Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro, Eric Weinstein, and Dave Rubin LIVE! | POLITICS | Rubin Report

[Music] [Music] alright here we go guys I got a Peterson I got a Shapiro I got a Weinstein I got a Reuben I feel I should go to you first because using the Canadian yeah that's I saw that movie was pretty bad alright you're you're on real time tonight and I thought that it's an interesting little piece of all of this because we're sort of all out of the mainstream but we kind of dance in there every now and again you probably dance in there a little more than the rest of us you're gonna smack around Marv tonight or what you know I think that it'll probably be pretty pretty cordial I mean I think that Marv is secretly one of us now maybe I'm wrong but I think I think that Marv is tired of the I mean his show was called politically incorrect I mean I think that he is tired of the identity politics I think he's tired of the intersectional nonsense I think that he wants to have some open conversations I just think that he is he's tied politically the left so I'll be interested to see how much of that he goes after you know how much Trump talk there is which I find utterly uninteresting is that are and how much of them will be about kind of broader issues of freedom of speech and and civility and having decent conversations I think that he's on the right side of those issues I mean I've played him on my show right and I disagreed him on everything politically but I play clips of him on my show specifically on those issues and him cracking the whip on people on the identity politics nonsense and I think we're on the same page there well if he wants to be an effective advocate for the left he should lead the March and dissociating the moderate left from the radical unreasonable left someone's got to do it because the strategy that they're abiding by right now is pretty damn self-destructive and he's in a good position to do that and I think he's motivated to do it because he is a free speech guy being a comedian and everything it's risky I think I think you take your life in your hands if you're the leftist she says that right now if you're the person on the Left who does this I mean you didn't survived but you but that's I'm retired from the left that's right you know so you you found it you found a bunch of new friends right I mean that's that's really what what people have to understand is that when you when you take these positions yes there gonna be a lot of people who decide that you are Satan but there's gonna be a whole lot of people who are your new friends who are ready to have these conversations which is why you know again this sort of IDW determinant that Eric coined is so fascinating because everyone disagrees with everyone about nearly everything in this group but because we don't want to shut down the conversation it's created this whole audience for every one of us like each one of us our audiences in creased tremendously just by being part of conversations with one another so that's that's it to me what is it you guys think about us and this wider what I do just the awesomeness of the amazingness and all that but like but like minded people we just happen to be the examples that are sitting here that it is for all the differences that we've talked about on gay marriage and abortion and death penalty and all of these things that I know we all have various disagreements on why are we all okay with that and so many people outside of this seem to not be okay well I think it has to do with the fact that most of us are confident there's a sort of a principle of faith in rationality that I'm not that worried about a lot of the things that the far left is very concerned about because I have an idea that more or less if you do the reason correctly the reason incorrectly everything is going to work out pretty much okay and I think that we have the dexterity in changing our minds admitting them when we're wrong when we've changed a perspective and stealing each other's ideas and and giving credit so that I have a sense that if I'm you know Ben and I have not gone toe to toe on abortion for example and I have an idea of the outlines of his position he probably has some idea of mine but my guess is is that he's not going to go bananas on spermicide and I'm not going to be advocating for the right to abort a child a day before it's due date and except for extraordinary circumstances and well and even then I'm not sure but I think what it is is a certain kind of confidence that you can allow the other person in a discussion to actually have a genuine position and that you can contend with it and what we need to do is to push out more of the cognitive Lego that gives us that confidence to more people so that they can say I don't need to fear the disco you know pro-choice and pro-life or both really limited positions in my opinion and it's just an example of one of many things that we have we have gained the confidence with each other that we it's not going to devolve into name-calling if everybody plays in an honest fashion and uses the full capacity that's where it is I mean the honest fashion things I think what counts I asked Sam about this earlier says just doing podcast Sam right because we all hang out together got really seven people lunch with his mother was more important than us but you know what what I asked him about this and what Sam said is that he thinks that what what has changed is that there's there's a bunch of us who are not interested in the stupidest version of the argument right so if if if I want to hear an a a pro-choice argument I want to hear the most sophisticated version of the pro-choice argument then see if I make an argument against that I don't want the simplistic version of the pro-choice argument just so I can knock down the simplistic version of the pro-choice yes it makes for a great Ben Shapiro destroys video but it's more fun for me like personally I really much more enjoy engaging with the best ideas that somebody else has to offer then engaging with the the worst ideas that you can pick out of a hand what's really well so I mean one of the things that was useful for me for example in this portrayed discussion with Sam is that my arguments my arguments are better now than they were and you might say well why do you care if your arguments are better and the reason I care about whether my arguments are better is because I know that my arguments are part of the toolkit that I use to operate effectively in the world like arguments aren't just some abstraction that you hold that's disconnected from your actions in the world and if my arguments are more fine-tuned and sharper and if I am able to and to account for a wider range of phenomena because someone has put forward facts that were hard for me to incorporate then my toolbox is much more efficient and I can operate more effectively in the world so I find it well it's a it's a variant of your position it's like I want to hear the best versions of the arguments that run counter to mine because I'd like to figure out where I'm wrong and I'd like to make what I'm doing better and that's more important to me it is literally more important to me than making sure that what I already know is right like I'm confident in what I know but I also know that I could do a better job of expressing it that it could be it could be the system could be more dynamic it could take more think more things into account like I've got plenty to learn and a real discussion with someone who objects to you that's where you learn so so I think apparently I would say that I think there's pretty easy test which is when someone catches you out on a part of the argument that you've made that you