Feb. 5, 2018 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
02:47:29
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| Outro Alright people, we are live on the YouTube, or we're at | ||
| least live until the stream crashes. | ||
| We shall see what happens. | ||
| And I am sitting between. | ||
| The famous Weinstein brothers. | ||
| I've got Eric to my left. | ||
| I've got Brett to my right. | ||
| In no order, by the way. | ||
| Did I intro you or seed you? | ||
| This was- The order in which we were born. | ||
| That makes perfect sense. | ||
| The order in which you were born. | ||
| As you guys know, I believe that there is an idea revolution happening in this country. | ||
| I think these two are right at the center of it. | ||
| They happen to be born from the same two parents. | ||
| We're gonna talk about that and a lot more first off. | ||
| You guys arrived together. | ||
| You took a car here together. | ||
| You actually like each other as brothers. | ||
| That's pretty good, right? | ||
| Quite a bit. | ||
| Yeah? | ||
| Quite a bit. | ||
| Quite a bit? | ||
| We don't see each other all that often, but this is the first time we've ever appeared. | ||
| Uh, the same place. | ||
| Like ever, ever. | ||
| With all the professional stuff that you guys have done, you in the math world, you in the biology world, this is somehow the first time you've done this. | ||
| This is the first. | ||
|
unidentified
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Uh oh. | |
| Yeah, so we have no idea what happens. | ||
| I guess I first should ask you, the family hair, what's going on here? | ||
| You had to go there, didn't you? | ||
| As the more kempt version, I guess. | ||
| Well, thank you. | ||
| I'm glad I asked. | ||
| I'll ask you, what is going on in this family with the hair? | ||
| Holy, holy curly. | ||
| Well, the hair is a bit of a curse. | ||
| And the problem is that there are a lot of people who enjoy pointing that out. | ||
| And I'm actually, I'm not going to bring this live until March, but I'm going to institute a rule where it's fine to make nasty comments about the hair as long as they come with a helpful suggestion. | ||
| Mine is always on your YouTube comments. | ||
| He's the managing director of Teal Capital. | ||
| Why can't he afford a decent weave? | ||
| Yeah, well, I love the fact that we could talk for like two hours. | ||
| You mentioned 87 theories that go way over my head, and 90% of the comments are about your hair. | ||
| All right, let's just do a little history with stuff with you guys first, because obviously we're gonna talk about some ideal stuff here. | ||
| But obviously, it seems to me, at least from the outside, your parents must have done something right that they got too, brothers who so care about ideas but are true experts in their field of math and biology and that care about doing what I see as what's right and being brave enough to constantly do that. | ||
| What did they do that was right or where did this passion for education and all of that come from? | ||
| Older brother, you first. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh boy. | |
| Well, I mean, I think that the family history has a few ingredients, and not all of them are about the nuclear family. | ||
| I think that there were four families that came out to California. | ||
| We grew up not too far from here. | ||
| And the They came out to make mayonnaise. | ||
| It was the Gelfands who figured out how to make mayonnaise not separate properly, the Koenigs, the Marglins, and the Rubens. | ||
| And the Rubens were the weakest branch of this family. | ||
| You're not making this up. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| The Rubens. | ||
| We are Ruben chicks. | ||
| And so we were raised by Harry and Sophie Ruben as well as our parents. | ||
| And Harry Ruben was a chemist who couldn't finish college. | ||
| I think there's a family history of learning issues. | ||
| And there was a lot of question about how to ground one's idealism and rationality so that you are fundamentally thinking with your head, feeling with your heart, and that the two of them remain connected. | ||
| And I think that there was a lot of emphasis on not taking shortcuts to a better tomorrow and taking massive risks. | ||
| Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned the head-heart thing, because I think you're particularly in that space these days. | ||
| Well, you know, it's tough because I think that as we've been talking about this group of people who sort of growing up outside of standard channels of communication, you know, and made a joke about the intellectual dark web and then it got repeated, we sort of ran with it, but the only part of it that was dark was that the media and the institutions weren't You know, sort of making sure to avoid any reference to this group of people as much as possible. | ||
| And, you know, I think that This intellectualism outside of the mainstream was definitely a part of our family growing up, and I think that the learning issues in some sense disconnected us from standard institutional structures. | ||
| One of the things I think we'll get to hopefully today is that while people are tuning into this conversation that Brett and I have been having for a long time, there were a lot of previous rounds | ||
| where there just wasn't anyone to talk to. | ||
| And there were a lot of different issues that got brought up. | ||
| And it would be great to use this current passion, where you may see it over free speech, | ||
| perhaps I see it a little bit less so over that. | ||
| But it would be great to talk about some of the previous battles that we fought | ||
| that involved things like drug testing or wealth transfer by using the CPI | ||
| as a closet way of raising taxes and slashing benefits. | ||
| So we've been at this a long time. | ||
| And the great new thing, I think, is that there's so many new voices | ||
| and there's this channel to go around and to disintermediate this very strong thing | ||
| that I call the gated institutional narrative, which we've never been able to crack through so easily. | ||
| And now we have channels where we can actually get to the world. | ||
| Yeah, well, as I said to you guys right before we started, I mean, I've scribbled down a few things here, but I fully want you guys to take as much control here as you see fit. | ||
| I mean, he teed you up on a couple things there, but just first, just on the family stuff growing up, I mean, in the house, like, was just education and education and education just constantly drilled into you guys? | ||
| Well, I mean, the funny thing is the concept of education was quite prominent, but as Eric points out, neither he nor I had a comfortable experience in school. | ||
| They were different, uncomfortable experiences, but both of them were... | ||
| Troubling in many ways. | ||
| So for you, for example, what does that mean? | ||
| Oh, I was actually, I think Eric figured out some mechanisms for getting through school that were more effective than what I did. | ||
| And in my case, I actually remember being in the second grade and my handwriting and spelling in particular were so bad that I remember Somehow I remember school giving up on me and declaring me off in some way. | ||
| And I, you know, this is the adult me looking back, but I felt a choice. | ||
| I can either submit to what its judgment of me is and I can try to confront it, or I can stop playing ball. | ||
| And that's what I did, which caused my academic life to come apart and really it didn't go Back together arguably ever although I did find a home in graduate school, but But the process of walking away from the formal education and then having our grandmother died relatively early, but | ||
| Harry, our grandfather, was a really interesting intellectual person who had the unique characteristic of taking children very seriously. | ||
| And that doesn't mean he wasn't fun. | ||
| He was extremely fun. | ||
| But it meant, really, if I think back on it, you could ask him any question. | ||
| Any question. | ||
| If it was a good question, he would do his best to answer it, and he would let you know at the point that you topped out what he could address. | ||
| And that, it was like having a personal intellectual tutor. | ||
| And, you know, that was one facet that was particularly important. | ||
| Maybe especially for me, but it sort of picked up where school left off and because he was an unusual mind in his own right, I think some of the stuff that Eric and I picked up from him ended up being sort of jumping off points to places that are hard to get to through the standard. | ||
| A standard model. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I'm curious, did either one of you, even now, where you're both obviously public people, and you were sort of thrust into it just only in the last... Eight months ago. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What was it? | |
| It was about yesterday, right? | ||
| Did you ever anticipate that you'd be someone that is talking about these things publicly? | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Like you had this great, long piece of work, but now you end up sort of talking about this stuff from a zillion different angles. | ||
| Well, I don't think either one of us Wanted to become a public figure, per se. | ||
| I think we wanted to do work, and we wanted the work to go into the world, and then it turned out that the opposition to the work, like, it's important that this work never be heard, is a very different thing than, it's important that this work be heard, and that it be evaluated properly, and if it's found to be wanting, discarded. | ||
| So, I think that we ended up spending a lot of Our energy just mystified as to, Hey, I've come up with this great new thing. | ||
| I've got a new discovery. | ||
| I've got a new way of seeing things. | ||
| Why are people so angry and hostile? | ||
| And that created a choice in some, in some sense where we had to, uh, give up a certain amount of privacy. | ||
| And I, you know, I still value our privacy. | ||
| Like, you know, I don't think either one of us tweets pictures of our children or something like that, or even names them. | ||
| And I think, It's in some ways a little bit uncomfortable. | ||
| Oh yeah. | ||
| Tremendously uncomfortable. | ||
| The ideal would be to have the ability to speak into the public dialogue in an important way but not be recognizable so that you could have your anonymity and your influence simultaneously, but nonetheless. | ||
| So you're saying the Twitter avatar people might be doing something a little wiser than the three of us? | ||
| Is that it? | ||
| They're maintaining their anonymity and at least at some level getting in on the conversation. | ||
| Yes, on the other hand, I think part of what is driving the sort of surprise interest, you know, I feel surprise interest in me and in Eric, is the Void of authenticity. | ||
| And so the very fact of anything authentic, it doesn't matter if it lines up with the way you think things are or not, just the simple fact that it's unpolluted by bullshit is so powerful that it causes people who wouldn't otherwise be interested in what you had to say to listen. | ||
| So at some level I feel like that's the trade, is that we have given up the anonymity part in exchange to illustrate that this really is authentic and that that That is driving a lot of the interest. | ||
| I also feel like our hands are somewhat forced that it is astounding all of the interesting and important things that are simply not being said in a world where, you know, you go through these news cycles and it just repeats the same mind-numbing perspective that doesn't really, I mean, it can't be made sense of upon reflection. | ||
| You know, just getting back to your original question, I think our grandfather, Harry Rubin, in particular, refused to teach. | ||
| At least in my case, you know, I remember he gave me this guitar and he said, all you need to do is tune it, you don't need to play it. | ||
| And it was a very strange instruction, like why would you have a guitar if you could only tune it? | ||
| And his point really was, It'll be so frustrating to have a nice guitar that is tuned that you don't know how to play that you will figure out that it's a mystery and that you do not need a teacher. | ||
| And I remember going to UCLA Music Library and xeroxing all of these beautiful guitar pieces. | ||
| I could barely read the notes on the page. | ||
| But it turned out that this was a very strange and interesting form of teaching for two people who couldn't actually... It really needs to be emphasized. | ||
| You can think all you want about privilege, about maleness or whiteness or this or that, but if you have a learning disability that is as conceived of by the educational system, it is almost impossible to lead a normal life. | ||
| And so you either find some crazy way of overcompensating, and then you have an original perspective because the system can't serve you, or you sort of accept that you are the problem. | ||
| And I think Neither of us accepted that we were the problem, and it was sort of a radical overreaction to the mismatch in education. | ||
| There's one other thing I just want to add before we move on from it, which is, there's an important question about Birth order and where we end up. | ||
| Birth order is an interesting mystery because if you imagine that where you fall in the birth order causes you to lead a very different life than you would have if you had been born somewhere else in it, that almost sounds like a failure of evolution to function because whatever you should be doing optimally, you should do. | ||
| On the other hand, you're born into a world that is altered by the siblings that were born ahead of you. | ||
| And so, for me, I think part of why I end up where I do is that I was born into a world with Eric in it, and Eric was a very unusual intellectual presence to be in your natal home. | ||
| You don't say. | ||
| Yeah, I do say. | ||
| So, you know, if you think about it, Eric has a extreme talent for fundamental thinking. | ||
| And when I say fundamental, I mean the most fundamental levels of thinking. | ||
| That meant that the niche in the home I was born into, that niche was full. | ||
| Fundamental thinking wasn't where it was going to be at. | ||
