'm curious about why.

And what is it that you saw coming? And what is this it that you're referring to? You've had a lot of time to be thinking about this now. It's been four years. And I mean, you're, and the other thing I want to ask you about is your life was thrown completely upside down, you and your wife. You don't have your job at the university anymore, either of you, despite the fact that you were tenured professors. It's not an easy thing to get another toll hold in academia. Once you've been a tenured professor somewhere, especially if you've gone through what you went

through because no hiring committee anywhere is going to give you any consideration once you've been, once you've been tired by scandal regardless of what your role in it was. They're far too conservative to ever do anything like that. And so, okay, so let's, I don't know if I can remember the order in which I asked those questions, but the first one was, why in the world were you compelled to object and what is it that you were objecting to? Do you think? Well, it's a funny question for you to pose to me because I have the feeling that the answer will be entirely native to you. I literally don't believe I had any choice.

People frequently ask me why I stood up, and my sense is if I think through the alternative, I simply can't live with it, I can't sleep. Yeah, but that doesn't seem to bother most people, so I don't get that, like why you? Well, right. I mean, I guess that's the the thing I'm discovering. So you alluded to my political leanings and you and I both know what you mean by that. I'm a liberal and I would actually I describe myself sometimes as a reluctant radical.

By that, I mean that I believe we must engage in radical change if we are to survive as a species, but I also know that radical change is very dangerous. And so it's not like, you know, I find most people who would call themselves radicals feel like radical change is always called for. And I don't. My sense is I hope to see change that makes civilization good enough that I get to be a conservative, that I get to say, actually, we're doing so well that we have no choice but to preserve this. If we try to improve it, we'll mess it up. That's where I want to go. But what I'm discovering is that the bedrock of my liberalism is nothing like the underpinnings of the so-called liberalism of most of the people on the left side of the political spectrum.

My liberalism comes from a sense that, yes, compassion is a virtue, but that policy must be based on a dispassionate analysis of problems. It is based on an understanding that the magic of the West comes from a tension between those who aspire to change things from the better for the better and those who recognize the danger of changing them at all. And so in any case, I think the short answer is, we look around the world and everybody makes arguments that sound as if they come from first principles. But most people do not arrive at conclusions from first principles.

If they extrapolate it all, they don't do it very well. And that results in a severe compartmentalization of thought. And that means that when confronted with changes that threaten a system on which we are dependent, most people don't recognize it, and if they do recognize it, they wouldn't know what to do about it. So, how can I put it in plain terms? I had no choice because I was as if on a ship

where somebody had proposed to fix our course through a field of icebergs and navigate based on some absurd theory with no grounding in fact. Somebody had to object and I was a little surprised at how few and far between the objectors were, but if I'm to be totally candid about it, at the point that things went haywire at evergreen.

I had watched video of you reacting to protesters in Toronto. And it had made so much sense to me at a number of different levels. You know, I recognized you as somebody who knew that although. The initial proposals were arguably symbolic, that they were connected to things that ultimately were very much about an exercise of power and a transfer of well-being, and that it was therefore you felt obligated to stand up and say no, which resulted, as you know, better than anyone anyone and you being mocked for overreacting. And then here we are years later and it turns out that you saw with absolute clarity what others couldn't even imagine.

Yes, but I certainly didn't see what was going to happen to me. Right. with clarity, you know, so be quite strange. Right, I don't think it's rude. It wasn't possible to see what would happen with specificity. But am I correct in seeing that you knew that something very dramatic was likely to come from your standing on principle and that that didn't provide any license to do anything but make that stand?

I really can't say, you know, it's a while ago now, so that's part of it, but so much has happened to me that's been so strange in the last four years that I have a very difficult time making any sense of it. I can't even really think about, especially the last two years, I can't really think about them in any consistent and comprehensive way. I mean, my family situation has been so catastrophic and my illness and my wife's illness. It's just been, although she recovered, completely, thank God, it's just been so utterly catastrophic that my my thinking about it is unbelievably fragmented. And I'm

struck dumb still to some degree by by all of what emerged as a consequence of me making the first videos that I made. You know, I went downstairs, talked to my wife and my son. My son was living at home at that time, temporarily. And I said this piece of legislation is really bothering me because it calls for compelled speech. And I looked at the background documents and something wasn't right. And I said, I need to say something about it.

They said, well, go for it. You know, we'll see what happens. And all hell broke loose and continues to break loose for that matter, which is one of the things that's so bloody strange about it. It doesn't seem to end. And I would have thought when it first started, I thought, oh, well, you know, I'd be a flash in the pan. For a week or something or two weeks or a month or six months or a year or two years or but

it doesn't stop. And I really can't understand that. It's beyond my comprehension. Now, I guess it's partly because I continue to communicate my thoughts to some degree, even talking to mainstream media people, all the increasing less, and perhaps not at all from here on in. I mean, I had an interview with the London Times two weeks ago, three weeks ago, it was published, and you know, it was just another complete, absolute bloody nightmare for my family, my daughter in particular, because they took her to task in an extraordinarily nasty way.

And, you know, in the journalist who did the interview was completely, you couldn't invent her. You know, not only the way she was so deceitful in what she did, but I learned more about her background afterward as a consequence of another journalist who wrote about her. And, you know, she's a very singular person to say the least. So I did feel at the time like you did, I guess,

that I was more afraid of not speaking than I was afraid of speaking. And I have something against being told what to say. It's like, I'll pay the price for what I have to say. I'm not going to pay the price to say what you want me to say. You go say it yourself and see what the hell happens. And, you know, maybe that's just a kind of incomprehensible stubbornness in some sense. Although I did, I think I did see what has, I did see the beginnings of what has unfolded since then, although I can't even really put my finger on what it is that's happening. So well, I wonder a little bit about, you know, in some ways, you know, there's nothing good about why you were absent

from the scene. But there may be something good about you're having not been there for every moment of it and being able to come back to the discussion with something like fresh eyes, because a lot of this is developmental. And, say you're surprised that this is continuing. And I must say I'm having the same experience. I feel like I was picked up, my whole family was picked up by a tornado and we haven't been put down. And I sort of feel like we rejoined in the tornado during 2020.

It was such a crazy year that a lot of people whose lives were continuing in some normal fashion are suddenly aware that things are wildly off-kilter. But actually, this raises a question. I think one of the things that I know from my own life and I know of course a bit about your life because of the fact that it's public and because I've met Tammy and have had a chance to interact with you in that context as

well. But the question I have is, I wonder about the difference between a person who might think the way you are, I would think about bad policy and, you know, compelled speech and that sort of thing? The difference between a person who might think such a thing in isolation and a person who has a proper familial context in which to actually check in. So in other words, I have the sense that in part, the reason that I'm able to just simply describe things as they are and do so unflinchingly is because my family understands the same puzzle and they may have different elements that they see with clarity.

But there's no question, I can go to Heather and I can say, I ran into this thing today, and here's what I'm concerned it implies. And we can have a rational discussion about it without anybody accusing anybody of moral defects or any of the things that have become so common. And so in your case, I know that you have a familial network that provides you that same kind of reality check. And then I wonder, looking at the generation of people advancing the woke revolution, and I see the failure of that very thing.

