Joe Rogan Experience #1006 - Jordan Peterson & Bret Weinstein

getting bigger but the video part is reaching a higher percentage 3 2 1 gentlemen we are live here we go Jordan Peterson Bret Weinstein how are you doing? Alright, thank you for coming to be here, how excited to have you, I should be. It's funny, you're classy, ​​you make us look so sloppy, what are you doing, what can I say man, you know, I only brought a limited amount of clothes, well, nice move, you look great and it's good to see you both, And so whose idea was it? to do this first of all, so uh, I think it was, I think it was from Brett, yeah, I saw a tweet from Jordans or maybe it wasn't a tweet.

I saw a YouTube clip that someone tweeted, I don't know if. was you your perspective on Hitler and your argument was that he was actually much worse than his reputation would have us believe and it's funny, it goes back to my first evolutionary project as an undergraduate that I was working with, Bob Trevor, who was he was the leading evolutionary minds of the 20th century. I was lucky enough to have him as a college advisor, hold this sucker up to your face because he'll turn sideways because we're looking at each other, yeah, yeah, okay. Anyway, I did a project with Bob on analyzing the Holocaust from an evolutionary perspective.

I wanted to test the question about whether at that time it was common for people to say that Hitler was crazy and there was something that bothered me about that. analysis I think it's really dangerous for us to dismiss someone like Hitler as crazy before we really understand what they're doing, so when I saw your video clip I thought it would be worth having a discussion so we could figure out whose perspective It makes sense, it sounds like a amazing topic but before we get to that I would really like to know what is going on with you because you are at the center of this crazy Evergreen State College controversy, you essentially left the area where you are suing. university now, so what is your situation now?

We have not filed a lawsuit yet and in fact I will talk about what happened within the negotiation, but yesterday we had our first meeting with the university and this was an attempt to avoid a lawsuit, but I will say from where I feel so hard to believe that the university appears to have learned nothing from this episode and is doubling down on the same foolish sets of beliefs and assumptions that got it into trouble in the first place, so that's not a hopeful situation, no, and for anyone If you don't know what this whole story is about, you'd have to go back to Bret's podcast that we did a few months ago or just Google Evergreen State University and Google Bret and you.

You'll be blown away by the incentive, the social justice warrior gone crazy, kids from the entire campus patrol the campus with baseball bats. I mean, this whole thing is completely crazy, kids telling the college president not to use his hands when he talks. because it's a microaggression so he puts his hands down the kids start cheering and laughing they don't realize they're being played this is all just a big crazy game on the part of the kids and I call them kids I don't give how old they are to have power over people, I mean essentially what this all boils down to and you really see it in that moment where they tell him to put his hands down and he does it and they laugh and they cheer and they think it's amazing, well. you know they are educated to do that to a certain extent because one of the principles of postmodernism that they are being fed is that there is no such thing, there is nothing but power, that is the only thing that mediates relationships between people because there is There is no real world, everything is a social construction and it is a landscape of conflict between groups, that is the postmodern world and the only real means of expression is power, that is why postmodernists constantly affirm that patriarchy is a corrupt institution because They look at hierarchical organizations and they are stratified, obviously there are people at the top and people at the bottom, the only reason there are people at the top is because they dominate by power, there is no philosophy of authority or competition that no longer exists. exists and So, and if you're cynical about that sort of thing and you should be, you could say that part of the reason postmodernists believe in its power is because it helps them justify their arbitrary use of it under any circumstances. circumstances and I think that's right, I think that's exactly what happened, so it's not surprising that you see this manifested in the behavior of the students like a mob, okay according to everything that they are being taught, so good that they are also being taught. and this kind of necessary means to overcome the system as if the system is a horrible institution and they can justify almost anything, yes this is like beating up a Nazi who is a Nazi, everyone who disagrees with you I mean , is essentially What is said ad nauseum in online social justice warrior circles at EEC?

I've seen Nazi hits so many times, I mean, but when it came to Charlottesville there were very few Nazi hits, you know, it was like that was it. It's all very crazy we see real Nazis, those are real Nazis, you know, yeah, go punch them please, you know before, we too I think don't even do that, by the way, well, I think we've already discovered everyone from right to left, everyone realized that wherever the Nazis went was wrong, we all agreed that we wouldn't go there anymore, so when someone shows up and says, well, we should go there, it's like were immediately identifiable.

Put them together and if you have any sense of knowing, like many conservatives did after Charlottesville, they come out and say well, in case it needs to be said again, we're not really allied with those people, yeah, well, that's one of To them, the most disturbing thing for a lot of people about Donald Trump's reaction was that he didn't take a tough stance against these white supremacists who showed up with tiki torches walking down the street shouting anti-Semitic phrases or whatever, I don't know. exactly what they are shouting. I've read a lot of different things, but everything was a bomb in ancient times.

I mean, it was a horrible thing to see and you know, Donald Trump comes out and says there was horrible behavior on all sides, yeah, well, I thought I thought about that a lot because I got tangled up with it in a weird way in Canada. She was supposed to appear on a panel, a panel discussing the suppression of free speech on college campuses, which was then quickly canceled by the university that was going to host it after Charlottesville in part because one of the panelists was going to be Faith Goldie, who was the journalist covering Charlottesville and got the pictures of the car and the damage, but we were attacked right after with the Nazi epithet and Ryerson cut, closed, closed the free speech panel, so it comes back up and no one it does.

You were attacked like Nazis, yeah, yeah, yeah, what happened was this, this, this, this person put up a Facebook page and used a swastika with an O, you know, like a circle with a line through it and essentially said no fascists, no fascists at Ryerson, but he used the swastika and got a group of people together to pressure the university administration to advise the event which they quickly did and then they had a celebration party the night of the event and this is something that was really interesting, so they got a couple, I think, a couple hundred people for the celebration at Ryerson and they were united under the flag of the hammer and sickle and we were calling for revolution and what it was What was so interesting about that and I really mean technically it was interesting was that the mainstream media said virtually nothing about the fact that these, let's call them counter-protesters, I don't know exactly what you would call them, had shown up under this murderous symbol and that It made me think that I couldn't understand why the swastika is an immediate identifier of a pathological personality and the hammer and sickle is not, there is actually a reason why they are.

It's not just arbitrary and I think maybe it's something like the Nazi is the guy who stabs you in the alley and steals your wallet and the communist is the white collar criminal who takes your pension and you actually have more. afraid of the first person than the second person because the damage they cause is closer and more emotionally recognizable, but that's the second guy who collects your pension, for example, maybe it's even more dangerous, but there's something bloody about the symbol Nazi and an immediate emotional impact than the hammer. and the sickle just doesn't produce and some of that is because people are poorly educated.

Historical events are pure ignorance. I don't think it's just ignorance, no, I think the people who wear those Che Guevara t-shirts really understand the history. of Che Guevara or do you think he represents this sexy South American counter-protest character, a guy who takes on the system as we know it? A guy was wearing a green beret and was wearing a beret hiding in the jungle fighting against the oppressive dictatorship of the United States. I mean, that's what they're looking at when they see that the fact that historical ignorance plays a role in this is absolutely certain and I think the romanticization of people like Che Guevara is exactly that.

I think you've nailed it exactly, but I think there's a deeper question here. It's like I'm thinking that after Charlottesville many conservatives immediately divorced themselves from the Nazis. Ben Shapiro was a good example, yes, and he reminded me a lot of William F. Buckley divorcing the John Birch Society. In the 1960s, the right seemed to have an easier time drawing a line around the Nazis and saying no, that's not us, partly because right-wing conservatives are better at drawing boundaries, but you know, let's say we wanted to draw a line around radical leftists, okay, point something, well, to the right, you say, well, you were a swastika, yeah, you're out of the club, man, just to the left, well, you think, which one It's the smoking gun, you believe in fairness.

That's a smoking gun as far as I'm concerned, but it doesn't have the same emotional impact as if you wore a swastika to the protest, yes, you believe in equity and refuse to define it. That would be correct, but that's so big. Wait, there's no impact on that, it's like well, I'm not going to partner with you because you believe in fairness, it's like it's too complicated hmm, that's right, although I want to back us up here because I think we underestimate the danger of and I think the Nazis are a red herring, there's something really threatening to resurface and Charlottesville is a version of that, but I think because we have a cartoonish understanding of what that protest was really about and how many people are actually involved, we don't know. .

I don't really see why this is a dangerous and fair topic and I think the answer is evolutionary and hasn't been spelled out, and because it hasn't been spelled out, it's very hard to pinpoint. I would like to continue interrupting you. but just put this in your face it sounds good to us but people listen online or better yeah just when you turn to him just turn the thing around with you okay yeah just get it always keep it at a fist from your face. that's the best, sorry, okay, so explain what you mean by this, so my point would be that what happened in Germany in the 1930s was a particularly visible and well-documented example of a pattern that is very much most common in human history and because this pattern arises as a result of certain characteristics of the way evolution works in the context of humans;

In reality, there is always the danger of it arising again and knowing what to do about it is not so simple until you have seen why it happens. and what it means what I've been saying in the lectures I've given on this is that tyranny is the ultimate goal of prosperity and therefore there is a pattern in which you will go through a period of prosperity in which it appears that that thing is defeated once and for all, there is no reason for people to go after each other in this particular way and then the moment that pattern fades, it reinvents itself, people don't expect it, it flies under a flag different or something like that.

So I think looking at the small number of people who were doing what they were doing in Charlottesville and saying "well, we all agree this is wrong" overlooks the fact that I actually think Trump is doing it. cynically, but Trump was riding the wave that there are ideas that are not permissible in the environments we all grew up in and that will become permissible again if we are not careful to recognize that that is the nature of history. I think it's very likely. that that's going to happen, I mean, part of the reason I landed in the political mess that I landed in last year was because I was increasingly aware that this process of polarization was going to take place and that, in my opinion, the continuous is the continuous anyway.

The search for new ground under a radical left rubric, especially in the universities, is beginning to produce an extraordinarily dangerous opposition and that manifested itself at least to some extent in Charlottesville, and that is whyI think you're right, well, you don't want to be complacent, say, well, we know who the Nazis are and we're not going there, so the problem is solved, the problem is not solved, there is all kinds of strange activity in space from the non-radical left as in the other side of the radical left, whatever it is and right now what it is is not obvious, you know, it's the alternative laboratory, okay, that's part of it, it's kickass danny , it's this light-hearted thing, it's some of its comedy, some of its satire, some of its seriousness, some of its inversion of identity politics, which is very dangerous and perhaps the most dangerous thing about charlottesville is that there is something extraordinarily dangerous about the fact that the people re-identify with their racial identity It's really not a good thing, well, there is a reversion to their racial identity, there is basically an outbreak of tribalism, which explains what is happening on the far right, what is happening on the left , it is a new twist, what there is is a coalition of different tribal identities that are not large enough to gather a force on their own and that is why they are united and together they are a formidable force, but what is going to happen is that something that is an unstable entity at the point where that force gains power is going to disappear. to fall apart, the internal dynamics destroy it, so it is not really able to restrict the version that is repeated on the right the version that manifests itself as white nationalism that version is stable because it represents a real population that has an evolutionary basis for remain cohesive and I should point out that there is a danger when you hear an evolutionary biologist talk about evolutionary patterns, it is often inferred that if an evolutionary biologist says that something is a pattern that has evolved, that is some kind of defense and it is not at all, We call this the naturalistic fallacy, so evolution is an absolutely amoral process that has produced the most wonderful characteristics of human beings and the worst characteristics and, in a sense, we are forced to choose which characteristics to honor and promote and which ones. crushing something may have something may have evolved as a virtue in some circumstances and still be the type that if magnified beyond its proper limits becomes pathological so let me tell you something I learned about Hitler that I haven't really recovered from.

I'm Shocked by this, so we've been analyzing the relationship between political belief and personality. Okay, and your political belief is strongly determined by your temperament, so liberal left types are high and business openness is creativity and low on conscientiousness, but you can chunk conscientiousness into industriousness and order and the true predictor of conservatism It is order, not industriousness, and one might think that it is not surprising that right-wingers are more orderly, hence Hitler's call for order, let's say, but it is one thing to propose that and another thing to measure it and now it is measurable and it seems that order is associated with disgust sensitivity and this is actually a big problem, it's a big problem, which is why there is a paper that was published in PLoS ONE about three years ago that looks at the relationship between the prevalence of infectious diseases and authoritarian political attitudes and they did this country by country and then within countries by state or province and the correlation between the prevalence of infectious diseases and authoritarian/right-wing political beliefs at the local individual level was 0.6, so I want to break it down this a little bit, okay, so the idea is that this is part of what could be described as the extended behavioral immune system and one of the problems with interactions between groups of human beings in our evolutionary past was exactly what happened to it The Native Americans, you know, went out and shook hands with the Spanish conquistadors and then within a couple of generations, 90% of them were dead of smallpox, measles and mumps, so it's been a truism in our country than if you meet a group. of isolates, if you are a group of isolated humans and you meet another group of isolated humans and you exchange pathogens, there is a real possibility that you and everyone you know will die in a short time, so we have a discussed mechanism that produces this implicit bias, let's call it racial, racial and ethnic, which is part and parcel of the human cognitive landscape, but the problem with that is that it's rooted in a contested mechanism that actually serves as a protective function now that I was figuring this out.

