"Welcome to this curated educational transcript of the Joe Rogan Experience. In this session, we provide a deep-dive examination of the critical perspectives and historical dialogues presented in Episode #1006. Our mission is to offer a high-fidelity, searchable research resource for students of cultural history, emerging technology, and global discourse. This transcript has been specifically optimized for academic reference, linguistic study, and archival preservation regarding Clinical Psychology, Archetypal Symbolism, and the Evolution of Modern Social Structures." 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. Excited to be here. I'm
excited to have you in. Hey, should be fun. Look
at you, you're spiffy. You make us look 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.
Good to see you guys, both of you. And so whose
idea was it to do this, first of all? I think
it was Brett's. Yeah, I saw a tweet of Jordan's
about, or maybe it wasn't a tweet. I did see
a YouTube clip that somebody tweeted. I don't
know if it was you. Your perspective on Hitler
and your argument was that he was actually even
far worse than his reputation would lead us to
believe. And it's funny, it harkens back to my
first evolutionary project. As an undergraduate,
I was working with Bob Trivers, who's one of
the leading evolutionary minds of the 20th century.
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 anyway, I did 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 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 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. You essentially left the area. You're
suing the college now. So where do you stand
now? 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 this was an attempt
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
is not a hopeful situation. No, and for anybody
that's not aware of 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 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 fuck how old they are.
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 laugh
and cheer and think it's amazing. Well, you know,
they're educated to do that to some degree because
one of the tenets of the postmodernism that they're
being spoon -fed is that 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 the postmodern
world. And the only actual means of expression
is power. That's why the postmodernists 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 philosophy of authority or competence. That's
all gone. 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
postmodernists 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 you see
this manifested in the mob -like behavior of
the students. It's right in accordance with everything
they're being taught. Well, they're also being
taught in this sort of any means necessary. to
get over the establishment. The establishment
is this horrible institution and they can justify
pretty much anything. 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
being said ad nauseum in social justice warrior
circles, online. 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 very
insane. We see real Nazis. Like, those are real
Nazis. You know, like, go fucking punch them,
please. Don't even do that, by the way. Well,
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 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 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 through 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 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 about that for a lot. because I got
tangled up with that in a strange way in Canada.
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 car and the damage. We were targeted immediately
afterward with the Nazi epithet, and Ryerson
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 person. 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 canceling 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 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 emotionally recognizable. But the second
guy who takes your pension, for example, he's
perhaps even more dangerous. But there's a bloodiness
about the Nazi symbol. And an immediate emotional
impact that the hammer and sickle just doesn't
produce. 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. Do you think that the people
that are wearing those Che Guevara t -shirts
really understand the history of Che Guevara?
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 beret, hiding in the jungle,
fighting against the oppressive... dictatorship
of America. I mean, that's what they're looking
at when they see that image. Well, the fact that
historical ignorance plays a role in this is
absolutely certain. And I think the romanticization
of people like Che Guevara is exactly, I think
you nailed that exactly. But I do think there's
a deeper question here. It's like I was thinking
in the aftermath of Charlottesville, many conservatives
immediately divorced themselves from the Nazis.
Ben Shapiro was a good example. 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. On the left?
Well, what's the smoking pistol? You believe
in equity? 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 the indicator to me.
Right, but 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 too complicated.
It's right. I do want to back us up here, though,
because the... I think we underrate the danger
of, and I think Nazis are a red herring. There
is something that actually does threaten to reemerge,
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 you, but
just get this right up to your face. It sounds
good to us, but the people listening online are
going to have an issue. 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. 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 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 features
of the way evolution functions in the context
of humans, it is actually always a danger. that
it will reemerge. And knowing what to do about
it is not so simple until you've seen why it
occurs and what it means. What I've been saying
in lectures I've given on this is that 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. And 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 reemerges 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, 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 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 the
nature of history. 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 new ground. underneath the radical leftist
rubric, especially in the universities, is starting
to produce an extraordinarily dangerous counterposition.
And that was manifest, at least to some degree,
in Charlottesville. And so I think you're right.
You don't want to be complacent and 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.
It's the alt -right, that's part of it. It's
the Kekistanis, it's this peppy thing. Some of
it's comedy, some of it's satire, some of it's
serious. Some of it's the inversion of identity
politics, which is very dangerous, and it's 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 an unstable entity. At the
point that that force gains power, it's going
to come apart as internal dynamics rip it up.
