Minefields and the New Political Landscape | Bret Weinstein - Jordan B. Peterson Podcast S4 E10

[Music] i have the pleasure today of speaking with dr brett weinstein who i met about five years ago an evolutionary biologist who taught at evergreen state college until political circumstances made it impossible for that to continue brett served as the moderator for two discussions i had with sam harris is that right that is correct in vancouver i think that was when that was the first time we met in person wasn't it uh i believe we met prior to that at a conference in vancouver also um a uh young libertarian oh oh yes that group and the ubc group right that was before yeah well and we haven't spoken since when vancouver is that right uh it must have been more recent than that in fact i'm certain it was but it's been quite some time well so we i thought it might be interesting for us to catch up and to share that process of catching up on my youtube channel so and brett you have a youtube channel and you have a podcast which the image of which i believe is on the wall a beautiful wall behind you that that's your kitchen that's all done in cedar like that no that's uh one half of my office that we uh at the beginning of covid my son and i my son produces our podcast and we built the studio in this room making runs back and forth to the hardware store and uh bugging out of the uh the prior space that we were in so anyway yes we erected this in about two days and uh you know the sync works and uh it's all it's functional but it's it's basically my workspace in my office it makes a lovely background you have some skulls back there too i sure do i have skulls in my office interestingly enough what are they um well let's see we have back there a bear and a seal and the juxtaposition is important to heather and to me because seals are actually bears they evolved they return to the sea and their skulls are extremely difficult to distinguish except for the teeth you can tell by the teeth but otherwise a seal skull looks like a bare skull to an amazing degree and so which one is the seal uh let's see yeah well i'm gonna i would guess that it's on the one on my right the seal is the one closer to the plant yes okay because i have a bear skull which looks more like the one on the left so so um when did you start your podcast well the podcast started geez i'm not good at remembering these things exactly but the podcast started must be about two years ago and then it went through a radical transition at the beginning of covid where instead of just being a show that we taped we moved it into this room and heather and i started doing weekly live streams which we still do or i still do separate discussions with people but the weekly live streams have become a really important component and what's the live stream what do you do on the live stream well what we do is we point the evolutionary lens at important topics everything from the woke revolution to the fragility of civilization what future governance might look like basically whatever interests us and it's accumulated quite a following it's been you know it's never something that we intended to do but it turns out that there as you know better than anyone there's a huge hunger for people who know something are willing to talk courageously in public and won't mislead you right we can all be wrong but uh it's rare enough that somebody will tell you explicitly what they think and why and uh you know if you do that it's amazing how many people will find you yeah well people do have some desire for the truth painful though that might be yeah and you said you didn't expect to be doing this on a full-time basis there's no doubt that life is full of all sorts of twists and turns that you don't expect well that's certainly true and that actually brings me um you know the way you you introduced this discussion didn't give me a chance to say by far the most important thing here which is it is so great to be talking with you jordan we were so worried about you and i'm sure you're getting that message loud and clear but at another level it's probably hard to appreciate um how profound your absence from the discussion has been over the last year and i know you've been to hell and back and we've been experimenting with hell on earth here while you were away but uh it is really really good to be with you and um anyway i think it's very important that that just be the baseline for the conversation welcome back thank you that's so nice of you and people have been so welcoming to me you know with the exception of the odd journalist let's say but online people are so good to me that i can't believe it it's well there's many things i can't believe that's certainly one of them it's very nice to see you and you're looking well thank you you as well yeah well that's deceiving unfortunately but well at least you're headed in the right direction can we say that that's that's the theory and i'm able to work a bit i'm working about two hours every three days now i would say um doing this sort of thing which i also didn't expect to be doing as my major what what would you say as my major occupation my my area of occupation has shrunk to a staggering degree over the last two years and that's been quite difficult to contend with um well i hope it's temporary um but i mean from the outside enough so that i can't be as functional as i used to be but i can't sit around and do nothing because it drives me completely out of my mind to do nothing i'm used to being occupied all the time and so but i'm very happy that i'm able to do these discussions and so far that's been going well so i'd like you to walk me through what's happened to you since the events in evergreen and and bring everybody up to date on my end so man maybe you could start with what happened at evergreen although i suspect many of the people watching this do know that does that seem reasonable sure um yeah we can we can start there i think we should um probably air in the direction of being sparse with the details and uh see where it leads us so in 2017 i was teaching at evergreen as was heather my wife and she was literally evergreen's most popular professor i wasn't too far behind i was very popular as well our classes were always over full and we accepted more people than we had to and had to turn some away anyway and then in actually 2016 the new president of the college george bridges began an initiative or a set of initiatives surrounding diversity equity and inclusion and these initiatives included the impaneling of a committee that was supposed to look into racism at the college its impacts and to propose solutions and as it became clear what they were alleging and proposing heather and i became very alarmed and i began to speak out at first in faculty meetings and then when the ability to speak out in faculty meetings became non-existent i took to our faculty and staff email list to talk about the threat to the college that was created by these initiatives and that of course brought about exactly what you would imagine which were accusations that i was motivated by some kind of uh racism or white supremacy or white fragility or who knows what the accusations were exactly but um but in any case i fought back anyway and my sense was i had tenure and i was well liked and i was well known at the college i had been there for 14 years and so i didn't think they had the power to uh to get rid of me and that gave me the ability to say what needed to be said about these proposals well the upshot is that ultimately protesters 50 students that i had never met showed up at my classroom accused me of racism demanded that i either be fired or resign i told them i wouldn't and riots broke out at the college in which faculty and administrators were kidnapped i was apparently hunted car to car on campus by protesters the police were stood down by the college president and we were basically left to fend for ourselves with student patrols roving the campus with weapons baseball bats and the like so it was a chaotic scene there was a lot of interest in it because it was very colorful but of course most people back in 2017 dismissed this as yes an overreaction but you know how college students are and those of us who saw it up close knew that that couldn't be the case that it would ultimately spill out into civilization and we of course were right and now it's everywhere we see it taking over institution after institution in the u.s and canada we see it making tremendous strides in government and there's no telling where it ends and what is i mean i have a bunch of questions that come out of that so i'm gonna i'll lay out three why in the world did this bother you enough so that you took a stand especially given your political leanings because you were which i'm not criticizing by the way i'm just stating that it isn't obvious to begin with why it would be you that would take a stand say rather than someone else but you did and so i'm curious about why and um what is it that you saw coming and what is this it that you're referring to you've had a lot of time to be thinking about this now it's been four years and i mean you're and the other thing i want to ask you about is your life was thrown completely upside down you and your wife you don't have your job at the university anymore either of you despite the fact that you were tenured professors it's not an easy thing to get another toe hold in academia once you've been a tenured professor somewhere especially if you've gone through what you went through because no hiring committee anywhere is going to give you any consideration once you've been um once you've been tarred by scandal regardless of what your role in it was they're far too conservative to ever do anything like that and so okay so let's i don't know if i can remember the order in which i i asked those questions but i think the first one was why in the world did you why in the world were you compelled to to object to object and what is it that you were objecting to do you think well it's a funny a funny question for you to pose to me because i have the feeling that the answer will be entirely native to you i literally don't believe i had any choice people frequently ask me why i stood up and my sense is if i think through the alternative i simply can't live with it i can't sleep yeah but that doesn't seem to bother most people so i don't get that like why why you well right i mean i guess that's the the thing i'm discovering um so you alluded to my political leanings and you and i both know what you mean by that i'm a liberal and i would actually i describe myself sometimes as a reluctant radical by that i mean that i believe we must engage in radical change if we are to survive as a species but i also know that radical change is very dangerous and so it's not like you know i find most people who would call themselves radicals feel like radical change is always called for and i don't my my sense is i hope to see change that makes civilization good enough that i get to be a conservative that i get to say actually we're doing so well that we have no choice but to preserve this if we try to improve it we'll mess it up that's where i want to go but what i'm discovering is that the bedrock of my liberalism is nothing like the underpinnings of the so-called liberalism of most of the people on the left side of the political spectrum my liberalism comes from a sense that yes compassion is a virtue but that