I was reading Hitler's Table Talk and Hitler's Table Talk is a very interesting book, it's a book of his spontaneous statements at lunchtime in 1939 and 1940, and I went ahead with this new knowledge because people think that conservatives are similar or that Fascists fear those who are different, they are not afraid, they are disgusted and that is not the same because you burn things that disgust you and then I was terrified to read it because then I also thought oh well, the sensitivity to disgust is associated with order and You need order in a society to maintain it and the Germans are very orderly and that was actually a canonical part of their civilization and part of what makes them great and powerful and that just had to bend a little more than necessary and all of a sudden , everything needed to be cleaned and you know Hitler talked about cleanliness all the time and he actually meant it, so this thing that's coming up, you know, you talked about its biological basis, its evolutionary basis, is part of this deep-rooted discussion. system that protects us from dangerous pathogens that can and do manifest themselves in the political arena, is not good, so I don't know exactly how to separate this, but I agree with your point that there is a real danger when populations are like a literal danger of a pathogen and that this is likely to have produced a certain instinctive fear of the other that does not have to be limited to that particular thing but is sufficient to generate a selective force that would cause a certain reluctance to meet, but I want to I want to point out that at least in the West and probably universally human beings when they go to war tend to dehumanize the other population and of course call the other population subhuman vermin, whatever it is that human beings and my The concern is that we are doing exactly this with the Nazis or de facto Nazis that are appearing on our screens right now, what we are doing is comforting ourselves by saying: well, it's a small outbreak of something that makes these people inhuman. and it justifies punching them or whatever and, as you know, I'm not scrupulous about there being a right to violence when someone is threatening a way of life, so it's not that, but my concern is that if you take the model of the pathogen and you imagine that all those people who showed up in charlottesville say that this is a contagion and that it needs to be isolated, then they will have the feeling that as long as they do it it will not appear anywhere else, whereas I think the real danger is that in In reality it is a latent program that has served populations in past circumstances, it is indefensible, but it has served populations and the populations from which we come have it, therefore, in reserve and when certain characteristics appear in the environment, that program can emerge, so my concern is that that's where we are, you can't isolate it as one phenomenon associated with the other, one of the things I've done for decades is teach my students a variant of that, which is something like because I try to guide them through the psychological understanding of what happened in Nazi Germany and in the more intense situations like in places like Auschwitz, so the question might well be: if I were in Germany instead of the 1990s 1930, could it be a constant guard in a concentration camp and the visceral reaction? to that is no, those people are not like me and that is the wrong answer, the correct answer is that those people were human and I am also human and that means that the Nazis are us, that is what it means and that and who hell want I think that and no one will think that and I have thought carefully about it because I thought carefully for a variety of reasons what are the limits of my potential behavior and the limits of my potential and maybe I am more pathological than the average person, it is certainly possible, but I understand that the limits of my potential behavior are beyond the limits of what people would normally consider civilized and I think that's characteristic of human beings in general, so I mean, you know, look, oh, go ahead, No, I was going to say, I think this.

It's one of the things that really highlights the importance of having uncensored discussions because we've already touched on so many hot topics to the point where you need to really clarify your position and when you talk about this guy. of the latent program in human beings and the need for it at a given moment, all these things are very taboo to discuss today and this is a giant topic because what you are doing is talking about things in an objective, reasonable, logical way. and clear. but when you get to these kinds of hysterical topics, that is somewhat prohibited nowadays and there is a big problem with that because when you have prohibited discussions, you energize those topics and the topics grow in the absence of discussion in the absence of being separated. and analyze them to determine what their core components are and what we're talking about from an evolutionary perspective, this is very, very important because these patterns really look at it and I think any of us are given the wrong neighborhood, the wrong parents, the wrong wrong parents.

In life, we could have been one of those with the tiki torches in Charlotte, I mean, it's where human beings like you said, I think it's absolutely critical to discuss it well and there's also something else going on right now that I've been trying to characterize. the state of the sociological and psychological landscape that we all inhabit right now and I think we are in a position of radical instability and things in the future could be much better than they are now radically and they could be much worse than they are And the small decisions go from small to small.

The decisions that people make are going to have huge effects, well, they make them, like look what happened with this guy in Charlottesville, you know, this was, I mean, I know he was surrounded by a circle of deplorables... zz let's say , but it was a guy who decided to do something murderous and that changed the entire political landscape and what I see happening now is that we are surrounded by these interactions between people that are positive feedback loops, you know and a positive feedback loop occurs when, if you do something, what caused it happens even more and the polarization is like that, then I say something left and you say something right and that bothers me, so I get more left and it bothers you and you become more correct and suddenly we were fighting and that's happening everywhere, right, it's very unstable and what you can hope is that we can move away from it and discuss it, we can say look, you know? under one circumstance, he could have been a communist inquisitor or a Nazi prison guard.

I need to know that and then I need to know what the situations were that made that likely and then I need to know how I should behave to make that less possible and the only way we can resolve that is by having the kind of conversations we're having right now. and these are not them. Some of my friends have chastised me, for example, for using the social justice warrior. terminology because I have been told well you know that you are participating in this process of demonization and polarization and I think yes, I can understand that although I am also radically concerned about the fact that universities, for example, are essentially controlled by radical Marxists and they are driving this polarization and it's not obvious to me how to have a discussion about that without participating in the polarization process, it's something that I've been trying to figure out for the past year, you know, and I have.

I have been emphasizing the role of personal responsibility rather than ideological identification. Get it into your head that you have the capacity to do great evil and stop aiming, stop assuming that that is something. that only manifests itself in people with whom you disagree politically, taking responsibility for that and trying to put their lives back together. I don't see an alternative to that, but it has been very difficult to avoid doing it and at the same time avoid becoming a participant in this process of polarization and it is a very dangerous process, it is what destabilized Germany in the 1920s and 1930s, it was This back and forth ping-pong between the radical left and the radical right, and what you mean is that the radical right is actually more powerful once they organize, it's really good because there's no fractionalization, it's more stable, of course, and they have all the weapons, that's another thing to think about, certainly in this country the right is much better armed and that's very scary, it's a scary thought. which you know, I mean, we've heard this a lot recently about the Trump administration about if he's impeached that there will be some kind of civil war, I think Roger Stone said, that this thought is so terrifying that we literally can't do anything. to stopsome kind of physical confrontation with weapons if we don't agree ideologically that it's going to happen, first of all, there's a lot we can do and actually, you know about each other.

The thing about the evolutionary toolset is that I think we have exactly the tools to navigate this puzzle, which are also built into us, in addition to this latent program, but now we are in a very dangerous situation because, for example, if Google and other of these online goliaths begin to implement algorithms that decide what we can talk about and we see that we cannot use the same tools that are necessary to escape and avoid something like a civil war, which frankly communicates and debates by analyzing all the components of this topic in a completely objective way, yes.

I'm taking the risks that are necessary with that and some of the risks are that if we have free and open communication, a percentage of that communication will be reprehensible and deplorable, but yes, but the consequences of suppressing that are much more dangerous than the consequences of allowing them not to be in the same universe, yes, we strengthen ourselves with those terrible ideas by making them, I mean, electronically taboo, yes, and then the point is that they are going to rot, whereas if we just discuss them, we can deactivate the which are terrible, we can spot the opportunities we don't know we have and we can move forward instead of descending into a civil war which, frankly, is more like this problem with Google and YouTube, let's say and these are the giant Internet companies, you know , it's not about whether they're going to produce fall BOTS that do preperceptive censorship, they're doing it right 16 wet sad explained well, he tweeted that the other day and I knew this was in the works because I've been watching what YouTube and Google are planning Regarding their AI censors, let's say they know they want to get to the point where the gruesome video isn't even published, so what happened I hope?

I understood this exactly, but God was in the process: you upload a video and then you publish it, and once you upload it, YouTube has access to it and they have access to your content and informed you that it would be monetized. before I posted it, it's right here, we put it on the board, there it is. YouTube thinks my jaw-dropping hypocrisy sign is triggering. There is nothing objectionable. Objectionable object in my clip. Awesome, yeah, and that was a manual review, so I'm. wrong on that though how the hell did they decide they were going to manually review God's video, I also mean how many videos are they uploading to YouTube what the hell why are they manually reviewing theirs and I mean God said it's not a right radical.

Now that's what I mean, he's an evolutionary biologist and that makes him a radical now because he's a bunch of people who question what's happening and by questioning what's happening you instantly get lumped into this right-wing hate group. , well, he also claims that Human beings have an intrinsic nature and now there is a new fashionable phrase that goes hand in hand with that and that is that you are a biological essentialist and you see, if you are a radical postmodern neo-Marxist, your theory is that Human beings can be anything you want to turn them into is a central doctrine of the theory and is part of what makes it intensely totalitarian because then human beings are simply putty for the mold and that is part of the motivation that will drive affirm the radical constructionist claim that there is no biological essence well, why do you make that claim?

Because we want to free people from prejudice and tyranny. It's like no, that's not why you're making that statement. You make that statement because you want to justify your claim that there is absolutely nothing wrong with renewing. humanity in an image of their ideology and and that would be a well-documented intellectual argument that was intertwined in what happened in communist Russia, for example, because the statement that explicitly was that you erase the past, there is no real biological identity, you can shape the human being of the future in the image of your perfectionist ideology and the Russians actually effectively marginalized themselves with respect to evolutionary theory because they were basically so far behind on a biological front that while they were implementing this set of broken ideological tools they were destroying their ability to thinking about how biology works and so what you are pointing out about evolutionary biologists is not only that we question the content of evolutionary biology is absolutely the opposite of politically correct, yes, yes, because nobody says it. the biota what is right and what is wrong the biota does what it does and those of us who look at it and try to understand what those patterns are cannot help but be deeply politically incorrect almost all the time and that is why the idea that the truth of biology will actually become inexpressible and we're going to move on, we're just going to put it aside so we can move forward with these ideological things, I mean, ecology is racist and sexist, well If I could, biology and we'll have to come back here to collect a tool, but biology creates entities that have the potential for racism in our genomes, we have the potential for racism for Darwinian reasons, sexism is a little different. right so I'm about to get very politically incorrect oh yeah I know oh it's not possible for male genes to merge with female genes because all of our genes spend half their time in male bodies and half their time in female bodies. which does not mean that civilization is fair with respect to sex and gender, it does mean that there is no biological basis for the evolution of a patriarchal force that subordinates women because, no matter what patriarchy does, those who are part of the patriarchy become women in the next iteration. and suffer the consequences of it, this is not the case with race, unfortunately, this is not a good thing, but it is true in the Darwinian sense, a population can unite against another population and it has happened again and again, that explains all. the worst chapters in human history and in a sense what I mean is that you want to understand that process and once you understand what your genes are really doing and you understand that your genes, their goals in the universe are not defensible .

What your genes want cannot be defended in rational terms, so we will be free to do something else to recognize that our genes are doing things that we have no reason to honor and we can basically take them out of control. position, but if we imagine that what our genes are doing must be right and therefore cannot include anything resembling racism, then we are simply stuck, we don't have the tools to spread racism, so one of the things that This It happened when I made my video a year ago complaining about bill c16 in Canada and that was the one that exemplified transgender rights, one of the things I was pointing out, as if my comments had nothing to do with transgender rights. transgender people, but one of the things that What I was pointing out was that Canada had put into law a social constructionist version of human identity and that is actually the case, so, for example, now in Canada there is a proposition which now has the force of law: there is no causal connection between biological sex and gender identity. gender expression and sexual proclivity technically it is illegal to make a claim that those things are causally linked and the causal link claim is a biological claim and not only is it a biological claim, it is a factual claim, those four levels are so closely causally linked that there are almost no exceptions, there are exceptions, because almost all who have biological sex ismail consider themselves men manifest as men and their heterosexual, so they are linked and the reason they are linked is that there are biological and cultural reasons , but now it's in Canada The proposition that they are independent is now law and I was pointing out that by saying we don't want to do that, you don't understand that you have incorporated social constructionism into the law, which means that it is now illegal to be a biologist, well then everyone.

He said oh no no no that's not happening it's like don't fool yourself when you put things in the law, things happen and we were accused of not only being Nazis and that was part of the reason why this talk was closed but also of being biological essentialists and biological essentialism is the new buzzword for Nazis essentially, so I have to go, please, I want to, I want to correct you. It's not that it's illegal to be a biologist, it's just illegal to be good at it. there is a concern that putting biology as a fact could get in the way of civilization because we are supposed to overcome all these problems, we are supposed to overcome these things as we evolve, we are supposed to look at people.

They are free to choose the gender they want, free to choose the sexual orientation they want, free to express themselves in any way and that by defining them in purely biological terms we are essentially relying on the car of the flesh to guide us through civilization instead Note that it's great that you've done a very good job of outlining the credible case against biological essentialism and because it can deteriorate into something like eugenics, there is a real danger, like a political danger from the side of a biological determinant, it is also dangerous to deny it. because then we can't use our rational minds to truly mitigate any problems we have with our biological impulses and that's the irony of it, yes, actually, no, you can argue that we need to free ourselves from our biology, yes. and we have the ability to do it, most creatures wouldn't, but human beings are built, we absolutely have the ability to be rational about these things and decide what things we want to bring into the future, but we can't do it if we don't. we make.

Don't talk about these things in Reister, well a subset of males are biologically hyperaggressive, you can identify them at 2 years of age and they are the boys, if you put together a bunch of 2 euros, there is a small subset that is almost all of them. males about 5% of males who kick, hit, bite and steal, okay, so that's their biological programming, let's say, but the vast majority of them are socialized by the time they're four, so they're surprised, yeah , of course, absolutely, I mean it. Yes, absolutely yes, and the thing about kids like that is that if you socialize them properly, it's quite a bit of work because they're very calm about it.

My son was like that and if you socialize them properly, they can become incredibly useful. They're brave, they're outspoken, you know, they're not going to back down from a challenge, there's all kinds of massive utility in that and that's this proper interplay between biological circuits and socialization, but you know, and with The Maura James Memo , you know it was, has been accused of taking an essentialist biological route, which is not true. One of the things that James said is that there is credible evidence that there are biologically mediated differences between men and women in level of temperament and interest that are actually large and profound and I would say that the science on this is established enough to that someone can come out and say it's scientifically credible now, that doesn't mean it's correct because the scientists could be wrong, but what you can't say is that what James d'amour said was scientifically uninformed he was scientifically informed but he also said Look, let's make the assumption, I'm paraphrasing a little, but let's suppose that we want, as a society, to extract the most useful economic value from talented people.

So one of the things we want to do is if some of those people are women and some of those people are men, we want to understand the real differences between women and men so that we can set up the workplace in a way that both women and men can contribute. to the maximum economically so that they can benefit as individuals and everyone can benefit socially so that you can use the biological, so I mean, for example, one of the things here is a biological problem: on average, women are nicer than men and I think that's because they're nice.

