#1006 - Jordan Peterson & Bret Weinstein

September 1, 2017

Jordan Peterson is a clinical psychologist and tenured professor of psychology at the University of Toronto. You can check out all Dr. Peterson's self-improvement writing programs at www.selfauthoring.com Bret Weinstein is a biology professor at Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA. Currently he is in the middle of an intense controversy that has been documented by the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and several other mainstream media outlets. Sign up for a free crash course on Evolutionary Thinking at http://bretweinstein.net/early

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Diego and what he got the game other than a fucking awesome employee all right and we're at my guests today are two of my very favorite test and I'm very very honored to have them both here Jordan Peterson and Bret Weinstein

once dinerstein steam he said it's time that I said Stein I said Steen god dammit

he said Stein Bret Weinstein yes I called them steam Bret Weinstein I'm sorry bread that's awesome really ain't brilliant guys you might know Brett from the controversy from Evergreen State College where he refused to take part in a day of absence traditionally they had a day of absence at school where people of color or minorities would take the day off so the people would appreciate I guess their presents like to know what it's like when they're not there but then this year the social justice Warrior Brigade decided that it should be a day where white people are forced to stay home and of course he objected cuz he said that's racist like what are you doing and they freaked out and then it started a Cascade of bullshit that is still going on to this day I please if you have not listened to the podcast that I did with him if you have the time check it out what episode was that

what number real quick

but it was a it was a fast any podcast news right after it all happened. 970. 970. and Jordan Peterson who's one of my all-time favorite guests and the last podcast I did with Jordan is right up there with my I said at the time it was my all-time favorite podcast that might have been surpassed by Joey Diaz's shit stories from podcast one thousand

maybe that's like the charm of this podcast. The the varied content. This is a very heady one. These guys are both really amazing minds and legit intellectuals and it was a fast any conversation to be a part of we talked about a variety of subjects and including Hitler, truth I love this lot of awesome stuff I really enjoyed it so without any further Ado please welcome Jordan Peterson and Bret Weinstein Stein steam Weinstein yes Bret Weinstein sorry Bret I love you dude I'm just as bad with the stuff alright enjoy the show

The Joe Rogan Experience

gentleman here we go Jordan Peterson, Bret Weinstein how are you guys? doing very well we doing what can I say man you know I only brought a limited number of clothes well good movie look great and good to see you guys both of you and so whose idea was it to do this so just think it was I think it was Brett's yeah I saw a tweet of Jordans about the tree I did see a YouTube clip that somebody tweeted I don't know if it was you your perspective on on Hitler and your argument was that he was actually even far worse than his reputation would lead us to believe and it's funny at the it Harkens back to my first evolutionary project as an undergraduate I was working with Bob Rivers his went the leading The evolutionary minds of the 20th century was I was lucky enough

happiness and undergraduate advisor pull the sucker right up your face cuz you going to turn sideways we're looking at each other find out who each other yeah yeah okay so anyway but I did a project with Bob on analyzing the Holocaust from an evolutionary perspective I wanted to test the question about whether or not the time it was it was common place for people to say that Hitler was crazy and it was something that bothered me about that analysis I think there's something actually dangerous that we dismiss somebody like Hitler as crazy before we understand actually what they're up to you so when I saw your your video clip I thought it would be worth having a discussion so that we can figure out what perspective makes sense with you cuz you're at the center of this crazy controversy of Evergreen State College you essentially left the area you're suing the college now

so where do you stand now how we have not yet filed suit and in fact I can talk about what took place inside the negotiation we had our first sit-down with the college yesterday and this was a attempt to to avert a suit but I will say from where I sit as hard as this is to believe it appears that the college has learned nothing from this episode and that it is doubling down on the same foolish sets of beliefs and assumptions that got in trouble in the first place so that that is not a hopeful situation it's not aware with the soul stories about you would either have to go back to Brett's podcast that we did a few months back or please just Google Evergreen State University and Google brat and you will be blown away by the enchanted social justice Warrior gone amok the whole campus kids patrolling the campus with baseball bats I mean

whole thing is just completely bananas the president of the University of being told by the children not to use his hands when he speaking because it's a microaggression so he puts his hands down the children start cheering and laughing they don't realize they're being played the whole thing is just some crazy Grand game by the children and I'm calling them children I don't give a fuck I will they are too to have power over people coming to sensually with this is all boils down to it you really see it in that moment where they tell him to put his hands down and he does and they they laugh and cheer and think it's amazing do that to some degree because one of the tenants of the post-modernism that they're being spoon-fed is that there's no such there's nothing but Power that's the only thing that mediates relationships between people cuz there's no real world

everything is a social construct and it's a landscape of conflict between groups that's that's the postmodern world and the only the only actual means of expression is power that's what that's why the postmodernist make the claim constantly that the patriarchy is a corrupt institution because they look at hierarchical organizations and their stratified obviously there's people at the top and people at the bottom the only reason that there are people at the top is because they dominate buypower there's no there's no philosophy of Authority or confidence that's all gone and so and if you're cynical about that sort of thing and you should be you might say that part of the reason that the only thing that the postmodernists believe in his powers because that helps them justify their arbitrary use of it under any circumstances whatsoever and I think that's right I think that's exactly what happened so it's not surprising that you see this manifested in that more blank behavior of the students it's right in accordance with everything or being taught

so what are also being taught in this sort of any means necessary to to get over the establishment like the establishment is horrible institution and they can justify pretty much anything punch a Nazi who's Anansi everybody that doesn't agree with you I mean that's essentially what's what's being said Ad nauseam in in social justice Warrior circles online and punch a Nazi so many times I mean but when it came down to Charlottsville there was very little punching of Nazis you know the whole thing was like it's all it's all very insanely see real Nazis are those are real Nazis and I'll punch them please and to the left everyone figured out that wherever the Nazis went that was wrong we all agreed on that we're not going there anymore and so when someone pops up and says well we should go there it's like there immediately

identifiable You Can Box them in and if he sounds like you know like many conservative did in the aftermath of Charlottesville they come out and say well in case it needs to be said again we're actually not allied with those people yeah well that's one of them was that was the most disturbing thing for men people about Donald Trump's reaction to it that he didn't take a hard stance against these white supremacist showing up with tiki torches walking to the street yelling anti sematic phrases or whatever I don't know exactly what they're yelling at read a bunch of different things but the whole thing was is an Abomination and it was a horrific thing to watch and you know Donald Trump comes out and says there was horrible behavior on all sides with that in a strange way in Canada why was supposed to appear on a panel panel discussing the suppression of free speech on University campuses which was then promptly cancelled by the university that was going to host it in the aftermath of Charlottesville partly because one of the panelists

it's going to be Faith Goldy who was the journalist that was covering Charlottesville and got the footage of the of the car and the and the damage but

we were targeted immediately afterward with the Nazi epithet and shut down the shut down the Free Speech panel so it's coming up again in November what happened was this this this this this person put up a Facebook page and use the swastika with an O you know what like a circle with a line through it and said no fascists no fascist at Ryerson essentially but you use the swastika and she got a bunch of people rallied together to pressure the University Administration into cancelling the event which they probably did and then they had a celebration party the night of the event and this is here something that was really interesting so they got a couple I think a couple of hundred people up to the Celebration at Ryerson and they they were United under the banner of the hammer and sickle and we're calling for Revolution and what was so interesting about that and I really mean technically that it was interesting was that the mainstream media

should virtually nothing about the fact that these that's called him counter-protesters I don't know exactly how you turn them had come out on to this murderous symbol and it's made me think I can't figure out why the swastika is an immediate identifier of a pathological personality and the hammer and sickle is it there's actually a reason it isn't just arbitrary maybe it's something like the Nazi is the guy who knifes you in the alley and steals your wallet and the Communists is the white collar Criminal Who takes your pension and you're actually more afraid of the first person then the second person because the damage they do is more proximal in a meat and emotionally recognizable but that's the second guy who takes your pension for example he's perhaps even more dangerous but there's a there's a bloody anus about the Nazi symbol and an immediate emotional impact that the hammer and sickle just doesn't produce and some of that's because people are badly educated his starting. So I think it's pure ignorance

they're wearing those Che Guevara t-shirts really understand the history of Che Guevara or do you think he represents his sexy South American counter-protest character a guy who stands up to the establishment as we know a guy was wearing a green beret Beret hiding in the jungle fighting against the oppressive dictatorship of America I mean that's what that's what they're looking at when they see that image the fact that historical ignorance plays a role in this is absolutely certain and I think the romanticisation of people like Che Guevara is exactly I think you nailed that exactly but I do think there's a deeper question here it's like I was thinking in the aftermath of Charlottesville many conservatives immediately divorced themselves from the Nazis Ben Shapiro was a good example and it was very much reminiscent of William F Buckley divorce from the John Birch Society back in the 1960s the right-wing seems it seems to be easier for the right-wing to draw a line around the Nazis and say no that's not us part because the right-wingers conservatives are better at drawing boundaries but

let's say we wanted to draw boundary around the radical leftist okay point to something well on the right to say while you are a swastika yeah you're out of the club man on the last well you believe what what's the smoking pistol you believe in equity it's like that's that's a smoking pistol as far as I'm concerned but it doesn't have the same emotional punch as you wore a swastika to the protest that you believe in equity and you refused to find it that would be great but I mean to me the I think we under rate the danger of and I think not to Sarah red herring there's something that actually does threaten to reemerge and Charlottesville is a version of it but I think because we have a cartoon understanding of what that protest was actually about and how many people are actually involved we don't

only see why this is a dangerous and contentious issue and I think the answer is an evolutionary one that hasn't been spelled out and because it hasn't been spelled out it's very hard to point too but it sounds good to us but the people listening online right I was at better Fist from your face that's the best sorry that's alright so explain what you mean by this so my point would be that what took place in Germany in the 30s was a particularly

particularly visible well-documented example of a pattern that is much more common in human history and because this pattern emerges as a result of certain features of the way Evolution functions in the context of humans it is actually always a danger that it will reemerge and knowing what to do about it is not so simple until you've seen why it occurs and what it means and what I've what I've been saying in lectures I've given on this is that tyranny is the end game of prosperity and so there is a pattern in which you will go through a. Of prosperousness in which it appears that that thing is defeated once and for all there's no reason for people to be going after each other in this particular way and then I'm at the point that that pattern Peters out yttrium urges and people don't expect it it flies under a different flag or something like that and so I do think that looking at the tiny number of people

who were doing what they were doing in Charlottesville and saying well that's we all agree that this is wrong misses the fact that actually I think Trump is doing its cynically Trump was riding a wave that there are their ideas which are not permissible from the environments in which we all grew up that are going to become permissible again if we are not careful to recognize that that's that's the nature of History I think it's highly probable that that's part of the reason that I landed in the political hot water that I landed in last year it was because I was increasingly aware that this process of polarization was going to take place and that the continual in my estimation anyways the continual clawing of of new ground underneath the radical leftist rubric especially in the University's this is starting to produce an extraordinary dangerous counter position and need that was manifest at least to some degree in Charlottesville and so

I think you're right is that what you don't want to be complacent say while we know who the Nazis are and we're not going there and that's where the problem is solved the problem isn't so there's all sorts of weird activity in the non-radical left space like on the other side of the radical left whatever that is and right now what it is not obvious you know it's it's the old alright that's part of it it's the kekistanis it's this Pepe thing it's it's some of its comedy some of its satire some of it serious some of it's the inversion of identity politics which is very dangerous and it's maybe the most dangerous thing about Charlottesville is that there's something there something extraordinary dangerous about having people revert to identification with their racial identity it's really not a good thing well there's a reversion to their racial identity is basically an outbreak of tribalism which explains what's going on on the far right what's going on on the left is a bit of a new twist what you have is a coalition

different tribal identities that aren't large enough to Marshall a force on their own and so they're United and together they are a formidable Force but what's going to happen is that something that's an unstable entity at the point of that Force games Power it's going to come apart internal Dynamics rip it up so it's not actually a it's not capable of restraining the version that Rickers on the right the version that does manifest as as white nationalism that version is stable because it does represent an actual population that has an evolutionary basis for remaining cohesive and I should point out there's a danger when you hear an evolutionary biologist talk about evolutionary patterns people off and infer that if an evolutionary biologist is saying if something is a pattern that has evolved that that some kind of a defense and it is absolutely not we call this the naturalistic foul

evolution is an absolutely a moral process it has produced the most marvelous features of human beings and the worst features and we are in some sense obligated to pick and choose which features to honor it and come out and which ones to Tamp down something can have something can have evolved as a virtue in some circumstances and still be of the type that if magnified Beyond its proper limits becomes pathological so let me tell you something I learned about Hitler which really I haven't recovered from my shock from this so we be looking at the relationship between political belief in personality okay I'm and your political beliefs strongly determined by your temperament so liberal left types are high and trade open this that's creativity and low in conscientiousness but you can fragment conscientiousness up into industriousness an orderly and the real predictor for conservatism is an orderliness not industrious and you might think well that's no surprise right Wingers or more orderly Hance Hitler's call for order let's say but it's one thing to do

posit that and another thing to measure it now it's measurable and it appears that it orderliness is associated with sensitivity to discussed and this is actually a really big deal it's a really big deal so there's a paper that was published in plos one about 3 years ago looking at the relationship between the prevalence of infectious diseases and authoritarian political attitudes and they did it 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 .6 and I want to take this apart a little bit okay so the idea is that

