Nick Gillespie and Michael Shermer on Postmodernism, Rationalism, and the Intellectual Dark Web

[Music] [Music] you're watching reason live streaming to you from Los Angeles the following is a live conversation between the host the guests and the online audience if you'd like to participate please leave your question in the YouTube chat the views expressed by guests and the audience members in this discussion do not necessarily reflect those of reason and now your host Zach why some more all right thank you for tuning in for day 5 of 5 of the first week of this livestream experiment I'm Zach Weiss Muller we're gonna be talking with reasons Oh Nick Gillespie and skeptic magazine publisher and Scientific American columnist and author Michael Shermer and we're gonna be discussing post-modernism rationalism skepticism maybe a little bit of the intellectual dark web which Michael is part of or an associate of according to the New York Times columnist Barry Weiss at least and they'll be leading this conversation mostly I might pop in once a while to bring in your questions and also to some clips from a previous video that we made on this topic which is really what this is kind of based on we got a lot of interesting reactions to that video which is called libertarian post-modernism if you want to watch that video if you're watching this stream later and want to watch that first the link is in the description so you can take a look at that and honestly I'm surprised at the amount of people who have watched it all the way through it is a 40-minute video talking about post-modernism so it's a it's an interesting time to be alive that this topic has re-emerged for good and ill critics and fans it's it's something that people are talking about for some reason and and maybe the discussion will touch on on why this is something that's even being discussed at this this particular moment in time before we get to that conversation I just want to address a couple things one is last night's stream with Christian O'Brien was taken down for a couple hours due to a what is in my mind a bogus copyright claim but it's back up now for you all to enjoy and this the future of this stream or this this experiment we're running with live stream conversations we are gonna revisit that in the new year so this will be the last one of 2018 when we're making the decision as to whether to continue with this we're gonna be looking at a variety of signals first of all and most importantly engagement how many people are actually watching it and watching it you know all the way through or or most of the way through and if so first of all if you've been watching these either live or later you thank you for doing that that's giving us the signal that it is worth the time and energy to put this together and tie our energy that it could be put towards something else producing the other products that we make it recent so the other thing that we'll look at is just the enthusiasm so you know are people leaving good comments on the video are people excited about what we're doing you can leave comments or you can email us questions at recent comm is the email we've been using for this or you can find Mia or Nick on Twitter and let us know if you like today's conversation or the previous ones and also honestly just looking for feedback if if there are this hasn't been perfect by any means we're learning as we're going and so if you have suggestions for how this could be better or guests or topics you would like to see that's really what I see is the big value of this kind of thing is getting that instant feedback in making this a participatory experience interactive so in that vein go ahead and start posting your questions for Nick and Michael in the chat and we'll be working those into the conversation as we go and I want to start off this conversation with a clip from that video that we made libertarian post-modernism a reply to the intellectual dark web so we'll take a look at that and then come right back with Nick and Michael it's all they believe in is identity there's no individual man that's gone with post-modernism post-modernism is actually pre modernism resurrected post modernists are not really interested in truth the level of irrationality that grows out of this undermines the opportunities for doing something really significant and important this leftist postmodern Marx and stuff that this is the new religion show me a post modernist at 30,000 feet and in a jet and I'll show you a hypocrite if you're a post modernist just to have a discussion with someone like you cisgendered male of power you know and white to boot it's like that's that's an evil act in and of itself okay Nick and Michael welcome to the stream good to be here thanks so that that intro is just to show that this is a topic that's being widely discussed on the internet by a lot of different people and notably by members of what's become known as the intellectual dark web and one thing that I had so Nick you and I made that video together and we had a long conversation about post-modernism and I did come away you know with a few questions in my mind you know after having time to think and ruminate on it so I want to kick it off with one of my questions and then bring in Michael to start asking his questions because I think he has a different perspective from you as someone who's been a critic of post-modernism but also seemed kind of open to some of the arguments I would actually I would define myself as I if I'm gonna use terms like modernist or post modernist I'm more of a post modernist for sure okay so here is your I want to start with just your your definition the definition you put out there post-modernism and then ask you a quick question about it John Francois Lyotard he defined post-modernism is incredulity toward meta-narratives which means that you don't take knowledge or assertions of knowledge as a given but rather you understand that knowledge and wisdom and even scientific understanding of things it's not something that you you're walking around and you discover in the backyard you stumble across it like you stumble across the Grand Canyon or a mountain or something rather it's something that's produced by humans and as a result it's contingent it's limited incredulity toward meta-narratives means that you are skeptical of these big stories that we tell about well this is the why the world is the way it is this is why it's always been that way this is why it always will be that way or alternatively this is why the world should be this way which just happens to comport with what I want I see that phrase incredulity toward meta-narrative as very simpatico with libertarianism so incredulous the question that I'd like to just have you what I'd like to have you define here is just that term meta-narratives what exactly do you mean by that I I think it's any large theory that seeks to explain either all or part of the universe and by that I mean human society and things like that so you know there there can be a single meta-narrative which you know on a certain level would be something like evolution or the theory of relativity there can be in political context or say you know there are macroeconomic meta-narratives that people believe and speak to explain all economic phenomenon using one or you know multi factors and things like then so with meta-narrative I'm using it in a shorthand leotard and other people who really kind of conceived of post-modernism sometimes had specific categories that they would call I use it in a more shorthand of its it's any large kind of comprehensive theory that seeks to explain a particular phenomenon okay that's that's a great start anyway I'm sorry to you know interrupt you go ahead myself and but you know libertarianism has a series of meta narratives that are worth thinking about you know that the world works in a particular way that individuals work in a particular way reliably and predictably and the important thing I think about the phrase and this is where I think the type of post-modernism that I'm drawn to is distinct from some of what is criticised as well as some of what is advocated by post modernists or opponents of post-modernism is its incredulity it doesn't mean that we don't need meta-narratives or that some meta-narratives are not better than others it's just that we always need to be questioning we always need to be kind of checking our assumptions and and you know simultaneously I mean we're building a house and we're also constantly going down and making sure that the foundation is not starting to erode at the same time great and so that's a great working definition of the kind of post-modernism you're talking about and I'd like to pass the torch to Michael here to take it this this journey in any direction he wants right well I watched your your show yesterday on a long drive down to LA and I really liked it I thought Nick's pushing back a little bit against Jordan and and Joe Rogan's myself and others is good I mean that that is kind of the principle of post-modernism in a sense as you're using it that is skepticism which is you know what I do for a living to a certain extent you know we move toward truth or discovering truths about the real world