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Jordan Peterson is a clinical psychologist, co-founder of the educational platform Peterson Academy, host of "The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast," and the author of several bestselling books. His most recent title is "We Who Wrestle with God: Perceptions of the Divine." www.jordanbpeterson.com
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Bret Weinstein, PhD, is an evolutionary biologist, author, and co-host of “The DarkHorse Podcast” with his wife, biologist Heather Heying. They are the co-authors of “A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life.” www.bretweinstein.net www.youtube.com/@DarkHorsePod www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/618153/a-hunter-gatherers-guide-to-the-21st-century-by-heather-heying-and-bret-weinstein/
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Adolf Hitler, Hitler’s Table Talk, 1941-1944: His Private Conversations
C Collodi, The Adventures of Pinocchio
Hans Eysenck, Genius: The Natural History of Creativity (Problems in the Behavioural Sciences)
Homer, The Odyssey
Jordan B. Peterson, Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief
Karl Marx, Das Kapital: A Critque of Political Economy
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getting bigger but the video part is getting to a larger percentage three two
one
gentlemen we're live here we go jordan peterson brett weinstein how are you
guys doing very well
thanks for coming in to be here i'm excited to have you in hey should be fun
you're spiffy you
make us look uh very schlubby what are you doing what can i say man you know i
only brought a
limited number of clothes well good move you look great and uh good to see you
guys both of you and
uh so uh whose idea was it to do this first of all so just uh i think it was i
think it was brett's
yeah i saw a tweet of jordan's about uh or maybe it wasn't a tweet i did see a
youtube clip that
somebody tweeted i don't know if it was you uh your perspective on um on hitler
and uh your argument
was that he was actually even far worse than his reputation would lead us to
believe and it's funny
it uh it harkens back to my first evolutionary project as an undergraduate i
was working with
bob trivers who's um one of the leading evolutionary minds of the 20th century
he was i was lucky enough
to have him as an undergraduate advisor pull this sucker right up to your face
because you're going
to turn sideways because we're looking at each other next to each other yeah
yeah okay so uh anyway i did a
a project with bob on analyzing the holocaust from an evolutionary perspective
i wanted to test the
question about whether you know at the time it was it was commonplace for
people to say that hitler
was crazy and there was something that bothered me about that analysis i think
there's something
actually dangerous that we dismiss somebody like hitler as crazy before we
understand actually what
they're up to so when i saw uh your your video clip i thought it would be worth
having a discussion
so that we could figure out what perspective makes sense that sounds like an
awesome topic but before we
get to that i would really like to know what's going on with you because you're
at the center of this crazy
controversy of evergreen state college uh you essentially left the area you're
uh suing the college now so
where do you stand now uh we have not yet filed suit and in fact i can't talk
about what took place inside
the negotiation but we had our first sit down with the college yesterday and uh
this was a an attempt to
to avert a suit but i will say from where i sit as hard as this is to believe
it appears that the college
has learned nothing from this episode and that it is doubling down on the same
foolish sets of beliefs
and assumptions that got it into trouble in the first place so that that is not
a hopeful situation no
and for anybody that's not aware what this whole story is about you would
either have to go back to
brett's podcast that we did a few months back or please just google evergreen
state university and
google brett and you will be blown away by the insanity it's social justice
warrior gone amok the whole
campus kids patrolling the campus with baseball bats i mean the whole thing is
just completely bananas
the president of the university uh being told by the children not to use his
hands when he's speaking
because it's a microaggression so he puts his hands down the children start
cheering and laughing they
don't realize they're being played the whole thing is just some crazy grand
game by the children and i'm
calling them children i don't give a how old they are to to have power over
people i mean essentially
what this is all boiling down to and you really see it in that moment where
they tell him to put his hands
down and he does and they they laugh and cheer and think it's amazing well you
know they're educated to do
that to some degree because one of the tenants of the post-modernism that they're
being spoon-fed is
that there's no such there's nothing but power that's the only thing that mediates
relationships between
people because there's no real world everything's a social construct and it's a
landscape of conflict
between groups that's that's the post-modern world and the only the only actual
means of expression is
power that's that's why the post-modernists make the claim constantly that the
patriarchy is a corrupt
institution because they look at hierarchical organizations and they're stratified
obviously
there's people at the top and people at the bottom the only reason that there
are people at the top is
because they dominate by power there's no there's no philosophy of authority or
competence that's all gone
and so and and if you're cynical about that sort of thing and you should be you
might say that part of
the reason that the only thing that the post-modernists believe in is power is
because that helps them
justify their arbitrary use of it under any circumstances whatsoever and i
think that's right i think
that's exactly what happens so it's not surprising that that you see this
manifested in the mob-like
behavior of the students it's right in accordance with everything they're being
taught
so well they're also being taught in this sort of any means necessary to uh to
get over the
establishment like the establishment is this horrible institution and they
could justify pretty much
anything yeah this is what like punch a nazi who's a nazi everybody that doesn't
agree with you
i mean it's essentially what's what's being said ad nauseam in in social
justice warrior circles online
and you see i've seen punch a nazi so many times i mean but when it came down
to charlottesville there
was very little punching of nazis you know the whole thing was like it's all it's
all very insane we see
real nazis like those are real nazis you know like go fucking punch them please
you know we've also i
think don't even do that by the way right well and i think we've already
figured out everyone right from
the right to the left everyone's figured out that wherever the nazis went that
was wrong we've all agreed
on that we're not going there anymore and so when someone pops up and says well
we should go there it's like
they're immediately identifiable you can box them in and if you have any sense
like you know like many
conservatives did in the aftermath of charlottesville they come out and say
well in case it needs to be
said again we're actually not allied with those people yeah well that's one of
the one that was the
most disturbing thing for many people about donald trump's reaction to it that
he didn't take a hard
stance against these white supremacists showing up with tiki torches walking to
the street yelling
anti-semitic phrases or whatever i don't know exactly what they're yelling i've
read a bunch of different
things but the whole thing was a is an abomination i mean it was a horrific
thing to watch and you know
donald trump comes out and says there was horrible behavior on all sides yeah
well i thought i thought
about that for a lot because i got tangled up with that in a strange way in canada
um i was supposed to
appear on a panel a panel discussing the suppression of free speech on
university campuses which was then
promptly cancelled by the university that was going to host it in the aftermath
of charlottesville partly
because one of the panelists was going to be faith goldie who was the
journalist that was covering
charlottesville and got the footage of the of the car and uh and the damage but
um
we we we were targeted immediately afterward with the nazi epithet and ryerson
cut shut down the shut down
the free speech panel so it's coming up again in november 11th you were
targeted as nazis yeah yeah
yeah what happened was this this this uh this this person um put up a facebook
page and used a swastika
with a no you know like a circle with a line through it and said no fascists no
fascists at ryerson
essentially but she used the swastika and she got a bunch of people rallied
together to pressure the
university administration into cancelling the event which they promptly did and
then they had a
celebration party the night of the event and this is here's something that was
really interesting so
they got a couple i think a couple of hundred people out to the celebration at
ryerson and they
they were united under the banner of the hammer and sickle and were calling for
revolution and what was
so interesting about that and i really mean technically that it was interesting
was that
the mainstream media said virtually nothing about the fact that these let's
call them counter protesters
i don't know exactly how you'd term them had come out under this murderous
symbol and that's made me
think like i can't figure out why the swastika is an immediate identifier of a
pathological personality
and the hammer and sickle isn't there's actually a reason it isn't just
arbitrary and i think maybe
it's something like the nazi is the guy who knifes you in the alley and steals
your wallet and the
communist is the white collar criminal who takes your pension and you're
actually more afraid of the
first person than the second person because the damage they do is more proximal
and emit and emotionally
recognizable but that's the second guy who takes your pension for example he's
perhaps even more
dangerous but there's a there's a bloodiness about the nazi symbol and an
immediate emotional impact
that the hammer and sickle just doesn't produce and and some of that's because
people are badly
educated historically i think that's it i think it's pure ignorance well i don't
think it's just
ignorance no i think that the people that are wearing those che govara t-shirts
really understand
the history of che govara or do you think he represents this sexy south
american counter-protest
character a guy who stands up to the establishment as we know it a guy who's
wearing a green beret wearing
a beret hiding in the jungle fighting against the oppressive uh the
dictatorship of america i mean
that's what that's what they're looking at when they see that image well the
the the fact that
historical ignorance plays a role in this is absolutely certain and i think the
romanticization
of people like che govara is exactly i think you nailed that exactly but i do
think there's a a deeper
question here it's like i was thinking in the aftermath of charlottesville many
conservatives
immediately divorced themselves from the nazis ben shapir was a good example
right yeah and and it was
very much reminiscent of william f buckley divorcing himself from the john birch
society back in the
1960s the right wing seems it seems to be easier for the right wing to draw a
line around the nazis and
say no that's not us partly because the right wingers conservatives are better
at drawing boundaries
but you know let's say we wanted to draw a boundary around the radical leftists
okay point to something well on the right you say well you wore a swastika yeah
you're out of the club
man right on the left well you believe what what's the smoking pistol you
believe in equity it's like
that's that's a smoking pistol as far as i'm concerned but it doesn't have the
same emotional punch as
you wore a swastika to the protest yeah you believe in equity and you refuse to
define it that would be
right right but i mean right but that's such a there's no emotional punch in
that it's like well
i'm not going to associate with you because you believe in equity it's like it's
too complicated
it's right um i do want to back us up here though because um the i think we
underrate the danger of
and i think nazis are a red herring um there is something that actually does
threaten to re-emerge
and charlottesville is a version of it but i think because we have a cartoon
understanding of what
that protest was actually about and how many people are actually involved we
don't really see why this
is a dangerous and contentious issue and i think the answer is an evolutionary
one that hasn't been
spelled out and because it hasn't been spelled out it's very hard to point to i
hate to keep interrupting
but just get this right up to your face because it sounds good to us but the
people listening online
all right is that better yeah just when you turn to him just turn the thing
with you okay yeah
just get it always keep it a fist from your face that's the best uh sorry that's
all right so explain
what you mean by this so my point would be that what took place in germany in
the 30s was a particularly
particularly visible well documented example of a pattern that is much more
common in human history
and because this pattern emerges as a result of certain uh features of the way
evolution functions
in the context of humans it is actually always a danger that it will re-emerge
and knowing what to
do about it is uh not so simple until you've seen why it occurs and what it
means what i've what i've been
saying uh in lectures i've given on this is that uh tyranny is the end game of
prosperity and so there
is a pattern in which you will go through a period of prosperousness in which
it appears that that thing
is defeated once and for all there's no reason for people to be going after
each other in this particular
way and then at the point that that pattern peters out it re-emerges and people
don't expect that it
flies under a different flag or something like that and so i do think that
looking at the tiny number of
people who were doing what they were doing in charlottesville and saying well
that's we all agree
that this is wrong misses the fact that actually i think trump is doing it cynically
but trump was riding
a wave that there are there are ideas which are not permissible from the
environments in which we
all grew up that are going to become permissible again if we are not careful to
recognize that that's
that's the nature of history i think i think it's highly probable that that's
going to occur i mean
part of the reason that i landed in the political hot water that i landed in
last year was because
i was increasingly aware that this process of polarization was going to take
place and that
the continual in my estimation anyways the continual clawing of of new ground
underneath the radical
leftist rubric especially in the universities is is starting to produce an
extraordinarily dangerous
counter position and that was manifest at least to some degree in charlottesville
and so i think you're
right is that well i i you don't want to be complacent say well we know who the
nazis are and we're not
going there and so the problem is solved the problem isn't solved there's all
sorts of weird activity
in the non-radical left space like on the other side of the radical left
whatever that is and
right now what it is is not obvious you know it's it's the alt-left alt-right
that's part of it it's
the kekistanis it's this peppy thing it's it's some of its comedy some of its
satire some of its serious
some of its the inversion of identity politics which is very dangerous and it's
the maybe the most
dangerous thing about charlottesville is that there's something there's
something extraordinarily
dangerous about having people revert to identification with their racial
identity it's really not a good
thing well there's the reversion to their racial identity there's basically an
outbreak of tribalism
which explains what's going on on the far right what's going on on the left is
a bit of a new twist
what you have is a coalition of different tribal identities that aren't large
enough to marshal a
force on their own and so they're united and together they are a formidable
force but what's going to
happen is that's that's an unstable entity at the point that that force gains
power it's going to come
apart as internal dynamics rip it up um so it's not actually a uh a a a it's
not capable of restraining
the version that recurs on the right the version that does manifest as as uh
white nationalism that
version is stable because it does represent an actual population that has uh an
evolutionary basis for
remaining cohesive and i should point out there's a danger when you hear an
evolutionary biologist talk
about evolutionary patterns people often infer that if an evolutionary biologist
is saying that
something is a pattern that has evolved that that's some kind of a defense and
it is absolutely not we
call this the naturalistic fallacy so evolution is an absolutely amoral process
it has produced the most
marvelous features of human beings and the worst features and we are in some
sense obligated to pick
and choose which features to honor and and promote and which ones to tamp down
something can have
something can have evolved as a virtue in some circumstances and still be of
the type that if
magnified beyond its proper limits becomes pathological so let me tell you
something i learned about
hitler which really i haven't recovered from my shock from this so we've been
looking at the relationship
between political belief and personality okay and your political belief is
strongly determined by your
temperament so liberal left types are high in trade openness that's creativity
and low in conscientiousness
but you can fragment conscientiousness up into industriousness and orderliness
and the real
predictor for conservatism is in orderliness not industriousness and you might
think well that's
no surprise right-wingers are more orderly hence hitler's call for order let's
say but it's one thing to
to to to posit that and another thing to measure it now it's measurable and it
appears that orderliness is
associated with sensitivity to disgust and this is actually a really big deal
it's a really big deal
so there's a paper that was published in applause one about three years ago
looking at the relationship
between the prevalence of infectious diseases and authoritarian political
attitudes and they did it
country by country and then within countries by state or province and the
correlation between the
prevalence of infectious diseases and authoritarian slash right-wing political
beliefs at the local
individual level was 0.6 and so i want to take this apart a little bit okay so
the idea is that
this is part of what you might describe as the extended behavioral immune
system and one of the problems
with the interactions between groups of human beings in our evolutionary past
was well exactly what
happened to the native americans is you know they came out and shook hands with
the spanish conquistadors
and then within a couple of generations 90 of them were dead of smallpox and
measles and mumps and so
it's been a truism in our evolutionary past that if you meet a group of
isolated if you're a group of
isolated humans and you meet another group of isolated humans and you trade
pathogens there's a real
possibility that you and everyone you know are going to be dead in no time flat
and so we have a
disgust mechanism that that produces this implicit let's call it racial racial
and ethnic bias that is
part and parcel of the human cognitive landscape but the problem with that is
that it's rooted in a
disgust mechanism that actually serves a protective function now when i was
sorting this out i was reading
hitler's table talk and hitler's table talk is a very interesting book it's a
book of his spontaneous
mealtime utterances from 1939 to 1942 and i went through with this new
knowledge because people think
of conservatives as a like or fascist as afraid of those who are different they're
not afraid they're
disgusted and that's not the same thing because you burn things you're disgusted
by and so it was
terrifying to me to read it because then i also thought oh well disgust
sensitivity is associated with
orderliness and you need order in a society in order to maintain it and the
germans are very orderly and
that was actually a canonical part of their civilization and part of actually
what makes them great and
powerful and that just had to tilt a little farther than necessary and all of a
sudden everything needed
to be get cleaned and you know hitler talked about cleanliness all the time and
he actually meant that
and so this thing that's emerging you know you talked about its biological