And I can't help but wonder if it isn't connected. In other words, the idea that that hair bonding that marrying and producing a family has become something that most people don't even consider an essential part of life. It's not the objective of the exercise. It's a choice that some people make at best, that that has left people very isolated from any reality check, which makes them very vulnerable when they are threatened with an accusation like your racist, your transphobe, that sort of thing. Now, you definitely need, in this book, this is my new book, by the way. And so it's coming out

March 2nd, and I sort of clung to this like a life raft over the last couple of years while I was writing it. There's a section in here about sanity, you know, and it's a critique to some degree of psychoanalytic thought, because the cycle, not that I admire the psychoanalysts tremendously, but they tended to think of sanity as something that was organized inside your psyche, or let's say inside your brain for that matter, or maybe even a reflection of healthy brain function. But sanity is to large part outsourced. And what I mean by that is that if you're fortunate

and you're well-socialized, other people find you acceptable enough to include you in their networks. And then all you have to do is pay attention to the functioning of that network and regulate your behavior as a consequence of the feedback you receive, and you more or less stay sane. And so like if you have a family and you have friends, then they'll help you make sure that your jokes are funny and not mean because they'll laugh when they're funny and they'll raise an eyebrow when they're mean. And then you can check in with that and they'll help you figure out if you're dominating

the conversation too much and they'll push and prod you as you do the same to them and everyone stays relatively organized. And when all this hit to begin with, I guiding me, guiding me through the interview process and analyzing my errors and commenting when I did something hypothetically right and my family played an integral role in that. And so that was extremely helpful. I never thought about that as a precondition for saying what I said, but I think there's something

about that that's right. It's certainly the case that I have tremendously supportive parents Still they're both still alive. They're still tremendously supportive at a very deep deep level And I think that that was a real gift that I had that many people don't have, you know, I've been struck one of the things that that many people don't have. You know, I've been struck. One of the things that torments me constantly is, and I think it's really hurt me to discover this, is I had no idea how deep the desperation was for people who lack encouragement. It's just because every time I talk about this, it makes me tear up because of what I've seen, I think, but all these people that I've met now, you know, I spoke when I went on my book tour, which was an unbelievable event.

An unbelievably positive event, but also I would even say to some degree, traumatic, traumaticly positive, like it was just too much, I really loved it, but to see the depth of hunger that people had for an encouraging word was unbelievably tragic, and for people to come up to me repeatedly, over and over and over, hundreds, maybe thousands of times and say, you know, I was in such desperate straits, looking for some encouragement, unable to find it. And then, you know, I came across your lectures,

I thought, Jesus, it's pretty thin-gruel to feed a starving population. I mean, I thought Jesus, it's pretty thin gruel to feed a starving population. I mean, I'm absolutely pleased beyond belief that people have found what I've done useful, but that doesn't decrease the impact of the realization of just how hurt, how much hurt there is. how hurt, how much hurt there is. And it is hurt that's ground in a lock of encouragement. I have that. I've been encouraged my whole life. So, and that could easily be part of what. Now, I also thought somewhat calculated way about this.

Like, and I don't know how far this goes back, but I also organized my life so that I was standing. I had legs out in many directions. I had a clinical practice. I had a business. I had my professorship. I had my writing. You know, I had multiple sources of income and pretty independent areas. And so I and I did that in part to maximize my capacity for freedom, I thought, well, and this wasn't something I think I thought explicitly, you know, it was part of what unfolded in my life across time. It wasn't easy to take me out, although I've

been taken out a lot, like far more than I thought might be possible. I can't separate that exactly from intrinsic health problems, you know, but I, despite my, you know, I don't have, I, I, I, it isn't obvious to me that I can go back to the university. I'm still employed there. I'm on leave. They would take me back. I don't know if I can go back to the university. I'm still employed there. I'm on leave. They would take me back. I don't know if I can do it. I don't have my clinical practice anymore,

which I really miss. I love doing that. And that was 20 hours a week. So that's a lot of time. I finished writing this book, but I'm not writing right now. And so a lot of, I don't have any pressing financial concerns.

And so that's, of course, that's a huge privilege, a huge benefit. And thank God for that. But despite me being distributed like that, I was still taken out. Pretty hard. So. Yes. Well, you, you know, I, I confess confess I have wondered while you were in Communicato over the last year, whether that was just Goliath's good fortune or if there might be something more to it,

because you were such a singular voice at the point that Tammy got sick. And then you did that obviously it was a tremendous blow to those of us in intellectual dark web space in our ability to fight and to hold the line. But you clearly have been taken out in your words But you clearly have been taken out in your words, deliberately, multiple times, and how it comes about. Oh, continue. I don't know. It's amazing to me that it continues to happen. And the thing that's so damn weird is that exactly the same thing continues to happen.

And it was just replayed with this Times article. Now, I have thought I had a lot of interviews lined up for this book. And once the Times article came out, I reacted to it, my family reacted to it. And we dealt with it effectively. The same thing happened that had happened to me before when journalists had written a hit piece about me. It was extremely stressful because when it happens, you do not know which way it's going to go. And you can get unlucky and a number of bad things can happen to you simultaneously. All that has to happen is for that to happen once

to exceed your capacity to deal with the number of bad things in your out. That's basically an accident. I really think that's what happened to me in the last few years is that everything that happened socially was unbelievably stressful, positive and negative. The positive end of it was extremely intense and amazingly compelling and interesting, but the negative end was really, really stressful. You know, and I notice what happens to people, generally speaking, and I don't think I'm making this up is, you know, I've watched the typical person who gets mobbed on Twitter

will get mobbed by 20 people. And it'll last for two or three days, and they'll apologize like, man, they're so stressed out. They retreat right away. And it's really hard on them. You know, and that happened to me, like, I don't know how many times, hundred times, 200 times, and really publicly. You know, I've been called every bloody name in the book, and that's been really literally, I mean, I remember one day where I was called a Jewish

shill and a Nazi the same day, you know, by two competing publications. And I thought maybe they canceled each other out, you know, but, and that's been very hard on my family, you know, and, and, and although they, they're doing reasonably well under the circumstances, but then, you know, Tammy got sick, it terribly, and, and, and in a really nasty way. And then her surgery was complications multiplied, and she was near death daily for months. And then this proclivity I had for depression seemed to have become untreatable. And that took me out. And so, and I'm still struggling with that. You know, I get up. I can hardly stand up when I wake up in the morning. I feel so bad. I can't believe I can be alive and feel that bad. I stumble down stairs and I'm in the sauna for about an hour and a half and then I can stand up long enough to

have a shower, which I do for about 20 minutes. And I scrub myself from top to bottom, trying to wake up. And then I can more or less get upstairs. And I eat and then I go for a walk like 10 miles every day, because I need to do that in order to deal with this, whatever it is that's plaguing me. And I can get myself to the point where by this time in the afternoon, I'm more or less functional, but then it repeats the next day. And so, and it's so terrible. My God, that's terrible. It is, it's terrible.

It's so terrible. It's so terrible that I can't think about it without it being traumatic. So I have a hard time figuring out where to place my mind because this has been happening, it's been happening every day really for, for two years. I think it's fair to say that every single day of the last two years has been worse than any day I had previous to that. Oh my goodness. And what a predicament you're in then because, you know, I can hear, I would guess it anyway knowing, knowing you and knowing of you in the way that I do, but you're caught in this predicament where that's really

intolerable. And frankly, most people wouldn't tolerate it. But you also know that there is, you know, both at the level of your family and at the level of those who admire you and listen to you and are, you know, waiting to hear the little bits of affirmation that they need, the little bits of guidance that they were unable to get in the world. You know how much good comes from your facing that, what sounds like a completely excruciating existence. Yes, but it's perverse beyond comprehensibility, which is sort of the hallmark of a traumatizing experience.

