TRIGGERnometry - Jordan Peterson & Heather Heying: Identity, Religion, Death

Episode Date: June 13, 2021

Recorded live on 11 June 2021 Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Locals! https://triggernometry.locals.com/  Support TRIGGERnometry Here: https://www.PayPal.me/triggerpod https://www.subscribestar.com/triggernometry https://www.patreon.com/triggerpod Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/sign-up/ Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media:  https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod About TRIGGERnometry:  Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Before we begin, we'd like to say that in our opinion it is not suitable for children or for those of you who may have a nervous disposition. Hello and welcome to this very special live episode of Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kisson. And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people. I don't think it gets any more fascinating than the two people we have for you today. You know the more evolutionally, biologists. is Dr. Heather Heying and of course Dr. Jordan B. Peterson. We're going to bring them in in a second before we do. I should just tell you very quickly the format of our conversation today. We're going to talk for about an hour to an hour and 15 minutes.

It will be us in conversation with Jordan and Heather. Then we're going to have a quick break and then we're going to take all your questions. If you want to submit a question for us to put to either of our guests or for us to discuss as a group, there's a PayPal link below in the description of the video or you can just send a super chat. Our team here will collate everything and then we'll ask the most suitable and the best questions about an hour and 15 minutes from now. So Francis, I think without any further ado, we should get started. Couldn't agree more. Our first guest is evolutionary biologist, Dr. Heather Heimann, welcome to Trigonometry. Thank you so much, guys. I'm thrilled to be here. And our next guest is Dr.

Jordan Peterson. Welcome to Trigonometry. Welcome back. Good to see you again. It's great to have you. back. Listen, let us get started straight away. There's an issue that we've been talking about on the show for about for a long time. It's something that is really become very important. We talk about identity politics, but there's a deeper thing that's going on. Let me summarize it very as briefly as I can. The idea is at some point 50 to 60 years ago, something happened where increasingly you started to see an increase in fatherlessness, increasing breakdown of the family, as people describe it. And many people, including one of our former guests, Mary Eberstad,

argue there was a sexual revolution that triggered that. Others have other theories. But nonetheless, many people say the product of all of that has been the focus on identity. The breakdown of the family has resulted in many of the things that we're seeing now, identity politics, obsession with finding your own community that's not really about your family because you don't really feel attached to yours, to the one that you have, etc. Heather, it's your first time on the show. It's such a pleasure. Tell us, what do you make of all of that? As I look at, your cat, flicking its ear to my long question, what do you make of all of that? And what are your

thoughts on that issue? Well, there's about eight different topics on what you asked, right? Since you raised the cat who's partially visible on camera here, cats are, of course, sexually reproducing organisms, as all mammals are, as all vertebrates are with a couple, a handful of exceptions. But cats don't really have fathers. I mean, they do at the genetic level, but they don't at the social or behavioral level the way that humans do. And so, you know, there's an ongoing live question as to exactly how monogamous humans really are. and in polygynous cultures, children don't know their fathers as much. It's at least a different kind of relationship. But the cultures that we are living in are at least monogamous by expectation.

And that doesn't suggest that there isn't a whole lot of cheating that goes on, of course. But what does it mean to have a father then? What does it mean for me to say, for instance, that this cat doesn't have a father? He had a relationship with a mother who nursed him and who taught him some things about being a cat, and then they probably never met again. Whereas in humans, the relationship with both parents is critical for most to emerge into adulthood as able humans regardless of what sex we are. So, you know, was it the loss of fathers in the family, the breakdown of the nuclear family

that contributed to identity politics? That's not one of the things that I tend to point to, but I think it's certainly contributed. I often go a little bit more recently. I say, you know, 30 years ago-ish, we start to have this perfect storm of postmodernism in academia, gaining ground of legal drugs being shoved at children, and it's different ones for girls and boys because we see different so-called failings and boys and girls. it's the screens, it's the helicopter parenting. But, you know, add into that mix, having only one parent in a household so that you don't have the tension, the back and forth, the ability for two parents to actually both have their eyes on a problem, you know, be it behavior that a child's engaging in or, you know, whatever else and discuss it. Yeah, that's going to make things much harder for children growing up. I'm curious.

Jordan, sorry, Heather, Jordan, what about you? You've talked about the sexual revolution and its impact in the past. What do you make of all of this? Well, I think there are two questions that are sort of importantly nested in your question, and one is the issue of identity per se and why that's become a question. And then the second question is, why has identity politics arisen as an answer to that question? I would say the first issue has arisen because of technological transformation in large part. And you could say that reproductive technology and its consequent effects on the family would be one branch of that.

But look, if you look at more traditional societies, and so let's say those are societies that aren't transforming technologically at the same rate that the world is transforming now, the issue of identity doesn't come up that much because there isn't much choice. You do what your parents did. If you're a man, you do what your father did. If you're a woman, you do what your mother did. And the question doesn't arise because the options aren't there. Well, now we have options. And we don't know how many there are what the limits are.

And we don't even know what the options are to some degree because things change so quick. We can't even keep up with them. I can't keep up with my computer, let alone the world. I mean, it's so interesting, well, and distressing in some sense, and this is partly a function of age. I'm surrounded by gadgets I don't understand that are changing faster than I can adapt to that are smarter than me. And that's just one. And I'm actually fairly technologically astute. You know, like I mastered computers, well, to some degree.

At least I could use them when I was in my 30s. And, you know, I was sort of on the edge of, I would say, the generation that managed that, at least to some degree. But the issue of identity comes up when the pathway isn't fixed. Well, it's not fixed. Okay. So then, see, Nietzsche said at one point that the issue of morality per se, the question of what is moral, doesn't emerge until you compare many morality. It doesn't emerge as a question. The question before that is what's right and wrong within a given moral system.

Not is their morality as such. That only comes up when the idea becomes questionable. Well, now we have this problem. What is identity? Well, and then because no one knows the answer to that off the top of their heads and has never generated and articulated and lengthy thought-through response to that, someone can say, well, it's your felt sense of gender. It's like, well, oh, maybe.

No, actually. that's a very small subset of what it is. That's a very sparse theory. But your theory of a helicopter is sparse. And so, you know what I mean? If I asked you to draw a helicopter, you'd draw something like a four-year-old would produce because what the hell do you know about helicopters?

And if you think identity is less complex than a helicopter, well, you're wrong. And so, you know, the issue comes up because we have so many paths to choose from and then these political answers come up And no one knows what to do with them exactly because no one can articulate the rationale for the traditional modes of being. That's not easy. You know, like that's hard.

Is the family a patriarchal structure? Well, I don't know. Maybe. Well, no, upon consideration over many years, here's a counter argument. But it's not like you can just generate that on the fly. And so, you know, we fall prey to these casual critiques in some sense. But they're less casual than our ability to articulate our, you know, implicit beliefs. And so we get caught out all the time.

Technological transformation makes us uncertain of who we are, and partly by providing us with more freedom. And then answers arise to the questions that are driven by that, and we have a hard time making philosophical sense of them, or defending ourselves against them. You know, I've been trying to think through this idea that human social institutions are fundamentally predicated on the arbitrary expression of power. It's like, well, yeah, sort of.

But wait, no, no, fundamentally that's wrong. But it's not like it's simple to think through, and we can return to that later. Heather, before Francis moves on to the next little bit, I was going to ask you, is the family patriarchal structure? I don't see it that way. And there are compelling arguments. in evolutionary biology space as to, you know, how it is that males wield power in the outside world more often in a nuclear family situation than females do. But there's, you know, there's a question then

of what your definition of power is. You know, this will seem like we quickly fall into a semantic trap, but it's, you know, if you're going to argue, you know, patriarchy, archie is about power. That is what patriarchal refers to. So you have to define power. And if women tend to have power within the family, within social systems, women tend to engage in hierarchies in which the competition is more covert. Men tend to engage in competition and hierarchies that are more overt. And so, you know, that is the power that is more overt.

More overt. Of course it is. Zipso factor, right? You can point to it and say, well, that's where the power is. But the power that women tend to yield being more cryptic, being more covert. And that's partially because we are sexually dimorphic. We do have some history of at least, you know, some history of polygamy in our past such that men are on average, bigger and stronger and all of this. And so in engagement between the sexes, women aren't going to use power, aren't going to use physical power. That wouldn't make any sense. That would be a losing move. And so once you start down that road

where women are going to be more likely to be able to compete on something like an even playing field if they're going to be using psychological or social tools as opposed to physical tools when engaging with men, then also you expect, and we see, this is, there's plenty of evidence in the psychological literature as to, you know, the kinds of competition that women engage in being more covert. So all of that is sort of a background answer to, you know, is the system we live in patriarchal, only if the only kind of power you're interested in is the overt expressions of power, especially raw physical power. It's also whether or not you think that the fundamental principle that structures social organizations is, in fact, the expression of power. And it's not.

That's just wrong, I believe. I think it's antithetically the truth. What do you think it is? Well, if you look even at primates like chimps, and chimps are a lot more violent. The males are a lot more violent than human males, at least reactively. And their social structures are more vicious and violent than human social structures. The alpha male, so to speak, the top chimp is constantly engaged in grooming and reconciliation and in stable chimp societies attends to the needs of the females and the infant. to a large degree. And so what DeWall has demonstrated quite nicely is that even among chimpanzees, social structures

predicated on the arbitrary expression of power, which we could define as the use of force to compel others to act against their wishes, let's say, or against their intrinsic desires, produces very unstable social hierarchies that are ripe for revolution. And the chimps that rule for a long time are markedly, cooperative. Now, they're still capable of exerting force, but force isn't the animating principle of the society, which is the claim that, you know, that social relations among humans are predicated on power. That's the claim. Unless we weasel out of the definition of power. Power is when I get you to do something you don't want to do or else. And that's not the basis for

human social institutions. It's an aberration and people who use power to make to obtain and maintain their positions are by and large incompetent. I agree. Yep. I think that's exactly right. And just exactly as you say, alpha, alpha males are not brutes in non-human primates and in human primates where the systems are functional. There may be other males who are brutes, but it's not the alpha. Alphas use affiliative behaviors and conciliatory behaviors and cooperation to accrue loyalty, which then is a way of maintaining power. And that's only sort of in male hierarchy space. And of course, what I think one of the modern problems that we are experiencing is

male hierarchies and female hierarchies both exist. They follow different rules. There are different rules of engagement. It's a very rare species that actually has both, because typically in other species, one or the other sex disperses, and you also don't have multiple males and multiple females in a group together, baboons being an interesting exception to that. But for us, we've combined, you know, we now live in this attempting to be egalitarian world where we've got this, you know, call it six million years since we split with the ancestors of bonobos and chimps. six million years of evolution within our particular lineage in which we've got female hierarchical relationships and male hierarchical relationships.