basis its evolutionary basis
it is it's part of this deeply rooted disgust system that protects us from
dangerous pathogens that can
manifest itself and and does manifest itself in the political realm it's not
good so he i don't know
exactly how to tease this apart but i agree with your point about there's an
actual danger when populations
meet like a literal pathogen danger and that that is liable to have produced a
certain instinctive
fear of fear of of the other which doesn't have to be limited to that one thing
but that's enough to generate
a selective force that would cause a certain reluctance um to meet but i want i
want to point out
that at least in the west and probably universally human beings when they go to
war tend to dehumanize
the other population and you know so of course uh calling the the other
population subhuman vermin whatever
it is that that human beings do and my concern is that we are doing exactly
this with the nazis or de facto
nazis who are showing up uh on uh on our screens at this point that what we are
doing is we are comforting
ourselves by saying well that's a small outbreak of something that makes these
people subhuman justifies
punching them or whatever and you know i'm not squeamish about there being a
right to violence when
somebody is threatening uh a way of life so it's not that but my concern is
that if you take the pathogen
model and you imagine that all those folks who showed up in charlottesville
that that is a contagion
and it needs to be isolated then you will have the sense that as long as you do
that it's not going
to show up somewhere else whereas what's i think the the actual hazard is that
that's actually a latent
program that has served populations in past circumstances it's indefensible but
it has served
populations and the populations that we come from have it therefore on reserve
and when certain
characteristics show up in the environment that program can emerge and so my
concern is that that's
where we are in history it can't be isolated as a phenomena that's associated
with the other right
in one of the things i've done for decades is teach my students a variant of
that which is something
like because we i try to walk them through understanding psychological
understanding of what
happened in nazi germany and in the more intense situations like in places like
in auschwitz so
the question might be well if you were in germany than the 1930s could you be a
cancer concentration camp
guard and the gut reaction to that is no those people are unlike me and that's
the wrong response
the right response is uh those people were human and i'm also human and so that
means that the nazi
is us that's what it means and so and who the hell wants to think that and no
one will think that and
i have thought that through because i thought through for a variety of reasons
what the limits of my
potential behavior are and the limits of my potential and maybe i'm more pathological
than the average
person it's certainly possible but i understand that the limits of my potential
behavior are far
beyond the bounds of what people would normally consider civilized and i think
that's characteristic
of human beings in general well i mean you know looking oh go ahead no i was
going to say i think this
is one of the things that really highlights the importance of having uncensored
discussions because
we've you've we've already hit on so many hot topics to the point where you
have to like really clarify
your position and and when you're talking about this sort of latent program in
in in human beings and the
the necessity for it at one point in time like all these things are very taboo
to discuss today and this
is a giant issue because what you guys are doing is talking about things
objectively reasonably
logically and and clearly but when you get to these sort of hysterical subjects
that's that's sort of forbidden today and there's a giant issue with that
because when you have forbidden
discussions you energize those topics and the the topics grow in the absence of
discussion in the absence
of being picked apart and analyzing them for what their core components are and
we're talking about it from
an evolutionary perspective this is very very important because these patterns
are re-emerging we do see that
and i think any one of us given the wrong neighborhood the wrong parents the
wrong life
we might have been one of those assholes with the tiki torches in charlotte i
mean it's we're human
beings like you said i think that is absolutely critical to discuss well and it's
also there's there's
another thing going on right now i've been trying to characterize the state of
the sociological and
psychological landscape that we all inhabit right now and i think we're in a
position of radical
instability and things in the future could be way better than they are right
now radically and they
could be way worse than they are and small decisions are going small the small
decisions that people make
are going to have outsized effects while they make them like look at what
happened with this guy in
charlottesville you know this was i mean i know he was surrounded by a coterie
of of deplorables let's
say but it was one guy who decided to do something murderous and that shifted
the whole political
landscape and and and so what i see happening right now is that we're
surrounded by these
interactions between people that are positive feedback loops you know and a
positive feedback
loop occurs when if you do something then it makes whatever caused that occur
even in a greater way
and the polarization is like that so i say something left-like and you say
something right-like and
that annoys me so i get more left and it annoys you and you get more right and
all of a sudden we're
at each other's throats and that's happening everywhere right it's very
unstable and what what's to be
hoped for is that we can pull back from that and discuss it we can say look you
know under circumstance
a i could have been a communist inquisitor or nazi prison guard i i need to
know that and then i need
to know what were the situations that made that likely and then i need to know
how should i conduct
myself so that's less possible and the only way we can figure that out is to
have the kind of
conversations that we're having right now it's like and this isn't them i've
been taken to task
by some of my friends for example for using the social justice warrior
terminology because they've said
to me well you know you're you're you're participating in this process of demonization
and and polarization and i think well yeah i can understand that although i'm
also like radically
concerned about the fact that the universities for example are completely taken
over by radical
marxists essentially and that they're driving this polarization and it isn't
obvious to me how to
have a discussion about that without participating in the process of
polarization it's something i've been
trying to figure out for the whole last year you know and i've made i've been
emphasizing the role of
personal responsibility instead of ideological identification right get it into
your head that
you have the capacity for great evil and stop targeting stop assuming that that's
something
that's manifesting itself only in the people that you disagree with politically
take responsibility
for that and try to put your life together i don't see an alternative to that
but it's been very
difficult to to to to avoid to do that and simultaneously to avoid becoming a
participant in this process of
polarization and it's a very dangerous process it's what destabilized germany
in the 1920s and 30s right
it was this ping-ponging back and forth between the radical left and the
radical right and your point
brett that the radical right actually is more powerful once they get organized
is a really good one because
there's no fractionation it's more stable you bet and they have all the guns
that's another thing to think about
certainly in this country the the right is much better armed and that's a very
frightening that's a
terrifying thought that you know i mean we've we've heard this many times
recently about the trump
administration about if if he's impeached uh that there will be some sort of a
civil war i believe
roger stone said that like this thought is so terrifying that we literally
cannot do anything to stop
some sort of physical confrontation with weapons if we disagree ideologically
that it's going to happen
well first of all there's a lot we can do and in fact you know one of the other
things about about
the evolutionary toolkit is that i believe we have exactly the tools for
navigating this puzzle they're
built into us also in addition to this latent program but we are now in a very
dangerous situation
because for example uh if google and other of these online goliaths start uh
deploying algorithms that
decide what we get to talk about and see then we cannot use the very tools that
are necessary
in order to escape um and avoid something like civil war which frankly open
communication and debate
analyzing all the components of this issue completely objectively exactly
taking the risks that are
necessary with that and some of the risks are that if we have free and open
communication that some
percentage of that communication is going to be reprehensible and deplorable
but that yes but
that but that the consequences of suppressing that are so much more dangerous
than the consequences of
allowing it that they're not in the same universe yes we empower those terrible
ideas by making them i mean
electronically taboo yeah and then point is they're going to fester um whereas
if we just if we discuss them
we can diffuse the ones that are terrible we can spot the opportunities that we
don't know we have and we can uh we can
move forward rather than descend into civil war which frankly looks more more
and more this issue with
with google and youtube let's say and these other gigantic internet companies
you know it isn't a
matter of if they're going to produce automated bots that do pre-perceptual
censorship they are doing
that well to explain well it's sad explain yeah well he he he tweeted the other
day that um and i knew this
was in the workings because i've been looking at what youtube and google are
planning with regards to their
artificial intelligence sensors let's say you know they want to get to the
point where
the the apo the appalling video is not even put up so what happened i hope i've
got this exactly right
but gad uh was in the process you upload a video and then you publish it and so
once you upload it
youtube has access to it and they have access to its content and they informed
him that it would be
demonetized before he published it there it is right here we put it up on the
board there you go youtube
thinks that my pointing to astounding hypocrisy is too triggering there is
nothing objectable object
objectionable in my clip unbelievable yeah and that one was a manual review so
i'm wrong about that that
they although how how in the world they decided that they were going to
manually review gad's video is
also i mean how many videos are going up on youtube what the hell why are they
manually reviewing his
and i mean gad's that is not a radical right that's the thing i mean he's an
evolutionary biologist and
that makes him a radical now it does because he's a biological essentialist
questioning what's
happening and by questioning what's happening you instantaneously get lumped
into this right-wing
hate group yeah well he's also making the claim that human beings have an
intrinsic nature and so now
there's a new buzz phrase that goes along with that and so that's that you're a
biological essentialist
and you see so if you're a radical post-modern neo-marxist your theory is human
beings can be
anything that i want to make them into it's a core doctrine of the theory and
it's part of what makes
it intensely totalitarian because then human beings are just putty for the molding
and that's part of the
the motivational drive for claiming the radical constructionist claim there's
no biological
essence well why do you make that claim well because we want to free people
from prejudice and
tyranny it's like no that's not why you make that claim you make that claim
because you want to justify
your claim that there's absolutely nothing wrong with making over humanity in
the image of your ideology
and and and that and that's that that that was a well-documented intellectual
argument that that
that wove through what happened in communist russia for example because the
claim there explicitly was
you wipe out the past there's no real biological identity you can mold the
human of the future in the
image of your perfectionistic ideology and and the the russians actually um sidelined
themselves
effectively with respect to evolutionary theory that basically they were so
backward on a biological
front that as they were deploying this uh this very broken ideological uh
toolkit they were wrecking their
ability to think about about how biology works and so what you're pointing to
about evolutionary biologists
it's not just that we question the content of evolutionary biology is
absolutely the opposite of
politically correct yes yes exactly because nobody tells the biota what's right
and what's wrong the biota
does what it does and those of us who look at it and uh attempt to understand
what those patterns are can't
help but be deeply politically incorrect almost all the time and so the idea
that the that the truth
of biology is actually going to become unexpressible and we're going to move
ahead we're just going to
we're going to uh we're going to sideline it so that we can move ahead with
this ideological stuff i mean
that is cutting off your nose that's already happening so biology is racist and
sexist you uh
well if if i might um biology and we're going to have to go back here in order
to collect a tool but
biology does create entities that have the potential for racism in them in our
genomes we carry the potential for racism for
darwinian reasons sexism is a little different right it is so i'm about to
become very politically incorrect
uh-oh um yeah i know uh-oh uh it is not possible for male genes to gang up on
female genes because
all of our genes spend half their time in male bodies and half their time in
female bodies which does not mean
that civilization is fair with respect to sex and gender but it does mean that
there's no
biological basis for the evolution of a patriarchal force that subordinates
women because whatever the
patriarchy does those who are part of the patriarchy become female in the next
iteration and they suffer the
consequences of it this is not the case with race unfortunately this is not a
good thing but it is a true thing
in a darwinian sense one population can gang up on another population and it
has happened again and
again it explains all of the worst chapters in human history and so in some
sense what i'm getting at
is that you want to understand that process and once you understand what your
genes are actually up to
and you understand that your genes their objectives in the universe are not defensible
what your genes want
cannot be defended in in rational terms then we become free to do something
else to recognize that our genes
are up to things that we don't have any reason to honor and we can we can
basically take them out of
the control position but if we imagine that what our genes are up to must be
all right and therefore
it can't include anything like racism then we're just stuck then we don't have
the tools to to diffuse racism
so one of the things that happened when i made my video so a year ago
complaining about bill c16
in canada and that was the one that instantiated transgender rights one of the
things i was pointing
to my like my comments had nothing to do with transgender rights but one of the
things i was
pointing to that was that canada had built into the law a social constructionist
version of human
identity and that's actually the case so for example now in canada it here's a
proposition which now has the
force of law there is no causal connection between biological sex gender
identity gender expression
and sexual proclivity technically it's illegal to make a claim that those
things are causally linked
and the the causal link claim is a biological claim and not only is it a
biological claim it's a factual claim
those four levels are so tightly linked causally that there's hardly any
exceptions there are exceptions
so because every almost everyone who's biological sex is male considers
themselves male manifests
themselves as male and is heterosexual so they're linked and the reason they're
linked is well there's
biological and cultural reasons but it's now in canada the proposition that
they're independent
is now law and i was pointing that saying we don't want to do that you don't
understand you've built social
constructionism into the law that means that now it's illegal to be a biologist
well and everybody said
oh no no no no that's not happening it's like don't kid yourself when you put
things in the law things
happen and we were accused not only of being nazis and that was part of the
reason that the the this this uh
talk was shut down but also of being biological essentialists and biological
essentialism is the new
buzzword for for nazi essentially so i have to go please do i want to i want to
correct you it's not
that it's illegal to be a biologist it's just illegal to be any good at it oh
yeah okay well that's even
more effective i would say so is there is there concern that putting biology as
fact
it will get in the way of civilization because we're supposed to be moving past
all of these issues
we're supposed to be moving past these things as we evolve we're supposed to be
looking people as being
free to choose whatever gender they like free to choose whatever sexual
orientation they like free
to express themselves in any way and that by defining them by purely biological
terms we're essentially relying
on the meat wagon to lead us through civilization rather than the mind that's
great that you did a
very good job of outlining the credible case against biological essentialism
and because it can deteriorate
into something like eugenics there's a real danger like a political danger on
the side of a biological
determinism but there's a danger in denying it as well because then we can't
use our rational minds to truly
mitigate whatever issues that we would have with our biological urges and that
that's the iron
of this yes that actually there is an argument to be made that we need freedom
from our biology yes
and we have the capacity to do it most creatures wouldn't but the way human
beings are constructed
we absolutely have the ability to be rational about these things and decide
which things we we want to
bring into the future but we can't do it if we don't discuss these things in
right yeah well a subset of
males are are are biologically hyper aggressive you can identify them at two
years of age and they're the
kids if you put a bunch of two-year-olds together there's a small subset they're
almost all males
about five percent of males who will kick hit bite and steal okay so that's
their biological programming
let's say but the vast majority of them are socialized by the time they're four
years old so that's
amazing yeah sure absolutely absolutely i mean it is yeah absolutely yeah and
the thing about about
boys like that is that if you socialize them properly it's quite a bit of work
because they're very
combative my son was like that and if you socialize them properly then they can
become unbelievably useful
they're courageous they're forthright they're they're you know they're they're
they're not going
to back down from a challenge there's all sorts of massive utility in that and
that's this proper
interplay between the biological circuitry and the socialization but you know
and with with james
demore's memo you know he he was he's been accused of taking a biological
essentialist route which is not
true one of the things james said is look there's credible evidence that there
are biologically
mediated differences between men and women at the level of temperament and
interest that are actually
large and profound and i would say the science on that is sufficiently settled
so that someone can come
out and say that's scientifically credible now that doesn't mean it's right
because the scientists could be wrong
but what you can't say is that what james demore said was scientifically uninformed
it was scientifically informed but he also said look let's make the assumption
i'm paraphrasing
slightly but let's make the assumption that we want to as a society we want to
extract
maximum useful economic value from talented people so one of the things we want
to do is if some of those people are women and some of them are men
we want to understand the actual differences between women and men so that we
can set up the workplace
so that both women and men can contribute to the maximum economically so that
they can benefit as
individuals and everybody can benefit socially so you can use the biological so
i mean for example one of