So it's not actually a, it's not capable of restraining
the version that recurs on the right. the version
that does manifest as white nationalism, that
version is stable because it does represent an
actual population that has an evolutionary basis
for remaining cohesive. And I should point out,
there's a danger when you hear... And evolutionary
biologists 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 promote and which
ones to tamp down. 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. 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 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 PLOS 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'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 produces
this implicit... let's call it 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 or fascists 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 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 does manifest itself in the political realm.
It's not good. So 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 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 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 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 I'm not squeamish about
there being a right to violence when somebody
is threatening 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 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. And one of the things
I've done for decades... is teach my students
a variant of that, which is something like, because
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 in the 1930s, could
you be a 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, those people were human, and I'm
also human, and so that means that the Nazi is
us. That's what it means. And who the hell wants
to think that? And no one will think that. And
I have thought that through, because I've 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
we've already hit on so many hot topics to the
point where you have to really clarify your position.
And when you're talking about this. sort of latent
program 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 and 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 reemerging 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, we're human beings, like
you said. I think that is absolutely critical
to discuss. Well, and it's also, 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, 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 deplorables, let's say, but it
was one guy who decided to do something murderous.
And that shifted the whole political landscape.
And so what I see happening right now is that
we're surrounded by... these interactions between
people that are positive feedback loops. 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'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 a Nazi prison guard. 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 participating
in this process of demonization and polarization.
And I think, well, yeah, I can understand that.
Although I'm also 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. 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 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 right is much better armed, and that's a
very frightening fact. That's a terrifying thought.
We've heard this many times recently about the
Trump administration, about if he's impeached,
that there will be some sort of a civil war.
I believe Roger Stone said that. 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 If Google and other of these online
Goliaths start 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. and avoid something like civil war,
which frankly... Open communication and debate,
analyzing all the components of this issue completely
objectively. Exactly. Yes, and 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 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. And then
the point is they're going to fester. Whereas
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 move forward
rather than descend into civil war, which frankly
looks more and more likely. And this issue with
Google and YouTube, let's say, and these other
gigantic internet companies, 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 what happened with
him. He tweeted the other day that and I knew
this was in the workings because I'd 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 appalling video is not even put
up. So what happened, I hope I've got this exactly
right, but Gad YouTube 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 objectionable in
my clip. Unbelievable. Yeah, and that one was
a manual review, so I'm wrong about that. Although,
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 Saad is not a radical, right?
Not at all. 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. Because he's questioning what's
happening. And by questioning what's happening,
you instantaneously get lumped together. into
this right -wing hate group. Well, and 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 postmodern 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 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 that was a well -documented
intellectual argument 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 the Russians
actually... sidelined themselves effectively
with respect to evolutionary theory, that basically
they were so backward on a biological front that
as they were deploying this very broken ideological
toolkit, they were wrecking their ability to
think 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, 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 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
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 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. Well, if I might, 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. Yeah, I know. 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 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 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 diffuse racism. So one of the
things that happened when I made my video a year
ago complaining about Bill C -16 in Canada, and
that was the one that instantiated transgender
rights, one of the things I was pointing to,
like my comments had nothing to do with transgender
rights, but one of the things I was pointing
to 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, 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 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
almost everyone whose 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 to 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, 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 this talk was shut down, but also of being
biological essentialists. And biological essentialism
is the new buzzword for... For Nazi, essentially.
Please do. 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. Okay, well, that's even
more effective, I would say. So 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 at 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. You did a very good
job of... outlining the credible case against
biological essentialism, because it can deteriorate
into something like eugenics. There's a real
danger, like a political danger, on the side
of 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. That's the irony of this, is 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 want to bring into
the future. But we can't do it if we don't discuss
these things in honest terms. Well, a subset
of males 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 5 % 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. That's amazing. Yeah, sure, absolutely.
I mean, it is. Yeah, absolutely, yeah. And the
thing 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 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.