And now, I don't know, post-industrial, something since at least agriculture. So at a minimum, at a maximum 10,000 years old, we're combining these two hierarchies and we're pretending it's just going to be easy and fine. And we have to figure it out. Like we have to figure out how to work together. But imagining that we're just going to do. default into male style of hierarchy and it's going to be cool with all the women or that we're going to just default into female style of hierarchy and it's going to be cool with all the men is

an amazing error. And in fact, what I feel like we see is this like pendulum swing from, well, we were just doing it the male way because women came into sort of the external realizations of power later. And that wasn't really working for everyone. And at the moment, we're seeing this pendulum swing over into really female styles of dominance relationship. And it's equally dysfunctional. It's just something we don't have as much history with recognizing, but that doesn't make it any better.

You know, this... Yeah, the future is... No, the future is all of us. That's a very controversial thing to say, especially nowadays, Heather. Right. But don't you think part of this problem, and I'll direct this question first at Jordan,

is that we now think that we are above animals. We think that we are evolved, that we are higher, superior, more intelligent. But isn't that one of our main failings, not acknowledging the fact that we are part of the animal world? Well, I think you're... It's very useful to inform your ideas

about what constitutes human beings by looking at carefully controlled experiments on animals and observations of animals. Because, well, if you look at our morphology, our physiology, we share organs pretty much all the way down the vertebrate. you know, there's a lot about us that's like other creatures. Now, you know, there's important differences too. So you look across species and you try to make comparisons where that seems

useful. And sometimes that can clue you into how things originated. So Duol, for example, who primarily studied chimpanzees, has looked at the emotional basis of morality as it emerged in chimpanzees. And before that, people like Yak Panksep, who's a brilliant animal, rat psychologist, essentially, rat researcher, researcher of rats showed that even rats engage in fair play when you put them together in repeated playbouts. So if a big rat can dominate a little rat by the expression of power, which he can do if he's about 10% bigger, he will do that if you put them together and they play once. But if they play repeatedly, if the big rat doesn't let the little rat win 30% of the time, at least, the little rat will stop playing. and the proclivity for reciprocity has been well documented in many mammalian species.

And so we can see that our behavioral patterns have roots that are very deep, and that's useful. It helps clarify the philosophical discussion. It helps us understand ourselves better. It helps us understand that moral behavior, for example, isn't merely a consequence of rational decision-making or rational inference, let's say. it's much more deeply rooted in us than that. And so there are, now having said that, I would also say there are many important differences between human beings and other animals, not least our linguistic capacity and our incredible capacity for complex mimicry, which is unparalleled, I would say.

And our visual ability, there's lots of things about us that are quite unique. But, you know, you try to derive your wisdom where you can, and you're a fool if you ignore biology. And it's a lot easier to ignore it because it's actually difficult to see. study and you have to work at it. And so it's easier, especially now, especially if you're driven by utopian social theory that implies that human beings are infinitely malleable and you want to make them malleable in your mold of what constitutes the ideal. Well, then you can ignore biology and, you know, call people biological essentialists and other sets of idiocy. And we see a fair bit of that. And Heather, what do you think, do you think by turning our back on the animal

well thinking that, you know, that blank slatism, et cetera, et cetera, what we've actually done is create a whole raft of problems for ourselves that didn't exist before. We're out absolutely creating a whole raft of problems for ourselves. I would, I would add to what Jordan said another, I guess another way in, another way in to point out how similar we are to many other species out there. What Jordan's pointing out is our shared history, our shared phylogenetic history, evolutionary. history such that we can look at non-human primates and see in chimps and bonobos who are two closest extant relatives, many similarities, ability to, you know, and yet chimps and bonobos are

so different socially. You know, one of them bonobos tend very much towards explicit affiliation and peacemaking and one of them chimps not as much with the big caveat, as Jordan indicated before, that the alpha is actually a conciliatory figure. And you go farther, back, you go into other mammals. And yes, because we all share this sort of founding thing for which we are named, mammary glands, that obligates us to maternal care and that obligates us to sociality and relationship, and it brings in love. And therefore, we get this sort of cascading series of events wherein we have closer relationships. Then we're at least obligated by anatomy and physiology before the evolution of milk and lactation.

But I would say that that's actually not even the most interesting thing. That we can also look to birds. And our most recent common ancestry with birds was some reptile-y thing that bears no resemblance to any extent reptile now, you know, many hundreds of millions of years ago. So birds and mammals are not all that closely related, but in some species of birds, in crows, in parrots, in a variety of linear. ages of birds, we also find what looks like love and long-term relationships and fair play

and exchanging of ideas. So what is common? How is it that we have converged between like crows and parrots and dolphins and elephants and wolves and chimps and humans? And I'm leaving some things off that list. But that list is like, okay, social, but there's a lot more things than that that are social, long-lived, generational overlap, so you can have exchange of ideas and learning between generations and long childhoods. So that these organisms are born or hatch, depending on if they're mammals or birds,

without yet fully being what they're going to be. You know, compare that to, I mean, any mammal, excuse me, is somewhat what we call altricial, which is to say born, you know, not fully able yet to do everything it's going to do. because it's going to need milk from its mother. But a horse, within a half an hour of being born, is able to run around and keep up with the herd-ish,

because if not, it's going to get eaten. Whereas the more altrucial you're born, the more helpless you're born, the more software you are. So, no, we're not blank slates. And this is something that Brett and I talk about a lot, and we've actually written into the book that we have coming out in the chapters on childhood and on parenthood and relationship.

We're not blank slates. But we are, we argue, the blankest slates of any species on the planet. Like when we are born with whatever genetics we have on board, we have the most potential of any species on the planet to become anything else. Like our fate as individuals is less guaranteed at birth than even for a dolphin or an elephant or a parrot and certainly then for a squid or a cedar or a mouse. So yeah, we aren't blank slates. we have tremendous potential to become almost anything.

And that's not at odds with the pushback that you guys, all of you and I as well, are giving to identity politics. Because that, you know, that, I think, identity politics is a failure of an understanding of emergence, that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. It is a reductionist approach that the identity politics says, you know, I am, white and female and middle-aged and American and, you know, over-educated. And, okay, all of those things are true, but they don't even begin to encompass a description of me. And I could do the same thing for any of you or any other human being. And that's, that is a reductionist,

sort of metric-laden approach to an understanding of what humans are. It's an insistence. It's an insistence. And it's a numeracy, too. Like, if you can count it, then it's real. And no, sometimes the most important things aren't countable, and sometimes the things that you can count don't matter. So let's be our whole best selves, as opposed to reducing us to the things that you can label. I wanted to weave a couple of the themes that we've talked about together there, particularly technology and the sexual dimorphism that is inherent in us.

Do you think there will come a point where technologically we're capable of eradicating that, should we choose to? Then it seems to be a lot of people who'd like to do that. sexual dimorphism? Yeah. Or to compensate for it somehow in a way that it doesn't manifest itself in the way that it currently does where one sex is stronger and therefore, quote, unquote, more oppressive. And the other one is, you know, you know what I'm talking about.

Yeah, no, of course. I mean, I think this is just, can I swear here? Absolutely. Absolutely. This is just bad shit crazy, right? Like, I grew up in the 70s and 80s, and all options were on the table. for me. And granted, I grew up on, you know, the West Coast of America with parents who, you know, looked at me and said, okay, we weren't expecting that and a girl, but cool, you want to be mathy,

you want to be sportsy, like, go for it, you know, do those things. And it was because we, the world seemed to be willing to abandon those regressive gender roles that weren't necessary anymore without ever pretending that me being good at math meant I wasn't a girl, right? Like, that that's the thing that we are emerging into now. It's this it's this regressive backward slide into stereotypes that I thought we were free of. Like actually no, men can't gestate or lactate or give birth or any of that. And if you are a particularly caregiving man who wants to be the primary parent for your child, that's awesome. But you still don't get to breastfeed because that's not what men do. Right. So like we, we,

can get rid of a lot of the layer on top that we weren't able to before. And there's attention, as you Jordan have pointed out, you know, like we've got all this freedom and you push it too far and you get people really, really confused and unable to make choices among all of the things that are downstream of the freedom. But if we can just hold on to the reality at base and then say, okay, now, you know, if you're a scientist, that doesn't make you male-ish. And if you're an artist, that doesn't make you female-ish. And we should be able to live in that world. I feel like that is the world that we were creating until, frankly, until sort of the 90s

when this grip on academia that looked post-modern and post-structuralist was happening. And then it bled out into the schools of ed and the media and Hollywood and big tech and every place else. And Jordan, do you think the problem comes from the fact that we don't believe in religion anymore? And if you don't believe in religion, I don't know who said this and then you don't believe. People need to believe in something. And as a result, what we've taken is identity politics as a way to belong to a group. Or do you think it's far more complex than that?

