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July 31, 2025 - Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
57:52
5 Great Moments From Behind the Paywall | EP 567
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So, Megan, how long have you been married?
17 years.
17 years.
And you said you had your children in your later 30s?
38, 40, and 42.
Right.
And that, and that, how did that work for you?
I mean, you have three children, so obviously it worked pretty well, but that is, you're pushing the envelope at that point.
My sister had her child, children at later at about that age.
No, you're definitely pushing the envelope.
You get the big AMA on your chart, and then you make the mistake of asking what that means, and it means advanced maternal age.
Right.
You know, you're still in your 30s.
You're not thinking of yourself as advanced age anything, but yeah, I was.
And, you know, as I said to you earlier, I met my husband when I was 35.
We got engaged.
I turned 36 a couple months later.
We got engaged a year after that.
So I was 37.
And we got married when I was 37.
So, you know, it was a fast turnaround once I met my husband.
I had a shorter first marriage that ended in divorce.
We ended our relationship amicably and thankfully with no children, because that's a whole sticky wicket, right?
When you end a marriage and there are children involved.
So anyway, then Doug and I met, we got married pretty quickly and we tried to have a baby very quickly because we saw that clock ticking and we both really wanted to have children with each other.
To be honest, I wasn't feeling that urge prior to Doug.
In my first marriage, I kind of knew I didn't want to.
I just, I think I might have had a sense like this wasn't going to work out with all due respect to my first husband, who is a great guy and now is happily married to another woman with kids of his own.
In any event, so my husband and I met.
We got married pretty quickly.
And pretty early on in that first year of trying, I went to the OBGYN to see whether I was okay.
You know, just before we went down this exasperating path that everybody goes down in their mid-30s or women who wait.
And the eggs, as it turned out, were very youthful and fine.
My eggs were great.
So I wasn't suffering from what you can suffer from at that age, for sure, 37, of like old eggs that are really not that fertile.
That's a very real risk you're taking.
To me, it wasn't even like on my mind because I wasn't really focused on children.
But I was glad to hear that the eggs were in great shape.
But I, not to get too detailed, but I have what's called a T-shaped uterus.
It's basically just a smaller uterus.
And so the doctor said, that'll make it a little tougher for you.
Really at any age, it would have.
And so I did use IVF for all three of my pregnancies and it worked like a charm.
And I had three beautiful babies and it worked out perfectly.
So look, I'm lucky and I realize that.
If children are important to you, and hopefully they are.
I mean, honestly, like I too am alarmed about the birth rate.
We're not going to have a society if we don't start repopulating.
But anyway, if they're important to you, you definitely should know you're taking a risk if you wait.
And I think people need to be actively searching for partners and we need to do better about helping connect them.
It's like one of my missions in life to, in my personal role as a human on this earth, be active about introducing men and women to each other who are single.
Like I make it my mission.
My husband hates it, but I just think it's part of our societal responsibility is to connect, especially good people with other good people.
And in my mind, like good Christians with other good Christians and hopefully, you know, let them populate.
That's what happens next is up to them.
But we can't leave it all to Tinder.
You know, at some point, actual loving, caring human beings need to help forge relationships the way we used to.
So in any event, we had the kids and I left Fox so that I could spend more time with my children who I was not seeing enough of.
And that was a career problem of mine and a personal regret.
But I rectified it and things have been great ever since then.
So what, as you pointed out on the YouTube side, you've had a unique and rare career, an archetypally desirable career, you might say.
And as you also pointed out, that is a situation that typifies a very small percentage of people.
And yet you speak of your children with immense fondness, let's say.
And so tell me how you would explain to a younger woman how your priorities changed in the aftermath of having a baby and what that experience was like,
because it's the experiential aspect of it that I'm curious about, you know, because my sense is that we have a category that's something like generic baby, but your own baby is not generic, right?
That's an individual right from the onset.
And so, and that's not well explained, especially to young women.
So I'd like to hear your experience in that regard.
I mean, it's cliche, but it is a before and after moment in your life.
It is the before and after moment in your life.
And it's not just when you give birth.
It's when you find out you're pregnant and you have a human life growing inside of you.
That's when you become a mother.
I don't care if you're pro-life or not.
There's no disputing.
That's at least a potential life in you.
Even the pro-choicers have to admit that.
And that's when you become a mother.
That's when you start nurturing another human with your body and your energy and your chemistry and your aura, all of it.
You know, your love, your faith, all of it starts nurturing that little being from that moment forward.
And for me, it was like, okay, so I had the babies, I gave birth to the babies.
