Joe Rogan Experience #1208 - Jordan Peterson

Key Takeaway

Today, identify one problem you have been avoiding and reduce it to the smallest action you can complete voluntarily. Make the action challenging enough to stretch you, but not so large that you freeze or quit. Then repeat tomorrow with the next step. Peterson’s practical claim is that confidence is built less by waiting to feel fearless than by repeatedly confronting manageable difficulty, gaining skill, and discovering that you can carry more responsibility than you assumed.

Episode Overview

Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson explore responsibility, meaning, adversity, competition, social media, free speech, and the relationship between individual development and society. Peterson argues that meaning emerges when people voluntarily accept manageable burdens, build competence, and participate in reciprocal relationships rather than resentment-driven status conflicts. They also discuss the psychological effects of online communication, political polarization, hierarchy, and technological change.

Full Transcript

Transcript of Joe Rogan Experience #1208 - Jordan Peterson from Joe Rogan Experience. Auto-generated from episode audio; may contain minor errors.

three two one here we are again hey joe hello jordan how are you doing man i'm doing great you have uh the schedule that you have and the amount of energy and enthusiasm you maintain with the schedule it is very remarkable because you're not stopping you're not slowing down i mean you've you've had your foot on the gas for like two solid years now make hay while the sun shines i guess that was what it is is that how you feel about it well you know when you have an opportunity that's completely preposterous you're a fool to take it for granted yeah and i guess that's so and yeah so tammy and i have been to 100 cities since january so everywhere you know and part of what keeps us going well first of all i have a really good crew you know like the caa guys they're really good live nation's been really good they make sure the theaters are smooth and and we've had no problems at all and then i have lots of people who are helping me with my scheduling and tammy travels with me and then the the lectures themselves well i really like doing them partly because i do a different lecture every night and so that keeps me sharp and it makes sure that i'm thinking about new things all the time and trying to formulate my thoughts more precisely and they're also unbelievably positive so that's also that that's also something that makes it a lot easier to to do because you know i go to a city and there's 1500 to 2 000 people waiting for me there which is like staggering in and of itself wherever i go and they're all there listening intently and and it's it's a sophisticated discussion or at least as sophisticated as i can make it and i'm communicating directly with the audience and all the people are there to try to get their lives together and so the the the feeling in the in the hall is really really positive and then i usually talk to about 150 people afterwards and you know they're they all of them well many of them you know they just say hi and they're polite and we have a photograph and all that but lots of them have stories about how they've been putting their lives together and they're thrilled to death about it you know that they're out of the hole they were in or they've started a new business or they've sold a new business or they just decided to get married or they're going to have some kids or they've fixed up their relationship with their parents or they quit drinking or and they're they're not addicted i talked to one guy in europe he'd stopped he was he was addicted i don't remember what to but it wasn't it was something that wasn't good he he'd stopped for nine months and got nine of his friends to quit too so he comes up he's just like bouncing you know he's so damn happy that his life is better and not only that that he had this additional positive effect on other people so and it's so fun because i have these conversations with people they're brief but they're very personal and they're very intense you know because they they you think people have to trust you to tell you that their lives weren't going so well and then they have to trust you even more to tell you that they're going better now because of course what you want when you tell someone that things are going better is you want real encouragement and real sense from the person you're talking to that they're happy for you and i'm absolutely thrilled to hear these things like i was in whole foods this morning i went down near where i'm staying and two of the guys that worked behind the meet counter came out to talk to me and independently and they'd both been reading my books and watching my lectures and one of them said he had a seven-year-old son he really wanted to do right by him he was looking for ethical and moral guidance and you know he found the books really helpful and then it was helping him put his life together and and so car guy at the car rental place last night told me the same thing and so it's so exciting it's so ridiculously exciting to go everywhere around the world and to go into airports or to walk down the street and have people come up and say um i've been watching you on youtube they often mention you i've been listening to what you say i've been developing a vision for my life it's really helped me out a lot thanks a lot and jesus like to be able to have that happen you know time after time day after day all over the place that's just absolutely it makes going to 100 cities like continually uh energizing because it's so positive and so and then there's all this weird crap in the press you know about my dangerous followers and all this alt-right nonsense and it's so ridiculous you know i've talked to 250 000 people in in in seven months we haven't had one incident that was negative in that entire time not one nothing no misbehavior on anyone's part we had one heckler who was obviously not a fan of mine given that he was a heckler that was it other than that the audiences behave perfectly they all dress up they come in suits which is really cool a lot of the young guys they dress up so they have a little suit competition with me which is quite fun so that's an additional bonus and yeah it's it's pretty damn good joe i think it's really fantastic and i think what's going on is uh it makes me very optimistic because i think that one of the things that new media has provided is these new avenues for information to get out there and these new things like these lecture circuits when was the last time you saw public lecture circuits that were popular to the tune of thousands and thousands of people i saw the ones that you and sam harris did on youtube and you know sam's doing them with a lot of other people as well you're doing them with the bottom people with dave rubin as well yeah these are i mean this is a very unique thing that's for sure and also this desire to understand new paths of behavior and patterns of thinking and that these are corrective paths and patterns that can lead you to a more fulfilled and happier life and and recognize the pitfalls of certain types of behavior that people just fall into yeah and i think oftentimes the difference between someone who lives a fulfilled life and someone who lives a life filled with disaster is following incorrect patterns and not knowing what the correct ones are so there's a lot of good people out there that live shitty lives and they don't do it because they're they're just dumb or because they're bad they do it because they've been influenced by certain patterns they've fallen into patterns whether it's because of the people that they surround themselves with or the the neighborhood that grew up the the people that around them have this way of being and they kind of fall into that or it's drugs or it's alcohol or whatever it is but then they find a new one yeah and then they can slide right into that new one and all of a sudden they feel energized when they wake up in the morning instead of hungover they're getting exercise in they're eating healthy they're starting to think about things correctly and do good things and the momentum of them doing those good things leads them to feel good about themselves and energized and this is these are all things that you promote and that i think are genuinely really significant yeah like really important but it gets but the thing is it gets maligned it gets you get pushed into this weird but what we were talking about before the podcast is by a small select group of people it's a very small but vocal minority that wants to misrepresent you yeah and then there's the periphery that listen to this small group and then they sort of parrot those words out without any real thinking about what you've said well you know one of the things that i have made a mistake about in the past that i just realized in the last couple of weeks was that you know people often accuse me and they say well most of the people that listen to you are men and i think and that you know when you're accused like that your automatic response is well you wouldn't be accused if you weren't doing something wrong so there must be something wrong about that it's like why isn't it 50 women and so i've said things like well you know 80 of the people who watch youtube videos are men and so the fact that 80 of the people who watch my videos are men isn't that surprising given that base rate but then about three weeks ago i started thinking what what the hell am i doing it's like what is there something wrong with talking to men is that actually a problem it's like i'm trying to i mean i didn't set out to do that specifically but if that's the way it's working out and and there is a majority of men coming to my shows say then is that why is that's all of a sudden supposed to be a bad thing i'm asking men to you know to be more honest and especially in their speech and their thinking and to be more responsible for themselves and for their family and for their community and to grow up and to shoulder their burden and to live a responsible and meaningful life and putting those two things together conceptually and it's like and then there's an accusation about that as if there's something wrong and i thought why am i even playing into this it's like fine i'm talking to men i'm encouraging them and i am absolutely thrilled like every time someone comes up to me and that's happening i mean maybe a hundred times a week or something like that and tells me one of these stories about how they put their life together it's like i'm absolutely thrilled about that and so i don't see it's just a sign of how pathological our times have become in some sense that there would have been any guilt about that to begin with because how is that not a good thing man it's weird uh i think a lot of that has to do with this concept that men are running everything and that men have this massive advantage there's a white male advantage and privilege that we all enjoy and share and that men have this advantage financially there's disparity in terms of the the gender gap and pay you know and income and that if you were really a good person you would be looking out you would be trying to balance that out and yeah you wouldn't be trying to pump up the winning team right so that's the funny thing well that's it and that's part of that narrative that well if there's winners there there has to be losers and the reason that there are losers is because there's winners and that's complete bloody nonsense because as far as i'm concerned that and i really believe this is that every single person who sets out to put themselves together ethically is a net positive to everyone around them there's no downside to that you know my book has been criticized by people who've read it very poorly especially chapter one when i talk about hierarchies that i'm somehow supporting the idea that power in a hierarchy is the right way to be and that's there's absolutely nothing and what i've written that suggests that at all like i'm suggesting that human hierarchies are very complex and that the way that you win in a human hierarchy is by being competent and reciprocal and so and so i mean for example even if you're selfish let's say you got to think very carefully about what that would mean if you were selfish and awake because you have to work to take care of yourself and what you want say in this moment but then there's you tomorrow and there's you next week and there's you next month the next year and 10 years from now and when you're old so because you're self-conscious and because you're aware of the future you're actually a community unto yourself and if you're selfish and impulsive all that means is that you're serving the person you are right now you know in that impulsive way but not the person you're going to be and so that's not a good grounds for any sort of ethical behavior and i see that if you serve yourself properly there's no difference between that serving your family properly and serving your community properly those things all mesh in a kind of a harmonious manner and one of the things that's really being effective in the lecture tour is a discussion about that idea and its relationship between the relationship between that and meaning and responsibility because one of the things that strikes the audience is silent constantly because i'm always listening to them to see you know when when the attention is maximally focused is whenever i point out to people that the antidote to the meaninglessness of their life and the suffering and the malevolence that they might be displaying because they're resentful and bitter about how things have turned out the antidote to that is to take on more responsibility for themselves and for other people and that that's aspirational which is kind of cool you know the conservative types the duty types and i'm not complaining about them you know that they're always basically saying well this is how you should act because in some sense that's your duty right that's how a good citizen would act and that's a reasonable argument but the case that i've been making is more that well there is a there is value distinctions between things some things are worth doing and some things aren't and you can kind of discover what that is for yourself and then you should aim at the things that are most worth doing and what you'll find if you watch carefully is that the things that you find worth doing are almost always associated with an increase in responsibility because if you think about the people you admire for example you spontaneously admire people and that's a manifestation of the instinct to imitate and people are very imitative you don't admire people who don't take care of themselves like unless there's something wrong with you you at least want an admirable person to be accountable for themself and then if they've got something left over so they can be accountable for their family well then that's a net plus obviously that's someone you think is solid and then maybe they take care of some more people they have a business or they're involved in the community in some positive way you see well that's a person whose pattern of being is worth imitating and so and that's all associated with responsibility and it's so interesting because it's as if everybody kind of knows this but that it hasn't crystallized it's like well you should be responsible because that's what a good citizen is it's not no no you should be responsible because you need to have a deep meaning in your life to offset the suffering so you don't get bitter and the way you do that is to bear a heavy load you know to get yourself in in check for you now and for you in the future and then to do the same for your family and your community and that there's real nobility in that and there's real meaning and more the other thing that i've been suggesting to people and i also believe this is that and i think that the guys that have come to talk to me especially the ones that have had real real rough lives they really understand this if you don't get your act together and you let yourself slide then what kind of moves in to take the place of what you could have been is something that's really not good at all so it's not only that if you're living a like a dissolute life that you're not aiming at anything positive and so you don't have any real meaning and you're subsumed by anxiety and all of that hopelessness but something kind of hellish moves in there too to to occupy that place and so then you end up making things worse and when you know one of the things i learned about studying totalitarian systems whether they were on the right or the left was that part of the reason that the totalitarian horrors of the 20th century manifested themselves was because average people didn't take on the proper responsibility they shut their eyes when their eyes should have been open even though they knew it and they didn't said things they knew they shouldn't have done and said and that was what supported those horrible systems so you know if you don't get your act together then you leave a little space for hell and i really believe that don't you think when things are happening like something like nazi germany i i i would imagine that during that time the people that were not in support of it felt helpless whether you're you're in germany you're a part of this country this country is turning towards this horrible situation where jewish people are being put on trains and you know the people that didn't speak out in that i don't necessarily know if it's a lack of discipline or just complete fear and paralysis it's a fear for sure i mean no knowledge of how to deal with it disbelief well that's the thing the problem is that if you're going to forestall that sort of thing you have to do it early you know because the longer you wait the higher the price you pay for it but isn't it it's hard to take that jump early because you're not exactly sure where it's going that's true and you're entering well and you're also likely to be jumped on i mean you can see that happening in our own culture you know you make a mistake on twitter or even something that isn't a mistake and you know you can pay a well what feels to be a pretty high price right now whether it is a high price or not is hard to tell because twitter is so weirdly fictional you know it's so hard to to to get your to get a grasp on exactly what's going on what's it it's also your comprehension of what what is the your emotional reaction to people that you don't know being mean to you like this is like what is that price well and people some people want to dismiss that as being not just nothing it's not not that big a deal but it is a big deal it causes people to commit suicide i mean it has absolutely bullying online has caused many people to commit suicide well the thing is you know when you the weird thing about that online communication is that like i find that i tend to react to a negative twitter comment as if it's someone sitting across from me talking to me that i know now it's not and i don't even know if the person is real or because the accounts are often anonymous right so that person isn't really real but your emotional response is still well someone's gone out of their way to be harshly critical to you right you know and that doesn't happen that often in your day-to-day life and so you know if you're a reasonable person you're very sensitive to criticism right because it's rare and because you might be wrong especially if there's a lot of people criticizing you because you kind of have to be psychopathic in order just to brush that off you know it's like well a hundred people think i'm wrong there's nothing to that it's like well if it's a hundred people out of a hundred million but you can't tell on twitter right then it's irrelevant but if it's a mob of 100 people that show up outside your house which is quite kind of what twitter feels like then you think well god you know i must have done something wrong because otherwise why would all these people be here right you know and i think that's why so many people are driven to apologize you know when they when they do something on twitter and or do something and then the twitter mobs go after them they think oh god i must have done something wrong i should i should you know do some soul searching and yeah so some of that's not even fear it's more like it's it's in a sense it's a morality that's misplaced because of our inability to calibrate the the social messaging i mean i've stopped almost completely stopped reading twitter comments in the last month and i'm definitely better for happier it yeah it's just it's too much it's too crazy what is your number up to now the number of followers about a million on twitter that's that's when it's about time to get out of dodge yeah yeah well i mean and i'm still following people and reading what people are posting but no the comments i'm just i'm just not worth it no it's not and i think it does have something to do with the technology itself like i do believe that that small limit um facilitates angry impulsive responding so you're trying to get people to respond to you but the alternative is facebook where you have these long posts that are just rambling first drafts that people put out like when they get go when they start ranting about politics or what have you i just can't get involved they're just too big and then people jump in and comment on them and often their comments are massive as well it's just too verbose whereas the good thing about twitter is it makes you boil down what you're trying to say to a very succinct thing although i do enjoy when someone has a good twitter thread like there was a really good twitter thread what was that gentleman's name respectable lawyer respectable law he wrote a long history of the sentinelese people that um that you know that's that uncontacted tribe uh in the indian sea where they uh this gentleman went there to try to commission christianity and shot him full of arrows yeah and he wrote this long history of these people and what what kind of what they've had to endure with being you know a few people going to them and doing some awful thought things and diseases and stuff like that so i enjoy when someone will do that like these long like every now and then someone will use it in a novel way i really like that but there's um you know a lot of it is just people just trying to get a reaction and what's the reaction they can get by pissing you off that's like the best one well they also might be the ones that are most like we don't exactly know what motivates people to respond on twitter and it might be that the fundamental motivation for a twitter response is anger yeah you know rather than the desire to share something because we don't know anything about how these new communication techniques function psychologically like maybe twitter is skewed 90 towards people