Because it is exactly that. And I look at it, and I can't wrap my mind around it. It, and also that the, my degree of exposure, you know, when I, when I decided to make those videos, I was playing with YouTube. And I was playing with fire, like YouTube is fire. In a way, social media is fire in a way that is unimaginable. It's so powerful. YouTube will see, but YouTube demolishes the

printing press in terms of its long-term significance. Because now you can do with video and audio what you did with print and it's way easier. You have access to a massive audience with no intermediaries, whatsoever. And, you know, I, and I don't know really how to grapple with that either. How to comprehend it. Well, I mean, actually, this brings me to one of the things I've been hoping to talk to you about for the longest time. So I think there's a part of you that finds you've always been very gracious about it and welcoming, but finds my liberalism a bit paradoxical. No, no, I don't, look, look, I don't, I understand the catastrophe of the pre-do distribution. the catastrophe of the pre-do distribution. I don't like it. There is this proclivity for capital to accrue in the hands of smaller and smaller numbers of people. It's just capital. It's all goods.

You get this terrible problem of distribution that's like a natural law. And the fact that people object to that is completely unsurprising. And the fact that if it goes unchecked, it destroys societies is, I don't think that's a hypothesis. That's demonstrably self-evident. So I don't find, especially don't find the concern, the compassionate concern for working class people and their well-being, the least bit incomprehensible. It's the solutions that are the problem. It's like, well, what should the solutions be? And, well, that's where things get very, very

complicated. It's not. Well, perfect. And I'm sorry if I implied something that wasn't even my perception. I think you are, to an extent, a conservative. But I find you, if I listen to you, it's not a simple kind of conservative. I'm a conservative for the same reason you are. You already pointed out, like if you're a social scientist and you don't understand the law of unintended consequences, you are not a very a social scientist and you don't understand the law of unintended consequences, you are not a very good social scientist.

I learned from my clinical research and from studying clinical research for so long and publishing it too, is that you think your intervention is gonna do what you think it's going to do, but it isn't. It's gonna do something else and you have to build in, if you have an intervention that you think is going to have beneficial results, you have to build in an assessment to see if it

has those results. And like I talked to the woman who headed the, the name of the, it was done in, not in Cambridge, but in Massachusetts. It was a longitudinal study of anti-social children. The first longitudinal study was done in a working class neighborhood just outside of Cambridge. I used to live there and I can't remember the name at the moment, but in any case, this team intervened with kids that were likely to have, they came for broken homes,

broken neighborhoods, anti-social neighborhoods. This was done in the 1930s. And they intervened at the level of the child and at the level of the teachers and at the level of the parents. And ran this multiple year project to reduce risk for negative outcomes among this population, randomly assigned participants to groups.

And by all accounts from the participants, the children, the parents, the teachers, and the professionals who were running the investigation, it was a resounding success. And they looked at the results and the intervention group did worse on virtually every outcome measure. And they figured out later that the reason for that

likely was that they took the anti-social kids and grouped them together in summer camp. They took them out of the city to put them in camp. They thought that would be a good intervention. But grouping them together seemed to produce a competition for anti-social behavior and it overwhelmed all of the other interventions. That was Joan McCord, famous study. And I talked to Joan McCord a lot about that. But you see that all over the intervention literature is it's very hard to fix, it's very hard to define a problem correctly.

It's very hard to define it to develop an intervention that addresses that problem and only that problem. And then it's very hard to get the intervention to do what you want it to. And that's what makes me conservative to the degree that I am. So, yeah, I think that's that's incredibly wise. I would add one thing to your list. It's not just that it's hard to get an intervention to do what you want it to do. It is that it is hard to get it to do what you want it to do. And at scale, these things also tend to evolve. So even if you did get it to solve. Right.

And so the problem of unintended consequences coupled with the problem of perverse incentives and therefore bad policy that is effectively corruption is a very frightening problem. And so I do think we're caught in a basically damned if you do, damned if you do damned if you don't scenario. We can't stay here. And you know, you're, I agree with you, the social media for lack of a better term for it is going to dwarf the printing press for various reasons. Some of them because

it's so easy. Yeah. But also because it's so easy, but also because it's of a fundamentally different nature, right? When you're reading a book, it may be that somebody writes something that's bad for you to absorb, but you know you're reading a book because the experience of it, the perception of it is of a book, whereas social media increasingly fools the mind into, you know, the interaction you and I are having is more or less a face to face interaction. But a lot of interactions that look like face to face interactions don't have these characteristics and it bests the impact on the mind as arbitrary. So, you know, we're watching things like amplifiers of threat. And you know, this goes back to the thing we were discussing earlier.

But look, with Twitter, here's a good example of unintended consequences. It's like, what don't we know? Okay, we don't know what regulates human communication. We know that if you restrict the bandwidth, people don't understand each other as well. But we don't know how communication functions. It's too complicated. Okay, so we absolutely don't know what happens to communication at a large scale when you restrict

people to 140 or 280 characters and then put them in a network with millions of other people. We have no idea. And it could be that you tremendously bias the discourse towards impulsive anger. It could be that you tremendously bias the discourse towards impulsive anger. It looks like that. If you look at Twitter, I mean, and because it's a 140 or 280 characters, you can whip something off very quickly. And so it's almost as if the technology is implicitly commanding you to be impulsively aggressive. And then we don't know what it means when only those people who are motivated to be impulsively aggressive, that day are those that are communicating. And then when you only see those communications, even though, you know, 10,000 people might read your tweet only 100 who are irritated for some reason respond.

We don't know any of that. And we completely underestimate the power of the technology because it looks harmless. It just sits there on your phone and doesn't do anything. And so, you know, God only knows what kind of power of babble that is. Right. And not only that, but the fact that the algorithm changes, and we don't get any notice of it. Not only do we not have access to whatever the algorithms content is, but we don't know when it changes, which means it's impossible for us to even track the impact of our own behavior because we can't run a controlled experiment.

That's like predicting the stock market. It's an illusion that you're dealing with the same thing every day. It's complete illusion. And then of course, we don't know, you know, the algorithms increasingly have a life of their own and increasingly they're governed by artificial intelligence and and it builds in it's going to take multiple tries for us to get there. Hopefully, we'll have the opportunity for multiple discussions. But the question is, all right, you're a conservative, but you're a wise conservative

that understands the importance of liberalism, understands the necessity of tension between the desire, not to mess things up with unintended consequences, and the desire to solve problems that are actually solvable. And I would argue the necessity to solve certain problems, which will be fatal if we don't solve them. But the combination, in other words, I think there's a new dialogue that has to happen. Those conservatives who understand the puzzle need to get together with those liberals who understand the puzzle and figure out what the new insights are because we are somewhere

so novel that if there's one thing we can say, it's that our system is unstable and it is putting us in great jeopardy, which means that even if your impulses are conservative and you point out correctly that I have some conservative impulses, even if your impulses are conservative, we aren't anywhere, right? We're on a precipice in a windstorm and at some level we have to make enough progress relative to the fundamental instability of the system and the fundamental, you know, here let me take an example. The point you make about social media and the human psyche, you could make exactly the same point about pharmaceuticals and physiology. That we know very little about the way the body actually works.

Yeah, I can sure make that case all right. Yeah, I'll bet you can. The hell you've been through makes this point very clearly. But, you know, I'm constantly struck by the fact that our narrative about medicine I'm constantly struck by the fact that our narrative about medicine proceeds from an entirely false premise, which is that we know a great deal about the body and have all of these useful interventions. What we have is a lot of interventions where sometimes we know what one of their effects is. We very rarely understand why the spectrum of you know collateral consequences are what they are. And all of these systems are linked together, and nobody is tracking the long-term implications

of anything. So we have this sort of obsessive focus on the things that you can detect on very short timescales, and almost a studied ignorance of what the same pharmaceuticals or procedures do to us long-term. Right. And we then, you know, I suspect if you did the statistics properly, I suspect that that medicine independent of public health kills more people than it saves. I suspect if you factor in phenomena like the development of super bugs in hospitals, for example, that overall the net consequence of hospitals is negative. Now that's just a guess, and it could easily be wrong, but it also could not be wrong.

