Joe Rogan Experience #1006 - Jordan Peterson & Bret Weinstein

getting bigger but the video part is getting to a larger percentage 3 2 1 gentlemen we're live here we go Jordan Peterson Bret Weinstein how are you guys doing very well thanks for coming in to be here how excited to have you in hey should be funny you're spiffy you make us look very slubby what are you doing what can I say man you know I only brought a limited number of clothes well good move you look great and good to see you guys both of you and so whose idea was that to do this first of all so just uh I think it was I think it was Brett's yeah I saw a tweet of Jordans about or maybe it wasn't a tweet I did see a YouTube clip that somebody tweeted I don't know if it was you your perspective on on Hitler and your argument was that he was actually even far worse than his reputation would lead us to believe and it's funny it it harkens back to my first evolutionary project as an undergraduate I was working with Bob Trevor's who's went the leading evolutionary minds of the 20th century he was I was lucky enough to have him as an undergraduate advisor pull this sucker right up to your face because he's gonna turn sideways cause we're looking at each other next to each other yeah yeah okay so anyway I did a project with Bob on analyzing the Holocaust from an evolutionary perspective I wanted to test the question about whether you know at the time it was it was commonplace for people to say that Hitler was crazy and there was something that bothered me about that analysis I think there's something actually dangerous that we dismiss somebody like Hitler as crazy before we understand actually what they're up to so when I saw your your video clip I thought it would be worth having a discussion so that we could figure out what perspective makes sense that sounds like an awesome topic but before we get to that I would really like to know what's going on with you because you're at the center of this crazy controversy of Evergreen State College you essentially left the area you're suing the college now so where do you stand now we have not yet filed suit and in fact I'll talk about what took place inside the negotiation but we had our first sit-down with the college yesterday and this was a attempt to avert a suit but I will say from where I sit as hard as this is to believe it appears that the college has learned nothing from this episode and that it is doubling down on the same foolish sets of beliefs and assumptions that got it into trouble in the first place so that that is not a hopeful situation no and for anybody that's not aware of what this whole story is about you would either have to go back to Bret's podcast that we did a few months back or please just Google Evergreen State University and Google Bret and you will be blown away by the incent it's social justice warrior gone amuck the whole campus kids patrolling the campus with baseball bats I mean the whole thing is just completely bananas the president of the university being told by the children not to use his hands when he's speaking because it's a microaggression so he puts his hands down the children start cheering and laughing they don't realize they're being played the whole thing is just some crazy grand game by the children and I'm calling them children I don't give a [ __ ] how old they are to have power over people I means essentially what this is all boiled down to and you really see it in that moment where they tell him to put his hands down and he does and they laugh and cheer and think it's amazing well you know they're educated to do that to some degree because one of the tenants of the post-modernism that they're being spoon-fed is that there's no such there's nothing but power that's the only thing that mediates relationships between people because there's no real world everything's a social construct and it's a landscape of conflict between groups that's that's the postmodern world and the only the only actual means of expression is power that's what that's why the post modernists make the claim constantly that the patriarchy is a corrupt institution because they look at hierarchical organizations and they're stratified obviously there's people at the top and people at the bottom the only reason that there are people at the top is because they dominate by power there's no there's no philosophy of authority or competence that's all gone and so and and if you're cynical about that sort of thing and you should be you might say that part of the reason that the only thing that the post modernists believe in his power is because that helps them justify their arbitrary use of it under any circumstances whatsoever and I think that's right I think that's exactly what happened so it's not surprising that that you see this manifested in mob-like behavior of the students it's right in accordance with everything they're being taught so well they're also being taught and this sort of any means necessary to to get over the establishment like the establishment is this horrible institution and they could justify pretty much anything yeah this is what like punch a Nazi who's a Nazi everybody that doesn't agree with you I mean it's essentially what's what's being said ad nauseam in in social justice warrior circles online in eec I've seen punch of Nazi so many times I mean but when it came down to Charlottesville's there was very little punching of Nazis you know the whole thing was like it's all it's all very insane we see real Nazis those are real Nazis you know yeah go [ __ ] punch them please you know before we've also I think don't even do that by the way right well I think we've already figured out everyone right from the right to the left everyone's figured out that wherever the Nazis went that was wrong we all agreed on that we're not going there anymore and so when someone pops up and says well we should go there it's like they're immediately identifiable you can box them in and if you have any sense like you know like many conservatives did in the aftermath of the Charlottesville they come out and say well in case it needs to be said again we're actually not allied with those people yeah well that's one of them that was the most disturbing thing for many people about Donald Trump's reaction to it that he didn't take a hard stance against these white supremacists showing up with tiki torches walking to the street yelling anti-semitic phrases or whatever I don't know exactly what they're yelling I've read a bunch of different things but the whole thing was a is it a bomb in ancient I mean it was a horrific thing to watch and you know Donald Trump comes out and says there was horrible behavior on all sides yeah well I thought I thought about that for a lot because I got tangled up with that in a strange way in Canada I was supposed appear on a panel a panel discussing the suppression of free speech on university campuses which was then promptly cancelled by the university that was going to host it in the aftermath of Charlottesville partly because one of the panelists was going to be faith Goldie who was the journalist that was covering Charlottesville and got the footage of the of the car and and the damage but we we were targeted immediately afterward with the Nazi epithet and Ryerson cut shut down the shut down the free speech panel so it's coming up again and nobody does you were targeted as Nazis yeah yeah yeah what happened was this this this this this person put up a Facebook page and used a swastika with an O you know like a circle with a line through it and said no fascists no fascists at Ryerson essentially but she used the swastika and she got a bunch of people rallied together to pressure the university administration into counseling the event which they promptly did and then they had a celebration party the night of the event and this is here something that was really interesting so they got a couple I think a couple of hundred people out to the celebration at Ryerson and they they were united under the banner of the hammer and sickle and were calling for revolution and what was so interesting about that and I really mean technically that it was interesting was that the mainstream media said virtually nothing about the fact that these let's call them counter protesters I don't know exactly how you'd term them had come out under this murderous symbol and that's made me think like I can't figure out why the swastika is an immediate identifier of a pathological personality and the hammer and sickle isn't there's actually a reason it isn't just arbitrary and I think maybe it's something like the Nazi is the guy who knifes you in the alley and steals your wallet and the communist is the white-collar criminal who takes your pension and you're actually more afraid of the first person then the second person because the damage they do is more proximal and a meat and emotionally recognizable but that's the second guy who takes your pension for example he's perhaps even more dangerous but there's a there's a bloodiness about the Nazi symbol and immediate emotional impact that the hammer and sickle just doesn't produce and and some of that's because people are badly educated historic events it is pure ignorance I don't think it's just ignorance no I think that the people that are wearing those Che Guevara t-shirts really understand the history of Che Guevara or do you think he represents this sexy South American counter-protest character a guy who stands up to the establishment as we know it a guy was wearing a green beret wearing a beret hiding in the jungle fighting against the oppressive dictatorship of America I mean that's what that's what they're looking at when they see what well the the fact that historical ignorance plays a role in this is absolutely certain and I think the romanticization of people like Che Guevara is exactly I think you nailed that exactly but I do think there's a deeper question here it's like I was thinking in the aftermath of Charlottesville many conservatives immediately divorced themselves from the Nazis ben shapiro was a good example yeah and and it was very much reminiscent of William F Buckley divorcing himself from the John Birch Society back in the 1960s the right-wing seems it seems to be easier for the right-wing to draw a line around the Nazis and say no that's not us partly because the right-wingers conservatives are better at drawing boundaries but you know let's say we wanted to draw a boundary around the radical leftists okay point to something well on the right you say well you were a swastika yeah you're out of the club man right on the left well you believe what's the smoking pistol you believe in equity it's like that's that's a smoking pistol as far as I'm concerned but it doesn't have the same emotional punch as you wore a swastika to the protest yeah you believe in equity and you refuse to define it that would be right right but that's such a wait there's no punch in that it's like well I'm not going to associate with you because you believe in equity it's like it's too complicated hmm that's right um I do want to back us up here though because the I think we underrate the danger of and I think Nazis are a red herring there is something that actually does threaten to reemerge and Charlottesville is a version of it but I think because we have a cartoon understanding of what that protest was actually about and how many people are actually involved we don't really see why this is a dangerous and just issue and I think the answer is an evolutionary one that hasn't been spelled out and because it hasn't been spelled out it's very hard to point to I'd like to keep interrupting you but just get this right up to your face it sounds good to us but the people listening online or is that better yeah just when you turn to him just turn the thing with you okay yeah just get it you always keep it a fist from your face that's the best uh sorry that's all right so explain what you mean by this so my point would be that what took place in Germany in the 30s was a particularly particularly visible well documented example of a pattern that is much more common in human history and because this pattern emerges as a result of certain features of the way evolution functions in the context of humans it is actually always a danger that it will re-emerge and knowing what to do about it is not so simple until you've seen why it occurs and what it means what I what I've been saying in lectures I've given on this is that tyranny is the end game of prosperity and so there is a pattern in which you will go through a period of prosperous Ness in which it appears that that thing is defeated once and for all there's no reason for people to be going after each other in this particular way and then at the point that that pattern Peters out it reimagined people don't expect it it flies under a different flag or something like that and so I do think that looking at the tiny number of people who were doing what they were doing in Charlottesville and saying well that's we all agree that this is wrong misses the fact that actually I think Trump is doing it cynically but Trump was riding a wave that there are there are ideas which are not permissible from the environments in which we all grew up that are going to become permissible again if we are not careful to recognize that that's that's the nature of history I think I think it's highly probable that that's going to occur I mean part of the reason that I landed in the political hot water that I landed in last year was because was increasingly aware that this process of polarization was going to take place and that the continual in my estimation anyways the continual clawing of new ground underneath a radical leftist rubric especially in the universities is is starting to produce an extraordinarily dangerous counter position and that was manifest at least to some degree in charlottesville and so I think you're right is that well I you don't want to be complacent say well we know who the Nazis are and we're not going there and so the problem is solved the problem isn't solved there's all sorts of weird activity in the non radical left space like on the other side of the radical left whatever that is and right now what it is is not obvious you know it's it's the alt lab all right that's part of it it's the kickass danny's it's this peppy thing it's it's some of its comedy some of its satire some of its serious some of its the inversion of identity politics which is very dangerous and it's maybe the most dangerous thing about charlottesville is that there's something there's something extraordinarily dangerous about having people revert to identification with their racial identity it's really not a good thing well there's the reversion to their racial identity there's basically an outbreak of tribalism which explains what's going on on the far right what's going on on the left is a bit of a new twist what you have is a coalition of different tribal identities that aren't large enough to marshal a force on their own and so they're united and together they are a formidable force but what's going to happen is that something that's an unstable entity at the point that that force gains power it's going to come apart internal dynamics rip it up so it's not actually a it's not capable of restraining the version that recurs on the right the version that does manifest as as white nationalism that version is stable because it does represent an actual population that has an evolutionary basis for remaining cohesive and I should point out there is a danger when you hear an evolutionary biologist talk about evolutionary patterns peep often infer that if an evolutionary biologist is saying that something is a pattern that has evolved that that's some kind of a defense and it is absolutely not we call this the naturalistic fallacy so evolution is an absolutely amoral process it has produced the most marvelous features of human beings and the worst features and we are in some sense obligated to pick and choose which features to honor and and promote and which ones to tamp down something can have something can have evolved as a virtue in some circumstances and still be of the type that if magnified beyond its proper limits becomes pathological so let me tell you something I learned about Hitler which really I haven't recovered from my shock from this so we've been looking at the relationship between political belief and personality okay and your political belief is strongly determined by your temperament so liberal left types are high and trade openness that's creativity and low in conscientiousness but you can fragment conscientiousness up into industriousness and orderliness and the real predictor for conservatism is an orderliness not industriousness and you might think well that's no surprise right wingers are more orderly hence Hitler's call for order let's say but it's one thing to to posit that and another thing to measure it and now it's measurable and it appears that orderliness is associated with sensitivity to disgust and this is actually a really big deal it's a really big deal so there's a paper that was published in PLoS ONE about three years ago looking at the relationship between the prevalence of infectious diseases and authoritarian political attitudes and they did a country-by-country and then within countries by state or province and the correlation between the prevalence of infectious diseases and authoritarian / right-wing political beliefs at the local individual level was 0.6 and so I want to take this apart a little bit okay so the idea is that this is part of what you might describe as the extended behavioral immune system and one of the problems with the interactions between groups of human beings in our evolutionary past was well exactly what happened to the Native Americans is you know they came out and shook hands with the Spanish conquistadors and then within a couple of generations 90% of them were dead of smallpox and measles and mumps and so it's been a truism in our they passed that if you meet a group of isolated if you're a group of isolated humans and you meet another group of isolated humans and you trade pathogens there's a real possibility that you and everyone you know are going to be dead in no time flat and so we have a discussed mechanism that that produces this implicit let's call it racial racial and ethnic bias that is part and parcel of the human cognitive landscape but the problem with that is that it's rooted in a discussed mechanism that actually serve as a protective function now when I was sorting this out I was reading Hitler's Table Talk and Hitler's Table Talk is a very interesting book it's a book of his spontaneous mealtime utterances from 1939 to 1940 - and I went through with this new knowledge because people think of conservatives as a like or fascists as afraid of those who are different they're not afraid they're disgusted and that's not the same thing because you burn things you're disgusted by and so it was terrifying to me to read it because then I also thought oh well disgust sensitivity is associated with orderliness and you need order in a society in order to maintain it and the Germans are very orderly and that was actually a canonical part of their civilization and part of actually what makes them great and powerful and that just had to tilt a little farther than necessary and all of a sudden everything needed to be get cleaned and you know Hitler talked about cleanliness all the time and he actually meant that and so this thing that's emerging you know you talked about its biological basis its evolutionary basis it is it's part of this deeply rooted discussed system that protects us from dangerous pathogens that can manifest itself and does manifest itself in the political realm it's not good so he I don't know exactly how to tease this apart but I agree with your point about there's an actual danger when populations meet like a literal pathogen danger and that that is liable to have produced a certain instinctive fear of the other which doesn't have to be limited to that one thing but that's enough to generate a selective force that would cause a certain reluctance to meet but I want I want to point out that at least in the West and probably universally human beings when they go to war tend to dehumanize the other population and you know so of course calling the the other population subhuman Vermin whatever it is that that human beings do and my concern is that we are doing exactly this with the Nazis or de facto Nazis who are showing up on on our screens at this point that what we are doing is we are comforting ourselves by saying well that's a small outbreak of something that makes these people subhuman and justifies punching them or whatever and I'm you know I'm not squeamish about there being a right to violence when somebody is threatening a way of life so it's not that but my concern is that if you take the pathogen model and you imagine that all those folks who showed up in charlottesville that that is a contagion and it needs to be isolated then you will have the sense that as long as you do that it's not going to show up somewhere else whereas what's I think the the actual hazard is that that's actually a latent program that has served populations in past circumstances it's indefensible but it has served populations and the populations that we come from have it therefore on reserve and when certain characteristics show up in the environment that program can emerge and so my concern is that that's where we are in right it can't be isolated as a phenomena that's associated with the other right in one of the things I've done for decades is teach my students a variant of that which is something like because we I try to walk them through understanding psychological understanding of what happened in Nazi Germany and in the more intense situations like in places like in Auschwitz so the question might be well if you were in Germany than the 1930s could you be a constant concentration camp guard and the gut reaction to that is no those people are unlike me and that's the wrong response the right response is those people were human and I'm also human and so that means that the Nazi is us that's what it means and so that and who the hell wants to think that and no one will think that and I have thought that through because I thought through for a variety of reasons what the limits of my potential behavior are and the limits of my potential and maybe I'm more pathological than the average person it's certainly possible but I understand that the limits of my potential behavior are beyond the bounds of what people would normally consider civilized and I think that's characteristic of human beings in general well so I mean you know looking oh go ahead no I was gonna say I think this is one of the things that really highlights the importance of having uncensored discussions because we've we've already hit on so many hot topics to the point where you have to like really clarify your position and and when you're talking about this sort of latent program in in in human beings and the necessity for it at one point in time like all these things are very taboo to discuss today and this is a giant issue because what you guys are doing is talking about things objectively reasonably logically and and clearly but when you get to these sort of hysterical subjects that's that's sort of forbidden today and there's a giant issue with that because when you have forbidden discussions you energize those topics and the the topics grow