who are impulsively angry at that moment it could easily be we don't know like you know if you're driving in your car and someone cuts you off you curse you know or at least i do and and it's often a situational issue rather than a personality flaw on the part of the other driver even though it's easy to assume that but you respond impulsively i mean god only knows how how much of our social media networks are set up to differentially um reward impulsive behavior and it's also not that easy to hold people accountable in some sense and maybe there's some utility to that but with anonymous accounts and all of that the anonymity is also problematic because it certainly enables people to allow their worst to manifest themselves especially if they're resentful and angry so the only benefit that i can see to anonymity is it gives you the opportunity to explore controversial ideas without bullying true true true i think it's used correctly well that's it i think that that's true i think there's there's some utility i mean i don't think that it should be forbidden but well like most things it's ha it has its advantages and its disadvantages like most things it's not entirely negative to be anonymous hey so i figured something out that i thought i'd tell you about this took me like 30 years to figure out and i figured it out on this tour so there's this old idea you know that you have to rescue your father from the belly of the whale right from some monster that's deep in the abyss you see that pinocchio for example but it's a very common idea and i figured out why that is i think so imagine that we already know from a clinical perspective that you know if you set out a path towards a goal which you want to do because you need a goal and you need a path because that provides you with positive emotion right so you set up something as valuable so that implies a hierarchy you set up something as valuable you decide that you're going to do that instead of other things so that's kind of a sacrifice because you're sacrificing everything else to pursue that and then you experience a fair bit of positive emotion and meaning as you watch yourself move towards the goal and so the implication of that is the the better the goal the the more full and rich your experience is going to be when you pursue it so that's one of the reasons of of that's one of the reasons for developing a vision and for fleshing yourself out philosophically because you want to aim at the highest goal that you can manage okay so you do that and then what you'll find is that as you move towards the goal there are certain things that that that you have to accomplish that frighten you you know maybe you have to learn to be a better speaker a better writer a better thinker you have to be better to people around you or you have to learn some new skills and you're afraid of that whatever because it's going to stretch you if you if you pursue a goal and it's and so that'll put you up against challenges okay so all the clinical data indicates well the opposite of safe spaces as jonathan height has been pointing out that what you want to do when you identify something that someone is avoiding that they need to do because they're afraid you have them voluntary voluntarily confronted and so you break it down what you try to do if you're a behavior therapist is you break down the thing they're avoiding into smaller and smaller pieces until you find a piece that's small enough so they'll do it and it doesn't really matter as long as they start it you know then they can put the next piece on the next piece and what happens is they don't get less afraid exactly they get braver they get they get it's like there's more of them and you can and here's why so imagine you do something new and that's informative right there's information in the action and then you can incorporate that information and turn it into a skill and turn it into a transformation of your perceptions so there's more to you because you've tried something new so that's one thing but the second thing is and there's good biological evidence for this now that if you put yourself in a new situation then new genes code for new proteins and build new neural structures and new nervous system structures same thing happens to some degree when you work out right because your your muscles are responding to the load but your nervous system does that too so you imagine that there's a lot of potential you locked in your genetic code and then if you put yourself in a new situation then then the stress that's the situational stress that's produced by that particular situation unlocks those genes and then builds new parts of you and so that's very cool because who knows how much there is locked inside of you okay so now here's the idea so let's assume that that scales as you take on heavier and heavier loads that more and more of you you get more and more informed because you're doing more and more difficult things but more and more of you gets unlocked and so then what that would imply is that if you got to the point where you could look at the darkest thing so that would be the abyss right that would be the deepest abyss if you could look at the harshest things like the most brutal parts of the suffering of the world and the malevolence of people and society if you could look that look at that straight and and directly that that would turn you on maximally and so that's the idea of rescuing your father because imagine that you're like the potential composite of of all your all the ancestral wisdom that's locked inside of you biologically but that's not going to come out at all unless you stress yourself unless you unless you challenge yourself and the bigger the challenge you take on the more that's going to turn on and so that as you take on a broader and broader range of challenges and you push yourself harder then more and more of what you could be turns on and that's equivalent to transforming yourself into the ancestral father into all because you're you're like the what would you call it you're the consequence of all these living beings that have come before you and that's all part of your biological potentiality and then if you can push yourself then all that clicks on and that turns you into who you could be that's and that's the re-representation of that positive ancestral father so that's why you rescue your father from the belly of the beast so you think that this ultimate goal of sac of sacrifice and of of risking your life in order to save someone who's truly important to you that this somehow or another maximizes your potential as a human being well i think i think you can think about it religiously too so think about it this way so in in the christian story for example you have christ does two things that are messianic one is takes the suffering of the world unto himself because that's a weird idea okay so what does that mean let's think about it psychologically well maybe it means that well that's your job is the world's full of suffering and you should accept that as your responsibility past present and future you're supposed to do something about that as much as you can about it and maybe you start with your own localized suffering you know put yourself together but then you expand that outward and you decide that it's you're not a victim of that even though you know you're part and parcel of it but you're you're the potential solution to that and so you accept that as a responsibility so that's part of taking on a load that's part of bearing across you could look at it that way the cross is sort of a symbol of the place of maximal suffering okay so you accept that as a challenge not as a not as something that you're victimized by maybe you accept that as the price of being okay so that's one that's one responsibility you're responsible for addressing the suffering in the world so that could give you some meaning seems to me then the next thing is there's a story of course that christ met the devil in the desert and so that's the encounter with malevolence so that would be the other thing because the two major problems that people face obviously are suffering tragedy and malevolence and so that's the other thing that you're responsible for is that you're supposed to look at the capacity for human evil as clearly as you possibly can which is a very terrifying thing you know that causes post-traumatic stress disorder in people that aren't accustomed to it and in the mythology that's associated with the encounter with evil it's almost always the case that the entity that does the encountering even if it does it voluntarily is is is hurt by it so the egyptian god horus for example who's the i and the falcon the thing that can see and pay attention when he encounters his evil uncle seth who's the precursor of satan he loses an eye because it's no joke to encounter malevolence you know it can really shake you but the idea would be that if you can face the malevolence and you can face the suffering then that maximally that opens the door to your maximal potential and then the op the optimistic part of that is then this is this is why it's so useful to peer into the darkness let's say the optimistic part of that is is that although the suffering is great and the malevolence is is deep your capacity to transcend it is stronger so what you get out of the most negative viewpoint is the most positive possible consequence because one of the things you'd like to know if you wanted to know something deep about yourself is that you could face the worst that there was and prevail and i believe that's cape i believe that's care i believe that that people are capable of that i think that despite how tragic life is and how malevolent things are that fundamentally our spirit let's say has the capacity to to confront that and to fix it like psychologically to confront it courageously to be able to bear up under that if you do it voluntarily but also to address it not only to deal with it psychologically but to deal with it practically and that we could make things much better there's always a striving towards utopia right like this is the ultimate goal that if you you ask people what would you like out of civilization well i'd like everyone to be happy and everyone to get along and there'd be no war nothing no suffering no anything but in order to really truly learn about yourself and about life you have to overcome adversity you have to experience things and i firmly believe that in order to truly appreciate love you have to understand and really have felt hate and to really appreciate camaraderie you have to feel loneliness so this is just a part of being a person for whatever reason like yeah well maybe see the other thing that i've been thinking along the same lines is that you know it isn't so in the in the biblical stories in abrahamic stories for example abraham basically hangs around his dad's tent till he's like 80.

he's one of these guys that fails to launch you know in a big way and god eventually gets sick and tired of him like you know playing video games in his basement and says get the hell out there into the world and and have a life and so he does he leaves his his father's tent his community and his and his country which is what he's commanded to do and then he goes out and has an adventure but you know the first thing he encounters is a famine and then he encounters a tyranny and then he encounters a bunch of people in the tyrannical state that want to take his wife and so you can imagine that abraham's response to that is like it was a hell of a lot better sitting in my dad's tent playing video games but what's cool about that story what i realized when i was doing the lectures on it last year was that that was a call to adventure you know and and that the right way of conceptualizing what we're talking about isn't that utopia would be a place where everyone was happy because because and i think because of what you just laid out is you need that polarity you know and people need a load and we need adversity and we need difficulty we need all of that um so maybe what you want is an adventure the greatest adventure that you could have and that would involve you know something to push against it would involve real challenge and so just a a see dostoevsky knew this because when he wrote notes from underground which i would highly recommend to everyone who's listening it's a great book and it's a very short book he he criticized socialist utopia back in like 1860 way before it became the sort of widespread idea that that it is now and what dostoevsky said was that while human beings are these very peculiar creatures and if you gave us a utopia so that we had nothing to do but eat cake and busy ourselves with the continuation of the species that was that was his line um that the first thing we do is smash it all to bits just so that something unexpected and and and troublesome would happen because we're built for adventure and not for peace and happiness well we're designed to overcome the natural world is filled with that the natural world is filled with things trying to eat things this is just everywhere you look that's all you observe you observe predators and prey and animals eating vegetables and that's it and i think that this this concept of overcoming adversity is so it's so human it's so a part of what we are that i want to bring it back to you because one of the things that i've been considering is that i've said this many times and i just had a conversation with my good friend steve vanello the other day where he brought it up independently he said i think jordan peterson is the most misunderstood and misinterpreted guy in the world he's like people are always like not just mr but but misstating what you believe in misdating what you say this opposition to you this uh i mean like we were talking about this gq interview which i thought was uh i thought that woman was far more intelligent than the and her approach was far better and far more reasoned and well thought out than some of the other attacks on you before so they're bringing in the varsity level players that's what i'm saying it's like but i think this is important i think this is part of what with what forges this message is that you are and you you and this one of the things that eric weinstein and i had said about you is that you're essentially the the hoist gracie of the intellectual dark web if you don't know what that means is the early days of the ufc no one knew what the best martial art was and the idea was like there was all these martial arts that are running around independently and they were all claiming that they had the best technique and let's see what happens and hoist gracie was the one who represented jiu jitsu and went out there and beat all these people with superior technique and superior strategy south american yes he's from brazil brazil yeah okay i know about him yeah and he launched this brazilian jew and his family launched this brazilian jiu jitsu empire that has since taken over the world of martial arts but you are the one who's consistently engaging in these people you're the one who's involved these valley tudo events where you're debating these people who are coming at you hostile with notes and i think is as uncomfortable as those moments are like who was the woman that said so what you're trying to say is kathy newman yeah her i think her approach i think she misunderestimated you i think she underestimated you i think she misinterpreted who you are and she thought that she could come at you with this straw man sort of article and uh argument rather and frame your positions in a very unflattering way it just didn't work no it just was it was like the early days of hois gracie guys would come at him flailing and get him in an arm bar and they'd tap out and they'd go [ __ ] that's kind of what happened with you but now this woman who you had this conversation with in gq she was much more skilled yeah she was better verbally she was she her arguments made more sense yeah she seemed more reasonable more well-read yeah she was able to think on her feet quicker but still these are really important conversations well it was a funny day because i went to the to the hotel room in baltimore you know and i went out of my way to do it and um she was hostile to me the second i walked into the room really yes and and that really kind of put me off how so well she basically told me that we were going to have a war you know not so many words that that but just there was a coldness to her and uh a distaste for me that was sort of radiating from her so she had a she was animus possessed from a union perspective that's the right way of thinking about it one of the ways of thinking about that is that she had a chip on her shoulder in relationship to me so she'd already formulated who i was in her imagination and she it was also maybe a form of projection so like i was the embodiment of all the things that she found distasteful and that's who she was so there was no willingness to consider on her part that i could be different than her preconceptions of right and so she was she was hostile to me in the way that you would be if you were prejudiced against someone right from the beginning and so by the time it was uncomfortable in the room and by the time and there was a photo shoot and so by the time the conversation started i was more impatient than i would normally be because one of the things that i do expect from journalists and kathy newman was like this by the way and and so some of the other people that gone have gone after me at least they had the professionalism to be civil before the interview started you know like because there's a certain amount of politeness i would say that not that i'm owed but that someone you're interviewing is owed if they come out of their way to go talk to you it's like it's just human decency yes there's no there's no real conflict right until you have this conflict it's just hello nice to meet you yes thank you for coming to human beings interacting with each other yes yes on on on well on relatively professional well even just professional right even just professional grounds it's like well we're both here to do a job and i've agreed to come but but knows the the there was palpable enmity in the air right to begin with and you know when i actually thought at the end of that interview i thought geez you know maybe i'm maybe i've done enough interviews because i found that i was more impatient than i would have liked to have been now luckily it doesn't seem to have gone overboard because i've been watching the comments on that gq interview and i think it's got about four and a half million views some ridiculous number of views and people have said that i was more impatient and a little harsher than usual which i think is true and i thought god you know maybe i'm starting to run out of patience which isn't good right right i don't want to run out of patience because then it it will flavor the message that you're putting out definitely and people will take it in the wrong way and they'll take it in with that bitterness yes exactly well you know one one of the things that i think is very important is that you don't become uh resentful like and and well and and you know when i'm on this tour for example like there's no resentment for me because you think well this is you might think well this is a lot of work and i've been running around like mad and and uh you know it takes a lot of organization and it's quite demanding and all of that and that's all true and that none of that is a complaint and i decided with tammy right at the beginning that well first of all that this was going to be work and not a vacation because we're not stupid we know you can't have everything at the same time if you have any sense you're lucky if you get some things that are good at once you know so we're very grateful to have that opportunity and that i was going to continue to do this as long as i was thrilled to be in front of the audience and then when i meet people afterwards that i'm not looking at the end of the line to see when the night ends you know because i want to be sure that every single person that comes to meet me i'm you know present present for absolutely because i am i am actually quite taken aback and thrilled i guess is the right word grateful that's better that they're there it's like god man some of these people you know like i was in they're coming from all over the place you know people flying from australia into europe they've flown they've flown lots of eastern europeans came to england in fact they're making huge treks there's guys who came from like eight they took them like 12 hours to get through russia to come to finland to watch the talk there you know and and then not just a few people like that people are really going way the hell out of their way you know and then and then they line up and it's not that it's not inexpensive because these venues are expensive and and all of that and i'm well i'm i'm do it and it's the same with the damn interviews it's like i'm doing my best to not take any of this for granted and not get annoyed about it and and that goes for the conflict too it's like well you know i've tried to have my agent screen out maybe the more egregious interviews you know the ones that would just be nothing but combat because they're i find them quite stressful though i wouldn't say i'm hiding from them but you don't know to begin with how an interview is going to go and i could just say well i'm done having interviews for a while but i i can't help but see that the conflict is a necessary part of this even though i don't find it pleasant like people think they accuse me of being a provocateur of enjoying the conflict it's actually not true at all i don't enjoy it at all it usually takes me about three days to recover from a like a particularly contentious interview you know because i find it i find conflict interpersonal conflict quite stressful yes you know but i think everyone does yes and to pretend you don't you're either a sociopath or you're a liar yes yes well there are people who seem to enjoy that kind of intellectual combat you know that they yeah and the political types are more like that but but i think they still afterwards feel it and if they read the comments and people are against them it's just that the unease it carries well you would think so i mean i don't even know how people deal with it because i mean i'm being fortunate because although you know i've had a fair bit of negative press coverage the comments in on youtube in particular which is where the bulk of the mar and and i would say among the general public have been overwhelmingly positive i don't know what the hell it would be like to be in a world where that was reversed where you know the majority of people are against you i've seen jesus i've seen it happen with guests that i've had on the show where i've met them afterwards and you see a physical effect on them you see them beating down like jesus christ those comments are so mean i'm like