You know, and with James Damore's memo, you know,
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 Damore 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 things... Here's
a biological problem. On average, women are more
agreeable than men. And I think that's because
agreeable people are 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 tilted in the direction of the necessity of
self -sacrifice for infant care. Okay, that doesn't
equip women very well for dealing with aggressive
men. Because aggressive men and infants are not
the same creatures. So women play a... pay a
price, being optimized to some degree for infant
care, they pay a price that they're less, what
would you call, prepared, that's one way of thinking
about it, 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 be able to fight
for an idea, too. 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 in females. Females, because they
have the capacity to have fewer offspring in
a lifetime than males, are obligated, as you
say, to. 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, 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
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 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 that we can't actually have a reasonable
discussion about it, because the discussion is
often forestalled by the claim that, well, men
and women are exactly the same. It's like that's
not a helpful discussion. And with the agreeableness
issue, I don't know exactly what should be done
about that, but one of the consequences of it
is that there's many reasons why 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 the rule is something
like, you review male salaries once a year and
female salaries every eight months, or something
like that. And I'm not saying that's a good idea.
I'm not saying that. I'm saying that... 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 someone like James Damore comes
out, and he's no scientist. Well, he has some
scientific training, but that wasn't his primary
field 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 a good pathway. Well, it also wasn't
good that his stuff was being republished without
citations, that people were publishing it without
the scientific papers that were sort of affirming
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 goes back to 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. 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
Damore 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 a really
good time for everybody to be very careful about
what they write and say and about their motives
for tarring and feathering the opposition. That's
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 a strange time. You know, I got into it
yesterday. I got bored and I started trolling
with Pepe the Frog. I started putting up the
frog like... with rainbows 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 cartoons that the guy created,
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 read
a story about Kekistan. I was looking into it,
trying to figure out if it was really the menace
to humanity that everybody... claims it is. And
the story was preposterous. It was a, you know,
it's a magical place 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 cause your mind to throw an
error. Yeah. Well, and that is what, so I think
this is an excellent thing to talk about 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 like
a satirical realm where... I don't know what
it is. It's defensive humor in some sense. Let
me give you an example. I gave my father a Kekistani
flag about three weeks ago. Why did you do that?
Well, because he's been following what's happening
to me online, you know, 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 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 Kekistani 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. 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 does it have to be opposite?
Couldn't it just be different? Well, that's a
good question. 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. Stay away from the ideological
idiocies 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 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 shuffle
off the responsibility, and if that means that
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 to 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, what would
you say, exalt 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. So 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'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 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 pool 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,
you know, I mean, free speech has become an ideological
issue and increasingly identified with the right,
which is horrible. It's horrifying. But the right
justification for free speech is what you just
laid out, which is that in order for... The collective
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. And free speech does that.
That's the mechanism. 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 on Earth, all of these things
proceed from the fringe. 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'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 Eysenke, a 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. 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
necessary to be creative. But, you know, 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 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 Jewish 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 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 authoring
these texts, in a way. Yes, well, that's a claim
that I'm very, what would you call... And that's
something I believe to be fundamentally true.
And I mean, I've started... See, because I'm
interested in this idea of strengthening the
individual. 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 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. We have a very uneasy relationship
with that collection of texts now because 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 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 describing this idea that's emerged
in the West, that consciousness is the mediator
between chaos and order, and the generating,
the phenomena that generates experience, and
that... And that you can think about that as
a divine category of existence. And I've been
trying to delineate 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. 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 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 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 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 argument you got into with
Sam Harris about the nature of truth. And since
I heard... that I've been sort of itching to
have this conversation with you because I think
there's a way of viewing this that will actually
perhaps reconcile the two points of view, but
there's a bitter pill that comes along with it.
So here's my argument. We tend to think of intellect
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 realize 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... They're
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.
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 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
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 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.
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 purpose. What isn't true is that those
things are inherently up to date. 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 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 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. You can't even point that out.
But anyways, 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 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. But the story's also about Geppetto,
because what happens is that when Geppetto loses
Pinocchio, loses his son, which 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 Godhead has 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. So 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 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 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. So Carl Jung talked
about this a lot. And one of the things he said
was that your moral duty is to realize the archetype
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 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, you can't have
that life, because you would have had to be in
the Middle East 2 ,000 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... 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, but... the greatest hazards to
us in the present are only partially going to
be dealt with in these texts. And that's my biggest
concern is that, you know, if we take, 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 challenges. Okay, so 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 operate
at a level of abstraction. such that 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 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 phenomenological landscape. And their
claim is... 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 taking the package 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. Yeah, it's
also not that easy to rewrite a fairy tale. 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, because
I say, well, the religious texts encode. profound
and evolutionarily determined truths that are
universal. Okay, which religious texts? Right,
they contradict each other. And you might say,
well, all of them, but then that obscures the
important differences between the traditions,
and I'm by no means certain that all of them
do. 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 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 you don't mind, but isn't the issue using
the word truth? Because we can use tradition
and wisdom, and we're okay. But as soon as we
start saying truth, then we run into problems.
