The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - Progress, Despite Everything

Episode Date: August 4, 2019

Steven Pinker returns for a conversation with Dr. Jordan B. Peterson. Steven Arthur Pinker is a Canadian-American cognitive psychologist, linguist, and popular science author. He is a professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University, and is known for his advocacy of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind.

Welcome to season 2 of episode 20 of The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast. I'm Michaela Peterson, dad's daughter and collaborator. Weekly update, mom is still stable and we are still stressed out. She's finally going home from the hospital next week. That's about it for updates, to be honest. Actually, I just tried Wagyu B for the first time. Not that that's an important update, but if you haven't tried just tried Wagyu beef for the first time. Not that that's an important update, but if you haven't tried A5 Wagyu, try it. It's literally the best

thing I've ever eaten. It was like eating chocolate, I was cried. Sorry, that's not an important update, but I was still excited about it. I've only been eating meat for so long. Anyway, this week's episode titled Progress, Despite Despite Everything features Dr. Stephen Pinker. Stephen Pinker is a professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University. Dad's going to introduce him right away, so I won't give anything more away. Hope you enjoy it. Dr. Stephen Pinker is a very interesting human being. When we return, Dad's conversation with Dr. Stephen Pinker, progress despite everything.

I'm very pleased today to be talking to Dr. Stephen Pinker from Harvard University. He's the John Stone family professor in the Department of Psychology there, and is taught additionally, Stanford and MIT. He's an experimental psychologist who conducts research in visual cognition, cycling, questics, and social relations. Dr. Paker grew up in Montreal and earned his BA

from McGill and his PhD from Harvard. He's won numerous prizes for his research, his teaching, and his nine books, including the language instinct, how the mind works, the blank slate, the better angels of our nature, and the sense of style. He's an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, a humanist of the year, a recipient of nine honorary doctorates, and one of foreign policies,

world top 100 public intellectuals, and times 100 most influential people in the world today. He's chair of the usage panel of the American Heritage Dictionary and writes frequently for the New York Times, the Guardian, and other publications. Enlightenment now, the case for reason, science, humanism, and progress, was his tenth and best-selling book, published in February 2018. And it's very nice, by the way, to have the opportunity to speak with you again and

thanks very much for making the time. Thank you Jordan. So can I ask you, it's been about a year since we talked last and I guess I'd like to ask you, first of all personally, what's this year being like for you? You've become a much more controversial figure, I would say, than would really be predicted. Like, you've always seemed to me to be a solid, reliable, interesting, mainstream scientist, not someone who would attract a tremendous amount of critical attention. And yet, you've become, well, oddly enough, associated with the intellectual dark web, whatever that happens to be. And so much of what you're doing is controversial.

And so, what's that been like? And once your life been like over the last while? Yeah, you wouldn't think that a defensive, reason, science, humanism, and progress would be incendiary, and I'm hardly a flame thrower. And as you know, I have put forward some pretty controversial ideas in the past, such as that men and women aren't distinguishable, that we all harbor some unsavory motives like revenge and dominance. But at saying the world has gotten better, it turns out to be a radical inflammatory hypothesis. There are, first of all, just sheer incredulity because the view of the world that you get

from journalism is so different from the view of the world that you get from data because journalism reports everything that goes wrong. It doesn't report things that go right. And so if there are more things that go right every year, there's just no way of learning about it. And so there there are more things that go right every year, there's just no way of learning about it. And so there's just sheer disbelief. On top of that, there are intellectual factions that are committed to the idea

that they will has never been worse than it is now. And data on human progress undermines some of their foundational beliefs. And so that does attract some opposition. People think of it as a defense of neoliberal capitalism or a defense of the opposite, secular, humanism, traditional liberalism. And so it does get some people exercised. Basically, if you're a social critic, if your reputation comes on saying what's going wrong about current society, then you're kind of committed to the idea that things have gotten worse.

And the idea that things are not as bad as they used to be, not as bad as they could be is an insult to those core beliefs. Yeah, well, it's a surprising thing because, well, so let's talk about that a little bit. I mean, here's some of the things I know, I think I know. And maybe you could describe some of the things you know. And like I started learning that the world had been improving when I worked for a UN committee about five years ago now and started looking at the data on ecology and sustainable economic development.

And that's like, there's some bad ecological news. I think that what we're doing to the oceans is fundamentally unforgivable and foolish beyond belief. But there's some ecological news that's of surprising positivity. Like there was a paper published in Nature, not so long ago, stating for example, that an area twice the size of the US

has greened in the last 15 years. I think it was last 15 or 20 years. Not actually happened to be as a consequence of increased carbon dioxide because plants can keep their pores closed if there's more carbon dioxide in so they can live in more semi-arid areas. And there's more forests in the northern hemisphere than there were 100 years ago and more forests in Indian China than there were 30 years ago.

And then this has gone along with a massively improved standard of living. The child mortality rate in Africa is now the same as it was in Europe in 1952, which is a statistic that I just regard as absolutely miraculous. The African economies are growing sub-Saharan African economies seem to be growing faster at the moment if the stats are reliable, then economies anywhere else in the world, partly because the Africans are getting connected electronically and have access to reasonable information into something approximating, let's say, stable currency alternatives. And people are, the rate of poverty is diminishing at an amazing rate, right?

We have poverty considering it at $1.90 a day between 2000 and 2012, and I've read criticisms of that, saying, well, that was an arbitrary number. But if you look at 380 a day, you see the same decline. If you look at 760 a day, you see the same decline, not as precipitous, and even the UN, not known, I would say, for its optimistic prognostications estimates that at this rate, by the year 2030, there won't be anyone in the world who's living below the current poverty level. So there are some positive statistics.

So what would you like to add to that? Oh, yes. And those are all of those numbers are reported in graphs in the light now. But also, what else? Elyteracy is declining. R rates of violent crime, including violence against women and children are declining, child labor is declining, death and warfare is declining, people have more leisure time, they have more access to small luxuries like here and luxuries like here and getting afforded out of plain fair.

So it's funny that all of these gaffles of human progress, which what we think vindicate the attempt to make the world a better place is not just do good, it's not romantic, it's not utopia, we really can improve the world if we set our minds to do it. Should, should, around so much anger, partly because they, people are so unused to thinking that things have gotten better, that they confuse it with certain kinds of magical thinking such as that things get, this must mean that there is a force in the universe that, that carries us ever upward, which which makes progress happen by itself, which is the exact opposite to reality.

The universe not only doesn't care about us, but has a number of features that are constantly pushing back at us, like entropy, like pathogens. And entropy is the root of all human suffering ultimately. I've read to other things that are peculiar that are so interesting and well, okay, so first of all, it's pretty hard on the Marxists, I would say, because even though there is inequality and inequality is a problem, first of all, it doesn't look like inequality can be placed at the feet of capitalism.

It seems to me to be a far more intractable problem than that. Second, it's clear that the poor are getting richer despite the fact of inequality. Third, and this is hard on the environmentalists, I think, is that it turns out that if you get people's income up to about $5,000 a year in terms of gross domestic product, they actually start to care about the environment, which I suppose is because they're not worried about dying instantly that day or that week. And so we seem to be in this perverse situation for a pessimist where we could make people

wealthy in a positive manner and we could make the world a better place simultaneously. And that does seem to be very hard on ideologues whose ideology is predicated on a fundamental pessimism, where you get the other people, like the biologists do this sometimes and say, well, yeah, we're purchasing all this short-term prosperity for these billions of people, but at the cost of some medium to long-term eventual precipitous apocalyptic collapse. And it's very difficult to formulate an argument against that kind of idea because, well, you never know. When some, I think this is one of the things

talent takes you to task for it, doesn't it? Yes, even though I actually have pretty extensive coverage of the of Kail risks, both in the better angels of our nature and in light of it now. And indeed, we do, we cannot take incremental improvement as itself an indication that the risk of catastrophes is at an acceptable level, and it may not. It's very hard to estimate what the risk of it's a catastrophe is, but there are certainly some that we ought to take very seriously. On the other hand, the facts that you mentioned are often resisted by people in the Green

Movement, but if anything, it should give hope and sucker to the environmental movement, because it shows that it is not true that we have to choose between economic growth, which people do not want to give up and protecting the environment, but that we can have both. And indeed, there are some ways in which they go together. The nations that have done the most to clean up their environment in the last 10 years are the wealthiest nations because they can afford it. If you're a dirt cooler, as you mentioned, your first priority is putting food on the table in a roof over your head.

And the fate of the white rhinoceros is pretty low on your list of priorities. And you might be willing to put up with some smog in order to have electricity. It's really awful to do with electricity. And I know having visited cities like Guatemala, which are horribly polluted, and that they are awful, but it would be much worse to not have any electricity.