People are selfless and I think as a woman you have to be prepared to be selfless or you won't be able to tolerate taking care of babies, that's my opinion. Well, now there are some problems with that. Let's say that a large part of the female wiring is inclined towards the need for self-sacrifice for child care. Okay, that doesn't prepare women very well to deal with aggressive people because aggressive men and babies are not the same creatures, so women pay a price by optimizing themselves to some extent for child care, they pay. the price of being less prepared, that's one way of thinking about it, in fact, when dealing with hyper-aggressive and competitive men, well, one of the consequences of this is that nice people don't make as much money and the reason is that to make money You actually have to be nasty because you have to go to your boss and say "give me some damn money."or something you don't like." If something doesn't happen to you, you have to do it, I'll let you, you have to be able to fight for an idea, yes, but there is something about this being a perfect test case, so biologically speaking , there is a very good reason why certain types of wisdom are predisposed to manifest in females, females because they have the ability to have fewer offspring in life than males, they are obliged, as you say, to care in a particular way and the fact that care in humans takes so many years has resulted in the emergence of menopause and menopause essentially when a woman finishes producing new offspring, her interests in her evolutionary interest, which in this case I think are honorable. , it becomes synonymous with the lineage of the population because their offspring will do well or poorly depending on the population they are in, so women have a kind of vision about the lineage and I don't think it has anything to do with it. do with human women, actually this is a trait that we can see in females of other species, so it is something old, while males There is a high variance, that is, a male can have many offspring in his life, many males do not have offspring in their entire life and that high variance means that to the extent that there is wisdom around risk taking that has historically traveled along the male path now.

In modern times there is no reason why we can't look at these two types of wisdom and democratize them properly. The fact is there's no reason if you're born female that you can't tune into what has historically been male-biased wisdom and take advantage of that and we should encourage this, there's no reason why people have to continue with the The problem is that we can't really have a reasonable discussion about it because you know that discussion is often preempted by the statement that while men and women are exactly the same, it's like that's not a useful discussion and you know, On the subject of kindness, I don't know exactly what should be done about it, but one of the consequences is that there are many reasons why payment is paid.

The difference between men and women and the issue itself is very complex, but we know that nice people generally make less money in the same positions and it's because they don't negotiate very well on their own behalf. Now it is conceivable that you can have an intelligent relationship. discussion about public policy or corporate policy about what to do about it, maybe the rule is something like reviewing men's salaries once a year and women's salaries every eight months or something, you know, and I'm not saying it's a good idea. I'm not saying that if you take into account the facts on the ground, there are ways that you could use them to be able to, and I'm not going to say level the playing field because I think that's a horrible phrase, but to maximize the possibility of economic contribution between genders. , which is obviously the best thing for everyone, but we're not going to do that when someone like James d'amour comes out and he's not a scientist, you know well he has some scientific training, but that wasn't his main field of expertise, he came out and did a pretty credible job of summarizing the literature.

He did so because he had been subject to mandatory diversity training and was asked to give an answer that he did not respond to. he did it so that it would go viral within the company and become public and because he expressed his opinion, let's say imperfectly, he was fired, it's like that's not a good man, that's not a good path, well, It wasn't good that his stuff was republished either. without citations, people where we were publishing it without the scientific articles that affirmed some of the things he said. I couldn't understand anything until I saw the original version of it, yes, and that goes back to what I was saying earlier about it being an unstable time in which people's individual ethical decisions in some circumstances will have effects far beyond what local, it's like if those journalists who jumped on the story did it wrong, you know, because they were incompetent or because it was maliciously done well and so on, then now we could say, let's say things are going very badly over the next year, then every one of those journalists could sit at home and say, hey, I played a causal role in causing this state of murderous collapse because of my poor ethics, my ethical lapse when I was covering the James d'amore memo, you know, because to my own laziness and ideological rigidity, I was willing to play fast and loose with the truth and now I have played an important causal role. paper and you know, pushing everything towards a state of chaos is as if people have to be alert because we are in a situation that is radically unstable and that is why it is time, it is a very good time for everyone to be very careful with what they they write. and they say and about their motives for smearing and smearing the opposition, that's another form of something else that we have to be very careful about, it's very strange how quick people nowadays are to call someone a racist.

I mean, I've never seen anything like it. In all my years it's a strange time, you know, I got into this yesterday, I just got bored and started trolling Pepe the Frog. I started making the frog rainbow saying that this looks like a frog who is really interested in gay rights. here's a frog holding a lemon with a sour face like this is a frog who ate a lemon and is reacting like how is this all racist? like how is this like someone isn't like all these people that are creating this frog are coordinating? anyone can make a meme with the frog and like much of the original it feels good, the car the guy created, those are applicable to his nonsense, a lot of it is really dumb, well I think a lot of it was intentional trolling , Yeah.

I read a story about Kekaa Stan, you know? I was looking into it trying to find out if it really was, you know, the threat to humanity that everyone says it is and the story was absurd, it was a, you know, it's a magical place where we are. Anti-Semites, Jews, Atheists and religious people live in harmony, which is hard to even analyze, it's designed to make your mind throw up an error, yeah, well that's what I think, so I think it's excellent to talk about this because I have been because I have been, let's say, identified in many circumstances now with the good.

I have been researching everything I can about its many manifestations. It is a very confusing place. It is certainly not an organized place and exactly what it is. This is by no means obvious and the cast and issue is a good example because for the most part it's like a satirical realm where I don't know what it is, it's late, so its defensive humor in a sense, let me give you a Por For example, I gave my dad an amazing Danny Flagg about three weeks ago and three weeks ago and I did well because he's been following what's happening to me online, you know, a lot, and I teamed up with the frog on a major way and it's a crazy story.

I won't go into that, but in one of my videos I was wearing a frog hat that an Indian carver, a Native American carver, had given me and told me that the frog was in their culture a harbinger of environmental instability because if polluted waters not at all the frogs died first so the Frog is the the Frog is the creature in their mythology that warns society that things are out of place is the canary in the coal the canary in the coal mine so I wore this hat as a frog and I made this video about things that are unstable and they identified me with Kermit because my voice sounds like Kermit the Frog and it actually does.

I've been making jokes about it and then I made this video. with this frog hat and the frog that my friend Carver made actually had red lips and then I made the video and as soon as I posted it people said it was Pepe and I literally almost fainted because it never occurred to me that that was a connection . Anyway, I've gotten tangled up with this frog thing in this absolutely crazy, surreal way, but that's how it was and that got me into the cast and a lot of the people I'm trying to target online are young people. men who are pushed, I would say, in a right-wing direction by the alienating radical left movement and then think, well, I'm certainly not that right, so what am I?

Well, maybe I'm the opposite of that. Is it the opposite of the radical left, the alt-right or is there a better opposite? Is there a different opposite that people might run away from? And that's what, in part, that's what I'm trying to figure out, but what has to be the opposite? Not only will it be different, well opposition is a real problem with people like you were talking about before, when people just intensified their positions and became more ideologically based and they're doing it as a reaction to the other side rather than just being who are instead of having some kind of personal sovereignty, they are literally reacting to the opposite side and changing who they are.

Yeah, okay, so what I've been trying to do with my videos and I think this is part of the reason why they've become so popular, in fact I'm sure of it is that I've been trying to campaign for Adopting that personal responsibility as an alternative to political ideology is like getting your act together, having a vision straighten out your life say what you think you know stay away from ideological idiocy and simplicity and oversimplifications and try to pull yourself together because I think I believe at the most fundamental level and I think this is the remarkable realization of Western civilization is that the well-developed individual is the antidote to the tyranny of society and biology.

I think that is our great discovery in the West. It's not that other cultures haven't had that idea in an incipient form, but it has been hyperdeveloped in the West and me. I think that's right and then we abandon that path of divine individuality and go back to the ideological identification of race or sex, we're going to tear each other down and I think part of the reason we're motivated to do that show is because Much People don't want to take the responsibility of developing themselves as an individual, so they will get rid of the responsibility and if that means you know we are dancing in the streets because everything is on fire, everything will be fine. and that's another thing that adds to the terrible danger that we're in right now, so I think you're right and I think that this personal audit program that you're a part of is gigantic and people see it as something separate from all of these issues that we're dealing with culturally, but I don't think that's the case.

I think you're absolutely right and I think there's a real lack of struggle and understanding of struggle among many people today. struggle financially, but I mean a physical struggle, spiritual struggle, understanding that you have to overcome difficult problems to really understand the true potential of your mind and your body, you must not only overcome them, but you must willingly seek them and-and- and what would you say exalt the fact that they exist, right, yes, and that is part of burying the burden of being, it is as if being is a tragic state, being human is a tragic state, so you can move away from that, but if you move away of that, the suffering. it escalates and intensifies and you become resentful and malevolent yes the alternative is to move forward boldly, that's the dragon's motive, that's essentially the hero myth and that's the way to go as far as I'm concerned, well I guess which also has implications, you know.

We're talking about it at the level of what's best for the individual, but we also have a problem which is that these collectivist movements, whether they're white nationalists on the right or social justice warriors on the left, can't see the future and what What's missing is that actually the mechanism that allows us to discover new ways involves individuals who are able to think independently and if there are several individuals who think independently about related matters, then they can put those things together, but if what we do It is forcing everyone to do it. sign up for the same things we all agree are true, there is no way to discover what we don't know yet because every great idea starts with a minority of one, so we should have the freedom to be the only person who believes in something and then forcing others to say that some of us are in the right neighborhood and others to take up that mantle and, in said board meeting, that's exactly why, you know, I mean, free speech has become a logical issue in India and it is increasingly identified with but with what is correct and which is horrible, it is horrible, but the correct justification for freedom of expression is what you just stated, which is that for the collective to be a group of what is already known, by definition we inhabit the collective and that is what is already known. what we could agree on, but the problem with that is that what we can agree on what is already known is not enough, it means we still have problems, so people have to be on the sidelines, on the border between chaos and order, where they discover new things. and communicate it to the freedom of collective expression, that is the mechanism, it is also a deep evolutionary truth, which is that all the innovations that allow, whether we areTalking about a creature, learning to do some new trick that gives rise to a group of species doing the same trick or if we're talking about populations discovering a new way of living on earth, all of these things come from the periphery, but the people at the Center for whom things are working better are not going to do so. be the ones to innovate the new way it is the people for whom things are not quite working that are going to innovate new ways and that is also true for a population of frogs or birds or plants or whatever, those who are not well placed They are those in which an experiment can bear fruit.

Yeah, why did the ice cake psychologist write a good book called Genius and he was interested in what predicted high levels of creative success and some of what you would expect - IQ is one of them and creative temperament is another. , but losing a parent before the age of 10 was a good predictor and you know. people think of creativity as if it were all sweetness and light, it is not possible, man, if you are going to be creative it is because you are tormented by a problem, right, and if you are not in a position to be tormented by a problem You are not going to put in the time, the effort and the risk-taking necessarily necessary to be creative, but you know, I've been trying to understand the evolutionary landscape from which our most fundamental religious convictions emerge and the idea that it is by definition the individual who innovates and By definition, therefore, it is the individual who is the savior of the collection.

I mean, it's hard, it's hard to imagine how you could find a biological reaffirmation of an essential Christian presupposition that was more mapped one-to-one. That could now be said well, that is not exclusive to Christianity. I see the same thing in Judea in the Jewish antithesis between the prophetic tradition, the prophet and the tradition, because the Prophet is always the only voice that comes out, it happens over and over again. In the Old Testament a lone voice comes out and challenges the king and says look, you know you are a blind tyrant and nature is turning away from us and preparing its revenge and you better be careful because you are violating intrinsic moral standards and you are going to pay for it, that happens over and over again and maybe there are 50 of them and the one that gets recorded is the one that turned out to be closest to right because that's the population that gets past the bottleneck and So, you know, it What we have is a kind of evolution in writing these texts in a way, yeah, well, that doesn't mean that I'm very, what would you call that?

It's something that I think is fundamentally true and I mean, I started, I started. Look, because I'm interested in this idea of ​​strengthening the individual, I mean, and when I wrote my first book, Maps of Meaning, it was about ideological conflict and it was about whether or not there was any alternative to ideological conflict because you could make an In In this case there is no right, left and war, but there is a third way and I think that is the way of the heroic individual and I say this technically and that involves the development of individual characters so that you can say what you believe that you can articulate your

experience

appropriately and that you can bring what is unique to you into the collective picture and that is what actualizes the collective picture, is absolutely vital and that's why I started giving these Bible lectures.

I've done 12 of them now going through Genesis and what I'm trying to do because I think the Bible is the documentation of the emergence of the idea of ​​the divine individual, that's essentially what it is and we have a very uneasy relationship with that collection of texts. now because we read them as if they are making claims about the objective nature of the world and those claims appear to be false from a scientific perspective. I don't think those are the claims that were made at the beginning. so I guess it's a non-starter, but I've been trying to give lectures on the Genesis stories, for example, in a way that makes them accessible to people who are okay with Athey, who are theists, let's say, and many atheists have been responding very Positively to them, now I have people in my YouTube comments who call themselves Christian atheists because they can understand, they understand what it is that I'm describing, this idea that has arisen in the West that consciousness is the mediator between chaos and order and the and the and that generating the phenomena that generates

experience

and that and that you can think of that as a divine category of existence and I have been trying to outline how the biblical stories trace the path by which the individual divine must manifest itself or itself in time because that is what it is and I and I have been studying, for example, the stories of Abraham that I didn't know well and the stories of Abraham are really interesting.

I mean, Abraham is called by God and when Abraham is called by God, he's old, he's like one of those guys who is 40 years old and stayed in his mother's basement, that's Abraham, it's a little late for Abraham Go out into the world and God basically tells you to leave your family and your friends and your place of comfort and travel to the land of the stranger. That is the call to adventure and so Abraham does, who is now chosen by God. You think carefully about everything. It goes well for Abraham that's not what happens at all the first thing he encounters is a famine and to escape he flees to the tyranny of Egypt where they try to steal his wife it's like being careful of being called by God you know you would think everything would be sweetness and light after that is not that at all it is a very realistic story it is like leaving where you are safe towards what you do not know what you are going to find there well, not your fortune, you will find the catastrophes of life, but if you stay If you are morally oriented and make the right sacrifices, which is the story of Abraham perfectly, then you can transcend the catastrophe of being and prevail.

I mean, who the hell doesn't want to hear that, so we're kind of close to the argument. The one he got into was Sam Harris on the nature of truth and ever since I heard that I've been looking forward to having this conversation with you because I think there's a way of looking at this that maybe reconciles the two points of view, but there's a catch. bitterness that accompanies it, so here's my argument: we tend to think that the intellect has evolved because knowing what is true gives you an advantage, but in reality there is nothing to say that literal truth is where the advantage lies, so that I have a category that I call literally false, metaphorically true, these are ideas that are not true in the factual sense, but they are true enough that if you behave as if they were true, you will get ahead of where you would be if you behaved as if they were true.