truths with a small T by these kinds of back and forth and you know conjecture and refutation is as popper put it and but at some point we we do get closer to something that we're reasonably confident is probably true so the meta-narrative of the Big Bang origins of the universe the meta-narrative of the theory of evolution by means of natural selection these are largely true and superior to other meta narratives that have come before based on empirical evidence based on testing hypotheses and if enough people convert people working in the field scientists converged to a conclusion we can be reasonably confident that it's probably true again with the small T and so while it's good to be skeptical of meta-narratives at some point it's also okay if they have a lot of evidence to say well okay I think you know we're converging on something here very likely to be true and so what those of us in the so-called intellectual dark web are concerned about is not getting to that last step just being in incredulous for the sake of being skeptical as I prefer to say well you know I I think that you're right about well two things one is I essentially agree with you and people who refuse to say that something is factual or something is empirically verifiable or kind of logically or conceptually verifiable you know that's a problem because I think that's where you go into a realm of kind of non rational thought and everything becomes a kind of will to power to kind of mix see we're just errors of things and and it oftentimes becomes very situational but so I agree with you on that but my question then is Michael where did you like where did you start to emphasize truth with a small T rather than the Apple T because to me this is essentially the difference and you invoked Karl Popper between modernism and post-modernism and I think post-modernism is very much a kind of well I was I was gonna say it's an Epiphone amin on of modernism but in fact I think it's the true kind of enlightenment ideal of seeking truth moving towards enlightenment but also D capitalizing everything so I attended when did you notice yourself or when did the scientific world stop talking with a capital T yeah well for me when I entered a doctoral program in the history of science I was first in a in a graduate program and experimental psyche in the 70s and then due to a series of contingencies I ended up being a bike racer for about a decade and doing something completely different then I went back and got got my doctorate in history of science in between there I have taken courses in anthropology back in the 70s in graduate school and then I took another one and so I'll just I'll just read to you what I wrote here in my book at the borderlands of science I wrote an essay about my my collision with with post-modernism and deconstruction I took a graduate seminar co-taught by a anthropologist and a historian in both fields were being deconstructed by so-called postmodern literary critics and social theorists anticipating the kind of anthropology done in the 70s when I last studied the science the customs rituals and beliefs of indigenous pre-industrial peoples around the world people like Napoleon Chagnon and his work at the Yanomami I loved that stuff I was shocked consumed dismayed to find myself bogged down in such books as Michel tossings the devil and commodity fetishism in South America with such chapters as fetishism and dialectical deconstruction and the devil and the Cosmo genesis of capitalism i couldn't figure out what was going on until the anthropologist announced his was a marxist interpretation of history that sees the past in terms of class conflict and economic exploitation and then i have a long passage here from the book that's just impenetrable to me I can't imagine and so this was my first collision with this and then when we started skeptic in the early 90s and I started looking into the Holocaust deniers and creationists you know they were kind of being postmodern deconstructionist of the meta-narrative of the Holocaust and of the theory of evolution and I realized if you take this too far then you can actually take it right into a classroom and go look our story about the creation of the universe 6,000 years ago is just as good as the scientific one because there are no objective truths and then you can get really crazy and go okay and then I end up writing a book about these guys denying history about the Holocaust deniers they just well our story that you know this was exaggerated and so on is just as good as the other historian because there is no objective truth so that's what bothers bothered me back when I first collided with it and then the clips you showed of Jordan for example is emblematic of the kind of postmodern wars that our rear up together the 90s is captured I think in John Heights got a nice lecture about universities making the transition from the search for truth to the search for social justice and and he's got a great basically challenge to them you should just announce on your web page which one you want are you helping students understand the truth are you helping students learn how to be social justice warriors and just just be upfront about it because that's what a lot of them are doing and that's the only certain we have yeah yeah well you know and it's a concern that I share because I you know when you look at the 19th century side you know that they the gray kind of the arguably the three big thinkers who come out of the 19th century or Darwin Marx and Freud I think Darwin's meta-narrative is the only one that holds up right at this point and it's been heavily change or it's heavily modified and adapted and reinterpreted so that you know in this this gets to I think the benefit of post-modernism and a kind of understanding of skepticism and that D capitalizing you know taking a capital T and turning it into a small t is that throughout the 19th century and throughout a good chunk of the 20th century there were people who used evolution or evolutionary theory and kind of you know a what I think we would agree as a bastardization or a misunderstanding of Darwin and some of some of the implications of which Darwin himself didn't even understand that you know particular races were better than others and had a right you know extrapolating from biology to politics to rule over other people etc so to me that you know you didn't I understand your hesitation with post-modernism but what does it mean to go from a capital T to a small T and to me this is why I find post-modernism particularly simpatico I don't think it's the same as libertarianism but it fits very well and you know my background in terms of you know my PhD studies were in literary studies where literary critics deconstructed the literary canon and it was a couple a couple of things if no one is so what would essentially what they did is they brought context back into the creation of literary meaning and and you know this is one of the things where I think post modernists are wrong and this is something that I first read in Hayek but that they're applying kind of methodologies or an understanding of a field of knowledge in literary studies or in history and then applying it say to you know physics or Sciences that are a distinct type of knowledge and actually require a different way of understanding the world and possibly even truth I think truth in math or physics is probably different than truth in philosophy and like living philosophy as opposed to logic or in literature I don't think there is such a thing as like the greatest writer of all time what I'm interested in is the ways in which we use literature and literary tradition and create literary tradition in order to have conversations and to find meaning in our lives to express ourselves to engage with people and that's exactly what post modernists were doing in literature in literary studies starting you know arguably it goes back further but the high-tide of this stuff really started hitting the grad programs in the 70s and 80s and early 90s when I was in school and it was incredibly useful because it was a corrective to a really stale and boring understanding of literature with capital L and here for instance I'm an American s but you know we were taught there were five great writers that created something called the American Renaissance which at the time it was happening nobody it you know the American Renaissance which took place before the Civil War in literary terms is something that was created in like the 1920s and 30s or 40s by people after the fact recover and then it was presented as if oh well you know what like we were just digging around in the backyard and like oh my look at this we found the American Renaissance and going back and looking at what people at the time were reading why they were reading it how they were reading it and recovering that and creating what Michel Foucault who's you know one of the bugbears of anti post modernists would call a genealogy of knowledge rather than just a received you know kind of set of Commandments there I find that very helpful and I again I find a very simpatico with libertarianism in particularly when we start to talk about kind of meta narratives of political power or