Jordan Peterson is Back! - Bret Weinstein's DarkHorse Podcast

[Music] hey folks welcome to the dark horse podcast i have the great pleasure of sitting today with dr jordan b peterson he is an author a youtube lecturer and professor of psychology at the university of toronto welcome jordan good to see you thanks for the invitation well it's very good to see you sir um i should probably tell people in our audience uh that there might be some slight strangeness about this discussion because you and i have had a recent one on your channel which is not yet out and so in some sense we are picking up a discussion in motion that those who are watching will not have yet seen in any case we talk in in that one about your uh your absence from the scene and how grateful i am to see you uh back at it so i won't recover that territory here i should say that this uh discussion between you and me is taking place on the occasion of the publication of your new book yes book is called beyond order 12 more rules for life i should tell our listeners that i have not read it you sent me a copy but it got hung up in customs um but anyway i'm very excited to see it and i think many others will be as well do you want to say anything about the book well i have it here perfect as you said it's out today um it's making the scene i guess it's number one in australia and number two which is quite nice i've and 12 rules is number five so that's was kind of remarkable to see today and so thank you to all the people in australia who are reading me i appreciate that very much i hope people find the book useful i tried to put as much care into it as i put into the first book and i hope that's reflected in in the book and i hope they make a nice balanced package the first one concentrates more on excesses of chaos associated with uncertainty and the unexpected i suppose and the second one concentrates more on the danger of excess order and those are the two great dangers i think great two of the greatest dangers the pathology of social structures and and the danger of everything that we don't understand and so those are two of the major things that people have to manage in life archetypally speaking universally speaking and so that's the basis for the books now obviously this is the first 24 rules for life that you came up with i know you generated a long list initially when you started on the project presumably people should read both of those books if they're interested in your top 24 is there a reason that they should read the first one before reading the second one or i hope not i didn't write them that way i think that they complement each other so if you read both of them both of them are better but i designed each of them to stand on their own so and i i hope they do that each of the chapters as well i would say so there's a chapter dedicated to each rule also stands on its own but they are thematically linked and they play on each other so hopefully the whole is greater than the sum of the parts that's the that's the whole point of writing a book and hypothetically i managed that and uh i should say that these are not the only two books you've written you also famously at this point wrote maps of meaning much earlier in your career a very different style of book i would say more analytical and less dedicated to providing people uh useful advice on how to to work through the the various trials and tribulations of life do you want to say anything about about it well i wrote it obviously to communicate with people but i wouldn't say that was my primary goal um although perhaps that should be the primary goal of an author i wrote it to figure something out you know it was it was an investigation and writing is a protracted form of thinking and the advantage to writing as thinking is that you writing makes you smarter than you are without the paper and pencil or without the computer especially the computer because the computer can enable you to edit editing has become effortless in some sense back when you use paper and pencil there was a tremendous amount of labor involved in editing not not just mental labor obviously reconfiguring the ideas but actual muscular energy or even with a typewriter it was very difficult to produce sequential drafts you have to retype whole pages or or it would become an unreadable mess but with a computer you can incrementally improve indefinitely and so you can have a very long discussion with yourself and i took full advantage of that when i wrote maps of meaning and i was trying to i was trying to account for malevolence of the genocidal sort i suppose at the individual level motivation for for genocide um and then to also try to outline how that might be avoided given that it's a pronounced human propensity far more pronounced than we like to admit and i i spent 15 years thinking about that and that was maps of meaning it's a very difficult book it was difficult to write i found it difficult to read when i re when i've reread it there are chapters that i really have to think hard about to to to fully understand even though i wrote them they it's because i stretched myself to my intellectual limits maybe beyond in some ways um all of the many of the ideas that i developed in 12 rules for life and in beyond order stem from maps of meaning so and certainly much of what i've done in my career as a lecturer owes its success to the the 15 years of three-hour days roughly speaking that i put in on that book and so it was an unbelievably useful exercise uh so i don't know if you'll uh recall and i admit i'm not certain of what the exact scope was but you and i have discussed before the fact that my very first evolutionary project when i was an undergraduate working for bob trivers or working with bob trivers i did a project in which i analyzed the holocaust through an evolutionary lens and effectively reached the conclusion that these that um that hitler was a monster but that he was a rational monster and that it is very important for us to understand what that means that this was too easily dismissed as insanity rather than depravity of a recognizable kind and yes well it's important to give the devil his due and when you when you discount something of that magnitude you risk failing to understand it you think of it as a one-off in some sense and that may be true although it's not as if genocidal acts are one-offs they're very common unfortunately you can make a strong case that there was something particularly egregious about the holocaust although there were 20th century catastrophes that were arguably of of of comparable horror if you want to compare dare to compare horrors but terrible things happened in maui's china and in cambodia and in the soviet union and perhaps all of that wasn't undertaken with the blood blood curdling efficiency of the third reich that's part of what makes that story uniquely horrible but i i i agree with you that discounting it as a form of psychopathology is not very helpful especially when you think that there was a whole country involved and more than that really so yes i think um a i do think there was something special about the third reich but it was a variation on a theme that is much less unique and that in some sense is now a problem because um in my opinion the only way to prevent these things from continuing to happen is to understand what it is in human nature that causes them and that in fact um well all right let's start with the dangerous argument shall we god yeah here let me let me uh talk by analogy um let us just say that all of us because for very for many reasons are likely the descendants of uh women who were raped at some point in history and we likely all carry the genetic capacity to engage in it as a result but most men that i spend time with i believe are actually not capable of this and they're not incapable of it because they're genetically incapable they're incapable of it because development took that option off the table and that there are great many things in human nature that are like this things that when we are born the capacity exists and then a proper upbringing and an environment that does not reinforce these things or better makes them disgusting to us takes them off the uh the list of possibilities and i believe that genocide let me let me add something to that please you tell me what you think well there's there's two things i think that take it off the table one might be developmental history and and so you might say that there could be a biological tendency and if it isn't encouraged reinforced or even if it's punished out of existence through inattention even i won't pay attention to you if you do that or i'll punish you outright if you do it one way or another it can't develop but then i would also say that in a functioning society the eliciting conditions for that behavior are also unlikely to arise i mean you you see mass rape very frequently in wartime and it it is quite unlike normal male sexual behavior in the context of an intimate relationship partly because it's often at least somewhat public which makes it unique because sexual activity among intimate partners is generally private but in wartime it can be public and so i would say that we protect ourselves against that biological propensity that genetic propensity partly through socialization by by bringing aggression under control especially in its sexual elements but also by structuring our society so that we never allow ourselves to go somewhere where those motivations are likely to emerge and also where they wouldn't be immediately punished out of existence but that can happen i think you see those sorts of things happen in the midst of riots for example where you know a law-abiding person a generally law-abiding person will get caught up in the chaotic frenzy and find themselves doing things that they had perhaps never done before i would like to think that it's a matter of socialization and a matter of regulation by conscience but i do think that a fair bit of it is also brought under control by the stability and relative benevolence of the social surround well i think those two things uh obviously fit well together now let me give you let me give you an example sure from the chimps so chimps especially the adolescent males will go on what are essentially border patrol uh they'll patrol the borders of their territories and there's usually a couple of them three four five a group a small group and sometimes a female or two but generally adolescent males if they come across uh a chimp a mailchimp from another troop or if it could be one or a couple they have to outnumber them generally they'll often react extremely aggressively and really aggression without control so chimps are hunters and they'll hunt colabus monkeys for example which are about 40 pounds if i remember correctly and they tear them from limb to limb and sometimes they'll eat them when they're alive and they're screaming away and that doesn't inhibit them and then when they attack foreign chimps there also doesn't seem to be any inhibition of aggression whatsoever it's it's it's it's there in its full array then but in their own troops they engage in dominance disputes and those will often escalate but the rest of the troop gets upset and tends to regulate it and so that's it's looking at that sort of thing that makes me afraid that it isn't so much socialization as it is our attempt to ensure that we always maintain ourselves in peaceful circumstances and we never depart from those places not if we can help it so hopefully socialization also matters well i would argue that these two things work together that you have a very dangerous possibility and that um by reducing the amount of flammable material around and reducing the care with which one plays with the flame the likelihood of a fire out of control is reduced and that if you take away either one of these things it it goes up spectacularly with respect to the question of of rape i would say you have the added feature that in order for a man to rape a woman he has to be turned on and so in some sense there's an extra protection on the system that a a a man who has grown up as a boy in an environment that caused the idea of rape to become disgusting to him will not be uh capable of the act hopefully so we don't have that in the case of something like genocide i believe we do need to make all of the various thought processes that result in warfare and genocide disgusting so that people do not engage in these behaviors and you know if we don't i suspect we will see exactly what we are seeing now which is people playing with the very tropes that create this impulse not realizing that in some sense there is a program uh latent within humans that when activated creates exactly the the discontinuous kind of behavior that you see in in chimpanzees when they encounter rival males well i think in the human case it's actually the chimps the chimp analogy is is pretty brutal but chimpanzees are certainly exceeded in their capacity for brutality by human beings and that's partly because i think it's partly because and this it took me a long time to think this through and i do outline it in in all three of my books um there's a scene in genesis where people become self-conscious their eyes are open and virtually at the same time so the story goes they become capable of the knowledge of good and evil and it's a very mysterious story but after thinking about it literally for a decade or so i i started to understand i think that it's a story about so what happens is people become self-conscious they become aware of their nakedness and they become aware of good and evil they also become aware of their uh destiny they're destined to work and work is something that's relatively unique to human beings if if you think about it as uh delay of gratification conscious delay of gratification i'll give up something now which is a sacrifice in order to obtain something of more value in the future that that's one of the outstanding discoveries of of of humankind the emphasis on sacrifice in the old testament for example i think is a is is a it's a historical portrayal a quasi-historical portrayal of the emergence of the idea of sacrifice which i believe was first acted out before it was understood psychologically or explicitly so you imagine you know you think i do think in an evolutionary manner and you know i i take seriously the fact that life has been around for three and a half billion years and that there's been mammals for 60 million and you know it's been seven or eight since we split from our shared ancestor with chimps that's a very long period of time over that period of time human beings realized that they could let go of something in the present and gain something in the future and there's that's and but that there's no way you don't leap from the complete lack of knowledge of that fact among chimpanzees to the explicit ability to state it as a set of propositions without an insanely long developmental history in between those two points and human beings learned over time that those who let go in the present at least under some conditions were much more likely to be popular let's say with their peers because if i'm a hunter for example i could share with you and store up my goods in the form of the favor that you now owed me which is an extremely effective way of storing food and a very strange way of storing it we learned over time that people who were able to do that were more likely to survive they made better mates and and after that only long after that were we able to derive