that you know was flawed and someone catches you out do you smile or you get angry right thing it really is almost that easy because the truth is that there is something fun about the idea of having to rethink your position and something adventurous about the idea that you haven't thought everything through that there are these new vistas of thought that maybe you haven't considered before and it does hone you it makes you better at it and it also allows you to listen life is funny and it's funny that we're flawed human beings that our logic is flawed so there's certain humors the idea that somebody is exposing a rift in your thinking that you now have to deal with it's well we like fun if you if you were just a stone all the time it would be really boring we kind of got there cuz when we did the abortion discussion my position basically I think is similar to yours which is that at 20 weeks where they've shown that the fetus can feel pain that to me is the cutoff I describe myself as grudgingly pro-choice but you said to me well if you're acknowledging that it's a life at 20 well then it's obviously in a life at 18 now to be completely cogent in my argument I have to concede that point to you it didn't it didn't move me to tell you that I'm gonna now agree with you on this on what the policy should be but we can do that and we didn't punch each other after and and it's alright it wouldn't you know and then what if somebody comes in and says well you know life or not life is a boolean and the problem is in computer science is one of casting which is if you if you make it afloat and you're talking about the degree of life or the meaning of the life or the quality of the life does that change things and so you know this idea about may I break your frame well I'd prefer if we stayed in it for a little while but then let's explore that in a second and so there's sort of a generosity of spirit argument and I think that quite frankly one of the strangest things about this group of people is that I find it spectacularly non-ego ik in terms of when we have a dinner I don't have a sense that anybody needs to lead I mean it's as close as I've seen like a round table where the sheer pleasure of talking to people at a time in a time this is a McCarthy like time and we have I feel so happy to be at a table in which I can talk about things that are troubling me or bring out something I worry that says something negative about myself that I'm having these thoughts that nobody wants to be booted out of the group by virtue of grandstanding and I think that that that kind of it's really interesting watching people who would be thought of as being highly ago.if behaving in an ongoing fashion it's all I think that part of that too is one of the things Dave and I have talked about and the technology is enabling this is that because I've looked at this group and thought well why in the world did it ever get categorized as a group because it's a strange group and there's some there's some reasons pretty much everybody who's in it is entrepreneurial in the fundamental sense and that everybody's created their own little domain and it's kind of hard to knock them over because they're in their domain so we're not reliant in some important sense on external funding let's say to to to to enable us to continue so that gives us a certain amount of freedom but another part of it is that as far as I can tell everybody who's participated believes that their audience is intelligent and I think that that's also a reflection of that it's it's it's not lack of intellectual self-confidence it is lack of commitment to your set of ideas as long as if they're axiomatically true but that spills over to the attitude towards the audience like I don't feel that I'm there to tell my audience a bunch of things that they need to know that I already know when I'm conducting my tour it's like well here's a bunch of ideas that I'm confused about still and I'm going to use this as an opportunity to explore them and I'm gonna explore them with you and you guys are going to come along for the ride and that's going to be good for everyone I really saw that with Harris in Vancouver because we had a well as high level of an intellectual discussion as we could manage and I would say it was approximately at the same level as a good PhD defense when when the defense is going well and the audience was with us the whole way and they're participating in this discourse process far more important to participate in the process of discourse than to specify the outcome and the audience had made that decision and abided by it while we were while we were doing this I think that that's that is the difference between yeah I think that's why like Joe Rogan for exam it's so popular when I listen to Joe I know he's going on an intellectual journey that's going to take three hours I don't know where the destination is gonna hurry but I know the returnees gonna be a lot of fun yeah but I think that that's that's what makes for success in this in this field and so much of our politics so much of our intellectual life has become what you're talking about standing on a stage and people yelling at you what you ought to think if you're a good person it's no fun Joe does the same thing that great authors do it's like a distinction between Dostoevsky inane Rand it's like you know we're round is going to end right from the beginning whereas if you read a dusty esky novel you have no damn idea where that's going to come out and neither did he so he was exploring the ideas and formulating them as he went along and that's true art and now that is what Rogen does is that you know and and he's very good at that because he's a smart guy who isn't afraid of the fact that there's a whole bunch of things he doesn't know and so he can lead people on that journey and the journey is more important than to use a terrible cliche the journey is more important than the destination I think Maria's a tiny time we have to get on to other points but the one thing I would add which is a dangerous idea is that I think there is a concept of good diversity and bad diversity which is not understood in the general population good diversity is when you have a collection of people with different ideas and they're somehow complementing each other and checking each other and people are backing down and seeing things that they wouldn't have seen because you're walking around the elephant from all the different sides and seeing all the different components bad diversity is something like two people grow up in different countries one one drives on the left side of the road one drives on the right side of the road and the idea that you decide that everybody should be able to drive on the same side of the road that they grew up on and so instead of everybody getting to a really interesting panel you've got a lot of auto accidents and nothing really interesting happens and so I think it's very important to be honest that there is a lack of diversity about what constitutes conversation and I think that that's a very troubling thing because we there's no precedent for discussing bad diversity at the moment which is I would much rather listen to to theologians talking and building up some high structure and to atheist astrophysicists talking about the same thing than having two conversations of an atheist and an astrophysics where each of them keeps tearing down each other starting assumptions and you come back eight hours later and nothing has been achieved but does that kind of explain your success in a way because probably four years ago when conservatives were basically only talking to conservatives the way the left seems to only be talking to itself these days you started doing a little