this is part of what you might describe as the extended behavioral immune system and one of the problems with the interactions between groups of human beings in a revolutionary past was exactly what happened to the Native Americans is no they came out and shook hands with the Spanish conquistadors and then within a couple of generations 90% of them or dad of smallpox and measles and mumps and so it's being a truism in our evolutionary past that if you meet a group of isolated if you're a group of isolated humans and you need another group of isolated humans and you trade pathogens there's a real possibility that you and everyone you know are going to be dead in no time flat and so we haven't discussed mechanism that that produces this implicit that's called racial racial and ethnic bias that is part and parcel of the human cognitive landscape but the problem with that is that it's rooted in a discussed mechanism that actually serve as a protective function know when I was sorting this out I was reading Hitler's table talk and Hitler's table talk is very interesting book

a book of his spontaneous mealtime utterances from 1939 to 1942 and I went through with this new knowledge because people think of conservatives as a like her fascist as afraid of those two are different they're not afraid they're discussed it and that's not the same thing because you burn thinks you're disgusted by and so it was terrifying to me to read it because then I also thought oh well disgust sensitivity is associated with orderliness and you need to order in the society in order to maintain it and the Germans are very orderly and that was actually a canonical part of their civilization and part of actually what makes the Great and Powerful and that just had to tilt a little farther than necessary and all the sudden everything needed to be get cleaned and we don't have to talk about cleanliness all the time and he actually meant that and so this thing that's emerging you know you talked about its biological basis its evolutionary basis it is it's part of this deeply rooted discussed system that protects us from dangerous pathogens that can manifest itself in the end does manifest itself in the political Realm

it's not good so I don't know exactly how to tease this apart but I agree with your point about there's an actual danger when populations meet at like a literal pathogen danger and that that is liable to have produced a certain instinctive fear of of the other which doesn't have to be limited to that one thing but that's enough to generate a selective force that would cause a certain reluctance to meet but I want 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 you know so of course calling the other population subhuman Vermin whatever it is that the human beings to my concern is that we are doing exactly this with the Nazis are de-facto Nazis who are showing up on on our screens at this point that what we are doing is we are comforting ourselves by saying well that's a small outbreak of something

that makes these people subhuman justifies punching them or whatever and I mean I'm not squeamish about there being a right to violence when somebody is threatening a way of life so it's not that but my concern is that if you take the pathogen model and you imagine it all those folks who showed up in Charlottesville that that is a contagion and it needs to be isolated then you will have the sense that as long as you do that it's not going to show up somewhere else where as what's I think the the actual Hazard is that that's actually a latent program that has served populations in past circumstances it's indefensible but it has served populations and the populations that we come from have it there for on reserve and when certain characteristics show up in the environment that program can emerge and so my concern is that that's where we are in here

is teach my students are very into that which is something like as I try to walk them through understanding psychological understanding of what happened in Nazi Germany and in the more intense situations like in places like an off switch so the question might be well if you were in Germany than the 1930s could you be a constant concentration camp card and the gut reaction to that is no those people are unlike me and that's the wrong response the right response is those people were human and I'm also human and so that means that the Nazi is Ox that's what it means and so the end who the hell wants to think that and no one will think that and I have thought that through cuz I thought through for a variety of reasons what the limits of my potential Behavior are and the limits of my potential and maybe I'm more pathological than the average person it's certainly possible but I understand that the limits of my potential Behavior are far beyond the bounds of what people would normally consider civilized and I think that's characteristic of human beings in general

I think this is one of the things that really highlights the importance of having uncensored discussion because we were we've already hit on so many Hot Topics the point where you have to like really clarify your position and end when you're talking about this sort of Layton program in in in human beings and the the necessity for it at one point in time like all these things are very taboo to discuss today and this is a giant issue because what you got your doing this talk about things objectively reasonably logically and in clearly but when you get to these sort of hysterical subjects

that's that's sort of forbidden today and there's a giant issue with that because when you have forbidden discussions you energized those topics and the topics grow in the absence of discussion in the absence of being picked apart and analyzing them for what their core components are we talking about it from an evolutionary perspective this is very very important because these patterns re-emerging we do see that and I think I need one of us given the wrong neighborhood the wrong parents the wrong life we might have been one of those assholes with the tiki torches in Charlotte mean it's worse human beings like you said I think that is absolutely critical discuss it's also there's another thing going on right now in the state of the sociological and psychological landscape that we all inhabit right now and I think we're in a position of radical instability and things in the future could be way better than they are right now

radically and they could be way worse than they are and small decisions are going to smoke the small decisions that people make are going to have outsized effects while they make them like look at what happened with this guy in Charlottesville you know what this was I mean I know he was surrounded by a Coterie of of deplorables let's save it was one guy who decided to do something murderous and that shifted the whole political landscape and and what I see happening right now is that we're surrounded by these interactions between people that are positive feedback loops you know that that positive feedback loop occurs when if you do something and it makes whatever cause that occur even in the greater way and the polarization is like that's why I say something left like and you say something right liking that annoys me so I get more left and it annoys you and you get more right and all of a sudden work at each other's throats and that's happening everywhere rights very unstable and what what's to be hope for is that we can pull back from that and discuss it we can say look you know under circumstances

quit being a communist Inquisitor are Nazi prison guard I need to know that and then I need to know what were the situations that made that likely and then I need to know how should I conduct myself so that's less possible and the only way we can figure that out if they have the kind of conversations that we're having right now it's like I'm this isn't them I've been taken to task buy some of my friends for example for using the social justice Warrior terminology because they've said to be well you know you're you're you're participating in this process of demon isation and then polarization and I think while yeah I can understand that although I'm also like radically concerned about the fact that the universities for example are completely taken over by radical Marxist essentially and that they're driving this polarization and it isn't obvious to me how to have a discussion about that without participating in the process of polarization it's something I've been trying to figure out for the whole last year and I've been emphasizing the role of personal responsibility instead of ideological identification right get it into your

I bet you have the capacity for great evil and stop targeting stop assuming that that's something that's manifesting itself only in the people that you disagree with politically take responsibility for that and try to put your life together I don't see an alternative to that but it's been very difficult to do to to avoid to do that and symbol taneously to avoid becoming a participant in this process of polarization and some very dangerous process Germany in the 1920s and 30s ping pong and back and forth between the radical left in the radical right and your point Brett that the radical right actually is more powerful once they get organized is a really good one because there's no fractionation it's more stable you bet that's another thing to think about certainly it in this country that the right is much better armed and that's very frightening terrifying thought that you know I mean we've heard this many times recently about the Trump Administration about if if he's

impeached that there will be some sort of a Civil War I believe Rodger Stone said that like this thought is so terrifying that we literally cannot do anything to stop some sort of physical confrontation with weapons if we disagree ideologically that it's going to happen well first of all there's a lot we can do and in fact you know one of the other things about about the evolutionary toolkit is that I believe we have exactly the tools for navigating this puzzle they're built into us also in addition to this late and program but we are now in a very dangerous situation because for example if Google and other of these online Goliath start deploying algorithms that decide what we get to talk about and see then we cannot use the very tools that are necessary in order to escape and avoid something like Civil War which frankly I'd Decay Shin in debate analyzer

all the components of this issue completely objectively exactly if we have free and open communication that's some percentage of that communication is going to be reprehensible and deplorable but that but that the consequences of suppressing that are so much more dangerous than the consequences of allowing it that they're not in the same universe if we had power those terrible ideas by making them electronically taboo yeah and then point is they're going to Fester whereas if we if we discuss them we can diffuse the ones that are terrible we can spot the opportunities that we don't know we have and we can we can move forward rather than descend into civil war with frankly looks more more more like a gigantic internet companies you know it isn't a matter of if they're going to produce automated Bots that do free perceptual censorship they are doing that let's explain we're outside

playing right now on the other day that I knew this was in the workings because I'd be looking at what YouTube and Google are planning with regards to their artificial intelligence sensors let's say no they want to get to the point where the the opposed the appalling video is not even put up so what happened I hope I got this exactly right but God was in the process you upload a video and then you probably shouldn't so once you uploaded YouTube has access to it and they have access to its content and they informed him that it would be demonetized before he published it up on board Eagle YouTube thinks that my pointing to astounding hypocrisy is to triggering there is nothing objective subject objectionable in my clip unbelievable so I'm wrong about that. How in the world they decided that they were going to manually review gads video is also let me know how many videos are going up on YouTube what the hell why are they manually reviewing his

dad's side is not a radical right now questioning what's happening you instantaneously get lumped into this right-wing hate group and so that's that you're a biological essentialist and you see so if you're around achill postmodern Neo Marxist your theory is human beings can be anything that I want to make them into it's a core doctrine of the Syrian it's part of what makes it intensely totalitarian because then human beings are just Putty for the molding and that's part of the the motivational drive for claiming the radical construction is claim there's no biological hazards of why do you make that claim well because we want to free people from Prejudice and tyranny so I can know that's not why you make that claim you make that claim because of you want to justify your claim that there's absolutely nothing wrong with me

taking over Humanity in the end of image of your ideologies and end and that's that what that that was a well-documented intellectual argument that go through what happened in communist Russia for example cuz the claim they're explicitly was you wipe out the past there's no real biological identity you can mold the human of the future in the image of your perfectionistic ideology and the the Russians actually sideline themselves effectively with respect to evolutionary theory that basically they were so backward on a biological front that is they were deploying this this very broken ideological toolkit they were wrecking their ability to think about about how biology works and so what's your point about evolutionary biology it's not just a quick question the content of evolutionary biology is

absolutely the opposite of politically correct because nobody tells the biota what's right and what's wrong the buyout it does what it does and those of us who look at it and attempt to understand what those patterns are can't help but be deeply Politically Incorrect almost all the time and so the idea that the that the truth of biology is actually going to become an Express a ball and we're going to move ahead we're just going to we're going to we're going to Sidelines at so that we can move ahead with this ideological stuff I mean that is cutting off your nose to spite his racist in Sac State well if I can't find my biology and we're going to have to go back here in order to collect a tool but biology does create entities that have the potential for racism in them in our genomes we carry the potential for racism for darwinian reasons

this is a little different right it is so I'm about to become very Politically Incorrect yeah I know it is not possible for male genes to gang up on female teens because all of our genes spend half their time in male bodies and half their time and female body which does not mean civilization is fair with respect to sex and gender but it does mean that there's no biological basis for the evolution of a patriarchal force that subordinates women because whatever the patriarchy does those who are part of the patriarchy become female in the next iteration and they suffer the consequences of it this is not the case with race unfortunately this is not a good thing but it is a true thing

in a darwinian sense one population can gang up on another population and it just happened again and again and explains all of the worst chapters in human history and so in some sense what I'm getting at is that you want to understand that process and once you understand what your genes are actually up to and you understand that your jeans their objectives in the universe are not defensible what your jeans want cannot be defended in in rational terms then we become free to do something else to recognize that our genes are up to things that we don't have any reason to honor and we can we can basically take them out of the control position but if we imagine that what are genes that are up to must be all right and therefore it can't include anything like racism then we're just stuck then we don't have the tools to to diffuse racism

to one of the things that happened when I made my video so year ago complaining about Bill c16 in Canada and that was the one that instantiated transgender-rights one of the things I was pointing to my like my comment had nothing to do with transgender rights but one of the things I was pointing to that was the Canada had built into the law of social constructionist version of human identity and that's actually the case so for example now in Canada here's a proposition which now has the force of law

there is no causal connection between biological sex gender identity gender expression and sexual proclivity technically it's illegal to make a claim that those things are cause we linked the cause a link claim is a biological claim and not only is his biological claim it's a factual claim those four levels are so tightly linked Causley that there's hardly any exceptions there are exceptions so because every almost everyone who's biological Sexes male considers themselves male manifest themselves as male and is heterosexual so they're late and the reason they're linked this while there's biological and cultural reasons but it's now in Canada the proposition that their independent is now a law and I don't want to do that you don't understand social constructionism into the law that means that now it's illegal to be a biologist while than everybody said oh no no no no that's not happening it's like don't kid yourself when you put things in the law things have

we were excused not only of being Nazis and that was part of the reason that the this this talk was shut down but also of being biological essentialists and biological essentialism is the new buzzword for for Nazi essentially so I have to pack to go please I want to correct you it's not that it's illegal to be a biologist it's just illegal to be any good at it that's even more effective I would so is there a is there concern that putting biology as fact

maybe it will get in the way of civilization because we're supposed to be moving past all of these issues we're supposed to be moving past these things as we evolved we're supposed to be looking people as being free to choose whatever gender they like free to choose whatever sexual orientation they like free to express themselves in any way and that by defining them buy purely biological terms were essentially relying on the meat wagon to lead us through civilization rather than the mind that's great against biological essentialism because it can deteriorate into something like Eugenics there's a real danger or like a political Danger on the side of a biological determinism danger in denying it as well because then we can't use our rational Minds that truly mitigate whatever issues that we would have with our biological urges and that that's the irony of this but actually