And that is a good example, or that's where my thinking about what we don't know has taken me with regards to the critique of what we do. The fact that it's even plausible is a stunning. Well, you know, medical error is the third leading cause of death. Yep. And that doesn't take into account the generation of super bugs, for example, the generation of super bugs or, you know, if you're thinking broadly about it, let's, I don't know where you stand on this issue, but I have been tracking the lab leak hypothesis

for COVID, and it is very distressing to me that as much as it's an unsettled question, the evidence for the lab leak gets stronger over time. All of the competing hypotheses fall one by one and are replaced by some alternative that hasn't yet been falsified, but that's very ominous to me. And if this is the case, if this was a bug that was modified in the lab through gain of function research and escaped, then you have to add that to the balance sheet with respect to the costs of medical errors, because it looks like if this was an escapee from the Wuhan lab, that it was an escapee from experiments designed to create a vaccine to protect us from future

coronaviruses. So we can't say that was specificity, but if we look at the circumstantial evidence of what was being studied, how it was being studied, and what the likely purpose of those investigations were, then this is the mother of all self-inflicted wounds, and it is downstream of naive thinking about the cost benefit ratio of enhancing the infectivity of viruses. I know, I did know that that's something that you've been tracking and pursuing. I don't have an opinion about it because I don't know enough about it to have an opinion. So I'd also, with regards to conservatism,

I don't know if approaching how people should deal with the problems in their lives from a psychological perspective, viewpoint of a clinical psychologist, I wonder if that automatically makes you conservative in some way, because my locus of concern has always been the individual. And so, and individual well-being and, you know, being trained as a

behavioral psychologist, I always took as my unit of analysis, the enhancement of well-being of health, let's say, at the individual level, and maybe translated into political, and when that's translated into the political landscape, maybe that looks something like conservatism. I don't know. I mean, I never thought about this. I never thought about what I was doing

in political terms to begin with. Like, even my initial statement about Bill C. 16 and compelled speech wasn't supposed to be something specifically political. I just thought the political had escaped its boundaries. It's like, no, you don't get to in fringe on free speech. You're no longer in the political had escaped its boundaries. It's like, no, you don't get to infringe on free speech. You're no longer in the political realm at that point. That's a different realm. Get the hell back where you belong. That's how it looked to me. But, you know,

everything, that's another thing that's very peculiar about our culture at the moment. It's almost impossible to have a discussion about anything and have the coverage not be politicized. And I think that's partly a function of how the media, the legacy media work because they tended to view everything through a political lens and also a consequence of this insistence and this I think comes primarily from the radical left that everything is political. And I don't buy that. It's like you can say that everything has a political aspect, but that's a completely different claim than everything is political, which is a totalizing claim.

And I also, as a social scientist, don't like totalizing claims because most things are multivariate complex. And so, well, so. Yeah, I think we can prove that you can politicize everything, but not everything is political, and that the tendency to view everything in political terms destroys our ability to properly navigate questions on which we actually ought to have alignment. And this is a very disturbing pattern to see every question, including COVID itself, turned into a team sport. Because that is, of course, sabotaging exactly the ability to reason through our various options

and then to get us to move in a coordinated direction to actually address the pandemic. And in some sense, I suspect we are headed to having to accept COVID as a permanent fact having to accept COVID as a permanent fact of the landscape, when that was not a foregone conclusion, that in effect, our politicizing of this issue is going to leave us with a bug that we can't ever get rid of. Why do you think that? I mean, I've been hoping that,

and watching Israel in particular, there seems to be some indication that they've got the vaccinations ramped up to the point where they're having some effect on the rate of transmission of the virus, which is a positive thing. And, you know, I keep hoping that the vaccines are, there's enough of them and they're getting out there fast enough so that we might be able to keep the bug under control. You're not so optimistic about that. Apparently. No, I'm not because for one thing, I know that it's been obvious from the beginning, it was going to evolve, and that the key to managing it's evolving out of our control was limiting the number of people who had it and limiting their ability to spread

new variants around the globe. And we've done a terrible job of this. Somehow, you know, a year in, it is only beginning to be, it is only beginning to dawn on us that new mutants that are harder for our immune systems to recognize are essentially a certainty and that the key to ever regaining control is to ensure that when these things arise somewhere, they don't immediately find their way around the globe. So I guess what I would say is I think we tend to, you know, even the idea of compromise in a political sense is the wrong approach with

something like COVID. We should have been much more aggressive earlier on so that our total level of compromise with respect to civil liberties could have been much less. In other words, if early on we had engaged in a really intense six-week lockdown, and we had ramped up our capacity to test for COVID with precision. So that after six weeks, basically the idea of six weeks would be, it's very hard to control COVID inside of a household, it tends to bounce around, but that it will tend to burn itself out in most households within something like a six-week period, that if we had engaged in that and then used track and trace to find and control outbreaks following such an intense

lockdown, we might not have had to deal with a full year of the half-assed measure. And the sense is, there's a sense that I have, is that we're getting, you know, maybe it's a Pareto distribution, maybe it's we're suffering 80% of the harm of lockdowns and getting 20% of the value that we might get for having, you know, not gone the full distance. And unfortunately, I think the prerequisite to our behaving rationally is having our experts completely liberated from market forces, from political dynamics, and free to tell us what it is that we need to know and then getting on the same page and having a proper rubric for evaluating what has worked and what hasn't and instead what we've had Is an authorly politicized discussion from the get go in which even our countermeasures are

Fought over on the basis of, you know, if you, you know, why is it that a, you know, a Trump voter is much more likely to be a mask skeptic? A question of masks is an empirical question. I shouldn't have anything to do with your political leanings. And yet, it undeniably does in North America. And that has robbed us of the kinds of controls that we might otherwise have instituted. I wanted to ask you, you talk, I'm going to bring the discussion if you don't mind back to something that we were touching on earlier, that your initial objection when you were ever green to whatever it was that was developing in the background. And now we've had four years to see

whatever it is manifesting itself. And so, you, what is it? What is it that's happening? Do you think in our politicized landscape? Well, I have a guess and it's right up your alley. It's something I'm intending to explore at greater length, but the basics are this, I suspect. You and I, I think, would share the opinion that psychological development is among the most important phenomena for understanding human beings, and it is underrated. We tend to look at the behavior of adults and study it, but we should spend more time thinking about how those adults ended up the way they did in order to really understand them. And I think for, you know, for each generation, you have a developmental landscape. And what the governing forces are in that developmental landscape has a lot to say about both the insights and

the blind spots of the people who emerge from it. And so I would say that for Americans of my generation, I'm a Gen X, the market played too much of a role developmentally. And it has created a kind of lens through which we can't help but look. It has, you know, commodified things in a way that is quite unhealthy. You were born when? I was born in 1969. Okay.

For millennials and maybe even more so for Gen Z, I suspect that there is a pivot to something else. And many people, you know, Jonathan Hyde and Greg Lukionov have certainly talked about Jonathan Hyde and Greg Lukyanov have certainly talked about, um, I gen the internet generation. But what I suspect is really going on is that if you are sufficiently plugged into the internet early enough, there comes a point at which the. Your persona on the internet takes primacy. It is more important than your actual physical life Person. It's worse than that. It's worse than that. I would say from personal experience There is more of me on the internet than there is in me My electronic avatars are far more powerful than me personally.