| And so it is, I think, totally fair to say that I ended up as far away from the fundamental as you could get. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Biology is about complexity and emergence. | ||
| And so in order to, you know, maximize the chances of contributing something that was not already taken care of, I went to the other end and I got very fascinated with living systems. | ||
| And it turns out that actually that pair of toolkits is pretty useful together. | ||
| Eric is much better at understanding My toolkit, he's quite good at evolutionary thinking in a way that I will never be good at mathematical thinking. | ||
| And so anyway, there is a way in which I think the Williams sisters, the tennis players, | ||
| provide something of a model of one of the aspects that was very unusual in our house, | ||
| which was there was a kind of, and you've said it before, maybe on your program, about | ||
| a kind of intellectual arms race, you know, a friendly sibling intellectual arms race | ||
| that resulted in us, you know, both upping our game just to keep up, which I think... | ||
| But it was also like off script. | ||
| In other words, it was like two twins speaking a language that nobody else was speaking and | ||
| you're competing inside of this, I mean, it's like a system that nobody even knows that | ||
| this competition is going on. | ||
| And I think, you know, Brett is actually slightly inaccurate in that what he did in biology was to take this emergent system and treat it as an as-if fundamental system. | ||
| And I think that's where so much of his power comes from, is that he treats evolution, like most people think of evolution as kind of bedrock. | ||
| And I think Brett goes below that and says, look, The critiques of evolution have more to it than you imagine, but the solution isn't a religious solution. | ||
| It's actually better, more fundamental theorizing about a layer that can actually support that, even though there's no reason you should be able to do fundamental thinking in such a high-level emergent layer. | ||
| So I feel like he sort of copied the same behavior pattern. | ||
| And I also think in terms of birth order, just to be entirely honest about it, I don't think Brett really became Brett until I left the house. | ||
| Like, he was almost mute. | ||
| He was very, very shy, wouldn't say anything. | ||
| And when I left the house, suddenly, you know, I'd been pretty good in speech and debate, and Brett would just clean up from public speaking at a level that I couldn't. | ||
| And, you know, there's also this aspect where you feel that as an older sibling, you are in part suppressing the younger sibling unintentionally. | ||
| So it's not mean-spirited, it's just, those things are already occupied. | ||
| And so as soon as you leave the house, suddenly you have an as-if, | ||
| Brett became an as-if older sibling, or an only child. | ||
| And I think that really catalyzed the transformation. | ||
| All right, so there's a lot here. | ||
| So it seems to me that, for me personally, my whole life has sort of led up to this. | ||
| Like, I sort of mean this actual moment, because this is what I do, but I mean, | ||
| what is this thing that's happening right now that we can all feel, the reason? | ||
| That, you know, all these new people love you that didn't know who you were a year ago or that, you know, two or three years ago when you messaged me and you said, can we just jump on Skype for a second? | ||
| I had no idea who you were. | ||
| And I did a quick Google and I was like, oh, this guy seems bright. | ||
| Let's talk. | ||
| And everything that has sort of flowered out of that, that it seems like there's something happening right this moment that is way bigger than certainly than three of us sitting here. | ||
| When did you start tracking it? | ||
| Early 80s. | ||
| The Reagan transition was very violent, very interesting, and the university system was the first place that I was able to notice that the institutions contained fundamental structural lies, that they'd been built in a different time, and they required growth that could no longer be supplied. | ||
| Can you give me an example of what that means? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| I think I've mentioned this before, but I think pre-war, We educated about 8% of the population at a post-secondary level, so some kind of after high school training. | ||
| And then we went to about 50% of the population. | ||
| So that's a huge expansion in a very brief period of time from 1945 to about 1970. | ||
| And the university system couldn't keep growing. | ||
| You can't have a professor leaving You know, 15 PhDs who all become professors who leave 15 PhDs. | ||
| So that structure works as long as the system is growing. | ||
| And as soon as it hits steady state, then you go from saying one professor should leave 15 students to one professor should leave one student over a career. | ||
| Well that doesn't work because you need the students to do work under the professor. | ||
| Same thing for lawyers, you know, and partners and associates. | ||
| Same thing for doctors, you know, maybe an intern. | ||
| You need growth to have these structures so that almost all of these institutions stop growing in this particular way and then they had to have a story to try to attract people in uh... to pay in and it became | ||
| akin to Ponzi schemes. | ||
| And that's why during this period of time, you know, I wrote this essay called Anthropic Capitalism and the New Gimmick Economy. | ||
| And the whole idea of the essay was that we had kept these institutions alive by trying to figure out every gimmick known to man. | ||
| So offshoring, downsizing, securitization, playing with, you know, GDP and CPI dials. | ||
| All of these sorts of Games were used to try to squeeze a little bit more as-if growth out of the system so that nobody would have to confront the fact that the whole thing had become, in some sense, pathological. | ||
| And my belief is that with the end of the baby boomer bubble, if you will, which is a very long-lived bubble, it's not like a short Bitcoin-style bubble, what you have is a situation in which the narrative is unsustainable. | ||
| By 2008, this narrative about deregulation and the Great Moderation couldn't be sustained and Lehman Brothers went down and AIG was at risk of exploding and the world financial system might have collapsed. | ||
| And during the period that followed it, there was no ability to create really strong new narratives, and the old narratives no longer work. | ||
| So what you're seeing is a little bit that the institutions treat us almost like an infection, but their immune system is weakened. | ||
| So even though maybe YouTube isn't thrilled with us on its platform, and Twitter may not be thrilled, and maybe the intelligence community is worried about Things getting incoherent and media doesn't like the competition in sense-making. | ||
| So far they haven't really tried very hard to stop us, although I think that that can change. | ||
| And these new ideas are really just the ideas that were being suppressed. | ||
| So for example, you know, at some point we will talk, I'd like to talk, about why Brett should have become famous rather than Evergreen making him famous. | ||
| So I would have thought it would have been his discovery that the laboratory animals used for drug testing and other | ||
| purposes have extraordinarily long telomeres on the end of their chromosome, which may make | ||
| them very bad test animals for drug testing because they have the capacity to repair against | ||
| the toxicity of a drug. | ||
| And those animals will die of cancer. | ||
| But that whole episode where Brett predicted from first principles that the laboratory animals would have wildly elongated telomeres allowing for radical histological repair of the tissue. | ||
| There's no trace of that story in the world. | ||
| There's almost no trace of that story. | ||
| So is that the sort of catch-22 of your situation? | ||
| There you were, you know, doing some great work, and by every account of every student that I've seen write about you, thought you were a great teacher, and everything that Eric just said, and then what put you on the map was something that was so backwards in nature, yet is so directly related to all of these systems. | ||
| Like, these systems crashing, you were just one of the symptoms of it, actually. | ||
| Yeah, I stumbled into a realm where the system had gotten feeble, was lying to itself, just because I was intellectually interested in a question that took me there. | ||
| of gerontology was polluted by the fact that uh... there's money to be made if you can address the questions of aging so that's not why i was there but the point is the lies they were telling themselves are more pernicious than the ones that get told over an evolution space and uh... it it was fascinating it was a trial by fire i learned a ton about the way the world actually functions from that and the fact that it to this day It shows no public sign of having been addressed. | ||
| It is one of the odder facts of my trajectory. | ||
| And we've repeated that multiple times. | ||
| I mean, this is the crazy thing. | ||
| This is like the fifth, sixth, seventh time we've been at this rodeo. | ||
| And we know we'll be there again. | ||
| I mean, Lindsey Shepard, you know, just a couple of months ago, and we know these things will continue. | ||
| That's one pattern, and this is really interesting, which is, You put a ton of pressure on a large group of people to salute some flag that shouldn't be saluted. | ||
| And most people make the calculation, do I really want to screw up my life just over whether or not I salute a flag, whether that's maybe it's diversity or multiculturalism or something that sounds pretty good and has a lot of good stuff in it. | ||
| And then you've got like one person who will stand up and say, you cannot compel me. | ||
| And this is how we found Brett. | ||
| It's how we found Jordan Peterson. | ||
| It's how we found Lindsey Shepard. | ||
| In all cases, the commonality seems to be that the person who doesn't salute the flag usually has a very deep reason. | ||
| It's not just that it's wrong. | ||
| It's that they've got an entire worldview. | ||
| So what is the least interesting, interesting thing about Jordan Peterson? | ||
| That he won't use compelled pronouns. | ||
| I'm sure you'll use them as a courtesy as you found out with Ben Shapiro. | ||
| Yes, he absolutely will. | ||
| And so the whole idea is, isn't it interesting that the only people willing to screw up their | ||
| entire lives over these things are people who the crowd will find? | ||
| It's like a truffle hound. | ||
| You want to find a really interesting professor at some not so interesting field or department or out-of-the-way university. | ||
| You just have a compelled, everybody's going to sing the following anthem every morning at 8 a.m. | ||
| And the person who says no, that person's research, which is totally unrelated to singing the anthem at 8 a.m., You know, wearing yellow or whatever thing you're asking that person to do. | ||
| That person is most likely to be the person who is doing groundbreaking research in an area that you would never know. | ||
| And that's why I forward you all these emails that I get from musicians that are struggling with this, that are having the system collapse on them because they might be a white heterosexual choreographer or just everyone that's a little bit different in the system. | ||
| So if he was tracking this thing since Reagan in the 80s, You, as the first time I saw you on television, you said to Tucker, what did you say? | ||
| I'm deeply progressive. | ||
| I'm deeply progressive. | ||
| All my bells went off. | ||
| What's wrong with this guy? | ||
| You've also become a master of Twitter in Snark, which is really nice because your evolution has been very quick on that regard. | ||
| I actually don't think that's what happened. | ||
| Is that not what happened? | ||
| Not exactly. | ||
| I had 400 Twitter followers in May of last year, so Twitter was not an interesting place for me because most people never... I couldn't speak to anybody. | ||
| What happened is that in May of last year, suddenly things became extremely perilous for me, and the tool that I had used in the classroom to great effect, which was using humor to teach. | ||
| I mean, in fact, if I think If I'm ungenerous with myself, a lot of what I did in the classroom was, in good humor, troll my students to force them to learn in order to escape the little traps I set for them. | ||
| And so anyway, I feel like for the last seven months, or no... | ||
| Over the last eight months, my sense of humor has been suspended because it is so dangerous to speak into this public void. | ||
| It's so dangerous. | ||
| But it's back now. | ||
| I mean, I see you on Twitter now and it's like you've become a master at that. | ||
| Some part of me has, whether it's right or not, has begun to feel safe enough to return to my sort of more complete persona. | ||
| And that's showing up on Twitter, I guess. | ||
| Okay, so he's tracking this thing from the 80s. | ||
| You're at a school that is thought of as one of the most left or progressive schools. | ||
| You're in the biology department, which is pretty much... Oh, there's no biology department. | ||
| It's so progressive, there are no departments. | ||
| Oh, right, there aren't even departments. | ||
| But this is your field of study, at least. | ||
| Right, there's no tenure, there's some other thing besides tenure. | ||
| When did you sort of realize, wow, this... I mean, it couldn't have been the day that you sent the email. | ||
| It must have been a little bit before that, right? | ||
| No, this has been a long road. | ||
| And maybe the way to do this is to go back a little bit to Eric's point about the fact that these... | ||
| People who get confronted and who stand their ground over these points are always there for some deeper reason, and Eric points to. | ||
| They have a relatively complete model that they've built themselves. | ||
| So how do you find those people? | ||
| Well, you start saying wrong stuff and forcing people to salute that flag, and people who have built their own model of how the world works won't do it. | ||
