#958 - Jordan Peterson

May 9, 2017

Jordan Peterson is a clinical psychologist and tenured professor of psychology at the University of Toronto. All Dr. Peterson's self-improvement writing programs at www.selfauthoring.com 20% off for Rogan listeners until June: code joerogan   Dr. Peterson's YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/JordanPetersonVideos   Support Dr. Peterson's work at www.patreon.com/jordanbpeterson

Episode Sponsors

Help improve this transcript!

oh hello everybody how you doing this May 12th this Friday May 12th I am in Dallas Texas taxi Grand Prairie I'm at the Verizon Wireless theater with Ian Edwards and Tony Hinchcliffe and it is almost sold out so don't sleep and then July 7th I am at the Cobb Theater at the MGM with Tony Hinchcliffe and a bunch of more shit it's going to be announced next week tickets are available at joerogan.net Ford's tour this episode of the podcast I got a lot of I got a lot of shit going on ladies and gentlemen but before I even tell you the sponsors and potatoes

the podcast that you're about to hear is my favorite podcast ever so that's it it's sponsored by LegalZoom LegalZoom is an awesome way for you to deal with legal issues without having a go anywhere you can do it all at home you can sign up an estate plan from LegalZoom you not to worry about choosing between a will or a living trust on your own instead you can work with an independent attorney to customize a plan for you LegalZoom is reliable for over 15 years LegalZoom has been The Trusted choice of millions of Americans for living trust wills and more guidance they can guide you folks and they can connect you with an independent attorney to customize a plan for you flexibility you don't have to do it during business hours you don't have to do it on someone else's time you don't have to find a parking spot or make an appointment you can do it anytime you want and you could do it on your own with LegalZoom

having an estate plan will help protect you your family your property and as your family and assets grow it's easy to make updates along the way with LegalZoom helpful support legal zooms US based team of customer service pros are happy to provide assistance and they're always just a click or a call away and no surprises since LegalZoom is in a law firm law firms there are no hourly expenses or hourly fees just upfront pricing and complete transparency set up your estate plan at legalzoom.com now and for special savings enter broken at checkout that's legalzoom.com enter Rogan at checkout we're also brought to you by my all-time favorite underwear me undies I'm wearing and I wear everyday they are designed in LA and made from sustainably-sourced micromodal is a fabric three times softer than cotton and I swear to you my friend

once you wear these underwear you will not want to wear other underwear I've had so many people come out to Mingo dude I can't believe how God damn, and guess what you can save time and money each month with a subscription plan a monthly subscription from me undies yes there's so soft and so comfortable and you can get them delivered to your door if you're not ready for subscription that's okay you can still save that's because me undies is offering you 20% off your first pair just use our special URL meundies.com Rogen and you'll get 20% off your first pair so go ahead folks revamp your underwear drawer you deserve it once again that's meundies.com/Roganmeundies.com/Rogan were also brought to you by CW hemp Charlotte's Web hemp

cwhemp.com I just had a conversation about this with Greg Fitzsimmons and he was telling me how fantastic he feels since he's been taking CBD oil from Charlotte's Web but Charlotte's Web I had to inform him is not just CBD oil it has CBD in it but it's made from the whole hemp plant Charlotte's Web is a hemp extract oil that is that naturally has incredible health and wellness compounds called cannabinoids

it has all the beneficial cannabinoids not just single compounds not just a single compound rather like CBD it helps with inflammation from exercise mild anxiety focused I got some right here

that's my little thing I open it I take it all time I take it during podcast and people think I'm doing drugs

but I'm not

cuz it's not psychoactive but it is really good for you it helps with again inflammation from exercise mild anxiety Focus it's a neuroprotectant it helps with your blood sugar balance it's an antioxidant and more CW is made by the Stanley brothers from Colorado and you might have heard dr. Sanjay Gupta who used to be a Tweed hater but now he's not he's on our side now folks and he's told the amazing story about the Stanley Brothers on CNN and the impact temp can have on your help and your health you can help with your help to have somebody working for you to go get him some Charlotte's Web hemp oil for your health it's amazing get authentic Charlotte's Web do you research it is the most trusted hemp oil and it just makes you feel better that's important to me go to CWhemp.Com and save 10% off every day plus or everyday advanced

with the promo code Joe Rogan 17 that CWhemp.com and enter the code Joe Rogan 17

fuck it all right my guest right now that I'm going to he's been on the podcast before I'm going to introduce you to him the great Jordan Peterson he's a fantastic human being a fascinating man what a smart people I've ever talked to in my life and was on fire in this episode so without any further Ado Jordan Peterson

The Joe Rogan Experience

poop welcome back mr. Peterson thank you how are you not too bad how are you doing man you look like a man who was dealing with a considerable amount of stress but is handling it well yeah well I hope that's true I think the first part of its true I hope the second part is true I read that you were denied a grant for the first time in in your history as an academic yes and you think this is all based on you are outspoken and very public denouncing the political correctness and I have all this stuff even going through over the past more than a year now I don't know because I haven't got the full commentary on the grant yet I only found out that it was denied and it takes the credit agency a while to send out the full report I've heard from other people I know some other people who I would consider relatively high-profile research is a walk also didn't get funded this round so

there might be multiple reasons but I can't help suspect that the fact that the Grant application concentrated on delineating that personality characteristics of politically correct belief might have had something to do with it still will taboo subjects fastening that thinking and thinking and pondering and examining certain types of behavior would still be a taboo subject yeah but these amazing all right and becoming more taboo all the time I would say I don't think the universities her have I think they're getting worse still it'll be awhile before they get better I shouldn't say that so globally but certainly the case with the humanities and much of the social sciences but it seems Global elite mean not necessarily in terms of all the different subjects but certainly in terms of what you teach and what you are involved in and it just sits so

may I hate to use the word but it's over aggressive to put restrictions on the examining of thinking in the university and it's kind of crazy I mean what what you went through and one of your most recent public speeches where they allowed these kids to be in the room with you with bull horns and they were screaming bitch and see if you can find a video that what was the name Master the exact Master University giving your speech and there was supposed to be some other people involved they backed out and you decide to continue on so you're standing there in front of these people that were there to hear you talk and there's a group of kids with bull horns like literally and shouting and yelling and chanting the signs in the room just completely disrupting what you're doing and they allow this all the app and air horns as well so I'll be out they were blowing air horns quite close to me that was the one thing I really objected to because they're home

actually happened to be quite loud no I don't know yet. It's actually an assault on your ears it's very bad for your hearing like you're not supposed to be in a room with those without hearing protection they're supposed to be like for like scary thing I can play some is Jamie so we can hear how crazy this

shut him down no freedom for hate speech and the hate speech thing has like of the Prince symbol made some sort of Martian language like what the fuck is that they have on that note no freedom for hate speech I guess it's a polygender Simpson symbol of some sort there's a fist in it not so good about behind a hammer and sickle Banner

no it's just absolutely amazes me because I still haven't been able to quite figure this out I can't figure out why you couldn't do that with the Nazi symbol but you can do that with a hammer and sickle you know it's there's a reason maybe it's because the Nazi Doctrine was so explicitly racist but God does not like the hammer and sickle wasn't equally murderous or actually quite profound Lemoore murderous as it turned out so and I house. How people can not still know that is beyond me and and to Rally behind a banner like that without realizing what they're doing or if we even worse realizing it and still organizing themselves behind it and then you ask about hate speech no there's no real communicating with with people who are demonstrating like that there in a kind of Trance you know and I went up to try to talk to a couple of them

random but when you look at people who are in that state of mind you're not looking at you as if you were human being you know you're the you're the target of their conceptualizations your the realization of their conceptualization course they didn't listen to anything I said well hardly anyone get all the way. To talk outside cuz I took everybody outside and then spoke out there for a while and when you are outside with his still yelling at my store on a couple of inches and the people that want to hear kind of a circle around me and pushed all the protesters to the back so they could so that I could address the people that actually wanted me to actually wanted to listen to what I was saying and so did you have a dialogue with them or did you give a speech and how did that work I didn't have dialogue at all with the protesters around me with the people that came to see you once I got outside I mean

the protesters had showed up I mean practically speaking because I'm in this peculiar situation where if the protesters show up that's good and if they don't show up that's good too it's good if they show up because I have access to do a YouTube audience obviously and then it gets filmed and the film's get put together and not get put back gets put online in generally speaking when the social justice types of come after me they've done a pretty admirable job of discrediting themselves and so that seems to be all to the good and then if they let me speak well then I get to speak and I can put that on YouTube so it's it's a very strange situation for me because as long as I don't do anything too stupid or anything any stupider than I have done let's say I seem to come out okay and I'm not I'm certainly not counting on that continuous and I'm not

I'm surprised by it but so far it seems to be working out so you know her a well I guess the way you handled it is admirable the way you kept your cool and just continue talking and in didn't flip out and didn't didn't give in didn't succumb to the publication it's cuz they're obviously provoking you and they're obviously I just don't understand how the university allows them to do that how they allow them to be in that room first ball with those air horns which are really bad for anybody in that room who's near them it's cause hearing damage morning me was really quite I would say that's a forward about it to know that they were coming close enough to me to to to do some damage and and I have seen the odd person at those rallies that really isn't well put together you know people I look in their eyes and I think know your ear

definitely here for the wrong reasons and I think it's more characteristic often to the guys that I see at the events rather than the women I mean I'm not sure about that I'm obviously speculating but you know I have a reasonably good clinical intuition and some of the guys I see at those events there I don't know what their story is man I don't know what they're up to I guess they're what are they trying to do be allies of the women for their own nefarious purposes I mean that's what it looks like to me you don't like what they're certainly an issue with that so it's a Common Thread with men that especially in the male feminist category that they they align themselves with these women as allies and as this Ellie take this moral High ground and they're this person that's going to show you no other man how to do feminism and how to behave with women and they're really just sort of there mining the situations for social points

that guy at the Berkeley the recent Berkeley demonstration the guy who hit someone with a bike block ever in a bag and he was hiding behind some women in any darted out just nailed the guy with a bike lock with one turned out to be a bike laws in verified all of that fish photographs of him this photographs of his face they compared to his eyes to the professors are they know that the guy was there and the guy will align themselves with Marxism and he's just like communist socialist Professor who's very adamantly against right-wing ideology and this kind of shit so he they're pretty sure that that's the guy

I mean a guy with a deadly weapon that it was a bike lock I mean not that just figures you know so well it's just the idea that you could just walk up to someone you don't like the way they sang can hit them in the head with a metal thing is it's so it's so crazy and so delusional and so indicative of someone who looks at a person as the other you're not looking at as a human being disagrees with you like a human being like talk about a lack of empathy year old guy all the guy was get hit in the head your expecting him to have his ideology down solid and not be influenced by peers or not be curious about what this argument for the guy was even yelling anything he was standing there characters at McMaster to you know it's partly why don't get upset it's like I look at these kids that are out there protesting in all apart from the professional professional protester types and I think about Jesus they they've been served so badly

application system that it's absolutely beyond belief you know they're basically being sent out as avatars of this pathological postmodern Movement by their professors who are themselves too cowardly to show up generally speaking it certainly aren't aren't brave enough to debate me know or if I do show up there like this guy with a mask on hitting people in the head who was a professor postmodern eats I was to have a dialogue with people you don't agree with some you weren't able to talk to anyone that opposed you not so far not in any serious sense when you able to talk to anyone that had the hammer and sickle signed and sent in a stem like do you understand what this stands for what is this mean to you like what what what are you trying to project by having the sign said whenever I get close to anybody that was protesting there was no one to one human interaction you know I mean I can tell when someone's

going to be willing to communicate with me and when they're they're kind of got cold eyes like a cod fish and only whatever they're looking at has nothing to do with me or very little to do with me but that seems to me to be one of the other aspects of this

thing that you're going through this so that this these all these is a series of altercation so you're going through is the lack of discourse and there was this one that you want on on television what we talked about the last time you were here with this very bizarre androgynous person that was saying there's no gender there's no biological basis for gender which is just complete Insanity and you shooting that down and it's now or soon to be in federally so it's Insanity for sure but but it's the kind of insanity that's going to have legal for us very soon what is specifically in which was the bill that I was complaining about or criticizing let's say there's a variety of surrounding policy documents that are derived from the Ontario Human Rights Commission and they indicate quite clearly that you're to regard biological sex gender identity gender expression and sexual proclivity as

varying independently which of course they don't by any stretch of the imagination there so tightly correlated that you can't use correlation to imply cause or to infer causality but Jesus when the correlations are above .95 you have to start wondering if there's actually not some cause a link and it's exerted to me that we really even have to have that discussion but the notion and this is being taught to school kids this this isn't this is mainstream Doctrine Joe let me know the gender look up the gender unicorn that's a fun thing to look up and what is a gender unicorn the gender unicorn is this little happy symbol that's being marketed to two children in elementary school describing to them the fact that biological sex gender identity gender expression and sexual proclivities very independently they're going after them very young and so that's part of the that's part of the school system now in many many places so in many ways is sort of an indoctrination they're trying to

gender unicorn female or male intersects physically attracted to men women other other gender s emotionally attracted so what you do if your kid is you put a little marker there on the Arrow to show where you're located on all those independent dimensions and obviously if you look at the at the style of the gender unicorn you can tell what sort of age it's aimed out cuz that looks like it's aim for certainly not aimed at kids over I would say 10 unicorn have a double helix DNA symbol where it's penis or vagina so it should be. There's no such thing as biology I presume but why I don't know how ironic

it's a weird place to put it over the crotch of the Unicorn an indefinite number of weird things about the genderbread person has a male symbol female symbol and then what am I

all together with a circle with a red hole so Circle so strange I would say just triggered well it's so bizarre but what's even more bizarre is the lack of dialogue I feel like you're in a weird position where there's a tremendous amount of support for you outside of the academic system people like me people like so many people to support your YouTube videos so many people that do read about you online you're experiencing all this backlash I'd like McMasters and these sort of things but there's people are not engaging you and the way they're they're keeping from engaging you is saying that you are demonstrating hate speech I criticized the University of Toronto's decision to use

Toronto chapter of black lives matter as policy advisors in the reason I did that was because the two women who founded black lives matter in Toronto let's say they have let's say they have questionable reputations and leave it at that and so apparently that makes me racist because well has publicly stated that you know why people are inferior to black people because they don't have enough melanin In Their Skin and melanin is the chemical that communicates cosmically so that you're spiritually enlightened that was one essential client and the other one is is embroiled in a lawsuit with the University of Toronto student union for essentially she's being accused of inbev embezzling with the couple cronies about $400,000 from the coffers of the students union so I felt that perhaps those weren't the best people to for the University of Toronto to be associating with when their formula