in the absence of discussion in the absence of being picked apart and analyzing them for what their core components are and what are we talking about it from an evolutionary perspective this is very very important because these patterns are really do see that and I think with any one of us given the wrong neighberhood the wrong parents the wrong life we might have been one of those [ __ ] with the tiki torches in charlotte i mean it's where human beings like you said i think that is absolutely critical to discuss well and it's also there's there's another thing going on right now i've been trying to characterize the state of the sociological and psychological landscape that we all inhabit right now and i think we're in a position of radical instability and things in the future could be way better than they are right now radically and they could be way worse than they are and small decisions are going small to small decisions that people make are going to have outsized effects well they make them like look at what happened with this guy in Charlottesville you know this was I mean I know he was surrounded by a coterie of deplorable --zz let's say but it was one guy who decided to do something murderous and that shifted the whole political landscape and and and so what I see happening right now is the we're surrounded by these interactions between people that are positive feedback loops you know and a positive feedback loop occurs when if you do something then it makes whatever caused that occur even in a greater way and the polarization is like that so I say something left like and you say something right like and that annoys me so I get more left and it annoys you and you get more right and all of a sudden were at each other's throats and that's happening everywhere right it's very unstable and what what's to be hoped for is that we can pull back from that and discuss it we can say look you know under a circumstance a I could have been a communist Inquisitor or Nazi prison guard I need to know that and then I need to know what were the situations that made that likely and then I need to know how should I conduct myself so that's less possible and the only way we can figure that out is to have the kind of conversations that we're having right now it's like and this isn't them I've been taken to task by some of my friends for example for using the social justice warrior terminology because they've said to me well you know you're you're you're participating in this process of demonization and and polarization and I think well yeah I can understand that although I'm also like radically concerned about the fact that the universities for example are completely taken over by radical Marxists essentially and that they're driving this polarization and it isn't obvious to me how to have a discussion about that without participating in the process of polarization it's something I've been trying to figure out for the whole last year you know and I've made I've been emphasizing the role of personal responsibility instead of ideological identification right get it into your head that you have the capacity for great evil and stop targeting stop assuming that that's something that's manifesting itself only in the people that you disagree with politically take responsibility for that and try to put your life together I don't see an alternative to that but it's been very difficult to to to avoid to do that and simultaneously to avoid becoming a participant in this process of polarization and it's a very dangerous process it's what destabilized Germany in the 1920s and 30s right it was this ping-ponging back and forth between the radical left and the radical right and your point bread that the radical right actually is more powerful once they get organized is a really good one because there's no fractionation it's more stable you bet and they have all the guns that's another thing to think about certainly in this country the right is much better armed and that's very frightening that's a tariff terrifying thought that you know I mean we've we've heard this many times recently about the Trump administration about if he's impeached that there will be some sort of a civil war I believe Roger stone said that like this thought is so terrifying that we literally cannot do anything to stop some sort of physical confrontation with weapons if we disagree ideologically that it's going to happen well first of all there's a lot we can do and sure fact you know one of the other things about about the evolutionary toolkit is that I believe we have exactly the tools for navigating this puzzle they're built into us also in addition to this latent program but we are now in a very dangerous situation because for example if Google and other of these online goliaths start deploying algorithms that decide what we get to talk about and see then we cannot use the very tools that are necessary in order to escape and avoid something like civil war which frankly communication and debate analyzing all the components of this issue completely objectively yeah I'm taking the risks that are necessary with that and some of the risks are that if we have free and open communication that some percentage of that communication is going to be reprehensible and deplorable but yes but that but that the consequences of suppressing that are so much more dangerous than the consequences of allowing it that they're not in the same universe yes we empower us those terrible ideas by making them I mean electronically taboo yeah and then point is they're going to fester whereas if we just if we discussed them we can defuse the ones that are terrible we can spot the opportunities that we don't know we have and we can we can move forward rather than descend into civil war which frankly looks more this issue with with Google and YouTube let's say and these are the gigantic internet companies you know it isn't a matter of if they're going to produce autumn BOTS that do pre perceptual censorship they are doing that well 16 wet sad explained well he tweeted the other day that and I knew this was in the workings because I've been looking at what YouTube and Google are planning with regards to their artificial intelligence censors let's say you know they want to get to the point where the the the appalling video is not even put up so what happened I hope I've got this exactly right but God was in the process you upload a video and then you publish it and so once you upload it YouTube has access to it and they have access to its content and they informed him that it would be d monetized before he published it is right here we put it up on the board there you go YouTube thinks that my pointing to astounding hypocrisy is to triggering there is nothing objectionable object objectionable in my clip unbelievable yeah and that one was a manual review so I'm wrong about that although how in the world they decided that they were going to manually review God's video is also I mean how many videos are going up on YouTube what the hell why are they manually reviewing his and I mean God said is not a radical right now that's the thing I mean he's an evolutionary biologist and that makes him a radical now it does because he's a bunch of questioning what's happening and by questioning what's happening you instantaneously get lumped into this right-wing hate group well he's also making the claim that human beings have an intrinsic nature and so now there's a new buzz phrase that goes along with that and so that's that you're a biological essentialist and you see so if you're a radical postmodern neo-marxist your theory is human beings can be anything that I want to make them into it's a core doctrine of the theory and it's part of what makes it intensely totalitarian because then human beings are just putty for the molding and that's part of the the motivation will drive for claiming the radical constructionist claim there's no biological essence well why do you make that claim well because we want to free people from prejudice and tyranny it's like no that's not why you make that claim you make that claim because you want to justify your claim that there's absolutely nothing wrong with making over humanity in the in an image of your ideology and and and that's that would that that was a well documented intellectual argument that that that wove through what happened in communist Russia for example because the claim they're explicitly was you wipe out the past there's no real biological identity you can mold the human of the future in the image of your perfectionistic ideology and and the the Russians actually sidelined themselves effectively with respect to evolutionary theory that basically they were so backward on a biological front that as they were deploying this this very broken ideological toolkit they were wrecking their ability to think about about how biology works and so what you're pointing to you about evolutionary biologists it's not just that we question the content of evolutionary biology is absolutely the opposite of politically correct yes yes because nobody tells the biota what's right and what's wrong the biota does what it does and those of us who look at it and attempt to understand what those patterns are can't help but be deeply politically incorrect almost all the time and so the idea that the truth of biology is actually going to become unexpressable and we're gonna move ahead we're just gonna we're gonna we're gonna sideline it so that we can move ahead with this ideological stuff I mean that is ecology is racist and sexist you well if I might biology and we're gonna have to go back here in order to collect a tool but biology does create entities that have the potential for racism in them in our genomes we carry the potential for racism for Darwinian reasons sexism is a little different right it is so I'm about to become very politically incorrect oh yeah I know oh it is not possible for male genes to gang up on female genes because all of our genes spend half their time in male bodies and half their time in female bodies which does not mean that civilization is fair with respect to sex and gender it does mean that there's no biological basis for the evolution of a patriarchal force that subordinates women because whatever the patriarchy does those who are part of the patriarchy become female in the next iteration and they suffer the consequences of it this is not the case with race unfortunately this is not a good thing but it is a true thing in a Darwinian sense one population can gang up on another population and it has happened again and again it explains all of the worst chapters in human history and so in some sense what I'm getting at is that you want to understand that process and once you understand what your genes are actually up to and you understand that your genes their objectives in the universe are not defensible what your genes want cannot be defended in in rational terms then we become free to do something else to recognize that our genes are up to things that we don't have any reason to honor and we can we can basically take them out of the control position but if we imagine that what our genes are up to must be all right and therefore it can't include anything like racism then we're just stuck then we don't have the tools to to diffuse racism so one of the things that happened when I made my video so a year ago complaining about Bill c16 in Canada and that was the one that instantiated transgender rights one of the things I was pointing to right like my comments have nothing to do with transgender rights but one of the things I was pointing to that was that Canada had built into the law a social constructionist version of human identity and that's actually the case so for example now in Canada here's a proposition which now has the force of law there is no causal connection between biological sex gender identity gender expression and sexual proclivity technically it's illegal to make a claim that those things are causally linked and the the causal link claim is a biological claim and not only is it a biological claim it's a factual claim those four levels are so tightly linked causally that there's hardly any exceptions there are exceptions so because every almost everyone who's biological sex ismail considers themselves male manifests themselves as male and his heterosexual so they're linked and the reason they're linked is while there's biological and cultural reasons but it's now in Canada the proposition that they're independent is now law and I was pointing that saying we don't want to do that you don't understand you've built social constructionism into the law that means that now it's illegal to be a biologist well then everybody said oh no no no that's not happening it's like don't kid yourself when you put things in the law things happen and we were accused not only of being Nazis and that was part of the reason that the this this talk was shut down but also of being biological essentialists and biological essentialism is the new buzzword for for nazi essentially so i have to go please do I want I want to correct you it's not that it's illegal to be a biologist it's just illegal to be any good at it is there is there concern that putting biology as fact may it will get in the way of civilization because we're supposed to be moving past all of these issues we're supposed to be moving past these things as we evolve we're supposed to be looking people as being free to choose whatever gender they like free to choose whatever sexual orientation they like free to express themselves in any way and that by defining them by purely biological terms we're essentially relying on the meat wagon to lead us through civilization rather than the mind that's great that you did a very good job of outlining the credible case against biological essentialism and because it can deteriorate into something like eugenics there's a real danger like a political danger on the side of a biological determinant is a danger in denying it as well because then we can't use our rational minds to truly mitigate whatever issues that we would have with our biological urges and that that's the irony of this yes actually there is no there is an argument to be made that we need freedom from our biology yes and we have the to do it most creatures wouldn't but the human beings are constructed we absolutely have the ability to be rational about these things and decide which things we want to bring into the future but we can't do it if we don't discuss these things in Reister well a subset of males are are biologically hyper aggressive you can identify them at 2 years of age and they're the kids if you put a bunch of 2 euros together there's a small subset they're almost all males about 5% of males who will kick hit bite and steal ok so that's their biological programming let's say but the vast majority of them are socialized by the time they're four years old so that they're amazed yeah sure absolutely I mean it is yeah absolutely yeah and the thing about about boys like that is that if you socialize them properly it's quite a bit of work because they're very calm about it my son was like that and if you socialize them properly then they can become unbelievably useful their courageous their forthright their their you know they're they're they're not going to back down from a challenge there's all sorts of massive utility in that and that's this proper interplay between the biological circuitry and the socialization but you know and with James de Maura's memo you know he was he's been accused of taking a biological essentialist route which is not true one of the things James said is look there's credible evidence that there are biologically mediated differences between men and women at the level of temperament and interest that are actually large and profound and I would say the science on that is sufficiently settled so that someone can come out and say that's scientifically credible now that doesn't mean it's right because the scientists could be wrong but what you can't say is that what James d'amour said was scientifically uninformed it was scientifically informed but he also said look let's make the assumption I'm paraphrasing slightly but let's make the assumption that we want to as a society we want to extract maximum useful economic value from talented people so one of the things we want to do is if some of those people are women and some of them are men we want to understand the actual differences between women and men so that we can set up the workplace so that both women and men can contribute to the maximum economically so that they can benefit as individuals and every can benefit socially so you can use the biological so I mean for example one of the thing here's here's a biological problem on average women are more agreeable than men and I think that's because agreeable people are they're self-sacrificing and I think as a woman you need to be wired to be self-sacrificing or you won't be able to tolerate taking care of infants that's my sense of it okay now there's some problems with that it's like let's say that a huge part of female wiring is is tilted in the direction of the necessity of self-sacrifice for infant care okay that doesn't equip women very well for dealing with with aggressive met because of aggressive men and infants are not the same creatures so women play a pay a price being optimized to some degree for infant care they pay a price that they're less what would you call prepared that's one way of thinking about it indeed with dealing with hyper aggressive and competitive men well one of the consequences of that is that agreeable people don't make as much money and the reason for that is to make money you actually have to be disagreeable because you have to go to your boss and say give me some bloody money or something you don't like will happen to you you have to I'll leave you have to be able to fight for an idea - yeah but so there's something that this is a perfect test case so biologically speaking there's a very good reason for certain kinds of wisdom to be biased in the direction of manifesting in females females because they have the capacity to have fewer offspring in a lifetime than males are obligated as you say to to care in a particular way and the fact that care in human beings take so many years has resulted in menopause emerging and menopause essentially when a woman is done producing new offspring her interests in her evolutionary interest which in this case I think are honorable becomes synonymous with the lineage the population because her offspring will either do well or do poorly based on the population that they're in so women have a kind of farsightedness about lineage and I don't think it has anything to do with human women actually this is a trait that we can see in females of other species so it's an ancient thing whereas males are high variance that is to say a male can have many offspring in a lifetime many males have no offspring in a lifetime and that high variance means that to the extent that there's wisdom that surrounds risk-taking that has traveled historically along the male path now in modern times there's no reason that we can't look at these two kinds of wisdom and democratize them both right the fact is there's no reason if you're born female that you can't tune into what has historically been male biased wisdom and take advantage of that and we should be encouraging this there's no reason that people have to continue with problem is is that we can't actually have a reasonable discussion about it because you know the discussion is often forestalled by the claim that while men and women are exactly the same it's like it's that's not a helpful discussion and you know with the agreeableness issue I don't know exactly what should be done about that but one of the consequences of it is is that there's many reasons why why the pay there's pay differential between men and women and the issue itself is very complex but we do know that agreeable people overall make less money in the same positions and it's because they don't negotiate on their own behalf very well now it's conceivable that you could have an intelligent public policy or corporate policy discussion about what to do about that like maybe maybe the rule is something like you review male salaries once a year and female salaries every eight months or something like that you know and I'm not saying that's a good idea I'm not saying that I'm saying that if you if you take the facts on the ground into account there are ways that you might be able to use them so that you could and I'm not going to say level the playing field because I think that's an appalling phrase but maximize the possibility of economic contribution across the genders which is obviously in everyone's best interest but we're not gonna do that when when someone like James d'amour comes out and he's no scientist you know well he has some scientific training but that wasn't his primary field of expertise he came out and did a pretty credible job of summarizing the literature he did it because he had been subject to mandatory diversity training and was asked to produce a response he didn't do it so it would go viral within the company and become public and because he expressed his opinion let's say imperfectly he got fired it's like that's not good man that's not that's not a good pathway well it also wasn't good that his stuff was being republished without citations people were we're publishing it without the scientific papers that were sort of affirming what some of the things that he was saying I couldn't make heads or tails of it until I saw his original version yeah and that goes back to the the point I was making earlier about this being this is an unstable time where people's individual ethical choices in some circumstances will have effects far beyond the local it's like those journalists who jumped on the story did it either badly you know because they were incompetent or they did it maliciously right and that and and so now we could say let's say things go really badly in the next year well then each of those journalists might be able to sit at home and say hey I played a causal role in bringing about this state of murderous collapse because of my little ethical my ethical lapse when I was covering the James d'amore memo you know because of my own laziness and ideological rigidity I was willing to play fast and loose with the truth and now I've played a major causal role and you know pushing everything towards a state of chaos it's like people have better be on their toes because we're in a situation that's radically unstable and so it's time it's it's a really good time for everybody to be very careful about what they write and say and about their motives for for tarring and feathering the opposition that's another way of another thing that we have to be very careful about it's just very bizarre how quick people are to call someone a racist today I mean I've never seen anything like it in all my years it's it's a strange time you know I got into it yesterday just I got bored and I started trolling with Pepe the Frog I started putting up the Frog like with rainbows saying this seems like a frog that's really into gay rights like here's a frog that holding a lemon with a tart face like this is a frog that ate a lemon and he's reacting to it like how is this all racist like how is this like anyone it's not like all these people that are creating this frog are coordinating anyone can make a meme with the Frog and like a lot of the original