Anthony made that we need freedom from our biology us and we have the capacity to do it most creatures wouldn't put through human beings are constructed we absolutely have the ability to be rational about these things and decide which things we want to bring into the future but we can't do it if we don't discuss these things in our biological for them at 2 years of age and are the kids if you put a bunch of two-year-olds together there's a small subset they're almost all males but 5% of males who will kick hit bite and steel okay so that's their biological programming website but the vast majority of them are socialized by the time they're four years old so they let me about boys like that is that if you socialize the property 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 then they can become

useful their courageous their fourth right there you know their there they're not going to back down from a challenge is all sorts of mass of utility in that and that's this proper interplay between the biological circuitry in the socializing but you know anything was with James D'Amore memo you know he was being accused of taking a biological essentialism route which is not true one of the things James said is look there is credible evidence that there are biologically media differences between men and women at the level of temperament and the interest that are actually large and profound and I would say

the science on that is sufficiently settled so that someone can come out and say that scientifically credible now that doesn't mean it's right because the scientist could be wrong but what you can say is that what James D'Amore said was scientifically on informed it was scientifically informed but he also said look let's make the Assumption I'm paraphrasing slightly but let's make the assumption that we want to as a society we want to extract maximum useful economic value from talented people so one of the things we want to do is have some of those people are women and some of them are men we want to understand the actual differences between women and men so that we can set up the workplace so that both women and men can contribute to the maximum economically so that they can benefit as individuals and everybody can benefit socially so you can use the biological for example one of the thing here's here's a biological problem on average women are more agreeable than men and I think that's because agreeable people are there self sacrificing and I think as a woman you need to be wired

maybe self-sacrificing or you won't be able to tolerate taking care of infants that's my sense of it okay now there's some problems with that it's like that say that a huge part of female wiring is is tilted in the direction of the necessity of self-sacrifice for infant care okay that doesn't equipment women very well for dealing with with aggressive Matt is aggressive men and infants are not the same creatures some women pet playoff pay a price Deep being optimized to some degree for infant care they pay a price that they're less what would you call prepared that's one way of thinking about it was dealing with Hyper aggressive and competitive Matt what one of the consequences of that is that agreeable people don't make as much money and the reason for that is to make money you actually have to be disagreeable because you have to go to your boss and say give me some bloody money or something you don't like will happen to you also have to be able to fight for an idea to but so there's something that this is a perfect test case so biologically speaking

there's a very good reason for certain kinds of wisdom to be bias in the direction of manifesting in females females because they have the capacity to have fewer Offspring in a lifetime than males are obligated as you say to I'm too care in a particular way and the fact that care and human beings take so many years has resulted in menopause emerging and menopause essentially when a woman is done producing the new Offspring her interests in her evolutionary interest which in this case I think are honorable become synonymous with the lineage the population because her Offspring will either do well or do poorly based on the population that they're in so women have a kind of farsightedness about lineage and I don't think it has anything to do with human women actually this is a trait that we can see in females of other species so it's an ancient thing where as males

High variance that is to say a male can have many offspring in a lifetime many males have no Offspring in lifetime and that high variance means that to the extent that there's wisdom that surrounds risk-taking that has traveled historically along the mail path not in modern times there's no reason that we can't look at these two kinds of wisdom and democratize them both

write the fact is there's no reason if you're born female that you can't tune into what has historically been mailed by us wisdom and take advantage of that and we should be encouraging us there's no reason that people have to continue that we can actually have a reasonable discussion about it because you know the discussion is off before installed by the claim that want men and women are exactly the same so I guess that's not helpful discussion and Tina wishing agreeableness issue I don't know exactly what should be done about that but one of the consequences of it is is that there's many reasons why why the pay their pay differential between men and women and the issue itself is very complex but we do know that agreeable people overall make less money in the same positions and it's because they don't negotiate on their own behalf very well now it's conceivable that you can have an intelligent public policy or Comfort policy discussion about what to do about that like maybe maybe the rule is something like you review mail salaries once a year and female salaries every 8 months or something like that

you don't have not saying that's a good idea I'm not saying that I'm saying that if you if you take the facts on the ground into account there are ways that you might be able to use them so that you could and I'm not going to say level the playing field because I think that's an appalling phrase but maximize the possibility of economic contribution across the gender switch is obviously in everyone's best interest but we're not going to do that when when someone like James D'Amore comes out he's no scientist in a while he has some scientific training but that wasn't his primary field of expertise he came out and did a pretty credible job of summarizing the literature he did it because he had been subject to mandatory diversity training and was asked to produce a response he didn't do it so it would go viral within the company and become public because he expressed his opinion let's say imperfectly he got fired it's like that's not good that's not that's not a good pathway stuff was being republish without citations that people were were publishing it without the sign

tific papers that were sort of affirming what it was some of the things that he was saying I couldn't make heads or tails of it until I saw his original version this because this is an unstable time where people's individual ethical choices in some circumstances will have it fixed far beyond the local it's like those journalist to jumped on the story did it either badly you know because they were incompetent or they did it maliciously. So now we could say let's say things go really badly in the next year well then each of those journalists might be able to sit at home and say hey I played a causal role in bringing about the state of murderous collapse because of my little ethical my ethical lapse when I was covering the James D'Amore memo you know because of my own laziness and it is logical rigidity I was willing to play fast and loose with the truth and now I played a major cause of rolling you know pushing a

listen to words of state of chaos but people have better be on their toes because we're in a situation that's radically unstable and so it's time it's it's a really good time for everybody to be very careful about what they write and say that about their motives for for tarring and Feathering the opposition that's another way of another thing that we have to be very careful about it's just very bizarre how quick people are to call someone a racist today I mean I've never seen anything like it in all my years it's it's a strange time you know I got into it yesterday just I got bored and I started trolling with Pepe the Frog I started putting up the Frog like with rainbow saying this seems like a frog that's really into gay rights like here's a frog that holding a lemon with a tart face like this is a frog that ate a lemon and he's reacting to it like how is the song racist like how is this like anyone just not like all these people that are creating this frog are coordinating anyone can make a meme with the Frog and like a lot of the original feels good man

cartoons of the guy created those are applicable to their their silly a lot of a really silly I think a lot of it wasn't intentional troll yes so I read a story about kekistan you know I was looking into a trying to figure out if it was really you know the Menace to humanity that everybody claims it is and the story was Preposterous it was a you know what it's a magical place where where anti-semites and Jews and atheist and religious people live in harmony which is like it's hard to even parse designed to cause your mind to throw an error I think this is an excellent thing to talk about because I've been because I've been let's say identified under any circumstances now with the all right I've been doing every bit of Investigation I can into its many manifestations it's a very confusing place it's certainly not an organized place and exactly what it is by no means obvious and then

sound issue is a good case in point because mostly that's that's like a satirical realm where where where are in some sense I got to let me give you an example I gave my father a cast and a flag about 3 weeks ago and three weeks ago and and he's like to do that and I got associated with the Frog and then in a major way and it is a crazy story I won't go into it but I wore a frog hat on one of my videos that an Indian Carver Native American Carver had given me and he told me that the Frog was in their culture a harbinger of environmental and stability because if the water is polluted it all the frogs died first so the frog is at is that the frog is the creature in their mythology that warns the society that things are out of kilter is the canary in the coalmine about things being unstable and I

because my voice sort of sounds like Kermit the Frog and it actually does so I'd be making jokes about that and so then I made this video with this frog hat and the Frog that my Carver friend made actually had red lips and then I made the video in as soon as I posted it people said that's Pepe and I thought I just smoked fainted literally cuz it never occurred to me that that was a connection so anyways I've been Tangled in with his frog thing in this most absolutely insane and surreal manner but I've been showing that got me into the kekistani thing and a lot of the people that I'm trying to address online are young man who are pushed I would say in a right-leaning Direction by the movement of the radical left alienating and then they're thinking well I'm certainly not that right well then what am I wrong maybe I'm the opposite of that what is the opposite of the radical left the alt-right better office it is there a different office at the people to flee to and that's what wealth partly that's what I'm trying to figure out but but does it have to be opposite couldn't just be different

she would people write like what you were talking about before when people just ramp up their positions to get more ideologically based in there doing it as a reaction to the other side instead of just being who they are instead of having some sort of a personal sovereignty they're literally reacting to the opposite side and changing who they are and I think this is part of the reason that they've become so popular I'm in fact I'm certain of it is that I've been trying to add jatate for the adoption of that personal responsibility as an alternative to political ideology it's like get your act together have the vision straighten out your life say what you think you know it stay away from the ideological idiocies and simplicit and oversimplifications and try to put yourself together because I think that I do 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 bio

I think that's our great discovery in the west it's not like other cultures haven't had that idea in nascent form but it's being hyper developed in the west and I think it's right and so we abandon that that that pathway of divine individuality and revert to idiot logical identification of race or sex we're going to tear each other apart and I think part of the reason we're motivated to do that show is because many people don't want to Bear the responsibility of developing themselves as individuals so they don't know shuffle off the responsibility and if that means that you know we're dancing in the streets because everything is on fire that will be just fine and that's another thing that's adding to the terrible danger that we're in right now so I think you're right and I think that personal auditing program that you you were a part of his gigantic and people look at it as being separate from all these issues that we're dealing with culturally but I don't think it is I think you're absolutely right and I think that there is a real lack of struggle and understanding of

struggle with a lot of people today not stirred necessarily struggle financially but I mean like physical struggle spiritual struggle understanding that you have to overcome difficult issues to really understand the true potential of your mind and your body and that's part of bearing the burden of being it's like being is a tragic State human being is a tragic state so you can shrink from that but if you shrink from that the suffering increases and intensifies and you become resentful in the Vista move forward courageously that's the dragon Motif right that's essentially and that is the pathway forward as far as I'm concerned you know you're talking about at the level of what is best for the individual but we also have a problem with just that these collectivist movements whether they are you know white nationalists on the right or

a social justice warriors on the left they cannot see forward and what is missing is that actually the mechanism that allows us to discover new ways involves individuals who are capable of thinking independently and if you have multiple individuals who think independently about related matters then they can pull that stuff but if what we do is we force everybody to sign up for the same things that we all agree or true there's no way of discovering what we don't yet know because every great idea starts with minority of one so we have to have the freedom to be the only person who believes something and then to compel others that it's somewhere in the right neighborhood and for others to pick up that mantle and so by step board meeting in free speech is becoming an ideological issue and increasing identified with but with the right and which is horrible it's horrifying but the right justification for free speech is what you just laid out which is better

order for the collective is is a group of what's already known by definition we inhabit the collective and that's what's already known what we can agree on but the problem with that is that what we can agree on once already known is insufficient news we still have problem so people have to be out at the fringes on the border between Chaos and Order where they discover new things and communicated back to the collective this is this is also at a deep evolutionary truth which is that all of the innovations that allow whether we're talking about one creature learning to do some new trick that gives rise to a bunch of species that do the same trick or whether we're talking about populations discovering a new way to live on Earth all of these things proceed from the French right the people at the center for home things are working best aren't going to be the ones to innovate the new way it's people for home things are not quite working that are going to innovate new ways and up that's also true for a population of frogs are birds are play

or whatever the ones that are not well situated are the ones where an experiment can pay off. Of success and some of its what you'd expect IQ is one of them a creative temperament is another but losing a parent before the age of 10 was a nice predictor people think about creativity as if it's all sweetness and light it's like nobody way man if you're going to be creative it's because your tormented by a problem right and so if you're not in the position to be tormented by a problem you're not going to put in the time and effort and take the risk necessarily necessary to be created so what do you know what I've been trying to understand the evolutionary landscape out of which are most fundamental religious convictions emerging the idea that it is by definition the individual that innovates and that by definition therefore it's the individual that's the savior of the collective it mean it's hard to it's hard to imagine how you could find a biological restate

essential Christian pre supposition that was more map 121 than that now you can say well that's not unique to Christianity I see the same thing in the Judean in the Jewish of antithesis between the prophetic tradition the prophet and the tradition cuz the profit is always the lone voice right that comes out it happens over and over in the Old Testament alone voice comes out and challenges the king and says look you know you're you're a blind Tyrant and nature is moving away from us and preparing her revenge and you better watch the hell out cuz you're violating the intrinsic moral norms and you're going to pay for it that happens over and over and maybe there are 50 of them and the one that gets recorded is the one that happened to be closest to write because that's the population that gets through the bottleneck and so you know what we have is sort of evolution offering these texts in a way that's something I believe to be true

I started because I'm interested in this idea of strengthening the individual way that's when I 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 TD logical conflict because you can make a case that there isn't theirs right and there's left and there's a war right but there is a third way and I think that is the way of the heroic individual and I mean that technically and that that involves the development of individual character so that you can say what it is that you think that you can eat articulate your experience properly and that you can bring what it is that's unique to you into the collective landscape and that's what updates the collective landscape it's absolutely vital and so I started doing these biblical lectures I have done 12 of them walking through Genesis and what I'm trying to do because I believe that the Bible is the documentation of the emergence of the idea of the Divine individual that's essentially what it is and we we we have a very uneasy relationship with that collection of texts now because they

we read them as if they're making claims about the object of nature of the world in those claims seem to be false from a scientific perspective I don't believe that those are the claims that were made to begin with so I think it's a non-starter but I've been trying to lecture about the stories in Genesis for example in a matter that makes them accessible to people who are my YouTube comments now that are calling themselves Christian atheist because they can understand they understand what it is I'm I'm describing this idea that emerged in the west that Consciousness is the mediator between Chaos and Order and the and the and the generating the phenomena of the generates experience and that and that you can think about that as as a as a Divine category of existence and I've been trying to delineate how

how the biblical stories lay out the pathway by which the Divine individual should manifest him or herself in time cuz that is what it is and I've been studying for example the abrahamic story which I didn't know well and the abrahamic story is a really interesting I mean Abraham was called by God and when Abraham was called by God he's old he's like one of these guys who's 40 years old and it stayed in his mother's basement that's that's Abraham it's a little late for Abraham to be getting the hell out there in the world and God basically says to him leave your family and your friends and your place of comfort and journey into the land of the stranger that's the Call to Adventure Time does that now he's chosen by God you think why everything goes well for Abraham that is what happens at all the first thing he had encounters is a famine and to escape that he flees into the tyranny of Egypt where they try to steal his wife it's like beware of being called by God you know you think it be all sweetness and light after that it's not that at all it's a very realistic story it's like get the hell out of

you're safe into what you don't know what are you going to find there while you're fortunate know you're going to find the catastrophes of life but if you keep yourself morally oriented that you make the right sacrifices which is the the abrahamic story to a tea then you can transcend the catastrophe of being and prevail mean it's who the hell doesn't want to hear that

so we're trading kind of close to the the argument you got into with Sam Harris about the nature of Truth and since I heard that I've been sort of itching to have this conversation with you because I think there's a way of viewing this that will actually perhaps reconcile the two points of view but there's a bitter pill that comes along with it so here's here's my argument

we tend to think of intellect has evolved it has as having evolved because knowing what's true gives you an advantage nothing that says that the literal truth is where Advantage lies and so I have a category but I called literally false metaphorically true these are ideas that aren't true in the factual sense but they are true enough that if you behave as if they were true you come out ahead of where you would be if you behave according to the fact that they're not true so let me give you a couple of trivial examples that won't be controversial

porcupines can throw their quills

it's not true however if you live near porcupines and you imagine that porcupines can throw their quills you'll give them some space if you don't you may realize that the cancer their quills get really close to one and it may we all around and nail you with a porcupine quill which can be extremely dangerous because they are microscopically designed to move in from where they puncture you overtime and they can puncture vital organ or you can get infection so the person who believes that a porcupine can throw their quills has an advantage that isn't predicated on the fact that this is actually a literal trip right now other one might be people say everything happens for a reason right unless you talking about physics of the reason everything doesn't happen for a reason however if you are the kind of person who believes that everything happens for a reason and then some terrible tragedy befalls you you may be on the lookout but what's the reason that this happened maybe it's supposed to open some opportunity and you won't miss that opportunity the waist