Well, there's a New Testament doctrine that you render unto Caesar what is Caesar and unto God what is gods. and I actually think that's a very astute psychological statement. And now it depends on whether or not you believe that human beings have a religious instinct. And I think broadly that the answer to that is that they do for a variety of reasons. First of all, religious experience is elicitable by biochemical means. So that's pretty powerful evidence right there. But there are all sorts of religious-like experiences that we, we all pursue. So we feel awe to beauty. We feel awe to the ideal. We participate in

like mass worship of sports prowess. We like to see people hit the target, which is the opposite of sin, which means to miss the target. We get enraptured by a gospel-oriented rock performance in this stadium and we do that with other people and it fills us with enthusiasm which is to be filled with God because that's what enthusiasm means. We feel awe towards certain actions that people undertake, particularly if they radically altruistic or radically truthful. We're possessed by the desire to mimic people that we see act out an ideal that we don't understand, etc., etc. I've made a list of about 50 of these things that I'm not going to go through all of them.

So you imagine there's an instinct that orientes us towards the ideal, and that would be part of the consequence of us having to emerge from this insufficient biological substructure that Heather was talking about and move towards whatever we could be. We need a vision of what that is, and I believe that vision is deeply influenced by biological factors, reciprocity, for example,

which would emerge again from the first. phenomena that our social nature, our protracted childhood dependence, etc. It's emergent property of that. All of that is reflective of a religious instinct. So now then you might posit, societies have to organize themselves so that that religious instinct is fulfilled without it disrupting other functions or without other functions being disrupted by it. So the religious system collapses.

The need for it doesn't disappear. And so then what happens, as far as I can tell, is it just plummets down the value hierarchy until it hits a point where it can find some satisfaction. So politics becomes religion. And then look out. See, you know, maybe we have some sense of an absolute ideal. We have the need for an absolute ideal. And maybe you make that abstract and you view that as God.

And God is distant and ineffable and undefinable and abstract and eternal. He's not local. he's not local to your country and your place, like a figure like Stalin or Mao. And maybe if you don't have something to project that ideal onto, something abstracted, let's say, and perhaps even something communal, then it finds, it starts to contaminate other functions.

And I believe that, I think this is where the new atheists went so wrong. They assumed that if we just dispensed with all that idiotic superstition, we'd all become, you know, avatars of Richard Dawkins style logic, assuming we had the capability, which we generally don't. And I just don't see that that's true. I don't see any evidence that that's the case. I think what happens is we become, we dispense with the catastrophic superstition of Catholicism and end up swallowing something much more ungainly and horrible.

Jordan, I want to latch on to that because we've been talking about, religion and you know how we've turned our back on religion don't you think a lot of these crises come from the fact that we don't yet know in the West how to address the issue of death and you can see the way we dealt with COVID to me it seemed like a moral crisis it seemed like a general panic we don't know how to address the fact that we're mortal and as a result of that we just seem to be scrabbling around for anything don't we including identity politics. Well, I think there's some truth in that. I mean, one of the existential facts that compels us to ask religious questions is the fact of death. And so, and that's why I also think

you can't eradicate religion, for that matter, because what are you going to do? You're going to eradicate people's concern with death? I don't think so. You know, and I've been at funerals and people stand around and they don't know what to say to each other. Not really. Maybe they can give each other a hug. That's something, isn't it? But they don't know what to say, and that's because we're all speechless in the face of mortality. But that doesn't erase the question, and the question begs an answer. What's it all for? Well, we're trying to figure that out in our collective religious ideation, let's say. So, for example, when I look at Christianity, I think, well, at minimum, speaking as a psychologist, the figure of Christ is the consequence of a centuries-long,

a millennial long discussion of what constitutes the ideal human being. Now, you might ask, is it any more than that? That would be a metaphysical question, but it's certainly at least that. And as that ideal, well, have you got a better solution to that problem? You know, you think about how it's expressed. That ideal is expressed in music. It's expressed in art. It's expressed in literature.

It's expressed in architecture. It's expressed in dogma, spiritual belief, and experience and commitment and faith. all of that. It's a very multidimensional conception. And you know, you can you can dispense with it rationally. But well, then what? You got something better? Well, no, you don't. You have something that looks like a set of arbitrary axiomatic assumptions that are enforced by fiat. And that's not a like part of Christianity, let's say, was an exploration of what the ideal was. There was at least that exploratory element. I mean, I know things degenerate. into insistence, but it wasn't, you really think all of that was insistence by force?

I don't think that's a plausible explanation in the least. I mean, Christ isn't the sort of character that a power-hungry maniac would dream up to exercise arbitrary control over a docile population. It's just, that just doesn't make sense. I'm going to give our ancestors and us more credit than that, you know. We were at least trying to figure out how to be ideally in the face of our catastrophic morality. And that question, that's not going away. Heather, I can't see your facial expressions at the moment, which is deeply frustrating to me, because I suspect, I can't tell whether there's a lot of

agreement or disagreement with you on this. Tell me, from an evolutionary biologist perspective, what is the function of religion? Do we need it to thrive as a species? Well, I'm going to punt the first part of that a bit, because it warranted. its own dedicated conversation. But I agree very much with what Jordan was saying. And I think it actually indicates the problems with modernity in part are about a decohering. So I also agree with the problems with the new atheists. Atheist is a term that I have used to describe myself, but never new atheist.

and that comes with the full understanding that religion has adaptive value. That if it did not, we wouldn't find every single culture in the history of humanity having had some form of religion. And what does it mean for us to be abandoning religion so quickly? Well, we can see part of it. You know, add this to the perfect storm of why it is that people are grasping for meaning. Because, sure, any system. that becomes orthodox, that becomes the representation of the sacred, will begin to become corrupt.

Like this is the nature of systems, and they will need to be renewed, and there needs to be tension. Again, one of the concepts that Brent and I explore in our forthcoming book, there needs to be tension between orthodoxy and heterodoxy, between the sacred and the shamanistic. and without this system that people are raised into and they can say, I see that, I see the sacred there, I see the holy and maybe I want to go to it and maybe I want to turn away, people are just unable to even know where to find meaning. And so, you know, mind, body, and soul. I don't know, I don't have a brilliant grasp of what all is meant by soul, although much of it is in what Jordan is talking about in the ineffable in awe, in glory, what we feel when we experience a piece of music that just moves us viscerally. But even that, you know, that word that I just used at the end, that is a recognition that they all tie together. Visceral, it's body, right? And so much of what we're experiencing now, the decohering of not just society, but I think of individuals,

is people thinking, well, I don't need any of the stuff of the pest. I don't even need to be tied to my own body. I can pretend that the thing that I am from the very beginning is simply a social assignment. No. All of this is who we are. Everything about our mind and our soul is embodied as well. And imagining otherwise is wrong. So, you know, I admitted that I was going to punt the question of exactly what religion is for evolutionary up front, evolutionarily up front.

And I did. But what I did say clearly was, given that every culture ever known has had some form of religion, we know there was adaptive value in it. And there is yet to be a culture that is completely without religion that is succeeding widely. And there will be those, and Jordan is much better positioned to speak to this than I am, who knows more history than I am. There will be those who will argue perhaps that China is an exception. But I think that some of what is passing for ideology, for instance, there is unto a new religion. You know, something will fill the vacuum. Christianity is growing faster in China than it did in Rome when it first emerged.

So there it is. You know, that's an interest. And the suppression is probably helping it. No doubt. It seems that there's an emergent issue. Heather, maybe you can tell me what you think about this if you don't mind. And so, you know, we have to organize ourselves in relationship to values because we can't figure out what to pursue unless we rank order things because we can't pursue everything at once. And so we have to rank order things in terms of their value and their approachability.

So then imagine that, well, out of that we can abstract something like value as such, right? And then you might say, well, there's an implicit understanding there that there are higher and lower values. And the whole value hierarchy is oriented around whatever value. value is. And you could say that the drive to God is the drive to understand the central factor that organizes all value. Or you could say it's representative of the thing that's at the top of a properly structured value hierarchy. We all kind of have an intimation of that. I mean, everyone I ever met upbraids themselves for not being all they could be. Well, compared to what exactly? Well, something, right? Compared to the ideal that we hold. What's that?

compared to the ideal that we hold in our heads. Yes, well, and it's an odd ideal because what it does is whack you when you've deviated from it. And then your conscience tortures you. Now, conscience can go astray. You know, it can be too severe and it can bring you down.

So it's not an unerring guide. But it's an interesting phenomenon because it sort of operates independently. And it's not subject to your will exactly because, you know, wouldn't we all be able to like to be able to just dispense with the dictates of conscience? It's no, you compare yourself to an implicit ideal and you torture yourself to the degree that you deviate.

And you might rationalize and lie and deceive and try to ignore it and all of those things. But I've never seen that work. And so that's another example, I think, of something that's akin to, well, that's partly the function of religion from a social and biological perspective. It's like it orientes you towards a collective ideal. I think that's absolutely right. if I may tell an anecdote from my from my deep history. Maybe the first time that I was in Madagascar, Brett and I were in Madagascar before I was doing my research there.

And we'd been on a, I don't remember the numbers, but it was something like a 43-hour bus ride that took us only 430 kilometers across the southern half of Madagascar. It was excruciating in every regard. But we met a young man who was on the bus with us, who invited us at our end point to have dinner with his family. And it was at the home of a female judge. This was the early 90s.

Female judge and her husband, whose line of work I don't remember, and they were solidly middle class Malagasy, which is still, there's almost no relationship to what middle class looks like in the weird world, in the Western educated, industrialized, rich democratic world. But we were having a very interesting meal,

mostly in French. we spoke almost no Malagazi and they spoke almost no English, until one of them, it was extended families. There's like eight or nine of the Malagazi family, and Brett and me as young, you know, between college and graduate school at that point, so 22, 23 something. One of them asked us what our religion was.