you can't read those and you see how it's affecting them like they can't sleep they really oh yeah it [ __ ] with them they'll stay up for nights you know it's not good it's it's you're you're you're taking in all of these opinions of hundreds if not thousands of people that you don't even know you don't know if they're coming from a healthy place and and most of those opinions they would not express it that way if they were talking to you yeah if they could get the same message across like i think you were ignorant to these facts i think you are biased in your perceptions even if they had a an opinion that was unflattering the way they'd express it to you they'd be considerate about you and your your feelings as a human being and if they weren't you wouldn't take into consideration what they're saying because this guy's just an [ __ ] yeah right but when you just see it in type we just see print it just doesn't it just it it could be a smart person it could be a psycho it could be a fool it could be anything well it's also funny too because that the negative comments that are part of social media seem to be just as potent as negative comments in real life but the positive comments don't seem to be as positive as the positive comments in real life yes like and i don't they don't seem as real and i guess that's partly because we're wired you know to be more sensitive to threat and to negative emotion because well because we're we can be hurt well it's also healthy too to not stroke your ego too much if you're just like concentrating only on the like like there's something distasteful if you go to someone's page and they just retweet all the positive things that people say to them because then it has this sort of reinforcing site like people know that i say something really positive to jordan he's going to retweet me there are some people that they engage in this sort of commerce you know like you say something positive they retweet you and you know it's it's a little too strokey right right people get really into that stroking their own back yeah yeah well i guess yeah i guess the danger of that is that possibility of of that ego inflation that you really want to avoid because that's a bad idea yes that's a very bad idea you've done a wonderful job of avoiding those waters because this is a new this for a guy who's in his 50s who becomes famous out of nowhere and doesn't just become fame just just become famous but becomes this culturally significant sort of lightning rod i mean that that's how i view you and a lot of these talks you're doing a lot of these these debates like you're having with this woman at gq or some of your your interviews what you're doing is you're expressing yourself in a brave but very controversial way and a lot of people are paying attention to this but then you're backing it up with your research you're backing it up with real science you're backing up with a tremendous amount of history of of of the the human race and of religion and of the scientific studies that have been done that show correlations between different types of behaviors and human beings and all this is rich it's it's very it's very rewarding if you could take it all in but when it goes against what people have their preconceived notions or their own set of beliefs that they're bringing to your conversations into your debates then it creates this hostile battle where what you're saying is is is very contrary to what the way they've been living their life or the really really saw that in scandinavia scandinavia yeah well i i was there i went to stockholm twice in oslo twice in helsinki twice and and and copenhagen once in the last month and i spent quite a bit of a lot of interviews um and a lot of discussion about the so-called gender paradox that's a very interesting thing because it's really put their tails in and not in scandinavia and and that makes sense because the scandinavians are going to have to deal with this first because they've gone the farthest down the road for like making their society gender equal but explain that to people yeah they don't mind i will i will okay so so imagine first of all that there's two kinds of equality that you might pursue one would be equality of opportunity and so that would mean that um you know there's there's wide range of talent across people regardless of their type whatever that might be sex gender race ethnicity there's there's talent distributed everywhere and it's a kind of a truism and i would say a truism of the west in the deepest sense that each of the individuals within those groups should be put in a position where they their talents are they're encouraged to manifest those talents partly because that would be good for them spiritually and psychologically but also because that would be of obvious benefit to the community right i mean talent's rare which people don't understand there's lots of different kinds of talent but it's but in each domain it's rare and so it's to everyone's benefit to exploit talented people to the maximal possible degree so even if you're just selfish you'd want to push for equality of opportunity because the more talented people there are out there the more cool stuff you get to have and hopefully the the more diverse and interesting your life is so so you can pursue equality of opportunity um policies and the scandinavians have done that especially trying to knock down barriers for women in the workplace and by all accounts by all standard theories the scandinavian countries in places like like like the netherlands canada to to a slightly lesser degree have done uh have gone farther than any other countries in pursuing those um policies okay and and and part of the consequence of that is that some of the differences between men and women have been um minimized so obviously there's far more women in the workplace than there were 40 years ago and in many occupations there's actually dominance by women there's dominance in the universities there's dominance in the health care fields and so women have poured into the workplace and hypothetically there's problems with that because it's put a lot of stress on family structure but hypothetically that's for the best and because it gives people a broader range of choices and it gives everyone access to more talent so and then also if you look around the world you see that one of the best predictors of of the probability of economic development in developing countries is their attitude is the attitude in those countries towards equal rights for women and it looks causal the more positively the country is predisposed to female rights the more likely they are to develop economically and maybe that's because that indicates that they're open to new ideas or something like that or open to transformation so okay so that's one kind of equality open up the playing field so that everybody has a chance to compete and cooperate and and land where they will but then the other kind of equality is equality of outcome so and that's often described as equity in today's language and so the ultimate equity utopia would be take every job every conceivable kind of job and then stratify that by every conceivable level of authority within every job and then ensure that every single category of person is represented in precise uh proportion to their to their prevalence in the population so every job should be 50 women and 50 men and say 13 non-western ethnic minority and whatever that happens to be and then you could break that down and so and otherwise there's evidence of systemic prejudice okay now first thing to say about that is that's impossible and the reason it's impossible is because there's no limit to the number of ways that you can categorize people into groups so you know you you know about sex and ethnicity and race maybe those are the obvious ones but now you have gender and then you have ethnicity and you know and then there's attractiveness and intelligence and temperament and and height and age and and socioeconomic background and i mean let's say there's 20 but there's a lot more than that there's no possible way that you could ever regulate a society so tightly that every single one of those groups was equally represented in every single one of those occupations at every single level of the hierarchy so they want to concentrate on the significant ones men and women and race well yeah but who's to say those are the significant ones that's the other thing it isn't even obvious that they are because i would say that like a more significant one is cognitive ability because that's a way bigger predictor of long-term life success than sex or race so i don't even think that we've necessarily identified the canonical groups we've just decided that gender and race are the maybe they're the most obvious right but isn't there a problem is it people don't that what what they don't do is they don't take in in terms of cognitive ability they don't get on a team they don't get on like there's people that are sexist yeah but there's it's very rare that someone is elitist in terms of their cognitive ability well hard to say joel i mean i think one of the reasons though i shouldn't say elitist prejudiced is a better word i don't know i mean you could be right but look i think one of the reasons that like if you here's something that's kind of exciting makes sense now that i'm thinking about it of course they are it's well there's one thing that's quite peculiar about the united states in that regard it's like most working-class people let's say are far more irritated with the intellectual elite than they are with the wealthy elite and that's because they think they could become wealthy and they could but they don't think they could become part of the intellectual elite and it isn't obvious to me that the intellectual elite so those would be the liberal left-leaning types that dominate the media and academia are particularly um positive in their in their attitudes towards the typical working-class person i think they're prejudiced and elitist i do believe that that's the case and i think they're also what would you call it patronizing and i think that the typical working-class person say who voted for trump is very very sensitive to that and so they're much more concerned with the one percent who are the cognitive elite than they are the one percent who are the economic elite because at least they think that's a game they could play so anyways it is not also because there's caricatures right of the the one percent of the economic elite you just think of people that are in these lofty positions that are in control the financial institutions but the one percent of the intellectual elite you think of in terms of like some of the more preposterous things you're hearing out of universities now and safe spaces and oh yeah there's that too there's no well there's no appreciation on the part of the intellectual elite for the pathologies of rational of rationalism right i mean there's no there's nothing stupider than a smart person who went wrong you know like you you can tank on i've seen this in my clients you know frequently like if i have a particularly smart client who's particularly disordered in their personality that that's just that's often just that's so difficult it's almost unimaginable because there's so much rationalizing for example yeah what is your approach to handling something like that who's like super intelligent but yet completely their life is in disarray well you know i'm i usually i usually take a very practical approach like you know we try to identify because i start always in my therapy practice i always start with behavioral principles it's like okay well let's see if we can identify a few areas you know through negotiation that are really causing you grief and misery you know like what's what's wrong with your life as far as you're concerned and so that often takes a lot of discussion and then we might try to figure out what's causing that and that's often very difficult to figure out too because it might be geez it might be something physical you know you might be sick in some way because depression is lots of depression is autoimmune related and and anxiety can be a side effect of all sorts of physiological disorders or eating improperly or sleeping badly or or not exercising you know enough to to kind of keep yourself regulated so you try to figure out what's what's causing it and then you try to sketch out some possible solution that we could both test and then with the with the uh with the more intelligent ones you know often they can come up with all sorts of reasons why none of this is going to work or or a thousand reasons why yeah well usually a thousand reasons why none of this is going to work and that with people like that sometimes it's useful to turn to their dreams if if they dream because one of the things that's cool about dreams is that even though they're hard to interpret they never lie and so sometimes you can take someone who's hyper rational they'll have a dream and they'll tell you the dream and then you can work through an interpretation which is a tricky business and the dream will tell them something and there's just no denying it it's like well it's a statement from nature so what are you going to do you're going to pretend that that's not the case you know so so that's that's often extremely useful so so okay so well back to the equality issue so okay so here's what's happened so psychologists have and this is what's putting a tail not in the tail of the scandinavians psychologists have come to a pretty decent agreement about standard personality models right so there's extroversion neuroticism agreeableness openness and conscientiousness and they look fairly stable cross-culturally and that was all done by asking thousands of people hundreds and hundreds of questions and then grouping them statistically so it was a theoretical basically took computational power and statistics to to find out that these are how traits group so um inextroverted people are sociable and happy and neurotic people experience a fair bit of negative emotion so that's the positive and negative emotion dimensions agreeable people are maternal and disagreeable people are competitive and there's a fair bit of male female difference there conscientious people are dutiful and industrious and orderly and the open people are creative and so those are your basic five dimensions okay so that's been established and everyone more or less agrees on it now maybe there's seven dimensions and we've got a questionnaire that that that breaks the five down into ten that's called understand myself um but but basically there's good there's good consensus consent consensus on the five okay so now as soon as you have the five basic traits you can ask some questions like well do men and women differ and so what you do is you just give the questionnaire you can either fill it out yourself or have other people fill it out on your behalf so and it could be a teacher could be a parent you know and that's all been done and what you find is there are systematic differences between men and women and the biggest differences are that women experience more negative emotion and that and that they're more agreeable than men so and that's borne out by the psychiatric evidence because higher levels of negative emotion are manifested in depression and anxiety and women are diagnosed with higher levels of depression and anxiety all around the world and with agreeableness that's also borne out by the clinical literature in some sense the medical literature sociomedical literature because disagreeable people are more likely to be incarcerated because it's the best predictor of being incarcerated even though it's not a very good predictor and men are incarcerated at about a ten to one rate compared to women and are more likely to be antisocial and conduct disordered so the personality differences are mirrored in the socio-medical literature okay so that so now so there are differences but then there's a question are those differences a consequence of socialization or are they biological and the answer to that is tricky because how much something is social and how much it is biological actually depends on the social circumstances so well here's an example if you have a society where no one has enough to eat and people are starving then there's a huge cultural effect on people's intelligence let's say that's mediated by economic factors even though it's got a biological origin right that's the starvation so the relationship between biology and culture is actually partly culturally dependent so it makes it complicated but in any case here's how the scientists decided to address this they thought well why don't we rank order countries by how egalitarian their social policies are which you can do with a fair degree of reliability you know you put the countries where women are second-class citizens at the bottom and you put the scandinavian countries at the top you can get good reliability across raiders for how you'd rate those countries and then look at the magnitude of the differences between men and women by the egalitarian social policies and so then you'll find out and here's the hypothesis if the differences between men and women are primary primarily social then as cultures become more egalitarian men and women will become more alike that's not what happened the opposite happened the the more egalitarian this society and it turns out the richer the society because that's also being discovered now the more different men and women become and so the differences are not huge so with agreeableness for example if you took the average man if you took a typical man and a typical woman out of the population just randomly and you had to bet that the woman was more aggressive than the man you'd be wrong 60 percent of the time so there's quite a bit of overlap right because you'd be right 40 percent of the time but the problem is is that a lot of selection takes place at the extremes maybe you're only concerned about disagreeable people when they become violent and maybe it's only the one in 50 most disagreeable person who's violent and they're all men so you can have quite a bit of similarity at the average level and big differences at the extremes and the extremes is where people do things like like uh employment selection so the biggest difference that's been discovered between men and women and this is the one that gets biggest in the scandinavian countries is interest men are more interested in things and women are more interested in people and it's a big difference it's one full standard deviation and so what that means is that if you were a man you would have to be more interested in people than 85 percent of men to be as interested in people as the 50th percentile woman and you'd have to be more interested in things than 85 percent of women to be as interested in things as the typical man and what do you how do you define things objective gadgets okay gadgets gadgets things non non-inanimate things cars car yeah yeah tools yeah you know technology right right stem fields because the other thing that's happened is that the more egalitarian the society the fewer women go into the stem fields the fewer that's interesting yeah okay so so now this unravels in a big way it's like this is a hugely uh relevant issue politically because it means that you cannot have equality of opportunity and equality of outcome at the same time it's not possible because as you make your society more egalitarian and you open up the opportunity for equality of outcome you increase how different men and women are are and that changes their occupational choice so if men are more interested in things which they are by a substantial margin then way more of them are going to be engineers wouldn't that possibly support this idea that an enforced model of of of equality would allow people to be themselves more i mean this is almost what you're saying well that's because that is that is the optimistic viewpoint well look it's so funny because the swedish foreign minister told me to go croc climb back under the rock that i came out from under when i was in scandinavia because i was describing this these this this science i read that but i'm not exactly sure why well she regards me as misogynist because i think that there are because i think because i've been putting forward the evidence that there are genuine differences between men and women but she should be held accountable for that because that's just a flippant thing to say like you you should have especially in a position of power like she's in you should have a very specific argument saying like for a leader to have such a a base thing to say such a a crude dumb thing to say crawl back under the rock that you came from well i thought she was making a joke about lobsters but i don't think she was the lobsters going to rocks i guess they do they're growing cracks yeah and the bigger lobsters have better rocks that was another very interesting thing in the gq thing where the woman was uh challenging you on your neural biology your oh yeah yes well hardly hardly any hardly any uh uh psychologists understand that serotonin is associated with hierarchies it's like a truism it's been known for 30 years so we can definitely get back to that but i'm very curious about this because this idea of uh enforced equality right ensuring that there is such a high emphasis played or placed on equal equality that you have the equal amount of men the equal amount of women and the opportunities are absolutely available as much to women as they are today and this is enforced yeah this creates an environment where there's less resistance now in an environment where there's less resistance perhaps women don't feel as compelled to say i'll show you yeah that is what seems to happen this is the well here's an look here's an example so there are fewer women mathematicians in the in the higher echelons okay but here's something interesting about mathematical ability first of all it's very rare so that's the first thing to keep in mind now it looks like if you look in junior high that give mathematically gifted men and males and females are approximately as common now there's a little bit of debate about that because there is some evidence that maybe at the very upper extremes there's a male advantage just like there's a male disadvantage at the low end because the male distribution for intelligence might be flatter and so that's the greater male variability hypothesis there's been papers putting that forward that have been retracted as a consequence of pressure from politically correct people even though greater male variability is actually quite common in the animal kingdom for a variety of reasons men are more expendable that males are more expendable in some ways or you could say that males are more likely to produ to pursue high risk high return strategies you can look at it either way and it's certainly possible in any case the men the males in junior high who happen to be