political righteousness yeah I read fuko's book on I forget the title but it was something like the the invention of mental illness you know mental illness was regarded in madness and civilization yeah Madison civilization you know madness madness was invented in 1620 or something like that you know it's like wait what I mean we have some idea of brain chemistry and genetics and schizophrenia is clearly a you know a brain disorder it's a malfunction of the neural networks and so on what are you talking about okay so I steal man his his argument I tried to understand it and he makes some good points that you know say something like a more contemporary example the kind of over prescription of ADHD medications to young children who may not really actually have some kind of brain disorder but they're just active you know young boys that like to run around a lot and you force him into these rows of desks and classrooms for hours on end and the teacher can't control them so they just they just medicate him up okay that would be an example of something that's you know called a disease as if it's a medical the condition when in fact it's just a social thing that we embedded it in IDs to gain control over hyperactive kids that would be an example that I would say Foucault is fair about but then then I was introduced to Thomas oz in the 90s we started skeptic people said oh my god if you're a libertarian Shurmur and if you didn't and if you you know if you're challenging these these meta-narratives have a speaky you got a read Thomas Oz because he he's a psychiatrist and he practices this and he shows that you know there's no such thing as schizophrenia it's like okay this is an example of a good idea you know the contextual basis of scientific theories gone too far where you just say it's all invented well it's not all invented the narratives are structured around something that's really out there yeah well and you know it's an interesting in the original video that Zack and I did we talk about saws and Foucault partly because in the early 60s along with Artie Lange and there were a couple of other people who tended to be psycho psychologists psychiatrists anthropologists looked at the construction of mental illness as a means of getting rid of people who you know we're just annoying to the power in sometimes you know sometimes it's your family sometimes it's political prisoners I mean there's a reason why in the Soviet Union political prisoners were routinely remanded to a psychiatric institution I and saws and Foucault fuko's first teacher gig in America was that SUNY Buffalo in the late 60s early 70s and saws was up in Syracuse and they actually correspond it fair matter I do saws bit and it's I you know I agree people say who have a better understanding of say of you know brain chemistry and whatnot that saws went too far with what he was saying often times or that he stopped keeping up with advances in understanding you know actual markers of disease but he wrote a book called the myth of mental illness I think that's powerful and again you know a you know you everybody can take everything too far there's no question of that and to the extent the I think one of the most ridiculous examples and I'm trying to remember exactly where it was from it might have been a journal called October which was a left-wing publication I don't know if it's still around but where during kind of the AIDS crisis or the AIDS era it hypothesized that you know the difference between a vagina and an anus was completely socially constructed and that it was you know merely the way we talked about these things is what created the reality that then somehow ended up with aids infecting gay men you know that's wrong because there is there are physical differences and even if you're heterosexual you're more likely to you know get or at the time I mean we've kind of moved past into a post AIDS here abut you know the anus is not the same as a giant in terms of intercourse and there's more likely to have you know bleeding which then leads to HIV transmission etc so you know Alan Coors the you know with the guy who wrote the book the encyclopedia of the Enlightenment for Oxford or Cambridge press retired from University of Pennsylvania I'm sure you know we know him in common but he once said you know there's a difference between talking about the social construction of reality which is what a lot of extreme post modernists focus on and they say everything is socially constructed realities completely socially constructed versus the construction of social reality mmm I think is where a post modernist understanding and incredulity toward meta-narratives becomes really important and this is probably less so in the research sciences in terms of you know physics or certain aspects of biology and chemistry and whatnot and it's more in the way that science gets applied and then trickles into politics or trickles into different ways to control people's lives jump in real quick with one question I think is relevant these conversation that came in from the comments and also mentioned that since you brought up Thomas's early next year I am producing a documentary for reason on this very topic kind of the history of Thomas's and what he got right and wrong and how what insights apply in modern day and and which ones we probably need to push aside so keep an eye on recent TV for that next early next year but this question is from someone named simply irresistible and and Michael Shermer brought up the idea of steel Manning and this is basically asking you to steel man the other side to Nick what is the biggest problem you see with post-modernism - Michael what is the biggest strength so Michael was about to talk so let's start with you Michael oh we're just parenthetically on saws I we published an article by a man skeptic because I'm always open to people that that have counter views and lo and behold I thought if I I found a some supporters in Scientology that liked what we were about challenges in psychiatry I'm like wait a minute what we're skeptical of Scientology why are they liking my magazine oh that's right they don't like psychiatry hi the enemy of my enemy is my friend kind of thing I guess for them well for me I think I already said it that it's clear that the old idea that it's what a 19th century idea that historians the job of the historian is to just tell the past as it really was well there's no such thing as it really was there obviously you can't disentangle the historian from history and you know the the narrative writer you know from the narrative the text from the context that he's writing in and she's writing in it and so on so I think that's probably the best part of it you know when I exited my doctoral program in the history of science I I no longer held that my original view when I entered was that science is a sort of progressing like an asymptotic curve coming right up to but not quite making the upper ceiling of truth with a capital T we're get we're gonna get closer and closer to it pretty soon we'll get there so I gave that up after the influence of post-modernism clearly that it's not the case but on the other hand there still is progress I mean there's a reason why for example the Big Bang Theory won out over the steady state theory which we're competing in the 50s and 60s and it wasn't clear which one was gonna win out but the evidence started piling up and piling up and by the by the late sixties early seventies it was pretty pretty clear to every almost everybody with the handful of exceptions like Fred Hoyle who named the big bang theory just as ironic but it is it's stuck and so why did that happen why was there a convergence of conclusions toward one theory than the other and it's because the evidence is there real empirical evidence not that and not just that that I can see that you can see and you and you and you and anybody can go look at it and run the experiment and so on so we can get out of the postmodern trap that we'll never know anything by recognising that it's a social process of getting out of my head to make sure that I'm not deluding myself by having you look at what I'm looking at and so the whole idea of empiricism and again poppers conjecture and refutation is I put it out there into the community and go this is my theory tell me if I've gone off the rails if I'm looking at something that might be real and then you look and you look and at some point we we converge to conclusion one way or the other and I think that's where we're at now and Nick what would you say is the biggest weakness of post-modernism i think michael has touched on it it's you know an intense i was almost gonna say like an intense subjectivism it almost becomes a form of intellectual autism where nobody nobody can understand the world as I experience or as the group that I claim to speak for which I might invent experiences and things like that and there is a there is a move towards the non-rational I wouldn't even say irrational but it's that you know the idea of if-then statements or the idea of being able to submit the evidence of how you came up with your system of beliefs to where you you kind of open up the data and you give people you know the you know you show them