of this and I would venture to guess that you probably in a way feel more comfortable with this crew who you disagree with on a gajillion things then probably when you're hanging out with just a bunch of conservatives that you're like yeah we all agree on this stuff my name is you know I think that the the idea that I the fun conversations are the ones where you're surprised and I think we have yet to have a group conversation or even a conversation one-on-one because we all talk you know one-on-one to each other to wear something surprising doesn't get said and that makes everything a lot more interesting and fun too right now I gotta say everything is so boring like for all the chaos everything is so boring because it just it breaks down into a truly you mail order it really it really is just everybody feels like everything is spun out of control but everybody's hunkered down in their own bunker and so everything comes down to Trump is always right or Trump is always wrong and we're all supposed to revolve around this this black hole that is Trump or this Sun that is Trump and he's the center of gravity I don't think most people live their lives thinking about these problems the whole Trump attack and Trump defense thing is really dull I mean when I went on Mars show there was the YouTube part afterwards and the panelists with the exception of me were tearing Trump apart and I was sort of watching that from the outside in some sense partly because I'm in Canadian and I thought well first of all it's just not that interesting that you can list Trump's faults it's like you and you and my crazy neighbor it's like why you're not bringing anything to the table doing that it's too easy and then of course the other problem is while by going after Trump you're going after his supporters hypothetically speaking and of course that's 50% of your population which turns out to be a very big strategic problem for you you know now and in the future so it is dull and and and I don't I don't think people are people would rather have a a more interesting conversation that's what we can offer to Sonu so that's what I want where I wanted to take this how do we I mean we we hit on this a little bit in the first two hours but how do we do that now how do we lay I think we're already laying out a more interesting conversation but how do we also lay out something that doesn't make everyone feel horrible because that is a lot of what's going on here all these people that are showing up to your events they're going wow what a reprieve I mean I haven't been able to do that politically I wouldn't say I mean what I've been suggesting to people is that as intolerable as they find their lives for reasons that are arbitrary and self-inflicted there are things that they could do at the individual level that will make a radical improvement they're difficult things there are things that require the adoption of responsibility and vision and the willingness to to speak your partial and imperfect truth but if you put that into practice there is an OP now one of the things that needs to be done in the political sphere is to delineate what that up might look like politically you know to give people something that's positive to strive for it well I mentioned earlier that I see that to some degree in the burgeoning literature that's suggesting that many things around the world are improving very rapidly you know in your counter position was well that doesn't mean our situation isn't fragile which I also agree with what but there is reason I think there is genuine reason to be optimistic about the future at a sociological and political level and I think that that's something that we could be having a more serious discussion about so I think yeah I think that's right I also think that you know what the reason that you've been so successful is because while you are speaking in in kind of terms about society everyone reads it as self-help and everybody reads it as self-help and I think that pretty much all of us what we are saying is being read as self-help and I think that that's empowering because basically we're saying to people is for the most part it's a free country like shut up and get on with your life yeah just it's not like there's a bumper sticker that is going around you know that the Shapiro 2020 or 2024 bumper stickers with the something I said on the show which would solve your own problems right which is ooh because we're all looking for the banners all better on ones better than that it doesn't solve your own problems it's three three solve your own problems you can solve your own problems and you'll find the deepest meaning in your life if you decide that you're going to solve your own exactly now that's a nice combination I think that message is is for the vast Malay even when you're talking about societal problems the very emphasis on reason is a suggestion that you can solve a lot of the problems in your life if you change how you're thinking I think we are engaged in a collective form of cognitive behavioral therapy I think that everybody is depressed and we don't know why we're depressed and we're upset and we don't really know why we're upset I was saying my wife the other day like if you a couple of things so I say my wife the other day if you were in 1913 these so we just dropped you in 2018 you think my god this is heaven my kids are dying and in youth my wife's I'm gonna die in childbirth I'm not gonna really have to experience dire poverty I can get anything I want from the comfort of my own home and go anywhere everybody has several cars I have entertainment that never ends right all of this stuff is just fantastic and then yesterday I was having I was having lunch with a prominent Hollywood figure of his name I won't mention so he doesn't lose work and we're doing it at a restaurant in Brentwood and we were talking about Trump and politics and I was looking around this room and everybody's drinking $200 bottles of Chardonnay and then they're in the bubbly water and then and they've got their their kale salad and the whole thing and it occurred to me that 98 percent of the people in this room think we are living in danger of incipient fascism right if you would pull the room and say are we living in crisis mode 98% of people that room go yes we're living in crisis while they sip their Chardonnay I thought well then either you're not active enough or you're just lying yourselves because you don't actually think that we're in crisis now that's not to say that we we aren't at crisis point because there's so many people willing to break the system but I think that one of the things that's coming true right now is that so many people think that the system is irrevocably broken that they are willing to break the system that was what Maher said essentially bring on the recession because that'll rid us of Trump it's like well you want the disease so that you can have the cure it's like it's not helpful yeah where I should sit this one out so I sort of radically disagree I think that a lot of the people who are at the very top understand why these games are fragile and so the games are still serviceable but if you actually understand how the games are played you understand and just how quickly this thing could turn so I think first of all it is precisely the people with enough success because it shouldn't mean they would be willing to turn it that's the thing well that's where I don't get the distinction the number of people with nine and ten figures worth of wealth talked to me about like the rich and the powerful as if they are some different group yes it's very hot and rich is richer than me that's what I think it's that there's a difference between people who have their Senators on