I agree with the fact that they are not true, so let me give you a couple of trivial examples that will not be controversial. Porcupines can shed their quills. It isn't true. However, if you live around porcupines and imagine that porcupines may throw their quills, you will give them some space if you don't, you may notice and they may throw other quills. If you get too close to one, it can spin around and stab you with a porcupine quill, which can be extremely dangerous because they are microscopically designed to move from where they are. If you get pierced over time, you can puncture a vital organ or you can get an infection, so the person who believes that a porcupine can shed its quills has an advantage that is not based on the fact that this is actually true. literally, right?

It might be that people say that everything happens for a reason, unless you are talking about physics as the reason why everything doesn't happen for a reason, however, if you are the type of person who believes that everything happens for a reason reason and then a terrible tragedy occurs. happens to you, you might be attentive, well, what is the reason why this happened? Maybe it's supposed to open up some opportunity and you won't miss it the same way someone who was worried about their misfortune would. Literal falsehood but metaphorical truth, I actually would. argue the category under which religious truth evolves now the problem, the bitter pill that I mentioned is that I heard you say that the truths that are captured in the religious version of things are basically like you know there is an individual truth and then there is a truth of your family and there is the truth of the population in which you live and all these things are codified in these doctrines, which is true and you would expect it to be true because the doctrines are transmitted in the population, the problem is What you I hear you argue when you tell me that if I'm wrong it's that we should therefore expect the metaphorical truths encoded in these religious traditions to be morally correct, but there's nothing that really says that they will be morally correct because there are metaphorical truths that might in fact , may be reprehensible but still effective, so I'd say the general point here would be that you're right that the documents that contain these descriptions of things are full of things that are true in some sense that is neither literal nor scientific truth. was that its purpose, what's not true is that those things are inherently up-to-date and, look, that would be fine.

I mean, first of all, the first thing about that is that an argument like that and this is also what happened with Sam. Harris pushes me to the very limits of my intellectual capacity, and so even in discussing it I'm going to make all kinds of mistakes because it's treacherous territory, but I would say that my understanding of the great myths has that observation built into it, so One of the archetypes is that of the tyrannical father, which is the archetype that possesses the minds of people who accuse Western society of being patriarchal, they are possessed by a singular archetype and that is the archetype of the tyrannical father who does not No I see that there is a tyrannical father and a wise king because there is that you can't even point out that, but anyway in the ancient in some of our oldest or there is a representation of the dead past, so let me give you an example that all the The world knows about the story of Pinocchio.

It is the story of the individualization of Pinocchio. He begins as a puppet. He is a marionette. He is a wooden head. He is a liar and is carried away by forces that he does not understand. Okay, but he has a good father, that is Geppetto. and that's why he has a good and Geppetto wants him to become a real individual and he knows that that is an impossible wish. He wishes upon a star that his son could become a real individual, knowing full well that that is unlikely and impossible, so Geppetto is a good king, but the story is also about Geppetto because what happens is that when Geppetto loses, Pinocchio loses his son, which could be considered the act of the dynamic and attentive force of youth, and then ends up brutalized in the womb. of a whale that is a symbol of chaos at the bottom of the ocean and then Pinocchio has to rescue it, so I would say that there is an instance of evolutionarily accumulated wisdom in the great stories of the past, but they are still dead and requires the Union is for that in Christian theology the Divinity has a tripartite structure this is part of the reason why God the Father exists but the father is dead the father was right a hundred years ago a thousand years ago and he is still partially right but he is dead no you can participate in the updating process, so you need an active force.

Now the active force is the same one that generated those stories over time, so it's the same thing except it's also alive in the present and therefore your moral duty and This is another thing that happens and in Pinocchio it's rescue your dead father from the whale's belly and that's partly what I'm trying to do with these Bible lectures because your objection is correct, the reason it's correct is because even if the solution was right, the The landscape has changed and sadness has progressively changed in a revolutionary way that we do not know and therefore those old truths are at best partial and at worst blind, but that does not mean that you can say as Mao did during the Cultural Revolution.

Revolution well, let's destroy the past, it's like no, that would be like saying well, you no longer need a body because your body is the accumulated wisdom of the evolutionary process over three and a half billion years. I absolutely agree because the stories are not literal, it is impossible to know if well, it is not impossible, but it is very difficult to know if the truth that is contained metaphorically is still relevant or not, if it has been inverted and is now absolutely false, or That Carl Jung talked a lot about this and one of the things he said was that your moral duty is to realize the archetype in the confines of your own life and that's why you say, well, there is an archetype of perfection that permeates the West and that's why, in for the sake of argument, I'm going to call that Christ the image of Christ is something like that that's the archetypal image now we have a story about what the historical life of Christ was like well, well you can't have that life because you would have had to be in the Middle East 2,000 years ago.

It's not your life, but what you can do is take the archetype and you can manifest that it's within the boundaries of your own life and what that does is force you to go through the difficult process of updating the ancient wisdom and not just giving up. she. you can't or you can, but you will pay a huge price and part of that will besocial disintegration because the past is alive enough that those of us who inhabit its corpse won't kill each other while we're feeding well, that's the critical problem now it's not alive enough because the damn thing could fall apart at any time. moment and we need to be awake and alert to keep it updated and well maintained, not only that, but they are the biggest dangers for us in the present, they will only be partially addressed in these texts and that's it.

My biggest concern is that if we take into account that Dawkins dismisses religion as a mental virus, this is very dangerous because he ignores the truth that you are talking about and prevents us from having a conversation where we can talk about the fact. that religious texts religions are not mental viruses they are adaptations to past environments they contain a type of truth that is not necessarily literal and in general is not literal but none of them any ancient religion is up to date for Google algorithms the danger that probably represents for civilization we need to figure out how to navigate where ancient wisdom just isn't up to par with the current situation, so let me modify it slightly because I think it's true and not true, the stories are wrong in detail and right. in the pattern, so, for example, there is the idea that one of the things the mythological hero does is stand up to the tyranny of the state.

Now it is not necessary to specify the nature of state tyranny for that to be a truth that is applicable in different contexts. I would say that what happened with the great religious myths is that they operate at a level of abstraction such that the abstract entities are applicable in all settings. I'll give you an example of that. It is extremely useful to represent the phenomenology of your experience as a domain of chaos and order that works in each environment for each person, so the domain of order I can technically describe. You are in the domain of order when your actions produce the result you want and you are in the domain of chaos when they do not and then I could say that your task is to cross the border between those two domains because you don't always want to be where everything is. you want. what you're doing is working because you're not learning anything and you don't want to be where nothing you're doing is working because it's overwhelming, you want to be stable and dynamic at the same time and the Taoists do that very well because they have a conceptualization of order from chaos. of the phenomenological landscape and his claim is that the point of maximally appropriate being is right in the middle of the boundary between chaos and order and I think that's true in all contexts, so I don't think the truth gets old. some of them don't, but the question really is: at what point is there so much legacy code that taking the package is more harmful than beneficial and at what point would you know if God were writing today? quite convinced that the first commandment would be not to enrich uranium, it would make sense since the number one commandment is not there because uranium was not a concept at the time it was written nor was the danger of enriching it obvious, so the The fact that it's not mentioned tends to downplay it as a risk, so I guess the question is whether it's possible.

I mean, is it possible that by recognizing that these traditions convey enormous amounts of ancient wisdom, but that that wisdom is safe? be so incomplete that it doesn't address modern issues that we can feel liberated to move forward and honor those traditions that brought us here, but recognize that we actually have to move forward with something more powerful and up-to-date that isn't easy because you can't just take the scientific truth of the moment and implementing much of it is not even correct, yes, it is not that easy to rewrite a fairy tale either, you know, and I am some of those fairy tales that people are trying to rewrite in the times modern version is maybe fifteen thousand years old and people think we can update it to make the modern version better.

It turns out that that is very, very difficult and there is another one that I am going to play devil's advocate against. Not my own position here, because I say well, religious texts encode deep, evolutionarily determined truths that are universal, okay, which religious texts are correct, because you could say well all of them, but that means that it obscures important differences between the traditions and me. I am by no means sure that everyone knows this so I am going to go out on a limb because no it is not obvious to me that Islam knows this because it is very difficult for me to see that the totalizing nature of Islam does not make it unique among religions. , so well, that's on the tape if you don't mind, but the problem is not using the word truth because we can tell truth, we could use tradition and wisdom and We're fine, but as soon as we start telling the truth, so we run into problems, I mean, and even when you talk about porcupines, well, you talk about what would you say: metaphorical truth versus look, it's not true, it's very simple, just don't do it. don't go near the porcupine teach the child not to go near the porcupine because the porcupine quills are dangerous they get stuck in you they are really dangerous they can throw them away you know they can't but stay away from them because you don't want someone else to get in somehow in contact with your body, it is not true that they can throw their quills at you, it benefits you to be particularly aware of the dangers of their quills, but if you tell a child that they can throw their quills and therefore the child remains away from them here's a wrong assumption in their head you're lying to them for their own protection and I wasn't good I wouldn't do it I think the same could be said about everything happens for a reason well here's the problem we don't know if everything happens for some reason maybe when you die you go to some audit room and they go well, you know that everything is just a part of some gigantic algorithm that it is impossible for you, it is impossible for you to understand because of your limited human brain processing power you are dealing with a kind of complex simian geometry that is actually designed to keep your body moving, you can stay alive and spread your genetics so that you can eventually evolve to the point where you are a good god first of all I have children I would write on them that a porcupine I'm sure it has a will but since I use the word truth ah because well the question is why do people tell you that a porcupine can throw its quills I don't think they do, oh, they're doing well, if they do, they don't know anything better, right?

Or they're liars, right, and all I'm saying is that, actually, it's probably a product of selection, in other words. that those people who had coded that they throw their quills have an advantage, it's not the way I wouldn't do it and for exactly the reason you point out, which is if you give a child the wrong model of porcupine, I don't do it. I don't know if a porcupine could be the gateway to some bigger question, but if it were, you've simply misdirected the child, well, something here is part of the problem and this is part of but and this is a really big problem. , There are two.

Things that I guess came from what you described and the first is the terminology of truth. Now, Harris' claim regarding my use of truth was that I got away with the definition of truth and false, but he was wrong because the idea of ​​truth is much older than the idea of ​​objective truth. and the original notion of truth was not objectively true, it was as if the arrow flew straight and true, it meant something like reliable, dependable on its way to the proper destination, something like that and when Christ said: I am the truth in the form in that I also can't remember yes, yes, the truth that I was talking about was not an objective truth, so Sam's idea that somehow I had taken the idea of ​​the truth that was actually objective all along. and I've done something crooked with it it's just wrong it's wrong well there's no truth there can be multiple definitions well maybe there were that's the problem and that's exactly who we are what we're trying to get out here it's like for me there is two kinds of truth and they can be proportional, you might be able to stack them on top of each other, but from time to time they dissociate and this is actually what Brett was referring to, like this, like this, and this is where it gets so complicated that I can barely handle it, there is a truth that manifests in the way you act and there is a truth that manifests as a representation of the objective world and sometimes both truths are stacked on top of each other. others and sometimes they are not so like I could give you a little bit of wisdom that would work well if you acted it out and that carried within it an inaccurate representation of part of the objective world and you could say well, maybe that's really the case with biblical stories because if you read them as science they don't read well, so let's take malaria as a good example malaria the root of the word is bad area bad air true malaria is not transmitted by the air bad to that transmitted by mosquitoes that live in places where you might think the air is bad so the point is that it's part of the way there yeah that's good and also you see there's another weird distinction here and that I was trying to draw with Sam but it's really complicated and We made the request because we started talking about pragmatism, but there is also something like the truth of a description and the truth of a tool, and my feeling is that people's fundamental truths are too similar, we use them to function correctly in the world and you could say well, a sharp ax is truer than a dull ax and in fact you can use the word true in that sense which is not really appropriate, the proper use of the word there are tool truths and there are tool truths objective now and under optimal circumstances.

Those maps relate to each other, but often we are not smart enough to map each other because we simply don't know enough and there are many truths that we have that portray the objective world incorrectly and that are still true. this problem uses the term true when sometimes you should use the term fact like yes, one plus one is two, that's a fact, one plus one is two, that's also true, you throw some water on a match, i.e. and it will go out, that's a fact. Yes, well, as I see it, at least there is this general truth, the one that Sam Harris was pointing out, the one that I think you are also pointing out and the one that I'm imagining we all subscribe to, surely there is the verifiable truth there. that is revealed in the laboratory, it was in a careful experiment in the field and that really is the high level truth, but then there are the truths that you can't tell yet, so let's take the word filth from the old testament, okay, filth It means you are right.

You're not supposed to be at camp because God finds it offensive. Now the problem is that the germ theory of disease does not appear until thousands of years after that truth was written. That truth prevents you from infecting people long before you can explain it exists. There are microbes that grow in humans that are a particular danger to your population, so the point is: would you rather be held in the place where you can actually describe the literal underpinnings of what's happening or do you want to be freed to say something that It actually results in improved health before you know it, literally thousands of years before anyone had any idea that microbes were the root of it.

Yeah, you don't need to figure it out, so an elaboration of that would be something like humans need to figure out how. act without dying before you can understand the nature of the world well enough to justify that right and someone might be crazy now that we have the germ theory of disease to amplify that crude original version of the truth or that crude approximation of what what is it. you need to believe to behave safely, there is no reason for that truth to be promoted; in fact, you don't hear people describe this part of the Old Testament correctly and this is probably why dietary restrictions were in the Old Testament as well. shellfish red tide eating pigs trichinosis there are many many problems that go along with that, yes, well, maybe there is a certain mixture of hygienic concerns with also the desire for groups to be distinguished from other groups because you can, you can unite your groups quite a bit strict for dietary restrictions, so going back to your point about the terminology, you know we could do something like fact and wisdom, you know, you say right, that's the general category and then it breaks down into fact and wisdom and what you want so optimal is you.