But on the other hand, when you get more prosperous, then you're willing to spring for the cleaner energy. And you can afford the cleaner energy. And as you mentioned, your values tend to climb a hierarchy and more long-term future concerns move larger in your value system. So it's an odd assumption that both the hard right and the hard green have in common,

which is that if we want to protect the environment, we have to sacrifice prosperity, go back to a simpler, more peasant style of life. The hard greens say, well, we've got to give up modernity, give up capitalism, go back to living off the land, the hard right says, well, I don't want to do that, no one wants to do that, so to hell with the environment. The reality is that if policy and technology are deployed intelligently, as they ought to be, then we can afford to protect the environment without going backwards and for going all of the benefits of modernity. Right, well, I was shocked when I started to learn about this, the fact that there was so much good both economic and ecological news, with the economic news, perhaps being somewhat

better than the ecological news. And it doesn't mean that we can sit back and relax in the environment, we'll clean itself up all by itself. Quite the contrary, we know why the environment got better. Combination of policy, like the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act in the United States in 1970. And technology like catalytic converters and scrubbers and clean energy. So it doesn't happen by itself. The fact that it has, this is one of the great fallacies in people's understanding of progress,

that they equate the existence of progress with progress happening all by itself as if it was some force of the universe, which is contrary to reality. The other, you mentioned that the existence of human progress is a blow to Dr. Nier Marxist, which is certainly true because we have seen the spectacular economic growth in India and China when they liberalize their economies. And the disasters of, say, North

Korea with a beautiful control group, South Korea, saying geography, saying resources, saying culture, saying language, same history. What differentiates in their political system and South Korea is a much better place to live. It's not only freer, but it is also enormously more prosperous. As for the question, do debate Slavoj, as she's yet on the 19th of April, and I've been preparing for that, and I thought what I might do to begin with is list. There's a graph that I think human progress dot org put out. It might be Matt Ridley's graph or maybe hands.

Is it hands rosling? Rosling. It's marium toopy is the proprietor of you. Right. But it's what they call the most miraculous, most important graph in the world, which shows this unbelievable acceleration of human prosperity basically kicking in exponentially around 1895. Yes, a little bit earlier, but this is a combination of data sources, including a late historical

monastery, Angus Madison, who began the Madison project, trying to retrospectively estimate GDP per capita in eras where they did not collect those data at the time by using historical data. Yes, it is astonishing, and I've got to say when I first saw that curve when I was working on better angels in my nature, I was stunned. I mean, this is the original hockey stick. Yes, you know, I look at that and I think, well, look, I mean, what's the issue here? We still have inequality, but you can't put it at the field of capitalism because it seems

to be a much more fundamental mechanism. Well, at least poverty, certainly, yes. Yes. Well, and not, well, and even inequality, I mean, there seems to be this proclivity towards the unequal distribution of phenomena, not just monetary phenomena, but I mean, if you look in virtually every domain of human endeavor that's associated with creativity, you get a pre-dow distribution of productivity, you know, I mean, a small number of basketball players shoot the vast majority of the hoops and a small number of basketball players shoot the Mavask majority of the hoops and a small number of record recording artists record the majority of the hits.

A small number of planets have most of the mass. And like there is this, I mean, I'm not trying to make a case that inequality isn't a problem. I'm trying to make a case that it's a way deeper problem than the Marxist presumed. And then you have the other problem that, well, the poor keep getting richer. I mean, half the world is middle class now. And obesity is a bigger problem than starvation. I'm really having

a hard time trying to understand what the Marxists have left as a doctrine. It's like, well, the problem you guys were identifying seems to not exist anymore. Yeah, so part of it is that their foil is a kind of iron-randian objectivism in which you have a pure, untrammeled, unconstrained market capitalism with no regulation and no social safety net. And what are the discoveries that I made,

which was almost a surprising as the hockey stick graph of prosperity, is the fact that in the 20th century, every developed country, every rich country, went on a spree of social spending. And so from a baseline, about 1.5% of GDP redistributed to children and the poor and the elderly and the sick. Now, the median OACD-Cuntry redistributes about 22% of its prosperity, and all which countries are in a band from about 20% of GDP, to about 30% of GDP.

The United States is at the low end. Actually, Canada, to my surprise, are in our home and native land, is actually a bit lower than the United States. I think so, I think in the United, even though Canada would appear to have a more generous welfare state than the United States. And in fact, the United States would be even higher

if you added all of the socialism that has done through employers like retirement and health insurance, which in other countries has done through the government. But even if we just looked at government redistribution, it just does not exist a wealthy country without an extensive social safety. So here's the theory. You tell me what you think about this. So I've been trying to, let's say, steal man the positions of the left. I don't mean the radical left.

I mean the moderate left, because I believe that a dialogue between the moderate left and the moderate right is what keeps our ship stabilized, essentially, and for this reason. So imagine people have to group together cooperatively and competitively to solve difficult problems because we have difficult problems. That's entropy, let's say, and the assault of the natural world. So we have to group together. When we do that, we create hierarchies, and we do that in large part, we hope, by elevating those with the most competent at solving the problems to the higher positions

in the hierarchies. Now, that can be contaminated by power and tyranny and crookedness and poor selection and all of that, poor measurement. But fundamentally, if your hierarchy is functional, the more competent people rise to the top. Now, that produces the advantage of solving the problem, but it produces the disadvantage of making a lot of people stack up at the bottom of that hierarchy, because that's what tends to happen, because of the pre-distribution and the built-in proclivity for inequality. So the answer to that seems to be, well, we produce the hierarchies, we accept the inequality, but then we attend with some degree of clarity of vision and care to those who are dispossessed by the necessity of the hierarchies.

And your claim seems to be, from what you just said, is that that's essentially what we've been doing in civilized democracies for the last hundred years, and that that seems to be roughly working. Well, it is, yes. I'm sorry, now whether or not the hierarchies are optimal in the sense that we better off with the hierarchy, because of just what will happen in a distributed market economy, you may have winner-take-all situations where the most entertaining story, the most efficient car, the best washing machine in a global market will push out

a lot of competitors and so you get that creative distribution. Whether or not anyone would have designed it if they were to plan the entire society, might even be beside the point, as long as you don't have central planning and distribution, it might naturally result if it is not explicitly opposed, which some of our policies do. As you mentioned, it's a little bit like the environmental progress, far from being in opposition to economic growth.

It's often economic growth that lets people become more unificent or generous. There are a number of reasons why every wealthy country has a social safety net and why as countries get richer, like Brazil and India and China, they turn their attention to more social welfare. The European and North American societies did it in the 20th century and the developing world is following soon. Partly, it's because some of the investment in some of the redistribution is investment.

It's a public good. It's really good if the entire population is educated for everyone, including the people who are hiring them. And so some of it is just investment in public goods. That's another one. That's one thing take on the Marxist position because funny funny thing is, is that, you know, you lived in Montreal. I lived in Montreal. Montreal is a relatively flat city, in some sense, in terms of its economic distribution. Like, there are no pockets of carifying poverty,

at least, on the island. And it's a very safe place. And so it's socially rich in some sense. Like I always felt wealthy when I lived in Montreal, even though I was living on a PhD's stipend, which was very long. The area at least to call the student ghetto, which now has luxury condominiums. Right, right. But what was so lovely about Montreal was that it was safe. It was beautiful. And

it had an unbelievably vibrant public culture. Yes. And that was all a consequence of the fact that people generally speaking were well enough off. And so, you know, if you contrast that with a country like Brazil, where a tiny minority of people have all the wealth, well, they're stuck with the problem of living in gilded prisons. They have to move in children around in helicopters. And I think one of the things that people realize as societies become richer is that it's better to calculate

your wealth on a broader level to include more people within the purview of what constitutes wealth for you, because it's so nice to be in a city that's thriving and healthy and not crime-ridden and resentful, and those need to be factored in as elements of individual wealth. That's right. And there is a debate among social scientists as to whether it is inequality that drives these other social goods, such as low crime, such as public investment, such as education, or whether it's prosperity. It's not so easy to tell them apart because in general, poorer countries like South Africa and Brazil have sky-high inequality,

countries like Norway and Sweden and Switzerland which have less inequality are also very rich and it isn't so easy to see which one is driving it. Because as the societies get richer, as we've discussed, they tend to redistribute partly out of investing in a public good, such as roller crime, such as having an educated populist is just a really good thing. Partly, it is literally insurance, and the euphemism is of social safety in it. That is something that captures you, if you fall. Captures the idea that even when people are well off, they worry that they're but for fortune go I that you got to be nice to people on the way up because you might need them on the way down. And so

putting a bottom of more on how you can be makes everyone feel a little more secure that if the worst thing happened, they would not be destitute. It's not that uncommon for people who are in the top 10% say of the economic distribution, or even in the top 1% to suffer a substantial... Welcome to season 2, we have a so-20 of the Jordan B. Peterson broadcast. I'm Michaela Peterson, dad's daughter and collaborator. Weekly update, mom is still stable and we are still stressed out. She's finally going home from the hospital next week.

That's about it for updates to be honest. Actually, I just tried Wagyu beef for the first time. Not that that's an important update, but if you haven't tried A5 Wagyu, try it. It's literally the best thing I've ever eaten. It was like eating chocolate, I almost cried. Sorry, that's not an important update, but I was still excited about it. It's literally the best thing I've ever eaten. It was like eating chocolate. I was cried. Sorry, that's not an important update, but I was still excited about it. I've only been eating meat for so long. Anyway, this week's episode titled Progress, Despite Everything, features Dr. Stephen Pinker. Stephen Pinker is a professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University.

Dad's going to introduce him right away, so I won't give anything more away. Hope you enjoy it. Dr. Stephen Pinker is a very interesting human being. When we return, Dad's conversation with Dr. Stephen Pinker progress despite everything. I'm very pleased today to be talking to Dr. Stephen Pinker from Harvard University. He's the John Stone family professor in the Department of Psychology there, and has taught additionally Stanford and MIT. He's an experimental psychologist who conducts research in visual cognition, psycholinguistics, and social relations. Dr. Pinker grew up in Montreal and earned his BA from McGill and his PhD from Harvard. He's won numerous

prizes for his research, his teaching, and his nine books, including the language instinct, how the mind works, the blank slate, the better angels of our nature, and the sense of style. He's an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, a humanist of the year, a recipient of nine honorary doctorates, and one of foreign policies world top 100 public intellectuals and times 100 most influential people in the world today. He's chair of the usage panel of the American Heritage Dictionary and writes frequently for the New York Times, the Guardian and other publications.