policy must be based on a dispassionate analysis of problems it is based on an understanding that there that the magic of the west comes from a tension between those who aspire to change things from the better for the better and those who recognize the danger of changing them at all and and so in any case i think the short answer is we look around the world and everybody makes arguments that sound as if they come from first principles but most people do not arrive at conclusions from first principles if they extrapolate at all they don't do it very well and that results in a severe compartmentalization of thought and that means that when confronted with changes that threaten a system on which we are dependent most people don't recognize it and if they do recognize that they wouldn't know what to do about it so uh how can i how can i put it in in plain terms i had no choice because i was as if on a ship where somebody had proposed to fix our course through uh a field of icebergs um and navigate based on some absurd theory with no grounding in fact somebody had to object and i was a little surprised at how few and far between the objectors were but you know if i'm to be totally candid about it at the point that things went haywire at evergreen i had watched video of you reacting to protesters in toronto and it had made so much sense to me at a number of different levels you know i recognized you as somebody who knew that although the initial proposals were arguably symbolic that they were connected to things that ultimately were very much about an exercise of power and a transfer of well-being and that it was therefore you know you felt obligated to stand up and say no which resulted as you know better than anyone in you being mocked for overreacting and then here we are years later and it turns out that you saw with absolute clarity what others couldn't even imagine yes but i certainly didn't see what was going to happen to me right you know so i don't think it's root it wasn't possible to see what would happen with specificity but i th am i correct in uh seeing that you knew that something very dramatic was likely to come from your standing on principle and that that didn't provide any license to do anything but make that stand i i really can't say you know um it's a it's a while ago now so that that's part of it but so much has happened to me that's been so strange in the last four years that i have very difficult time making any sense of it i can't even really think about especially the last two years i can't really think about them in any consistent and comprehensive way i mean my my family situation has been so catastrophic in my illness and my wife's illness it's just been although she recovered completely thank god it's just been so utterly catastrophic that that my my thinking about it is unbelievably fragmented i'm and i'm i'm struck dumb still to some degree by by all of what emerged as a consequence of me making the first videos that i made you know i went downstairs talked to my wife and my son my son was living at home at that time temporarily and i said this piece of legislation is really bothering me because it calls for compelled speech and i looked at the background documents and something wasn't right and i said i need to say something about they said well go for it you know we'll see what happens and all hell broke loose and continues to break loose for that matter which is one of the things that's so bloody strange about it is it doesn't seem to end and i would have thought when it first started i thought oh well you know i'd be a flash in the pan for a week or something or two weeks or a month or six months or a year or two years or but it doesn't stop and i really can't understand that it's it's beyond my comprehension now i guess it's partly because i continue to communicate my thoughts to some degree even talking to mainstream media people although increasingly less and perhaps not at all from here on in i mean i i had an interview with the london times two weeks ago three weeks ago it was published and you know it was just another complete absolute bloody nightmare for my family my daughter in particular because they took her to task in an extraordinarily nasty way and um you know and the journalist who did the interview was completely she you couldn't invent her you know not only the way she she she was so deceitful in what she did but i i learned more about her background afterward as a consequence of another journalist who wrote about her and you know she's um a very singular person to say the least and so i did feel at the time like you did i guess that i was more afraid of not speaking than i was afraid of speaking and i have something against being told what to say it's like i'll pay the price for what i have to say i'm not going to pay the price to say what you want me to say you go say it yourself and see what the hell happens and you know maybe that's just a kind of incomprehensible stubbornness in some sense um although i did i think i did see what has i did see the beginnings of what has unfolded since then although i can't even really put my finger on what it is that's happening so well i i wonder a little bit about um you know in some ways you know there's nothing good about why you were absent from the scene uh but there may be something good about your having not been there for every moment of it and being able to come back to the discussion with something like fresh eyes because a lot of this is developmental and you know you say you're surprised that um that this is continuing and i must say i'm having the same experience i feel like i was picked up you know my whole family was picked up by a tornado and we haven't been put down and you know i sort of feel like we were joined in the tornado during 2020 it was such a crazy year that a lot of people whose lives were continuing in some normal fashion are suddenly aware that things are wildly off-kilter um but actually this this raises a question i think one of the things that i know from my own life and you know i know of course a bit about your life because of the fact that it's public and because i've met tammy and and have had a chance to to interact with you in that context as well but the the question i have is i wonder about the difference between a person who might think the way you or i would think about um bad policy and you know compelled speech and that sort of thing the difference between a person who might think such a thing in isolation and a person who has a proper familial context in which to actually check in so in other words i have the sense that in part the reason that i'm able to just simply describe things as they are and do so unflinchingly is because my family understands the same puzzle and they may have different elements that they see with clarity but there's no question i can you know i can go to heather and i can say you know i ran into this thing today and here's what i'm concerned it implies and we can have a rational discussion about it without anybody accusing anybody of moral defects or any of the things that have become so common and so in your case i know that you have a familial network that provides you that same kind of reality check and then i wonder looking at the the generation of people advancing the woke revolution and i see the failure of that very thing and i can't help but wonder if it isn't connected in other words the idea that um that pair bonding that marrying and producing a family has become something that most people don't even consider an essential part of life it's not the objective of the exercise it's a choice that some people make at best that that has left people very isolated from any reality check which makes them very vulnerable when they are threatened with an accusation like you're a racist you're a transphobe that sort of thing now you definitely need in this book this is my new book by the way and so it's coming out march 2nd and i sort of clung to this like a life raft over the last couple of years while i was writing it there's a section in here about sanity you know and it's a critique to some degree of psychoanalytic thought because the psycho not that i admire the psychoanalysts tremendously but they tended to think of sanity as something that was organized inside your psyche or let's say inside your brain for that matter or maybe even a reflection of healthy brain function but sanity is to large part outsourced and what i mean by that is that if you're fortunate and you're well socialized um other people find you acceptable enough to include you in their networks and then all you have to do is pay attention to the functioning of that network and regulate your behavior as a consequence of the feedback you receive and you more or less stay sane and so like if you have a family and you have friends then they'll help you make sure that your jokes are funny and not mean because they'll laugh when they're funny and they'll raise an eyebrow when they're mean and then you can check in with that and they'll help you figure out if you're dominating the conversation too much and they'll they'll push and prod you as you do the same to them and everyone stays relatively organized and when all this hit to begin with i had quite a large network of people which expanded at some point to include people like you and the so-called intellectual dark web members and they were helping me check in on my sanity all the time you know helping guiding me guide me through the interview process of analyzing my errors and commenting when i did something hypothetically right and and my family played an integral role in that and so that was extremely helpful i never thought about that as a precondition for for uh saying what i said but i think there's something about that that's right it's certainly the case that like i have tremendously supportive parents still they're both still alive they're still tremendously supportive at a very deep deep level and i think that that was a real gift that i had that many people don't have you know i've been struck one of the things that torments me constantly is and i think it's really hurt me to discover this is i had no idea how deep the desperation was for people who lack encouragement it's just because every time i talk about this it makes me tear up because of what i've seen i think but all these people that i've met now you know i spoke when i went on my book tour which was an unbelievable event unbelievably positive event but also i would even say to somebody traumatic traumatically positive like it was just too much i really loved it but to see the depth of hunger that people had for an encouraging word was unbelievably tragic and for people to come up to me repeatedly over and over and over hundreds maybe thousands of times and say you know i was in such desperate straits looking for some encouragement unable to find it and then you know i came across your lectures i thought jesus it's pretty thin gruel to feed a starving population i mean i'm absolutely pleased beyond belief that people have found what i've done useful but that doesn't uh decrease the impact of the realization of just how hurt how much hurt there is and i and it is hurt this ground in a lack of encouragement i have that i've been encouraged my whole life so man that could easily be part of what now you know i also thought somewhat calculate in a calculated way about this like and i don't know how far this goes back but i've i