And then you have this extraordinary moment where ideally you breastfeed your child.
And that's too completely a mother earth moment where you are like back in connection with one of your core reasons for being like that nurturing, that ability to nurture, grow, and take care of another human being to the point of independence.
Like this is one of the first steps.
And here he is or here she is completely dependent on you, completely in need of you, and only you can solve it.
It's a beautiful feeling where you feel incredibly needed, important, and bonded to this incredibly beautiful creature who knows nothing other than love for you.
That's it.
They love the dads, they put them on the dad's chest, and the dad loves holding the babies, but let's be honest, that baby only has eyes for his or her mother.
And there's just no fulfillment like that.
There's no problem.
That's the issue.
I think that's the crucial issue because, and this is a pathological reflection in part of the immaturity of our society, but also its consumerist element.
People look for meaning, significance, purpose in the pursuit of self-centered gratification, happiness, so to speak.
But that's not where you find it.
Now, it has to be that way, because first of all, we have this immense dependency period.
And second, we're unbelievably social, right?
Like you can punish psychopaths by putting them in solitary confinement.
That's how social human beings are.
You can take the most antisocial people and you can torture them by not letting them around other people.
Okay, so we're social to the core.
So what does that mean?
Well, it has to mean that we find our being in relationship to others.
And the relationship that you're describing is one of opportunity and necessity.
And that's the same thing.
And it's not just limited to the infancy years.
I mean, like, that's just the first experience upon arrival.
But I will say now my children are 15, 14, and 11.
And it only gets better and more profound.
I mean, for some women, the toddler years are the peak and they get, they're very sad when the kids age out of the toddler years.
For me, I was excited.
I couldn't wait until I could have conversations with them, you know, back and forth that were more meaningful.
And we're in that stage now.
And, you know, you just, whatever.
I went to see my daughter at a talent show and these girls were out there having the time of their lives.
Many of them were just being silly, happily and intentionally making fools of themselves, like in big costumes that bump into the other girls and then they fall down into fun music.
And I cried like a small schoolgirl myself because it was this feeling of camaraderie and they were rooting for one another.
And you see your child get up there, whatever she's doing, and just give it her all, just stand in front of a microphone and try and ask the world to give her a shot, right?
To give her a chance to see what she can do.
It's just so bold and optimistic.
And so when you have children, you're around that bold optimism all the time.
Not like, whatever, your kids have vulnerable moments too.
It's not all, you know, uniformly positive and wonderful, but the vast majority is.
And so you're just immersed in such a happier, more promising world.
My whole outlook on life got more positive as a result of my children.
It brings into your life such positivity and promise and possibility and socialization for sure, because you're going to be not just with your kids, but with your kids, friends, parents, and interacting at school in the same way a dog gets you out into the world times X by a child and then more and more children and you'll have even more and more of it.
So even though people know me as a career woman and I am and I love my career as we talked about on the on the other part of the interview, I love my career.
It completely energizes me and excites me.
And some days coming out in front of this microphone is like a therapy for me.
Just the chance to say what's real and correct the record for people out there who are being misled.
There's zero competition.
If you said, MK, you can go back and live these same 54 years over again, but one thing's not going to happen, either your children or your career.
There's no decision to be made.
As much as I adore this career, it doesn't hold a candle to my motherhood, my relationship to my children, my family, the core five, as we call ourselves, and the experiences we've had together through these last 15 years since I are 16 technically, since I became a mother for the first time as I got pregnant with my eldest.
So I want, my thing is, Jordan, I want people to know that I want young women to know that.
They need to know that.
But I also, but I also want young women who feel that budding love for their career, whatever it is, whether it's journalism or it's as a doctor or whatever, whatever it is that's like really grabbing them, that that's okay too.
You know, I worry about the conservative movement not making room for those women who've got that thing that I had, which is like, I've got to do this.
This is amazing.
I love it.
You know, and I am a better person.
And actually, I'm a better mother too, for the fact that I did become a journalist and I did all the things that I've done over the past whatever years before I had them.
So my main point in speaking like to young conservative women today is, yes, valuing motherhood and understanding it alone is a valid choice and a really fulfilling one.
But if you are somebody like I was who does feel a fire lit under them to pursue a career, that's okay.
These are questions that take cultures thousands of years to answer.
During answer the call, I take questions from people just like you about their problems, opportunities, challenges, or when they simply need advice.
How do I balance all of this grief, responsibility?
How do you repair this kind of damage?
My daughter, Michaela, guides the conversations as we hopefully help people navigate their lives.