speed dial and people who don't so you know the rich is not a monolith and that's one of the huge problems in this story if you're engaged in some kind of business like armament or extraction where you need to have a very close relationship with government you see the world very differently than if you're very good at picking investment opportunities and you just want to be unfettered in your ability to go to go make more you know I think that one of the things that really resonates about your message and and I feel a little bit less close to Ben on is is that somehow the message that you should improve your own life got conflated with if your own life isn't awesome it's because you failed to make it so and I think that was it sort of more true in a period of uniform high growth as between 1945 and 1970 when you know if you had beta to the system if you just had exposure hard work usually paid off I think the depending upon what sector you're in what your skillset is where you are in your life it's very hard for some people to turn things around and the idea of look you may not be able to solve your problem you solve the problems you confront but you can solve the portion of the problems that you can solve yourself and that you should at least do that that is a very different message because it says even if I'm not living in luxury at the end of it it's not because I failed and I think the decoupling or distinction and I would probably you know given that criticism I probably agree to the curbing of my own kind of solution right like I think that I think that's right clearly there are people we are all created equal in our rights we're not all created equal in our abilities or in our capacity to rise or fall in this or in trade for 100% and I would do the other half of that thing which is I would climb down from asking you know if more people were willing to admit that I would say okay it's very important that people at least make an a co-payment of trying to solve the problems in their own life before demanding that the outside that's the part and that's the part that I focus on more simply because I think that the government is so big I mean there's more politics and philosophy made right so I think the government is so big and so intrusive and so involved in so many areas of our life that the the tendency right now in America is to blame other people for the problems that you have and that's true on virtually every side of the aisle I think that when you and I have disagreements about trade theory but I think when President Trump goes to a Rust Belt town in Ohio and he says I'm gonna bring back all your jobs because the Mexicans and the Chinese screwed you I think that that's that's a lie I don't think he's bringing back those jobs aren't disagreeing about them yeah and so and so you know I think that when my solution to that is there's not necessarily a solution I think one of the lies that there's always a solution to every problem that can be had if you just have enough communal power behind him and I don't think that's right I think that the solution for most problems in life not all because I don't think all problems in life ever again solved but at least the majority of the major mistakes people make in their life that create obstacles that they can never overcome the rest of their life are self-inflicted I think that the the the unbarring health serious health problems or mental disability and I think that the number of problems that make it impossible for you to overcome sheer dire poverty in the United States virtually all of those problems are problems that people put in front of themselves and so if you can make those basic decisions they can turn your life around in a pretty significant way yeah or you if they're not problems that people create for themselves there are problems that are they're subject to that are also very intractable to communal level solutions like mental illness is a good example of that and its contribution to homelessness it's like well it's terrible to be mentally ill and to end up on the streets it definitely is terrible but it isn't like we actually know how to solve that so even if that can't be put at the feet of the individuals who are suffering it's like okay well we'd like to sort that out communally it's hard to sort that out without making it worse we don't know do you guys think we can only make it a little better or a little worse like of course all hell could break loose on one side of it but that within the margins like it's pretty good and we can maybe make it a little better but that that the capacity for humans to make a system much better than this that will allow most noble to flourish worse like that's what I'm yeah we can aim for incremental improvement which compounds by the way so that that's very powerful incremental improvement but we could aim for incremental improvement while deciding that we're going to stay off stave off chaotic and unnecessary descents into the abyss right which is what I see the danger in this in this polarization processes not generating it's like a catastrophe that we actually don't need what would he make of the amount of people that seem to want that right now I mean I always say every week on the show it's like Twitter is not real life yeah but the amount of people that I'm seeing constantly talking about tear it down and now the new attack on civility where even if you say be civil be respectful that that is now thought of as a tool of the patriarchy or a tool the oppressed or all of that stuff what do you make of that assault I mean I think first of all the fundamental hatred of the system by a lot of people is I'm not gonna justify it given the fact that the system that we have is the best that has ever you know happened to any human beings in the history of the world I mean this is a pretty great place to live compared to all other right cuz right nothing compared to utopia compared to heaven I'm not saying can't get any better I think that one of the great dangers always is utopianism and I think you're seeing it from both sides I mean right now when you saw Alexandra Ocasio Sanchez when in New York and she's promising universal health care universal college tuition Universal Universal housing right all of this stuff is gonna magically happen then she's asked on MSNBC are gonna pay for any of this and she just basically says well just how FDR did after didn't okay one of the big problems yeah and the and also there was a giant world war happening at the time so it's the the the itch to to grow to provide that that's the thing it's like that's you you really you really want to you want to make a state that has enough power to grant all those wishes it's like careful what kind of genie you generate because it's going to have a demand on you so I don't think the market is that the free markets are inherently utopia and I don't think that a vast government is inherently but I think free markets at least have a certain respect for human labour dignity and individuality and collectivist utopia is certainly do not and they also have a certain distributed quality it's like it's not like there's a central administration making the decisions so even if the decisions are bad which sometimes they are they tend to be self-correcting and mostly they operate locally so there's something to be said for that so what do you say to all the people that are gonna listen to this that I think you're a little more sympathetic to the rest of us that are going but but we need help or or this is this sounds cold or my lord is gonna be colder than this you guys are like warming my heart with their bootstraps I mean there was a phase change in the economy around 1970 that I cannot get people to