You know, and I can watch this because I've been away for a year and a half. And yet, my internet presence has steadily increased during that time. And I look online now and it's 700 million views. Something like that. So now, now imagine that as the developmental environment for children. Now, here's the connection I want to draw. My contention is that the online landscape is postmodern, right?

That if we were just to simply describe it, the rules, the physics of online life are postmodern. Because it's extracted from the environment. Right. So for example, living in a dictionary, if I decided tomorrow that I was a woman, right, I could change my internet presence such that I would present in a female way. I could say, hey, anybody who doesn't

treat me as female is a jerk. And the point is, I have transitioned completely, right? Now, obviously, there's no such thing in the physical world. You can transition, you can take hormones or blockers, you can get surgeries, but no man has ever become a woman and reproduced in a female way, right? So the point is the physical world has all kinds of constraints that come from physics and biology, which do not translate to the online world. And for people like you and me, for whom the online world is an add-on world, we think, well, obviously real life is the important one. And then the online thing has some interface with it, which is frightening, but we understand how they relate. But if you reverse these two things, then what you get is a generation that its problem-solving mind says

actually, of course, you can transition. You can transition, and then it is everybody's obligation to live by who you've told us you are and anybody who doesn't is a bad person. And what has to be true for that to be the case, right? You know, I had a fantasy a long while ago that people would end up wearing glasses, like the Google glasses, that would be illegal to take off. And that you'd be mandated to see what people wanted you to see. Was there right to be presented to you in the manner that they chose to present themselves? You know, and I'm not saying that's a particularly brilliant vision, but it's very much in keeping with what you're describing.

Don't. Yep, I think it's close. But if you imagine then that an online world in which effectively we can all be equal tomorrow as long as we say that that's the objective, and we can all present as we want, and others can be forced to adhere to it or be thrown off of whatever discussion, then all of this begins to make a great deal of sense. And so I'm wondering if we are not in effect in a kind of civil war between those for whom the real world has primacy and those for whom the online world has primacy. And if that's not the fundamental nature of the battle. Well, I think it could be the fundamental nature of part of the battle. I mean, obviously part of what's going on is whatever this unbelievably rapid rate of

technological transformation is doing to us. I mean, my daughter and some people of approximately her age, so late 20s, are helping me with managed social media, let's say. She's noticed that people five years younger than her have advantages in understanding the newly developed forms of social media that she's already outside of. And so that process of being hooked into the web, and that being the determining factor for your world view is probably accelerating. I mean, it's going to accelerate. Obviously, it's going to accelerate because the web is becoming more and more dominant

and machines are becoming more and more intelligent. So they abstract themselves away from the world. And then the question is, well, what's the consequence of that abstraction? But it's funny that it's postmodern. That doesn't. There's more going on with whatever it is that's happening than technological transformation, but you think that's the fundamental driving factor. Well, I think there are a lot of ways you can look at it. Obviously, I don't think this is a real battle. Obviously, the internet runs on hardware in the real world. And everybody, you know, when the power goes out, we are all reduced to our

biological self. So I don't think there is actually anything to fight over. One of these worlds has primacy and the other is an add-on. And this is not debatable. But my point is really about the mental confusion that arises from, for most people, I mean, if you think about the lives that most people are living, right? Most people, at best, are working a job in which they trade their labor for money that they get to spend on goods or relatively generic adventures. And the part of their life that is interesting and compelling is, you know, the internet over which they range freely and engage in battle. And know they fall in love increasingly and whatever else they do. And so my point is that that is a distortion developmentally. It misleads the mind into misunderstanding what is necessary. If

you take the postmodern rules of the internet And you now impose them on politics in the real world, you get crises, you get the basic structure of civilization coming apart in front of our eyes, which I really believe that it is, all right, with the homelessness crisis in the US, for example, is jaw dropping. And we have a particularly acute crisis on the West coast in the US that appears to be the result of people being utterly compelled of their own political beliefs to an extent that even as those beliefs are failing around them visibly, they just double down. So imagining that people who think the internet has primacy are now exerting a force to correct the real world in the direction of their naive internet

understanding of things are in danger of crashing the aircraft. And in some sense, people like you and me are responding to what they're saying about how we should restructure the real world and saying, that doesn't make sense. It won't work. It is going to put us in grave danger.

It is going to disrupt essential things. And there are those who can hear us. And know, there are those who can hear us, and we are popular with those who can hear us. And then there are those who regard our pointing out the obvious as a danger to their program who are intent on silencing us. And I don't thought about this obsession with identity from a developmental perspective too. And I thought this insistence by a loud minority that their determination of their identity take primacy is, first of all, it's just, it's wrong technically, I think, because an identity isn't merely what you feel you are. An identity is way more complicated than that,

as any decent social constructionist should already know. An identity is a set of complex roles that you negotiate with other people, so that you can thrive across a very long span of time. And it can't be something that you impose on other people so that you can thrive across a very long span of time. And it can't be something that you impose on other people because then they won't cooperate with you. Now you might say that you have a right to impose certain aspects of it on other people. And you could have a reasonable debate about that, but identity is definitely not merely

what you feel it is. And it's certainly not merely what you feel it is, and it's certainly not merely what you feel it is moment to moment. That identity is actually much more like that of a three or four-year-old child. And I mean this technically, it's not an insult. So when you're a child, you pick up one identity after another and play with them. So for example, my granddaughter, who's about three at the moment, if you ask her who she is, she has two names, a first name and a second name, and her dad calls her by her second name and her mom calls her by her first name. So she's Ellie or Scarlett. And she's fine with either of those, but she's also Pocahontas. And if you ask her,

whether she's Ellie or Scarlett or Pocahontas, she will say Pocahontas. And she has said that for eight months. It's amazing. It's been that persistent in a child of that age. It's quite remarkable. But what she's doing is playing. And girls will play to be boys at that age. And boys will play to be girls.

And they play with multitudinous identities. And then they settle into one. So then the question is, what if you disrupt that play? That's fantasy play. And then another question might be, well, what if you disrupt it with technology? Not the technology itself is producing a message that's counter to that, but that the fact

that children are on technology all the time means they're not engaging in that kind of identity establishing fantasy play. And then you might say, well, maybe what you see happening in that case is that it bursts out in late adolescence. And the insistence there that my identity is what I say it is is actually the scream in some sense of an organism that hasn't gone through that of an organism that hasn't gone through that egocentric period of play where they are in an fictional sense exactly the way they define themselves. You can't tell my granddaughter who's three that she isn't Pocahontas. It's stupid to tell her that because she means it in an experimental sense.

And all you're doing is interfering with her fantasy play. And so I see a fair bit of this as delayed fantasy play with the kind of pathology that comes up when you delay a necessary developmental stage. Now that could be wrong, you know, when probably is, but still it looks to me like it looks to me like that's part of what's happening. It's very strange to see this insistence. Like I just it's so conceptually unsophisticated, the even the hypothesis that identity is only what you feel that it is. And the intense insistence that that be the case is also another mystery. It's like, why is it that it's a foregone conclusion that other people have to go along with your self-definition?