Everyone has their own destiny.
Everyone.
Let's talk about two things, or three things, maybe.
I want to know what you see happening on the government policy side.
You were at the Bitcoin conference in Las Vegas.
There were political figures there.
Pierre Polyev in Canada has indicated some interest in Bitcoin.
Nigel Farage in the UK, Trump in the United States.
I'm wondering what you think is going to happen at the state level in relationship to Bitcoin.
They haven't made it illegal, for example.
So that's a good thing.
And I know that countries that have tried to go to war, so to speak, with Bitcoin have seen damaging consequences for their currency, which I think is extremely interesting and telling.
Then I'd like to know what you see for the future in relationship to Bitcoin, let's say over a five or 10-year period.
And I'd like to know what your advice would be for young people, practically speaking, in relationship to ensuring their financial future.
All great questions.
I think the last 10 months have been extraordinary for Bitcoin and the entire crypto ecosystem.
An inflection point was in Nashville last July when Donald Trump, the presidential candidate, showed up, gave a speech, embraced Bitcoin, embraced the community, told everybody that if he was elected, the United States government would never sell their Bitcoin.
And in essence, endorse it as apex property and legitimate property that he respected.
The entire crypto industry and the Bitcoin community were extremely active.
And there are a lot of people that think that they tipped the election in favor of the red sweep.
They were definitely very significant actors in November.
And so November 5th, there was a red sweep.
The House, the Senate, and the White House went Republican.
What followed next is an orange cabinet.
And orange is the color of Bitcoin.
I'm wearing an orange tie.
What that means is Robert F. Kennedy is a Bitcoin believer.
Tulsi Gobbert in Intelligence is a Bitcoin believer.
Atkins at the SEC is a Bitcoin believer.
Scott Besant at the Treasury is a Bitcoin believer.
Brian Contez at CFTC is a Bitcoin believer.
The president is a Bitcoin believer.
He created a cabinet position for David Sachs as the crypto czar, who is a Bitcoin believer.
And so what you saw was the administration flipped from being the, I would say, before this administration, they grudgingly accepted Bitcoin and were hostile to everything else.
And Bitcoin was accepted under protest because they couldn't stop it.
And then after November 5th, the administration moved aggressively.
They established an executive order to develop a digital assets policy.
When was that executive order?
I guess it must have come.
Well, sometime in the last 100 days, I guess thereabouts.
It came in the first quarter.
Yep.
Okay.
And they established a strategic Bitcoin reserve.
And the most important thing that happened is David Sachs went on public record saying the Trump administration recognizes Bitcoin as the one decentralized crypto network in the world, an asset without an issuer, digital gold, a commodity, special.
That's very, very important.
Unlock.
A commodity, an asset without an issuer has legal superiority, ethical superiority.
A public company can capitalize on a commodity.
Under the SEC 40 Act, a public company cannot capitalize on securities.
You can't have more than 40% of your balance sheet invested in securities.
So a commodity means it's like soybeans or gold or land, and no one actor can manipulate it.
And that makes it global property.
So that only happened just in the past few months.
But what's happened since is you could say the United States has gone from being very regressive to being the most progressive digital assets nation in the world.
And the agenda of the United States is to normalize the use of digital currencies, digital tokens, digital securities, and digital commodities on digital exchanges trading 24-17.
And that'll be Bitcoin-based.
Do you think that that?
Bitcoin is the base layer.
It is the reserve asset or the capital base of the entire crypto exchange.
When other jurisdictions are speaking, I'm thinking about the WEF types in particular, when they're speaking about digital, central bank digital currencies, they're generally not thinking about, they're not proposing that that's going to be founded on a Bitcoin standard.
Yeah, that is viewed as anathema by the crypto community.
But here we get to this basic philosophical observation, which is, do I want all of the money and power in the world to be controlled centrally by one banker or one politician who will then decide what I can buy, what I can do, what I can think?
Yeah, that sounds like a bad idea.
Or do I want all of the money and the power of the world to be held by individuals apart from a corporation or a bank or a government where they have privacy, where they have sovereignty, where they have dignity, where they have power?
My author, Heinlein, he said, an armed society is a polite society, right?
And the idea is, 100 people have guns in the room and you watch your step and you show civility.
Well, the significance of Bitcoin is for the first time in the history of the human race, we have found a way to tightly bind economic energy to the individual, cryptographically bind it.
If you know a secret in your head, it could be a billion dollars of power.
Thinking about fantasy, I know it, I can cast a billion dollars spell.