also organized my life so that i was standing i had legs out in many directions i had a clinical practice i had a business i had my professorship i had my writing you know i had multiple sources of income pretty independent areas and so i and i did that in part to maximize my capacity for freedom i thought well and this wasn't something i think i thought explicitly you know it was part of what unfolded in my life across time it wasn't easy to take me out although i've been taken out a lot like far more than i thought might be possible um i can't separate that exactly from intrinsic health problems you know but i i despite my you know i don't have i it isn't obvious to me that i can go back to the university i'm still employed there i'm on leave they would take me back i don't know if i can do it um i don't have my clinical practice anymore which i really miss i love doing that and that was 20 hours a week you know i so that's a lot of time i finished writing this book but i'm not writing right now and so a lot of i don't have any pressing financial concerns and so that's that of course that's a huge privilege a huge benefit and thank god for that but despite me being distributed like that i was still taken out pretty hard so yes uh well you you know i i confess i have wondered while you were um [Music] incommunicado over the last year whether that was just um goliath's good fortune or if there might be something more to it because you were such a singular voice at the point that tammy got sick and then you did that um obviously it was a tremendous blow to those of us in intellectual dark web space in our ability to uh to fight and to hold the line um but you clearly have been taken out in your words um deliberately multiple times and you know how it comes about i don't know it's it's my it's amazing to me that it continues to happen and the thing the thing that's so damn weird is that exactly the same thing continues to happen you know and it was just replayed with this times article now i have thought i had a lot of interviews lined up for this book and once the times article came out my i reacted to it my family reacted to it and we we dealt with it effectively the same thing happened that had happened to me before when journalists had written a hit piece about me it was extremely stressful because when it happens you do not know which way it's going to go and you know you can get unlucky and a number of bad things can happen to you simultaneously all that has to happen is for that to happen once to exceed your capacity to deal with the number of bad things and you're out that's basically an accident i really think that's what's hap what happened to me in the last few years is that everything that happened socially was unbelievably stressful positive and negative you know the positive end of it was extremely intense and and and amazingly compelling and interesting but the negative end was really really stressful you know and i notice what happens to people generally speaking and i don't think i'm making this up is you know i've watched the typical person who gets mobbed on twitter will get mobbed by 20 people and it'll last for two or three days and they'll apologize like mad they're so stressed out they retreat right away and it's really hard on them you know and that happened to me like i don't know how many times 100 times 200 times and really publicly uh you know i've been called every bloody name in the book and that's been really literally i mean i remember one day where i was called a jewish shill in a nazi the same day you know by two competing publications and i thought maybe they canceled each other out you know but but and that's been very hard on my family you know and and and although they they're doing reasonably well under the circumstances but then you know tammy got sick terribly and and in a really nasty way and then her when her surgery was complications multiplied and she was near death daily for months and then this proclivity i had for depression seemed to have become untreatable and that took me out and so and i'm still struggling with that you know i get up i can hardly stand up when i wake up in the morning i i feel so bad i can't believe i can be alive and feel that bad i stumble downstairs and i'm in the sauna for about an hour and a half and then i can stand up long enough to have a shower which i do for about 20 minutes and i scrub myself from top to bottom trying to wake up and then i can more or less get upstairs and i eat and then i go for i walk like 10 miles every day because i need to do that in order to deal with this whatever it is that's plaguing me and i can get myself to the point where by this time in the afternoon i'm more or less functional but then it repeats the next day and so and it's oh my god that's terrible it is it's terrible it's it's it's so terrible it's so terrible that i can't think about it without it being traumatic so i i have a hard time figuring out where to place my mind because this has been happening it's been happening every day really for for two years i think it's fair to say that every single day of the last two years has been worse than any day i had previous to that oh my goodness and what a predicament you're in then because um you know i can hear i would guess it anyway knowing knowing you and knowing of you in the way that i do but you're caught in this predicament where that's really intolerable and frankly most people wouldn't tolerate it but you also know that there is you know both at the level of your family and at the level of those who admire you and listen to you and uh are you know waiting to hear the little bits of affirmation that they need the little bits of guidance that they were unable to get in the world you know how much good comes from your facing that uh what sounds like a completely excruciating um existence yes but it's perverse beyond comprehensibility which is sort of the hallmark of a traumatizing experience because it is exactly that and i like i look at it and i can't get my i can't wrap my mind around it it well i and also that the uh the my degree of exposure you know when i when i decided to make those videos i was playing with youtube and i was playing with fire like youtube is fire in a way social media is fire in a way that is ver unimaginable it's so powerful youtube will see but youtube demolishes the printing press in terms of of its long-term significance i mean because now we can now you can do with video and audio what you did with print and it's way easier you have access to a massive audience with no intermediaries whatsoever and you know i and i i don't know really how to grapple with that either how to comprehend it well i mean actually this brings me to one of the things i've been hoping to talk to you about for the longest time so i think there's a part of you that finds um you've always been very gracious about it and and welcoming but finds my liberalism a bit paradoxical no no i don't look look i don't i understand the catastrophe of the pareto distribution i don't like it you know it it there is this proclivity for capital to accrue in the hands of smaller and smaller numbers of people it's just capital it's all goods you get this terrible problem of distribution that it's like a natural law and the fact that people object to that is completely unsurprising and the fact that if it goes unchecked it destroys societies is that i don't think that's a hypothesis that's demonstrably self-evident um so i don't find i especially don't find the concern the compassionate concern for for working class people and their well-being the least bit incomprehensible it's the solutions that are the problem it's like well what should the solutions be and well that's that's where things get very very complicated it's not well perfect and i i'm sorry if i implied something that wasn't wasn't even my perception i think you are to an extent a conservative but i find you uh if i listen to you it's not a simple kind of conservative i'm a conservative for the same reason you are you already pointed out like if you're a social scientist and you don't understand the law of unintended consequences you are not a very good social scientist i learned from my my clinical research and from studying clinical research for so long and publishing it too is that you think your intervention is going to do what you think it's going to do but it isn't it's going to do something else and you you have to build in if you if you have a an intervention that you think is going to have beneficial results you have to build in an assessment to see if it has those results and like i talked to the woman who headed the um the name of the was done in not in cambridge but in in massachusetts it was a longitudinal study of anti-social children the first longitudinal study it was done in a working-class neighborhood just outside of cambridge i used to live there and i can't remember the name at the moment but in any case this team intervened with kids that were likely to have a uh they came for broken homes broken neighborhoods anti-social neighborhoods this was done in the 1930s and they intervened at the level of the child and at the level of the teachers and at the level of the parents and ran this multiple year project to reduce risk for negative outcomes among this population randomly assigned uh participants to groups and by all accounts from the participants the children the parents the teachers and the professionals who were running the investigation it was a resounding success they looked at the results and the intervention group did worse on virtually every outcome measure and they figured out later that the reason for that likely was that they took the antisocial kids and grouped them together in summer camp they took them out of the city to put them in camp they thought that would be a good intervention but grouping them together seemed to produce a competition for anti-social behavior and it overwhelmed all of the other interventions that was joan mccord famous study and i talked to joan mccord a lot about that and but you see that all over the intervention literatures it's very hard to fix it's very hard to define a problem correctly it's very hard to define in to develop an intervention that's that addresses that problem and only that problem and then it's very hard to get the intervention to do what you want it to and that's what makes me conservative to the degree that i am so yep no i think that's that's incredibly wise i would add one thing to your list it's not just that it's hard to get an intervention to do what you want it to do it is that it is hard to get it to do what you want it to do and at scale these things also tend to evolve so even if you did manage to solve right and so the the problem of unintended consequences coupled with the problem of perverse incentives and therefore bad policy that is effectively corruption is a very frightening problem and so i do think we are caught in a basically damned if you do damned if you don't scenario we can't stay here and you know you're i agree with you the um social media for lack of a uh a better term for it is going to dwarf the printing press for various reasons some of them because it's so easy yeah but also because it's of a fundamentally different nature right when you're reading a book it may be that somebody writes something that's bad for you to absorb but you know you're reading a book because the experience of it the uh