mathematically gifted are less likely to also be verbally gifted whereas that doesn't seem to be the case for the females and so if you're a male math nerd then math is a pretty logical pathway for you because you don't have as many other options whereas if you're a female math nerd you have other options because you're all you're less likely you're more likely to also be verbally gifted and so that's enough to at least in principle account for some of the reason why there are fewer women mathematicians than men mathematicians they have other options and there's lots of complex reasons like this and so we have this reflexive idea and this is very much the case because this is like the core idea among the feminist neo-marxist types is that if there's differences in outcome that's that's proof of prejudice and that's support for the idea of the patriarchal tyranny and that's like the core axiom of the radical left is the patriarchal tyranny as far as i'm concerned that's that's god for them the patriarchal tyranny it's like well if it turns out that many of these differences in outcome between men and women aren't a consequence of the patriarchal tyranny in fact even get bigger when you reduce the tyrannical aspect of the patriarch and even the patriarchal aspect to it then it makes that theory not only wrong but opposite of the truth which is the worst kind of wrong and so you know if men are more likely to pursue careers in the stem fields which seems to be the case under conditions of optimal freedom for men and women then that's going to drive income disparities because the stem fields pay more and they pay more partly because they're scalable like it's really hard to scale care for people you know like if you work in a daycare you're going to care for three infants you're not going to care for 50 because you can't it's not scalable but if you're like a software designer it's infinitely scalable and so there's there's a much wider range of possible of possibility for generating much larger much larger income pools and much larger pools of wealth you know and men are also more likely to work longer hours and if you work 10 percent longer hours you make 40 percent more money there's a non-linear return on that's a good thing for everybody who's listening to know if you have a job you want to be the guy or the woman who's working that extra 10 because the return on that is non-linear so that's a really useful thing to know men are more likely to work outside they're more likely to work in dangerous businesses they're more likely to run full-time businesses rather than part-time businesses and they're more likely to move in pursuit of their career goals and that all contributes to differences in and and in in among uber drivers they're they make seven percent more money because they drive faster so and so anyway that's not good though well no but it's a high risk high return issue right i mean it's a pattern male 1 yeah it's more risk there's more risk in it so there's more return as long as you don't get hurt right and i think that's a pretty common male pattern is there's more risk is there's more return as long as you don't get hurt the problem seems to be when discussing these things in any way uh romanticizing or uh glorifying male behavior or putting any emphasis whatsoever on there being a a positive aspect to a lot of the things that we think of as being negative like aggression or ambition or or yeah or competition yeah yeah well the competition amongst men is fine competition with men against women is often thought of as cruel yeah well that yes well and and there's a certain amount of reason for that as well because obviously physical competition is it's easy for that to border on cruel this is why we were we were talking before the show that instead of calling people men and women when referring to like because there's there's this very disturbing in my opinion trend of transgender women entering into these competitions now with women who are biologically female yeah and dominating them yeah and that instead of calling people men and women let's dispense with you yeah you can be a man or a woman yeah you can be a man or woman that's your choice and you can change it whenever you want so you're a man or a woman that and that's your choice but we're going to have a new rule which is that if you have an x y chromosome so you're an x y person or an x x person then if you're an x x pers xy person you don't get to engage in physical combat with an xy person yes men or one xxx doesn't matter yes yeah how would that be if you're xy you can't engage in physical combat with x that's right xyz cannot hit x x's how's that and maybe they can't um run in running contests against them and maybe they can't play tennis against them not within and maybe that's just reasonable right it is reasonable yes it is certainly it is reasonable but if you you talk about that especially someone like you who was you were against this bill that was going to enforce these pronouns and the com compelling the use of these pronouns that you're thought to be a transphobic person yeah because you feel like there maybe should be some rational discussion about the physical limitations of certain body structures because that's what it is if you're talking about my field of business you're talking about combat sports right i've been involved in combat sports my whole life and there is a difference and it's not to say that females aren't aren't competent and i mean i had miriam nakamoto on yesterday she's a good friend of mine she's an eight-time world muay thai champion and she's a monster but she doesn't fight against men and she shouldn't fight against men although she probably could beat a bunch of them right it's not she shouldn't have to and she's tough women a tough woman can beat a variety of men yes but a really tough man can beat all women yes right so that's the problem that's the reality yes and that is definitely this is reality you know and people don't like to hear these things and they don't they they want to pretend that you can even out the playing field with hormones no you can even at a little there's certain things like i've always said you if you gave brock lesnar a sex change and put him in a dress he's going to run through every woman that's ever lived in the history of women there's not a single woman that's going to be able to deal with that bone structure and that that mind that that guy has had with testosterone pumping through it for 39 years it's just you just it's just it's just preposterous that we even have to have to have the discussion it's so it's so absolutely ridiculous it's the one thing that i was attacked on more than anything in my entire life is saying that i think it's ridiculous to have a trans woman compete against women and mixed martial arts i was like you want to have them do it in chess you want to have them do it in something that's non-physical sure you want them to be a woman yes okay you want them to be recognized as a woman you're sure but as soon as you're compelling people like here's one that's going up lately if you don't want to date a trans woman then you're some sort of a bigot that if you're a man even if you want a family you know you remember in in in uh brave new world in huxley's book it was considered immoral to reject anyone's sexual advances because it was prejudicial oh yes and the thing is it is prejudicial that's the thing now but but to see so that makes the question even more interesting because the the question is at what point do you have the right to your prejudices right and what one of the things that we seem to cling to um and i would say rightly is that we're allowed to be prejudiced when it comes to who we interact with sexually and then and who we choose as friends and that's right that's the right to association and you know you say but only up to a certain point well that's this is the because this this new logic is kind of leaking into sexual preferences now like if you have a problem with someone being overweight yeah then you're you're a sizes or something yeah like what is that well the thing is is that you can't have preferences without having prejudices of course right and so that's a big issue so what does that mean you don't get to have any preferences how's that gonna work out in terms of like what you like to eat or what kind of films you enjoy or what kind of books you read you're allowed to have these preferences but when it comes to what you're sexually attracted to there's new emphasis now trying to draw that line and and say like but it's preposterous people that are pushing this and almost everybody's pushing back but i find it interesting well it's a logical conclusion to all these other things that have been happening because that is where the rubber hits the road it's like you know when when i when i well i've seen this in in debates that i've had publicly where people you know talk about prejudice and i've pointed out to them that they have prejudicial attitudes with regards to their sexual preferences because they don't just sleep with anyone who asks them right so it's like well how is that not a prejudice well of course it's a prejudice well then the question is under what circumstances are prejudices justifiable and that's a conversation we don't like to have because we believe that there are no circumstances whatsoever under which prejudices are are acceptable there's a big difference between prejudices and discrimination i think those two get conflated yes there is a big difference between prejudice and discrimination right and hopefully discrimination has to do with uh setting your standards in relationship to the task at hand yes right that that's what you'd hoped for that that's the appropriate form right of discrimination right that's that's like intelligence sure everything everything isn't the same about everything all the time so you discriminate you rank order things and you need to rank order them even to pursue things that are valuable this is one of the problems with the people who are so anti-hierarchy like the like the radical leftists well there shouldn't be hierarchies it's like okay then why do something well that that argument is so foolhardy that it's it's difficult to take seriously but you do have to engage in it and i think when you engage in it it's really fascinating to watch uh because there's it's like you're playing a game of chess with someone only has a couple of pieces they have this strong move that they do but you've got all these other pieces and you're like well let's just keep this game going until this comes this logical conclusion which is checkmate there's there's hierarchies all throughout nature it doesn't mean people should suppress people it doesn't mean people shouldn't have rights it doesn't mean people should enforce themselves or force themselves on other folks that's not what it means it also doesn't mean that the hierarchies especially if they're human hierarchies well or or or that they're only that's right not that they're good necessarily or that they're predicated on power like one of the most pathological elements of the postmodern types especially people like foucault is their insistence that all hierarchical structures are predicated on power and that there's nothing other than power and that's completely preposterous i mean i use examples of plumbers in my lectures more recently because it's rather comical it's like well on what basis do you hire a plumber so imagine that there's a hierarchy of plumbers ranging from very successful to very unsuccessful okay and you say well what makes plumbers successful well the power theory would would imply that there are roving bands of mafioso plumbers who like come pounding on your door at three in the morning and tell you that if you don't get their particular posse to fix your pipes leaking or not that they're gonna come and burn down your house of course that's completely it's completely absurd when you go to hire someone like a plumber well the first thing you want to know is reputation can they actually fix a pipe because you actually want your pipe fixed and then you want to know well do they deal with you fairly and part of what's tangled up in that in all likelihood is do they deal with their employees fairly because that's going to make their business function properly and so the hierarchy of plumbers which is part of the patriarchal tyranny is almost entirely predicated on competence and almost every enterprise in the west is like that because i keep wondering well where the hell is this patriarchal tyranny like is it massage therapists is it nurses like most nurses are female if you get females organized into a hierarchy which you do in nursing is that all of a sudden is that part of the patriarchal tyranny or is it the fact that now all those people are women does that mean it's no longer well it's still a hierarchy is it no longer a tyranny is it no longer patriarchal like is it patriarchal only because there's men in it or is it patriarchal because it's a hierarchy all this stuff is so incoherent that it just all you have to do is think about it and and that hasn't been done to any great degree and it just dissolves in your hands yes that's what i'm saying is that if you're entering into a job straight out of college you leave university and now you're entering into you know your first year in the workplace it's it's just a natural fact of life that there's going to be people that are further ahead in this race than you yeah because they're better at what they do some of them because they have more experience some of them are more crooked and sneaky too possible as well because but it's the it's the agreeing everyone agreeing that this is a game yeah this is some sort of a competition yes and you're going to have hierarchies in competitions you're going to have people who win you're going to have people who do better yes you know no matter what so that's the fundamental issue as soon as you so we could look at it this way as soon as you let's assume people have problems everybody can agree on that and then we could assume that people would like solutions to those problems so we could agree on that then we could say well then if you implement a solution socially so with other people then you're going to cooperate and compete in relationship to the solution and that's instantly going to produce a hierarchy because no matter what the problem is some people are going to be better at solving it than others and then if you have any sense you put the people who are good at solving it at the forefront because then they solve it faster and cheaper and better and then everybody benefits but then you get a hierarchy right the people who solve those problems get financial incentive to solve those problems yes and they do that because the rest of us are greedy and desperate it's like you know we want the people who are good at solving the problems to keep solving them and so what we're trying to do is to reward them so that they'll keep doing it even if it's difficult to give them some status extraordinarily if necessary yes yes when you look at the people that are the the head of giant industry the the ceos of super successful companies they're the ones who have the giant yachts and the big houses and this is the incentive for people to try to get to that position and the idea that there's no incentive and there should be no incentive but yet you're still going to have all this innovation is ridiculous it's not how it works it's not a human being's work if human beings are going to work really hard there has to be some sort of a reward and it can't be an equal reward yes and then then what you could say like so okay so the right that that would be roughly speaking a conservative position and then you can take a left-wing position that's reasonable and you can say yes there are hierarchies but we have to stay awake because they can degenerate into power hungry tyrannies so that it's no longer competence it's it's political machination and game playing and tyranny that that produce the positional the positional differentiation so we've got to stay awake to that and so we've got to criticize the hierarchies not the fact of hierarchy but the structure of hierarchy so they stay honest and then we also have to be careful because when you do set up a hierarchy then a lot of people collect at the bottom that's the necessary consequence of a few people collecting at the top and so then you have to be concerned about those people at the bottom and so there's a variety of things that you would do to express that concern is one you might want to have a lot of hierarchies so that people have different talents could play different games and a complex society is pretty good at that but you're still going to have people who stack up at the bottom of all hierarchies right those are going to be people who are sick mentally and physically and maybe people who are cognitively impaired or you know or who've experienced some kind of catastrophe in their life and then you you want to set up your system so that those people don't suffer unduly partly because that's bad and partly because that destabilizes your whole society and so you could say well that's the left's place is to speak for the speak on behalf of the unjustly dispossessed and the right's position is to stabilize and maintain functional hierarchies and encourage competition that's of benefit to the whole yes and and to the individuals within the competition and then the political dialogue is a continual discussion between the left and the right saying well you know this hierarchy is getting a little too steep and a little too rigid and and and well and that's for me that's also the the fundamental reason for the necessity of free speech is because that's the only way to discuss this it is the only it's the only way of working it out and it is the case you nee you're going to produce hierarchies if you're going to pursue things of value socially you're going to produce hierarchies and they're necessary and there's also i have a giant issue with the concept that these things are mutually exclusive that you can't have competition and also have a a a good social environment i think that's a preposterous idea i mean one of the things i really like about the psychologist jean piaget who's i would say the world's foremost expert on games is that he did a very careful analysis of say competitive games okay so let's take hockey or soccer it doesn't matter same example okay you say well because people now they they have kids play these games and don't keep score which of course the kids keep score because they're not stupid like the adults but you know while we can't have it be competitive okay so let's take it apart it's like well is hockey a competitive game or a cooperative game okay well so first of all everyone's trying to do the same thing that's cooperative it's not like half the people are playing chess and another you know a third of them brought a basketball and two of them are boxing and well sometimes they do in hockey boxing in a quarter but everyone's trying to do the same thing so that's cooperative okay everyone plays their position that's cooperative they all follow the same rules that's cooperative right so so there's competition but it's nested inside a fundamental structure of cooperation and the cooperation is the basis of the game itself let's all arbitrarily agree that it's important to put this black disc in the net which is to get your aim right and then let's cooperate within our teams to do that because we're going to pass and we're going to pass to each other and we're also going to work so that each of us is a good player but so that we all work for the betterment of our team because we want to win games across multiple games so that's also cooperative and then you want to interact with your your enemies let's say the other team in a way that's indicative of good sportsmanship so that the entire league can flourish and to think of that as competitive is absolutely it's so um there's no other way of describing it than stupid that's what it is it's a it's a it's an ignorant unidimensional analysis it's put forward by someone who's reflexively opposed to anything that smacks of competition and who isn't thinking it through at all they're denying the benefits of competition and the fact that they reap those very benefits of competition by enjoying the products that are created by these corporations yes well it's very hypocritical and well well that's for sure that's called a performative contradiction it's like well i'd like to i like to complain about left-wing issues on my iphone right exactly you know it's like well yeah fair enough but you know you should have a little gratitude for the fact that you've got your iphone to complain about and those and those organizations those uh corporations are unbelievably competitive and they fall apart almost instantly when that competition starts start stops being a an issue because then there's no constraint on the behavior of the system so yes and you know the issue with men i think with young men and this is one of the things i've been trying to address is that if your fundamental presupposition is that our culture is a patriarchal tyranny which is an appalling presupposition along with the idea that the best way of looking at history is that it it was the oppression the continual oppression of women by men which is also something that i regard as absolutely reprehensible doctrine then okay so it's a patriarchal tyranny but but that in their defense that did exist there has been continual oppression of women it's just not the only thing that's happened well there's been women that have been revered there's been women that have been celebrated there's been women that have accomplished great things but there's been a lot of oppression so if they concentrate primarily on that oppression and that's their main point of study and that's the thing they want to talk about all the time they kind of have a point in the fact that if you're looking at all the events that have ever taken place there's a significant number of them that have been women being oppressed yeah but i don't know if there's more women who've been oppressed than men who've been oppressed that's a very good point so i would say that the entire history of i mean you look at it this way is that we oppress ourselves personally with our own malevolence and stupidity and then we're all oppressed by the kind of the crushing hand of the social world that molds us in one way and not in another and then of course nature is doing her best all the time to give birth to us but also to kill us and take us out and so there's this endless like there's this endless what would you call it vulnerability that characterizes our existence psychologically and socially and naturally and and i would say 150 years ago that was even more intense than it was now you know because the typical person in the west lived on less than a dollar a day before 1895.