feels good man cart that the guy created they those are applicable to their silly a lot of them are really silly well I think a lot of it was an intentional troll yes so I read a story about kekaa Stan you know I was looking into it trying to figure out if it was really you know the menace to humanity that everybody claims it is and the story was preposterous it was a you know it's a magical place where we're anti-semites and Jews and atheists and religious people live in harmony which is like that's hard to even parse it's designed to cause your mind to throw an error yeah well that is what though so I I think this is an excellent thing to talk about because I've been because I've been let's say identified under many circumstances now with the all right I've been doing every bit of investigation I can into its many manifestations it's a very confusing place it's certainly not an organized place and exactly what it is is by no means obvious and the cast an issue is a good case in point because mostly that's that's like a satirical realm where where where I don't know what it is it's late so its defensive humor in some sense let me give you an example I gave my father a kick-ass Danny Flagg about three weeks ago and three weeks ago and do that well because he's been following what's happening to me online you know and well and a lot and I got associated with the frog in in a major way and it's a crazy story I won't go into it but I wore a frog hat on one of my videos that an Indian Carver a Native American Carver had given me and he had told me that the Frog was in their culture a harbinger of environmental instability because if the waters polluted at all the frogs died first so the Frog is the the Frog is the creature in their mythology that warns the society that things are out of kilter it's the canary in the coal the canary in the coal mine so I wore this Frog hat and I made this video about things being unstable and I had been identified with Kermit because my voice sort of sounds like Kermit the Frog and it actually does so I've been making jokes about that and so then I made this video with this frog hat and the frog that my Carver friend made actually had red lips and then I made the video and as soon as I posted it people said that's Pepe and I just about fainted literally because it never occurred to me that that was a connection so anyways I've been tangled in with this frog thing in this most absolutely insane and surreal manner but I've been so and that got me into the cast anything and a lot of the people that I'm trying to address online are young men who are pushed I would say in a right-leaning direction by the movement of the radical left alienating and then they're thinking well I'm certainly not that right well then what am I well maybe I'm the opposite of that well is the opposite of the radical left the alt-right or is there a better opposite is there a different opposite that people could flee to and that's what well partly that's what I'm trying to figure out but what does it have to be opposite couldn't just be different well that's the opposition is a real issue with people right like what you were talking about before when people just ramped up their positions and get more ideologically based and they're doing it as a reaction to the other side instead of just being who they are instead of having some sort of a personal sovereignty they are literally reacting to the opposite side and changing who they yes okay so what I've been trying to do with my videos and and and and I think this is part of the reason that they've become so popular I'm in fact I'm certain of it is that I've been trying to agitate for the adoption of that personal responsibility as an alternative to political ideology it's like get your act together have a vision straighten out your life say what you think you know stay away from the ideological idiocy xand simplicity and oversimplifications and try to put yourself together because I think that I do believe at the most fundamental level and I think this is the remarkable realization of Western civilization is that the well-developed individual is the antidote to the tyranny of society and biology I think that's our great discovery in the West it's not like other cultures haven't had that idea in nascent form but it's been hyper developed in the West and I think it's right and so we abandon that that that pathway of divine individuality and revert to ideological identification of race or sex we're going to tear each other to apart and I think part of the reason we're motivated to do that show is because many people don't want to bear the responsibility of developing themselves as individual so they'll they'll shuffle off the responsibility and if that means that you know we're dancing in the streets because everything's on fire that'll be just fine and that's another thing that's adding to the terrible danger that we're in right now so I think you're right and I think that personal auditing program that you you're a part of is gigantic and people look at it as being separate from all these issues that we're dealing with culturally but I don't think it is I think you're absolutely right and I think that there is a real lack of struggle and understanding of struggle with a lot of people today not stress acerra ly struggle financially but I mean like um physical struggle spiritual struggle understanding that you have to overcome difficult issues to really understand the true potential of your mind and your body you have to not only overcome them but you have to seek them out voluntarily and-and-and what would you say exalt in the fact that they exist right yes and that's part of burying the burden of being it's like being is a tragic State human being is a tragic state so you can shrink from that but if you shrink from that the suffering increases and intensifies and you become resentful and malevolent yes the alternative is to move forward courageously that's the dragon motif right that's the hero myth essentially and that is the pathway forward as far as I'm concerned well I think it also has implications you know you're talking about it at the level of what is best for the individual but we also have a problem which is that these collectivist movements whether they are you know white nationalists on the right or social justice warriors on the left they cannot see forward and what is missing is that actually the mechanism that allows us to discover new ways involves individuals who are capable of thinking independently and if you have multiple individuals who think independently about related matters then they can pool that stuff but if what we do is we force everybody to sign up for the same things that we all agree are true there's no way of discovering what we don't yet know because every great idea starts with a minority of one so we have to have the freedom to be the only person who believes something and then to compel others that it's some we're in the right neighborhood and for others to pick up that mantle and so by said board meeting that's exactly why I you know I mean free speech has become an India logical issue and increasingly identified with but with the right and which is horrible it's horrifying but the the right justification for free speech is what you just laid out which is that in order for like the collective is is a group of what's already known by definition we inhabit the collective and that's what's already known what we could agree on but the problem with that is that what we can agree on what's already known isn't sufficient means we still have problems so people have to be out at the fringes on the border between chaos and order where they discover new things and communicate it back to the collective free speech does that that's the mechanism this is this is also a deep evolutionary truth which is that all of the innovations that allow whether we're talking about one creature learning to do some new trick that gives rise to a bunch of species that do the same trick or whether we're talking about populations discovering a new way to live on earth all of these things proceed from the fringe right the people at the Center for whom things are working best aren't going to be the ones to innovate the new way it's people for whom things are not quite working that are going to innovate new ways and that that's also true for a population of frogs or Birds or plants or whatever the ones that are not well situated are the ones where an experiment can pay off yes why hands icing cake psychologist wrote a good book called genius and he was interested in what predicted high levels of creative success and some of its what you'd expect IQ is one of them and creative temperament is another but losing a parent before the age of 10 was a nice predictor and you know people think about creativity as if it's all sweetness and light it's like no bloody way man if you're gonna be creative it's because you're tormented by a problem right and so if you're not in a position to be tormented by a problem you're not gonna put in the time and effort and take the risk necessarily necessary to be creative so but you know I'm I've been trying to understand the evolutionary landscape out of which our most fundamental religious convictions emerge and the idea that it is by definition the individual that innovates and that by definition therefore it's the individual that's the savior of the collec I mean it's hard to it's hard to imagine how you could find a biological Restatement of an essential Christian presupposition that was more mapped one to one than that now you could say well that's not unique to Christianity I see the same thing in the Judea in the Jewish antithesis between the prophetic tradition the prophet and the tradition because the Prophet is always the lone voice right that comes out it happens over and over in the Old Testament a lone voice comes out and challenges the king and says look you know you're you're a blind tyrant and nature is moving away from us and preparing her revenge and you better watch the hell out because you're violating the intrinsic moral norms and you're gonna pay for it that happens over and over and maybe there are 50 of them and the one that gets recorded is the one that happened to be closest to right because that's the population that gets through the bottleneck and so you know what we have is sort of evolution authoring these texts in a way yes well that's that's not to claim that I'm very what would you call that that's something I believe to be fundamentally true and I mean I've started I started see because I'm interested in this idea of strengthening the individually that's and when I when I wrote my first book maps of meaning it was about ideological conflict and it was about whether or not there was any alternative to ideological conflict because you could make a case that there isn't there's right and there's left and there's a war right but there is a third way and I think that is the way of the heroic individual and I mean that technically and that that involves the development of individual characters so that you can say what it is that you think that you can articulate your experience properly and that you can bring what it is that's unique to you into the collective landscape and that's what updates the collective landscape it's absolutely vital and so I started doing these biblical lectures I have done 12 of them now walking through Genesis and what I'm trying to do because I believe that the Bible is the documentation of the emergence of the idea of the divine individual that's essentially what it is and we we have a very uneasy relationship with that collection of texts now because they we read them as if they're making claims about the objective nature of the world and those claims seem to be false from a scientific perspective I don't believe that those are the claims that made to begin with so I think it's a non-starter but I've been trying to lecture about the stories in Genesis for example in a manner that makes them accessible to people who are well to Athey who a theist let's say and many many atheists have been responding very positively to them I have people in my youtube comments now that are calling themselves Christian atheists because they can understand they understand what it is I'm describing this idea that's emerged in the West that consciousness is the mediator between chaos and order and the and the and that generating the phenomena that generates experience and that and that you can think about that as as a divine category of existence and I've been trying to delineate how how the biblical stories lay out the pathway by which the divine individual should manifest him or herself in time because that is what it is and I and I I've been studying for example the Abrahamic stories which I didn't know well and the Abrahamic stories are really interesting I mean Abraham is called by God and when Abraham is called by God he's old he's like one of these guys who's 40 years old and his stayed in his mother's basement that's that's Abraham it's a little late for Abraham to be getting the hell out there in the world and God basically says to him leave your family and your friends and your place of comfort and journey into the land of the stranger that's the call to adventure and so Abraham does that now he's chosen by God you think well everything goes well for Abraham that isn't what happens at all the first thing he encounters is a famine and to escape that he flees into the tyranny of Egypt where they try to steal his wife it's like beware of being called by God you know you'd think it'd be all sweetness and light after that it's not that at all it's a very realistic story it's like get the hell out of where you're safe into what you don't know what are you gonna find there well your fortune no you're gonna find the catastrophes of life but if you keep yourself morally oriented and you make the right sacrifices which is the the Abrahamic story to a tee then you can transcend the catastrophe of being and prevail I mean it's who the hell doesn't want to hear that so we're treading kind of close to the the argument she got into was Sam Harris about the nature of truth and and since I heard that I've been sort of itching to have this conversation with you because I think there's a a way of viewing this that will actually perhaps reconcile the two points of view but there's a bitter pill that comes along with it so here's here's my argument we tend to think of intellect has evolved as having evolved because knowing what's true gives you an advantage but there's actually nothing that says the literal truth is where advantage lies and so I have a category that I call literally false metaphorically true these are ideas that aren't true in the factual sense but they are true enough that if you behave as if they were true you come out ahead of where you would be if you behaved according to the fact that they're not true so let me give you a couple of trivial examples that won't be controversial porcupines can throw their quills not true however if you live near porcupines and you imagine that porcupines can throw their quills you'll give them some space if you don't you may realize and that they can throw other quills get really close to one and it may wheel around and nail you with a porcupine quill which can be extremely dangerous because they are microscopically designed to move in from where they puncture you over time and they can puncture a vital organ or you can get an infection so the person who believes that a porcupine can throw their quills has an advantage that isn't predicated on the fact that this is actually a literal truth right another one might be people say everything happens for a reason right well unless you're talking about physics as the reason everything doesn't happen for a reason however if you are the kind of person who believes that everything happens for a reason and then some terrible tragedy befalls you you may be on the lookout well what's the reason that this happened maybe it's supposed to open some opportunity and you won't miss that opportunity the way somebody who was preoccupied with their misfortune would so literal falseness but metaphorical truth is actually I would argue the category under which religious truth evolves now the problem the bitter pill that I mentioned is that I've heard you say that the truths that are captured in the the religious version of things are basically like you know there's an individual truth and then there's a truth of your family and there's the truth of the population that you're living in and these things are all encoded in these these doctrines which is true and you would expect it to be because the doctrines are carried along in the population the problem is what I hear you arguing when you tell me if I have it wrong is that we should therefore expect the encoded metaphorical truths in these religious traditions to be morally right but there's nothing that actually says it will be morally right because there are metaphorical truths that might in fact be reprehensible but nonetheless effective and so what I would argue the overarching point here would be that you're right that the documents that contain these descriptions of things are full of things that are true in some sense that is not literal scientific truth nor was that their their purpose what isn't true is that those things are inherently up-to-date and see I would okay I mean first of all the first thing about that is that a discussion like that and this is also what happened with Sam Harris takes me to the very limits of my intellectual ability and so even in discussing it I'm going to make all sorts of mistakes because because it's treacherous territory but I would say my understanding of the great myths has that observation built into it so one of the archetypes is that of the of the tyrannical father which is the archetype by the way that possesses the minds of people who accuse Western society of being patriarchal they're possessed by a singular archetype and that's the archetype of the tyrannical father they don't see that there's a tyrannical father and a wise king because there is that's that's you can't even point that out but anyways in the in the old in in some of our oldest or there's a representation of the dead past so let me give you an example that everyone knows about the story of Pinocchio is the story of the individualization of Pinocchio he starts out as a puppet he's a marionette he's a wooden head he's a liar and he's pulled by forces that he does not understand right ok so but he has a good father that's Geppetto and so he's got a good and Geppetto wishes that he becomes a real individual and so and he knows that that's an impossible wish he wishes on a star that his son could become an actual individual knowing full well that that's unlikely and impossible so Geppetto is a good king so but the story is also about Geppetto because what happens is that when Geppetto loses Pinocchio loses his son which way you could think about as the act of dynamic attentive force of youth then he ends up stultified in the belly of a whale which is a symbol of chaos at the bottom of the ocean and then Pinocchio has to rescue him so I would say there is an instantiation of evolutionarily accumulated wisdom in the great stories of the past but they're still dead and it requires the Union this is why in Christian theology the the Godhead has a tripartite structure this is part of the reason there's God the Father but the father's dead the father was right a hundred years ago a thousand years ago and is still partly right but he's dead he can't participate in the updating of the process so you need an active force now the active force is the same thing that generated those stories across time right so it's it's the same thing except it's also alive in the present and so your moral duty and this is another thing that happens and in Pinocchio is to rescue your dead father from the belly of the whale and that's partly what I'm trying to do with these biblical lectures because your objection is correct the reason it's correct is because even if the solution was correct the landscape has changed and it's changed incremental iorry in a revolutionary way we don't know and so those old truths are at best partial and at worst blind but that doesn't mean you can just say like like Mao did during the Cultural Revolution well let's just destroy the past it's like no that would be like saying well you don't need a body anymore because your body is the collected wisdom of the evolutionary process across three and a half billion years I absolutely agree because the stories are not literal it's impossible to know whether they well not impossible but very difficult to know whether or not the truth that is contained metaphorically is still relevant if it's been inverted and it's now absolutely false or so Carl Jung talked about this a lot and and one of the things he said was that your moral duty is to realize the archetype in the in the confines of your own life and so you say well there's an archetype of perfection that pervades the West and for that for the sake of argument I'm going to call that Christ the Christ image it's something like that that's the archetypal image now we have a story about what Christ's historical life was like well well well you can't have that life because you would have had to be in the Middle East 2,000 years ago that's not your life but what you can do is take the archetypal and you can manifest it was within the confines of your own life and what that does is force you to undergo the difficult process of updating the ancient wisdom and you don't just forego it you can't or you can but you'll pay a massive price and part of that will be social disintegration because it's it's the the past is alive enough so that those of us who inhabit its corpse aren't clawing each other to death while we're feeding right that's the critical issue now it's not alive enough because the bloody thing could fall apart at any moment and we need to be awake and alert in order to keep it updated and maintained well not only that but they're the greatest hazards to us in the present are only partially going to be dealt with in these texts and that's that's my biggest concern is that you know if we take you know Dawkins dismissing religion as mind virus this is very dangerous because it neglects the truth that you're talking about and it prevents us from getting to a conversation in which we can talk about the fact that religious texts religions are not mind viruses they are adaptations to past environments they do contain a kind of truth that isn't necessarily literal and is in general not literal but none of them no ancient religion is up-to-date for Google's algorithms being the hazard to civilization that it probably is we need to figure out how to navigate where the ancestral wisdom is simply not up to the current okay so let me modify that slightly because I think it's true and not true the stories are erroneous in detail and right in pattern so for example there's an idea that one of the things that the mythological hero does is stand up against the tyranny of the state now you don't have to specify the nature of the tyranny of the state in order for that to be a truth that's applicable across different context I would say what's happened with the great religious myths is that they've they operate at a level of abstraction such that the the abstract entities are applicable in every single environment I'll give you an