that as a principle anyways back to back to uh having our eyes opened when we became self-conscious we became aware of the future along with our awareness of the future came awareness of our own fundamental mortality and fragility because that's associated with the discovery of the future that also enabled us to put things off until the future all those things happen at once the thing about human beings that makes us so unbelievably vicious is that once i'm aware of my own fragility deeply aware of that i can capitalize on that because i can understand that what will hurt me will also hurt you and that means i can start to make an art out of pain animals you know at their worst they're predatory in in a brutal manner but human beings go way past that in their capacity for destruction and it isn't only that the the capacity that we have because we are aware of our own fragility and so can artfully use that awareness on others it's also that we have motivations that animals don't have too like very complex motivations of revenge and resentment and they're very very very dark dark motivations and i think part of the reason it's so difficult for us to understand our own behavior in relationship to events like like the holocaust is that to really understand that you have to look in places that are so dark that looking there is is in itself virtually traumatic and so people don't and i understand why but i don't think we have that luxury unfortunately i would say that exactly we don't have the luxury and it's not that everybody needs to look deeply into those dark places but we need to agree that it has to be done that people who are capable of figuring out what's there have to be licensed to do it and uh we have to avoid demonizing them for uh thinking about it and discussing it but i want to go back a little bit um a lot of what you say resonates with me here i suspect the answer with respect to what animals do and don't do is um more nuanced than than your thinking so for example i can easily come up with several examples um from various species of what appears to be an impulse toward delayed gratification i don't think well i know it's there in its nascent form and and you certainly see it acted out um i don't i mean it's built into animals like insects like bees for example it's built into beavers um you see i think you see instinctual there's instincts that mimic delay of gratification and i do think it's there in its nascent form i mean like languages for example in chimpanzees they can get some distance with language although not very far you know it's ver there's virtually nothing that you see in human beings that you can't see echoes of in other animals but but you know at some point a degree a difference in quantity say makes a difference in quality and and the self-conscious emotions are developed to a very high degree you see elephants for example seem to have some sense of death from what i've been able to understand they do return i think there are reliable reports of them returning to places where a close relative of theirs had died and moving the bones and that sort of thing and they seemed to grieve and i've seen grief in my pets or what it certainly appears to be grief um but you know the the the certain knowledge that your life is finite and so is everyone else's that seems to me to be uniquely human and it's certainly uniquely human to be able to state it as an explicit proposition yes i think that's very frequently where the line is there's no question in my mind that we have clear evidence of grief in uh dogs in chimps in gorillas in elephants in toothed whales probably baleen whales we've seen it and there's also no doubt in my mind that in some of those cases there is an element of what we would call consciousness involved but the thing that is so special about humans is the degree of elaboration of consciousness and the degree to which it is not confined to individual skulls that's to say our ability to transmit abstract ideas between skulls through language allows us to actually share a consciousness which is something i uh i believe that we do in the most literal sense and i believe is actually the um the fundamental rudiment of consciousness and that unfortunately we've we've bought the job of studying it because we take individual consciousness uh to be primary when in fact it is secondary well i'm i'm of the line of the animal investigators let's say that you know there's this injunction that's frequently delivered to people who study animals that you should be careful of anthropomorphizing but i don't really like that idea i think that you should assume continuity unless there's evidence to the contrary and i think that's even true of consciousness i mean you know people reflexively assume that consciousness is a consequence of the development of the higher order brain centers the neocortex the prefrontal cortex and all of that but you can lose an awful lot of cortical territory and still maintain consciousness so i think consciousness is i mean it's very difficult to pin down exactly what it is there's a phenomenological aspect to it which is extraordinarily mysterious the fact that experience exists is almost indistinguishable from the idea that being itself exists and so it's a very deep idea but i think that consciousness is an ancient phenomena elaborated self-conscious that's linguistic that's a different story that seems to be something that's well comparatively new and also comparatively unique it's at least it's at least unique in the degree that it allows us to work in conscious space and innovate so the delayed gratification point that you were making earlier it is certainly true that um you know a squirrel caching acorns is involved in something that is clearly reflective of an instinct as you say towards delayed gratification we don't know how much the squirrel knows about it but we humans can um innovate we can decide that our ultimate objective is something deep in the future and we can in we can link together many different costs that we might be willing to pay in the short term in order to get there and do a very elaborate version of what a uh a squirrel or salmon or any one of a number of creatures do in a rudimentary form but the degree to which that is distinct is so substantial that in some sense it's its own category yes yes well and and we can also reflect on it as you're doing and i think the critical apart from the ability to reflect on it the critical element there is that we can delay gratification in a way that no other human being in our ancestral chain has ever delayed gratification whereas squirrel a and squirrel offspring b pretty much do exactly the same thing and that's part of the innovation idea and if they do innovate that's usually a consequence of difference in environment between squirrels rather than any innovative capacity that's inherent to the squirrel that's even true of chimpanzees as far as i can tell you know there is some variation in tool use but i think the simplest explanation for that is well there's variation in environment so those things that offer them to the rudimentary to themselves to the rudimentary tool using capacity of the chimp vary from environment to environment that's the innovation because it has to be that way to my way of thinking because you know because of compound interest you don't need much innovative capacity for it to become explosive very very rapidly on the evolutionary time scale like if you could if a chimp could innovate one tenth of one percent a year it would only be let's say a million years before there was an advanced chimpanzee society and we don't see that so the the the evidence is well the innovation doesn't occur or if it does it's certainly not cumulative it can't be transmitted and that's also something of crucial importance or it exists in a bounded context where it pays less and less basically i would argue you would i mean a you do see roughly what you're describing in the six million year trajectory from our our split from chimpanzee ancestors um you know we have seen a uh we have seen several cumulative booms right it's not a perfectly consistent rate but there has been an elaboration of capacity and in fact the best argument for why our lineage looks different is that we achieved something that my phd advisor called ecological dominance which is the state at which it is competition with other members of your species that is the strongest determinant of your evolutionary success at which point you have an arms race and so basically human capacity for thought uh was built up as one group competed against another and innovated against another which of course would make tremendous use of language as a conduit between consciousnesses in order to facilitate um adaptation so in the chimp case i would argue the very limited capacity to transmit abstract ideas between chimps is running up against the degree to which one can escape the uh the limits of the ecological context in which the chimp finds itself so um there's the capacity for cumulative culture even in chimps but its ability to extract more and more from the world is limited by the ecological context so i i i know something that that i'd like to talk to you about i i have some evolutionary ideas i've been wrestling with these for a long time about the origins of i suppose the origins of religious ideas the evolutionary origins of religious ideas um and so i'd like to run those by you a little bit can i can i put you on pause this uh it certainly can you uh you reminded me of what i wanted to talk to you about uh as a result of what you were saying in that last segment okay and it is exactly on this topic so we are we are converging here so my point was going to be that actually belief in something like an afterlife is it's consistent at least with the hypothesis that evolution is extending the possible if gratification can be delayed gratification can be delayed till after death right that in effect by building an afterlife on which you reflect during your actual life one can effectively reschedule the rewards such that it is fine by you to pay a cost that you are not repaid in life thinking that it will be repaid later and in some sense it is repaid but not in the form that the mythology would tell us it's repaid in the form of your descendants the carriers of your genes being well positioned in their future going forward and so uh to see it's ideas like that that that motivated at least in part the discussions that i had with sam harris because that's a really good example assuming that it's valid and it might be and it might not be like we can't tell um that's that's an idea let's say your your proposition is that's an idea that in some sense is objectively false but evolutionarily true metaphorically true but literally false yes yes but but but because it it it furthers adaptation and it's it's at some point it's difficult to at some point you have to make it distinct it's difficult to draw a distinction between truth as it's uh defined pragmatically and on the darwinian landscape and truth as it's defined when you're when your concern is the nature of the objective world and and that that was really at the core of the discussion that i wanted to continually have with sam and i think did have with some degree of success um so um i i agree with what you just said and the the difficult point sometimes i can make this point to the scientifically minded about the phenomenon of religious mythology it becomes very difficult to make the reverse point which i heard you just make there which is actually if you look at the way we do science effectively we start out with a large uh fraction of a model that we have for some phenomenon and the large fraction is effectively metaphorically true literally false it's good enough in order to operate in the space but it's not accurate if you pursue the phenomenology and over time what you get is models that contain less and less of that metaphorical truth and are closer and closer to literal laboratory truth you never get to zero right as far as we know but the fact that we get better causes us not to realize that it was in some sense an analog of the instinct to religious faith that effectively provides the faith to explore yeah that was exactly young's argument about the derivation of science from alchemy no interesting well it's exactly that argument is that for from the union perspective the alchemists were possessed by a and the fantasy was that the redemptive substance could be found in the bowels of matter in base matter and the perfection of matter would reveal the redemptive substance and and now the reason that jung insisted upon that was because he was trying to account for why people became motivated to pursue pursue the painstaking behaviors and observations that made up empirical science which may not be motivationally significant in and of themselves they have to be associated with something that is of motivational significance so it was a redemptive fantasy and that's also partly what convinced me that the scientific enterprise is in some sense inerratically nested inside a narrative um and the narrative is well if we explore the material world the objective material world that that will be of benefit to all of us and that's not a scientific proposition that's that's the an a priory statement of faith that motivates everything that constitutes the scientific enterprise and so that's another example of the of the same thing um let let me i've been thinking about the development of the idea of the hero and i suppose the like the the archetype of the hero the the the hero doesn't go any farther than the messianic story by definition i would say that's sort of where it where it tops out and so how might have that evolved well it seems to me that it's a consequence of us living in in hierarchies and we tend to think of hierarchies as hierarchies of power especially when we're looking at the animal kingdom although with chimpanzees that's and even other animals that's that's it's not clear that that's the case at all that the wall has shown that primatologists have shown quite clearly that chimpanzee troops are a lot more stable when the dominant male because it is a patriarchy chimpanzees are essentially a patriarchal society if the if the alpha male is cooperative and generous and kind to the females and their offspring there's a lot less internal conflict inside the troop and there's a higher probability that the guy in charge is going to stay in charge and so what that implies is that strongly implies is that the the hierarchy that's predicated on good faith game playing reciprocal game playing and reciprocity is more stable even biologically speaking than one that's based on nature red in tooth and claw and then you can imagine so then take it another step so imagine you have a hierarchy and the most effective way of moving up that hierarchy across time so that would be something that's stable across multiple landscapes of selection is whatever moves you up the hierarchy and the reason that that's that benefits fitness is because the females are more likely to mate with the the more the the males that array themselves near the top of the hierarchy and so then imagine that we've been in these hierarchies forever and we've observed successful behavior and have an instinct to admire it because that instinct to admire it facilitates mimicry and then imagine that we've learned to mimic multiple aspects of behavior that are associated with reciprocity and fair play that move people up competence hierarchies