Enlightenment now, the case for reason, science, humanism, and progress was his tenth and best-selling book, published in February 2018. And it's very nice, by the way, to have the opportunity to speak with you again. And thanks very much for making the time. Thank you, Jordan. So, can I ask you, it's been about a year since we talked last, and I guess I'd like to ask you, first of all, personally, what's this year being like for you? You've become a much more controversial figure, I would say, than would really be predicted.

Like, you've always seemed to me to be a solid, reliable, interesting, mainstream scientist, not someone who would attract a tremendous amount of critical attention. And yet, you've become, well, oddly enough, associated with the intellectual dark web, whatever that happens to be. And so much of what you're doing is controversial. And so what's that been like? And once your life

being like over the last while? Yeah, you wouldn't think that a defense of reason, science, humanism, and progress would be incendiary, and I'm hardly a flamethrower. And as you note, I have put forward, it's a pretty controversial ideas in the past, such as that men and women aren't indistinguishable, that we all harbor some unsavory motives like revenge and dominance. But at the same time, the world has gotten better. It turns out to be a radical inflammatory hypothesis. There are, first of all, just sheer incredulity because the view of the world

that you get from journalism is so different from the view of the world that you get from journalism is so different from the view of the world that you get from data because journalism reports everything that goes wrong. It doesn't report things that go right. And so if there are more things that go right every year, there's just no way of learning about it. And so there's just sheer disbelief. On top of that, there are intellectual factions that are committed to the idea that the

world has never been worse than it is now. And data on human progress undermines some of their foundational beliefs. And so that does attract some opposition. People think of it as a defense of neoliberal capitalism or a defense of the opposite, secular, humanism, traditional liberalism, and so does get some people exercised. Basically, if you're a social critic, if your reputation comes on saying what's going wrong about current society, then you're kind of committed to the idea that things have gotten worse,

and the idea that things are Not as bad as they used to be not as bad as they could be is an insult to that those core beliefs Yeah, well, it's a it's a surprising thing because well, and so so let's let's talk about that a little bit I mean here's some of the things I know I think I know and Maybe you could describe some of the things you know. And I started learning that the world had been improving when I worked for a UN committee about five years ago now and started looking at the data on ecology

and sustainable economic development. And there's some bad ecological news. I think that what we're doing to the oceans is fundamentally unforgivable and foolish beyond belief. But there's some ecological news that's of surprising positivity. Like there was a paper published in Nature, not so long ago, stating for example that an area twice the size of the U.S. has greened in the last 15 years. I think it was last 15 or 20 years. That actually happened to be as a consequence of increased carbon dioxide because plants can

keep their pores closed if there's more carbon dioxide and so they can live in more semi-arid areas. And there's more forests in the northern hemisphere than there were 100 years ago. And more forests in Indian China than there were 30 years ago. And then this has gone along with a massively improved standard of living. The child mortality rate in Africa is now the same as it was in Europe in 1952, which is a statistic that I just regard as absolutely miraculous. The African economies are growing sub-Saharan African economies seem to be growing faster at the moment. If the stats are reliable, then economies anywhere else in the world, partly because the Africans are getting connected

electronically and have access to reasonable information and to something approximating, let's say, stable currency alternatives. There's, and people are, the rate of poverty is diminishing at an amazing rate, right? We have poverty considering it at $1.90 a day between 2000 and 2012, and I've read criticisms of that saying, well, that was an arbitrary number, but if you look at 380 a day, you see the same decline. If you look at 760 a day, you see the same decline, not as precipitous, and even the UN, not known, I would say, for its optimistic, prognostications estimates that at this rate, by the year 2030, there won't be anyone in the world who's living below the current poverty level. So there are some positive statistics.

So what would you like to add to that? Oh, yes. And those are all of those numbers are reported in graphs in the lightning hour. But also, what else? Eliteracy is declining. Rates of violent crime, including violence against women and children are declining, child labor is declining,

death and warfare is declining. People have more leisure time, they have more access to small luxuries like beer and getting affording out of plain fare. So it's funny that all of these draffles of human progress, which one would think vindicate the attempt to make the world a better place. It's not just dukering, it's not romantic, it's not utopian, we really can improve the world

if we set our minds to do it. Should, should, around so much anger, partly because they, people are so unused to thinking that things have gotten better, that they confuse it with certain kinds of magical thinking, such as that things get, this must mean that there is a force in the universe that carries us ever upward, which makes progress happen by itself, which is the exact opposite to reality. The universe not only doesn't care about us, but it has a number of features

that are constantly pushing back at us, like entropy, like pathogens, like... And entropy is the root of all human suffering ultimately. I've read two other things that are peculiar and that are so interesting. Well, okay, so first of all, it's pretty hard on the Marxists, I would say, because even though there is inequality and inequality is a problem, first of all, it doesn't look like inequality can be placed at the feet of capitalism. It seems to me to be a far more intractable problem than that. Second, it's clear that the poor are getting richer despite the fact of inequality. And third, and this is hard on the environmentalists, I think, is that turns out that if you

get people's income up to about $5,000 a year in terms of gross domestic product, they actually start to care about the environment, which I suppose is because they're not worried about dying instantly that day or that week. And so we seem to be in this perverse situation for a pessimist where we could make people wealthy and in a positive manner and we could make the world a better place simultaneously. And that does seem to be very hard on ideologues whose ideology is predicated on a fundamental pessimism, or you get the other people, like the biologists do this sometimes and say, well, yeah, we're purchasing all this short-term prosperity

for these billions of people, but at the cost of some medium to long-term, eventual precipitous apocalyptic collapse. It's very difficult to formulate an argument against that kind of idea because, well, you never know when some, I think this is one of the things talent takes you to task for it, doesn't he? Yes, even though I actually have pretty extensive coverage of the of tail risks both in the better angels of our nature and in light right now and and indeed we do we cannot take incremental improvement as itself an indication that the risk of catastrophes

is at an acceptable level, and it may not. It's very hard to estimate what the risk of it is, but there are certainly some that we ought to take very seriously. On the other hand, the facts that you mentioned are often resisted by people in the green movement, but if anything, it should give hope and sucker to the environmental movement. Because it shows that it is not true that we have to choose between economic growth, which people do not want to give up

and protecting the environment. But we can have both. And indeed, there are some ways in which they go together. The nations that have done the most to clean up their environment in the last 10 years are the wealthiest nations because they can afford it. If you're dirt poor, as you mentioned, your first priority is putting food on the table and a roof over your head. And the fate of the white rhinoceros is pretty low on your list of priorities.

And you might be willing to put up with some smog in order to have electricity. It's really awful to do with electricity. And I know having visited cities like Muammai, which are horribly polluted, and that they are awful, but it would be much worse to not have any electricity. But on the other hand, when you get more prosperous, then you're willing to spring for the cleaner energy. And you can afford the cleaner energy. And as you mentioned, your values tend to climb a hierarchy and more

long-term future concerns, moon-largering in your value system. So it's an odd assumption that both the hard right and the hard green have in common, which is that if we want to protect the environment, we have to sacrifice prosperity, go back to a simpler, more peasant style of life. The hard greens say, well, we've got to give up modernity, give up capitalism, go back to living off the land. The hard rights as well, I don't want to do that, no one wants to do that, so to hell with the environment. The reality is that if policy and technology are deployed intelligently as they ought to be, then we can afford to protect the environment

without going backwards and for going all of the benefits of modernity. Right, well, I was shocked when I started to learn about this, the fact that there was so much good both economic and ecological news. With the economic news, perhaps being somewhat better than the ecological news. It doesn't mean that we can sit back and relax in the environment, we'll clean itself up all by itself. Quite the contrary, we know why the environment got better. Combination

of policy, like the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act in the United States in 1970, and technology like catalytic converters and scrubbers and clean energy. So it doesn't happen by itself. The fact that it has, this is one of the great policies and people's understanding of progress, that they equate the existence of progress with progress happening all by itself

as if it was some force of the universe, which is contrary to reality. The other, you mentioned that the existence of human progress is a blow to Dr. Nier Marxist, which is certainly true because we have seen the spectacular economic growth in India and China when they liberalize their economies. And the disasters of, say, North Korea with a beautiful control group, South Korea, same geography, same resources, same culture, same language, same history, what differentiates them as their political system. And South Korea is a much better place to live.

It's not only freer, but it is also enormously more prosperous. But as for the question, do debate Slavo, as she's checked on the 19th of April, and I've been preparing for that, you know, and I thought what I might do to begin with is list. There's a graph that I think you and progress.org put out. It might be Matt Ridley's graph, or maybe Hans, is it Hans Rosling? Rosling, it's Mariam Tupi, is the proprietor of humans. Right, but it's what they call the most miraculous, most important graph in the world, shows this unbelievable acceleration of human prosperity, basically kicking in exponentially around

1895. Yes, a little bit earlier, but this is a combination of data sources, including a late historical conisting Angus Madison, who began the Madison project, trying to retrospectively estimate GDP per capita in areas where they did not collect those data at the time by using historical data. Yes, it is astonishing. And I've got to say, when I first saw that curve, when I was working on betterings with my nature, I was stunned.

I mean, this is the original hockey stick. Yes. You know, I look at that and I think, well, look, I mean, what's the issue here? We still have inequality, but you can't put it at the field of capitalism because it seems to be a much more fundamental mechanism. Well, at least poverty, certainly, yes. Yes. Well, and even inequality, I mean, there seems to be this proclivity towards the unequal distribution of phenomena, not just monetary phenomena, but I mean, if you look in virtually every domain of human endeavor that's associated with creativity, you get a pre-do distribution of productivity, you know, I mean, a small number of basketball players shoot the vast majority of the hoops and a small number of record recording artists record the majority of the hits. A small number of planets have most of the mass.