And we said we didn't have any. We didn't say we were atheists, and Brett actually does not, will not use that word about himself. We said we didn't. didn't have any, and they recoiled in horror, and they almost kicked us out of the house. And if we hadn't already had an hour, hour and a half with them, establishing rapport and establishing that we were decent human beings, I think they would have.

And the conversation that continued forward was them trying to figure out how we could possibly be relied on to be moral if we didn't have religion. And I think having been forced into that conversation by well-meaning Malagazi people in my early 20s really, you know, forced into full consciousness. How is it? How is it then that if I am not answering to a God that I am going to be, who do I answer to? Right. And, you know, is it this sort of invisible pyramid of values?

What is it exactly? And it can't be just you. It has to be, you know, in my case, I'm very lucky. And, you know, I had Brett and I had each other then and we still do. And so, you know, to have someone else to whom you can always go to and say, tell me if I have done wrong. You tell me if I have done wrong and you, you know, you don't hold back. And better if you have a few of those people because, you know, absent imagining that someone is up there who can see all, you need more than just your own honesty, no matter how honest you are. Francis, aren't you glad you and I have each other?

No. To put it quite simply. But Jordan, I was going to ask, so we are currently experiencing a pandemic. Do you think that's going to see a reawaking of religion as we're confronted with our own mortality, as we're reminded that actually we are not these omnipotent beings? We don't have control over Mother Nature.

We can't even control something as simple as a virus. Which religion is the question, isn't it? Yeah. Well, Dr. Randy Thornhill, who studied the relationship between infectious disease and political belief, would predict that people will become more conservative as a consequence of this. And so that's one possibility. You know, I think that when you're faced with a challenge, the issue of what constitutes the ideal and what constitutes deviation from that starts to look. loom large, right? And there's a reason for that, which is when you're subjected to a catastrophe, one of the logical things to do is to figure out where you went wrong. So it didn't happen again.

And to figure out where you went wrong is to do something like what Heather described doing with Brett, except internally, right? You posit an ideal in your imagination, and you make that into an avatar. That avatar becomes your judge, and you have a conversation. And you have a conversation. with it, something like that, or maybe that's all played out at the level of emotion, but that's not optimal. You want to be able to articulate it. And then you call yourself on it, you say, well, maybe if I was a better person, this wouldn't happen to me. And, you know, sometimes that's not true. Sometimes you just got run over by a bus driven by a maniac, right? It's just, you're in the wrong place at the wrong time and tough luck for you. But by and large, if you take account of those things that you can take account, of the desire to not reproduce past errors that produced a catastrophe is a pretty useful approach. And we're very, we abstract these things up to a very, very high level, you know, and that's one of the things that's very peculiar about human beings is, well, another thing that God is is the voice of the omniscient collective within. And, you know, you might think,

you might object, well, that's not God. It's like, well, these things are not as obvious as they look. the conscience again calling to you from within. I mean, here's part of what that is. So imagine that you're subject to social pressure of all sorts, right? And you see that social structure abstracted as well in literature and stories. And so that's like a concentrated social structure. And you're just completely bombarded by that information all the time. And you build an internal representation of the spirit that that,

characterizes, and it's what calls you out on your own misbehavior. But that spirit is something that has aggregated itself over God only knows how long, since the dawn of consciousness itself, a long, long time. And so distinguishing that from something omniscient that's watching you, that's not so easy. And you might say, well, that's still not a metaphysical claim. It's like, Fair enough. But when you tangle in the fact that consciousness itself generated that, at least in part, and that you have no idea whatsoever what consciousness is, then you start to skirt the edges of a profound metaphysics of, like the omniscient observer, pretty closely. And those things aren't easily rationalized away, not as far as I can tell. The deeper I've looked into it, the more peculiar and odd it becomes.

especially when you start to think about consciousness itself. So. Heather, I want to give you the last word on this because I want to move on to something a little bit different. So is there anything you'd like to add? You know, hours' worth, but maybe we move on because that was a great place to end, I think. Unconsciousness. All right. Well, listen, in addition to both of you being experts in your field and really making a significant contribution to the sort of abstract discussion,

there's something else that we wanted to talk to you about, which I think is very relevant. in the current climate and Jordan, I'm sure you'll argue that partly this is a product of technology. Both of you have made a stand at one point or another for something that you felt was important to make a stand about, whether it was principle, whether it was a line being crossed, whether it was an approach you just felt was not appropriate. And I think increasingly all of us in our society are confronted with the fact that there are certain things that are being violated on the one hand that we're unwilling to see violated. and say nothing.

And on the other hand, it's very easy at the same time to descend into the sort of social media-driven desire to destroy people with facts and logic, quote, unquote, and have these pointless, meaningless, superficial, trivial battles with each other on the time. And I was wondering, you two people who've managed to be at the very, you know, in the very heart of this argument that is raging in Western society, yet conduct yourself with a lot of dignity. How do we as individuals pick our battles so that we can distinguish between making a stand on something that's really important without finding that Nietzsche quote, the abyss is staring so much back into us that we become the monster that we're fighting?

There's a lot to say. And there's not going to be a one-size-fits-all answer. definitely pick your battles and don't spend time waiting in mucking about battles that you have decided that you're not going to fight in. You know, it used to be before social media was so ubiquitous that authors would say, you know, I only read a couple of reviews or I don't read reviews at all because getting that into my head is not helpful for my creative process. And I think there's a lot of truth in that, that we need to be able to be able to, to hear our critics, certainly, you know, certainly as a scientist, being open to ideas that challenge what it is that you currently think is true is absolutely paramount, right? So how do you, how do you walk that fine line where you can be open enough to hear reasonable challenge from good faith interlocutors and not find yourself just, you know, pelted with tomatoes hurled by,

sometimes real people, but often not even, right? So, you know, the fact that much of the chaos online doesn't even seem to be organic. Actually, for me, makes it easier to say, you know what, off. Just not doing that because I'm not turning off people. I'm turning off some combination of people and chaos. And I suspect actually, Jordan, that you and I and I, are effective in some ways in this realm for similar reasons. That even though you were a professor also for many, many years,

it was, I think, your clinical psychology practice and your relationship with your patients that gave you such a deep sense of the humanity of people. And in Brett's in my case, it was the particular institution we were at and the way that we were able to teach. And so it was our relationship with our students, wherein you see that so many people in their interactions with other human beings

actually kind of maybe don't even regard the person on the other side as a full human. And we see the dehumanization certainly in Brexit era and Trump era and just each side picking a moment a person aside and accusing fully half of the other, fully half of the population of not quite being real, honestly, you know, deplorable or reprehensible or incompetent or, you know, whatever it is. And I think that having been face to face with so many, you know, patients in your case, Jordan and students in my case, who I just came to know so well. You know, what I say is that teaching actually made me much less of a misanthrope than I used to be. I used to have almost no hope

for humanity. And people who were superficially familiar with what happened at Evergreen would be like, are you kidding me? It was those Yahoo students who, you know, took bread out and you were like, no, actually. The Yahoo students were indoctrinated by Yahoo faculty who were in charge there. That was the indoctrinated faculty and staff who did that. And the cowardly administrators. Oh, for sure, the government administrators, yes, yes. But none of our students behaved that way. Our students were loyal to a person because we created them, we created them, we treated them like whole human beings. And what I used to say at Evergreen was, my God, the bar for being an educator at the college level should be, you know something real, you know how to communicate it, and you fundamentally believe in the humanity of your students. And I'm shocked at how many people fail one or two or all of those.

And so I do think that for those of us who do have something real to share, do know how to communicate. communicate it and do fundamentally believe in the humanity of the people on the other side, that comes across. It's clear that we're real and human and actually, you know, fallible, but doing our best. And it probably also makes us more susceptible to garbage arguments from bad faith actors that come our way. And so it may be, for me, I say, you know what, I am willing to just, you know, shut the curtain a lot of the time because I know that I engage. truly and honestly and really with people when I know they're actually people and I therefore don't have to with a lot of the social media stuff.

And Jordan, how do you manage to keep your head when all around you are losing theirs? Well, it isn't self-evident that I did. You know, I mean, first of all, battles pick you much as you pick them, maybe more. You know, when I made the first video I made, I was playing. playing around with YouTube. I put my lectures on YouTube. I had a little bit of experience with TV in Ontario, you know, so I was dabbling. And I didn't know what YouTube was. Neither did anybody else. You know, I didn't know it was going to be the world's biggest television network by an order of magnitude. I thought it was a place for cute cat videos. It still is to be fair.

Yeah, well, fair enough, you know. Maybe that says something positive about people too. So, but I got swept up and, you know, in many ways, it's been absolutely devastating. So now, I made, I decided a long time ago that I was going to say what I thought, you know, that I was going to try to orient myself. And I think I had experiences that were similar. Heather said something very interesting, you know, that she's much less misanthropic than she might have been, had she not being a teacher, a caring teacher. Well, you know, the spirit that animates our social institutions is a lot more in the nature of caring teacher with deviation that it is power-hungry tyrant. I really believe that.

I mean, you have to be extraordinarily cynical not to see at least some of that. And so the people I've known that were competent in their positions, incompetent institutions, were mentors who encouraged. And that's a good relationship to have with people. And it's the opposite of the arbitrary expression of power. And it's something you do, both of you, the mentor. and the mentee, let's say the teacher and the student, you do that in the service of a higher ideal. And I've never met anyone that I admired who exploited their students, who considered that a power.

I mean, I've met professors who didn't put their graduate students' names on research papers or were stingy about credit. But it's not like they were thriving. It just doesn't work. So, and when do you stay silent? Well, you stay silent until the weight of having to love. lie is worse than the danger of speaking. And I'm not fond of deceptive silence or outright lies. In my clinical practice, I never, ever, ever, ever saw anyone get away with anything.

And so that was horrible. It's horrible to think that that's true. It's true. You think you got away with it. you just don't know the causal chain that led to your demise. So, you know, that plus my understanding too, that one of the factors that sustained and generated totalitarian atrocity was the willingness of ordinary people to swallow things they knew to not be true.