the perception of it is of a book whereas um social media increasingly fools the mind into you know the interaction you and i are having is more or less a face-to-face interaction but a lot of interactions that look like face-to-face interactions don't have these characteristics and at best the impact on the mind is arbitrary so you know we're watching things like amplifiers of threat and you know this goes back to the thing we were discussing earlier with twitter for here's a good example of unintended consequences it's like what don't we know okay we don't know what regulates human communication we know that if you restrict the bandwidth people don't understand each other as well but we don't know how communication functions it's too complicated okay so we absolutely don't know what happens to communication at a large scale when you restrict people to 140 or 280 characters and then put them in a network of millions of other people we have no idea and it could be that you you tremendously bias the discourse towards impulsive anger it looks like that if you look at twitter i mean and because it's a 140 or 280 characters you can whip something off very quickly and so it's almost as if the technology is implicitly commanding you to be impulsively aggressive and then we don't know what it means when only those people who are motivated to be impulsively aggressive that day are those that are communicating and then when you only see those communications even though you know 10 000 people might read your tweet only 100 who are irritated for some reason respond we don't know any of that and and we completely underestimate the power of the technology because it looks harmless it just sits there on your phone and doesn't do anything and so you know god only knows what kind of tower of babel that is so right and not only that but um the fact that the algorithm changes and we don't get any notice of it not only do we not have access to whatever the algorithm's content is but we don't know when it changes which means it's impossible for us to even track the impact of our own behavior because we can't run a controlled experiment it's like predicting the stock market it's an illusion that you're dealing with the same thing every day it's complete and then of course we don't know you know the algorithms increasingly have a life of their own and increasingly they're governed by artificial intelligence and and it it builds in it builds in it derives implications that we don't even understand and and as you pointed out it all changes so quickly that we can't keep up with it in any event so yes so right so so then the the conversation and i'm i'm certain it's going to take uh multiple tries for us to get there uh hopefully we'll have the opportunity for multiple discussions but the question is all right you're a conservative but you're a wise conservative that understands the importance of liberalism understands the necessity of tension between the desire not to mess things up with unintended consequences and the desire to solve problems that are actually solvable and i would argue the necessity to solve certain problems which will be fatal if we don't solve them um but the the combination in other words i think there's a new dialogue that has to happen those conservatives who understand the puzzle need to get together with those liberals who understand the puzzle and figure out what the new insights are because we are somewhere so novel that if there's one thing we can say it's that our system is unstable and it is putting us in great jeopardy which means that even if your impulses are conservative and you point out correctly that i have some conservative impulses even if your impulses are conservative um we aren't anywhere right we're uh we're on a precipice in a windstorm and at some level we have to make enough progress relative to the fundamental instability of the system and the fundamental you know here let me take an example the point you make about social media and the human psyche you could make exactly the same point about pharmaceuticals and physiology that we know very little about the way the body actually works yeah i could sure make that case all right yeah i'll i'll bet you can the the hell you've been through makes this point very clearly but you know i'm constantly struck by the fact that our narrative about medicine proceeds from an entirely false premise which is that we know a great deal about the body and have all of these useful interventions what we have is a lot of interventions where sometimes we know what one of their effects is we very rarely understand why the spectrum of uh you know collateral consequences are what they are and all of these systems are linked together and nobody is tracking the long-term implications of anything so we we have this sort of obsessive focus on the things that you can detect on very short time scales and almost a studied ignorance of what the same pharmaceuticals or procedures do to us long term right and we then i suspect if you did the statistics properly i suspect that that medicine independent of public health kills more people than it saves i suspect if you if you factor in phenomena like the development of superbugs in hospitals for example that overall the net consequence of hospitals is negative now that's just a guess and but it's and and it could easily be wrong but it it also could not be wrong and that is a good example or that's where my thinking about what we don't know has taken me with regards to the critique of what we do the fact that it's even plausible is a stunning well you know medical error is the third leading cause of death yeah you know and that doesn't take into account the generation of superbugs for example the generation of superbugs or you know if you're thinking broadly about it let's i i don't know where you stand on this issue but i have been tracking the lab leak hypothesis for covid and it is very distressing to me that as much as it's an unsettled question the evidence for the lab leak gets stronger over time all of the competing hypotheses fall one by one and are replaced by some alternative that hasn't yet been falsified but that's very ominous to me and if this is the case if this was a bug that was modified in the lab through gain of function research and escaped then you have to add that to the balance sheet with respect to the costs of medical errors because it looks like if this was an escapee from the wuhan lab that it was an escapee from experiments designed to create a vaccine to protect us from future coronaviruses so we can't say that with specificity but if we look at the circumstantial evidence of what was being studied how it was being studied and what the likely purpose of those investigations were then this is you know the mother of all self-inflicted wounds and it is uh downstream of naive thinking about the cost-benefit ratio of enhancing the infectivity of uh viruses i know i did know that that that's something that you've been tracking and pursuing i don't have an opinion about it because i don't know enough about it to have an opinion um so i'd also with regards to conservatism you know i don't know if approaching how people should deal with the problems in their lives from a psychological perspective the viewpoint of a clinical psychologist i wonder if that kind of automatically makes you conservative in some way because my locus of concern has always been the individual and so and an individual well-being and you know being trained as a behavioral psychologist i always took as my unit of analysis the enhancement of well-being of health let's say at the individual level and maybe translated into political and when that's translated into the political landscape maybe that looks something like conservatism i don't know i mean i never thought about this i never thought about what i was doing in political terms to begin with like even my initial statement about bill c-16 in compelled speech wasn't supposed to be something specifically political i just thought the political had escaped its boundaries it's like no you don't get to infringe on free speech you're no longer in the political realm at that point that's a different realm get the hell back where you belong that's how it looked to me but you know the everything that's another thing that's very peculiar about our culture at the moment it's almost impossible to have a discussion about anything and have the coverage not be politicized and i think that's partly a function of how the media the the legacy media worked because they tended to view everything through a political lens and also a consequence of this insistence and this i think comes primarily from the radical left that everything is political and i don't buy that it's like you can say that everything has a political aspect but that's a completely different claim than everything is political which is a totalizing claim and i also as a social scientist don't like totalizing claims because most things are multivariate complex and so well so yeah i think we can prove that um you can politicize everything but not everything is political and that the tendency to view everything in political terms destroys our ability to properly navigate questions on which we actually ought to have alignment and this is uh it's a very disturbing pattern to see um every question including uh covet itself turned into a team sport because that is of course sabotaging exactly the ability to reason through our various options and then to get us to move in a coordinated direction to actually address the uh the pandemic and in some sense i suspect we are headed to um having to accept covet as a permanent fact of the landscape when that was not a foregone conclusion that in effect our politicizing of this issue is going to leave us with a bug that we can't ever get rid of why do you think that like i mean i've been hoping that and watching israel in particular there seems to be some indication that they've got the vaccinations ramped up to the point where they're having some effect on the rate of transmission of the virus which is a positive thing and you know i keep hoping that the vaccines are there's enough of them and they're getting out there fast enough so that we might be able to keep the bug under control you you're not so optimistic about that apparently no i'm not because for one thing i know that it's you know it's been obvious from the beginning it was going to evolve and that the key to managing its evolving out of our control was limiting the number of people who had it and limiting their ability to spread new variants around the globe and we've done a terrible job of this somehow you know a year in it is only beginning to be uh it is only beginning to dawn on us that new mutants that are harder for our immune systems to recognize are essentially a certainty and that the key to ever regaining control is to ensure that when these things arise somewhere they don't immediately find their way around the globe so i guess what i would say is i think we tend to you know even the the idea of compromise in a political sense is the wrong approach with something like covid we should have been much more aggressive earlier on so that our total level of compromise with respect to civil liberties could have been much less in other words if early on we had engaged in a really intense six-week lockdown and we had um ramped up our capacity to test for covid with precision so that after six