So I think, first of all, that's fascinating and that fits rather exactly with what I'm getting at. And I suspect it is adding a dimension where I was vague about the developmental pathway. But you're absolutely right, that a child can take on an identity and effectively within limits they are allowed to assert that identity and adults will play along with it. And, right. Now the thing is, there's a process. I'm more familiar with the, you know, the male side of this because I, you know, I went through boyhood and being a young man. But if you have a misunderstanding about how you present in the world, so you assert that you are one way, then your peers will,

that you are one way, then your peers will, you know, if your peers are nice, they will poke fun at you in order to reveal to you what it is that you actually present as so that you can adjust your self image. Right, and that's part of that's part of healthy socialization. That's what happens. That's it. Once you pull out of that egocentric stage

where you're playing with yourself, then you have to integrate other people into your play. And then it's a, then it's a negotiation. Otherwise, you're not accepted by your peers. And so that's another thing that's very interesting is that it is precisely those children who aren't accepted by their peers that insist that their self-definitions rule. And then what one of the things that's kind of terrifying about that is if you know they child anti-social literature, there's a percentage of children that are quite aggressive at the age of two. Almost all of them are male. Almost all of them are socialized out of the regression by the time they're for. The percentage that isn't become persistent lifetime offenders,

if their behavior isn't rectified by the time they're for, which means if they're not transformed into children that are acceptable to their peers, there's no intervention that is being evident in the literature that will reverse that. So, this is both frightening and it's making me happy in the sense that I believe that the model that we are wrestling to the surface here is accurate and it doesn't fit what most people are expecting is going on.

And I think there's a lot of power and understanding it this way. But what you are effectively saying is that there's a period in which self-definition is identity in some sense. And then there is a period of correction at which your insistence on who you are meets everyone's else's insistence on who you are, and you then learn who you actually are, and that thing better be a pretty good match for the world. But then, yeah, it better be all right. Right, and so I have argued as an evolutionist that the, I would say the job of a parent is to mirror the environment that the child will mature in the issue, so that when they get there, they have the software

that is an appropriate match for it. And a lot of mental health issues come down to a mismatch between the software that your developmental environment produced and the environment you actually live in. And that can happen. So, why you shouldn't be nicer to your children than the world is. In fact, you're doing them a disservice. That's the devouring mother from the psychoanalytic perspective. Right. And this gets into some very uncomfortable territory. What, you know, what does good, if you're a slave, if you're born into slavery, and you produce children, how should you parent them? Should you protect them from, well, I wouldn't say all of the implications of slavery, presumably not. Let's go through the stage idea again, because there's three stages, I think. There's

of slavery. Let's go through this stage idea again because there's three stages I think. There's there's the the egocentric stage where the child is manifesting multiple identities self-defined and playing. Then then that's under the protection of parents. The parents put up a walled enclosure so to speak within which the child can do that experimentation. Then the child meets the world of peers. That happens between the ages of four and the ages of 17, experimentation, then the child meets the world of peers. That happens between the ages of four and the ages of 17, 18, something like that. And that's when your identity has to expand to include others in a cooperative and negotiated way. You have to manage competition and cooperation, and your identity becomes socialized. And then there's a stage beyond that, I would say, where you kind of pop out of that socialization, and you're no longer necessarily a member

of the group. It's like a self-actualized person. Although I don't like that phrase, the self-actualization theorists thought to some degree in this matter, once you're done with your apprenticeship, you can become Post apprentice and then you can take control of your own destiny to some degree independently of your peers So hopefully you can get to there But and so that's part of the answer to the slavery Conundrum, you know, you should be a good member of your group, but you shouldn't only be that Well, I think there are two different questions.

The slavery issue is the very uncomfortable idea that if a parent is supposed to mirror the adult environment that a child will have to get along in, then a person whose children will mature into an arbitrary environment needs to understand that it's an arbitrary environment rather than being protected from it, right? In order to, you know, to properly avoid running a foul of the arbitrary authorities in a slave environment, one has to be developmentally brought into how you navigate below the radar, how you, you know, how you play that game. And so anyway, you would expect the parenting to look very different. And you know, this idea that childhood is, you know, a joyous time where you should be free of all of those adult influences is exactly wrong. It's prep, it's preparation. So, um, though now if we take this model

that I think you and I are agreeing on here about the fact that the, and I like your point here, that there are three stages. You've got, I assert my identity independent of the world, then the world, and I negotiate over what my actual identity is. And then I'm not an apprentice anymore, and I get to be who I am in the adult world, having been informed by that process. And you imagine that you've got generations now, one and a half of them maybe, for whom the online environment was so compelling and so much the source of most of their affirmation that its rules have become sacrosanct to them.

And those rules really do look like, it's a childish world, right? You join some community of people. You tell them who you are. There are rules about them having to respect who you've told them, you know, it is, if I say I'm Pocahontas, who are you to say I'm not, right? And that in some way, the answer to that question in the real world is, I'm someone you have to get along with in repeated interactions, but that may not be the case at all online. That constraints go on. Right. Maybe you can just pick up and move to the next community.

And that's another thing we should talk about because another thing that's happening online is that I've detected this recently, is that the online environment is also making everyone acutely paranoid. And I think the reason for that is that everyone, it's easy for our thinking to go to go astray. And as we talked about earlier in this discussion, other people tap you back into shape. And you're surrounded by a kind of random assortment of other people in the real world,

because you didn't select them. So because it's random, it provides you with what is in essence relatively unbiased feedback information. But online you can choose your compatriots. And it's likely to be the case that at your weakest point psychologically, you choose the least demanding compatriots. And so your craziest ideas are the least likely to be challenged. All right. So there's so many interesting threads here. One of them,

I my guess is you and I will fall out in the same place here, but if you give me a choice between a community that believes everything I believe, and one in which people believe very different things, I'm not going to choose the one in which people believe the things I believe because for one thing, it's the end of growth. Definitely. I want objects slightly. Okay. I've had, and you've had this experience too, I've had the experience of being in an environment

where a very large number of people don't agree with me vociferously. And what I would say is, a little of that goes a long way, even if you're a courageous thinker, I'm not going to put myself in that category. But if even, even if you're someone who wants to be able to tolerate dissent, there's a limited amount of dissent that you actually can tolerate. You are going to seek out an environment where most people agree with you, but some people don't some of the time. And it's kind of like listening to music. You'll like music that's optimally different from what you are enjoying right now, right? If it's exactly the same, it's boring. If it's too different, you can't hear it. There's

a, there's an amount of novelty that you can tolerate, but it's not that large. And so even people who have been trained to look for evidence that disproves their own theories, they're only going to be able to tolerate a tiny bit of that out of time. It's too destabilizing. It's too destabilizing. Well, all right. So I want to link this back up to what you said too destabilizing. Well, all right. So I want to link this back up to what you said before about the three stages. So my experience as a scientist is that my most valuable characteristic is the ability to be completely indifferent to the prevailing wisdom on a given point, right? And I think this is no, no personal stake in it. Well, I may even have a personal stake.

I may come up with an idea that compels me that it's probably right. A hypothesis. And I may advance it and have every single one of my peers say, that's garbage. And my sense is not one of, oh crap, I've said something bad. My sense is, well, wouldn't that be delightful? If I'm as right as I think I am, then the fact that everybody else doesn't get this makes it even even better, right? So my point is, that's not normal. I know that's not normal. And it's not normal for evolutionary reasons that are easy to understand.

It takes a lot of training to accomplish that. Yes, or a developmental environment that rewards it. Sure. If you have, if you have the right experience. But then again, you know, you said yourself, again, at the beginning of this conversation, think about the preconditions for that is that in order to open yourself up to that

sort of criticism, you have to be supported in all sorts of ways. Even as, so when I'm functioning as a scientist, I am trying to disprove my presuppositions. I'll test them. It's like something manifests itself in an experiment that I design three or four experiments to see if I can make that effect go away. And I do that because I don't want to propagate nonsense and I don't want to pursue nonsense in my own career. But in order to tolerate that, think about how we set up the system is you have to be a tenured professor to do science. Or have the equivalent position in the research lab, but your economic situation is stabilized. Your social status is stabilized.