and so we've evolved our morality has actually evolved to match biologically what's being demanded by the social hierarchy and then we abstract out of that the ideal which is that pattern of behavior that moves you across the largest number of dominance hierarchies and that actually exists in our imagination as a latent religious symbol and then that's filled up by narrative constantly refilled and filled and the ultimate exemplar of that has religious power and it and the r that that inspires is if you're thinking about it biologically is the manifestation of the instinct to imitate and then you think okay then you can take that one step farther if that's true and i believe me i'd welcome a critique because if there's something wrong with that idea i'd really like to know it um that that ideal does in fact end up being the most effective way to live in the broadest possible sense and so it's valid and then you might ask well is it objectively valid and that's a very difficult thing to say because generally we're not very good at looking at complex patterns as objective reality we tend to have to reduce things to the material substrate and we can get a grip on what's materially true as we become more and more reductionistic but at those higher levels of abstraction you know like hierarchies have been around for a very very long time it's not unreasonable to assume that there's a characteristic pattern of behavior that moves you up or down the hierarchy it's not unrealistic to assume that we would be able to note when we're partaking of that or observing it or violating it that's conscience as far as i can tell and there it isn't unreasonable to note that our perceptions of that might be accurate now what that means metaphysically see i don't understand that either because human beings are unbelievably complicated we have the most complicated nervous systems that there are our brains are the most complex structures that we know of except for other brains so we are the most complex thing that we know of and so we're a pinnacle of sorts and i'm not saying that evolution is driving towards that pinnacle but in terms of cognitive elaboration it has so is the ideal form of that complaint is it unreasonable to propose that the ideal form of that complexity is divine the universe has been aiming at it since day one in some sense well so the universe has not been aiming at it as far as i can tell what it does is tend towards something it tends toward a kind of stability and what you're arguing i hear some things in it well i didn't want to smuggle in a tube over teleology but you know here we are and everything you know we we actually did emerge so and it's not it's not obvious what to make of that may it could have been otherwise you can say that but it wasn't so right so so here we are and i think you know what i what i get from what you're saying and the part i agree with is that a i think people like both you and me are too used to having to argue that these patterns are adaptive and therefore entitled to a whole host of defenses that they are not uh generally given or at least they are entitled to leeway to be evaluated on honorable grounds rather than uh castigated for the fact that they don't match up with experiment or something along those lines i do think or desire well that's that's where i'm going next is we the thing that i don't hear in what you're saying the bitter pill here is that ultimately or maybe not i won't say ultimately but historically the genes have been in charge every step of the way that is to say all of the stuff that we do above the gene level all of the cultural stuff all of the conscious stuff has been in service of the genes and that's unfortunate but but no there is a flaw in that i thought about that well look in human beings increasingly consciousness structures the mechanism that selects the genes so here's an example let's say i'll see if i can get this right so imagine for example that that you live in a hunter-gatherer troop and you have a great hunter in your midst and he's great for two reasons one is that he can hunt but the other reason is that he shares and so that makes him a really great hunter and so you elevate his status now you you elevate his status it's like you all vote all the men vote here's the good guy he's he's on top now the price you pay for that is a reduction at least on one level of your own biological fitness because by elevating him up the hierarchy you increase the probability that he's going to be chosen as a mate now the benefit of that however is that you know you get to eat and you don't die so but but my point here is is that by that continual voting on what constitutes competence and the arrangement of those hierarchies our conscious minds have structured the landscape that actually selects so the so men vote on which men are likely to mate and then the women compete for access to that victor and so both men and women are behaving in a manner that privileges certain kinds of genetic manifestations and so the consciousness is shaping the genes as much as the genes are shaping the consciousness the consciousness is in control of the behavior but it is subservient to the objective of the genes and unfortunately i think your the situation is that you've been handed a feeble toolkit by evolutionary biologists and are trying to make sense of the world as if it was higher quality than it is so i don't want to drag uh you or our viewers too deeply into the weeds here but my claim is that my field is divided between two camps that are incorrect one camp are the kin selectionists right people who view this as narrowly genetic these are my intellectual ancestors and the other group are the group selectionists who have understood something else which is that essentially altruism pays and there are certain places you can stand that it appears that that is a driving evolutionary force whereas mathematically it is very difficult to make a robust model of this sort at least not a realistic one my point would be the kin selectionists have understood one part of the logic correctly but they've instantiated it too narrowly the group selectionists have found a fiction but just as we were describing 15 minutes ago that fiction has actually given them license to explore a very fertile piece of evolutionary territory which is the landscape of cultural evolution right cultural evolution does not make a tremendous amount of sense through the narrowest kin selected lens it makes a great deal of sense through the group selected lens but the gateway is fictional and so i think you have for me you have to bring that down to earth more before i can completely follow what what you're yeah i'm going to harass you about critiquing my specific point after that anyway okay good so i'm trying to follow but i i put some examples would probably help me make sure i'm following you let's take your example and let's put it into what i think the right way of resolving this conflict in evolutionary biology is so i would argue that the right way of viewing this is something called lineage selection now a lineage is an individual and all of that individual is descendants okay and my point is that is actually a valid target of evolution lineages can evolve just the same way individuals can evolve so we can see adaptation at the lineage level which will look like if you don't pay close enough attention to what you're looking at it may look like group evolution which is in part why the group selectionists have gotten themselves confused but here's the point let's take your hunter-gatherer band and the case of the individual male who is an excellent hunter and is also valued by his male companions because he shares and therefore his status in the group provides some increased likelihood of mating which could be taken as an evolutionary loss from the point of view of his male competitors inside of his band but i would argue isn't one and the reason is this let's think about this band if everybody took a narrow view of their own contribution to the next generation right if all they did if all the males did was try to leave as many genes in the next generation as possible by whatever means necessary right a that's a band full of conflict right now if we look across the larger landscape all of the bands of hunter-gatherers how much does the competition between two individuals within one band over mates affect how many copies of their genes are on that larger landscape and the answer is almost not at all right that is to say you can have 10 offspring to some other individual's two right and you might think that you'd beaten him by a factor of five but there are two problems with this one if you are closely related to him then a lot of what we narrowly and the kinselect the traditional kinselected view would regard as a loss to you is actually insignificant compared to the larger landscape but the other thing is if your band blinks out of existence five generations down the road taking all of your great great great great grand offspring right if it takes all those people with him then you have not succeeded the advantage you got within one generation is completely erased by the loss of the population within which you were embedded so the point is if we really understood the mindset of the individual in rational evolutionary terms we would understand that they in some sense will be built they will be wired and programmed to behave in such a way both to advance their own genetic interests and to protect the long-term uh population well-being that allows those genes to circulate right they will effectively be protecting a gene pool now the group selectionists will jump and they will say aha you've done it you've said that groups are valid and i will say no it is not the group it is a lineage it is the lineage protecting itself through the individual that is responsible for the adaptation here you can dismiss it as a group but that's like that's like saying um that uh i threw a frisbee what practical difference what practical difference do you think that makes in relationship to what are the implications of that view compared to the implications of group selection viewpoint well they're subtly distinct but i would argue in the end decisive so for example if you take the group selection view and you do not recognize the game theoretic instability at its core then you may struggle to find a formulation of marxism for example that realizes the full benefits of human cooperation not realizing that the structure you build will be inherently unstable and that you have to actually correct for that instability which will either happen through brutality which you don't want right or you will have to architect something much closer to what eleanor ostrom discovered in her nobel prize winning work about the way indigenous peoples do this very job so i guess the point is the group selection i would argue is a temporary misunderstanding of lineage selection but it does a good enough job to allow those who are involved in thinking in a group selected way to see human cultural evolution for what it is and that's where the payoff comes and so my point is we can now go back having found human cultural evolution which is where the heavy lifting is done we can now go back and correct the group selected viewpoint and we can make it rigorous by looking at it as a lineage phenomenon not a group phenomenon and we have then a continuous understanding which then i we've gotten super complicated here and i wish we hadn't but i will point out though that the upshot of this from my perspective is the genes have been in charge all along they have acted through consciousness they have acted through culture but those things have been subordinate to genetic objectives but now that we have consciousness we can look at what it is that genes would have us do and we can actually take them out of that control position and we must because they contain things like programs for genocide and warfare that we must sideline if we're going to survive so having arrived at an understanding of what we are actually built for we now have to turn the tables on the genes which is not easy but i also don't think it's impossible okay so i'm going to branch out two ways there i there i don't i there's no objections to the argument that you laid out come come into my mind and it's it's obviously something you've thought about a lot and i can't spin up hypothesis about lineage selection versus group selection sort of on the cuff i would say however that it isn't clear to me how that argument independent of its validity is related to my original proposition that um it's it's misleading in some sense to think of the genes more in charge than the consciousness they're looping with one another because the because consciousness is in fact making choices about what constitutes those that will be elected to the status of more likely maters and so that that doesn't have any detrimental effect as far as i'm concerned on the idea of genetic i'm not trying to devalue the power of genes across time at all but if consciousness is selecting the mechanism that selects it's definitely altering the probability that genes are going to propagate against across time i would say your lineage argument in some sense actually likely makes that case more strongly because look one of the things i outlined in beyond order i touched on it a little bit in in the previous book was the idea that you know some an action you undertake an action to to to to uh to gain a particular goal in a particular framework of time so all of your actions are bounded in space and time you don't want it to take forever and you don't want it to occupy everywhere right so you're you're operating locally but you have to operate locally in a way this is like the lineage idea in a way that doesn't disturb your next local action or the one after that you have to think about your action now its consequences immediately its consequences in a day a week a month a year and that shades off forever and so an optimal action is one that takes you where you want to go now but doesn't interfere with your ability to get to where you want to go in the future or maybe even makes that easier and so you could say we're we're sophisticated enough so that we not only look for patterns of behavior to admire that work now but we look for patterns of behavior that work now in a way that isn't compromising the future and that's why for example i think that we admire and track reciprocity and that's obviously something you're interested in as someone who worked with trivers we track reciprocity unbelievably well and i would say that's at least in part because reciprocity is a game that sustains itself across time and that's actually a place where you can see our eye to the future operating if i do you a favor and you don't return it you're not trustworthy over the long run i can't rely on you and so i'm not going to afford you any benefits evolutionarily or other otherwise so any anything any flaws in that that you see no i would say that there's another rung to that ladder so uh as an undergraduate i worked with trivers um and uh reciprocity was obviously uh a key feature of his contribution to the field my graduate advisor dick alexander contributed the idea of indirect reciprocity in which typically mediated through things like reputation it does not have to be repaid by the individual for whom you've done the service and of course this actually underlies the evolution of of economic systems and and the like um but i want to go back to the