weeks basically the idea of six weeks would be it's very hard to control covet inside of a household it tends to bounce around but that it will tend to burn itself out in most households within something like a six-week week period um that if we had engaged in that and then used track and trace to find and control outbreaks following such an intense lockdown we might not have had to deal with a full year of the half-assed measure and the sense is the sense that i have is that we're getting you know uh maybe it's a pareto distribution maybe it's we're suffering 80 percent of the harm of lockdowns and getting 20 of the value that we might get for having you know not gone the full distance and um unfortunately i think the prerequisite to our behaving rationally is having a um having our experts completely liberated from market forces from political dynamics and free to tell us what it is that we need to know and then getting on the same page and having a proper rubric for evaluating what has worked and what hasn't and instead what we've had is a thoroughly politicized discussion from the get-go in which even our counter-measures are uh fought over on the basis of you know if you you know why is it that a you know a trump voter is much more likely to be a masked skeptic a question of mask is an empirical question it shouldn't have anything to do with your political leanings and yet it undeniably does uh in in north america and that has has robbed us of the kinds of controls that we might otherwise have instituted i wanted to ask you we you talked i want to bring the just discussion if you don't mind back to something that we were touching on earlier that your initial objection when you were at evergreen too whatever it was that was developing in the background and now we've had four years to see whatever it is manifesting itself and so you what is it what is it that's happening do you think in our politicized landscape i mean well um i have a guess and it's it's right up your alley it's something i i'm intending to explore um at greater length but the basics are this i suspect you and i i think would share the opinion that um psychological development is among the most important phenomena for understanding human beings and it is underrated we tend to look at the behavior of adults and study it but we should spend more time thinking about how those adults ended up the way they did in order to really understand them and i think for uh you know for each generation you have a developmental landscape and what the governing forces are in that developmental landscape has a lot to say about both the insights and the blind spots of the people who emerge from it and so um i would say that for americans of my generation i'm a gen x the market played too much of a role developmentally and it has created a kind of lens through which we can't help but look at his you know commodified things in a way that is quite unhealthy for you i was born in 1969 okay um for millennials and maybe even more so for gen z i suspect that there is a pivot to something else and many people you know uh jonathan height and greg lukianov have certainly talked about igen the internet generation but what i suspect is really going on is that if you are sufficiently plugged into the internet early enough there comes a point at which the your persona on the internet takes primacy it is more important than your actual physical life jesus it's worse than that it's worse than that i would say from personal experience there's more of me on the internet than there is in me my electronic avatars are far more powerful than me personally you know and i can watch this because i've been away for a year and a half and yet my internet presence has steadily increased during that time and i i look online now and it's 700 million views something like so now now imagine that as the developmental environment for children now here's here's the connection i want to draw my contention is that the online landscape is postmodern right that if we were just to simply describe it the rules the physics of online life are post-modern because it's extracted from the environment right so for example like living in a dictionary if i decided tomorrow that i was a woman right i could change my internet presence such that i would present in a female way i could say hey anybody who doesn't treat me as female is a jerk and the point is i have transitioned completely right now obviously there's no such thing in the physical world you can transition you can take hormones or blockers you can get surgeries but no um no man has ever become a woman and reproduced in a female way right so the point is the physical world has all kinds of constraints that come from physics and biology which do not translate to the online world and for people like you and me for whom the online world is an add-on world we think well obviously real life is the important one and then the online thing has some interface with it which is frightening but we understand how they relate but if you reverse these two things then what you get is a generation that its problem-solving mind says actually of course you can transition you can transition and then it is everybody's obligation to live by who you've told us you are and anybody who doesn't is a bad person and what has to be true for that to be the case right you know i had i had a fantasy a long while ago that people would end up wearing glasses like the google glasses that would be illegal to take off and that you'd be mandated to see what people wanted you to see it was their right to be presented to you in the manner that they chose to present themselves you know and i'm not saying that's a particularly brilliant vision but it's very much in keeping with what you're describing boom yep i think it's i think it's close but if you imagine then that an online world in which effectively we can all be equal tomorrow as long as we say that that's the objective and we can all present as we want and others can be forced to adhere to it or be thrown off of whatever discussion then all of this begins to make a great deal of sense and so i'm wondering if we are not in effect in a kind of civil war between those for whom the real world has primacy and those for whom the online world has primacy and if that's not the fundamental nature of the battle well i think it it could be the the fundamental nature of a part of the battle i mean part obviously part of what's going on is whatever this unbelievably rapid rate of technological transformation is doing to us i mean my my daughter and and some people of approximately her age so late 20s are helping me with manage social media let's say um she's noticed that people five years younger than her have advantages in understanding the newly developed forms of social media that she's already outside of and so that process of being hooked into the web and that being the determining factor for your world view is probably accelerating i mean it's going to accelerate obviously it's going to accelerate because the web is becoming more and more dominant and machines are becoming more and more intelligent so they abstract themselves away from the world and then the question is well what's the consequence of that abstraction but it's funny that it's postmodern that doesn't there's more going on with whatever it is that's happening than than technological transformation but you think that's the fundamental driving factor well i think there are a lot of ways you can look at it obviously i don't think this is a real battle obviously the internet runs on hardware in the real world and everybody you know when the power goes out we are all reduced to our biological self so i don't think there is actually anything to fight over one of these worlds has primacy and the other is an add-on and this is not debatable but my point is really about the mental confusion that arises from for most people i mean if you think about the lives that most people are living right most people at best are working a job in which they trade their labor for money that they get to spend on goods or relatively generic adventures and the part of their life that is interesting and compelling is you know the internet over which they range freely and engage in battle and you know they fall in love increasingly and whatever else they do and so my point is that that is a distortion developmentally it misleads the mind into misunderstanding what is necessary if you take the postmodern rules of the internet and you now impose them on politics in the real world you get crises you get the basic structure of civilization coming apart in front of our eyes which i really believe that it is right with the homelessness crisis in the u.s for example is jaw-dropping and we have a particularly acute crisis on the west coast in the u.s that appears to be the result of people being utterly compelled of their own political beliefs to an extent that even as those beliefs are failing around them visibly they just double down so um imagining that people who think the internet has primacy are now exerting a force to correct the real world in the direction of their naive internet understanding of things are in danger of crashing the the aircraft and in some sense people like you and me are responding to what they're saying about how we should restructure the real world and saying that doesn't make sense it won't work it is going to put us in grave danger it is going to disrupt essential things and you know there are those who can hear us and we are popular with those who can hear us and then there are those who regard our uh pointing out the obvious as a danger to their program who are intent on silencing us and so i haven't thought about this obsession with identity from a developmental perspective too and i thought this insistence by a uh loud minority that their determination of their identity take primacy is first of all it's just it's wrong technically i think because an identity isn't merely what you feel you are an identity is way more complicated than that as any decent social constructionist should already know an identity is a role a set of complex roles that you negotiate with other people so that you can thrive across a very long span of time and it it can't be something that you impose on other people because then they won't cooperate with you now you might say that you have a right to impose certain aspects of it on other people and you could have a reasonable debate about that but identity is definitely not merely what you feel it is and it's certainly not merely what you feel it is moment to moment that identity is actually much more like that of a three or four year old child and i mean this technically it's not an insult so when you're a child you pick up one identity after another and play with them so for example my granddaughter who's about three at the moment if you ask her who she is she has two names a first name and a second name and her dad calls her by her second name and her mom calls her by her first name so she's ellie or scarlett and she's fine with either of those but she's also pocahontas and if you ask her whether she's ellie or scarlet or pocahontas she will say pocahontas and she has said that for eight months it's amazing it's been that persistent in a child of that age it's quite remarkable but what she's doing are is playing you know and girls will play to be boys at that age and boys will play to be girls and they're they