what you did and you say would you check my math for me would you proofread my way of thinking about the world and I think a lot of the times the people who traffic in kind of postmodern lingo or jargon are that's something that they have moved that they absolutely refuse to engage in and you know in a campus context that being shutting down speech and I don't even mean you know I'm not talking about somebody like Milo or Ann Coulter coming to campus but really shutting down the intellectual work of engagement with people who disagree with you so that you can actually move towards a better approximation of reality and there is an objective reality out there but you know this is obviously a very old concept but you know there's an objective reality out there that clearly impinges on us you know with a you know with something falls off the bill is safe falls off a building and hits me whether I see it coming or not it it hit me and killed me but how do we how do we apprehend that how do we comprehend that and how do we make sense of it the other thing that I would say is really is a problem which I hadn't really thought about it until this conversation but in the counter-revolution of science Hayek's book from the 50s called studies in the abuse of Reason where he kind of uses the French Revolution as the paradigmatic enlightenment driven mania where people you know the French revolutionaries thought that they could redesign everything at will and just wipe out the past literally wipe out the calendar wipe out every distinction and just start over he talks a lot about what he calls scientism which at one point he defines as the mechanical application of a system of knowledge to other things which actually run by different rules and I think in many ways that's one of the problems with post-modernism it really grew out of history and literary analysis and and in certain ways philosophy or the philosophy of science or historiography and things like that and I think it very quickly was people started using it to level all discourse and treat all discourse exactly the same and that's a problem because the whole point of post-modernism is actually that the world is is more complicated than we think and that there isn't a single Medan error meta-narrative or a single system of knowledge that's going to explain everything let me read something I wrote here on that where it shifts from the biological to the physics and biology to social sciences which gets more complex it is my hypothesis that in the same way that Galileo and Newton discovered the physical laws and principles around the natural world that really are out there so to have social scientists discovered moral laws and principles about other about human nature and society that really do exist just as it was inevitable that the astronomer Johannes Kepler would discover that planets have elliptical orbits given that he was making accurate astronomical measurements and given that planets really do travel elliptical orbits he could hardly have discovered anything else scientists study political economic social and moral subjects will discover certain things that are true in these fields of inquiry for example democracies are better than autocracies market economies are superior to command economies torture and the death penalty do not curb crime and that burning women as witches is a fallacious idea that women are not too weak and emotional to run companies or countries and most poignant ly here that blacks do not like being enslaved and that the Jews do not want to be exterminated and now how do we know those things we can just ask the people that are potentially affected they're gonna be tortured or enslaved they will tell you I don't I don't want that so that's a kind of truth I think that's what I push you toward III you know I agree with those truths but we also will recognize that at various points you know you can submit those arguments to the you know to the world and they might not agree with you or to say something like autocracies are better than democracies perhaps morally perhaps economically not always or in a given period of time and whatnot and I guess one of the questions that I have and this was you know this the I was interested in post-modernism when I was in grad school and I was expecting to become an academic this is and then I ended up getting a job at reason and you know I'll get back to you know you know teaching at a university someday I suppose but you know I was going to use post-modernism as a way to smuggle in Hayek and Mises in particular as well as saws and a couple of other libertarian thinkers because Michel Foucault towards the end of his life he actually in some of his last lectures spoke highly of Mises and Hayek and said that his students should read them and and a kind of classical liberal you're wearing a t-shirt I don't know if viewers could say that says classical liberal but that he was looking at classical liberalism in the nineteenth century as a way of hemming in certain types of power and social control and I was like okay well you know what like let's Foucault in the late 20th century was the most widely cited scholar and most of the social sciences and humanities let's look at these guys he said we're worth looking at my question for you Michael or a way of thinking about this is what you know where do those truths go once you start moving you know like I think we would both agree that men and women are biologically different they're evolved in different ways which are going to have ramifications on broad-based behavior patterns how do we use science or how do we have a conversation that is informed by science but then does not become overly deterministic because this is a little bit different than post-modernism per se but it's this is the problem I think that modernism had which is that it very quickly devolved into hyper determinism I think you see that more now on the left and kind of a Marxist left even more than a post modernist left and we could argue about Marxism and post-modernism when I was in grad school these they were you know the Crips and the Bloods they hated each other right it's one the scientific and the other was mush but you know how do you how do you check yourself so that you don't become deterministic yeah well you did disentangle Marxism from post-modernism in your first conversation and when you do that post-modernism doesn't seem quite so dangerous but in the minds of many people I think they're not disentangled so for example you'll see in that clip with with Jordan you showed you know he's he's got them overlapped because that's what I see he's in academia in part because so many academics are so far left-leaning they don't always call themselves Marx oh and if I might just inject I mean post-modernism and I'm guilty of this too it's kind of a garbage term right like we're debating is it for everything either having the joke that Umberto Eco the novelist if philosopher who wrote name of the Rose and Foucault pendulum and you know is like one of the great kind of theorists opposed modernist and he said you know post-modernism is something that you know any people label it whatever they love I think we're at a stage now to where it's people label everything they hate as pretty so yeah yeah so the concern like to bring up a contemporary issue that you mentioned was you know different men and women you know I'm really afraid to touch that myself although I touched on it a little bit but Jordan got himself into so much hot water for for talking about that it's that's one of those taboo subjects now but it's clear scientifically that obviously there's physical differences but but just on things that matter like why there are gender differences in the number of stem field graduates and then jobs and it's clear that there's no intelligence difference between men and women you know the bell curve is you know that the mean of the bell curve is the same but when you look at the spread of the edges there's a wider diversity of men that the bell curve is spread more widely than it is for women so as Pinker says it's like in mathematics more genius is it amongst men and more dunces amongst men so yeah it's just that it's just a wider range bell curve so you get more extremes but if you then shift to something like interest what are men and women interested in doing with their lives there you see a dramatic gender differences that start pretty early like in middle school when and early high school and schools start giving kids vocational interest tests like what are you interested in doing in most kids have no idea so they answer the hundred and fifty questions on the on the on the battery and see what comes up the the male-female differences of the kinds of jobs careers they would be interested in going into ends up being about the same percentage that they are into you know decades later and so this is one piece of evidence that it's not intelligence as interest what are you interested in doing look what is the you know what is the reality of things and say maybe not programming per se which is a totally mysterious dark art to me computer programming but when you look at the culture of Silicon Valley or the culture of Wall Street or