the thing here's here's a biological problem on average women are more agreeable
than men and i think
that's because agreeable people are they're self-sacrificing and i think as a
woman you need to be wired to be
self-sacrificing or you won't be able to tolerate taking care of infants that's
my sense of it
okay now there's some problems with that it's like let's say that a huge part
of female wiring is is
tilted in the direction of the necessity of self-sacrifice for infant care okay
that doesn't equip
women very well for dealing with with aggressive men because aggressive men and
infants are not the
same creatures so women play a pay a price be being optimized to some degree
for infant care they pay
a price that they're less uh what would you call prepared that's one way of
thinking about it
indeed with dealing with hyper aggressive and competitive men well one of the
consequences of
that is that agreeable people don't make as much money and the reason for that
is to make money you
actually have to be disagreeable because you have to go to your boss and say
give me some bloody money
or something you don't like will happen to you you have to like i'll leave you
have to be able to
fight for an idea too yeah but so there's something that this is a perfect test
case so biologically
speaking there's a very good reason for certain kinds of wisdom to be biased in
the direction of
manifesting uh in females females because they have the capacity to have fewer
offspring in a lifetime
than males uh are uh obligated as you say to um to care in a particular way and
the fact that
care in human beings takes so many years has resulted in menopause emerging and
menopause
essentially when a woman is done producing new offspring her interests in uh
her evolutionary
interests which in this case i think are honorable become synonymous with the
lineage the population
because her offspring will either do well or do poorly based on the population
that they're in so
women have a kind of farsightedness about lineage and i don't think this has
anything to do with human
women actually this is a trait that we can see in females of other species so
it's an ancient thing
whereas males are high variance that is to say a male can have many offspring
in a lifetime many males have
no offspring in a lifetime and that high variance means that to the extent that
there's wisdom that
surrounds risk-taking that has traveled historically uh along the male path now
in modern times there's no
reason that we can't look at these two kinds of wisdom and democratize them
both right the fact is
there's no reason if you're born female that you can't tune into what has
historically been uh male
biased wisdom and take advantage of that and we should be encouraging this
there's no reason that
people have to continue the problem is is that we can't actually have a a
reasonable discussion about
it because you know the discussion is often forestalled by the claim that well
men and women are exactly
the same it's like it's that's not a helpful discussion and you know with the
agreeableness issue i don't
know exactly what should be done about that but one of the consequences of it
is is that
there's many reasons why why the pay there's pay differential between men and
women and the issue
itself is very complex but we do know that agreeable people overall make less
money in the same positions
and it's because they don't negotiate on their own behalf very well now it's
conceivable that you could
have an intelligent public policy or corporate policy discussion about what to
do about that like maybe
maybe the rule is something like um you review male salaries once a year and
female salaries every eight
months or something like that you know and i'm not saying that's a good idea i'm
not saying that i'm
saying that if you if you take the facts on the ground into account there are
ways that you might be
able to use them so that you could and i'm not going to say level the playing
field because i think
that's an appalling phrase but maximize the possibility of economic
contribution across the genders which is
obviously in everyone's best interest but we're not going to do that when when
someone like james
damore comes out and he's no scientist you know well he has some scientific
training but that wasn't
his primary field of of expertise he came out and did a pretty credible job of
summarizing the literature
he did it because he had been subject to mandatory diversity training and was
asked to produce a
response he didn't do it so it would go viral within the company or become
public and because he expressed
his opinion let's say imperfectly he got fired it's like that's not good man
that's not that's not a
good pathway well it also wasn't good that his stuff was being republished
without citations that people
were were publishing it without the scientific papers that were sort of affirming
what some of the things
that he was saying i couldn't make heads or tails of it until i saw his
original version yeah well that and
that that goes back to the the point i was making earlier about this being this
is an unstable time
where people's individual ethical choices in some circumstances will have
effects far beyond the local
it's like those journalists who jumped on the story did it either badly you
know because they were
incompetent or they did it maliciously right and that and and so now we could
say let's say things go really
badly in the next year well then each of those journalists might be able to sit
at home and say
hey i played a causal role in bringing about this state of murderous collapse
because of my little
ethical my ethical lapse when i was covering the james demore memo you know
because of my own laziness and
ideological rigidity i was willing to play fast and loose with the truth and
now i've played a major
causal role in you know pushing everything towards a state of chaos it's like
people have better be on their
toes because we're in a situation that's radically unstable and so it's time it's
it's a really good
time for everybody to be very careful about what they write and say and about
their motives for for
tarring and feathering the opposition that's another way of another thing that
we have to be very careful
about it's just very bizarre how quick people are to call someone a racist
today i mean i've never seen
anything like it in all my years it's it's a strange time you know uh i got
into it yesterday just i got
bored and i started trolling with peppy the frog i started putting up the frog
like with rainbow saying
this seems like a frog that's really into gay rights like here's a frog that uh
holding a lemon with a tart
face like this is a frog that ate a lemon and he's reacting to it like how is
this all racist like how is
this like anyone it's not like all these people that are creating this frog are
coordinating anyone
can make a meme with the frog and like a lot of the original feels good man uh
cartoons that the
guy created they those are applicable too they're silly a lot of them are
really silly well i think a
lot of it was an intentional troll yes so i i read a story about kekistan you
know i was looking into it
trying to figure out if it was really you know the menace to humanity that
everybody claims it is and
the story was preposterous it was a you know it's a a magical place where where
anti-semites and jews
and atheists and religious people live in harmony which is like that's hard to
even parse it's designed
to to cause your mind to throw in error yeah well and that is what so i i think
this is an excellent
thing to talk about because i've been because i've been let's say identified
under many circumstances
now with the alt-right i've been doing every bit of investigation i can into
its many manifestations
it's a very confusing place it's certainly not an organized place and exactly
what it is is by no
means obvious and the kekistan issue is a good case in point because mostly
that's that's like a satirical realm
where where where i don't know what it is it's like it's defensive humor in
some sense like let me give
you an example i gave my father a kakistani flag about three weeks ago and
three weeks ago and and he
why did you do that well because he's been following what's happening to me
online you know and and a lot
and i got associated with the frog in a major way and it's a crazy story and i
won't go into it but i wore a
frog hat on one of my videos that an indian carver a native american carver had
given me and he had told
me that the frog was in their culture a harbinger of environmental instability
because if the water's
polluted at all the frogs die first so the frog is that is the the frog is the
creature in their
mythology that warns the society that things are out of kilter it's the canary
in the coal mine it's the
canary in the coal mine so i wore this frog hat and i made this video about
things being unstable
and i'd been identified with kermit because my voice sort of sounds like kermit
the frog and it
actually does so i've been making jokes about that and so then i made this
video with this frog hat and
the frog that my carver friend made actually had red lips and then i made the
video and as soon as i
posted it people said that's pepe and i thought i just about fainted literally
because it never occurred
to me that that was a connection so anyways i've been tangled in with this frog
thing in this most
absolutely insane and surreal manner but i've been so and that got me into the
kakistani thing and
a lot of the people that i'm trying to address online are young men who are
pushed i would say
in a right-leaning direction by the movement of the radical left alienating and
then they're thinking
well i'm certainly not that right well then what am i well maybe i'm the
opposite of that well is the
opposite of the radical left the alt-right or is there a better opposite is
there a different
opposite that people could flee to and that's what well partly that's what i'm
trying to figure out
but but does it have to be opposite couldn't it just be different well that's
the thing it's like
opposition is a real issue with people right like what you were talking about
before when people just
ramp up their positions and get more ideologically based and they're doing it
as a reaction to the
other side instead of just being who they are instead of having some sort of a
personal sovereignty
they're literally reacting to the opposite side and changing who they are so
okay so what i've been
trying to do with my videos and and and and i think this is part of the reason
that they've become so
popular in fact i'm certain of it is that i've been trying to agitate for the
adoption of that personal
responsibility as an alternative to political ideology it's like get your act
together have a vision
straighten out your life say what you think you know stay away from the
ideological idiocies and
simplicity and oversimplifications and try to put yourself together because i
think that i do believe
at the most fundamental level and i think this is the remarkable realization of
western civilization is
that the well-developed individual is the antidote to the tyranny of society
and biology
i think that's our great discovery in the west it's not like other cultures
haven't had that idea in
nascent form but it's been hyper developed in the west and i think it's right
and so we abandon that
that that pathway of divine individuality and revert to ideological
identification of race or sex we're
going to tear each other apart and i think part of the reason we're motivated
to do that joe is because
many people don't want to bear the responsibility of developing themselves as
individuals so they'll
they'll shuffle off the responsibility and if that means that you know we're
dancing in the streets
because everything's on fire that'll be just fine and that's another thing that's
adding to the
terrible danger that we're in right now so i think you're right and i think
that personal auditing
program that you you're a part of is gigantic and people look at it as being
separate from all these
issues that we're dealing with culturally but i don't think it is i think you're
absolutely right
and i think that there is a real lack of struggle and understanding of struggle
with a lot of people
today not necessarily struggle financially but i mean like physical struggle
spiritual struggle
understanding that you have to overcome difficult issues to really understand
the true potential of
your mind and your body you have to not only overcome them but you have to seek
them out voluntarily and
and and what would you say exult in the fact that they exist right yes and that's
part of bearing
the burden of being it's like being is a tragic state human being is a tragic
state so you can shrink
from that but if you shrink from that the suffering increases and intensifies
and you become resentful
and malevolent yes the alternative is to move forward courageously that's the
dragon motif right that's the
hero myth essentially and that is the pathway forward as far as i'm concerned
well i think it also has
implications you know you're talking about it at the level of what is best for
the individual but we also
have a problem which is that these collectivist movements whether they are you
know white nationalists
on the right or social justice warriors on the left they cannot see forward and
what is missing is that
actually the mechanism that allows us to discover new ways involves individuals
who are capable of thinking
independently and if you have multiple individuals who think independently
about related matters then they
can pull that stuff but if what we do is we force everybody to sign up for the
same things that we all
agree are true there's no way of discovering what we don't yet know because
every great idea starts with a minority of one
so we have to have the freedom to be the only person who believes something and
then to compel others that
it's somewhere in the right neighborhood and for others to pick up that mantle
and so by subordinating
that's exactly why i you know i mean free speech has become an ideological
issue and increasingly identified
with but with the right and which is horrible it's horrifying but the the right
justification for free
speech is what you just laid out which is that in order for like the collective
is is a group of what's
already known by definition we inhabit the collective and that's what's already
known what we can agree on
but the problem with that is that what we can agree on what's already known isn't
sufficient we still have
problems so people have to be out at the fringes on the border between chaos
and order where they
discover new things and communicate it back to the collective which free speech
does that that's the
mechanism this is this is also a deep evolutionary truth which is that all of
the innovations that allow
whether we're talking about one creature learning to do some new trick that
gives rise to a bunch of
species that do the same trick or whether we're talking about populations
discovering a new way to
live uh on earth all of these things proceed from the fringe right the people
at the center for whom
things are working best aren't going to be the ones to innovate the new way it's
people for whom things
are not quite working that are going to innovate new ways and that that's also
true for a population of
frogs or birds or plants or whatever the ones that are not well situated are
the ones where an experiment
can pay off that's why hans eisink he psychologist wrote a good book called
genius and he was interested
in what predicted high levels of creative success and some of it's what you'd
expect iq is one of them
and creative temperament is another but losing a parent before the age of 10
was a nice predictor
and you know people think about creativity as if it's all sweetness and light
it's like no bloody way man
if you're going to be creative it's because you're tormented by a problem right
and so if you're not in a
position to be tormented by a problem you're not going to put in the time and
effort and take the
risk necessarily necessary to be creative so but you know i'm i've been trying
to understand the
evolutionary landscape out of which our most fundamental religious convictions
emerge and
the idea that it is by definition the individual that innovates and that by
definition therefore it's
the individual that's the savior of the collective i mean it's hard to it's
hard to imagine how you could
find a biological restatement of an essential christian presupposition that was
more mapped
one-to-one than that now you could say well that's not unique to christianity i
see the same thing in
the judae in the jewish uh antithesis between the prophetic tradition the
prophet and the tradition
because the prophet is always the lone voice right that comes out it happens
over and over in the old
testament a lone voice comes out and challenges the king and says look you know
you're you're a blind tyrant
and nature is moving away from us and preparing her revenge and you better
watch the hell out because
you're violating the intrinsic moral norms and you're going to pay for it that
happens over and over
and maybe there are 50 of them and the one that gets recorded is the one that
happened to be closest
to right because that's the population that gets through the bottleneck and so
you know what we have is
sort of evolution authoring uh these uh texts in a way um yes well that's that's
that's a claim that
i'm very uh what would you call uh um that that's something i believe to be
fundamentally true and i
mean i i've started i started see because i'm interested in this idea of
strengthening the individual
that's and when i when i wrote my first book maps of meaning it was about
ideological conflict
and it was about whether or not there was any alternative to ideological
conflict because you
could make a case that there isn't there's right and there's left and there's a
war right but there
is a third way and i think that is the way of the heroic individual and i mean
that technically
and that that involves the development of individual characters so that you can
say what it is that you
think that you can articulate your experience properly and that you can bring
what it is that's unique to
you into the collective landscape and that's what updates the collective
landscape it's absolutely vital
and so i started doing these biblical lectures i have done 12 of them now
walking through genesis and
what i'm trying to do because i believe that the bible is the documentation of
the emergence of the
idea of the divine individual that's essentially what it is and we we we have a
very uneasy relationship
with that collection of texts now because they we read them as if they're
making claims about the
objective nature of the world and those claims seem to be false from a
scientific perspective i don't
believe that those are the claims that were made to begin with so i think it's
a non-starter
but i've been trying to lecture about the stories in genesis for example in a
manner that makes them
accessible to people who are well to athe who to atheists let's say and many
many atheists have
been responding very positively to them i have people in my youtube comments
now that are calling
themselves christian atheists because they can understand they understand what
it is i'm i'm describing
this idea that's emerged in the west that consciousness is the mediator between
chaos and order and
the and the and the and the generating the phenomena that generates experience
and that and that you can
think about that as as a as a divine category of of existence and i've been
trying to delineate how
how the biblical stories lay out the pathway by which the divine individual
should manifest him or
herself in time because that is what it is and i and i i i've i've been
studying for example the
abrahamic stories which i didn't know well and the abrahamic stories are really
interesting i mean
abraham is called by god and when abraham is called by god he's old he's like
one of these guys who's 40
years old and has stayed in his mother's basement that's that's abraham it's a
little late for abraham to
be getting the hell out there in the world and god basically says to him leave
your family and your
friends and your place of comfort and journey into the land of the stranger
that's the call to
adventure and so abraham does that now he's chosen by god you think well
everything goes well for
abraham that isn't what happens at all the first thing he encounters is a
famine and to escape that
he flees into the tyranny of egypt where they try to steal his wife it's like
beware of being called
by god you know you'd think it'd be all sweetness and and light after that it's
not that at all and it's
a very realistic story it's like get the hell out of where you're safe into
what you don't know
what are you going to find there well your fortune no you're going to find the
catastrophes of life
but if you keep yourself morally oriented and you make the right sacrifices
which is the the abrahamic
story to a t then you can transcend the catastrophe of being and prevail i mean