| They can't. | ||
| They're not built for it. | ||
| I found my way there. | ||
| I got interested in evolutionary biology. | ||
| I found some people who were willing to take me seriously as a freshman at the University of Pennsylvania. | ||
| I realized I had a talent for it. | ||
| And then I got to the University of California, Santa Cruz, where Bob Trivers was teaching. | ||
| And Bob Trivers is one of the great living evolutionary biologists, one of the great evolutionary biologists of the 20th century. | ||
| So we were just fortunate to land in his milieu. | ||
| But anyway, that was sort of the evolutionary red pill. | ||
| Like, this was somebody who was thinking at the frontier of the field, and he had been part of the socio-biological movement, which tried to understand human beings with the same tools that we could understand a platypus. | ||
| And that was a very controversial endeavor. | ||
| And in fact, it explains a kind of internal paradox of the left, which is that the left on the one hand wants to be a champion, The left is deeply uncomfortable with the implications that Darwinism might have for people. | ||
| And so, the sociobiologists were trying to figure out how to map Darwinism onto people, and they did a poor job, because actually they didn't have all the tools necessary to do it. | ||
| But I got a glimpse of that in the early 90s, working with Trivers. | ||
| And I started, and I didn't realize it was what I was doing, but I started building up the kit of concepts and tools and | ||
| lenses that allow you to properly map Darwinism onto people. | ||
| And so that thing was something I was building, and then when I started teaching at Evergreen, | ||
| I just simply turned it into the context of my classroom. | ||
| I taught them the model that I had architected and they pushed me around and the model got better. | ||
| And so the recognition that the story of human beings is actually an evolutionary story and the sense that we all have that the evolutionary part of humans is a quadrant of what we are It's just so wrong that it results in you spotting these wrong-headed movements and things like that. | ||
| My recognition of where we were and what it meant came over time. | ||
| I think it wasn't as quick as for Eric. | ||
| At the point that Occupy happened, which actually I participated in, the quality of the conversation inside of Occupy was so disappointing with respect to what you would need to fix in order to make civilization work, that it kind of woke me up that there was no adjacent solution to the problems we were dealing with, that one had to think Farther afield in order to even begin to address them. | ||
| Is it fair to say that I I've been warning you about Olympia and Evergreen and Occupy that in essence in order to be In order to carry progressivism properly in its best sense you actually have to start from scratch almost because The main branch of progressivism is the most dangerous branch of thinking currently found in the political spectrum. | ||
| And the branch that I think you and I... Wait, how would you define that branch? | ||
| Well, it's one that begins from a substrate of thinking about oppression, which is not a fundamental language. | ||
| You cannot make a cosmology or an epistemology out of oppression and resistance. | ||
| It leads to madness. | ||
| The most difficult thing is to take the burden of evolutionary thinking and the theory of natural and sexual selection and to realize that that is your toolkit and from that toolkit you must build something that doesn't look like evolution has always looked before because we're now on too crowded of a planet and the toys we've been able to produce from science are too powerful. | ||
| I think Brett has called this wisely the hard problem, the really hard problem in evolutionary theory which is You can't continue to dance with the one that brought you. | ||
| Because evolution gets you here, and it almost certainly will end in a self-extinguishing event if you keep playing the evolutionary game. | ||
| And there is no thought, and I think that Brett is the best person carrying this forward, There is no proof that there is a way to use evolutionary building blocks to avoid the evolutionary fate of having, you know, unlock the twin nuclei of cell and atom, because they're just too powerful as tools. | ||
| And so, this is why I think both of us come down on the left Even though we now travel in a world that often leans right because the right is correct about the left generally being in denial. | ||
| Like trying to wish yourself into a better world. | ||
| You know, you want sexual equality but you're not willing to pay attention to what sex and gender actually are. | ||
| You don't have any idea what sexuality means because you're just thinking about it in humans and you're not studying it in a million different species. | ||
| Okay, so you can't wish yourself into a better tomorrow because you will You will try to create utopia, and both of us are strong anti-utopians. | ||
| Utopia always leads to dystopia. | ||
|
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Always. | |
| If you go for it. | ||
| But we also don't have any choice, but we have to get off this treadmill, because as the tools get more and more powerful, it's very clear that if we continue to run the evolutionary program, there is no guarantee that we emerge from this. | ||
| Did you ever expect that it was going to be this political? | ||
| Because it seems like, if you look at just the things that I hear you talking about all the time, they're not necessarily political in nature, but everything now is political. | ||
| They've been politicized. | ||
| But I would say, I mean, there's a conversation coming. | ||
| And I have the sense that those, so first of all, I will say, the last time I was on your program, the only time I was on before, I remember you asking me what I thought of the left, and I quipped, uh, what left? | ||
| I haven't seen them in who knows how long. | ||
| That turns out not to have been right. | ||
| They exist. | ||
| I mean, yes, I hadn't seen them, but one of the funny things about my trajectory is that having been You know, the experience was very much like being ejected from the left. | ||
| And I got ejected from the left, and a lot of people on the right embraced me, which was weird. | ||
| And then, even weirder, was the discovery of all the other people who'd been ejected from the left. | ||
| And so the point is, this is sort of a cryptic left. | ||
| You're talking to the right gang! | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| So the point is, the discovery that there are a lot of people who you might, if you just looked them up online, you would come to the wrong conclusion about where their sympathies lay. | ||
| That's interesting. | ||
| And I think the conversation between those of us who have been, you know, catapulted out and those of us who have landed on the right is going to involve the recognition That in fact we are all suffering from a kind of political PTSD. | ||
| And that in fact many people who are on the right are there because they've been traumatized by really low quality dangerous leftist thinking. | ||
| But that does not make their right of center position natural. | ||
| I'm not saying there are no natural positions over there, but many people who are there are there Because they have run from things that they have heard on the left. | ||
| And once we give up on the idea that anybody on the map today has the answer with respect to the policies that we are supposed to embrace, once we say, actually, everybody's policies are a failure, if we were to enact the libertarian program, it would fail for game-theoretic reasons. | ||
| If we were to enact the socialist program, it would fail for game-theoretic reasons. | ||
| Capitalism, same thing. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So the point is, okay, fresh sheet of paper with respect to policy, Now there's a lot for us to talk about, starting from values. | ||
| And there are a lot of people who, if you ask them to list their values apart from policy, would fall out on the left. | ||
| So, wow, is it an interesting moment that that conversation may be about to get started. | ||
| And to be in a position to actually influence it, I must say, is pretty exciting. | ||
|
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That's also one of the... No, go ahead. | |
| You know, you said something which I think can be misheard, and since you've had the experience coming off of The Young Turks, it's worth saying. | ||
| The center-right is, in some sense, the blankest part of a non-blank canvas. | ||
| And so, the whole purpose of introducing the Thinkquisition concept was to analogize the left with Spain, and the center-right with Turkey, and the expulsion of the Jews, and the idea being that One of the things that I always want to come to your rescue about, and also push you a little bit on, is that there's this army of Twitter trolls that say, well, why won't Rubin criticize the right? | ||
| And we've just never gone and done it. | ||
| In part, the point is, if your heart is largely in making a better world and trying to be realistic about it, but recognizing that we have to change some things, and then you get kicked out of your home, The last thing you want to do is start criticizing the people who took you in during a really dangerous period. | ||
| And so, in part, I think you give the right a little bit of a pass. | ||
| And I think more than I'm comfortable with. | ||
| Because you also have the twin problem of wanting to be decent to the fact that the people who have embraced... | ||
| You know, I've always struggled with Tucker Carlson. | ||
| Last time I checked, I'm one of a hundred people that he's following on Twitter. | ||
| And, you know, he stepped up at a moment when other people would not. | ||
| And so, you know, it's this very violent shift in thinking that's just not comfortable. | ||
| But the canvas is blank enough that we can leave the sword in the stone. | ||
| Rather than saying the answer is capitalism, no, the answer is libertarianism, no, the answer is ending oppression, you can say we don't actually have the answer. | ||
| We don't know. | ||
| And it's very important that the people who are certain be silent, because they are not the important people at this moment. | ||
| And that's basically everyone on cable news and everyone sort of... Well, they all have their, like, we know, and they'll talk to you about it. | ||
| I remember when I did the McNeil-Lehrer News Hour, they said, look, Eric, you have to be either for or against immigration. | ||
| And I said, why? | ||
| And they said, well, if you're for it, we'll get a guy who's against it. | ||
| If you're against it, we'll get a guy who's for it. | ||
| But you can't be both for and against it. | ||
| And they couldn't use anything from an hour and a half interview they did with me, because I needed to be a widget in order to fit the pre-assigned format. | ||
| This is where I started learning about fake news and why our world is constructed, because you construct the program before you meet the people. | ||
| And so once you have the template, You have to shoehorn everybody into the template to produce that very consistent product. | ||
| Think about, you know, if you buy salami. | ||
| That's a lot of different individual pigs. | ||
| But it all tastes like salami. | ||
| It's uniformized. | ||
| And that's what we're dealing with. | ||
| And our group that's discussing these issues is anything but uniform. | ||
| And everybody's split. | ||
| Like, you know, just exploring this Ben Shapiro acting as the atheist. | ||
| That turns out to be, you know, really quite Quite correct. | ||
| And you know, the fact that Jordan and Ben both are up for using sensitive pronouns, but they were just hiding that for some reason. | ||
| This is a really rich area, and that richness is sort of anathema to the machine that just needs a dependable product and is gonna grind us in to some, I don't know, some uniform, soylent green to be distributed to the world. | ||
| Yeah, well, I'm sure there's some mathematical or biological answer even to what you're saying about me right there, which we've discussed privately many times, so I'm more than happy to discuss it publicly as well. | ||
| You know, it's funny, when I've sat down First off, I think your basic premise is actually correct, as I've said to you privately. | ||
| But when I've sat down with all of these supposed scary right-wingers, Shapiro and Prager and Gutfeld and Glenn Beck and whoever else it may be, they have actually no problem publicly and privately having disagreements with me. | ||
| No problem. | ||
| We don't slander each other, we don't slur each other, we don't hate each other, we don't unleash mobs on each other. | ||
| So yes, I actually feel very comfortable with them, even though we have certain political disagreements now where I don't get that on the other side. | ||
| I don't think you get it on the other side. | ||
| You and I have this crazy thing where I'm always asked, why are you hanging around with Ruben? | ||
| Because fundamentally, he's really right wing and he refuses to correct. | ||
| And you get, why don't you have left-leaning people on your show? | ||
| And so it's like, are you aware that you're talking to both of us so that we're able to compare notes? | ||
| But the irony is that both of you, by default of your upbringing and everything else, I think would have, you certainly were on the left for basically your whole adult life. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And I think basically you were too, it's a little, I don't even know where to put you anymore, but that shows how the map just means nothing anymore. | ||
| It just doesn't mean anything. | ||
| What means something is that little place you're talking about on the canvas. | ||
| And that place at the moment happens to be center right, I think. | ||
| Yeah, I mean the thing that I, so I'm raising my children, at least my son, on these old Tom Lehrer records. | ||
| And Tom Lehrer was this incredible pianist and he wrote naughty, dirty little songs, you know, way back in the 1950s that were incredibly clever and witty and talked about politics. | ||
| And if you play them today, You know, I think about Barney, I love you, you love me. | ||