Durante racist policies. Clearly that makes any brought that is like you're not say anything about black people using about two individuals to individuals that you're in your you're having very specific thing will everybody that makes men and women right that's right except men and women men and women can be anything because these activists they stand out in claim that they're standing for oppressed communities right at first of all they identified the identity group that there that activate activating on on the part of as a community and then the largest community and then they state that because they happen to be members of that Community by their own admission let's say our by their own declaration that's a better word that they are now legitimate representatives of that

community and one of the things that's been quite fascinating to me since this isn't Curtis that I've had a very a comparatively large number of letters from transgender people about 35 so far and every one of those except one was positive they're not happy about like that my sampling of the trans Community which isn't

you know it's not a random sample or anything like that but 35 letters is a lot when the community of people is actually quite small and they're not happy at all that they don't they don't they're not happy to be so publicly discuss now cuz many of them would just assume have some privacy you know when they're already having trouble fitting in they don't regard these people as legitimate Representatives they don't believe they're not homogeneous and their political viewpoints no end and they're not necessarily fans of the people who are playing gender bender games because many of the transexuals who are let's a serious about it you know fruit for lack of a better way of describing it fart happy that this has become a kind of a fad essentially and that they're being used by the politically correct types to further their political agenda so that's quite cool too because it isn't obvious to me at all that the attitude that I have to work the situation is actually different than any genuine since then the attitude that at least a substantial minority of the trash

sexual people themselves have and there's plenty of them on YouTube who are complaining about the social justice appropriation of their of their identity they're not a community right I mean Community I mean Community is in continual contact with one another they have something that directs their actions in common I mean but you know who's on the on the on the postmodern end of the spectrum if you have some identifiable group feature then that means you're one of that group and that everything that you do indicates indicates only that there are believers in in race and gender and sex that they believe in the reality of those of those categories far more than anybody on the right to as far as I can tell so it's very peculiar and and unnerving so

so and and widespread and powerful and all of those things so which is very peculiar that they are not into labels unless it suits their purposes do not into labels or into generalizing Behavior unless it's with the purpose and also another thing that's weird to me is that whenever something becomes an issue that becomes discuss that becomes a hot-button issue which clearly transgender rights whether it's the North Carolina Bill to keep transgender people out of the bathrooms that associate with that identify you know but that they identify with whatever gender it whenever there's some sort of a hot-button issue there becomes this thing where a bunch of people seek attention through those issues and these people use whatever issue it is too becomes like a part of their identity like becoming an activist and then and it really didn't very vocal about it where is Dodie

the actual cause itself gets money than the cult of personality and it gets muddy to end these personal wishes and ideas that the people who are seeking to get attention by communicating about these ideas sort of soak in you know what it is it just becomes a lot about human nature in human behavior more than is about the actual issue each of these hypothetically contentious issues is an opportunity for a certain kind of sterile drama to unfold in a dream is always the same and you can see that in the in the demonstrations say with regards to my talks it don't matter what I'm talking about and it actually doesn't matter what I've ever said all that matters is that there's an occasion an excuse to trot out the ideologies and to pathetically Mouse the same

unbelievably sterile and chaotic phrases I mean I think the people at McMaster the protesters could only muster about 3 chats and two of them were seriously obscene which I don't care about accepted it's so mindlessly unimaginative bro it it's their operating at such a low level of of intellectual effort and and of course it gone by their pathological postmodern professors who are hiding behind them like like scared scared weasels so other shut him down that was racist transphobic homophobic all these things without substance because there's no more specific which was you know rather flattering and all of that so it's a you don't seem to have any hate towards trans people at all no I mean from the discussions I've had with you both on

turn off the are the idea of you being transphobic seems so inaccurate because you seem pretty accepting about anybody whether it's a trans person a gay person it's not the issue is far more concerned about women are people are honest I mean that's what I that's what that's my fundamental orientation and so for my fundamental concern I mean I don't expect people to be a hundred percent honest because of course who is you know I mean that's a hell of a little kids get through some of that just to just to sort of establishing for people maybe they don't know what issues do it do you have any issue whatsoever with some being transgender no I don't have any issue with out what I have an issue with this late is that I don't like to see the postmodern neo-marxist use the transexual issue as a lever for pushing forward their political nonsense and I said that right from the beginning in the

videos of need to begin with the reason I wouldn't use the word zian's earn it and all those other made up words however many there are now is because I'm not willing to cede the linguistic territory to postmodern radical I'm not doing that and they say well we're doing it on behalf of the oppressed transexual people and I think yeah well that's what you say but there's no reason I should believe that don't believe anything you say I think you're contemptible cowardly idiot logically motivated cult-like corruptors of the youth so why would I use your language listen my son pack that because one of those things that I find fascinating is how few transgender people want to use those words the transgender people seem to want to identify with whatever gender they like it if you are a male to female transgender person you would prefer to be called a sheet like Caitlyn Jenner right I'm pretty much everybody calls

the artist formerly known as Bruce Jenner Caitlyn Jenner right that's that's just it's like if you had a look at how many people just open the except it's pretty it's pretty well except most transgender people prefer that they prefer female to male I prefer they prefer to be a man now I'm a man now okay Bob dick whatever your name is that's in there's not a lot of Caesar talk to you when I talk to someone else I like her name right now I could use your name I might use Heat fan but I don't know well all of it is probably observed it's always hard to get the level of analysis for this sort of issue correct you know because the people were pushing it Forward say well we're against harassment and and and discrimination and

and they attribute all the moral virtue to themselves but then what I see is that there utilizing us a group of a very small minority group who already have enough problems in my estimation for for nothing other than straight for political purposes I don't buy the warm-hearted so all inclusive love that the people who are pushing this sort of thing for reclaim to display I don't see that at all but I see mostly is resentment and the desire to undermine and I'm quite familiar with the postmodern philosophy not as familiar as I could be and also reasonably familiar with the tenderloin Marxism and there's nothing touchy-feely about any of that I can tell you the postmodernist the best you can do with post-postmodern is philosophy is emerge nihilistic that's the best the worst cases but you're kind of an article social revolutionary that's directionless except that you want to tear things apart or or that you end up depressed which I see happening to students all the time because the post

Mike rip out the remaining structures of their foundations of their ethical foundations so just to be really clear for anybody Towing in your issues are absolutely not with someone who identifies with a gender other than their biological gender as long as they're not using that to to promote a political agenda and it's the personal personal personal issue personal issue and and I would also deal with it on an individual individual basis does he know where he's just as much as they were extremely masculine man extremely feminine women and is a broad spectrum of human beings in between and each one should be dealt with on an individual basis on what they want but when you're talking about these made up words what it seems like is it some people trying to push these made up words and turn them mainstream now the question is what's the motivation behind that

is a necessary thing are there so many people that are out of asexual or of some sort of me what would be as easy or as Ur what is that supposed to be is that supposed to be a male or female is it supposed to be asexual or is it supposed to be a non-conformist mean what is it supposed to be someone who are the male nor female in the policy guidelines anywhere or nowhere on the Spectrum and that's actually in the policy guidelines and tell me where or know where these are policies that are that are going to determine the laws within which the laws going to be interpreted I don't even know what know where on the spectrum means I don't understand what that means doesn't mean anything it's so you have so here's the options right there is someone who identifies with the opposite gender of their

biological birth so there's a man for instance who identifies as a woman everyone's cool with that whatever your name is whatever you would like to be called whether it's Wendy or Mike or whatever it is that would be the noise that you want people to make with their mouth that means you

that's it right now whether you're a he or a she outside of that that's where things get squirrely so third person is the only issue the only issue is like say if we're talking to Jamie Jamie just decided that he's going to be Jamie now he's still Jamie Jamie the girl's name to I know girls named Jamie so he could be Jaime and Jaime decides he's a woman and now he wants to be called she work okay okay she all right Jamie now you're she but when it gets to like loser and z and the 78 different gender pronoun it seems to a person outside of its a person who is cisgendered it seems pretty pretty bizarre and it seems pretty Preposterous and it seems pretty indulgent and it seems like there's something else going on in this hell. Something else going on part that is what concerns me there is something else going on it it if there wasn't something else going on a relatively obscure

professors amateurish YouTube videos on a relatively obscure piece of Canadian legislation wouldn't have had any effect right it would have just disappeared I didn't ask because there's more going on then then the straightforward tissue surrounding the pronoun use and everybody knows it for everybody feels it at least what it seems like from someone's outside of Academia some like me is it seems like you're pushing back against something that they are really trying hard to establish and then it's some kind of control it's some kind of control with how people behave and communicate and it's not it's not like a societal thing it's a very small isolated group of people that seem to be trying to indoctrinate others into their ways and they become their becoming very vocal and very angry and innocent like verbally violent about your opposition to their controlling the way they can

poking holes in the Radiology in the thing about the postmodernists and I'm going to speak mostly about Jacques Derrida because I'll consider him the central villain now he actually they make a point when who he is so he's a he's a French philosopher French intellectual who became quite popular in the late 1970s and then was introduced to North America through the Yale Department of English and of course English literature is one of the disciplines such as become entirely corrupt and so

Diridon wasn't Marxist to begin with but that's a favor because it turned out the Marxist political doctor and kept producing evil empire isn't even radical left French intellectuals were forced to admit that by the mid-1970s you know they put their head in their ass in the sand for 20 years 50 years really thoroughly in the sand and make sure their ears were full too but by the mid-1970s the evidence that that was the case was so overwhelming that even a French intellectual couldn't deny it anymore and so they started to play sleight of hand with the Marxist ideas so instead of trying to promote revolution of the working class against the against the capitalist class let's say they started to play identity politics and said well we can just separate everybody into a pressed versus oppressor but we don't have to do it on economic grounds and so we can we can call it power instead of Economics so that was part of it and then the other thing about the fundamental critique the Derrida

this focused on this is this is this is really worth laying out because that the problem that he discovered the postmodernist discovered was discovered by a variety of other people at the same time and other disciplines so for example artificial intelligence since the early 1960s it was always supposed that we'd be able to make machines that can move around in a natural environment without too much problem and the reason we could do that was because the world in some sense was just made out of simple objects there they are and all you have to do is look at them and you see them and that's vision and then the complex problem is not how to say or what to say about how to act in reference to what you see but it turned out that ran into this problem is sometimes known as the frame problem in the frame problem is is that there's almost an infinite number of ways to look at a finite set of objects

so the fact that vision for example it turns out to be way way way more complicated than anybody ever ever ever estimated in fact you can actually solve division problem until you saw the embodiment problem so on the artificial intelligence that doesn't have a body can't really see because seeing is actually the mapping of the world on to action and so that was figured out more or less by robotics engineer called Rodney Brooks but but what's at the bottom of this is the idea that any set of phenomena can be seen a very large number of way so like there's a bunch of pens in front of me here when I look at the my brain basically notes that there are a group of object with which I can write so I see the function like like if you look at a bean bag you see a chair not because it's got four legs and a seat in the back but because you can sit on it and then most of what we see in the world we actually see functionally rather than see as an object and then interpret the object and then figure out what to do so the function of the object

constrains our interpretation but there's an endless number of interpretations so for example if I was going to paint that you paint on canvas this set of pans and try to do it in a photo-realistic way I would be looking at tiny details of these objects that the multiple shades of red that are there in the multiple shades of white and black and and I would decompose it and then he went many ways and so the AI guys ran into this problem which was looking at the world turned out to be exceptionally complex and that's still being solved now okay and in literature the same thing happened what what the postmodernist realize was that if you took a complex book let's say the Bible for example of Shakespeare play there's an endless number of potential interpretations that you can drive from it because it's so complex and so sophisticated so imagine that well you can interpret the word you can interpret the phrase you can interpret the sentence you can interpret the paragraph you can interpret the

let's say you have to interpret that within the confines of the entire work then of the entire tradition and then within the context of discussion that you're currently having and all of those things affect how you're going to interpret the play so that their conclusion was well there's an infinite number of ways to interpret a text and then they're complete what's well there's an infinite number of ways to interpret the world there's a there's a way in which that's correct until the next conclusion was there's no right way to do it so you could do it any old way and then the next conclusion was in this is where the Marxism creeped up again people interpret the world in a way that facilitates their acquisition of power now that's where the bloody Theory starts to get corrupt because yes a bit but also know right because and this is why the wrong this is why the wrong you see

the world is complicated beyond our ability to comprehend so there is a very large number of ways you can interpret it but but

you have to extract out from the world

a game from your interpretation that you can actually play so it's the lesson that you extract from Hamlet is you should kill your family and yourself then we might say that that's not very functional interpretation right cuz first of all people are going to objective that right if it ends your life it in so many people's wise people are going to eject to it and it isn't a game that you can play over and over again in the world so when were when were interacting with the world you see what we're trying to do is to extract out a set of tools that we can use the function in the world because we're constrained by the world so that we don't suffer too much and so that the things that we need in order to continue can be provided and we need to extract those out in a way that other people will

so that other people will cooperate and compete with us in a peaceful and maintainable way so that then you think well we have to extract out an interpretation that allows us to live and Thrive over multiple periods of time in multiple environments well we're doing the same thing with other individuals who are motivated the same way so there's a tremendous number of constraints on our interpretations in the post modernist don't care about that at all all they do is say well no no you can interpret the way the world the world anyway you want all people are ever doing is playing power games based on their identity and there's going to be no crosstalk between the power hierarchies it's not even allowed that's why they don't engage in dialogue

she just to talk to like let's say if you're up if you're a postmodernist just to have a discussion with someone like you you know I had a row sexual what do they call is cisgendered male of power you know and white to boot it's like that's that's an evil act in and of itself because all you're doing by engaging in dialogue with that person is validating their their power game that's all this isn't this is no aberration that these people don't engage in dialogue that it's no operation it's built right into the philosophical system they regard the idea of the idea if you're in one power group and I'm in another the idea that we can step out of that group engage in a dialogue have our worlds meat and produce some sort of understanding understanding know that's part of your your oppressive patriarchal game that idea that whole idea is part of your game

if I even engage in the dialogue I'm playing your game you win

it's completed so it's complete people don't understand that post-modernism is a complete assault on two things one in it's an assault on the metaphysical substrate of our culture and I would say that the metaphysical substrate looks something like a religious substrate so it's a direct assault on that and the second thing it's in the salt on his everything that's been established since the Enlightenment rationality and parasitism science everything Clarity of Mind dialogue the idea of the individual all of that is is normally you see it's not only that it's up for grabs that's not the thing it's to be destroyed