it's who the hell doesn't
want to hear that so we're treading kind of close to the uh the argument you
got into with sam harris
about uh the nature of truth and and since i heard that i've been sort of itching
to have this
conversation with you because i think there's a uh a way of viewing this that
will actually
um perhaps reconcile the two points of view but there's a bitter pill that
comes along with it
so here's here's my argument um
we tend to think of intellect has evolved as having evolved because knowing
what's true gives
you an advantage but there's actually nothing that says that the literal truth
is where advantage lies
and so i have a category that i call literally false metaphorically true these
are ideas that aren't true
in the factual sense but they are true enough that if you behave as if they
were true you come out ahead
of where you would be if you behaved according to the fact that they're not
true so let me give you
a couple of trivial examples that won't be controversial porcupines can throw
their quills
not true however if you live near porcupines and you imagine that porcupines
can throw their quills you'll
give them some space if you don't you may realizing that they can't throw their
quills get really close
to one and it may wheel around and nail you with a porcupine quill which can be
extremely dangerous
because they are microscopically designed to move in from where they puncture
you over time and they
can puncture a vital organ or you can get an infection so the person who
believes that a
porcupine can throw their quills has an advantage that isn't predicated on the
fact that this is actually
a literal truth right another one might be people say everything happens for a
reason right well unless
you're talking about physics as the reason everything doesn't happen for a
reason however if you are the
kind of person who believes that everything happens for a reason and then some
terrible tragedy befalls
you you may be on the lookout well what's the reason that this happened maybe
it's supposed to open
some opportunity and you won't miss that opportunity the way somebody who was
preoccupied with their
misfortune would so literal falseness but metaphorical truth is actually i
would argue the category under which
religious truth evolves now the problem the bitter pill that i mentioned
is that i've heard you say that the truths that are captured in the the
religious version of things
are basically like you know there's an individual truth and then there's a
truth of your family and
there's a truth of the population that you're living in and these things are
all encoded in these
these doctrines which is true and you would expect it to be because the doctrines
are carried along in
the population the problem is what i hear you arguing and you tell me if i have
it wrong is that we should
therefore expect uh the encoded metaphorical truths in these religious
traditions to be morally right but
there's nothing that actually says it will be morally right because there are
metaphorical truths that
might in fact be reprehensible but nonetheless effective and so what i would
argue the overarching
point here would be that you're right that the documents that contain these
descriptions of things are full
of things that are true in some sense that is not literal scientific truth nor
was that their their purpose
what isn't true is that those things are inherently up to date um and see i
would okay i mean first of all
the first thing about that is that a discussion like that and this is also what
happened with sam harris
takes me to the very limits of my intellectual ability and so even in
discussing it i'm going to make all
sorts of mistakes because because it's treacherous territory but i would say my
understanding of the
great myths has that observation built into it so one of the archetypes is that
of the of the tyrannical
father which is the archetype by the way that possesses the minds of people who
accuse western society of
being patriarchal they're possessed by a singular archetype and that's the
archetype of the tyrannical
father they don't see that there's a tyrannical father and a wise king because
there is that's that's
you can't even point that out but anyways
in the in the old in some of our oldest stories there's a representation of the
dead past
so let me give you an example that everyone knows about
the story of pinocchio is the story of the individualization of pinocchio he
starts out as a
puppet he's a marionette he's a wooden head he's a liar and he's pulled by
forces that he does not
understand right okay so but he has a good father that's geppetto and so he's
got a good and geppetto
wishes that he becomes a real individual and so and he knows that that's an
impossible wish he wishes on a
star that his son could become an actual individual knowing full well that that's
unlikely and impossible
so geppetto's a good king so but the story is also about geppetto because what
happens is that when
geppetto loses pinocchio loses his son which what you could think about as the
active dynamic attentive
force of youth then he ends up stultified in the belly of a whale which is a
symbol of chaos at the
bottom of the ocean and then pinocchio has to rescue him so i would say there
is an instantiation of
evolutionarily accumulated wisdom in the great stories of the past but they're
still dead and it
requires the union this is why in christian theology the the godhead has a tripartite
structure this is
part of the reason there's god the father but the father's dead the father was
right a hundred years
ago or a thousand years ago and is still partly right but he's dead he can't
participate in the
updating of the process so you need an active force now the active force is the
same thing that
generated those stories across time right so it's it's the same thing except it's
also alive in the
present and so your moral duty and this is another thing that happens in in pinocchio
is to rescue
your dead father from the belly of the whale and that's partly what i'm trying
to do with these biblical
lectures because your objection is correct the reason it's correct is because
even if the solution was
correct the landscape has changed and it's changed incrementally or in a
revolutionary way we don't
know and so those old truths are at best partial and at worst blind but that
doesn't mean you can just
say like like mao did during the cultural revolution well let's just destroy
the past it's like no that
would be like saying well you don't need a body anymore because your body is
the collected wisdom
of the evolutionary process across three and a half billion years i absolutely
agree because the stories
are not literal it's impossible to know whether they well not impossible but
very difficult to know
whether or not the truth that is contained metaphorically is still relevant if
it's been
inverted and it's now absolutely false or uh so carl jung talked about this a
lot hey and and one of the
things he said was that your moral duty is to realize the archetype in the in
the confines of your own
life and so you say well there's an archetype of perfection that pervades the
west and for the for the sake
of argument i'm going to call that christ the christ image it's something like
that that's the archetypal image
now we have a story about what christ's historical life was like well well well
you can't have that life
because you would have had to be in the middle east 2000 years ago that's not
your life but what you can
do is take the archetype and you can manifest it within the confines of your
own life and what that
does is force you to undergo the difficult process of updating the ancient
wisdom and you don't just
forego it you can't or you can but you'll pay a massive price and part of that
will be social
disintegration because it's it's the the past is alive enough so that those of
us who inhabit its corpse
aren't clawing each other to death while we're feeding right that's the
critical issue now it's
not alive enough because the bloody thing could fall apart at any moment and we
need to be awake and alert
in order to keep it updated and maintained well not only that um but the the
greatest hazards to us in
the present are only partially going to be dealt with in these texts and that's
that's my biggest concern
is that you know if we take uh you know dawkins dismissing religion as mind
virus this is very
dangerous because it neglects the truth that you're talking about and it
prevents us from getting to a
conversation in which we can talk about the fact that religious texts religions
are not mind viruses they
are adaptations to past environments they do contain a kind of truth that isn't
necessarily literal and
is in general not literal but none of them no ancient religion is up to date
for google's algorithms
being the hazard to civilization that it probably is we need to figure out how
to navigate where the
ancestral wisdom is simply not up to the current challenge okay so let let me
modify that slightly
because i think it's true and not true the stories are erroneous in detail and
right in pattern so for
example there's an idea that one of the things that the mythological hero does
is stand up against the
tyranny of the state now you don't have to specify the nature of the tyranny of
the state in order for
that to be a truth that's applicable across different contexts and i would say
what's happened with the
great religious myths is that they've they operate at a level of abstraction
such that the the abstract
entities are applicable in every single environment i'll give you an example of
that it is extremely
useful to represent the phenomenology of your experience as a domain of chaos
and order that works in every
single environment for every person and so the domain of order i can describe
it technically you're in the
domain of order when your actions produce the result you desire and you're in
the domain of chaos when
they don't and then and then i could say well your task is to straddle the
border between those two
domains because you don't always want to be where everything that you're doing
is working because you
don't learn anything and you don't want to be where nothing you're doing is
working because it's
overwhelming you want to be stable and dynamic at the same point and the taoists
do that very nicely
because they have a chaos order conceptualization of the of the phenomenological
landscape and their claim
is the the point of maximum proper being is right at the center of the border
between chaos and order
and i think that's true across contexts so i don't think that truth ages some
of them don't but the
question really is one of at what point is there so much legacy code that the
taking the package is uh
is more harmful than it is beneficial and at what point are you know if god
were writing today i'm
pretty convinced the first commandment would be thou shalt not enrich uranium
it would make sense as the
number one commandment it's not there because uranium wasn't a concept at the
point that the thing was
written nor was the hazard of enriching it obvious and so the fact that it isn't
mentioned tends to
de-emphasize it as a risk and so i guess the question is is it possible i mean
is it possible
that by recognizing that these traditions carry huge amounts of ancestral
wisdom forward but that that
wisdom is certain to be so incomplete that it doesn't address modern questions
that we can be liberated to
move forward and to honor those traditions for bringing us here but to
recognize that we actually
have to move forward with something more potent and up to date which is not not
easy because you can't
just take the scientific truth of the moment and implement it a lot of it isn't
even right it's
also yeah it's also not that easy to rewrite a fairy tale you know and i'm some
of these fairy tales that
people are trying to rewrite in modern times are perhaps 15 000 years old and
people think well we
can just update that so that the modern version will be better it turns out
that that's very very difficult
and there's another i'm going to play devil's advocate against my own position
here you know because
i say well the religious texts encode profound and evolutionarily determined
truths that are universal
okay which religious texts right right because you well because and you might
say well all of them
but then that means that obscures the important differences between the
traditions and i'm by no means
certain that all of them do you know so i'm going to stick my neck way the hell
out because why not
it isn't obvious to me that islam does because i it's very difficult for me to
see that the totalizing
nature of islam doesn't make it unique among religions so now good so well
there's that out on the table if
if you don't mind but isn't the issue using the word truth because we can say
true we could use tradition
and wisdom and we're okay but as soon as we start saying truth then then we run
into problems i mean and
even when you're talking about porcupines where you're talking about what would
you say metaphorical
truth versus look it's not true it's real simple just don't go near the porcupine
teach the kid to
not go near the porcupine because porcupine quills are dangerous they get stuck
in you they're really
dangerous can they throw it at you no they cannot but just stay clear of them
because you don't want
them to somehow or another get in touch with your body there's no truth in that
they can throw their
quills at you you benefit from being particularly aware of the dangers of their
quills but if you tell
a kid that they can throw their quills and so therefore the kid stays clear of
them he has a faulty
assumption in his head you're lying to them for their own protection and i i
was not good i wouldn't do it
i think the same thing can be said of everything happens for a reason well here's
the problem we
don't know if everything happens for a reason maybe when you die you go to some
auditing room and
they go well you know it's all just a part of some gigantic algorithm that you're
impossible it's
impossible for you to understand due to your limited processing power of the
human brain you're dealing
with some simian sort of uh complex geometry that's really just designed to
keep your body moving and
keep you alive and spread your genetics so that you can eventually evolve to
the point when you're a god
well first of all i i have kids i wouldn't tell them that a porcupine i'm sure
you wouldn't but how
but why use the word truth though ah because well the question is why do people
tell you that a
porcupine can throw its quills i don't i don't think they do oh they do well if
they do they don't know
any better right or they're liars right and so all i'm saying is that actually
that is likely to be
the product of selection in other words that those people who had encoded that
they do throw their
quills have an advantage it's not the way i would do it and for exactly the
reason that you point out
which is if you give a child the wrong model of a porcupine i don't know
whether a porcupine is liable
to be the gateway to some more important question but if it were you've just
steered the kid wrong well
it's something here's part of the problem and this is part of and this is a
really big problem there's
two things i guess that that were brought up by what you described and the
first is the terminology
of truth now harris's claim with regards to my utilization of truth was that i
was absconding
with the definition of truth and in false manner but he was wrong because the
idea of truth is much
older than the idea of objective truth and the original notion of truth wasn't
objective true it was like
the arrow flies straight and true right and it meant something like reliably
reliably on its way to the
appropriate destination something like that and when christ said i am the truth
and the way when i
can't remember the other yes yes the truth he was talking about wasn't an
objective truth so sam's idea
that i had somehow you know taken the idea of truth that was actually objective
all along and done
something crooked with it is just wrong it's wrong well the truth can have
multiple definitions well
that's maybe there was that that's the issue and that's exactly what we're what
we're trying to get
at here it's like there's to me there's two kinds of truth and and they may be
they may be commensurate
you may be able to stack them on top of one another but now and then they
dissociate and this is
actually what what what brett was referring to as well so so and this is where
it gets so complicated
that i can barely manage it there's a there's the truth that manifests itself
in the manner in which
you act and there's the truth that manifests itself as a representation of the
objective world
and sometimes both those truths are stacked on top of each other and sometimes
they're not so like i
i could give you a piece of wisdom that would work well if you acted it out
that carried within it an
inaccurate representation of part of the objective world and you could say well
maybe that's actually
the case with the biblical stories because if you read them as science they don't
read well so let's
take malaria as a good example malaria the root of the word is mal area bad air
right malaria is not
transmitted by bad air it's transmitted by mosquitoes that live in places where
you might think the air is
bad so the point is it's part of the way there yeah that's that's a good one
and that and that also
gets see there's another weird distinction here and that i was trying to draw
with sam but it's a really
tricky one and we augured in because we started to talk about pragmatism but
there's also something
like the truth of a description and the truth of a tool and my sense is that
people's fundamental truths
are tool-like we use them to function properly in the world and you could say
well a sharp axe is more
true than a dull axe and actually you can use the word true in that sense that
actually isn't
appropriate appropriate use of the word there there are tool truths and there
are objective fact truths
now and in the optimal circumstance those map onto each other but we're not
smart enough often to make
them map onto each other because we just don't know enough and there are lots
of truths that we have
that portray the objective world improperly that are still true is the problem
using the term true when
sometimes you should use the term fact like like one plus one is two that is a
fact one plus one is two
is also true you throw some water on a match that is and it'll go out that's a
fact yes well as i see
it at least there is this overarching truth the one that sam harris was
pointing to the one i think you're
pointing to also and the one i'm i'm imagining we all subscribe to sure right
there is the testable truth that
reveals itself in the laboratory we're in a careful experiment in the field and
that really is the top
level truth but then there are the truths you can't speak yet so let's take um
the word filth from uh
from the old testament okay filth means shit right you're not supposed to
shit in camp because god finds it offensive now the problem is the germ theory
of disease doesn't
come about for thousands of years after that truth was written that truth keeps
you from infecting
people long before you can ever explain that there are microbes that grow in
human
shit that are a particular danger to your population so the point is would you
rather be held back to
the place where you can actually describe the the literal underpinnings of what's
going on
or do you want to be liberated to say something that actually results in uh an
improvement in health
before you know literally thousands of years before anybody had any idea that
it was microbes at the
root of this yes and you need to figure out so so an elaboration of that would
be something like
human beings needed to figure out how to act without dying before they could
understand the nature of
the world well enough to justify that right and something like that you'd be
crazy now that we do have
the germ theory of disease to to amplify that original crude version of the
truth or that crude
approximation of what you need to believe in order to behave uh safely there's
no reason for that truth to
to be promoted in fact you don't hear people describing this part of uh the the
old testament
anymore because it's true it's not relevant right right and this is probably
all why dietary
restrictions were in the old testament as well shellfish red tide uh eating
pigs trichinosis there's
a lot of a lot of issues that go along with that yeah well there is some intermingling
perhaps of
hygienic concerns with also the desire for the groups to distinguish themselves
from other groups
right because you can you can unite your group quite tightly by dietary
restrictions
so um back to your point about terminology you know we could we could do
something like fact and wisdom
you know you say truth that's the overarching category and then that divides
into fact and wisdom
and what you want optimally is you want the facts and the wisdom to be one one
to one but often they're
