Evolution, Religion, and Happiness | Dr. Gad Saad | EP 377

even the most serious Pursuits for example the pursuit of science is a form of Play It's the highest form of play right because in the same way that you try to solve a 1 000 piece puzzle by putting the pieces together well what is science it's it's drawing links between a whole bunch of variables that heretofore you didn't know were linked together so the whole Endeavor of science is a form of or geostic higher order play right [Music] hello everyone watching and listening today I'm speaking with my friend Dr Gad sad professor at Concordia University researcher podcaster an author of the new book The sad truth about happiness eight secrets for leading the good life I'm here with my friend today Dr gadsad we've met a number of times I gotta say um Dr Saad was one of the first and really one of the few academics who supported me right at the beginning when I was embroiled in the first round of controversy that enveloped me or that I stirred up you know or that our idiot government stirred up which is more accurate uh description of the whole event gag was one of the first people who had the uh courage or the or the uh hutzpah I guess that's the word to to interview me and and to discuss my situation with me and you know he played that very very straight and I don't think it was obvious to him at all at that point when he took that risk you know he didn't know anything about me really he could have easily decided like so many people did that I was just fundamentally reprehensible and uh you know stayed on the safe side of the fence but I don't really think that's the sort of person he is and I think that's become more and more evident over the ensuing uh months and years and so I want to thank you again for that you know it was a brave moment one of the things I learned you know in the last six or seven years is that um courage is a very very rare virtue much rarer than I even thought you know I'd studied um totalitarian States for a long time and I knew that people were easily led into a state of pathological science silence but I didn't understand how rapidly that could occur and how few people even in a free Society with a long history of Freedom would be loath to speak um and and how rapidly that could occur you know and then you do see people who stand up and say things that might get them in trouble and some of them are just people who are unwise right and who are willing to impulsively say what comes to mind and then there are other people and they're much rare who are thoughtful and who carefully considered what they have to say and are willing to say it anyways and you fell into that camp right away and you've been pursuing that for a good long time and you know also with a sense of humor which is I think a sign of Mastery by the way you know you just wrote a book called The sad truth about happiness that's coming out July 25th I believe and you know it is the case that I think you're a credible Observer on that front because you have this playful aspect that you it doesn't disappear even when you're dealing with serious topics at some risk to yourself and so I think that makes you a credible Observer on that front and anyways I'm done complimenting you so uh you could you could say one or two comments about how how might how good my tan looks after spending two weeks in Portugal it is it is very impressive I must say you're you're positively glowing sir and so now anything else is there anything else I need to add to that no I'm just uh it's it's been a delight we'll finish with the reciprocal complement compliments but it's been a a delight forging uh friendship with you as you said I think we we got to know each other about seven years ago and uh you know of the ecosystem that we both navigate in regrettably many people turn out to be cowards and you're certainly not one who exhibits any cowardice and so in that sense we are truly sympatico and it's a it's a pleasure and honor to be your friend yeah well and we we have areas of mutual interest as well you know I'm I've been interested in psychology of Entrepreneurship and of of managerial and administrative ability for that matter I spent a lot of time studying that and also very interested in evolutionary psychology and biology and so we have those overlaps which is quite interesting professionally and so um I thought that's part of where we can go today as well as talking about your book let's start with your last book The parasitic mind when was that published Gad so it came out right in the midst of covert October 2020 was the hardcover and then a year later in October 2021 the paperback came out yeah and how did it do and how is it doing well it's always difficult to be excited about how well it's done when you're speaking to someone who sold 20 12 million copies of his last book so if we don't use you as a benchmark then I think it did remarkably well so I'm very happy with it but as I often tell my wife it's done incredibly well but not enough to give me an exit strategy out of communist Quebec so it's done well but maybe I'm saying this in front of a guys behind the line who are all proud to be quebecers I love Quebec but I'm not very happy about uh as you might agree with the sort of Socialist Communist ethos here I'm not a fan of the cold weather so hopefully the next book will offer me the at least the option of having an exit strategy if I choose to implement it yeah well the university that you happen to inhabit also has a very pronounced left-wing tilt to put it mildly they do yes that's for sure it's amazing that you've been able to survive there at all so do you want to just familiarize people with the thesis of the parasitic mind and sure and then we'll turn to your new book and then we'll talk a little bit more about evolutionary biology and psychology I think that sounds like a great plan uh so my last book what I was trying to do is argue that in the same way that all sorts of animals can be parasitized by neuroparasites actual parasites that can go into an animal's brain altering Its Behavior to suit its reproductive interests I argue that human beings can be parasitized by another class of pathogens called idea pathogens and so these ideological parasites can then cause us to take positions that are truly maladaptive and so what I do in the book is I first describe many of these idea pathogens postmodernism social constructivism biophobia uh cultural relativism and a slew of other such parasites all of which were regrettably spawned in the University ecosystem because as I to sort of borrow from George Orwell it takes intellectuals to come up with some of the dumbest ideas and so then what I do is I trace the uh the spawning of these brain parasites and then I offer uh hopefully an effective mind vaccine against these parasitic ideas so that's the general thesis okay okay so let me delve into that a little bit there there's a few things that I'd like to clarify on that front get your opinion about so the first is is that you could imagine something approximating a darwinian race between sets of ideas for memorability and communicability right so for an idea to spread it obviously has to be memorable which means it has to be adapted to the structure of human memory and there's a biological element to that but it also has to be charismatic enough so that the people who remember it will also communicate it and so stories seem to fit into that category quite well we we seem to be very fond of stories so you could imagine that there's a competition between sets of ideas and it's sort of a detached competition in some ways it's it's the free darwinian play of ideas that could occupy our cognitive space both in terms of memory and on the communicative front and so you could think about those ideas that come to the top of that as either having some practical function or as actually serving as in some ways that of genuine as genuine parasites in the cognitive space but then there's another element to this too and I want to know what you think about this so you know I've been delving into the since about 2016 psychologists have finally in their wisdom determined that there is such a thing as left-wing authoritarianism and so that would be a web of ideas that are correlated in in that if you have one you're likely to have the others you can identify that said I did some of the work on that early work on that with one of my students Christine Brophy we found a set of progressive ideas and then a set of totalitarian leftist ideas that combined the progressive ethos with the willingness to use fear and compulsion and force to implement them okay and so we found we found the following predictors because we were curious is do this does this system of ideas exist or is it just a right wing you know conspiracy delusion and the answer is there's clearly a set of coherent statistically coherent left-wing ideas that are allied with the willingness to use compulsion and force and we found four major predictors of the proclivity to have that idea set and the first predictor and it was a walloping predictor negative 0.45 if I remember correctly verbal intelligence and pl and left-wing authoritarianism correlated more highly than verbal intelligence and and academic performance right a stunning correlation so when you ask yourself you know how P how can people be Daft enough to accept this relatively reductionistic and simple-minded view of the world everything is about power one of the answers to that is well they're not very verbally sophisticated okay the second best predictor was being female the third best predictor was having a feminine temperament independent of being female right and the fourth best predictor was um having ever taken even one explicitly politically correct higher education course so now since then other people have developed analogous models of left-wing authoritarianism and looked for other predictors and one of the most interesting predictors that has emerged is there's a very powerful relationship between the dark tetrad personality characteristics including malignant narcissism and the proclivity to hold left-wing authoritarian views in fact the correlation between malignant narcissism and left-wing authoritarianism is 0.6 which is so high that you could make the case because the scales are somewhat unreliable you could make the case that they're not distinguishable on the measurement front Okay I know this is a long-winded question but I want to specify it exactly all right so the dark tetrad personality types they have subclined they show subclinical characteristics of psychopaths and psychopaths are predatory parasites and so so we could imagine there's two forms of parasitism going on here there's there's the darwinian competition between idea sets for memorability and communicability but then there's the proclivity for people who occupy the parasitical niche in the human ecosystem and that would essentially be Psychopaths to utilize ideas like the parasitical idea sets that you described for their own truly parasitical purposes and then I want to decorate that with one more thing so you correct me if you're wrong here I think this is actually especially because of the emerging virtualization of the world I actually think that there's an existential threat here because parasitism is an unbelievably deep problem right sex itself evolved to foil parasites and there's always been parasitical people criminals and the like and the most parasitical of those are the Psychopaths and we've evolved mechanisms to keep the parasitical Predators under control a lot of them involve physical force and all of our evolved mechanisms for dampening down