that's the goal to be destroyed just like the Communists wanted you to move out of the Revolution to destroy the the capitalist system it's the same thing these people now you might say well does every social justice Warrior activist notice it's like oh no of course not it's not. Not any more than any every Muslim knows the entire Muslim dr. Noor Islamic doctrine of every Christian knows the entire Christian doctrine you know it's fragmented among people but then when you bring them together the fragments unite and the entire philosophy axe itself out so you don't think that this is a nefarious plot by a few well planned out individuals that have some sort of a knife and agenda that they're going to promote this ideology cuz it and they understand what they're doing you eat you feel like it's what you're saying that there's a bunch of different factions bunch a bunch of different parts to this and it could be a lot of it is that people feel disenfranchised socially they they are empowered by their position

and universities and buy these insulated environments and groups they're Intoxicated by the power that they have over young people and shaping their minds and an in an imposing their ideologies they receive feedback from these kids it builds up everything strengthens they Shore up the walls around them and they push this forward and then when they have something like this speech that you gave at mcmaster's and they get to actually act it unites them the unite 7 this is what you're getting from this glazed I you know Cod look good citizen

it's like Richard Dawkins idea of meme know it's you imagine that in your in your neuro neural structure whatever ideas that you're manifesting are represented your own binder on let's say I did to web of neurons not any one neuron has the entire idea set this is obviously not or simplification but you get the point for the network from which the idea emerged well the meme idea is is that an idea can rest upon multiple individuals as if the individual is a neuron and so I mean there are people who are more or less fully

informed as to the nature of postmodern Doctrine and they're pushing it Forward consciously and unconsciously there they're constantly pushing forward and acting it out and so there are individuals who are more representative of the entire set of ideas and individuals who are less representative but if you get them together in a group the thing that animates them and unites them is the common set of ideas and those ideas were produced by the postmodern French intellectuals in the in the mid-70s roughly speaking Jacques Derrida Michelle Foucault was the person who famously pronounce bit psychiatric diagnostic categories were primarily social in origin rather than biological and you know I read fucose work think it was Madness and civilization where he advance that particular Doctrine you can actually read Foucault I'm like Derrida unlock account but I just found what he was writing obvious it's I knew from my clinical training that psychiatric categories have a heavy soul

illogical construction partly because Psychiatry into science medicine isn't a science it's an applied science those aren't the same thing at all you know a pure science is is a pure science deals with scientific categories like atoms and science well it's a compromise between all sorts of different things and mental illnesses themselves are shaped by the social environment even though often they have a biological root the way they manifest themselves clearly shape by Society in language I didn't find his work the least bit surprising I thought well really mean everyone who's the sophisticated Medical Professional psychiatrist psychologist everyone knows that it's like me and if there's a book called discovery of the unconscious by a guy named Audrey Oliver say that was written in the believe in the 60s great book on history of psychoanalysis and it covers the shift and diagnostic categories across time it's self-evident so

anyways there's all these French postmodernist they were all Marxist the most of them are student revolutionaries in France in the late 1960s before that all fell apart and they did two things they they pulled out this Frame problem issue the issue with multiple interpretations and said well there's nothing that's canonical there's no overarching narrative there's no real interpretation and I already said Why That's wrong and then the other thing they said was they did the the sleight of hand so instead of the working class against the Brewers was it was it was race against race or gender against gender unbelievably divisive totally believe in his identity there's no individual man that's gone with post-modernism

if this isn't an accident all of this stuff it's not random it's driven by these ideas like ideas are always at War always and we're in a war between these ideas I mean Marxism we already know it was tremendously powerful Doctrine and this is its newest manifestation what is the motivation behind the individual that are at the heart of this movement

well I would say that the motivations are as complex as as human motivations are in general but they seem to have solidified into a movement right part of it is that it's kind of it's almost like a scapegoat mentality it's it's almost like psychoanalytic projection that's another way of thinking about it's like what are the things that I've come to learn and one of the things I talked about a lot is that the battle between good and evil so to speak isn't between States and it's not between individuals precisely manifest itself at those levels it's an internal battle Memorial Battle it happens inside people and so people have a broad capacity for malevolent Sanford and for benevolence and that's a terrible War for people and it's a terrible thing to understand and realize in fact often when people realize their capacity for malevolence if they're not prepared for it they develop post-traumatic stress disorder

what happens to soldiers and battlefields so they go out there innocent guys naive guys young guys and they go out onto the battlefield in and they get put in a really stressful situation and you know what they say they step outside themselves and they do something unbelievably vicious and brutal and then they're broken the cat that manifestation of them self and put it with like Iowa corn fed it all nice guy and no wonder because one is like a flesh eating chimps chimpanzee on a war Rampage resina was relatively well brought-up and polite Farm Boy from the middle of the United States is like how in the world you going to put those two things together well you can't that's supposed to Matic stress disorder and to treat my experience with post-traumatic stress disorder is that you have to teach people the philosophy of evil of Good and Evil because otherwise they can recover and I've had I've had by the way in the last 4 months

letters from from Soldiers with PTSD and I meant to personally who said that watching my lectures had brought them back together because they couldn't understand what they had become before looking looking deeply at at the at their malevolence now so I would say with regards to this movement this post modern movement the malevolent aspect of it there's a there's a couple of them one it's unbelievably authoritarian I got a letter today from a university student in Italy I don't know what university but she's been having kind of a flame war on Facebook with the with the social justice warrior in at the end she recommended that this particular social justice Warrior seek out a local mental health counseling unit and put a link to it in the in the exchange and then she got a letter from the University I guess the other person that the sjw type turned her in but she got a letter from the University saying

that violated University policy and constituted harassment and that she should seriously consider retracting it and that you know future employees employers might be looking at what she posted and it was inappropriate to put that on the public site and it's like I thought wow is he how could you be so clueless as a as a administrator say to think that you're monitoring of your students private utterances

good morning Trina that an institution level and your intervention and threat at an Institutional level is less dangerous than letting to students you know troll each other on on a on a public social Forum it's just I just I don't know what to think about it it's just unbelievable it happened in it it's happening all over the place this sort of thing and it said there was an element to it which is a hatred of I think it's a hatred of competence because confidence produces hierarchies that aren't based on power I think it's a hatred of clear intellect picture to clear in the White House Eau Claire intellect as far as I'm concerned I think that's why you're so popular it's because you pay attention and say what you see

and you're not too concerned about doing anything other than that I mean yeah of course you have an agenda because everyone has an agenda you can't help but have an agenda if you're alive but you can temper the agenda like you can be glued in enough to try to listen and learn and watch and and pay attention to what your own senses are telling you and try to articulate that and not that's what the logos is technically speaking and the reason I'm bringing this up is because Jacque Derrida describe Western culture in a famous phrase he described it as fellow fell logocentric p h a l logo logo Centric phallogocentric and it needs to be brought down for the fellas part that's mail the logo part that's logos now that's partly logic because the word logic comes from the word logos but logos is a deep mate much much older concept that logic like logos is

it's essentially it's a theological Concepts and that's where things get complicated but you could describe it as off as the manifestation of Truth in speech and the postmodernist I don't like any of that so foul logo Center something ultimate mansplaining man who expresses tried to correct a woman becomes a man screaming to correct anything anyway Ted Cruz Sally Yates testimony that's been going on in America last name cuz I don't know I'm not aware of that I saw an example about an Australian Congressional debate where a guy was accused of mansplaining by one of his colleagues and really liked or strip off her quite nicely what's happening in the states choose fired by the Trump administration because she rejected this idea of

what was the the very specific things about restricting immigration about shutting down different people to try to come into the United States and she had this debate with Ted Cruz where she you know it's brilliantly shut him down with you know her knowledge of the Constitution and knowledge of what is and what is not legal or should or should not be allowed to happen and she was fired for it and he was grilling her and his very smart guy Ted Cruz although I don't agree with him and I agree more with her the way it was going down this debate was described as mansplain it because it was a man talking to a woman touches that recent example the female Supreme Court Justices spoke less than the male Supreme Court Justices immediately a traded that to sex isn't because you know how oppressed female Supreme Court Justices are

so I still want to get back to this that the hatred or the dislike of clear thinking do you think this comes from people I'm not sure I'm completely wrap my head around this but do you think this is from someone with they understand that their logic is Muddy they understand that there are imposing of this muddy logic is illogical and some sort of a way on the side of the social justice types because a lot of what they're doing is is rehab motion obeys the best personality predictor of done the study of that's not published yet is a trait agreeableness and agreeableness I would say the best way to think about it is that it's the maternal Dimension it that's an oversimplification but not much of one

so anybody that the maternal Viewpoint is something like anybody who's part of my in group is an infant in trouble whenever anyone who's outside of it is a predatory snake or something like that so you're saying that manifest itself in a political Doctrine will you clearly seeing that today with what's going on with these like let's say the Berkeley Milo Ralf where people who are on the left who you would think of is being pro woman Pro you know anti-violence are more than capable of committing violence against women who support Trump because then they categorize them as Nazis were supposed to punch Nazis and I mean there's been a bunch of instances where you seen video footage of people getting pepper sprayed and hit with sticks because they were wearing the wrong you know Lil Wayne wasn't even a make America great again hat is actually I make Bitcoin great again happy

famous video of a girl getting pepper sprayed I think I've seen that one by the left and by people were supposed to be you know quote on quote Progressive and people are supposed to be Pro women's rights you know anti violence against women anti domestic violence but yet they have no problem doing it to this other person because this person becomes the other because they're on the other side about this line between good and evil runs down people's hearts it's a terrible fault line and it can be shocking to see that it's the case and so it's much more convenient for people to divide the world into the righteous and the and the damned let's say and then to persecute the Damned it's convenient to because whatever resentment and hatred and bitterness you have in your heart and you have plenty of that generally speaking if your social justice type because you regard yourself as impressed and then like that's a great starting point for resentment and hatred right to be to be

we know that that one of the precursors to genocide and I'm not saying at all that where near that stayed I'm not saying that but one of the precursors to genocide in the dinner genocide I'll stay free Jenna cycle state is the the acceptance of victim status by the eventual perpetrators cuz the ideas well like we're innocent were being persecuted that those people are going to get us So eventually that becomes well we'll get them first and give it to you have a target for all your resentment in your hatred and it's a justifiable moral Target and so all the part of yourself that you don't recognize as contributing to whatever problem you think to know now pollutes the world you can ignore all that you're on the side of the good there's no more effort required and then you have someone to conveniently hate and hate and hurt at all the while you can look at yourself in the mirror and say I'm I'm on the side of the good I'm just punching Nazis bike locks

definitely standing in front of you

is there an evolutionary origin for what we were talking about in regards to the soldier being able to commit these horrible atrocities in the name of War to these people that are able to look at someone who has a different ideology as the other and attacked them is almost like a subhuman is there a it's some sort of an evolutionary origin for this disassociative sort of thinking and behavior that some people seem to me it seems like a very common thing throughout history

is that actually makes sense from from an evolutionary perspective I mean first of all we are tribal primates right and on our optimal group size seems to be something like 250 we can keep track of the boat that many social relationships and that's that's also awesome so why that size and then you might say well he has to be optimized for two functions and one is what you want to be able to climb the damn thing so if it's really really big but you're going to climb it is really low if it's too small one who cares if you climate and powerful enough to make the climb worthwhile and soul and so there's some optimization there now so you might think of everything within that hierarchy has explored territory and the reason for that is that

explored territory is where when you do something you get what you want

so so think about the conditions under which the limits of your knowledge manifest themselves mean is all sorts of things you don't know I met you know a trillion things but you're not sitting there like torturing yourself to death because there's a trillion things you don't know but then if you go in the world and you act something out and the outcome isn't what you desire then that registers an error so let's say you're at a party and you tell a joke and no one laughs the party Scentsy think about what happens to the space around the party when you tell the joke the second before you tell the joke you're in one place and the second after you tell the joke when there's an awkward silence and everybody's looking embarrassed you are no longer in the same place you stepped outside the protective Embrace of of that particular hierarchy and you've made yourself an alien and that's the thing that people use to process the alien is what is the snake detector the serpent detector the dragon detector

and it's always been that way because anything that's outside the hierarchy is a threat any stranger any strange idea any any any animal manifestation any noise and he spirit it's a it's a it's a threat to the Integrity of the dog on a tire can in many many ways so for example deeply rooted cuz that was your question what's the evolutionary basis is a great paper published in the Journal called Plies one plos one about 5 or 6 years ago looking at something absolutely terrifying it in my estimation which was there's this there's this idea that part of what motivates the authoritarian end of political conservatism so let's say the right-wing fascist and is associated not with fear but with disgust disgusting and entirely different emotion and so these research is did this fascinating study where they went to a number of different countries and also look at States within the same country looking at the relationship between the prevalence of infectious disease

and what's or Terry and attitudes at the individual level the higher the Infectious Disease rate the more authoritarian the political views and and the correlation was really high it was like point one it was .7 it's one of the highest correlations between two phenomena I've ever seen in the social studies sciences and you might say well why well here's one reason I said that the strange idea and the stranger in the pathogen let's say are all the same thing so it's all because their external threats to the structure of the dominant turkey you know when they when the Spaniards came to the new world 95% of the natives died he died from smallpox they died from measles they died from mumps they died from chicken pox because you don't know what the hell is coming at you when you let something new inside the dominance hierarchy whether it's an idea or a disease you know words are a virus think that was Lori know that was

what's the heroin addict author that was his phrase Laurie Anderson made a nice video about that words are a virus and so we respond to them with the same circuitry that we used to detect pathogens and I'll tell you something even more frightening when we were working this out because it's associated with this trait called orderliness which is actually good predictor of right-wing political belief I went back and looked at Hitler's table talk to book Hitler's table talk and he wrote that it it was drive from notes that were taken by his secretaries between 1939 and 1942 when he was eating dinner and spontaneously expounding on the structure of reality he was very open Hitler very creative person but also extremely orderly and I looked at the metaphors that he was using to describe the Jews and the Gypsies and all the other people that he burned in and destroyed it was all pathogen it's all pathogen metaphor the Aryan race is a body it's a pure body the blood is pure

the Jews are rats are insects or or lice or disease and so are the Gypsies and everyone else and they need to be eradicated and burned out since Leanne here's something even more frightening so when Hitler when Hitler first took over Germany he was kind of a public health freak to wash his hands a lot everyday and he was also a worshipper of willpower so he was a really orderly guy and he started this public health campaign in Germany and he put together these bands that would go around like screening people for tuberculosis which it was a perfectly fine idea then he started the beautification program of the Factories do you like how messy the factories were in Germany so we had people clean them up. You know sweep the mountain plant flowers out front and and fumigate them for rats and insects right parasites in the Jews were always compared to rats and insects as well but used Cyclone be to do the insecticide