America was preoccupied with their Misfortune would so

literal false Ness but metaphorical truth is actually I would argue the category under which religious truth evolves not a problem the bitter pill that I mentioned is that I've heard you say that the truth is that are captured in the the religious version of things are basically like you know there's an individual truth in the myth of truth of your family and there's a truth of the population that you're living in and these things are all encoded in these these doctrines which is true and you would expect it to be because the doctors are carried along in the population the problem is what I hear you arguing and you tell me if I have it wrong is that we should therefore expect the encoded metaphorical true the sunnis religious Traditions to be morally right

but there's nothing that actually says it will be morally right because there are metaphorical truth that might in fact be reprehensible. None the less effective

and so what I would argue the overarching 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 not literal scientific truth Norwest up there their purpose what isn't true is that those things are inherently up-to-date and that. I mean first of all the first thing about that is that a discussion like that and this is also what happened with Sam Harris takes me to the very limits of my intellectual ability and so even discussing it I'm going to make all sorts of mistakes because because it's treacherous territory but I would say my understanding of the great myths has that observation built into it so one of the archetypes is that of the of the tyrannical Father which is the archetype by the way that possesses the minds of people who accuse Western Society of being patriarchal they're possessed by a c

archetype in that's the archetype of the tyrannical father they don't see that there's a tyrannical father and a wise King because there is that's that's you can't even point that out but anyways

in the in the old and some of our old stories there's a representation of the Dead past so let me give you an example that everyone knows about

the story of Pinocchio is the story of the individualization of Pinocchio he starts out as a pop but he's a marionette he's a wooden head he's a liar and he's pulled by forces that he does not understand right okay so I'm so he's got a good and Japan a wishes that he becomes a real individual and so and he knows it that's impossible but she ate wishes on a star that his son could become an actual individual knowing full well that that's unlikely it impossible for Geppetto's a good King so but the story is also about Geppetto because what happens is that when Geppetto loses Pinocchio loses his son which way you can think about is the active Dynamic attentive force of Youth then he ends up stultified in the belly of a whale which is the symbol of chaos at the bottom of the ocean and then snoke you have to rescue him so I would say there is an instantiation of evolutionarily accumulated wisdom in the great stories of the past but they're still dead

and it requires the union this is why in Christian theology the God has tripartite structure this is part of the reason there's God the father but the father's dead the father was right a hundred years ago or a thousand years ago and it still partly right but he's dead he can't participate in the updating of the process so you need an active Force now the active force is the same thing that generated those stories across time right so it's it's the same thing except it's also live in the present and show your moral duty in this is another thing that happened to Pinocchio's to rescue your dead father from the belly of the whale and that's partly what I'm trying to do with these biblical electric because your objection is correct the reason it's correct is because even if the solution was correct the landscape has changed and it's changed incrementally or in a revolutionary way we don't know and so those old truths are at best partial and at worst blind but that doesn't mean you can just say like Mike Malta during the cultural revolution

well let's just destroy the past it's like no that would be like saying well you don't need to bother you anymore because your body is the collected wisdom of The evolutionary process across three and a half billion years I absolutely agree because the stories are not literal it's impossible to know whether they lost not impossible but very difficult to know whether or not the truth that is contained metaphorically is still relevant if it's been inverted and it's now absolutely or Carl Jung talked about this a lot and your moral duty is to realize the archetype in the in the confines of your own life until you say well there's an archetype of perfection that provides the Westin for the for the sake of argument I'm going to call that Christ the Christ Image it's something like that that's the archetypal image know we have a story about what Christ historical life was like well well well you can have that life because you would have had to be in the Middle East 2000 years ago that's not your life but what you can do is take that

and you can manifest it was within the confines of your own life and what that does is

force you to undergo the difficult process of updating the ancient wisdom and you don't just forgo it you can't or you can but you'll pay a massive price and part of that'll be social disintegration because it's it's the the past is alive enough so that those of us who would have it it's corpse aren't clawing each other to death while we're feeding right that's the critical issue now it's not alive enough because the bloody thing to fall apart at any moment and we need to be awake and alert in order to keep it updated and maintained well not only that but the greatest hazards to us in the present are only partially going to be dealt with in this text and that's that's my biggest concern is that you know if we take you no Dawkins dismissing religion is mind virus this is very dangerous because it neglects the truth that you're talking about and it prevents us from getting to a conversation in which we can talk about the fact that really just text religions are not

mine viruses their adaptations to past environments they do contain the kind of truth that isn't necessarily literal and it's in general not literal but none of them know ancient religion is up-to-date for Google's algorithms being the hazard to civilization that it probably is we need to figure out how to navigate where the ancestral wisdom is simply not up to the current how to find out slightly cuz I think it's true and not true the stories are the Ronis in detail and write in pattern so for example there's an idea that one of the things that the mythological hero does is stand up against the tyranny of the state you don't have to specify the nature of the tyranny of the state in order for that to be a truth it's applicable across different context and I would say what's happened with the great religious messages that they they operated level of abstraction

such that the the abstract entities are applicable in every single environment I don't know give 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 every single environment for every person and so the domain of ordered I can describe it technically you're in the domain of order when your actions produce the results you desire

and you're in the domain of chaos when they don't and then and then I could say well your task is to straddle the border between those two domains because you don't always want to be where everything that you're doing is working cuz you don't learn 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 point and the Dallas do that very nicely cuz they have a chaos order conceptualization of the of the phenomenological landscape and their claim is the point of Maximum proper being is right at the center of the border between Chaos and Order and I think that's true across context so I don't think that truth ages

some of them don't know but the question really is one of at what point is there so much Legacy code that the taking the package is more harmful than it is beneficial and at what point are in a if God were riding today I'm pretty convinced the first commandment would be thou shalt not enriched uranium it would make sense is the number one commandment it's not there because you're any of them wasn't a concept at the point that the thing was written or was the habit of enriching it obvious and so the fact that it isn't mentioned tends to be emphasized it as a risk and so I guess the question is is it possible is it possible that by recognizing that these Traditions carry huge amounts of ancestral wisdom forward but that wisdom is certain to be so incomplete that it doesn't address modern questions

that we can be liberated to move forward and to honor those traditions for bringing us here but to recognize that we actually have to move forward with something more potent than up to date which is not not easy because you can't just take the scientific truth of the moment and Implement a lot of it isn't even right until some of these Fairytales that people are trying to rewrite in modern times are perhaps 15000 years old in people take while we can just update that so that the modern version will be better it turns out that that's very very difficult and there's another I'm going to play Devil's Advocate against my own position here no cuz I say well the religious texting code for filing and evolutionarily determine traits that are Universal okay which religious texts you might say well but then that means that obscures the important differences between the traditions and I'm by no means certain that all of them do

you know so I'm going to stick my neck way the hell out because why not it isn't obvious to me that Islam does because it's very difficult for me to see that the totalizing nature of Islam doesn't make it unique among religions so now good so well there's that out on the table if you don't mind but isn't the issue using the word truth cuz we can say true we could use tradition and Wiz and we're okay but as soon as we start saying truth then then we run into problems I mean in in even when you're talking about porcupines will you talk about what would you say metaphorical Truth Versus look it's not true it's real simple just don't go near the porcupine teach the kid did not go near the porcupine because porcupine quills are dangerous they get stuck in you the really dangerous can they throw it at you know they cannot but just stay clear of them because you don't want them to somehow another get in touch with your body is no truth in that they can throw their quills at you you benefit from being particularly aware of the dangers of there

but if you tell a kid that they can throw their quills and so therefore the kid stays clear of them has a faulty assumption in his head you're lying to them for their own protection and I wouldn't I wouldn't do it the question is could be set of everything happens for a reason well here's a problem we don't know if everything happens for a reason maybe when you die you go to some auditing room and they go well you know it's all just a part of some gigantic algorithm that you're impossible it's impossible for you to understand Duty Limited processing power of the human brain you're dealing with some Simeon sort of complex geometry that's really just designed keep your body moving and keep you alive and spread your genetic so that you can eventually evolve to the point when you're a God person I have kids I would ride on the truth though because the question is why do people tell you that a porcupine throw its quills I don't know they do right

weather like right and so all I'm saying is that actually that is likely to be the product of selection in other words that those people who had encoded that they do throw their quills have an advantage it's not the way I would do it in for exactly the reason that you point out which is if you give a child the wrong model of a porcupine I don't know whether a porcupine is liable to be the gateway to some more important question but if it were you just stared the kid wrong so something in this is a really big problem what you described in the first is the terminology of Truth Now Paris is claim with regards to my utilization of Truth was that I was absconding with the definition of Truth and then false matter but he was wrong because the idea of Truth is much older than the idea of objective truth and the original notion of Truth wasn't objective true it was like The Arrow flies straight and true

something like reliably reliably on its way to the appropriate destination something like that and when Christ said I am the truth and the way but I can't remember light of it yes yes the truth he was talking about wasn't an objective truth so Sam's idea that I had somehow you know taken the idea of Truth it was actually objective all along and done something crooked with it is just wrong it's wrong will the show truth can have multiple definitions to me there's two kinds of Truth and they maybe they may become answer you may be able to stack them on top of one another but now and then they dissociate and then this is actually what what what Brett was referring to as well so

so in this is where it gets so complicated that I can barely manage it there's a there's the truth that manifest itself in the manner in which you act and there's the truth that manifest itself as a representation of the objective world and sometimes both those traits are stacked on top of each other and sometimes they're not so like I could give you a piece of wisdom that would work well if you acted it out that carried within a 10 accurate representation of part of the objective world and you could say well maybe that's exactly the case with the biblical story because if you read them as science they don't read well so Atlas take malaria as a good example malaria the root of the word is malaria bad are right malaria is not transmitted by bad are transmitted by mosquitoes that live in places where you might think the air is bad so the point is it's part of the way there

and because we started to talk about pragmatism but there's also something like the truth of a description and the truth of a tool and my sense is that people's fundamental truths are tool like we use them to function properly in the world and you could say Wella a sharp axe is more true than a dull Axe and actually you can use the word true in that sense that actually isn't appropriate appropriate use of the word there there are two truths and there are objective factories now and in the optimal circumstance those map onto each other but we're not smart enough often to make the map onto each other because we just don't know enough and there are lots of truth that we have that portrayed the objective World improperly that are still true is this a problem using the term true when sometimes you should use the term fact flight likes 1 + 1 is 2 that is a fact 1 + 1 is 2 is also true you throw some water on a match that is and it will go out that's a fact

as I see it at least there is this overarching truth the one that Sam Harris was pointing to the one I think you're pointing to also and the one I'm imagining we all subscribe to right there is a testable truth that reveals itself in the laboratory weren't careful experiment in the field and that really is the top-level truth but then there are the true that you can't speak yet so let's take the word felt from from the Old Testament filled mean shit right you're not supposed to shit in Camp because God finds a defensive

now the problem is the germ theory of disease doesn't come about for thousands of years after that truth was written that truth keeps you from infecting people long before you can ever explain that there are microbes that grow in human shit that are particular danger to your population so the point is would you rather be held back to the place where you can actually describe the the literal underpinnings of what's going on or do you want to be liberated to say something that actually results in an improvement in health before literally thousands of years before anybody had any idea that it was microbes at the root of this operation of that would be something like human beings needed to figure out how to act without dying before they could understand the nature of the world well enough to justify the right and some crazy now that we do have the germ theory of disease to to amplify that original rude version of the truth or that crude approximation

what you need to believe in order to behave safely there's no reason for that truth to to be promoted in fact you don't hear people describing this part of the Old Testament dietary restrictions were in the Old Testament as well shellfish with red tide eating pigs trichinosis there's a lot of thought of issues that go along with that some intermingling perhaps of hygienic concerns with also the desire for the groups to distinguish themselves from other groups right cuz you can you can you night your group quite tightly by dietary restrictions so I'm back to your point about terminology you know we could we could do something like fact and wisdom