I want facts and wisdom to be one for one, but often they are not, and if you find wisdom where the facts are not stated correctly, you can't waste the wisdom, which is what I think happens. in the case of people like Dawkins and Harris and Harris makes another sleight of hand that I don't like and that is that he thinks that yes, let's say except for a second the distinction of fact from wisdom, he would say well, the factis the thing and wisdom is a second-order derivation of that, you can ground wisdom in fact and I don't believe that and I don't think he has any real justification for that claim. and this is something that bases wisdom on the fact that he thinks that if you know the facts clearly enough you will know how to act well, that is not necessarily true, there are ways to act that are best for you and then there are ways to act . that are of interest to all the people around you may not serve you as well, this diction is where ethics comes from. right or correct where the consequences are delayed yes, a number of generations, something sure like yes, well, that is big deal and it's true, so sam acts like mac's process of mapping facts into action would be simple if we just got the facts right, but it's the weakest part of his argument and we never get to that for a variety of reasons, but Part of the reason it's weak is okay, well there are an infinite number of facts, so let's say you're standing in front of a field and you're looking at the field, the field doesn't tell you how to get around it, there's a million ways. of traversing the field and no matter how much data about the field you add, you will not be able to determine the appropriate route by adding those facts, so that's it and that's a problem that I don't think Sam is willing to take seriously and well, I think there is two tangled problems here, one of them is that there is a question of whether an individual is supposed to have all the facts and navigate based on that kind of community version of rationality of things or do you know that the practical truth is that they don't We can all be experts in everything and that is why we have to follow guidelines for our behavior that are approximate? and that that is inherent and then there is a question about civilization, civilization should be guided by our best understanding of what is really true, but understanding that we don't have a complete map of many things, so I think what you're pointing out The thing is, we've been handed down a wisdom that's not such that we can just say oh, here's the nugget in the center and we need to preserve that thing because we don't necessarily know what it's doing, yeah, which one.

Do you know this is dangerous because some of what he is doing may not be acceptable? Let's think on the wise side of things for a minute. You talk, you've alluded a little bit before to the iterations that you like and and about the fact. that things repeat themselves over time and that's something that works now, it could fail terribly in a month or two, so that's how something has to be to be wise, let's say well, first of all, let's say it would be well if it was the way it was. according to the facts, but we'll leave that aside for now, it has to work if you operate according to the principle of wisdom, whatever it is, it has to work in the world, but then it has to work in a world that allows you keep you. your relationships with people in the world, then suddenly this question of wisdom is something that is not only limited by, let's call it, objective reality, but it is limited by the need for a social contract, a functional social contract, so you're only allowed to propose actions in the world that would be beneficial to you if they simultaneously don't undermine the structure within which you live, and then there's a game theory element to that, which if it's wise, then it works. . in the world, then that would be the limitation of objective reality, but then it works for you now and for you who will be in a week and for you who will be in a month and it works for you and your family and it works for you, your family and society, and it works in a way that all of those things line up to repeat themselves over time, so really they are all, so the solution is and I would really like to hear what you think about this.

I think this is the solution to the postmodern conundrum because postmodernists bless their hearts, so we'll give the devil his due. Well, the problem is that there are an infinite number of interpretations of a finite set of facts and the correct answer. that's oh oh that's true that's true that's not good and that's why postmodernists say well they can't agree on a canonical interpretation of a great literary work because the number of potential interpretations are infinite and so they say well why? If we settle for some interpretation, then why should we privilege one over another and then they say, well, those are all power plays and that's ours?

You have to take it seriously, but what they missed and this is a big problem, I think it's a big problem. Is this idea of ​​ethical restraint? It's like, there's a landscape of potentially infinite interpretations, but almost none of them will work in the real world and almost none of them will work in the real world in a way that won't get you killed by others. people or doom yourself by your own stupidity to failure over time, so the landscape of interpretation is almost infinite, but the landscape of applicable interpretation, functional interpretation, is incredibly restricted and I think that system of restrictions is What we consider ethical is something like that. at some level, stories continue through time for a reason, you know, good stories continue for a long time, you know, the Odyssey is with us for a reason and we, so there's a scientific reason or a scientifically investigative reason why Which Odyssey has lasted, I may not know, but in principle it's a question you could investigate, so I guess yes, at the end of the day, the problem with the postmodernists is that they are right, the point is that perception gets in the way of anything we want to do objectively, but that point only gets you so far and that's why they turned to Marx as far as I know, because what happens with the postmodernists as they say, oh, there's an infinite number of interpretations and then the human part of them goes well, well, what do you suppose? what to do next since there are an infinite number of options and the postmodernist says well my theory can't explain that and then they say well let's go back to Marxism and that's why I think there is this unholy alliance between the postmodernists and the neo-Marxists It is because postmodernism is a dead end from the perspective of applicable wisdom, it leaves you bereft and nihilistic and that is not good because people cannot exist without a purpose and that is why they hide Marxism through the back door and jump into this power landscape for the reasons we discussed above, you really think it's due to an infinite number of possibilities of interpretation of things, because I've always felt that it was really just a response to capitalism.

They feel that capitalism is a very negative aspect. our culture and society and that there has to be some kind of alternative. Marxism is a clearly defined alternative that other people have subscribed to in the past. You could point out that it's a structure that's already established and it's romanticized and I think adopting it for that reason because it has socialist aspects attached to it and they looked at socialism as something to do with equality and you know it's kind of an egalitarian approach, well , okay, so we would have to take two Separating things, we would have to separate Marxism, neo-Marxist Marxism and postmodernism in order to do it historically and I would say that although there is a reason for postmodernism, which is the reason we ended up to discuss, the landscape The infinite landscape of the problem of interpretation is a real problem if you look at it historically.

Postmodernism actually emerged from Marxism and what happened is that Marxists put forward their theory that the human social environment is made up of a power struggle. between the privileged and the disadvantaged, the rich and the poor, and in its initial phases, and that is a story that is partially true and has a lot of driving power, as if the driving power were the romantic driving power that you just described. On the side of the oppressed it became a war for what is right, there is the element of resentment, which is that that son of a bitch has more than me, so we are going to cut off their knees, which manifested itself brutally in the Union Soviet and then there is the question of ideological totality that gives people a sense of security which took a serious blow in the late 1960s because Nosov's murderous Marxism had been clearly presented as a doctrine and which opened the door to this movement of mostly French intellectuals to develop postmodern philosophy that has these advantages that we describe, but also use it as a screening tactic to allow Marxism to transform into identity politics, so it seems difficult to disentangle all the motivations that are going on there, but there's something about it, that's really pathological intellectually because you can't be a postmodernist and a Marxist, you actually technically can't be both at the same time and the fact that most people are both at the same time raises There are reasons to criticize capitalism, obviously, but it is this clandestine anti-capitalism driven by resentment that I think is one of the fundamental motivators, well, if I may, if I may add. a couple of things, the risk of alienating my last friends, so here's the thing about Marxism: there are a lot of Marx's criticisms of capitalism that are actually correct and that helps you get through the door once you start to look at the analysis. and then there is the recipe that is toxic, but it is not obvious why it is toxic; in other words, it's a pretty good story that doesn't work and that's why people gravitate toward it because the story is moderately compelling, it's not a theoretically functional or stable or viable game and it descends into this kind of serious, you know, inevitable violence. , so we know that now, historically, it's not just a theoretical question, we've seen enough to know that there is a fact, but nevertheless, the fact that there are people who say The Story for Children who still don't know what doing something that seems like it could be true is very dangerous if you don't care to explain why it goes wrong.

Well, I mean, it's kind of a tired criticism, but I think it's right, which is to say that it just doesn't take into account what it is to be human and what makes society work, speaking like a true fascist. Well, I think it might be related to "ok", so let's go back to the idea that Marx had something to say, well, and we could clarify that a little bit, so there's a problem here, this is the problem that seems to arise as the function of some really fundamental force that we don't fully understand and that's this phenomenon that I've referred to as the Pareto distribution, so this is the situation if you look at any creative endeavor that human beings engage in. , so it would be an effort where there is variability and individual production, no matter what it is, this is what happens, people. they compete to produce whatever it is and almost everyone produces zero, they lose completely, a small minority is a little bit successful and a hyperminority is incredibly successful, so the Pareto distribution and the Pareto distribution is the graphical representation geometric of that phenomenon and this is how it manifests if you have ten thousand people, a hundred of them have half the money, then the rule is the square root of the number of people under consideration, they have half of whatever is under consideration , then this works everywhere, so if you took a hundred classical composers, ten of them produce half of the music that is played and then if you take the ten composers and take a thousand of their songs, thirty of those songs, which is the square root of a thousand, generally speaking, they reproduce fifty percent of the time and then there is this underlying natural law that is expressed as Matthieu's principle, which comes from a statement in the New Testament, the statement is that a those who have everything will be given more and those who have nothing will have everything taken away.

It's a vicious statement, but it's actually one of those places where it's empirically true: this happens everywhere, so what Marx observed was that capital tended to accumulate in the hands of fewer and fewer people and he said that this is a defect of the capitalist system. That's wrong, it's not a defect. The capitalist system is a characteristic of every production system that we know, regardless of who created it and how it operates, and now we have a problem because what happens is that as soon as a domain of production is established and you need it because you need it to be produce things, then it instantly produces a competition and the loot goes disproportionately to a small percentage of people, then the questionnaire, yeah, then, well, what?, then the rest of the people starve or the system. it becomes unstable because everyone is angry, it's like it's a big problem, so how do humans solve that?

The first thing we did was diversify the number of productive games so that you don't end up being an NBA basketball star, but you know that running a podcast is a completely different competitive landscape, so we can fractionate the production landscape and then people who are not successful in one domain could be successful in others, that creates human creativity. We are verygood at that, but the problem with that is that you can. You still have a positive correlation between the successful people you know because you are very successful, for example with your podcast on your YouTube videos, your connection network is incredibly powerful, so you still have this tendency that what is useful and good is what is distributed. let's call it unfairly and it has the power of a physical law in fact there are people who call themselves econo physicists no one knows that there is a field econo physicists econoPhysics and they use the same mathematical equations that represent the propagation of molecules in a gas and molecules in the void to describe the way money is distributed in an economy.

Well, then Marx made a fundamental point, but he said, "Well, that's a mistake." Capitalism is like no, it's not, it's something much more pernicious than that and it's kind of like when one good thing at the Institute makes you a little more powerful and attractive and that fractionally increases the possibility of another good thing happening to you. and then that gets out of control and there are people who have, well, they have all the money or they have all the podcast downloads, you're in that position, you know what 1.2 billion is, what the hell, but it's for those who have more and don't It's because there's something oppressive about you, it's because you rode the wave of the Pareto distribution and it threw you into the stratosphere like that and we don't know what to do about it, you should share it. your podcast views with the oppressed and downtrodden, I mean, you have a few billion, you could spread that damn stuff, it's not fair that you're the only one being heard, you know, it's the same argument. and it's a compelling argument because why the hell should you have all that power?

If you call it power, you could call it authority or competence. This is not a different argument because no one is asking anyone to download anything specific, no one is forcing anyone to do it. download anything specific, you can download whatever you want and if you put more effort, more time and more concentration into your work, whatever it is, whether it's a podcast or your YouTube videos or whatever, if people enjoy it, They gravitate towards it and then, over time. it exponentially increases the number of people who are exposed to good, so I think that and this is the other problem with the Marxist perspective and postmodernists in particular unfairly conflate power, competence and authority.

Now your point is kind of the point of the free sellers you are saying well look all I am doing is offering a product I am not forcing anyone it is a quality product or at least as far as the market is concerned it is if it turns out that everyone wants it Well, what's wrong with that and I don't disagree with that argument in the slightest, but the problem is that it doesn't solve the problem like the problem with money, let's say the problem is that if you leave in a monetary system , all the money ends up in the hands of very few people and you're saying this happens with any kind of creative endeavor too, man, now what's wrong?

I think the real problem would be maximizing potential performance or maximizing the number of successful people you have to figure out what it is that you don't focus on what people are doing right focus on what people are doing wrong, for example, why? what what people are doing wrong that are failing, whether it's on some team that's why we got together just to be one, that's part of the reason we created the Future authoring program because we're trying to figure out what made that people were successful and one of the things that makes people successful is that they specify a goal and then aim for it. true, because if you are everywhere in a relatively functional society like ours, we know what predicts success.

IQ and conscientiousness are the biggest predictors of success. Now there is a genetic lottery that is a little difficult, but he says it is smart. People who work hard are disproportionately likely to be successful and so you could also say, "Well, we want to remove the impediments for people who have those abilities so that they can move forward," and one of the predictors of success is also deciding what is your success. is going to be and then work hard in that direction and that really works so I think it's a very useful thing to do and that's good, like I said, that's partly why we've been working in that direction, but there are other problems that is still not resolved as one of them is that if you don't have money it is very difficult to get it once you have it it is not that difficult to get more, but if you are at zero Jesus man you are in this you are in the reverse situation mm-hmm you are poor thing you have nothing no one wants to talk to you you can't get out of this because you're too poor to get out of this, you know you're penalized by the economic system because you can't even afford to start playing, you're stuck at zero, you're stuck at zero and you can't get out, and the revolutionary guys who I know go to people who are stuck at zero and say, hey, you're stuck at zero, why don't you burn the whole damn thing to the ground?

Because maybe in the next iteration you won't be stuck at zero and For young men, that's a big decision, because they are already, let's call them biologically expendable and that makes them more adventurous and risk-taking. If someone says and maybe that's why they wear the Che Guevara t-shirt, it's like, hey, me. I'm stuck at zero, well I'd rather be with the romantic who is burning everything to the ground than just be stuck in my immobile position, but that's where huge amounts of creativity comes from because of that struggle. of innovation massive amounts of people who have visions because you are not living off some kind of trust fund, you know that you have a real risk in real danger and you have a real concern for your future, where someone who has no worries of any kind and their el future is set in stone, they could do whatever they want, buy a new Ferrari every year, they won't have the same motivation as the poor person, yes.

Well, that may be why family fortunes tend to last only three generations, yeah, and you know, you're saying well, why don't you take a look at the advantages of zero and one of the advantages is that you're driven out of raw necessity and that can be really motivating and I think that's why first? children of first generation immigrants often do very well, yes you know they are driven by need and risk so yes I agree but I would still say zero problem is that there are levels of absolute deprivation that they are so intense, yes, that all the good will in the world will not get you from zero, right, if you live in a third world country, in a very small village with no way out, that is the zero of zero, right, Tanzania in the river, people being eaten by crocodiles in your village, you are yes, zero is like a magnet, yes, just wait, yes, it is a black hole that has a little, very little, maybe that state of motivation actually be generative, right, there's a difference and then what's really strange is that those people in that village might be happier. that people who live in a gated community in Beverly Hills, well, I wanted to get back to your point about whether we should focus on what you're doing right or what you're doing wrong.