the parasite the predatory parasites none of them work online and so I think our whole culture is enabling the predatory psychopath on the criminal front and on the sub-criminal front right 35 percent of net traffic is pornographic online crime is rampant and then you have all the demon troll types you know who are polluting the political discourse and there's data on them too so if you're an online troll you're much more likely to show all the dark tetrad traits narcissism and machiavellianism psychopathy and to top it all off sadism so so please have out that set of ideas there's a lot of good stuff that you put in there so I'll try to take a couple of threads number one your your first point about you know the the battle between the arena ideas there's actually a whole field called evolutionary epistemology that exactly speaks to what you're saying that idea so think back of Richard Dawkins uh when he introduced the concept of the meme in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene so there was a whole field that unfortunately hasn't lived up to its promise called memetic theory that exactly tries to model what you said which is there's a bunch of ideas floating around and what is the darwinian mechanism that allows some ideas to be selected versus others that fail now in in my book and then I'll come in a second to some of the predictors that you spoke about in terms of left-wing authoritarianism uh in my book I basically argue that what uh what is common to all of these parasitic ideas is they wish to be free from the pesky shackles of reality right so post-modernism as we we've both commented on is the ultimate granddaddy of all parasitic ideas because it basically frees us from you know the pesky shackles of objective reality because it purports that there are there is no objective Truth transgenderism uh frees me from the pesky reality of my genitalia social constructivism frees me from the idea that there might be innate biological differences between people so it really stems originally from the noble notion of seeking to maximize empathy right uh so the I so the idea starts off as a noble idea but then it metamorphosizes into complete garbage in the pursuit of that empathy to the detriment of truth right so that's number one number two regarding your predictors uh I actually am familiar with the study that you mentioned I think it was a thesis that you supervised correct yeah that's right right yeah so we actually looked uh so I'm I'm actually working right now with a graduate student myself where we're looking and we've actually looked at the thesis that you supervised with your student we're looking at another set of predictors that might interest you Jordan and specifically we're looking at morphological predictors of ideological positions that people take now that's uniquely interesting because you might otherwise not think that your morphology might be linked to the ideological positions that you take but it turns out and I discussed this in the parasitic mind that for example your likelihood of supporting military interventionism is correlated to your upper body strength not surprisingly so now I'm talking about male subjects male subjects who are stronger are more likely to support military interventionism uh Stronger men are more likely to be against egalitarianism I mean enforced egalitarianism right yeah taking from one and so that to me is uniquely interesting because you can look at symmetry so there's exactly I don't know if you guys know this but there's a paper that was published two months ago something like that looking at uh they they used facial averaging of activist Types on the left and then conservative types you saw that so the conservatives well I was I was Obsession I saw that paper because because they're kind of they're they're stealing some of our thunder right you might remember in the uh in the parasitic mind although I remember I think I first proposed this Theory to you in our first conversation when you came on my show remember I talked about male social justice Warriors as sneaky [ __ ] actual term right yeah yeah well sneaky [ __ ] is actually not a term that I came up with to be profane it's actually a Zoological term that captures uh in nature the the idea of kleptogamy where you're trying to steal mating opportunities so for example let's say you have a type of fish where there are two phenotypes of a male you know of a male there's the dominant physically imposing male and then there's a whole bunch of other males that actually pretend to be females so that they can sneak by the dominant males and then have a surreptitious coupling opportunity with the females and that became known as the sneaky [ __ ] mating strategy and so in the in the parasitic mind I argue that male social justice Warriors are instantiating a form of sneaky [ __ ] strategy right look look I'm I'm you know I'm very sensitive I hug trees I cry when I watch Bridget Jones Diary see I'm not you don't have anything to be afraid of and then hopefully that can allow me to have access to some willing and available females so do you know so you know their literature on orangutans so you know there's two types of male well there's two forms of male orangutan in any given um Eco like what would you say roughly tribal uh uh low Eco local ecology so there's one form of male develops he's like the quarterback orangutan he gets so big he can't even really be arboreal he has the huge fat pads around his face that make him round it makes his face round he's very physically powerful and the females come to him to mate but then there are other male orangutans in the same area that for a long time anthropologists primatologists thought were juveniles but it turns out they're not juveniles they're males who don't undergo the complete transformation into the the non-non arboreal male and they use exactly The Mating strategy that you described right so there's exactly yeah yeah yeah yeah well that's why I was so I'm I'm always amazed that people get so uh triggered by your Lobster analogy because the whole field of comparative psychology operates on the premise that we could learn a lot about human cognition by studying our animal cousins I mean right I mean that's the whole premise behind the tree of life so I don't really see why someone would be so triggered by the fact that you use the the dominance hierarchies of lobsters to then make certain points about human society there's a whole field called comparative psychology that does that so to me the people who are coming after you uh for those kinds of uh analogies between us and other animals uh are simply displaying their ignorance right yeah well they're mad at me because if lobsters have hierarchies it's pretty hard to blame hierarchy on capitalism you know because we haven't discovered a sub-genus of capitalist Lobster yet and Strikes me as highly unlikely that we will but let me ask you this I mean we're going off sort of our but I mean conversations are organic so this might be a good opportunity to talk about this why do you think that you uh trigger a lot more animus than I do because one could argue that I actually On Any Given Tuesday morning will tweet as many if not more things that are quite quote controversial and yet somehow I now obviously your platform is larger than mine but even if we correct for that even if we do it per capita there seems to be something and by the way I've been asked that many times when I appear on shows because people know that we're friends and they'll ask me you know how come you don't get so let me turn it to you since we're now chatting do you have a theory as to why you are such a polarizing figure whereas you know I might one can argue I take positions you know I mean I'll criticize Islam a lot more forcefully yeah and yet somehow I don't trigger as much animus what what do you what do you think is the drama maybe I annoyed people on more fronts simultaneously than you did partly well can so what happened this is a possible explanation you know when when things first blew up around me in 2016 I already had 200 hours of lectures on YouTube and so you know I was pilloried as a right-wing demon essentially by the sorts of people that we're discussing who like to do that sort of thing to hide their own character let's say and then people looked me up online and went to my YouTube channel and then found you know this extra hundreds of hours of content which demonstrated rather incontrovertibly that I wasn't the sort of person that I was being accused of being but also touched on all sorts of other topics that people might not have expected a like in the religious and mythological domain the psychoanalytic domain and so I think the fact that I had that Storehouse of lectures already stored up when when when the trouble emerged expanded out my reach in a very dramatic Manner and that's probably you know as the first occupier of that position in some ways because I was an early adopter of YouTube I know you were too but you know I think I got there a little faster than you did and a little a little broader and so I think that's probably a fair bit of it you know um I I wonder also if so like in my latest book now which I guess we'll talk about in a second I also engage in prescriptive remedies you know here are some steps by which you can increase your happiness but historically I've been much more of a descriptive right right I describe how things are now in your case by virtue of you also being having been a clinician by definition you engage in the ecosystem of prescriptions a lot more and that I think triggers people's ire because you're telling them how to behave and by doing that you're obviously going to alienate people whereas I come along and I say here are the evolutionary reasons why there are differences between men and women and I stopped I stopped there whereas by you taking the prescriptive jump that probably augments the amount of animus that you receive what do you think about it yeah yeah I think I think that's a reasonable proposition as well I also think that I think we could develop that line of uh of hypothesis a little further too I think that many of the people who have an animus against me and almost all those people are anonymous online trolls by the way because I never encountered that or virtually never in my my actual life quite the contrary I think they're very very irritated that my simple-minded prescriptions like take some responsibility for yourself and don't play the victim because it's not good for you or for anyone else I think they're very very annoyed that first of all I'm calling them out on their hypothetically empathic virtue signaling attempts to escape from all possible responsibility which is exactly what they're doing and second they're very annoyed that the simple ideas that I've been putting forward and the simple somewhat conservative ideas in the end that they're traditional they're very annoyed that those work and then they're also annoyed because I have this very deep interest in religious issues that also you know grates on people to some degree and um this is something you and I are going to talk about because it overlaps with our interest in nomadic ideas because religious ideas are mimetic ideas for better or worse you know and and we can talk about that so um you know and then I'm also I think I'm also probably enabling to the degree that I'm enabling young men and and speaking to them about the virtues of their ambition instead of dismissing them as pathological you know patriarchal oppressors that's also very annoying especially to the types of men that you're describing who want to sneak about in the background and pretend to