That was insisted upon by the sophisticated observers of totalitarian states that I found most influential. You swallow enough lies, your state becomes a monster. And so, you know, I've upbraided myself continually for bringing the chaos of the world into my nice, tidy little family. And it's being terrible. But, you know, in my defense, I would say,

I'm trying to stave off something worse. And if you think that it can't get worse, that just means you're not. don't know anything. So, you know, it's up to everybody in their conscience, you know. And I think it's a matter of figuring out what to be afraid of. I'm more afraid of silence and lies. I think they're more terrifying.

As am I. I mean, you know that I was born in the Soviet Union and I've seen the process of whereby people are having to make those decisions every day. And actually, that's very much the reason we asked you by this question because you are both remarkable people in your own right and you've, as you say, you've suffered terribly both of you for what you took a stand on, but also people would argue you've been rewarded and I would argue you've had both, right? You've been punished and rewarded at the same time. But there are a lot of people who maybe they're wrong, but they do feel, you know, we get the messages every day. I'm sure

you get heaps of messages every day from people saying, look, I, you know, I hate the fact that my kids of being indoctrinated at school, but I also want to be able to feed them. And if I lose my job speaking out, then, okay, great, they're not being indoctrinated anymore, or maybe they still are, but I'm also not able to feed them anymore. How do ordinary people who are not college professors, let's say, who may not become a YouTube host or whatever it is, who maybe don't feel that they want to be a public person as a result of making some kind of stand, how do they square those two conflicting desires, Heather? There's an easy question for you.

Yeah, exactly. Right, we're all trying to work it out. You're right, I'm sure that all of our inboxes look similar in this regard, and it's heartbreaking. And I do, when Evergreen was actively blowing up, I was saying, you know, I completely understand why all of the people who are coming to us privately to say, I see what's going on, and I support you.

I can't have your back publicly. I felt very generous to them then, and I feel less generous to them now. And I actually am a little surprised that that's the direction. It's gone. What is clear is if there is a fever pitch, if there is a moment, then you need a critical mass of people to stand up and you can't stop it. I don't know what the equivalent of that is when there's not a precipitating event, right? because most of social media is just this slow burn. And I don't know what it would mean to stand up on mass there.

I don't think there is a virtual equivalent in that slow burn space. But when there is an event and someone is, you know, someone's the witch, when someone's a witch and there are 30% of people in the organization who are privately saying, oh my God, this is really dangerous and bad. And half of them are saying to the would be witch, I know you're not a witch, but this, I can't stand up. If that 15%, you know, and I'm making up numbers here, but, you know, if some substantial fraction, substantial minority of people can actually see what's going on, and I think that's

actually a conservative estimate, and then even 50% of those people said, this will not stand, not in my name, no, then those events can get turned back. And, you know, I don't, in the particular case of my story, I don't know that the institution was savable, even if 15% of the faculty and staff had gone public with, and we know that at least that number of people actually saw it was going on and didn't approve. But in some cases, systems aren't that far gone, and they would be savable. And it requires courage. And that wasn't easy for me to feel back when we were losing two tenured positions and that was all we knew. and it feels easy to, you know, it may feel like it's easy for me to say now with the hindsight

of four years and, you know, effectively being funded by the crowd. And it's, you know, it's both less security and vastly more security. Most people won't end up in, you know, being able to transition in that way, nor will they want to exactly as you said, Constantine. So how can you encourage people to stand up in defense of the system that they are in, you know, the functionality of the institution that they're at such that it can continue on without being captured, without any more witch hunts. You know, that's the piece of it that I don't exactly know. It has to be something like don't lie. You know, like if you're being called upon to lie or to burry your head in the sand, well, where's that going to end? It's not

It's not going to stop. It isn't how it works, as far as I can tell. So it has to be something like that. And I mean, I'm not saying these are easy decisions. I'm certainly not saying that I made the right decision. I hope that they'd have to cart my skeleton out of the University of Toronto. You know, I liked my job a lot. It was just fine.

And, you know, it's been nothing but chaos and upheaval since then. I mean, I have been rewarded, but I haven't been rewarded. with security, something like that. That's not the right word exactly. Stability, maybe. Yeah, well, it's high risk, high reward. Fine, but I would have settled for much less reward and much less risk.

And I was perfectly happy with that. Now, I'm not ungrateful for what I've accrued in the meantime, but it's not an improvement, that's for sure. And I wouldn't lecture people about their moral obligation because you've pointed out the problem. It's the proximal cost and the distal reward, right? You know, you see a system degenerating, and you're going to say something, and the cost you is going to be bloody high,

and that impact is going to be perhaps not even measurable. But then you run into the problem that Heather just described, which is, well, if 70% of you don't like what's going on and you don't say anything, then, you know, where is it going to end? And people have to make those moral decisions for themselves. The only thing that I know, perhaps, is that, that lying doesn't seem like a good idea and being forced to, particularly, you know, this is where I took my stand. I'm not saying things that other people want me to say. It's like, up yours. You go and live the consequences of your speech and I'll live the consequences of mine.

And I'm not going to live the consequences of your speech. And that's where my government went too far as far as I was concerned. It's like, no, no compelled speech. I don't give a damn what your rationale is. because I don't, why should I trust your rationale when you're transgressing against something so sacred? Why would I possibly trust your rationale? There isn't anything more sacred than the word. I mean, unless you want to just dispense with our accrued morality in its entirety, the one thing we've more or less agreed on in the, you know, relatively Christian West, or perhaps the Judeo-Christian West, is that the word is, sacred. Well, if you want to throw that out, be my guess, but you're not getting me to throw that out.

So now, whether I'm right about that or not, well, probably, you know, right, Christ, there's lots of ways I'm not right. I can tell you that, but lying is not a good idea. You say that lying is not a good idea. Do we need to redefine the meaning of courage? In particular, when we look at courage, what it used to mean in generations past, going to Well, really, you look at a lot of the courageous people now, they tend to be whistleblowers. They tend to be people who stand out from the crowd and say that they don't agree.

Do we need to redefine what it means to be courageous? I think that's always been the case. I mean, if you look at the prophetic tradition in the Old Testament, that's just one story after another, of society degenerating towards a tyrannical state and a prophetic voice emerging, you know, representative of God in some, abstract sense saying, be careful, you're deviating from the proper path. And if you don't think

there are going to be consequences, you're just not paying enough attention. Well, you know, how do you distinguish a false profit from a true profit? I don't know, maybe the false prophet tells you what you want to hear. I guess I would just add to that, that I think physical courage and mental courage are related, that there's a reason that we use one word for both. and that in the modern world, there is far less opportunity to manifest physical courage or to know what it would be like. And, you know, it's been much discussed, and I agree with the sense that, you know, the lack of war is both beautiful and, in some ways, demasculinizing for society, not having that as even a possibility on the horizon. And there's plenty of things that girls and women do as well that requires physical courage, but it tends to look different. And in our disembodied behind screens, especially for the last, you know, especially during COVID era, just, you know, a physical lives.

Without having any sense of what physical courage might be or what physical risk might be, of course we're now also more confused about mental courage. And so, you know, being told things like silence is violence and also speech is violence. So, you know, the whole thing, the whole thing just falls apart very quickly. Before we go to our break and the Q&A, Jordan, I just want to come back to you on this because I'm not satisfied with the conversation we've had so far. And that's maybe because there is no answer. But I just feel like I've had so many conversations with people where I've said exactly the same thing to them. Lying is bad. It has consequences.

If we carry on down this path, we will go to a very bad place. And we're already in a very bad place. And the answer is, yeah, you're just exaggerating. It's just the pendulum swinging the other way. We'll swing back. Everything will be fine. And even if it's not, well, at least I get to survive today. You go and die.

I'll survive today. What does one say to something like that? They might be right. You know, you just can't tell, can you? I mean, let's say the pendulum does swing back. well, maybe it swings back because people stopped it from swinging too far. But then the people who said it's going to swing back will say, well, we said it was going to swing back and look, there it went. Well, that's why you can't in some sense make your moral determinations as a consequence even of the analysis of an outcome.

I think that's partly why something like faith is necessary. So do you have faith in truth? Well, prove to me that truth is the best path. Well, I can't. That's not provable. and for exactly the reasons that you just laid out. It's a decision you make at some point. And you weigh the evidence.

You stake your life on, you know, you're either incoherent and all over the place, which is its own catastrophe, or you stake your life on a certain set of principles. You do that. You have to do one of those two things. You're either incoherent or you're coherent. If you're coherent, you stake your existence on some axiomatic principles. They're basically axioms of faith. And you have to decide what those are.

And then you live out the consequences of that. And that's each individual soul's journey. And I'm not even sure you can convince people in some sense. I mean, you can talk to people and you can tell them what you think and you can let them make up their own mind. It's one thing I learned as a therapist. And I've watched therapists on TV all the time. They're always telling their clients what to do.

I didn't tell my clients what to do. I didn't know what the hell they should do. I mean, they were different people than me. and I didn't want to take ownership of their victories or responsibility for their defeats. You know, that's not a good thing. And so I was always trying to help them figure out what they should do. And, you know, insofar, I think as I've been successful in my lecturing capability, that's because I'm doing that for the people I'm talking to.

I'm not saying you have to believe this. You know, it's people wrestle with their own conscience. But, you know, if you're forced to violate your conscience, something's up. Either your conscience is malfunctioning or the thing that's forcing you to violate it is becoming tyrannical. What are the other options?