If you work and you should do both simultaneously, you'll max out faster, but the real problem is that the system where we focus on what you're doing right and what you're doing wrong and supposedly getting paid for some integration of those things is that we don't understand what we're programmed to produce evolutionarily well, we think we all operate, they have the idea that we're chasing some state of happiness or satisfaction and you know, we think we know what's going to help us and maybe it's inventing something and then You will be happy, but it is a trap.

The fact is what we are programmed to do is discover opportunities and then when we discover an opportunity, it benefits the population. where we come from and we turn that discovery into more mouths to feed or more consumption and we restore the state of deprivation, we restore the state where people don't have enough, so if you really wanted to solve this problem, if you wanted to address the problems that the communism thinks it is solving but it also fails, we have to design around this characteristic of human beings where we look for new opportunities and as soon as we find a new opportunity instead we find a way to stabilize the benefits so that it results in a stable feeling of satisfaction, for example, we strive to turn it into more of the same because, of course, that's how we got here.

Can you give me an example of what a hum means? I'm sure, so let's look at something like the Let's imagine that a former farmer has a piece of land and that piece of land will support a certain number of people with the level of technology that the farmer is using. Somehow, the farmer ends up thinking or discovering a wheel by watching someone else. now that farmer has a technology that allows him or the number of people working on that farm to produce much more food without more work because the wheel allows him to transport more, for example, at a time, so now that same piece of land can support more people because it can be farmed more efficiently, that could be stabilized as a kind of success, in other words, the surplus could be turned into a kind of persistent luxury, yes, a luxury, but I mean, not even the luxury is a little bit.

It sounds too trivial, you could turn it into a space where you use it to research important things or you could turn it into more mouths to feed, in which case as soon as you've produced those extra mouths they are now consuming the result of that. farm now the level of, you know, the fear of starvation is back to where it was mm-hmm and so it is, that's more money, more problems, yeah, essentially, I mean, you know well it used to be that we produced more people, we now produce a larger search. for consumption, but if we were smart, what we would do is think about the problem of how to take the gains that come from not being pushed to the limits of a system and turn them into what we value.

We've done some of that, I mean because, we've done some of that because, what do you say? a rising tide lifts all boats and there is certainly some truth in that the general standard of living has risen so stupendously since 1895 that it is an absolute miracle, so we have done some of that, so there is another problem, going back to Marx, Let's say that there is another problem that we have that we cannot deal with and one of those could well be to imagine that for society to progress we have to allow the individual to compete in a relatively free space so that he can innovate and then imagine that one of The consequences of that innovation is that these preeto distributions are developed because the innovator or the one who is in second place after the innovator, ends up staying with them with most of the loot, so you could say that there is a cost to pay in inequality for innovation and then you could also say that too much inequality destabilizes things, which seems pretty clear, so there is room for an intelligent conversation about that right because leftists say "Oh, too much inequality" and they need be heard because the evidence is pretty clear, if you let inequality grow enough, the whole system destabilizes because the people at the bottom think that's the way it is, we're just going to do it.

Just turn the system on its head, right? No one wants that, just like right-wing conservatives don't want that, because you could make a Republican argument that says, "Don't let inequality in your neighborhood get out of control." because the crime rate will skyrocket and the Empirical evidence that inequality drives crime is overwhelmingly strong. Now you can argue about why, but the fact that it does is indisputable, so we can have. an intelligent discussion between the left and the right and the discussion would be something like this, you need innovation, you pay for innovation with inequality, but you need to limit the inequality because if it is too intense, then things become destabilized, okay, we could agree that We have the parameters set, now we have to start thinking very carefully through how to approach the issue of redistribution and we don't know how to do it, so you could say, well, we have a guaranteed annual income for people, which I think it's a horrible solution, by the way, but it addresses the right problem: the problem is that we are hyperproductive, but the loot goes to those at the top and some of those resources should be funneled to the people who have nothing to have a chance to at least get to the point where they can innovate and then the whole damn thing doesn't wobble and fall and we could, and I would say in a sense that's what the political discussion is about, but we've slipped into these simplifications excessive radicals, which is kind of like, well, if you have more than someone else you're an oppressor and you're evil and if you have less it's because you're virtuous and victimized and that's just a failure so you think there's a real problem with something like that. as a universal incomebasic well, I think the idea that the solution is a basic income is not a good idea because I think the problem is deeper than that.

I don't think the fundamental problem is that people don't have enough money. I think the fundamental problem. is that human beings in a sense are beasts of burden and if they are not given a place where they can honorably accept social responsibility and individual responsibility, they will degenerate and die, but that is the opioid crisis in the West right now, Men need men who are men, they don't need money, they need to function and we have a problem, one of the problems is, for example, here is an ugly statistic, I think I already told you. This time before, it is illegal to induct anyone into the Armed Forces if they have an IQ below 83 and the reason is that you know that the military, despite having every reason to draw the contradictory conclusion, has decided not to There's a The only thing they can train you to do in the military if you have an IQ of less than 83 that isn't positively counterproductive is ten percent of the population and we're producing a culture that's very cognitively complex like what the hell? are you? what you're going to do if you can't use a computer like if you can use a computer at least you're in the game if you can actually use one you're hyper powerful if you're not literate enough to use a computer with zero ten percent of the population, the conservatives say there's a job for everyone if they work hard enough it's like oh no and increasingly no and liberals say everyone is basically the same and you can train anyone to do anything it's like no you can't, yeah, I want to come back to the point of inequality here because if you look at this biologically, I actually think it reveals a lot about why we are.

I mean, we know from careful study that people are motivated more by the degree of inequality. that the absolute level of well-being that they have and there is a very good, tragic, but a very good evolutionary reason for this, which is if you are working on a piece of land and your neighbor has the adjacent piece of land and they are doing twice as well as you. you is because they know something that you don't do well and therefore focusing on what they are doing that you are not doing is a rational thing to spend your time on so that you can discover what it is that they know that in the environment modern this is a catastrophe because who are your neighbors?

Well, you have a box on your living room wall that has a completely artificial portrait of other people who may be much richer than you and it is transmitted as if you were looking through the window of the adjacent house and then you think that they are inciting you to thinking you're doing something wrong that you could fix when in reality the solution may not be First of all, the person on the other side of that screen may not be real, but even if they are, they don't live in the same environment as you , technology interacts poorly with our brain, but that is how we perceive it. of massive inequality economically, we have massive inequality.

You are arguing that the solution to this involves some kind of massive redistribution, but even then redistribution is wildly unpopular for a number of reasons, so what we have now is a situation that is speculative, but what is really happening is is that austerity is being used as a threat to keep in line people who would otherwise rebel against inequality and my fear about this is that these are exactly the conditions that are going to unleash that chaos between tribal population and population of the What were we talking about. At the beginning of this conversation, when people get the sense that the bursts of growth they were experiencing are over, the natural response is to turn on those who aren't as powerful and take away their stuff.

This is totally indefensible, but nonetheless. biological pattern of history and that if we want to avoid that we have to stop sending the signals that make us imagine that we have reached the limit of the opportunity that we had discovered and that now is the time to look and see who cannot defend their positions, How well are we sending these signals by not providing enough welfare so that people's perception of inequality is reduced to a tolerable level? Well, the argument for universal basic income is certainly strong and you already know it. It's also a good argument for equal opportunity, because people aren't actually as resentful of the success of others as you might expect, they're resentful of it if they feel the game is rigged hmmm, but I'm also up for it. to consider the long game, so a lot of people will say, "Looks like I'm stuck at no zero.

I'm stuck at one, but my kids could get to four and that's enough and that's being the American dream." that is a very powerful antidote to inequality. It's like, there's some inequality, we need it to keep the generative mechanism going, but it's fair and you can play it too and there's a reasonable chance that you or someone you love will be successful. It has to be fair play and that is why ethics are so important to keep this landscape stable. People can't play crooked games and the rich shouldn't fix the game if they want to keep their money and the problem. is that some of them, but not all, are fixing the game and no one is happy about it and it's no wonder you know that and I guess that was evidenced to some extent with the 2008 crash because it seemed like and I'm just "I'm so "I'm as uninformed as anyone, so I'm the only one who can comment on this.

From the outside it seems like the rich benefited disproportionately from the restabilization of the economic system and people are not happy about that and they should be." I'm not happy about that because it indicates that there is something fundamentally rotten in the game, so you could say that maybe people can tolerate the necessary inequality if the game is not violated and that is why everyone has to act in a way that indicates that the game is not rigged and that means they can't rig it, that's really what it means, so and so we are also being pushed into this corner of inequality, I would say, by the postmodernists and the neo-Marxists because they say this is the Something pernicious they say well, the reason some people have more than others is because every hierarchy is based on arbitrary power and everyone is an oppressor and the reason they have the money is because it was stolen from you and there is some truth in That's because there are some criminals, but when you get to the point where you can't tell the productive people from the criminals, which is exactly what happened in the 1920s in the Soviet Union, you better not be careful because when you do radically egalitarian things You are going to wipe out all your productive people and then you are going to starve, and that is one of the final doomed scenarios that awaits us if this idiotic process of polarization continues and what I find reprehensible about universities and you are tangled up.

What's up to their necks in this is that universities are actively agitating to produce people who believe that all inequality is due to oppression and power and that's good, first of all, it's technically incorrect, but why is that so? ? system so well, here's the problem, no, as far as I know, no one has adequately studied the question of what fraction of the economy is actually a corrupt non-productive rentier right and I'm afraid the answer to that question is that it is a tremendously large fraction of the economy is not because of some conspiracy, but because opportunities are finite, but scam games are not, so anyone who can find a mechanism to transfer wealth from someone else without doing anything finds that mechanism and that thing is that we were present while we discovered the next one.

The most important thing that's really productive is that you know something that goes and fits and starts, so if we were, I mean, you've really described it very well, we have a battle between two caricatures of what is true, Arthur, or the market is wonderful. and it is producing great things with very little corruption or everything that makes people unequal is the result of corruption. Both things are wrong. Markets are wonderful engines for figuring out how to do something really well. They are brilliant at this. Those who see that fall in love, it is understandable because they are very good at it, but what they do terribly wrong is tell you what you should want or what you should do well if people tell the markets that this is what we would like to achieve. and then the markets tell us well how best to achieve it, which would be a very viable system that would not result in massive rent seeking that would make everyone feel that all their misfortunes are the result of a rigged game that is so massively rigged that when they check who see that yes, that is largely what we are suffering from, but they want to throw out the baby with the bathwater and that is why they want to throw out the markets completely, which you know would be a terrible mistake. and you asked why this happened in universities and so I think it's one of these runaway positive feedback processes, you know universities started leaning heavily to the left in the '60s and that just got out of control and Now we are at the point where that is the dominant force and why it is probably another manifestation of one of these preeto principles.

It was like at some point there were enough people left hired that the probability was that they would only hire people the same way. or more starts to reach 100% and then you repeat it over a couple of generations and you get no conservatives, which is more or less the situation in, say, the humanities and most of the social sciences and it seems kind of conspiracy, but it is not like that. It doesn't mean that anyone is actually planning it, although there are also conscious attempts to silence conservative voices, let's say, and that is also driven by this postmodern spirit, not a neo-Marxist spirit.

I would say that it says that all the right, the moral right, is on the side of the left, you know, and then it is the combination of those two things, there are more things. I think I often comically think that if you paid sociology professors three times as much, the likelihood that they would be anti-capitalist would decline precipitously, like me. I think a lot of this is because there are a lot of smart people in academia and they are underpaid relative to their intelligence, hmm, that doesn't make them happy, so they get bitter and resentful about it and think there are these bastards. bankers. that they are raising 20 million dollars a year and here I am barely struggling, but here I am struggling comparatively and that is the problem, comparatively with a hundred thousand dollars a year, a hundred and twenty thousand dollars a year, you know, I look at that and Think well, be it whatever, it doesn't matter, but there is a feeling where my colleagues are often angry with me because I work in business school, you know, and I also have a business.

They are not anti-capitalist in the slightest, but it blows my mind. because they come up to me and say, well, are you so sure you should work in business school? And I guess what damn planet you are from. Positive question like all businessmen are evil. It's like that's really the level of your sophistication, this is really an argument that's been presented to them that business owners are evil, well they don't come out and say that, but they certainly questioned my motivations, for example by reporting the links with the Business School, like what they say about it, they say exactly.

They questioned my ethics about forming ties with the business school so many, but they don't give you any reason, the reason is supposed to be obvious, Joe, you know, so let's make this argument, I mean, I don't believe in this. argument but but anyway let's not caricature yes that is good in an absolutely free market which is not what we have but we have something that tends in that direction in an absolutely free market if two individuals compete one of whom is completely amoral will Take advantage of any opportunity if he makes a profit no matter what it is and the other individual has some limit on what he will do well, then there is no question who wins if we give this experiment a sufficient period of time for the individual who does either thing to outperform the other individual. competence. the individual with moral limits because he depends on what the game is, because now you will discover that you have no moral limits, then they will withdraw from your market, unfortunately no and no, here is what I know it seems like that. and in any round, that's true, that's fine, but to the extent that what you're saying is to the extent that people control their purchases and will know that they will stop using uber if uber is ethically compromised, for example, well , so the point is good.

What's the game? The game is to find out what things are being monitored and not do any of the unethical things that are being monitored, but do all the unethical things that are not being monitored and therefore the individual who perceives what things can get away with it. with his, he has an advantage and a good psychopath advantage, norI don't even want to call it the psycho advantage, right? What this is is that a market will enable you to do this if it is not regulated and the best thing is that ethically What an ethically restricted person can do is compete dead even if they have no way to get ahead because the person who is completely free, The amoral business actor has the ability to do anything that the restricted actor has, this depends entirely on what the battlefield is not really about.

There's kind of an exception and that exception is people who have done something that has suddenly put them in a powerful position, so tech people write to tech people who have skyrocketed as a result of having innovated, the next big thing. has not gone through the markets, enabling them to discover the landscape of what is not being monitored, that a profit can be made. That's one of the fascinating things about tech people in general is that these gigantic tech corporations almost all lean left, well, the gigantic tech corporations lean left, that's true, on the other hand, I mean , I hate to say it, but think about how Google started well, don't be evil, right?