and so the way i think that we should view the history of the world is that men and women labored under virtually impossible conditions for the entire bulk of human evolution and they did their best to cooperate and to compete but to cooperate so that they had some modicum some possibility of a modicum of security and satisfaction and that that's the right framework and then within that of course there's power games that are played by people who are corrupt yeah within that there's horrible events of course things have taken place but there's there's a massive amount of hypocritical thinking when you are criticizing the actions of so many people and and talking about how many people are complicit in these things while you're carrying around a phone that's made by someone who gets a dollar a day i was talking to a journalist in slovenia who is a lefty and and not a very sophisticated one and she was talking about the one percent and i said well do you know that if you make more than 32 000 a year that you're part of the one percent she said well what do you mean i said well that's the worldwide statistic it's like so you're part of the one percent well she didn't first of all she said well i don't believe that statistic and i thought well that's fine you can go look it up yourself but what was so interesting was that for her that characterization the one percent victimizers was only relevant within the confines of her national border right right as soon as i said well no it's all you have to do is expand that out a little bit and you're the problem and not the solution then that was that was completely untenable for her exactly she couldn't include herself in the population of victimizers even though you know she lives in a western country and she's a well-paid journalist and she's lives a very privileged life so to speak by historical and world standards to someone living in the congo or something or or anybody living anywhere in the entire history of the human race right yeah for sure if you make thirty four thousand dollars today you absolutely are in the top one percent of everybody who's ever definitely well of course of course yes yes definitely especially given what you can buy with it the only reason to deny that is because it doesn't fit what you've come into the argument with it doesn't it doesn't fit your pre the the priest predisposed notion that you have the your idea that you're it's so rigid this idea that you are not one of the ones that's just that's right that's exactly carrying that iphone with that laptop and all these different things that you enjoy that are created by these corporations that you you support them financially but yet they're the ones that are destroying this earth these are the ones that you're rallying against these are the ones you hate against yeah well the victim victimizer narrative only works if you assume that you're a victim right and as soon as you assume that you're a victimizer well then it's not so much fun one of the things i wrote the um forward for the new version of of solzhenitsyn's gulag archipelago the abridged version it came out november 1st and i was trying to figure out why the russian revolution went wrong so rapidly because it went wrong right from the beginning and they they sold itself quotes this guy named i think his name was walter lazis if i remember correctly i got the latsis part right anyways and he said when you're interrogating a member of the bourgeoisie um to decide whether they you know whether they constitute an enemy of the state you don't give any credibility to such niceties as individual guilt or innocence all you care about is their group and their background and their economic status and if they're in the wrong group the bourgeoisie then that's it that's the end of them and solzhenitsyn comments not just the end of them but the end of their children and their grandchildren as well and latsis was eventually executed by stalin somebody wrote me and just told me that after i wrote the forward but one of the things i figured out was this and this is really worth thinking about man so the intersectional claim is that you know each person has more than one group identity so fundamentally if you're going to calculate their victim status then you have to calculate it across all the different groups that they might be victims in and so you know maybe uh oh who knows a native american is one form of victim in this line of thinking but a native american victim is a female is is like twice the victim or however you would calculate that mathematically it's like okay and maybe you have maybe you can be put into six different groups we already talked about that a little bit but here's the bloody rub if i put you in six groups in one of those groups you're a victimizer you can bloody well bet on it and then here's the next rule if you're a victimizer among any possible dimension of analysis then it's the gulag for you and so that's the fundamental danger of that group identity victimizer victim narrative is that you fragment your identity in multiple dimensions you'll find out that you're a victimizer and then everyone then everyone's a criminal and then everyone's guilty that's exactly what happened in russia and then you think well wait a minute there are a bunch of people who are really compassionate about the poor it's like let's say just for the sake of argument that at the beginning of the russian revolution the 20 of the communists were really concerned about the poor maybe we could say 50 just to be arbitrary about it the other 50 were jealous and resentful about anyone who anything more than they did all right now that you put those two groups head to head in a battle for four years and see who's standing at the end even if you are one of those utopians who actually cares for the dispossessed when the revolution comes you can bloody well be sure that your head's going to be first on the chopping block because the people who are motivated by hate are going to be a lot more vicious in their attempts to eradicate than you're going to be what would you call it effective in your in your attempts to save that whole game that whole identity politics game that is dangerous beyond belief and it's it's predicated fundamentally on resentment and and the desire to devolve people back into a tribal antagonism i think it's so important that you talk about it this way and i think it's really interesting when i see the resistance to you talking about it this way and how many people are unwilling to look at it as this multi-level historical sort of record you could look and see how this played out and you can look and see what's going on right now with these control games that people are playing socially and that they are enforcing certain types of behavior in certain ways of thinking and then trying to rein in earnings and and rally against capitalism and support communism and socialism and doing so in this sort of weird trendy way without understanding the full scope of the historical implications when it's been tried in the past that it's not as simple as like you know uh you know you got this ann ryan thing doing you're looking at this world of you know uh capitalism against socialism it's good people who care about folks versus people who are ruthless it's not that well that isn't even how capitalism doesn't even work like that you know that managers are more stressed by the people they manage than the people they manage are stressed by their managers i mean then think about it right just all you have to think about that for a minute it's like you're an employee and you have a manager and the manager is a bit of a jerk let's say but there's 20 of you right so there's like you're kind of 120th oppressed by the manager but now you're the manager and you're managing 20 people and you're responsible for them and we're assuming that you're not a psychopath and you're probably not because you probably wouldn't have been able to get to be a manager if you're a psychopath because psychopaths generally aren't very successful and they have to keep moving as people figure out who they are so the idea that like psychopathic power is a good route to power in a functioning organization it's a stupid theory there are some organizations that are pathological enough so that works but they don't last very long either so you're the manager and you're a decent human being and you've got 20 people who are dependent on you and at least two of those people are real trouble like they're serious trouble and they're they're they're you're concerned all the time and so you see this as and as people move up the corporate hierarchies you think well they have more and more power it's like yeah but not really they have more and more responsibility and their behavior is actually monitored with increasing severity it's like you're quite constrained in most high-level positions of authority in complex organizations like you have to behave pretty damn carefully or you're going to get yourself in trouble very very quickly well certainly today i think that that wasn't necessarily the case a decade ago or two decades ago it was less the case yes less the case today it's far easier to get called out on things but even so like you know even even 20 years ago like if you didn't treat your customers properly you know in and carefully reciprocally in long-term relationships you're going to be a failure yeah and you know in in in any corporation that that produces anything of any value i mean the production is one thing so you have to be competent at the production but you have to be in constant communication with your with your buyers and foster those relationships personally because there's intense competition and if those personal relationships aren't of high quality then your business fails and one of the things i really learned because i spent a lot of time with business people as well as academics is that business people do a tremendous amount of socialization compared to academics like academics can judge each other's work more or less on the basis of its scientific merit and so they don't have to establish personal relationships to the same degree but business people are always wondering well can i trust you can we enter into a reciprocal relationship that's going to be of mutual benefit over the long run and so they're testing people out socially all the time and if you're not capable of reciprocating honestly over some decade say then you're going to screw things up in an absolutely horrible way it's one of the reasons why they like to use golf as a matter yes exactly that's exactly right there's two things one you get to see how someone handles competition yeah you get to see if they cheat yeah because people do cheat and golf you know it's an interesting story a good friend of mine his uh his dad was playing golf with this man and uh his wife was there as well and the wife saw the dad move the or saw this man that he was playing golf with move the ball and she said do not go into business with this man do not trust this man he's a cheater he cheated at golf and he thought it was not that big a deal it's like it's just a game of golf he's like no this is a big deal turns out the guy was a [ __ ] criminal just took a while to find out i mean he wound up doing a lot of other things that how you do some things is oftentimes how you do everything yeah well that's why people are so um interested in games yes you know because a person really is well games this is again why i'm such an admirer of piaget because he knew very well that game is a microcosm of reality yeah that's why we like i mean you have to have an explanation for why people like games yeah you know and i've been talking about this a lot in my lectures too is you think well you know any game like if any competitive game soccer is a good example it's basically a hunting game okay because you're you're firing a projectile at a target okay so the target's the goal and the projectile's the ball but it doesn't matter is that so you have it you have teams that are figuring out how to hunt properly then you think well to hunt properly you have to put the ball in the net as many times as you possibly can so and so you organize yourself in a hierarchy to facilitate that but then that's that's not the whole story because you tell your kids it doesn't matter whether you win or lose it matters how you play the game and the kids all freaked out about that because he doesn't know what you mean and he says well what do you mean dad i'm trying supposed to try to win and you say i don't know what i mean but it's it's still true but here's what you mean is that if you're in a league you're not trying to win the soccer game you're trying to win the soccer championship and to win the championship you have to win a whole bunch of games and the rules to win a whole bunch of games aren't the same as the rules to win one game you know like you could go flat out as the prima donna and bend and bend the rules and cut corners and exhaust everyone and win the game and then lose the next three because that's a stupid medium to long-term strategy or you could be like the superstar and hog the ball all the time and never give your teammates a chance to develop but then you're injured and your team is out so that's a stupid strategy too so you think well what you have to do to win the championship is that you have to organize your team so that the best players lead but that everybody gets developed and that you play the medium to long-term game in a fair way in a fair and decent way okay and so you think well that's how you win a championship i talked to a coach a while back and he said one of the things he did to select athletes was to watch what happened when they scored a goal and if they were celebrating on their own you know in sort of an egotistical way then that wasn't such a good sign but if they scored a goal or a touchdown or whatever it was and their entire team came in and mobbed them and then like lifted them up on their shoulders and they thought that guy is an athlete because not only can he put the goal put the ball in the net but he does it in a way that benefits the entire team and that's the person you want around for the long run and so then the goal isn't just to put the ball in the goal the goal is to put the ball in the goal the the largest number of times while simultaneously benefiting as many as your of your fellow players as you can well although i think that's a great strategy i don't think that's necessarily the meaning of it doesn't matter if you win or lose it's how you play the game i think what i don't think people think of it in terms of like a long-term strategy for championship leagues i think when they're saying it doesn't matter whether you win or lose it's how you play the game meaning don't cheat yeah do your best yeah and learn right but i think that's right well learn how to handle failure right learn how to handle victory we'll also learn from the experience itself like if you make a mistake and you you're trying your hardest but you make an error because someone has a counter to that yeah then you learn from that yeah that's how you play the game right so stupidly and you don't think and you win just because you got lucky that's not as good as playing intelligently and expanding your skills and losing yes because the other people are superior and then you learn from the fact that they figured out a way to have solutions to all the problems that you present yes okay so so one of the things that you're pointing out is that while you're playing you want to be expanding your range of skills so that you get better at playing the next game but then you think well even the soccer championship isn't the whole game right because your life is a whole series of games of of of championships of different titles the idea is that championships will come if you continue to excel and get excellent yes and also if people invite you to play yes so there's both so those are the two things so that's the goal right the goal isn't to put the ball in the net the goal is to get excellent and to be invited to play and the mechanism is that you put the ball in the goal and that makes sense see that helps explain why people find competitive sports so unbelievably compelling because you can be cynical about it you can say well look there's 50 000 people there watching you know somebody kick a uh a spheroid object into a net who the hell cares like and but but that's not the issue what you're what you are in fact doing is you're going there to watch people develop expertise and to learn to play reciprocally in a noble and ethical manner and all of that sport when it's done properly is a direct physical incarnation of that ethic and so it's not surprising that that's why people get so excited when they see an athlete do something imagine the best thing that you can see at a sports event is someone who does something purely in the spirit of fair play and in a manner that's unbelievably excellent wayne gretzky was very good at that right because he was an excellent excellent sportsman and also unbelievably skilled and so people loved him and that's that's perfect because he was he was a player who played the game like it was more important to play it properly than to win and he was on the top of his game at the same time right and that's what you want to be in light didn't cut corners that's right there's no cutting corners yeah and so that's very cool and you see a very high order ethic emerge out of that you want to be the kind of player that everybody i kind of wrote about that in 12 rules for life when you know because part of my advice in rule 5 was not to let your kids do anything that makes you dislike them and that's part of the idea there is that you know if you're really on the side of your children you help them develop in a manner that makes them eminently desirable to other children and capable of interacting properly with adults because then the whole world opens up to them that's a really and then you do that the thing that's cool about that too is that this is what makes the postmodern and the marxist type so wrong is that your best strategy for success in life isn't the exercise of raw power it's a really counterproductive strategy doesn't even work very well for advanced animals your best strategy is skill and reciprocity so when there's a real high order ethic in that that has nothing to do so the idea that our hierarchies are predicated on power and they're corrupt because of that and the whole world is a battleground between hierarchies of you know different power hierarchies and it's winner take all and you know the devil take the hindmost that's just that's completely inappropriate psychologically there's a a real situation where you very rarely find people who excel at competition and who have benefited from competition who are against competition and you very rarely find people who have no skill and competition at all and who have never engaged and have shied away from their whole life that support it and and and believe that it's an important part of our culture i think people want they want to believe and they want to support things that reinforce their idea of how they're living their life correctly and if if they shy away from competition if it makes them nervous if they've never excelled at it if it doesn't feel right to them if it makes them uncomfortable they want to feel like there's some better way and this is one of the things that leads young sensitive kind compassionate people towards socialism and this concept that capitalism and any form of competition at all ultimately is ultimately is going to lead to a few people hogging up all the wealth and dominating all the people well the other thing that's kind of sad about that is that no matter what system you set up that's the outcome yeah you know like if you look at the pareto distribution so if that's the distribution of wealth you'll find that in every society that we know of whether it's capitalist or socialist or communist for that matter a small proportion of the people have a disproportionate amount of the resources so so you so the other thing that i've been trying to explain in my lectures is that if you were really concerned about the dispossessed and the poor you wouldn't put hierarchical dispossession at the feet of capitalism because it's a way worse problem than that you know because the marxist types they think well if we didn't have capitalism there wouldn't be hierarchies and there wouldn't be dispossession and that's complete bloody rubbish because the problem of hierarchy and the problem of dispossession is way deeper than the problem of capitalism so like if you look at neolithic grave sites way before there was capitalism you see that a small number of people are buried with all the gold so the the the fact of of dis dis unequal distribution of