The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss - Jordan B Peterson on Confronting Value, Meaning, & More

Episode Date: December 18, 2021

This exciting episode of the Origins Podcast features Jordan B Peterson along with host, Lawrence Krauss. They explore Jordan's upbringing and background, the nuances of meaning and value, as well as the difficulties and opportunities of doing research in our current cultural climate. Many viewers will enjoy seeing a unique side of Jordan B Peterson that shines through during this discussion and it is planned to be the first of many, so please consider subscribing and supporting the podcast to receive notifications of upcoming episodes! Get full access to Critical Mass at lawrencekrauss.substack.com/subscribe

Hi, welcome to the Origins Podcast. I'm your host Lawrence Krause. I'm extremely excited about this episode with Jordan Peterson. Jordan and I did an episode of his podcast some time ago, during which he peppered me with questions, and we decided we do a second podcast where I could return the favor for the most part. And in this discussion that we had, I was able to probe a lot of aspects that I've tried to understand about Jordan's writing and his thinking. some of which I found difficult to appreciate. And we talked about his own background, as interest in becoming a psychologist,

and also studies in addiction and personality. And then we moved to a topic that we both decided we wanted to focus on, which was in some sense, the nature of meaning based on his book, Maps of Meaning. And I wanted to parse some of the ideas that he talks about there a little more carefully, which we did, and talked about things from existential threats,

to values and what you mean by values, to the nature of narrative and life as storytelling. It was a wide-ranging discussion, including also discussing such things as how to do research in a time era of PC commandments that make that research difficult. I particularly enjoyed the discussion, and I think many of you who might have listened to Jordan before will find a new side of Jordan here as we try to explore in depth the ideas behind some of what he talks about and where he's coming from. So I hope you enjoy this as much as I did. For those of you who are watching this on YouTube, please consider subscribing to our YouTube channel

because most of the people who watch it on YouTube actually don't subscribe. It helps us, but it also helps you because you can get notices of upcoming podcasts as well. And as you may know, the podcast is produced by the Origins Project Foundation, which is a non-profit foundation designed to encourage communication about science and important ideas. So if you want to support the podcast in another way, please consider becoming a subscriber on Patreon, which will support the foundation directly. And you'll also be able to see and watch all of the episodes without any advertisements as well. Either way, I hope you enjoy the podcast. And I hope you enjoy in particular this podcast with Jordan Peterson.

Well, welcome, Jordan. It's great to have you now on my podcast after I was on yours. It's really great to have a chance to talk to you again. Well, thank you. I'm really looking forward to it. And I hope you are. I should say that this has perhaps been for me one of the most difficult and exasperating and furrating preparations for a podcast I've had to do. I have enough notes here for about 21 hours. We won't go more than two, but I know I have a lot because there's so much to parse. So what was what made it difficult and exasperating? It's kind of a compliment. It is. It is. Well, you know, I want to give a. I want to give a.

preface because I want to be in in in full disclosure about how I've come to understand you before and after and after our last meeting I I I'm often certain I know for a long time when I've read you that I'm not sure I understand what you're saying just in the reading I've had a hard time understanding what you're saying or at least whether it's me or that or the or the or the work and before I met you there's a line from the Dick Van Dyke Show from Carl Reiner that I always remember where he said one on the surface seems vague is in reality meaningless.

Yeah, yeah. And I've, and when I read a lot of the stuff, I thought, well, this is vague. I don't exactly know where it's coming from. And as I read you, and now I've been reading in preparation for this, I've been reading you in depth. I've read you, I'd read you before. I alternate between this sense of some things I think are just clearly true, but they kind of seem like truisms. Like I often wonder whether when I first, my first reaction of 12

rules for life was maybe it should be 12 pages. I mean, the Ten Commandments was one tablet. And, and whether one, you know, it's a long book. And you know, you write and you write a lot. It's just the property of the way right. And that and, and, and then sometimes there were illusions and discussions that I really couldn't comprehend or I thought were vague. sometimes there were insights and there are insights that seem incredibly deep and profound and true that you're reaching towards and I find them fascinating and sometimes there are statements that I disagree with completely. So I alternate between all of that and it's been and it's and it's a fascinating way to go. I was naturally skeptical before I, before we had our dialogue. I want to tell you that. A skeptical physical physicist? Yes. Really? Exactly. But I was skeptical of you because I couldn't understand. lot of it and and and and there were lots of there were lots of reasons but I've been primarily was that Carl Reiner quote that kept me in the back of my head mm-hmm

but after our last dialogue I totally changed my view because you your questions were deep and interesting and curious and what I became convinced of was that you were a man who's seriously wants to understand the world and engage in conversation and I and it switched and my respect for you just went through the roof as a result because that that conversation demonstrated to me that you're earnest and serious in your desire to understand the world and then I decided to look at what you wrote in a different way and try and seriously understand it so that's you know I hadn't expected that and the strong connection that I do feel as an academic and as a human being towards you which is which is a

wonderful thing because I love I love being wrong or at least I love having my viewpoints change and they certainly did after our discussion. So I wanted to, in full disclosure, I wanted to say I came into our first discussion as a complete skeptic and more so maybe even suspicious. And then it changed. I'm very glad to hear that. And it is good to be wrong and find that out, unless everything in your life is so perfect that it's clear that you know everything.

You know, yeah, yeah. Well, we, now the other thing I want to do, do. I want to give you a chance to ask some questions too because I enjoy your questions. And I know in some of our email dialogues back and forth between, I know there's some things you've been reading that you want to about about cosmology. They want to talk about. So I want to, I'll give you a chance to ask some of those after in the latter part. Or maybe if there's a relevant point in the middle, you can bring it up and feel free to ask the question in the middle as far as I'm concerned. I know the things about fine tuning and, and a universe before our universe. There's a number

of things. Also, I want to, for the listeners, I want to preface this, because what we discussed, you asked me really said, the thing you want to discuss with me was mostly maps of meaning. And that's what I've now focused on. And in particular, what you suggested, I really parse carefully was from the new book, Beyond Order, Rule 11. And so that's what I've done, just so you're aware. I've tried to try. So the discussion I want to have, and you've written a lot of different things will be primarily about those things, but of course it'll it'll overlap with other things. But that's where the discussion is going to focus on. And can you remind me what Rule 11 was? I'm having some memory troubles. That's all right.

I can never remember what I write the day after I do either. And the thing is about Rule 11, like many things when I read you, is that the title of Rule 11, it only by the end of it, I kind of vaguely understood where the title came from. Rule 11 really seems to be. to me to be a summary of maps of meaning in fact but it's do not allow yourself to become resentful deceitful or arrogant oh yes and and really that and those and as you and as I now understand understanding from having read you that the sources of those of those three ills are really related to the sources of the problems of dealing with the the meaning the map of meaning in a sense and so that's why

it was a good place I think for you to direct me to yes I remember why now, yep. Okay. But before we get to those, because it is an origins podcast, I want to go into your origins because I know some of the things, but I have some questions about this. So, you know, I know you're very interested. In fact, in some sense, in my mind, origins of me, I mean, Maps of Meaning is really about the origins of the psyche in some sense, but I want to understand the origins of your psyche first. So that's where I want to go. Born in Edmonton? Yes. Okay. And, um, What influenced, what, what did your parents do?

My dad was a teacher. Of what? And my mother was a nurse, trained as a nurse, and then she worked as a librarian. That was mostly her career, was a librarian at the local college. And my dad was a teacher for most of the time I was at home. A high school teacher or a, or a, junior high teacher, or elementary school teacher, grade six. He was the vice principal of our local elementary school. And he taught me when I was in grade six, some classes.

Oh, that must have been an interesting experience itself. It was extremely interesting, both for good and not good. Yeah, I can imagine it's difficult. I once taught my daughter took a summer course in physics, and I taught her. And it was really fascinating for me because I saw a very different side of her in class. She was very different as a student than she was as a daughter. I imagine your father was a very different teacher than he was as a father. No, no, he was pretty much, well, I'll tell you a story about my dad in grade six.

And so, you know, by grade six, kids are pretty noisy and horrible. And they get really bad in grade seven. But by grade six, they're already pretty bad. And my homeroom teacher was not my dad. He was the principal. My home room teacher was the principal. My dad taught math. And for at least 10 minutes before he walked in to teach our math class,

no one said anything. They were quiet. Yeah, my dad was not someone you messed around with. And so, and he was. like that at home too like he's a tough guy my dad and and and he's a good teacher he's a very good teacher he taught me to read when I was a very young and spent a tremendous amount of time with me but he was not someone you you trifled with lightly and all the kids knew that he had that kind of authority that's rare actually but necessary for teachers and he didn't really have to ever resort

to any kind of discipline other than that underlying threat of absolute mayhem that was there all the time and so and so that that had some trouble for me because some of this kids didn't really like him, even though they respected them. And now and then they took that out on me, but, you know, whatever. There's all sorts of things that happen when you're a kid. Yeah, it's all character-building. And as we'll talk about, both you and I agree that, you know, some bad things happening is an important part of your life

and that you shouldn't be shielded from it. Did it, so did your dad sort of practice tough love? I mean, because I kind of, you know, that's sort of, in some sense, one gets a sense that he didn't suffer fools gladly okay and so so yes i would say he did do that he had very high high standards and um although he's also extremely good with little kids my dad was really had a great hand with kids from say well two to 12 he was he wasn't so fond of teenagers and you know you can understand why well yes yes but he's great with little kids he was he's still alive and he's great with Mike he was great with my kids too oh that's great so so so he I don't know he

has this genuine unbelievably genuine love for little kids you know and and it's a cool thing to see in someone who's so fundamentally tough you know my dad's a hunter and a trapper and and a sharpshooter and yeah so he he's he's the sort of guy who yeah yeah yeah I was too soft-hearted really to hunt I did trap with him but even that because I'm temperamentally I'm very high in compassion and so that sort of thing was hard on me we didn't see exactly eye to eye temperamentally there he taught me to shoot I can shoot pretty well not as well as him he was a provincial level shooter and our house was full of guns it's like 400 rifles and yeah my wife's father was like that he taught her how to he had she had guns from the time she was young he taught her how to shoot and how to take care of them responsibly and and I guess she she she went to shooting with him for ducks but she drew the line she didn't want to do deer eventually couldn't do that Did, do you think, you know, that influence of that tough love, I mean, when I hear in some sense, even before I knew much about you, I knew of, in some sense, you were preaching tough love in a way, you know, man up, you know, basically get over it, get over it and just move on.

Well, you know, it's not really true. What I was pointing out more was the danger of regarding yourself as a victim. And a lot of that was influenced by my reading of Freud in particular. because Freud was very concerned about the pathology of the devouring mother. And you see that in Jung as well. But Freud really came up with that insight to begin with, and that an excess of compassion is destructive. And I see that manifesting itself in victim mentality and what that does to people.

And I also see it as a manifestation of the female proclivity towards authoritarianism. Now, it's funny to think of that as a manifestation of compassion, but we don't know much about female political pathology. because females haven't been involved in in the political sphere for that long and but to In the modern world in the ancient world. Well, exactly. Yes, yes, yes. But to think that there's no tilt towards pathology that's specifically feminine is well, that's naive. It's foolish and to not think that an excess of compassion can be a catastrophe is to be blind. And so and the Freudians were very, I think it's a quote from Freud or at least one of his astute followers that the good mother

necessarily fails. And so what I see, so it's not so much tough love, I would say, is that the proper balance for a child is something like an embrace, right? That's the maternal embrace, and that's absolutely necessary. And encouragement to transform, and that's more the paternal territory. Now, both parents can play a role in those two territories. I'm speaking more symbolically in some sense. But, you know, women are tilted towards compassion. temperamentally, they're higher in trait compassion than men on average. There's individual variability that's quite substantial. In a variability, my wife is more encouraging of transformation.

And I'm, well, she's also probably more compassionate, too, than me. She probably has both traits more than me. Yeah, well, I'm at least in terms of agreeableness and probably negative emotion. I have quite a feminine temperament. And so I'm probably more agreeable than my wife. I think when we took my personality test, that was the case. And so we're a bit mixed on that front. When kids used to come over and visit my kids,

we used to have a talk with the kids when they come over. Teenagers is like, we're really happy you're here, and you're welcome here. But if you do anything stupid and we never see you again, that would be just fine. And that worked pretty well. And when they first came to my house, they were always more scared of me,

but after they came about five times, they were more scared of my wife. So there you go. I can see that. Now, let me, the other question that comes to mind when I hear about your father, And I didn't plan to go this way. And I'm certainly not blind trying to cycle unless you because I couldn't. But did he affect, did his teaching style affect your teaching style?

You've been a teacher for a long time. My understanding is that you're not a teacher that your students are afraid of. Rather, they think you're rather compassionate. But do you think they were quiet before they came into your classroom? That's a good question. I don't know if my dad's teaching style overtly affected me. I think all the interactions he had with me when he was teaching me to read did. And I think his attitude towards learning did.