I'm not trying to make a case that inequality isn't a problem. I'm trying to make a case that it's a way deeper problem than the Marxist presumed. And then you have the other problem that, well, the poor keep getting richer. I mean, half the world is middle class now. And obesity is a bigger problem than starvation. I'm really having a hard time trying to understand what the Marxists have left as a doctrine. It's like, well, the problem you guys were identifying

seems to not exist anymore. Yeah, so part of it is that their foil is a kind of iron randian objectivism in which you have a pure, untrammeled, unconstrained market capitalism with no regulation and no social safety. And what are the discoveries that I made, which was almost a surprising as the hockey stick graph of prosperity, is the fact that in the 20th century, every developed country, every

rich country, went on a spree of social spending, and so that from a baseline, about 1.5% of GDP redistributed to children and the poor and the elderly and the sick. Now the median OACD country redistributes about 22% of its prosperity and all which countries are in a band from about 20% of GDP to about 30% of GDP. The United States is at the low end. Actually Canada, to my surprise, our home and native land is actually a bit lower than the United States. I think so, but the United, even though Canada would appear to have a more generous welfare state than the United States.

And in fact, the United States would be even higher if you added all of the socialism that is done through employers like retirement and health insurance, which in other countries is done through the government. But even if we just looked at government redistribution, it just does not exist a wealthy country without an extensive social safety net. So here's the theory. You tell me what you think about this. So I've been trying to, let's say, steal man the positions of the left.

I don't mean the radical left. I mean the moderate left, because I believe that a dialogue between the moderate left and the moderate right is what keeps our ship stabilized, essentially. And for this reason, so imagine people have to group together cooperatively and competitively to solve difficult problems, because we have difficult problems. That's entropy, let's say, and the assault of the natural world.

So we have to group together. When we do that, we create hierarchies, and we do that in large part, we hope, by elevating those who are the most competent at solving the problems to the higher positions in the hierarchies. Now, that can be contaminated by power and tyranny and crookedness and poor selection and all of that, poor measurement. But fundamentally, if your hierarchy is functional, the more competent people rise to the top. Now, that produces the advantage of solving the problem, but it produces the disadvantage of making a lot of people stack up at the bottom of that hierarchy,

because that's what tends to happen, because of the pre-distribution and the built-in proclivity for inequality. So the answer to that seems to be, well, we produce the hierarchies, we accept the inequality, but then we attend with some degree of clarity of vision and care to those who are dispossessed by the necessity

of the hierarchies. And your claim seems to be, from what you just said, is that that's essentially what we've been doing in civilized democracies for the last 100 years, and that that seems to be roughly working. Well, it is, yes. I'm sorry, now whether or not the hierarchies are optimal in the sense that we better off with the hierarchy,

because of just what will happen in a distributed market economy, you may have winner-take-all situations where the most entertaining story, the most efficient car, the best washing machine in a global market will push out a lot of competitors and so you get that kind of distribution. Whether or not anyone would have designed it if they were to plan the entire society, might even be beside the point, as long as you don't have central planning and distribution, it might naturally result if it is not explicitly opposed, which some of our policies do. As you mentioned, it's a little bit like the environmental progress,

in that far from being in opposition to economic growth. It's often economic growth that lets people become more unificent or generous. There are a number of reasons why every wealthy country has a social safety net and why as countries get richer, like Brazil and India and China, they turn their attention to more social welfare. The European and North American societies did it in the 20th century, and the developing world is following suit.

Partly, it's because some of the investment in some of the redistribution is investment. It's a public good. It's really good if the entire population is educated for everyone, including the people who are hiring them. And so some of it is just investment in public goods. So that's another one. That's one thing take on the Marxist position. Because funny thing is, is that you live in Montreal.

I lived in Montreal. Montreal's a relatively flat city, in some sense sense in terms of its economic distribution. There are no pockets of terrifying poverty, at least on the island, and it's a very safe place. And so it's socially rich in some sense. I always felt wealthy when I lived in Montreal, even though I was living on a PhD's stipend, which was very long. The area we used to call the student ghetto, which now has luxury condominiums.

Right, right. But what was so lovely about Montreal was that it was safe, it was beautiful, and it had an unbelievably vibrant public culture. Yes. And there was all a consequence of the fact that people generally speaking were well enough off. And so, you know, if you contrast that with a country like Brazil, where a tiny minority of people have all the wealth, well, they're stuck with the problem of living in gilded prisons. They have to move in children around in helicopters. And I think one of the things that people realize as societies become richer is that it's

better to calculate your wealth on a broader level, to include more people within the purview of what constitutes wealth for you. Because it's so nice to be in a city that's thriving and healthy and and and not crime-ridden and resentful and and those need to be factored in as elements of individual wealth. That's right and there is a debate among social scientists as to whether it is inequality that drives these other social goods such such as low crime, such as public investment, such as education, or whether it's prosperity. It's not so easy to tell them apart,

because in general, poorer countries like South Africa and Brazil have sky-high inequality, countries like Norway and Sweden and Switzerland, which have less inequality, are also pretty rich. And it isn't so easy to see which one is driving it. Because as the societies get richer, as we've discussed, they tend to redistribute partly out of investing in a public good,

such as lower crime, such as having an educated populist, is just a really good thing. Partly, it is literally insurance and the euphemism social safety net that is something that captures you, if you fall. Captures the idea that even when people are well off, they worry that they're but-for-for-ctioned go-i, that you gotta be nice to people on the way up

because you might need them on the way down. And so putting a bottom floor on on how you can be makes everyone feel a little more secure that if the worst thing happened, they would not be destitute. It's not that uncommon for people who are in the top 10% say of the economic distribution, or even in the top 1% to suffer a substantial reversal of fortune at some point in their life. And it's a very rare person, a very, very rare person who isn't at economic danger of economic disadvantage at some point in their life for some reason.

Well, certainly people move in and out of the top desial, top 10% of the income distribution. Although this argument for social spending would be to indemnify people against the worst outcome, I don't think that many people in the top 10 to say nothing of the top 1% will ever go on welfare. But still, a lot of people in the middle class can imagine it, and they don't want to think that they'll be out on the street if they use their job

or if they have a suddenly suffer of thinking on medical expense. And the third reason after investment and insurance is just a compassionate empathy. We see in the history of the West, after the Industrial Revolution, you get a a literature of compassion for the poor. You have the little match girl. You have René Zéabla and Jean-Pallé Jean-Bain in prison for still a bit of grand de Satan's sister. You have the Joads bearing grandpa on the side of Route 66

in a grapes of wrath. And so people are also moved by sheer fellow feeling with their compatriots, their fellow citizens. Maybe that's another reason why the people who are criticizing your informed optimism are irritated, because if your fundamental political doctrine insists that, well, every, your primary identity is your group, whatever that happens to be. And the primary motivating factor for the function of your group is raw, naked power,

played out within that group against all other groups, the introduction of something like the notion of an implicit compassion for the downtrodden seems to like wreak havoc with the purity of that ideological position. But like I've never met anyone in my life, and I know a large number of extraordinarily successful, economically successful people,

I've never met anyone in my life who walks down the street and sees it down and out alcoholic, who's clearly suffering terribly as a consequence of dwelling on the street. What would you say? Celebrate the justice of the universe in elevating them above that person who's suffering. I mean, we do know from social psychology that there is a tendency to blame the victim to the leaf that in a just world. So I think those are two motives that we have,

compassion for everyone, but also a feeling that those who are badly off must have done something to deserve it. We we do see this of course in the surveys that you and I have all you see attention there because of course you see attention. I think that's right. It's also modulated by my some degree of ethnic solidarity. It's been noted that some of the generous welfare states of Europe have at least historically occurred in countries that are ethnically more homogeneous, certainly racially more homogeneous than the United States, which tends to be a somewhat stench year. Now this is not, there is some elasticity into what we cognitively categorize as our group.

And one of the greatest achievements of any kind of nation- building is to instill a feeling, well, we're all Canadians or we're all Swiss or we're all Iraqi. Something that has actually not happened in Iraq, which is a big problem. Unless you have that fictional family, that fictional clan of the nation, then people tend not to cooperate, including in ways of providing social welfare for the worst off. And that's a ridiculously interesting point, I would say, because one of the things that you already see in Canada, for example, and our prime minister is a real devote of this idea, is that there really is no Canadian culture. There's no central Canadian ethos. And what we have is a plurality of multicultural microcosms and that that's actually all for the best.

Yes, the Canadian mosaic is opposed to the melting pot as a very, very, very, very, although the Prime Minister's father, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, famously tried to forge a kind of Canadian identity that's spanned English, the Anglophone and Francophone communities, hardly exemplified in himself because he was a dashing charismatic figure who was distinctively Canadian. He just wasn't French. He was a French. He wasn't American.

He had the rose in his lapel. He wore a cape. He was perfectly bilingual. He was debonair and witty and charming. We all felt at the time, I remember this, I remember Trudeau Mania. We all felt, now that is a Canadian, that's something to aspire to. And he did with his policies and with his symbolism, forge a kind of Canadian consciousness above and beyond the mosaic of the Lebanese Canadians and the Italian, Canadian Jewish Canadians

and so on. Well, and with sufficient, what would you call it? Success to at least keep the country together, which was something quite remarkable. Well, at one point he had to declare martial law to do it. Yes. During the October crisis, when Separatist terrorists kidnapped a trade commissioner and a government minister.