Like you're protected on 50 fronts, and then you can open the door and say, okay, let's have some novelty come my way. And that's assuming that you're at a point where you can tolerate any novelty at all. And more curious, more open, more emotionally stable, more intelligent people are more compelled by novelty and can handle it better, but still our ability to handle it is pretty low. And we will find environments that mostly

reflect back to us what we want, most comforting. what we want, most comforting. Well, actually, this is fascinating. I wonder if there's not effectively a budget for discordant interactions. And if we go back to what we were speaking about it, at the beginning of the conversation, the fact that not only do Heather and I have a great relationship, but we also speak the same language scientifically. So, you know, it's a kind

of across the board, sounding board and ability to, you know, I feel no vulnerability there because there's no place where our world views aren't compatible and you know, I could say similar things about about Eric So what that means is that my budget for discordant interaction is probably larger when I get to the outside world Because I haven't spent it at home or in the context of family or friends.

And you know, you spend that it is definitely a budgetary phenomenon. You spend like, you produce a unit of psychophysiological preparation for every unit of uncertainty. And the size of that unit of expenditure varies with your trait neuroticism, because that's like evolution's guess at how dangerous the environment would be. It varies with your position in the social hierarchy, because if you're at the top where you're protected, the consequence of an error is attenuated compared to what it would be at the bottom. And that's why social position modulates serotonergic output. So the higher you are in that hierarchy,

the more serotonin dampens your negative emotion to uncertain events. And that's in keeping with your actual fragility. Neuroticism determines it, social hierarchy determines it, intelligence determines it to some degree, because you're a more effective problem solver if you have a high IQ. So, but you do pay for uncertainty, because if something's uncertain, you don't know what to do. And so you have to prepare to do everything, and that's unbelievably costly, psychophysiologically. It ramps your cortisol production up, and it starts to eat away from future reserves.

It's definitely a budgetary process. So... Yep. All right. So I want to see if there's something more with respect to this model in which four people whose developmental environment has been internet first, and who have wrongly encoded the lesson that my identity is mine to define, and that those who would challenge it are enemies, rather than people doing me a favor of giving me information that I don't have about myself,

they are enemies to be challenged and driven out. Then this interfaces with those of us for whom the internet is not our primary developmental experience in the following way. And I'm using the case of trans ideology simply because it's the clearest case biologically. But if you take the rules of trans, and I actually believe probably these ought to be the rules

online, which is you can present as whatever you want and by and large people should just simply treat you that way. And you also, by the way, online have the tools to do that, so that you're not creating some kind of unresolvable paradox. But if we then say, okay, the online rules are that there's no such thing as sex because a man can become a woman simply by Showing up as one and then we say whatever must be true in the real world in order for those rules to be the rules everywhere We are going to make those things true. Therefore, it must be the case that biology was wrong about sex and what's more that because simply saying that you are female is sufficient to put you fully in that category, then therefore, whatever morphology and physiology you happen to have at the point that you make that assertion

is consistent with being female. And we have the absurd discussion that we now see so regularly about basically female penises and things like this. And so those of us with real world primacy are constantly saying you can't rewrite the rules of civilization around simple claims and isolation, like all you have to do to be female

is say that that's what you are. And that that battle is one that is now ironically going to be lost in the real world as a result of the fact that actually political power is accumulating in the hands of those who subscribe to the online rules. So the identity issue is, I mean, it forces us to, one of the things I found so so challenging about all of this is that these challenges to fundamental assumptions force you to make arguments for things you actually don't know how to argue for. So for example what does it mean to be

female? Well I don't know because no one's actually ever asked me that question they just act being female and I act being male whatever that means and we don't know because no one's actually ever asked me that question. They just act being female and I act being male, whatever that means. And we don't ever sit down and lay out the explicit assumptions. Now, you do that to some degree when you're arguing with your wife about who's going to do what when and maybe with your mother and with your sister. You have local discussions when when roles come into conflict, but you never list the axioms that you're using to do your perceptual categorization. And so then when you're forced to defend your presumption, you don't know how to do it,

because you don't have the arguments at hand. So to be female, I mean, means something like, what do you do? I had a discussion with one of my students, former students today. We're trying to help people develop this, we're trying to develop this program that helps people, um, identify and then accomplish important life tasks and forced me to think about something I've thought about over years. What are the important life tasks? Like, okay, so you should get educated to the approximate level of your intelligence. You should be employed gainfully, have a job, or maybe if you're lucky, a career. You need an intimate relationship.

You should have some friends. You need a family. You need to regulate the world of temptation, drug and alcohol use, that sort of thing. You have to take care of your health. You need to make some use, productive use of your time outside of work. So there's eight things. Maybe there's more, but that's sort of eight. And maybe you don't need to be fully accomplished along all of those eight, but they're pretty important and they're not a bad start. And if you can come up with a better list, more power to you. But let's take one.

You can have a family and intimate relationship and a family. Well, the classical way of doing that is that someone's male and someone's female and they get together and they have children and then they have grandchildren. And that's like a third of your life or a quarter of your life or a fifth of your life. I don't care, it's some non-trivial portion of your life. And that identity, male and female, is a precondition to that root through life. And then you have children,

and they mean something to you, and they give you something to do, and you have grandchildren, it's the same thing. So by playing out male and female, it's sort of like you've now occupied 25% of your time productively. That's the role. Okay, let's say we blow that apart. Well, then what? What are we supposed to do then? Because you can't pretend that into existence. And that's

the postmodern element of this. This is the refusal of the real world. It's like, okay, we'll make identity entirely mutable. But what are the trans kids that came after me in the first demonstration against me? I said, you think I'm your enemy, but I'm not. And the reason I said that being a clinician was because I thought, well, you're adopting an identity that there is no rules for what the hell are you going to do with that? You're inviting so much trouble into your life, you can't even possibly imagine it, because

you won't know what to do. And people won't know how to treat you. And so where does that leave you? Now, you might say, well, I'm so distraught about my, the discordance between my psychological state and my biological reality that that pales in comparison. And maybe there are situations where that's the case. But, man, an identity that doesn't solve the problem of how you're going to live isn't an identity. I don't know what it is, but it's not an identity. Yep. And I don't even know how people would change the rules exactly to make that work. So I agree

with you wholeheartedly that effectively our identities are means to an end. And there is, there are conservation laws that apply to the system as a whole. And unfortunately, and this is actually essentially the core argument of the book that Heather and I have just completed. But the core argument is we are living in a period of evolutionary hyper novelty, where human beings are actually the species for which we have the best tools to deal with novel circumstances that our ancestors did not know anything about, but that the rate of change has become so high that there is no conceivable way for us to keep up with it. And what we are effectively watching is, even in principle, that the very fact that you can say the environment that we live in is not the one that we were born into, that's way too fast. You may be able to make a discrete jump, you know, human beings are capable of moving from one habitat to another and figuring out one time what the rules of the new habitat are.

But a habitat that is constantly in motion and has become utterly arbitrary with respect to even the most fundamental characteristics is not something to which we can be well adapted, which is causing us to be. Sounds like a powerful argument for conservatism. It is. Yeah, I know. I understand. Well, I do understand. I do understand that. That is to the degree that I'm conservative in my outlook. That is, that is the reason it's like, look, uh, one that I've kept up, you know, like, I've transformed myself multiple times over the years and I was taken out by this illness and it isn't obvious to me that I can catch up again. I've caught up a lot and I've watched my peers, my high school classmates, my university

classmates and I've seen people who don't have one transformation in them. They're people who they adapt to the high school environment and that's it. That's where they are for the rest of their life. They peak at 17, they're done. They don't change. Then I've seen people who can manage one transformation. I've seen people much rarer who can manage two or three, but after that, it's like,

it gets massive drop off in probability with every demand for transformation. And now, like I find myself now, I have to rely on my son for doing some of my technological chores. And I hate that because I stayed on top of it for so long, but I got sick and I fell out. And it isn't obvious to me that I can clamber back in. It's very difficult.