will Cyclone be that was the gas that was used in the in the death camps so went like pathogen insect rats then it went into the Asylum so you know so it's so the people who are mentally deficient they were like parasites and rats and then it was Jews and Gypsies and parasites and rats and they were using zyklon-b and not zyklon any I believe they were using zyklon-b I don't know I know that the gas was zyklon where there is icon day was the gas that was formulated with a very extreme smell so that people would smell it and no cuz it was extremely toxic zyklon-b it all came from Fritz Harbor Harbor was the guy who created the harbor method of extracting nitrogen from the oxygen that we use for fertilizer today Harbor created zyklon a and made it extremely toxic smelling so you would know to avoid it as I convey that that it would ever element was removed from the smell so that it would be used in gas Chambers they have no idea

they're being gas right proper who was a Jew ironically did not know that his zyklon a was eventually going to be used on his own people but the thing is is that well so I know you said what's the biological basis in the biological basis is that like we're basically wired in some sense also to two for the domain of order or the domain of chaos that's another way of thinking about it the domain of order once again is where you are when what you're doing is working

because you see because our our environment isn't just natural it's also social so not only do you have to deal with the degrees of the natural world properly so that it gives you what you're aiming at that's how you know if you're right it gives you what you're aiming at but you have to do it in the way that other people approve of and support that's a very tight constraint we talked about that as a constraint on the interpretation of the world but then now and then something happens to disrupt that stability so that's like the white circle that's the black circle in the white serpent in the yin-yang symbol you know how the white one that's order the white one has a black. And it's not because chaos can come pouring through into order at any moment and you have a circuit that detects. And that's the same circuit that detect snakes predators and it obviously why wouldn't it be intruding force and intruding Forest has to be responded to right now I need for a demand of the instantaneous respond to me it's been almost like you were saying of those kids

like almost at a non-human or disassociative sort of the ability to act almost as if like like something other than a person without reason or logic when I say she write another thing that so funny is that

we think that the natural response to looking at a human being is humanization and that isn't right like the default person in some sense isn't human the default member of your tribe is human I mean most tribes around the world the name for their tribe is the people implying that they're the people and all those other things out there are barbarians right there there forces of chaos there are the stranger they bring disease in trouble I don't want to be too Bleak about it because this is the basic debate between conservatives and liberals to some degree is the conservatives take the stranger equals pathogen root more frequently and they're less attracted to the idea of the free of of or they were conventionally that trade with the Foreigner have benefits that way the the the

the risks and generally speaking their Bowls have the opposite attitude so but that's because those two things are both true one is that man it's really useful to trade with strangers because they have all sorts of cool things you don't have that but be well it might be real dangerous because you don't know what those things are infected with like realistically speaking let's say but then also metaphorically speaking you don't like to hear as an example of how it how how can be a virus think about the automobile

like if you wanted to introduce something into a communist country that screamed the Paramount status of the individual You couldn't possibly create something that brought cast out more clearly than a car right the car is driven by one person the person is completely autonomous they're completely sealed off they don't need any state supporter sanction whatsoever to move around in the car it's like if you wanted to know if you wanted to rescue the Communists from their Collective pathology the best thing to do would be to parachute in automobiles because the automobile just screams individual autonomy and so when you when you get a heart attack from a foreigner you don't know what that's contaminated with let's put it that way and so we have a circuit for dealing with that and it's a it's a

it's the thing that Associates The Foreigner with the force that eats the sun when it sets at night that's the most archaic way of thinking about it but it's the snake or the Predator so and what are you do with the Snake River Predator you kill it you crush it it's like there's a there's a destructive force that comes along with it without that's absolutely what's morally right you you can hold if it's a poisonous snake and it's threatening the village obviously you kill it and then you're celebrated for it so no sense the same dehumanizing force that allows people to act that way in war also allows people to disassociate between

anyone who doesn't agree with their ideology in a school setting in the University like what happened at my building to those safely ensconced within our dominance hierarchy and serpents

and so that's dangerous and in the reason that that this doctrine that I described about the line between good and evil running down the individuals heart I mean I got that particular line mostly from Alexander solzhenitsyn but it's also up it's a it's an idea that's been developed intensively in the West for thousands and thousands of years and I mean maybe it's been developed since far before we we invented the stories in Genesis because of course the serpent sea in Genesis of course Genesis is like a paradise right you can think about it doesn't well-functioning hierarchy it's also a balance between Chaos and Order two walls and it's a garden so but there's a snake that pops his head in and that's the same as that as I said that block. Inside the White serpent in the yang symbol it's that no matter how it doesn't matter how perfect the the environment is set up something that doesn't fit is going to make its way inside it's one of the oldest stories of mankind

the thing that makes it sells itself manifest inside in the Genesis story is a snake now that snake turns out to be Satan which is like how the hell did that happen it's a snake like what where does that come from it's it's not actually in the biblical writings to any degree it's part of the surrounding mythology when it's partly because people started to figure out that the worst snake wasn't a snake the worst snake was the snake that was inside a person because I'm malevolent person is way more of a threat than just a snake like a snake wants to bite you it wants to meet you and all of that and and they were hell on are extremely primordial ancestors but the human race has been trying to figure out where the threat is forever off first of all it was external right it was all external it was the snake was the Barbarian but then it got localized to some degree inside the individuals like that's a bad person that person has a snake in them and then the idea kind of came out this is so cool that idea is that what the snake that's inside bad purse

and the snake that's inside bad person be is somehow the same so that's where the idea of of an articulated morality starts to come from is there's an equivalence of evil across individuals so then idea of evil itself starts to become abstracted at the same time that the idea of good or evil gets associated with Satan and Satan gets associated with the snake it's it's mind-boggling mean these are how do you say we were chimps for Christ's sake you know it took us a long time to develop up an ideal just to say the word and ideal implies a counter ideal say all those things were in body weigh before they were ideas and after they ate they were in body first not as bad but as a bad thing or a bad person bad had to be extracted how does that I needed that was extracted as a drama first you don't like the bad guy in the movie he isn't a bad guy he's a composite bad guy you know he's he's a literary

bad guy or good guy isn't just a good guy he's a literary good guy he's a hero he's got way more heroic attributes than the typical person and that's where abstract ideas are born so anyways back to your question you said you said yes for that sort of disassociative and it it makes a whole lot of sense that there's an actual that they're on and I knew you probably knew this which is why I asked you that I knew you had an answer rather that there is some sort of an evolutionary basis for that sort of that ability that people have to look at someone as the other people with invading tribes and like you said with other external threats whether it was animals or insects or snakes or anything they could kill you

all the good part of the time and modern people don't even know what that's like that's why they go out and they go into Warrior mode and they get post-traumatic stress disorder because it's so unlike the way they can figure themselves but that they can't even the cat even bridge the gap between the two identities for just for sake of clarity I think for some folk some post-traumatic stress disorder is actually come from not just that but also from the threat of being attacked from what I understand people like special ops people people like Rangers Navy Seals and the like are less likely to develop post-traumatic stress disorder because they're acting versus reacting that where is people that are on that are going on like Patrol and then they get blown up like those people apparently have a far more likely issue with post-traumatic stress disorder because they're constantly worried about these external threats and then they going to come back to civilization they have a very difficult time

back to Baseline pray mode really in a very serious way yes so it's just acting but it's also reacting that the reacting issue sometimes as even more problematic for the individual in the acting mode because very frequently if you're going to encounter a stress it's best to do it fall and Tara Lee cuz he was a whole different circuit use the approach circuit and so I mean that sounds paradoxical what you just said because I said that you know people often observed themselves doing something and get post-traumatic stress disorder and then you said well yeah but if people act as likely to but that's that's part of a more General phenomenon which is that in the face of a stressor you're you're better off cycle physiologically to act voluntarily but it's either you're either going to be the thing that advances on the on the anomaly or its prey that's that's roughly the way to think about it to be a prey animal is a terrible thing because it's due

it's paralysis like literally speaking it's it's like in the Harry Potter series with the Basilisk regular cat the Basilisk in that turns you to Stone what why because that's what happens to a prey animal when a horrible Predator looks at it it's frozen it's turned to stone that's Medusa with all her snakes right she looks at you mad Mother Nature looks at you like the devouring part of Mother Nature opens her eye on you it's like you're paralyzed that's an old old story that is a really interesting thing that I never consider the Medusa does have his head of snakes and she looks at you she turns you into stone and that is the biggest issue with people it's not fight or flight people think it's fighter fight its fight flight or freeze right to freeze thing is very common with people and I've seen it I've seen it with people that just they don't know what to do when they're in a stressful situation instead of reacting to freak out

you say someone tells a joke maybe they're kind of socially anxious and they finally managed to mumble out a joke and it falls flat it's like to freeze in the face of that is very common reaction know the personal freeze then off to no break into tears and run so well if I buy the whole Community that's very shaming and so that. Stop is dumped on top of them I mean that socially anxious people are afraid of that all the time that they're going to be regarded by the group as an outcast ride right yeah it's very hard on people and the paranoid amongst them are always thinking the people are talking about them and trying to make them the other night yes very uncomfortable State of Mind

yeah this is a very you I think this is a very important subject and a in explaining it this way I think for the open-minded whoever is willing to listen to this who maybe might have opposed some of your ideas before I think they'll get a better understanding of what's really dangerous about his lack of dialogue in his lack of engaging in this shutting you out and making you the other as it were yeah well I mean it's what post-modernism is fundamentally concerned about they don't believe there's any other way of operating in the world in that decision and this is this is one of the things that I think Western Civilization has contributed so brilliantly to to the expansion of knowledge in the world is what's the what's the cure for the inadequacies of the group

what you might say it's the perfect state so one of the ways I'm going to do a series of lectures on the Bible starting May 16th and and for reasons that I outlined to some degree when I was talking about Genesis a little bit earlier but in the Old Testament for example the Israelites are always trying to make their peace with God so they're trying to live in the world without getting walupt constantly by natural events and buy you know we invading forces in which they attribute to God's will never be on their understanding and some since they're more sophisticated than merely this but whatever is beyond our understanding but they're kind of conceptualising being such an trying to figure out how to deal with it and one of the hypothesis they come up with something like well you can bargain with it and the thing as you can that's one of the things that's so cool and partly the reason you can bargain with reality is because the reality that you encounter As you move forward in time is partly the world but partly the abstract social system and so

you can bargain with the future abstract social system all the time you do that every time you make a promise you do it every time you sacrifice one thing for another you know so you for going impulsive Temptation and that gives you a moral claim that you can redeem in the future that happens all the money is for God sake and you know we discovered the future at some point as I said we were chimpanzees at one point we discovered the future then we discovered that you could bargain with the future as if it was a person that's amazing it's amazing and that's partly where the idea of God has a personality came from I should front flip that that idea that you could bargain with the future came out of the idea that God was a personality cuz the God has a personality idea came first but it was a it was a it was a developmental stage on the way to even be able to say the future

you don't have no idea how that's like a 6 million year path from chimpanzee to to self aware human being and we have no idea where these unbelievably sophisticated ideas that we have come from like the idea of sacrifice do you know how much blood was spilled before human beings were able to sacrifice abstractly instead of killing something we had to act out God enjoys you killing something because he's happy with the blood work that out for God kunos 20000 years hundred thousand years before we got anywhere near the idea that you could do that abstractly

so when I look at these old stories I look at them like an evolutionary biologists now I'm not trying to reduce them in anyway because what we don't understand about Evolution that could make a very thick book and this other strange things about religious phenomenology that we don't have a clue about you know like the fact that the drugs are often called in Sea Legends are psychedelics can reliably produced mystical experiences no one has any idea what to make of that you can just discounted it's like yeah well he told their drugs yeah sure people being using the things for who knows 50,000 years hundred and fifty thousand they might be the source of all our religious ideas I don't I'm not saying that they are but they could well be and so why do we have a capacity for mystical experience

who knows it isn't that associated with the sense of art associated with the same feeling that you get when you listen to particularly dramatic music or when or when something moves you deeply in the hair on the back of your neck stand up you know what that is that's piloerection that's the same thing that happens to a cat when it looks like a particularly big dog it's all

you feel that when there's a swell of music off your hair stands up in the back of your neck it's like you pop up just like a cat except you know what that's like a bald cat so what do you make of this idea that well not the idea but the reality that these entheogens closely mimikyu mineral chemistry businesses that we share an evolutionary path way with all these things that we eat no plants and fungi and you know look linked evolutionarily to every form of life on planets can and like serotonin in lobsters has the same effect on lobsters as it doesn't human being so if you up there serotonin levels artificially the lobster GIF stands up more reactants and stronger in this much more willing to fight and if you decrease the serotonin in lobsters nervous system that it gets all depressed and runs away and hides think about that

monsters about 350 million years ago and they still live in dominance hierarchies that's how old the dominance hierarchy is older than trees it's older than flowers it's permanent weed involved for the hierarchy and in the spirit of the hierarchy that's that's the Old Testament God that's at least part of it the spirit of the hierarchy so these things are well there mind-boggling to me which is partly why I'm investigating them but all of our wiring is conditional on that so I don't mean women use the dominance hierarchy to select mates so it's so strange because we know people think of evolution from a natural selection perspective almost always but sexual selection plays a huge role so he wrote something wild for you okay so we know that you have prices many female ancestors as male ancestors how people have a hard time with that but you could imagine that roughly speaking that would happen if every single woman had one baby and only every

can man fathered a child so for men it would be you either have two kids or zero but that's basically what it is on average across time if you're a man you have two children maybe with two different women or is it here or if you're a woman everyone has one that's how it averages out so there's more disparity of success among men and that's very common in the animal kingdom by the way now the question is how do women select their mates now unlike female chimps female humans are choosy Mater's female chimps will make with any chimp they go into heat Dough made with any champ the dominant males are more likely to meet with him but that's cuz they chase away the subordinates it's not because the females exercise Choice human females exercise choice and that's one of the things that differentiated us from chimpanzees but how do they do it well they look at the male dominance hierarchy

that's where the men are competing know you could say they're competing for power but that's pretty corrupt way of looking at it like they're competing for let's say influence they're competing for leadership in some sense the people at the top of the hierarchy if they're men are elected by the other band now I know there's a brutes and there's predators and all of that but I'm talking on average across time it's like the man organize themselves and there are influential men that rise to the top and the women take them and we think about that what that means is that over the millions of years that a dominance hierarchy with those properties exist it so let's say since we split from chimps let's say that six million years

that means that the male dominance hierarchy is the environment that pushes The Mating male to the top so that means the mail that's most likely to take precedence in the dorm in the mail dominance hierarchy is the one most likely to leave a genetic contribution so that means that the male dominance hierarchies a selection mechanism mediated by the female so what that means is that as we move forward to 6 million years of time man have become more and more well adapted not only to the presence of the male dominance her key but to the ability to move up it and that's the central Spirit you could say in some sense that's the central Spirit of the individual the individuals the thing that can move up dominance hierarchies it's the thing that's at the top it's the eye at the top of the pyramid it's being selected for and then what's happened is that we've watched so we get better and better and better for biological reasons culturally mediated at figuring out how to climb across the sea

dominant turkey so we can leave at genetic contribution that's what's happened to human beings now imagine that. Time for six million years now imagine that we started to watch that because we're curious creatures were trying to figure out who we are and then as we watch that we started to tell stories about what the people who can climb the higher keys were like those were Heroes that's where hero mythology came from and the biggest hero was the person go out and kill the snake well I'm surprisingly because that was a big hero man and maybe when we are living in trees that was a hero so big hero is the person who goes out plays the dragon gets the gold brings it back to the community and distributes it he's also the person most likely to go up the dominant turkey he's the person most likely to find the Virgin right cuz it's a virgin that you free from the dragon and you get to claim her