Right. Right, a dark day for Canada. Well, so it looked, it looks like there's a contradiction, maybe, and you could tell me what you think about this in a certain element of leftist doctrine, because assuming that multiculturalism can be reasonably viewed as part of the leftist doctrine, if it is the case that people are more likely to be generous to those that they see in some sense as they're in group, then what it suggests is

that you need to take the the mosaic of your culture, the African Canadians and the European Canadians and the Asian Canadians, the same in the US, and have them maintain their culture and their traditions, but also to embed them inside a broader game that constitutes the national identity, that unites them all despite their differences. And it seems like, given what you just described, that unless you can forge that trans-ethnic or trans-racial identity, that you motivate people to be less generous in their social policies. Well, that is true. I consider this to be one of the key ideas of coming out of the enlightenment, opposed by the counter enlightenment of the 19th century, by the Romantics and the

Nationalists, that a state, a group of people under the jurisdiction of a government, are held together basically by social contract. I agree with that we're all in this together. There are many public goods that we share public costs that we can suffer. A government that allows us to get along by serving in our interests is a way of improving our wealth there. to get along by serving in our interests is a way of improving our welfare. It's a very different conception of a nation than the blood and soil nationalism of the 19th century,

continuing well into the 20th. That would make us a nation is that we're all white. We all speak, we come from the same ancestry. And that the successful nations are often ones that manage to forge the somewhat artificial identity. So that's also fascinating because then okay, then we got two arguments here for that, let's say artificial or conceptual nation building process. One is that maybe you could allow people in their different ethnic and racial groups to maintain key elements of their identity and feel comfortable doing so, but also embed them

in a broader game, or Terry played and laid out. But if exactly. By the same token given your logic, By the same token given your logic, that's also the most effective antidote to the kind of nationalism that is identitarian, that also seems to be in the resurgence. And you see this, I really see this as having been done extraordinarily effectively in the United States. Now, they had the advantage of the examples of England and France, but that the American experiment was an experiment in conceptual nation-building. It's like, here's a bit of principles that we can all agree on despite our differences. And to the degree that we decide

that we will agree on these principles, then we're the same enough, we can cooperate. We don't need to revert to nationalism or... No, very much. In the Declaration of Independence, that was made crystal clear that to pursue life liberty and pursuit of happiness, governments are formed with the consent of the government to allow people to flourish the cost. Nothing in the Declaration said anything about the European, the White, the Protestant, the Christian. It was really a social contract set up for first principles,

which of course there's some pretty big problems with the course of the African citizens. It took quite a while to work that out. And there were tensions in the 20th century with ways of immigration from Ireland, from Eastern Europe, from Jews, from Italians. And there were of course tensions between the Italians and the Irish, but by the standards of human history they got worked out pretty well. I think capitalizing on a feature of our psychology, which is that even though we do have an in-group favoritism, we do have tribalism. What counts as a tribe is pretty elastic.

It is not by skin color. We form coalitions that cut across skin color. And a successful country is one that capitalizes on that elasticity, form a virtual tribe, which is simply every citizen of the country. And that ultimately, every citizen of the country, and that ultimately, every citizen in larger units, including the humanity, including the other world. A lot of this depends on undermining certain features of human nature, such as skin solidarity,

and it's been noted that in cultures that have a lot of cousin marriage, where you're related to people in your clan, it's rather hard to do nation-building there, like in Iraq, for example. People don't have a sense of superordinate royalty to a coalition above their blood relatives and they are tightly tied to blood relatives by a cousin marriage. But this also played itself out in the history

of the United States. And there's a wonderful snatched dialogue at the end of the first Godfather movie. When Michael Corleone enlists after Pearl Harbor, and as brother Sunny says, what did you go to college to get stupid, you can't treat your blood, you're gonna be a saphoidized for strangers. And that is a perfect encapsulation of the difference

between traditional tribalism and the mentality that we need for a successful movement. So it sounds like it's one of the ways to combat right-wing identitarianism, that the new emergence of right-wing identitarianism is to make that conceptual distinction between national identity that's predicated on blood and soil, let's say kinship, direct kinship, or even secondary kinship.

And these more abstract conceptions. Now, it seems to me, so just, you may know this or you may not, but Ben Shapiro's new book is number one on the New York Times bestseller list. And I read Ben's book a while back and I think it shares some features with your book and it shares some features with my book. My book is that I stress the importance of the Judeo-Christian stories as part of that conceptual substructure that unites a civilization. And then it has features in common with your book because it's also a pro-enlightenment manifesto celebrating the achievements, let's say, of the Greeks and the rationalists moving forward from there. Like Shapiro sees our culture as, and this is something

that I agree with, I would say, as a marriage between that Judeo-Christian tradition and that emergent enlightenment, you're, you're, and it's taught me if I'm wrong, but you're emphasis. So let's say that we're playing this abstract conceptual game that unites us as a people, independent of our ethnicity and our race. And there are principles that constitute the game rules for that agreement. And you see those as primarily deriving from the enlightenment and starting then. Well, not, I mean, there's nothing new under the sun and certainly some of the enlightenment

ideas had precursors in the Renaissance and in ancient Greece. But that set of ideas that came together then and needed further elaboration. I think that's much more of a basis of human progress than the Judeo-Christian tradition. Again, every intellectual movement draws from pre-existing ideas and movements. So there was some cherry picking from the Judeo-Christian tradition, but it certainly did not depend on belief in Jesus Christ our Savior, it did not depend on one God as opposed to many gods, really dependent on human well-being, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That's something you can believe in regardless of your theological commitments. So what do you think? So here's the question I have about that is that it seemed to me so that the citizens who would determine the course of the nation. And there's some recognition there as far as I'm concerned of intrinsic value outside of a

rational argument, you know, as an a priori presupposition, we accept these truths as self-evident. And the most fundamental truth of that is that it's something like, in my view, it's something like the strange metaphysical equivalence of man before God, the fact that we all have intrinsic value. And that's where I see the enlightenment being irreducibly embedded inside this underlying structure. And that's different than the idea of progress, which is something that you're focusing on and that I think is more attributable to the development, let's say, of science and technology. But it still seems to me that the Enlightenment had to have an understructure that enabled it to emerge for those self-evident truths to be accepted universally as self-evident. Well, except I agree that those are scientific ideas and these are the set of ideas that I draw together under the rubric of humanism.

It's not clear that the self-evident right to life-liberating the sort of happiness is particularly a Christian. I think I don't think you could find that in scripture. In fact, in the Jewish tradition, God chose the Jews, we're the chosen people. So the idea of universal human worth and well-being is not a particularly Jewish notion. Now, it's a particularly Christian notion. It's only you have to accept Jesus in order to escape eternal damnation. None of that's in the declaration. What's self-advent is are the things that are almost prerequisite to even considering what ought to go into a country or anything else. Namely, you've got to be alive rather than dead. You've got to be able to express opinions and order to even have that

conversation. So you've got freedom. Happiness, as we know from evolutionary considerations, is basically the set of motives that kept our ancestors alive and allowed us to come into existence in the first place, combating the grind of entropy. So I think that the foundation of that enlightenment, we does not particularly Judeo-Christian, but more existential. It just comes from what of the actual prerequisites to being an incarnate, reasoning creature. I'm going to press you on two elements of that. And I'm not disagreeing with you, by the way, because I'm not convinced that I'm right. It's just that these, this is how things have laid themselves out for me in my thinking. I mean, one of the things that's very interesting about the book of Genesis is that it insists

that human beings are made in the image of God and that gives them an intrinsic value, and that they're made in the image of God regardless of whether they're male or female. And then I know that Jews emerge as the chosen people in the Old Testament, but there's also a strong idea, powerful conceptual idea in the Old Testament that emerges that the people of Israel, the true Israelites, are those who wrestle with God. So it's like an existential adventure. It's partly based on blood. It's partly based on ethnicity, but there's a conceptual idea too there that there's the struggle for ethical endeavor, let's say, and the struggle for the discovery of the meaning of existence

is actually what marks out the true follower of God. And then as Judaism transforms itself, at least in some part, into Christianity, what I see happening is that you get the idea that that identity with God that existed in Genesis, that intrinsic value starts to become more humanized, that really manifests itself sort of fully in the Renaissance, that the religious figures start to become more individual, and that the idea that each individual does, in fact, have a divine worth,

that keeps the state at bay, is part of what allows for the conception that people are deserving of the chance independently of their ethnicity and their race and their creed and their sexuality to do such things as pursue life, liberty and happiness. And see, because otherwise I can't see, I can't see where the ideas would have otherwise emerged during the Partly the enlightenment came about as a reaction to seeing what happens if you ground even worth in religious doctrine such as the European Wars of religion unprecedented carnage and of

in words of religion, unprecedented carnage, and together with the burning of heretics, if you're going back to scriptures, particularly in the Hebrew Bible, God commands the Israelites to engage in one genocide after another. There is no prohibition against slavery, there's no prohibition against rape, there's no prohibition against grizzly forms of torture for victimless crimes like working on a Saturday. I don't think it's very easy to come up with a notion of universal human rights from either scripture or Christianity. I think the reason that it happened in the enlightenment, who knows why anything happened to the exact moment that it did. Farley, it was a realization of the the internecine carnage from the Wars of Religion, but also it's when you start to peel away

scripture and dogma and doctrine, what you're left with is our common humanity. Namely, there's no way that I can insist that only my interests are special and you're not because I mean you're not and I hope for you to take me seriously. So as we engage in any kind of discourse with diverse other people, what we are forced to fall back on is what we have in common. Namely, we are both sentient. We are both rational. We have the ability to suffer. We have the ability to flourish. I made it the same stuff as you. I can't claim that

you don't suffer. That would be a ludicrous proposition. And that's what gives you the notion of universal human rights and as government as a derivative means of pursuing those rights as opposed to say Divinely ordained monarchy. It's so hard and disheartened like this because it depends to some degree on your time frame and also on whether you take the broad picture or you concentrate on the details to some degree because I mean I've got no objection to any of the descriptions of the horrors of religious tribalism that you just laid out. I mean I would place that

more in the domain of tribalism than in the domain of religion because I think the tribalist tendency is the war like tendency that the national government Although the most severely punished heretics are often those who have tried Those are the ones where they really want to burn the state as an example So it's not it is I think there's tribals, I think there's also a kind of curatannical emphasis on the on pure essence that anyone who contaminates the body politic must be expelled. Oh yes, there's definitely there's definitely that. And well, you see that with taboo violations in. Absolutely. Tribal in tribal. And authoritarianism, the idea of the...