be virtuous and harmless which is a pretty damn pathetic way of comporting yourself in my estimation like I've watched those kind of men operate in the protests against me you know and so I can be surrounded by a mob of pretty decent screaming harpies and you know they're annoying as can possibly Be Imagined but when I look at the men that are with them they just make my blood run cold like those are and that's with my clinical eye those are not good people you know they're hanging around those those women who are doing the harpy thing and they're there as exactly the kind of parasitical Predator that you're describing and I can see that and they are not they're not the sort of person that you would want anyone you cared for to come to to have any association with whatsoever plus because they have to be sneaky [ __ ] in your terminology you know they're bitter and resentful and they're very likely to want to tear down anything that approximates true accomplishment because all those who have true accomplishment are their genuine competitors and that's partly why I think the radical left-wing authoritarians go after merits so assiduously is that you know they're they operate in a completely non-meritorious basis and it's in their best interest to present Merit itself as a falsehood to take out their sexual competitors what do you think is the the main predictor of folks like you and I who are willing to speak our minds unencumbered by any shackles of political correctness and maybe I'll start by answering it for myself I I absolutely think it's an indelible part of your personhood but if I were to give a more Vivid account of that I always tell people when they ask me you know why do you take on these risks and speak your mind then as you know Jordan last year I received some pretty serious death threats and yeah right right many years and you were very kind to right away contact names well you get more Flack on the Jewish front hey so like I've got more Flack but I would say I haven't got Flack as serious as some of what's been levied against you like I've been fortunate enough to escape that now because I'm associating with all the evil Jews at the daily wire I get some anti-semitic blowback you know but it hasn't and I've watched a lot of that online and it's bloody vicious the the and the anti-semitic parasitical psychopaths are in a demonic class of their own they're so they are yes yes and so you've you so I have been targeted more frequently but I think you've been targeted more terrifyingly that that is true but so but to to to make the point about uh my unique situation in terms of why I take the risks I always argue that at the end of the night when I put my head on the pillow uh it is important for me in order to be able to sleep well at night to know that I did not modulate my speech in any way and walk away from defending the truth if I feel that I have done that then I would feel fraudulent and I would feel inauthentic and one of the probably the highest ideals that I hold to you know close to my heart are freedom and truth and so I speak not because I'm you know trying to signal that I'm courageous it's because I don't know how to be anything else so for example it took me a lot of effort while I was on my Portugal vacation to not jump in you know whenever I'd go on Twitter and see some idiot saying something my first instinct is to always come in and you know with some correction uh it's just an indelible part of my personhood to speak the truth and by and then of course in my forthcoming book as you know we might talk about I talk about authenticity and realness as a important Pathway to happiness right I mean even you know the ancient Greeks as you know the delphic maxim know thyself and so I Know Myself and I know that I can't modulate my speak so that's my answer for why I can't hold back and I always speak the truth is it the same for you with that exact answer apply to you what drives you to take the difficult positions that you take well I think I think you know they say the uh fear of God is the beginning of wisdom and I think that what happened to me in the course of my studies is at least an analog of that you know God I I started studying totalitarian atrocity when I was 13. you know it's really been an obsession of mine and it was really a psychological Obsession rather than a political one so I was always curious about the psychology of the perpetrator right what sort of person would you have to be to do those sorts of things or what Spirit would have to inhabit you you know and one of the things I learned I learned a lot of things I learned that it's easier to be that way than you think that you could enjoy it more than you might um possibly imagine and that people do and that the true grip of the totalitarian state isn't top down tyranny it's everyone's willingness to abide by the principles of the lie and so the more totalitarian the state the more every single person in that state is gripped by the lie and for me that's indistinguishable from hell and I I think I mean that practically and also metaphysically and I learned that do you know the willingness of people to utilize their speech instrumentally was literally the pathway to hell and so once I actually understood that and and and understood it in a manner that made it an incontrovertible Truth for me everything else became less frightening by contrast it's like so when I spoke out against this idiot Bill c-16 back in 2016 which was the Forerunner of much of the trouble we're seeing now especially on the gender Insanity front you know on the one hand there was the threat of me putting my job on the line and as it turned out my clinical practice and of course making myself unpopular with the government and I thought that's nowhere near as frightening to me as the prospect of losing control of my tongue because I know where that leads that leads to the worst place you can possibly imagine and I know that like it I wouldn't even think for me that it's an axiom of Faith it's like no I know how totalitarian States develop they develop when people who have something to say don't speak and I don't want to go there I I I think I've lived that reality having grown up I mean some of your viewers may not know my personal history having grown up in the Middle East having gone through uh the early parts of the Lebanese Civil War I always contextualize any threats that I might face in my job which of course are serious to what I faced when I grew up in Lebanon and it's no surprise then that many of the staunchest Defenders of Western values end up being immigrants like myself because we have we have sampled from the wide Buffet of possible societies and we know that the the Western experiment is not it's an outlier right it's it's an anomaly and therefore it it typically takes people who did not grow up in a western tradition who've escaped the the hell holes from which Davis great to then be able to say hey westerners don't take for granted the the freedoms that you have uh and and and so if you look at many of the you know think of Ayan Hersey Ali right uh she can speak you know with a lot of clarity and Authority about uh some of these issues precisely because she too has come from a similar background to mine and so beyond me part I want Ian me park is another fantastic example we've both had wonderful chats with her and you know I don't know if you know Yasmine Muhammad who who didn't grow up do you know Yasmine Muhammad no no she she wrote a book she I I think she grew up in Canada but she had a very tough upbringing where she was married to an Islamic extremist who forced her to wear the kneecub and so on and so I wonder also if the fact that we come we meaning myself and Ayan and yeah and so on we come from these societies affords us a bit more leeway when we speak than someone like you because you know you're the you know evil Western white male whereas you know we're quote you know brown people and so on and so we do have high victimology scores so when and play the the oppression Olympics against those who might be coming after us we can always cash in our chips because as I've often joke but I'm being serious that my my victimology poker card is going to be higher than most people as will yonmi Parks as well whereas the fact that you don't have that currency puts you at a distinct disadvantage in the victimology poker game right the Bible is the root of all wisdom inspiration and spiritual nourishment the Hallow app empowers you to explore the Bible's profound teachings and to effortlessly incorporate them into your daily life a great place to start while you deepen your understanding of the Bible is to check out father Mike schmitz's Bible in a year available on the Hello app for brief daily readings and Reflections here you can dive into an extensive library of Bible reading plans accompanied by insightful Reflections and audio guided meditations whether you're a seasoned Bible reader or just starting your journey hallow provides a platform for you to engage with scripture like never before studying the Bible's literary Brilliance has influenced countless writers poets and artists throughout history by studying the Bible yourself you'll gain a deeper appreciation for the power of Storytelling symbolism and metaphor enriching your 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our somewhat differing opinions about the utility of Union ideas about archetypes and I want to segue into that given this particular issue I think it's a good entry point so get I've been reading the uh biblical Corpus in great detail in the last months um and and of course previous to that because I'm writing a new book called we who wrestle with God and one of the things that I discovered in the analysis of that sequence of stories was that there was a transformation at the time of Elijah which is what makes him a canonical prophet uh there was a con there was a transformation in the conceptualization of what constituted the highest animating principle that the the ultimate deity let's say yeah well in this particular case from and this occurred when Elijah stood up against the prophets of Baal and the prophets of Bal was a nature God and so you could imagine among primordial people and there's certainly Echoes of this still within our own psyches that extraordinarily awe-inspiring natural events would produce a kind of religious apprehension so that could be earthquakes or typhoons or or uh tornadoes or thunderstorms you know these these manifestations of quasi-cosmic force that can in some ways they definitely Inspire awe and can bring you to your knees now ball was a nature God plain and simple and so what that meant at that time was that the highest authority to which people owed fealty was the authority that made itself manifest in the storm and in the earthquake and in the Thunder now Elijah had an intuition um he was uh what would you say uniquely isolated follower of Yahweh at that time because the Israelites the Israelite King had married this woman named Jezebel and she brought ball worship into the Israelite society and attempted to obliterate the worship of Yahweh as an Enterprise and really reduce the ranks of the Yahweh supporters to almost nothing to Elijah you might even say now Elijah defeated the Priests of fall in a head-to-head competition which I suppose was the archaic equivalent of a debate but then he had to run off because Jezebel got wind of his victory and was going to kill him and then he spent some time in a cave and when he was in the cave he experienced an earthquake and he experienced a thunderstorm and some of these magnificent magnificent displays of nature but he had this intuition