not and if you find wisdom where the facts aren't laid right out you don't just
get to throw away the
wisdom which is what i think happens in the case of people like dawkins and harrison
harris makes another
slight of hand move which i don't like which is that he thinks so let's say
except for just a second the wisdom fact distinction he would say well the fact
is the
thing and the wisdom is a second order derivation of that you can ground the
wisdom in the fact
and i don't believe that and i don't think that he has any i don't think that
he has any real
justification for that claim and this is something i never got what do you mean
by grounding the
wisdom in the fact he thinks if you know the facts clearly enough you'll know
how to act
well that's not necessarily true well well there's a huge there's ways to act
that are within your best
interest and then there's ways to act that are within the the interest of all
the people around
you they may might not serve you that well well there's also a distinction is
where ethics come
right or where the consequences are delayed for some number of generations or
something like that
yes well that's a big problem and right so so sam acts as if the process of mac
mapping facts onto
action is simple if we just got the facts right but but it's the weakest part
of his argument and we
never ever got to that for a variety of reasons but part of the reason it's
weak is okay well there's
like an infinite number of facts man which so let's say you're standing in
front of a field and you're
looking at the field the field does not tell you how to walk through it there's
a million ways through
the field and no matter how many facts about the field you aggregate you're not
going to be able to
determine the appropriate path by aggregating those facts so it's that's and
that that's a problem that
i don't think sam is willing to take seriously and well well i think there are
two problems tangled up
here one of them is there's a question of are is one individual supposed to
have all of the facts and
navigate based on on that sort of the rationality community version of things
or um does you know the
practical truth is we can't all be experts in everything and so we have to go
along with
you know guides to our behavior that are approximate and that that's inherent
and then there's a question
about civilization civilization should be guided by our best understanding of
what's actually true
but with an understanding that we don't have a complete map of a lot of stuff
and so i think what
you're pointing at is that there is wisdom that has been handed to us that is
not such that we can
just simply say oh here's the nugget at the center of it and we need to
preserve that thing because we
don't necessarily know what it's doing um which is you know that's this is
dangerous because some of
what it's doing may not be acceptable well and think about let's look at the
wisdom end of things for
a minute and you talked you alluded a little earlier to like iterations and and
and about the fact that
things are iterated across time and that something that works now might fail
dreadfully in a month or
two months so so here's here's what something has to be like to be wise let's
say well first of all um let's
say it would be good if it was in accordance with the facts but we'll leave
that aside for now
it has to work if you operate according to the wisdom principle whatever it is
it has to work in
the world but then it has to work in a world that allows you to maintain your
relationships with
people in the world right so so it's all of a sudden this wisdom thing is
something that's not
only constrained by let's call it objective reality but it's constrained by the
necessity of a social
contract a functional social contract so you're only able to you're only
allowed to put forward
actions in the world that would be of benefit to you if they simultaneously don't
undermine the
structure within which you live okay and then there's a game theory element to
that which is
well if it's wise then it works in the world so that'd be the constraint of
objective reality
but then it works for you now and the you that'll be in a week and the you that'll
be in a month and
it works for you and your family and it works for you and your family and
society and it works in a
way that those things all line up to be iterated across time and so this this
is actually the also the
solution is for and i'd really like to hear what you think about this i think
this is the solution to
the post-modern conundrum because the post-modernists bless their heart so we'll
give the devil his due
say well the problem is there's an infinite number of interpretations of a
finite set of facts
and the right response to that is oh that's true that's true that's not good
and that's why the
post-modernists say well you can't agree on a canonical interpretation of a
great piece of literature
because the number of potential interpretations are infinite and so then they
say well why should we
settle on any one interpretation then why should we privilege one over another
and then they say well
that's all power games and so that's a you got to take that seriously but what
they missed and this
is a big deal it's a big deal i think is this idea of of ethical constraint it's
like yes there's a
landscape of potentially infinite interpretations but hardly any of them will
work in the real world
and hardly any of them will work in the real world in a way that doesn't get
you killed by other people
or doom you because of your own stupidity to failure across time and so the
landscape of interpretation
is almost infinite but the landscape of applicable interpretation functional
interpretation is
unbelievably constrained and i think that constraint system is what we regard
as ethics it's something
like that well at some level um stories continue through time for a reason you
know good stories
continue for a long you know the odyssey is with us for some reason and we so
there is a scientific
reason or scientifically investigatable reason why the odyssey has been durable
um we may not know it
but it's in principle it's a question you could investigate um so i guess at
the at the end of the day
the problem with the post-modernists is that they have a point the point is
perception gets in the way
of anything we wish to do objectively but that point only takes you so far and
uh that's why they turn
to marxism as far as i can tell because what happens with the post-modernists
is they say oh there's
an infinite number of interpretations and then the human part of them goes okay
well what am i supposed
to do next then since there's an infinite number of choices and the post-modernist
says well my theory
can't account for that and then they say well back to marxism and so that's why
i think there's this
unholy alliance between the post-modernists and the neo-marxists is because
post-modernism is a
is a dead end from the perspective of applicable wisdom it leaves you bereft
and nihilistic
and that's not good because people can't exist without a purpose and so they
sneak the marxism through
the back door and and jump into this power landscape for the reasons that we
discussed earlier so you
really think that it's because of an infinite number of possibilities
interpreting things because
i've always felt that it was really just a response to capitalism they like
that they feel that
capitalism is a very negative aspect of our culture and society and that there's
got to be some sort
of an alternative marxism is a clearly defined alternative that other people
have subscribed to
in the past you could point to it it's a structure that's already already set
up and it's romanticized
and i think they adopted for that reason because it has a socialist aspects
attached to it and they
looked at socialism as it's some sort of a thing that it regards equality and
uh you know it's some sort of
an egalitarian approach well it's okay so we'd have to take two things apart we'd
have to take
marxism slash neo-marxism marxism and post-modernism apart so we could do that
historically
and i would say that although there is a reason for post-modernism which is the
reason we just
discussed that the the landscape the infinite landscape of interpretation
problem it's a real problem
if you look at it historically post-modernism actually grew out of marxism and
so what what
what happened is that the marxists laid out their their their theory about the
human social environment
being composed of a power struggle between the privileged and the underprivileged
right the rich
and the poor in in its initial phases and that's a story that's partially true
and it's got a lot of
motive power like the motive power is the romantic motive power that you just
described i get to be on
the side of the oppressed i get to be a warrior for what's right there's the
resentment element which
is that son of a has more than me so let's cut him off at the knees which
manifested itself brutally in
the soviet union and then there's the ideological totality issue which gives
people a sense of security
that took a vicious hit by by the late 1960s because the murderousness of marxism
had been clearly laid
out as a doctrine and that opened the door to this move by by mostly french
intellectuals to to develop
the post-modern philosophy which has these advantages which we we described but
but also to use that as a
screening tactic for allowing marxism to transform into identity politics and
so like it's hard to
disentangle all the motivations that are going on in there but there's
something about it that's
that's truly intellectually pathological because you don't get to be a post-modernist
and a marxist
you actually technically cannot be both of those things at the same time and
the fact that most
people are both of those things at at the same time raises the specter of just
exactly what their
motivation is and then i would say it's this resentment driven anti-capitalism
there's reasons to
criticize capitalism obviously but it's this underground resentment driven anti-capitalism
that i think is
one of the fundamental motivators well if i can if i can add a couple things um
the risk of alienating
my last few friends uh in for a penny yeah i guess um so here's the thing what
what's up with uh with
marxism is a there's a lot in marx critique of capitalism that's actually right
and so that kind of
gets you through the door once you start looking at the analysis and then there's
the prescription
which is toxic but it's not obvious why it's toxic in other words it's a pretty
good story that
doesn't happen to function and so people gravitate to it because the story is
moderately compelling
it's not game theoretically functional or stable or viable and it does descend
into this kind of
you know inevitable grave violence and so we know that now historically it's
not just a theoretical
issue we've now seen enough of it to know that as a fact but nonetheless the
fact that there are people
telling the story to kids who don't yet know what to do with something that
sounds like it might be true
um is is very dangerous if you don't mind break it down as to why it goes bad
well i mean it's sort of a tired critique but i happen to think it's about
right which is that it
just does not take account of what a human being is and what makes society
function spoken like a true
fascist biologically essentialist yeah but no i think that wasn't very nice i
think i think that is
well i think it might be related back to okay so let's go back to the idea that
marx had something
to say okay and we could clarify that a little bit so here's a problem this is
the problem that that
seems to emerge as the function of some really fundamental force that we don't
quite understand
and that's this phenomena that i've been referring to as the pareto
distribution okay so here here's the
here's the situation if you look at any creative endeavor that human beings
engage in so that would be an
endeavor where there's variability in individual production it doesn't matter
what it is here's
what happens people compete to produce whatever that is and almost everybody
produces zero they lose
completely a small minority are a tiny bit successful and a hyper minority are
insanely successful and so the
perito distribution for and the perito distribution is is the what geometric
graph representation of that phenomena and so here's how it manifests itself
um
if you have 10 000 people a hundred of them have half the money
so the rule is the square root of the number of people under consideration have
half of whatever it is that's under consideration so
this works everywhere so if you took 100 classical composers 10 of them produce
half the music that's
played and then if you take the the 10 composers and you take a thousand of
their songs 30 of those
songs which is the square root of a thousand roughly speaking are played 50
percent of the time
and so there's this underlying natural law
which is it's expressed as the matthew principle which is from a new testament
statement the statement is
to those who have everything more will be given and from those who have nothing
everything will be taken
it's a vicious statement but it it's actually here's one of those places where
it's actually empirically true
this happens everywhere and so what marx observed was that capital tended to
accumulate in the hands of fewer and fewer people
and he said that's a flaw of the capitalist system that's wrong it's not a flaw
of the capitalist system
it is a feature of every single system of production that we know of no matter
who set it up and how it operates
and so then now we have a problem because what happens is
as soon as you set up a domain of production and you need to because you need
things to be produced
then you instantly produce a competition and the spoils go disproportionately
to a tiny percentage of people
so then the quid so then well so what well so the rest of the people starve or
the system becomes unstable
because everybody's mad it's like that's a big problem okay so how do human
beings fix that
well the first thing we did was diversify the number of productive games
so you don't get to be nba basketball star but you know you can run a podcast
it's a completely
different competitive landscape so we can fractionate the the production
landscape and then people who
aren't successful in one domain might be successful in others that's human
creativity we're really good at
that but the problem with that is you still get a positive correlation among
the successful people
you know so because you're so successful for example with your podcast and your
youtube videos your
connection network is insane insanely powerful right so you still have this
tendency for what's useful
and good to be uh what distributed let's call it inequitably and it's it's it's
got the power of a
physical law in fact there are people they call themselves econophysicists no
one knows that there's a field
econophysicists econophysics and they use the same mathematical equations that
that that represent the
propagation of molecules into a gas molecules into a vacuum to describe the
manner in which money
distributes itself in an economy okay so marx pointed to a fundamental issue
but he said well that's a
fault with capitalism it's like no it isn't it's something way more pernicious
than that and it's it's
something like well when one good thing happens to you it makes you a little
more powerful and attractive
and so that fractionally increases the possibility that another good thing will
happen to you
and then that spirals out of control and you get people who have well they have
all the money or they
have all the podcast downloads you're in that position you know what is it 1.2
billion like what the hell
but it's to those who have more and it's not because there's something oppressive
about you
it's because you you rode the wave of the Pareto distribution and it and it it
threw you way
up way the hell up into the stratosphere and we don't know what to do about
that like should you
be sharing your podcast views with the with the oppressed and downtrodden i
mean you've well you've
got a few billion you could spread the damn things around it's not fair that
you're the only one that's
being listened to you know it's the same argument and it's a compelling
argument because why the hell
should you have all that power if you call it power you could call it authority
or competence
but isn't that a different argument because no one's asking anyone to download
anything in specific
no one's no one's compelling anyone to download anything specific you could
download whatever you
want and if you put more effort and more time and more focus into your work
whatever it would be
whether it's a podcast or your youtube videos or whatever people enjoy it they
gravitate towards it
and then over time it exponentially increases the amount of people that are
exposed to it well this
is why i think that the the and this is the other problem with the marxist
perspective is that
and the post-modernists in particular like they conflate power competence and
authority unfairly
now your point it's sort of the point of free marketers you're saying well look
all i'm doing is
offering a product i'm not compelling anyone it's a quality product or at least
as far as the market is
concerned it is if it turns out that everyone wants that well what's wrong with
that and i'm not
disagreeing with that argument in the least but but it's the problem is it
doesn't it doesn't fix the
problem like the problem with money let's say the problem is is that if you let
a monetary system run
all the money ends up in the hands of a very few a very small number of people
and you're saying this
is also with any sort of creative endeavor any creative endeavor man now what
is wrong like i think the the
real issue would be to maximize potential output or maximize the amount of
successful people you'd have
to figure out what's don't concentrate on what people are doing right
concentrate on what people
are doing wrong like what why what are the people doing wrong that are failing
whether in any creative
that's that's partly why we put together sorry just give me one minute at all
that's partly why we put
together the future authoring program because we were trying to figure out what
made people successful and
one of the things that makes people successful is they specify a target and
then aim at it right
because if you're all over the we do know in a relatively functional society
like ours we know what
predicts success iq and conscientiousness are the biggest predictors of success
now there's a genetic
lottery thing going on there that's kind of rough but it does say that smart
people who work hard are
disproportionately likely to succeed and then you might also say well you want
to remove the
impediments from people who have those capabilities so that they can move
forward and one one of the
predictors of success as well is to decide what your success is going to be and
then work hard in
that direction and that actually works so i think that is a very useful thing
to do and that's well like
i said that's partly why we've been working in that direction so but there's
other problems that it
doesn't still still still doesn't solve like one of them is if you don't have
any money
it's really hard to get some like once you have some it's not so hard to get
some more
but right but if you're at zero jesus man you're in this you're in the reverse
situation
you're poor you don't have anything no one wants to talk to you you can't get
out of it because
you're too poor to get out of it you know you're penalized by the economic
system because you can't
even afford to start playing the game you're stuck at zero you're stuck at zero
and you can't get out
and the revolutionary types you know they go to the people who are stuck at
zero and they say
hey you're stuck at zero why don't you burn the whole goddamn thing to the
ground right
because maybe in the next iteration you won't be stuck at zero and for young
men that's a hell of a
call right because they're already let's call them expendable biologically and
that makes them more
adventurous and risk-taking if someone says and maybe that's why they wear the
shake wavera t-shirt
it's like hey i'm stuck at zero well i'd rather be with the romantic who's
burning the whole thing
to the ground than to just you know to stay locked in my immobile position
right but that zero is where
massive amounts of creativity come from because of that struggle massive
amounts of innovation massive
amounts of people who have visions because you're not living off of some sort
of uh trust fund you know
you you have real risk and real danger and you have a real concern about your
future whereas
someone who has no concerns whatsoever and their future is carved in stone they
can do whatever they
want and buy a new ferrari every year that they're not going to have nearly the
amount of motivation as
the poor person yeah well that may be why family fortunes tend to only last
three generations yes and
you know you're saying well why don't you take a look at the advantages of zero