| And then you have Tom Laird saying, I hold your hand in mine and it's a severed hand. | ||
| You know, it's just, he was making fun and joking about our hatred for each other across ethnic lines, about sexual misbehavior. | ||
| And, you know, we grew up in a house in which this was normal and it produced a kind of immunologically sophisticated rather than immunologically naive perspective where we've created this very safe world for children now and I think our world was not safe and you know I think it's very important to look at what the effects of that if you watch Vietnam on television during the sixties and early seventies as I did the images that were beamed into every living room | ||
| Look like no images that were beamed in from the Iraq war or even the collapse of the Twin Towers. | ||
| So you have a very different world and a very different situation that I think we grew up in. | ||
| And what you and I find when we're told either, you know, don't do Rubin's show or why don't you have left-wingers on, is that the left is behaving in some sense like a cult. | ||
| A cult is always wondering, did you talk to anyone outside? | ||
| Well, if you talk to somebody outside, then you might have ideas come in that disconfirm what the cult has been telling you. | ||
| And so, the fact that you and I always want to talk, I mean, I'll talk to a convicted killer, I'll talk to somebody with horrible views. | ||
| Because even if I just want to protect myself against that person, I want to understand how they think. | ||
| If you think Fox News is the enemy, why wouldn't you listen to the enemy's broadcasts? | ||
| And so this idea of revulsion, I cannot possibly even bear two seconds of that voice, or that idea, or that person, is a tell. | ||
| And it's a tell that the person is trying to say, don't worry, I haven't spoken to anyone outside of our cult. | ||
| Yeah, these rules that are established are tactical, and they are rationalized as if they were about some sort of a sophisticated conclusion, but they simply aren't. | ||
| And so, you know, I'm not sure this is the right analogy, I don't want to trivialize it this way, but I almost feel like the left has revived the schoolyard game of cooties. | ||
| There are certain people you just can't Talk to because you'll catch their disease and it's like actually that's not how it works. | ||
| You can talk to people who with whom you disagree and you can actually I mean the whole process of intellectual dialogue of dialectic is to gain from the conversation that which you didn't know | ||
| that's actually valuable and reject that part that isn't and persuade the other person of something. | ||
| So the whole idea that we shouldn't be talking to these people because they are beyond the pale | ||
| is preposterous on its face. | ||
| Likewise, the idea that free speech is all well and good, but there are certain ideas that shouldn't be voiced. | ||
| These things are, they're transparent nonsense. | ||
| Is there some biological analogy you can give me for what Eric just laid out there? | ||
| So for the two of us that get, as you said, catapulted out of this thing, | ||
| that we end up in a new space and now we see some decency there. | ||
| So then the ideas start spreading there. | ||
| There's gotta be some biological something there. | ||
| Well, in some ways, this is a brand new situation. | ||
| It would be very unusual for an ancestral human to have been ejected from their group and to find a home in another group. | ||
| That's not typically the way it works. | ||
| Typically being ejected from your group is a fatal That is much less true. | ||
| The world we live in is very unusual because reciprocal altruism is really, it has taken over. | ||
| And in some ways, you know, this is dicey because you have antecedents in the Torah, but the New Testament actually prioritizes reciprocal altruism across a larger group. | ||
| It's clearly not universal because when the Christians get to the New World, they treat the people in the New World as if they're not part of the same species. | ||
| But nonetheless, the ability to forge a union that is not based on genetic lineage is novel. | ||
| On the other hand, it's also beautiful that there's a kind of, if it were genes, we might call it hybrid vigor. | ||
| When it works. | ||
| but there's a way in which you take people who bring different kinds of wisdom | ||
| from different traditions that have faced different challenges, | ||
| and you put them together and you get superpowers. | ||
| So anyway, it is very exciting to see it. | ||
| What? | ||
| When it works. | ||
| But I would say that, but I think what you're saying | ||
| is that's starting to happen right now, right? | ||
| Well, I would guess. | ||
| Because there's something now that's clearly to me far bigger than any of us happening. | ||
| For the amount of people that are either watching this live or will watch this, that will then spread some of these ideas and realize that they're not the hostages, the intellectual hostages that they think they are. | ||
| Well, maybe there's a missing piece here, which is Our economic system, when you plug it into certain things very directly, like journalism, I think actually this is your point originally, that it's truth-seeking, which cannot withstand direct contact with market forces. | ||
| That when you do that, You generate artificially feeble truth-seeking mechanisms, and it eventually invades them all. | ||
| So, how hard is it to beat the mainstream news outlets? | ||
| Not very hard, because they're so bad at delivering the... Not very hard at analysis. | ||
| It's very hard to beat them at some kind of competition. | ||
| Competitively, they're extremely dominant. | ||
| But in terms of what they're trying to deliver, they're terrible. | ||
| Likewise, the university system. | ||
| And so, you know, what we're, you know, to return to the conversation of a few minutes ago, | ||
| the authoritarians confront people. | ||
| Most people capitulate because it's just cheaper and they don't have anything worth fighting over. | ||
| Those people who don't capitulate turn out to be intellectually interesting for reasons that have nothing to do with the issue they were confronted over. | ||
| Why is that? | ||
| It's because all of those fields have become stuck. | ||
| The market forces have caused them to adopt some wrong assumptions and then to be unable to get out of the cul-de-sac. | ||
| And so feeble fields result in people quietly inventing a better path that never gets traction but is very powerful in terms of understanding what's true. | ||
| And so anyway, the conversation you're talking about is It's marvelous to be a part of it, but I think its basic nature is that a lot of people have privately invented some part of the right answer, and they are now finding each other by virtue of technologies that, you know, didn't exist. | ||
| Wait, I have this part, you have that part. | ||
| The only thing that I'm worried about, and I don't know how to get around this, is there's this phase one, phase two problem, where in phase one, Phase Zero, you're like, I'm the only person out here, I don't know of anybody else I can talk to. | ||
| And then in Phase One... | ||
| You sort of say, OK, well, I found you. | ||
| And we have to talk about the fact that ideas are being suppressed rather than investigated and found wanting. | ||
| So that's the one we've been in for a while. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And we need to kick this out into the next phase, which is, OK, we've got the channels. | ||
| We've got some audience. | ||
| I personally am predicting that very bad things are going to start to happen to some people in this network as the world discovers how powerful this medium is, because it's going to be very disruptive. | ||
| What does that actually mean? | ||
| I'll come back to it. | ||
| I don't want to get derailed. | ||
| The next phase of this should be, okay, what is it that you're building this vehicle to deliver? | ||
| Like, what is wrong with economics? | ||
| What is wrong with biology? | ||
| What is wrong with physics? | ||
| What is wrong with our theories of spirituality and religion? | ||
| Beyond the anti-theories, which is just like, how can I say that string theory has been a disaster in physics without immediately getting trampled by the string theorists who have been in control of this disaster? | ||
| The next thing is, okay, well, what is the positive theory that goes in that place? | ||
| What should we be doing instead? | ||
| It's one thing to say, you know, it's terrible that we're being demonetized on YouTube or that we're being downranked on Twitter, which we didn't know was their word for shadow banning or whatever it is. | ||
| Okay, we have to stop bitching and whining about that and start to say, let me tell you what I'm absolutely excited about. | ||
| Here's something that's never happened before and it belongs to our group. | ||
| Fundamentally, the telomere stuff, if that turned out to be right, that this is affecting drug testing, maybe we could save lives. | ||
| Maybe some of the issues with the damage to the heart Because the heart's peculiar nature of not having a ton of mitosis or whatever it is. | ||
| It's an unusual histological repair profile. | ||
| Maybe we could actually heal some families and keep some drugs from being released that have to be recalled later. | ||
| That's exciting. | ||
| Maybe if we could prevent particular interests from playing around with the CPI. | ||
| You had Pia, my wife, on the program. | ||
| She released this amazing theory in her thesis that never got taken up in economics because | ||
| it interfered with a cryptic attempt to raise taxes and slash benefits. | ||
| And it's sitting out there in the open. | ||
| The H-1B visa that I took on in the 90s is a conspiracy that came out of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Science Foundation to attack the wages of American scientists on behalf of scientific employers. | ||
| I've had a working paper for, I don't know, 10, 20 years, something like that, out on the web that | ||
| nobody has argued with strongly and just sits there, where no news media wants to touch it | ||
| because the H1B is some part of the protected narrative. | ||
| And now it has nothing to do with being against foreigners. | ||
| It just has to do with a conspiracy inside of the science complex. | ||
| And we could be talking about any one of a number of super interesting issues as opposed | ||
| to the suppression of speech. | ||
| But I think we don't get into that. | ||
| I'm curious as to why. | ||
| And I would love to start this next phase. | ||
| I actually have a sense of why maybe we don't get there. | ||
| There's a problem. | ||
| The scenario I laid out about how people end up inventing their own models to beat fields that have gotten stuck causes a byproduct. | ||
| And the byproduct is that when you When you look at a field and you try to figure out what's wrong with it and you bang your head against the wall enough to actually get there, you end up redefining terms, throwing out assumptions, building new assumptions, all sorts of things. | ||
| Then when you meet somebody else, And you start trying to put forth the model that allows you to solve certain important problems, you sound crazy. | ||
| So, for example, I know because I had to confront the problem that the term heritable is a disaster. | ||
| That what Darwin meant when he said heritable is not what we currently mean, and that the difference, the fact that we all think... Slow it down for some of the slower people here. | ||
|
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So, heritable... For Eric, not for me. | |
| The common parlance definition of heritable just means something that you pass down to your descendants. | ||
| At the point that DNA came to be understood as a mechanism for encoding information that then caused cells to make proteins that affect things, that do things, we made a terrible error. | ||
| And it's a natural error, which is that the elegance of the genetic mechanism is so Extreme. | ||
| The beauty of the explanation of these triplet codons specifying particular amino acids that are then strung together. | ||
| That explanation is so good, right? | ||
| It's not murky at all. | ||
| It's perfectly precise. | ||
| And it caused biologists to say, That is Darwin's mechanism. | ||
| This is premature codification, which happens in every field, where you find something beautiful and there's this premature codification, well now we've got the story. | ||
| Right, because it's paying dividends at such a high rate when you first discover it. | ||
| It's so good that it can't possibly be wrong. | ||
| Then you start building structure on top of it, and this is the language, and so every time you try to get in underneath that and say, I don't know what you're about to say on heritable, but a typical device that we use is maybe there are two terms that are being conflated into a single word. | ||
| Computer science term for this is overloaded. | ||
| So maybe the word heritable is overloaded and we actually mean multiple things by the same term and we don't realize we have a confusion. | ||
| So there are all of these techniques for sort of unweaving the frame of an idea. | ||
| But I'm going to take issue. | ||
| I don't think that we actually sound crazy. | ||
| I think that's a story. | ||
| I think that with enough exposure to any one of the people who know how to do this reasonably well and have done it a number of times, it's usually not that the person sounds crazy. | ||
| That is the portrayal. | ||
| No, I'm saying something slightly different. | ||
| I believe you're correct, that when you confront the field that you've found a way to solve its problems, it doesn't want to hear it, right? | ||
| And it can't hear it. | ||
| In fact, really the people think you You don't have it. | ||
| You're wrong. | ||
| And you know, very often this happens with telomeres. | ||
| You're wrong, and we already knew what you just told us. | ||
| They say that at the same moment. | ||
| And you know you're on the right track when you get those two at the same time. | ||
| What I'm talking about is, I mean, let's take an example. | ||
| By the way, this food is lousy in such small portions. | ||