that whatever the ultimate voice was was a voice that spoke within and not externally and so it's Elijah it's in the book of Elijah that you find first find the phrase the still Small Voice Within essentially and so what happened was there was a transformation of the notion of the highest deity to something that was external and a manifestation of the grand Grand uh what would you the grandiosity of nature to this idea that no it was something akin to the voice of conscience Within and so the reason I'm bringing that up is because it's a radical psychological transformation and a subtle one but I also think I want to know what you think you said that there are two things that give you abiding that you have Abiding Faith in and one is the power of the word right you're a professor you're a writer you're a communicator you're a podcaster and you are very careful in your selection of words and and not only so not only do you have faith in the word let's say but you also believe that you have uh the your highest moral obligation is to be guided by your conscience in the formulation of your words okay so now you could think of that and this is what this is where I want to know your opinion as far as I can tell one of the meme-like qualities of the biblical Corpus is the increasingly sophisticated insistence as the stories unfold that the highest animating principle is to be understood not as a manifestation of the awe-inspiring power of nature but it but in terms of something that is relational that's associated with the conscience and that's tied to something like adherence to this spoken and communicated truth and so and that that's become a very powerful meme in the west right the dominant meme you might say and so I'm I'm wondering what you think about that like especially given your your admission let's say that the principle that does animate your behavior for better or worse is this Fidelity to the accuracy of the of the word right so I guess I mean there are several ways that I can answer this one of which is that I don't need to uh situate my pathological and obsessive defense of the truth in a supernatural cause having said that though or in a supernatural you know reason right having said that though as an evolutionist I'm fully aware that the default value of human beings is precisely to be uh moved by religion in other words it in other words being a non-believer is certainly not the default value of humans that often surprises people because they often think that given that I'm not particularly religious that somehow I have a built-in animus towards religion to the contrary I fully understand the functional value of religion uh but and I can I can concede that point without necessarily believing that you know the specific Supernatural elements are true I can see that there is Great Value in the Moral Stories and The Parables and the allegories that are taught and so a lot of the stuff that you might talk about or a lot of the stuff that you know the jungian archetypes I could completely situate them within an evolutionary Paradigm and fully agree with them I think the the main place where I might disagree with some of the more religiously oriented folks is that I stop at simply recognizing their functional value without necessarily believing in their veracity the action right so okay okay so so okay so let me ask you about that so let's take that apart very carefully okay because you you said that you can take the stance that you've taken with no reference to the supernatural all right so so let me delve into that and you can help and clarify my thinking on this in this regard so okay so the first I'm going to make some I'm going to offer some propositions the first is is that you're strangely and I I don't just mean you I mean human beings in general but also particularly you you're strangely beholden to your conscience and in some ways it operates as an autonomous entity right because you know you know this your conscience will call you on things and you could say well my conscience is me but then I would say well if it's you why the hell don't you get the pesky little thing under control and bend it to your will instead of subordinating yourself to its claims and and then I would say it's claims because I think that you can make a credible case that the voice of conscience within you is very much analogous to the voice of conscience within me let's say but also within all people and that in that manner the person who does determine to abide by their conscience is conducting themselves in accordance with something that if not Supernatural at least has to be given status as something Transcendent like let me decorate that a little bit you know perfectly well that when you're thinking something through right when you have a pressing question on your mind that you'll get flashes of intuition and I don't really think there's a hell of a lot of difference between intuition and Revelation technically speaking right and it isn't obvious at all where those flashes of intuition come from and I think that if you're a genuine scientist the voice of Revelation within isn't really distinguishable from that willingness to pursue the truth and the willingness to attend to the voice of conscience right because you're supposed to be pursuing the truth as a scientist and you make you lay yourself open to so so can we separate Transcendent and Supernatural in some manner that's productive I'm not sure that I'm able to answer the precise question but what I can say is that are conscious uh our morality is exactly what you would predict of a social species in a very material way right because and I'm willing and as a matter of fact many ethologists and evolutionary scientists have already made these arguments that there is a very compelling scientific argument that can explain the evolution of morality without situating it within some Transcendent you know uh religious framework because many of the religious folks will say yeah sure Evolution can explain why we have opposable thumbs Evolution can explain uh why there are sex differences but it can never explain morality and of course many evolutionists some of whom are incredibly accomplished thinkers have argued that there's nothing uniquely magical about the construct of morality when you have a social species the most the most dangerous thing that you know humans have faced our evolutionary history other than Predators as our con specifics as other people we're we're walking through the Savannah and here comes another group of folks that are unrelated to us we don't know if they are Friend or Foe and that's why one of the reasons we've evolved coalitional thinking right blue team versus red team and so it makes perfect sense when you have a non-solitary animal to evolve things like a conscience things like the emotions of anger retribution vengefulness right so all of these mechanisms whether it be morality or our emotional system can be completely couched in an evolutionary adaptive framework but again that said I think that it makes perfect sense for an animal like us who's developed this big prefrontal cortex who is regrettably aware of their mortality to be uniquely Intoxicated by religion because religion offers us the ultimate pill for the most fundamental problem which we face which is the recognition of our mortality right if I have high cholesterol level and if we agree that let's say having bad cholesterol is bad for you although of course that's debated then I can go see my physician he can give me a Statin and my cholesterol scores will drop unfortunately there is no pill for my mortality fear other than the religious solution right and so to me as a you know as a functional analysis it makes perfect sense for us to be susceptible to believe in religion now I don't think and here I'm gonna link up to I saw that you've recently been having some spicy exchanges with Richard Dawkins I don't think I'm nearly as uh uh yeah I don't exhibit as much animus towards religion as does let's say Richard Dawkins again I think because I'm coming from the perspective that there are very clear evolutionary reasons why we evolve to be Believers and so and oftentimes this uh assuages some of the anger that the religious folks might feel towards me because they actually see that I don't have a built-in uh hatred towards religion as a matter of fact just as a side note it might interest you to know that there are two fundamental Ways by which evolutionists can study religion there is What's called the the adaptation approach and the exactation approach so maybe I could take a minute or two to to address them the adaptation approach is why would religion have ever evolved what survival or mating Advantage would be conferred on those who are religious as opposed to those who are not religious and the the the top argument that's been proposed is one by David Sloan Wilson The evolutionary biologist who actually he wrote a great book called Darwin's cathedral which if you haven't read it Jordan I think you'd enjoy it he uses a group selectionist argument to argue that religious group as compared to non-religious groups are going to have greater likelihood of surviving because religion affords you greater cohesion communality cooperation and so that's that would be one approach to situating an evolutionary understanding of religion the exactation approach many of your viewers may not be familiar with that term an exactation is a byproduct of evolution so for example if I say why do humans have the color of the skeleton that they have that itself was not adaptive it's a byproduct of evolution now the top guy for for the exactation approach of religion is a evolutionary Anthropologist named Pascal Boye who basically argued that religion piggybacks on neural systems that evolved for other reasons and hence it's a byproduct so so even if you are someone who is not very religious but you are grounded in evolutionary theory you can fully understand why it is so easy for most people to be religious rather than wrong religious if that makes any sense this is real and happening now with the abortion pill accounting for over half of the abortions committed in the country more than one thousand pre-born children die at the hand of this Poison every day preborn is the organization providing the solution to this devastating situation women are being fed the abortion pill and led to believe it's an easy out to terminate an unwanted pregnancy but they are not being told the truth about the harmful side effects and the emotional trauma left behind this is a heartbreaking reality that needs to be addressed pre-born Network clinics are there for these women offering love hope and an abortion reversal pill which can save their baby if taken soon enough but they cannot do this without our help as all of their services are free for just 28 dollars you can help hurting women and at-risk babies dial pound 250 and say the key word baby or visit preborn.com Jordan all gifts are tax deductible you will never regret saving a child's life that's pound 250 baby or visit preborn.com Jordan okay okay so so let me address a number of the things that you just said the first the first comment I might want to make and you you tell me what you think about this God you know I don't think that it's unreasonable from a narrative perspective to frame you as someone possessed by the same spirit that made itself manifest in the prophetic tradition now this makes sense to me partly because of your cultural heritage and the way that you approach ideas but I also think that it's true in a more than merely passing sense you know because one of the things that you see that constantly characterizes the