resources that's as old as that's that's as old as hierarchies are old it's unbelievably old and so for the leftists to take an anti-capitalist position and assume that that's going to be of benefit to the dispossessed is an idea that's at least 145 years out of date as far as i'm concerned but we do want to discourage tyranny we do want to keep keep that we do want to keep someone from accumulating so much wealth that they dominate the world and have a disproportionate effect on culture and and do things that are detrimental that could be in fact detrimental for decades and decades to come i mean look to this day well that's why you have a balance of powers in the united states too because yeah well the thing is it's not the case it should like the fact that you can't characterize the west as a patriarchal tyranny doesn't mean that hierarchies don't become tyrannical sometimes they do and yeah and we have to be alert to that and that's been known for a very long time so is it fair to say that the west has some aspects of a hierarchy hierarchical tyranny of course of course and that's i would say that's a mythological truism so like the way that that society is represented in our deep narrative structures is always twofold there's a wise king and a tyrannical king and they're pitted against each other and your job is to amplify the wise king and keep the tyrant under control that's the evil advisor to the king you know like scar in the lion king yeah right so he there's always this shadowy figure in the background that's malevolent and psychopathic and power obsessed that's attempting to take over the hierarchy by by ill-gotten means that and that that's that's that's evil itself in some sense it's the archetype of evil and so that has to be taken into consideration but the problem with the viewpoint that's so prevalent in our society right now is that that's the patriarchal tyranny viewpoint is that it's only the evil king and then that's particularly hard on young men because if you believe that all of our hierarchies are predicated on nothing but arbitrary power and then that's a natural consequence of masculinity then whenever you see anyone who's masculine manifest anything that's associated with competence or confidence or or or or um or let's say competitiveness or or you know heaven forbid aggression then you immediately assume that that's nothing but a manifestation of tyrannical power and that you discourage it or or or you certainly fail to encourage it and i think that that's a dreadful mistake because that all that masculine energy whether that's characteristic of women or men because women can certainly manifest that that's something that should be integrated and celebrated and the way you do that that's partly why mechanisms like competitive sports are so necessary is that you want to take um kids let's say boys the more competitive and aggressive boys just for this example you want to take them and you want to socialize them intensely so that they take that aggressive competitive impulse and they're capable of manifesting it inside a social structure like a game so that it's of benefit to everyone and and you can do that it's not a problem you know you teach an aggressive kid that it's beneath his dignity to uh bully someone weaker so you can attach that right to the competitiveness it's like you're a loser you bully someone weaker than you you're a loser that's pathetic yes it's like it it it speaks right to that competitive drive says oh i don't want to be a loser of martial arts are so critical i mean that's one of the major tenets of martial arts you know this is a it is a huge part of what's taught in traditional martial arts academies because there's a very clear way of behaving and you're you're never supposed to do anything remotely like bullying right right and you're supposed to have because it's misuse of your power exactly and you're supposed to have extreme reverence for the people who taught you i mean your master you literally call them a master right you know in all almost all martial arts right and so that's another well so that's another thing that's really in that's really interesting about a functional hierarchy is like because the the leftist critics look at a hierarchy and they think every position is up looking down right right but what you're saying what you're pointing out is no in a functional hierarchy there's plenty of respect going up right so it's not only it's not just power it's like it's power it's it's it's authority and subordination at the same time voluntary subordination because you should be um you should be properly subordinate to the people who are better at what you're doing yes and in a functional organization that happens naturally and the other thing that happens too and the radical leftists never take this into account as far as i'm concerned is that one of the things i've learned about people who've run successful organizations whether they're academic or business um is that they really love mentoring young people it's a it's an intrinsic pleasure because you know you think well it's in for the evil capitalist it's it's it's winner take all and and and to hell with everyone else and that's an unbelievably cynical view of human nature it only really applies to people who are genuinely psychopathic and they're very rare and so most of the people i know that have been hyper successful are absolutely thrilled if they can find a young person and they don't care generally speaking about sex or creed or color or any of that crap they care about competence they want to find a competent young person who's got a lot of possibility and then open up all sorts of doors of opportunity for them and to see how they can help them develop and if they can do that with 20 or 30 people then like my graduates or my graduate supervisor had his uh he's getting old and he had his retirement party about two years ago and about 30 of the people that he trained in to becoming scientists came to his party and they talked non-stop about the beneficial effect that that he had on their life you know he found a lot of them were you know they were young and smart but didn't really all that properly oriented in the world and he picked them out and gave them opportunities and he certainly did this for me has opened all sorts of doors for me and that was a huge source of pleasure in his life i think maybe the primary source he had a family as well and obviously his family was of primary importance but in his professional career it wasn't his name on papers and his you know his his name in the market it was all these young people whose careers he could foster never-ending source of satisfaction yeah i think that's a critical aspect of being a successful person that you have to realize that there's a there's a great personal benefit in helping other people and that you feel this this is not just like something that looks good on paper when you can show some young person who's coming up the way you're 10 years ahead of them and you could say these are the mistakes that i made yeah i can help you get through this and then you see them flourish there's a great deal of personal satisfaction oh definitely there's got to be some sort of an evolutionary benefit to this kind of people that's well that's part of see that's the thing is we are evolved for reciprocity we really are we're not evolved for power right right this is this is what's so deeply wrong about the damn post-modernists and the marxist is that that isn't what human first of all power is not the best strategy to attain success it's simply not it doesn't even work for chimpanzees because the more the brute chimps you know the ones that that rule purely as a consequence of force as soon as they weaken two subordinates that are reciprocally engaged so that have a friendship tear them into pieces so i don't care how strong you are three guys that are like two-thirds your strength are going to take you out so so you're much better situated in in society and in your life if you if you're in an interactive network of reciprocally beneficial relationships that works in games but it also works in life and to reduce that and and if you're competent so there's there's the the killer combination hyper competence and the capacity for genuine reciprocity that makes you unstoppable why is there this lack of understanding and appreciating this nuance in people that oppose these ideas like what is what's the willingness to be ignorant about all the variabilities especially when you consider the bulk of the research well i think some of it's justification for failure you know like if you're not doing very well then it's really easy to think that the game is rigged it's also easy to be resentful about people who seem to have more than you have especially if you're not thinking about it very clearly you know and that's another thing that i've been trying to lecture to people about is that you should be very careful about assuming that someone else has more than you do i mean one of the best predictors of whether someone has money is how old they are so old people are richer than young people well obviously right because they had their whole life to accrue wealth it's like well who's got it better you want to be rich and old or young and poor you know i mean you can't buy youth with money so it isn't obvious who's better off in a situation like that it's in in fact i think most people who are old and rich would trade it for young and poor fairly damn quickly well that's why people really get angry when they see young rich people yeah i know that's just too much to bear yeah like a young rich famous rapper like uh what's that fella this 17 year old a little pump how about that famous 17.

but you know the first in high school well the funny thing too though is that you know even with people who have that that sort of let's call it good fortune um you know independent of of their talent you don't have to scratch beneath the surface very far even in successful people's lives until you find a pretty decent vein of tragedy you know and so it it that jealousy of of of the successful is also based on a really unidimensional view of exactly what constitutes success you know you see the the trappings whatever they might be let's say it's a yacht and and more money than you know what to do with and you assume well that's going to put that person at the pinnacle of a satisfying life but there's no shortage of dreadfully unhappy and addicted celebrities and it isn't obvious always that more money is good for people you know i mean you say oh that's a problem i'd like to have it's like look fair enough i mean there are worse problems but celebrity and fame and fortune are also not that easy to deal with and they come with their own pitfalls plus there's lots of things they don't protect you against you know people still get divorced and they still get sick and they still die and their parents still get alzheimer's and all of that like the the fundamental tragic elements of life are still in place one of the interesting things about people that are jealous of other people that are extremely successful is that you're missing one of the core lessons of competition is to be inspired by those who are more successful and not to try to chip them down and take away their accomplishments because they don't make you feel good yeah the people that are piss-poor at competition are always the ones that are trying to diminish the accomplishments of those who are extremely successful you see this in sports fans if you see a loser fat sports fan talking about what a piece of [ __ ] lebron james is because he dropped the ball or he missed a shot like this the extreme reaction that they could have to someone who's extraordinarily successful is almost always in direct proportion to how much of a failure they are in their own life and that's one of the reasons why in contrast it looks so ridiculous yeah well that's part of the danger i would say that's part of the danger of the entire identity politics movement is that you know is that that reasonable care for the dispossessed which we already talked about is easily contaminated by hatred and resentment for people who are not only successful but who are the most annoying person who's successful is the person who deserves it not the person who doesn't deserve it because you can write the person who doesn't deserve it off right the lottery winner you can say oh yeah well you know he just got lucky yeah exactly but then you see the person who's broken themselves in half and you know come out of a really pathological background and has been successful and you're like you're you're uselessly um wasting your life away that's the sort of person that you really don't like because they cast you in a very dim light so this is where competition is so important because the person that has a background in competition has been involved in competition sees a person who's busted their ass and and becomes something really extraordinary and it's incredibly inspirational and you look to those people and you want to read their biography and you want to watch documentaries on them because it literally gives you fuel whereas the person who who shies away from competition is afraid of their own insecurities and failures and really has never tested themselves those are the ones that find these people extremely distasteful because when they put themselves in comparison to these incredible people they they come up short yeah well every idea exercises every idea is a judge yes and so what's what's the answer to that no ideals that's a stupid suggestion no it certainly doesn't because then it leaves people without any meaning in their life you know so well i think it speaks to what you were talking about earlier that we need adversity we need difficulty we need struggle you need you need a weight to carry and if you don't have any of this you do not get your character tested you do not advance in your own perception of who you are in this world and how you how you engage with all the other people around you you don't call out what's best in you yes and then and then you can't live without that you need that and so and the trick seems to be that voluntary acceptance of the adversity see that's one of the things that i think is core to the mythos of christianity because there's an idea that you should pick up your cross and stumble uphill and that's really what that means is that you you know you set your eyes on some high level vision the city of god on the hill whatever that happens to be you know and then you take the burden whatever burden you're capable of lifting which is obviously going to be a burden of suffering at least to some degree and you carry that voluntarily that's the trick is that and then you say well you need a purpose in your life it's like well look there's a lot of problems around you in the world you have some problems some problems even that bother you right personally they seem to call out to you those problems maybe those are your problems those are the problems you should solve and those i think are the call to adventure it's like there's a problem it bugs me okay do something about it that's your problem there's a certain amount that you could tolerate i mean i think it's like weight training there's a certain amount where it becomes detrimental where you've over trained your body's breaking down there's a certain amount of problems you have in your life that are extremely beneficial yeah because through going through these problems sorting them out you you build your spirit you you build your character and if you don't accomplish anything and you never encounter any problems you you are this gelatinous soft atrophied soul and you don't have the intestinal fortitude or the spirit or the the the human potential has not been developed to the point where you can overcome adversity the only way to overcome adversity is to face it so that that optimum that you were talking about so i've really been interested in the neurophysiology of the of the sense of meaning because neurophysiology yeah yeah because the meaning the feeling of meaning is an instinct right it's not a thought it's not a secondary consequence of rational processes it's way deeper than that it's something that drives rationality itself so now you just vary amongst people definitely yeah but it varies in this way as far as i can tell so so imagine as you said that there's an optimal load right you exceed that and to your detriment and you see that in the weight room you pull a muscle you hurt or you'll hurt yourself you can injure yourself very badly right you can take yourself out for the count um but then if you if you work too little well then there's no gain in it you have to find that thin edge where you're competent at what you're doing but you're pushing yourself that's going to be where meaning lies that's what meaning tells people it says you're on the edge where you're competent and and out of undue danger but pushing yourself enough so that you're continually developing that's the instinctive meaning and that looks to me like it's a consequence of the interaction between the right and the left hemispheres and a consequence of the interaction between the negative emotion systems anxiety and pain that regulate you that protect you from harm and the exploratory and play systems that drive you forward you want the exploratory and play systems to drive you forward but then they're regulated by these negative emotions so you don't hurt yourself and if you get that optimally right then that's the maximal that's the point of maximal challenge and that makes you really alert because your positive emotion is functioning that's what's driving you forward this is worth doing and your negative emotions are alert too saying yeah but be awake and be careful and you know what that's like in the weight room if you know you're lifting something that's at the edge of your ability you've got a spotter you want to push and you can barely do it and you want to make sure that you're not going to like pull your arm down and rip the hell out of your muscle but you you're right on that edge and that's the place of maximal gain and that sense of meaning that's what puts you on the border between chaos and order right because too much order means you're just practicing what you already know and then you then you you stultify and stagnate and too much chaos means you better look out because you're going to hurt yourself you're pushing yourself beyond your limits you stay right on that edge that's where there's maximal meaning and then you're entirely trying to get edges just push it to push it yeah now one of the things i recommend to young people especially true for people in their 20s is that you should push yourself beyond your limits of tolerance in your 20s to find out where it is how much can you work how disciplined can you become like can you work 12 hours a day can you work eight hours a day can you work three hours a day like flat out where's your limit and how much how much work can you do and how much socialization you should find out push yourself past and then back off to that point where it's optimally sustainable that's what a lot of people do isn't it i mean they party too much when they're in their 20s they make a lot of mistakes it's it's what they're doing and i would say in sort of a haphazard way right because there's that instinct to go out there and do more right and but it's it's unregulated and it's not it's not as self-conscious as it might be it's good to know that there's it's good to think about that as a goal it's like you're trying to discover what your limitations are when you're when you're in your 20s so that you can hit that edge so that you can sustain yourself across the decades and so yeah because you don't you don't want to have too much fun all right too much fun takes you out you don't want to be the oldest guy at the disco you know it's not it's not fun being the 40 year old at the singles bar precisely so you want to make sure that what you're doing is age appropriate and you want to push yourself in every direction that you can but you should be doing that with an aim in mind it's like you're trying to make yourself into a better and more competent person and so some discipline along with the fun is a good idea so to take care of yourself and the people around you that's a one of the things i recommended to people and i've had quite a few people actually tell me that they've done this interestingly enough i said well one thing you could aim at if you had any sense when you were young is to be the most worth you could be the most reliable person at your father's funeral and so i think that's a good challenge and i had a bunch of people come up to me in this last tour and tell me that that's exactly what they did these were often young guys you know like before 20.