the culture of law offices or medicine that were created you know and particularly maybe something like Wall Street or medicine like they were created at a time when women were absolutely not allowed to pursue certain occupations and a culture of workplace culture builds up which then is seen as somehow you know god-given as opposed to malleable or manipulable in a way that I think we're seeing that you know when this goes to your question of how truths with a small T kind of evolve and any quality and individuality triumphs over time I think we're seeing you know this this is where I think understanding the construction of social reality yes yeah which I said it's not unlimited but it can change and it can change pretty quickly I mean I think in our lifetimes alone you know we probably have older relatives who were smart women who became nurses because it was unthinkable that they would become doctors and they're right we've become doctors yeah now the barriers are down that they're there last time I checked I think they're just as many women MDS now as men and there's certainly more in medical school and the same thing in the biological sciences and the social sciences like in psychology it's like 7030 email you know maybe 6040 in PhD programs but it's clear so the evolutionary psych explanations but you know boys are interested in things girls are interested in people you know not across the board of course these are just average generalizations but what it ends up resulting in is women are more likely to go into the helping professions medicine anything with people and men are more likely end up wanting to be involved with things and programming I'm told because I'm like you I have no idea so it's like it's a dark art to me but programming computers is more of a being a guide thing then anyway this is the explanation and it seems to me that as you lower the barriers to entry whatever results percentage differences results that's reflecting probably more interest than then say ability and and also the other thing I'm gonna that bothers me about these conversations is this idea that somehow being a Wall Street trader or a politician or somebody that works you know a hundred hours a week and a law firm to become a partner or in the medical practice that like that's the ultimate thing you want to do to me working a hundred hours a week this does not sound like a high quality life you know to be the CEO of a major corporation you know for thirty years you've got to work the you know the basically probably 80 hours a week is something like it you know who wants to do that that's not much of a life and so women are more likely to say no I'd rather work half time and spend time with my kids there's a higher quality life and somehow that's been transponder fide into so you're saying that women can't work as CEOs no and and you know Pinker also makes this point you know but you know why aren't there more women Caltech physicists winning Nobel Prizes or whatever because almost nobody could be a Caltech physicist or mathematician I mean it's such a tiny tiny percentage of the population that could do it that those extreme ends on the bell curve at the genius and those slight differences there are then reflected that's the explanation I want to throw in a question that was came up on the original video because this is what a lot of the critics of post-modernism seem to be worried that it's undermining a lot of the assumptions upon which our very civilization is built I think this comment kind of exemplifies it it says here we go post-modernism implies that all previous generations knew nothing and that we know better it's perfect for Maoist Cultural Revolution we should be skeptical of established narratives but an outright rejection of all narratives makes us extremely open to whatever the powerful today want us to believe and they will change it at their whim as expected reasons rebuttal of jordan peterson are dismissed with prejudice so this idea of cultural Marxism that you hear people like Jordan Peterson talking about is that legitimate concern in any either of your minds you know I'll jump in I think you know one of the things that post-modernism actually valorizes is what a at American literary critic from the 20s or 30s of an what Brooks called a usable pass it it valorizes rummaging through the past to find examples of the of the kind of world that you want or that that kind of is a premonition of the world that you want where that might be and to go back and look at kind of counterfactuals you know that you could spin out of history so in a way I think I would argue that post-modernism for me again thinking about stuff like the revision of the literary canon it didn't mean getting rid of standards what it meant was going back and opening up more books and reading more books you read all of the received wisdom and then you see what else is out there that it's worth talking about so I think properly understood it's the exact opposite of that it's actually inoculation against the idea that the way the world that you were born into is the way the world always was and always should be I would argue that but it is true I think you know a lot of people constantly want to just will away you know any any sense of history and that's always a problem and Michael what do you think of that because Peterson obviously is very concerned with the power of myth and that you know our civilization is built on a certain religious outlook and as a skeptic I imagine you have some problems with it but I'd like you to tackle that and the cultural Marxism argument yeah so your interlocutor over there he's reflecting something like what edmund burke's wrote about in his analysis of the French Revolution that you can't just throw everything from the past out and start over because those people figured out some things at work some things that weren't such a great idea like slavery but other things in certain social institutions that maintain a society stability of the society and the French Revolution went too far in throwing all that out he supported the American Revolution because there was a balance there the French Revolution went too far so a gala day but the or rather libertine fraternity were pretty good egalitarian gala ticket now back to Jordan so I know Jordan pretty well I like most of what he says but he kind of flirts with some post-modernism when he talks about the power myth and you mentioned his podcast with Sam Harris which I've listened to it was just you know painful to listen to that you know he could you know that Sam could not get him to say you know this is really absolutely true like this hands great example was you know there is a correct order of US presidents starting with Washington and Adams and Jefferson and so on and but let's say that a group of you know Isis fighters have captured somebody and they're torturing them and they have to give the correct order of the presidents of the United States or else we're gonna detonate a nuclear bomb in Los Angeles and and but the terrorist has an incorrect memory of the sequence of presidents so they kept the captured person has to give the incorrect version and and Sam could not get Jordan to say there's actually a correct sequence of US presidents and the terrorist has the incorrect version of this and and this went on and on back and forth and it's like what is what is his what's the holdup with technology and powers that power and that power constructs narratives it's really the post-modernism stuff and well it's you know let me ask you in terms of evolutionary psychology or thinking about that also Peterson it to me it's not an accident that he's at University of Toronto where Northrop Frye a literary critic and cultural critic who kind of liberated archetypal criticism came out of her clients Brooks as well other people like that poly is very indebted to this but what what do you think of archetypes I mean are archetypes an emanation of a biological of an evolutionary kind of collective consciousness or is that also mumbo-jumbo that I think it's mostly mumbo-jumbo I think I think it's a kind of class of a classification we impose on nature of sorting animals into certain categories and plants into certain categories and things like that that's perfectly that makes perfect sense from an evolutionary perspective from there you can start conceptualizing ideas into categories which you know can make some kind of sense that's kind of a form of abstract reasoning where I think Jordan gets a little messy is is when you ask him like do you believe in God and you know his answer it you asked me that I go no yes ask him that because that would take me 40 hours to answer it's like why well what do you mean by belief and what do you mean by God and like for example Jesus was resurrected okay so people like me and Dawkins say no he was not resurrected that would be a miracle violation natural you're conceding he existed so you've what I didn't but for Jordan he you know he wants to say something like Jesus is a archetype of absorbing the sins of the past and redemption starting over you know he's got this whole story and that's really true it's okay what do you mean by true I mean as an archetype as an idea