prophetic tradition in the Old Testament is that people like Jonah so I just took the story of Jonah apart for this book that I'm writing and so it's very cool God so this is the proposition in Jonah right Jonah is just minding his own business and God makes himself manifest to Jonah in the form of a call from conscience that's the simplest way to think about it and he tells Jonah there's this city up near you called Nineveh which is full of foreigners that hate you and that that are your enemy but they're deviating from the desirable path and I'm thinking about wiping them out but um I think you should go up there and say what you have to say on the off chance they'll listen so that they tap themselves back onto the straight narrow and don't reap divine retribution and Jonah being a very sensible person says yeah I don't think I'll do that um it doesn't sound like a great deal for me it's me who's a foreign Jew against 120 000 of my enemies why the hell do you think they'll listen to me I don't really care if they're saved anyways how about I just go in the other direction so he rejects this call to speak right now he's on a boat getting the hell out of there eh and the sailors um the storms come and the waves rise and now the ship is in danger that's the first hint in the story that by refusing to speak when you're called upon you put the ship itself in danger that could be the ship of state right now the sailors are kind of superstitious and they think someone on this boat is on outs with God or with their gods we better find out who it is so we can Rectify this situation so they go interrogate all the passengers and uh Jonah admits that he has defied a direct order and so he basically tells the sailors who were somewhat loath to do this by the way to throw him into the ocean where he's going to drown and he might think okay so what does that mean well this is what it means to me is that if you're called upon to speak and you stay silent then you're going to put the ship in danger and at par at the great Peril of your own life so now they throw him in the ocean you think well that's about the worst thing that could happen to poor Jonah because now he's way the hell away from Shore and he's going to drown that isn't the worst thing that happens because the next thing that happens is that some horrible demon from the abyss itself Rises up from the bottom of reality and takes them in its jaws and pulls them down to hell and I say hell because that's how Jonah describes it and it's also a type of the harrowing of hell that is laid out in the gospel stories much much later and so this is my sense of what that story means you know and and I think this is something particularly relevant to the experience of the Jews let's say in the 20th century is that if you're called upon to speak and you reject that call not only do you put the ship in danger and your life but then you're going to be like what would you say the jaws of Hell itself are going to close around you and take you to the bottom the very very bottom of things and I do think that's what happens to States when the people in the states don't speak so Jonah is down in hell for three days in the belly of this whale this Dragon whale and uh you know he has a chance to think and he decides well you know maybe I should have said something when I was called upon to say something and he repents and the whale spits him out and then he goes to Nineveh and he talks to all the foreigners who are his enemies and they actually listen and God decides not to destroy them now you know that in that story The Spirit of your ancestors and mine is portrayed as the voice that calls from within to stand up and say what you have to say even to those who would want to destroy you even to those who have habitually been your enemies and that if you don't do that well you you bring the forces of death and Hell against yourself and everyone else and so well there's see that's not exactly a what would you say uh uh uh a testament to the existence of the supernatural but it is definitely The Testament to the existence of something Transcendent that you have moral obligation to and so well so yes yeah no I I I buy all of that and that that's precisely why when people ask me well how can you be so attached to your religious identity and not be much of a Believer it's precisely for the reasons that you said which is I come from a very long line of uh of thinkers uh there are cultural values that come with being Jewish that I'm very proud of uh I don't know if you saw just on a slightly uh a note of levity have you seen Jordan the the Dutch AI group that put together their best rendition of what Jesus would look like have you seen that image no no I haven't where would I find that well that image it turns out looks hauntingly like the guy that you're speaking to right now right and I mean it's literally shocking so if you take that image that the AI Dutch researchers came up with and you take it now I'm not I'm not engaging in in a delusion of grandeur saying that I'm Jesus but what I'm saying is that there is a lot to be proud of in the Heritage that I come from I'll tell you a quick story personal story that speaks to that kind of Jewish ethos that I discussed in my last book in the parasitic mind uh when I was talking about uh you know the differences between uh values of one culture and another that which by the way speaks to your point about personal responsibility and so on so after I had finished uh so I did a undergrad in mathematics at computer science and then an MBA at McGill I'm saying this not to flaunt my CV because it's relevant to the story and so after I had finished my MBA I my goal was always to continue you know do a PhD Behavioral Science and so on but one of the places I've been accepted to from my PhD was University of California Irvine and my brother at the time lived in Southern California he was a very very successful entrepreneur and he was trying to convince me having just finished my MBA to take a couple of years put on the proverbial suit work with him a few years get some experience and then of course go back and you know pursue my PhD but I was really not interested in that I always knew that I wanted to be an academic well when I returned home to Montreal and my mother had caught wind of the fact that my brother was trying to convince me to stop my studies for a few years she takes me to a side room she says come I want to speak to you it seemed like an ominous thing that she wants to talk to me I said what's up Mom she said well I hear that you're thinking of not continuing with your PhD and before I could even ass wash her fears she said well do you want people to know you as somebody who dropped out of school so for her for the standards of excellence of my family having a degree in mathematics and computer science and an MBA and then not going on and doing your PhD would would bring shame to the family would be a a manifestation of having dropped out of school now of course I didn't do my PhD to to please my mother but it gives you that's what you say right you're speaking as the clinician that you are right exactly and so right and so and so that gives you a sense of the importance that you know learning has it's really a pathological desire for uh that is instilled within you from the youngest of age to be a learned person and so I can be incredibly proud of that Heritage because it is a real material Heritage it's a real sociological reality cultural reality to be uh from that long tradition of Jews again without necessarily buying into every single element of the supernatural so for example even if I were to concede that God exists I can't imagine that the ruler of the universe cares about whether you light the Shabbat candles at 8 21 or 8 22 but I can promise you that if you go to some of the Hasidic neighborhoods in Montreal where they are very Orthodox Jews they would argue that no no God absolutely cares at the exact minute when you so so in that sense I could be very very much tied to my religious Heritage without necessarily caring about some of the ritualistic elements okay so so I want to tell you about a study that someone brought to my attention about six months ago it's not a very old study and it's a really remarkable study and in fact I think it's revolutionary so it turns out you know that when when DNA molecules are damaged they can repair themselves and they generally do that with spectacular accuracy but the accuracy varies okay so imagine this imagine that there's a hierarchy of genes and that some genes are so fundamental that if they vary even a trifle the organism that they produce will be non-viable and then imagine that there are other genes like the ones that code for eye color where there can be tremendous variability with virtually no consequence now there might be minor consequences like maybe maybe blue eyed blondes have a sexual advantage over those who aren't blue-eyed and blonde you know because of attractiveness but all but but having brown eyes or or darker hair doesn't make you unviable right now it turns out that there is a relationship between the accuracy of DNA repair mechanisms and the canonical status of the genes that are being repaired is the more fundamental the gene is to the morphology upon which existence itself depends the closer to 100 percent accuracy the repair mechanisms manage okay so so that means there's a core set of genetic axioms you might say that don't vary with mutation and there's a peripheral set that are allowed to vary you might say as as experimental variations on the adapt on the adaptational landscape now I think there's an analog between that and conceptualizations let's say memes is that there are some Axiom some conceptual axioms that have to remain utterly unchanged across time and then there is a host of more peripheral propositions that can vary substantively with with no disadvantage and maybe some Advantage because of the variability and I think also that we regard the canonical axioms as deep and profound and were affected if they move where we're willing to abide or to allow and even to enjoy variation on Fringe and so I'm wondering you tell me what you think about this with regard to what you claimed is that you know you said that you're unwilling to adhere to the more Picayune distinctions that are made on the religious front and some of those might involve right the propositions of the existence of something Supernatural and inexplicable in its fundamental nature but but it also seems to me that for you that's Allied with an unshakable faith in certain axiomatic presuppositions some of which we already discussed which is like is it incorrect for me to say that your attachment to the communicated truth is most appropriately conceptualized as adherence to an unshakable axiomatic Faith like I don't understand how I don't understand how it isn't so if you don't think it is then help me understand and right uh so so for example I now let's bring in say my my math background in mathematics there are axiomatic truths right so take for example the transitivity Axiom if I prefer car a to car B and I prefer car B to car c it must be that I prefer car a to car c if I don't then that's called an intransitive preference and therefore I'm I'm committing a violation of rationality those are actually dramatic mathematical truths but they are also empirical truths right if I throw a person off a 100 store story building 100 times out of 100 I'll know exactly what will happen because there's a thing called gravity so in other words I can pursue Truth uh without and as you said universal truth that is invariant to time or place and those truths while we may couch