play with multitudinous identities and then they settle into one so then the question is what if you disrupt that play that's fantasy play and then another question might be well what if you disrupt it with technology not the technology itself is producing a message that's counter to that but that the fact that children are on technology all the time means they're not engaging in that kind of identity establishing fantasy play and then you might say well maybe what you see happening in that case is that it bursts out in late adolescence and the insistence there that my identity is what i say it is is actually the the scream in some sense of a of an organism that hasn't gone through that egocentric period of play where they are in in a fictional sense exactly the way they define themselves you can't tell my granddaughter who's three that she isn't pocahontas it's stupid to tell her that because she means it in an experimental sense and all you're doing is interfering with her fantasy play and so i see a fair bit of this as delayed fantasy play with the kind of pathology that comes up when you delay a necessary developmental stage now that could be wrong you know when probably is but but still it looks to me like it looks to me like that's part of what's happening it's very strange to see this insistence like i just it's so conceptually unsophisticated the the even the hypothesis that identity is only what you feel that it is and the intense insistence that that be the case is also another mystery it's like why is it that it's a foregone conclusion that other people have to go along with your self-definition so i think uh first of all that's fascinating and that fits rather exactly with what i'm getting at and i suspect it is adding a dimension where i was vague about the developmental pathway but you're absolutely right that a child can take on an identity and effectively within limits they are allowed to assert that identity and adults will play along with it encouraging and right now the thing is there's a process i'm more familiar with the you know the male side of this because i you know i went through boyhood and and being a young man but if you have a misunderstanding about how you present in the world so you assert that you are one way then your peers will you know if your peers are nice they will poke fun at you in order to reveal to you what it is that you actually present as so that you can adjust your self image right and that's part of that's part of healthy socialization like that's what happens that's it once you pull out of that egocentric stage where you're playing with yourself then you have to integrate other people into your play and then it's a then it's a negotiation otherwise you're not accepted by your peers and so that's another thing that's very interesting is that it is precisely those children who aren't accepted by their peers that insist that their self-definitions rule and then the what one of the things that's kind of terrifying about that is if you know the child anti-social literature there's a there's a percentage of children that are quite aggressive at the age of two almost all of them are male almost all of them are socialized out of their regression by the time they're four the the percentage that isn't become persistent lifetime offenders if they're not if their behavior isn't rectified by the time they're for which means if they're not transformed into children that are acceptable to their peers there's no intervention that is being evident in the literature that will reverse that so uh i i this is this is both frightening and it's making me happy in the sense that uh i believe that the model that we are wrestling to the surface here is um accurate and it doesn't fit what most people are expecting is going on and i i think there's a lot of power in understanding it this way but what you are effectively saying is that there's a period in which self-definition is identity in some sense and then there is a period of correction at which your uh insistence on who you are meets everyone's else's insistence on who you are and you then learn who you actually are and that thing better be a pretty good match for the world but then yeah it better be all right right and so i i have argued as an evolutionist that the i would say the uh the job of a parent is to mirror the environment that the child will mature into so that when they get there they have the software that is an appropriate match for it and a lot of uh mental health issues come down to a mismatch between the software that your developmental environment produced and the environment you actually live in and that can happen why you shouldn't be nicer to your children than the world is in fact you're doing them a disservice that's the devouring mother from the psychoanalytic perspective right and this gets into some very uncomfortable territory what you know what does good if you're a slave if you're born into slavery and you produce children how should you parent them should you protect them from well i would say all of the implications of slavery let's go through the stage idea again because there's three stages i think there's there's the the egocentric stage where the child is manifesting multiple identities self-defined and playing then and that's under the protection of parents the parents put up a walled enclosure so to speak within which the child can do that experimentation then the child meets the world of peers that happens between the ages of four and the ages of 17 18 something like that and that's when your identity has to uh expand to include others in a cooperative and negotiated way you have to manage competition and cooperation and your identity becomes socialized and then there's a stage beyond that i would say where you kind of pop out of that socialization and you're no longer necessarily a member of the group it's like a self-actualized person that although i don't like that phrase the self-actualization theorists thought to some degree in this manner once you're done with your apprenticeship you can become post-apprentice and then you can take control of your own destiny to some degree independently of your peers so hopefully you can get to there but and so that's part of the answer to the slavery um conundrum you know you should be a good member of your group but you shouldn't only be that well i think there are two different questions the the slavery issue is the very uncomfortable idea that if a parent is supposed to mirror the adult environment that a child will have to get along in then a person whose children will mature into an arbitrary environment needs to understand that it's an arbitrary environment rather than being protected from it right in order to you know to properly avoid running a foul of the arbitrary authorities in a slave environment one has to be developmentally brought into how you navigate below the radar how you you know how you play that game and so anyway you would expect the parenting to look very different and you know this idea that childhood is you know a joyous time where you should be free of all of those adult influences is exactly wrong it's prep it's preparation so um though now if we take this model that i think you and i are agreeing on here about the fact that the and i i like your point here um that there are three stages you've got i assert my identity independent of the world then the world and i negotiate over what my actual identity is and then i'm not an apprentice anymore and i get to be who i am in the adult world having been informed by that process and you imagine that you've got generations now one and a half of them maybe for whom the online environment was so compelling and so much the source of most of their affirmation that its rules have become sacrosanct to them and those rules really do look like you know they're it's a it's a childish world right you join some community of people you tell them who you are there are rules about them having to respect who you've told them you know it is if i say i'm pocahontas who are you to say i'm not right and um that in some ways the answer to that question in the real world is i'm someone you have to get along with in repeated interactions but that may not be the case at all online that constraints you can just pick up and move to the next community and that's another thing we should talk about because another thing that's happening online is that i've i've detected this recently is that the online environment is also making everyone acutely paranoid and i think the reason for that is that everyone it it's easy for our thinking to go to to go astray and as we talked about earlier in this discussion other people tap you back into shape and you're you're surrounded by a kind of random assortment of other people in the real world because you didn't select them so because it's random it's it provides you with what is in essence relatively unbiased feedback information but online you can choose your your compatriots and it's likely to be the case that at your weakest point psychologically you choose the least demanding compatriots and so your craziest ideas are the least likely to be challenged all right so there's so many interesting threads here one of them i i my guess is you and i will fall out in the same place here but if you give me a choice between a community that uh believes everything i believe and one in which people believe very different things i'm not going to choose the one in which people believe the things i believe because for one thing it's the end of growth and it's deathly i want to object slightly okay i've had and you've had this experience too i've had the experience of being in an environment where a very large number of people don't agree with me vociferously and what i would say is a little of that goes a long way even if you're a courageous thinker i'm not going to put myself in that category but if even even if you're someone who wants to be able to tolerate dissent there's a limited amount of dissent that you actually can tolerate you are going to seek out an environment where most people agree with you but some people don't some of the time and it's kind of like listening to music you'll like music that's optimally different from what you are enjoying right now right if it's exactly the same it's boring if it's too different you can't hear it there's a there's a there's an amount of novelty that you can tolerate but it's not that large and so even people who have been trained to look for evidence that disproves their own theories they're only going to be able to tolerate a tiny bit of that at a time it's too destabilizing it's too destabilizing well all right so i want to link this back up to what you said uh before about the three stages yeah um so my experience as a scientist is that my most valuable characteristic is the ability to compete to be completely indifferent to the prevailing wisdom on a given point right and i think this is no personal stake in it well i may even have a personal stake i may come up with an idea that compels me that it's probably right a hypothesis and i may advance it and have every single one of my peers say that's garbage and my sense is not one of oh crap i've said something bad my sense is well wouldn't that be delightful if i'm as right as i think i am then the fact that everybody else doesn't get this makes it even even better right um so my point is that's not normal i know that's not normal and it's