And his fundamental sense of encouragement. Like I always knew. And this made me very rare among my friends, by the way, because most of them have pretty pathological relationships with their fathers, where I grew up in northern Alberta. My dad, I knew he always had my back, even when we were at odds with one another fundamentally. And even when he was displeased with me,

it was almost always, you know, barring human frailty. because he was disappointed that I wasn't living up to the high standards he expected of me. And they were high, and sometimes I think they were perhaps unreasonably high. It's very hard to say, because it's not that easy to figure out how to balance that embracing compassion with the compliment that high standards truly are, right? I mean, that's a tough thing to get right. And now my mom, I always got along really well with my mom, and I could make her laugh. She's a lovely person.

and she's very easy to be around. And so I was fortunate my parents because the toughness of my father was quite nicely counterbalanced by the warmth of my mother. And so, you know, I was fortunate in that regard and many others, but certainly that. Now you eventually became an academic

and a practicing psychologist, clinical psychologist. Did they encourage, well, did they encourage your reading, your academic? Oh yes. Okay. Oh yes. Books were very important in my family and I learned when I was four like books were at the top of the list and I used to virtually every night. When I was 10, 9, 10, 11, I read a book a day. Science fiction. My neighbor across the alley had a huge science fiction collection and he used to just let me go in there and take like 15 books and then I

bring them back in two weeks and take 15 more. And so I was reading a book a day up until I think all the way through high school. I started reading more literature in junior high. a librarian there who was a pretty educated woman by the standards of our hometown sort of tilted me towards genuine literature and that's when I started reading I would say seriously and so I was 13 when that happened so but yes books were very important in our household you read science fiction literature did you read any much nonfiction or was to primarily fiction when you were younger it was mostly fiction when I was younger yeah yeah no I didn't switch to nonfiction

until I, well, after I read Dostoevsky when I was in my early 20s, almost all fiction seemed sort of bloodless. But also by that time I was starting my research career and I got a lot more interested in nonfiction. I also think that's a maturation issue and I'm not saying that in a negative sense towards fiction, is that at some point it just didn't have the same attraction for me as nonfiction started to. Yeah. No, I know the feeling.

I mean, I'm trying to relate it because I, I, I think it's incredibly important and useful. I mean, I read, well, I had more time, it seemed to me then, but I read, I just read an incredible amount when I was younger. All the time, that's what I did during the summer, even during, just reading. It was a way to get away from the family, too. I just would immerse myself in reading. And you're right, it was mostly, well, there was some science fiction and literature. But one of the reasons I asked you this is because it's not surprising to me that because in some sense you're arguing that that all of understanding comes from stories in a way. Yeah, yeah. Well, that's the thing about the...

It's not surprising that your own understanding began with stories. I think psychologically it seems it makes sense. Yeah, well, and also that switch to nonfiction, let's say, did dovetail with my... I started to be much more analytic in relationship to fiction at some point, especially when I started thinking as a clinical psychologist and a research psychologist, I got more interested in, well, oh yeah, these are stories. Well, stories are a particular kind of information. Okay, well, what are they exactly? What's going on there psychologically? And I was doing a lot of reading in that point, too, at the neurophysiology level and animal behavioral biology, essentially, and a lot of it about perception. And I came to realize that the most advanced researchers into

perception were essentially making the argument that we actually look at the world through a story. And that really, that was really quite the key insight. I really developed that insight when I was reading Jeffrey Gray's book, the Neuropsychology of Anxiety. And he doesn't ever say that we perceive through a story, but the frame that he used to describe perception was a narrative frame. And so that was extremely interesting to me. It was a key insight.

Yeah, no, well, that's, I wonder where you got that. I mean, that's, again, that seems to be a central, one of your central thesis is that the world, seeing, we see the world of stories and that's what determines their meaning. And we'll get into that. But it's interesting that it came, that realization came later, but your own interest in stories was really generic. I mean, it was not, by nature, you were interested in stories as a young person. Yeah, well, and it's so interesting how powerful that interest is among young people. It's easy to teach a kid anything if you embedded in a story.

And then even later when I was writing, like when I was writing my more popular books, I also knew by that time technically that facts inside stories were much more effective. And so the story, well, partly I think because we also remember in stories. And stories are about action and we're really interested in action. Yeah, sure. Yeah. Well, now the it's interesting because

it's kind of sad in a way that people get I remember my daughter stopped being interested in reading because she was forced to read books that she went in I guess probably middle school read books that she hated in school and and and

taught by people who hated books yeah and and her own love of therefore our own love of reading as something you do as a or stories as something you do for pleasure, you know, went away. And that was, that was, that's sad. I remember in grade eight, this just drove me crazy. I usually read the whole language arts curriculum for the year in the first day. Oh, really? Wow. And so, yeah, yeah, it was, I was very fast reader. And I remember who had a teacher in grade eight. And I said, I told her, I think two days in, I said, I already read all these books. What

should I do? She said, read them again. Oh, God. I thought, Yeah, oh God is right, like in a major way. It's really, that's your bloody attitude. You can't give me another book. So I used to put books behind the books I was supposed to be reading and just read them. Yeah, there's a famous. Delinquent reading. That was my specialty.

Yeah, that's right. I remember that Amrines me of a famous, I don't know whether it was from a movie or whatever about a kid who, you know, normally they've got playboy behind their math book, but basically he had his serious books behind Playboy. Yeah, right, right, exactly. Okay, you went, interestingly, so your parents who encouraged, they, did they encourage you to consider being an academic

or they just encourage you to go wherever you want it, to follow whatever was? Yes, yes, yes. Now, I was interested that you went to what looked like a community college before you went to university. Is that, yes. Was that, I'm surprised,

unless that was a normal trajectory where you're from. It was. Well, the normal trajectory where I was from was to drop out of school in grade 9 and go work on oil rigs. And so, you know, going to college, it was expected in my family. It was an implicit expectation that I would go to college university. The level that was different. My dad and my mom both had bachelor's degrees. And I don't think there was anybody in either of their family that had ever advanced past that.

And so that wasn't part of the landscape. Right. And that wasn't for me even until I was. was through my degree. I never considered going further. I didn't really even, in some sense, I didn't really even understand the distinction between bachelor's, master's, and PhD, you know, because I hadn't met anybody. I don't think by that point that had a master's degree, not in Fairview. There might have been some, but there weren't very many. So Fairview is a small town outside of Edmonton, is it? Four hundred miles north. Yeah, way outside. Oh, it's, I, I thought

you lived in Edmonton. So I, okay. No, no, that makes much more sense. I was wondering why in a big city your father would be your teacher, but if you're in a small town, that often happens. It was just scraped out of the prairie 50 years beforehand. It was the end of the railway. It was the northernmost reach of the prairies and the last place settled, likely, really settled in North America. Okay, that makes them a more sense than you would have gone to a community college first.

But both your parents had, were obviously not from there. They both had, neither my parents happened as it worked out, have either graduated high school. But your parents had both gone. University in Alberta? Yes. Okay. Saskatchewan. Saskatchewan.

And then they moved up there to work. They were. Yes. Okay. Now, so, okay, so they said, go what you want to do. And then you took, but your interest in psychology wasn't originally the case. You studied political science and literature. And there's a, and you fell out of love with political science.

I I uh there's a there's a there's a discussion here somewhere in um in in in fact maps of meaning as you talk about losing interest in political science yeah well the thing is I was really interested in well I was interested in politics to begin with I ran for the vice presidency of the socialist party NDP in Alberta when I was 14 oh really yeah yeah I was quite quite engaged in politics when I was a kid and I was I've always considered in the back of my mind a political career, but it has always fought against, I would say, my more

aesthetic and psychological interests, and they've always won. And with political science, when I went to that community college where I got a great education, by the way, the teachers were really good, the profs were really good, and we had little tiny seminars, five or six people in the first year, and they all loved to teach. I had like six great professors, so it was wonderful. It was wonderful, man. And I like political science to begin with because we were reading philosophical classics. But then as I advanced in political science, there was this implicit assumption that people's values, essentially that we were motivated by economic interest. And I thought, yeah, but why are we motivated by economic interest?

I was interested in something under that that was never discussed by the political scientists. Their axiomatic presupposition was pseudo-Marxist in some sense. you know, that our fundamental motivations are economic. And that's true because we don't want to starve to death. But it wasn't true enough for me, for the questions I was interested in. And what I really started to dominate my interest was war and atrocity. And I just became obsessed by that. Now, this is interesting to me, because, by the way,

what I'm going to do throughout this discussion, if I can, is I'm going to refer. America going to quote you on, because then I'm going to ask me to sort of, Don't do that out. I am because then I'm going to ask you to explain to me what it means sometimes. Okay. But this early on in Mathsumini, you actually discussed this in a way that I think is relevant to understanding the importance of meaning for you. You said, I could not believe, and this resonates with what you just said, I could not

believe and still do not believe that commodities, natural resources, for example, had intrinsic and self-evident value. In the absence of such value, the worth of things had to be socially or culturally or even individually determined. This act of determination appeared to me moral, appeared to me to be a consequence of the moral philosophy adopted by the society, culture, or person in question. What people valued economically merely reflected

what they believed to be important. This meant that real motivation had to lie in the domain of value, of morality. The political scientists I studied did not see this and did not think it was relevant. Well, when I read that, of course, that's a way better answer to the one I gave you well sometimes when one writes things one thinks about them a little more carefully but but I find it enlightening because it's it not just because

it reflects your view of political science but it clearly reflects the underlying view you're trying to get across in what you're saying in what you're saying throughout master meaning as far as I can tell throughout everything that that that there is that that objects themselves have no meaning, but we ascribe meaning to things, and it's based on a variety of things which will get into, some of which are cultural and basis. And so I was interested to see that your disillusionment with political science was due to the, in some sense, an emerging idea, which probably wasn't even yet conscious in your mind that you eventually produced in maps and meaning and some of the other things you've been writing about. Yeah, well, I mean, people

obviously fight in wars sometimes over economic issues but they also fight wars over religious issues and they do that a lot more i think of course right and right now our political trouble in the west i believe is religious fundamentally and we can get into that what i mean by that because i mean that psychologically i i try not to actually speak religiously because i think it muddies the water most of the time i'd rather speak psychologically and we could get into that distinction too and anyway I had the sense that, no, there's something much deeper here underneath the surface, which the political scientists are treating as an axiomatic fact and not investigating. So, and then I, well, that's what led me into psychology, really.

I was going to say eventually, so you first, but the first degree you did was political science, right? I did a three-year degree that was political science and literature. Then I worked for a year. Then I took nothing but psychology for a year. You decided, yeah, you came back. I was from press. So you have two BAs, as it. is. Yes.

Rather than two BSs, I guess. Yeah. I probably have 10 of those. Well, yeah, so I want to get to your emerging interest in psychology, but you interested, you said you were fascinated by war. Yet at the same time, you said you were, it was more atrocity. It was more the Nazi thing was really, yeah, and then later that what happened in the Soviet Union and China, but it was the Nazi concentration camp issue that really, it just wouldn't go away from me.

It just, and I don't know why. Like that happened at 13. I remember, I wrote an essay in grade 7 on the concentration camps, and there was a Jewish dentist in our town who had a tattoo from the camps. And he was my dentist, and I had seen the tattoo. And I asked him if I could talk to him about it. And he said, no, and you know, fair enough. But that interest was there at 13.

Wow. So, yeah, and that's weird, eh? I mean, who knows what hooks you way down deep and where that comes from? I mean, part of it was. You should know more than me. Yeah, well, our deepest intuitions, they guide us rather than being under our control, and they're deeply rooted in our temperament, our biology, and in things we certainly don't understand. Part of it was kind of an obsession about the Cold War and thermonuclear catastrophe, you know,

and that was pretty typical of my generation. How old are you? I'm a little older than you. I'm 67, so I guess I'm five years older than you or something. Yeah, same thing, though, right? And so that was always lurking in the background. And my friends and I used to talk about that a fair bit. And then I guess when I started thinking about that more deeply,

that led me into what had happened in World War II. And then it was what happened in the camps, especially, that proclivity to eradicate. And I was interested in that psychologically, not politically precisely, at the level of the individual. And that's always been, that's, I think, why I never did go after a political career. I just got way more interested in individual level of analysis. Now, but you, but interestingly, of course, you made as a number of people do,

that you were, and you were sort of socialist and then moved away, and you said you're conservative by nature. Interestingly, you said that Orwell influenced you in that regard, but Orwell also was fascinated by atrocity. Yes. And impacted. So is that what attracted to Orwell in the first place or not? Well, part of, I think, what attracted me to Orwell was that he's just such a great writer.

Yeah, he is. He's such a great writer, especially as an essayist, nonfiction writer. Road to Wiggin Pair is just a deadly book. And it's the sort of book that's very attractive to intelligent socialists. Because like those working class people, man, you think your life is rough. You should read. Those people had to, like, crawl to work underground in the coal mines, in tunnels that they couldn't stand up straight in for two miles, before they got to work.

Yeah, right. So it's an amazing book, but Orwell was a very astute critic of socialist thinking as well, although he was also very sympathetic to it. So I loved reading Orwell. Well, interestingly, I want to pick up on one thing, which I read, because I want you to have a chance to, in some sense, respond. So you had said somewhere that Orwell basically got you thinking about,

turned you off from socialism because he became, convinced you, he basically convinced you that socialists themselves didn't care about poor people, they just didn't like rich Well, look, I went to a lot of these NDP conventions, new Democratic Party conventions and I had like a front row seat because the librarian was the wife of our

MLA, our legislative assembly member. He was the only socialist in Alberta and the only person who was in opposition for like 15 years. And he was voted in by the people in my constituency, not because they were socialist, but because he was really a good man. And so I met the Premier of Saskatchew, and I met Ed Broadbent, who was the leader of the NDP in Canada,

and labor leaders, and I got to sit and listen to them talk and sometimes sing old union songs. And a lot of them were, they were admirable people, a lot of them, and they really cared about the working class. It wasn't a facade, and they were honest. And I don't remember any of those discussions where I thought something was off. But at the conventions, there were often demonstrations, and there were a lot of low-level activists of the sort who became. woke the woke crowd later and I just kind of recoiled from them psychologically and then at the same time and I talk about this and Maps of Meaning a bit I was sitting on the board of governors at that local community college and there was all these

self-made guys there most of them were immigrants because there was an immigrant place and they were all conservative politically and temperamently and I really respected them and so that really put a lot of existential angst into me because on the one hand you know intellectually I was attracted to the so socialist ideas and maybe on compassionate grounds too who knows but then I had this countervailing tendency which was well yeah but I don't really like the activist types they really drive me crazy and I respect these guys so that was hard on me I didn't know exactly what to do and then well then what I did do is I realized that I didn't know anything

that's what happened and that was my roommate who taught me that you know he he was he kicked around a lot he was a little older than me still a really good friend of mine he's tough guy came from an even smaller town than me, rough upbringing, real cowboy type, tough as a boat. He came back to college and got literate. And we had some good talks continually. And one of the things he said to me was, you know, that ideology of yours, that just doesn't explain the world. And I thought, by then I kind of knew that, but that really crystallized it for me. And then I also realized that I thought I knew way more than I actually did because I had imbued that ideology.