focus on and you know if you look at like GDP which is a very flawed measure and median male income which Tyler Cowen I think was the one who pointed out that this is the best version of the argument one of these things they're they're both going up together until like 1970 yeah and then one of them flatlined and then keeps going and the idea that this is not a structural change that is in every school textbook and that we don't understand that we've built up to plus generations of experts lying about what happened what do you what do you think happened what do you I did that B because I've read criticisms of the decoupling theories nobody likes my version of it but no because I don't understand it everyone who cares about this stuff should read a guy named Eric de sola Price who was active in the late 50s and started talking about there will be a singularity in science so he looked at prices law yeah number of PhDs number of journals number amount of funding everything was going up exponentially and things that go up exponentially cannot continue and so he predicted this is going to end because there would be too many PhD you know too many PhDs per child and sure enough that system sort of came apart so if you look at the period from between 1945 to 1970 you have this growth regime and everything that got built during that time has what I call an ego an embedded growth obligation if it doesn't grow at this rate it's going to turn pathological and so we built a ton of infrastructure around this beautiful period of high broadly distributed fairly even in stable technology technologically life growth and that ended and then began this crazy period of excuse making where we found every gimmick known demand and if you want to read an article about this call I think I wrote one called anthropic capitalism in the new gimmick economy and so part of the problem is is that the concept of jobs as how we feed ourselves rather than creative enterprises or something else jobs are probably tied to a period of time that isn't going to go on forever and it's probably weakening as a means of feeding us so the market was unbelievably brilliant and then there was a structural change and now the question is how do we account for these egos that make embedded growth obligations that make Liars of all of the experts who service the institutions so the big problem that we're having the reason we can't wake up from this madness is is that you've had since about 1970 people having to lie to keep the institutions afloat so what's the lie well take a law firm the idea is you have some number of partners the partners have associates all the associates want to become partners so you have to tell them a story about if you work hard you will become partners but when you hit steady-state like the professors the professor wants to have 20 students the 20 students want to become professors to have 20 students none of this stuff works anymore but the intimate love your thing it's it's a hidden what do you call that game it's a hidden pyramid scheme pyramid scheme come ability levels since 1980 have been relatively stable in the United States well we've been a very rich family trying to figure out ways to live out our days in the style to which we become accustomed and we found every kind of gimmick known to man whether it's offshoring or you know mergers and acquisitions or you know self regulation of markets all of these things that we've learned how they were just the transfer over to the service economy as opposed to in the intellectual economy as opposed to manufacturing well the thing is is that a lot of this was led by something like you know science in the form of let's say just semiconductors coming out of physics you know how much of of our current growth has been scientifically led and now you know with Moore's law the reason everybody talks about it is it's one of these growth laws that can't go on forever so I'm doing pretty well I mean part of it I know things that are impossible can't continue forever that's the rule listen the doubling seems to be one of them the ideas that we've been pretty good staving off disaster for a very long time it seems to me though that there is like this is and this is this is perhaps part of the contradiction that people are wrestling with is like and you're pointed to two structural deception let's say something like that and delusion the delusions that go along with it but it also does seem to me and this is where the measurement issues become so complicated is that even though wages among men have been flat since the 1970s I think you could make a pretty cogent case that we are actually in many ways much richer than we were first of all the world's much richer there's much less poverty worldwide and in an absolute sense as well and so even if the average American isn't richer let's say although we could dispute that the world that surrounds him is much richer and that actually constitutes a form of accrued wealth because you're actually safer when when a quarter of the Chinese aren't starving and a quarter of the Indians are okay so but so but then I would also say so there although there's been local stagnation in the West arguably there's been massive global in improvements and but then the other question is is the idea of local stagnation actually accurate because there are lots of ways that we are clearly way richer than we were now we're certainly richer in terms of our access to high-quality information at a very very low cost and so the technological revolution seems to be real and we can purchase a lot more of this high-quality technology for less money than we could so I'm not I'm not entirely convinced of the wage state about the wage stagnation argument there's a tremendous amount to be done but the metrics about how we measure yeah things there's also a total flaw that is suffused throughout economics I just came back from four days in Venice and the first day in Venice I thought this place is unreal if the most beautiful thing I've ever seen in my higher life every 52 years didn't prepare me right great more days later I was like wow there's so many tourists and okay took almost no time to remove that level of magic because I got used to it that quickly yeah yeah yeah well that's a problem we get we get use of the headaches that are going well extraordinary atomically numbing is a real issue the other thing is is that what were the Gini coefficients measuring the inequality during the period that was going up you know we're now in a period of such inequality that you know humans are very focused on things like status yes yes yes and so it's not clear to me that people wouldn't be actually happier in a totally different regime I mean we have enough companies that wouldn't exactly right yeah now in all of it all of that might Michael that okay so that's that's an interesting issue because one of the things we could say perhaps is that between 1945 and 1972 what was provided for people wasn't so much a standard of living that's higher than we have now but a trajectory of development that appeared more stable stable and believable and so a low variance yeah yes well so so and then the question is well what actually do you want do you want a high standard of living or do you want to believe that if you put an incremental effort your life can improve and it could easily be that people will rather have the ability to make a 30 year plan we want the ability yes yes if what I value right minister to your plan and I want to have some idea of how I'm gonna get to my retirement and put kids through school and do all of this it's this plan yeah idea the predictability is gone no question right that's why I said jobs are not going to be the means of