Well, if you'll take some advice from a friend and I'm not even sure, I'm not sure I even have it fully formulated, but the thing you described earlier in the conversation, the amount of effort it takes for you to get to the point where you can be productive in the day, the amount that is riding on you're doing it, the number of people who are listening to you and who basically need your influence in their life and in some sense, it is, it's a mythological story.

And I know you will have spotted that a thousand times over. But just the, the, the herculean effort, the tremendous amount that's riding on it and the degree to which you're, you're paying some in human price in order just to continue playing your role is profound. And so the advice to the extent that I have any. I didn't see how you can see that. It shocks me that you say that. I mean, that isn't to say, I...

You disagree? No. It seems like that from inside here. Well, I mean, I think, you know. But I can't, but I can't, having said that, I still can't believe it. So what I think I would do in your shoes and what I hope you will do is you will, you know, I don't think there's anything about that story that isn't right. I think you're, you're reporting honestly how hard it is.

And I know because I've seen it in person and everywhere else, I've seen the effect that you're having on people. And I know how important it is in keeping them out of trouble and steering them in the right direction and giving them hope. And so what I would hope is that instead of reinventing yourself again or updating yourself that you would figure out what the efficient way of showing up in the world in that role is. And I hope that's why we're having this conversation. I seem to be able to do this. So I can do this. And so that's what I'm doing. And I have this well coming out and we'll see how that goes. But I mean, I think, you know, I know your audience and they will, they'll accept you

anyway, you can show up for them. And I think, you know, the key thing is to figure out how to get out how to get out of the predicament of having to go through that herculean struggle every day. Yeah, well, it's beyond, I've been struggling with it for two years. I can't get out of it. I can't. Well, I mean, I'm out of it to some degree. I'm living at home again. I'm not in the hospital. But the reason I'm not in the hospital is because there's nothing that can be done for me in the hospital. Like, there's no point in me going to a hospital. It will just make it worse.

When I wake up in the morning, like any sensible person would go to the emergency room and say, look, this is just, this just isn't possible. But it's irrelevant because all that will happen, and I've been in like four hospitals. So I know all that happens is I made much worse. And so I live in 15 minute increments, fundamentally. Wow. Well, I hope you can detect how many people are rooting for you.

It's mind boggling. And it's lifeerving that fact. I can't believe it even after this last London Times interview. The amount of support that came pouring in is just unbelievable. I can't wrap my head around it. I don't get it. Well, but there it is. You know, there it is. But I mean, it makes sense, you know, because those of us who have been on your team or paying attention to you for the last several years know who you are. And I think in some sense, your enemies know what you are. They know that a voice like yours carries a tremendous amount of weight that their fictions will not survive in the context of Accountor-vailing force like that. And so that's why

They come after you the way that they do But you know the fact is people are getting wise or over time. They're recognizing what an attack looks like You know at some level. They vary a little bit aesthetically, but the overall picture is the same. There's a new one planned, apparently. So the next thing, yeah, the next thing, this is something that hasn't happened yet, but is apparently coming. A financial expose of my, my, I don't know, economic existence. So, you know, which will be accompanied by claims that I'm exploiting everyone.

And, and, and, well, yes, they're going to come after you for succeeding. And for people doing, you know, what, what they can in order to, well, I live away live such a Siberatic existence I drink sparkling water and nothing else ever And I eat nothing but meat ever and so my luxuries. This is so corn. It's so absurd my luxuries have been High-end toothpicks and sparkling water Well, I sometimes wonder when I look at attacks on you if the idea is this. There are a certain number of people who haven't spent any time listening to you yet. And if they did, they would quickly gather that you're not what your enemies are portraying you as so the idea is there has to be a constant stream Of

Suggestions that there's something deeply wrong with you in order to get people not to check in with that question You know, it's like um, you know julienn a sange right The number of things that have been said about Julian Assange that would make you think, well, I don't know what's going on there, but something is going on. Yes, right. Right. And so the idea is it has the stink that they create around you or Julian Assange or another figure that they regard as very dangerous has to be sufficient to drive most people away

from even checking for themselves. And I don't think it's working in your case, but I do think of that. Well, so far, it doesn't seem to, but you know, there's always the possibility that it'll be the next one that'll work. And it's not like I have any shortage of things wrong with me. There are things wrong with me, you know, whether they're ethical things or not, that's a whole different question, but like nobody has a, nobody has a, what, no one has an untrammeled conscience, that's for sure. So, and I'm not too worried about the economic attack. I mean, I'll just make my, if it gets out of hand, I'll just make all my finances public. I mean, I've never made any apologies for being an evil capitalist. So I think actually all the things I've done, I've tried to use market forces to modify

because I think it's a really good source of feedback. You know, like I've produced these processes to help people plan and assess their personalities. And, you know, we thought about giving them away for free, but free is actually a really bad price. And once you start making things and starting to put them out in the environment, you find out very rapidly that pricing is very complex and you have to get the price right and free is not the right price. First of all, if people will only use it, if it's free, it might actually not be any good. And that's a signal. So why not use that signal? That's how it's

appeared to me. And then you have to make the thing sustain itself. So it has to generate some income. And anyhow, that that from what I've heard, that's the next thing that's going to happen. We should stop pretty quick, I guess, although I'm really enjoying this, and we will definitely do it again. I would really like that. I had a very fun conversation with you. It's so nice to talk about what are essentially scientific hypotheses. I miss that so much because I don't have my graduate students anymore. Your life has changed dramatically. If you could have taken a route, I guess I'm asking, you know, would you do it again?

And I do, but I don't want to ask that in a cliched way. And maybe it's a stupid question because you just don't know, but are you okay? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, on the one hand, if I think about it logically, what I do it again in a heartbeat, there are a few things I might do slightly differently, but I'm not even compelled, you know, I think It went pretty well in light of what the the forces in play were, but you know the the thing that we've lost is security

Right the fact is and you the world. I mean, people might, you got a settlement from the university, but that was a trivial proportion of your future, your mutual future earnings. It was nothing. It was enough so you didn't starve to death immediately, but that was all. Right. You know, and if I'm honest about it, we were forced to move out of our home to a different city. We uprooted our children's lives, which was quite disruptive. But I really don't feel there was any choice. I don't, you know, if I think about it as a matter of choice, I cannot find the circuit that would have done anything differently.

And I'm not, all I can say is our lives are full of purpose. And we're doing fine. The absence of security is something I think about a lot. But yes, I would say there wasn't any choice, nor should there have been. And I'm not, I'm not sorry I made the choices I did in the slightest. Well, you look good, man. And you look, if you don't mind me saying, you look different than you did when I saw you before. Well, I'm older now. Well, but you know, I've noticed this

in my clinical clients, when they integrate their aggression, their face is hardened. And they look determined all of a sudden, instead of questioning. And you look like that more than you did. Now, some of that's from getting older, but not all of it. It's...

Well, I think, you know, if I'm understanding you correctly, it's probably a lot about, you know, getting catapulted into the big leagues and learning to play that role. It's, you know, it's trial by fire, but certainly it's been fascinating and I'm looking forward to see in what comes next. Famous last words. Yeah, that's ominous coming from you, Jordan. Look, it was great to see you say say hi to Heather for me. I sure will and I can't tell you how relieved we were to hear that Tammy had recovered and that you were back. And I know it's a rough road, but hang in there, brother. We need you and there are so many people who are just thrilled that you've come back from hell to rejoin the battle. All right, so soon we'll talk again.

Great. Be well, Jordan. you