not normal for evolutionary reasons that are easy to understand it takes a lot of training to accomplish that yes or a developmental environment that rewards it right sure if you have if you have the right experience but then again you know you said yourself remember again at the beginning of this conversation think about the preconditions for that is that in order to open yourself up to that sort of criticism you have to be supported in all sorts of ways you know and even so when i'm functioning as a scientist i am trying to disprove my presuppositions you know i'll test them it's like some something manifests itself in an experiment then i designed three or four experiments to see if i can make that effect go away and i do that because i don't want to propagate nonsense and i don't want to pursue nonsense in my own career but in order to tolerate that think about how we set up the system is you have to be a tenured professor to do science or have the equivalent position in the research lab but your economic situation is stabilized your social status is stabilized like you're protected on 50 fronts and then you can open the door and say okay let's have some novelty come my way and and and that that's assuming that you're at a point where you can tolerate any novelty at all you know and more curious more open more emotionally stable more intelligent people are more compelled by novelty and can handle it better but still our our ability our ability to handle it is pretty low and we will find environments that mostly um reflect back to us what we want most most uh comforting well actually this is this is fascinating i wonder if there's not effectively a budget for um discordant interactions and you know if we go back to what we were speaking about it at the beginning of the conversation the fact that um not only do heather and i have a great relationship but we also speak the same language scientifically so you know it's a kind of across-the-board um sounding board and uh ability to you know i feel no vulnerability there because there's no place where our world views aren't compatible and uh you know i could say similar things about about eric so what that means is that my budget for discordant interaction is probably larger when i get to the outside world because i haven't spent it at home or in the context of family or friends and you know you spend that it is definitely a budgetary phenomenon you spend like you produce a unit of psychophysiological preparation for every unit of uncertainty and the the size of that unit of expenditure varies with your trade neuroticism because that's like evolution's guess at how dangerous the environment would be it varies with your position in this in the daw in the in the social hierarchy because if you're at the top where you're protected the consequence of an error is attenuated compared to what it would be at the bottom and that's why social position modulates serotonergic output so the higher you are in the hierarchy the more serotonin dampens your negative emotion to uncertain events and that's in keeping with your with your actual fragility neuroticism determines it social hierarchy determines it intelligence determines it to some degree because you're a more effective problem solver if you have a high iq so but you do pay for uncertainty because if something's uncertain you don't know what to do and so you have to prepare to do everything and that's unbelievably costly psychophysiologically it ramps your cortisol production up and it it starts to eat away from future reserves it's definitely a budgetary process so yep um all right so i wanna i wanna see if there's something more um with respect to this model in which four people whose developmental environment has been uh internet first and who have wrongly encoded the lesson that my identity is mine to define and that those who would challenge it are enemies rather than people doing me a favor of giving me information i don't have about myself they are enemies to be challenged and driven out then this interfaces with those of us for whom the internet is not our primary developmental experience in the following way and i'm using the the case of trans ideology simply because it's the clearest case biologically but if you take the rules of trans and i actually believe probably these ought to be the rules online which is you can present as whatever you want and by and large people should just simply treat you that way and you also by the way online have the tools to do that so that you're not creating uh some kind of unresolvable paradox but if we then say okay the online rules are that there's no such thing as sex because a man can become a woman simply by uh showing up as one and then we say whatever must be true in the real world in order for those rules to be the rules everywhere we are going to make those things true therefore it must be the case that biology was wrong about sex and what's more that because simply saying that you are female is sufficient to put you fully in that category then therefore whatever morphology and physiology you happen to have at the point that you make that assertion is consistent with being female and we have the absurd discussion that we now see so regularly about um basically you know female penises and things like this and so those of us with real world primacy are constantly saying you can't rewrite the rules of civilization around simple claims in isolation like all you have to do to be female is say that that's what you are and that that battle is one that is now ironically going to be lost in the real world as a result of the fact that actually political power is accumulating in the hands of those who subscribe to the online rules so the the the identity issue is i mean it forces us to to one of the things i found so so challenging about all of this is that these challenges to fundamental assumptions force you to make arguments for things you actually don't know how to argue for so for example what does it mean to be female well i don't know because no one's actually ever asked me that question they just act being female and i act be male whatever that means and we don't ever sit down and lay out the explicit assumptions now you do that to some degree when you're arguing with your wife about who's going to do what when and maybe with your mother and when with your sister you have local discussions when when roles come into conflict but you never list the axioms that you're using to do your perceptual categorization and so then when you're forced to defend your presumption you don't know how to do it because you don't have the arguments at hand so to be female i mean means something like and i'm what do you do i had a discussion with one of my students former students today we're trying to help people develop this we're trying to develop this program that helps people um identify and then accomplish important life tasks and it's forced me to think about something i've thought about over years what are the important life tasks like okay so you should get educated to the to the approximate level of your intelligence you should be employed gainfully have a job or maybe if you're lucky a career um you need an intimate relationship you should have some friends you need a family you need to regulate the world of temptation drug and alcohol use that sort of thing you have to take care of your health you need to make some use productive use of your time outside of work so there's eight things maybe there's more but that's sort of eight and maybe you don't need to be fully accomplished along all of those eight but they're pretty important and they're not a bad start and if you can come up with a better list more power to you but well let's take one you can have a family an intimate relationship and a family well the classical way of doing that is that someone's male and someone's female and they get together and they have children and then they have grandchildren and that's like a third of your life or a quarter of your life or a fifth of your life i don't care it's some non-trivial portion of your life and that identity male and female is a precondition to that root through life and then you have children and they mean something to you and they give you something to do and you have grandchildren and it's the same thing so by playing out male and female it's sort of like you've now occupied 25 of your time productively that's the role okay let's say we blow that apart well then what what are we supposed to do then because you can't pretend that into existence and that's that's the post-modern element of this this is the refusal of the real world it's like okay we'll make identity entirely mutable but what are what the the trans kids that came after me in in in the first demonstration against me i i said you think i'm your enemy but i'm not and the reason i said that being a clinician was because i thought well you're adopting an identity that that there is no rules for what the hell are you going to do with that you're you're you're inviting so much trouble into your life you can't even possibly imagine it because you won't know what to do and people won't know how to treat you and so where does that leave you now you might say well i'm so distraught about my the discordance between my psychological state my biological reality that that pales in comparison and maybe there are situations where that's the case but man an identity that doesn't solve the problem of how you're going to live isn't an identity i don't know what it is but it's not an identity yep and i don't even know how people would change the rules exactly to make that work so i i agree with you wholeheartedly that um effectively our identities are means to an end and there is there are conservation laws that apply to the system as a whole and unfortunately and this is actually uh essentially the the core argument of the book that heather and i uh have just completed but the core argument is we are living in a period of evolutionary hyper novelty where human beings are actually the species for which uh we have the best tools to deal with novel circumstances that our ancestors did not know anything about but that the rate of change has become so high that there is no conceivable way for us to keep up with it and what we are effectively watching even in principle that um you know the very fact that you can say the environment that we live in is not the one that we were born into that's way too fast you may be able to make a discrete jump you know human beings are capable of moving from one habitat to another and figuring out one time what the rules of the new habitat are but a habitat that is constantly in motion and has become utterly arbitrary with respect to even the most fundamental uh characteristics is not something to which we can be well adapted which is causing us sounds like a powerful argument for conservatism it is yeah i know i understand well i do understand i do understand that that is to the degree that i'm conservative in my outlook that is that is the reason it's like look i wanna i've kept up you know like i've transformed myself multiple times over the years and i was taken out by this illness and it isn't obvious to me that i can catch up again i've caught up a lot and i've watched my peers my high school classmates my university classmates and i've seen i've seen people who don't have one transformation in them they're people who they adapt to the high school