It's profound.
If you want to go back 100 million years, the big breakthrough for mammals was when they could bind organic energy to their frame, and we call that fat.
If you have fat cells, you can eat a lot and go without food for 30 days.
Take away the fat, you're a type 1 diabetic.
You last a few days, you're dead.
And so this idea that I can bind organic energy is what makes human beings.
This idea that I could bind cryptographic, cryptographically bind economic energy, that gives sovereignty to the individual.
But you know what?
8 billion people could have their own energy, but also 400 million companies.
And the traditional central banking system of the CBDC and fiat currency is there's one bank, you know, the U.S. Reserve that controls everybody.
And then there's a hundred big banks.
And if they give you permission, you're allowed to do stuff.
And if they take away your permission, you can't.
I think the Trump family ran into that when they got debanked.
All the crypto people ran into it.
There was the Canadian trucker example.
Oh, God.
You do something we don't like.
We turn off your oxygen.
With no court intervention whatsoever, right?
No trial, nothing.
Yeah.
And if you look at the history of Austrians, they all lamented that the money is broken and that is the source of so many of our economic ills.
And if you look at the history of libertarians, they say government intervention, government policy and medicine and commerce and foreign policy and domestic policy and monetary policy and education policy is generally counterproductive, iatrogenic.
It does more harm than good.
They both understood the problem.
They both had a philosophy, less government, more civil liberties, more economic liberties, more freedom.
We took a shot at that in the United States during the Revolutionary War, and we did it with the Constitution, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
We found out in 2020 that sometimes your rights get suspended because they're inconvenient to someone with more power than you.
But the truth is, your civil rights have been suspended every 30 years for the last 30,000 years by someone, and that's the story of civilization, rights being suspended for the normal, by the more powerful.
The crypto revolution and the Bitcoin ethos is Satoshi found a way to give power back to the people by combining cryptography with semiconductors, with the internet.
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Was it Watson or Crick who proposed an extraterrestrial origin for DNA because he couldn't understand how it could have possibly evolved?
I don't remember which of the two co-discoverers of DNA it was, but.
Well, there's two interesting papers that came out.
One was looking at the half-life of DNA complexity as a Moore's Law equivalence.
So you know Moore's law.
Right, right.
Yeah, I saw that paper.
Yeah.
And where if you extrapolate in a straight line back to the time at which DNA would have first been evolved, it actually goes back about 12 billion years ago, between 9 and 12 billion years.
And yet Earth has only been around for 4 billion years.
So it basically means that we got a jumpstart because it came from somewhere else.
And people say, well, how could it come from somewhere else?
Well, I said, just look at your watch if it's made of metal.
Every piece, every atom in that metal came from an exploded star several billion years ago that coalesced in a cloud and created the planetary ring that eventually became Earth.
So you are made of star stuff.
You are made of exploded materials.
Now, what's interesting about life is that the core components of life are what?
Carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and hydrogen.
Just that.
Those four things are the majority of what you are made of.
They were all like the first elements that were available in the universe after the so-called Big Bang.
They were the first iteration of the evolution of the elements.
It wasn't until multiple stellar explosions later did you get the heavier elements.
So life in its most simple form could have happened within a few billion years of the start of the universe as we think of it.
So there's plenty of time for things to get around.
So I don't, that to me is that first question is not, is it here?
It's can it be here?
So yes, the answer is it can be here.
Now the question is, is what is here, you know, manifesting itself in a way that it cares about humans in the first place?
Right?
I mean, people, you know, the Hollywood trope is they're here to take our planet or to take some natural resource from our planet.
I think that if anything that we see is a manifestation of its capabilities, we are the least of its concerns.
If anything, we're, You know, we're a, you know, we're a zoo.
I just came back from Africa, three weeks in Africa, going to the various nature preserves there.
So if anything, it's just they're just watching what we were, what they were billions of years ago.
And they have other concerns.
That's how I like to think about it.
You know, just because I don't worry people, I was on Tucker Carlson once and he says, does it worry me?
Why should it worry me?
I can't do anything about it in the first place.
And if they were going to do anything about us, they would have done it more recently.
But what's interesting, though, is, and for your viewers, go look up where most of the UAPs are actually seen.
They're seen around our nuclear aircraft carriers and they're seen around our nuclear facilities.
Why?
Because maybe that's the one thing we can do that might hurt them in some way.
And if we are about to break out into the local galactic arm and, you know, and we're a bunch of angry monkeys, maybe they want to basically keep an eye on what the angry monkeys are up to lately and what they can and can't do.