example of that it is extremely useful to represent the phenomenology of your experience as a domain of chaos and order that works in every single environment for every person and so the domain of order I can describe it technically you're in the domain of order when your actions produce the result you desire and you're in the domain of chaos when they don't and then and then I could say well your task is to straddle the border between those two domains because you don't always want to be where everything that you're doing is working because you don't learn anything and you don't want to be where nothing you're doing is working because it's overwhelming you want to be stable and dynamic at the same point and the Daoists do that very nicely because they have a chaos order conceptualization of the of the phenomenological landscape and their claim is the the point of maximum proper being is right at the center of the border between chaos and order and I think that's true across contexts so I don't think that truth ages some of them don't but the question really is one of at what point is there so much legacy code that the taking the package is is more harmful than it is beneficial and at what point are you know if god were writing today I'm pretty convinced the first commandment would be thou shalt not enrich uranium it would make sense as the number one commandment it's not there because uranium wasn't a concept at the point that the thing was written nor was the hazard of enriching it obvious and so the fact that it isn't mentioned tends to de-emphasize it as a risk and so I guess the question is is it possible I mean is it possible that by recognizing that these traditions carry huge amounts of ancestral wisdom forward but that that wisdom is certain to be so incomplete that it doesn't address modern questions that we can be liberated to move forward and to honor those traditions for bringing us here but to recognize that we actually have to move forward with something more potent and up to date which is not not easy because you can't just take the scientific truth of the moment and implement a lot of it isn't even right it's yeah it's also not that easy to rewrite a fairy tale you know and I'm some of these fairy tales that people are trying to rewrite in modern times are perhaps fifteen thousand years old and people think well we can just update that so that the modern version will be better it turns out that that's very very difficult and there's another I'm gonna play devil's advocate against my own position here no because I say well the religious texts encode profound and evolutionarily determined truths that are universal okay which religious texts right well because you might say well all of them but then that means that obscures the important differences between the traditions and I'm by no means certain that all of them do you know so I'm going to stick my neck way the hell out because why not it isn't obvious to me that Islam does because I it's very difficult for me to see that the totalizing nature of Islam doesn't make it unique among religions so now good so well there's that out on the tape if you don't mind but isn't the issue using the word truth because we can say true we could use tradition and wisdom and we're okay but as soon as we start saying truth then then we run into problems I mean and even when you're talking about porcupines well you talk about what would you say metaphorical truth versus look it's not true it's real simple just don't go near the porcupine teach the kid to not go near the porcupine because porcupine quills are dangerous they get stuck in you they're really dangerous can they throw it out you know they cannot but just stay clear of them because you don't want them to somehow another get in touch with your body there's no truth in that they can throw their quills at you you benefit from being particularly aware of the dangers of their quills but if you tell a kid that they can throw their quills and so therefore the kid stays clear of them here's a faulty assumption in his head you're lying to them for their own protection and I was not good I wouldn't do it I think the same thing could be said of everything happens for a reason well here's the problem we don't know if everything happens for a reason maybe when you die you go to some auditing room and they go well you know it's all just a part of some gigantic algorithm that you're impossible it's impossible for you to understand due to your limited processing power of the human brain you're dealing with some simian sort of complex geometry that's really just design to keep your body move you can keep you alive and spread your genetics so that you can eventually evolve to the point when you're a god well first of all I I have kids I would write on them that a porcupine I'm sure he's wills but how do I use the word truth though ah because well the question is why do people tell you that a porcupine can throw its quills I don't think they do oh they do well if they do they don't know any better right or they're liars right and so all I'm saying is that actually that is likely to be the product of selection in other words that those people who had encoded that they do throw their quills have an advantage it's not the way I wouldn't do it and for exactly the reason that you point out which is if you give a child the wrong model of a porcupine I don't know whether a porcupine is liable to be the Gateway to some more important question but if it were you've just steered the kid wrong well something here's part of the problem and this is part of but and this is a really big problem there's two things I guess that were brought up by what you described and the first is the terminology of truth now Harris's claim with regards to my utilization of truth was that I was absconded with the definition of truth and in false matter but he was wrong because the idea of truth is much older than the idea of objective truth and the original notion of truth wasn't objective true it was like the arrow flies straight and true right it meant something like reliably reliably on its way to the appropriate destination something like that and when Christ said I am the truth in the way what I can't remember either yes yes the truth he was talking about wasn't an objective truth so Sam's idea that I had somehow you know taken the idea of truth that was actually objective all along and done something crooked with it is just wrong it's wrong well there's no truth can have multiple definitions well that maybe there was that that's the issue and that's exactly what we're what we're trying to get out here is like there's to me there's two kinds of truth and and they may be they may be commensurate you may be able to stack them on top of one another but now and then they dissociate and this is actually what what what Brett was referring to as well so so and this is where it gets so complicated that I can barely manage it there's a there's the truth that manifests itself in the manner in which you act and there's the truth that manifests itself as a representation of the objective world and sometimes both those truths are stacked on top of each other and sometimes they're not so like I could give you a piece of wisdom that would work well if you acted it out that carried within it an inaccurate representation of part of the objective world and you could say well maybe that's actually the case with the biblical stories because if you read them as science they don't read well so let's take malaria as a good example malaria the root of the word is mal area bad air right malaria is not transmitted by bad air to transmitted by mosquitoes that live in places where you might think the air is bad so the point is it's part of the way there yeah that's a good one and that also gets see there's another weird distinction here and that I was trying to draw with Sam but that's a really tricky one and we ordered in because we started to talk about pragmatism but there's also something like the truth of a description and the truth of a tool and my sense is that people's fundamental truths are too alike we use them to function properly in the world and you could say well a sharp axe is more true than a dull axe and actually you can use the word true in that sense that actually isn't appropriate appropriate use of the word there there are tool truths and there are objective fact truth now and in the optimal circumstance those map on to each other but we're not smart enough often to make the map on to each other because we just don't know enough and there are lots of truths that we have that portray the objective world improperly that are still true is this problem using the term true when sometimes you should use the term fact like yes one plus one is two that is a fact one plus one is two is also true you throw some water on a match that is and it will go out that's a fact yes well as I see it at least there is this overarching truth the one that sam harris was pointing to the one i think you're pointing to also and the one i i'm imagining we all subscribe to sure right there is the testable truth that reveals itself in the laboratory were in a careful experiment in the field and that really is the top level truth but then there are the truths you can't speak yet so let's take the word filth from from the old testament okay filth means [ __ ] right you're not supposed to [ __ ] in camp because god finds it offensive now the problem is the germ theory of disease doesn't come about for thousands of years after that truth was written that truth keeps you from infecting people long before you can ever explain that there are microbes that grow in human [ __ ] that are a particular danger to your population so the point is would you rather be held back to the place where you can actually describe the literal underpinnings of what's going on or do you want to be liberated to say something that actually results in an improvement in health before you know literally thousands of years before anybody had any idea that it was microbes at the root of this yes no need to figure out so an elaboration of that would be something like human beings needed to figure out how to act without dying before they could understand the nature of the world well enough to justify that right and somebody might be crazy now that we do have the germ theory of disease to to amplify that original crude version of the truth or that crude approximation of what you need to believe in order to behave safely there's no reason for that truth to be promoted in fact you don't hear people describing this part of the Old Testament relevant right and this is probably all why dietary restrictions were in the Old Testament as well shellfish red tide eating pigs trichinosis there's a lot of a lot of issues that go along with that yeah well there is some intermingling perhaps of hygienic concerns with also the desire for the groups to distinguish themselves from other groups right because you can you can unite your group quite tightly by dietary restrictions so um back to your point about terminology you know we could we could do something like fact and wisdom you know you say truth that's the overarching category and then that divides into fact and wisdom and what you want optimally is you want the facts and the wisdom to be one not one to one but often they're not and if you find wisdom where the facts aren't laid right out you don't just get to throw away the wisdom which is what I think happens in the case of people like Dawkins and Harris and Harris makes another sleight-of-hand move which I don't like which is that he thinks so let's say except for just a second the wisdom fact distinction he would say well the fact is the thing and the wisdom is a second order derivation of that you can ground the wisdom in the fact and I don't believe that and I don't think that he has he I don't think that he has any real justification for that claim and this is something by grounding the wisdom in the fact he thinks if you know the facts clearly enough you'll know how to act well that's not necessarily true well there's ways to act with that are within your best interest and then there's ways to act that are within the interest of all the people around you've been might not serve you that well well this diction is where ethics come right or right where the consequences are delayed yes some number of generations sure thing like yes well that's a big problem and right so so Sam acts as if the process of mac mapping facts onto action is simple if we just got the facts right but but it's the weakest part of his argument and we never ever got to that for a variety of reasons but part of the reason it's weak is okay well there's like an infinite number of facts man which so let's say you're standing in front of a field and you're looking at the field the field does not tell you how to walk through it there's a million ways through the field and matter how many facts about the field you aggregate you're not going to be able to determine the appropriate path by aggregating those facts so it's that's and that that's a problem that I don't think Sam is willing to take seriously and well I think there are two problems tangled up here one of them is there's a question of re is one individual supposed to have all of the facts and navigate based on on that sort of the rationality community version of things or does you know the practical truth is we can't all be experts in everything and so we have to go along with you know guides to our behavior that are approximate and that that's inherent and then there's a question about civilization civilization should be guided by our best understanding of what's actually true but with an understanding that we don't have a complete map of a lot of stuff and so I think what you're pointing at is that there is wisdom that has been handed to us that is not such that we can just simply say oh here's the nugget at the center of it and we need to preserve that thing because we don't necessarily know what it's doing yeah which is you know that's this is dangerous because some of what it's doing may not be acceptable well and think about let's look at the wisdom end of things for a minute you talk you've alluded a little earlier to like iterations and and and about the fact that things are iterated across time and that's something that works now might fail dreadfully in a month or two months so so here's here's what something has to be like to be wise let's say well first of all let's say it would be good if as it was in accordance with the facts but we'll leave that aside for now it has to work if you operate according to the wisdom principle whatever it is it has to work in the world but then it has to work in a world that allows you to maintain your relationships with people in the world right so it's all of a sudden this wisdom thing is something that's not only constrained by let's call it objective reality but it's constrained by the necessity of a social contract a functional social contract so you're only able to you're only allowed to put forward actions in the world that would be of benefit to you if they simultaneously don't undermine the structure within which you live okay and then there's a game theory element to that which is if it's wise then it works in the world so that'd be the constraint of objective reality but then it works for you now and the you that'll be in a week and the you that'll be in a month and it works for you and your family and it works for you and your family and society and it works in a way that those things all line up to be iterated across time and so this this is actually they're all so the solution is for and I'd really like to hear what you think about this I think this is the solution to the postmodern conundrum because the post modernists bless their heart so we'll give the devil his due say well the problem is there's an infinite number of interpretations of a finite set of facts and the right response to that is oh oh that's true that's true that's not good and that's why the postmodern to say well you can't agree on a canonical interpretation of a great piece of literature because the number of potential interpretations are infinite and so then they say well why should we settle on any one interpretation then why should we privilege one over another and then they say well that's all power games and so that's our you got to take that seriously but what they missed and this is a big deal it's a big deal I think is this idea of ethical constraint it's like yes there's a landscape of potentially infinite interpretations but hardly any of them will work in the real world and hardly any of them will work in the real world in a way that doesn't get you killed by other people or doom you because of your own stupidity to failure across time and so the landscape of interpretation is almost infinite but the landscape of applicable interpretation functional interpretation is unbelievably constrained and I think that constraint system is what we regard as ethics it's something like that well at some level stories continue through time for a reason you know good stories continue for a long you know the Odyssey is with us for some reason and we so there is a scientific reason or a scientifically investigative reason why the Odyssey has been durable we may not know it but it's a in principle it's a question you could investigate so I guess yeah at the end of the day the problem with the postmodernist is that they have a point the point is perception gets in the way of anything we wish to do objectively but that point only takes you so far and that's why they turned to Marx's as far as I can tell because what happens with the postmodernist as they say oh there's an infinite number of interpretations and then the human part of them goes okay well what am I supposed to do next then since there's an infinite number of choices and the postmodernist says well my theory can't account for that and then they say well back to Marxism and so that's why I think there's this unholy alliance between the post modernists and the neo-marxists is because post-modernism is a is a dead end from the perspective of applicable wisdom it leaves you bereft and nihilistic and that's not good because people can't exist without a purpose and so they sneak the Marxism through the back door and and jump into this power landscape for the reasons that we discussed earlier you really think that it's because of an infinite number of possibilities interpretating things because I've always felt that it was really just a response to capitalism they feel that capitalism is a very negative aspect of our culture and society and that there's got to be some sort of an alternative Marxism is a clearly defined alternative that other people have subscribed to in the past you could point to it it's a structure that's already already set up and it's romanticized and I think they adopt it for that reason because it has a socialist aspects attached to it and they looked at socialism as it's some sort of a thing that regards equality and you know it's some sort of an egalitarian approach well it's okay so we'd have to take two things apart we'd have to take Marxism slash neo-marxist Marxism and post-modernism apart so we could do that historically and I would say that although there is a reason for post-modernism which is the reason we just discussed that the the landscape the infinite landscape of interpretation problem it's a real problem if you look at it historically post-modernism actually grew out of Marxism and so what what happened is that the Marxists laid out their their their theory about the human social environment being composed of a power struggle between the privileged and the underprivileged right the rich and the poor and in its initial phases and that's a story that's partially true and it's got a lot of motive power like the motive power is the romantic motive power that you just described I get to be on the side of the oppressed I get to be a war for what's right there's the resentment element which is that son-of-a-bitch has more than me so let's cut them off at the knees which manifested itself brutally in the Soviet Union and then there's the ideological totality issue which gives people a sense of security that took a vicious hit by it by the late 1960s because the murderous nosov Marxism had been clearly laid out as a doctrine and that opened the door to this move by by mostly French intellectuals to to develop the postmodern philosophy which has these advantages which we described but but also to use that as a screening tactic for allowing Marxism to transform into identity politics and so it like it's hard to disentangle all the motivations that are going on in there but there's something about it that's that's truly intellectually pathological because you don't get to be a postmodernist and a Marxist you actually technically cannot be both of those things at the same time and the fact that most people are both of those things at the same time raises the specter of just exactly what their motivation is and then I would say it's this resentment driven anti capitalism there's reasons to criticize capitalism obviously but it's this underground resentment driven anti capitalism that I think is one of the fundamental motivators well if I can if I can add a couple things the risk of alienating my last few friends so here's the thing what's up with with Marxism is a there's a lot in marx critique of capitalism that's actually right and so that kind of gets you through the door once you start looking at the analysis and then there's the prescription which is toxic but it's not obvious why it's toxic in other words it's a pretty good story that doesn't happen to function and so people gravitate to it because the story is moderately compelling it's not game theoretically functional or stable or viable and it does descend into this kind of you know inevitable grave violence and so we know that now historically it's not just a theoretical issue we've now seen enough of it to know that there's a fact but nonetheless the fact that there are people telling the story to kids who don't yet know what to do with something that sounds like it might be true is very dangerous if you don't mind break it down as to why it goes bad well I mean it's sort of a tired critique but I happen to think it's about right which is that it just does not take account of what the human being is and what makes society function spoken like a true fascist well I think it might be related back to ok so let's go back to the idea that Marx had something to say ok and we could clarify that a little bit so here's a problem this is the problem that it seems to emerge as the function of some really fundamental force that we don't quite understand and that's this phenomena that I've been referring to as the Pareto distribution ok so here's the here's the situation if you look at any creative endeavor that human beings engage in so that would be an endeavor where there's variability and individual production it doesn't matter what it is here's what happens people compete to produce whatever that is and almost everybody produces zero they lose completely a small minority are a tiny bit successful and a hyper minority are insanely successful and so the Pareto distribution for and the Pareto distribution is is the what geometric graph representation of that phenomena and so here's how it manifests itself if you have ten thousand people a hundred of them have half the money so the rule is