and one of the advantages
there is that you're driven by brute necessity and that can really be
motivating yes and that's i think
why why first the children of first generation immigrants often do so well yes
you know they're
driven by necessity and it's so yes agreed however i would still say you know
the zero issue is there are
levels of absolute privation that are so intense yes that all the good will in
the world won't get you out
of zero right if you're living in a third world country in some very small
village with no way out
whatsoever that is the zero of zero you're in tanzania on the on the river
people are getting eaten by
crocodiles in your village you're fucked yes zero is like a magnet yeah just
hold yeah it's a black hole having
a little very little maybe that motivational state that's actually uh generative
right there's a
difference and then what's really bizarre is those people in that village might
be happier than the
people who live in a gated community in beverly hills well i wanted to i wanted
to come back to this
your point about uh about whether we should be concentrating on what you're
doing right versus
what you're doing wrong both of those will work and you should actually be
doing both of them
simultaneously you'll you'll uh maximize faster but the real problem is that
the system in which we
concentrate on what you're doing right and what you're doing wrong and
supposedly you get paid for
some uh integration of those things is that we don't we don't understand what
we are wired to produce
evolutionarily right we think we all operate based on the idea that we're we're
pursuing some state of
happiness or satisfaction and you know we we think we know what's going to get
it for us and maybe
it's inventing something and then then you'll be happy uh but it's a trap um
the fact is what we
are wired to do is to discover opportunities and then when we discover an
opportunity it benefits the
population that we come from and we turn that discovery into either more mouths
to feed or more
consumption and we restore the state of privation right we restore the state in
which people don't
have enough and so if you really wanted to fix this problem if you wanted to
address the problems
that communism thinks it's solving but fails to you have to engineer around
this uh this feature of
human beings where we pursue new opportunities and as soon as we find a new
opportunity instead of figuring
out a way to stabilize the benefits so that it results in a stable sense of
satisfaction for
example we fall all over ourselves to turn it into more of the same because of
course that's how we
got here can you give me an example which mean buzz um sure so let's look at uh
something like
the um let's imagine uh an ancient farmer an ancient farmer has a piece of land
and that piece of land will
support a certain number of people with the level of technology that the farmer
is utilizing somehow
the farmer ends up either thinking of or discovering by watching somebody else
a wheel now that farmer
has a technology that allows him or however many people are working that farm
to produce that much more
food with no more labor because the wheel allows you to transport more for
example at one time
so now that same piece of land can support more people because it can be more
efficiently farmed
that could be stabilized as a kind of um success in other words that you could
turn
the extra um the surplus into a kind of persistent uh luxury yeah a luxury but
i mean i don't even
luxury is a little bit too trivial sounding you could turn it into a space
where
you use that to uh to investigate important stuff or you could turn it into
more mouths to feed in which
case as soon as you've produced those extra mouths that are now consuming the
output of that farm now
the level of um you know fear of starvation is right back where it was and so
uh so so that's mo money more
problems uh yeah essentially i mean you know well it used to be that we
produced more people now we produce
uh a greater quest for consumption right but if we were smart what we would do
is we would think about
the problem of how to take uh the gains that come from not being bumped up at
the limits of a system
and turn them into what we value right what we collectively we've done some of
that i mean because
so we've done some of that because as
what do they say a rising tide lifts all ships and there's certainly some truth
in that the overall
standard of living has gone up so stupendously since 1895 that it's an absolute
miracle
so we've we've done some of that and so there's another issue back to marx let's
say there's
another issue that that we haven't we can't contend with and one of those might
be well imagine that
in order for society to progress you have to allow the individual to compete in
a relatively
untrammeled space so that they can innovate and then imagine that one of the
consequences of that
innovation is that you get these prido distributions developing because the
innovator or or the one
who's second in line to the innovator whatever ends up with them with the bulk
of the spoils
so you might say there's a cost to be paid in inequality for innovation and
then you could also say
well too much inequality destabilizes things which seems to be quite quite
clear so there's room for an
intelligent conversation about that right because the lefties say oh too much
inequality and they
need to be listened to because the evidence is quite clear if you let the
inequality ramp up enough
the whole system destabilizes because the people at the bottom think it we'll
just we'll just flip the
system upside down right no one wants that like right-wing conservatives don't
want that so because
you could make a republican argument say don't let the inequality in your
neighborhood get out of hand
because the crime rate will skyrocket and the empirical evidence on that is
overwhelmingly strong inequality
drives crime now you can say you can argue about why but the fact that it does
is that's not
disputable so we could have an intelligent discussion between the left and the
right and the discussion
would go something like this you need innovation you pay for innovation with
inequality but you need to
bind inequality because if it's too intense then things destabilize it's like
okay we can agree on that
we've got the parameters set now we have to now we have to start thinking very
carefully through how
to do the redistribution issue and we don't know how to do that so you might
say well we have a
guaranteed annual income for people which i think is a horrible solution by the
way but it addresses the
right problem the problem is is that we're hyper productive but the spoils go
to those at the top
and some of those resources need to be funneled down to the people who have
zero so that they have an
opportunity to at least get to the point where they can innovate and so the
bloody whole bloody
thing doesn't wobble and fall and we could we and i would say in some sense
that's what the political
discussion is about but we we've we've skittered off into these radical oversimplifications
which is
something like well if if you have more than another person you're an oppressor
and you're evil and
if you have less it's because you're virtuous and victimized and that's just a
non-starter so you
you think that there's a real problem with like something like a universal
basic income
you think it's a horrible idea well i think the idea that the solution is a
basic income is not a good
idea because i think the problem is deeper than that i i don't think the
fundamental problem is that
people don't have enough money i think the fundamental problem is that human
beings in some sense are
beasts of burden and if they're not given if they're not provided with a place
where they can accept
social responsibility social and individual responsibility in an honorable
manner they
degenerate and die that's the opiate crisis in the west right now like men need
men who who are men
don't need money they need function and we've got a problem one of the problems
is for example here
here's an ugly stat i think i told you this once before it's illegal to induct
anyone into the armed
forces if they have an iq of less than 83 and the reason for that is the the
you know the armed
forces despite having every reason to draw the contradictory conclusion has
decided that there isn't a
single thing that you can be trained to do in the military if you have an iq of
less than 83 that isn't
positively counterproductive that's 10 of the population and we're producing a
a culture that's
very cognitively complex like what the hell are you going to do if you can't
use a computer like
if you can use a computer you're at least in the game if you can really use one
you're hyper powerful
if you're not literate enough to use a computer you're at zero 10 of the
population the conservatives
say well there's a job for everyone if they just worked hard enough it's like
uh no and increasingly
no and the liberals say well everyone's basically the same and you can train
anyone to do anything
it's like no you can't yeah i want to go back to the inequality point here
because if you look at
this biologically actually i think it reveals a lot why are we i mean we know
from uh from careful study
that people are motivated by the degree of inequality more than they are the uh
the absolute
level of well-being that they have and there's a very good it's tragic but a
very good evolutionary
reason for this which is if you are working on some piece of land and your
neighbor has the adjacent
piece of land and they're doing twice as well as you it's because they know
something you don't
right and so becoming focused on what they're doing that you're not doing is a
rational
thing to to spend your time on so you can figure out what it is that they know
that you don't
in the modern environment this is a catastrophe because who are your neighbors
well you've got some
box sitting on the wall of your living room that has a totally artificial
portrait of other people
who may be much wealthier than you and it's broadcasting in as if you're
looking in their
window right in the adjacent house and so you think you you're being triggered
to to think that
you're doing something wrong that you might fix when in fact the solution may
not be
first of all the person on the other side of that screen may not be for real um
but even if they
are they're not living in the same environment as you the technology is interfacing
with uh with our
our brains badly but so we have the perception of massive inequality
economically we do have massive
inequality you're arguing that the solution to this involves some sort of
massive redistribution as a solution i would be a solution but nonetheless
redistribution is wildly
unpopular for various reasons and so what we've got now is a situation this is
speculative but what's
really happening is that austerity is being used as a threat to keep people who
would otherwise rebel
against the inequality in line and my fear about this is that this is exactly
the conditions that are going
to trigger that uh tribal population against population mayhem that we were
talking about at the beginning
of this conversation that when people have the sense that the the burst of
growth that they were
experiencing is now over the natural response is to turn on those who are not
as powerful and take their
stuff that this is a totally indefensible but nonetheless biological pattern of
history and that
if we want to avoid that we have to stop sending the signals that trigger us to
imagine that we've just
run to the limit of the opportunity that we had discovered and it is now time
to look and see who can't
defend their position how are we sending these signals well by um basically
failing to provide enough
well-being that people's perception of the inequality is reduced to a tolerable
level that's the argument
for universal basic income right certainly certainly a strong one and i you
know it's also it's also
a good argument for equality of opportunity right because people are people are
actually not as resentful
about the success of others as you might expect they're resentful about it if
they feel that the
game is fixed but they're also willing to consider the game long term so lots
of people will say look
like i'm stuck at not zero i'm stuck at one but my kids might make it to four
and that's good enough
and that's been the american dream right and then that's that's a really high
power antidote to
inequality it's like well yeah there's some inequality we need it to keep the
generative mechanism going
but the game is fair and you can play it too and there's some reasonable
probability that either
you or someone you love will be successful so that so it has to be a straight
game and that's why ethics
is so important to keep this landscape stable people can't play crooked games
and the rich shouldn't be
fixing the game if they want to hold on to their money and the problem is is
that some of them although
not all some of them are fixing the game and no one's happy about that and no
wonder you know and and
i guess that was evidenced to some degree by the 2008 collapse because it
seemed
and and i'm just as uninformed as the next person so i'm i'm what i'm i'm
capable of commenting on
this it seems from the outside that the rich disproportionately benefited from
the restabilization
of the economic system and people are not happy about that and they shouldn't
be happy about that
because it indicates that there's something fundamentally rotten about the game
so you could
say well maybe people can tolerate necessary inequality if the game isn't rigged
and so that's why everybody
has to act in a manner that indicates that the game isn't rigged and that means
they can't rig it
that's really what it means so and so we're also being driven into this
inequality corner by i would
say by the post-modernists and the neo-marxists because they say this is the
pernicious thing they
say well the reason that some people have more than others is because every
hierarchy is based on
arbitrary power and they're all oppressors and the reason they have the money
is because they stole it from
you and there's some truth in that because there are some criminals but when
you get to the point
where you fail to distinguish the productive people from the criminals which is
exactly what
happened in the 1920s in the soviet union you better bloody well watch out
because when you
radically make things egalitarian you're going to wipe out all your productive
people and then
you're going to starve and so that's that's one of the doom end scenarios that
awaits us if this
idiot process of polarization continues and what i find reprehensible about the
universities and
you're tangled up right up to your neck in this is that the universities are
actively agitating to
produce people who believe that all inequality is due to oppression and power
and that's just well
first of all it's technically wrong but why is that you guys both operate in
that system so what
well here's the problem no i as far as i know nobody has properly studied the
question of what fraction of the
the economy is actually crooked rent-seeking right not productive and i fear
that the answer to that
question is that it's an awful large fraction of the economy not because of
some uh conspiracy but
because opportunity is finite but con games aren't and so anybody who can find
a mechanism for transferring
wealth from somebody else for doing nothing finds that mechanism and that thing
is is ever present whereas
discovering the next big thing that's actually productive is you know something
that goes along
and fits and starts and so if we were i mean really you've described it very
well we've got a battle
between two caricatures of what's true right are the either the market is
wonderful and it's producing
great stuff with very little corruption or everything that makes people unequal
is the result of corruption
both of these things are wrong right markets are marvelous engines for figuring
out how to do
something really well they're brilliant at this right and so people who see
that fall in love with it
understandably because they're so good at it but what they're terrible at is
telling you what you should
want or what you should do right if people tell markets here's what we would
like to accomplish
and then the markets tell us well how do we accomplish that best that would be
a very viable
system that would not result in massive rent seeking resulting in everybody
feeling that all of their
misfortunes are the result of a rigged game which is so massively rigged that
when they check they see yes
that is actually large large to large extent what we're suffering from um but
they want to throw the
baby out with the bath water and so they want to throw out markets entirely
which you know would be a terrible mistake
it's a it's a it you asked you why why this has happened in the universities
and like that
that i think it's one of these runaway positive feedback processes you know the
universities start
to tilt hard to the left in the 60s and that just went out of control and now
we're at the point where
that's the dominant force and why is probably another manifestation of one of
these pareto principles
it was like well at some point there's enough lefties hired so that the
probability that they're only
going to hire people equally as left or greater starts to reach a hundred
percent and then you iterate
that across a couple of generations and you get no conservatives which is more
or less the situation
say in the humanities and most of the social sciences and it sort of looks like
a conspiracy
but it doesn't mean that anyone is actually planning it although there are
conscious attempts also to
silence conservative voices let's say and then that's also driven by this post-modern
ethos
neo-marxist ethos i would say that says that all of the right the moral right
is on the side of the left
you know and so it's the combination of those two things there's more things i
think i often think
comically that if you paid sociology professors uh three times as much the
probability that they would
be anti-capitalist would decline precipitously like i think a lot of it's
driven because there's a lot
of smart people in academia and they're underpaid relative to their
intelligence so and that doesn't
make them happy so they get bitter and resentful about that and they think well
there's these goddamn
bankers who are hauling in 20 million dollars a year and here i am hardly
struggling but here i am
struggling comparatively and that's the issue is comparatively on a hundred
thousand dollars a year
120 000 a year you know i look at that and i think well whatever it doesn't
matter but there's a
like my colleagues are often angry with me because i do work with the business
school
you know and i also have a business i'm not anti-capitalist in the least um but
i it's just
dumbfounding to me because they'll come up to me and say well are you so sure
that you should be
working with the business school and i think what bloody planet are you from to
to posit a question
like that's all businessmen are evil it's like really that's the level of your
sophistication
this is really an argument that's been presented to you that businessmen are
evil
well they don't come out and say that but they certainly question my
motivations for example in
in forming ties with the business school like what do they say about it they
say exactly that they
question my ethics about forming ties with the business school so but they don't
give you any
reasons you're supposed to the reason is supposed to be self-evident joe oh you
know well so let's give
this argument its due i mean i i don't buy this argument but um but nonetheless
let's let's not uh let's not
caricature it yes that's good um in a an absolutely free market which is not
what we have but we have
something that tends uh in that direction in an absolutely free market if you
compete two individuals
one of whom is completely amoral will embrace any opportunity if it makes a
profit no matter what it
is and the other individual has some limit to what they will do well then there's
no question who wins if
we give this experiment a long enough period the individual who will do
anything will out compete
the individual with moral limits because doesn't depend on what the game is
though because people
find out that you have no moral limits then they're going to remove themselves
from your market
unfortunately not and here's the i know it seems like that and in any given
round that's true okay but to
the extent that what you're saying is to the extent that people police um they're
purchasing and they
will you know they will stop using uber if uber is ethically uh compromised for
example um well then
the point is well what's the game the game is to figure out which things are
being monitored and not do
any of the unethical things that are being monitored but to do all of the unethical
things that aren't
being monitored and so the individual who is perceiving which things they can