question you asked me about um whether or not the genes are not in fact in some ways subject to the the consciousness there's a limited way in which that is true clearly the genes are exists in an environment in which the consciousness has a great deal of say over what the genes get to do but here's the problem let's take it away from people for a second so that we can see this clearly the genes of a spider exist in all of the spiders cells incapable of doing anything exerting any force on the world whatsoever except through the spider so you might say that actually the body of the spider is in some ways in charge of the gene's well-being and that's true but if you had a group of spiders that woke up to the fact that their bodies were in fact in charge and that their genes couldn't force them to do anything and those spiders decided instead of investing in spider ecology stuff they were going to invest in um spider hedonism right something like that so that the spiders were just doing what their bodies felt like doing and not what their genes wanted them doing which is to spread those genes then those individual spiders would indeed be in control they could do exactly what they wanted but what would happen is those spiders that made that decision would fail to pass on their genes and two spider generations later they would be gone and the spiders that would absolutely well i i would i would certainly i'm thinking of a bi-directional effect obviously i mean it's clear i think you're absolutely right that consciousness can make decisions that are going to put genetic evolution to a halt but what i'm saying actually is that we must do that if we are to survive but it is i believe it is the most difficult puzzle human beings have ever faced we have to reverse we have to turn the tables on the genes and we have to actually say look we have to confront the genes the genes awarded us the most amazing computational machinery in the known universe they also awarded us the ability to pursue and appreciate beauty to be compassionate they awarded us all of those things as a means to a narrow genetic end a very uninteresting one and the point is now that we have consciousness and we do appreciate beauty and we can be compassionate and we appreciate people who have good characteristics we have to look at what we're programmed for and say actually no the machine is capable of something honorable whereas the genetic objective is actually 100 percent identical to the genetic objective of every other creature with genes that is to say the capacity of a human being is spectacular it is unrivaled but the purpose of a human being is no different than the purpose of a liver fluke or an oak tree or a malaria particle it's to pass on its genes and given that we can now see that we don't want to be advancing our genetic interest because frankly that's not a defensible goal but we do honor the things that our machine is capable of we have to place those things at a higher position in the hierarchy and the critical part the difficult part is we have to do that without giving an advantage to people who refused to give up the genetic program as its primary as their primary objective god you know i feel like i'm caught in a modern um incarnation of the arguments between freud and jung is that right yes because well but i'm i'm not playing i'm not playing freud's role yes i think i think you are oh terry there's not an insult by any stretch of the imagination um and and but what i hear is genes as id well and and and well let me let me just walk through the analogy sure and tell me what you think genes as id and superego as control mechanism so what you see in freud continually is the idea that base impulses have to be inhibited and that's actually the primary function of civilization and you know the the brain is an inhibitory mechanism in large part and so there's a neurological rationale for that we shut off many things all the time we they're they're lurking and ready to leap forth but they're inhibited but there's two ways of thinking about such things as the regulation of aggression let's let's and that we can work with aggression and sexuality those though they come together we started with rape they come together very well there so um do you inhibit aggression do you inhibit sexuality or do you spin them together with a variety of other impulses and make them into like a dynamic and harmonic game where they have their say where you have access to their force but but they're not manifest in a way that is incompatible with long-term reciprocity and then i would say i wouldn't underestimate the genes because i i think that not only do they code for the aggressive impulses which they clearly do and the sexual impulses which they clearly do but i think they also code for behavioral patterns that represent the integration of those into a reciprocal game i think we're sophisticated enough biologically for that and that's why i think that we admire that's why we have the capacity to admire high order ethical behavior now there might be a bit of a competition you know that so that the genes that that uh control or or bring about aggression have been around for so long and are so primordial and powerful that the the biology that allows us to to integrate and to recognize integration is of insufficient power to regulate them that's a possibility but but i i think that our biology i think the biology of ethics is more sophisticated than than mere inhibition well so boy there's a lot to say here one i think you're hearing echoes of the debate between freud and young i don't think the positions map and what i would argue is that freud clearly has something right with respect to inhibition in some sense human beings have a range of behaviors that they are endowed with genetically and then the program that they acquire through nurture limits where those programs are deployed it may turn certain programs permanently latent um and my point is that's a natural process young is focused somewhere different right freud is focused on the inhibition itself and i must say i'm not well versed in freud but um with things like uh the edible complex the electric complex i believe he's got it dead wrong he basically bought the job because he saw a pattern that he recognized and in fact it was a slightly different pattern but we can return there later my point would be we have a natural process of those inhibitions being wielded in an ever more sophisticated way that does ever better sideline things like violence society is getting less violent if you look over a long time scale it's getting less violent in terms of your risk walking down the street more tolerant etc but that the problem is that that has functioned as a means to an end and the end is a genetic one even though we're not aware of it if you look at society any society it may look increasingly peaceful but in part its being increasingly peaceful on the inside is strengthening it for battle with other societies on the outside and ultimately we can't play that game forever right there is no there are no new continents our weapons are too powerful we are too interconnected we are all bound together in one experiment and if we continue to allow a dynamic that brought us here to rule to govern our behavior we will extinguish ourselves in short order so my point is the genes and competition between lineages was good enough to generate all the amazing stuff that's built into humans it also generated all the horrifying stuff it is now time for us to choose between them because in some sense we've run to the end of the tape we have now gotten to a place where the game that brought us here will be fatal we can say that with essential essentially certainty um at this point because of the power of our tools right 500 years ago a human population that uh was foolish could extinguish itself but it couldn't extinguish humanity and now we're at the point where a foolish population can take humanity out and it's only a french individual yeah even a foolish individual well increasingly we're moving to well i certainly i certainly don't disagree with that um that that danger i guess i i i you know i've always been attracted to the union idea of integration of the shadow and that is not an inhibition argument it's a it's an integration argument and so i would say rather than and i think this is an important difference is that there's lots of ways that you can be a warrior that are in keeping with reciprocity but allow that fundamental motivational force to still have its say now let one of the things that i think capitalism is i think capitalism is under appreciated for its vices so it's better that warlike men establish mercantile empires then empires of war and so and i think rather than the whole scale remodeling of our group of our proclivity for group aggression we need to figure out how to refine and and orient it um so capitalism is a landscape of competition it's not only that because it's also a landscape of cooperation and virtually everything we do is a landscape of competition and cooperation but i see for example misguided efforts to insist that all games among children be cooperative as a way of dampening down the competitive impulse and to me that that is that's going to make things worse rather than better now i'm not saying that that's what you're what you're aiming at but it is it look we we share a common view of this problem the problem is is that we've become so technologically powerful that our moral failings are increasingly fatal okay so what do we do about that well my my answer to that to the degree that i have one is that while we learn to play the best of all possible games and we bring all of that evolutionary heritage on board to play that game and that's a that's a sublimation and a sophistication and and it's it's sort of bj rather than freud in some sense yeah i would say uh i think we're in near perfect agreement here we have to learn each other's language about it yes what i would say is you know an explosion is a very dangerous thing but it's a marvelous thing in a cylinder where it can be used to do physical work and so the point is yeah let's not pretend that we are something other than we are but let's take those impulses and channel them to something productive and so yes this is actually that's good because i can bring that back to my book now because that's what i'm that is really what i'm trying to do in these three books is to say well look don't underestimate your downside your capacity for mayhem but don't assume that that makes you unredeemable don't be so afraid of it that you can't admit to it that'll make it even worse and find something better to do we're jealous and resentful and vengeful and bitter and all of those things and i also especially in chapter 11 of the new book try to explain why we have those motivations and why they're so powerful again to give the devil his due but to say nonetheless well we have to get beyond that despite the fact despite the reasons for our motives for our dark motives the thing is we know that we are capable of marvelous things and frankly i don't think this puzzle is as hard as it seems if we set ourselves to it if we're continually battling over whether or not it's real then i i don't think we're gonna make it but okay so let me let me offer you a practical problem i've been talking to bjorn lomborg and matt ridley on my podcasts and they're future optimists in in within a materialistic framework fundamentally both of them insist that things are not as dire as they're painted but regardless of that what they do point to like stephen pinker i would say is that we've made tremendous progress on all sorts of dimensions in the last three or four hundred years and there's every reason to assume that we could continue doing that over the next hundred years if we got our priorities straight it's within our capability and so you can look at such things and i think these are hard bits of data although time frame is always a problem um we're there are far fewer people in abject poverty by proportion now than there were 40 years ago and 40 years ago there were much fewer much fewer than there was a hundred years ago and that trajectory appears to be continuing we can continue to make incremental improvements in the material well-being of everyone by and there's limits obviously and the economists and the biologists argue about what those limits might be but one of the problems with that view is that it's not saleable you know it doesn't have for some reason it doesn't have the kind of motive power that enables people to get on board and get enthusiastic about it well i also don't think i i don't think it's i must say i have mixed reactions i'm i'm a fan of ridley's not so much lomborgs and i have mixed feelings about pinker's view there's obviously some truth in it but i believe it goes out of its way to miss the counter-argument and well it might it it might go out of its way to mystic you know even from from a rhetorical perspective and you know i would look at that symbolically i would say look there's a there's a tyrant and there's a wise king and they're both there and if you only look at the tyrant that's the corruption of society then you're missing half the story and i would imagine that pinker would say well people are looking at the tyrant so hard that we need to look at the wise king a little bit more well i i would take a different approach to this so i would argue that things have gotten better the the pinker pattern is recognizable but that it is it cannot be indefinitely extended and that the limit is that we've come to a place where lineage versus lineage competition on a planet of this size with a population as large as we have and the technologies that we've got is a fatal proposition almost no matter how it plays out so in order to take the pattern that has continued to this point and extend it indefinitely into the future you have to do two things one of them we've already described which is you have to take the genes out of the driver's seat which is frankly in the long-term interests of the genes but genes are too dim to see it right so we have to take uh effectively a something like a buddhist approach to uh long-term well-being we have to become very uh dedicated to the idea of sustainability and i realize how hard it is to operationalize an idea like that but somehow we cannot keep degrading the planet and imagining that we're going to technologically rescue it well i hope your conscience does that technically speaking i mean i mean i'm dead serious about this because you you just said something of crucial importance and i think it's at the core there's an argument that's always going on now between biologists and economists i would say that they're the two camps and the economists say human ingenuity can continually rescue us from whatever problems are likely to emerge and the biologists say well never forget malthus and it's a matter of time frame which is the argument you made it's like well that's working now you know there's that famous bet between um paul ehrlich and simon and ehrlich wrote the population bomb yep a very pessimistic book and he believed at that point 68 i think that there would be mass starvation and a terrible shortage of material resources by the year 2000 and he had a famous pet with simon who was a genius in his own right certainly the intellectual match for erlick and simon said no i'll bet you that everything will be cheaper and people will be less hungry and simon won the bet now erlich could say yeah