them in a supernatural cause I can completely adhere to them without them being you know co-opted with a with a supernatural element so for example in the parasitic mind I hope we'll have a chance to talk about my forthcoming book soon we can actually talk about in the context of religiosity and happiness if you'd like that could be a good segue but uh in my last book I in chapter seven I talk about how to seek truth and I I offer the epistemological approach called nomological networks of cumulative evidence uh and I think we have discussed that privacy previously right so the idea there is that if I want to demonstrate to you Jordan that there is a unshakable universal truth what would be the data that I would need to amass and present to you for you to start coming around to me and the way that you do that if you're building a normal logical network of humans of evidence is you come up with data that that is across cultures across eras across species across methodologies across theoretical Frameworks and if all of these triangulate to demonstrate that your phenomenon is universal then you're well on your way to having built a rather unassable unassailable argument and so notice that I've been able to do that without ever requiring some higher Supernatural authority to contextualize that truth and so again I'm very very uh open to the idea that people need religion I think it religion in in most cases serves more benefits than than costs although I wouldn't have left Lebanon were it not for religion right because it is specifically religious hatred that caused me to leave Lebanon right it wasn't feasible in the mid 70s when the Lebanese civil war broke out to be Jewish in Lebanon because Lebanon is exactly what happens to a society that is completely organized along identity politics lines so it's particularly dismaying that the progressives and the West wish to model that from which I escaped in Lebanon but in that case the reason why we had to leave Lebanon is exactly due to religion because somehow our religious Heritage was no longer possible to to hold to practice in Lebanon and we left so I I have an ambivalent relationship with religion all right so so let me ask you okay let me ask you a couple things about that so the first question might be and this is something that we both grappled with as academics you know the universities have become very corrupt now you could argue on the one hand that that corruption is just an extension of the intellectual Enterprise as such or you could argue that the corruption that's made itself manifest in the universities is a is a parasitical extra Sense on the core Enterprise the intellectual Enterprise of the universities okay now on the religious front the same issue emerges right the question is is that when you know you already pointed out earlier that the parasitical Predator types can utilize strategies of empathy let's say to to amplify their attractiveness on the sexual front right so they can co-op something that emerged for other reasons and bend it to their own purposes so is it re so what do you think is more reasonable like do you think that on the religious front that the danger you're exposed to in Lebanon is a merely a consequence of the fact that the religious Enterprise itself is flawed and will produce this multiplicity of competing and often murderously competing claims or is it reasonable to assume that something analogous happens on the religious front and that the fundamental conflict is a consequence of the predatory parasites twisting uh fundamentally axiomatic and necessary religious claims to their own devices and and sewing Discord as a consequence well I can't be so charitable as to give religion a a free pass because many of the religious narratives certainly in the abrahamic faiths are precisely US versus them right so so there is no way to misinterpret some of the teachings in many of these books whether it be Deuteronomy so the old Old Testament whether it be in certain Christian doctrines and certainly when it comes to Islamic doctrines it is very difficult to quote misread or mistranslate and it's certainly difficult to tell someone who's who Arabic Arabic is their mother tongue that I'm misunderstanding what is being communicated let's say in some elements of you know the Islamic faith my point here is not to uniquely bash Islam because as I said all abrahamic faiths have a US versus them mentality so I think what happened in Lebanon is not some human co-opting of otherwise benign and loving religious narratives uh let's put it another way and again this you may not like because I'm boring from Richard Dawkins and I know that you've been having a little tiff with him Richard Dawkins famously said that the difference between an atheist and a very staunch believer is really very minimal if we assume that there are 10 10 000 Gods the very religious person is an atheist on 999 Gods but is very fervently a believer in one whereas The non-believer Atheist is a non-believer on Ten Thousand so there's only a difference of 999 to ten thousand that strikes me as a pretty compelling argument let me put it another way in the consuming instinct which was one of my earlier books in 2011 I had a whole chapter where I was talking about the thought experiment of what might happen if an extraterrestrial uh being came to Earth shopping for the one good faith and what I did there I mean some people might think that I was you know being facetious but actually I was being deadly serious I said take every single issue that you could think of from the most consequential to the most banal and I can find you two religions that purport the exact opposite prescription does God want you to eat prosciutto yes if you're Catholic absolutely know if you're Jewish or Muslim what's God's view on homosexuality I can give you some that are totally okay with it some that are not I mean literally I give a million so how can you then argue for a specific religion when on any given point I can find two religions that are perfectly contradictory okay okay okay so I I think I have an answer to that that you might find at least interesting so I forgot that in your book you laid out the rationale for normal logical networks let me just develop that a little bit and this is from your new book okay so the idea of a normal logical network is akin to the idea of sensory quintangulation let's call it that and so everyone knows that we have five senses now each of those senses uses a qualitatively different strategy of measurement right somewhat independently evolved and so and so our proposition as embodied biological organisms is that if something manifests itself simultaneously in the domains covered by the five dimensions of our senses it's real right so what's real you can taste it you can touch it you can see it you can hear it you can feel it if if you can do all five of those then there's a pretty damn good chance that it's real now actually that turned out not to be real enough and that's partly why the development of language had some adaptive utility because because you and I can communicate I can use your five senses transmitted to me through the linguistic domain to calibrate my five senses and then we can do that on Moss and to a large degree that's what science does all right so you take multiple independent sources of measurement and if they converge then you assume that there's something there fair enough so far yeah I'm with you okay okay I would say from from from what I've been able to understand that that's what the unions did in their archetypal analysis now you can debate as the postmodernists have about whether or not what they found was spurious but in my maps of meaning book what I tried to do was to take what the unions had discovered by constructing a normal logical network of cross-cultural mythological analysis and I tried to beat that against the measurement techniques of Behavioral Psychology and Neuroscience and I found at least I claimed in that book to have found like a substantive non-trivial and surprising degree of overlap so so let me and I think this is relevant to your book on happiness now you tell me what you think about this because happiness doesn't just mean transitory hedonic joy and you certainly don't think that because that isn't how you live so the the core element of the hero archetype is the injunction that you should Advance courageously in the face of threat if said threat stands as an obstacle between you and a valid goal yes right right and so that's different than rabbit mythology which would be when you see a wolf freeze the human myth is no no when you encounter a threat you explore it until you master it okay and as far as I can tell all the variants of hero mythology are basically that right it's the dragon fight is that you find the terrible predator and that's what a dragon is it's an emblem of of the predator and you encounter that voluntarily and as a consequence you get the Virgin so that's on the sexual front and you get the gold and that's on the material front and so and you know the unions to their credit and I really do think to their credit pointed out that that underlying narrative structure makes itself manifest cross-culturally and a multitude of forms now unfortunately to understand that you have to throw yourself pretty deeply into that body of research right and it's pretty arcane and and young thoughts symbolically and so he's he's not a particularly he's not a thinker who's particularly amenable to people whose primary mode of thought is rational rather than pattern recognition right right right so but but like I do think the unions used a normal logical Network and I think that the core religious doctrine that they converged on was something like the universal validity of the hero myth and the Redemptive quality of that courageous advancement in the face of the unknown and so that that's a place where you could because your question was well there's all these competing religious claims right and I'd say well there's no way I can offer a contrary perspective to that Viewpoint given the multitude of contradictory religious claims but then I would say there's a hierarchy of claims and some of them are more Central and there is a convergence at the level of what claims are most Central and I think the convergence is analogous to your proposition that you should abide by the truth in your communicative in your exploration and your communicative Enterprise and I think that's associated with the kind of happiness that you're writing about in your new book right a kind of deep happiness right uh I mean I agree largely with all that you've said about the the universal myths that the jungians talk about and again there have been many studies from an evolutionary perspective that look for example like if I want to study female sexuality the best way to study it is to do a archetypal analysis of the male hero in romance novels and it turns out that the male hero in romance novels is the exact same guy in every single romance novel that has ever been written I mean to the point that you would think it's been plagiarized he is tall to my detriment since I'm not tall uh he he wrestles alligators on his six-pack and wins he is a surgeon and a prince uh he's reckless in his behavior but he can only be tamed by the love of of one woman right and so I just described everything Beauty and the Beast yep and so these archetypal narratives are Universal precisely because they are an indelible part of human nature and that manifestation exists independently of whether you believe in the Supernatural origin of those stories or not but if I can just quickly segue into my forthcoming book so I do talk