I think they actually meant that. right, right, and the thing is don't be evil, that's what it sounds like when the market hasn't trained you to do whatever it takes to beat your competition, you just came up with the big search engine. and suddenly you're on top of the world, but over time, what happens? That entity is now exposed to competition from a bunch of other entities that will increasingly find an advantage in being freer to do questionable things and what it does is force an entity like Google to evolve in the direction of a morality, so now don't stick with China Google, yes, Google wanted to expand into China and so you know they had to make a deal with the devil, so to speak, and they agreed. censorship, they will find ways to rationalize everything because not rationalizing what their competitors can take advantage of would be to perish and study problems if there were all kinds of fake Google, just like they have fake Apple stores in China, they don't. we have the same type of copyright laws that we have and you can essentially plagiarize anything you want when Brett you also said that I shouldn't make a straw man of my peers' anti-business arguments and there's another way I shouldn't make it a straw man. a straw man, although I am not anti-capitalist, I also do not believe that each entity is a business and one of the things that has happened to universities is that they have been pathologized in several dimensions. but they have also been pathologized in the business dimension as administrators have become increasingly trained or come from the ranks of business managers because a university is not really a business, it is as if a church is not a business, there are organizations that are not. companies that cannot be squeezed into the free market structure whether they like it or not, and that is why my colleagues also oppose the transformation of the university into a commercial entity run by profit-seeking MBAs and they should oppose that because that is not Whatever the institution is, there are reasons to be skeptical about my association with the business school that are not simply a reflection of a simplistic anti-capitalist ideology.

Oh, there are many things they don't have. immunity to contact with the market, right? What has happened to the university system is that the markets have pushed it in all kinds of directions that are not healthy for the mission of the Academy and this is also true, you know, journalism is not done well in a market, the Proper journalism done in a market ends up telling you what you want to hear, not what you need to know, so anyway markets are wonderful, but there are certain things they shouldn't be allowed to touch and there are certain things they shouldn't be allowed to touch. tap. there is no magic principle by which a market knows what is healthy and what you know it can draw, that also brings us back to another part of the dilemma of the liberal conservative left, which is well, you know.

Running the market means imposing the heavy hand of the state and its potential pathologies on the market, but leaving it alone means it wanders randomly across an indeterminate landscape and I guess part of the problem there is also its kind of well, how do we, how we do, how do we properly balance foresight and planning, which you would think would have some role in building states on a large scale, is like, well, what do we want the landscape to look like, how do we balance that with the kind of end-to-end computer? that the market allows and of course the answer is that we have political discussions about it all the time without hindrance so that we can adjust the relationship between those two things as necessary, so again, that is a REIT that is an argument of the free speech side, yeah, I mean, it really couldn't be more important, the real answer is that both failures are terrifying, right?

I mean, you really don't want a state to take care of you and overregulate the market and take the magic out of it and you don't want the completely unregulated landscape where the market you know starts probing your kids' minds and figuring out how to sell things to people you don't. They have no ability to resist, right? I need to discover what that path is and it is not easy, but you cannot do it in a scenario where you cannot talk about the questions and this brings us censorship, right? Because this is a real problem with the market. of free ideas when you talk about whether it's Google or YouTube or whoever may be imposing their own morality and their own ideas about what you should and shouldn't be able to discuss and what should and shouldn't be monetized, you're basically imposing these limits, these You see, I read them once and it's a very good point that freedom creates inequality because you are free to put as much effort as you want into something and you will get the same results, and that's if you do it. truly free in a free world some people will do much better than others and only based on their own contributions only based on their effort only based on the amount of focus and dedication they have is very unequal, you know, I know many people. who are much more dedicated than other people I know and do better, yeah, well, that's fine, but trust the empirical literature, yeah, well.

I mentioned earlier that the two best predictors of long-term success are intelligence and conscientiousness and what intelligence is. probably something like the amount of credible operations you can manifest in a given period of time, it's something like speed, now it's not just that, but it speeds up a lot of it, so if what you're doing works and you can do it faster. that works best, okay, that's pretty simple and the next thing is conscientiousness, well, conscientiousness would be something like how many of those effort cycles are dedicated to that specific task and it turns out that if there is a relationship between effort and Task success, more effort is better, but I can give you an idea of ​​the power of that.

If you have good measures of conscientiousness and IQ, you can predict someone's success in the competitive landscape with a correlation of about 0.6 and what that would mean is imagine you tried to pick people, you just randomly said, you're going to be successful. in the top half of successful people, you say and you'll be in the bottom half, you'd have a fifty-four fifty percent chance of making it. that selection correctly if you made it at random if you made it informed by the results of a good cognitive test and a consciousness test you would be right eighty-five percent of the time, so you can say with 85 percent of the time precision which of two people would be most likely to be in the top fifty percent, so it's a huge effect and it's actually a validation of the essential integrity of our system because we hope, given that it's essentially an open meritocracy, that a smarter, harder-working people would do better and do.

Now other corruption factors are applied, for example, many factors are applied. I mean, one thing wrapped up in IQ is a big question: to what extent are the differences in IQ that exist democratized laws, that is, how much of this is the result of environments that are not nurturing or is there lead in water or who knows what, not enough vitamins, my sense, actually my intuition based on what I know biologically is that a large fraction, maybe all, but a large fraction of the differences in IQ is actually could be generalized and that's part of equal opportunity, it's not an easy opportunity, Tessa Mystic, about that and that's partly because maybe because I spent a lot because I'm interested in improving the differences, you know, for example, that's why I built this future creation program, it's like, hey, if we can figure out how to make people more effective, let's do it, so I looked at the literature on improving IQ and it's very depressing, when it's hard, it's very, very difficult to put two in one cognitive training. program like some things have worked in important ways, like the fact that people aren't starving, it's gone away, it's moved the bottom of the IQ distribution up in the last hundred years, that's been a resounding success, but a lot of the things we hoped would work like Head Start, a good example of you know Head Start was part of the American war on poverty and the idea was to give disadvantaged children an early head start. before they get to school and start training them cognitively before. and the hope was that they would have a pre-mass thing where they would be a little smarter in kindergarten and then they would do a little better in first grade and that would make them even better in second grade. they did better than second grade, but what happened was that the kids who went through Head Start actually got a cognitive jump over their competitors, but all the other kids caught up in sixth grade and in sixth grade there was absolutely no The remaining Head Start training program had a couple of benefits: fewer teen pregnancies and fewer dropouts, but that was probably because the children who entered Head Start were better socialized or because a fraction of them was removed for some time from extremely difficult situations. toxic environments, well, it turns out they were at an advantage, but they didn't produce the cognitive improvements that everyone, left and right, alike, expected.

Yes, but this is, in a sense, a very uncontrolled experiment, because an advantage begins. late, yeah, and B, it doesn't insulate you from all the things that come with, oh yeah, yeah, growing up in a disadvantaged neighborhood and absolutely now I also don't know what the truth is about human IQ and there. There are some results that suggest some things that are not hopeful, on the other hand, some of them simply conflict with the biological realities of intelligence, well, here is a good example of the lack of malleability. I mean, there are a couple of things, the first is that we already have, we may already be at a point of diminishing returns in terms of eliminating individual differences in IQ because everyone has central heating, everyone has air conditioning, everyone They have enough food, everyone has access to an infinite set of information so that you can say that even if you are from a disadvantaged background but you are intelligent, although the intellectual landscape is completely open to you now, I am not saying that is the case, but you can defend it, but the bleaker end of biological research and IQ shows things like if you take identical twins at birth and put them into adopted families, the IQ of the adopted twins is much clearer, there's a help there much closer to the original biological parents than to the adoptive parents and they are almost perfectly correlated with each other and that correlation increases as separated twins get older, so let's say you had a twin, they were both adopted at birth, we evaluate their coefficients intellectuals at four, they are quite close, they are closer to their biological parents than to their adoptive parents. parents, but then we test you every year until you're 60, when you're sixty, no matter how long you've been separated as an identical twin, your IQ score is so close to your twins' IQ score that it's like If the same person were being tested twice and that's really complicated because you think well, when twins travel around the environment and accumulate different experiences, their IQs should diverge, obviously that's not what happens well, so there are many places to criticize that.

One thing is that there are not many identical twins raised separately, it is a small sample, this is definitely true, those identical twins raised separately carry with themWhatever effect there was before they were born, it's almost certainly the same thing, so if you know if they had been harmed by an environment that was unhealthy for them when they were pregnant, then they would carry it out and it would show up as a similar IQ. later in life, so one really wants to see that this is true on the positive side, not the positive side. just the negative side so anyway I'm not saying there's nothing like that, I'm really saying I think we don't know, it's very early in this, but what I can say and I think you know a couple of things that Lo What we have already decided in this conversation is that there is an environment in which we can say anything, we can present any argument and test it, it does not mean that that argument is protected, but that any argument can be presented and then challenged. that's inherent to sailing and the other thing that I think we would agree on is that equal opportunity is nothing more than a good thing, right, fair play with equal opportunity, fair play with equal opportunity and I think that one thing I would add is that I don't know if we would agree on this, but you were talking about the fact that you forget what exactly, but that a system based on merit produces inequality because people will have freedom, yes, that freedom produces inequality, that's not necessarily a bad thing, but it's not.

It means that we are forced to go through it to the bottom, the fact is that it could make people safe from failure, so that you are encouraged to try to do something very valuable and if it doesn't work, then the point is that you are not a person without home, this would be the argument in favor of something like universal basic income. thank you, your needs are to take care of your food, your shelter and now you are free to follow any ideas you may have about your problems with food, and well, there is some evidence that that actually happens, yes.

I am now in Canada. These are multivariate problems, so I'm not claiming that this is true, but it does suggest that the rate of entrepreneurial activity in Canada is actually higher than in the United States and one of the reasons for this appears to be the fact that the rate of entrepreneurship in Canada is actually higher than in the United States. that if you are 2527 let's say and you have a family you can quit your job and start a new company and not lose your health care um right, and now you know that the issue of universal health care is obviously very thorny and it's not like the Canadian system works perfectly, but it doesn't work that badly and we've been able to manage it for about 50 years.

There are artificial shortages in the system and delay times are longer than they would be. If I flew to the Mayo Clinic and bought their health care, I would say that at the high end the American health system is better than the Canadian health system, but I would say that at the middle and low end the Canadian health system is clearly preferable. and it's also cheaper, which is kind of interesting because, especially if you're a free market type, you'd expect me to know the healthcare system in the US. It's not exactly free market, but it's more so than in Canada.

However, Americans pay a substantially higher proportion of their total GDP and devote a larger proportion of their total GDP to personal healthcare than Canadians, and the statistics are similar if you look at it. on the other hand, you know, quasi-socialized medicine, there's a great article by Adam that ruins everything. Have you ever seen that TV show? It's really interesting, it looks at a lot of different topics, but Bakke breaks down the American healthcare system to pretty much where it is. went wrong and I encourage anyone to go see it because it shows how they raised the price of all kinds of different things, they somehow make up for the lack of profit and it's just a really fascinating little piece that we're almost three hours into this now, so we haven't talked about Hitler, oh, in a way, we did, but let me, do you want to make your point about Hitler and then I'll respond and I don't I don't know if I want to, I mean, I think I actually think I should stop because I'm. borderline, I'm at the point where the likelihood of me saying something stupid is starting to increase and I'd rather not do it because just saying the things I'm trying to say that aren't stupid is pretty dangerous yeah, this isn't the issue with the Do you want to make that connection?

Yes, boy, is there a more loaded topic? It's funny that it's loaded. because, as you point out, we are practically all in agreement on this. I mean, you find someone who isn't and they're instantly ostracized from society. Anyone who has a discussion about Genghis Khan. I mean, there's a really fascinating take on this. Dan Carlin from history stalwart is talking about the amount of time that has passed since a horrible atrocity and that there are people who will argue that Genghis Khan, who killed 10 percent of the world's population, changed things so badly that he literally reduced the carbon footprint of the human race, while he was alive, killed untold millions of people and was responsible for their deaths.

People look at him and find all kinds of positive things to attribute to his reign. The opening of trade with China. The opening of trade routes. Although all these different things that people have attributed to him and that one day someone can do the same with Adolf Hitler right now well, it's impossible, he certainly made that job very difficult with all the documentation, yes, especially the movies, but let's just say the argument that I want to level I want to be very careful when doing this so that no one can misinterpret it. I'm going to enjoy watching this if I'm cornered, okay, so my argument from all those years ago in my newspaper that What Was Done for Bob Trivers and what I mentioned at the beginning was that Hitler was a monster, as we all know, but he was a rational monster, that the program he implemented was not what he said.

Mind you, what he said was wrong in many places, especially where he approaches Darwinism, it's just all tangled up and broken, but what he did was rational from the point of view of increasing the amount of resources that were dedicated to producing members of its population, so my point is that this is the danger we are in if we allow ourselves to imagine and that Jenna Seidel's impulses have more or less disappeared from the world because we have all assumed that we all agree that they are something bad and the point is that they exist in a latent program and in a There is a time when there is austerity as a result of an opportunity that has run its course and has resulted in the population growing to take advantage of that opportunity and suddenly there is nowhere to go go because all the opportunity has been absorbed, the tendency of people is to find out who what other population is weak and if that population is on the other side of a border then there is some excuse for war and if the population is inside the border then It's genocide but the point is that it's an ever-present danger to us, okay?

So I want to clarify one thing, I'm sure because this argument was worded in a certain way because we have a disagreement about Hitler and I would like to point out that I don't actually disagree with anything you just said. Okay, if I stay relatively silent, I don't. I don't want to be seen I don't want to be seen that the fact that I disagree with you means or that there is a disagreement means that there is a disagreement about some of that I think the disagreement was something like I said that Hitler was even more evil than what we thought and I think correct me if I'm wrong.

You are pointing out the danger of assuming that you can put Hitler in a box that he was just a monster and not think about it. more and I would say I absolutely agree with that. I mean, I've studied Hitler a lot and there are a lot of things you can't say about him, you can't say he was stupid, right, you can't say he wasn't stupid. artistic talent it cannot be said that he was a bad organizer it cannot be said that he was not charismatic it cannot be said that he did freako wonders for the economy of Germany in the first part of his reign and that is why it is very necessary when you are dealing intelligently with a real monster you give the devil his due yeah so I think what I saw in your video was your argument was that he was losing instead of putting a pause on the genocide and winning and winning the warning that hehe traffic jam increased yes, I don't know if it really would be like that.