And it gave me a map, right, of everything. Yeah. But then I realized, well, look, you haven't had a family. I had worked a lot by then because I started working very young. But there was just, I just didn't know anything to speak of. And so then I thought, well, I'm never going to consider a political career until I'm a competent person. Because I could have had a political career. I knew it when I was like 17.

Yeah. No, I can see it. Yeah. You certainly have a, yeah, I can see it. You have a way of capturing people in your discussions. And, but okay, so it was more of the people there because, you know, there was, there's a, you, you probably know of this rather scathing review of you by Nathan Robinson and. Oh, yes, he's fun. And, but he, he, his argument was, well, you, you, you didn't understand Orwell because he said, you know, yeah, right.

Orwell turned you off from, and Orwell's whole point was you shouldn't not like socialism, but just because you don't like socialists. And, oh, no, that wasn't Orwell's whole point. Or one of Orwell's points was, you should be skeptical of people who say they're acting in the best interests of others and are also simultaneously after power. Yeah. So, yeah, I don't think I misunderstood Orwell. And I, you know, and Robinson can think that if he wants, if that's comforting. But I don't think so. Yeah, I want to give you a chance to respond to that.

Okay. Yeah. So, but, but, so, um, look, it's not like I'm not sensitive to left-wing concerns. No, of course. Like, I understand. Look, I, part of the reason I really don't like left-wing ideal. is because they don't take the issue of inequality seriously enough. They think it's a consequence of capitalism.

It's like, no, it's way worse than that. It's way deeper than that. And that's a big problem because it is a problem inequality. And if it's so deep that even getting rid of capitalism won't solve it, like it's a real existential problem, and it's threatened many societies with complete chaos. So, but that's not the solution. Like, it's capitalism that causes inequalities.

He's like, no, that's stupid. Sorry. It's too able to label things, and we'll get in it. Well, Lawrence, you might know. You might know. Do you know about the work of the econo physicists? I know of some of it. I have been, like many things, skeptical.

Yeah, well, fair enough, you know. But there are physicists who've modeled such things as the distribution of money into a society using the same equations that they use to describe the distribution. of gas into an atmosphere. Diffusion, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So it's really, well, it points to something way deep down, right? And that's something like the proclivity to get more, more easily once you already have,

and the proclivity to lose more, more easily when you don't have. It's not linear. There's a non-linear function there, and it's way under things. You know, like many things, it's more easy to deal with the large groups of people than individuals. That's one of the reasons psychology itself is probably so hard. People as groups behave in ways that just, like particles, just like galaxies. On the large scales, it's easier to understand if you have many things you can argue statistically. And that's one of the reasons why I've always

sort of like to look at, you know, in some sense, at large-scale structures. By the way, I do know a number of my colleagues. I remember when I was at Harvard, one of my, a really good physicist and cosmologist that later on actually ended up going into neuroscience. But for a while, he decided he would be going to economics because the simple thing was he looked and he said, well, you know, physics is getting really hard. But if you look at economics, these people win economics Nobel prizes for studying equations that we study in first year physics. And so all I have to do is look at the equations from second year physics and try to apply them and I can become a big person in that field. But but I have a great, I will tell you, I have a huge skepticism about economics.

Yeah, well, fair enough. The calling it, calling it as science is really, really generous. in my mind because it doesn't make predictions that are accurate. Yeah, well, you get real rich if you were an economist who could make predictions that were accurate, wouldn't you? Yeah, and, well, I mean, econometrics. Studying the data is really important, but general theories of, right now, I'm very, anyway, I'm very skeptical of it, and that will undoubtedly bring yet more hate mail.

But anyway, okay, we're almost to the point where I want to get to maps of meaning, but I wanted, I'm really interested in your own progression there, and I'm already beginning to see things, which I think are interesting, and I hope maybe others will be interested in in your own background that led you to these ideas. Well, I got obsessed when I was about, I kind of have an obsessive mind in some ways, and it runs away with me. And I got obsessed about, I think it was thermonuclear war to begin with. It's like, what the hell's going?

Why do we want to blow all this up? Why do we want to blow this up? What's going on exactly? And then that dovetailed with the atrocity issue. It's like, what's going on with the concentration camp guard exactly? and that desire to annihilate and burn. And when I mean obsessed, like I really didn't think of anything else in some sense for like 20 years, and I probably thought about that manically for 15 hours a day.

Wow. And so, you know, I had life and all that, but man, it was just there. As soon as I woke up in the morning, it was just running through my head nonstop. And I wrote Maps of Meaning three hours a day for 15 years. So, okay, well, but you know that, well, and I have to ask you, again, in all due respect, it's interesting you say you get, your mind runs away with things with you, and I can't help, but when I read it, think that somehow, I don't know if you were edited, but sometimes it seems to me you get obsessed with an idea and you run away with it.

Well, in maps of meaning in particular, see, I didn't write that really for people to read. I wrote that to figure something out. Okay. Right? So I was thinking, thinking, thinking, thinking. The later books, I wrote those for audiences. It's clear there's a difference. Oh, yeah.

Maps and Meeting, it goes on. And, yeah, I really feel like it's you talking to yourself and getting wrapped up in ideas. And that's why it was hard for me, because you got to distill from all of that what you're talking about. And at times I had a hard time. Oh, well, it's, yeah. Well, yeah, fair enough. And I'm sure. It's a flawed book, but I don't think I could make it any better now.

Even I read it. I read the audio version, recorded it last year when I was like three quarters dead. And I've thought about editing it, but I don't think I've got the brain power to dive into it and do it. It was certainly something you, it was core dump, and it would be hard to core dump again, I think. But, okay, so you got interested in psychology and, well, before that, I got to ask this. I know, I know a little bit about this, but were your parents religious? That's a hard question, but no, not really. My mother attended church, United Church, Protestant Church, and she went every Sunday.

And we went when we were little kids, but I stopped going when I was 13 because the pastor, well, because I didn't like it, but also because the pastor, the minister, he didn't, couldn't answer my questions about reconciling evolutionary theory with biblical stories. And I thought, well, you don't believe what you're saying, which is something I've often thought while sitting in church. And I was looking for an excuse anyways, and my dad didn't go to church. And so I bailed out then. And my mom didn't like that. but it wasn't like she was she wasn't overtly religious my mom is a very in the best sense a very normal sort of person you know she she's not extreme in any ways and she went to church because that's what people did and she liked to sing and she liked the community and you know she had her beliefs in some sense but not really because it was just part of the culture and that's what she did and so and a small town that's what people do I mean I know my my first wife's mother came from a small town her mother went to you know church and it was a social thing as much Yeah. Also, for better or worse, if you didn't go, it reflected badly on you, which is one of my problems with religion.

I met a lot of people. You know, if there is a lot of social pressure in a small town especially to conform religiously, you know, just because if you don't go, it gives the impression that somehow you're a bad person, and that's one of the problems I've had with at least organized religion. Yeah, well, we could talk about that in some detail, too, I think, because there's, you know, with situations like that are always really complicated. One of the things people are doing when they go to church is indicating that they're willing to sacrifice an hour a week in a disciplined manner to the community as such. And then so you don't go, well, maybe it's because you're a conscientious objector, let's say, and that's a moral reason. But maybe it's just because you're lazy bastard and you don't care about the community.

And I'm not saying that's the case, but I'm saying these rituals are complex. I think I was more influenced by Babbitt and Sinclair Lewis, the notion that if you don't go, it means. that you're somehow slapping, the community expects you to go. If you don't go, it means you're not respecting the community. Yeah, right. And there's a lot of social pressure. And you have to go to keep, I'm better or worse, to keep up appearances. Because it's not, yeah.

So that, and that part, well, we'll get there. I want to, I want to get, if, we'll see if we get there. Yep. Because I have somewhere where we're at the beginning. But you, I, but I'm intrigued as much by you as, well, I'm intrigued equally by you and what you say. So I want to get the U part done. You moved, you did, you decide to go back to school and do psychology and then you decide to go to graduate school, which as you say, was a new thing.

You know, I don't know why. I guess I decided I wanted to be a professor or I wanted to be an academic. And I don't know. In my case, and I've said this often in our podcast, it was just that my mother wanted me to be a doctor. And she convinced me doctors were scientists, which was her mistake. And then I got interested in science. and then I looked at see what... Yeah, I really wanted to go and be a clinical psychologist,

but I didn't really get into research, interested in the research end until I got to McGill, and that was under the influence of my supervisor, who was a clinician, but mostly a researcher, and he sort of opened up the research world to me, and then that got really fascinating to me. And so I got to do both because I was a clinical... And McGill was a real research school.

You know, I had 15 publications by the time I... Yes, exactly. Wilder Penfield and all the others. Yeah, exactly. the Montreal Neuro was a major place. And a lot of fundamental discoveries about the brain were made at McGill and at the Douglas or at the Montreal Neural. And so I had great advisors there, Robert P.L. and Maurice Dengue, man, they were top rate.

Frank Irvin, I got to know he had a monkey farm on St. Kitts where he raised alcoholic monkeys, which is quite funny. And so McGill was great, man. It was wonderful. And I got really interested in being a scientist there. And then I found out I could do both. So that's where that's switch cane. I wondered about that.

Yeah, no, I mean, I have a good friend of mine's a neurologist, and he actually was a resident out in, down at McGill, and I get to see the impact of that on him. He's now a professor, actually, in the West Coast. But, okay, so that's what got you interested in research. But I was interested, so you wanted to be a clinical psychologist. Why? I mean, early on, I was going to ask you, why? Well, I like trying to help people, you know, and I was interested in what made people tick. And, you know, I had some friends who's probably.

I tried to straighten out and I was interested in what it meant to live a I suppose a psychologically healthy life if To speak I guess that's a reasonable way to put it. Yeah, so and I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm high in compassion that's part of it high in openness and high in compassion so that's good good good root for clinical psychology's good root for someone like that because people are endlessly fascinating So you know it's it's actually interesting you know like I actually you are that's that's that's it's that's another thing that surprised me. You are high in openness, which is something, maybe because you've been interviewed publicly in a very aggressive and

antagonistic way, I got the sense that you were much more defensive than you are. Yeah, well, some of those interviews, you know, especially the GQ interview, which is like 40 million views, it's like I was exhausted at that point, and

it was a very unfriendly environment. I mean, it was hostile the second I set foot. in there which was like an hour before the interview started and so hostile in that sort of cold underlying subtle way that permeates everything and so by the time the interview started i was sort of like a cat that was too close to the you know the doghouse and and so i didn't handle myself with as much humor humor as i would have liked to you know because if you're really on top of something you can do it with a light touch and yeah i wasn't really light touch in that interview but i was also partly

Because I knew perfectly well at that point that if I said anything wrong or that could be twisted to be wrong, I was dead in the water. So that's not... That's that automatically. Yeah. If you feel you can't open up, then that really makes it, yeah. Anyway, you remained... The question that entreated me before I even heard any of this, so now... But early on was why you remained a clinician, why during your academic career,

I mean, I guess it was great for teaching. It was great for teaching, man. Oh, God. Because you can use examples. I noticed in the book, there are lots of time, and in all your books, I think, but at least I haven't, I've voluminously read it at all. And it kept the theory tied to the reality, eh? Because I was very interested in psychological theories of all sorts.

Yeah. I mean, it taught personality theory, and that's basically a walk through great psychological thinkers in the clinical domain. But practicing continually meant that, you know, I was always where the tire was hitting the road, and that was unbelievably useful, because I could tell. out these ideas in their practical application and see where they were useful and where they weren't. And they were useful, unbelievably useful. You got into personality eventually.

Your first interest was more sort of addictive things, alcoholism, right? Yeah. And is that because of, was that a personal interest or was it because your professor had alcoholic monkeys or? Well, it was, it was a little bit of one, a little bit of the other. It probably wouldn't have been my first choice. But I was really interested in why it was that certain substances were so attractive to people. And that was tied with an underlying interest in neurobiology. And so when Robert Peel offered me this position at McGill, it was like, oh, good, I get to go to Montreal,

because I always wanted to do that. And yeah, I could do that. I could look into that. And alcohol use turned out to be a great field of study because alcohol crosses the blood-brain barrier like water, unlike, say, cocaine and heroin and so forth, and benzodiazepines. They're much more specific in their action, but alcohol affects everything. So to understand the pharmacology of alcohol, you have to study the whole nervous system. And that was really, really, that was great because I did a lot of neuroscience work at McGill. Okay. And then, so, and do you, I shouldn't know this, but do you still continue to do clinical work?