about religiosity and happiness in my forthcoming book and you and many other folks who are who you know are very pro-religion will be happy to know that the research shows and I know that you probably know this that there is a moderate correlation between religiosity and happiness meaning that on average uh people who are more religious tend to manifest higher happiness scores but we can discuss why that is now I argue that that doesn't mean though that if you're not religious you can't find your way to mount happiness uh and I can couch it in a Divine language so you and I are right now engaging in an intoxicating conversation that is truly Divine Right friendships are Divine as Aristotle said and as I described in my book The the love that you have for your children and your wife is a form of you know Divine love uh having purpose and meaning in your chosen profession I talk about that in the book I basically argue that the two most important decisions that either make you happy or incredibly miserable is choosing the right spouse and choosing the right profession if you make those two choices correctly you're well on your way to being a happy that was Freud's observation right work and love that was his and look and he said it a hundred years ago and I've said it today precisely because they are Universal truths to our earlier point you know one of the things that I did in this book is really delve into the you know the ancient Greeks you know Epictetus and and the Seneca and Marcus Aurelius and here I want to point to a quip that my fellow Lebanese friend Nassim Talib once told me which turns out to be uh hauntingly true he he once was teasing me that he said I don't know what you study in Psychology God because everything that there is to know about human nature the ancient Greeks have already said and now he was he was quipping me he was teasing me uh but as I started delving into that literature I said I think Nassim might be right because I would get some I would get some insight for example about the link between cognitive behavior therapy and some some other you know mechanism of you know happiness and so on and then I find out that Epictetus had made that exact point over 2 000 years ago so so I think that there are these Universal truths that exist whether it is and how we seek happiness or in in any other domain of human import that are Universal precisely because they are an indelible part of our human nature I mean that's why I love evolutionary psychology so much because it is very difficult to have powerful explanations of human behavior void of an evolutionary understanding of our species and so it always amazes me that people exhibit an animus to evolutionary psychology what else could it be like where did your brain come from if you take it outside of the purview of evolutionary theory so one of the things that I talk about in the book that speaks to your very kind introduction at the start where you talked about me having a sense of humor I have a whole chapter on I call it life as a playground and I basically argue that even the most serious Pursuits for example the pursuit of science is a form of Play It's the highest form of play right because in the same way that you try to solve a 1 000 piece puzzle by putting the pieces together well what is science it's it's drawing links between a whole bunch of variables that heretofore you didn't know were linked together so the whole Endeavor of science is a form of or geostic higher order play right yeah and so if it's done right if it's done right and and so that's by the way one of the reasons why you know I have the sense of humor that I have is because I think it's a very very powerful way to communicate very serious things some people will say oh but aren't you a basing yourself as a serious Professor by donning that pink wig or by self-flagellating because you're mocking that you're friends with Jordan Peterson no because mockery is actually a astronomically powerful way to demonstrate certain forms of lunacy right that's why uh dictators will usually try to eradicate the satiris first they don't go after the guys with the big muscles they go after the guys with the sharp tongues and the stinging pen because those are the ones that are the biggest threat and so so you might be interested in this so I spent a lot of time studying Jacques Bank steps work on play and he he detailed out the neurophysiology of play to a greater degree than any other scientist that I know and hanksept conceptualized play in really I would say is the highest as the state of highest possible neural integration because play only emerges when all competing motivating and emotional systems have been uh satiated and and put aside so if you're able to enter into a state of play that's actually an indication that you've mastered the domain in which you're exploring so thoroughly that no other competing motivations whatsoever can emerge to disrupt that you know and laughter laughter eradicates muscular tension when I used to work out with my friends we used to make jokes when people were bench pressing and as soon as they laugh there must they couldn't hold the weight anymore which was a good part of the joke but you know I I've spent a lot of time in my last tour laying out the idea to my audiences that the antithesis of tyranny is playing like if you had tyranny is a spirit of sorts right it's a malevolent spirit and you might say well what the hell's the opposite of that and I don't think it's joy and I don't think it's like the absence of fear or pain I think it's literally play and so I think you're dead on in that in the allying of the spirit of play with the highest form of Happiness it's really something to aim for at your exact exactly right and actually so to link play with our earlier discussion about you know choosing the right spouse uh so as you as you know Jordan you know one of the fundamental rules Universal rules for a happy marriage is the birds of a feather flock together Maxim so they are sort of two competing ideas Opposites Attract versus birds of a feather flock together now if you're interested in a short-term sexual values then opposites attracts might perfectly might work perfectly well yeah I may be introvert you're extrovert you might bring me out of my you know sexual shyness but that's for a short-term uh you know uh Valiants but for sure for long-term relationships it is birds of a feather flock together at least on things like life goals values belief systems it's not at all Opposites Attract now that principle of birds of a feather flock together applies specifically to playfulness and there's very very interesting research which uh if you're not familiar with I I'd be happy to send you some links that looks at how uh people who assort on their adult playfulness scores tend to have happier marriages and I give seven oh I'd like examples yeah I'd like to see that yeah I'll be I'll be happy to send you that okay and so for example one of the things that makes I mean I know you've met my wife a few times and you know that we have a very strong relationship we've been together for 23 years is that we're constantly in play mode right she can rib on me and so you know so for example I'll walk into the room you know I'll you know engage in some kind of full grandiosity showing off my muscles and then she'll say something like oh we might need to fortify the the the the base of this house because I don't think your ego fits in this house anymore right so that's a very fun right and we're constantly engaging in this kind of play we're very very good friends with each other now of course you can't always predict a priori when you're choosing to marry someone whether you you score perfectly compatibly on all of these things but trying to find someone who shares your life mindsets is certainly a prescription uh for leading a happy marriage and I'm right I'm willing to play together maybe that's why teeth was made out of Adam's Rib perhaps there you go Bringing In the religious narrative wonderful some of the other things that I talk about is I talk about um uh so I I argue that the most fundamental universal law that is most ubiquitous is something that Aristotle had already talked about in his uh nicomachian ethics book uh the golden mean right too little of something is not good too much of something is not good and The Sweet Spot lies somewhere in the middle right which mathematically is referred to as the inverted U right somewhere in the middle is the time and I demonstrate in one of the chapters that whether it be at the neuronal level the individual level the uh this economic level the societal level the same pattern of the inverted U manifests itself across countless domains so for example how much alcohol should you consume that follows an inverted you how much fish should you consume that falls in inverted you how intense your exercise should be that follows an inverted you and on and on and on so the challenge is to try to find where your sweet spot is and if you can find that you're well on your way to happiness another thing that I talk about in the book is how to assuage the threats of regret at the end of your life so and here I talk about uh my former professor of psychology at Cornell Thomas gilovich who's a pioneer of regret theory he argued that there are two sources of regret regret due to actions and regret due to inactions so I regret that I cheated on my wife and now my marriage is over that's a regret due to action versus regret due to inaction is I always wanted to be a artist but I became a pediatrician because my dad was a pediatrician and it turns out that people's most looming regret are those of inaction right the what if I wish I would have done and so do you think do you think that's the same thing that befalls people when they hold their tongue when they have something to say because that's a form of inaction that that could easily resistance isn't that same thing that's exactly right exactly right and that's why by the way to use my earlier argument about when I put my head on the pillow and I need to feel that I didn't walk away from defending the truth I I would be regretful if I did that if I held my tongue and did not weigh in on Twitter to some inane BS that someone then I would be very regretful and therefore I live a life some might argue of obsessive authenticity and I say obsessive because sometimes I'm authentic to a fault I can't hold my tongue if it means that I'm doing it for careerist reasons because then I feel as though I'm being inauthentic right and so but that makes me happy because then my personhood has no fissures I don't feel like a fraud I feel real and for better or worse then I present myself to the world with full confidence and happiness we are just days away from the Durban Accords the greatest threat to the US Dollar's Global dominance in the past 80 years on August 22nd brics Nations Brazil Russia India China and South Africa are expected to announce the launch of a new international super currency fully backed by gold or other Commodities you can protect your IRA or 401K from The Fallout of this Landmark Announcement by diversifying with gold from Birch gold historically gold has been a safe haven in times of high uncertainty which is right now how much more time does the Dollar have protect your savings with gold Birch gold has an A plus rating with the Better Business Bureau and thousands of happy customers text Jordan to 989898 and get your free info kit on gold again text Jordan to 98 9898 thank you um you're very active on Twitter I don't know if you're as active as I am on Twitter but we have a pretty it's it's it's a close battle and I think our style