Freight and so dominant turkey is a mechanism that selects Heroes and then breeds them

so then we watch that for six million years we start to understand what it means to be the hero we start to tell stories about that until then not only are we genetically aiming at that with the doorman at Arkansas election mechanism mediated by female choice but our stories are trying to push us in that direction and so then we say we look that person's admirable tell a story about him and we said this person is admirable tell story about him and this person is admirable and at the same time we talked about the people who aren't admirable and then we start having admirable and non admirable as categories and out of that you get something like good and evil and then you can start to imagine the perfect person that would be not only so it would be you take 10 admirable people and you pull out someone who's meta admirable and that's a hero. Becomes a religious figure across time that becomes a savior or Messiah cross time as we conceptualize what the ideal person is

I'm waiting in the last year's how we figured it out we said the ideal person the ideal man is the person who tells the truth and what that means is that's the best way of climbing up any possible dominant turkey in the end of its most stable and most lasting that's that's the conclusion of Western culture so in a sense psychologically when you talk about post modernist and their rejection of these classic male structures are what they doing is realizing that they're not going to compete in the the classic as stated male hierarchy so they're creating their own version of it that's the motivation of these pathological guys who wrote they're like bull stirring up the feminist yeah well you know they don't compete any other way they don't compete as allies let's say

very sneaky yeah wow yeah that's how everybody was described him to when you let me know it's almost like it just almost feels gross to label them like that but that is the way you think of male feminist you think of them as sneaky and yeah it's creepy and discriminant discriminatory towards classic male Behavior

wow that's deep is deep this is going to be hurtful to a lot of people some people listening to this right now very upset and very triggered by the postmodernist don't like blunts Peach Burns it burns off Deadwood and people don't like having to Deadwood burnt off often because they're like 95% Deadwood and I'm not being believe me I'm not being snide about that it's no joke when you start to realize how much of what you've constructed of yourself is based on deception and lies that is a horrifying realization and it can easily be 95% of you that you things you say things you act out no it's well you see that in Pinocchio which I often you discussing old Pinocchio when he gets corrupt as easy as he matures first learns to lie and then he becomes a brain jackass on Pleasure Island

and and be threatened by the underground authoritarians right they're going to sell them to the salt mines like yeah that's for sure exactly right man

so then you figure out your brain jackass and you're lying all the time that's a terrible realization and then all that needs to be burnt away and the people don't like that held in this conflict for quite a long time and I've got to imagine that the way you look at the world the way you see things many many steps ahead do you see any sort of a logical conclusion to this process do you see any light at the end of the tunnel or do you see it impossible to avoid conflict like you what what do you see when you look at this whole thing long-term well I would say I can't look at it long-term and the reason for that is that and this is why I get a kick out of all the Keck

Pakistan boys you know I do believe it we're too. Of chaos what's a cat stack is a mythological country that's ruled by chaos by the god cat who's a frog by was a frog as it turns out I don't know I don't know about this Pepe the Frog was there is apparently so distraught that has frog has been used to align them off and I killed them off what's good luck he didn't Uber using Pepe I haven't got the story quite right but I'll get it mostly write the people who were using Pepe as a meme is hilarious place LOL and the reason I did that was because kek in Korean means LOL

Justice little joke Tech kek well then somebody found out these were people who are using Pepe remember it's a frog then people found out the check was an Egyptian God and he was a frog names between categories for like a transexual by the way he was between categories and so now they have this Republic of CAC and it's ruled by this Egyptian god whose name is cat who's the Frog hold on go back go back don't don't keep changing this Jamie's doing this in the background while you're talking but look at this there's a frog with a make America great again hat and he's he's got like a tombstone it says those who served in the meme War 2015/2016 we are the gods of the great meme War We Are The Ship posters the Legion of CAC we are the internet the death of the normies laws and CAC we are one where in the fuck is going on is the questions and that's the question you asked me and my answer was I don't know

we're going to. Of chaos. Chaos and dinner. Of chaos the time Horizon shrinks because no because the outcome is uncertain this seems to be truly embracing chaos mean that statement the Frog the Donald Trump thing with the hat on this seats this is one of the things that seems to me to be a reoccurring feature in this whole chaos ballet that were watching play out is that people are enjoying the fact that Donald Trump sucks as a president they don't feel threatened by that they like it and they don't don't like it because they want to burn this mother fucker to the ground and towards this thing and like a phoenix will rise from the no no it's not that it's that they they are enjoying that it's falling apart this is why we are the shitposter do you know what shitposting is Jamie explain shitposting you're really good at explaining it

posting for like literally no reason other than to get someone mad that's almost like trolling but it's like a separate level of trolling right tell me about shitposting I wasn't aware till that was a year ago in the belly of the Beast for the belly of the whale and you're underwater underworld underworld & Chaos it so that's inside the turkey where everything is going well because nothing abnormal is happening you're getting what you need and you want and you're conscious knowledge devices right okay but then something tilts and that starts you're no longer works so where do you end up the end up in the Underworld that's what happens when your partner of 20 years has a has a long-term Affair and you find out about it it's like you thought you knew where you were

but you didn't now that you found out you don't know where you are when you don't know where you are you're in the Underworld right and that's where the unconscious forces play those are the thoughts for those guards in the Underworld and people go to the underworld all the time it's chaos and fear and depression hopelessness in imaginative this it's everything is terrifying terrifying and promising to have gold because it's always done the unknown has two things

just like the future it's like look out it'll do you in and look out it offers everything to you that's the underworld that's why they here always goes into the underworld to find a cave guarded by dragon in The Hobbit literally it's it's chaos and down there there's all sorts of play of possibility and the reason the frog with a goal was the guardian of chaos is because of the frog is this thing that doesn't fit into categories you say because it's partly water it's partly land its tadpole yet it's it's adult right so it's like a fish and then it's like an animal doesn't fit and it's things that don't fit that blow apart the categories right well that's what the transsexuals do the category of gender for example and that puts you in the state of chaos puts you in the state of chaos and that's what we're in now or in the state of chaos and so what are the rules for operating in state of

well as far as I can tell the fundamental rule when operating in chaos is tell the truth

so for example if you want for the people that want to navigate this successfully has a shield and weapon and and

and that that's the guidepost that's the that's the way through while you see that Hero Stories all the time you know so it's it's a lights allegiance to the truth but the truth is a strange thing it's a very strange thing often the hero in a story has to assimilate their Dark Side before they're capable of telling the truth right in The Hobbit for example he has to become a thief

right because I have to get tough that's the thing that's if they also the thing about telling the truth is that it's not for it's not for the naive

not at all

and partly it's because it burns off Deadwood party cuz it hurts people's feelings it's a sword

so you have to be a warrior

wow a truth Warrior

in this time of chaos right what emerges from this right

sometimes sometimes it's catastrophe that's the thing about these categories they're real the real and you know of Optimus that I hear say while depending on the swings and then swings back and I think yeah well sometimes it it takes a hundred years to swing back and it takes a hell of a lot of people out on the way and sometimes it never swings back at all so we know sometimes people go out to fight a dragon and it just eats the word burns them and that's the end of that like wearing an unstable. Of time at the moment in a transition. Of some sort I can't put my finger on it but I know that that's partly why what I've been saying has been resonating with people because obviously it's not about pronouns well it is

it is except

language turns out to be about a lot more than like you can't take a little thing like that desire to transform pronouns and think that that's a little thing was not a little thing it's also your disagreement with this use of these new gender pronoun words they trying to force on people has opened up this discussion where you can Enlighten people on your very deep understanding of human psychology it's not just simply this gender pronoun disagreement you are transphobic you erase is your transphobic piece of shit it's this opportunity now because of this that means essentially the fuck with the wrong dude it's it's not shallow in any sense of the word mean to engage you in this this battle of rhetoric is it it's it allows you

to expose your very deep understanding with the problems that are going on right now with human beings in general people are often told in because of the social justice Warrior stuff but then they see I have all these other videos and they're curious about me part because people are calling me names

and so then they watch a video or two and they say come I haven't heard that before they watch a bunch of them and then they really helpful and I say thanks I'm really happy about that because I am are you in an unmanageable position now though as far as like responding to people over the last few months must be just overwhelming given up trying to keep up on an email it's just not my wife helps me is out and I've had some other people help me but you know what I do is I don't I try to say thank you to people and write them a couple of lines when I have a moment but you know because I can't get to all of it just come in because people are writing me very heartfelt long letters brilliant frequently like amazing letters telling me you know their experiences with the author Terry and laughter or

or the way they've been you know cornered in in one way or another or or how starting to clean up the room change their life that's quite fun because it's something I always tell people to do instead of going out in protesting Jesus I just can't see out of that room meaning well my sense is that if you want to change the world you start from yourself and work out work because you build your confidence that way it's like I don't know how you can go out and protest the structure of the entire economic system if can't keep your room organized it's not an issue with people though that they always want to enact some sort of control over the outside world when they're inside is all fucked up for social people to the most adamant about it outside world for lots of many of those ways aren't just pure good but you know I thought about you I made a video called which was called message to Millennials where I was it was called how to change the world properly a bit of a note

pretentious I suppose but I was trying to produce something that was a counter position to this idea that what you should do is go out and fix up other people and that's just not right there's a new testament lying about that something about you know not worrying too much about the log in your neighbor's eye or about the speck in your neighbor's eye when you have a log in your eye like yes no kidding but you know do you really want to do you really want to face that so what I thought about is that well what you start to do as you start to tell and act out the truth locally like within the domain of your actual competence you don't cuz the world presents itself as a series of puzzle some of which you are capable of solving and some of what you're not and you have many puzzles in front of you that you could solve but you choose not to you know what that those are the things that weigh on your conscience so you know why I should really do this but you don't like so I had this idea long time ago because the world is a pretty Dreadful place I thought well what would the world be like if

stop avoiding the things they knew they should do you don't get the question is how much are we contributing to the fact that life is a is an existential catastrophe in a tragic how much is our own corruption contributing to that how to read it worthwhile question things you leave undone because you're angry or resentful you're lazy you have inertia well you can sell your conscience and it says well you know that place over there could use a little work

it's the same as working on yourself until you clean that up because you can then things are little clear around you and you're a little better off because you practiced a bit and it's only a little stronger and then something else manifest itself and says well maybe you could like take a crack at 6 me up to so you decide to do that and then that gets a little bit more pristine you know when soon and it's it's humble because you're not feeding your domain of confidence and it's like don't be fixing up the economy 18 year olds you don't know anything about the economy it's a massive complex machine Beyond anyone's understanding and you mess with it at your peril

so when can you even clean up your own room no well you should think about that you should think about that cuz if you can't even clean up your own room who the hell are you to give advice to the world

that's so very very important thing for people to hear it's a very important thing for people to hear so many times I mean here's a perfect example of people understand to be able to resonate with it will resonate with them brother when you see people that have a lot of inspirational memes on my Instagram and Facebook through almost all fucked up El Ron Hubbard was completely insane and was self-diagnosing and one of the things he was trying to do I mean if you read Lawrence writes book going clear he was clearly trying to fix himself in creating this religion this religion that was a lot of it based on self-help principle that he took from other sources

that you see from a lot of these people that are like a legitimate Lee motivational people that find great benefit in being an example a powerful strong example and they find great comfort and showing people their methods that they've used in order to improve their life like your own self watering system that you're promoting so it's not just it's not that they're all that it's all it's all not real or you know in a way that people can approve them quite the contrary people can improve themselves I think to a degree that we don't understand you don't because a human being for better or worse is it something potentially as well as something actual that's really weird that idea of potential because it's not actually measurable or tangible but it's something like the idea of spirit

you know what my potential yeah but people believe in it because I might say what you're not living up to your potential and you might disagree but you would definitely understand the statement it's like it's not an actual it's not real but it is isn't it though if you see someone especially artistic like you see someone who may be self-sabotage with drugs or alcohol or personal chaos but they can create amazing music but they never get it out you see that often times with artists and often times you see that after initial success you'll see some amazing motivation early in their career then initial success and then self-sabotage after the fact not realizing their potential. Obviously they've hit some sort of a frequency with a resonate with people that appreciate them authors you see that with musicians comedians of all sorts of people that create things and then they're not living up to their potential because

the loud the demons to take over the inner workings of their mind you know so you can I'm not talk there's a lot of sincere people that are motivational people that I follow I think there's a lot of people out there that are then they take great pleasure and expressing to other people the things that have benefited them so I don't want to sell them short Freud and Jung because I would say particularly because I haven't read anyone I regard is deeper than you he's terrifying truly terrifying but but here's one of the things that differentiates in from the typical self-help person I really love this is that he believes that the pathway to completion as a human being is through the is through the embodiment of the monster

embodiment of the monster that's the discovery of the Shadow you see so you don't even believe that you could be a good person until you realized your capacity for evil I don't mean actor that was in the world but I understand it's possible. Only understand it but them to bring it under your control you see because there's a big difference between someone who is naive and is a good person