get away with has an
advantage that's the psychopath advantage well i don't even want to call it the
psychopath advantage
right what this is is that a market will train you to do this if it is unregulated
and the best that
the ethically that the ethically um restrained person can do is compete dead
even they have no way of
getting ahead because the person that is completely free the the amoral uh
business actor has the
ability to do anything that the constrained actor has doesn't this depend
entirely upon what the
battlefield is not really there's there's sort of one exception and that
exception is people who have
done something uh that has suddenly put them in a powerful position right so um
like tech people right
tech people who have skyrocketed as a result of having innovated the next big
thing have not been through
the markets training them to discover the the landscape of what isn't being
monitored that you can make a
profit that's one of the fascinating things about tech people in general is
that these gigantic tech
corporations almost all lean left well the gigantic tech corporations lean left
that's true on the other
other hand i mean i hate to say it but think about how google started right don't
don't be evil right
i think they actually meant that right right and the thing is don't be evil is
what it sounds like when
you haven't been trained by the market to have to do whatever you have to do to
beat your competition
you've just come up with the great search engine and suddenly you're on top of
the world
um but over time what happens that entity is now exposed to competition from a
bunch of other entities
that increasingly will find an advantage in being freer to do ethically
questionable stuff and so what
it does is it forces an entity like google to evolve in the direction of amorality
so now don't happen
with china and google you know because google wanted to expand into china and
so you know they had to
make a deal with the devil so to speak right and they had to accept censorship
they will find ways to
rationalize everything because to not rationalize that which their competitors
can avail themselves of
would be to perish and one of the issues was uh there was all sorts of fake
google going on uh just like they
have fake apple stores in china they don't have the same sort of copyright laws
that we have and you
can essentially plagiarize anything you want and brett you you also said that i
shouldn't make a straw man
of the anti-business argument of my peers and there's another way that i
shouldn't make a straw man of it
like despite the fact that i'm not anti-capitalist i don't believe that every
entity is a business either
and one of the things that has happened to universities that has actually they've
pathologized in a number of
dimensions but they've also pathologized along the business dimension as the
administrators have
become increasingly trained or drawn from the ranks of business managers
because the university is
actually not a business it's a like a church isn't a business there are
organizations that aren't
businesses that you can't just cram into the free market structure willy-nilly
and so my colleagues
also object to the to the transformation of the university into a business
entity run by
profit-seeking mbas and they should object to that because that's not what the
institution is for
so there are reasons for them to be skeptical say of my association with the
business school that aren't
merely a reflection of a simplistic anti-capitalist ideology oh there are lots
of there are lots of things
that are not have no immunity to contact with the market right what has
happened to the university
system is that markets have pushed it in all kinds of directions that are not
healthy for
the mission of the academy and this is also true you know journalism isn't well
done in a market either
right journalism done in a market ends up telling you what you want to hear not
what you need to know
so anyway markets are wonderful but there are certain things they shouldn't be
allowed to touch
and there are certain things that they shouldn't do like tell us what to want
right they're not
there's no magic principle by which a market knows what's healthy and what you
know you might
create well that also then brings us back to another part of the conservative
um liberal left dilemma
which is well you know to direct the market means to impose the heavy hand of
the state and its
potential pathologies on the market but to leave it alone completely means that
it wanders randomly
through a through an indeterminate landscape and and i guess part of the issue
there too is it's sort of
like well how do we how do we how do we properly balance for foresight and
planning which you'd think
would have some role in in the construction of large-scale states it's like
well what do we want
the landscape to look like how do we balance that with the sort of
comprehensive computations that
the market allows and of course the answer to that is we have political
discussions about it all the
time that are untrammeled so that we can adjust the ratio between those two
things as necessary
so again that's a that's a re that's a argument on the side of free speech yeah
i mean really it couldn't be
more important the real answer is that both failures are frightening right
right you really don't want a
state uh nannying you um and over regulating the market and taking the magic
out of it and you don't
want the completely unregulated landscape where the market you know starts probing
the minds of your
children and figuring out how to sell them things that they don't have any
ability to resist right you
need to figure out what that path is and it's not easy but you can't do it in a
landscape where you
can't talk about the questions and this brings us to censorship doesn't it
because this is a real
issue with the marketplace of free ideas um when you're talking about whether
it's google or youtube or
whoever might be imposing their own morality and their own ideas on what you
should and should not be able
to discuss and what should and should not be monetized you're essentially
imposing these limits
these look i've read once and it's a very good point that freedom breeds
inequality because you're free
to put as much effort as you'd like into something and you're going to get in
equal results and that if
you are truly free in a free world some people are going to do far better than
others and just based
on their own input just based on their effort just based on the the amount of
focus and dedication
they have it is very unequal you know i i know many people that are far more
dedicated than other
people that i know and they do better yeah well that's that that's well buttressed
by the empirical
literature because well i mentioned earlier that the two best predictors of
long-term success are
intelligence and conscientiousness and what intelligence is probably something
like the number of of credible
operations that you can manifest in a given period of time it's something like
speed now it's not only
that but it speeds a big part of it so if what you're doing is working and you
can do it faster that
works better okay that's pretty damn straightforward and the next thing is well
conscientiousness well
conscientiousness would be something like how many of those cycles of effort
are devoted to that specific
task and it turns out that if there's a relationship between the effort and
task success more effort is
better but and so i can give you some indication of the power of that so if you
have good measures of
conscientiousness and iq you can predict someone's success in a competitive
landscape with a
correlation of about 0.6 and what that would mean is imagine that you tried to
pick people
you just said randomly you're going to be a success in the top half of the
successful people say and
you're going to be in the bottom half you'd have a 50 for 50 chance of of do of
making that selection
correctly if you did it randomly if you did it informed by the results of a
good cognitive test and
a conscientious test you'd be right 85 percent of the time so you could say
with 85 percent accurately
accuracy which of two people would be more likely to be in the top 50 percent
so it's a whopping effect
and it's actually some validation for the essential integrity of our system
because we hope given that
it's essentially an open meritocracy that smarter hard-working people would do
better and they do now
other factors apply corruption for example lots of factors apply i mean for one
thing wrapped up in iq
is a big question which is how much of the differences in iq that exist is
democratizable that is to say
how much of this is the result of environments that aren't enriching or there's
lead in the water or who
knows what not enough vitamins right my my sense actually my intuition based on
what i know biologically
is that a huge fraction maybe all of it but a huge fraction of differences uh
in iq is actually um
could be generalized and that's part of equal opportunity it's not an equal
opportunity see
i'm way more pessimistic about that and that's partly because i mean maybe
because i spent a lot of
because i'm interested in the amelioration of differences you know so for
example that's why
i built this future authoring program it's like hey if we can figure out how to
make people more
effective well let's do it so i scoured the literature on on iq enhancement and
it's bloody dismal
man it's rough it's very very difficult to put together a cognitive training
program like some things
have worked in a major way like the fact that people aren't starving has wiped
out has moved the bottom
of the iq distribution way up over the last hundred years that's been like a
walloping success but a lot
of the things that we hoped would work like head start's a good example of that
you know head start
was part of the american war on poverty and the idea was you'd give you know
deprived deprived kids
leg up early before they hit school and um start training them cognitively
earlier and the hope was
that you'd get a preto thing going where they'd be a little smarter in
kindergarten and then they do a
little better in grade one and that would make them do even more better in
grade two more better do
better in grade two but what happened what happened was that the kids who went
through head start
actually did get a cognitive jump on their competitors but all the other kids
caught up by
grade six and by grade six there was absolutely no effect whatsoever of the
training program left
now head start did have a couple of benefits one was fewer teenage pregnancies
and fewer dropouts but
that was probably because the kids who got into head start were either socialized
better or that some
fraction of them were removed from for some time from extremely toxic
environments just while they
happened to be at head start but it didn't produce the cognitive improvements
that everyone right and
left were equally hoping for yeah but this is this is in some sense uh it's a
very much an uncontrolled
experiment right because a head start starts late yep and b it doesn't insulate
you from all of the stuff
that comes along with oh yeah yeah growing up in in the deprived neighborhood
and so absolutely and now
also we really don't know what the truth is of um of human iq uh and there
there are some results that
suggest some things that are not hopeful on the other hand some of them just
simply run afoul with
uh the biological realities of intelligence well here's a good example of the
of the lack of
malleability i mean there's a couple of things the first is that we may have
already we may already be
at a point of diminishing returns in terms of eliminating individual
differences in iq because
everyone has central heating everyone has air conditioning everyone has enough
food everyone
has access to the an infinite pool of information so you could say even if you're
in a deprived
environment but you're smart the intellectual landscape is wide open to you now
i'm not saying that's the
case but you can make a case for that but the more dismal end of the of the
biological research on iq
shows things like if you take identical twins at birth and you put them in uh
adopted out families that the
iq of the adopted out twins is much there it's much closer a to the original
biological parents than to
the adoptive parents and be almost perfectly correlated with one another and
that correlation
increases as the separated twins age so let's say you had a twin you were both
adopted out at birth
we test your iqs at four they're fairly close they're closer to your biological
parents than your
adoptive parents but then we test you every year until you're 60 by the time
you're 60 no matter how
long you've been separated as as a an identical twin your iq score is so much
like your twins iq score
that it's as if the same person was being tested twice and that's a really
complicated one because
you think well as twins travel through the environment and accrue different
experiences their iqs should
diverge like obviously that's not what happens they converge so there are there
are a lot of places to
critique that for one thing there aren't very many identical twins raised apart
it's a small sample
this is definitely true those identical twins raised apart carry with them uh
whatever effects
there were from before they were born for sure they look the same and so if if
they you know if they've
been damaged by an environment that was unhealthy for their mother when she was
pregnant then they would
carry that through and it would show up as uh as a similar iq later in life so
that one really wants
to see that this is true on the positive side not just the negative side um so
anyway there's i'm not
saying that there's nothing to it i'm really saying i think we don't know it's
very early in this but what
i can say and i think you know a couple of the things that we've settled on in
this conversation
already are that a uh an environment in which we can say anything that we can
advance any argument
and test it it doesn't mean that that argument is protected but that any
argument can be advanced and
then challenged that that is inherent to navigating and the other thing that i
think we would agree on is
that equality of opportunity is uh nothing but good right a fair game with
equality of opportunity
fair game with equality of opportunity and i guess one thing i would add i don't
know if we would agree
on this but um you were talking about the fact that uh i forget which thing
exactly but but that a system
based on uh merit produces inequality because people will freedom yeah that
freedom produces inequality
that's not necessarily a bad thing but it doesn't mean that we are obligated to
to ride it all the way
down right the fact is we could make people safe to fail right so that you are
encouraged to attempt
to do something highly valuable and if you if it doesn't work out um then the
point is you're not homeless
this would be the uh the argument for something like universal basic income
that your your needs are
taking care of your food your shelter and now you're free to pursue any ideas
that you might have that
you would ordinarily be saddled down by your your issues with food and well
there is some evidence of
that actually happening um in canada now these are multi-variable problems and
so i'm not claiming that
this is true but it's suggestive the rate of entrepreneurial activity in canada
is actually higher than in the united
states and one reason for that appears to be the fact that if you're 25 27 let's
say and you have a family
you can quit your job and start a startup and you don't lose your health care
right and so now you know the issue of universal health core is obviously a
very thorny one and it's
not like the canadian system works perfectly but it doesn't work too badly and
we've been able to
manage it for about 50 years you know we have there's there's artificial
scarcity in the system and the
delay times are longer than they would be if you flew to the mayo clinic and
bought your health care
like i would say that at the high end the american health care system is better
than the canadian
health care system but i would say at the middle and at the low end the canadian
health care system
is clearly preferable and it's also cheaper which is quite interesting because
you would expect especially
if you're a free market type that you know i know the health care system in the
u.s is not precisely
free market but it is more so than it is in canada yet americans pay a
substantially higher proportion
of their overall uh devote a higher proportion of their overall gdp to personal
health care that canadians
do and and the stats are similar if you look at other you know quasi socialized
medical medical systems
great piece on that by adam ruins everything have you ever seen that television
show it's really
interesting he breaks down pretty much uh a lot of different subjects but
breaks down the american
healthcare system to pretty much where it went wrong and i just encourage
anybody to go watch it because
it just shows how they elevated the price of all sorts of different things to
sort of make up for you know
lack of profits and it's really it's a really fascinating little piece um we
are already almost three hours
into this so we haven't talked about hitler oh my goodness well we kind of have
we kind of did we
kind of have but let me just uh do you want to lay out your argument about hitler
and then i'll respond
to it and uh um i don't know if i do want to i mean um i think i i actually
think that i should stop
because i'm kind of at the limits of i'm at the point where the probability
that i will say something
stupid is starting to increase and i would rather not because just saying the
things that i'm trying
to say that aren't stupid is dangerous enough yes this isn't the topic where
you want to make that
kind of yes right so i would say maybe is there a more charged subject it's
funny that it's charged
because as you point out we're pretty much all in agreement about it right i
mean i mean you find
someone who's not and they're instantly ostracized from society right i mean
anybody who has an argument
about genghis khan i mean there's a really fascinating um take on this by dan
carlin from
hardcore history where he's talking about the amount of time that has passed
since a horrible atrocity
and that there are people that will argue that genghis khan who killed 10 of
the world's population
changed things so badly that it literally lowered the carbon footprint of the
human race while he was
alive killed some untold number of millions of people and was responsible for
their deaths people look to
him and they find all sorts of positive things to attribute to his reign uh
opening up trade with china
opening up trade routes although all these different things that people have
attributed to him and that
someday someone may do the same thing about adolf hitler right now well it's
impossible he uh he certainly made
um that job very difficult with all of the documentation yes especially the
films but um
but let's just say uh the argument that i want to level i want to be really
careful to do this
so that it can't be misinterpreted by anybody i'm gonna i'm gonna enjoy
watching this okay
if i'm cornered will you will you come out no way man the knives are going out
okay so my argument from all those years ago in in my uh my paper that i was
did for bob trevers
that i mentioned at the beginning was that hitler was a monster as we all know
but he was a rational
monster that the program that he deployed was not what he said mind you what he
said was wrong in many
places especially where it gets near darwinism it's just all tangled and broken
but what he did was
rational from the point of view of uh increasing the amount of resource that
was um dedicated to
producing members of his population and so my point is this is the danger that
we are in if we allow
ourselves to imagine um that genocidal impulses are more or less gone from the
world because we've all
assumed we've all agreed that they're a bad thing and the point is that they
exist in a in a latent
program and at a point when you have um austerity as a result of uh usually a
an opportunity that has run
its course and has resulted in the population growing to fill that opportunity
and suddenly there's nowhere
to go because the opportunity has all been absorbed the tendency of people is
to figure out who what
other population is weak and if that population is across a border then there's
some excuse for war
and if the population is within the border then it's a genocide but the point
is that is an ever-present
danger for us okay i want to clear clarify one thing i mean because this
argument was sort of phrased as
we have a disagreement about hitler and i would like to point out that i don't
actually disagree
with anything that you just said because i cert if i remain relatively silent i
don't want to be seen
i don't want it to be seen that the fact that i'm disagreeing with you means or
that there is a
disagreement means that it's a disagreement about any of that i think the