yes I get that you know the the idea of Jesus dying for me and redemption starting over the flood myths for example whether it's true it's probably not true but it represents some kind of truth like you know people can start over and rebuild their lives and so if you read a novel that inspires you to do this or you read a religious texts like the noachian flood or the Jesus story it's kind of a destruction Redemption we're starting over and that's true for you okay I get that it sort of metaphorically or archetype archetype only but not true scientifically not empirically true do you you know I one of the things have you ever been to the Creation Museum outside of Cincinnati yeah yeah and I'm forgetting the name of the guy Keith whatever I can't hate them can have yeah I mean you have to consider it in an enormous concession that that whole museum which is extremely well done and I find it enjoyable and not simply on an ironic level although it's just that you know that they're arguing in scientific terms like they're using the language and at least the appearance of science and logic in order to make their case it seems to me that that's a gigantic concession and I am curious if well that's right before like the century ago no one really cared about scientific discoveries in terms of their implications for religious beliefs um but most didn't because most weren't basing their religious beliefs on facts and evidence and empirical reasoning and arguments and logic and all that it was just what they believed so this is a very modern idea that science is now the power narrative and if you want to power in culture you have to use that narrative to get your message out so at this I at the Creation Museum you go in there as you may recall there's two pathways you can go down the science pathway and you end up in this room where there's you know sex drugs and rock and roll and euthanasia and abortion and you know it's just you know that culture has gone to hell in a handbasket all thanks to you know Darwin and then you go down the other path when you end up Jesus in heaven and love and everything is great so they're really kind of post modernist you know in a way as you've defined it they're saying the meta-narrative you tell ends up it's not a it's not a just a hypothetical interesting discussion about DNA or the age of the earth it it has implications for politics economics ideology beliefs life and death morality where you end up after you die and so on do you do you also believe that though because I guess one of my questions and the this conversation has been helpful for me I mean to kind of clarify this idea of taking a you know what I mean kind of arbitrage a system of knowledge developed in one field and then putting it into another sometimes I can yield a really interesting and other times it can lead to confusion and I like categorical confusion which I think when post modernist and I think in the clip that Zack showed at the beginning he was talking about or you were talking about you know show me a postmodernist at 30,000 feet and I'll show you a hypocrite I think I came back to something along those lines of saying like yeah that you know that you know it's true but like what does aerodynamics the science of aerodynamics and there are certain wings there are certain engines or a certain you know measurements that are more efficient and more effective and keep us from crashing and we can we can model these and predict these and retro dick things and everything but what does that have to do with living a meaningful life which is really ultimately the arena in which we're gonna spend most of our lives so you know but what does astrophysics have to tell us about you know whether or not our our you know our children should you know become doctors or lawyers yeah so here you know let's get back to the charge of scientism which I'm guilty of I think the mistake here is thinking that when you're talking about like bridging the is odd gap and using science to find meaning and morality but here we're not talking about science like theology we don't turn to the ichthyologist to find out what the meaning of life is or or what's good and evil or what's right and wrong here I'm just talking about the whole body of the Western tradition science and philosophy the in throw in theology and and literature and the arts everything we know when you throw in religion now I went through in religion because the you know they were there before science and they've been thinking about these things a long time and they didn't have a systematic method to get at the truth so to speak the scientific method but through trial and error they figured out some things that were better than other things and so and some religions are better at this than others I I think because Christianity went through the Enlightenment it came out more civilized it's become you know reasonably supportive of most moral civil rights movements and things like that they're slow to change but Judaism is probably my top I was going to be religious it would be maybe a Jew even more than a Buddhist and most of the Jews I know they're atheists but they still you know the cultural tradition back to Burke's idea that the certain things people have discovered in the past we should hang on to because they work by work what do we mean you know less violence more prosperity a more stable society these sorts of things we know that certain things work better than others just like we know planets travel in ellipses and so there's some value there I think I tend to agree and I think you know one of the things that I was I was raised Catholic in a Catholic tradition like a Jewish tradition and like Protestant Reformation Protestant tradition is a skepticism actually towards meta-narrative I mean obviously you know getting together and arguing about the finest you know every jot and tittle I mean some of my best friends are biblical literalists and one of the things that I as I became more interested in literary criticism that I found was a you know a kind of common ground was like every Lynn turists in understanding a text and you know they would talk about how every jot and you know that God breathed every jot and tittle into the King James Bible which strikes me as a ridiculous statement I mean you know every comma and every period every punctuation mark much less the longer passages and that is a good that that you know regardless of how it's being done you know that process of kind of being conscious and trying to ferret out a better understanding of what you what you're looking at I think is a good one yeah so if you find value in Jane Austen or Shakespeare or whatever like that Dostoyevsky you know jordan loves michi and Dostoevsky well there was no brothers Kara's Karamazov in Russia that I know of but it's irrelevant that's not the right question you know what is it true it is is that an accurate true history of the modernisation of Russia in the 19th century it's that that's the wrong question it's irrelevant you know a lot of people that send us articles about I have an explanation for the noachian flood it was a you know meteorite or a volcano you know whatever or Jesus didn't really die you know when he was up there on the cross somebody gave him some stuff that knocked him out and his heart break it was super low and they thought he was dead but he wasn't that he escaped and he went to France and you know and so it's sort of a Dan Brown novel kind of thing at this point but but but to me they're they're going down the wrong path I mean I like the scientific approach to these sorts of things let's find a natural explanation for this apparently supernatural phenomena but maybe there's nothing to explain maybe the stories are just mythic they're archetypal stories that represent something people just make up the story to deliver some kind of moral homily or message that is true in that sense but not true in a historical scientific sense and another question came in that I think goes to what you were talking about Michael and and maybe challenges it a little bit I mean you wrote a book called the moral arc which I interviewed you about and Sam Harris also seems to have and I don't know if you this is a correct characterization of your beliefs but that there are kind of moral goods that can be rationally derived and one of the questions that just came in from d4 and Nabal why should we care about individualism or egalitarianism etc why not attempt to make the state as glorious as possible all those questions can't be answered by science what say you I he's wrong I mean we we know what happens when the state gets glorified and the collective is put over the individual we have tons of historical experiments the experiment has been run and they're almost always catastrophic I mean not almost all these boys now if it's a tiny little commune of you know 20 people in nineteenth-century Kansas or something you know it's relatively harmless people have a lot of sex and because their feelings hurt and the cult leader ends up absconded with the money whatever but if you scale that up to the big communist experiments and the 20th century then you end up with a hundred million death and the problem is that it's too