I mean, and even when you're talking about porcupines,
when you're talking about... 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. That's
not good. I wouldn't do it. And 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... 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 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 have kids. I wouldn't
tell them that a porcupine is a girl. I'm sure
you wouldn't, but why use the word truth, though?
Well, the question is, why do people? tell you
that a porcupine can throw its quills. 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 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. And it meant something
like reliably on its way to the appropriate destination,
something like that. And when Christ said, I
am the truth and the way, the truth he was talking
about wasn't an objective truth. So Sam's idea
that I had somehow taken the idea of truth that
was actually objective all along and done something
crooked with it is just wrong. It's wrong. Well,
so truth can have multiple definitions. Well,
that's the issue, and that's exactly what we're
trying to get at here. To me, there's two kinds
of truth, and 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 Brett was referring to as well.
And this is where it gets so complicated that
I can barely manage it. 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 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 malaria, 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 a good one. And that also
gets, see, there's another weird. distinction
here that I was trying to draw with Sam, but
that'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,
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... I'm imagining we all
subscribe to. There is the testable truth that
reveals itself in the laboratory or 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 the word filth
from the Old Testament. Filth means shit. 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 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 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
you'd be crazy. now that we do have the germ
theory of disease, to amplify that original crude
version of the truth or that crude approximation
of what you need to believe in order to behave
safely, there's no reason for that truth to be
promoted. In fact, you don't hear people describing
this part of... the Old Testament anymore because
it's not relevant. And this is probably all why
dietary restrictions were in the Old Testament
as well. Shellfish, red tide, eating pigs, trichinosis.
There's 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 unite your group
quite tightly by dietary restrictions. Back to
your point about terminology, you know, 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 -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
Harris. And Harris makes another sleight -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 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. There's ways to
act that are within your best interest, and then
there's ways to act that are within the interest
of all the people around you that might not serve
you that well. And that only distinction is where
ethics come in. Right, or where the consequences
are delayed for some number of generations or
something like that. Yes, well, that's a big
problem. So Sam acts as if the process of mapping
facts onto action is simple if we just got the
facts right. is 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, is one individual supposed to have all of
the facts and navigate based on that, sort of
the rationality community version of things?
Or 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'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. Which
is, you know, 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 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 here's
what something has to be like to be wise, let's
say. Well, first of all... 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 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 is
actually also the solution. I'd really like to
hear what you think about this. I think this
is the solution to the postmodern conundrum.
Because the postmodernists, bless their hearts,
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, uh -oh, that's true. That's true.
That's not good. And that's why the postmodernists
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've 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 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,
Stories continue through time for a reason. Good
stories continue for a long... The Odyssey is
with us for some reason. So there is a scientific
reason or a scientifically investigatable reason
why the Odyssey has been durable. We may not
know it, but in principle, it's a question you
could investigate. So I guess at the end of the
day, the problem with the postmodernists 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. That's
why they turn to Marxism, as far as I can tell,
because what happens with the postmodernists
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 postmodernist 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 postmodernists
and the neo -Marxists. It's because postmodernism
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. jump into this power landscape
for the reasons that we discussed earlier. 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 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 can point to it. It's a structure
that's already set up and it's romanticized.
And I think they adopted for that reason, because
it has the socialist aspects attached to it,
and they looked at socialism as some sort of
a thing that regards equality and, 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
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, the infinite
landscape of interpretation problem. It's a real
problem. If you look at it historically, postmodernism
actually grew out of Marxism. And so what happened
is that the Marxists laid out 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 its initial phases. That's a story that's
partially true, and it's got a lot of motive
power. 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 bitch 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 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 mostly
French intellectuals to... to develop the postmodern
philosophy, which has these advantages which
we described, 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
truly intellectually pathological, because you
don't get to be a postmodernist 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 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 add a couple things.