Are those areas more surveyed?
Perfect question.
Yes.
So maybe it's an observer bias.
But because they're more observed with credible camera systems, right, and with credible observers, then it's more, you know, then it's more credible.
Here's an interesting thing that happened.
So about two years ago, we pushed to what we call open the filters on the, you know, so the U.S. defense system has a number of sensors.
And as it turned out, when somebody looked, it turned out that our sensors are only, because we're collecting so much data, are so narrowly focused.
We're looking for signatures of rockets, signatures of planes.
And there's a lot of other information that's being collected, but it's being dumped in the garbage immediately.
So we pushed to say, you know what, maybe there are capabilities of some of our near-level adversaries that we need to pay attention to, like hypersonic rockets from Putin.
So let's open the filters.
And guess what they found?
The first thing they found were the Chinese balloons.
So the Chinese had found a loophole in our sensor systems.
But because we in the UAP community said, you need to open your sensors, maybe something's missing, the first thing they find were those Chinese balloons.
And they closed the loophole.
So, you know, for all wants to say that this lobbying has no effect, it actually had a perfectly good outcome that prevented the Chinese from overflying these quiet drones, which were basically just high-altitude balloons with sensor systems.
But all of that data is still there waiting to be processed.
And so I'm part of other initiatives to get some of the data processed in a secure manner to look for signatures of UAP.
But, you know, you don't even have to wait for me.
Just look at what this guy, Tim Phillips, has been saying publicly and what even Sean Kirkpatrick, the former head of Arrow, has said.
Yes, he's the one who talked about the Mosul orb.
We're seeing these things all over the planet.
And the orbs, is that a standard sighting?
Yes.
It's relative.
Well, I mean, it's relatively frequently reported by the military as well as by individuals, you know, the public.
But I don't have less faith in it, but it's so much more easily discredited.
And these days, especially with AI.
But here's an interesting one.
So there are several, let's call them legacy photos of UFOs going back 50 or so, 60 years.
And somebody noticed that in these legacy photos, there's, of course, the central UFO.
But there are three or four round orbs in each of these pictures.
So that leads to an interesting problem, right?
Here you have things that some people claim were hoaxes, and yet they, even though nobody had even thought of it before, they thought to put these orbs in them.
Or you have these multiple pictures, each of which have a central UFO, but then they have these orbs.
It's almost like a signature of authenticity.
And so it's these kinds of things that get me, that I just, as a scientist, I hate a problem that can't be solved.
And so my mind is like always, okay, how do I solve it?
How do I solve it?
How do I, you know, how do I get there?
But then one of the other attributes that I think of myself as having is that I hate to see opportunity lost.
And so the unprocessed data, the unrealized potential of what these things might mean, I've done enough for humanity with the technologies that I've developed for patients and whatever.
So in my spare time, if you will, this is something that none of my colleagues are interested in, or at least fewer previously than they are today.
That it's like, well, gee, a grain of silicon changed our civilization.
Our civilization is based on silicon and germanium.
Imagine if any of this stuff is real, it represents thousands of technology revolutions.
If we can just scrape one new idea off the top, what could we do with it?
Remember when Bitcoin was under a dollar?
Or you could have just snagged property cheap after 2008?
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I've been thinking a lot about foundational principles, and I wrote in my last book a lot about sacrifice.
And that catalyzed a realization for me, which was that, well, this is what I want to run by you.
So Judaism is predicated on the philosophy of upward sacrifice.
So you aim at the good, which would be the opposite of hell, let's say, and then you swear, vow, to shed everything that's not in keeping with that aim.
That's sacrifice.
And so, and you could sacrifice on behalf of your well-being, your own well-being.
That would be an abandonment of a kind of narrow hedonism.
You could sacrifice for your marital partner, for your family, for your community, for your nation, for then what?
Then what's above that?
The spirit of your nation, let's say, or the spirit of the upward aim of your nation.
It caps out in some transcendent good.
Christianity extends that by making, it stunned me, this realization, by making voluntary self-sacrifice in the face of death and hell, the foundational principle.
And then that's laid out in the architecture.
Because you have the crucifix at the center, on the altar, in the center of the church, at the center of the town.
We've acted out the idea that voluntary self-sacrifice is the proper foundation of the world for 2,000 years without making it explicit.
Because it didn't need to be made explicit.
Because it already was explicit.
Well, we acted it out at least, and that was sufficient, right?
It was sufficient, but now it seems to me that we have to be conscious of it.
And there's alternative foundations, power, but it's unstable.