The challenging, a legitimate authority is itself inherently evil. It's not the idea that criticizing the leader is essential to the health of a nation, which is constitute of our idea of democracy and freedom of speech. You have the ability to make fun of the president on mass. Yes. You are getting from. And the moral obligation too.

And moral obligation too. And that's a deeply unintuitive feeling that the natural human tendencies to, we know this from the work of people like a rich trader and John Height, and there's this that, Les Measures stay attacking the king is a mortal sin that hierarchies are themselves often moralized. That's a natural human idea that was, I guess as we'd say, deconstructed or rejected during the Enlightenment, including the rationale for government, laid out in the Declaration of the New York Times. So it's a funny thing, eh, because what I see happening is that over the thousands of years of religious thinking,

let's say, that went on in the West, is that what emerged initially was the idea that there was something, a kin to deity that characterized human beings. And that stated very early on in the religious tradition. And in a very surprising way, partly because it's distributed between men and women equally. And it seems to be partly a creative function in that human beings partake in the co-creation of existence and partly an ethical function in that we're called upon

to act courageously in truthfully. And that's the core idea, I think, that's expressed in Genesis. And it's a really sophisticated and demanding idea. And then I see it like the mustard seed that's part of the parable in the New Testament. It's this tiny idea that takes root and against incredible odds manifests itself across the centuries until what we get is an increasing realization of the universality

of humanity and that that constitutes part of the core of the enlightenment. And you know, you made arguments about religious sectarianism and also the, and religious tribal warfare. But the funny thing is, is that I would say that the critics of your defense of the Western enlightenment project might point to the same details in some sense and to say, well, look at the consequences of Enlightenment thinking, there's been endless warfare since the Enlightenment, there's been a tremendous generation of destructive technology, the negatives,

which you can point to, case by case and piece by piece, arguably outweigh the positives. I mean, I certainly don't believe that, but people could make that case. So it's not so difficult, hey, when you're trying to take a long view of history to decide which part of the melody you focus on, like is it the deep, the details that seem to work against those themes?

Yes, well, I of course talk about the historical trajectory of warfare in some detail in the bitur angels of our nature, with something of a reprise in the chapter on Keith Smith's Senate right now. And it's certainly not true that wars increased after the Enlightenment, quite contrary. If you look at the percentage of years of the great powers of the day were at war with each other, it actually goes down starting in the 17th century. Great power wars don't even occur anymore. We haven't had one for about 65 years.

But what happened was that in the centuries after the 18th century, there were two trends that went in opposite directions, which is that wars actually got shorter and less frequent. But the ones that did occur got deadlier. That is, the country countries got more efficient at killing more people in a shorter amount of time, partly because of a weaponry, but also just because of social organization,

being able to conscript large numbers of young men and sent them to the battlefield as cannon fodder. Until, and a lot of that was driven, actually, by counter-enlightened ideologies of nationalism, which meant to both both world wars. Then starting in 1945, for the first time, wars became less frequent, shorter, and less deadly. So the first time in human history, you have a systematic move away from war. occurred after 1945 with the formation of the United Nations.

With a kind of unprecedented universalism, a kind of global consciousness, including all races, all religions, still not, of course, universally accepted, even as an aspiration. That's something that's pretty new in human history. It did not occur during the time of the European in the 18th century. But I think it was the consolidation of light and the ideals, including the formation of the United

Nations, which was called for by a manual continent, it was a perpetual peace, which of course did not happen at the time, but we've enjoyed it since. And crucially, for the universal declaration of human rights, the United Nations, now the sustainable development goals, you have people coming together, nations coming together,

some of them not from a Judeo-Christian tradition by any means, but who can agree on things like, well, it's really better if people live than if they die of disease. It's better if they die in their first year of life. It's better if kids go to school. It's better if we don't go to war. It's better if we have a clean environment.

All these things that we have in common because we're human beings. I wish I could agree on the lack of utility of unnecessary suffering, something like that. And maybe even the lack of utility of unnecessary suffering, something like that, and maybe even the lack of the utility of unnecessary malevolence. Yes, you don't need to be, all you have to do to endorse that is be a human and have the ability to to suffer or to flourish. So okay, so let me switch this a bit if you don't mind. And I'd like to

speak a bit more personally if you would. What's the consequence for you over the last year of this increasing public exposure and also controversy. And what do you think just out of curiosity about being associated with this loose IDW, which no one really joined, but just be merged out of the blue. I mean, I think all the people in it, in some sense, you're the most surprising member because, well, in some sense you're the most surprising member because well.

Well, yes, you may be the prototype. And I am more privileged, it just comes from being, not having drunk the Kool-Aid of political correctness, identitarianism, social justice, warfare, wokeness, as long as you're not part of that tribe, as long as you haven't signed up to that, and then you get associated with this,

this of course, whimsical humorous entity called the intellectual dark web. Right, right, so so you... I mean, it's a joke because of course there is a dark web. Right. Cell all kinds of... Well, it's a joke in all sorts of ways because it's a joke because of course there is a dark way. Right. Salon, I'm sorry. Well, it's a joke in all sorts of ways

because it's a ridiculous club. I mean, I've been trying to figure out what characterizes the people who've been loosely aggregated in that association. You know, and I think that a certain fortunate independence is part of it. That almost everyone in that group has their own means of support.

I mean, you're a university professor obviously and that could be taken from you, but I mean, you have nine books and many of them are best sellers. And like you have the means to keep yourself operating as an independent being, without being dependent on any necessary external bureaucracy. And I also have tenure, which means that I'm a little harder to fire than most people

in most genres. Right, right, exactly. So that gives me a certain, I used to be cynical about 10 years, kind of a unique cynicure of university professors, but there is part of the initial rationale in giving you something to read intellectual independence and really coming to appreciate. 10 years like the Canadian Senate, it's useless, except when it's absolutely necessary. Yeah, I think it's really, and politically, of course, the people in this, I mean, there is no such thing as an intellectual dark web as except for the kind of joke, but the people who are connected to it, I think to have cowtow or bow down to some of the

Hiadies that have become Orthodox on many college campuses because politically the people who have been connected to it are pretty diverse. They're very diverse. They're there's there's there's there's almost the complete range except For the absence of people who are politically correct. The other thing that's very interesting about the group, two other things I would say, is that they've been very effective users of social media, and also they don't think that their audience is stupid. You know, yes, I think that's, I think that is a true and it's one of the keys to effective teaching, to

effective communication. One of the first bits of advice I got when I paid the crossover from academia to popular writing, from an editor at a university press, he told me the mistake that academics often make when they try to reach a broad audience is they talk down. They assume that their audience is not as bright as they are. So the key is assume that your audience is your intellectual here, but they happen not to know some stuff that you know. Right. And I often that also as writing advice in my book is the sense of style, but you're also right that this independent minded people that we've been talking about, try not to use insults and put downs, not as a means of argument, not even

so much the audience being stupider, but rather being evil, that if you don't agree with me, then you are a reprehensible human being. That is definitely a mistake. Within the bounds of that group, let's say, I think it's a brand mistake, let's say, whenever that happens. So, that defines the kind of political, politically correct social justice warfare that these people are reacting

to, namely, that the mode of argument that I think we're all trying to distance ourselves from is that if you don't agree with me, then you are a moral cred. Right, right. And so, okay, so now, what's been the personal consequences for you, like you've been at the center of a fair bit of controversy? And I mean, it's very difficult to have a series of best-selling books, for example, in speaking tours and so forth,

without being controversial in some way, because it probably indicates that you're not saying anything of any real novelty or importance. But how has it affected you? And has it been a net positive or a net negative? And how are people reacting to you? Oh, it's unquestionably a net positive. And at least so far, I have certainly escaped

to be kind of the outrage mobs that we know can be aroused by advancing heterodox opinions. I have gotten some anger. I was subject of a rather bizarre incident where a panel that I was on called the Political Correctness, Electronaut Trump, where some of my remarks were spliced in the video. It was then cited by the, by all right, in neo-Nazis, which led to a kind of demonstration on the left. Fortunately, in my case, I can't complain because the New York Times stepped into my defense.

Jesse Singal wrote an op-ed with my photo adorning it, saying, how social media are making a stupid. And using the attack on me as evidence with the technology of social media. So I came out of that unscathed. On the other hand, I do live in some degree of fear, but the mob could turn on me at any moment. There was a wonderful essay by Neil Ferguson expressing a similar fear. He said, well, my wife who's made it of

a braver stuff than I tell him not to worry. She's made a braver stuff than almost getting us in the world. So I don't know. That, that was the joke, of course, is white thing I am here, so I'm the greatest people in the planet, but that was a slide, a little bit of humor for those who know this personal situation. And a reminder that people have withstood much fiercer attacks than any of us have to worry about.