No. I stopped in when all, when everything exploded around me, partly because, look, when you do clinical work, nothing should be on your mind except that person right there. and then. And I couldn't do that. I was so distracted by everything that was happening. And you have to be around and you have to be on call. You have to be available. You have to have some leftover emotional space. And none of that was possible. And so I just had to stop. And it's too bad because I love doing it. But the podcasts are a good substitute. Yeah, it gives you a chance to connect. And then, okay. And then you, and then you did a postdoc there. And then, and then with,

to Harvard? Well, I was on the academic job market during that postdoc, so I went to a few places and generally got mixed reviews for my approach because I had a hard scientific research, what would you say, CV at that point. I think I published more papers when I was at McGill than any graduate student ever had. And, you know, that was attractive to many of the places that were hiring, but I also had these weird side interests that people were less, you know, more skeptical about and I wouldn't shut up about them even though people told me to. But that worked really well when I went to interview at Harvard. Why? Well, because, see, one of the things you see in people who are educated is they think that if they don't know something, then it's probably

not worth knowing. They don't just know that they just don't know. Yeah, well, lesser academics are like that. Well, when I went to Harvard, the professors were so damn smart there that I couldn't say anything that they didn't know about. And so there was nothing about what I was interested in that bothered them. In fact, they were interested in it. Oh, it wasn't. Oh, I thought, I see you surprised me again. I thought you're going to tell me they didn't mind hearing from you things they didn't understand or didn't know about because it intrigued them, but you tell me they already knew. I thought I was, well, they knew at least enough to know that there was something there. They weren't, they wouldn't just like say, well, no, anybody who's interested in that, like

Jung, for example. There were a lot of them are skeptical of Jung and fair enough, you know, I can see why, but yeah, well, fair enough. But that didn't mean that they didn't understand. that there was such a thing as the psychology of literature and narrative. And so, yeah, that worked great. And when you went there, you expressed early on that that was what you were interested in, the psychology of literature and narrative. I talked about everything I did. I talked about the alcohol research.

By that time, the ethics committees had made the sort of research I was doing basically impossible, and so I had to switch. Interesting. Yeah, yeah, well, because... Let's pick up on that. I mean, I like to go place I hadn't planned, but I suspect that impacted on some of the things you're talking about later on. Yeah, it did.

I hate ethics committees. They're terrible. And I understand why. Why don't you elaborate on a little bit? Well, first of all, they'll come back and say, well, why don't you do this experiment this way? It's like, do your own goddamn experiment. Part of the reason I'm doing this is because that's what I'm interested.

And you want to do a different experiment, get your PhD, set up your lab, do the goddamn experiment, and don't come in and fix mine. Who the hell are you anyways? That just irritated me to death. And then, oh, so irritating. because I love doing it, you know, and scientists, you've got to leave them alone because they're weird people. It's like they got these strange obsessions. Don't interfere with that. Well, that's, I mean, you know, one of the things that sort of made you at least more famous publicly was the response to being told what to say or do in some ways, which clearly pushes your button.

I don't like that. Well, that clearly pushes your button. Zero doubt about it. But I can see it the origin in the ethics community. Well, here's what happened. McGill, I was studying. We had a very specific population we were studying. They're very, very hard to find these people.

Non-alcoholic men, 18 to 23, but they had to drink, they couldn't be alcoholic, but they had to drink, they had to have an alcoholic father, an alcoholic paternal grandfather, and an alcoholic paternal first or second-degree relative, in addition. Very hard to find.

So we were studying the psychophysiological responses of people who had males who had a genetic predisposition to alcoholism. Very specific population. We couldn't study women because if your mother was alcoholic, you might have fetal alcohol syndrome. And so that just muddies the waters too much. And so, well, when I went to Harvard to try to do this research, by that time, the N.I. trip, oh, and so what would happen?

We'd bring these guys into the lab, and we'd give them three shots of alcohol in 20 minutes and get their blood alcohol level up to about 0.10, above legal intolerantial. And that's where the interesting psychophysiological responses manifested themselves lower doses which almost all other labs used Didn't produce that effect. So then I went down to Harvard and I AAA had got all ethical by that point and They wouldn't let us let our research subjects leave until they're at blood alcohol level was at 0.02 We used to leave them go at 0.04 or 0.06 something like that and usually we'd make sure they got a taxi home and all that we were sensible But that meant that these guys had to sober up in the the lab awake for like 10 hours. Well, no one was going to do that. It was torturous. And then we had to

include half women. It's like, well, we can't. And first of all, male alcoholism is primarily a male disorder, although not entirely. And the reasons for female alcoholism are probably different. And so I couldn't give the doses. I couldn't use the research population. And basically what happened is every single research psychologist stopped studying the response to alcohol because it became impossible and you know how ethical is that it's just alcoholism right it's like the fifth leading cause of death or some damn thing it's it's not important yeah so the end of that so then I just couldn't do it so well that's yeah and that's something we both are I mean where we where we began to converge you and I at least intellectually it seemed to me is our concerns that whenever I see

research being interfered with I get upset well here's this an Do you know that 70% of this research applicants to the UC system this year were dispensed with at hiring because of their diversity statements? I've written an article on it. I just wrote an article about it. Actually, it's 76%. Oh, okay. Well, that's better. No, no. I actually have a piece coming out in the Wall Street Journal, which will probably come out before this appears. Yeah, that's not bad. That's devastating. It's devastating. It's devastating. I'll send you my piece. I'm totally angry. about it but that's that kind of interference with academia is something that we'll we may get to I'd like I'd like to explore your thoughts more than that maybe in another time we can because it's something we both relate to let me ask you just to close off this because yeah this is a great concern

of both of us but has that has research in alcoholism has it died has research in that area died or has it ever come back in terms of looking well the research of the sort we were doing that's you can't do it so yes it's dead it's just not possible to do that. You can't get funds for it, for example. Plus, they made it. We'd like to get these guys back three or four times, you know, because they were hard to find. And we were onto something. We found that a substantial proportion showed a pronounced heart rate increase to alcohol administration that looked like it was associated with opiate release. It could be blocked by an Torexone. It was deadly, deadly research. But, you know, whatever. Wow. Done. So that really

irritated the hell out of me. So you, well, you know, it's true. And I can understand irritated the hell out of you, but sometimes when one door closes, another one opens, and that's clearly what happened. I mean, you might have gone on to be a wonderful researcher in alcoholism, but instead you shifted gears a little bit. And, um, yeah, well, I was hired to teach person.

I was hired to teach personality. I was in personality and psychopathology, uh, subsection there. And, and so I started to turn my research towards personality, although I kept a bunch of other research lines going until I was up for promotion. I think it was to a full professor at the U of T. And they basically said, we can't put your research record forward because you haven't specialized in any single area enough.

And I thought, well, I've published in like seven areas. You know, there's something to be said for that. But then I thought, well, it's way easier actually only to publish in one area. So if that's what you want me to do. So that was also annoying. to say the least, but anyways, I did it, and it worked. And I focused more on personality for for a bunch of reasons. Why were you hired in personality if your work had been on a sort of alcoholism? I mean, you said you were hired to teach personality. Was that just the available slot at Harvard,

or what was, what was that? Well, I was a clinical psychologist, and I knew the personality theorists well, and so that was a big part of that. And they liked the fact that I had a hard research edge because, well, because psychology, at least when it's done right, is a hard, you know, it's a research discipline. And Harvard was certainly, it was a great place. I loved being there. It was great. Miguel was great too.

Yeah, I enjoyed. I was in the Boston area for 10 years and did my PhD at MIT and then moved to Harvard. Yeah, I loved the faculty, man. I loved our faculty meetings. They were so funny because no one wanted to be there and they were all really funny. And so if anybody ever objected to something, the chair would say, you're head the subcommittee to discuss that somewhere else, which is perfect, right? It's like, that'll teach you to make the meeting longer.

Yeah, that's what happily. I didn't have to. I had a position, something called the Society of Fellows and where I was allowed to totally avoid anything related to anything but what I wanted to do. So I didn't have to, I didn't have to, I was supposed to just think. So I happily didn't have, I didn't learn of the, of the tedium of faculty meetings to later on. Actually, the interesting thing is I went to Yale to become an assistant professor. And Yale has the policy that assistant professors aren't worth.

worthy of faculty meetings. So they don't even allow them in the faculty meetings. Oh, so that was good for you. Yeah, yeah. And then I later on when I became, when I got promoted, and then I quickly became chair of a department and then I had to run faculty meetings. It's a lot easier. Well, it's a lot easier to be in a meeting when you run it than when someone else is.

True. Yeah. And I love teaching. So that was, that was never an impediment to me. Yeah, and I hear that you were an incredibly popular teacher. At least that's what the word on the street, or at least word in the literature I've read is. Yeah, it was fun. I love teaching. It was especially personality psych. It's so fun to teach that to people. It's so engaging that as a subject, especially for people that age. You had a big following at Harvard. Did that

continue when you move to UFT? Yes. Again, let me ask a question. And I don't know whether it's you've free not to answer it or we can cut it out or whatever. But why do you move back to Canada? Well, the probability of being promoted to full tenure from an associate position at the Ivy Leagues is basically zero. It's zero. I agree. That's why I left. And I knew that. And I had this attitude. I got my attitude, because I saw some of the people there, the assistant professors who were or an associate's who were on the verge of leaving and they were all annoyed, not all of them, but mad that they weren't going to be make it, you know? And I thought, look, if you could be promoted to full professor, these slots that you occupied would have never been open.

So you can't be unhappy about what brought you here. And then I thought, I'll just accept that. It's like, okay, I got to come here. The way I looked at it was, hey, I got to go to Harvard for six years and I got paid for it. Like, that's a deal, man. It was a great deal. And I was really sad to leave. And, you know, I wanted to fight for promotion on the basis of Maps of Meaning.

And I think, you know, I think I had a shot at it, you know, because some of the professors there really liked what I had done. But I got sick then. And I didn't have the bloody spirit to put up the proper fight. And then this position came up at the U of Toronto, and it was perfect for me. It was tailor-made for me in some sense. And so then that's what we did. And it was hard to leave, though, because I loved Harvard.

I loved living in Arlington. When I left Boston for Yale, it was very hard to leave back. I kept one day a week. I went back to Harvard and BU, you know, just to, it's hard to break that umbilical cord right away. Yeah. I really liked my colleagues, too. And a lot of them were still my friends. Okay, that was good. Oh, that's great. Oh, that's wonderful. Yeah. Well, but I understand the, again, the psychology of it. I left Yale again before I had already been promoted to, like you, I guess, associate professor, but I saw that there was no, there was, you know, the opportunities at Yale were going to be minimal, especially in my own field. And so when when the opportunity came along, in this case, to build a department, to become chair of another department and have 12 faculty positions, so I was, it was so attractive to me that I couldn't, I couldn't resist. But I wondered why I left. And I, I,

I'd know if it was a yearning. You know, as a Canadian who moved to the States, I moved much earlier than you because I went to graduate school down there. You know, the question of whether I'd return to Canada was always on my mind. I didn't until after I retired. But I always thought about it. I often considered coming back, and there were a few times actually to Toronto. But anyway, let's now, now having, I hope that this has been interesting for you.

It's been interesting for me. and I hope it'll be interesting for people who are interested in what you have to say because understanding you as a person I think is important and I never have heard much about it. Hi, this is Lawrence Krause. I travel a great deal and during that time I find that using NordVPN has been incredibly useful. For example, I live in one country and work in another and often I need to access streaming services in that other country and I need an IP address in that country with NordVPN it's incredibly easy. With one click of a button, I get a US IP address.

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That's go to NordVPN.com slash Orrgence. Origenspod or go to NordvPN.com and use the code Originspod to get 73% off your NordVPN plan plus a bonus gift. Consider doing it today. Now I want to move to what you've written about and in maps of meaning and in and as I say in Rule 11, at least what I surmise from it. And the best way I can do it, as I say, for better or worse, Jordan, is to read quotes from you and ask you. about them. So I'm going to do that and we'll just skip through and we'll see how far we get. And then I want to give you some chance, hopefully, for us to discuss some of those issues. I know that you were still interested in following up with me. Some of the things I'm going to

talk you about, we'll follow up on, for people listening, we'll follow up on our discussion. I didn't realize, actually, I hadn't done my preparation, which is fine. I was, I was being, our dialogue was you asking me questions. I realized that I forced myself to watch our, our podcast. only I hate it because I had to listen to myself for a lot of it. But I didn't realize how many of the ideas and things you were bringing up if I'd known about it from your books would have meshed perfectly. And so we can follow up on some of that discussion because now I understand where you were coming from.

But let's talk about how, write at the early on a Maps of Meaning, by the way. You basically say beliefs make the world. And let me read this quote. I discovered that beliefs make the world in a very real way, that beliefs are the world in a more than metaphysical sense. This discovery has not turned me into a moral relativist, however, quite the contrary. I've become convinced that the world that is belief is orderly, that there are universal moral absolutes, although these are structured such that a diverse range of human opinion remains both possible and beneficial. I learned, let's see, okay, I believe that individuals and societies who flout these absolutes in ignorance or in willful opposition are doomed to misery and eventual dissolution.

And I learned that the meanings of the most profound substrata of belief systems could be rendered explicitly comprehensible. Let's get to that later. Let's talk about the first thing. I believe that individual societies who flout these absolutes in ignorance or willful opposition are doomed to misery and eventual dissolution. Do you want to elaborate on that because I'm shocked. It's interesting to me to hear you say that because, again, it goes against the grain for me. So I want to understand where you came from in writing that. Well, I first started to understand that what we perceive in some real sense isn't exactly material reality. And partly that's because that's actually impossible. And I mean that technically.