Pleasure, but it devours itself.
Faithlessness, that's nihilism and antinatalism, cannot be sustained.
So, okay, so then one further issue.
One of the sticking points between Islam and Christianity, let's say, is conceptions of the death of Christ and the resurrection, right?
That's the primary sticking point.
Christ is that Jesus is a central figure in Islam, just as he is in Christianity, but there's a deep theological mismatch.
It isn't obvious to me that in the Islamic world that the spirit of voluntary self-sacrifice upward is the foundation.
It looks to me more like it's something approximating power.
Now, I say that with trepidation because I've been watching the UAE and Saudi Arabia and the signatories of the Abraham Accords warn the West about radical Islamism, which they seem to regard as a form of dangerous psychopathy.
And it seems to me that it would be a wonderful thing if the Islamic world, the sane Islamic world, could formulate a definition of psychopathic Islamism that would be applied universally and adopt.
We're not going to do it in the West.
We're too damn weak, as far as I can tell.
Look at the UK.
We won't draw boundaries in the UK.
We won't draw boundaries in Canada or on the university campuses.
We're too guilt-ridden.
Yes.
Well, as I see it, and as you know, I've written about this for many years, principally in the strange south of Europe.
What I've seen happening in our era has been two things happening simultaneously.
One is the guilt-ridden societies that have effectively slowed off their faith structure, which happens in the Jewish world as well.
There's a movement within Judaism, mainly sort of Reform Judaism and what I call spilt Judaism, which is something called Tikkunu Olam, which is effectively that the end point of Judaism is sort of social justice.
It's effectively for non-believing Jews, but who have seen themselves as Jews, still Jews, but who they cultural Jews, but that they can express their Judaism by a support for the downtrodden and so on.
There's lots of good to be said for that, but it's just that on its own, it's the question, Douglas, is how do you support the downtrodden?
And the answer to that is not necessarily by economic means.
I don't believe that.
Just as we talked about on the other podcast, is that economic incentives don't increase the birth rate.
Why?
Because people do not live by bread alone.
Right.
Exactly.
And in Christianity, in what T.E. Hume might have called spilt Christianity, you get it in the language of human rights and so on.
But again, it doesn't understand the water in which it's been swimming.
And so this has been the case for, I know, you might say 200 years in the West.
You might draw the line at different dates.
But the interesting thing to me, which is the dangerous moment for our societies, is when these forms of very weak, sort of spilt religion, encounter a religious fervor that is not weak,
is not guilt-ridden, loves the fact that we are, is very keen to push it on us where it advantages it, and which, in the house of Islam, has, to put it quite frankly, not got its house in order.
There are those who've told me for a quarter of a century.
As evidenced by the almost complete absence of functional societies in the Islamic world.
That's one piece of evidence.
I would add one on.
It's a big one.
It's a big one.
I'd add one on the more personal level, which is why is it that even in every Western society where there are Muslim reformers who are outspoken as reformers and who are the most virulent opponents of the deaf cult, jihadists and extremists, even the not at the moment violent but Islamist movements within their midst?
Why is it always the reformers who are at risk?
You mean like Ayan?
Like Ayan.
Dullified by the feminists.
Well, of course, you'll get a double whammy because you're seen, among other things, as bringing the problem, because you identified the problem.
So you're bringing the problem.
We wouldn't have the problem if you hadn't identified it.
Endless, I mean, I think I have a pretty good grasp of the extraordinarily brave individuals who in Western countries, never mind in Muslim countries, who have put their head above the parapet and been shot at a hell of a lot, sometimes quite literally.
Why is it the case, if the house of Islam is in any decent order, that it would be that way round?
Why would it be that again and again the men of violence keep on being able to say, we have the truth on our side?
Now, there are countries that have pushed this worst interpretation of Islam for centuries.
There are specific strains, but we have seen in our own day that this can also be reversed.
The House of Saud in the 1990s was pumping Wahhabist ideology through the Wahhabi.
Now, if you speak to the Saudis, they will sometimes admit privately that what happened was that after the Iranian Revolution, the Khomeinist Shiite revolution in 1979 in Iran, the Saudis got spooked and realized they needed a Sunni fundamentalism equal to it.
And they drew up the Wahhabist tendencies that were always there.
And then they pushed that around the world.
Oh, yeah.
As a bulwark.
Since 9-11, the Saudis started to get some pressure on that from the West and others.
But that had always been there.
But they can diminish it.
They can suppress it.
They can, instead of propagandizing for the worst versions of Islam, they can try to do something different.