yeah well i got it wrong by 50 years or i got it wrong by a hundred time frames deadly dead yeah so but but okay we can take time frame serious seriously i've been taking this idea of an intrinsic evolutionarily determined biologically based ethic seriously and i think that the voice of conscience is the voice of sustainability and iterability speaking within and it's not overwhelming it's not overwhelming because you have to sacrifice the future for the present fairly often it turns out that way right because you have to you have to you have to make snap emergency decisions that might not be in your best long-term interest but the long-term interest speaks inside you agreed and agree but less less and less well as we have abandoned the mythology that used to undergird it so as we have become more secular why would you say that's a very interesting thing to say why do you believe that well i i first of all the problem with cultural evolution is that if we talk about genetic adaptations you can look at virtually any creature virtually any appendage virtually any behavior in a non-human creature in its natural environment and be pretty sure it makes a good deal of sense right the stuff that didn't make sense got pruned away it's not there to see how it makes sense that's a tough question but whether it makes sense not tough almost ever in human cultural evolution space that is not the case right we have a huge amount of noise stuff that will not stand the test of time that nonetheless dominates our current cultural landscape and so we can't go into it and assume these things make sense so what i'm telling you is that in my view the religious mythology was doing jobs that we don't know some of them we can piece together some of them will never understand what the role of a particular mythological belief was but what we have now is kind of an intermediate level of sophistication where we've gotten past some of the religious mythology but without the wisdom necessary to replace it with anything that does the jobs that it was doing and so we're now screwing up left and right you know that's the right way to put it too because most of this see what to me what's happened is that functional mythology has been replaced by inadequate ideology and the ideology and i wrote about this in beyond order there's a chapter called abandoned i think of ideologies as parasites on a fun on a on a on a religious platform they have their power the power they have is because they derive their power from an underlying mythological narrative structure but they they only tell half the story if that that's that's akin to that that's an idea that's akin to the one that you just laid out yeah i think so although i think you're being generous to call it all ideology i'd say some of it's just idiocy right we've we've replaced a structure that worked that is now not viable because it's not in the environment for which it adapted but we've replaced it with something that doesn't stand any chance of working and we keep uh you know one self-inflicted wound after the next and either we're going to figure out that pattern and recognize that the function that we're using to generate the next level of behavior and culture is a lethal hazard or it's going to take us out so i would say the key if i can go back to what we were talking about a few minutes ago the key to continuing the trajectory of improvement that has been recognized by pinker and ridley at least is to understand that it needs to be based on something else going forward that the limits of the system that they are recognizing we have to go through a a revolution in the way we sustain ourselves we cannot fuel it on lineage versus lineage competition however what we mustn't do is either create a stagnation that causes the human beings to react in the way that they do when uh they run up against the limits of a landscape a physical landscape or run up against the limits of economic growth both of which would be a disaster so we have to create a steady state in which we don't degrade the planet but we do give the human beings the sensation of living in a time of growth that's going to be the key right human beings when they are well i want to i want to decorate that slightly i mean part of the problem here too is that i when you're absolutely deprived having that deprivation remediated is powerfully motivating but as the deprivation decreases the motivating power of the remediation decreases and so i would also say that arguing for the uh motivational viability of a more generous material landscape is also a a game that is decreasing in its attractiveness because you know what one of the things i realized a few years ago was that um if you're stuck in traffic it makes very little difference how expensive your car is that there's we've we've hit we've hit the point where we most people many people have enough so that having more isn't going to be of that much utility and i'm not talking about people who are still absolutely deprived and i understand full well that a large percentage of the population decreasing though it may be are still in a state of absolute deprivation i'm not and they and they're going to be motivated by the desire for material improvement for sure but those of us who are in who are past that and i would say that's virtually everyone in north america that isn't suffering reasons that material cannot remediate we're wealthy we have heat we have refrigeration we have an infinite expanse of informational technology that can all be improved but the improvements aren't going to make that much difference what what's next like what do you do when you have enough all right so you try to make everyone else have enough that's something right that's something and it's worth it but even that is a that's happening right so i realized something uh over the last several weeks which is that there's something that has bothered me about the way those of us who um fear marxism argue against it it seems to me that we very frequently say things about how marxism goes wrong and these things i would say them very somewhat differently than most people but by and large there is some direct connection between the attempt to create a marxist utopia and starvation authoritarianism and i think i know what this is and actually it goes back to the question of group selection which is because these systems are game theoretically unstable because they punish those who do more and reward those who do less in order to get people who are harmed by that that is to say those who tend to contribute more and are therefore punished by such a system to uh adhere to it you have to threaten them right they're unplayable games and you have to enforce them by force because people discover they're unplayable right yeah so that unplayable game i just want to elaborate that because you said game theoretic and you're going to lose you'll know you'll lose a bunch of your audience because of that but these are and stop me if i mangle this but game theorists are interested in the repeatability of interactions and some forms of interactions uh degenerate with time those aren't sustainable they're not good games as you play them you get bored by them or hurt by them you don't want to keep playing some games maintain themselves and i would say we have an ethic that teaches us when we're playing a sustainable game i think that's the voice of conscience that's related to the points i made earlier your main system as it's instantiated is actually an unplayable game and you gave a reason is that you you can't set up a system that punishes people that are productive and and and rewards people who aren't even if some of the people are only miming productivity and they're actually power hungry tyrants you can't clump them in with the competent people and punish all of them yep and if you try in order to stabilize it in order to get those who are being punished for contributing not to defect you have to you have to threaten them so the authoritarianism follows quickly on the heels as does in many cases the failure of the system to deliver even basic well-being hence starvation well and piaget pointed out quite explicitly because he was very interested in games as the basis of morality that a game that you have to punish people to adhere to is going to be out competed by a game that people will play by themselves bingo yeah so what i it's natural ethic so we make this argument many of us who have this particular concern we make this argument or some version of it here's the argument that i don't hear the argument that i don't hear but i'm certain that i believe and have believed all along is that equality of outcome even if you could achieve it is in and of itself not desirable and certainly unjust i would love to talk about that i thought you might so my argument is very simple right what you want is a system that leverages well-being in order to generate uh improvements so in other words you want the reward that comes from successfully competing to get individuals to contribute to collective well-being and mythology the mythology of our economic system is that you're being rewarded for delivering stuff that's good and that's why you're wealthy right now it happens that our economic system does a terrible job of this it enriches lots of people who are actually harming other people but in principle if you were economically rewarded for generating well-being that would be a good thing and it is desirable therefore that we have a system in which people who have contributed more have earned the right to live better and people who have contributed less do not live as well but live at a respectable standard and bitcoin people would really like to talk to you about this i'm sure they have made themselves hard to talk to i will tell you but yes well they're hoping it's incorruptible you know it can't be gamed as easily and it's an interesting argument there's aspects of the argument that are very interesting yes they're on to something they they seem to think they've found the ultimate uh solution to all sorts of problems whereas i think they found a very promising avenue but not a solution i remain to be convinced of that but in any case the point is we on the left you will very frequently hear that um inequality is evidence of injustice yes i i definitely wanted to re return to that so continue and this is not the case a system in which people were armed with high quality tools with which to compete in which competition rewarded behavior that contributed to our collective well-being and did not reward behavior where we harm each other that would be a good system in which people would end up living unequally now it might not be a massive level of inequality it might be more limited but nonetheless the point is those who would shoot for a system in which we all end up with exactly the same amount are actually setting us up for a very a despicable and unjust outcome whereas a system in which the ability to earn a higher quality of living is available to you and you have the tools with which to pursue it is a desirable system okay so let me add something to that sure okay so it isn't that obvious when you're talking about outcome and when you're talking about right now i don't mean you i mean in general so like you have an array of talents and abilities and and some of those are what you're going to use to pursue your outcome but some of them are already outcomes okay so so it's not obvious what's the difference between an outcome and an ability now you want to you also want to if everyone was equal no one could trade because you wouldn't have anything to offer me you have to offer me something i don't have now you might say the fact that you have something i don't isn't an outcome but i already said that what exactly constitutes the outcome is blurry it's arbitrary now all you have to bring to the world is what is unequal about you and so unless and you'd think that people who push on the diversity end of things would recognize that above all else and so to by by forcing equality you actually destroy what everyone has to bring to the table to trade and that's a terrible thing because well because you punish them then for the best thing they have that's one terrible thing but the other thing is you deprive everyone of the opportunity to benefit from everyone bringing what's unique about them to the table so i would say there's a there's a terrible contradiction between diversity as a value and equality of outcome as a desire those two things aren't i don't see how they're logically commensurate that's a very interesting point i i really i really like it um that in effect uh our collective well-being is a matter of the creation of wealth through the exchange and the exchange inherently requires an inequality right yes and you even work for the inequality because let's say you're only as good as everyone else at some at everything well then you're going to go out and educate yourself like mad about something until you're now a marketable commodity and you should and so you're making yourself you're you're increasing the amount of inequality as a consequence but that's actually a virtue not an advice another way of putting it is that in order for all of the jobs to get done that make us collectively robust and well-off people have to arbitrage things that are under valued in other words if there is a dearth of computer programmers then it is your desire to get ahead that might cause you to go into computer programming which is the force that ensures that there are enough computer programmers in the next round of the game and if you don't have that motivation because everybody has been slated for an equal outcome then the point is there's no telling what you'll have too many of and too few of in the next round because there's no reward for figuring out uh which thing is uh is is is uh well worth it there's a punish there's a punishment for being exceptional because your exceptionality is exists in violation of the principle of equality yes it's uh i mean it's uh it's the harrison bergeron uh dystopia and so anyway i didn't want to um drag us too far down the road here but i do want to say that i think both of these arguments against anything uh marxist must be on the table right not only does it devolve into something uh authoritarian and ineffective at feeding people but it also wouldn't be desirable even if it didn't it would be horrifying and so i want to put that as a counterpoint to what i was arguing for before which is in order for us to continue through the next several hundred years let's say and to continue to enjoy a high quality of living we have to retool the objectives of the system so that they give the human beings the somatic sensations that they need we have to feel that we are living in a time of growth because we will be less violent if we feel the sensation of growth i think your point about integrating the [Music] dangerous components of the human psyche with the productive components is probably key to this as well in other words and in fact we can see many examples of this right so for example if we look into the past before widely available birth control for example before widely available birth control women were wise to avoid engaging in behavior that might cause them to have to raise a child alone because that's a very expensive mistake to make the fact of women being careful about that made sexual relationships with women scarce they had a high bar to them and when they had a high bar to them that created an awful lot of motivation