The risk of alienating my last few friends. In
for a penny, man. Yeah, I guess. So here's the
thing. What's up with Marxism is, A, there's
a lot in Marx's 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 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 biological
essentialist. That wasn't very nice, Peterson.
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 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'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 Pareto distribution is the geometric graph
representation of that phenomena. And so here's
how it manifests itself. If you have 10 ,000
people, 100 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 10 composers and you
take 1 ,000 of their songs, 30 of those songs,
which is the square root of 1 ,000, roughly speaking,
are played 50 % 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'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 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, well, so what? 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 can run a
podcast. It's a completely different competitive
landscape. So we can fractionate 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. So because you're so successful, for
example, with your podcast and your YouTube videos,
your connection network is insane, insanely powerful.
So you still have this tendency for what's useful
and good to be distributed, let's call it, inequitably.
And 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... represent
the propagation of 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 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 rode the wave of
the Pareto distribution, and it threw you 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 oppressed
and downtrodden? 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 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. and this is the other problem with the
Marxist perspective, and the postmodernists in
particular, 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 the
problem is it doesn't fix the problem. Like the
problem with money, let's say. The problem is
that if you let a monetary system run... All
the money ends up in the hands of a very small
number of people. And you're saying this is also
with any sort of creative endeavor. Any creative
endeavor, Matt. Now, what is wrong? I think 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 are the
people doing wrong that are failing in any creative
endeavor? Well, that's partly why we put together...
Sorry, just give me one minute. 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 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. But there's other problems
that it 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 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'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, 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? Because maybe in the next
iteration you won't be stuck at zero. And for
young men? That's a hell of a call. 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 Che Guevara 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 trust fund. 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, 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'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. And that's, I think, why
the children of first -generation immigrants
often do so well. You know, they're driven by
necessity. So, yes, agreed. However, I would
still say, you know, the zero issue is there
are levels of absolute privation that are so
intense that all the goodwill 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 river. People
are getting eaten by crocodiles in your village.
You're fucked. Yes. Zero is like a magnet. It
just holds you there. Yeah, it's a black hole.
Having a little, very little, maybe that motivational
state that's actually 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 come back
to this. Your point 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 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...
integration of those things, is that we don't
understand what we are wired to produce evolutionarily,
right? We think. We all operate based on the
idea that we're pursuing some state of happiness
or satisfaction, and we think we know what's
going to get it for us, and maybe it's inventing
something, and then you'll be happy. But it's
a trap. 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 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
of what you mean by this? Sure. Let's imagine
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
success. In other words, you could turn the extra,
the surplus, into a kind of persistent luxury.
Yeah, a luxury, but I mean, luxury is a little
bit too trivial sounding. You could turn it into
a space where you use that 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 fear of
starvation is right back where it was. So that's
more money, more problems. Yeah, essentially.
I mean, you know, well, it used to be that we
produced more people. Now we produce a greater
quest for consumption. But if we were smart,
what we would do is we would think about the
problem of how to take the gains that come from
not being bumped up at the limits of a system
and turn them into what we value. Well, 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 done some of that.
So there's another issue, back to Marx, let's
say. There's another issue that 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 Pareto
distributions developing because the innovator,
or the one who's second in line to the innovator,
whatever, ends up 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 clear. So there's
room for an intelligent conversation about that,
right? Because the lefties say, uh -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, fuck
it, we'll just flip the system upside down. No
one wants that. Like, right -wing conservatives
don't want that. Because you could make a Republican
argument and 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 argue about why, but
the fact that it does, 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 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 that we're hyperproductive, 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 whole bloody thing doesn't wobble
and fall. And I would say in some sense that's
what the political discussion is about. We've
skittered off into these radical oversimplifications,
which is something like, well, 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 think that there's a real
problem with something like 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 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. Men who are men
don't need money. They need function. And we've
got a problem. One of the problems is, for example,
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 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 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, ah, 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. 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 careful
study that people are... motivated by the degree
of inequality more than they are 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. And so becoming focused on what they're
doing that you're not doing is a rational thing
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're being triggered 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. But even if they
are, they're not living in the same. environment
as you. The technology is interfacing with our
brains badly. 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.