You see that, I would argue, in the Emirates.
you see a very dangerous example of a 1980s, 90s-era Saudi Arabia in Qatar at the moment, which, although putting out a very materialistic pro-Western face, certainly with a lot of money to pump into the West and pollute a lot of people, are playing with...
Absolutely.
But they are not just playing with, but pumping out the same type of Islamist.
Back to the universities, back to the universities.
Same ideology that the Saudis were pumping out in the past.
But I would come back to this central thing, which is that the big problem for Islam as a faith is, can they deal with this problem within the house of Islam or not?
Well, that's a very old problem.
Psychopaths are defined as predatory parasites.
And the problem of parasitism is so profound that sex itself evolved to deal with it.
So one of the measures of the robustness of a system is its ability to contend with predators and parasites.
And if the system is overwhelmed by those forces, then it's become pathological.
But it does go back to the roots.
And I always get myself into trouble when I say this, but I say it anyway because it's true.
Everybody in the West who looks at this problem can identify endless examples in our own history and in the Western past where religious fundamentalism has erupted and gone very badly wrong.
The history of Europe shows that.
But if you ask a Christian today, or even in the 16th century in Europe, if you throw them a verse like, he who is without sin casts the first stone, you have got the texts on your side.
You have got Jesus on your side.
If you want to talk about voluntary self-sacrifice for the highest possible good, you do have Christ on your side.
So it sounds like the findings from the genetic research, correct me if I'm wrong, are complex like the genetic findings in relationship to intelligence.
That there's a plethora of contributing factors.
There's no simple one-to-one correspondence between a genetic marker.
It's more like a symphony of notes than a single causal factor.
So I mentioned over 100 rare genetic variants.
So that already tells our listeners that autism isn't a single gene.
It's polygenic.
But when we factor in the common genetic variants or variation in the population, where autistic and non-autistic people may simply differ in the frequency of particular forms of a gene and the combinations of those genes, we may be talking about hundreds or thousands of genes, so very complex.
And even then, we know that even if you have identical twins, where one is autistic, the other one may not be.
And even though they share all of their genes, that must mean that there are some non-genetic factors that also play a role in autism.
So genes operate in an environment, and it's the interaction between genes and environmental factors that may be changing brain development, for example.
Are there differences in androgen exposure prenatally in the twins who, the identical twins who differ in expression of autism?
Do we know?
That's a great question.
I mean, back in 2015, our group was the first to demonstrate that autistic people are exposed to higher levels of prenatal testosterone.
And then later we found estrogens too, prenatal estrogens.
So in all likelihood, the hormonal environment in the womb that the baby is exposed to is interacting with the inherited genetic predisposition that the fetus or the baby is born with.
So it's a gene-hormone interaction, but that's just the kind of beginning of the research.
I mean, you're asking, you know, would it be possible to look at discordant twins where one is autistic and the other one isn't, to see whether hormones might explain, hormone exposure might explain why they're not both autistic.
You know, those kinds of experiments or studies could be done, but they're challenging because twins themselves are quite a rare occurrence.
I think it's about one in 80 in the population.
You know, autism itself is not completely rare, but it's only like 2% or 3% of the population.
So it's kind of looking for needles in haystacks.
Right.
And what do you make of the claims that, well, certainly rates of diagnosis of autism have skyrocketed?
Now, my understanding as a clinician is that decreases in the diagnosis of other so-called developmental disorders account for at least some of that.
So many people who would have been classified using the archaic terminology of mental retardation are now shunted into the autism category.
And so I can't make heads or tails out of the claims that the prevalence of autism is increasing.
What do you think about that?
Yeah, so if we just take the prevalence data from the year 2000 up to today, so that's the last 25 years, the prevalence of autism has increased over 800%.
That's massive.
So when I started in this field, autism was considered relatively rare.
All the textbooks back in the 80s said that autism was 4 in 10,000.
And today it's 1 in 30.
So our listeners would be quite reasonably asking what is causing the increase in the prevalence.
I don't think it's just the explanation you gave, which is that people that we used to call learning disability or having a learning disability or an intellectual disability, we no longer use words like retardation because they're stigmatizing.
Is it simply that they've been reclassified as autistic?
That turns out not to be the explanation because the rate of autism in autistic people with a learning disability or an intellectual disability hasn't increased that much over 25 years.
Rather, it's the other group, autistic people without a learning disability.
And that can be explained because back in the mid-90s, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, DSM, that's the American Psychiatric Association's classification system, they introduced a new diagnosis of Asperger syndrome.