| Right, it's exactly that. | ||
| Jordan Peterson and I overlap in a particular place. | ||
| We came there from, as far as I can tell, totally different routes. | ||
| He came there from psych, and he, you know, unlike almost any psychologist, he took evolution seriously. | ||
| Very wise of him, because it's an evolutionary, psych is an evolutionary phenomenon. | ||
| I came to psych from evolution, because if you want to understand human beings and what they do in an evolutionary way, you have to understand a bit about psychology. | ||
| That causes a lot of overlap in terms of what we care about. | ||
| But there's a lot of definitional stuff that is not perfectly concordant, because we've each invented our own private language. | ||
| Now, I've seen this private language thing enough times to know that that's a landmine waiting to cause trouble. | ||
| And so what you have to do, doesn't matter There's nothing at stake in terms of who gets to define each term, but you have to recognize that some term that's important to both of you will be differently defined, and if you don't iron that out, it blows up. | ||
| So, anyway, the... Well, am I also right that... I mean, this is a particularly good example. | ||
| I hadn't really thought about this. | ||
| Jordan initially tripped a lot more of my filters that there was something off or wrong. | ||
| And I think that when he had the show first with Sam Harrison that they deranged on the issue of what truth is, Jordan was technically not right. | ||
| But it took a while to understand that this guy was at a deeper layer than even he could, I mean, he can correct me if he disagrees, but he had a bit of a Ferrari in a Volkswagen chassis. | ||
| Ferrari engine and a Volkswagen chassis. | ||
| And that was very confusing because some of the things that he was saying seemed kind of pretty good, pretty good, pretty good. | ||
| Whoa, that's a sour note. | ||
| Pretty good, pretty good, you know. | ||
| Something tripped our filters. | ||
| I think Sam is probably still much less convinced that Jordan is really on to something deep. | ||
| And I'm not saying that I'm signing up for the whole Jordan Peterson program. | ||
| But it's a good example of how something that you know to be true gets tested against something that you're hearing for the first time. | ||
| That person may not be saying it well. | ||
| And that person may not be fully able to explain it. | ||
| And over time, as you start to work out the kinks, you realize that person's really onto something beautiful, deep, and profound. | ||
| And maybe I hadn't thought about it when I said that it sounds crazy. | ||
| Jordan probably sounded a little bit more off. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I'll put it on me that I didn't get it. | ||
| I really don't think he is. | ||
| The more I listen to him, the more I can map what he's saying, and it all checks out from the part that overlaps with what I know. | ||
| And actually, his situation with Sam Harris is the classic case. | ||
| Jordan Peterson is optimized around a different value function, what he's trying to accomplish. | ||
|
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Meaning. | |
| Yeah, meaning, exactly. | ||
| And Sam Harris is a stickler at this philosophical... Truth first, then we'll get to meaning if we can. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| So, of course there was a train wreck. | ||
| Now, perfectly possible to say, ah, You're optimized around X, I'm optimized around Y, but we have a lot of overlap in terms of objective and we can just recognize the discordance and just solve it. | ||
| So I'm hoping that we will get good at this so that we don't keep tripping over things that become sacred to each of us. | ||
| So that's the next step then. | ||
| Right, if we have to get into, we did zero, one. | ||
| That two really, it's not just that we need answers, we need to get good at, and I think what my job in this is just getting all of you together. | ||
| I think that's a piece, you know what I mean? | ||
| I'm not gonna be dropping down anything like what Sam is doing or Jordan, but I think I can help people get some of these ideas and use them for themselves. | ||
| Like if you swapped me out and put in Richard Dawkins in this chair, and you just forced these guys to go hard on evolutionary theory, My guess is that Dawkins is both at the very top of people who've developed important concepts like memes or extended phenotype or whatever, but on the other hand, his particular hobby horse against religion is probably some sort of intermediate | ||
| Product on the way to where he's going, and I feel like he's stalled out there. | ||
| So I think that would be a super productive conversation. | ||
| Maybe Brett turns out to just be wrong about this stuff, but that's a place where you have two top minds on the same topic who are discordant, and almost certainly they need to encounter each other to find out, you know, is Dawkins really correct that this is a mind virus, or is Brett really correct that this is some sort of positive co-evolution? | ||
| Is there anything you think that these systems can do? | ||
| I mean, to me, we're watching all the systems collapse. | ||
| You talk about the education system, but I mean, we're watching the media system collapse. | ||
| We're watching the political system collapse. | ||
| I think it seems like everything is sore. | ||
| Even when I watch sports now, it doesn't seem the same. | ||
| Something seems old and corroded. | ||
| ESPN's having a ton of trouble. | ||
| Like, there's just so much crumbling at once. | ||
| Can these things all be fixed together or? | ||
| I think that's the only way. | ||
| That's the only way. | ||
| Is that we have to be bold enough to imagine our way To a truly different structure without, and this is key, you can't screw this one up. | ||
| A lot of people believe civilization will collapse and then we'll put the right thing in place. | ||
| That is not going to happen. | ||
| We have to protect civilization enough that it can carry us through the bottleneck. | ||
| And that's the tricky part. | ||
| We have to do that. | ||
| You know, the tools that you end up needing are, on the one hand, they're daunting to people, the tools you need to think about these things. | ||
| On the other hand, when you get to them, they're actually simpler than you think, and they simplify your life. | ||
| In other words, most of us are carrying around too many different kinds of concepts to understand our own lives. | ||
| If you swap in a little bit of game theory. | ||
| And it doesn't take much, you know. | ||
| There are four or five fundamental games that just change the way you see almost all human interaction. | ||
| If you know what those are, and you spend the few hours necessary to understand how they work, so that you can walk through the world and look at puzzles and say, ah, this one's failing because it's a race to the bottom. | ||
| Here you have a free rider problem. | ||
| Once you can just spot those things, you realize that most of the Design space in which we might build civilization is effectively empty. | ||
| It can't be inhabited because what you would build there, even if it was nice, wouldn't be stable. | ||
| So the answer is limited to that small number of things that both accomplish what you want them to accomplish and are stable enough not to be destroyed. | ||
| Is part of the issue, though, that the people that are going to actually do these things You know, it's like our conversation a couple months back when we were talking about the bull and the china shop, and I said to you, well, what you're asking for is a panther. | ||
| You want to have a china shop and a panther to walk in and ding one thing off and knock another thing off with its tail and then walk out. | ||
| What we got in Trump, and we don't have to make this specifically about Trump, but that the people who will come in and fix these systems, if not these two great people I'm sitting between, are gonna be the bull in the China shop. | ||
| While you guys are trying to fix things, manage things, without having civilization crumble at the same time, that the thing that we want is sort of not the thing that you get, in an odd way. | ||
| I got teased mercilessly because I said that your panther in the china shop was one of the wisest things anybody's said to me. | ||
| I get one. | ||
| One every ten years. | ||
| You had a few. | ||
| We need the panther in the china shop. | ||
| The fact is that the system that we're in won't let in a panther. | ||
| So that's Trump then, right? | ||
| That fully explains Trump. | ||
| Yeah, but the problem with Trump is Trump revealed the weakness in my position. | ||
| So I voted. | ||
| I said Trump is an existential risk. | ||
| I took a lot of heat because I work for a guy who supported Trump in the election. | ||
| I voted Bernie then I voted Hillary and I thought okay well if you really believe that you're dealing with orange Hitler and that we're playing with nuclear annihilation the Democratic Party should Say look, we've lied about a number of things. | ||
| The big three for me are immigration, trade and terror. | ||
| And let's dig up the bodies in the back and say, you know, mea culpa, we did some wrong things. | ||
| We have to reestablish trust because we cannot afford to be playing this game. | ||
| And when I saw that the Democratic Party Wanted to double down and had no intention, even though they were claiming that we were on the brink of annihilation and that Russia was invading the country through the election and all of these terrible things. | ||
| The places where I could check, here's something positive you could do to reestablish trust. | ||
| You know, it was a narrow election. | ||
| You could almost have won it. | ||
| It became clear that They don't get it. | ||
| And that my hope, and I think Sam Harris' hope, for example, that we can subtly reestablish trust within the institutions by small modifications, by tweaking expertise rather than really thwacking it. | ||
| is not possible unless you and I and some other people are somehow successful in saying the expertise during this period of time from 1980 to 2008 got so polluted across all institutions that were playing these Ponzi scheme games to keep the plates spinning. | ||
| This is like a bad batch, and you're going to have to throw out tons and tons of bottles of wine because they're all not workable. | ||
| And there's a tiny amount of stuff that was workable, but the institutions turned on all of those people. | ||
| So you're going to have to seat people. | ||
| The Panthers are, in general, what I call anti-experts. | ||
| They're people who usually have the credentials. | ||
| They're known in the community. | ||
| People are very uncomfortable with them. | ||
| They'll talk to them privately, but they won't seat them on the main stage. | ||
| And some of these people are very tough to deal with. | ||
| I got Nassim Taleb in front of Congress, and Nassim is a very tough person for most people to deal with. | ||
| But the fact is that he's just As Jordan Peterson says, ultimately one of the most disagreeable people around, and he's public-minded. | ||
| He wants to protect the system against crazy risk-taking by bank heads who get the profits and then socialize the losses and the risk. | ||
| And, okay, so, you know, you're going to sort of keep this guy off to the side, where everybody knows his name, but nobody wants to deal with him. | ||
| Well, this is kind of a profile. | ||
| Who are the people who the system discarded between 1980 and 2008 for standing up, and who have some, you know, track. | ||
| Well, he's an egotist, he doesn't publish, she fundamentally is talking in her own language. | ||
| Those tells are the people that need to be back introduced back into the system if we're going to get the Panther effect. | ||
| So just to be clear though, so in terms of Trump, it seems to me that he is one of those guys, whether you like him or not, he was one of those guys that was on the outside saying something that was kind of real. | ||
| But he just went in with a sledgehammer. | ||
| So he may have some intuition, to take a very simple one. | ||
| I'm not saying he's a great intellect, but as Jordan has said right here, the guy's obviously a lot smarter than most people are giving him credit for. | ||
| Look, he has a certain kind of genius, and I haven't backed off of that, and he's got a lot of intuitions, not all of which are wrong. | ||
| That's not the issue. | ||
| The issue is, this is some surgical stuff. | ||
| If you're going to fundamentally try to fix, let's say, America's immigration issues, You've got to go in there with a nano-knife and be very, very careful because our country is multicultural. | ||
| It is never going to be a white nation. | ||
| Ever. | ||
| It's never going to happen. | ||
| And the way in which people who would intuit that something is wrong with our immigration policy, and intuit that it's been used, but they can't ground that in some sort of analytic framework, deal with it, sooner or later you start hearing these Well, the Mexicans are sending us their rapists. | ||
| Well, are there some rapists that are being sent or coming from Mexico? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| But you cannot, you can't do that without destroying the fabric of this country. | ||
| And, you know, this is where I, it's a pleasure to antagonize the far right. | ||
| You know, the Richard Spencer fantasies about racial purity, the amount of violence you would have to use if you tried to implement that, let alone the fact that it's a terrible idea. | ||
| Would be so enormous. | ||
| We don't even know what these people are talking about. | ||
| And it's important that you don't flirt with this. | ||
| You don't want more than a thousand people in the country carrying around citronella candles and saying things about blood and soil. | ||
| That's a very dangerous idea. | ||
| To fan the flames of. | ||
| And so you know the thing that I personally had the hardest time with Trump on was during the campaign he said this thing about we used to have a beautiful system if we had protesters at a political rally we'd rough them up and if you do that I'll pay your legal bills. | ||