It's very, very true. Right. We are going to take a very short advert break now from our sponsors. And what we will do is we're going to collect all of your questions that you want to ask Jordan and Heather. And then when we'll come back,

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Join our community by hitting the link in the description and the pin comment below. See you there, guys. Hey everybody, welcome back. We're going to bring Heather and Jordan back into the conversation now and ask them some of your questions. Anton, if you can move us around, here we go. I apologize to both of you for those cringy ads, but it's our brand. Jordan, this is one for you, I think, but I'm sure Heather, you'll have something to say on this as well. Rob Evans from Australia, I think, says it seems to me that the descent of the West into Marxism-stroke communism is inevitable at this point.

Unfortunately, particularly with the COVID pandemic, he says, being used to accelerate it. What can we do about this and how can we reverse it if we can? Well, I don't think it's inevitable. So I think it's a it's a it's a it's a it's a it's a it's a it's a it's a it's a it's a it's a it's a It's a it's a it's a I mean if you look at the United States for example There's there's a fair bit of power on both sides of the political spectrum and the battle's raging But it isn't obvious that one side is one so and I think the Americans have negotiated their way through worse crises than this

I mean it isn't obvious to me that this is worse than well certainly not worse than the time that Nixon was president that that period of time say from 66 to about 74 it was pretty it was much like it is now except worse I would say so I'm not hopeless about this I think that and I do think a lot of this is a consequence

of radical technological transformation that's a more that's a more unsettling phenomenon in some sense but but I don't really have any answers but what to do with that. Francis, let me tack on to this a question. Maybe Heather, you want to jump on this because Sherry says, what do you guys think is the best way to peacefully protest against critical race here and our tax-funded public schools?

And that's part of the same conversation, I feel. Yeah. I guess peacefully protest brings up images of people in the streets. and I don't think that that is how CRT is going to get disappeared from the schools. I think that, well, I think we need our schools of Edback. Good luck with that. Yeah, and that's a long-term, that's a long-term solution that is the only one that will stick. So in the moment, I imagine that, again, your inboxes may also look like mine in this regard,

but I certainly hear from a lot of parents. and teachers both, whose kids are in schools, both K-12 and higher ed, but especially K-12, saying this is a disaster, what do we do? And I guess I would go back, it's not an operational answer, but I would go back to my answer from before and say, be assured that if you are seeing this, either as a parent or as a teacher or staff or administrator at some school that you are affiliated with, you're not the only one and you're not the only one who's concerned. I feel certain and it's impossible to do the numbers from where I'm sitting, but I feel certain that it's never just one person and it's often a significant minority

and sometimes it's actually a majority of people and an institution who don't like what's happening are putting their head down and just trying to do what they perceive as their job or just trying to get their kids to the school because they don't feel like they can make trouble, but they're actually dying inside. They really cannot tolerate what is happening and find each other, figure out some way to find each other. And this is one of the few places where I would say, like I am with you, Jordan, on the hyper-novel technology

being a big part of the crisis that we're living through right now. And that's the thing that makes this different from Nixon era, right? Like, you know, it's just not like that because they didn't have social media. but one of the things that our hyper-connected hyper-novel technology allows us to do is potentially find people and talk privately and establish some rapport and figure out what to do. And I think, you know, with regard to in the schools, know that there are many of us out here who see it and are doing what we can with bigger platforms, but figure out who it is, who else, where you know, you are can actually see this as well. And, you know, just start almost every, just, and this is

not about CRT in schools, but like when I just engage, I'm here in Portland, Oregon, which is sort of like the epicenter of ridiculous in a lot of ways. And it's, I love it. I love Portland. I love the people here. And there's just a tiny minority of Yahoo's who are just driving the narrative and driving a lot of chaos here. And when I talk to a barista, a waitress, you know, the, the person at the front desk at physical therapy. You know, when I just talked to any, you know, at UPS, whatever, and just give any indication when they say something standard and generic that I don't actually fit into the standard generic model that they're assuming

is what you have to do to do small talk now, almost everyone responds with relief and wants to have a real conversation. Almost everyone. I think, I think that actually it's a majority of us. who want to be having a real conversation and want this to stop. I think the evidence for that is pretty clear is that the extremists on both sides are a very small minority. I wouldn't underestimate the utility of writing a letter.

Write a letter to the school board. At least you don't even have to send it. At least you get your arguments down and articulate them. That's something. And then maybe once you do that, you know, you can write the letter. Then you can let it sit for a week and you can think about it, think about it, make sure you got your words right, as much as you possibly can.

Then maybe send it. like there's not much risk there. And, you know, we do have political structures. People aren't involved in them. And I got involved in political structures in Canada a bit when I was younger. And they're so starving for people's participation that it's beyond belief. And so you can make an effect locally in your community or in your state or province or nationally, for that matter, if you want to put in the time. So those institutions, well, that's what we have.

And so unless you want to generate new institutions, you could try, you. using those and people think they won't get listened to, but, and sometimes they don't, but letters have more effect than you think. So that's something at least, isn't it? And it's not going to expose you to a tremendous amount of risk, especially if you word it carefully, and you write before you're so angry that you can't control yourself. This is Euphoria Calvin Klein, the new elixir collection featuring three perfume intense scents, inspired by a unique orchid accord, paired with vanilla, each with its own distinct attitude, each with a its own universe. Bold elixir. Sensual, woody, addictive, magnetic elixir, sweet and romantic like a

lingering touch. Solar elixir, a radiant expression of joy, ultra-concentrated for amplified impact and lasting power. Find your euphoria. Discover the euphoria elixir collection by Calvin Klein. In England, we love a strongly worded letter, Jordan. It's a national pastime. It is a national pastime to find something that mildly pisses us off and then writing a strongly worded letter about it. Yes, well, thank God for England. So the next question is from the rather charmingly named Toey Redback. It's a dreadful name, but it's a good question. Do our big brains have a downside that we overthink things and impose behavior contradictory to our nature, e.g. veganism and gender, etc. So over to you, Heather, and then we'll go to Jordan with that one.

Yeah, I mean, of course, there's a trade-off there. And just at the most maybe banal level, they're really expensive to run. You know, our brains are the most expensive organ in the body to run. And, you know, once we started growing our brains big, we needed more food, and then we needed to spend more time getting food, and then we needed to spend time figuring out new technologies in order to get our food to be more accessible to us. We started cooking, for instance.

And you get a sort of cascade. of events that is really hard to stop at the point that you start going down the, we're going to solve this intellectually road. On the other hand, you know, we don't tend to solve things with brute force. We're not the brawnyest ape or primate or mammal. That's not what we do. So, you know, is it, is there a tradeoff? Yes.

Can we figure out how to, I mean, I feel like a broken record. here. But, you know, can we return ourselves to something of an integrated, coherent whole? And remember that we are actually fully embodied beings with emotion, in addition, you know, fully embodied with emotion and not just analysis and intellect. It's not just the logic and the words and the, you know, typing furiously while hunched over your phone, right? It's, you know, we're here in these bodies going out into nature, feeling all of our senses, and having a sense of awe sometimes of love, of anger, of spite, even, you know, all of these are part of what it is to be human. And it is, I think, again, a failure that is best described as

reductionist to say, that's, you know, our big brains is what we are. It's the only thing that we are. That's what makes us human. No, it's all of this. And it's the integration of all of the parts that makes us human. And so, yeah, tradeoffs, for sure, how to evade the tradeoffs? No perfect way, but remembering that we are more than the sum of our parts and that we are a holistic whole is an approach. And Jordan, what is your view on this question? Well, you guys kind of pointed to it earlier. I mean, we're the only creatures that have discovered our temporal finitude

in an explicit sense. There's evidence from other animals that they have something akin to grief, and maybe grief itself. There isn't a lot of evidence that they conceptualize themselves as finite beings. That's a big difference. And it might be a fatal difference in some sense. I mean, if you look at religious stories like the story of Adam and Eve, you know, when our eyes were opened, we discovered that we were going to die. And that's the fall, essentially. And we've never recovered from that. And you can view the whole Bible in some sense as an attempt to redress that problem. And the story there is something like, well, a sufficiently noble, ethical endeavor. might be sufficient to remove the sting of death. And maybe that's true. So the big brain has a price, right?

We're very self-conscious, and that's great in some sense because we're aware of who we are. But it's not like it's not a fall. It's a fall, right? For the writers of the Bible, that was the beginning of history, was the dawn of self-consciousness. And history is, in some sense, the attempt to erect a culture that protects us from our death. So, you know, on the upside, we live a long time and our lives are less brutish, you might claim than those of most animals.

And so forth, you know, we've gained, but not without a price. And it isn't obvious that we can bear the price. It's not obvious. A former guest of the show, one Michaela Peterson, says go dad in the chat. So, Michaela, good to see you again. Also, a few of you are surprised to discover you can ask questions. We mentioned at the beginning. There's a link in the bottom.

You can send us a PayPal, send a super chat, and we'll get to your question if we possibly can. Robin asked the question. This is coming back to the very beginning of our discussion, which is the breakdown of the family. There is a quite a persuasive argument, particularly I think it's more. likely to be on the political right, the introduction of the welfare state in the United States is what fueled the breakdown of the family. Do either of you have any strong feelings or thoughts on that issue? Well, as a conservative in some sense, which I think I became, at least in part, because I was a social scientist and learned about the law of unintended consequences, is that

you mess with complex functional systems at your peril. And if you think that you're well-meas, meaning intervention is going to have the positive effect that you think it will, and only that effect, you're blinded by your own ignorance of your ignorance. It's a really profound form of ignorance. And so I think there were more factors driving the breakdown of the family. And we should also point out, it's like, well, what do you mean by the breakdown of the family? You know, if you lived in the 1900s or the 1800s, the late 1800s, let's say, the probability that you were going to lose a parent before the age of 10, before you were at the age of 10, was pretty damn high. And so the intact two-parent family with kids that lived and parents that lived,

you know, for a substantial amount of time is a relatively novel and modern phenomenon. Certainly, it's a 20th century phenomenon as far as we can tell. So. But Jordan, I would argue that, and obviously I wouldn't argue with you about it, but, because you're actually an expert on this, but psychologically, I would imagine the impact of losing a parent to a natural cause like disease or whatever is different to the experience of feeling that your dad, let's say, walked out on you before you've even born. That gets processed in a different way. You can be composed that a lot of ways. You know, I don't know if you can make a blanket case that it's worse to have a father who leaves or one that dies. Those are both pretty bad.