said my dad died suddenly or you know he died after a year's illness and it was just taking me out and no wonder you know he said i said i was listening to your lectures you said you want to be the most reliable person at the funeral because everyone else is grieving and what the hell else are you going to do he said that's what they tried to do and that got him through it so well that's part of that picking up that load as far as i'm concerned you get a little self-respect out of that too in a real sense right because you know you're this sort of sad suffering creature that's capable of a fair bit of malevolence but if you find out that you can carry a heavy load and take care of yourself and have a little left over for some other people then you can wake up at three in the morning and think well man i could be worse and this is not a political perspective this is a positive constructive way of looking at how to navigate the world but when you break down these sort of behavior types whether it's the people that generally support socialism or socialist ideas or their anti-competition versus people that are pro-pushing yourself they fall into these right-wing left-wing sort of paradigms in this really weird way that i mean especially that i think that's especially true on the radical ends but i think you get that on the radical right too because you get people who are who are collectivist in their fundamental orientation you know and they're they're trying to take undue credit for who their racial ancestors were or okay what what i would say with the with the political issue is that i think that you can build decent responsible people who are on the middle right of the spectrum and the middle left you know because i think that you can have left-wing political beliefs that are genuinely aimed at aid to the dispossessed without being resentful of the hierarchies and without contaminating it with jealousy for the successful it's hard right you you have to because when i worked for the ndp when i was a kid when that was the socialist party in canada the leaders some of the leaders were people like that like a lot of the low-level party functionary types they were the activist types that you still see today and they're mostly resentful i didn't like them at all but some of the leaders were genuinely genuine advocates for the working class you know and they they had their flaws obviously but but their they put their money where their mouth was and they were trying to ensure that the hierarchies were open to advancement for for for let's say the common person so to speak the person who stacked up at the bottom or for their children which might even be more important you know so that the hierarchies remain open to genuine competition based on competence which would be a perfectly reasonable thing for the left to insist on right is that let's bloody well make sure that it's a fair game and so that people don't get locked out of movement forward because of arbitrary positions of power right and that's that's that's a reasonable part of the discussion so i think if you build better people you can build better people on the left and on the right and people that are going to appreciate that rules to the game are better for everyone they're better for the people that win they're better for the people that are coming up they're better forever yes if you have to have real structure and real rules and that you're better off being a guy like wayne gretzky yes better off being a guy who's respected who plays the game correctly and just does his best and really truly becomes a champion and love by all because of it you're better off in every way right right and that's the most state the other thing that's so cool about that so imagine this this is the antidote to moral relativism okay so the first thing is is that there are real problems and and hierarchical organizations can offer real solutions socially and personally so you can confront the problems courageously and you can solve them so that's real it ameliorates suffering and limits malevolence and so there's nothing morally relative about that the second is that sense of meaning that we discussed that's not some philosophical second order consequence of thinking it's way deeper than that that sense of meaning tells you when you're vygotsky this russian psychologist called that the zone of proximal development which i believe is where the phrase the zone came from and so in the zone of proximal development this is what adults do with children little kids that are learning to talk adults automatically talk to little children who are learning to talk at a level that slightly exceeds their current vocabulary they do that without even knowing it and that puts those kids in the zone right because if you just talk baby talk to kids then all they learn is baby talk and if you just talk like an adult then they don't understand a word you're saying so you'll find this happy medium in between where the kid mostly understands what you're talking about and that you're pulling them forward so that puts them in the zone and that's a meaningful zone and so you can feel the operation of that zone in your own life that's what the taoists are on about because they say well you dow is the way right and that's the pathway between chaos and order that's meaning and you can feel that in your life when you're deeply engaged in something like we have deeply engaging conversations okay which is part of the reason that we keep having them and i think why they're popular and we're not paying attention to how the clock is ticking or how time is flowing or even to the fact that we're doing what we're doing we're just having a conversation and it's meaningful it's engaged it keeps our eyes focused and our senses um concentrated on what's happening and the reason for that is that there's enough information flowing between us so that we're being slightly transformed as a consequence of the discussion right so we're both comfortable we trust each other we trust that the conversation is aimed at something that's of mutual benefit we trust each other to tell the truth to to to the degree that we're capable of doing that and then when you engage in this exchange of information and to the degree that it's breaking you down a little bit and building you up in a different way that's a little death and rebirth there's constant little deaths and rebirths in a meaningful conversation then that keeps you alive and functioning and that that focuses you like that that speaks to you so deeply that that focus happens without any consciousness and that's meaning and that's that line between chaos and order and that's real that has nothing it's it's a it's and i would say here's another thing that's cool so that line between chaos and order that's the same thing that's happening when you're playing a game properly right because you're in the game and you're you're exercising your skill but you're pushing it in a way that's also a benefit to your teammates and to the progression of the game as such and to being a better general player you're doing all that at the same time and you're evolved with enough natural intelligence so that the sum total output of your nervous system says to you you're in the right place at the right time doing the right thing and that's what makes your life meaningful and that's real and i think it's more real than anything else i think it's more real than suffering i think it's more real than malevolence because it's the antidote to both of those and so the whole moral moral relativism issue for me is a non-starter it's just wrong there's lots of ways of interpreting the world but there aren't very many ways of interpreting it optimally and you can feel when you're doing that it makes you stronger and then the people that come to me after my talks and say well you know i've been putting my life together i've developed a vision i've been trying to be more responsible i've been trying to be more honest and put my relationships together they're all sparkly-eyed because of this or crying sometimes because it's really had an impact at the moment on them at a deep level they think oh wow this actually works it's like yeah it actually works it's real it's real and i would say as well that that's associated with the idea of the deep western idea of the logos which is meaning in action and speech so you know if we have a conversation that's meaningful then that's a manifestation of the spirit of the logos and that's the thing that destroys an and and recreates at the same time because you learn something it destroys something destroys a little presupposition that you had that was erroneous and replaces it with something that's healthier and every time you have a meaningful conversation that happens it's like a little tweak now it wasn't quite right here click that moves and something new takes its place so and that's a little death and rebirth instead of the catastrophic death and rebirth that you might have to have if you weren't paying attention so that's all tied together with that phenomena of meaning and that's the same as the adoption of responsibility that all ties together so not so nicely yeah the concept of meaning like what is important that it's so it's so huge to people but so fleeting it's so difficult to like what is meaning well you know there's the simple ones right like family and loved ones and companionship and community and finding something that you enjoy doing that you know you can do that seems bigger than you or bigger than yourself but but meaning like the meaning of life what is meaning and this it's one of the things that gives people so much existential angst and i i think is the cause of a lot of despair because there's well you can question it yes but the the thing is is that that's one of the dangers of rationality is that see the egyptians associated the catholics did this to some degree too they associated ration rationality with a proclivity to malevolence partly because rationality tends to fall in love with its own productions intelligence has this like inbuilt arrogance and the egyptians in particular were really in insightful they tried to replace the idea of intelligence as the highest virtue with the idea of attention as the highest virtue this is something eldest huxley knew he wrote a book called island island was an island that was populated by had a lot of birds on it and the birds could talk and all they did was say pay attention to remind everybody on the island to pay attention all the time but you you can undermine your sense of meaning and you can question it but the best thing to do is to actually pay attention to when it manifests itself because it's a it's a phenomenon like like color or like or like love or like beauty it it exists it isn't something you create it's something that you discover and you can discover it you just have to watch like you're ignorant about yourself you think okay well i'm gonna i i've told my clinical clients to do this and my students is watch yourself for two weeks just watch like you don't know who you are and notice when you're doing something that you're engaged in it's like you'll see it maybe it's only 10 minutes because your life is pretty out of balance but you'll see that oh man i was engaged in something there for 10 minutes it's like why what was what did you do that was right that engaged you you were in the right place at the right time doing the right thing for a few minutes what was it what were the preconditions there's this line in the new testament christ says the kingdom of god is spread across the earth but men do not see it and that's what it refers to is that you you you wander into paradise now and then when you're engaged and you're deeply engaged in something but you don't notice it you don't think oh look i'm in the right place and everything's working out right now it means i've got it right somehow and then i need to practice being there more and more and more which is well that's the appropriate thing to try to practice and that's to make that's to come to some negotiated what would you call it it's do it it's to come to a negotiation with that intrinsic sense of meaning and to realize it as a fact rather than just as an opinion or or something that's secondary because it's annoying concept for people though to be so aware of who they are and what they're doing they could recreate that so when they do feel that feeling of meaning that they could figure out a way to get back into that state and what were all the extenuating circumstances and where was my head at what caused me to have this this feeling like things were right yes well it's like someone gives you a gift and you think well i'd like that gift again it's like yeah well you have to figure out what it was that you did to deserve it so to speak and yeah i know it requires a fair bit of careful reflection but it also requires that ignorance is you have to think well i don't know who i am i'm going to find some things meaningful what are they they might not even be things you want to find meaningful they might be things that you might even be ashamed of you know because sometimes people are interested in things that they don't think that they should be interested in like maybe you'll you'll have a guy who is who was is kind of a cliche but who was um you know socialized to be a real tough guy and he finds out that he's kind of interested in art or aesthetics it's like well he's ashamed of that because maybe it's too feminine or whatever well it's doesn't matter because that's actually speaking that that's actually something that's speaking to him from the core of his genuine being he's going to have to pursue that or you might find you know that someone who's really agreeable and kind of a pushover stands up to someone just once at work says what they really think and then they realize afterwards wow you know that was exactly right then they think oh my god you know i've decided when i was a little kid maybe they had a harsh father and they decided when they were four i'm never going to be angry in my whole life there's something wrong with aggression so they've gone out of their way their whole life to be free of conflict then they find out the one day they stand up for themselves that that whole domain that they'd parsed off as inappropriate is actually contains exactly what they need to put themselves together but you find what you need where you least want to look that's the old alchemical dictum instir qualis inventure right i want to talk to you about activists because it's something that you brought up earlier saying that you you you know you find them unappealing like i want to know what you think the motivation of a lot of these like particularly radical left-wing activists that want to shut down lectures and scream people down and you know in these uh auditoriums what do you think the motivation of these people is and what do you think is the root of it well i think that it's a quick route to moral virtue you know like it's actually really hard to put yourself together and you have to do that in ways that you can't trump it you know because most of the things that are wrong with you are kind of low what would you call it second rate and embarrassing you're all your stupid little habits and your proclivity to procrastinate and all the things that you're minorly ashamed of and then you have to work on those slowly because you the probability that you're going to be able to fix them quickly is low and you can't really brag about it because it's so embarrassing just to admit that they exist to begin with that you can hardly brag about it and it's sort of painstaking private work and you you don't get a lot of social you don't get a lot of quick social status for it it's effortful embarrassing humbling and difficult and then you can do something like be an activist and you get all that public acclaim for being on the good side with no effort whatsoever and so it's a plus do you think that there's any motivation at all to try to make the world a better place yes i think that's that's part of it sure well i think it's flavored by this desire to broadcast your virtue yes because it's very difficult to make the world a better place you know that's the thing is no i mean young people have a messianic impulse that's another thing that was documented by piaget that there's a stage you know in late adolescence where you want to make the world a better place and i would say that's probably part of the impulse to you know establish a permanent relationship and have a family and and and take care of people you know and and to take on some of the burden of life it's it's the psychological precursor to that and it's reasonable for smart young people to be concerned about broader philosophical issues if they tilt in that direction as well but it's all too easy for that to be pathologized into resentment for for those who seem to have more unfairly and also to take the easy route out and there aren't easy routes there are only difficult routes to doing useful things and it's better just to do that and then so i think that there's some impulse to you know there's some wish that things could be less unfair and that fewer people could suffer but it's kind of a low level virtue that that reflects of compassion you know i i'm not saying it's it's without merit because it's the that compassion is the basis for the ability to take care of of people who are ill and and and infants and so feel this low level like where's that it's not thought through things are complicated it's hard to make complicated systems work better and it's really easy to make them work worse what about activists that want to shut down certain speakers like someone who's uh in my opinion uh fairly innocuous uh in in terms of the the net like here's one christina hoff summers i just i don't see a good argument for shutting her down she's so polite she's a feminist she's well-read yeah she's a really nice person yeah janice femenko is like that too in the canada yeah some sort of person doesn't make sense that people would shout her down yet they do oh yeah they shout her down they say horrible things about her they mischaracterize her in a a really brutal way that it completely invalidates their argument or their opposition to her to anyone that's paying attention to what she said oh well a lot of it is also just immature acting out yes you know and there's an arrogance it's tolerated very strange way yeah yeah it is it is it is well yeah it's it's it's part of our doubt i suppose about authority and about its and our our willingness to assume that all authority is contaminated by power it's like it's nation heckling too it's almost like like you're if you're doing a play you know or a musical or you're singing a song someone just decided to start screaming out well that person's an [ __ ] but if you're espousing an opinion yeah and that person decides to scream out and they they do so under the guise of moral virtue yeah yeah undeserved access to power yes you know and it's no wonder that the radical leftists in particular concentrate on power everything's about power well then it's okay if they use power as part of their means of expression it's like well you're just playing power games it's perfectly reasonable even appropriate for me to play power games because you know i'm oppressed compared to you if everything's power then everybody gets to yell right and there's no one of the things i realized about about recently as well is that there isn't a debate about free speech exactly not the way that we think about it you know you know because the there's the classical defense of free speech so the classical defense of free speech is that it's better for both of us if we're able to exchange our opinions because i have the opportunity to learn from you and you have the opportunity to learn from me and you have the opportunity to learn from your own mistakes and social feedback and so do i and negotiation beats war okay so that's kind of the classical now but that's predicated on some assumptions and those are you're an autonomous being you're capable of formulating an opinion that that's actually unique to you and that in dialogue we can mutually modify each other's unique opinions in a way that produces a mutually harmonious and beneficial outcome that's all the predicate well the the people who are opposed to free speech you see it's not that they're trying to shut down people whose opinions are different than theirs exactly it's that they're opposed to the idea that free speech exists it's a way deeper problem because at the bottom of the postmodernist mess is the following assumption is that well there's no there's no one way of interacting with the world that's preferable to any other way and so what people do is organize themselves into hierarchies of power and then struggle for dominance within the hierarchies and then the hierarchy struggle between each other so it's a landscape of warring hierarchies that's all it is and you think that you're a person and that you have an opinion but you're not you're just the mouthpiece of your privileged hierarchy and so am i and so and it's incommensurate if we're from different hierarchies there isn't a you talking to a me that could come to an agreement there's just you acting as a mouthpiece for your power and me acting as a mouthpiece for my power and so since i'm part of my group and i want to win because it's all about power then why the hell would i ever want you to talk it's not like i have anything to learn from you or even that learning is possible or even that there are two people having a discussion there's nothing but the mouthpiece of power there's two mouthpieces of power warring and so that why should i listen to you i'll just shut you down because then i win and so this this free speech debate isn't about who whose opinion should be allowed within you know an overarching framework where free speech is is a real thing it's a debate about whether there's such a thing as free speech at all the the radical post-modernist types they deny even that there's such a thing as an autonomous individual in any way you're just you're just the nexus of economic forces economic and social forces you're entirely socially constructed there's no you these are deep criticisms like i've made this case before that the post-modern types although they have to ally themselves with the marxist for for reasons that we don't have to go into they are going after things that are so fundamental you can't believe it they don't there is no autonomous individual in the post-modern world that's a that's a modernist or an enlightenment viewpoint that's or a christian viewpoint or a judeo-christian viewpoint or maybe an abrahamic religion viewpoint who the hell knows it might be that that that deep you're the nexus of sociological forces there's no integrated self you don't have ideas or opinions and there's no dialogue between us that doesn't exist there's your group your identity your struggle for power and that's all this is your interpretation no no this is this is the fundamental essence of post-modernism especially it's especially true in the format espoused by daradan foucault foucault everything's about power and daredevil was definitely that's why he criticized the idea of logocentrism logos is that ability of the individual to engage in dialogue the root for dialogue is logos or logic that's all criticized that's all gone the identity politics players the serious the people who are serious about this philosophically they don't believe in the idea of the autonomous individual that's gone so it's not like they're playing a game within you know you think well this is a game we're all playing a game where we agree on some things and and we're just disagreeing about the details it's like oh no no no no you don't want to make that mistake this this critique is way way deeper than that which is why darada was opposed to the idea of logocentrism he didn't believe in the idea of an autonomous individual that didn't exist that's just a fiction set up by those who have used the idea of the autonomous individual to advance their power maneuvering within the uh confines of the colonialist the colonialist west now and what's the rationalization for that perspective is this to enhance their argument to try to to push forth their ideas in a less less debatable way like why i think the motivation is hatred for competence i truly believe that i've been trying to go down like go down as deep as i could to find out i think it's cane and able wow i really believe that i think that because i can't understand