And that's something we could go into in great depth because that realization paralyzed a number of fields. It really started to come to the forefront in many fields in the early 1960s, especially in AI. When the AI types started to try to make machines that could see the world in some sense like we do and then act in the world. And what they instantly realized was that, oh, there isn't just something there that we see this is way harder than we ever possibly imagined. In fact, it's so hard that it looks like it might be impossible in some sense. So how the hell do we do it? And like we still don't have

robots that can move around the world like we do. You know, endless generations. I'm not, maybe it's improved. The last time I looked at this great detail, we didn't have robots that could fold laundry very efficiently either. So yeah, well, a lot of these so-called simple things like seeing, well, it's half your brain. It takes you half your brain to see. And most animals, like we see way better than almost all animals. Eagles, raptors. Really? Because I would have bald eagles in my back. Yeah, they can see. Their eyes are the same size as yours, and they have two foveal spots. Eagles, falcons, they're the animals that can see better than us. But other than that, it's us, and it's half our brain. Just to see. Well, so why? Well, you're a physicist.

you understand that reality is composed of levels of being, right, from the subatomic up to the cosmic. It's like, well, first of all, how do you specify the proper level of analysis? Well, one of the things that's quite interesting psychologically is that we have short words are generally used to describe things that manifest themselves to us at our level of analysis. Cat. We see a cat. We don't see a species. We don't see cat subparts. We don't see cats. We see this cat. Well, why? Well, that's the level that's most biologically relevant to us, given our embodiment. That's an evolutionary answer. And so we see, what we see, first of all, what we see a lot of is memory, but we see something that's overlaid on the world. We actually

see the overlay. And hopefully it reflects what's underneath, and generally it does, and it's a hell of a shock to us when we make a perceptual error. But I see, and then I started to learn, especially from reading Jeffrey Gray, that we also see the world within a motivated frame. And he was influenced by Norbert Wiener, who was one of the world's first cybernetic scientists, essentially, a great influence on AI. Yeah, and Gray never talked about narrative, but the frame that he described that we see and in animals as well basically has a point A and a point B, so we're always moving towards a goal if we're mobile animals.

And I thought, oh, well, the description of the movement from point A to point B, that's the simplest unit of meaning that's a story. And then I learned that a better story is a story about how stories transform. And so those are actually perceptual frames of reference that transform. And then I understood that if you don't have respect for the transformation process above all else, then you can't transform your perceptual frames when necessary, and then you can't adapt to error. and that destroys you. And so that's all part of that. When you,

okay, there's two bits of this I want to parse more carefully. First, the statement, the beliefs are the world. I mean, yeah.

As a psychologist, I'll accept that statement if you're talking about a psychologist, namely the human psyche. I won't accept that statement as a scientist. Yeah, well,

that's where we could really have a good conversation. Well, let's have that good conversation. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. So, so look, it has been very difficult for scientists to describe the world in a way that isn't like that narrative, right? And so the idea that there's a tension between science and religion in some sense is just a statement

that it's been very hard for scientists to pull out an objective description of the world, given the way we perceive. Well, it's been easy for physics. Not easy, but it's worked for physicists. Oh, I didn't say it didn't work. I'm not making that claim at all. I'm saying we didn't manage it till 400 years ago at all. I think we talked, this is something we talked about before, actually, that we both agree about that science is hard, and I don't mean hard in the mathematical sense.

No. In the sense that it goes against the grain. That's right. It's unnatural. It's very unnatural. Yes. And if we didn't, we wouldn't need science if it wasn't unnatural. I mean, everyone would be a scientist if it wasn't.

And instead we, and so that, okay, so that's, that's, that's an insight into that issue. So then the question is, well, what is it that science as a, as a technique struggles against? Well, it struggles against the fact that we see everything through a value laden lens. And I mean C. Well, here, here's an example. Like, look, when I'm looking at you on this screen, there are almost an infinite number of ways things I could be looking at. So first of all, there's each pixel insofar as I can see pixels. But then there's all the combinations of pixels, right?

And there are a lot of combinations of pixels. And I could concentrate on one hair on your beard, or I could concentrate on the blurry cupboard behind you, or that book. Like, it's endless, but I don't. I look at your eyes, and you look at my eyes. Yeah, sure. And you look at my eyes because you've made a value judgment that there's nothing more valuable during the course of this perceptual exercise

then looking at my eyes. And that's a biological judgment. Well, yeah, when you say a value judgment, that's interesting. Let me take back. Again, I'm a neophyte. So, well, I mean, I've read a lot, but I wouldn't describe the value of it. My understanding is that infants are hardwired to look at eyes. And there's an evolutionary reason for it, right?

There's values that are hardwired. That's no problem. Why do you call them values? Because, look, to segregate out a particular element from a background of elements, I have to make that primary, have to make it most important and the other things less important. Okay, so that's what you mean by value. Yeah, it's technical idea. It's like you have to look through the world.

You have to look at the world through a hierarchy of value. There's no way to look at the world without doing that. Okay, you could take an economic attitude, which you look at the world, what's most effective? That's fine. The results most quickly and looking at eyes. Certainly, if you're dealing with humans, looking at eyes, gets you where you want to go. Well, and here's why. It's like our eyes have evolved the whites. And the reason for that is because

the fact of the whites make make it much easier for us to see where eyes are pointing. And what that implies is that all of our ancestors who had eyes that weren't easy to see either got killed or didn't mate. And the reason that we want to see where people point their eyes is because foveal tissue is extremely expensive and you're not going to waste it looking at something useless and so that if I can see what you're looking at, then I know what you're interested in, then I know your value structure for that moment. I can understand you. Plus, I've been directed to the valuable part of the visual landscape and we're unbelievably good at that. It's part of a shared reference and kids have that extraordinarily early, as you already pointed out, like unbelievably early. And so it would work. So,

evolution has picked that out. Okay. So when I say value structure, I mean a decision about the hierarchy of importance. Okay. Okay. And I mean it in some sense, both economically and evolutionarily. Like, there's nothing about this that's not nailed down, especially into evolutionary theory. It's like there's a reason we...

Oh, yeah. No, I'll buy that. Yeah. Okay. Okay. So that's the value hierarchy issue. So when you, but then when, okay, the value hierarchy. And when you say that, okay, so when you say beliefs are the world you're

talking about psyche, that namely beliefs are related to values and some, I mean, when you say beliefs are the world, I still want to go back to that. You're saying as a human being, well, it's partly because the world is could, we can be wrong. What was that? Well, it's partly because we can be wrong. Like, I may think that something's important and look at it, but I might be so wrong. Like I'm driving down the highway and I focus on something and some car hits me and I'm dead. Well, that's kind of why it's a belief. It's like, well, I believe that that was the best thing to look at. and there was evidence to support that, but man, it was really wrong. It was wrong.

And so part of its fallibility, that's partly why I refer to it. It's not only that. There's more to it than that. I guess my way of phrasing it would be thinking about it, is that beliefs that the world conditions our beliefs. Namely, we continually reappraise our beliefs. And the world tells us whether those, which beliefs are, if you want to call beliefs, which beliefs are reasonable and which aren't by, you know, I might be. by killing us.

Yeah, I can walk out this window, but the world pretty well tells me, no, that that doesn't work, and then I don't reproduce, but, but, uh, although it's too late, I already have. But, um, uh, uh, so I guess I think of the world of conditioning beliefs rather than the way around. No, no, it did. Oh, yeah, that's fine. And it does. And that's a very, what would you say, an eternal philosophical dilemma.

Because you can look at it both ways. So the existential psychologist, for example, taking a page from Heidegger, one of them made the presumption that, you know, we lay values on the world, and the other made the presumption that values reveal themselves to us through the world. And that's, they're both right. They're both equally right. You can look at it either way and it works. So, and for the reasons that you pointed out.

So, but you see, it's not so, it's not so clear always where the objective reality is. So, for example, you can train rats to produce. a dopamine surge to an electric shock. So the shock is punishing, right? Generally, punishment will bring behavior to a halt. But if you pair the shock with a reward, but now that's, you know, intensity of shock matters. But it can be a pretty good shock.

If you pair the shock with a reward frequently, then the shock becomes positive. And so there's a good example, even in a rat, where, yeah, yeah, it's a shock, and that's an objective reality, it's electricity. But the valence of that can be shifted by learning. So there is this interaction between the psyche and the objective, well, in the domain of value.

And the thing is, so for an astute perceptual psychologist, the best one, an ecological approach to visual perceptions, great book, hard-nosed book, doesn't really go into narrative in any direct sense, but is very much akin. And he was one of the founders of modern perceptual psychology, the person who wrote that book. And he said, with children, we don't see a cliff. We see a falling off place. And even six months old, six month old see a falling off place.

They also see beauty. They see symmetry. A lot of this is deeply wired, right? But still malleable. Right? It's still malleable by learning. So, and that's partly why there are these archetypal values because they're built into us biologically. And then if you flout them, well, I can give you a quick example of how flouting

this is catastrophic. Well, so, you know, part of the strange question, I suppose, is what exactly are we interacting with? And you might say, well, it's the material world. And I would say, no, not exactly. We interact more, what we interact with is more like a field of potential. Now, we resolve that pretty quickly into perceptual objects, but it really is a field of potential, because it can go one way or another, and somewhat unpredictably. Yeah, and you talk about that. Yeah, well, and consciousness resists, well, it's strange. Consciousness snaps that into, well, the being that we perceive anyways. And so it's a field of potential. And so you can kind of experience that. You wake up in the morning and you think, what am I going to do today? And what you're saying is, well, I've got these

degrees of freedom, weirdly enough, and if I act a certain way, I hope these things will happen as opposed to these things. And so what presents itself to you in the morning, you've already seen your damn room. You don't even look at it really, because you've memorized it. Well, what you perceive in the deepest sense is this field of potential that you can interact with. Yes. Okay, now, now the issue is, what's the best way of interacting with that field of potential? Well, think about it collectively. Okay. You and I are having a discussion right now,

because you can think and I can think, but we think differently. Now, we're hoping that if we exchange thoughts, that we'll be able to master what's coming at us better. And hopefully we will be able to. Now, imagine we shut that down. Well, then we can't interact with that, with what's coming at us better,

and it'll kill us. And so that's partly why free disc, free discourse isn't an option. It's not different than thinking. And thinking isn't different than dying. So that's one example of why the West has elevated free speech to the highest place, even religiously. That's the divine word, essentially. And that's the idea lurking underneath that. It's like everything else is dependent on that. Well, you know, that's intriguing to me, because, yeah, we both have been speaking out about free speech in various ways. And I, lately. But one of the things that was intriguing to me that never hit me, and you just sort of,

it relates to what you said. And I was talking about this recently to actually Stephen Fry, but it came to me from watching a speech by my friend Christopher Hitchens, who said that the problem of censorship, the problem of cutting down free speech, doesn't just, the saddest part isn't that you're infringing on the rights of the speaker. No, that's not, that's bad. But you're infringing on your own rights because you lose the opportunity to learn that you might be wrong. Yeah, well, and that's fine.

If you're already in paradise and you already know everything that you need to know to make your life just how it should be, that's no problem. But if you've got some problems, well, maybe you should listen a bit. Well, even if you don't, the point is if you shut down others,

you really lose that opportunity to learn, even if what they're saying is reprehensible, you are at least forced to ask why do I believe what I believe? Why do I know they're wrong? And maybe they're not wrong. And that is a right, in some sense,

you fringe upon your own rights more than others because you lose that opportunity to learn your wrong. Absolutely. There's no doubt about that. Look, one of the things I really learned from Carl Rogers,

even though I talk so much, was the importance of listening, the vital, vital, vital importance of listening. And I've met many, many people in my life who no one has ever listened to, not even once. And if you listen to people, they unfold. That's the secret to Rogarian psychotherapy, and Freudian to some degree, because he let his people free associate. It's like if you just let, so you listen, because then they watch while they're talking, how your face changes. And then maybe you ask them, well, I didn't understand that. And so they're thinking. And,

And they're on that edge. And they're putting themselves together. Not metaphorically, man. This is, they are, they're reorganizing the internal chaos right in front of you. And that's part of what's so fascinating about being a clinical psychologist because you get in that groove and it's so remarkable. It's what's so fascinating for me as so, by doing these podcasts, which is a, which is different for me.

I'm used to expounding for most of my life. And, and, um, learning how to live. listen effectively and and get people to it's real for me it's been a fascinating thing to do and that's one of the things I'm enjoying right now at this very instant by asking you questions that you can associate about a free associate about okay let I think we we've we've beaten that horse about belief and and where you come from to death all probably may come back to it also but the second part of that is what I find fascinating that you become up that you believe that this that this that you've convinced that the world that is belief has universal moral absolutes and that and that

if you ignore them and individuals or societies ignore them are doomed to misery and eventual dissolution it's interesting how much we'll get through here because we're just at the beginning but but i find that um again it's something that i that doesn't resonate with me at all so so uh why don't you expound on it a little bit well i can give you some examples i guess so um And these are like pointing to narrative substructures, let's say. Well, when I look at what's happening on the far left edge, what I see is an existential issue. So here's the existential issues.

There's the tyrannical father, there's the benevolent father, there's the tyrannical mother, there's the benevolent mother. That's four. And we can easily become obsessed with any one of those. Well, you get obsessed with the tyrannical father. Well, that's an existential absolute in some sense. And the reason for that is that, well, we're historical creatures. Right.

So we have a culture. It's often viewed as a patriarchy, and that's one way of looking at it. And it definitely has its evil edge. I mean, and everyone, to some degree, suffers from the guilt of history. That's privilege, right? It's like, well, do you really deserve what you have? I mean, you didn't invent all of it. And there's people who maybe are just as worthy as you, who don't have the same stuff.

you know, what about European invasion of North America, let's say, and et cetera, et cetera, right? And so that's an existential absolute. We always have to contend with the tyrannical father. Well, fair enough, but there's another half to that. And if you just get obsessed with this one thing, you're so off balance that you're going to, you're not going to fix the problem. You're just going to make it worse because you just don't have a sufficiently, in some sense, even a sufficiently random view of the world, randomized.