I don't think it's necessarily fair to say that he was the one who did that, although I think he had something to do with it. It seems to me that that's what happened well and my point would simply be and again there, I couldn't be less sympathetic to the individual. My point is simply that from an evolutionary standpoint, if your goal is to cold-bloodedly increase the number of genomes that are written the same way yours are on earth and enslaved the Jews who were most apt to work in the service of the German war machine, right, that's what those camps are, not all the camps were work camps, but you know, oh! mill, for example, was both a labor camp and an extermination camp, so there was a tendency to enslave, so let me ask you a question if you have this because you know, I think you have to make a pretty tenuous biological argument. to say that there is evolutionary utility in increasing the number of your relatives, but unless they are very close, but here is a slight variation on that, tell me what you think about this, is it reasonable to assume that a decent survival strategy is to homogenize your environment with respect to under some conditions, homogenize your environment with respect to racial or ethnic differences to decrease the likelihood of you and yours being killed oh yes, again, there is no defense of this, yes, you are right, in the extent to which there is another population that is different from that population. even if it is small and has so little power now it may not be small and has little power later, so undoubtedly that program is there - okay, okay, but I would say that the tendency to believe that evolution only works at the level of relatives when We're talking about very close relatives, I think it's a mistake that's just a result of the fact that evolutionists from the beginning wanted to operationalize fitness and it's very difficult to operationalize fitness at the whole level of relatives.

DIF population, so they built a definition that deals with immediate relatives, but there is no logical reason to imagine that Peters is on the edge, okay, okay, so all I'm arguing is that what Hitler did was go after a population within his border that had a more distant relationship with the people who were his constituents and then he obviously went after Eastern Europe and looked for Germany's future in Russia and it took 12 million Russians to change the machinery of German war. I mean, those are military deaths, there were a lot more civilian deaths, but the point is that it didn't manage to do what it set out to do, but it also didn't fail in the sense that it took a lot of resources that belonged to a population that was more closely related. distantly and got rid of those people and by getting rid of them the amount of resources increased. that was available to the Aryans this has nothing to do with it the genes are not interested in finding out which genes are superior all the language about German superiority is nonsense however the genes are very interested I mean they are obviously genes who don't think but act like they're interested in replacing alternative spellings, that's fine, and part of the reason you're running around this just to keep this obvious is to warn people not to alert them to the fact that the kind of programs that Hitler ran and got from people are lurking in our, let's say, in our genome, in our set of biological possibilities, and we have to be very awake to that fact on an ongoing basis, they're lurking. in our genomes, which doesn't mean that we as adults have this as a possibility, a lot of people will not accept this, other people have the idea of ​​it being activated and I think you know what worries me is that Trump, I think, He very cynically used this lurking program to win office. that he took advantage of the fact that certain people were going to hear those noises and what he said about Charlottesville, you know again, he didn't, he didn't go after the white nationalists, the way you saw the response of the white nationalists, did the See?

Yes, the Daler. I think one of the white nationalist newspapers broke down what Trump did and essentially at the end they said he didn't go after us, he didn't target us, this was very good, it was very clear that it was all parties and he never attacked us, no said nothing bad about us, senator, then they said God bless Trump, in the end there's a really complicated issue about the truth, you know, because I went because my free speech, the free speech panel that I was a part of was canceled, I had to make comments in the Canadian media about Charlottesville and then I really had to think about what Trump said because the fact that there is reprehensible behavior on both sides of the extremes of the distribution is true, however, the truth is something complicated because you have to take into account the temporal context, you know, because I would saythat you can imagine that there are white lies and black truths, a black truth is when you use the truth in a way that is not truthful, just like a white lie when you lie in a way that is not harmful, you can use the truth to hurt and hurt and what that really means is that you have misused the truth. truth and therefore it is actually a complex form of lying, but what Trump did wrong is independent of whether he was actually engaged in manipulation or deception if he did not specify the time and place for the expression because what he should have done he came out and voila he said: I unequivocally denounce the white supremacist racism that emerged in Charlottesville, yes, and then he should have shut up and then, two weeks later, he could have said: well, we would look at the political landscape as a whole, perhaps commenting on Berkeley .

He could have said that it's pretty obvious that there are reprehensible individuals acting on both ends of the spectrum, but Charlottesville week was not the week to make that point, so do you know why he did so well? It could just be ineptitude because it was It's been a very complicated week to get things exactly right. I don't believe it. I think we can actually look at what he did during the election and I think we should expect him to do exactly what he did right. It's fair enough that I think there's always a wink and a wink at them with white neo-Nazi President Pau Donald Trump's response on a daily basis, yeah, look, look if he could see the actual text of what they were written because quote from the editor right here.

I didn't mention anything to do with us, the reporters were yelling at him on white nationalism, he just walked out of the room, huh? There was an actual article they wrote on one of those Trump websites. The comments were good, no. attacked, that is, he didn't attack us, he just said the nation should unite, nothing specific against us, he said we need to study why people get so angry and implied there was hate on both sides, exclamation point. so he implied that the antiva are enemies mm-hmm, I mean, that energized them in some way and it's no secret that they support him, you know, my friend Alonzo Bodden is a very funny quote, he's a comedian, he says, Not all Trump supporters are racist. but all racists are traitors, it's a great quote and there's political power in that, whether Trump is racist or not or it's the wink and wink to that side, the only thing that weakens the nod they're getting.

I mean, yeah or even underreporting, which was pretty much what she did, and there's a Canadian journalist named Faith Goldie who was fired from the rebel media for being accused of being too cozy with the Daily Stormer guy, who she he did a podcast about cryptocurrencies and I listened. to the podcast very carefully, she was actually one of the people who was supposed to be a panelist in this talk about freedom of expression, which put us in a real bind, but well, what happened on the podcast, well, I What happened was, in my opinion, that she did not adequately fulfill her role as a critical journalist, it was something like an argument with her friendly neo-Nazi neighbor and what I mean by this is that she did not ally herself with any of the supposed targets. of the neo-Nazi people she was talking to, but I think she didn't criticize them enough, she didn't ask the hard questions that you know and that and that was a fatal mistake, I mean, they fired her. of the rebel media and it is going to have terrible repercussions for her, although she may land on her feet, but the rebel media is also very conservative, certainly according to the Canadian position, yes, yes, that's right, no rebel media liked that implode after Charlottesville due to What faith did Goldie do with the Daily?

She wasn't even the Daily Stormer. It was a group called Crypto, but they are associated with the Daily Stormer. So she continued there, which I think you could make a case for. You could file a case. That's fine as a journalist, you can go talk to neo-Nazis, but the question is how to talk to them and the answer is: you point out her agenda, you don't allow them to pose as friendly and innocent people. I can't do that, so I would say that she danced, she condemned herself by insufficiently criticizing the villains, it was something like that.

You, uh, you know yourself. I'm sure you're familiar with Louie through no, I'm not familiar with the whole documentary and I. I know him from England, a fascinating, fantastic guy, like one of the best and one of the things he has done is good. He's interviewed a lot of different people, but one of the big ones he did was Westboro Baptist Church and he brought himself in. them and was very nice and very kind and non-threatening and stayed with them for long periods of time, like weeks at a time, and got them to eventually expose who they were and understand them from a privileged person's point of view and in a sense. not necessarily condemning them, but just constantly asking questions, but being very, very polite about it, not as a group, not as a bunch of serious, confrontational criticism, but a very friendly and polite British way of discussing things and it's particularly good to integrate. he did it with Scientology, he's done it with a bunch of different groups, he integrates himself and just classifies them correctly, so there's a justification for trying that kind of clearance, yes, but I really had to think about it carefully because, well, What happened to our The talk was like the Hall of Mirrors, like it was a talk about free speech conversations that were shut down on campus that was shut down by a campus and it was a panel of people who claim to support free speech. expression who kicked someone off the panel because of something good, not exactly what she said, but it's close enough to make the irony quite palpable, so I had to analyze what happened on faith very carefully to discover what the right ethical path was, you know, but I listened to the I listened to the podcast very carefully with my son and we talked a lot and our conclusion was that she had failed, she had failed, she didn't ask enough difficult questions, one would have, even such time, I would have done it safely. but it was that the discussion was too cordial hmm and it could even have been cordial in your point because maybe that would have led to more arguments yes, but it should have been cordial with a snake bite, you know it wasn't necessary to make that snake. bite, I mean, it depends on what you mean by required, but my idea is to find out what these people really want and what we're really trying to achieve.

Sometimes you don't have to confront them, you just have to allow them. to be comfortable and Kamau Bell did really great on a CNN show with the KKK. In a way, he just allowed them to be themselves and they became more and more comfortable with him the more time they spent with him to the point where he was actually joking with him, but you could see that the ugliness was so obvious and obvious, and without him confronting them, without him yelling and arguing, you could see it because he was just friendly and joking with them, now no one would accuse them. a black man like Kamau Bell for being a KKK sympathizer, he was in this unchallenged position like no one, no one could accuse him of it, this woman, I guess, is white, that's where the problem lies, what if she had problems, yeah , it was? a black woman in the same situation as Oprah in the past, like Oprah interviewed the KKK in the past and was never accused of being in any way or another a sympathetic person to them, right, and somehow we have to raise the threshold of the offense.

There are many ways to contribute to the conversation, one of them may be to integrate and allow the world to see people who are doing something abhorrent in the way they see themselves so that you can understand it by being there. ask questions well, you don't necessarily have to be cute, what are you to change them? I'm being critical of them, I mean just arguing with them, I mean, they might be able to see some of that from their response to something rational. discussion about your problems, this leads us down another rabbit hole that maybe we could talk about at some point in the future because this is a really interesting topic, you know, it's part of the reason why I've been accused of being To the extreme. -I said well or on the extreme right it is because I have spoken with people who are perhaps closer, what would you say has a network of associations that could be more closely allied with that than people feel comfortable, but my attitude has changed?

I've been there and I don't want to talk about this in too much detail because it's really complicated, but the anti-left spectrum, let's say, is very confusing and could easily tip very quickly towards the far-right anti-left, which is the danger that you're in. describing and partly what I hope is to be able to talk to people who could possibly be on that development path because they are tired of being accused of implicit racism, let's say and say, look, you can be anti-radical. left without falling all the way to the right and that's how you can do it, but that means I have to talk to them and then if I talk to them, it means I risk associating with them and risk being contaminated, it's an option very difficult line to walk well is also one of the big problems with this hard left stance of the hard left like this Pepe the Frog stuff like that, anyone, I mean, one of the things I tweeted was a guy you called me, You just admitted you're a Nazi because I posted a meme that someone had created of me as Pepe the Frog who is apparently everyone's Pepe the Frog, so I told this guy, well, you just admitted you're a Nazi.

Nazi and I think this is part of the problem and this creates massive pushback. People get angry because that frog is mostly used in humor and yes, the phrase defensive humor is actually used, yes, and it really is, and I think. I mean, I didn't mean to interrupt your joke, but no, please, there's something to the idea that the effectiveness of this meme is that it tangles humorless people into knots and that's a big part of why those things are generated that's why okay that's exactly right yes yes yes I mean, I'm afraid that I'm saying something about this frog and that something is going to come up that I should know about it somehow I'm admitting something, but all that What I'm saying is that what I see is that a lot of people use it to make fun of people.

Yes, I can't understand it. I think that's the vast majority. I think so and I think the same thing about the keka Stanny guys is that's almost it. all humor, yes, and there is a big problem with opposing that and calling those people Nazis and racists, and especially when they only use humor and especially when it is very clear if you look at all the memes online and I thoroughly checked Google to find them there are some hateful there are some horrible there are some who have Nazi uniforms there are some some anti-Jewish there are some horrible most of them are not that most of them the vast majority of them are funny and yes and Again, these people are not coordinating, so If a person decides to make a racist Mickey Mouse meme (which, by the way, in a lot of the early Mickey Mouse cartoons, you could just take a screenshot and they were tremendously racist, right? because dealing with the side of the Sometimes I mean images of black people that work in an extremely cartoonish way, you know, a giant black top faces the whole thing or a horribly racist, you could say racist Mickey Mouse don't go to Disneyland, no one says that , true, but they could and this is a slippery slope. you start with the Frog, you know, and you know, first they came for Pepe and I didn't say anything, yeah, well, if the Frog is racist, you start to get into what's not a racist cartoon frog, but you can make some cartoons about everything that has ever existed. existed and making that racist doesn't make the Frog racist here's where it's crazy is like what percentage of people are making the Frog racist and then the Southern Poverty Law Center says this is a hate symbol now this frog Well, guess what, you just put these people against the wall and you're sure that their offense is because they're now realizing, oh well, these people are angry, they're angry, they're not just angry like angry, but also as crazy as you.

You're not looking at this rationally at all, you're saying that a frog where 99% of memes are either just funny or dumb, now the frog is a symbol of hate, not just a symbol of hate, but the Nazis know a supremacist, I mean, you're just drying up all the space between your absurd perspective and the nightmare on the other end of the spectrum and the point is that almost all of us live in that space in between, so yes, almost all thoughts live in that space intermediate. a variability of all thoughts you know there is flexibility in all ideas and when you talk about something with extremely humorous words you are talking about a humorous frog I mean damn I need to call that all hate when sometimes it is hate and others by Who are the people who did that hateful thing?

Those are the people who arehateful, not the others, who use that frog for humor. I mean, this is the fact that this is an argument, it just shows how lost we are. these ideological arguments are the far left versus the far right of the spectrum at one end of the field, throwing rocks at the other end of the field, yes most of us are somewhere in the middle, it's useless, yes, if we can't have many discussions. I mean, Jesus Christ, well that's a good conclusion, yes, it could be. Listen, this was a lot of fun, as always, and I'm glad you guys came up with this idea and I'm glad we had the time to do it.

Yes, Jordan Peterson, what's your Twitter username? Jordan Pederson, yes, and Brett Weinstein, you're right, Weinstein on Twitter, once stopped by saying Weinstein, that doesn't mean they're not interchangeable. Sorry, sort of, but thanks everyone, I really appreciate it, it's a lot of fun. Yes, good night again, goodbye everyone.