| I thought did you just seriously write a blank check that if there's some crazy person here who chooses to stick a knife in somebody you're going to pay that person's legal bills? | ||
| That was the moment I realized that no matter what he might get right, | ||
| and no matter what he might intuit, he's playing a kind of sloppy game with the world | ||
| that's Russian roulette. | ||
| We can't have somebody in that office playing that game just the way we can't have Hillary Clinton | ||
| servicing this crazy narrative that gets us deeper and deeper in intellectual debt. | ||
| Right, so I guess what I'm saying is that, to me, all the good reasons that you guys are sitting here | ||
| and we're in the midst of this idea revolution is because of. | ||
| of the mess that he has now sort of created, versus if Hillary was in charge, I think all of our positions right now would be much worse, because we'd be thought of as crazier, right? | ||
| If all those institutions had just been fakely propagated by her. | ||
| It's good for us locally, but we've got two completely unacceptable alternatives in the system. | ||
| And it's this issue of just saying, I'm sorry if it's multiple choice, I refuse to answer this. | ||
| I'm not penciling anything in here because it's neither Hillary nor is it Trump. | ||
| It's fundamentally asking the question, who admits to being confused? | ||
| Who has the ability to think reasonably clearly? | ||
| Who has the ability to steel man, to echo, to go metacognitive? | ||
| And I don't see those skills here. | ||
| I think you have more comfort with this than I do. | ||
| I'm not saying he has those skills. | ||
| I'm just saying the room for those skills, this is proof of it. | ||
| Something has made room here. | ||
| That just seems obvious to me. | ||
| I'm not applying those skills to him. | ||
| I don't even know if it was intentional. | ||
| He took advantage of the feeble aspect of the system. | ||
| He correctly spotted that the thing was ripe to go after and he correctly understood that he could effectively be a third party candidate inside of the Republican Party and win. | ||
| Which never worked. | ||
| Right, never works. | ||
| So there's a kind of, you know, there's a kind of genius, a strategic genius there. | ||
| But the point is, what is the objective of the exercise? | ||
| And I think it's really to displace the rent-seeking elites with a different alternative set of rent-seeking elites. | ||
| And so that's not progress. | ||
| It's not the panther in the china shop by any stretch. | ||
| Now it does open the door here to the conversation that we're having, as you're arguing. | ||
| But I would argue that there's a There's this metaphor that we use over in evolution space, and economists have made a lot out of it, the adaptive landscape. | ||
| In which opportunities or niches are represented as peaks, and the bigger the volume of the peak, the more opportunity there is there, and then the obstacles to getting to a new peak are valleys, and the deeper the valley, the harder it is to cross. | ||
| This actually turns out to be useful for understanding all kinds of transition, transitionary phenomena. | ||
| You know, it explains how you get from one squirrel species to the next, but it also | ||
| explains what it's like to go from a system like ours that has become rickety across every | ||
| important structure to a new system that wasn't like that. | ||
| What would it be like? | ||
| Well, you're going to have to go through a heck of a valley. | ||
| What's that going to feel like? | ||
| Well, it might feel like you're electing somebody like Trump who's playing recklessly with, | ||
| you know, nuclear standoffs and things like this, and that the opposition is incapable | ||
| of doing anything. | ||
| But even in the face of somebody who would play nuclear chicken, they're still on about, | ||
| you know, Hitlerian stuff that clearly is not, it doesn't accurately map to the situation | ||
| at all. | ||
| And so that is what the Adaptive Valley sounds like as you begin to head into it. | ||
| It sounds incoherent, and that's where we are. | ||
| The incoherence is making room for a coherent conversation, and I don't know, maybe there are others, but somehow we're at the epicenter of one of those coherent conversations. | ||
| Would you believe that? | ||
| I mean, this is one of the questions that I have. | ||
| Where are the other groups of people who are willing? | ||
| I mean, wouldn't we be able to hear them from where we are? | ||
| Well, I think some of them exist. | ||
| I mean, some of them have sat here that aren't traditionally in this space. | ||
| You look at guys like Jason Whitlock and Clay Travis, who come from the sports world, who were calling this out from what they were seeing. | ||
| Yeah, but I would say it's sort of that they're still affiliated. | ||
| It's still close enough. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, where are these people? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I'd be happy to have any of them right here, you know? | ||
| I mean, I think one of the key questions is more of them, we should be finding more of them in the universities, is one of the great disappointments, or the issue that a lot of us are extremely angry at journalists. | ||
| And journalism. | ||
| But it's not because we don't want journalists in journalism. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| You're crowding out journalism. | ||
| You need to not stop journalism from occurring by saying that you're a journalist and keep doing hit pieces against the people who are actually trying to hold power to account. | ||
| Either you hold power to account or stop hitting the people who are going to try to hold power to account. | ||
| Stop defending power by pretending to hold power to account by going after the challenges. | ||
| And it's not only that, it's when we talked about the different kinds of fake news, and when everything was happening with you at Evergreen, well, how many stories did the New York Times do on it? | ||
| Stories, not op-eds. | ||
| Stories. | ||
| They did one, and it was appalling. | ||
| Yes, and it was very late into the story. | ||
| Very late, weeks late, and it was completely at odds with what the editorial page had twice gotten right. | ||
| So, yeah, it was a bizarre... No, it was not bizarre at all. | ||
| I would have absolutely predicted it. | ||
|
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Right, right. | |
| This is what you've been saying forever. | ||
| In fact, you did predict it. | ||
| I did predict it. | ||
| You did predict it. | ||
| Because Brett's story was counter-narrative, and almost perfectly counter-narrative, he could have gotten a story about this had he screwed up and said something slightly stupid, and then the story would have been largely about that. | ||
| But by not saying anything stupid, by facing down this mob as an anti-racist, and the fact is the mob was racist, The whole thing was exactly wrong and therefore it could not be reported and that's why it didn't occur, even though the school, I mean, it was on lockdown and they didn't report it. | ||
| So it's like clearly a news story. | ||
| I mean, the school experimented with Bigotry-driven anarchy, and the president told the police not to intervene. | ||
| That story is simple. | ||
| I mean, that was two sentences. | ||
| And not understood by people, that that's what took place. | ||
| So I think what a lot of people would wonder, then, is how does this happen across the board, basically? | ||
| Like, for example, just in the last two weeks, where Jordan really has now skyrocketed to a new level, virtually every article that I've read about him And usually they're from websites that you've sort of maybe have heard about or whatever. | ||
| But pretty much all of them are bad, or they're strawmanning him, or they're saying awful things about him, or he's part of this, they'll call him off, right? | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
|
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Or simply the voice of angry white men. | |
| Yeah, there's all these angry white men. | ||
| Meanwhile, I went to his thing last week at the Orpheum here. | ||
| It was a completely diverse group of people. | ||
| They were having an absolute ball. | ||
| People were out there in the audience with giant lobster hands on them. | ||
| People were having fun. | ||
| It was like going to a sporting event, really. | ||
| But what does it say that all of it, it's not just the New York Times and CNN, you know, my favorite two to attack, but it's that everywhere was all the reporting that should have been right on this. | ||
| Where was all the lefty, where was Mother Jones and everybody else that should have been defending you? | ||
| The progressive guy at the progressive school who is doing progress and fighting racism. | ||
| How does that happen across the board? | ||
| So first of all, part of the problem is that in order for certain processes to take place, there has to be no reliable venue that you can go to to get the alternative story. | ||
| And so, I don't know how it is that Mother Jones is compromised. | ||
| I must say, that hurts, that Mother Jones is compromised. | ||
| This is a publication... It used to be something we depended on. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| They called me further to the right than Breitbart. | ||
| I remember that. | ||
| Rise of the new extremists. | ||
| So, what happened to Mother Jones? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| It's one of two things. | ||
| Either it was compromised by some sort of intentional plan to compromise it, or it got compromised by... I mean, there's actually an intermediate. | ||
| It could have been compromised by forces that drove it into foolishness. | ||
| Or the hybrid is that some... | ||
| It may not even be a conscious entity. | ||
| It may be an emergent something. | ||
| But something knows which narratives threaten it, and it poisons them. | ||
| And the thing is, human beings, precisely because a human being cannot survive on their own, nor can they ordinarily switch lineages, people are terrified of being isolated from the group that is keeping them afloat. | ||
| And so, they carry that with them when they go to their jobs in journalism. | ||
| And so what kind of noises do you have to make before Mother Jones recognizes that there's no niche for telling a story in which the bigots happen to be bigots of color? | ||
| That's not a story that plays well on the left and Mother Jones doesn't play well on the right. | ||
| So exactly who would they be telling that story to? | ||
| They put themselves potentially out of business and the same thing that you know you find that One of the theories I have is the great oppression shortage, which is that we had thought that if we could get rid of really serious amounts of oppression, we'd get a much more diverse outcome. | ||
| It's gotten better by a lot, but it hasn't gone far enough for a lot of our tastes. | ||
| This is a puzzle. | ||
| It's an uncomfortable puzzle, but I think we should be working on it and say, okay, is there more seriously structural oppression that we didn't catch? | ||
| Are there some moves that we didn't, you know, so I've made the point repeatedly that maybe we have to pay women more because the burden of kin work of young children and elderly parents has been falling on female shoulders. | ||
| You know, I'm certainly willing to experiment with fairly radical ideas, but what I will never do is mandate equality of outcome or pro-rata shares of the population | ||
| because that's insane and it will cause all sorts of terrible things to happen. Now, I think what | ||
| has happened is that we've gotten very terrified | ||
| of where are we? Why is it that we didn't get a bigger dividend | ||
| in diversification? | ||
| It's pretty good, but it's not as good as it needs to be. | ||
| Okay, that's fair, but we should be thinking about it. | ||
| Instead, there's this idea of let's run it backwards and we'll say that whatever the extent is that the field doesn't represent the pro-rata shares that's a high-end field, that is the level of oppression. | ||
| I just want to go back and clean up something. | ||
| This actually is the reason that you have to fix the question of heritability. | ||
| I know that sounds like it comes out of nowhere at this point, but the problem is that genes are not synonymous with heritability. | ||
| There are multiple layers of heritability, including all of this cultural stuff. | ||
| And the point is, we've never figured out how those things interact. | ||
| I mean, I think I know how they interact, but we've never agreed on it as a field. | ||
| Once you do understand that actually there's a necessary way that culture and genes and other epigenetic phenomena interact, you will discover that there is a logic to why things fail to correct when you solve these structural obstacles to diversity. | ||
| So, recognizing that actually we were paying attention to too small a set of things to actually solve the problem is key. | ||
| But we can't even have that conversation yet because when you say, you know, that something is heritable, you immediately invite a terrible confusion. | ||
| And the organs that should be discussing this are just not equipped intellectually to address a problem like black racism against whites, which is a feature of the world. | ||
| Or we've created this very unrealistic picture of male-female relationships, | ||
| which doesn't have a very realistic picture of either men or women. | ||
| And we're shying away from the intellectually difficult conversations, | ||
| and we're having the socially and politically very difficult conversations. | ||
| But you did this to me. | ||
| No, I didn't. | ||
| Yes, you did. | ||
| And, you know, we're using a ton of energy fighting around the Thanksgiving family table, but we're not, like, getting quiet and getting thoughtful and saying, this is pretty interesting. | ||
| We didn't expect to be here. | ||
| How do we go further? | ||
| And none of, I don't think Mother Jones or NPR or CNN or the New York Times is intellectually equipped. | ||
| Plus we have this different problem that at least in the case of something like the New York Times, you've got this democratic donor class that doesn't I think have standard democratic interests at heart. | ||