Let's look at it that way. Your sampling is off in a major way. And so then, well, and that tyrannical father, let's say, that's also something really easy to identify with. That's what happens when people become authoritarian. And there's a shadow to that. And so that's part of, and if you ignore that, well, then your society becomes totalitarian. And it's like, well, good luck to you.

It's like, we've seen what happens when that happens. and there's a difference between a totalitarian society and a free society and the difference isn't trivial and it's associated with value and what's at the highest place well you said more didn't use value use the word moral which is intriguing to me what do you mean by morality well morality basically is the difference between good and evil fundamentally and so if you push if you that's how i'm defining it okay okay that's what you know you might say well is there evil or is there good and and i know that's a complicated question, but at some point there's an answer to that. So here's how I answered it for me. Well, you can be dubious all you want about an ultimate good. But there are things that have

happened in the recent past, the last hundred years, that are so terrible that I defy you to look at them and say they're not evil. And then you have to think very carefully if you say that they're not evil, just exactly what are you saying? And so then I invert that and say, well, I don't know what good is, but it's the opposite of that. Right. And that's a good starting point, right? It's like, I don't know. It's whatever takes me farthest away from that. And this was a personal thing for me to some degree, because when I was wrestling with the issue of atrocity, and this is what I think, I think this is one of the things that made me different from most people who think about these things. I didn't think of myself as concentration camp victim. And I didn't think of myself as,

you know, Schindler. Yeah. Or the Dutch family that hid Anne Frank, because that's pretty bloody unlikely. It's like, let's do some stats here. I thought of myself as a resentful concentration camp guard. Okay. And that was quite shocking to do that. Yeah, well, it's like, are you a victim or a perpetrator? Are you a hero or a perpetrator? Well, I can tell you for sure that you are at least in part a perpetrator.

And if you don't understand that, then if the temptation to become a perpetrator arises, you won't know how to withstand it and you may even want it. And you think, well, I wouldn't want that. It's like, oh, yeah, really? Is that right? Do you really know yourself that well, do you? And you actually know what happened in Germany, do you? And the steps that people took read ordinary men.

That's a great book. Talk about step by step. That's a great book, man. And those were ordinary guys. And they weren't particularly reprehensible. But what they did, it's like they were taking pregnant women out into fields, stripping them naked and shooting them in the back of the head. You think, I couldn't do that.

It's like, yeah, okay, maybe. And you think you wouldn't enjoy it. It's like, you. Yeah, maybe. There's a lot more in there than you think, unfortunately. So, well. So let's go back to the hierarchy of value. Like that is embedded inside a framework of good and evil.

There's no way around it. It's part and parcel of it. It's way out at the fringes. And so when I talk about what's religious, so imagine there's a hierarchy of value. And here's how this hierarchy works. The deeper the value, the more other values are dependent on it. So that's the definition of deep.

When you look at the deepest values, you are in the religious domain, psychologically speaking. Okay. Again, explain that. You often say things and the word in, yeah, and I don't understand what you mean. We got to think about this experientially and not, I'm not talking about propositional description. Yeah, okay. I'm talking about something different. Oh.

You equate religion to biology. throughout at least in many many places. Yes. And to mythology, which I find. Yeah, I know. And it's something I have to get over because I find it. It's hard. It's hard, man.

Well, it's not just hard. I find it sort of, I guess for me, it diminishes the argument. I mean, you say, I, I, I, I, you really say, I learned that the meanings of the most profound substrat of belief systems can be rendered explicitly comprehensible, even to the skeptical, rational thinker. And then you just, and then you say, and to me, this. this is sort of naturally turns me off because you say the world as a form for action is composed essentially of three constituent elements which tend to manifest themselves in typical patterns

of metaphoric metamorphic metaphoric representation first is the unexplored territory and I say fine but then you automatically go to mythology as if it's as if it has some you say the great mother nature creative destructive sources of final resting place of all the time terminate things. Second is the explored territory. The great father, culture, protective, and tyrannical, cumulative, and ancestral wisdom. Third is the process that mediates between unexplored and explored territory. The divine son, the archetypical individual, creative exploratory world. We are adapted to this world of divine characters as much as the objective world. You are, and I see that you've found, I mean, the whole point, as far as I can see,

of a lot of what you're saying is something that on the surface seems straightforward. It would be horrible if you didn't object to all that. Well, I object to it. But I object to it. One of the reasons I object to it by nature is to say, well, it seems obvious that myth, to the extent that there's any universality of various myths and the fact that it goes back a long way is intimately reveals aspects of the way humans thinking, evolved, you know, evolutionary psychology and myth are related. Okay, that seems obvious, but I don't

know why one needs to make more of it than that. I guess the question is, why describe everything in terms and more of it than that? That's quite a lot right there. There's a lot of it right here. Yeah, I'm trying to, I'm trying to unpack it. So, well, I'll give you an example. I mean, the examples are quite nice. So the Egyptians viewed Horace. remember they're trying to figure things out. They're trying to figure out how to assemble a very large state and they're trying to figure out what should be sovereign. So they're trying to figure out, well, who is this Pharaoh and what should he embody and how should he act if things are going to work? And they're doing this for like thousands of years. They're trying to puzzle this out. And they're using their imagination.

And so they parse out their patriarchal God into two forms. There's Osiris. And he's the old state. He was once a hero. He was pretty good. But he got archaic and ossified, turned to stone in some sense. And he has a son, Horace. Now Horace is that Egyptian eye. And everyone knows that eye. It's the eye. Why the eye?

Well, that's a falcon, because falcons can really see. And so Horace was also a falcon. Okay, so what the Egyptians were doing was worshiping attention. Okay, so now what does that mean? Well, attention isn't the same as thought. So when you're listening in these podcasts, You know when a podcast's going real well, you get into it and time disappears. Okay, it's because you're attending, right?

And what you're attending to, fundamentally, you're on that edge where you're willing to let the things that are ossified about your cognitive structures flex. And you're expanding yourself out into unexplored territory. And that's way better than being right. It's way more fun than being right, although being right protects you from being anxious. Not eventually. It doesn't work eventually. But being on that edge, well, we're adapted to that edge. I mean, I mean, seriously adapted to it.

Yeah, I certainly am. Well, everyone is, although the, let's say the breadth and intensity of that edge is much different between different people, and where they find it for them differs with their temperament. But you need everything about your beliefs needs to be subordinate to the process of transforming those beliefs, unless you already know everything. And so that's just one.

And so that's played out to some degree. You see that to some degree in Christian symbolism, let's say, where there's a tension between the son and the father. And the father is more, this is what is. It's already established. And the sun is more, well, wait a sec. Yeah, but there's this horizon of possibility that we have to contend with. So this needs to be updated.

And that's a very, it's a tough thing for human beings because, well, it's a lot easier just to go with what you know. But we just don't know enough. So we have to subordinate that to this process of exploration, that creative, and that, I believe that's encapsulated fundamentally in hero mythology. Hero mythology is about transforming ideas. That's essentially what it's about. I'll buy that, but why, I guess if one's trying to explain something which you're talking about now, which I find fascinating and can relate to, why can, why, what utility is there in reverting to the myth? Well, that's a good question. I mean, partly it's the same utility that there is in me using an example to describe what I meant.

But yeah, but you're right. And the example, and I find when you write, well, that was sort of a micro-miss. More compelling when you talk about, say, and I used to find the same thing about Oliver Sacks and other, but more compelling when you talk about your experience as a clinical psychologist, which I can relate to, then when you talk to me about the great father or the tyrannical mother or the hero or, yeah, well, It should be more compelling because the problem with those, say, low-level abstractions is they lack concrete embodiment. So I'll give you an example of that. This is a weird example, but it'll work.

Murcha Elia Elyada, he's a great historian of religions, and he was cognizant of Nietzsche's proclamation that God had died. And Eliazza knew what that meant and what the consequences would be. But he went back when he was doing his pioneering work into the history of religion. He said, this has happened many times. This is not the first time. Why? Well, what happens is a community comes together and forms some representation of the sumum bonum, right?

The thing that should be on top, the ultimate good. But it gets so damn abstract that it doesn't connect to life. It's like, well, that's God, but what does it have to do with me, like interacting with my wife or doing something embodied and practical? It gets so abstract, it floats away. No one has any relationship. to it anymore and it dies. But that's not good for a variety of reasons, which we can get into. Well, part of the way that the Christian imagination addressed that problem, speaking psychologically,

is to take that abstraction and make it incarnate in a particular time and place. And it pulls the story down to earth. And it makes it much more compelling. A student once asked me, look, if there's all these archetypal structures, why don't we just tell the archetype over and over? I thought, oh, it has to be particularized. It has to be optimally particularized for imitation. That's why. And so if I get too abstract, you don't know what it means for perception or action and loses all significance and you drift away.

A good storyteller, he knows his audience, and he can put the story on the edge of their cognitive transformation. And then it's absolutely captivating. But it means the archetype has to be particularized constantly and reparticularized constantly. Well, it's another way. I mean, yeah, I guess it's a, that's often you frame things in a way that I think is a fancy way of something, saying something that maybe I'm just too pedestrian. I would just say, you know, that I said before teaching is seducing, car salesman is seducing, if you want to get to people, you have to go ask where they're coming from, and you have to tell your arguments to where they're coming from so that they can emotionally relate. Isn't that just the case? Isn't that what you're saying? Well, I'm trying to explain why those things are seductive.

Okay, why? Why? Okay, they are. Because no, that's the thing. It's the experiential issue. And that's also relevant with regard to the notion of religious depth, which we should just take a quick side step into. Yeah, no, I was, we're going to go there eventually anyway.

Because it's a technical issue as far as I'm concerned, because I'm trying to speak psychologically. So when you start to toy with the deepest values upon which all these other, their values depend, that has an embodied consequence. One is it's deeply upsetting. So it's anxiety provoking. The other is it's deeply wonder provoking. And those things, those are both there. And the reason they're both there is because, well, you blow apart that base level map and all sorts of things fly out of Pandora's box. And some of those things might kill you, but some of those things might be just what you need to solve your current problem. So it's very, it's very, it's tense. When you speak at religious depth, there's an embodied consequence of that.

It's independent of any discussion about, you know, religious propositions as logical statements about the structure of reality. For me, most of that's beside the point. It's like, no, no, you don't. But for me, most of it's not only beside the point. Most of it's irrelevant. Well, it's irrelevant to what we're discussing because there are depths. Most of it's silly. Yes.

Yes, and there are depths, and if you get deep enough, you have religious experiences. Now, what that means about this, awe is a good one. Well, okay, so that's so the Einstein's goddess, you know, Spinoza's God, the fact that the universe is comprehensible, awe of the universe. Yeah, those things are. You call that a religious experience? Yeah, I think awe. I'm defining this in some sense.

Okay, I want to know, right? I'm defining this. Okay, so. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So awe, let's take the, the, the, the, the, the, motion of awe. It's a mixture of emotions. It's both positive and negative emotions. And it's predicated on a prey response to a predator. That's the biological underpinning. So, for example, your hair will stand on end. Well, why? Well, it's because it's pile of erection. It's what happens when a prey animal

sees a predator. It's like, poof. Well, that's part of awe. It's like you're in, you, you've, something greater than you and potentially dangerous has come into view. That's the embodied part of that. Of course, it's way more. If I look at the night sky, I'm odd by it. Yeah, yeah, that's certainly something greater than me. Yeah. It's certainly something greater than me. I don't know whether it's potentially dangerous because it sort of seems to be out there and separate.

I mean, unless you have astrology or some bit of nonsense. Well, it's awe-inspiring, even though it's completely, at least on the surface, unrelated to me. Well, it's also a place, though, where you do in some real sense confront the infinite unknown. Oh, yes. It's right there. Well, it is. The infinite unknown will swallow you. It swallows me every day.

Well, it'll swallow you when you die. It will do that. You're surrounded by it. Well, when I die, it won't swallow it. I mean, yeah, when, you know, when do you, what do you mean? When you say things like that, I don't know what you mean. Well, you dissolve into it because it's a hurrah. You just end.

You just, you just, you just, yeah, I know, but you don't get, you don't dissolve into some mystical, infinite unknown. I'm not, I'm not trying to say that. I know you're not, but then when you say it, it's natural for people to then jump into this new age nonsense. Yes, I want to. I want to hold your feet to the fire only because I care. You should. You absolutely should. Absolutely.

Look, here, what is one thing you experience at a funeral? You know, I've seen this many times, is people will stand by the body of the person they loved, and they cannot speak. There's nothing to say, and it's because they're on the horizon. Now, I'm not saying that you dissolve into anything particularly. I'm saying it's a limit experience. And when you look up into the sky, it's an analogy of that experience. You're on the frontier in some sense when you look up into the sky. And you're faced with, in some sense, you're faced with what you are in relationship to that.

And now that's also, okay, now I'm going to go sideways here for a second, tell you a bit of a story. I have no agenda. I've been looking at this image with my wife and this friend of mine, and it's of Mary, the mother of God. Okay, it's a very interesting image, and Renaissance painters were all over this. So you can Google Mary Serpent Stars, and you'll see like these beautiful paintings. Okay, so there's Mary. Her heads in the stars, 12 of them. There's a reason for that.

And her foot's on the world and on a serpent. Yeah, yeah, that's right. Well, it's the seasons. It's a bunch of things, man. It's a bunch of, but it's the cosmos. But, okay, so there's that image. And many, many painters spent much time on that image. It's like, it's very weird image.

your heads in the stars, or foots on the serpent, the earth is down there, what the hell's going on? Well, here's part of it. So, when you face something that's deeply unknown, it calls to you in some sense to be more than you are. Now, how is that related to the prey predator relationship? Well, if you're a prey, you should be a little more than you are in relationship to that predator. And so there's a call to adaptation in the awe response to a predator. It's like, be more or die. And look at us, man.