easy to rationalize why we need to suppress those individual rights over there or even get rid of those individuals in the name of this greater good this collective you know kind of archetype of the state as representing us and all that that and it's too easy to sacrifice people and that's what leads to you know major body counts in genocides and and Wars so yeah we know that's wrong and would you agree that in certain profound ways and I think I interviewed Steven Pinker about enlightenment now and I think one of the relative weaknesses of the book which i think is fantastic and it's one of the you know the best things I've read in memory in recent memory is that things like the gulag things like in a way Nazism were participating in a broad enlightenment narrative and in the sense of like when you were talking about how you fetishized the state and everybody has to everybody becomes kind of data in or you know some kind of integer in the formula for greatness and for you know for collective greatness and whatnot and it seems to me that recognizing and this is something where post-modernism you know I think this is one of the ways that that capital-t truth was demoted to a little tea was that people understood pretty quickly in the 19th and early 20th century that's very easy to start kind of losing your perspective and like you have the truth and then you want to impose the truth on the world and it ends very poorly yeah that's right yeah although in the case of the Nazis and the Communists this was more of a post enlightenment romanticism move in soil and you know the kind of elevation of the people the folk to something grander than the individual yeah or and yeah it's it's simultaneously both pre-modern and kind of postmodern and then I guess I you know what is a more accurate way of putting it is that then they used the kind of fruits of you know kind of modern industrial technique and yeah really kind of get where they were going in a relatively efficient and like Francesca Lea effective life yeah here's the way I phrased it some of my critics are accusing me of basing my ideas on weird Western educated industrialized rich and democratic culture that that's my embedded presumption about immoral progress so I write sure future scientists may one day discover that humans do not have an instinct to survive and flourish that most people do not want freedom autonomy and prosperity that women want to be lorded over by men that animals enjoy being tortured killed and eaten that some people like being enslaved and that large populations of people don't object to being liquidated in gas chambers but I doubt it okay so I think where do you take where does the family and kind of shifts in family life because again and and and I'm thinking about this in terms of a kind of you know science that is flavored by post-modernism so that you we recognize that if evolution is true we're evolved to have tighter kinship ties to people who are closer to us genetically or you know that we grow up with but then also we recognize that there's an a wide variety of family units and even within our lifetimes and certainly within the lifespan of the of the United States exactly how family is constituted how it is defined and what it means can change how you know so we know you and I are both good libertarians we we don't like the state we don't like the collective we don't like you know probably you know the group is important but it should be voluntary and whatnot but then how like how far down can you burrow into the family being a kind of voluntarist unit rather than something that is dictated by evolution yeah they're I think the evolutionary psych tendency is to see the family as an extension of your genetic autonomy it's it's different than any other collectives although you know hunter-gatherer groups are small enough everybody you know that everyone in the group knows each other pretty intimately and and if there's not genetic ties there's at least a lot of reciprocity that has gone on and so you get reciprocal altruism along with kin selection as kind of binding the group together the the challenge comes from extending the family and extended family to much larger communities in society once you break Dunbar's number of 150 or so and you end up with a thousand or ten thousand or a million then those then you need some kind of external networks of trust for people to be able to function and so the long debate as we know you know while we need a state well maybe we don't need a state maybe you know you can get these kind of bottom-up self-organized principles like in the west where miners and ranchers just drafted their own contracts and agreements sometimes that works sometimes it doesn't work sometimes you end up with bottom-up mafioso gangs just fighting it out and levels of violence go way up so that that's where I have to say you know solving the problem of the social problem of cooperation in large groups is really hard I want to go ahead and just we're coming to the end of the stream but there was one persistent reaction that we got to the original video that I'd like especially Nick to address and that is that we were more or less straw Manning the other side and not really talking about the same post-modernism and in this conversation you've already conceded that post-modernism is a garbage term but maybe we could just talk a little bit more about that and then wrap up soon here's one example of such a comment stupid video this is a 40 minute long straw man of Peterson's views on post-modernism Nick basically redefines post-modernism as it was originally intended instead of addressing the bastardized version of post modernism which Peterson and others are obviously criticism there saved you 40 minutes and then I was talking yesterday with Christian O'Brien of 1791 a YouTube channel and he was wondering if we are just conflating post-modernism with skepticism and should we just be talking about skepticism so any response to that Nick you know you have to define your terms and you know I was using the you know the incredulity toward meta-narratives which i think is a really good working definition of post-modernism and it's in the work that really introduced post-modernism to you know into intellectual discourse so I stand by that there is no question that we you know when I think when when people start saying look you know left-wing postmodern Marxist you know blah blah blah like you know something is going on there and it's not what the railing against might absolutely be true when I find you know are in one of the clips you know that you that you showed in our video Zack where Jordan Peterson said that the individual disappears and post-modernism like I think that's just factually wrong i I don't I don't see that at all as deriving from the assumptions of post-modernism or even the ways that it's often applied in in in the way that he means it having said that you know on college campuses today there is a you know people appropriate or or either get charged with being postmodern or or say that they are in terms of saying that everything is well to power that there are no logical arguments that all you do is you shut down you know either you're being shut down by the powers that be because you have a conversation they don't want to hear or you are the person shutting that down I don't know how you get around that and what do you think Michael is there a straight line from post-modernism to the campus identity politics and what I think Peterson calls you know power games is that a straight line and is that a legitimate criticism post-modernism may be clarified it's called Marxist post-modernism or something like that you know because there's probably different types that you know so Jordan is reflecting that time when talking about what's going on in the Academy yes I mean for sure that's that that's the whole idea of power or structures and the oppressed and the oppressor and you know the oppression Olympics is it's sometimes call now and you know that's the kind of thing that's being discussed at least on some campuses I don't think it's epidemic on all campuses but it's it's widespread enough that we should be concerned about that and it's particularly when spills over into the sciences like biology how many sexes are there how many genders are there you know these are slightly different questions when you get into the gender issue you know it's tied to biology but to what extent you know does culture play a role obviously some but part of that I think you know just sort of close out here what I have to say about this is that it's this kind of binary thinking we're in where we want to put things in boxes and categories okay that so there's two sexes there's two genders that's it I mean you know Ben Shapiro he grants it it's funny the way he rants about this but we but that's that categorical thinking that there is a slight spectrum of like less than 1% of the population has these genetic or hormonal differences that make it a little fuzzier okay we should recognize that and say okay you know 0.05 7% of the population is not clearly male or female fine they don't fit in either box and that's okay in science you can have these kind of spectrums you don't