the square root of the number of people under consideration have half of whatever it is that's under consideration so this works everywhere so if you took a hundred classical composers ten of them produce half the music that's played and then if you take the ten composers and you take a thousand of their songs thirty of those songs which is the square root of a thousand roughly speaking are played fifty percent of the time and so there's this underlying natural law which is it's expressed as the Matthieu principle which is from a New Testament statement the statement is those who have everything more will be given and from those who have nothing everything will be taken it's a vicious statement but it's it's actually here's one of those places where it's actually empirically true this happens everywhere and so what Marx observed was that capital tended to accumulate in the hands of fewer and fewer people and he said that's a flaw of the capitalist system that's wrong it's not a flaw of the capitalist system it is a feature of every single system of production that we know of no matter who set it up and how it operates and so and then now we have a problem because what happens is as soon as you set up a domain of production and you need to because you need things to be produced then you instantly produce a competition and the spoils go disproportionately to a tiny percentage of people so then the quiz yeah so then well so what well so the rest of the people starve or the system becomes unstable because everybody's mad it's like that's a big problem ok so how do human beings fix that well the first thing we did was diversify the number of productive games so you don't get to be NBA basketball star but you know you can run a podcast it's a completely different competitive landscape so we can fractionate the the production landscape and then people who aren't successful in one domain might be successful in others that's create human creativity we're really good at that but the problem with that is you can still get a positive correlation among the successful people you know so because you're so successful for example with your podcast in your YouTube videos your connection network is insane insanely powerful right so you still have this tendency for what's useful and good to be what distributed let's call it inequitably and it's it's it's got the power of a physical law in fact there are people they call themselves econo physicists no one knows that there's a field econo physicists econo physics and they use the same mathematical equations that that represent the propagation of molecules into a gas molecules into a vacuum to describe the manner in which money distributes itself in an economy ok so Marx pointed to a fundamental issue but he said well that's a fault with capitalism it's like no it isn't it's something way more pernicious than that and it's it's something like well when one good thing Institute makes you a little more powerful and attractive and so that fractionally increases the possibility that another good thing will happen to you and then that spirals out of control and you get people who have well they have all the money or they have all the podcast downloads you're in that position you know what is it 1.2 billion like what the hell but it's to those who have more and it's not because there's something oppressive about you it's because you you rode the wave of the Pareto distribution in it and it threw you way that way the hell up into the stratosphere and we don't know what to do about that like should you be sharing your podcast views with the with the oppressed and downtrodden I mean you've well you've got a few billion you could spread the damn things around it's not fair that you're the only one that's being listened to you know it's the same argument and it's a compelling argument because why the hell should you have all that power if you call it power you could call it authority or competence this is not a different argument because no one's asking anyone to download anything in specific no ones no one's compelling anyone to download anything specific you could download whatever you want and if you put more effort in more time and more focus into your work whatever it would be whether it's a podcast or your YouTube videos or whatever if people enjoy it they gravitate towards it and then over time it exponentially increases the amount of people that are exposed to well this is why I think that the and this is the other problem with the Marxist perspective is that and the post modernists in particular like they conflate power competence and authority unfairly now your point it's sort of the point of free marketers you're saying well look all I'm doing is offering a product I'm not compelling anyone it's a quality product or at least as far as the market is concerned it is if it turns out that everyone wants that well what's wrong with that and I'm not disagreeing with that argument in the least but but it's the problem is it doesn't it doesn't fix the problem like the problem with money let's say the problem is is that if you let a monetary system run all the money ends up in the hands of a very few number of people and you're saying this is also with any sort of creative it any creative endeavor man now what is wrong like I think the real issue would be to maximize potential output or maximize the amount of successful people you have to figure out what's don't concentrate on what people are doing right concentrate on what people are doing wrong like what why what are the people doing wrong that are failing whether in any crew that's why we put together just to be one at all that's partly why we put together the Future authoring program because we are trying to figure out what made people successful and one of the things that makes people successful is they specify a target and then aim at it right because if you're all over the place in a relatively functional society like ours we know what predicts success IQ and conscientiousness are the biggest predictors of success now there's a genetic lottery thing going on there that's kind of rough but it does say that smart people who work hard are disproportionately likely to succeed and then you might also say well you want to remove the impediments from people who have those capabilities so that they can move forward and one one of the predictors of success as well is to decide what your success is going to be and then work hard in that direction and that actually works so I think that is a very useful thing to do and that's well like I said that's partly why we've been working in that direction so but it there's other problems that it doesn't still still doesn't solve like one of them is if you don't have any money it's really hard to get some like once you have some it's not so hard to get some more all right but if you're at zero Jesus man you're in this you're in the reverse situation mm-hmm you're poor you don't have anything no one wants to talk to you you can't get out of it because you're too poor to get out of it you know you're penalized by the economic system because you can't even afford to start playing the game you're stuck at zero you're stuck at zero and you can't get out and the revolutionary types you know they go to the people who are stuck at zero and they say hey you're stuck at zero why don't you burn the whole goddamn thing to the ground right because maybe in the next iteration you won't be stuck at zero and for young men that's a hell of a call right because they're already let's call them expendable biologically and that makes them more adventurous and risk-taking if someone says and maybe that's why they wear the Che Guevara t-shirt it's like hey I'm stuck at zero well I'd rather be with the romantic who's burning the whole thing to the ground than to just you know to stay locked in my immobile position right but that's was where massive amounts of creativity come from because of that struggle massive amounts of innovation massive amounts of people who have visions because you're not living off of some sort of trust fund you know you you have real risk in real danger and you have a real concern about your future where someone who has no concerns whatsoever and their future is carved in stone they could do whatever they want buy a new Ferrari every year that they're not gonna have nearly the amount of motivation as the poor person yeah.well that may be why family fortunes tend to only last three generations yes and you know you're saying well why don't you take a look at the advantages of zero and one of the advantages is there is that you're driven by brute necessity and that can really be motivating and that's I think why why first the children of first generation immigrants often do so well yes you know they're driven by necessity and it's risk so yes agreed however I would still say you know the zero issue is there are levels of absolute privation that are so intense yes that all the goodwill in the world won't get you out of zero right if you're living in a third-world country in some very small village with no way out whatsoever that is the zero of zero right Tanzania on the on the river people getting eaten by crocodiles in your village you're [ __ ] yes zero is like a magnet yeah just hold yeah it's a black hole having a little very little maybe that motivational state actually generative right there's a difference and then what's really bizarre is those people in that village might be happier than the people who live in a gated community in Beverly Hills well I wanted to I wanted to come back to this your point about about whether we should be concentrating on what you're doing right versus what you're doing wrong both of those will work and you should actually be doing both of them simultaneously you'll you'll maximize faster but the real problem is that the system in which we concentrate on what you're doing right and what you're doing wrong and supposedly you get paid for some integration of those things is that we don't we don't understand what we are wired to produce evolutionarily right we think we all operate they the idea that we're pursuing some state of happiness or satisfaction and you know we we think we know what's going to get it for us and maybe it's inventing something and then then you'll be happy but it's a trap the fact is what we are wired to do is to discover opportunities and then when we discover an opportunity it benefits the population that we come from and we turn that discovery into our more mouths to feed or more consumption and we restore the state of privation right we restore the state in which people don't have enough and so if you really wanted to fix this problem if you wanted to address the problems that communism thinks its solving but fails too you have to engineer around this this feature of human beings where we pursue new opportunities and as soon as we find a new opportunity instead of figuring out a way to stabilize the benefits so that it results in a stable sense of satisfaction for example we fall all over ourselves to turn it into more of the same because of course that's how we got here can you give me example which mean buzz I'm sure so let's look at something like the let's imagine an ancient farmer ancient farmer has a piece of land and that piece of land will support a certain number of people with the level of technology that the farmer is utilizing somehow the farmer ends up either thinking of or discovering by watching somebody else a wheel now that farmer has a technology that allows him or however many people are working that farm to produce that much more food with no more labor because the wheel allows you to transport more for example at one time so now that same piece of land can support more people because it can be more efficiently farmed that could be stabilized as a kind of success in other words that you could turn the extra the surplus into a kind of persistent luxury yeah a luxury but I mean I don't even luxury is a little bit too trivial sounding you could turn it into a space where you use that to to investigate important stuff or you could turn it into more mouths to feed in which case as soon as you've produced those extra mouths that are now consuming the output of that farm now the level of you know fear of starvation is right back where it was mm-hmm and so so so that's more money more problems yeah essentially I mean you know well it used to be that we produced more people now we produce a greater quest for consumption right but if we were smart what we would do is we would think about the problem of how to take the gains that come from not being bumped up at the limits of a system and turn them into what we value all right we've we've done some of that I mean because so we've done some of that because as what do they say a rising tide lifts all ships and there's certainly some truth in that the overall standard of living has gone up so stupendously since 1895 that it's an absolute miracle so we've done some of that so there's another issue back to Marx let's say there's another issue that we have we can't contend with and one of those might be well imagine that in order for society to progress you have to allow the individual to compete in a relatively untrammeled space so that they can innovate and then imagine that one of the consequences of that innovation is that you get these preeto distributions developing because the innovator or the one who's second in line to the innovator whatever ends up with them with the bulk of the spoils so you might say there's a cost to be paid in inequality for innovation and then you could also say well too much inequality destabilizes things which seems to be quite quite clear so there's room for an intelligent conversation about that right because the lefties say Oh too much inequality and they need to be listened to because the evidence is quite clear if you let the inequality ramp up enough the whole system destabilizes because the people at the bottom think [ __ ] it we'll just we'll just flip the system upside down right no one wants that like right-wing conservatives don't want that so because you could make a Republican argument say don't let the inequality in your neighborhood out of hand because the crime rate will skyrocket and the empirical evidence on that is overwhelmingly strong inequality drives crime now you can say you can argue about why but the fact that it does is that's not disputable so we can have an intelligent discussion between the left and the right and the discussion would go something like this you need innovation you pay for innovation with inequality but you need to bind inequality because if it's too intense then things destabilize it's like okay we could agree on that we've got the parameters set now we have to now we have to start thinking very carefully through how to do the redistribution issue and we don't know how to do that so you might say well we have a guaranteed annual income for people which i think is a horrible solution by the way but it addresses the right problem the problem is is that we're hyper productive but the spoils go to those at the top and some of those resources need to be funneled down to the people who have zero so that they have an opportunity to at least get to the point where they can innovate and so the bloody whole bloody thing doesn't wobble and fall and we could we and I would say in some sense that's what the political discussion is about but we we've we've skittered off into these radical oversimplifications which is something like well if if you have more than another person you're an oppressor and you're evil and if you have less it's because you're virtuous and victimized and that's just a non-starter so you think that there's a real problem with like something like a universal basic income well I think the idea that the solution is a basic income is not a good idea because I think the problem is deeper than that I I don't think the fundamental problem is that people don't have enough money I think the fundamental problem is that human beings in some sense are beasts of burden and if they're not given if they're not provided with a place where they can accept social responsibility social and individual responsibility in an honourable manner they degenerate and die but that's the opiate crisis in West right now like men need men who are men don't need money they need function and we've got a problem one of the problems is for example here here's an ugly stat I think I told you this once before it's illegal to induct anyone into the Armed Forces if they have an IQ of less than 83 and the reason for that is the you know the armed force despite having every reason to draw the contradictory conclusion has decided that there isn't a single thing that you can be trained to do in the military if you have an IQ of less than 83 that isn't positively counterproductive that's ten percent of the population and we're producing a culture that's very cognitively complex like what the hell are you gonna do if you can't use a computer like if you can use a computer you're at least in the game if you can really use one you're hyper powerful if you're not literate enough to use a computer you're at zero ten percent of the population the Conservatives say well there's a job for everyone if they just worked hard enough it's like ah no and increasingly no and the Liberals say well everyone's basically the same and you can train anyone to do anything it's like no you can't yeah I want to go back to the inequality point here because if you look at this biologically actually I think it gave reveals a lot why are we I mean we know from from careful study that people are motivated by the degree of inequality more than they are the the absolute level of well-being that they have and there's a very good it's tragic but a very good evolutionary reason for this which is if you are working on some piece of land and your neighbor has the adjacent piece of land and they're doing twice as well as you it's because they know something you don't right and so becoming focused on what they're doing that you're not doing is a rational thing to spend your time on so you can figure out what it is that they know that you don't in the modern environment this is a catastrophe because who are your neighbors well you've got some box sitting on the wall of your living room that has a totally artificial portrait of other people who may be much wealthier than you and it's broadcasting in as if you're looking in their window right in the adjacent house and so you think you you being triggered to think that you're doing something wrong that you might fix when in fact the solution may not be first of all the person on the other side of that screen may not be for real but even if they are they're not living in the same environment as you the technology is interfacing with with our brains badly but so we have of the perception of massive inequality economically we do have massive inequality you're arguing that the solution to this involves some sort of massive redistribution but nonetheless redistribution is wildly unpopular for various reasons and so what we've got now is a situation this is speculative but what's really happening is that austerity is being used as a threat to keep people who would otherwise rebel against the inequality in line and my fear about this is that this is exactly the conditions that are going to trigger that tribal population against population mayhem that we were talking about at the beginning of this conversation that when people have the sense that the the bursts of growth that they were experiencing is now over the natural response is to turn on those who are not as powerful and take their stuff that this is a totally indefensible but nonetheless biological pattern of history and that if we want to avoid that we have to stop sending the signals that trigger us to imagine that we've just run to the limit of the opportunity that we had discovered and it is now time to look and see who can't defend their positions how are we sending these signals well by basically failing to provide enough well-being that people's perception of the inequality is reduced to a tolerable level well the argument for universal basic income certainly certainly a strong one and I you know it's also it's also a good argument for equality of opportunity right because people are people are actually not as resentful about the success of others as you might expect they're resentful about it if they feel that the game is fixed mmm but they're also willing to consider the game long term so lots of people will say look like I'm stuck in not zero I'm stuck at one but my kids might make it to four and that's good enough and that's being the American dream right and that's and that's a really high power antidote to inequality it's like well yeah there's some inequality we need it to keep the generative mechanism going but the is fair and you can play it too and there's some reasonable probability that either you or someone you love will be successful so that so it has to be a straight game and that's why ethics is so important to keep this landscape stable people can't play crooked games and the rich shouldn't be fixing the game if they want to hold on to their money and the problem is is that some of them although not all some of them are fixing the game and no one's happy about that and no wonder you know and and I guess that was evidenced to some degree by the 2008 collapse because it seemed and and I'm just as uninformed as the next person so I'm I'm what I'm capable of commenting on this it seems from the outside that the rich disproportionately benefited from the restabilization of the economic system and people are not happy about that and they shouldn't be happy about that because it indicates that there's something fundamentally rotten about the game so you could say well maybe people can tolerate necessary inequality if the game isn't raped and so that's why everybody has to act in a manner that indicates that the game isn't rigged and that means they can't rig it that's really what it means so and so we're also being driven into this inequality corner by I would say by the post modernists and the neo-marxists because they say this is the pernicious thing they say well the reason that some people have more than others is because every hierarchy is based on arbitrary power and they're all oppressors and the reason they have the money is because they stole it from you and there's some truth in that because there are some criminals but when you get to the point where you fail to distinguish the productive people from the criminals which is exactly what happened in the 1920s in the Soviet Union you better bloody well won't watch out because when you radically make things egalitarian you're gonna wipe out all your productive people and then you're gonna starve and so that's that's one of the doomed end scenarios that awaits us if this idiot process of polarization continues and what I find reprehensible about the universities and you're tangled up right up to your neck in this is that the universities are actively agitating to produce people who believe that all inequality is due to oppression and power and that's just well first of all it's technically wrong but why is that so you guys both operate in that system so well here's the problem no as far as I know nobody has properly studied the question of what fraction of the economy is actually crooked rent-seeking right not productive and I fear that the answer to that