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 tribal population against population mayhem
that we were talking about at the beginning of
this conversation. 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 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? It's certainly a strong
one. It's also a good argument for equality of
opportunity, right? Because 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 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 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 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 I guess
that was evidenced to some degree by the 2008
collapse, because it seemed, and I'm just as
uninformed as the next person, so 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. And so we're also
being driven into this inequality corner by,
I would say, by the postmodernists 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 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?
Here's the problem. No. As far as I know, nobody
has properly studied the question of what fraction
of 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.
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 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?
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. 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, to a large extent, what
we're suffering from. But they want to throw
the baby out with the bathwater, and so they
want to throw out markets entirely. you know,
it would be a terrible mistake. You asked, Jill,
why this has happened in the universities. 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. 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 100%. 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 postmodern ethos. neo -Marxist
ethos, I would say, that says that all of the
right, the moral right, is on the side of the
left. And so it's the combination of those two
things. There's more things. I often think comically
that if you paid sociology professors three times
as much, the probability that they would be anti
-capitalist would decline precipitously. 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. 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
a year, and here I am, hardly struggling, but
here I am struggling comparatively, and that's
the issue, is comparatively on $100 ,000 a year
or $120 ,000 a year. You know, I look at that
and I think, well, whatever. It doesn't matter.
But 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. But 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
a business school? And I think, what bloody planet
are you from to posit a question like that? It'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 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. But they don't give you any reasons?
The reason is supposed to be self -evident, Joe.
So let's give this argument its due. I mean,
I don't buy this argument, but nonetheless, let's
not caricature it. Yes, that's good. In an absolutely
free market, which is not what we have, but we
have something that tends 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. long enough period, the individual
who will do anything will out -compete the individual
with moral limits because... Doesn't it depend
on what the game is, though? No. Because if people
find out that you have no moral limits, then
they're going to remove themselves from your
market. Unfortunately not. No? 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... they're
purchasing and they will stop using Uber if Uber
is ethically compromised, for example. 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 restrained person can
do is compete dead even. They have no way of
getting ahead because the person that is completely
free, the amoral... 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 sort of one exception,
and that exception is people who have done something
that has suddenly put them in a powerful position.
Right. So 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 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 hand, I mean. I hate to say
it, but think about how Google started, right?
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. 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 be evil. It kind of happened with China
and Google. Yeah. Because Google wanted to expand
into China. And so, you know, they had to make
a deal with the devil, so to speak. Right. 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. One of the issues was
there was all sorts of fake Google going on,
just like they have fake Apple stores in China.
They don't have the same sort of copyright laws
that we have. plagiarize anything you want. And
Brett, 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 a university
is actually not a business. It's 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 things that 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's 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. There's no magic principle by
which a market knows what's healthy and what
you might crave but shouldn't have. Well, that
also then brings us back to another part of the
conservative 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 an indeterminate landscape. And I guess
part of the issue there, too, is it's sort of
like, well, how do we properly balance foresight
and planning, which you'd think would have some
role 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 an 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. You really don't
want a state nannying you. and over -regulating
the market and taking the magic out of it. And
you don't want the completely unregulated landscape
where the market starts probing the minds of
your children and figuring out how to sell them
things that they don't have any ability to resist.
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. 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. 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 unequal 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 amount of
focus and dedication they have, it is very unequal.
I know many people that are far more dedicated
than other people that I know, and they do better.
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 credible
operations that you can manifest in a given period
of time. It's something like speed. Now, it's
not only that, but speed's 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. 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, half of the successful people, say, and
you're going to be in the bottom half, you'd
have a 50 % chance 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 % of the
time. So you could say with 85 % accuracy, which
of two people would be more likely to be in the
top 50 %? 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,
hardworking 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 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 in IQ is actually
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 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 kids a leg
up early before they hit school and start training
them cognitively earlier. And the hope was that
you'd get a Pareto thing going where they'd be
a little smarter in kindergarten and then they'd
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 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 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, in some sense, it's very
much an uncontrolled experiment, right? Absolutely.
Because A, Head Start starts late. And B, it
doesn't insulate you from all of the stuff that
comes along with growing up in the deprived neighborhood.
Oh, absolutely. We really don't know what the
truth is of human IQ. And there are some results
that suggest some things that are not hopeful.
On the other hand, some of them just simply run
afoul with... the biological realities of intelligence.