they're not use their good person because they can't not be there like a domesticated house cat that there's nothing they don't even have the capacity to be bad so there's no morality in that the morality comes when you're a monster and you can control it and that's the union encounter with the shadow so you all set for example that the roots of the Shadow go all the way down to Hell and what he meant by that is that a way you can think about it literally you think about it metaphorically we'll just think about it metaphorically is like if you start to understand who you are then you understand the Nazis

who wants to understand the Nazis I can understand sex criminals

I can understand them right I can understand Nazis and the reason for that is because I can see that as an aspect of myself truly

but one of the things that so interns terrifying to realize that it's terrifying to realize the shadow which is why people don't do it it's no wonder they don't do it you know it's a it's a horrible thing to realize that you're human

and what being human meat like Angel like Christ to Satan that's the human being and you might say well those aren't real it's like okay well they're figments of the imagination that the human race constructed to describe themselves fine

does that make it less frightening I don't think so

so and it's not it's not it doesn't make it any less frightening if you take those two extreme seriously and he might say well who's going to take the Christ extreme seriously it's no problem man dispense with it you try getting rid of the other side see how you do with that so Young's idea that you find so compelling was essentially that one has to understand their potential for horrific behavior that it almost exist in all of us that it's a facet of Just The Human Experience

it's cuz you're a monster I mean look I got to watch what you did to the Kardashians on your on your end Jenner on your comedy show man you did this whole gargoyle things you remember you laugh yeah I see you can even like remote that would be crunched up on the back of his chair like a terrifying to do oh yeah well the problem is but while I'm doing it I'm not thinking I'm doing a comedy sketch this is what's fucked up about it while I'm Crouch there I'm thinking like a demon reason why do it that way the reason why I do it in a very flexible right so it's one of the reasons why I do it in almost cuz I want it to be in an almost

in a way that you don't imagine human beings moving you know that it's like it it confuses the mind because it's not standard human movement and then on top of that the way I'm thinking and then this like explosive like when he yells out nonsense cuz I don't think of it as me I really think it sounds so pretentious my brain goes into another place

it's a fee but it's all good because I'm happy when I retired it by the way I was very impressed by it I mean I thought it was hilarious to begin with but the fact that you would go there I thought that was really interesting and comedians are like that cuz they go into Dark Places there tricksters there on mediator between the normal world in the world of the Gods their tricksters so it was very funny to watch you do that and I wondered how far you would let yourself get into it but I think part of the reason that you're appealing to people if you don't mind me by saying that so you know I'm not trying to be forward particularly but I thought about it a lot is that you're a tough guy and you tell the truth but it's both of those together that's what's doing it because you know people don't look at you and think like holier-than-thou preacher that is what they think they say tough guy who's trying to figure things out like right on

good that's a good you're a good figure for the times because this whole war against the fellow go centrism you know need calls forward people who are like you if we're lucky and those are guys who have this Warrior end cuz you know you're a fighter

so you if you're going to be a fighter you have to want to win and you have to want to hurt people I mean not for the sake of hurting them that's what makes you different than an evil person but you have to have that capacity have to develop that

I know that's a step on the way to Enlightenment weirdly enough because that is what people think but I definitely think the truth is a valuable commodity in this very bizarre time and I think that's also one of the reasons why you're very popular as a you have stuck your neck out in a world that does not encourage it nor North Academia of Courage the courage is the exact opposite encourages you to stick your head you know in in the books and just to in in some way shape or form go with the tide like whichever way it is and you know get your 10 year and it just won't listen to let your pride but I don't consider myself an intellectual precisely

what is an intellectual if you're not

how about nobody because my ideas aren't disembodied I asked him out but I don't live in my head how do I get some degree but what is an intellectual do then you should you think of it as a pejorative what do you think of the term intellectual do you think of it is it a limited person in this book called The spake zarathustra Nietzsche has his his zarathustra come down from a Mountaintop after being enlightened and he sees this goes into the Public Square and there was this little tiny being there like an inch high and has a gigantic ear on it and it stalking and people are gathered around listening and that was sort of Nietzsche's metaphor for an intellectual

it's like mostly little except maybe the rational faculty or something like that expanded to monsters Dimensions unbalanced in that manner and and and and prone to become the subject of totalitarian etiology that's the worship of the rational mind that the Catholic Church always warned against you know it's not like the Catholic Church of course I have to say that I won't even say it so you don't need to know what that's right that's right so she'll mind like to fall in love with its own Creations right so the term intellectual the problem is that it is identifies one aspect and it it

it's sort of defines one aspect of behavior and thinking only one God. That's the right way to think the same thing the god idea here's another way of thinking about it that's quite cool I learned this from you and you can take it for what it's worth the highest ideal that a person holds consciously or unconsciously that's there God it's functions in precisely that manner and people might say while I don't believe in God it's like well it depends what you mean about that it's like we're very complicated creatures and we're run by all sorts of very strange things down there in the unconscious you know the Greeks thought we were the placings of the Gods because we serve lost we serve thirst we serve hunger we serve rage

you know when those things all transcend us so that's why they were God's you know Rage that's the war god what why is it a god what it exist forever it exists in all people it takes them over and directs their behavior it's a god well you can you can quibble about the details no it's not a God okay fine it's a psychological Force 1 Word well they don't they don't really we have to think about it functionally to some degree we have to think about what that idea means what I had that idea forever it isn't just some Superstition Jesus that's what I think is unfortunate about the new atheists they don't take the damn problem seriously they think well Christianity that's just a bunch of superstition slick

really

no sorry that's just not deep enough man so what it really is is the accounts of people trying to work out the issues of Being Human but let me give you another example this is so cool this is so cool it's Northrop Frye who is a Biblical scholar in in at the University of Toronto this was this was one of his elucidations of the structure of the Bible's the Bible's actually a story and which is weird because it's a whole bunch of different books written by a whole bunch of different people edited kind of willy-nilly over thousands of years and then assembled it'll by committee it's really strange book but it has a narrative structure so that sort of emerged as a collective decision across these thousands of years so that the Old Testament here's the rough store in the Old Testament

Israel is sort of a middle power and it rises to power

so and domination and then it profit arises and says look you guys are all successful now you starting to get corrupt you're not paying attention to the widows and children you're not running your state according to the super ordinate principal he might say will the Super Hornet principal doesn't exist keep a running it that way and see what the hell happens that's what the profit is usually at the risk of his life he says that to the king so fine you don't believe in God you don't believe in the superordinate principle that say that the Super Target ethical principle no problem keep doing what you're doing let's see what happens what happens is it will get wiped out you know and then four generations its enslaved or its population is being destroyed and then it's sort of

poems back up to power and then it gets powerful for a brief period of time and it gets corrupt and a prophet comes up and says remember that superordinate principle that you made a covenant with your not paying any attention to it anymore you better look the hell out and everyone ignores it and dang so it's it's order

corruption chaos order corruption chaos that happened 6 times now so here's a night just an idea behind it the idea because the state keeps Rising there's an idea that emerges out of that that game is the perfect state

that's a utopian dream that arises out of that let's call it learning process over thousands of years if we could only get the state perfect if we could only get the state of perfect will it say like the state of Israel or the or the Russian State the communist state if we could only bring Utopia in at the political level our problems would be solved well then what happens is there's a transition in conceptualization that happens with the New Testament and the New Testament conceptualization is wait a minute the state isn't salvation

the individual is salvation

now you say well we're going to just throw that out are we that was a hell of a discovery man it was and then there's more to it it's not only the individual salvation it's the truth philinda vidual that salvation you think of how difficult a concept like that is to develop if there's anything less self evident than that

because you think will who's going to run the dominant targets like the biggest bloody monster with a club like no turns out those are unstable go societies are unstable they don't work they collapse into chaos they get corrupt they lose sight of the superordinate principle whatever that is

the stable solution is the individual that tells the truth and it's taking us forever to figure that out and that's partly what the postmodernist sore after that's their Auntie fellow go centrism that's why they skitter off and hide in the Radiology they're afraid to come out there frayed to be seen there afraid to speak cuz I have nothing to say

soul

we have to get sophisticated about this stuff we're going to throw it away without understanding it it's me it's unbelievable like that story is

it's the story upon Western Civilization it's the story upon which Western Civilization is founded that's why I need to said when God was dead that everything would collapse into chaos he didn't say that triumphantly he knew what was going to happen so the Dostoyevsky that's why I admire those people so much they knew what was coming

so what I've been trying to do and I've been guided in large part by Young because he was the first tee young took me to his problem seriously need you said luck we're losing our faith we're losing our our ability to relate to the super bored to death tickle principal and he actually blame Christianity for killing itself with the with the sword of truth that it had produced said so we're going to lose this and it's big trouble make no mistake about it because our whole societies found it on those principles we get rid of the animating Spirit at the base of it we're going to lose all of it so I need you thought well we're going to have to become superhuman to manage it that's that's where his concept of the old man comes from where the Superman which the Nazis sort of pulled off on parody. I would say

now you don't you see you was a student of Nietzsche's not directly but very much influenced by him you thought that nature was wrong that we couldn't create your own values because it looked it so hard to create your own volume but say you're kind of an overweight guy and you decide to go to the gym for your New Year's resolution it's like you don't you go twice and then you stopped and it's because you can't create your own values right it's hard to know what your own slave you can't just tell yourself what to do you have a nature and so you don'ts idea was one that we had to go back to the mythology we had to go back to the stories way to go back into the underground unconscious chaos and lift out what we had forgotten and that's what he was trying to do with his psychology and he's done it very effectively the very very effectively use a revolutionary thinker but very difficult to understand and so I've been working with you inside ears for a long time trying to I would say

make them more rational inarticulate believe me that's no critique because every time I go back to you I which I do from time to time thinking I've kind of Master damn I learned a bunch of stuff that I didn't know so but so what I've been trying to do is to resurrect I'm trying to resurrect the dormant logos I suppose if you have to put it that way that's what I'm trying to do and it's mostly in mostly in men and they're starving for it cuz I got most of them in I don't know. Just seems to be what's happening like about 90% of my viewers on YouTube herb and tall men what the hell are they doing coming to hear somebody speak men don't do that right women do that

so and then I talk to them about truth and responsibility and their eyes light up because it's like no one ever mentioned that before and it just boggles my mind I'm asking because that is a gigantic theme today then searching for some sort of reason or some sort of I guess without without a better word path some sort of path and it seems to be very very prevalent today and almost all all walks of life is men feel disenfranchised with this world they find themselves stuck in

you know that's polytheism that's the return of polytheism for all intents and purposes I mean what the hell are those things there demigods obviously one of them's for for God sake I mean more obvious could it be you know I told you might say while who's the leader of the demigods cuz that's the person you really want to follow right yeah well the answer to that as far as the Christian root went was Christ but it just been lots of embodiments of that for the Mesopotamians it was Marduk martic was the Savior figured he had eyes all the way around his head and he spoke magic words that was his fun. What made of different from all the other gods and he was elected by other than all the other gods to be there King and then he went out and fought time at who's a great dragon and made the world out of four pieces one of his name's was he who makes ingenious things out of the combat with time at all that's what the human beings do is they go out into the unknown into chaos and they make ingenious thing

that's what we do. He's the found martic was the founder of Mesopotamian civilization and you can think about all those tribes came together to make Mesopotamia so then do squats went to war and out of that war of gods mediguard emerge that was Marduk and Mark has one of the sources for the figure of Christ that have no over the place you see the admirable man then you see 10 admirable Ben and you guys have something in common that's what you remember about the musi you remember the heroic things they've done cuz they stick in your memory because I set the pattern and then you start telling the story about the heroic things that a bunch of dates together and then you come out with your culture hero you're gone then there's like 50 tribes they have their own gone to all the way what are you going to do then the gods go to war

over centuries and then they elect a new God Marduk can in the case of the Mesopotamians and he's the thing that goes out and fights the dragon of chaos and makes the world so I can you do that with truth cuz truth introduces you to chaos why do you think though it's so much of an issue with males as opposed to females in our society have enough to do maybe men have to take this on voluntarily that's what it looks like to me cuz like you can you can screw around till your 50

you can still have a family you got time and then you can sit down and do nothing if you want you can do it

so but you shouldn't cuz it's horrible to do that and people who do it no it like it's it's meaningless it's well it's funny thing about meaninglessness there's no such thing when people say their lives are meaningless that is what they mean they mean I'm in pain and anxious all the time that's what they mean those are meanings man you don't get neutral you know I'm just sitting around and not feeling anything right so you say do nothing but your life is meaningless if you're doing nothing what it what do you mean by doing nothing by not lifting a great load by not acting out the archetype of the hero that's what people are that's what men are if there anything there mythological Heroes if there anything through some path whatever slots payouts being so look there's an old medieval idea this is the idea of the imitation of Christ this is something that you only elaborates on a lot he he believe this is one of the things that he said was that your

the proper goal of a Christian roughly speaking is to enact the The Meta pattern of Christ life in their own to make it their own story and so what did you mean by that what part of it is one of the things that characterizes the mythological figure of Christ let's say is that he takes on the burden of mortality voluntarily accepted as a precondition of existence and we have to do that because otherwise we get resentful like life is hard make no mistake about it people's lives are tragic you know if you pick a random person off the street and you ask them about their life man usually there's things that have happened to her and all they just Beggars the imagination it's no wonder people are angry and resentful and bitter

but the way out of that is to accept it to accept your mortality and that helps you try and send it. Partly with the crucifix symbol means because it was it was it was accepted voluntarily you have to accept your death voluntarily that's part of the path of the hero it's a very difficult thing to do obviously obviously what's your alternative obviously I think people are constantly searching for that thing that you just described the thing of meaning you know having meaning in this life and that meaning has a different definition for everybody mean everybody's meanings that mean your meaning might be very different than mine or Jamie so you kind of have to have your own path I think that's also one of the reasons why people are so confusing because you were thrust into an early age into a very rigid system of education and then of jobs and then of career structure while you're in this place at in most people don't feel like that's what

supposed to be doing and we feel very alienated by the very structure of society that we are in bed boys King and now there is the king who devours his own son like that's the destruct that's the that's the patriarchy that the feminist are always talking about low of course it's always there so society as a destructive force it doesn't care about you as an individual it did needs you to be part of society needs you to adopt the Norms into squelch your peculiar individuality and to be a car going to be socialized and you know to him yourself in and control yourself and not be impulsive and get to Tyrant but the thing is society as an only a tyrant that's the thing it's like how about a little gratitude in there well you know people have a hard time with this because we like it when a thing is only one thing but Society is always two things