| And it has to figure out how do we keep getting whatever tax exemptions or favorable treatment we need by extolling something that sounds vaguely progressive. | ||
| And so you've got this face that is shown to the world that doesn't really look like what's powering it. | ||
| And that's where the superdelegates and the anger against Debbie Wasserman Schultz came in. | ||
| Which is like if you've ever seen one of the invitations, you know, for this much money you can have, you know, 30 seconds and you can get a photo taken. | ||
| It's like a menu of stuff that makes you sick. | ||
| Okay, well, why is that? | ||
| It's because fundamentally it's very expensive to say let's fix the problems of working America and let's actually ask if we're in a low-growth environment. | ||
| What does that mean? | ||
| Do we have a plan? | ||
| Can we fix our institutions? | ||
| Do we need to come up with more growth? | ||
| Do we need to invest in research and development to have a broad technologically-led growth revolution to raise people up? | ||
| That's not guaranteed to work. | ||
| Are we going to take risks together? | ||
| Are we going to come to some kind of common cause? | ||
| Are we going to be able to live with the fact that inequality is always going to be present? | ||
| There's no way to banish it. | ||
| You don't want to get rid of it, but you do want to get rid of the inequality that comes from, well, who's got the sharpest elbows? | ||
| Who's been using them to outmaneuver the sharpest minds? | ||
| Let's go depressing for a moment. | ||
|
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All right. | |
| If we don't do any of this, if we don't, and all of your efforts are futile, what does that actually look like? | ||
| Because I think a certain amount of people that have jobs and struggle and gotta pay the bills and everything, they can tune into some of this conversation. | ||
| We're sort of in it all the time, right? | ||
| But they can tune into a little bit and be like, ah, maybe I could speak up more, or maybe I could share this video more, or tell my cousin about this or that. | ||
| But for the average person, I don't think they really know what to do. | ||
| What if? | ||
| We just kind of fail. | ||
| What does that actually look like? | ||
| Let's scare some people into waking up then. | ||
| It's not my usual tactic, actually. | ||
| I think the problem that we face is that we are mapping what's going wrong at the wrong level, and we see dozens of things that don't work, and we imagine dozens of solutions that we would have to come up with. | ||
| And that's not what's going on. | ||
| What's going on is actually one or a couple of things are way off and they are causing symptoms to emerge across the body politic and across civilization. | ||
| If we don't do anything, the power of the tools that we are now playing with technologically and the number of people on the planet and the Just a simple quantity of resources that they utilize in a lifetime and take off the map because they can't be recovered. | ||
| That will doom us. | ||
| How will it doom us? | ||
| Well, we may not get to starvation because we have an AI problem that nobody's figured out how to address. | ||
| Will you get an economic collapse that will cause warfare that goes nuclear? | ||
| That's quite possible. | ||
| Will you fail to notice the danger of a Carrington event taking out | ||
| transformers that could literally knock out a third of the country's electric power for six months? | ||
| Well, that's bad. | ||
| But it's not nearly as bad as the fact that we have nuclear power plants | ||
| depending on that power. | ||
| And if you don't continue to feed them electric power, and you don't get them diesel fuel in time, they turn into nuclear volcanoes. | ||
| So basically what we've built is a system that is ultra-fragile. | ||
| And the solution involves recognizing that you don't want to go after these things a la carte. | ||
| You want to go after them all at once. | ||
| You want to recognize what the, to use your term, the generating function Uh, is that has caused all of these fragile systems to be erected without anybody building the proper protections into them. | ||
| And then the question is, well, what would you have to do to address that core function, to patch the stuff that needs to be patched, to address the core function so it doesn't produce any more of these things, and then over time, replace the fragile parts of the system with something reasonable? | ||
| Is there a time that this has ever been done correctly? | ||
| I mean, like, I can think, you know, okay, the Enlightenment, we got good ideas that expanded freedoms, right? | ||
| And expanded intellect and science and things like that. | ||
| But this is a very different thing. | ||
| We're talking about truly the physical nature of what we have. | ||
| Yeah, I think, you know, look, you can, I can easily imagine that we squeeze 300 more years with good luck out of this world by repeatedly getting lucky through event after event. | ||
| But I don't think we'll get 300 more years. | ||
| And I do think that if we don't change, if we don't update for where we actually are, we're not going to have the right minds working on the right problems. | ||
| And I think there's two levels of the problem. | ||
| The first is that almost nobody's allowed to actually talk and think about where we are with institutional support. | ||
| So if you want to remain in the good graces of the institutions, which is the best plan we have, and I don't know how to make this work, you have to fundamentally start letting in the people who the institutions absolutely, under all circumstances, want out. | ||
| So this is sort of us, in a sense, and why Rogan isn't on television, or something like that, at a very, I'm giving you the simplest level. | ||
| He can be on Fear Factor. | ||
| But he can't be talking about the need to get ayahuasca to troops with PTSD as a normal thing. | ||
| On cable television. | ||
| Maybe he's had a million offers that we don't know about. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't know either. | ||
| So previously we've said this thing about real-time with Bill Maher has been the airlock between the world of kids with YouTube stations with really interesting ideas and grown-ups with institutional support who can't talk about real ideas very much. | ||
| And then we saw what happened when Somebody like Milo started to go through that airlock and you can be a fan of Milo or not a fan of Milo but they picked him off with old footage that had been out there for forever because he threatened to break in. | ||
| So my claim to you earlier is that I believe that almost all of us as we start to gain traction We'll be picked off because the fragile nature of our institutions doesn't want to be in conversation. | ||
| You get the Kathy Newman, Jordan Peterson interaction and suddenly it's an unscripted event and the challenger, who's a 97 pound weakling, defeats the sumo wrestler and it doesn't look good, right? | ||
| So assume that you could actually get The right iconoclasts, the right challengers, seated at the table, who would change the nature of the discussion. | ||
| Because you can't have these discussions about, you know, string theory, a great theory, or the greatest theory. | ||
| That's like the typical debate you would typically have. | ||
| Like, why have we wasted 30 to 40 years on something that is clearly not panning out is a different kind of a discussion. | ||
| With that kind of thinking, the next question is, if we confronted That we might have a low-growth world, that we have growth-predicated institutions, and that we may have a climate change problem, but it's not so easy to dial back carbon emissions, because carbon emissions are almost synonymous with an economic growth, and you might have warfare on the one side versus despoiling your planet on the other side. | ||
| So it's not just like fewer plastic pool toys from China, but actual war counterbalancing The issues with the environment, then you have this question like, no, we don't know. | ||
| We may not be able to solve these problems, but at least you'd have people working on them. | ||
| And I think to Brett's point about, you know, like, I have no idea how to diagnose our nuclear power stations and how much of a risk and whether they're on fault lines or there are tsunamis by the state, you know, until we had Fukushima, I had no idea that that was, you know, a real thing. | ||
| We are probably going to rely on some close calls. | ||
| Maybe there will be a ballistic missile that gets fired and suddenly people will stop saying, oh, you know, they're just posturing and North Korea is really just trying to do this for economic concessions and it'll all be fine. | ||
| Because it has all been fine. | ||
| Since 1945 It's pretty much all been fine at a global scale. | ||
| We haven't really restarted history in earnest in that way for so long, and that allows people to do some sort of extrapolation from the data. | ||
| Nassim says is that the turkey thinks the farmer is his best friend right up until Thanksgiving. | ||
| There's another aspect to this. | ||
| I often find that people who are interested in thinking deeply about the future are often divided into two camps. | ||
| There are those who are motivated by fear and there are those who are motivated by hope. | ||
| And the problem is trying to talk to them simultaneously. | ||
| If you talk to the people who are motivated by fear, you destroy your ability to talk to the folks who are motivated by hope and vice versa. | ||
| But there is a way in which There's sort of a... I can't be certain, but the force that has kept things from changing substantially, the force that has kept us on this trajectory is, on the one hand, a very dangerous force, and it's very tempting to anthropomorphize it. | ||
| I personally actually call it Goliath. | ||
| But Goliath is not a creature, right? | ||
| It is not a creature It behaves sort of like a creature in many ways, but it is actually composed of various things, various emergent phenomena. | ||
| There are people who staff Goliath, and they have a perspective on things. | ||
| And I think it is important, actually, maybe to try to get a message to people who may not even realize they're part of it. | ||
| But the message is something like this. | ||
| The process of transitioning to a world that functions is, on the one hand, daunting. | ||
| On the other hand, it would be pretty exciting to live in that period of transition. | ||
| And it would give people... I mean, we're talking about a process that would take several generations, I'm pretty sure, to get there. | ||
| But we have a planet of seven and a half billion people, most of whom have nothing meaningful to do, right? | ||
| That doesn't have to be that way. | ||
| And creating the will to change means actually living in a much more vibrant time that is much more rewarding. | ||
| It would be much more rewarding to live in. | ||
| What's more, many of the people who have been committed to this trajectory are bound to be noticing the same fragility that we are all noticing. | ||
| They may be ready, actually, to recognize that the transition would require some unusual kinds of thought processes, things that they can't source at the university level very easily. | ||
| So you could sort of get them to a place where they'd have to jump ship? | ||
| The question is, how do you bootstrap them? | ||
| effort to re-envision civilization. | ||
| Well, it's going to involve some stuff that doesn't sound right at first, going outside of the institutions, looking at people who you're going to have to work extra hard to figure out whether they actually know anything. | ||
| But, that having done so, there's more hope for the future than there would otherwise be. | ||
| So, you know, if the folks who are committing us to this trajectory have kids and grandkids, well, They might wake up and they might recognize actually it's time to do something different because... Well, it's also a call to adventure. | ||
| I mean, you know, one of the things is that I think we are both the hope and fear people. | ||
| Like, this is pretty depressing even to me, and I'm here. | ||
| But on the other hand, I know that we're probably going to have one more absolutely amazing drunken dinner. | ||
| I guarantee it. | ||
| And, you know, the call to adventure is incredibly interesting. | ||
| The key problem for most people is that it's not that they don't have anything meaningful to do. | ||
| It's that they're getting their meaning from the fact that they're feeding a family by doing something repetitive. | ||
| And if that non-repetitive, if that repetitive thing can now be automated, let's imagine. | ||
| Do we still want them to get their meaning from doing some repetitive thing, or do we want them to get their meaning more people, to get it from searching for something that is new, to try creation? | ||
| Is there any way we can fundamentally... People talk about redistribution of wealth. | ||
| I'm much more interested in the redistribution of risk-taking ability. | ||
| If somebody has a great idea and they need to be able to take risk on it, and they don't have the funds, then that idea dies with that person. | ||
| And if the person who's making up my hotel room has a great idea and they can't afford to pursue it, | ||
| I would like to redistribute some of my ability to take risks towards that person. | ||
| And that's much more important than talking about redistributing the fruits of labor. | ||
| Now, if more people feel excited, and this is why we can't go too gloomy and doomy, | ||
| because fundamentally, even if it's the end of history and it's the end of humanity, | ||
| fundamental, I'd love to have at least a last stand and to fight shoulder to shoulder | ||
| in some meaningful, glorious, decent way. | ||
| Well, I know you mean it at the most personal level, because I think you've said this publicly, but you said to me privately in the midst of your whole insanity at Evergreen, you said to me how proud you were to be publicly standing with your brother. | ||
| This is meaningful. | ||
| And I think maybe that's why, I mean, my show is funded by Patreon. | ||
| We're putting all these videos out for everybody, but there's a select group of people who have said, I want these things to be heard, so I will pay. | ||