We've done a pretty good job of doing exactly that for like little skinny naked apes. It's like, look the hell out, man. Wolves run away from us. Okay, and so in some sense, we imitated the predator as a consequence of that all response, and we're good at imitating. And God only knows what we're imitating when we look up at the stars. But this image of Mary is an attempt to puzzle that out. So that's serpent that she has her foot on.

That's the snake. Well, okay, Mary's a mother. It's like, don't eat my kids. snakes for 60 million years, right? This is a deep image. But it's deeper than that too, because there's this line of thinking in Jewish thinking and a Christian thinking that associates the serpent in the garden with malevolence itself. So that's the weird association between the snake and Satan, which is not in that original story. It's part of the after story in some sense. And I puzzled over that for a tremendous long. It's like, what's going on there? Why is that

association exists. Well, the worst snake is not a snake. The worst snake is like a meta snake. It's like, it's like the essence of snake. And then that becomes something psychological. And the good mother doesn't just protect you from snakes. It protects you from the snake in your heart. And that's a real snake, man. And if you're going to protect your kids, one more thing. If you're going to protect your kids from the snake in their hearts and and in your heart too you better bloody well have your head in the stars that's a nice analogy i have i'll give you that that's one of the ones that i can sort of well that's what those artists were trying to puzzle out hey i i guess so but but at the same time um why i can't know what's so important about why for you is important to puzzle that story about

that specific myth that makes it worth that makes it worth analyzing and and and and perseverating over why people paint Mary that way or why why why that myth of the Garden of Eden is what it is well I mean I guess you're because because again is it just simply because you think you think let me make it I can understand one aspect and the other I can't so okay my hoping the answer is what I my hoping the answer is because you think it tells you something about the human psyche, not because you think it tells you something about the world beyond the human psyche? The first claim is plenty for me. Okay, that's fine. I buy that. Then I understand that. The only thing that I worry about is sometimes the one gets the impression that in, well, this is where I get into trouble because you see,

there is a fundamental problem here that we could talk about as scientists. It's like, Yeah. People parody me because people will ask me questions like, do you think that's real? And so that's an equation. Is A, B? It's like, well, you think A is self-evident when you ask me that question, but it's not. And so then you might say, well, is this real? And so you might ask me, well, does this mean anything about the structure of reality? And my answer would be, what do you mean by reality? And why are you so sure that your presumption about what reality is, is the right presumption. So because I could say, well, reality pretty clearly has a narrative edge. And I don't know what that means. When you say reality,

I guess, yeah, well, that's the issue. That's the quest. Well, look. You come in and you say,

yeah, I think I understand it. And I'm trying to, I'm trying to get into your head here a little bit. So you're, when you say reality, you mean human reality because you're so tied to being,

here's the question. Here's a question. Here's a question for, if humans are relevant. Here's a question for a physicist, for a scientist. Good. Okay.

What if Darwin and Einstein are in conflict? They are. They're in conflict. Go on. Okay, the fundamental presupposition of Darwinism in some sense is that there's nothing more real than that which select. Whoa, hold on. I think you're posing more on it than you. It's the fundamental, let me rephrase that.

Are we adapted? Are we adapted? to reality. Are we adapted to reality? We are adapted to our own reality, yes. No, no, no, no. Wait a sec. Remember earlier in our discussion when you said that you won't walk through the window? Okay, so we're not just adapted to our reality. Okay, we are fine-tuned for the world around us to survive. Right.

Okay, and the world around us is reality. Okay, that fine-tuning has a narrative structure. Go on. Why? Well, because we have to, I know, I know, I know, look, I do too, I do too. Because we have to act out. We have to act. And our descriptions of actions, because the question for us isn't what is. The question is how to act, how to act.

How to act and what could be. Now scientists, okay, by definition, I believe this, by definition, the objective materialist types cannot answer the question, how to act. In fact, if they do, they're not. not doing what they should be doing. But that leaves us with this question, which is, which is the question, how to act? And so here we could have a discussion. What's the more fundamental question?

What is? That's the scientific presumption. Or how should we act? Now, you might think it's obvious that it's what is, but it is not obvious. It's tough. Now we're going, in fact, the next question I was going to ask you, actually, I was going to take a digression into something you wrote about reason and hell. We'll get back to that. But at the very beginning of Maps and Experience, you have these, you say, the world as a form for action is a place of value, a place where all

things have meaning. This meaning, which is shaped as a consequence of social interaction, is implication for action or at a higher level of analysis, implication for the configuration of the interpretive schema that produces or guides action. That's a long wind of way. Yeah, yeah. It's terrible. I know. You're just. tend to be long-winded. It's just the way you are. But that's okay. I'm working through that. But it's a definition of meaning. That sentence is a definition of meaning. If it means something to you, it means either it's relevant for you to change your action or it's relevant for you to change your perception. And the meaning signals that. Okay, but let me, so you can say the world is a place of

things or a place of actions, but no complete worldview can be generated without using both modes of construe. The fact that one mode is generally said. at odds with the other means only that the nature of their respective domains remains insufficiently discriminated. Adherence of the mythological worldview tend to regard the statement of their creeds as indistinguishable from empirical fact, even though such statements were generally formulated long before the notion of objective reality emerged. Those who, by contrast, accept the scientific perspective, who assume that it is or might become complete, forget that an impassable golf currently divides what is from what should be. Yep.

Again, and I mean this, you know, I am not taking any offense to your questions. There's no offense intended. I'm really, what's different in that long discussion from Hume's statement that you can't get aught from is? Well, what's different is that the world of ought is structured narrative, and it's evolutionarily determined. And since it's evolutionarily determined, well, that gives us a scientific conundrum, which no one's addressed.

Well, you know, you often, this is the other thing that interested me as a psychologist. I don't know where in somewhere I have a quote and I was going to get to it, but we're certainly not going to get to all the quotes, obviously, not in this discussion anyway. But you basically say science has a problem. Oh, yeah. With the fact that it can't really appreciate that there's a narrative and meaning and it doesn't embody that. But what about the science of psychology?

I mean, you're a psychologist. It's a weird hybrid. It's a weird hybrid. But isn't that the whole purpose of psychology is to understand? Well, it's got two purposes. Psychology is a weird hybrid because it's half medicine and half research. You know, it's truly a hybrid because the clinicians, they're all these weird characters like Freud and Rogers and the existential psychologist

and Jung. And then there's the straight research psychologists. And they're more like the cognitive behaviorists on the, let's say, on the clinical front. And so it's facing both ways, and in principle, could bring those things together. But you see, the scientific, this is a terrible problem, because one of the things that the scientific perspective has done is made things look quite bleak existentially. Now, I know there's wonderment in scientific investigation. I understand that. But because, but it's strange because science attempts to push subjective meaning out of the way.

Right? I mean, as part of its process. Sure. And it should do that. But there's an existential problem there that leaves us adrift. And look, one of the things I concluded from reading Milton's Paradise Lost in his figure of Satan, Satan for him was that really the tyrannical and authoritarian rational mind, the mind that presumes that his assumptions are final. Yeah, you relate to Satan to reason. Yeah, exactly.

You said that. And, you know, that was the quote. Not reason so much. Not reason so much. Not reason exactly. Although the reason that the, the reason that the French revolutionaries tried to make a deity in the great cathedral in Paris, that reason. That's Milton Satan. Why?

Because it falls in love with its own productions and raises them to the highest point. And for Milton, he was a poet, right? He's imagining this. He doesn't know what's coming. But for me, that's a warning from an artist about. the dawn of totalitarian reason in the aftermath of the scientific revolution. Okay, well, yeah, but you know, but you actually say it, I think, the adoption of God's place by reason is something that inevitably generates

a state of personal and social being indistinguishable from hell. Yes. Well, what do you mean by that? Okay, I mean, that's a really quite a dramatic statement about, that doesn't seem to suggest that reason is a good thing. Really? No, it's just not a good thing when it's elevated to the highest position. It's a really good thing.

Look, even in Milton's work, Satan is God's highest angel. And he falls the farthest. It's not like this is not a good. Everything in its proper place. In Genesis, man is instructed to subdue things properly. Put them in order. Put them in order. That's what it means.

Subdu. Make everything, give everything it's due. Where does reason fit? Not at the top. Attention. Why do you think there's intrinsic wisdom to something like Genesis? Why do you think there isn't? Because it's 5,000 years old and probably way older than that.

Yeah, I know. But why are things that are ancient, things that are ancient give me insight into human psyche, but they don't necessarily give me insight into profound understandings of the around me. I think we... Not in a scientific way. They don't. Not in the way that modern science does. They're not, that isn't what they are at all. They're not that. There's something completely. Look, here's what they are in some sense is, look, we have an idea that we can rank order literature by depth, right? Because you read a shallow book. Someone tells you a shallow story. You read a deep book and you have a sense of depth. I have a do. Yeah. Yeah, okay. So the deepest stories are

religious. Why? That's a definition. Oh, hold on. It's a, but that's a deep. I'm allowed to make that definition because I disagree with it. It's because religious emotions start to be aroused when stories are told at that level. This has nothing to do with propositional belief. It's a definition. So you're saying, if you're saying, okay, you use the word religion, you tell me that I should use the word awe, which I like better. If you're saying the stories that are deepest are ones that relate to awe, I can understand that. Let me translate what you're saying.

Yes. Yes. And this is experiential. Right. And then I would also say, awe is a biological instinct, and part of the manifestation of that instinct is the impulse to imitate. It's the impulse to, because, okay, so then the question, here's another question. What do we imitate?

Well, we don't just copy each other. We don't literally move the same way as the person we're imitating. We see someone that we are in awe of, that we respect and admire. We're gripped by the instinct to imitate. What are we imitating? Well, imagine that we can see that in five people. And then the person, those people, they do some bad things, but we ignore those. Okay.

We're imitating something central about all of them. That's a spirit. This is a definition. It's a definition because it's disembodied abstraction. It's a disembodied abstraction of action. It's a spirit for all intents and purposes. We're really smart. We abstract out the admirable and imitate it.

That's also. part of the religious process exactly that what is it that's admirable across instances of admirable behavior and we imitate that and when your child look here's an example this is a good example your kid goes out on the field hey and he can zip down and score a goal and soccer and he's got a pretty good shot at it but a teammate and maybe not one that's so good is really open and so he passes and the other kids scores and you're happier about your damn kid doing that, then you would, if you have any sense, then you would be whether, if he scored a

goal, because he is embodying the spirit of being a good sport. That's way better than scoring a goal. Okay, so that, that's a good example of, because if you're smart, and I see parents who do this badly all the time when I go to sports. If you go to any soccer games, I have them. I hate them watching the parents. Yeah, it's terrible because they don't do this, hey? They subordinate the, they subordinate the local victory to the character development. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. No, they sort of the other way around.

They subordinate the character development to the local victory. Yeah, I was wondering what you were going to get. Yeah, exactly. And they're worst. They're worst. Yeah, it's terrible. Sportsmen. Oh, yeah.

I can't stand going. Yeah, and then you look underneath that. It's like, oh, you have a lot of unrealized dreams, a lot of resentment. You're projecting that all in your child, and that has to do with your unresolved shadow and to the pathology that you had with your parents. And it's like just an endless nightmare going down into that sort of stuff. And you go way down. find some things down there and they are really ugly. And that's why you don't like going to those

soccer games and no wonder. So a lot of this is definition, right, rather than an argument in favor of in some sense. I guess for me, yeah. But the, well, so yes. And I think, you know, I'm going to try and segue slowly here because we could go on for another two hours and I'm not going to, I know we've gone. No, you're going to, I can't because I'll die. No, I know. And we're going to go, we're going to go on for another 20 minutes. We can't because I've got tickets. I've got tickets to a movie. It's even more serious than that.

Okay. Okay. But so I tend to put reason up at the top. I still maintain that that even that reason ultimately, even though you can't get off from is, without is and a reason applies to is, you can't get off. And so I think it's reasonable. Okay, I want to quibble with that. Okay, I want to quibble with that. Sure, sure, okay.

To some degree, this is going to hinge on how we define reason, right? Because it's kind of an expandable word. But I think it's useful to draw a distinction between reason and attention. And attention should be higher because attention feeds reason, right? So when you're in these podcasts and you're attending, new information is flooding in. Now, that's reasonable, but I wouldn't say that's reason. Oh, absolutely. No, I agree with you there.

In fact, actually, I think you said something I desperately disagreed with it. The idea, you say somewhere that the person who is truthful is then going to naturally do the right thing or something like that. Eventually. Well, yeah, but that really graded on me because it missed the attention part, namely, you don't get knowledge by revelation, you only get knowledge by attention. And I would call attention being a empirical, being experiment, and testing the world around you. No, you get knowledge from revelation all the time. All the time. Sure, I'll give you an example. You get wisdom maybe. No, I'll give you an example, man. This happens to you all the time, but maybe it's an issue of

definition, right? Okay, so you're trying to solve a scientific problem. So you ask yourself the question. Well, what happens is that answers pop up. Now, you have to use reason to differentiate the quality of the answers. But the fact that those answers manifest themselves in the field of your consciousness, that's revelation. Oh, no, no, no, it is. And it's based on my previous empirical observations of the world. I say, not just. What would happen if? It's way more than that. It's way more than that. No, no, no, no, no. Sure, it's based on the entire history of your biology. If you locked theoretical physicists in a room for 40 years and asked them to come up with a theory, the theories they come up with would have no relation to the world around us

because they constantly have to be prodded and changed by observation and experience. Of course, of course. And the brilliant insight, I've had, you know, gosh, there are times in my life I've had brilliant insights and I wrote them down as papers, nature didn't happen to agree with them. Of course. in a sense that, and so that's what I mean. I didn't say that that kind of revelation was infallible by any stretch of the imagination. It's not. And that's partly why you have to discuss it with other people. I guess I think of knowledge.