for straight males to achieve things right and so the point is okay we pulled the plug on that system sex became common people are now much more or straight males are much less likely to have incentive to participate in the system so maybe we've substituted a pure financial incentive for what was once a romance incentive right so that's one example another example might be the the case of the way once upon a time corporations used to deal with their career employees right who came in at some rung of the ladder and every year or two uh was awarded a bonus or you know a raise and an increase in the benefits that they had access to and that creates a kind of sensation of growth even if the economy was stagnant um and so in any case what i'm arguing is that there have been things in the past that functioned so as to create the correct uh structure of incentives for a person so that they had meaning and direction in their life so that basically by following um a normal set of impulses they ended up uh likely to uh contribute and then what we've got now is effectively well very much to the title of your book chaos where following one's impulses is very likely to lead you to spend tremendous number of hours playing a video game that does not contribute positively to the world but costs you has an opportunity cost with respect to what you will learn and achieve so what do you think about this i mean you can i'd like you to answer this personally i mean you've made some costly decisions in the last few years and they've had benefits they've had benefits as well but they've also had costs my sense is that as we face an increasingly complex landscape and the consequences of our actions echo ever more powerfully around because of the technology that the best place that we can start investigating to find out what the path forward might be is in more careful attention to the voice of i said this already conscience does that seem to you to be because you said something abstract we need we need this landscape to replace to to rectify the flaws in our current landscape but getting from that from where we are to that point is a very difficult proposition you know i've been criticized in my thinking because of my undue emphasis on the individual you know especially by people i would say people who are more on the left who who maybe view things at a systems level more readily well what about the role of government what about the fact of inequities in society um shouldn't you be concentrating on movement at that level and i think well all of that's changing extraordinarily rapidly as it is there's no doubt that there's action at those levels that's necessary but that doesn't seem to be what's particularly germane at the moment because i don't know where i don't know where else we can turn for answers i also turned to the past you know i i made the presupposition which is something you laid out earlier that you know if if an animal species engages in the behavior consistently you might start by assuming that there's something useful about it even though you might not understand it i made that assumption when i was looking at religious belief because it was clear to me and still is as a biologist that human beings have a religious instinct we have the capacity for religious experience and so that it so so dismissing all that out of hand because you're scientific actually seems to me to be a contradiction in terms you know if you're a physicist perhaps and perhaps not but if you're a biologist well no wait a minute you you run into the problem of darwin immediately human beings have a religious instinct why is that well is it a spandrel i don't think you should be allowed to define spandrel's post-hawk you know i can't figure out why that's useful therefore it's an evolutionary dead end perhaps not well the spandrel argument uh it's funny i was just uh writing about it a little bit uh this morning but uh the spandrel argument is a red herring your argument is exactly correct for and in fact i generated a four-part test for adaptation um to escape the spandrel's argument many years ago back do you want to define spandrel just so that they're going to lose people on on that one sure yeah spandrel is an architectural consequence of placing a dome on columns they're these sort of roughly triangular shapes and there's a famous set of them in saint mark's basilica in venice which stephen j gould and richard luonten used as the central metaphor in a paper that they wrote in 1979 which argued that evolutionary biologists were getting ahead of themselves and making up lots of stories to explain why this that and the other trait of creatures was adaptive when in fact they didn't have the logical basis to make that claim now i'm not going to go into the whole set of counter arguments but it's a nonsense argument on their part there's like a a grain of truth and then a whole lot of fiction stacked on top of it which was interestingly deployed uh both uh gould and luanton had marxist sympathies and there was this sense that so this was the era in which sociobiology was taking off and people were realizing um just how powerful evolutionary thinking was in explaining human behavior and marxists don't like this idea at all they fear it because well it means that human beings aren't infinitely malleable or that we have a nature and and that that has to be contended with that we have in nature and that we are not inherently equal right because in order for this to be a consequence in order for behavior to be a consequence of evolution um more effective behaviors had to out-compete less effective behaviors more effective people had to out-compete less effective people and so that's it runs counter to the marxist sympathies and so in effect this paper based on these spandrels um argued that uh evolutionists didn't have the evidence to claim adaptation except very rarely so the other right because a phenomenon could be the side effect of something that was selected for and it hadn't been selected against yet so it's there but it's not because it it evolved so to speak right so if you were standing looking at and maybe i'll i took some pictures when i was in venice recently and i took some pictures of these spandrels for the purpose of talking about them on youtube and anyway so these these triangular spaces that are left when you place this dome on top of these columns have been filled with mosaics uh in the central one they've been filled with mosaics of the four evangelists and so their point was you could look at these and you could say that the purpose of the spandrel is to house these mosaics when in fact the spandrel is an accident and the mosaics are just something that opportunistically was placed there um so why did that come up here we were talking about oh you were talking about religion and whether or not it was justified to imagine that it was serving some adaptive purpose by virtue of the fact that human beings seem to have a propensity for religious belief and i 100 agree with this argument i have made this argument myself the cost of religion to humans is so great that it must be paying that and much more at least historically in order for it to have been a feature of every important civilization so that argument is completely uh robust as far as i'm concerned now i'm trying to recover there was a thread that uh was the central argument that you were making has to do with oh yes you're right glad you got it sometimes it's a it's a mire of weeds but uh okay the point was this you are sometimes taken to task for being overly focused on personal responsibility and neglecting the uh collective well-being functioning of society level now as luck would have it that was actually on my list of things to talk to you about today because um the here's what i have learned as a uh a lifelong liberal who has now gotten to an age where wisdom is beginning to dawn is there is something about the personal responsibility argument that is uh absolutely essential and there is a reason that it looms so large in the minds of so many high quality thinkers in spite of what it doesn't do the reason is if you're going to advise somebody or some small group of people on how to approach life it's the slam dunk winner right it actually works you do have power over yourself and how you interact with the world so if you encounter a system that's very unfair you can complain about the unfairness and you have a very low chance of affecting it at all or you can say well it may be unfair but i'm going to play the cards i've been dealt as well as i can and that's something over which you have a tremendous amount of control so i think there's a way in which the just in terms of return on investment there's almost no return on the investment in complaining about a broken system there's tremendous returns to be had well it's especially true if you're not already competent and seem to be competent maybe you have some ghost of a chance of changing things if you are competent and are seen to be competent but before then um you can break things but building them that's pretty damn hard and so and you can work locally and then you have some chance of success and you can find out what is under your control and then maybe you can turn yourself into someone who can make cautious systemic adjustments and have them be for the good rather than than for harm whereas whereas if you take the other approach and you say well the system isn't fair and i'm going to change the system but you don't invest in your own competence then a you're unlikely to fix the system but even if you do you still don't arrive in it competent and so you're still going to be out competed by people who did invest in personal responsibility so in some sense it's just a loser of a position from the point of view of an individual's uh allocation of their time and effort on the other hand let's say so you know i first started thinking about this when i encountered uh a number of um black conservatives who had initially i didn't understand why there were black conservatives because it seemed like the system is unfair to blacks i know this to be true and so um putting the responsibility on the individual didn't make sense to me but then i realized this that i've what i've just said to you that from the point of view of helping people this is the winner as the argument goes and the other one doesn't even work but here's the problem with it let's say that you you get the attention of a number of people who are deciding between whether to complain about the unfairness of the system or invest in personal responsibility and you convince them that personal responsibility is the best answer okay they will do better they will do better at somebody else's expense they will out-compete someone else and it may be that you haven't increased the amount of wealth in their quadrant of the system at all and so while you've given them good advice for not ending up uh at the short end of the stick um you didn't solve a problem it just shifted where it went so there is i think though that would be i think that would be more dangerous if personal responsibility was directly associated with like socioeconomic success as a as an infallible marker of that responsibility it's partly why i constantly try to concentrate more on on ethical behavior and grounding responsibility in that because i think that if i don't think that you have to gain at the expense of other people if you play the game properly i think you can gain it's hard and i'm and it's it it's hard to do this but you can you can play the game so that the people around you benefit at the same time you do and that's actually a better game anyways even for you and i i know that can run into zero sum problems but no matter what you do it can run into zero sum problems i think it has the best chance of minimizing those zero-sum problems over the long run you know so you play the game and you don't cheat so if you're going to be a plumber then you're a good plumber and that's good because no one wants their basement full of sewage it doesn't hurt anyone you out-compete some of the plumbers who aren't doing so well but so i agree with you completely you can generate some wealth by increasing your capacity which means it's not zero-sum you ultimately may run into a zero-sum uh game in which the fact is some somebody's gonna be the loser part of the reason that i wrote the second book beyond order was to state something like look try to be successful try to be responsible but if you find out that you're being successful in a zero-sum game and your success is at the expense of someone else then you change the system perfect that's why it's beyond order it's like because your point is something like well if the game is unfair and you're good at it then you just get better at exploitation it's like right right of course systems can be corrupt and then if you're a good player in that game then you're the best at being corrupt but that's the situation where you have an ethical obligation to move beyond your responsibility and to adjust the game that's how it looks to me right oh no we've landed in exactly the same place that's that's the point is that the the problem is that the system is effectively in breach of contract which doesn't say anything at all about whether or not your best move is to complain about the system or invest in right i would say it's also an eternal truth that the system is in breach of contract that's an existential reality it's always now to a greater or lesser degree let's because there are systems that are completely unplayable and there are systems that are relatively playable but the the idea that your conscience should be bothered by the corruption of the system is like absolutely true but that doesn't mean that you should go making in cautious changes as a consequence of resentment right so now the present looks so insane from this perspective that you and i appear to share right where we are now educating children ever younger in obsessing about uh defects of the system many of them imaginary right rather than giving them competence in fact we are demonizing the very acquisition of competencies there perfect that's exact so that's that's something that needs to be broadcast everywhere i think that the what's that the pathology that that's that's at the core of the culture war is an attack on competence itself it's an attack on competence the idea of competence as well that's why the the critiques of meritocracy emerge or that's at least part of the motivation for that and everyone you know you can say well look do you rise according to your merit it's like partly okay partly and to and corruption reduces the correlation but to say partly and to admit to the existence of some corruption is not the same thing at all as to say merit itself is a corrupt idea right that's a completely different set of propositions with completely different outcomes totally agree and so we are constantly in this battle where if we say anything in defense of the idea of merit or meritocracy we are understood to have claimed that we live in a meritocracy and what's more a perfect one and then this is used to to remove any impulse towards the acquisition of capacity and to do this to children is so terrible it's terrible yes it's um the worst of all possible things you can do to children because you punish them for their virtues right you're not giving them brain damage you're giving them mind damage you're damaging their minds well i looked at what happened in boston this week when so a number of the