it's the thing that alienates you and the thing that you're benevolent father always know you know what tilt sometimes it tilts harder towards the Tyrant and now it's not so good but that's an archetypal reality know what do you have to contend with in life this is why these archetypal realities because everyone has to contend with them you have to contend with yourself and the adversary that's inside you that that seems to pose your every movement the fact that you're not but you just can't move forward smoothly through life without being in conflict with yourself so there's a hero in the adversary on the individual level and then on the social level there's the wise King in the Tyrant you're always going to run into that I don't care if you're a Bantu tribes Menorah you know when New York lawyer

call those things you're going to run into and then in the natural world you going to run into the destructive element of nature right that's the Gorgon you get you you let that thing get a glance at you and your one like frozen puppy but also there's the benevolent element of nature that's feminine that's Mother Nature both of those extremes so and that's the world that's the archetypal world it's because it's Eternal as far as human beings are concerned those things are always there that's our true environment it's not these things we see around us there are lasting no time these other things last forever and that's what were adapted to wear like weird app to do the things that last forever

so but yet we go through this finite life searching for meaning justifies the suffering

something like that that's a transcended meaning it's like this this is hard but it's worth it okay so what are you do pick something worth it right that's partly what I try to get people to do with that future authoring program to say okay look here's a place to start

you got your miserable self right now it's like 3 to 5 years out

imagine what your life could be like if you had what you would give yourself if you were taking care of yourself What would life be like just come up with an idea even about that

and so then people do that and then they write out a plan to attain it and then college kids are like 30% more likely to stay in University if they do that especially if they're men cuz man need a purpose I think women have a purpose

right now they have two purposes you know they're going to have a family that's a major purpose man like just to give birth it's that's no joke and then you're devoted to something for like 20 years you got your adventure right there yeah but a lot of women find great offense in someone saying that especially a man saying that mansplaining that a woman's purpose is to breed right mean is not have a giant issue that a lot of women have the only purpose people have an issue with it but it's like Crow up if you're a sophisticated person as far as I'm concerned

how many important things are there in life

but one of them is family

it's as simple as that now you might say well family isn't the end all solutions like yeah well thanks for pointing that out you know I've dealt with plenty of pathological families but it's a huge part of life you have a mother and a father to your children places you in the world any society that there's a reason societies worship the virgin mother and the child it's because societies that don't die

it so people say well you know what that relationship between mother and child isn't the only thing okay fine it's still a sacred thing and you miss it Miss it if your female you miss that at your peril now that doesn't mean women who shouldn't miss it because maybe they have another purpose that transcends that but that's rare it's very very rare and I would caution any women listening if they're young not to be deluded into the idea that their career is at will be upset high-quality that itself evidently Trump's having a family your you have to have a hell of a career before that's the case

so

don't you think that you need to the individual that some people just they'll be more satisfied and I mean depending on what they're doing artistically or creatively or whatever it is for the exceptional you know what they do what they're going to do those are open maybe those are open people that have genius level IQ like they're they're spectacular in some Manner and so there's a reason they're going to step outside the norm there shapeshifters no problem there's always going to be people like that and we need them

well telling the truth is a good start cuz then you don't fool yourself about who you are that's another one of the things I tried to Think Through is why you should tell the truth so it's not self-evident smart kids smart of the kids the earlier they learn to lie lying is very powerful because you can manipulate the world with your language and then you can get what you want lots of times or escape from things that you don't want to why not lie all the time

well I think the reason is there's a bunch of reasons but one of them is is that you can't trust yourself if you lie and there's going to be times in your life where you have no one to turn to accept you and so if you stuff yourself full of lies then you're going to be in a crisis one day and you can have to make a decision and you're going to decide wrong and you're going to be in real trouble cuz you won't have the clarity of Mind necessary to make the proper judgment cuz you fill your imagination and your perception with with rubbish join if you really think that through so there's this old idea in the Old Testament that fear of God is the beginning of wisdom and I can understand what that means

because one of the things I say we do with the future authoring program we offer people a little have it it's like okay construct your ideal aim at it come up with a plan you can modify the plan no problem you going to do a bad job of it no problem just do it okay so then now you've got a goal it's now your approach systems technically speaking positive motion systems that motivate you are you are engaged because they're engaged in relationship to a goal and the more Transcendent the goal the more they're engaged but that's not good enough it's great to run towards something you like but it's even better to run away from something that terrifies you so then we as people okay so here think about this real carefully take all your faults and your inadequacies and your your hatred for life all of that and then imagine that gets the upper hand

and then think about where you could be in three to five years everyone knows say some people know they be a street person some people know they being alcoholic some people know they be a prostitute or a drug addict like everybody's got their own little hell they could descend into with their degree of repetitive and a fair bit of enjoyment and people know that and so I said well delineate that out too so you know where you're headed when you fall off the path so then you're running away and running towards like yes but that's Heaven and Hell

you need it in the real as real as anything that you can

it depends on what you mean by real I suppose but

there's real as you make them how about that and people can make help pretty real people do seem to construct these pitfalls for themselves I mean self-sabotage is one of the most common things you find in people that are struggling

I mean you would think that someone who is struggling the last thing they want to do is help themselves toward their own demise but it's super, I thought about that too and so you can tell me what you think about this as if you talk to people they say why like I want to have a meaningful life generally people want that but then you think well then what why aren't you and then you say well what does it mean to have a meaningful life exactly and then you said well maybe it means that you have to take on responsibilities cuz you need your sacrifices have to be worth something right that has to have some cows have some meat what you're aiming at it has to be something that can elevate your worm-like self to the level of tolerability you know you can say well yeah I thought all these flaws but look at what I'm trying to do what's the real sound of self respect

well

I miss that I'm off the track with the question ground of self-respect I can't remember what you asked me

so we'll have to go to a different topic what how do we get on this we were you asked about the evolutionary basis of that was a long time ago that just doesn't disappear but where would we just now remember we were just now that's happening right now I'll give you let you know what does it, just got fired by Trump a little bit ago

Twitter is up

Auglaize is a little off topic but you want to talk about it figure talking about man motivates them and so then we were I was talking about the fact that you know when I'm speaking publicly now most of my audiences man and that their eyes light up when they're taking on the burden of responsibility because people are we should we be are acting as the archetype of the hero but we should be carrying a weight while we're doing it because we're we're like pack animals what do I copy without a weight and I think it's I do think it's it's something like have to justify your miserable existence do you think this is my theory about that I believe that there's certain human reward systems that we have ingrained in us and that have allowed us to survive this long and that these reward systems a lot of them and tail

overcoming struggle because struggle was inexorable it was a massive part of existence and that without struggle our body is almost like ball how come how come not over, yeah I'm something like a trick like you have to trick your body into trick your brain and trick your Humanity your your very existence into having some sort of a purpose in order to be out of Baseline yeah well I'm I'm more off well yes it does make sense but I I don't I don't think I don't think it's a trick. Here's why I think that because I think there is something irreducible about suffer I think it it it it it speaks for itself as a reality and unquestionable reality know what nobody says to her to a child it's in severe pain that it isn't going to matter in a million years write the pain trumps everything so then it seems to me that attempts to alleviate suffering Trump everything so if you want to responsibility it's like they're you got one try Oregon

Toyota that doesn't matter fine

you're suffering doesn't matter then that's for sure no none of his suffering matters you're going to go down that road are you you know what you know what you know what the face of someone who says that no suffering matter matters looks like it's not pleasant so there's no neutral position with regards to that so you see the world is full of unrequited suffering that saying who knows how much of it is unnecessary certainly the stuff you create seems to be unnecessary especially if you create a purposefully and people are doing that all the time so if you need a bird and it's like how about how about the unnecessary suffering a little bit about trying hard to do that for the rest of your life see if that'll do it God only knows how far you get you might get a long ways man when when people talk about meaning though when you need to talk about suffering and decide this idea like there's what is what is going on in the mind that desires this.

cold Pursuit like what it what is going on why is that a part of being a person like why is it a part of your ultimate happiness to have these obstacles to overcome and these character developing moments character building episodes in order for you to manage life in to get through life with the most amount of Happiness is a story about this think it's a frog and the Scorpion know the story of the Frog you know convinces the Frog to give him a ride across the river in the frog says while you were scorpion it's like you know I'm not going to do that because you're going to nail me with your tail and a scorpion says no know if I do that when we're in the river will both drown so why would I do that so the Frog agrees to Ferry the Scorpion across make it halfway out and scorpion stings them and the Frog says turns to him with his dying breath and says why you do that and the Scorpion said well it's in my nature

and that's the answer to your question is that it's in our nature that's what an archetype is the hero archetype is the story of men but do you think that that nature is because that is how we survived how over the millions of years we evolved from lower pomades to being a human being is that we needed to have the mechanisms in NRA very existence to overcome struggle then all the sudden I mean I think it is part of the evolutionary process but look the thing about sexual selection or the zoo so we talked about say we're by the dominance hierarchies the selection mechanism fruit for the transfer of genetic material there's a choice in that like if a group of guys gets to get together and a leader emergence someone everyone respects it's like an election everyone voted on it we chose that particular type of person who who is that type of chosen that and then the women think I look at her

problem before someone else gets him that's been going on forever so did we choose it well

the action of our choice across Millennia selected

these are things evolutionary psychologists biologists don't think about don't think about the role that Consciousness played in determining who survived and how and why it's been going on for a long time but I certainly know about sexual selection by female choice you know but the full implications of that haven't been thought through like I've just really started to Grapple with the idea that the male hierarchy is a sexual selection device

it's like the manor voting on well who which of us deserves to go sleep with the woman it's like well you don't you're kind of a Weasley little snake so you know no not you it's like oh JoJo looks like quite the guy that's put him at the top of the hierarchy

that's what I've been doing with each other forever

isn't there more to it than that there's a lot to that question is who is it that they're electing but is it really just about sexual selection

Preston Joel. So it's like it's half about that

it's a half well you know the answer but it's on the survival of the species so those are the two things but in the book even with that sexual selection even with that say if a person does rise to the top of the social hierarchy in that small dunbar's number of 250 people it's the person is not enough does that person still need purpose to they still need something and not some difficult struggle in order for them to feel fulfilled and yes absolutely no problem today is that the problem our lack of problems sure it's done so well for everyone that the only lack the only felt like we'll be for lock itself are you concerned because of that and because you're very cute Lee where of this issue you concern with this potential future

we have in front of us with artificial intelligence virtual reality in this need to live in a world that's not real like me and how many kids today listening to this exists for a massive amount of their day watching video games playing video game hero online I'll never forget this this statement he said to me he was in one of the managers of The Comedy Store he's a very nice guy but he was addicted to video games which I have been in the past I was addicted to videogames for a couple years my playing all the time I love them they were so much fun but this guy he had a bad I was I had a career while doing it I managed to figure it out that this was a massive waste of my time and get through he didn't and when one day he was like I mean like you hadn't been outside days and he was hanging out in the back of the comedy store we were talking and he was addicted to I think it was EverQuest which is crazy

role playing game that you just do when you just did people play 18 hours a day and he said something I'll never forget he said I'm so successful in the Video Game World and so unsuccessful in the real world

names like sitting at like shaking his head like wow in the real world he was like very unfulfilled couldn't find a girlfriend was struggling financially in the Video Game World he was like some warlock there slaying Dragons Den in any found great reward in that video game World very concerned that we will literally almost be like in The Matrix plugged into some artificial electronic thing which I think these these these video games that people are playing all day long there precursor that don't get me wrong if you have great self-control they're very enjoyable they're fun the great social time with you and your friends get-together you play and you have a great as long as you're actually being productive and active in our everyday life I don't really think there's a problem but my concern is that they are precursor and that we are seeing the beginning steps to this artificial world that that we will be in bedded in in the very near future well you know

we decided already that were in the period of chaos part of the reason I make any predictions that's one of the reasons it's like how many things need to be going sideways at the same time lots of things are going sideways I have no idea what's going to happen I mean we're building autonomous cars 70 that's the biggest employment category so you know why why worry about that there's 20 other things that are happening there just as revolutionary so what's going to happen

who knows I have no idea I think maybe I know how to steer the boat and home that's all you try to tell the truth and maybe you'll get through it and act it out as well because what else do you have isn't another fantastic sign of chaos I'm at me I say fantastic not in a positive way but that Donald Trump is our president now the president has who has had the biggest problem with the truth that we've ever experienced we've never experienced a president like this where we know that he has a problem with the truth and it's it's it's open it's it's an unstructured problem with the truth he was referred as a candidate to someone who had a structured approach to untruth right side picture type of love I can pick the idiot ideologies power aiming like I knew, or or more personal lie if you're going to be

apply to the didn't fit the standard structure that were costing too and felt very disenchanted with

yeah I know maybe a nakedly self-serving lies I can thank God that such a relief after the totalitarian aetiology lies that way so fucked up

that's obviously it though yeah well that's definitely part of it then I mean lots of people did I know people went into the voting booth and their hand was hovering over Hillary and I want it was shaking and they thought Oakdale with it Trump wow I'm so and you know what to send him at that I can appreciate so and so here we are but that's that's only the tiny that's only the tail end of the Dragon I mean

who knows who can look ahead this is a strange time. Maybe it's associated with kurzweil's prognostications you know I mean he talked about the consequence of endeavor accelerating technological transformation and you know I mean look just in the last 50 years we've had the birth control the hydrogen bomb in the transistor thrown out as it's like man those are some pretty wild tornadoes and that's just scratching the surface go back to the beginning of the 20th century to today Miss fucking it's unbelievable the average person in the west lived on a dollar a day in today's dollars

1995 yes really in today's dollars wow they find out that they top 1% the world makes about $34,000 you ask them right what is one of the things I really find funny about the like the radical left protest on the campus is like down with the 1% it's like sunshine you're part of the 1% baby 1/10 of 1% or maybe one one-hundredth of 1% or you're just angry because you're not there yet but you will be when you're 40 and you know it so does everybody else and now instead of

regarding yourself properly as a fledgling member of the elite do you want to have it both ways you want to be fledgling member of the elite and champion of the underground you're privileged so how narcissistic can you get you want to have all the benefits of having all the benefits and you want to have all the benefits of having none of the benefits because just all the benefits isn't enough for you one thing that I find incredibly fascinating and it keeps coming up and it's been brought up even more so lately because of artificial intelligence and automated vehicles and all these different things that are happening is they're going to be in a rosin of jobs and a subject keeps reoccurring and that's Universal basic income the idea of giving people giving everyone a certain amount of money whether it's 12000 or $18,000 what do you what do you thoughts on that