redistribution well right I do wonder if you know on the individual level I think that yeah that's you're right there's there's an enormous amount of chaos and volatility in the system and but I I think that the only thing that you can say to that is the same thing that that's been true for most of human history okay the time when people could actually stabili predict that in 30 years I will be significantly better off than I am now and I can make a retirement plan that's about 50 years of human history I mean before that it was basically you have kids one of them dies and then your wife dials in childbirth but birth the second to you you have eight then you have eight and six of them die three or miscarriages and fine yeah you know then and so that so this this dream that we had right in 1914 1970 even if I loved the premises I'm not sure that that's a realistic dream about what that was my point is it yeah so that was the entropic capitalism you just ascribed it to not under your article but the only one I'm making is that I think that what really has been lost and this is the part that I'm really focusing on a lot lately is we can't control the situation around us but we can't control our reactions to the situation and what I mean by that is these massive systemic changes that we're talking about we number one don't agree on what those systemic changes should be right and number or even what they are right what they are or what they would do right nobody knows what the hell thing we do and with all of that said the one thing that you can control is the amount of virtue that you yourself pour into your life and it seems to me in a non virtuous position that because somebody else is earning more than you you are therefore worse off and so what we really have lost I think and this may be an outgrowth I mean that there's there's not even may I know general Gober makes this argument for example that that sort of late-stage capitalism or advanced capitalism tends to tends to lead to this rat race where we are looking what the guy next door to us has but the but the lack of just basic virtue in the position that I am more soft because my neighbor is better off even though I have more stuff than I did five years ago the lack of inculcation of any sense of what I would call basic morality is having a significant impact well one is that one of the things that's happening clearly in in the tour that I'm doing in the people that I'm talking to is I'm actually making a variant of that case I said that and and it's it's probably in keeping with your vision as well so let's imagine that a rising tide does lift all boats and that's actually happening but we're purchasing up that at the price of a certain degree of predictability and stability into the future that seems quite clear and that's exaggerated by this incredibly rapid rate of technological change it's like okay so how do we tolerate all that uncertainty given that we're also deriving substantial benefit from it we don't want to we don't want to mess it up and what I've been suggesting to my audiences is get your act together as much as you possibly can because the way that you deal with uncertainty is by being prepared for anything and everything that's going to come your way and so you want to put yourself together so that when the difficult decisions come along even though we can't predict what they are you're going to be in the best possibility message here the new message is that whatever like I want to tell somebody you know very often I hear parents like we have two children and one of them is living at home and I say okay let me explain in part why your child may be living at home when you're disappointed that that's happening right and so I go through the economics argue person who feels better oh wow or I explain you know here's why you're not able to catch up to your parents it's not all about your personal failure right and so the idea that that personal responsibility is something that we need and we also can't have right it's too dangerous you have to do this tailored message and I think you've been into itting this like here's the portion of your life that you're responsible for and we're going to delineate it and if your room isn't cleaned up it's not because of the government right that was your point saying and and this is you know again you and I are gonna have to do this at some point this is a great country and well if you put your mind to making money then it may be the case that stick-to-itiveness and passing the marshmallow test and being inventive and creative works but there are a lot of people who are given a very different message and they grow up being told you know be a good person and work hard and a lot of this stuff doesn't work the way it used to it just doesn't and lying about it offends me so I want to say look if making money is very important and we need to be able to talk about the role of money it's money as fungible everything else is not so if you make money then you have lots and lots of options and we need to give people the idea that that's a good thing to pursue if they have any hope and in dream but it's also the case that fundamentally what we what your message is is you have to make the copay and the copay is the part of your life that you absolutely control and if that's out of control don't expect anyone else to take any simple then you can also make if that part of your life is in order you can also make a more credible argument for the existence of unreasonable systemic impediments because you can say to yourself look I put everything in today then you could make a credit business why this is the the attractive version of the personal responsibility thing that the point we have it we have another problem here with our discussion about dispossession because like one of the things that that's bothered me about the left and the right is the right tends to think well if you just got your act together and worked hard you can make it and that and the and the the left tends to think well everybody's the same and if you removed systemic impediment that everybody could could do whatever they needed to do well the left is wrong because there's real diversity of ability but the right is wrong because there's a real diversity of ability and so for example there is a distribution of IQ which is real and if you're if you're the the psychometric data basically indicate that if you have an IQ of less than 90 which is about fifteen twenty percent of the population you actually can't read well enough to follow instructions and you might say well that can be rectified say through educational means and so forth and the evidence for that is pretty damn thin and so the problem with a society that's meritocratic fundamentally even if it's meritocratic based on character is that they're still going to be individual differences that seem to be an eight that are going to produce radically unequal outcomes many of which are payable but the thing that you will have a hard time convincing me of having gone through the PhD system in the sciences is that some of the world's most brilliant people hold PhDs in the sciences and I came up at a time when in the early 90s these people we're told that the world was their oyster and that we were desperately in need of scientists and I remember a friend of mine being told that he had a $14,000 a year job offer post PhD from MIT with a pregnant wife and the person who offered it was like this is great we can we can we can get people for pennies right and why was that it was because of something that came out of the National Academy of Sciences and the National set of Science Foundation to slam American workers in the sector this is very very important it had