it always say truth that's the overarching category and then that divides into fact and wisdom and what you want optimally is you want the fax and the wisdom to be 1:01 to 1 but often they're not and if you find wisdom where the facts aren't laid right out you don't just get to throw away the wisdom which is what I think happened in the case of people like Dawkins and Harris & Harris makes another sleight of hand move which I don't like which is the he thinks so let's say except for just a second the wisdom fact distinction he would say well the fact is the thing and the wisdom is a second or two derivation of that you can ground wisdom in the fact that I don't believe that and I don't think that he has any I don't think that he has any real justification for that claim I'm just did something I never do know how to act

well that's not necessarily in your best interest and then there's ways to acted within the the interest of all the people around you been made might not serve you that well what is where ethics, the consequences are some number of generation Shore mapping fact on to action is simple if we just got the fax right but but it's the week is part of his argument and we never ever got to that for a variety of reasons but part of the reason it's week is okay well there's like an infinite number of fact man which so let's say you're standing in front of a field and you're looking at the field the field does not tell you how to walk through it there's a million ways through the field and no matter how many facts about the field you aggregate you're not going to be able to determine an appropriate path by aggregating those fat so it's that stand that that's a problem that I don't think Sam is willing to take seriously

well I think there are two problems tangled up here one of them is there's a question of is one individual supposed to have all of the facts and navigate based on on that sort of the rationality community version of things or does you know the Practical truth is we can't all be experts in everything and so we have to go along with you no guides to our behavior that are approximate and that's inherent and then there's a question about civilization civilization should be guided by our best understanding of what's actually true but with an understanding that we don't have a complete map of a lot of stuff and so I think what you're pointing at is that there is wisdom that has been handed to us that is not such that we can just simply say oh here's the Nugget at the center of it and we need to preserve that thing because we don't necessarily know what it's doing which is you know that's this is dangerous because some of what it's doing may not be acceptable

let's look at the wisdom into things for a minute and you talk to you but loaded a little earlier to like a duration Cent and and about the fact that these reiterated across time and it's something that works now might fail Dreadful in a month or two months so so here's here's what something has to be like to be wise let's say well first of all let's say it would be good if it was a new coordinate with the fax but will leave that aside for now

it has to work if you operate according to the wisdom principal whatever it is it has to work in the world

but then it has to work in the world that allows you to maintain your relationships with people in the world right so it so it's all the sudden this wisdom thing is something that's not only constrained by let's call it a object of reality but constrained by the necessity of a social contract a functional social contract so you're only able to you're only allowed to put forward actions in the world that would be a benefit to you if they symbol taneously don't undermine the structure within which you live okay and then there's a game theory element to that which is well if it's wise then it works in the world so bad be the constraint objective reality but then it works for you now and the youth it'll be in the week and they use it'll be in in a month and it works for you and your family and it works for you and your family on society and it works in a way that those things all line up to be iterated across time this this is actually the also the solution is funny I really like to hear what you think about this I think this is the solution to the postmodern conundrum because the postmodernist bless their heart so will give the Dead

his do say well the problem is there's an infinite number of interpretations of a finite set of facts and the right response to that is

oh oh that's true that's true that's not good and that's why the postmodern to say will you can't agree on a canonical interpretation of great piece of literature because the number of potential interpretations are in Senate and so then they say but why should we settle on anyone interpretation then why should we privileged one over another and then they say well that's all power gate and so that's a big deal it's a big deal I think is this idea of of ethical constraints it's like yes there's a landscape of potentially infinite interpretations but hardly any of them will work in the real world and hardly any of them will work in the real world in a way that doesn't get you killed by other people or Doom you because of your own stupidity to failure across time and so the landscape of interpretation is almost infinite but the landscape of applicable interpretation functional interpretation is unbelievably can straight and I think that constrain system is what we regard as ethics it's something like that

well at some level stories continue through time for a reason you know good stories continue for a long in of the Odyssey is with us for some reason and we so there is a scientific reason or scientific investigative whole reason why the Odyssey has been terrible we may not know it but it's in principle of the question you could investigate I'm so I guess at the end of the day the problem with the postmodernist is that they have a point the point is perception gets in the way of anything we wish to do objectively but that point only takes you so far and far as I can tell because what happens with the postmodernist as they say there's an infinite number of interpretations and then the human part of me goes okay well what am I supposed to do next then since there's an infinite number of choices and the postmodern it says well my theory can account for that and then they say well back to Marxism and so that's why I think there's this Unholy alliance between the postmodernist in the new Marxist

because post-modernism is a is a dead end from the perspective of applicable wisdom that leaves you breathless and nihilistic and that's not good because people can't exist without a purpose and so they sneak the Marxism through the back door and jump into this power landscape for the reasons that we discussed earlier so you really think that it's because of an infinite number of possibilities interpreting things because I've always felt that it was really just a response to capitalism the daily dick today for the capitalism is a very negative aspect of our culture and society and if there's got to be some sort of an alternative Marxism is a clearly defined alternative that other people have subscribed to in the past you could point to it it's a structure that's already already set up and it's romanticized and I think they adopted for that reason because it has a socialist aspects attached to it and they looked at socialism as it's some sort of a thing that it regards equality and you know it's some sort of an egalitarian approach

okay so we have to take two things apart we have to take Marxism / neo-marxist is Marxism and postmodernism apart so we could do that historically and I would say that although there is a reason for post-modernism which is the reason we just discussed that the landscape of incident landscape of interpretation problem it's a real problem if you look at it historically post-modernism actually grew out of Marxism and so what what happened is that the marxists laid out there they're their theory about the human social environment being composed of a power struggle between the privileged in the underprivileged write the rich and the poor and run it and its initial phases and that's a story that's partially true and it's got a lot of Motive Power like it the motor power is the Romantic Motive Power that you just described I get to be on the side of the oppressed I can be a warrior for what's right there's the resentment element which is that son of a bitch has more than me so let's cut him off at the knees which Madden

stupid self brutally in the Soviet Union and then there's the ideological totality issue which gives people a sense of security that took a vicious hit by the late 1960s because the murderousness of Marxism I've been clearly laid-out is a doctor and that open the door to this move by by mostly French intellectuals to to develop the postmodern philosophy which has these advantages which we describe but also to use that as a a screening tactic for allowing Marxism to transform into identity politics and so it's hard to disentangle all the motivations they're going on in there but there's something about it that it's truly intellectually pathological because you don't get to be a postmodernist and a Marxist you actually technically cannot be both of those things at the same time and the fact that most people are both of those things at it at the same time raises the Spectre of just exactly what their motivation is and then I would say it's this resentment driven anti-capitalist

there's reasons to criticize capitalism obviously but it's his underground resentment driven anti-capitalism that I think is one of the fundamental motivate if I can if I can add a couple things the risk of alienating my last few friends with Marxism is a there's a lot in Marx critique of capitalism that's actually right and so that kind of gets you through the door once you start looking at the analysis and then there's the prescription which is toxic but it's not obvious why it's toxic in other words it's a pretty good story that doesn't happen to function and so people gravitate to it because the story is moderately compelling it's not game theoretically functional or stable or viable and it does descend into this kind of you know inevitable grade violence and so we know that now historically it's not just a theoretical issue

now seen enough of it to know that as a fact but none the less the fact that there are people telling the story to kids who don't yet know what to do with something that sounds like it might be true it is very dangerous if you don't mind break it down as to why goes bad well I mean it's sort of a tired critique but I happen to think it's about right which is did it just does not take account of what a human being is and what makes Society function spoken like a true fascist biologically said that wasn't very nice. I think it might be related back to that little bit so here's a problem this is the problem that seems to emerge as the function of some really fundamental force that we don't quite understand and that's this phenomena that I've been referring to

is the Pareto distribution okay so here's the situation if you look at any creative Endeavor that human beings engage it so that would be an Endeavor where does variability an individual production it doesn't matter what it is here's what happens people compete to produce whatever that is and almost everybody produces zero they lose completely a small minority are a tiny bit successful and a hyper minority are insanely successful and so the burrito distribution in the printer distribution is it is the what geometric graph representation of that phenomena and so here's how it manifests itself

if you have 10,000 people a hundred of them have half the money so the rule is the square root of the number of people under consideration have half of whatever it is that's under consideration so this works everywhere so if you took a hundred classical composers 10 of them produce half the music that's played and then if you take the 10 composers and you take a thousand of their songs 30 of those songs which is the square root of 1000 roughly speaking are played 50% of the time its underlying natural law which is its expressed as the Matthew principle which is from a new testament statement the statement is to those who have everything more will be given and from those who have nothing everything will be taken it's a vicious statement but it's actually his one of those places where it's actually empirically true this happens everywhere and so what marks observe was the capital tended to accumulate in the hands of fewer and fewer people and he said that's a flaw of the capitalist system that's wrong it's not a flaw of the capitalist system it is

feature of every single system of production that we know of no matter who set it up and how it operates and so now we have a problem because what happens is as soon as you setup a domain of production and you need to because you need things to be produced then you instantly produce a competition and the spoils go disproportionately to a tiny percentage of people so then well so the rest of the people starve or the system becomes unstable because everybody's mad it's like that's a big problem he's so how did human beings fix that or the first thing we did was diversify the number of productive games it so you don't get to be NBA basketball star but you know you can run a podcast it's a completely different competitive landscape so we can fractionate the the production landscape and then people who aren't successful than one domain might be successful in others that's creepy human creativity we're really good at that but the problem with that is you can still get a positive correlation among the successful people and also because you're so sexy

for example with your podcast in your YouTube videos your connection network is insane insanely powerful right so you still have this tendency for what's useful in good to be

what distributed let's call it in equitably and its history its got the power of a physical law in fact there are people they call themselves Econo physicists no one knows that there's a field leak on a physicist econophysics and they use the same mathematical equations that

represent the propagation of molecules into a gas molecules into a vacuum to describe the manner in which money distributes itself in an economy okay so marks pointed to a fundamental issue but he said well that's her fault with capitalism if I know it isn't it something way more pernicious than that and it said something like well when one good thing happens to you it makes you look more powerful and attractive and so that fractionally increases the possibility that another good thing will happen to you and then spirals out of control and you get people who have they have all the money or they have all the podcast download you're in that position know what is it 1.2 billion like what the hell

but it's to those who have more and it's not because there's something oppressive about you it's because you you rode the wave of the parade of distribution in it in it it it true you away that way the hell up into the stratosphere we don't know what to do about that but should you be sharing your podcast views with the with the oppressed and downtrodden can you while you got a few billion you could spread the damn things around it's not fair that you're the only one that's being listened to 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 a power you could call it Authority or call but it is not a different argument because no one's asking anyone to download anything in specific no one's no one's compelling anyone to download anything specific you could download whatever you want and if you put more effort and more time and more focus and do your work whatever it would be whether it's a podcaster your YouTube videos or whatever people enjoy it they gravitated towards it and then over time it exponentially increases the amount of people that are exposed to all this is why I think that the

didn't this is the other problem with the Marxist perspective is that and the post-modernism particular like they conflate power confidence and Authority unfairly now your point it's to the point of free marketers who sang look all I'm doing is offering a product and not compelling anyone it's a quality product or at least as far as the market is concerned it is if it turns out that everyone wants that well what's wrong with that I'm not disagreeing with that argument in the least but but it's the problem is it doesn't it doesn't fix the problem like the problem with money let's say the problem is is that if you let him monetary system run all the money ends up in the hands of a very few of a very small number of people and you're saying is also that maximize potential output or maximize the amount of successful people you got to figure out what's don't concentrate on what people are doing right concentrator and what people are doing wrong

what what what are the people doing wrong that are failing weather in any creative what made people successful in one of the things that makes people successful is they specified Target and then they matted

right cuz if you're all over the place but we do know that in relatively functional Society like ours we know what predict success IQ and conscientiousness are the biggest predictors of success now there's a genetic Lottery thing going on there that's kind of rough but it does say that smart people who work hard or just proportionately likely to succeed and then you might also say what you want to remove the impediment from people who have those capabilities so that they can move forward and one one of the predictors of success as well is to decide what your success is going to be in in work hard in that direction and not actually works so I think that is it a very useful thing to do and that's what like I said that's partly why we've been working in that direction so but it does other problems it doesn't still still doesn't solve like one of them is

if you don't have any money

it's really hard to get some like once you have some it's not too hard to get some more but if you're at 0 she's this man you're in this year in the reverse situation where you don't have anything no one wants to talk to you you can't get out of it because you're too poor to get out of it you know you're penalized by the economic system because you can't even afford to start playing the game you're stuck at 0 you stuck at 0 you can't get out and the Revolutionary types you know they go to the people who were stuck at 0 and they say hey you're stuck at 0 why do you burn the whole goddamn thing to the ground because maybe in the next iteration you won't be stuck at 0 & 4 young man that's a hell of a call because they're already let's call them Expendable biological 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 I'm stuck at 0 well I'd rather be with the Romantic is burning the whole thing to the ground then to just you know to stay locked in my T-Mobile position that 0 is where

amounts of creativity come from because of that struggle massive amounts of innovation massive amounts of people who have who have visions because you're not living off of some sort of trust fund you know you you have real risk in real danger and you have a real concern about your future where is someone who has no concerns whatsoever and their future is carved in stone they can do whatever they want buy a new Ferrari every year that they're not going to have nearly the amount of motivation is to poor person only last 3 generations advantages of zero and one of the advantages there is that you're driven by brute necessity and that can really be motivated us and that's I think why why first the children of first-generation immigrants often do so well yeah you know they're driven by necessity and it's so

yes agreed however I would still say you know there's zero issue is there are levels of absolute privation that are so intense that all the Goodwill in the world won't get you out of zero right if you're living in a third world country and some very small village with no way out whatsoever that is the 00 year in Tanzania on the on the river people getting eaten by crocodiles in your village your fucked zero is like a magnet having a little very little maybe that motivational States actually generative really bazaars those people in that Village might be happier than the people live in a gated community in Beverly Hills so I wanted I wanted to come back to your point about about whether we should be concentrating on what you're doing right versus what you doing wrong