have to put things in just in boxes and I think that kind of categorization of things in the boxes gets us into trouble and you don't have to just pick up on that I think you know one of the great things about the 21st century and about intellectual life in the 21st century is that I I would like to think of my more optimistic moments that we're replacing binary thinking or you know either-or thinking with spectrum as a concept in a lot of different ways and you know as a description of reality because and you know I have exact I think we talked about this in the original thing I'm actually a big fan of intersectionality which originally is a term that was used in feminist critiques of power and whatnot and it ends up often being the worst kind of identity politics where you stack up all of your partial overlapping identities and then you know whoever has the most impression points or who is from the most the least empower gets the most power that's a problem having said that as a way of understanding who we are and what makes us up and what communities we belong to what identities we have it's I think it's a it's a fantastic very postmodern way of understanding if modernism is the idea that one theory or one idea can explain everything post-modernism is that actually we need more than one because we're more complicated as individuals and to Michael's point it's you know again for me I guess and this is partly because I I'm not a scientist so I don't have to worry about these things as much but it is kind of when we start talking in terms where we take supposedly hardcore scientific truths that are immutable which and they're always contextual ultimately on some level at least in the language we use to describe them what happens when we put that into a social or political order and particularly you know Michael I would love to have this conversation I'm like where does your individualism come from where does it spring forward forth from because is it evolution or is it you know is it nature is it nurture is it you know your mother when you were when she was pregnant had a particular type of mumps or measles and you came out an individualís is it epigenetics I'm not sure where mine comes from but that's the question you know that I'm I'm kind of obsessed with and do me this is where post-modernism obviously it can be used I guess like everything it can be used to shut people down or it can be used to kind of rethink things and really challenge the ability of the state or or the corporation or the family you know all these different sites of potential repression and oppression as well as empowerment to begin on us now you know like that's the conversation that I feel that we learn is and yields interesting results for we will have that conversation on my science elan podcast in weeks but but you brought up intersectionality theory you know this is again another example of a good idea just taken too far in the Academy that that really does end up being the oppression Olympics and by away that term was calling by a Latina feminist activist who warned her followers don't turn this theory intersectionality theory into oppression Olympics which is exactly what's happened so the print the problem is is when you put it into action from just the theory so if a black man says to me a white man Shermer you have no idea what it's like to be a black guy in America he's right I don't I I know I have privilege being a middle-aged white guy driving a Tesla around Santa Barbara I know I'm not going to be assaulted I know the police aren't going to shoot me you know I I just I'm relieved of all those things that I know let's say a black guy has to worry about but a black woman could then say to the black guy you don't know what it's like to be a woman much less a black woman and yeah and she's right you know and so on and you can start the premise of a John Lennon Yoko Ono song for the early seventies woman is the N word of the N word of the world because she's the slave to the world slaves probably could a white guy probably couldn't sing that song now it lets you just said n-word yes I want to wrap this up with just Nick you mentioned earlier and in our video also that this is in many ways a way for you to kind of smuggle in talking about people like Hayek and you near the end of his life apparently Foucault was a fan of Hayek and I want to just play a short clip of Hayek that was featured in that video and then really have you explicitly draw that connection for us to finish us out so here is a little bite from Friedrich Hayek socialism assumes that all the available knowledge can be used by a single central authority it overlooks that the modern society which I now prefer to call the extended urban which exceeds the perception of any individual and is based on the utilization of widely dispersed knowledge and once you are aware that we can achieve that great utilization of available to resources only because we utilize the knowledge of millions of men it becomes clear the assumption of socialism's as a central authority command all this Marge ok can you tell me those eyeglasses are back he was a hipster well that you know in a way that was one of the things that I think Foucault Michel Foucault was particularly drawn to he ultimately rejected classical liberalism or liberal kind of enlightenment hedges on Perry didn't think that they've worked in offer that it was not quite up to the task but I think you know what Hayek is tapping into there is a rejection of 19th century you know the worst strains of 19th century enlightenment thought and I think in the in the person of Marx and to a certain degree Freud as well you saw that kind of hubris fully formed later in in the 20th century where central authorities did start to say we can control everything we can control the price we can control you know the time or that you know the time zones and things like that so I think you know if if in fact Michael you know went from starting grad school in a period where truth with a capital T was a live option and then when he came back to it it was truth with a small T I think it's partly because Hayek who is very much in a following it was heavily influenced by Karl Popper they were together I guess for a while at Cambridge but they you know by stoppers understanding of the limits of knowledge and I think that that's you know that's the best part of post-modernism that it's right at the minute when you're about to throw the kill switch and you know jerk you know you know either like you know create the gulag or you know let the you know the dam wash over you know water wash over an entire society or civilization that lived in a valley forever because you know you're gonna do the right thing for the greatest number of people I think you know that that thought in our mind that says hold on we really ought to we ought to run the math again we ought to check our math I think that's tribute to Hayek and I think that's post-modernism and it's at its best great well that's a great closing more remarks any final thoughts from you Michael before we wrap up that was a perfect way to wrap it up I am deeply concerned about the Chinese movement toward planting like a hundred million cameras all around the society to try to dissolve the Hayek problem of knowledge we're gonna know what every single person does every minute of the day and then we're gonna reward them points or diss credits for everything that they do that you know there are people still trying to do this and they they have the kind of technology now that the you know the germ the East German Stasi could only dream of in terms of knowing what everybody's doing so we have to keep pushing back against that well thank you both for this really enlightening conversation I think this showed the potential of this forum and I hope that you those of you who watched agreed I mentioned in an earlier stream that I was thinking of this week as a kind of sample platter so I tried to get a little bit of lenore scapes kanae's you talking about parenting some psychedelics a philosophical conversation between Nick and Michael to cap it all off and I hope you enjoyed it I I know I did like I said we'll be taking a look at if it makes sense to continue this and part of that is going to be reading the signals the viewership the engagement so let us know through all those avenues commenting email Twitter whatever if if you like it or if there's anything that you would like to see done differently or guests that you would like to see come on the show but for now we'll leave it there and see we'll see you in the new year on Reason TV and in any case with our regular programming documentaries interviews Stossel videos remi videos all your favorites so thanks again for tuning in everybody and have a happy holiday and Happy New Year [Music]

Channel: ReasonTV

Views: 18,731

Rating: 4.6561985 out of 5

Keywords: libertarian, Reason magazine, reason.com, reason.tv, reasontv, postmodernism, intellectual dark web, Jordan Peterson, philosophy, Foucault, Derrida, Western civilization, alt right, new right, postmodern philosophy, FA Hayek, livestream

Id: zAvWRgF8Sj0

Length: 80min 15sec (4815 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 21 2018