Right, right, right. And how are people responding to you in public? Like when you're out in public, I mean, you're a rather striking figure, you're easy to recognize. But what happens when you go out? Well, how do you respond to you? Oh, it's positive.

I have nothing to complain about. People recognize me. And I expect after this, what we're doing now, heirs that I'll be recognized even more because I know that you have quite an odd and diverse following. But also in person as we know, people tend to often mitigate the kind of animosity that is easy to express when you're anonymous, in behind the shield of social media, remove and hand in your name. But people are a much more civil face to face. I have gotten a lot of warmth.

I've gotten to my surprise, a number of people writing to me saying that I've been good for their mental health. And that's included in my collete, I say, even though technically, like you, I'm a psychologist, unlike you, I'm not a clinical psychologist. I have no confidence whatsoever in treating anxiety, depression, psychological problems, but I even have to explain to people and ask me what I do for a living. I tend to avoid saying I'm a psychologist, even though that's what my degree is,

and the people assume that I'm a clinical psychologist, which I'm not. So I sometimes say I have a cognitive scientist because no one has any idea what that means. You know, I think you've been good for my mental health. Well, that's it. For the first time in my life, I say I've kind of earned that credential,

but some people write in, they say, I just, I'm so dejected and discouraging and downtrodden by reading the news that when I come across the data that you've presented, that humanity has been improving, it actually is good for my mental health. I don't feel as despairing for my children, for myself, for the future of my country. Right.

Well, that's a big deal. And you're also more than that. It's not, it's not only that you're Well, that's a big deal. And well, and you're also more than that. It's not only that you're saying it's deeper than that for a couple of reasons. I mean, first of all, you're a credible source. And naive optimism is worse than cynical pessimism, I think, because it's too fragile. it's too easily damaged, but your optimism isn't naive, it's data-based, and it's well researched, and so you can go

in there as a pessimist, like as a powerful pessimist, and you can think, oh, oh, well, look at that, look at that, and look at that. And it's not just one or two things, it's enough things so it starts to be a story and you think, oh, well, maybe we're not going to hell in a hand basket quite as fast as we thought we were. And then- At least not necessarily, yeah. Well, at least not necessarily, yes, well, that's something.

But then there's an implicit message there too, which is perhaps the enlightenment message itself, which is that well, not only are things getting better, but human beings are the sorts of creatures that could make things better if they chose to. And that's a radical message, I think. I mean, one of the things I've noticed about what people respond positively to in my lectures is my insistence to them that they could be, they may not be, but they could be powerful forces for good and powerful beyond, really, in some ways, beyond the limits of their imagination is that human beings unbounded, rationally, even from an enlightenment perspective, independent of the metaphysics, is that we do have the

capacity to address incredibly complicated problems, and with good will and caution and a certain degree of intelligence, we can actually make them better. And I think that that's a deeply positive message, especially for young people who've been raised on nothing but a steady diet of disenfranchisement and nihilistic pessimism about the future. Indeed. And it has been a source of tension in my own intellectual autobiography because I know that I'm not an optimist without the human condition by ideology or by background.

In fact, I wrote a book called The Blank Slate on the modern denial of human nature. We're not blank slates that we are equipped by evolution with a lot of motives, some of which are not so not so conducive to human well-being, like tribalism, like authoritarianism, like greed, like hoggative illusions, like self-exception, but that what shifted my worldview was really coming across data that came as much as surprised to me as to anyone, showing that violence has gone down and poverty has gone, how did prosperity has gone up?

And then trying to resolve that tension, how could we as a species, both burn our, burn each other alive and engage and invade the discrimination and genocide? But in the other hand, somehow manage to power this improvement. And I think it comes from the fact that we have, we're cognitively encyclotically complex. We have a number of ugly motives, but we also have some modicum of empathy.

We have self-control. We have cognitive processes that allow us to reason, we have language that allows us to share our ideas, and if we manage to channel those with the right institutions, with a commitment to free speech, to democracy, to science, to empirical testing, then we can mobilize the better angels of our nature and put them and and kind of eke out its improvement despite our worst selves. I think it's quite comical that you used a religious cell anelogies title. I mean because

I think part of the case that you're making and I would say this is a narrative case to some degree is that despite the depth of human depravity, which is definitely something that you didn't discuss in the blank slate, although not as intensely as some people have, that good, so to speak, has the capacity to triumph over evil and sorrow despite the depths of both of those. And that is also an unbelievably optimistic message, because I don't believe that you can be a credible voice for optimism. And what would you say, someone who celebrates the human spirit, unless you're very cognizant of its depths.

Because otherwise, you're just not informed. You're not going to be the right enemy. That's right. And you have to, I think, value the hard-won human institutions and norms that don't necessarily come naturally to us. Like the rule of law, like free speech, like empirical facing arguments on empirical data, things that have to be inculcated every generation.

We're not doing such a good job with generation, I sometimes think. But it's because of these games that we've invented that bring out our better side, that we have been able to overcome our inner demons, our darkening goals. I wonder sometimes too, I wonder what you think about this. I mean, you know, when I grew up, and when you grew up, you know, from the end of World War II until, let's say, 1989, there were real reasons for apocalyptic thinking in my estimation. You know, the massive buildup of the thermonuclear arsenal and the constant tension and testing between, especially the Soviets and the Western bloc, that the times when we came so close to nuclear annihilation, I think for several generations, and then also

in the 60s, the discovery of human beings as a, as let's say, a planet transforming force on an ecological level. I think there were real reasons for people to be terrified into a kind of apocalyptic pessimism. And I kind of wonder sometimes if one of the things that you're not battling against is what would you say is the revelation that that period of time in some senses over is that that particular apocalypse, God willing, has been reduced substantially in probability. And we can now start to think about the future in a positive way again, but man, it was 45 years, you know, and not counting World War II, which I think we probably should count. It was 45 years, you know, and not counting World War II, which I think we probably shouldn't count.

It was 45 years where everyone was, well, being, being talked that if they put themselves under their desks as elementary school, I was going to protect them from an atomic blast. And so I wonder if that is coming out of that. Now, that's true. I think 1989 truly was momentous. It was the end of the Cold War and the worst threats of nuclear exchange. It also led to a decline in the number of proxy wars

in Asia and Africa and South America, which people don't appreciate. You look at the horrific wars that are taking place now, such as in Yemen and Syria, and you might think that we're in a unprecedented area of warfare. But this is nothing compared to the 70s and 80s, where Africa was in flames. The war of the man killed far more people than the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and Syria combined.

There were threats like the young people of war in 1973, Richard Nixon raised the level of nuclear alerts, something that has not happened since. These really were perilous times. There's quite a part from the Cold War. Iran and Iraq fought their version of World War I, which threatened to choke the flow of oil out of the Persian Gulf, bringing the world economy to a halt. And then we lived through that. So people forget how awful the 60s, 70s, and 80s

were in terms of. Right. Well, and there was also the fact that, well, in Africa and in South America, I would say in particular, those proxy wars also being also ideological wars, absolutely stifled economic development both in South America and in Africa. And I think one of the reasons that we've seen this unparalleled improvement in economic

conditions, let's say, well, it's obvious in China because of their market reforms. But in Africa is at least in part because there isn't a codery of insane Soviet dictators dictating economic policy to African leaders that's absolutely counterproductive and pathological. And so just by removing that source of trouble, much less adding anything new and good just by getting that source of trouble, much less adding anything new and good, just by getting that source of trouble, the Africans have been able to free themselves

from the worst excesses of the most foolish economic theories in the 20th century. And I already think that started to manifest itself in the 2000s. That was part of it. And there is each effect is the others, so that poverty makes civil war more likely, and vice versa, because war is a system called development in reverse. And that nothing is worse for an economy than schools that are blown up, and people pull

that of their offices and shocked, and institutions destroyed as quickly as they can be built, markets, and transportation networks. But also, if countries are poor, and then it's true that Marx is economic ideas, the big countries poor, then it becomes more attractive to join militias and rebel groups, because the government isn't doing anything for you. And you've got a lot of young men who have nothing better

to do with their time bill, loyalty is commanded by the incompetent government. And then of course, both superpowers would fund the insurgency movements that opposed whichever government the other superpower was supporting. And so you had to amplify the problem, consequent. Yeah, qualifying the problem.

Again, people will talk about what a terrible state the world is, and now they often forget how awful the Cold War was for the, what we now call the development of, what we've been called the third world. Right, right, right, which is, okay, so let me close with this, if you would, we've had a good conversation. What are you working on at the moment that's occupying you that you have hopes for? And what are your general hopes, let's say, for the next three or four years? I mean, your career is ascendant in a manner that is true, very few people. And you have a tremendous global impact, I would say, all things considered, and one that as far as I'm concerned is

overwhelmingly to the good. What's next for you, and what would you like to see happen in the future for you over the over the next few years? Well, for the world, I would certainly like to see a push back against the authoritarian populism and a momentum going back to the forces of humanism, cosmopolitanism, of globalism, of democracy against the identitarian politics, primarily of the of the area politics, primarily of the populist rights since they are in power, but also of the campus left. But the renewal of the narrative that we, if we think about what we all have in common as human beings,

and if we apply our brain power over coming our cognitive limitations, then we can solve problems. Climate change being a big one, and I have my own views on climate change, and I'll express that in a New York Times editorial, it's coming out in a couple of days, it will work out. Oh, I'm looking forward to that.