Well, here's a good example 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 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 biological
research on IQ shows things like... If you take
identical twins at birth and you put them in
adopted -out families, that the IQ of the adopted
-out twins is much closer, A, to the original
biological parents than to the adoptive parents,
and B, 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 an identical twin, your
IQ score is so much like your twin's 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
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 whatever effects there were from before
they were born. Sure, and they look the same.
And so 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... as a similar IQ later
in life. So one really wants to see that this
is true on the positive side, not just the negative
side. So anyway, 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... 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 nothing. but good. Right. A fair game with
equality of opportunity. A 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 you were talking about the fact that, I forget
which thing exactly, but that a system based
on 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 ride it all the
way down. The fact is we could make people safe
to fail so that you are encouraged to attempt
to do something highly valuable. And if it doesn't
work out, then the point is you're not homeless.
This would be the argument for something like
universal basic income, that your needs are taken
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 issues with food and... Well, there is some
evidence of that actually happening in Canada.
Now, these are multivariable 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 care 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, devote a higher proportion of their
overall GDP to personal health care than Canadians
do. And the stats are similar if you look at
other, you know, quasi -socialized medical systems.
There's a great piece on that by Adam Ruins Everything.
Have you ever seen that television show? It's
really interesting. He breaks down pretty much
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 a lack of profits.
It's a really fascinating little piece. 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 – do you want to lay out your
argument about Hitler and then I'll respond to
it? I don't know if I do want to. I mean, I think
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. Yes. 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, 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 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 bad. 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, opening
up trade with China, opening up trade routes,
all these different things that people have attributed
to him, and that someday someone may do the same
thing about Adolf Hitler. Right now, that is
impossible. He certainly made that job very difficult
with all of the documentation, especially the
films. But let's just say 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 going to enjoy watching this. Okay.
If I'm cornered, will you come out? No way, man.
The knives are going out. Oh, no. Okay. So my
argument from all those years ago in my paper
that I 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...
increasing the amount of resource that was 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 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 latent program and at a point when
you have austerity as a result of usually 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. I want to clarify one thing. 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. If I remain relatively
silent, 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 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. 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 Germany's economy in
the first part of his reign. And so it's very
necessary if you're dealing intelligently with
a true monster that you give the devil his due.
Yeah. So I think the thing that I saw in your
video was your argument was that as he was losing,
instead of putting the genocide on pause and
winning and winning the war, winning that he
he ratcheted up the genocide. 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 point
would simply be, and again, 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 tendency to enslave. 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 increasing the number of your kinsmen. Unless
they're very close. 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 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, but 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 too. But I
would say that 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. 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
Russians to turn around the German war machine.
I mean, those are military deaths. There were
vastly more civilian deaths. 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 he got rid of those people. And by getting
rid of them increased the amount of resource
that was available to Aryans. 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 the track of this
remains self -evident, is to caution people against...
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 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 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.
Did you see the white nationalist response? No.
Yeah, the Daily Storm had, is that what it's
called? One of the 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 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 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 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 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 denounce the white supremacist
racism that emerged in Charlottesville. And then
he should have shut up. And then two weeks later,
he could have said, well, when 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. And, you know, 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 think so. I think, actually, we can look
at what he did during the election, and I think
we should expect that he would do exactly what
he did. Well, fair enough. There's a wink and
a nod to them always. Neonazis and white supremacists
applaud Donald Trump's response. Yeah. See if
you can see the actual, does it show the actual
text of what they wrote? A quote from the editor
here, right there. I've recently mentioned anything
to do with us. Reporters were screaming at him
in the white nationalism when he just walked
out of the room. Huh. There was an actual article
that they wrote on one of those websites. Trump's
comments were good. That's it. He 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, dot, dot, dot, on both sides,
exclamation point. So he implied that the Antifa
are haters. I mean, so that energized them in
a way. I mean, there's no secret that they support
him. You know, my friend Alonzo Bowden has a
very funny quote. He's a comedian. He goes, not
all Trump supporters are racist, but all racists
are Trump supporters. Right, right, right, right.
It's a great quote. And 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 a nod that they're
getting. Or even insufficient denunciation, which
was kind of what did. And there's a Canadian
journalist named Faith Goldie who got fired from
Rebel Media for being. Being accused of being
too cozy with Daily Stormer type, she did a podcast
with 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. 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. 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 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.