predicted that people would be paid six figures for PhDs which was you know larger than they had been paid for a long time and it was the meddling with the marker the thing that I don't like about the personal responsibility issue is is that individuals should not be solving the problems of let's say tech groups getting together and say we will not poach each other's employees that like the market has to work for people not just institutions and if you're in a sector in which you can make the market work for you you have this feeling of anybody can do this and in fact what you need to do is you need to migrate to these sectors because there are other sectors where you have let's say government intervention which says we are going to interfere with the free working of the market or we are not going to take into account that some people produce public goods and so it's very important to me to understand that some people are coming out of very different circumstances in which it's very unlikely that they will be able to make their world you know grow and blossom and that other people of extraordinary ability and high IQ and work ethic find themselves not fighting forces that they don't even know this is the sort of criticism that's often levied at me because people say well you don't take the systemic problem sufficiently into account and and so that's a nice outline of the systemic you know when when the bank's decided that they should be self-regulating with respect you know - they're gearing ratios or the risk there was one guy who rode in at this - this SEC hearing to allow these investment banks to you know do the last little bit before 2008 blew up everything this guy Len Bolle who was a computer consultant to banks it's like one guy in the entire country who saw a disaster coming and got involved in this internal game that was a by banks for banks and so what's very important to me is to understand when you have bad behavior by institutions it is pathological to put that responsibility on individual shoulders well but the only coda I would make to that and I think that's a fair comment is that what I'm hoping and what I'm trying to convince people of is that their ethical responsibility which is partly to further their own development to the degree that they can does extend to the community is that you want to make ethical said so that they don't make mistakes that corrupt the operation of the system at a systemic level the best way to do that in my estimation over the long run is to concentrate on the ethical behavior of the sovereign citizen now that doesn't address this problem and place the systems systems affect more people that means that when people make vague accusations about systems that are dysfunctional then it's not helpful you know what I see is not you're making very specific very specific institutions in very specific ways and those that's useful because then we can actually have a discussion about where those systems go wrong so you can have it as a unit you know it's got your housing the patriarchy right you can we can just know I'm trying to I'm trying to crowd that out and part of it yes what it is is that almost nobody in the regular commentariat wants to talk to me about what went wrong with our immigration policy how did we get in trouble with mortgage-backed securities what's going on with CPI adjustment because unfortunately we got something better going on here so let's not worry about them but you know we only have about 10 minutes because you got a hard out so I thought we'd do a little self therapy while we're here so I want to ask you each one thing I'll even answer it myself and then we can all sort of comment I'll start there if you had one blind spot what do you think it might be I've asked you guys some version of all of this before but you know a lot of changes over the time that we keep doing this but if there was something that you thought was your personal blind spot what would it be well I would say I don't know if I can identify a specific blind spot but I could say in general you know I know perfectly well that I don't know enough about a lot of the things that I need to know about to make the sorts of arguments that I'm making like I'm painfully aware and increasingly aware I would say of just how much I don't know how much more I need to be reading and concentrating on to flesh out what I have to say like that I don't know I don't know enough about economics barely anything I don't know a lot about history barely anything and so I'm more and more aware of how much I don't know and now I don't know if that's the kind of blind spot that you were thinking of but but but it it it's terrifying to comprehend that and still try to move forward in this sort space it makes it tough to be a public person these days right because everyone wants you to know everything about everything all the problem that Derek was just describing which is you know the reason that people won't contend with you is because you force them to move from their low resolution ideological certainties into domains where specific knowledge is necessary you instantly expose everyone's ignorance it's like that's that's hard on the people that you're having the discussion with but the devil is in the details all till the last sentence I would say that I would love you to shorten that and put it on a bumper sticker for me it was a brilliant summary yeah blindspot Shapiro I mean I find it hard to argue with with any of that I think that you know if you're intellectually curious then that means that you know that you don't know anything so I agree with with everything he just said I mean as far as other intellectual blind spots I mean or other blind spots generally I would say that for me the constant struggle is I find myself more stressed out now than I was two years ago when no one gave a crap when I thought right so so the fact is that it's you know living a less stressful life in the middle of believing that people actually care what you think it means you have to take your stuff much more seriously that's something that really a blind spot as much as a concern and I think that that means that you know just that the commitment to to hearing more about things as is deeply necessary but it also means that it just means your life in many ways is more miserable more people know about you and it's not a poor me thing I love what I do I love the fact that people care what I think like that's really I mean it's it's pretty sweet you got a lot of good stuff great stuff going on but the fact is that I suppose I spend I mean the risk is higher in some ways that makes you a better person it's almost like the you know the the old kind of religious slogan that if you feel God is watching you all the time then you're more likely to be a better person and there is that feeling like okay if I make a mistake I'd want to be the first person to notice that I made the mistake and correct that mistake but that also means that you live with a lot more self-doubt and a lot more second-guessing of yourself and you did you know when nobody cared so it's so that's not as much of a blind spot as concern but the problem with trying to identify your own blind spots is that they're in your blind spot but it's that's why I asked the question I wanted to make it pick a little bit it's funny cuz the other day or was yesterday actually I did the Adam Carolla podcast which he's you know it's comedy and he's doing more of a radio show thing so you speak a little more freely and I was about to say something very politically incorrect and I obviously don't have a problem doing that generally especially when I'm doing comedy and just for a moment I had you sort of ring in my head about be careful