Sure. There is less of a sense of perhaps the risk of feeling that it's your fault. fault or that something could have been done about it, arguably. But putting that aside, like I think if you look at the data on the development of children, the evidence that children who have intact two-sex, two-parent families do better, is overwhelming. Now, I don't think we know enough to specify the fact that it has to be two-sex, like, you know, a male and a female. I suspect that that's the case for a variety of complex reasons, but that doesn't.

mean that two people of the same sex couldn't make a good go of it. It also doesn't mean that single parents can't make a go of it. But on aggregate, it's better to have a mother and a father. And I think the reasons for that are self-evident, actually. It's like, well, because who are you going to model your masculinity from if you're a boy and your femininity from if you're a girl? You'll get echoes of that in the same-sex parent, but it's not enough for creatures that are as developmentally complex as us. And so it's kind of stunning to me that this is a discussion that we actually have to have. It's like, well, and especially when you also consider something we didn't talk about,

relationship to the patriarchal structure of the nuclear family. It's like, I don't know how twisted you have to be to think that a man's commitment long term to monogamy and child raising over multiple decades is an expression of his desire for arbitrary patriarchal power. That's preposterous. It's exactly the opposite. Obviously. So the fact that we, I can't believe that we're actually confused about this. Like, where is the selfish advantage precisely? The selfish advantage, the selfish advantage is manifested by psychopaths. They mate promiscuously, like mosquitoes. And, their offspring live or die, and that's how it is, and there's a niche for that. And that's the

arbitrary expression of power. So we're so demented about so many fundamental things that it just staggers me. We swallow things that aren't like incomplete theories. They're absolute preposterous falsehoods, and yet to oppose them means that there's something wrong with you ethically and politically. I just can't see how you can make a case that on aggregate, a family without a father and a mother is better than or equal to a family that has both. How can that possibly be true? You don't have to make a case.

You just have to say that the people who do make that case are bad people, which is what happens. Heather, do you want to weigh on on this? Yeah. First, I'm just delighted. I've never heard a promiscuous mating system identified as being like mosquito. before Jordan, so that made me laugh. The one thing that I would add, and I basically agree with what you've said here,

is that I think I don't see a reason to expect, I think that, you know, I agree with what you said, that all else being equal, two parents is better than one, and two parents of opposite sex is going to provide more diverse input to the developing child. And therefore, if you have a loving relationship between two women or between two men who are raising children, then one thing in their favor is they had to really, really want those children, whereas many heterosexual parents end up parents without necessarily wanting kids, right? You can happen into parenthood being hetero and you can't if you're homosexual. but I think it's more important if you are raising children as a homosexual couple of either sex to make sure that you have adults around of the sex that you are not so that they are providing some kind of model for your children of what it is to be the other sex.

And that's, you know, this is not some sort of a bioessentialist imagining that like all men are like this and all women are like this, but that there are different ways of doing things, even down to on average women being more agreeable than men. And just seeing what that looks like in real time, like the more exposure to the more diverse kinds of people you give your children, the more likely they are to be able to wade through life later on. And especially if their natal home only has men or only has women, make sure you introduce them to some women or men.

I can give you an example of that. bit offside, but not exactly. Girls with brothers are less likely to suffer sexual assault. Why? Well, it's hard to say exactly, but it's partly because their exposure to men from an early age allows them to read the social situations more carefully, more accurately. It's something like that. I'm sure I'll get lamb-baseded for this, but that is a fact.

So, and is it also not about the differences between non and limited? What's that? Is it not also the fact that they're perceived as having protection? You know, it works later in life even. Yeah. It's a protracted effect. So, you know, that might be part of it to begin with, but it seems to be longer lasting than that. It's not so preposterous to claim that you're more likely to deal with people that you understand more deeply,

deal, you know, effectively with people that you understand more deeply. Right. How dare you? are an extraordinary statement. I do, I think, look, I do think it's an indication of how confused we are by how much change is occurring that all these things have become open to question. It might also be the case that, you know, that's a consequence of, well, a university education that isn't sufficiently cognizant of the debt that it owes to the past. Yeah. No, and I guess I'm actually picking up on something that you said earlier with regard to what's going on at universities, I think you indicated that people who are concerned about their school boards could fill those spots because people are hungry.

The political environment is hungry for people at that level. And I think this is part of what happened in higher ed that no one who didn't have to went and pursued governance. You know, we're all expected, all us academics are expected to do a certain amount of governance. But if you were one of the scientists with big grants, you'd normally got an exemption. Or if you, you know, if you otherwise had a lot going on, that was how the university basically paid you. Like, you don't have to do the governance. So who was left in all the governance spots? People who couldn't do the research.

The people who were otherwise uninterested or incapable of bringing new ideas to the university. and frankly, to some degree, who were driven to bring ideology in. And so, you know, we absolutely need people who are creative and analytical and logical and compassionate and actually know something and know how to communicate it and believe in the humanity of other people

to be in positions on school boards and in governance. And, you know, the work that doesn't feel like almost anyone's highest and best use, but that we need real good people in those positions. And the next question is, by another awful name. He's actually a big fan of... Stop slagging off our audience.

His name is I'll fight you naked. Come on. That's not a good name. I don't know if that says more about him or the channel. Anyway, but it's a very good question. His question is, women seem more vulnerable to the woke religion, I think, because it hijacks the mama bear circuits.

Is there any psychological intervention or an evolutionary perspective that could be used to at least curtail this? And that's over to you, Heather. And then Jordan. Yeah. Great question. I'm actually familiar with

I'll fight you naked as well. He writes in dark UNA as well. I'm assuming it's a he with that name somehow. Yeah. Yeah. It's not a very feminine approach, is it, Heather? No, no, not so much. Not so much.

Women, both, you know, to go back to what I was saying, you know, right at the beginning of our time together today, Women being more likely to engage through covert competitive means than men with their overt competitive means. And also being more likely to be agreeable, which is related but not the same thing, are, and a third thing, more likely to have their entire world wrapped up in their social universe, as opposed to men who are more likely to also say have a shop, be tinkering, like have something else going on. all of those things, I think, make women more susceptible to groupthink, to social pressure, and to actually at the point that they have adopted some new ideology, or even just a piece of it, to feeling compelled to spread it to others. And I don't, I wouldn't actually put it, I feel like mama bear to the degree that that's,

that's something that we can all immediately grok what that means, is one of the best and frankly, I don't think, captureable pieces of womanhood, that, you know, protection of your children, and of course fathers do this too, but protection of your children at all costs is actually what I think we need to be, to be finding. I was just actually talking with Brett about this last night. Like, we need to get the mothers to discover what it is that is being done to the children. And once the mothers stand up, once the mothers stand up and say, actually, no, you don't get my kids. You do not get to do that to my kids. That is the thing that will make women disagreeable. And what we need is disagreeability. We need people to stand against the crowd

enough that then the people who won't go disagreeable say, oh, wait, but there's a lot of people I like and respect who are going this way. So I don't have to be disagreeable to go this way. I'm going to follow that new line over there. And it's going to be the one that is actually, you know, honest and honorable and protective of children and allows us, you know, freedom of expression and exploration of ideas. Yeah, agreeable means that you like your kin, but it doesn't necessarily mean that you're that fond of perceived predators. Yeah.

Right. So that's a weird thing. You know, we don't understand. You think, well, you love your family, therefore you're a loving person. It's like, no, wait a minute. wait a minute, it's not that simple. You love your family. Well, what do you do when you perceive a threat to them?

You don't love the threat and love your family at the same time. That's very unlikely. And so agreeableness, a very complicated personality dimension. It has marked advantages and disadvantages at every position along the distribution. You know, like disagreeable people are rather self-centered, let's say, and they have a tendency to be, in the extreme, they have a tendency to be antisocial. But there's pathologies associated with extremely high levels of agreeableness, too. And we don't understand how that will manifest itself precisely in the political realm, because this is all new territory in some sense.

So what does female political pathology look like? Well, it doesn't exist. It's like, right, for sure. No, that's wrong. You know, we know that the covert kinds of aggression that Heather was talking about, it's a reputation destruction that, that, that, that, characterize his feminine aggression. And if you, you know, what's the joke from the Simpsons?

There's nothing meaner than a roving pack of 13-year-old girls. And, you know, the boys, and my daughter used to comment on this now and then my friend, my son would have a fight with one of his friends. They'd actually have a fight and then they'd make up. But if the girls got their knickers in a knot, let's say, Jesus, all hell would break loose for a long time and often on social media. So, you know, is it reasonable to see some of this reputation, destruction, culture as a manifestation of female political pathology? It's like, I don't know, but I do know that because I've studied antisocial behavior, and I've been in touch with leading experts in that area, that that is the most extreme form of female aggression.

And so, and it scales. That's the thing that's interesting about it. You can't punch someone on Twitter, much as you might want to, but you can't. and sure savage their reputation. And so it scales. And that's, we don't know what to make of that, but to turn a blind eye to it seems to me to be prematurely foolish. Heather, I was going to, let me just follow up before I go to a question.

Just I want to talk a little bit more about this. You've written in the past about toxic femininity, which I think is what Jordan is alluding to a little bit there. Do you think, you know, this obsession with toxic masculinity and toxic, Do you think that's the useful frame or do we need to de-sex this and just go, there are some behaviors that are productive and some behaviors that are unproductive and we just need to try and steer society towards the productive ones, rather than sort of focusing on which sex it's more in tune with?