Is that going to get you in trouble? Yes, it will. And I'll leave that as something. OK, OK, well, I'm looking forward to that. I'm looking forward to seeing what you think. It's a very complicated problem. It is a very complicated problem, but I think some of the activists are making it

make it more complex and make it worse. But I'll leave that as a little enigma until people check out that article over. It was a hint in the right now. Okay. You have an academic, and academically? And academically, I've done a, I've done a number of studies over the years

taking off from an interest in how language is used in a social context. For a large part of my career, I studied language. And it may be curious about why we don't just work out what we mean so much at the time. We issue fail threats, sexual commons that are kind of folded between the lines. We show each other, we beat around the bush,

we can't use you. That led me to the concept of common knowledge in the game, the other sense. I know something, you know something, I know you know it, you know that I know it, I know it, you know that I know that you know that I know it, I know it, I know it, I know it, I know it. Or not, cases where we each know something, I know you know it, you know that I know it, I know it, you know that I know that I know it, I know it, I know it, I know it, I know it, I know it, I know it, I know it, I know it, I know it, I know it, I know it, I know it, I know it, I know it, I know it, I know it, I know it, I know it, I know it, I know it, I know it, I know it, I know it, I know it, I know it,

I know it, I know it, I know it, I know it, I know it, I know it, I know it, I know it, I know it, I know it, I know it, I know it, I know it, I know it, I know it, I know it, I know it, I know it, I know it, I know it, I know it, I know it, I know it, I know it, I know it, I know it, I know it, I know it, I know it, I know it, I know it, I know it, I know it, I know it, it, I know it, I know it, I know it, I know it, I know it, I know it, I know it, I know it, it, I know it, I know it, I know it, I know it, I know it, I know it, I know it, it, I know it, I know it, I know it, I know it, I know it, I know it, I know it, it, or not, in cases where we each know something, you know something, you know it,

it, you know not so sure that the other guy knows that we know it, I think that's it, I think that's it, I think it's usually powerful in our social going to start writing a book in two years whose hint of title is, don't go there. I'm a knowledge and the science of civility, the hypocrisy of rage and taboo. That sounds extremely interesting. We, one of the things that I've observed, you know, is that people have a hierarchy of values. And that the deeper in the hierarchy the value is embedded. The more experiential reality is stabilized. The more it's united under a single goal and the more it's brought out of uncertainty. And I think we have rules that are like, don't disrupt too much of someone's

map territory with any given utterance. And so we tend a bit to play on the periphery, and it might be too much for you to stand to be outright objected by, or rejected by someone that you're sexually attracted to. You know, because it casts light on your validity as a acceptable source of DNA, let's say, but to play a bit and to you to accept carefully and casually delivered playful rejection without it having to go way down into the depths of your character. It's like to me it's like a minimal necessary forced doctrine. Yes, I think there is there is there is a lot of that just just the ego threat being rejected. But in addition, we divide our social relationships into qualitative, different categories.

And a sexual relationship really is different from a friendship or a workplace relationship. Inescapable fact, there often people are sexually attracted to each other, sometimes want to attract it attracted to the other but not vice versa. Yeah, I wasn't. No. No, not too often. Indeed.

And there is something that is inherently threatening about a, say, a professional relationship with honest friendship is the sex is kind of out there. If you've blurred it out, even though paradoxically, any grown-up knows there's going to be sexual attraction in a lot of heterosexual relationships that are not overtly sexual. So he might know it, she might know it, but as long as he doesn't know that she knows that he knows that she knows that he knows it, then you can work under the fiction that the relationship is 100% platonic or 100% professional.

There's something about learning it out which generates common knowledge. You decide to deny that the other one knows that they know it. Right. Unequivocally changes the qualitative nature of their relationship. Once it's as we say, it's out there. It's out there, you can't take it back, it can't as long as the bell can't be unlonged, and it's your relationship. Under two, it's because the explicit statement, imagine that you have implicit motivations and many of them, and as implicit motivations, they have a relatively low probability of being manifested.

But when you formalize that implicit motivation in speech, do you suppose you move the probability of enacting it up the hierarchy and therefore pose more of a threat to the other person? Is that the speech is somehow closer to action than being. I think so, but I think it's even deeper than that. I don't think it's just sort of an analog shift along the scale. There is something qualitatively different about blurting something out. That's a deep reason.

I think we subdivide our relationships into different types, a 40 subordinate, equal sharing and and commonality of interest, exchange, these can take place over different resources, over money, over sex, over aid. And we are very attentive to which one holds between a given dry ad, you know, particular time. Each one is a different coordination game as the game theorist could put it,

where we both begin if we're on the same cell, if we're on the same page. But if we're, we have discrepant understandings, then there can be in mild form awkwardness and barism in the extreme case shock of age. Well, it's reminiscent of the problem of dual relationships that are often talked about in professional ethics, you know, that it's very of course very difficult to have a unit-dimensional relationship with someone.

But you're constantly warned ethically, not to, for example, if you're a clinical psychologist, not to make a friend out of your client. And to say nothing of a sexual partner, right? Well, that's absolutely nothing of that. Yes, exactly. The sorts of things happen between professors and students. And so, and I think, to some degree, they're inevitable. But the dual relationship problem also means that you end up playing at least two games with different outcomes.

And so the aims become blurry and the degree of conceptual confusion also increases. And now, I'm not exactly sure why making that explicit would necessarily make it worse, but it does seem to be associated with what would you call an unwise complexification of the situation. Absolutely. It is that kind of social, emotional dynamic that I will be writing about in Mad Dogoghear. I exactly have paradox. Well, I'm very much looking forward to reading it. And I know also one of my dreams, by the way,

I don't know what you think about this. I think it would be fun. And I suppose this is perhaps an invitation. I think it would be fun to I suppose this is perhaps an invitation. I think it would be fun to sit down with you and Ben Shapiro and have a talk about religion and the enlightenment and the state of the modern world. I don't know if you'd ever be interested in doing something like that, not a political discussion, but because I think there is something to be fought out in a serious way between the enlightenment types like you and like Sam Harris, for example, because I would put him in the same, well,

not in the same category, but in a similar way. Yeah, I think we're, we're, we're, there's a lot of overlap. Yeah, yeah. And, and, and then people like Sarah, like Ben and I, who are, and maybe the union analysts, for example, who tend to view the historical movement towards increased freedom and prosperity as a longer process. There's really something there that needs to be hashed out, and it's really complicated, and might be fun to have a conversation about that at some point if you if you're ever interested in if you ever have the time.

I accept the invitation. All right, all right. Well, I'll talk to Ben because I think we could have a good conversation, you know, and and and scrap it out a bit and see if we could get somewhere because. Because like I really liked your books, I really liked enlightenment now. And I regard myself in many ways as a pro enlightenment figure. I mean, I'm very scientifically minded. I've done a lot of empirical research and learned a tremendous amount from that.

And I certainly believe that the mastery of science and technology has been a major contributor to the furtherance of human well-being. And there's something to be said for the solidity of an objective materialist view of the world. But there's an element there that seems to me to be troublesome, that leads to a kind of nihilism, which interestingly enough, you happen to be fighting with some of your optimism, which is quite nice to see. But I think there's fertile discussion there to reconcile, maybe to reconcile some of the unnecessary tension between the different streams of thought that have made Western culture and world culture, for that matter, the

remarkable creation that it actually is. I think that could be fruitful indeed. All right. Well, is there anything else that you'd like to mention to people? At any forthcoming talks you have, or public appearances, or things you'd like to draw their attention to, or are we at the end

of a fruitful discussion? The problem is we could just keep going. So where to start? I will be, often on the road, I'm often on the road. I'm often given public lectures and discussions. I have one. I'm having a public event with Paul Kruebenen next week at Brown University.

We may not be next week by the time the circulates begin to pass. It's my then. But yeah, on my website, I have a list of upcoming events. Great. OK. Well, it's pretty fun to see that there's a public audience for this sort of discussion, okay, what's pretty fun to see that there's a public audience for this sort of discussion, eh? Who would have guessed? Much more than anyone would have

guessed just five years ago. Yeah, it's a lot more popular for ideas and debate. Absolutely. Another reason for optimism. That's hope. Very nice talking to you and thank you very much for taking the time and good luck with your your talks and your and your academic endeavors and with your attempts to help people understand that there's reason to be hopeful now and perhaps even more reason to be Reason to be hopeful now and perhaps even more reason to be hopeful in the future and about people. That's a hell of a thing for someone who doesn't think there's a blank slate. Indeed. Thank you, Jordan. Thanks for having me on. Great pleasure talking with you.

Okay, thank you. Let's stay in touch. Bye-bye. Bye. If you found this conversation meaningful, you might consider picking up Dad's books, maps of meaning the architecture of belief, or his newer bestseller, 12 Roads for Life, and antidote to chaos. Both of these works tell much deeper into the topics covered in the Jordan B Peterson

podcast. See JordanBepetersand.com for audio, e-book, and text links, or pick up the books at your favorite bookseller. Really hope you enjoyed this podcast. If you did, please leave a rating at Apple Podcasts, a comment, a review, or share this episode with a friend. Next week's podcast is going to be a 12 rules for life lecture recorded from Dad's lecture in Calgary on July 27, 2018 at the Jack Singer concert hall. Have a wonderful week, I'll the Jack Singer concert hall. Have a wonderful week. I'll talk to you next Sunday.

Follow me on my YouTube channel, Jordan B. Peterson, on Twitter, at Jordan B. Peterson, on Facebook, at Dr. Jordan B. Peterson, and at Instagram, at Jordan.B. Peterson. Details on this show, access to my blog, information about my tour dates and other events, and my list of recommended books can be found on my website, JordanB Peterson.com. My online writing programs designed to help people straighten out their pasts, understand themselves in the present, and develop a sophisticated vision and strategy for the future can be found at self-authoring.com. That's self-authoring.com.

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