both of those will work and you should actually be doing both of them simultaneously you'll maximize faster but the real problem is that the system in which we concentrate on what you doing right and what you doing wrong and supposedly you get paid for some integration of those things is that we don't we don't understand what we are wired to produce evolutionarily right we think we all operate based on the idea that we're pursuing some state of happiness or satisfaction and you know we think we know what's going to get it for us and maybe it's inventing something and then you'll be happy but it's a trap the fact is what we are wired to do is to discover opportunities and then when we discover an opportunity of benefits the population that we come from and we turn that Discovery into either more mouths to feed or more consumption and we restore the state of privation

all right we restore the state in which people don't have enough and so if you really wanted to fix this problem if you wanted to address the problems of Communism thinks it's solving but fails to you have to engineer around this this feature of human beings where we pursue New Opportunities and as soon as we find a new opportunity instead of figuring out a way to stabilize the benefits so that it results in the stable sense of satisfaction for example we fall all over ourselves to turn it into more of the same because of course that's how we got here I'm sure so let's look at something like the imagine that an ancient farmer Nathan 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 utilizing somehow the farmer ends up either thinking of or discovering by watching somebody else a wheel

now that farmer has a technology that allows him or however many people are working that farm to produce that much more food with no more labor because the wheel allows you to transport more for example at one time so now that same piece of land can support more people because it can be more efficiently formed that could be stabilized as a kind of success in other words that you could turn the extra the Surplus into a kind of persistent luxury yeah luxury but I mean I don't even luxury is a little bit too trivial sounding you could turn it into a space where you use that to to investigate important stuff or you could turn it into more mouths to feed in which case as soon as you produce those extra miles that are now consuming the output of that farm now the level of you no fear of starvation is right back where it was and so so

call Money More Problems yeah I used to be that we produced more people now we produce a greater quest for consumption but if we were smart what we would do is we would think about the problem of how to take the games that come from not being bumped up at the limits of a system and turn them into what we value collected some of that I mean because we've done some of that because as

what do you say a rising tide lifts All Ships and they're certainly some truth in that the overall standard of living has gone up so stupendously since 1895 that it's an absolute Miracle so we've done some of that I'm so there's another issue back to Mark's let's see there's another issue that we have we can't contend with and one of those might be well imagine that in order for society to progress you have to allow the individual to compete in relatively untrammeled space so that they can innovate and then imagine that one of the consequences of that Innovation is that you get these prito distributions developing because the innovator Worth or the one who's second in line to the innovator whatever ends up with the with the bulk of the spoils so you might say there's a cost to be paid in in equality for innovation

and then you could also say walk too much inequality destabilizes things which seems to be quite quite clear so there's room for an intelligent conversation about that right because the left do you say too much time do you need to be Listen to Because the evidence is quite clear if you let the inequality ramp up enough the whole system destabilize it's because the people at the bottom think fuck it will just will just flip the system upside down no one wants that like right-wing conservatives don't want that so cuz you can make a republican argument say don't let the inequality in your neighborhood get out of hand because the crime rate will Skyrocket and the the empirical evidence on that is overwhelmingly strong inequality drives crime now you can say you can argue about why but the fact that it does that's not disputable so we can have an intelligent discussion between the left and the right and the discussion would go something like this you need any vacation you pay for Innovation with inequality

but you need to find any quality because if it's too intense than things destabilize like okay we can agree on that we got the parameters set now we have to now we have to start thinking very carefully through how to do the redistribution issue and we don't know how to do that so you might say what we have a guaranteed annual income for people which I think is a horrible Solution by the way but it did dresses the right problem the problem is is that we're hyperproductive but the spoils to those at the top and some of those resources need to be funneled down to the people who have zero so that they have an opportunity to at least get to the point where they can innovate until the bloody whole bloody thing doesn't wobble a fit and we could we can I would say in some sense that's what the political discussion is about but we we we get off into these radical oversimplifications which is something like well if you have more than another person you were an oppressor and you're evil and if you have less it's because you're virtuous and victimized and that's just a non-starter so Universal

I think I'm glad you well I think 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 some sense are beasts of burden and if they're not given if they're not provided with a place where they can accept social responsibility social individual responsibility in an honorable manner they degenerated die with that's the opiate crisis and West right now like men need man who are men don't need money they need function and we've got a problem one of the problems is for example here here's an ugly status I think I told you this once before it's illegal to induct anyone into the Armed Forces if they have an IQ of less than 83

and the reason for that is the the the Armed Forces despite having every reason to draw the contradictory conclusion has decided that there isn't a single thing that you can be trained to do in the military if you have an IQ of less than 83 that isn't positively counterproductive that's 10% of the population and we're producing a culture that's very cognitively complex like what the hell are you going to do if you can't use a computer because you can use a computer your least in the game if you can really use when you're hyper powerful if you're not literate enough to use a computer you're at 0

10% of the population the conservative say well there's a job for everyone if they just worked hard enough it's like no and increasingly no and the Liberals say what is basically the same thing you can train any want to do anything it's like no I want to go back to the inequality Point here because it if you look at this biologically actually I think it did reveals a lot why are we we we know from from careful study that people are motivated by the degree of an equality more than they are the the absolute level of well-being and there's a very good it's tragic but a very good evolutionary reason for the switch is if you are working on some piece of land and your neighbor has the adjacent piece of land and they're doing twice as well as you it's because they know something you don't write and so becoming focused on what they're doing that you're not doing is a rational thing to do to spend your time on so you can figure out

is the thing now that you don't in the modern environment this is a catastrophe because who are your neighbors well you've got some box sitting on the wall if your living room that has a totally artificial portrait of other people who may be much wealthier than you and it's broadcasting in as if you're looking in their window right in the adjacent house and so you thinkyou you've being triggered to the to think that you're doing something wrong that you might fix when in fact the solution may not be the first of all the person on the other side of that screen may not be for real but even if they are they're not living in the same environment to see if the technology is interfacing with the with our brains badly but so we have the perception of massive and equality economically we do have massive in a quality you're arguing that the solution to this involves some sort of massive redistributions but none-the-less redistribution is wildly on popular for various reasons and so what we've got now

is a situation

the speculative but what's really happening is that austerity is being used as a threat to keep people who would otherwise rebell against the inequality in line and my fear about this is that this is exactly the conditions that are going to trigger that

tribal population against population Mayhem that we were talking about at the beginning of this conversation that when people have the sense that the the burst of growth that they were experiencing is now over the natural response is to turn on those who are not as powerful and take their stuff that this is a totally indefensible but none-the-less biological pattern of history and that if we want to avoid that we have to stop sending the signals that trigger us to imagine that we've just run to the limit of the opportunity that we had discovered and it is now time to look and see who can't defend their position how we sending these signals well by basically failing to provide enough well-being that people's perception of the inequality is reduced to a tolerable level

equality of opportunity right because people are people are actually not as resentful about the success of others as you might expect their resentful about it if they feel that the game is fixed but they're also willing to consider the game long-term so lots of people who say look like I'm stuck at not zero I'm stuck at 1 but my kids might make it to 4 and that's good enough and that's being the American dream right in the nuts that's a really high power antidote to inequality it's like well yeah there's so many quality we need it to keep the generative mechanism going but the game is fair and you can play it too and there's some reasonable probability that either you or someone you love will be successful so that is so it has to be a straight game and that's why ethics is so important to keep this landscape stable people can't play crooked games and the rich be fixing the game if they want to hold on to their money and the problem is is that some of them although not all some of them are fixing the game and no one's happy about that and no wonder you knowing

I guess that was evidence to some degree by the 2008 collapse because it seemed

and and I'm just as uninformed as the next person so I'm I'm what I am I'm capable of commenting on this it seems from the outside that the rich disproportionately benefited from the restabilization of the economic system and people are not happy about that and they shouldn't be happy about that because it indicates that there's something fundamentally wrong about the game so you could say well maybe people can tolerate necessary inequality if the game isn't raped and so that's why everybody has to act in the matter that indicates that the game is rigged and that means they can't make it that's really what it means so we're also being driven into the Sydney quality corner by I would say by the postmodernists and the Neo Marxist because they say this is the pernicious thing they say well the reason that some people have more than others is because every hierarchies based on arbitrary power and they're all oppressors and the reason they have the money is because they stole it from you

and there's some truth in that because there are some criminals but when you get to the point where you fail to distinguish the productive people from the criminals which is exactly what happened in the 1920s in the Soviet Union you better watch out because when you radically make things egalitarian you're going to wipe out all your productive people and then you're going to starve and so that's that's one of the doom and scenarios that awaits us if this idiot process of polarization continues and what I find reprehensible about the universities and you're tangled up right up to your neck in this is that the universities are actively agitating to produce people who believe that all inequality is due to oppression and Power

and that's just first of all it's technically wrong but why

here's the problem no as far as I know nobody has properly study the question of what fraction of the economy is actually crooked went right not productive and I fear that the answer to that question is that it's an awful large fraction of the economy not because of some conspiracy but because his opportunity is finite but Khan games aren't and so anybody who can find a mechanism for transferring well from somebody else for doing nothing finds that mechanism in that thing is is ever-present where is discovering the next big thing that's actually productive is you know something that goes along it fits and starts and so if we were I mean really you've described very well we've got a battle between two characters of what's true right are there either the market is wonderful and it's producing great stuff with very little corruption

or everything that makes people on equal is the result of corrupt both of these things are wrong right markets are marvelous engines for figuring out how to do something really well they're brilliant this right and so people who see that fall in love with it understandably because they're so good at it but with their terrible at is telling you what you should want or what you should do right if people tell markets here's what we would like to accomplish and then the markets tell us will how do we accomplish that best that would be a very viable system that would not result in massive rent-seeking resulting and everybody feeling that all of their misfortunes are the result of a rigged game which is so massively rig that when they check they say yes that is actually large large large extent were suffering from what they want to throw the baby out with the bathwater and so they want to throw up markets entirely which you know is would be a terrible mistake

it's it it's it

you asked your why why this is happening at the University so like that I think it's one of these run away positive feedback processes you know the university start to tilt hard to the left in the 60s and that just went out of control and now we're at the point where

that's the dominant force and why is probably another manifestation of one of these prito principles it was like well at some point there's enough left he's hired so that the probability that they're only going to hire people equally as left or greater starts to reach 100% And then you a rate that across a couple of generations and you get no conservatives which is more or less the situation say in the humanities most of the social sciences and it sure looks like a conspiracy but it doesn't mean that anyone is there actually planning it although there are conscious attempts also to silence conservative voices let's say and then that's also driven by this postmodern ethos note Neo Marxist ethos I would say that says that all of the right the moral right is on the side of the left and no one so it's the combination of those two things there's more things I think I often think, clean it if you paid sociology professors three times as much the probability that they would be Auntie capitalist would decline precipitously like I think a lot of

striven sick cuz there's a lot of smart people in Academia and they're underpaid relative to their intelligence showing that doesn't make them happy so they get bitter and resentful about that God damn Bankers who are hauling in 20 million dollars a year and here I am hardly struggling but here I am struggling comparatively and that's the issue is comparatively on $100,000 a year $120,000 a year you know I look at that nice thing well whatever it doesn't matter but there's a like my colleagues are often angry with me because I do work with the business school it when I also have a business I'm not anti-capitalist in the least but I guess it's just dumbfounding to me cuz they'll come up to me and say why are you so sure that you should be working with the business school and I think what bloody Planet are you from two positive question like that all businessman or evil it's like really that's the level of your sophistication

come out and say that but they certainly question my motivations for example in in informing ties with the business school like what do they say about it they say exactly that they question my ethics about forming ties with the business school so maybe they don't give you any reasons for the reason supposed to be self-evident joke on the left looks let's not let's not character in an absolutely free market which is not what we have but we have something that ends in that direction an absolutely free market if you compete two individuals one of them is completely amoral will Embrace any opportunity if it makes a profit no matter what it is and the other individual has some limits to what they will do

well then there's no question who wins if we give this experiment a long enough. The individual who will do anything will outcompete the individual with moral limits because you cannot find out that you have no moral limits that they're going to remove themselves from your Market unfortunately not and now here's the Rhino it seems like that in a given round that's okay but to the extent that what you're saying is to the extent that people police they're purchasing and they will you know they will stop using Uber if Uber is ethically, well then the point is what what's the game the game is to figure out which things are being monitored and not do any of the unethical things that are being monitored but to do all of the unethical things that aren't being monitored and so the individual who is perceiving which things they can get away with has an advantage I don't even want to call it the psychopath advantage

what this is is that the market will train you to do this if it is unregulated and the best that the ethical eat that the ethically restrained person can do is compete Daddy they have no way of getting ahead because the person that is completely free they a moral business actor has the ability to do anything that the constrained actor has dismissed depend entirely upon what the battlefield is not really there's there's sort of one exception and that exception is people who have done something that has suddenly put them in a powerful position right so packed people right tech people who have skyrocketed as a result of having innovated the next big thing have not been through the markets training them to discover the the landscape of what isn't being monitored that you can make a profit that's one of the things about 10 people in general is that these gigantic

directions almost all Dean left well which I can't attack corporations lean left that's true on the other hand I mean I hate to say it but think about how Google started right don't don't be evil I think they actually meant that right and the thing is don't be evil is what it sounds like when you haven't been trained by the market to have to do whatever you have to do to beat your competition you've just come up with the great search engine and suddenly you're on top of the world but over time what happens that entity is not exposed to competition from a bunch of other entities that increasingly will find an advantage in being free or to do at ethically questionable stuff and so what it does is it forces and entity like Google to evolve in the direction of immorality so now don't be evil China