question is that it's an awful large fraction of the economy not because of some conspiracy but because opportunity is finite but con games aren't and so anybody who can find a mechanism for transferring wealth from somebody else for doing nothing finds that mechanism and that thing is is that were present whereas discovering the next big thing that's actually productive is you know something that goes along and fits and starts and so if we were I mean really you've described it very well we've got a battle between two caricatures of what's true right Arthur either the market is wonderful and it's producing great stuff with very little corruption or everything that makes people unequal is the result of corruption both of these things are wrong right markets are marvelous engines for figuring out how to do something really well they're brilliant at this right and so people who see that fall in love with it understandably because they're so good at it but what they're terrible at is telling you what you should want or what you should do right if people tell markets here's what we would like to accomplish and then the markets tell us well how do we accomplish that best that would be a very viable system that would not result in massive rent-seeking resulting in everybody feeling that all of their misfortunes are the result of a rigged game which is so massively rigged that when they check they see yes that is actually a large large to large extent what we're suffering from but they want to throw the baby out with the bathwater and so they want to throw out markets entirely which you know it would be a terrible mistake it's a it's a you asked you why this has happened in the universities and like that I think it's one of these runaway positive feedback processes you know the universities start to tilt hard to the left in the 60s and that just went out of control and now we're at the point where that's the dominant force and why is probably another manifestation of one of these preeto principles it was like well at some point there's enough left he's hired so that the probability that they're only going to hire people equally as left or greater starts to reach 100% and then you iterate that across a couple of generations and you get no conservatives which is more or less the situation say in the humanities and most of the social sciences and it sort of looks like a conspiracy but it doesn't mean that anyone is actually planning it although there are conscious attempts also to silence conservative voices let's say and then that's also driven by this postmodern ethos no neo-marxist ethos I would say that says that all of the right the moral right is on the side of the left you know and so it's the combination of those two things there's more things I think I often often think comically that if you paid sociology professors three times as much the probability that they would be anti-capitalist would decline precipitously like I think a lot of it's driven because there's a lot of smart people in academia and they're underpaid relative to their intelligence hmm so and that doesn't make them happy so they get bitter and resentful about that and they think well there's these goddamn bankers who are hauling in 20 million dollars a year and Here I am hardly struggling but here I am struggling comparatively and that's the issue is comparatively on a hundred thousand dollars a year one hundred and twenty thousand dollars a year you know I look at that and I think well whatever it doesn't matter but there's a like my colleagues are often angry with me because I do work with the business school you know and I also have a business are not anti-capitalist in the least but I it's just dumbfounding to me because they'll come up to me and say well are you so sure that you should be working with the business school and I think what bloody planet are you from - positive question like that's all businessmen are evil it's like really that's the level of your sophistication this is really an argument that's been presented to you that businessmen are evil well they don't come out and say that but they certainly questioned my motivations for example in informing ties with the Business School like what do they say about it they say exactly that they questioned my ethics about forming ties with the business school so many but they don't give you any reasons your supposed the reason supposed to be self evident Joe you know so let's give this argument it's do I mean I don't buy this argument but but nonetheless let's let's not let's not caricature yes that's good in an absolutely free market which is not what we have but we have something that tends in that direction in an absolutely free market if you compete two individuals one of whom is completely amoral will embrace any opportunity if it makes a profit no matter what it is and the other individual has some limit to what they will do well then there's no question who wins if we give this experiment long enough period the individual who will do anything will out-compete the individual with moral limits because it's depend on what the game is though because now you'll find out that you have no moral limits then they're going to remove themselves from your market unfortunately not and no here's the I know it seems like that and in any given round that's true okay but to the extent that what you're saying is to the extent that people police their purchasing and they will you know they will stop using uber if uber is ethically compromised for example well then the point is well what's the game the game is to figure out which things are being monitored and not do any of the unethical things that are being monitored but to do all of the unethical things that aren't being monitored and so the individual who is perceiving which things they can get away with has an advantage and a Psychopaths advantage well I don't even want to call it the psychopath advantage right what this is is that a market will train you to do this if it is unregulated and the best that the ethically that the ethically restrained person can do is compete dead even they have no way of getting ahead because the person that is completely free the the amoral business actor has the ability to do anything that the constrained actor has does this depend entirely upon what the battlefield is not really there's there's sort of one exception and that exception is people who have done something that has suddenly put them in a powerful position right so like tech people write tech people who have skyrocketed as a result of having innovated the next big thing have not been through the markets training them to discover the the landscape of what isn't being monitored that you can make a profit that's one of the fascinating things about tech people in general is that these gigantic tech corporations almost all lean left well the gigantic tech corporations lean left that's true on the other hand I mean I hate to say it but think about how Google started right don't don't be evil right I think they actually meant that right right and the thing is don't be evil is what it sounds like when you haven't been trained by the market to have to do whatever you have to do to beat your competition you've just come up with the great search engine and suddenly you're on top of the world but over time what happens that entity is now exposed to competition from a bunch of other entities that increasingly will find an advantage in being freer to do questionable stuff and so what it does is it forces an entity like Google to evolve in the direction of a morality so now don't kind of hang with China Google yeah Google wanted to expand into China and so you know they had to make a deal with the devil so to speak right and they had accept censorship they will find ways to rationalize everything because to not rationalize that which their competitors can avail themselves of would be to perish and study issues was there was all sorts of fake Google going on just like they have fake Apple stores in China they don't have the same sort of copyright laws that we have and you can essentially plagiarize anything you want when Brett you you also said that I shouldn't make a straw man of the anti business argument of my peers and there's another way that I shouldn't make a straw man of it like despite the fact that I'm not anti-capitalist I don't believe that every entity is a business either and one of the things that has happened to universities that has actually they pathologized in a number of dimensions but they've also pathologized along the business dimension as the administrators have become increasingly trained or drawn from the ranks of business managers because a university is actually not a business it's a like a church isn't a business there are organizations that aren't businesses that you can't just cram into the free market structure willy-nilly and so my colleagues also object to the to the transformation of the university into a business entity run by profit seeking MBAs and they should object to that because that's not what the institution is for so there are reasons for them to be skeptical say of my association with the business school that aren't merely a reflection of a simplistic anti-capitalist ideology oh there are lots of there are lots of things that are not they have no immunity to contact with the market right what has happened to the university system is that markets have pushed it in all kinds of directions that are not healthy for the mission of the Academy and this is also true you know journalism isn't well done in a market either right journalism done in a market ends up telling you what you want to hear not what you need to know so anyway markets are wonderful but there's certain things they shouldn't be allowed to touch and there are certain things that they shouldn't do like tell us what to want right they're not there's no magic principle by which a market knows what's healthy and what you know you might crayon that also then brings us back to another part of the conservative liberal left dilemma which is well you know to direct the market means to impose the heavy hand of the state and its potential pathologies on the market but to leave it alone completely means that it wanders randomly through through an indeterminate landscape and and I guess part of the issue there too is it's sort of like well how do we how do we how do we properly balance for foresight and planning which you'd think would have some role in in the construction of large-scale states it's like well what do we want the landscape to look like how do we balance that with the sort of comprehensive computer that the market allows and of course the answer to that is we have political discussions about it all the time that are untrammeled so that we can adjust the ratio between those two things as necessary so again that's a that's a REIT that's a argument on the side of free speech yeah I mean you know really it couldn't be more important the real answer is that both failures are frightening right I mean you really don't want a state nannying you and over regulating the market and taking the magic out of it and you don't want the completely unregulated landscape where the market you know starts probing the minds of your children and figuring out how to sell them things that they don't have any ability to resist right you need to figure out what that path is and it's not easy but you can't do it in a landscape where you can't talk about the questions and this brings us the censorship doesn't it because this is a real issue with the marketplace of free ideas when you're talking about whether it's Google or YouTube or whoever might be imposing their own morality and their own ideas on what you should and should not be able to discuss and what should and should not be monetized you're essentially imposing these limits these look I've read once and it's a very good point that freedom breeds inequality because you're free to put as much effort as you'd like into something and you're gonna get in equal results and that if you are truly free in a free world some people are gonna do far better than others and just based on their own input just based on their effort just based on the the amount of focus and dedication they have it is very in equal you know I I know many people that are far more dedicated than other people that I know and they do better yeah well that's that that's well but rest by the empirical literature yes well I mentioned earlier that the two best predictors of long-term success are intelligence and conscientiousness and what intelligence is probably something like the number of credible operations that you can manifest in a given period of time it's something like speed now it's not only that but it speeds a big part of it so if what you're doing is working and you can do it faster that works better okay that's pretty damn straightforward and the next thing is well conscientiousness well conscientiousness would be something like how many of those cycles of effort are devoted to that specific task and it turns out that if there's a relationship between the effort and task success more effort is better but and so I can give you some indication of the power of that so if you have good measures of conscientiousness and IQ you can predict someone's success in the competitive landscape with a correlation of about 0.6 and what that would mean is imagine that you tried to pick people you just said randomly you're going to be a success in the top half of the successful people say and you're gonna be in the bottom half you'd have a fifty four fifty percent chance of do of making that selection correctly if you did it randomly if you did it informed by the results of a good cognitive test and a conscientious test you'd be right eighty-five percent of the time so you can say with 85 percent accurately accuracy which of two people would be more likely to be in the top fifty percent so it's a whopping effect and it's actually some validation for the essential integrity of our system because we hope given that it's essentially an open meritocracy that smarter hard-working people would do better and they do now other factors apply corruption for example lots of factors apply I mean for one thing wrapped up in IQ is a big question which is how much of the differences in IQ that exists is democratized law that is to say how much of this is the result of environments that aren't enriching or there's lead in the water or who knows what not enough vitamins right my my sense actually my intuition based on what I know biologically is that a huge fraction maybe all of it but a huge fraction of differences in IQ is actually could be generalized and that's part of equal opportunity it's not an easy opportunity Tessa mystic about that and that's partly because I mean maybe because I spent a lot of because I'm interested in the amelioration of differences you know so for example that's why I built this future authoring program it's like hey if we can figure out how to make people more effective well let's do it so I scoured the literature on on IQ enhancement and it's bloody dismal man when it's rough it's very very difficult to put two a cognitive training program like some things have worked in a major way like the fact that people aren't starving has wiped out has moved the bottom of the IQ distribution way up over the last hundred years that's been like a walloping success but a lot of the things that we hoped would work like head starts a good example of that you know Head Start was part of the American war on poverty and the idea was you'd give you know deprived deprived kids leg up early before they hit school and start training them cognitively earlier and the hope was that you'd get a pre dough thing going where they'd be a little smarter in kindergarten and then they'd do a little better in grade one and that would make them do even more better in grade two more better do better than grade two but what happened what happened was that the kids who went through Head Start actually did get a cognitive jump on their competitors but all the other kids caught up by grade six and by grade six there was absolutely no effect whatsoever of the training program left now Head Start did have a couple of benefits one was fewer teenage pregnancies and fewer dropouts but that was probably because the kids who got into Head Start were either socialized better or that some fraction of them were removed from for some time from extremely toxic environments just well they happen to be at headstart but it didn't produce the cognitive improvements that everyone right and left were equally hoping for yeah but this is this is in some sense it's a very much an uncontrolled experiment right because a head start starts late yep and B it doesn't insulate you from all of the stuff that comes along with oh yeah yeah growing up in in the deprived neighborhood and so absolutely now also I really don't know what the truth is of of human IQ and there there are some results that suggest some things that are not hopeful on the other hand some of them just simply run afoul with the biological realities of intelligence well here's a good example of of the lack of malleability I mean there's a couple of things the first is that we may have already we may already be at a point of diminishing returns in terms of eliminating individual differences in IQ because everyone has central heating everyone has air-conditioning everyone has enough food everyone has access to the an infinite pool of information so you can say even if you're in a deprived environment but you're smart though intellectual landscape is wide open to you now I'm not saying that's the case but you can make a case for that but the more dismal end of the of the biological research and IQ shows things like if you take identical twins at birth and you put them in adopted out families that the IQ of the adopted out twins is much clearer there it's much closer aid to the original biological parents than to the adoptive parents and be almost perfectly correlated with one another and that correlation increases as the separated twins age so let's say you had a twin you were both adopted out at Birth we test your IQs at four they're fairly close they're closer to your biological parents than your adoptive parents but then we test you every year until you're 60 by the time you're sixty no matter how long you've been separated as as a identical twin your IQ score is so much like you're twins IQ score that it's as if the same person was being tested twice and that's a really complicated one because you think well as twins travel through the environment and accrue different experiences their IQs should diverge like obviously that's not what happens well so there are a lot of places to critique that for one thing there aren't very many identical twins raised apart it's a small sample this is definitely true those identical twins raised apart carry with them whatever effects there were from before they were born for sure the same and so if they you know if they've been damaged by an environment that was unhealthy for their when she was pregnant then they would carry that through and it would show up as as a similar IQ later in life so that one really wants to see that this is true on the positive side not just the negative side so anyway there's I'm not saying that there's nothing to it I'm really saying I think we don't know it's very early in this but what I can say and I think you know a couple of the things that we've settled on in this conversation already are that a an environment in which we can say anything that we can advance any argument and test it it doesn't mean that that argument is protected but that any argument can be advanced and then challenged that that is inherent to navigating and the other thing that I think we would agree on is that equality of opportunity is nothing but good right a fair game with equality of opportunity fair game with equality of opportunity and I guess one thing I would add I don't know if we would agree on this but you were talking about the fact that forget which thing exactly but but that a system based on merit produces inequality because people will freedom yeah that freedom produces inequality that's not necessarily a bad thing but it doesn't mean that we are obligated to ride it all the way down right the fact is we could make people safe to fail right so that you are encouraged to attempt to do something highly valuable and if you if it doesn't work out then the point is you're not homeless this would be the the argument for something like universal basic income thank you your needs are taking care of your food your shelter and now you're free to pursue any ideas that you might have that you would ordinarily be saddled down by your issues with food and well there there are some evidence of that actually happening yeah I'm in Canada now these are multi variable problems and so I'm not claiming that this is true but it's suggestive the rate of entrepreneurial activity in Canada is actually higher than in the United States and one reason for that appears to be the fact that if you're 2527 let's say and you have a family you can quit your job and start a startup and you don't lose your health care mmm right and so now you know the issue of universal healthcare is obviously a very thorny one and it's not like the Canadian system works perfectly but it doesn't work too badly and we've been able to manage it for about 50 years you know we have there's there's artificial scarcity in the system and the delay times are longer than they would be if you flew to the Mayo Clinic and bought your health care like I would say that at the high end the American healthcare system is better than the Canadian healthcare system but I would say at the middle and at the low end the Canadian healthcare system is clearly preferable and it's also cheaper which is quite interesting because you would expect especially if you're a free-market type that you know I know the healthcare system in the u.s. is not precisely free-market but it is more so than it is in Canada yet Americans pay a substantially higher proportion of their overall devote a higher proportion of their overall GDP to personal health care the Canadians do and and the stats are similar if you look at other you know quasi socialized medical there's a great piece on that by Adam ruins everything have you ever seen that television show it's really interesting he breaks down pretty much a lot of different subjects but Bakke breaks down the American healthcare system to pretty much where it went wrong and I just encourage anybody to go watch it because it just shows how they elevated the price of all sorts of different things just sort of make up for you know a lack of profits and it's really it's a really fascinating little piece we are already almost three hours into this so we haven't talked about Hitler oh we kind of we kind of did it kind of have but let me just do you want to lay out your argument about Hitler and then I'll respond to it and I don't know if I do want to I mean I think I actually think that I should stop because I'm kind of at the limits of I'm at the point where the probability that I will say something stupid is starting to increase and I would rather not because just saying the things that I'm trying to say that aren't stupid is dangerous enough yes this isn't the topic where you want to make that connection yes boy is there a more charged subject it's funny that it's charged because as you point out