environment and that's it that's where they are for the rest of their life they peak at 17 they're done they don't change then i've seen people who can manage one transformation i've seen people much rarer who can manage two or three but after that it's like it's it gets you massive drop-off in probability with every demand for transformation and now like i find myself now i have to rely on my son for doing some of my technological chores and i hate that because i stayed on top of it for so long but i got sick and i fell out and it isn't obvious to me that i can clamber back in it's very difficult well if you'll take some advice from a friend and i'm not even sure um i'm not sure i even have it fully formulated but the thing you described earlier in the conversation the amount of effort it takes for you to get to the point where you can be productive in the day the amount that is riding on your doing it the number of people who are listening to you and who basically need your influence in their life and you know in some sense it you know it is it's it's a mythological story and i know you will have spotted that a thousand times over but just the the herculean effort the tremendous amount that's riding on it and the degree to which you're you're paying some uh inhuman price in order just to continue playing your role is profound and so the advice to the extent that i have see how you can see that it shocks me that you say that i mean that isn't to say i you disagree no it seems like that from inside here well i mean i think you know uh but i could but i can't having said that i still can't believe it so what i think i would do in your shoes and what i hope you will do is you will you know i don't think there's anything about that story that isn't right i think you're you're reporting honestly how hard it is and i know because i've seen it in person and everywhere else i've seen the effect that you're having on people and i know how important it is in keeping them out of trouble and steering them in the right direction and giving them hope and so what i would hope is that instead of reinventing yourself again or updating yourself that you would figure out what the efficient way of showing up in the world in that role is and i hope that we're having this conversation i seem to be able to do this so i can do this and so that's what i'm doing and i have this book coming out and we'll see how that goes but i mean i think you know i know your audience and they will they'll accept you any way you can show up for them and i think you know the key thing is to figure out how to get out of the predicament of having to go through that herculean struggle every day yeah well it's beyond i've been struggling with it for two years i can't get out of it i can't well i mean i'm out of it to some degree i'm living at home again i'm not in the hospital but the reason i'm not in the hospital is because there's nothing that can be done for me in the hospital like there's no point in me going to a hospital it will just make it worse when i wake up in the morning like any sensible person would go to the emergency room and say look this is there's just this just isn't possible but it's irrelevant because all that will happen and i've been in like four hospitals so i know all that happens is i made much worse and so i live in 15 minute increments fundamentally wow well um i i i hope you can detect how uh many people are rooting for you it's mind-boggling it's and it's it's it's it's un it's life preserving that fact and i can't believe it even after this last london times interview the the amount of support that came pouring in is just unbelievable i can't i can't wrap my head around it i don't get it well but there it is you know there it is but i mean it makes sense you know because those of us who have been uh on your team or paying attention to you for the last several years um know who you are and i think in some sense your enemies know what you are they know that a voice like yours carries a tremendous amount of weight that their fictions will not survive in the context of a countervailing force like that and so that's why they come after you the way that they do um but you know the fact is people are getting wiser over time they're recognizing what an attack looks like you know at some level they vary a little bit aesthetically but the overall picture is the same there's a new one planned apparently so the next thing yeah the next thing this is something that hasn't happened yet but is apparently coming a financial expose of my my uh uh my i don't know economic existence so you know which will be accompanied by claims that i'm exploiting everyone and and and well yes they're going to come after you for succeeding and for people doing you know what what they can in order to well i live going i live such a symbolic existence i drink sparkling water and nothing else ever and i eat nothing but meat ever and so my luxuries this is so com car it's so absurd my luxuries have been high-end toothpicks and sparkling water [Laughter] well i sometimes wonder when i look at attacks on on you if the idea is this there are certain number of people who haven't spent any time listening to you yet and if they did they would quickly gather that you're not what your enemies are portraying you as so the idea is there has to be a constant stream of uh suggestions that there's something deeply wrong with you in order to get people not to check in with that question you know it's like um you know julian assange right the number of things that have been said about julian assange that would make you think well i don't know what's going on there but something is doing something yes right right and so the idea is it has the stink that they create around you or julian assange or another figure that they regard as very dangerous uh has to be sufficient to drive most people away from even checking for themselves and i don't think it's working in your case but um but i do think well so far it doesn't seem to but you know there's always the possibility that it'll be the next one that'll work and it's not like i have any shortage of things wrong with me there are things wrong with me you know now whether they're ethical things or not that's a whole different question but like nobody has a nobody has a uh what no one has an untrammeled conscience that's for sure so and i'm not too worried about the economic attack i mean i i'll just make my if it gets out of hand i'll just make all my finances public i mean i've never made any um apologies for being an evil capitalist so i think actually all the things i've done i've tried to use market forces to modify because i think it's a really good source of feedback you know like i've produced these um processes to help people plan and assess their personalities and you know we thought about giving them away for free but free is actually a really bad price and once you start making things and starting to put them out in the environment you find out very rapidly that pricing is very complex and you have to get the price right and free is not the right price first of all if people will only use it if it's free it might actually not be any good and that's a signal so why not use that signal that's that's how it's appeared to me and then you have to make the thing sustain itself so it has to generate some income and anyhow that that from what i've heard that's the next thing that's going to happen so yeah um if you look we should stop pretty quick i guess although i'm really enjoying this and we will definitely do it again i would really like that i had a very fun conversation with you it's so nice to talk about what are essentially scientific hypotheses i miss that so much um because i don't have my graduate students anymore um your life has changed dramatically um if you could have taken a route i guess i'm asking you know would you do it again and i do but i don't want to ask that in a cliched way and maybe it's a stupid question because you just don't know but no are you okay yeah yeah i mean you know on the one hand if i think about it logically would i do it again in a heartbeat there are a few things i might do slightly differently but i'm not even compelled you know i think uh it went pretty well in light of what the uh the forces in play were but you know the the thing that we've lost is security right and you the world i mean people might you got a settlement from the university but that was a trivial proportion of your future or your mutual future earnings it was nothing it was enough so you didn't starve to death immediately but that was all right um you know and if if i'm honest about it we were forced to move out of our home to a different city we uprooted our children's lives which was quite disruptive but i really don't feel there was any choice i don't you know if i if i think about it as a matter of choice i cannot find the circuit that would have done anything differently and um i'm not all i can say is our lives are full of purpose and we're doing fine the absence of security is something i think about a lot but um but yes i would say there wasn't any choice nor should there have been and i'm not i'm not sorry i made the choices i did in the slightest well you look good man and you look if you don't mind me saying you look different than you did when i saw you before well i'm older now well but there's a year i've noticed this in my clinical clients when they when they integrate their aggression their faces harden and they they look determined all of a sudden instead of questioning and you look like that more than you did now some of that's from getting older but not all of it it's well i think uh you know if i'm understanding you correctly it's probably a lot about um you know getting catapulted into the big leagues and learning to to play that role it's um you know it's trial by fire but certainly it's been fascinating and i'm looking forward to seeing what comes next famous last words [Laughter] yeah that's ominous coming from you jordan look it was great to see you say say hi to heather for me i sure will and uh i can't tell you how relieved we were to hear that tammy had recovered and that you were back and i know it's a rough road but um hang in there brother we need you and um there are so many people who are um just thrilled that you uh you you've come back from hell to to rejoin the battle all right so soon we'll talk again great be well jordan [Music] you

Channel: Jordan B Peterson

Views: 1,428,009

Rating: 4.9029026 out of 5

Keywords: Jordan Peterson, Jordan B Peterson, psychology, psychoanalysis, Jung, existentialism, bret weinstein, idw, evergreen, identity politics, intellectual dialogue

Id: 2O_gW4VWZ5c

Length: 110min 13sec (6613 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 15 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/letsgocrazy]

@Bret Weinstein​ and I discuss the events that led to his resignation from Evergreen State College, dealing with controversy, pair bonding, the new political landscape, paranoia created by having communities online, discordant opinion budgets, and more.

Bret Weinstein is a theoretical evolutionary biologist, host of DarkHorse Podcast, and a former Professor at Evergreen State College.

Find more Bret Weinstein on YouTube @Bret Weinstein​, on Twitter @BretWeinstein on his website https://bretweinstein.net​

[u/Tyler_Zoro]

This response is well worth listening to... or you can just enjoy the scenery.