I actually, so obviously the pointing of the finger at any kind of masculinity and declaring it toxic is a disaster and foolish and often far. worse than foolish, like actually a kind of diabolical behavior. And there will be, there will be places, I would say, where approaching it without reference to the sex that tends to engage in a particular thing will be useful. But there is utility in understanding that sex roles have been around for millions of years and that, you know, men are more likely to engage in competitive interactions overtly in front of you where you can see it. And when it's over, it's over. It's over. and you know it. And women are more likely to engage in competitive interactions covertly,

behind the scenes, behind the people involved, perhaps, and you may not even know that you're playing. And, you know, those different dynamics, it's not that women can't do the overt thing and men can't do the covert thing, but understanding that there's actually a sort of evolutionary basis for the types of hierarchy and competition that men and women engage in and that they're different is, I think, important. You know, and it's not because we want to reify what's male and what's female, but because we want to understand so that we can move past the regressive parts of it. And those that we can't move past understand them so that we can actually create some kind of,

frankly, shared hierarchies so that we all can all work together without pretending that, you know, the male way of doing things is always wrong and therefore it's going to be the female way. and we can't even point out when there's a pathology there, as Jordan is pointing out, or vice versa. We need to integrate the best of the male typical approach and the female typical approach, and I don't know exactly what that looks like, but pretending that there's no difference isn't the right way, I'm sure of that. Well, attempting to integrate them would be a star, and we seem to be quite far off that at the moment. But let me ask this question. It's from important John, another great name. And his question really talks about there's obviously a lot of what you might call conspiracy theories floating around at the moment, the idea that, you know, COVID was created by Bill Gates and all this other stuff.

And Heather, I know that there are some conspiracies which have now increasingly turned out to be actually true. Lab leak is something we'll be talking with Brett about on Tuesday. But from a psychological perspective, Jordan, what is the appeal? of a conspiratorial view of the world? Why are people drawn to conspiracies? I think it's often a manifestation of low agreeableness, distrust. It's simple and explanatory, so that's helpful. We tend to personify things.

It's easy to see malevolence and intent where there's just ignorance and randomness. And because it's important to identify malevolent intent, might have a tendency to over perceive it, especially in the outgroup, let's say. And then, but I think there's additional factors at play right now. Like, it's not that easy to distinguish conspiratorial thinking from just creative thinking, right? So there's something happens. There's a bunch of explanations why it might happen.

Now, you might have a cock-eyed conspiratorial version, and then you go talk to your friends and your family, and they sort of tune you in, but let's say it's COVID and you're isolated. Well, you know, every one of us has got a proclivity towards our own particular form of insanity. Like we blow out at our weakest point when we're stressed. And the way that we deal with that is by banging ourselves up against other people. It's like, what do you think of this? I think that's stupid. Oh, okay, well, maybe I'll have to go rethink it.

Well, that's part of what keeps our conspiratorial thinking under wraps, right? We have to share it with other people. And if they think it's preposterous, then we go back and rethink it. It's distributed cognition in the social space. Now you can find like-minded people for your conspiracy instantly. And they're not even real people. Often they're disembodied. And so we also have no idea what that's doing to human, social, cognitive political thinking.

We don't know. And that's another consequence of this radical, transformation and technology. We don't even know what it does to people to have to speak to speak over video instead of in person, what that does to discourse. We have no idea what Twitter does to thought. You have to compress your thought into a minimum number of, or maximum number of characters. Well, does that bias you towards the expression of impulsive aggression? It kind of looks like it. You know, does it increase the probability that you're going to speak out, kind of in the privacy of your own cocoon like you're behind the wheel of an automobile

and shielded when something irritates you? Could easily be. These are mass communication networks with huge effects, and we have no idea about what they do to us psychologically. And we'll never figure it out, because by the time we study it, they'll have transformed into something completely different. So it's tough. It's a tough one. Heather? I agree. Don't assume Malone. levelance where you can assume ignorance. Yeah. That's a good, that's a good mental hygiene approach to conspiratorial thinking. It's probably stupidity.

Yeah, I agree with that. And just this isn't an, and also not following from that, but and also. And I know you're having the conversation, as you said with Brett on Tuesday. Currently, alternative approaches to thinking through what we are being told are being branded as conspiracy as a way to shut down the conversation. Right. And so this is, you know, this is the death of science. This is, you know, exactly the same people who are branding things, conspiracy theory, are saying, hashtag follow the science. And these aren't people who would recognize a hypothesis that was alternative to the only one that they're allowing us to talk about if it had been in the face.

So, you know, there's a weaponization of words, you know, again. But specifically, you know, as of five, ten years ago, we all knew that we were most afraid of being called racist. And now it's understood that you certainly don't want to be called a conspiracy theorist. But, hey, remember that every big idea and probably most of the small ones, too, that we now understand to be true, were once promoted by one or a couple of people, and they were roundly mocked and perhaps stigmatized and perhaps even ostracized or even executed for even saying the thing.

And so, yes, LabLeak is a perfect example, and there are more in COVID space, and there are more all the time. And what social media does is it gives the bullhorn to the orthodoxy. To those who are claiming they have no power at all, but actually have the power to shout down any dissent to the rating.

the reigning narrative. You know, if you look at the way science works, you think about it this way, well-meaning people doing everything they possibly can to rein their egos in, generate hypotheses about why something happens. 99 out of 100 times they're wrong. Right?

And now, if you're right 1% of the time, and that's cumulative, man, your knowledge is progressing, so damn fast, you can't even keep up with it. But your error rate is still 90%. And that's with the best method we possibly have to detect, you know, some, some facet of the truth in the political space. Well, it's much harder. So the error rate is going to be much, much greater. And so, and of course, everybody's tails in a knot because they've been locked down for a year and a half. And God only knows how sane we are because of that and what the consequence of that's going to be. I mean, I certainly don't think that the lockdown is going to result in a net, in net, in net, life saving. I doubt that very much. Now, we'll probably never have the data. And I can understand that the Western world and the rest of the world for that matter didn't want to see their medical

system completely swamped. But I doubt very much that we save people. We'll see. I don't know. I don't know. We save some people at the cost of others, is what you mean. We saved some people in the short term at the cost of many others in the long run. And, and look, those sorts of trade-offs, we make those sorts of trade-offs because that immediately evident catastrophe, mortality, is a lot more difficult to deal with psychologically than, you know, a 5% increase in the rate of alcoholism or something like that, which is basically invisible. I'm not castigating the people who did this. Well, the people who did that, this were us. So, castigate away. And we have time for one last question.

We've got a couple, actually. We started late, remember? yeah, we did start late. So I will leave that question. I'll ask it now. It's the most important question of our time. It's from Elana. It's, and we ask us to all our guests on the live shows. Heather and Jordan, what's your favorite biscuit and why? Biscuit? Yes. Cookie, cookie, cookie, cookie. Would you like to take this one first, Jordan? Well, at the moment, I'm still mostly eating a carnivore diet. So I have these meat chips that or something that might vaguely be dessert-like. So, I mean, if I, the unwanted image of strawberry cheesecake with chocolate drizzling comes to mind, but that's not precisely a cookie.

It's just an indication of my state of deprivation for having endured this bloody diet for so long. Heather? Cookie. I think it's probably the most American answer, but a good, chewy chocolate. The Chip Kokey is probably the best. Still warm from the oven, will crisp on the edges, melting on the inside.

It's pretty good. You could be a voice number off there, too, as far as I'm sure. Let's stop because Jordan looks like he's about to go off his diet, the way he was vigorously nodding there. Listen, guys, before we ask you the last question, can I just thank you both from the bottom of our hearts for joining us for having this conversation? It's been an absolute pleasure.

Our audience have, have been so grateful that we've been able to host it. So thank you, Jordan, and thank you, Heather, for coming on the show. It's been an absolute pleasure, and I hope we can do it again sometime. Francis, do you want to ask, maybe we can end on a positive. Should we ask this one from April? This is from April, and the question is, April Hill, how we avoid apathy, but also not cave into negative thought when informed of all that is wrong? Basically, how do you avoid apathy if you watch trigonometry, is the question. Early in the pandemic, when Brett and I started live streaming, I started saying at the end, get outside.

And that is the thing that I do to avoid apathy is as much as I learned from you guys and Jordan, like all of you and many others, still, the less time on the screens, the better. And that even holds for just taking in text. I still prefer to read through actual books, not on screens, and I read a lot. But the more time I'm outside, actually pursuing speed in my case because I just love going fast outside in nature and also being totally still outside in nature and letting nature come alive around me, that gives a renewed sense of meaning and purpose and, frankly, direction such that I can come back inside to this kind of work with, with less apathy and more purpose. Jordan?

Well, I probably find most of what's renewing in my relationships with my family and friends. And so, you know, to the degree that I'm able to engage in that, that's almost always to the good. So apathy as such, well, I find inactivity much more horrifying than activity. So I don't know how to answer the question in a broader sense because I just can't stand not being in.

engaged in something. And so I guess in some sense that question doesn't come up. If it's hopelessness, well, you know, in some sense, things are hopeless, but you move ahead regardless. And that's the nature of life, isn't it? You know that in the final analysis, in some sense, it's hopeless. You're going to disappear. I don't mean to be pessimistic about that, but it does speak to things we've already talked about in this episode, and you persevere to the degree that you're capable of, because that's the alternative is far worse than that. And not just for you, for everyone else around you as well. Well, I said let's finish on a high.

We didn't quite get there. I sure put the kibosh on that. We should have finished with a biscuit question. I knew it. I knew it. Guys, thank you so much for speaking with us. It's been an absolute pleasure. And thank you all for watching being here with us asking the questions.

As you know, we will be back on Tuesday with Breed. Weinstein talking about lab leak and COVID and many other things. But for now, let's say again, thank you to Jordan Peterson. Thank you to Heather Heying. And thank you for watching. And we will see you very soon with another episode or Raw Show. All of them go out at 7pm UK time. Take care.

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