I don't know what to think about that you know it certainly

it would require a revolution in the way people considered their lives like what would what do people do with Leisure Time

what should you do with it later time it's like what is ledger time exactly is it is it sitting in a closet like a like a disk or discarded Android I mean that's often how people respond when they retire would they have to retire or would they have their needs taken care of as far as food and shelter and then be able to pursue something that they actually enjoy and are interested in because the job that they were stuck in doesn't exist in well that's the question and I would say I would say at the moment data aren't great you know what happens to a lot of men who are unemployed now let's say they've they've had that thrust upon them involuntarily but most people who we would be talking about would be in that situation is that you know that they get depressed they sit on the couch they develop chronic pain problems they start taking opiates for the pain problems and then soon they're hooked if I could stay it's not a pretty and I mean everyone isn't doing up a lot of people are doing that

I don't know but my thought is that unemployment if you've got something like Universal basic income even I'm bored we're talking about a complete revolution in the way Society is structured right because automation does come along and artificial intelligence does come on and it really is a situation where a lot of the things that people do to occupy their time in order to feed themselves and shelter themselves they don't exist anymore so you're not talking about unemployment like Bob you're not a good enough lawyer you've been fired and now you like God I'm a failure I'm depressed I am unemployed not talking about that we're talking about literally society as we know it having a complete reset I have no idea what to say I don't either that's why I asked you

here's the optimistic and

I'll speak as a determinist I'm not a determinist but I'm going to speak that way anyways so there are lots of people who are creative there high and trade open this from the Big 5 perspective they're going to go do creative things but there are lots of people who aren't creative

so I don't know what they're going to do because it isn't going to be creative things what do you think people what why are people creative in non-creative like are there people that are just that it's never been nurtured in them they have the potential to be creative or you don't think so no the literature is pretty clear on that I mean that traits are highly heritable their modifiable but if you're really non-creative it's like it ain't going anywhere for you the reason for that is creativity isn't it's not all sweetness and light man I mean the reason there are non creative people as creative people often died throat doing like screwing things they attract attention from people they shouldn't attract attention from like the authorities you know creative people are revolutionary well tyrants don't really like revolutionaries there's lots of reasons not to be creative but even now like creative people it's hard to monetize your created creativity artist have a hell of a time surviving

right and so so creativity has such as a it's a double-edged blessing for sure and part of the reason that lots of people aren't created this cuz it's a lot let's think about it from an evolutionary perspective it's going to be a whole lot easier not to be decked out in bright colors when the Predators come along right you want to stay camouflaged against the herd like a zebra want to stand out I got you a little story about that so I think I got this from Robert sapolsky and if I didn't I apologize but so let's say you're a biologist to go to study some zebras you think people think those earrings are camouflage cuz they have black and white stripes well that's not camouflage of lion is camouflaged it's gold and it looks like the grass and see a zebra I like 15 miles away it's black and white

okay so you're looking at some zebras and you think we are I need to look at one zebra to figure out what it's doing cuz I'm trying to understand zebras so you look at a zebra and then you take some notes and look up anything call God which zebra was that because the camouflage is against the hurt just the idea that the camouflage is against the herd that's such a useful idea to have in your mind that camouflage it against the herd so you go up to the zebra in your Jeep and you've got to stick with a rag on a few you put a nice job of red paint on the zebra's Haunter you clip it's here like with a cattle clip and the first thing that you know you get the hell out of there in the Lions kill it

cuz they can identify the thing that stands out and organize their hunt around it and so that's why there are creative people I think that is supposed to be and I think it was an ear clip I remember this discussion yeah that it's also that the edge detection and I'm like dessert does a type of cat or a pattern of camouflage pattern called the ASAP and ASAP camouflage doesn't look like trees you know when people think of Love ASAP pattern First Lite Lite California Lottery All Season all terrain military graduation for animals and the reason is animals only see in black and white like a predator prey animals like deer and its Edge detection that

looking for and these things the hard lines of the black in the brown in the lighter colors it throws off the ant that's that's Fusion that's a different color it's a different type of, but the ASAP is what we're talking about which is right above it that leg read it right now it's right there yeah yeah it's a bunch of stuff I'm sure I'll give you guys that I really do love can and I think people up there just so much nicer it's a struggle to try to figure out why I've thought about it many many times but I think people in general in Canada are 20% less douchebags and Canada men's assholes everywhere you go but I feel like Canada for whatever reason people extremely polite yes yes I meant to say I don't know why I don't see I'm not sure I'm not convinced of it because I often think the same thing when I come down to the US

examples of what are the differences between Canada and the US is like in some sense is like the Midwest of the United States so we don't have this extreme culture that characterizes the US with the like the great Lowe's in the great highs were all elevator music compared to a full Symphony in parts of a symphony so you know if if you want peace order and good government that's our constitutional Credo then you know Canada's your place but it's it's a middle-class middle-of-the-road society and have some benefits you know it's nice and welcoming and and not to experimental and kind of column insecure and those are good things I don't think it's a place that is great at dealing with Excellence but that's interesting do you feel like Excellence to suppress because people don't like when someone stands out too much yeah I think that's true everywhere but I think it's

true of Canada is of the US I think it's celebrated a lot in the US

me and I think there's always going to be some resistance especially from people that don't feel like you people always measure themselves against someone if there's someone is out there is just no some genius and some form or another is always going to be with people that measure themselves against that person and find themselves coming up short yes they try to attack that individual someone who has just catastrophic success and some other reason for the end for people to be enemies of clear thought as well because clear thought is a good Pathway to success and so if you can go after people who think clearly it's another way of keeping the dominant turkey nice and flat for your for your delectation let's say so that's the enemy of competence as part of the social justice Warrior movement extreme lack of financial success and yeah

and even creative success insistence that hierarchies are always based on power it's like neuro the hierarchy of neurosurgeons is not based on power or yeah it is obviously you know hierarchies are based to some degree on power we don't have to be juvenile about it but you know the best neurosurgeons actually know how to do surgery that's not just a power thing right the best Farmers grow food so there's no there's no appreciation for actual the real world while there's no real world in post-modernism anyway so that doesn't matter but there's no appreciation for confidence or the fact that there's individual difference in, even though they're always talking about diversity and is it down playing competition on the importance of competition compete compete partly because women like winners I mean that's part of the reason so ashamed for that and he has post-modernism

view of the world is increasingly or non-competitive places it's like for a guy that means well let's tune out and go watch video games because like if I can't win it this why should I play to cooperate it's like well you know enough man but I'd actually like to try to win at something yeah well it's toxic masculinity Jordan that one drives me fucking crazy like what does that mean toxic masculinity toxic hasn't it has nothing to do in masculine or feminine if something is toxic toxic is no toxic masculinity if someone's evil they do something horrible there Genghis Khan or Adolf Hitler son toxic masculinity that's an evil person has nothing to do with the masculine or feminine

yeah well you know what depends what your political agenda is that mean men are more likely to be the type of person that does something awful in terms of dominating or war or violence it's it's almost in our nature and some way because of all the things we discussed before we're more likely to do something that's really evident there's plenty of bullying that goes on behind the scenes among women absolute manifest itself in naked physical aggression and I actually think that's hard on women in some ways I mean might my daughter for example is always mad at my son because like not chronically but you know what he'd have a dispute with one of his friends and maybe it would get physical and then not be the end of it may be friends again you know there was a way there's a way of bringing it to a conclusion without that then things can smolder on forever and that's really rough you know sometimes the simplest solution is a fight often and let you know

I'm not

I know what you're saying but I'm embarrassed that I would even think that I have to I know put some little quote marks around what I'm saying is it is it is an issue the simmering and stewing of of disputes where they never come to a head and they never get resolved sure to have these things that are just grinding away at you all the time and no it's not it's definitely not it's not a good place to be and then good motivations don't come out of it that's for sure

you made some some statements and we've had some you had some conversations about your role in Academia and that you might not necessarily be in structured Academia forever that did this might be an issue like that this is coming to a head that way now reacted towards me because a bunch of people got irritated and organized and you know when they're irritated way and said that I was a bad person and something should be done about me and there was enough of them so the university thought they needed to react to that pressure

how to charge a way of interpreting it but reasonable but then a bunch of people wrote the University of said wait a second I agree with what that guys doing you should leave him alone and not only people from the general populace but it soon after I posted the original videos like the Press was kind of ambivalent about me for a while and in the first 2 weeks or 3 weeks after I released those videos and they were the protests but then they started to look into what I was doing and they thought all turns out that you know freedom of speech actually happens to be quite important to journalists too and they came out like really Rowdy clean in support of me some of the major journalist in Canada and and and a hold the whole post media system which was about a hundred and fifty or 200 newspapers and so she had a reason to back off

and maybe they were happy to back off I mean the dean I was negotiating was no he wasn't a bad guy he was an older guy I think he's in his 70s is responding to pressure and he wanted the problem to go away from the one that's what you do for problems to do but anyways all this public support of God gave the university a reason to leave me the hell alone so they decided to do that and partly I suppose I was always reasonable during the negotiations because I'm a reasonable person and so I know when they met me they realize that I wasn't the particular kind of monster that I have been accused of being so the university is left me off and then so I was like a Health crisis in December that more or less rectified Itself by the beginning of January but I wasn't sure that plus what had happened to me because of these videos and all the crazy response to them I wasn't sure I was in a sufficiently

together position to go back lecturing in January I didn't even know for a while until December if I was going to be let's say allowed to continue to lecture was very uncertain but I decided that it was better to get back on the horse so to speak and so I started lecturing and it in the students were very welcoming so thank God for that what is it like now when you're in school as it is a completely different experience in before your notoriety exploded

well there's lots of things that are different about it I mean this lots of students there are lots of people who come to my classes just to sit in the classes as people who are stopping me all the time in the hallways and wanting to introduce themselves and that happens a lot in public in in in in the strangest situations so I'm rather on used to that the feeling up to University well I haven't processed any of that yet I would say I'm about 7 months behind in my understanding of my own life no because things happened so many things happened from September to now that I haven't had time to think about any of them and I was just being a continual absolutely continual

treadmill trying to keep up with the request for speaking in the email and then I'm supposed to be making these YouTube videos because I have people who are supporting me for doing that so I'm trying to keep that up and then I'm trying to go speak when people invite me but not all the time because of course that's a lot of traveling so I'm trying to recalibrate my life I'm trying to figure out okay I got 10 million views on YouTube what am I supposed to do without piece of information I got $250,000 so what is what does that mean what what does that mean for what I should be doing maybe I should be doing nothing but making YouTube videos for them it's unbelievable it's like terms of is there any other academic that is ever done anything remotely like that where you have 250,000 subscribers on YouTube and then millions and millions of

videos I know I don't know why I mean well and it's it's a defined territory right because who knows what YouTube is you told me I think that you're getting something like 70 million downloads a month is more like a hundred and twenty now

something like that more than that so what

right so what the hell so I could ask you what do you make of that like are you there are you the most powerful interviewer on the planet or are you the most powerful interview that the planet has ever seen well the numbers would suggest so nobody's had who has a billion of anything

no one

you know it's never happened so what the hell so what are you doing and why is it working and where are all these people in God well what I do is just keep doing it that's all I do I just do what I do I don't think too much about it I enjoy it I try to talk to people like yourself that I really enjoy talking to or the guy before you was a bow hunter which I enjoy talking to him to read it very very different conversation tomorrow I'm talking about a guy who's a debunker or talking to a guy was he runs a site called metabunk we're going to talk about people who believe the Earth is flat literally going to spend about 2 hours debunking the Flat Earth theory that is all over the Internet and realize

rabid anti-intellectual Vibe that's going on today and this is this Flat Earth theory and prominent intellectual types have become prisoners of their own imagination you know this is partly what breeds of intellectualism there's there's something there's something about it that we don't want to get too far away from our bodies

we don't want to get too far away from our souls that's another way of thinking about it and you know what there is there is this idea that as I said before that the Catholics always warned about is that the rational mind falls in love with its own Productions or even more that it tries to elevate it Productions to the status of God and that's what I mean that's really what Milton was warning about at least in some sense in his in his book Paradise Lost It All these Utopias are human creations and then people fall prey to them it's like idle worship really is very much like idle worship and and it's no wonder people get skeptical of of the intellectual because they're producing these Utopia that are fake that they inhabit they're almost like the abstract equivalent to video games and no soul I think you're right about that but I also think there's something else going on I think people are aware of this chaos we just grab your earlier and they're terrified and their claim to nonsense because of that Terror and they're there in embedding themselves

fruitless Pursuits chasing their own tail I'm on board with that man symbol of chaos when you thought about that word spiral man and gets smaller and smaller in the chaos gets bigger and bigger it's really an ugly pathway and you get more and more bitter and resentful and much more afraid of having your Prison Walls breached to downward spiral and much less interested in pursuing the truth or any sort of objective reasoning and much more interested in

confirmation bias to the extremes right that's exactly what happened I detailed out that process in my book maps of meaning exactly. It's this feedback loop a cuz if you are you are the Seeker the walls have to be but the thick you make the walls the less challenge you faced in the weaker you get so then the walls have to get thicker and then you get weaker in the walls have to get sicker and it's not a pretty it's not a pretty picture man

so

yeah that's what I think too yeah because and on that note

we still 3 hours

I just did it is my favorite podcast of all time well thank you thank you was awesome I could I say it was my favorite podcast of all time I have a much smaller domain of podcast on Paris so disliked number 901 what is it 58 I think you touched on some things that made me think in a very unique way today so thank you very much for that I'm going to say this one a couple of times thank you very much both for both occasions I mean you provided the tremendous boost to my present so whatever comes of that is to be blamed partly on you already alright thanks brother

I gave up on trying to stop saying without any further to do it just comes natural folks it is not what life's all about nature sort of fuck my talking about a man coffee co.com use the code word Rogan and save 10% they're awesome coffee thank you to me undies my all-time motherfuking favorite underwear go to meundies.com Rogen and save yourself some motherfucking money you can save 20% off your first pair just go to meundies.com forward slash Rogan thank you to CW hemp go to Charlotte's Web Charlotte's Web hemp go to cw.com and save 10% off every day plus or everyday Advanced with the promo code Joe Rogan 17 thank you to LegalZoom take care of

legal issues at legalzoom.com and get some savings by using the code word Rogan at checkout

folks that's it for today thank you so much for tuna to the podcast appreciate the fuck out of people as always just I say it a million times to the point where it almost doesn't sound sincere but I am a very very appreciative person and I have extreme gratitude that you people enjoy the show I love doing it I love the chance that I get to have these conversations with people like Jordan Peterson and my friend cam Hanes and all the other people I love it I'm very happy and I'm glad you guys enjoyed it so thank you and will see you soon bye

Help improve this transcript!

Episode Sponsors