of interaction on Twitter is analogous so I have a couple of questions for you there it's like how do you protect yourself against using your what would you say your charismatic forthrightness that's a good way of thinking about it how do you protect yourself against using that egotistically and for instrumental gain I mean you have a wife that pokes fun at you and that's helpful but and how do you know you're doing that and how do you know when you're poking and prodding to be authentic that you're not you know you're not mouthing off and going too far and showing off and and and you know engaging in an ego display on that front how how do you do you think you always keep yourself in check and how do you do it if you do it successful that's that's an amazing question because I've struggled with that conundrum when two important values Within Me conflict with one another so on the one so let me give you an example uh I may have a good friend who's spouting nonsense on Twitter okay and because of my values maybe my middle eastern values you know you don't go after a friend so I'll hold my tongue for a while but then I start there's that voice in my head that says but wait a minute if you hold your voice and don't correct that person if you think that they are uttering gibberish then you're being inauthentic that's exactly what happened not that I wish to bring him back to the Forefront but that's what happened between Sam Harris and me because we were on very friendly terms we got along very very well we we've gone out to dinner I'd been on his show and for about four or five years I kept completely quiet about his you know Trump hysteria because I felt that I I owed him because I knew him I had to have kind of a higher standard of restraint but then at one point I felt that my being restraining in my interactions with him I was being inauthentic to the truth and therefore I went after him and and I thought was a playful way but he didn't take well to it and regrettably I guess I presume that we're no longer friends now which is a real shame and so I struggle with that exact issue but I think the fact that I struggle with it is itself a form of ultimate humility right because if I didn't struggle with it if I was always self-assured in everything that I did without having the back voice in my head telling me are you doing the right thing then I would never engage in these Auto corrective behaviors so I don't have a definitive answer I I do struggle with that issue is it always best to tell the truth or should you hold your tongue once in a while it's a tough one to navigate well how much do you think how much of a rule do you think the social connections that you have play in helping regulate your behavior like you have a good relationship with your wife like are there are the people in your family the people that you're close to are they keeping an eye on you and giving you a whack when they think that you've stepped out of line well certainly my wife is very good at doing that because in her case she sees the fact that I might get angry at some insane thing that's being said at Twitter on Twitter and then she'll kind of come in because she'll see me like having you know kind of shaking my head on my laptop she says okay what are you upset at now who said what and then she'll try to kind of come in and say why don't we go out for a walk or why don't we play with our children and so that's another thing that makes choosing the right spouse so important because they react they recognize your behavioral traps they recognize where you might falter and they make you a better person and I I hope I also offer that to her and so right right turns out to be a beautiful symbiotic relationship yeah I see I learned from how you interact with your wife uh you you share a similar love of your wife yeah you know and I think we like we used to play together as kids say like we were childhood friends and that's true yeah yeah yeah and and you know what's really been interesting Gad and this is really a form of Miracle as far as I'm concerned and I I think it's because both of us passed so close to death in the last few years I mean Tammy almost died every day for about eight months it was really quite awful and I was out of commission for two and a half years you know when we when we came back together we were pretty alienated from one another because I really hadn't been around for two years and she had been recovering from her terrible illness and to some degree in isolation and you know we'd diver our Pathways had diverged to some degree and I was still quite sick when I came back home you know and what saved us was the habit of play that we had established over decades you know and we came together again in the field of play and that reunited us very quickly and the thing that's been so miraculous about this and it it really has been a staggering Revelation to me is that that Spirit of play has magnified itself now to such a degree that when I'm with her and we're in a playful mood I can see her across in some ways I can perceive her across the whole span of the time that we spent together right from you know 1969 to now and it's like I'm playing with that person that I've always known you know and that's actually deepened as we've got to know each other over the decades that's got more and more profound and and also more and more like a return to the state of mind that we had when we were young kids eight years old you know playing together as as as friends and that's really it's an amazing thing it's it's it's certainly one of the best things that's that's ever happened to me in my whole life so you know and and Eve the word Eve I learned this from Ben Shapiro the word eve means beneficial adversary right it means something like Optimal partner in play that's fine oh I didn't know that either yeah he's not cool that's so cool that is very very cool uh yeah so so the you know one of the things one of the reasons why I wrote this book I never thought that I would write a happiness book I thought that Jordan Peterson had already uh occupied that Niche but the reason why I wrote the book is because a lot of people would write to me and say how is it that you always are able to present yourself to the world as happy and and there and of course about 50 of your happiness comes from your genes that can't be controlled some of us have a sunny dispositions some of us have a more uh gloomy disposition and that's fine but the good news is that there's still 50 up for grabs right so even if 50 of your Genesis come of your happiness coming from your genes there is another 50 that the choices that you make the the mindsets that you adopt that can either increase the likelihood of happiness or decrease it and so I thought you know what I'd never thought about the idea of writing a book of happiness but tons of people are approaching me with you know asking soliciting advice why don't I take a shot at it and that's what led to my latest book well you know maybe to to tie this back to the way that we opened our conversation you know maybe one of the reasons too that has protected you to some degree against being pilloried too extensively except in those serious cases that we discussed is the fact that you've been markedly good at maintaining that playful men through all of your interactions right and that you are willing to put yourself forward you know on a fairly on a fairly regular basis even in in absurdist guys with your fright wig and your self-flagellation whip and and so you know I think that good humor has also been a really good it's not a defensive Shield you know because that that that's like something you're hiding behind you're not hiding and it takes humility right and it takes right to bring self-confidence right because someone could look at that and say my God this guy is looking like a buffoon and so it takes a lot of courage to your earlier point to be able to put yourself in that position right I remember the one of the first times that I I know we've both been on Jordan on uh Joe Rogan's show many times one of the nicest compliments that he gave me he said you know you're you're really cool because you're not like many other professors who take themselves too seriously right so so I can be austere and professorial when I need to be when I'm speaking at Stanford and I could be a complete Joker when the occasion demands it and so and and one doesn't diminish from the other you can both be a serious person and an incredibly playful person that's certainly a path to happiness oh yeah yeah you bet that that's an optimized path to happiness right look that's a really good place to stop and so your book is coming out in Late July that's the sad truth about happiness you said it comes out on July 25th and so those of you out there who are pouting away miserably and wretchedly might want to go pick up that book and see if you can pick up a tip or two and um also you know as we discussed God wrote parasitic mind and that's definitely a book worth picking up if you haven't done that already so you could you know buy both what the hell you know and then you can free him from the terrible shackles of the Communists at Concordia University of your lips the God's ear no kidding eh so look thank you very much for talking to me today it's always a pleasure to talk with you I hope we see each other in Montreal in person at some not too distant point in the future that seems highly probable um for those of you watching and listening on YouTube thank you very much for your time and attention um I hope you appreciated the conversation as I did um to the Daily wire plus folks for facilitating this conversation now it's much appreciated film crew here in Toronto that's appreciated as well um I'm gonna take God over to the dark side the daily wire plus side uh behind the paywall um and we're going to talk about um more autobiographical and personal issues I would say that's generally the tenor there and so if you want to join us there uh uh please please feel welcome and invited we certainly appreciate your patronage and otherwise Gad thank you very much for talking to me today thank you sir cheers yeah and good luck with the launch your book man I I hope that you you rip up the best seller charts and that the New York Times is forced to put you in its list thank you so much Jordan such a pleasure to talk to you and uh please stay in touch I might be coming down to Florida at some point soon are you going to be in Florida anytime soon um are you coming down to do some lectures for Peterson Academy I am the only decision is whether it's going to be in Toronto or Florida I'm discussing it with your people so that's on the roster I think for August so what are you gonna let what are you going to lecture on well so that's the thing uh of course it could be the happiness book uh or evolutionary psychology or the prosthetic mind my my penchant is to go with the happiness stuff if only to time it with the current book but we'll see I'm I'm opening well you could do three sets of lectures and then you wouldn't have to be sure yeah that would be good okay well look hopefully we'll see you there or we'll see you in Montreal or we'll see you in Toronto and thank you Jordan thank you Batman you bet talk to you soon bye-bye bye bye bye bye [Music] thank you

Channel: Jordan B Peterson

Views: 656,413

Keywords: Jordan Peterson, Jordan B Peterson, psychology, psychoanalysis, existentialism, maps of meaning, free speech, freedom of speech, personality lectures, personality and transformations, Jordan perterson, Dr Peterson

Id: PTq6CYfikbg

Length: 105min 13sec (6313 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 27 2023