Now, and that was... Well, it was a fatal error.
I mean, she got fired from Rebel Media, and it's
going to have terrible repercussions for her,
although she may land on her feet. And Rebel
Media is very conservative as well, right? Certainly
by Canadian standards, yeah. Yeah, that's right.
Rebel Media imploded in the aftermath of Charlottesville
because of what Faith Goldie did with the Daily...
It wasn't even the Daily Stormer. It was a group
called Crypto, but they're associated with the
Daily Stormer. So she went on there, which...
I think 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, innocent people. You can't do that.
And so I would say... She damned herself by insufficiently
criticizing the villains. It was something like
that. I'm sure you are familiar with Louis Theroux.
No, I'm not, actually. Louis Theroux, the documentarian.
Do you know him from England? Fascinating guy.
Fantastic. One of the best. And one of the things
that he's done is, well, 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 very congenial and very kind and unthreatening
and stayed with them for long periods of time,
like weeks on end, and got them to eventually
expose who they were and understand. from the
point of view of an insider, in a sense, without
necessarily condemning them, but with just constantly
asking questions, but being very, very polite
about it. Not like a bunch, not like a lot of
serious... like confrontational criticism, rather,
but a very friendly, sort of polite, British
way of 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 a justification for attempting that
sort of thing, clearly. Yes, yes. 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 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 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 it with
my son, and we talked about it 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 the discussion was
too cordial. And it could have even been cordial,
to your point, because maybe that would have
led to more discussions. But it should have been
cordial with one snake bite. But is she required
to make that snake bite? Well, it depends on
what you mean by required. Well, my thought is
to find out what these people really want and
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. And
Kamau 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 him to the point where they're actually
joking around with him. The ugliness was so obvious
and evident. And without him confronting them
on it, 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 Kamau Bell with being a sympathizer
with the KKK. He was in this inarguable position.
Like, no one could accuse him of it. This woman,
I'm assuming, is white. That's where the problem
lies. One of many problems. 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 have to raise the threshold
of offense. 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
people who are doing something abhorrent in the
way that they see themselves so you can understand
it. Just being there asking questions. Right.
You don't necessarily have to be. What are you
going to change them? I mean, 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 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 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
but 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. One
of the things that I tweeted was some guy that
called me, you just admitted you're a Nazi because
I posted a meme that someone had created of me
as Pepe the Frog. And apparently it's Pepe the
Frog of everybody. And so 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. Actually, you used the phrase
defensive humor when you were talking. And it
really is. And I think, I mean, this is, I didn't
mean to interrupt you, Joe, but 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 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, I mean, 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 who
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 Kekistani 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, especially when
they're just using humor, and especially when
it's very clear if you look at all the memes
online, and 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 Nazi uniforms. There are some
anti -Jew ones. There are some horrific ones.
Most of them are not that. Most of them. The
vast majority of them are humorous. 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 because
dealing with the sign of the times. I mean, images
of black people that were extremely cartoonish,
you know, giant lips, black faces, the whole
deal. 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 Pepe 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,
guess what? You just back these fucking people
up against the wall and you shored their offenses
because now they're realizing, oh, well, these
people are mad. They're 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, 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. Almost all thoughts live in that intermediate
space. There's a variability of all thoughts.
There's flexibility of all ideas. And when you're
talking about something where it's extremely
humorous, you're talking about a humorous frog.
I mean, goddamn, to call that all hate when sometimes
it's hate. And by who? By whoever the fucking
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,
the fact that this is 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. Most of us are in
the middle somewhere. It's hopeless if we cannot
have discussions in the middle. About a frog.
Yeah. About a cartoon frog. A cartoon frog. I
mean, Jesus Christ. It'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. And 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. It was fantastic. Thanks for the invitation.
My pleasure. Really good to meet you. Jordan
Peterson, what is your Twitter handle again?
JordanBPeterson. JordanBPeterson, yep. And Brett
Weinstein. Brett Weinstein on Twitter. Weinstein,
I've been saying Weinstein. It doesn't matter.
You're not the first. Is it interchangeable?
Sorry. Sort of. Sort of. All right. But thank
you guys. Really appreciate it. A lot of fun.
Yep. Good to see you again. Bye, everybody. Jesus
Christ.