um schools for the gifted were my understanding is were closed down because of racial inequality in their makeup and i thought well it's it's obviously um an undesirable it's obviously problematic but why should i assume that the motives of those who shut down the gifted system is the remediation of racism rather than an assault on the gifted because it's them that suffer immediately for it right now you know maybe that's unfair but but i ca i can't help but think that what we are seeing in the guise of virtue is an assault on the idea an assault on competence the the thing is competence presupposes value and value presupposes a hierarchy so if you admit to competence you admit to a value hierarchy and differential ability and that is flies in the face of equality so so i completely completely agree and the obvious answer of course is irrespective of how unfair the system is you should invest in your own competence you should make use of what tools you have and then we collectively ought to democratize the tools as well as we can because society is clearly best and it is the morally only acceptable thing that's even the only self-interested thing ultimately i would rather that you were more competent now if you're head-to-head in a competition with me i might let resentment you know uh allow me to desire your destruction but all things considered if you're competent well great then you're going to offer me something okay so we could agree perhaps that there is an element of the war on competence that's the pathological end of this culture war that we're seeing and we should also say that there's no doubt also a fair bit of attempts to uh rectify the terrible consequences of power-based inequality right so the good is intermingled with the bad but we have to pay attention to the bad then another question would arise would be and i don't know the answer to this at all if we're seeing the rise of something like a war on competence why are we seeing it and why now yeah that's a tough one um let's put it this way i do not know of any evidence that it is our global enemies seeding this but they could hardly have done better right were they to try to get us to sabotage ourselves they could hardly have done better than to get us to demonize our own competence and to sabotage our own children i mean the the thing that i can't get over is all right if we woke up and came to our senses tomorrow how long would it take for all of the nonsense to clear the system and for us to get back to the level of competence that we were headed towards i mean this is we're talking about you know the arguments have gotten particularly stupid in the last couple of years but the overarching degradation of the system by those who didn't believe incompetence in the first place goes back decades and has had a tremendous effect and you know what the bridges aren't falling down yet not in large numbers but that's by virtue of the fact that they were built by competent people and uh they don't require you know yearly maintenance and this is going to catch up to us it is time for us to to return to our senses and get back to business right quick or we are going to leave ourselves vulnerable to people who care so much less about freedom and about uh justice than we do do you i'm trying to to to understand again why this might be occurring i mean one possibility brett and this would be something interesting to consider at least briefly is like do you trust your sampling of the data that indicate this is happening you and i are in a particular position and and we share it we're going to be much more sensitive to that kind of information and we're going to be provided with it preferentially by other people now i look and i see especially what's happening in the education system for example i saw the uh some curriculum material for anti-racist math um claiming for example that getting the right answer was indicative of white supremacist culture domination and so is showing your work ridiculous propositions but then you know i don't know how widespread that material is i don't know how influential it is i'm i don't know who to trust to report on those things to me and i don't know how to escape from what might be the bubble that i'm in because of my particular situation so thoughts on that oh many a there's no good way of doing the analysis because what we have is sampling bias everywhere and what's worse it's not even consistent because we don't know how the algorithms are modified when they're changed in what way they're changed you can't it's a moving target on the other hand the material you're referencing with respect to mathematics showing your work focusing on the right answer etc being somehow associated with white supremacy that is uh that was funded by the gates foundation i know i know so that tells you something and it's backed by apparently backed by many influential school boards and i've seen that the same ideas pop up in the tweets of of of public school superintendents right commonly where generally one of the things that's so amazing about that i saw one of the superintendents in michigan had posted um an image of a blackboard with some of those propositions on it and there must have been 400 comments some hundreds of comments about that all negative yeah and i thought well if i was the person that posted that and i got 400 negative comments i'd be so shell-shocked i wouldn't be able to leave the house for like a month and i mean that i mean that you know so i think well how can you post something like that and then get 400 negative comments with nary a positive one because that was really the case and not think maybe i made a mistake do you do what do you do do you spin into a conspiracy theory at that point and say well you know these are this is a codery of people that are targeting these ideas and it's not representative of the general population i i have no idea what hoops you'd have to jump through as you will recall all of these tropes about white supremacy and evidence and merit they all involve these tricks to prevent you from discovering the truth right so the idea that to ask for evidence of racism is racism is a booby trap it's a kafka trap and what it means is that somebody who believes this stuff and then gets a whole lot of pushback has five categories with which to dismiss it right so whereas you or i might hit a particular sensitive note and say well that's flack over the target right i'm pretty sure i got close to something because of the reaction i got well that requires a certain amount of care that you do it only honorably only when it's justified but somebody else who regards any negative but i also like i also look at proportions you know like if i put up a youtube video right i actually attend to likes versus dislikes i read through the comments and you know i'm not happy when when five percent of them are negative you know and that's a that's so far thank god that's about as high as it gets some of them are very vitriolic that are negative and they certainly affect me but i'm i'm very sensitive i believe emotionally to to that kind of quantity feedback as well as quality well i mean that's partly how you keep yourself oriented in the world isn't it of course but you know you're actually looking to calibrate something you're a scientist and you're looking to understand what the actual information is and to you know sort the the signal from the noise somebody who's interested in advancing a position might have a mechanism for dismissing the signal um but the answer to your your first question which i believe is very important and i'm glad you asked it about well how reliable because i inhabit a position a position in the universe that might cause me to see all of that evidence and i might be misunderstanding how ubiquitous it is the fact is there's lots of evidence that it's ubiquitous for example um in the u.s and i assume in canada every parent i know with kids in school is facing that school now passing on disinformation about the nature of american history about the relations between people of different races school names are being changed this is taking place in every school of ed it is apparently taking place as much as i never would have predicted this it is taking place across corporate board rooms right and the thing that i yeah for evil capitalists they're sure not very good at defending themselves they have no idea no imagination for what kind of fifth column they're allowing to emerge well how pernicious that's going to be what little information i have uh about what's really going on there it sounds like they are actually being persuaded of this nonsense which i find well i think the like guilt a lot of it's guilt it's like guilt is a very powerful motivator especially for people who are essentially ethical you know when you might say well corporate leaders aren't essentially ethical it's like no no no just hold on a minute if you look at what predicts success in business it's intelligence and conscientiousness just like in science so it's it's intelligence and and and hard work slash ethics that doesn't mean everyone who's successful is ethical but you can't point to success and say well that indicates a lack of ethics unless the system is entirely corrupt i think it's guilt it's like well it's guilt and it's failure guilt failure to pay attention to pay attention especially to the long term underestimation of lack of knowledge about what's underneath all this but then again you know maybe that's just my paranoid perspective and yours too because we see we see these things well that's the thing you see these things and you think no there's something lurking there um well at the very least i think what we can say is this it is entirely possible for a person to get the wrong impression about how ubiquitous a movement is or how far its influence stretches but that we can check this in a number of places it appears to be every major college and university it appears to be almost every corporation it is every tech platform it's certainly every faculty of education every faculty of education and and that's not good it appears to be nearly every uh high school it appears to be driving the ascendant political party in the u.s so how many of these things have to be true before we simply accept that for whatever reason this movement is incredibly powerful at the moment that this is not our imaginations this is not us looking at a biased sample and and overreacting to it the evidence is this is um it is controlling many of the levers that dictate the way resources are to be distributed and that i think anyone who doesn't see the pattern is a fool not to be frightened well that doesn't help me escape from my bubble does it [Laughter] um well i don't know i uh yeah i mean there's an awful lot of power just simply between the democratic party the tech platforms oh we didn't even mention uh all the um major news media well there are a couple of exceptions obviously the wall street journal is an exception um fox news is an exception and you know certainly exceptional stories show up in mainstream news media but again the preponderance appears to have been persuaded of this so uh i think to the extent that one can peer outside the bubble and see the same thing that one sees from within the bubble it looks like this is um this is as as concerning as we would tend to suspect well that's too bad i would rather be wrong and this would be an illusion than to be right and to be and for it to be the current reality i i wholeheartedly agree i i also think optimistic as i am about the possibility of what we could all accomplish over the next hundred years i don't think we're nearly at the end of this because it seems to be accelerating to me and and the claims get more and more outrageous and the amount of resistance gets littler smaller and smaller you see you see some exceptions to that i mean um a lot of journalists have abandoned the new york times and have hit substack and they seem to be eking out an independent existence there and so that looks potentially promising that sort of thing well i think it is promising and i think you know hopefully we'll we will see more of this um the uh in some sense we are going to need parallel institutions if we cannot retake the institutions that exist we're going to need parallel ones in order to fight back and ultimately right exactly well that's working isn't it that's another example of what's working i agree which which makes it worrisome that uh we now see an instinct towards censorship and uh the policing of viewpoint on the yeah well it certainly made me nervous i've had conversations on my podcast recently that ver made me very nervous and you know i've been hit enough times i would say so that i don't have quite the resilience that i once had and um it doesn't seem to have stopped me from doing this but it certainly made it harder to do um you did you see what happened to dr seuss today oh my goodness yes i did um and you know it was obviously only a matter of time but uh i it's hard to imagine that we're here i mean it's not that it's not that there's nothing to the claim obviously there are some early cartoons that are disturbing but you know it's not like he defended those cartoons he apologized for them you know he appears to have uh to have grown up and the idea that we're going to deny children the cat and the hat because in the 20s dr seuss made unfortunate cartoons it's preposterous and i would also say well if only those who are sin free or allowed to contribute we're going to be in real trouble because you know my sense is that creative people are just as flawed as everybody else and that's flawed a lot or maybe even more flawed sometimes because you know they can be creative in their flaws um i think that's true i also as long as you raise it i just want to say one other thing about dr seuss which is the cartoons that are troubling are um [Music] they are real and the disturbance at them i understand i feel it too when i look at them but i also know that human beings are wired to caricature members of other populations and that's not a good thing but we've also gotten over it right the fact that you find disney cartoons that characterize or that caricature uh chinese people and blacks and everyone else the point is we have understood that this is bad and we've stopped doing it and that's honorable and to go back and punish people from the period before it was understood to be bad as if they were living in the present is obviously absurd just as it is absurd to pull down statues of abraham lincoln because you know he did not have a modern view of racial equality right it's nuts we just we have to stop behaving this way but i don't know why i'm telling you that you know that as well as anyone so well you know that was good yep that was good um sorry it went so long but i gotta say uh it's been uh incredibly enjoyable and i certainly hope you wore me to a frazzle all right well uh i look forward to our next conversation whenever that may happen thank you so much for joining me on the dark horse podcast jordan your book you want to hold it up again [Music] uh here we go beyond order um and it is available as of today which is mark second i recommend everyone get a copy number one in australia all right hey while we've been talking it may be number one in other places canada canada all right excellent well i'm looking forward to reading yes and it says beyond order not destroy order good right glad you clarified that okay okay jordan thanks so much bye bye be well [Music] you