Well, it defines it once it can and it's all epistemology, I suppose. And that's why I'm a physicist and not a philosopher of psychologists, I guess. But you know, when you say that all. What do you mean by knowledge? To me, knowledge is an understanding of the way the world works. What do you mean by works? The way it functions. So you make predictions and you understand the way the world works.

If I say, if this happens now, that will happen then. To me, you know, that's just a very pedestrian thing. It's why I'm a physicist. But that's, I guess, how I would define knowledge. How would you define it? I think that knowledge is basically experienced in relationship to action and predictions about the outcomes of actions. So we agree.

Oh, yes, yes, yes. And then that kind of knowledge can only come from experience then. No, definitely not. say how the world's going to work if you haven't next if you haven't watched at how the world worked up to now but you know that that's not true because well because the apparatus that you're using to acquire that knowledge of the world is like three and a half billion years old and all of that had to come for you to draw those conclusions from the experience that presents itself so revelation is definitely a consequence of your experience with the world but think about the

platform that's doing that. I think there's revelation. I think it's just reason applied to observation, right? You can call that revelation if you want. It's my reasonable rational mind. Yeah, but where do you think? Where does thought? Fair enough. Well, where does thought come from? Where does thought come from? You're supposed to tell me you're the psychology. I am telling you. No, no, no, no, but I'm saying, it bubbles up from the depths, right? There's no doubt, look, and I'm not, I'm not being naive. I, you know, again, we've talked about this before, and you made this other wonderful statement about reason being the slave of the passions and I'll buy that. So I'll understand that there are all sorts of human reasons why I do what I do and I pretend afterwards

it's rational thinking. But the knowledge ultimately comes when all of that is filtered by the results of experiments so that yeah, there may be all sorts of things, reasons. I do things I don't understand why I'm doing them. But the knowledge that comes out of it doesn't from any of those reasons or any of that internal machinations. It comes from a process that eventually I can compare to reality and test it, and then it's knowledge. But it doesn't come from just sitting there and saying, the world works this way, because who the hell knows how the world works unless you observe the world constantly? Yes, yes.

Look, most of that I'm in complete agreement with. But we think about the scientific process. I mean, one of the things that we don't teach young researchers is how to generate hypotheses. Yes. Like hypotheses, hypothesis testing. Okay, so now you want to generate hypotheses. Well, here's something you can do that will help. Read a lot, widely, a lot. Right. And then ask yourself some questions and hypotheses will come bubbling up. Okay, are they knowledge? No, they're proto-knowledge. Absolutely. In fact, I want to read, you not only read a lot, but that's one of the problems. You may not get this as a say, oh, you may because people are fascinating.

with consciousness, so you may get some of this. But as a physicist, I get this all the time. I get every day people writing me five times a day with their theories of everything. And well-intentioned people. I don't want to put them down. They thought hard. They've done that. But what they don't realize is that you, the hypotheses, to get good hypotheses, which is really asking good questions, which is something we talked about earlier, which is really what's all about, requires a lot of baggage. You have to have read a lot. You have to, in order to know what the good questions are,

you have to know where the current state of knowledge is. And so the problem with all of these letters I get is they're well-intentioned, but they don't know. They don't have all the baggage that goes along with it. And it's hard to tell people, oh, you really have to. Well, you can't. Yeah, but I mean, it's sad to say to people, this is nice, but you really haven't, you don't understand all the precursors that are necessary

to get to the point where your question makes sense. Yes. You also don't understand how ruthlessly. you have to be in killing off your own beloved hypotheses. Oh, absolutely. Right. And yeah, that's right. But again, to be fair to them of these people,

they haven't had the opportunity to do that yet. Yes. You're just at the early stages of the purses. But you have to have the built, as you say, to get to the right hypotheses. You have to read a lot or either of that or experienced a lot. I mean, that's the other way you can do it. And or, you know, if you're Richard Feynman,

instead of reising, by experiencing, I mean, you, you know, you write 60,000 pages of, of equations and you've figured out a lot so you now know how to address any situation because you have a lot of intellectual, you have a lot of this baggage, you have a lot of intellectual armor with you so you know how to address situation A, B, C, and D because you've prepared for that. And some of what you're saying when I read you and I'm being generous is you're saying, look, as an adult, you have to get that intellectual armor as well. You have had to have the bad experiences. You've had to have these things so you know

that the world can be a bad place as well as a good place, and you're prepared for it. And you have the armor. So when someone is mean to you, you know that you can respond to different ways. You can become resentful, which is the, you know, in that particularly, you can become bitter and resentful and all the rest. Or you can say, you know, let me, let me take an attitude that makes my life better rather than worse. And that's part of the armor that I think you're trying to provide people with.

And so, yeah. Part of it is, sure, I'm trying to ask, broadly speaking, do we actually want things to be worse? Exactly. And that's why both of you react. So both you and I react the same way. So bitterly to these people who not only feel victimized, but these people who want to make sure that no one, the impossible happen, which is that no one ever has anything bad happened to them. Because you do pointedly say at one point I wrote down, this is the point where he's really getting something. deep. And it's where you talk about the fact, I think, the example of the young girl who never has any, who's protected her whole life and never has any, anything bad happened to her. And oh, it's a maleficent. It's the example. Yes, sleeping beauty. You always have to use these stories, which to me, don't add anything, but to others they might. But, but, um, the notion that it's going to

come back and bite you in the butt literally, or the finger. If you, if you, if you've been protected from the recognition that bad things can happen and how to deal with them and that they never should happen. And if they happen to you that's unfair, then you don't understand that the world is unfair and you better be prepared for a world that's unfair. Yes. And if you've protected your children from all snakes, then you're the snake. Yeah. Okay. Well, I think there we agree. Let me, let me, the last thing I'm going to do, I mean, we could, there's so many ways with tensions and maybe we'll have a whole bunch more. I would also say, Lawrence, there's something we should think about temperamentally too, you know? So people like you, speaking broadly and respectfully,

because I know lots of people like you, they're more thing-oriented in their thinking, right? That's what makes you interested in physics and engineering. That's a real temperamental difference. And you would be less inclined to stories. No, I love stories. In fact, when I write, I write stories, but I guess I think of them as a hook to understand something else rather than something deep within themselves. I guess that's a difference between you. I love stories because I think there are a useful way of explaining, a useful way of getting people interested. But for me, the underlying, what I would call the underlying reality is more interesting than the story. Well, think of a map. Map is an interesting thing. So, because a map is a, you know,

maps of meaning, there are no maps in your book, by the way. Well, stories are maps. I know, but you're looking for them to see if there are any maps. Well, think about a map, though, because a map in some sense is an objective representation of the territory. But in some sense, it's not because the only thing that's on the map are things that people find valuable. And so even in that, you see this weird interplay of narrative and reality, right? Of course, it's a map. It's, if it isn't accurately laid on the world, you don't get to where you want to go. Yeah, but it only shows you where you want to go.

Right, exactly. Or the author of the map thinks you might want to go, which is always frustrating for me when I look at maps because they often are where the consensus has. And look at a map, most of it's like really vague. Why? Well, because you don't want to go there. And so, and that is really, in some sense, how we look at the world. We put a map on it. And it's a narrative. Absolutely.

Yeah, and I defer to you in that sense because you're, I mean, because, yeah, because you're interested in the psyche and you know much more about it than I do. But I guess I don't give it a higher priority. I say, yes, that is the way humans interact with the world. but to me that's of some interest, but it's not of key interest. To me, what's interesting is the world. Not so much the way the humans address.

Well, that's fair. That's fair. And look at where it's got us. I mean, we can't underplay the power of that kind of thinking. But one question that haunts me continually is, well, what does the fact that that's the way we look at the world say about the world itself? And then that gets tough because it starts. because you start to have to have conversations like, well, what do you mean the world? Exactly.

Well, no, but that you really hit it. That question you ask, what is how we, the way we look, you said it very well, but the way we look the world. What does it say about the world itself? Yes. And to me, I think that is a dangerous path. It represents, it, to me, it says a lot about how, how we learn as human beings to understand the world and deal with the world evolutionarily and successfully or unsuccessfully, which has a psychosophically. which as a psychologist, I think you're trying to help people avoid the latter. But I think I'm wary about the claim that you can use that to understand the world itself. I didn't claim that you could. I claimed that it was an interesting question. But I'm going to put a knot in your tail in one way, I think, hopefully. Well, one of the things that's happened in biology, and I think I probably have to stop after this because I'm getting warned.

Okay, I have one question. Can I have to do one, just one question after this? Sure. Okay, okay, okay. So one of the key insights of Darwin that was underplayed by biologists for decades, but has recently come back more into favor, is the fact that a lot of our being and that of many other creatures was a consequence, not of natural selection per se, but of sexual selection.

Uh-huh. Okay. Now, sexual selection is mediated by consciousness. Certainly. I'll buy that. Consciousness-shaped evolution. Okay, we evolve to adapt to what's real. What does that say about consciousness and its reality?

Now, the religious stories, one of the things that's interesting about them is they claim a kind of primacy for consciousness that isn't in keeping, generally speaking with the scientific viewpoint. But if consciousness is so deeply structured into reality that it selected us, then it's real, man. Now, but what do you mean real? Well, that's the rub. And it's not an invasion.

It's like, no, no, wait a second here. Like, is consciousness just epiphenominal? Well, it seems pretty similar across animal species. So that's interesting. And maybe it's epiphenominal. Maybe it's not. I mean, I don't know, because I don't understand consciousness at all. I don't know what consciousness is.

Right. And I don't even know if we have other, there's big debates. or I thought of whether other species have consciousness per se, at least in the way that humans have consciousness. Well, they don't seem to have this elaborated self-consciousness for sure. Yeah, self-conscious, that's for sure. Some of them can recognize themselves in the mirror, but they don't have

an elaborated self-consciousness. And you're right, and that's a deep question. And one of the, I said to you the last time we talked, that's one of the reasons I became a physicist because it's too complicated for me. I still, I've talked to many people and no one's given a definition of consciousness that I can yet understand. Yeah, well, I think the, I don't think the problem of the question of what consciousness is.

I don't think that's an epistemological question. I think it's an ontological question. It's like way down there. It's certainly way down there. You know, someone once said to me, I don't know if I said the last time, it was an interesting observation, that you could tell how little we know about something by the number of books that are written about it. The more books written, the less we know. There's tons of books about consciousness.

There are a few books about quantum mechanics because once Dirac wrote down quantum mechanics, you don't have to write another book about it. Let me read you two quotes. This is the last thing I want to do. And maybe I'll just, we may not even be a question. To me, this illustrates in some sense the difference of our psyches, you're in mind. There's a quote here in Beyond Order. First, a question.

What is the world made of? To answer this, we will need to consider reality. the world as it is fully experienced by someone alive and awake with all the richness of subjective being left intact dreams sensory experiences feelings drives and fantasies this is the world that manifest itself to or better that you meet head on with your unique individual consciousness i think that encapsulates a lot of what you've just been saying but it reminded me of a quote from one of the people i admire most as a science popularizer and maybe as a scientist,

Jacob Bernowski, who more than Carl Sagan, I think, did a wonderful, I just hold him in the highest regard. And here's the quote from him. Dream or nightmare. We have to live our experience as it is, and we have to live it awake.

We live in a world which is penetrated through and through by science and which is both whole and real. We cannot turn it into a game simply by taking sides. And so I think that is the, that maybe, maybe that's a good place to end because I think it's a great beginning point of a further dialogue between you and me because I view his view and the two are very closely related, the two statements, but they have very different perspectives, I think.

And I, and, and, and look, I really like the questions, you know, and I know you were apprehensive to some degree about peppering me with them, but I'm perfectly happy, although it's difficult to be questioned in that manner. Like, I know that many of these things seem obscure, and they were bloody obscure to me when I was first starting to figure them out. But the questions that you threw at me are questions that people have all the time about what I'm trying to talk about, and what people like Jung were trying to talk about.

I mean, he's even more impenetrable than me. So why I don't read philosophy very much, but I'd have. I got to admit, I pretend I don't, but I have. But no, look, look, if I didn't think it was worth parsing what you're saying, I wouldn't have. I absolutely understand that. And I'm sorry, because I agree with you. I love the questions. And I told myself when I was praying this, let me just let Jordan ask me questions,

because it's so much more interesting for me than the other way around. thought I owed it to you to ask you those questions, but there's a whole bunch of questions that I know you still had for me, which I hope to have in the last hour of this talk of this discussion. We haven't had time for it. Well, let's do it again. Let's agree to do it again. And I hope you've enjoyed it. And I hope it's in some of the things were new.

And I hope that for people listening that they'll, that this will provide additional insights into both you and the things you're saying. And for me, it's always, I was going to say a revelation, but I won't use that word. But it's, but it's, but it's, it's, it's fascinating for me to learn. So I've really enjoyed it and I really do appreciate your time. And, and, yeah, this is just the beginning, I hope, of more. Thank you, thank you. Yes, well, and it's a great compliment to be taken seriously.

I can I, I understand that, you know, very much. No, in fact, I, I think that's maybe what charmed me about when we first talked to me is the questions you had, you know, it's good. People react a lot better when they're taken seriously, but I do. and I'm glad that you feel that way. I hope you enjoyed today's conversation. You can continue the discussion with us on social media and gain access to exclusive bonus content by supporting us through Patreon.

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