Google expanded to China and so you know they had to make a deal with the devil so to speak right and they will accept censorship they will find ways to rationalize everything because cannot rationalize that with their competitors can Avail themselves I would be to Parrish and so there was all sorts of fake Google going on just like they have fake Apple stores in China they don't have the same sort of copyright laws that we have and you can essentially plagiarize anything you want you also said that I shouldn't make a strong man of the anti-business argument of my peers and there's another way I should make a strong man of it like despite the fact that I'm not Andy capitalist I don't believe that every entity is a business either and one of the things that has happened to universities that has actually a pathologist in the number of Dimensions but they've also pathologize along the business to mention as the administrator just have become increasingly trained or drawn from the ranks of business managers because the University

actually not a business it's a like a church is in the business there are organizations that aren't businesses that you can't just cram into the free market structure willy-nilly and so my colleagues also object to the to the transformation of the University into a business entity run by profit-seeking mbas and they should have ejected out because that's not what the institution is for so there are reasons for them to be skeptical say of my association with the business school that aren't nearly a reflection of a simplistic Auntie capitalist ideology go there lots of there lots of things that are not have no immunity to contact with the market right what has happened to the university system is that 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 and well done in the market either write a journalism done in the market and sip telling you what you want to hear not what you need to know so anyway markets are wonderful but the certain things they shouldn't be allowed to

and there's certain things that they shouldn't do like tell us what to want right there not there's no magic principle by which a market knows what's healthy and what you know you might crayon shouldn't have so then brings us back to another part of the conservative liberal left dilemma which is well you know to direct the market memes to impose the heavy hand of the state and its potential pathologies on the market but to leave it alone completely means that it wanders randomly throughout through an indeterminate landscaping and I guess part of the issue there to is it sort of like well how do we how do we how do we properly balance for foresight and planning what you think would have some role in in the construction of large-scale States like what what do we want the landscape to look like how do we balance that with the other comprehensive computations that the market allows and of course the answer to that

we have political discussions about it all the time that are untrammeled so that we can adjust the ratio between those two things as necessary so again that's it that's an argument on the side of free speech really it couldn't be more important the real answer is that both failures are frightening right you really don't want a state nannying you and over regulating the market and taking the magic out of it and you don't want the completely unregulated landscape where the market you know starts probing the minds of your children and figuring out how to sell them things that they don't have any ability to resist right you need to figure out what that path is and it's not easy but that you can't do in a landscaper you can't talk about the questions in this brings us to censorship doesn't it because this is a real issue with the marketplace free ideas when you're talking about whether it's Google or YouTube or whoever might be imposing their own morality and their own ideas on what you should and should not be able to discuss

what should and should not be monetized you're essentially imposing these limits these is a very good point that freedom breeds in a quality because you're free to put as much effort as you'd like and do something and you're going to get any cool results and that if you are truly free in a free world some people are going to be far better than others and just based on their own input just based on their effort just based on the amount of focus and dedication to have it is very an equal and no I I know many people that are far more dedicated than other people that I know and they do better by the empirical literature intelligence and conscientiousness and what intelligence is probably something like the number of of credible operations that you can manifest in a given period of time it's something like speed that's not only that but it speeds a big part of it so

if what you're doing is working and you can do it faster that works better that's pretty damn straight forward and the next thing as well conscientiousness well conscientiousness would be something like how many of those cycles of effort are devoted to that specific tasks and it turns out that if there's a relationship between the effort and task success more effort is better but and so I can give you some indication of the power of that so if you have good measures of conscientiousness and IQ You can predict someone success in the competitive landscape with a correlation of about .6 and what that would mean is imagine that you tried to pick people you just said randomly you're going to be a success in the top half of the successful people saying you're going to be in the bottom half you have a 54 50% chance of making that selection correctly if you did it randomly

if you did it informed by the results of a good cognitive test and a conscientious test you'd be right 85% of the time she can say with 85% accurately accuracy which of two people would be more likely to be in the top 50% so it's a whopping effect and it's actually some validation for the essential Integrity of our system because we hope given that it's essentially an open meritocracy jetsmarter hard-working people would do better and they do no other factors apply corrupt lots of facts apply me for one thing wrapped up in IQ is a big question which is how much of the differences in IQ that exist is democratize of all that is to say how much of this is the result of environments that aren't enriching or there's lead in the water or who knows what vitamins right my sense actually my intuition based on what I know biologically is that a huge fraction maybe all of it but a huge fraction of differences and I

you is actually could be generalized and that's part of equal opportunity it's not an equal opportunity, that's partly because I mean maybe because I spend a lot of because I'm interested in the amelioration of difference is he don't so for example that's why I built this future authoring program it's like pee if we can figure out how to make people more effective as well let's do it so I scoured the literature on on IQ enhancement and it's bloody dismal man well if it's very very difficult to put together a cognitive training program like some things would have worked in a major way like the fact that people aren't starving has wiped out has moved the bottom of the IQ distribution way up over the last hundred years that's being like a walloping success but a lot of the things that we hope would work like headstarts a good example of that you know head start with part of the American war on poverty in the idea was you give you know

before they hit school and start training them cognitively earlier and the Hope was that you get a pretty little thing going where they be a little smarter in kindergarten and then they do a little better in grade one and that would make them do even more better in grade two more better do better than great too but what happened

what happened was that the kids who went to Head Start actually did get a cognitive jump on their competitors but all the other kids caught up by grade 6 and by grade 6 there was absolutely no effect whatsoever of the training program Headstart did have a couple of benefits one was fewer teenage pregnancies and fewer dropouts but that was probably because the kids who got into Head Start or either socialize better or the sum fraction of them were removed from for some time from extremely toxic environment just while they happen to be at Head Start but it didn't produce the cognitive improvements that everyone right and left for equally hoping for this is in some sense

it's a very much an uncontrolled expanded right because a head start starts late and be it doesn't insulate you from all of the stuff that comes along with growing up in in the deprived neighborhood in any way but they don't know what the truth is of of human IQ there are some results that suggest some things that are not hopeful on the other hand some of them just simply run afoul with the biological realities of intelligent manners a couple of things the first is that we may have already 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 has enough food everyone has access to the an infinite full of information so you can say even if you're in a deprived environment but you're smart. Intellectual landscape is wide open to know I'm not saying that's the case but you can make a case for that but the more dismaland of the of the biological research and I cute shows things like if you take identical twins at Birth and you put them in adopted out families that the IQ of the adopted out twins as much there it's much closer a to the original biological parents been to the adoptive parents and be almost perfectly correlated with one another and that correlation increases as the separated Twins age so let's say you had a twin you were both adopted out if we test your IQ is it for their fairly close there closer to your biological parents than your adoptive parents but then we test you every year until your 60 by the time you're 60 no matter how long you've been

it as as a an identical twin your IQ score is so much like your twins IQ score that it's as if the same person was being tested twice and that's a really complicated one because you think well as twins travel through the environment and a crew different experiences their IQs should diverge like obviously that's not what happens well there are a lot of places to critique that's one thing there aren't very many identical twins raised apart it's a small sample this is definitely true those identical twins raised apart carry with them whatever affects there were from before they were born for sure if they if they damaged by an environment that was unhealthy for their mother when she was pregnant and they would carry that's true and it would show up as as a similar IQ later in life so that one really wants to see that this is true on the positive side not just the negative side

I'm not saying that there's nothing to it I'm really saying I think we don't know it's a very early in this but what I can say and I think you know couple of the things that we've settled on in this conversation already are that a an environment in which we can say anything that we can advance any argument and tested it doesn't mean that that argument is protected but that any argument can be Advanced and then challenged that that is inherent to navigating and the other thing that I think we would agree on if the equality of opportunity is nothing but good with quality opportunity and I guess one thing I would add I don't know if we would have green on this but I'm you were talking about the fact that I forget which thing exactly but that a system based on Merit produces an equality because people will that's not necessarily a bad thing but it doesn't mean that we are obligated to her to ride it all the way down

write the fact is we could make people safe to fail right so that you are encouraged to attempt to do something highly valuable and if if it doesn't work out then the point is if you're not homeless argument for something like Universal basic income in care of your food your shelter and now you're free to pursue any ideas that you might have that you wouldn't ordinarily be settled down by your ear issues with food and and threat at least multi-variable problems and so I'm not claiming that this is true but its suggestive the rate of entrepreneurial activity in Canada is actually higher than in the United States and one reason for that appears to be the fact that if your 2527 let's say and you have a family you can quit your job and start a startup and you don't lose your health care

Wright and Sean you know the issue of universal health court is obviously a very thorny one and it's not like the Canadian system works perfectly but it doesn't work too badly and we've been able to manage it for about 50 or to know we have theirs theirs artificial scarcity in the system and the delay times are longer than they would be if you flew to the Mayo Clinic and bought your health care like I would say that at the high-end the American Healthcare System is better than the Canadian Healthcare System but I would say it at the middle and at the low in the Canadian Healthcare System is clearly preferable and it's also cheaper which is quite interesting is he would expect especially if you're a free-market type that know I know what the Health Care system in the u.s. is not precisely free market. It is more so than it is in Canada yet Americans pay substantially higher proportion of their overall devote up higher proportion of their overall GDP to personal Healthcare the Canadiens doing and then the stats of similar if you look at other

you know quasi socialize medical Meadows Oaks great piece on that by Adam ruins everything of you ever seen a television show that's really interesting Heatley breaks down pretty much a lot of different subjects bake breaks down the American Healthcare System to pretty much where it went wrong and I just encourage anybody to go watch it because it just shows how the elevator the price of all sorts of different things to make up for No Lack of profits and it's really it's really fascinating little piece we are already almost 3 hours into this so and we haven't talked about Hitler oh my God what we kind of had a guy that did kind of have but let me just do you want to lay out your argument about Hitler and then I respond to it and I don't know if I do want to I mean I think I actually think that I should stop because I'm kind of at the limits of I'm at the point where the probability that I will say something stupid is starting to increase and I would rather not

is just saying the things that I'm trying to say that aren't stupid is dangerous enough yes this isn't the topic where you want to make that kind of air gas right so it's funny that it's charged because as you point out we're pretty much all in agreement about it right I mean you know you find someone who's not in there instantly ostracize from society right anybody who has a argument about Genghis Khan I mean there's a really fascinating that take on this by Dan Carlin from Hardcore History we talked about the amount of time that has passed into the horrible trocity and that there are people that will argue that Genghis Khan killed 10% of the world's population change things so badly that it literally lower the carbon footprint of the human race while he was alive killed some Untold number of millions of people and was responsible for the desk people look it to him and they find all sorts of positive things to a tribute to his Reign opening up trade with China opening up trade routes are there all these deer

things that people have attributed to him and that someday someone may do the same thing about Adolf Hitler right now is impossible he certainly made that job very difficult with all of the documentation yet especially the films but but let's just say the argument that I want 11 I want to be really careful to do this so that it can't be misinterpreted by anybody

my argument from all those years ago and in my in my paper that I was dead for Bob papers that I mentioned at the beginning was that Hitler was a monster as we all know but he was a rational monster but the program that he deployed was not what he said mine what he said was wrong in many places especially where it gets near Darwinism it's just all tangled and broken but what he did was rational from the point of view of increasing the amount of resource that was dedicated to producing members of his population

and so my point is this is the danger that we are in if we allow ourselves to imagine that

genocide olympus's are more or less gone from the world because we've all assumed where we've all agreed that there a bad thing and the point is they existed in a latent program and it a point when you have austerity as a result of usually a an opportunity that has run its course and has resulted in the population growing to feel that opportunity and suddenly there's nowhere to go because the opportunities all been absorbed the tendency of people is to figure out who what other population is weak and if that population is across the border then there's some excuse for war and if the population is within the Border then it's a genocide but the point is that is an ever-present danger for us to this argument was sort of phrased as we have a disagreement about Hitler and I would like to point out that I don't actually disagree with anything that you just said I don't want to