Channel: Bret Weinstein

Views: 968,752

Rating: 4.9125767 out of 5

Keywords: Jordan Peterson, 12 Rules For Life, Modernity, Wokeness, Cancelation, Dr. Seuss, Psychology, Beyond Order, Childhood, Evolution

Id: O55mvoZbz4Y

Length: 133min 21sec (8001 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 08 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/letsgocrazy]

• TIMESTAMPS:
• 00:00​ Welcome back, Jordan
• 01:00​ Beyond Order
• 03:40​ Maps of Meaning
• 06:50​ Holocaust through an evolutionary lens
• 09:25​ We're all descendants of rape
• 10:34​ Socialization and stable societies
• 15:25​ Genocide programming and chimps Vs humans
• 17:00​ Work, sacrifice, and self-consciousness
• 21:36​ Self-conscious emotions in non-human animals
• 24:00​ Consciousness shared between skulls
• 26:00​ Delayed gratification in squirrels and humans
• 28:35​ Chimpanzees and human capacity
• 30:51​ Belief in an afterlife
• 33:00​ Science and religion similarities
• 35:37​ How did the 'Hero's Journey' evolve?
• 40:57​ Bret's agreement and pushback
• 42:57​ Consciousness selects the gene
• 44:27​ Bret's pushback on Jordan's hypothesis, discussing kin Vs group Vs lineage selection
• 52:56​ Jordan's response
• 56:14​ Bret on consciousness selecting genes, and spider hedonism
• 58:39​ We must confront the genes
• 01:00:37​ Bret is Freud, Jordan is Jung
• 01:05:00​ Foolishness may end humanity
• 01:07:27​ Capitalism is underrated around vices
• 01:11:05​ Optimistic future? Ridley, Lomborg, Pinker
• 01:17:07​ Cultural evolution and religious mythology
• 01:20:00​ How to continue humanity
• 01:23:23​ Marxism fears
• 01:26:34​ Marxism argument Bret doesn't hear
• 01:29:39​ Outcome, ability, and equality
• 01:33:55​ Birth control and growth
• 01:37:17​ Paying attention to your conscience
• 01:39:19​ Spandrels
• https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_S...​
• 01:44:35​ Personal responsibility and criticizing systems
• 01:51:48​ Demonizing competence and meritocracy. War on competence
• 01:57:55​ How widespread is this problem. Discussing racist math
• 02:02:04​ Yes, Jordan reads YouTube comments
• 02:03:01​ Is it ubiquitous?
• 02:07:46​ Are we nearing the end?
• 02:09:41​ Dr. Seuss censorship and caricatures
• 02:12:03​ Wrap up

[u/jessewest84]

Prob the two smartest people in this lane. Besides Daniel Schmachtenberger.

And maybe Eric lol

[u/-zanie]

Hell yes! I haven't watched these two in a while.

[u/Green_Guitar]

Not a fan of weinstein, but I'll give it a listen