disagreement was something like
i said that hitler was even more evil than we thought he was and you i think
correct me if i'm wrong
you're pointing out the danger of assuming that you can put hitler in a he was
just a monster box and
don't think about it anymore and i would say i agree absolutely with that i
mean i've studied hitler
a lot and there's a bunch of things that you can't say about him you can't say
he was stupid
right you can't say he was without artistic talent you can't say that he was a
poor organizer you can't
say that he wasn't charismatic you can't say that he did wonders for equal germany's
economy in the
first part of his reign and and and so it's very necessary when you're if you're
dealing intelligently
with the true monster that you give the devil his due yeah uh so i think the
thing that i saw in
your video was your argument was that as he was losing instead of um putting
the genocide on pause
and uh winning and winning the war winning that he he ratcheted up the genocide
yeah i don't know
if it would really be i don't think it's necessarily fair to say that it was
him that did that although
i think he had a hand in it it does appear to me that that's what happened
right and my my point would
simply be and again there i couldn't possibly be less sympathetic with the
individual my point is
simply that from an evolutionary point of view if your objective is coldly to
increase the number of
genomes that are spelled the same way that yours are on earth that a he did enslave
those jews who were
most fit to work in service of the german war machine right that's what those
camps are not all
of the camps were work camps but you know auschwitz for example was both a work
camp and a death camp
and so there was this uh tendency to enslave and so let me ask you a question
about this because
you know i think you have to make a pretty tenuous biological argument to say
that there's evolutionary
utility in in increasing the number of your kinsmen but unless they're very
close but but here's a
slight variation of that you tell me what you think about this is it reasonable
to presume that a decent
survival strategy is to homogenize your environment with regards to under some
conditions to homogenize
your your environment with regards to racial or ethnic differences to decrease
the probability that
you and yours are going to be killed oh yeah again no defense of this yes you
are right that to the
extent that there's another population that's distinct that that population
even if it is small and has
little power now might not be small and have little power later and so
undoubtedly that program is there
okay okay um but i would say that the the tendency to believe that evolution
only functions at the level
of kin when you're talking about very close relatives i believe is an error
that is the result of the fact
that evolutionists early on wished to operationalize fitness and it's very hard
to operationalize fitness
across population level differences and so they built a definition that is
about immediate kin but there's no
logical reason to imagine that that peters out at the edge okay okay so okay so
that you're okay so all
i'm arguing is that what hitler did was go after a population inside his border
that was more distantly
related to the people who were his constituents and then he went obviously
after eastern europe and sought the
future of germany in russia and it took 12 million uh russians to turn around
the german war machine i mean
those are military deaths there were vastly more civilian deaths but um but the
point is he did not succeed
in doing what he set out to do but he also didn't fail in the sense that he
took a bunch of resources that
belonged to a population that was more distantly related and um he got rid of
those people and by
getting rid of them increased the amount of resource that was available to arians
this has nothing to do
genes are not interested in figuring out which genes are superior all of the
language about german
superiority is nonsense however genes are very interested i mean they're
obviously genes they don't think but
they act as if they are interested in replacing alternative spellings okay and
so part of the reason
that you're walking through this just so that this the track of this remains
self-evident is to caution
people against to to alert people to the fact that the sorts of programs that
hitler both ran and elicited
from people are lurking in our let's say in our genome in our in our set of
biological possibilities and we
have to be very awake to that fact on an ongoing basis they are lurking in our
genomes which does not mean
that we as adults have this as a possibility many people will not go along with
this other people have
it lurking to be triggered and i think you know what worries me is that trump i
think very cynically
utilized this lurking program in order to to gain office that he played upon
the fact that certain
people were waiting to hear those noises and what he said about charlottesville
you know again he did not
he did not go after the white nationalists the way did you see the white
nationalist response
do you see no yeah the daily storm had uh is that what it's called i think one
of the one of the uh
white nationalist papers had a breakdown of what trump did and that essentially
at the end they were
saying he didn't go after us he didn't target us this is very good he was very
clear that it was all
sides and that he never once targeted us didn't say anything bad about us and
then they said god
bless trump at the end of it there's a real tricky issue there about truth you
know because um i was
because my free speech the free speech panel that i was a part of was cancelled
i had to make comments
in the canadian media about charlottesville and so i really had to think about
what trump said because
the the fact that there is reprehensible behavior on both sides of the extremes
of the distribution is
true however truth is a tricky thing because you have to take the temporal
context into account you
know because i would say you can imagine that there are white lies and black
truths a black truth is when
you use the truth in a way that isn't truthful just like a white lie is when
you use uh when you lie in a way
that isn't harmful you can use the truth to wound and hurt and what that really
means is that you've
misused the truth and so it's actually a complex form of lie but what what what
trump did wrong
this is independent of whether or not he was actually engaging in manipulation
or deceit was
he failed to specify the time and the place for the utterance because what he
should have come out
and done was said i unequivocally uh denounce the white supremacist racism that
emerged in
charlottesville yes and then he should have shut up and then two weeks later he
could have said
well would we look at the political landscape as a whole perhaps commenting on
berkeley he could have
said it's pretty obvious that there are reprehensible individuals acting out at
both ends of the extreme
but the charlottesville week wasn't the week to make that point so and you know
what why he did that
well it could be just ineptness because it was a very tricky week to exactly
get things
right i don't i don't think so i think actually we can look at the uh what he
did during the election
and i think we should expect that he would do exactly what he did well fair
enough but i think
there's there's a wink and a nod to them always with neo-nazis and white supremacists
applaud donald
trump's response of dale yeah see see if you could see the actual does it show
the actual text of what
they were wrote because quote from the editor here right there
uh he refused to mention anything to do with us reporters were screaming at him
and the white
nationalism he just walked out of the room huh right um there's there was an
actual uh article that they
wrote on one of those websites trump's comments were good he didn't attack that's
it didn't attack us just
said the nation should come together nothing specific against us he said that
we need to study
why people get so angry and implied that there was hate on both sides exclamation
point so he implied
that the antifa are haters i mean so that that energized them in a way and i
mean there's no secret
that they support him you know um my friend alonzo boden has a very funny quote
he's a comedian he goes
not all trump supporters are racists but all racists are trump supporters right
right it's a it's a great
quote and he that's there's political power in that whether or not trump is a
racist or whether it's
the wink and the nod to that side that is the only wink and the nod that they're
getting i mean yeah or
even yeah or even insufficient denunciation which was kind of what did in there's
a canadian journalist
named faith goldie who got fired from rebel media for being uh uh being accused
of being too cozy
with uh daily stormer type she did a podcast with with uh crypto and i listened
to the podcast very
carefully she was actually one of the people that was supposed to be a panelist
on this free speech
talk so that put us in a real bind but well what happened in the podcast well
what happened was in my
estimation was that she didn't properly fulfill her role as critical journalist
she was it was sort of
like a discussion with your friendly neighborhood neo-nazi and what i mean by
that is she didn't
ally herself ellie ellie hers ally herself with any of the purported aims of
the neo-nazi
people she was talking to but i think she failed to criticize them sufficiently
she didn't ask the tough
questions you know now and and that and that that was a that was well it was a
fatal error i mean she
got fired from rebel media and and it's going to have terrible repercussions
for her although she
may land on her feet but rebel media is very conservative as well right
certainly by canadian
standards yeah yeah yeah that's right no rebel media like imploded in the
aftermath of charlottesville
because of of what faith goldie did with with the uh daily it wasn't even the
daily stormer it was a
a group called crypto but they're they're associated with the daily stormer so
she went on there which i
think you could make you could make a case that that's okay as a journalist you
can go talk to neo-nazis
but the question is how do you talk to them and the answer to that is you point
out their agenda
you don't allow them to masquerade as friendly as friendly innocent people you
can't do that and
so i would say she damn she damned herself by insufficiently criticizing the
villains it was
something like that you uh familiar i'm sure you are familiar with louis
through no i'm not actually
through the documentarian do you know him from uh england fascinating guy
fantastic like one of the
best um and one of the things that he's done is um well he's he's interviewed a
ton of different
people but one of the great ones that he did was the westboro baptist church
and he sort of embedded
himself with them and was uh very congenial and very like kind and unthreatening
and stayed with them
for long periods of time like weeks on end and got them to eventually like
expose who they were
and and understand from like the point of view of an insider in a sense without
necessarily condemning
them but we're just constantly asking questions but being very very polite
about it not like a bunch
not not like a lot of serious like confrontational criticism rather but a very
friendly sort of
polite uh british way of uh discussing things and he's particularly good at
embedding himself he did
it with scientology he's done it with a bunch of different groups he embeds
himself and just sort
of right so there's so there's a justification for attempting that sort of
thing clearly yes yes but
and i really had to think this through because well what happened with our talk
was it was so hall of
mirrors like it was like it was a talk about free speech talks being shut down
on campus that was shut down by a
campus and it was a panel of people who purport to support free speech who
knocked someone off the
panel because of something well not precisely that she said but it's close
enough to make the irony
rather palpable it is so i i had to go through what happened with faith very
carefully to figure out
what the right ethical pathway was you know but i listened to the podcast very
carefully i listened to
with my son and we talked about a lot and our conclusion was that she had
failed to she had failed
to she didn't ask enough tough questions one would have done it even maybe two
would have done it for
sure but it was that the discussion was too cordial and it could have even been
cordial to your point
because maybe that would have led to more discussions yeah but it should have
been cordial with one snake bite
you know that would be required to make that snake bite i mean well it depends
on what you mean by
required well but my thought is like to to find out what these people really
want and really like we're
really trying to achieve sometimes you don't have to be confrontational with
them you just got to allow
them to be comfortable look and kamal bell did that really great on his cnn
show with the kkk he sort of
just allowed them to be themselves and they became more and more comfortable
with him the more time they spent
with them to the point where they're actually joking around with him but you
got to see that the
ugliness was so obvious and evident and without him confronting them on without
him yelling and arguing
you got to see it from him just being friendly and joking around with them now
nobody would ever accuse
a black man like kamal bell with being a sympathizer with the kkk he was in
this inarguable position like no
one no one could accuse him of it this woman i'm assuming is white that's where
the the problem lies
well one of many problems yeah she was a black woman in the very same situation
like oprah was in the
past like oprah interviewed the kkk in the past and she was never accused of
being like somehow or
another a sympathetic person to them right and somehow we we have to uh raise
the threshold of offense there's
there are lots of ways to contribute to the conversation one of them may be to
embed yourself
and actually allow the world to see yes people who are doing something abhorrent
in the in the way
that they see themselves so you can understand it rather than being there
asking questions right you
don't necessarily have to be like what are you going to change them and being
critical to them i mean just
getting in arguments with them i mean you might be able to see something from
that from their response to
like rational discussion about their issues this brings us down a whole other
rabbit hole which
maybe we could talk about at some point in the future because this is a really
interesting topic
you know like part of the reason that i've been accused of being on the far
right say or on the
alt-right is because i've talked to people talked with people who perhaps have
are closer
what would you say have an association network that might be more closely
allied with that than
people are comfortable with but my attitude has been too it's and and i don't
want to talk about this
in much detail because it's really complicated but the the the anti-left
spectrum let's say
is very confused and it could easily tilt very rapidly into the hard right anti-left
which is the
danger that that you were describing and partly what i'm hoping is that i can
talk to people who might
conceivably be on that developmental pathway because they're they're tired of
being accused of implicit
racism let's say and say look you can be anti-radical left without falling all
the way into the to the far
right and here's how you might do it but that means i have to talk to them and
then if i talk to them
that means i risk association with them and that risks being tainted it's a
very tricky line to walk
well it's also one of the one of the big problems with this hard stance of the
of the left of the hard
left like this pepe the frog thing like that anybody i mean one of the things
that i tweeted was some guy
that called me you just admitted you're a nazi because you i posted a meme that
someone had created of
me as pepe the frog and apparently there's pepe the frog of everybody and so i
put this guy was like
well you just admitted you're a nazi and i'm like see this is a part of the
problem and this creates a
massive blowback people are getting angry because that frog for the most part
is used humorously
and yeah actually you used the phrase defensive humor when we were talking and
it really is and i think
i mean this is i didn't mean to interrupt you joe but no please do there's
there's something about the
idea that the effectiveness of this meme is that it tangles people with no
sense of humor in knots and
i and that's that's a huge part of why those things are generated that's why
they like it that's
exactly right they love it yeah yeah um yeah i mean i'm i'm fearing that i'm
saying something about
this frog and that there's going to be something that's going to emerge that i
should know about
that somehow i'm admitting something but all i'm saying is what i see is a lot
of people using it to
taunt people yes can't figure out i think that's the vast majority of it i do
believe that and i think
the same thing about the kakistani types is that that's almost all humor yeah
and there's a massive
problem with pushing back against that and calling those people nazis and racists
and especially when
they're just using humor and especially when it's very clear if you look at all
the memes online and i i
went thoroughly through google to find them there are some abhorrent ones there
are some horrible ones
there are some ones that are with the nazi uniforms there's some there's some
anti-jew ones there's
some horrific ones most of them are not that most of them the vast majority of
them are humorous and if
and again these people are not coordinating so if one person decides to make a
mickey mouse racist meme
which by the way a lot of the early mickey mouse cartoons you could just take a
screenshot and they're
fucking tremendously racist right because dealing with the side of the times i
mean images of black
people that were extremely cartoonish you know giant lips black faces the whole
deal are horribly
racist you could say mickey mouse is fucking racist don't go to disneyland no
one's saying that right
but they could and this is the slippery slope you start with the frog you know
and you know first they
came for peppy and i didn't say anything yeah well if the frog is racist you
start wondering what isn't
racist exactly because it's a bloody cartoon frog well you can make a cartoon
about everything that has
ever existed and make that racist it doesn't mean that the frog is racist this
is where it's crazy it's
like what percentage of people are making the frog racist and then for the
southern poverty law center to
say that this is a symbol of hate now this frog well well guess what you just
back these people up
against the wall and you sure their offenses because now they're realizing oh
well these people are mad
they're they're crazy not just mad like angry but mad like insane like you're
not looking at this
thing rationally at all you're saying that a frog where 99 of the memes are
just humorous or silly
now the frog is a hate symbol not only a hate symbol but nazi white supremacist
i mean the you're
they're just drawing up all of the space between their preposterous perspective
and the nightmare at
the other end of the spectrum and the point is almost all of us live in that
intermediate space so
yeah it's almost all thoughts live in that intermediate space and there's a
variability of all thoughts you
know there's there's flexibility of all ideas and when you're talking about
something that words extremely
humorous you're talking about a humorous frog i mean god damn to call that all
hate when sometimes it's
hate and some by who by whoever the people are that did that hateful thing
those are the people that
are hateful not the other ones that are using that frog for humor i mean this
is the fact that this is
a an argument at all just shows how lost we are in these ideological arguments
this left versus right
extreme end of the spectrum on one end of the field throwing rocks at the far
end of the field
yeah it's most of us are in the middle somewhere it's it's hopeless yes if we
cannot have discussions
about a frog yeah about a cartoon frog cartoon frog i mean jesus christ well
that's so weird that's a nice
conclusion yeah it might be it might be listen this was a lot of fun it always
is great and uh i'm glad you
guys came up with this idea and i'm glad we had the time to do it yeah me too
man thanks for the
invitation and my pleasure to meet you um jordan peterson what is your twitter
handle again
jordan b peterson yep and brett weinstein brett weinstein uh on twitter weinstein
i've been saying
weinstein it doesn't make you're not interchangeable uh sorry sort of sort of
all right um but thank you
guys really appreciate it a lot of fun yep good to see you again bye everybody