That was DSM-4.
You might remember that.
But suddenly there was a new diagnosis that was available, Asperger syndrome, which was basically autism without a learning or intellectual disability, autism without a language disability or delay.
And suddenly that diagnosis became available to people in the general population.
Prior to that, we tended to diagnose autism with an intellectual disability.
In our previous conversation, you referred to as more severe autism.
In the US, they're using a term called profound autism to describe individuals who are autistic, but who've also got many other disabilities, like intellectual disability and language disability and motor disabilities.
But the real increase seems to be in people whose IQ is in the average range or above, but who are seeking a diagnosis of autism.
That's where the increase has come from.
And I think that's because of things like social media.
If we think about what's happened over the last 25 years, the internet has really taken off and social media has really taken off.
People can learn about autism.
25 years ago, autism was still not very well known about.
So there's been this huge increase in awareness and recognition, and particularly amongst people without a learning disability, who might start thinking, hmm, I wonder if I'm autistic, or I wonder if my child's autistic.
So there's been kind of just an interest in pursuing a diagnosis if a child is maybe having social and communication difficulties, or even in an adult who was overlooked in their childhood, never received a diagnosis at the age when it might have been particularly useful, but they struggled right through their teens and have made it into adulthood, but feeling, I've never really felt like I fitted into social groups.
I've always had difficulty making friends.
But maybe those are individuals who show the other side of autism, the very positive side of autism, which is that laser focus on understanding how things work, understanding systems.
So they may be doing very well in music or drawing or chess or activities or domains that are very predictable and highly structured and rule governed, even if they find it very stressful to have a conversation.
So is there a generalist specialist dichotomy there as well?
Is it that the because it seems to me that the systemizer types, their advantage is derived from a proclivity to hyper-specialize.
And you could think of social intelligence in the way that we've defined it with its focus on high-order abstraction in the social domain and a tendency to operate in the social world primarily.
It looks like a social slash generalizer proclivity compared to a thing-oriented.
Yeah, and that's also that systemizer empathy dichotomy.
How is that associated with interest in people and interest in things?
Yeah, I mean, it broadly splits along those lines.
Yeah, yeah, okay, okay.
Yeah, so someone who's a systemizer who wants to understand systems has a preference for the specific.
We talked a little bit about this in the first segment.
You know, if you're trying to build a bow and arrow, imagine when you were a kid and you were fascinated on, could I make a bow and arrow?
It's this specific bow and arrow.
Why does the arrow fly further if I have a, you know, you know, a bow that's longer or shorter?
So you're trying to vary the parameters to try and make a new tool.
But it's this specific one.
You don't want to generalize it to all bows and arrows.
It's just this particular one.
And, you know, so when we think about autistic people, they do prefer detail rather than generalities.
And it's, you know, and these different kinds of brains or minds, it's not that one is better and one is worse.
We need people in the population who are good at the detail.
You know, that's why the cameras that we're talking through right now, that's why they work, is because the engineers have made sure that every component are fine-tuned in this particular system to work.
Engineers famously say that when they're developing a new tool, they put it on repeat a million times to make sure it works reliably.
Think of a plane taking off and landing.
A million takeoffs and a million landings happen without anything going wrong.
So that's the standard that engineers want.
For this very specific plane, will it repeat the operation a million times?
Reliably.
Reliably.
Yeah, well, you can see there that that proclivity to be sensitive to abnormality, to anomaly, is actually very useful in that regard because it has to work.
Well, many of our systems are like this.
They work so reliably that it's truly a kind of miracle.
I mean, in a reasonable country, the lights are on essentially 100% of the time, right?
Your car doesn't blow up 100% of the time.
Your natural gas fittings and pipes don't ever leak.
It's not 99.99%.
It's way better than that.
So engineers will accept a failure rate of one in a million.
And that's considered to be near perfect.
And that's when they'll release something into the market as being safe and reliable.
Whereas if you take something like empathy, where I'm trying to figure out what you're thinking, at best, all I can do is a guess.
You know, I can guess that Jordan is feeling a little bit tired.
I can guess that Jordan is interested in what I'm saying.
But these are just guesses because other people's mental states are not transparent.
I can use your facial cues, I can use your body language, I can listen to your words, but I'll never know for certain.
Whereas in the world of systemizing, I can know for certain, I've checked all of the variables, that this particular tool will work 999 times out of 1,000, or there'll only be one failure per million.
So specificity and understanding a system can lead to control over the system.
In the world of human relationships, there's very little control.
There are too many unknowns.
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