I seen I don't want it to be seen that the fact that I'm disagreeing with you means that there is a disagreement means that it's a disagreement about any of that I think will the disagreement was something like I said that Hitler was even more evil than we thought he was and you I think correct me if I'm wrong you're pointing out the danger of assuming that you can put Hitler in a he was just a monster box and don't think about it anymore and I would say I agree absolutely with that I mean I've studied Hitler a lot and there's a bunch of things that you can't say about him you can't say he was stupid say he was without artistic talent you can't say that he was a poor organizer you can't say that he wasn't charismatic you can't say that he did wonders for equal Germany's economy in the first part of his Reign and and and so it's very necessary when you're if you're dealing intelligently with a true monster that you give the devil his due

yeah so I think the thing that I saw in your video was your argument was that has he was losing instead of putting the genocide on pause and a warning that he ratcheted up the jam yeah it does appear to me that that's what happened right and my my point would simply be and again there I couldn't possibly be less sympathetic with the individual my point is simply that from an evolutionary point of view if your objective is coldly to increase the number of genomes that are spelled the same way that yours are on Earth that a he did enslave those Jews who were most fit to work in service of the German war machine right that's what those camps are not all of the camps were work camps bed

example was supposed to work camp and a death camp and so there was this tendency to enslave and you have to make a pretty tenuous by a logical argument to say that there's evolutionary utility in increasing the number of your Kinsmen but unless they're very close but he was a slight variation of that you tell me what you think about this

is it reasonable to presume that a decent survival strategy is to homogenize your environment with regards to under some conditions to homogenize your your environment with regards to racial or ethnic differences to decrease the probability that you and yours are going to be killed oh yeah again no defensive this yes you are right that there's another population that's distinct that that population even if it is small and has little power now might not be small and have little power later and so undoubtedly that program is there to K okay but I would say the tendency to believe that Evolution only functions at the level of Ken when you're talking about very close relatives I believe is an error that if the result of the fact that evolutionists early on wished to operationalize Fitness and it's very hard to operationalize Fitness across population level differences and so they built the definition that is about

immediate Ken but there's no logical reason to imagine that that Peters out at the edge I'm so so all I did was go after a population inside his border that was more distantly related to the people who were his constituents and then he went obviously after Eastern Europe and sought the future of Germany in Russia and it took 12 million Russians to turn around the German war machine tomatoes are military deaths are vastly more civilian deaths but but the point is

he did not succeed in doing what he set out to do but he also didn't fail in the sense that he took a bunch of resources that belong to a population that was more distantly related and he got rid of those people and by getting rid of them increase the amount of resource that was available to Ariens this has nothing to do with jeans are not interested in figuring out which genes are superior all of the language about German superiority is nonsense however genes are very interested in there obviously teams they don't think but they act as if they are interested in replacing alternative spellings is to caution people against to alert people to the fact that the sorts of programs that Hitler both ran and elicited from people are lurking

in our let's say in our genome in our inner set of biological possibilities and we have to be very awake to that fact on an ongoing basis there lurking in our genes which does not mean that we as adults have this is a possibility many people will not go along with this other people have it lurking to be triggered and I think you know what worries me is that Trump I think very cynically utilize this lurking program in order to to gain office that he played upon the fact that certain people were waiting to hear those noises and what he said about Charlottesville you know again he did not

he did not go after the white nationalist the way did you see the response decino down of what Trump did and then essentially at the end they were saying he didn't go after I didn't Target us this is very good he was very clear that it was all sides and that he never wants targeted us didn't say anything bad about you didn't they said God bless Trump at the end of it because the Free Speech panel that I was a part of it was cancelled I had to make comments in the Canadian media about Charlottesville and so 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 truth is a tricky thing because you have to take the temporal context into account I would say you can imagine that there are white lies and black truths a black truth is when you use the truth in a way that isn't truthful just like a white lion when you use when you lie in the way that isn't harmful you can use the truth to wound in hurt and what that really means is that you've misuse the truth and so it's actually a complex form of lye but what what what Trump did wrong this is independent of whether or not he was actually engaging in manipulation or deceit was he failed to specify the time and the place for the other it's because what he should have come out and said I unequivocally denounce the white supremacist racism that emerged in Charlottesville and then he should have shut up and then 2 weeks later

he could have said well would we look at the political landscape as a whole perhaps commenting on Berkeley he could have said it's pretty obvious that there are reprehensible individuals acting out at both ends of the extreme but the Charlottesville week wasn't the week to make that point so and you know why he did that well it could be just a nap nest because it was a very tricky week to exactly get things right I don't think so I think actually we can look at the what he did during the election and I think we should expect that he would do exactly what he did but I think there's there's a wink and a nod to them always Whitney and Nazis in White Springs at quad Donald Trump's response of Dale and see if he could see the actual Does it show the actual text of what they wrote Because quote from the editor here right there

I received mention anything to do with us reporters were screaming at him in the white Nationals and he just walked out of the room huh

I'm there is there was an actual article that they wrote on one of those websites Trump's comments were good he didn't attack that's it didn't attack us just at the nation should come together nothing specific against us he said we need to study why people get so angry and implied there was hate... On both sides! So implied that the antifa are haters I mean so that that that energize them in a way and there's no secret that they support him you know my friend Alonzo bodden that's very funny quote is a comedian he goes not all Trump supporters are racist but all racists or try orders and secretes a great quote and that's theirs political power in that weather. Trump is a racist or whether it's the wink in the knob to that side that is the only went in and out there getting it mean error even even insufficient denunciation which was kind of Rebel media for big being

being accused of being too cozy with the daily Stormer type she did a podcast with the with crypto and I listen to the podcast. Carefully she was actually one of the people it was supposed to be a panelist on this free speech talk so that put us in a real bind but what what happened in the podcast what happened was in my estimation was that she didn't properly fill her role as critical journalists she was it was sort of like a discussion with your friendly neighborhood Neil now to see what I mean by that is she didn't Ally herself La La by herself with any of the purported aims of the Neo-Nazi people she was talking to but I think she failed to

criticize them sufficiently she didn't ask the tough questions you know now and then. And that that was a that was what was a fatal error I mean she got fired from Rebel media and it's going to have terrible repercussions for her although she may land on their feet but Rebel media is very conservative as well I certainly by Canadian Stanley like good imploded in the aftermath of Charlottesville because of what faith Goldy did with with the daily wasn't even the daily Stormer it was a group called crypto but they are there associated with the daily Stormer so she went on there which I think you could make you could make a case but that's okay the answer to that is

you point out their agenda you don't allow them to masquerade as friendly as friendly innocent people you can't do that and so I would say she dance she damn herself by insufficiently criticizing The Village it was something like that you familiar I'm sure you are familiar with Louie through no I'm not every through the documentarian fascinating guy fantastic like one of the best and one of the things that he's done is well he's he's interview to a ton of different people but one of the great ones that he did was the Westboro Baptist Church any sort of embedded himself with them and was very congenial and very like kind and unthreatening and stayed with them for long periods of time like weeks on end and got them to eventually like expose who they were and and understand from like the point of view of an Insider in an in

incense without necessarily condemning them but we just constantly asking questions but being very very polite about it not like a bunch not not like a lot of serious like confrontational criticism rather but I'm very friendly sort of polite British way of discussing to and he's particularly good at embedding himself he did it with Scientology done with a bunch of different groups in beds himself and just sort of us with our talk was it was so Hall of Mirrors like it was like it was a talk about Free Speech talks being shut down on campus that was shot down by us campus and it was people who support to support Free Speech who knocked someone off the panel because of something well not precisely that she said but it's close enough to make me tired

alright I had to go through what happened with face very carefully to figure out what the right ethical pathway was so you know but I listen to the podcast very carefully I listen to with my son and we talked about a lot and our conclusion was that she had failed to she had failed to she didn't ask enough tough questions one would have done it even maybe two would have done it for sure but it was the discussion was too cordial and it could have even being cordial to your point because maybe that would have led to more discussions but it should have been cordial with one snake bite know that would have been required to make that snake bite I mean I can see what you mean by required but my thought is like to to find out what these people really want and really like we're really trying to achieve sometimes you don't have to be confrontational with them you just got allow them to be comfortable and come out Bail did that really great on a CNN show at the KKK he said he would just allow them to be themselves and they

team or more comfortable with him the more time they spend with him to the point where they're actually joking around with him but you got to see that the ugliness was so obvious and evident and without him confronting them on without him yelling and arguing you got to see it from him just being friendly and joking around with him know nobody would ever accuse a black man like I'm out Bail with being a sympathizer with the KKK he was in this inarguable position like no one no one could accuse him of it this woman I'm assuming is why that's where the problem lies she was problem situation like Oprah was in the past like Oprah interview the KKK in the past and she was never accused of being like somehow or another is sympathetic person to them and somehow we we have to raise the threshold of a fence there are lots of ways to contribute to the conversation one of them maybe to embed yourself and actually allow

world to see people who are doing something important in the in the way that they see themselves so you can understand it Ralph and being critical to them me just getting an argument with them I mean there might be able to see something from that from the response to like rational discussion about the issues this brings us down a whole other rabbit hole which maybe we can talk about it some point in the future because this is a really interesting topic you don't like part of the reason that I've been accused of being on the far right side or on the alt-right is because I've talked to people talk with people who perhaps have are closer what would you say have an association Network that might be more closely allied with that than people are comfortable with but my attitude is being too it's cuz I don't want to talk about this much detail cuz it's really complicated but the the ante left Spectrum let's say

is very confused and it could easily tilt very rapidly into the hard right and he left which is the danger that you were described it and partly what I'm hoping is that I can talk to people might conceivably be on that developmental pathway because they're they're tired of being accused of implicit racism essay and say look you can be Auntie radical left without falling all the way into the to the far-right and here's how you might do it but that means I have to talk to them and then if I talk to them that means I risk association with them and risks being tainted it's a very tricky line to walk but it's also one of the one of the big problems with this hard stance of the of the left of the hard left like this Pepe the Frog thing I did anybody I mean one of the things that I tweeted with some guy that called me you just admitted you're not see cuz you I posted a mean that someone had created of me as Pepe the Frog and apparently is Pepe the Frog of everybody and so I put

sky was like will you just admitted you're not see and I might see this is a part of the problem and this creates a massive blowback people getting angry because that frog for the most part is used humorously actually you use the phrase defensive humor yeah it really is and I think I didn't mean to interrupt your show but there's something about the idea that the effectiveness of this meme is that it Tangles people with no sense of humor in knots and yeah yeah yeah I mean I'm fearing that I'm saying something about this frog and that there's going to be something that's going to emerge that I should know about that somehow I'm admitting something but all I'm saying is what I see is a lot of people using it to taunt people can't figure out I think that

call humor massive problem with pushing back against that and calling those people Nazis and races and especially when they're just using humor and especially when it's very clear if you look at all the memes come on and I I went thoroughly through Google to find them there is some abhorrent once there was some horrible ones there's some ones that are with the Nazi uniforms there's some there's some anti-jew one through some horrific one most of them are not that most of them the vast majority of them are humorous and if not coordinating so if one person decides to make a Mickey Mouse racist meme which by the way a lot of the early Mickey Mouse cartoons you could just take a screenshot and they're fucking tremendously races tonight because dealing with a side of the time me images of black people that work extremely cartoonish you know giant lips Black Faces the whole deal or horribly racist you could say Mickey Mouse's fucking racist don't go to Disneyland don't say no

right but they could 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 any of the frog is racist you start isn't racist funny cartoon frog makes you a cartoon about everything that has ever existed and make that racist it doesn't mean that the frog is racist this is where it's crazy it's like what percentage of people are making the frog racist and then for the Southern Poverty Law Center to say that this is a symbol of hate now is fragua well guess what you just backed these fucking people up against the wall and you sure their offense is cuz now they're realizing all these people are mad their their crate not just mad like angry but mad like insane you're not looking at this thing rashly at all you're saying that a frog wear 99% of the memes are just humorous or silly now the frog is a hate symbol not only 8 simple but not see white supremacist they're just drying up

all of the space between their Preposterous perspective and the nightmare at the other end of the spectrum and the point is almost all of us live in that intermediate space so yeah it's it's almost a fox live in that intermediate space of variability of all thoughts you know there's there's two flexibility of extremely humorous you're talking about a humorous frog god damn you to call that all hate when sometimes at 8 and it's somebody who buy what are the fucking people are that did that hateful thing those are the people that are hateful not the other ones that are using that frog for humor mean this is the defect that this is an argument at all just shows how lost We R in the ideal logical arguments is left vs right extreme end of the spectrum on one end of the field throwing rocks at the far end of the field

if we cannot have discussion the sparta middle I mean Jesus Christ it might be listen this is a lot of fun as always it right and I'm glad you guys came up with this idea and I'm glad we have the time to do it was fantastic Jordan Peterson what is your Twitter handle again. Jordan B Peterson and Bret Weinstein Bret Weinstein on Twitter sorry sorta but thank you guys really appreciate it a lot of fun to the podcast and thanks to our sponsors thanks to On It Go 200 N N I T use the code word Rogan and save 10% off any and all supplements thank you to DraftKings go to draftkings.com now and use the promo code Rogan to play

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draftkings.com promo code Rogan we also would like to thank sip recruiter go to ziprecruiter.com Rogan and you can try ZipRecruiter for free that's right folks free post your jobs to a hundred plus job site with just a single click

I can't be done yes I can and you can try it for free ziprecruiter.com forward slash Rogan that's it ladies and gentlemen that is it for this week next week oh good googly-moogly do we got a good one on Monday Bert Kreischer Tom Segura and Ari shaffir will all be here and they're setting up a new challenge the big part of the challenge in Elberton Tom went through a weight loss challenge last time the big part of the challenge this time is going to be no booze for 90 days

and as we know he's even though we don't like to use this term for a crash is a fucking alcoholic okay it's a hard hurtful thing to say but he's clearly got an issue so much so that I have been inundated with people contacting me telling urging me to not have Bert go cold turkey because it will actually be dangerous

that's how much they think for a drinks and Albert will tell you that I only drink a box of wine an hour or something like that I'll tell you I'm fine he drinks way too much he knows he does he works out all the time and he still fat as fuck he's not happy about it he lost a little bit of water weight does a stomp by Tom secure in a competition the weight loss thing did not play out in his favor and now

they want to do one London can win so I think we're going to try to do is weight loss and a marathon

or no drinking a marathon so no booze for 90 days at the end of 90 days they race in a marathon what do you think

that's fucking radical a marathon is a radical think not if you're my fucking friend cam Hanes runs one a day that's like oh he's a runner hog that might be just as bad as being an alcoholic Jamie you run thinking about this depending on the rules they do I might try to do this with them really maybe you might want to die and you never run with that run backwards that's the move skateboard I want to know how long do I let them hoverboards got long so that's why I like 7 miles at the most

that should be fun though that's Monday Tuesday we have Cody garbrandt UFC bantamweight champion and he may or may not be bringing Mike Tyson with them think it's supposed to be Wednesday we have James D'Amore who's the Google memo guy that should be interesting I think Brian Redban is going to be on that week as well for now so we'll see you guys by appreciate you much love and big kiss huh

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