the motivation otherwise it's like well why are you tearing these things down well it's on the basis you know we have sympathy for the oppressed it's like well well why like where in your conceptualization does that idea of sympathy for the oppressed come from you don't even have the idea of the individual in your conceptualization it's like that's just a i i don't i don't i don't buy any of that i i think it's cain and abel all the way down do you think that when you're talking about the scandinavian model where they've made it incredibly equal and through this massive effort to take away any opportunity or to to to rather open up every possible opportunity for women that men also have and you've seen these these differences in genders actually accentuate because of this do you think that maybe what we're seeing also even in terms of the post-modernists and the radical leftists versus people on the right this same sort of competition aspect of it is also problematic because it's one of the reasons why there's so much debate in the first place and that if we if we had maybe more middle ground and more opportunity there would be less of an argument there would be less of a reason to have these these these extreme polar opposites that may be embracing of more like there's certain socialist uh aspects of our society that we just accept right like the fire department right yeah like police universal provision of infrastructure yes yeah that's a good one schools should be i think more emphasized in that direction but it it gears towards privatized schools for people with higher incomes which gets away more from socialism and sort of reinforces capitalism more right but i think things like maybe perhaps even universal basic income or certainly universal healthcare with you which you guys have in canada which we don't have here and definitely a higher education making higher education far more accessible and far less costly stop subsidizing these student loans stop making student loans something that you can never escape well i think this is part of the eternal debate right because we've already talked about the utility of hierarchies and the necessity of putting those who can in charge but the consequence of that which is an unequal distribution of both talent and resources well you don't want that to get so steep that people stack up at the bottom because your whole society starts to destabilize and so you have to have a continual discussion between the left and the right to see how you stop the bottom from suffering yeah from from hitting zero yeah because zero's not good you can't play when you hit zero and that's not good and so i don't think there is a universal solution to that problem because the problem keeps manifesting it's think about it as an eternal problem here's the problem there's a set of problems that'll never go away now what the problems are change but the fact that there are problems never go away okay the fact that you have to produce hierarchies to solve those problems never goes away the fact that the hierarchies dispossess never goes away but the details shift all the time and so the whole reason that you need the political discussion is to take a look at the particulars of the hierarchies and the particulars of the dispossession and say okay well now we need to shim it up here and now we need to adjust this because you can't come up with a final solution to those problems i think that's partly why you have consciousness itself you know because if you could automate the solution imagine there was a permanent solution well there's a permanent solution to breathing you have a part of your brain that just breathes you don't think about it you don't adjust it while you do a bit when you're talking but you get my point it's like problem taken care of well there's other problems that are so fluid like they're eternal problems but they're so fluid in their detail that you need awareness and linguistic capacity to address them and i would say the problem of hierarchy and dispossession fit exactly into that category is that we're going to organize ourselves hierarchically because talent is unequally distributed it doesn't matter like as soon as you invent basketball and instantly you know there's one percent of the population who are super great at basketball it doesn't matter as soon as you set up an arbitrary value structure you get a hierarchy then there's the whole schlubs at the bottom that can't put a ball in the hoop to save their lives and and that's an eternal problem that's why it says in the new testament that the poor will be with us always a very pessimistic if there's two lines like that one is to those who have everything more will be given and from those who have nothing everything will be taken that's a rough line and the second is the poor will be with us always okay so why well it's a reflection of what we just described is that you're going to get hierarchical structures and they're going to dispossess okay so then what we want to do is we want to use mercy say justice gives you what you deserve so that's on the competitive end you get what you deserve but there's this old idea an old religious idea this is a good idea god rules with two hands right hand is justice and the left hand is mercy justice means you get what you deserve but the world can't survive that way because people are flawed and make mistakes and if you only got exactly what you deserved it would be a hell of a world right because you'd be punished for every single mistake you make you know you'd be held accountable in a way that would be unbearable so that has to be tempered with mercy and and so maybe the left is the is the end of the distribution that tempers with mercy when it's functioning properly but it can degenerate into that cane-like resentment of the of the successful and that's a danger on the right you have the opposite danger which is well you know you advance because of your competence but then that can ossify and so you want to hang on to that that position even though you know your competence no longer justifies it you start to use the advantages of your position to accrue benefits for yourself that you did not earn and that's the proclivity of the of the hierarchy to become blind and tyrannical and that's a that's an eternal problem the the egyptians had a god for that osiris osiris was the god of hierarchies and he was always threatened by seth who was his evil brother and his evil brother was always conspiring to overcome him and that's the problem with hierarchies is that they tilt towards tyranny and the the reasonable left says that watch the hierarchies because they tilt towards tyranny it's like yes it's true but that doesn't mean that the idea of hierarchy itself is flawed and that doesn't mean that all hierarchies are tyrannical that's going way too far do you think that the scandinavian model that has revealed that when you do make things more equal you will find that people generally tend to gravitate more towards traditional gender roles that the the does this do you think that this makes people happier has it been observed that this is a a happier result that's a good question the the um indices of life satisfaction are pretty high in scandinavia but i don't know if anybody has done an analysis that would indicate whether the the sexual sorting is a contributor to that that's a good question i mean the the general idea has been that the scandinavians are happier because their societies are more egalitarian but but they're not more egalitarian in the sense that men and women are also more different so men and women are more different but the opportunities are more egalitarian yeah yeah yeah so but so then but and then the societies are more are more satisfied but it's tough because there's other variables because the scandinavian countries are relatively homogenous right and more homogeneous societies tend to be um more peaceful and happier not not more diverse societies and they're also small countries so they're somewhat easier to govern right and they tend to be wealthy so those so it'd be hard to parse out all those contributors right to figure out what it is that's making the scandinavians relatively um content this is almost like a super tribe versus a country yeah yeah right well and those those sorts of societies in some sense are easier to manage so there any benefit to this this model that we could perhaps bring to the united states or to canada and maybe mitigate some of the issues that we have between the right and the left like maybe there's some sort of a compromise that'll lead to uh a less less debate and dispute well i think that you guys in the states are doing real well actually personally i mean you know your your system of checks and balances seems to work out pretty well there's a fair bit of let's say left domination right now of of the mainstream media i think that's a reasonable claim and also of academia and of the intelligentsia but the political system is skewed pretty hard to the republican end of things at the moment and so that's not a bad balance and then in the last election i mean it maybe you could make a case perhaps that things had tilted a little too far to the republican side but that got balanced out because the hou the democrats took the house again and it seems like they were more moderate democrats that seems to be the scuttlebutt so you know it isn't obvious to me that your system isn't functioning well i think that one of the things that's happening that's making things look more contentious than they are is that the mainstream media is under such assault by the up and coming media forms including people like you that as their financial models deteriorate and as their journalistic standards take a hit and as they lose their fact checkers and their time to be careful with the stories they concentrate more on exaggerating the extremes to attract attention and so you know there was an article published in the atlantic monthly about a month ago showing that didn't it depends on how you calculate these things but that the radical leftists and the radical right-wingers are only about five percent of the population on each side and that mo the vast majority of americans consider themselves something approximating the relatively silent majority and so i don't think that things are polarized as as badly as they seem and it is also the case right now that if you poll people and ask them about the conditions of their life in the united states they tend to say that they're doing quite well but that other people aren't and so i think maybe i don't know this for sure but but i think maybe that the technological pressure that's being put on the mainstream media is driving extreme political views as a means of gathering the attention of a shrinking market share that's that's a very interesting take on and i wonder how detrimental that is to us as a whole because we are constantly dealing with this click bait nonsense headline you know and every every everything is a dispute everything's a war yeah everything well it's nerve-wracking yes yes you know i mean i noticed this years ago because i i really stopped watching the news oh 25 years ago although i've been heavily involved in the last two years because i noticed that most of what passed for news wasn't because my sense was well if it isn't important in a month if it isn't important a month from now it was never important and almost everything that's news is like important right now yeah and so i tried to stay away from that it was better for my peace of mind and i often recommended to my clinical clients who were depressed and anxious that they shield themselves from the news as much as possible but now there's the news is everywhere right it's everywhere it's twitter it's facebook it's youtube it's like we're just inundated by it it's like cnn on steroids it's 24-hour news cycle and it's produced by everyone whether they're um informed or not and it's really high emotion and i think that that is making things look a lot worse to us than they actually are i think it's also similar to what we were talking about earlier when it comes to reading comments on instagram or twitter i just think there's just an amount of data yeah that's incomprehensible i don't think you can handle it i don't think you can navigate it you can't navigate that many relationships i mean these are the reason why we have this dunbar's number in our head we if you're dealing with hundreds of thousands of people in your case a million followers that are constantly interacting with you it's going to [ __ ] drive you mad yeah well you don't even know what to do with it you know like because i well i don't even know what my ethical obligation is to my twitter followers you know because like there's a million people following you so react to all of them no definitely well certainly i know one limitation which is that having it drive me insane is probably not a good outcome for anyone except for those who hoped that i would fall let's say this is a personal thing right because they're responding and they're it's the mentions are to you personally but in a lesser way perhaps but is still also overwhelming is just the sheer amount of information that's available constantly about everything there's there's a million stories every day about every single thing that's going on in your life well everywhere everywhere on the whole planet yeah and where how are you supposed to navigate that how are you supposed to get through life and concentrate on things that are truly meaningful for you in the present moment without being completely detached from the outside world it's this balance that people try to find that is so elusive it's so hard to figure out how much to watch how much of this political process do i pay attention to well that's the big technological challenge yes you know i mean we thought when i was a kid we thought oh my god you know kids are sitting in front of the television four hours a night it's like well you ain't seen nothing yet yeah right you know it's not all day long no kidding phones yeah all day long yeah and the phones are so much more powerful than television that they're well it's like a typewriter compared to a computer yes you know and yeah it's well and it's it's it's so so we don't know how to adjust to that psychologically but it's even worse than that because as soon as you adjust to the degree that you do the technology changes on you right so comes more mercy sure it's always leading in that direction yeah yeah so it's a real i mean you know i see this especially with parents who have teenage kids it's like they know the phones aren't you know i've been talking to some teenagers lately about about you know maybe these are kids that are are getting bullied on social media it's like i think well when i was 14 you know it's kind of a rough time of life and you go to school and you've got your friends and you've got your enemies and then you come home and your friends aren't there and neither are your enemies right right you're you're outside there's an outside of that yeah but now on social media there's no outside you know the one kid i was talking to had moved schools and it's doing quite well in the new one but the people from the person's old school are still after them on social media so you know and you think well just don't use your phone it's like yeah yeah you tell that to your teenager you try not using your phone for a whole day yeah you think well the teenager is going to be able to manage the phone it's like no they're not you can't manage the phone nobody can manage the phone it's not just teenagers my middle daughter is 10 years old and all of her friends have phones yep all of them there's like two of her friends that don't have phones yeah and they come over the house and we have a rule at our house you can't use a phone like once you get inside the house there's no phone so your friends come over the house they want to like constantly be on their phone and and we said like you can't do that yeah and they look you're like what are you talking about yeah this is my life yeah yeah my life is my phone they want to make twitter posts and instagram and they want to do facebook and yeah they want to snapchat with each other with bunny ears on and these kids are just doing this all day long well and they are mastering the technology that's the other thing it's not surprising that they're trying to adapt to it but but it's happening at a really early age because if you're giving your kid a phone you're not putting any parental filters on it you're allowing that kid to have full access to google and the world wide web and they're just gonna if you give your kid a phone and you don't think they'll know how to use the phone better than you within a year you're a fool that's true you know they're gonna they're gonna have that thing figured out in ways that you haven't even imagined so yeah yeah you're not controlling it that's for sure it's uh it is a very extraordinarily unprecedented time to sort of navigate this world and i don't think any does not have been i mean civilizations have a deal with worse things right in terms of violence and famine and disease but i don't think anyone's had to deal with such a like a a radically transformative medium like this well we have this range of possibilities well and you ain't seen nothing yet right i mean this is just getting going well have you been watching the boston dynamics videos yeah oh my god there's about those guys in here oh yeah i bet i mean that the the amount of progress they've made in five years is just absolutely staggering i bet they smell like sulphur and they don't even know yeah i bet you bring them in here like the [ __ ] is going on these guys are doomed well elon musk was on the podcast talking about some new development they're working on called neural link and that this is some radical new way of accentuating bandwidth between human beings and information and just increasing the access to it and he was very vague about it yeah he said it was going to come out within you know x amount of months yeah well they've already you know there are scientists who've already managed direct brain to computer links right so you can get monkeys for example to move a robotic arm and so and i suspect that you know you're you can you can learn to control single neurons in your face my suspicions are that we'll develop technologies that'll be wearable that won't have to be neural implants that you'll be able to communicate with neurally and that's not very far down the road and the uh you know the the probability that we're going to build you know you know about uh what's his name kurzweil's idea the singularity you know well it's a wild idea and it seems somewhat improbable and i had a friend who once told me that if something's impossible then it won't happen you know there'll be something that will come up to stop it that you won't expect and maybe the singularity is one of those things but you know i know a lot of guys who are in the high-end computational world and a lot of them are convinced that we're within a decade of a machine that's as powerful as a human brain and i know people have been saying that for a long time but jesus you know computers are getting good at emotion recognition they're getting really good at facial recognition they can communicate with one another they can imitate those boston dynamic robots are pretty damn impressive and they're mostly autonomous we've got all sorts of things that can navigate on their own like these autonomous cars like all these things are they're coming together real fast have you ever watched black mirror on netflix the only one i watched was the one that outlined what the chinese are now doing to their own people oh yeah the crisper one yeah yeah no no the one where everything you do is rated and trying to write the social network one right right right yes which which is quite frightening and reasonably probable oh 100 probable um i was talking about the one i think it's called heavy metal it's about uh autonomous robots that seek out people and kill them and you know these uh artificial intelligence people that are making these boston dynamic robots and you know the scariest one that i read about was a darpa one called the eater robot e-a-t-r it operates on it uses as a fuel it uses biological material as fuel which means if you're kidding you're kidding no i'm not kidding e-a-c-r so this is going to be able to eat dead bodies in the field theoretically and use it as fuel good oh good that sounds like a fine thing to develop [ __ ] imagine uh an army of robotic armed artificially intelligent things corpse eaters eat corpses in order to have fuel to continue to kill well someone's obviously imagining that it's made i mean this is a real thing yeah well i mean part of the reason that i'm doing what i'm doing with regards to these lectures is you know i think that we're in a time of unparalleled possibility right so for good and for and for evil and that the more people that there are out there who have their acts together the better the probability that we're going to be able to manage it because we've all got some pretty hard decisions to make coming up real fast you know and these guys that are working on these ai systems i'm hoping that the ones that are more ethically oriented in a proper direction i'll be the ones that have the upper hand i'm really hoping that so yeah collectively and what's the matter i was looking into it because this that came up before that it it breaks the geneva conventions if they actually eat dead bodies you can't do that yeah whatever it's like once we have a robot war dude that's even conventions out the window yeah no i couldn't agree with you more and i think personally this is important and collectively it's very important that i mean i just think it's i think what you wrote 12 rules to life we need rules to be able to figure out how to navigate this thing that's complicated well that's why i think that the individual level of analysis is the right one is that i'm hoping that you know that like every time someone comes up and talks to me and says look you know i was in a dark place and i got my life together and this is how it's going i think that tilts the scales non-trivially towards a good outcome yes and the more people that that's happening to the better and i don't think there's a more effective way of doing it than to concentrate on the individual no i don't think there is either and it's happening a lot you know i i hear it every day with people that find you and find a lot of other inspirational people online and just jocko and there's just so many of them there's so many and there's so much fuel now for inspiration yeah so it's pretty it's pretty fun that that inspiration could become popular yeah it's crazy you saw this coming no kidding no kidding and encouragement and one of the things that's quite sad is how little encouragement people need and it's so touching you know because i'm constantly in a state of like being overwhelmed well even with what happened this morning when i went to whole foods you know because it's overwhelming to have people come up and like they share these really intimate pieces of their life with you in like 20 seconds you know it's like like you're an old friend you know and it's like here's what my life was like it's dark you know it's dark and like here's a bunch of good things that are happening it's like this little blast of it's like the the persona of the person disappears and you get to see the real person there for like 20 seconds it's like it's it's really it's overwhelming but every time that happens as far as i'm concerned it's a victory and it's a victory that multiplies too as far as i'm concerned so i'm hoping that well every little bit helps you know that's it certainly does and by the way if you meet me and you have one of those stories and i don't know how to react that's just how it is you know i go wow that's amazing yeah well that's that's good enough man i'm super happy for you that's it i'm genuinely happy for you but i still don't know how to react that's how to react i don't i never will learn that's how to react that's all you need is like that's great man i hope you keep doing it that's all my power too yeah and it always feels flat you know i mean like what they said it's so mind-blowing and i'm saying terrific yeah but it is terrific yes it is it is absolutely we just did another three hours it's gone thank you sir always please good to see you george peterson you're a good man it's a pleasure to be thank you everybody bye thanks very much