we're pretty much all in agreement about it right I mean you find someone who's not and they're instantly ostracized from society right anybody who has an argument about Genghis Khan I mean there's a really fascinating take on this by Dan Carlin from hardcore history he's talking about the amount of time that has passed since a horrible atrocity and that there are people that will argue that Genghis Khan who killed 10 percent of the world's population changed things so badly that it literally lowered the carbon footprint of the human race while he was alive killed some untold number of millions of people and was responsible for their deaths people look to him and they find all sorts of positive things to attribute to his reign opening up trade with China opening up trade routes although all these different things that people have attributed to him and that someday someone may do the same thing about Adolf Hitler right now well it's impossible he he certainly made that job very difficult with all of the documentation yes especially the films but but let's just say the argument that I want to level I want to be really careful to do this so that it can't be misinterpreted by anybody I'm gonna enjoy watching this if I'm cornered okay so my argument from all those years ago in my my paper that I was did for Bob Trivers that I mentioned at the beginning was that Hitler was a monster as we all know but he was a rational monster that the program that he deployed was not what he said mind you what he said was wrong in many places especially where it gets near Darwinism it's just all tangled and broken but what he did was rational from the point of view of increasing the amount of resource that was dedicated to producing members of his population and so my point is this is the danger that we are in if we allow ourselves to imagine and that Jenna Seidel impulses are more or less gone from the world because we've all assumed we've all agree that they're a bad thing and the point is that they exist in a latent program and at a point when you have austerity as a result of usually a an opportunity that has run its course and has resulted in the population growing to fill that opportunity and suddenly there's nowhere to go because the opportunity has all been absorbed the tendency of people is to figure out who what other population is weak and if that population is across a border then there's some excuse for war and if the population is within the border then it's a genocide but the point is that is an ever-present danger for us okay so I want to clarify one thing I'm sure because this argument was sort of phrased as we have a disagreement about Hitler and I would like to point out that I don't actually disagree with anything that you just said okay if I remain relatively silent I don't want to be seen I don't want it to be seen that the fact that I'm disagreeing with you means or that there is a disagreement means that it's a disagreement about any of that I think the disagreement was something like I said that Hitler was even more evil than we thought he was and you I think correct me if I'm wrong you're pointing out the danger of assuming that you can put Hitler in a he was just a monster box and don't think about it anymore and I would say I agree absolutely with that I mean I've studied Hitler a lot and there's a bunch of things that you can't say about him you can't say he was stupid right you can't say he was without artistic talent you can't say that he was a poor organizer you can't say that he wasn't charismatic you can't say that he did wonders freako Germany's economy in the first part of his reign and and and so it's very necessary when you're if you're dealing intelligently with a true monster that you give the devil his due yeah so I think the thing that I saw in your video was your argument was that as he was losing instead of putting the genocide on pause and winning and winning the warning that hehe ratcheted it up the jam yeah I don't know if it would really be I don't think it's necessarily fair to say that it was him that did that although I think he had a hand in it it does appear to me that that's what happened right and my point would simply be and again there I couldn't possibly be less sympathetic with the individual my point is simply that from an evolutionary point of view if your objective is coldly to increase the number of genomes that are spelled the same way that yours are on earth that a he did enslave those Jews who were most fit to work in service of the German war machine right that's what those camps are not all of the camps were work camps but you know ouch wits for example was both a work camp and a death camp and so there was this tendency to enslave and so let me ask you a question if you have this because you know I think you have to make a pretty tenuous biological argument to say that there's evolutionary utility in increasing the number of your kinsmen but unless they're very close but but here's a slight variation of that you tell me what you think about this is it reasonable to presume that a decent survival strategy is to homogenize your environment with regards to under some conditions to homogenizer your environment with regards to racial or ethnic differences to decrease the probability that you and yours are going to be killed oh yeah again no defense of this yes you are right that okay extent that there's another population that's distinct that that population even if it is small and as little power now might not be small and have little power later and so undoubtedly that program is there - okay okay but I would say that the the tendency to believe that evolution only functions at the level of kin when you're talking about very close relatives I believe is an error that only the result of the fact that evolutionists early on wished to operationalize fitness and it's very hard to operationalize Fitness across population level DIF and so they built a definition that is about immediate kin but there's no logical reason to imagine that that Peters out at the edge okay so okay so all I'm arguing is that what Hitler did was go after a population inside his border that was more distantly related to the people who were his constituents and then he went obviously after Eastern Europe and sought the future of Germany in Russia and it took 12 million Russians to turn around the German war machine I mean those are military deaths there were vastly more civilian deaths but but the point is he did not succeed in doing what he set out to do but he also didn't fail in the sense that he took a bunch of resources that belonged to a population that was more distantly related and he got rid of those people and by getting rid of them increased the amount of resource that was available to Aryans this has nothing to do genes are not interested in figuring out which genes are superior all of the language about German superiority is nonsense however genes are very interested I mean they're obviously genes they don't think but they act as if they are interested in replacing alternative spellings okay and so part of the reason that you're walking through this just so that this the track of this remains self-evident is to caution people against to alert people to the fact that the sorts of programs that Hitler both ran and elicited from people are lurking in our let's say in our genome in our in our set of biological possibilities and we have to be very awake to that fact on an ongoing basis they are lurking in our genomes which does not mean that we as adults have this as a possibility many people will not go along with this other people have it lurking to be triggered and I think you know what worries me is that Trump I think very cynically utilized this lurking program in order to to gain office that he played upon the fact that certain people were to hear those noises and what he said about Charlottesville you know again he did not he did not go after the white nationalists the way did you see the white nationalist response do you see those yeah the Daler storm had is that what it's called I think what one of the one of the white nationalist papers had a breakdown of what Trump did and that essentially at the end they were saying he didn't go after us he didn't target us this was very good he was very clear that it was all sides and that he never once targeted us didn't say anything bad about us senator then they said god bless Trump at the end of it there's a real tricky issue there about truth you know because I was because my free speech the free speech panel that I was a part of was cancelled I had to make comments in the Canadian media about Charlottesville and so I really had to think about what Trump said because the the fact that there is reprehensible behavior on both sides of the extremes of the distribution is true however truth is a tricky thing because you have to take the temporal context into account you know because I would say you can imagine that there are white lies and black truths a black truth is when you use the truth in a way that isn't truthful just like a white lie is when you use when you lie in a way that isn't harmful you can use the truth to wound and hurt and what that really means is that you've misused the truth and so it's actually a complex form of lie but what what what Trump did wrong this is independent of whether or not he was actually engaging in manipulation or deceit was he failed to specify the time and the place for the utterance because what he should have come out and done was said I unequivocally denounce the white supremacist racism that emerged in Charlottesville yes and then he should have shut up and then two weeks later he could have said well would we look at the political landscape as a whole perhaps commenting on Berkeley he could have said it's pretty obvious that there are reprehensible individuals acting out at both ends of the extreme but the Charlottesville week wasn't the week to make that point so and you know what why he did that well it could be just ineptness because it was a very tricky week to exactly get things right I don't think so I think actually we can look at the what he did during the election and I think we should expect that he would do exactly what he did well fair enough that I think there's there's a wink and a nod to them always with neo-nazis and whites president Pau Donald Trump's response at daily yeah see see if he could see the actual does it show the actual text of what they were wrote because quote from the editor here right there I use didn't mention anything to do with us reporters were screaming at him in the white nationalism he just walked out of the room huh right there's there was an actual article that they wrote on one of those websites Trump's comments were good he didn't attack that's it didn't attack us just said the nation should come together nothing specific against us he said that we need to study why people get so angry and implied that there was hate dot on both sides exclamation point so he implied that the antiva are haters mm-hmm I mean so that energized them in a way and there's no secret that they support him you know my friend Alonzo Bodden is a very funny quote he's a comedian he goes not all Trump supporters are racist but all racists are traitors it's a it's a great quote and he that's there's political power in that whether or not Trump is a racist or whether it's the wink and the nod to that side that is the only weaken the nod that they're getting I mean yeah or even or even insufficient denunciation which was kind of what did and there's a Canadian journalist named faith Goldie who got fired from rebel media for being being accused of being too cozy with daily stormer type she did a podcast with with crypto and I listened to the podcast very carefully she was actually one of the people that was supposed to be a panelist on this free speech talk so that put us in a real bind but well what happened in the podcast well what happened was in my estimation was that she didn't properly fulfill her role as critical journalists she was it was sort of like a discussion with your friendly neighbor neo-nazi and what I mean by that is she didn't ally herself la la hers Alai herself with any of the purported aims of the neo-nazi people she was talking to but I think she failed to criticize them sufficiently she didn't ask the tough questions you know now and and that and that that was a that was well it was a fatal error I mean she got fired from rebel media and and it's gonna have terrible repercussions for her although she may land on her feet but rebel media is very conservative as well right certainly by Canadian stand yes yeah yeah that's right no rebel media did like imploded in the aftermath of Charlottesville because of what faith Goldie did with with the daily it wasn't even the daily stormer it was a group called crypto but they're they're associated with the daily stormer so she went on there which I think you could make you could make a case that that's okay as a journalist you can go talk to neo-nazis but the question is how do you talk to them and the answer to that is you point out their agenda you don't allow them to masquerade as friendly as friendly innocent people you can't do that and so I would say she danced she dammed herself by insufficiently criticizing the villains it was something like that you uh familiar you I'm sure you are familiar with Louie through no I'm not every through the documentary and II know him from England fascinating guy fantastic like one of the best and one of the things that he's done is well he's interviewed a ton of different people but one of the great ones that he did was the Westboro Baptist Church and he sort of embedded himself with them and was very congenial and very like kind and unthreatening and stayed with them for long periods of time like weeks on end and got them to eventually like expose who they were and and understand from like the point of view of an insider and in a sense without necessarily condemning them but with just constantly asking questions but being very very polite about it not like a bunch not like a lot of serious like confrontational criticism rather but a very friendly sort of polite British way of discussing thing and he's particularly good at embedding himself he did it with Scientology he's done it with a bunch of different groups he embeds himself and just sort right so there's so there's a justification for attempting that sort of thing clearance yes but and I really had to think this through because well what happened with our talk was it was so Hall of Mirrors like it was like it was a talk about free speech talks being shut down on campus that was shut down by a campus and it was a panel of people who purport to support free speech who knocked someone off the panel because of something well not precisely that she said but it's close enough to make right irony rather palpable it is so I I had to go through what happened with faith very carefully to figure out what the right ethical pathway was you know but I listened to the podcast very carefully I listened to with my son and we talked about a lot and our conclusion was that she had failed - she had failed - she didn't ask enough tough questions one would have done it even maybe - would have done it for sure but it was that the discussion was too cordial hmm and it could have even been cordial to your point because maybe that would have led to more discussions yeah but it should have been cordial with one snake bite you know that was not required to make that snake bite I mean well depends what you mean by required well but my thought is like to find out what these people really want and really like we're really trying to achieve sometimes you don't have to be confrontational with them you just gotta allow them to be comfortable look and kamau Bell did that really great on a CNN show with the KKK he sort of just allowed them to be themselves and they became more and more comfortable with him the more time they spent with him to the point where they're actually joking around with him but you got to see that the ugliness was so obvious and evident and without him confronting them on it without him yelling and arguing you got to see it from him just being friendly and joking around with them now nobody would ever accuse a black man like kamau Bell with being a sympathizer with the KKK he was in this inarguable position like no one no one could accuse him of it this woman I'm assuming is white that's where the problem lies what if she was problems yeah she was a black woman in the very same situation like Oprah was in the past like Oprah interviewed the KKK in the past and she was never accused of being like somehow or another a sympathetic person to them right and somehow we we have to raise the threshold of offense there's there are lots of ways to contribute to the conversation one of them may be to embed yourself and actually allow the world to see yes people who are doing something abhorrent in the in the way that they see themselves so you can understand it right being there asking questions right you don't necessarily have to be cute what are you to change them I'm being critical to them I mean just getting in arguments with them I mean they might be able to see something from that from their response to like rational discussion about their issues this brings us down a whole other rabbit hole which maybe we could talk about at some point in the future because this is a really interesting topic you know like part of the reason that I've been accused of being on the far-right say or on the alt-right is because I've talked to people talk with people who perhaps have are closer what would you say have an association network that might be more closely allied with that than people are comfortable with but my attitude has been to it's and and I don't want to talk about this in much detail because it's really complicated but the the anti left spectrum let's say is very confused and it could easily tilt very rapidly into the hard right anti left which is the danger that that you are describing and partly what I'm hoping is that I can talk to people who might conceivably be on that developmental pathway because they're they're tired of being accused of implicit racism let's say and say look you can be anti radical left without falling all the way into the to the far right and here's how you might do it but that means I have to talk to them and then if I talk to them that means I risk association with them and that risks being tainted it's a very tricky line to walk well it's also one of the one of the big problems with this hard stance of the of the left of the hard left like this Pepe the Frog thing like that anybody I mean one of the things that I tweeted was some guy that called me you just admitted you're a Nazi because you I posted a meme that someone had created of me as Pepe the Frog that apparently these Pepe the Frog of everybody and so I put this guy was like well you just admitted you're a Nazi and I'm like see this is a part of the problem and this creates a massive blowback people getting angry because that frog for the most part is used humorously and yeah actually you use the phrase defensive humor yeah and it really is and I think I mean this is I didn't mean to interrupt your joke but no please there's there's something about the idea that the effectiveness of this meme is that it tangles people with no sense of humor in knots and that's a huge part of why those things are generated that's why it's nicely that's exactly right yeah yeah yeah I mean I'm fearing that I'm saying something about this frog and that there's gonna be something that's gonna emerge that I should know about that somehow I'm admitting something but all I'm saying is what I see is a lot of people using it to taunt people yes can't figure out I think that's the vast majority of it I do believe that and I think the same thing about the keka Stanny types is that that's almost all humour yeah and there's some massive problem with pushing back against that and calling those people Nazis and racists and especially when they're just using humor and especially when it's very clear if you look at all the memes online and I went thoroughly through Google to find them there are some abhorrent ones there are some horrible ones there are some ones that are with Nazi uniforms there's some some anti Jew ones there's some horrific ones most of them are not that most of them the vast majority of them are humorous and if and again these people are not coordinating so if one person decides to make a Mickey Mouse racist meme which by the way a lot of the early Mickey Mouse cartoons you could just take a screenshot and they're [ __ ] tremendously racist right because dealing with the side of the times I mean images of black people that work extremely cartoonish you know giant lid black faces the whole deal or a horribly racist you could say Mickey Mouse's [ __ ] racist don't go to Disneyland no one's saying that right but they could and this is a slippery slope you start with the Frog you know and you know first they came for Pepe and I didn't say any yeah well if the Frog is racist you start entering what isn't racist cartoon frog but you can make some cartoon about everything that has ever existed and make that racist it doesn't mean that the Frog is racist this is where it's crazy it's like what percentage of people are making the Frog racist and then for the Southern Poverty Law Center to say that this is a symbol of hate now this frog well well guess what you just back these [ __ ] people up against the wall and you sure their offense is because now they're realizing oh well these people are mad they're they're crate not just mad like angry but mad like insane like you're not looking at this thing rationally at all you're saying that a frog where 99% of the memes or just humorous or silly now the Frog is a hate symbol not only a hate symbol but Nazi know a supremacist I mean you're they're just drying up all of the space between their preposterous perspective and the nightmare at the other end of the spectrum and the point is almost all of us live in that intermediate space so yeah it's almost all thoughts live in that intermediate space right there's a variability of all thoughts you know there's there's flexibility of all ideas and when you're talking about something with it words extremely humorous you're talking about a humorous frog I mean goddamn need to call that all hate when sometimes it's hate and some by who by what are the [ __ ] people are that did that hateful thing those are the people that are hateful not the other ones that are using that frog for humor I mean this is the fact that this is an argument at all just shows how lost we are in these ideological arguments is left versus right extreme end of the spectrum on one end of the field throwing rocks at the far end of the field yeah it's most of us are in the middle somewhere it's hopeless yeah if we cannot have discussions a lot of nog I mean Jesus Christ well that's a nice conclusion yeah it might be it might be listen this was a lot of fun as always in right and I'm glad you guys came up with this idea and I'm glad we had the time to do it yeah Jordan Peterson what is your Twitter handle again Jordan Pederson yep and Brett weinstein right weinstein on twitter once tied up at saying weinstein it doesn't make you're not interchangeable sorry sorta sorta alright but thank you guys really appreciate it a lot of fun yep goodnight again bye everybody [Music]