about your words and I was like I just don't feel like offering up one extra con that way right because like the stuff that you felt like you could say you're now you realize not only maybe you shouldn't have said it a year ago but also you feel like if I if am i you're constantly saying am i curbing myself because I'm afraid or my crimping myself because it's the right thing to do to curb myself here mm-hmm and then so that's an interesting sort of calculus you have to do all the time yeah if you're concerned that it's because of fear then you might want to take the risk of saying it you know because I've tried wrestled with that problem is like you know or maybe am i avoiding this because I think it's better because I don't want to take on the responsibility if you have suspicions about that then you should do it because I think you should I should think you should arm yourself against your weaknesses and take that risk I think it's better developmentally to do that all right I'll answer or answer it for myself which is a cue of something your brother said to me once which is that perhaps I have a little PTSD from the left so my focus on these completely bananas ideas has been has been so singularly stuck in my mind that maybe I let some other things slide every now and again I'm trying to be very aware of that and trying to figure out how to go forward on that so does that mean you're a little bit more on the attack then you'd like to be because I think I want to ease up on a little bit of the attack on that I think I've spent the last couple years really it was first me identifying it for myself really I was interviewing all of these people and figuring out that they were often going through the same thing I was but then it morphed into going on the attack about it and now I feel like because and again I say the word winning with you know a little tongue-in-cheek but because I do sense something has turned here that maybe I can get my foot off the gas a little bit on the big ideas that I really care but I thought about that in relationship to this whole group it might be nice but I think we should really be careful to use necessary force yeah there's there's idiocy on the left and on the on the extreme right that needs to be pointed out but it might be better if we did the minimum necessary amount of that because it also starts to become saying something you can parody quite easily at some point and more and more of delineating what the alternative might be if there was a positive alternative right it will be interesting to see what happens with the IDW as it moves beyond the critique right because the what's really unified us I think has been a lot the critique right there antique of intersectionality in the identity politics and once we move into the space we're actually trying to maybe build something together or come to some sort of ideological continents then some of these some of these but I hopefully what I hope is different if we're gonna pitch away the arguments I hope that we recapitulate the arguments and more reasonable cogent and intelligent way you know in terms of the actual political arguments but I'm not sure that those I think that none of us I hope our dreaming that there will actually be an ideological countenance among a lot of us as clearly that is something that is not going to happen I mean we all have significant disagreements among ourselves on all of these issues but how beautiful that is that we're all kind of working through it in our own way and we're all not gonna get to the exact same ending but we'll kind of go with each other all the time blindspot feinstein oh my gosh it's more or less infinite I think that I do a terrible job of when somebody's making a bad analytic argument but is intuited their way to the right conclusion I tend to discount them as if the analytic argument was how how they should be thinking so different kinds of minds who have their variables you know if you if you think nothing of myers-briggs it should at least tell you that there are kinds of minds that aren't working at all like yours big five might be a little bit better so that's been a huge blind spot I think that I am very focused on provable institutional betrayal which I can point at and no one else seems to want to talk about and that because no one wants to talk about really specific problems with the institution's it leads me sometimes to not seeing the generic case I think that I am very much a prisoner of my learning disabilities I had to sort of construct my own operating system to get around them otherwise if you ever want to see something funny ask Brett Weinstein to read aloud because you could you just see that he's having to impression istic we figure out what's on the page because he's not tracking it exactly so I think that you know that fight to say I'm not stupid probably distorted me a great deal on having to build my own architecture and I think I think we can safely say you're not stupid so I think one last thing and I think that one of the things that I'm most worried about is that fighting the supposedly empathic army of people trying to destroy conversation itself has had a very negative impact on my empathy for exactly the people that they want me to have empathy for and I think that it's very important for all of us to say okay what's the steal Manning of that position and to make an extra effort when people are making absolutely non empathic arguments trying to destroy you and fry you to think about the empathy that you want to have for whatever went wrong in my life it might be fun at some point to conjure up a panel where some of the people that are in this group take the leftist position and defend it in in every possible way you know right from the post-modern conclusions which you know I think are worthy of substantial skepticism to the to the notion of the reality of the dispossessed and they and the presence of systemic oppression and all of that and to and to make the cases as as brutally as we possibly can with a useful not Steele man those tactics yeah the tactics to come with him because then we could because it doesn't seem like we've been able to have the debate with anybody who can carry the debate so it might be really you I think Ted and I have been trying but it's it's it's hard because we're spending most of our energy fending off I think we've all been tact the tactics that's exactly yeah that's not the conclusions all right we got to move on Jordan I are going to Long Beach tonight you're going to San Francisco you're going - daily why're you guys are doing selling for July 4th through July 4th of July 2nd we're gonna be doing a special episode of daily we're backstage that's me that's a god-king Jeremy boring who runs the place it is the execrable michael Knowles and Andrew Clavin and Jordan Peterson we're all going to be celebrating 4th of July with everyone's favorite Canadian so Jordans gonna stop by at 4 p.m. Pacific 7 p.m. Eastern so check out daily we're calm for all bad you can check it out at YouTube and Facebook as well links down below and see you tonight Long Beach you

Channel: The Rubin Report

Views: 2,310,969

Keywords: rubin report, dave rubin, idw, current events, free speech, intellectual dark web, critical thinking, rubin, the rubin report, david rubin, us news, political news, us politics, political science, political, political party, Jordan Peterson, Jordan Peterson interview, Ben Shapiro, Ben Shapiro interview, Eric Weinstein, Eric Weinstein interview, jordan peterson ben shapiro, Jordan Peterson Eric Weinstein, 12 rules to live by, jordan peterson life advice, 12 rules for life

Id: PagNM_oxssE

Length: 56min 33sec (3393 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 29 2018