Channel: PowerfulJRE

Views: 11,245,612

Rating: 4.8048487 out of 5

Keywords: Joe Rogan Experience, podcast, JRE #1006, 1006, Jordan Peterson, Bret Weinstein, Joe Rogan, Evergreen State College, comedy, comedian, jokes, funny, stand up, mma, UFC, Ultimate Fighting Championship, Deathsquad, Freak Party

Id: 6G59zsjM2UI

Length: 164min 56sec (9896 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 01 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/SuperComfyCouch]

real talk if you havent seen this yet, definitely watch it. you would be doing your brain a disservice by igmoring this beautiful podcast.

[u/bob_doobalina]

This is why phil needs to focus on doing Sunday podcast. So much potential

[u/livealegacy]

I would love to see Phil and joe get together. And add Reubin report on that list too.

[u/xylvera]

Notice for how long Joe is quiet here. He doesn't need to assert himself at all. When Jordan and Bret are talking he just listens. I appreciate that.

[u/Naerren]

This is one of the podcasts by Joe which has some amazing ideas in it (not the flat earth shit). Better than any other shit you will read/see on the news for the entire week. Well thought out, educated, and honest discussion about how things were and how they are changing. Just awesome.

[u/JDrakeR]

When did Phil talk about Jordan Peterson? I only started watching Phil's videos regularly around 6-7 months ago and I've tried looking for videos about this. Does anyone know the PDS where he talked about it?

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