| If I don't pay for it, how do I know that I'm actually part of this? | ||
| I want to bleed with you. | ||
| Because all of us are taking risks. | ||
| Some of us travel with security details, like Ayaan, for example. | ||
| There are multiple ways to die. | ||
| And one way to die is in your bed at 98, never having risked or tried or cared about something, never being willing to gamble with the full stack. | ||
| And I guess what I'd love to see is that energy that we saw. | ||
| I remember going to see Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins as your plus one. | ||
| And it was just like everyone was introducing them. | ||
| Dave Rubin, can you sign this? | ||
| Can I get a picture? | ||
| How do we fundamentally open this up a little bit more? | ||
| Because all the time people are telling me, look, here are my skills. | ||
| I'm a mechanical engineer. | ||
| I've got an ex-wife and a kid, and I have to make certain payments. | ||
| But above and beyond that, I've got this many hours. | ||
| Is there anything I can do for you? | ||
| And we are not calling. | ||
| I remember that moment after 9-11 where People wanted to know, what can I do? | ||
| And somebody said, go shopping. | ||
| Yeah, Bush said, go shopping. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Well, that was wrong. | ||
| I remember when Katrina hit, we all sort of said, how do I get to Louisiana? | ||
| Can I make it happen? | ||
| My partner and I reached into our pocket and just handed somebody Silly amounts of cash because he was going to go down because we wanted to be in. | ||
| And this urge to be in and to do something to support people who are taking risk is this buried thing that the institutions can't stand because they're actually quite vulnerable to it. | ||
| And that's why, like, you see one of these articles, a hit piece on Jordan, they'll probably try to find some really funny picture where he's... Yeah, right, right, right, it's always a bad picture, yeah. | ||
| There's one with my friend Peter Thiel, where he's got this really strange expression, like, let me guess what you're about to write about a person who's always behaved decently and generously to me. | ||
| You're gonna create that character that you do, which isn't a real person, but the press just loves it, right? | ||
| And so each one of us is gonna have our shadow character, Which is how the press is going to see us and our actions are going to be translated into that. | ||
| And I think Douglas Murray said it best. | ||
| He said, you know, it's just the water's not too bad. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And once you actually make it beyond this, okay, so maybe they destroy us. | ||
| Maybe they write the hit pieces. | ||
| Maybe they neutralize us as is their dream. | ||
| But to have fought and to have people who will actually stand, I mean the best part of standing up with breath through the evergreen thing is was I didn't know whether I'd buckle or fold. | ||
| I didn't know whether, you know, everyone was saying, well, Brett will apologize because they all apologize. | ||
| You watch. | ||
| It's just a matter of time. | ||
| And to actually fight feels good. | ||
| Yeah, well that's why I feel like this is personal for us. | ||
| I can tell you my personal. | ||
| But I don't even mean just, but Evergreen, I mean this whole damn thing. | ||
| It's there, like this is it. | ||
| I wake up, it's what's on my mind. | ||
| I go to sleep, it's what's on my mind. | ||
| Well, I wish that, I mean to be entirely honest, I wish that, I wanna get back to actually solving The problems that the battle is crowding out. | ||
| So, you know, I've been trying to push out all of my techniques for unspinning the news because even though, you know, I'm very proud of like the four quadrant model and the Russell conjugation and all of that theorizing. | ||
| But I want other people to operationalize it and build computer models where you can get machine learning. | ||
| There's this new thing, the Knife Media. | ||
| Maybe it has a little bit of a shadowy backer, but so far the product has been really good. | ||
| So I just treat it like the Christian Science Monitor. | ||
| I don't believe in Christian science, but that was a pretty good newspaper. | ||
| And they are trying to unspin the news using everything of mine that they can get their hands on and every conversation with them. | ||
| They're just absolutely genuine about detecting bias. | ||
| And I would rather, if that's their passion, they take the models and run with it. | ||
| And I get back to thinking about how do we fix our theory of economics or how do we figure out any way around the Einsteinian speed limits because that's really what I'm supposed to be doing but right at the moment I feel like Our group has been just fighting for the right to have a space and to breathe and to disseminate the fact that, yes, the whole narrative structure is crumbling. | ||
| There's no way to sustain it. | ||
| You can watch CNN and you can just see it just doesn't make sense anymore. | ||
| I must say I'm a little bit excited to see who will be discovered by this process. | ||
| There are many more to come, and it will be interesting. | ||
| Each one that shows up brings something interesting to the table. | ||
| I mean, I can't wait just to open my email after this, because I get those emails every day. | ||
| I'm an engineer, I want to help you. | ||
| I'm a graphics guy, I want to help you. | ||
| I just don't know how to respond to them. | ||
| I don't know what to do either. | ||
| We send them all to a file, we've got all of them, but I kid you not, I'm not being sarcastic. | ||
| Literally thousands of emails, people saying, I want to get in this fight, I don't know what to do, here are my skills. | ||
| Well, and that's the thing, is that this is actually a characteristic that exists in lots of people. | ||
| Lots of people are actually perfectly capable of being brave and decent and, given something worth fighting for, will do it. | ||
| And I think that's actually what the institutions fear most, is that there are actually a lot of people sort of waiting to be activated in that In that way. | ||
| One caution that I would offer is that there is a very uncomfortable period at the point that you have been identified and it attempts to disincentivize you continuing in that direction. | ||
| Many people not realizing that they feel like they're hanging by their fingers from the cliff and they reverse course. | ||
| Chelsea Manning did this recently. | ||
| She got spooked off of hanging out with the wrong folks and retreated and turned on them, which was a terrible error. | ||
| Anyway, the advice is If you're going to stand up, you will be targeted, and it will be very uncomfortable, but you have to stick to it long enough to get across the gap. | ||
| If you don't get across the gap, you will have the sense- You can't hedge it out. | ||
| Yeah, you can't hedge it out. | ||
| If you're gonna go- If you're gonna go, you have to go. | ||
| Yeah, so did you realize that immediately? | ||
| I mean, the places that put you on were basically Fox and other right-wing places, and that evil Rubin report, and et cetera, et cetera. | ||
| Did you immediately say that, okay, if I'm doing this, I have to do it? | ||
| Well, you gotta understand, this goes back to what Eric was saying at the beginning. | ||
| This is not the first one of these that we've encountered. | ||
| And they're all different, right? | ||
| This one was way different. | ||
| I was not expecting to become well-known as a result of alleged racism. | ||
| I mean, that just sounds like a preposterous turn for my life to have taken. | ||
| But nonetheless, the experience, once you survive one, You know something that only the tiny percentage of the population knows, which is that there is... You can do it. | ||
| You can get across. | ||
| And having gotten across, you never want to go back because you're free. | ||
| And so, anyway, the point is, people are carrying this huge cognitive load because they're not free to think, to see, to do all those things. | ||
| The cost to shed that load is not small, but having shed it, you can live without it. | ||
| Once you've paid the price of the attempted stigma and it's fallen short... | ||
| I love that. | ||
| I mean, that's what we've been looking for, right? | ||
| Like, that's it. | ||
| That's when Douglas said the water's not too cold. | ||
| I mean, that's it. | ||
| Get on the other side. | ||
| You will somehow survive. | ||
| Or not. | ||
| I mean, look, I don't want to sell, because I can tell you, I mean, I've been I've been sick to my stomach. | ||
| I've been absolutely terrified. | ||
| When a hit piece is done on you or your friends and suddenly everybody's talking about the hit piece you have the feeling That your life is over. | ||
| And it's not for the faint of heart. | ||
| I don't want to incentivize people just to, you know, go ahead and make the leap. | ||
| Nobody's saying it's safe. | ||
| Nobody's saying it's safe. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But what it is, is it is often survivable. | ||
| And, you know, I make this joke that Before I traded in my respectability, I was cowering in front of department heads. | ||
| And after I traded it in, I started flying around in private jets, hanging out on private islands, because in part, there is this network of people who thinks for themselves in a way that is absolutely repugnant to the institutions. | ||
| And there are resources. | ||
| There are opportunities. | ||
| It's very difficult, but I want to absolutely say that there are no promises, because if you don't do it well, you should not just stand up. | ||
| You have to think that you can possibly make the jump, and you have to be prepared that you're going to be smeared. | ||
| This is something I wanted to bring up, which is I've tried to document the ways in which people have been brought And the last time we really cleaned house in the intelligence community was in the mid-seventies with the Church and Pike commissions. | ||
| And we learned a ton about these untraceable ways that Goliath, which sometimes is emergent and sometimes conscious, can take somebody down and you don't realize that the story that got written about you was planted by the government. | ||
| And if that sounds crazy to you, You actually have a problem because this is fully documented. | ||
| There's no conspiracy theory. | ||
| This is conspiracy fact. | ||
| What we don't know is what happened since Church Pipe. | ||
| And this is why, for example, the Nunes memo, you know, I think it's completely a partisan stunt, but it's a partisan stunt that may actually have an underlying reality as well. | ||
| Those two things are not one. | ||
| You can't say, well, it's because it's a partisan stunt that I don't want To investigate. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And so, you know, there's this thing where Eisenhower said, beware the military-industrial complex in his final farewell address. | ||
| And I would say that that needs to be updated to beware of what I call TIM, technology, intelligence, and media. | ||
| And there's something about the fact that all of our personal information is housed on the servers of a few large tech companies. | ||
| The intelligence community has not been vigorously, vigorously, vigorously investigated for a very long time. | ||
| And the media is in some sort of relationship to both of those that we don't understand. | ||
| And so my real concern is that the people who threaten this dominant, gated institutional narrative have to beware of Tim. | ||
| Technology, intelligence, and media working behind the scenes in ways that we don't understand, which is the expectation post-Church Pike Commission. | ||
| That is, the default should be That this is the way the world normally works. | ||
| That wasn't an anomaly. | ||
| And if you believe that that doesn't happen anymore, absolutely, the burden of proof is on you if you want to take it up. | ||
| Please. | ||
| But otherwise, we have to imagine that fundamentally we're all vulnerable to having all of our email in a Gmail account, all of our personal interactions in a Facebook account, what we are doing with direct messages being read by Twitter engineers as per this... I don't love James O'Keefe, but he seems to have unearthed some stuff at Twitter. | ||
| We should be very, very worried. | ||
| You followed him. | ||
| I mean, I said that was good, what you last said. | ||
| That was pretty solid. | ||
| You guys are brothers. | ||
| I'm not even sure where to go from here. | ||
| So I think we've been going for about two hours. | ||
| I think we can do about three, I think. | ||
| I feel there's more here. | ||
| I also want to do some questions with the audience. | ||
| Where else am I not thinking right now? | ||
| What are the spots that I'm not thinking about? | ||
| Because, you know, I view most of this through such a media political lens. | ||
| that when I hear the parts that are your expertise, I go, wow, that's really, it's totally ancillary | ||
| related to this. It's right on the level, but it's a little out of the lane that I usually | ||
| look in. What else are people not thinking about? Well, one thing I would just point out here, | ||
| that again, maybe this is cleaning up from the beginning of the conversation, but Eric and I | ||
| have a little advantage, which is that we don't have two different languages. | ||
| Eric speaks math in a way that I don't speak it, but because we've been keeping up with each other intellectually on stuff that matters, there is no distance to cover when, you know, if I need to define some term in some new way in order to address some problem, I can just say, here's the definition I need you to Temporarily accept. | ||
| So that is a kind of a model for something that we need to bootstrap where people don't have a sibling relationship that would cause that kind of alignment. | ||
| And the necessary tools involve High degrees of tolerance, the assumption that somebody, this is an assumption that does not work on Twitter, but the assumption that somebody is making sense, and if it sounds like what they're saying does not make sense, then you haven't understood it correctly yet. | ||
| They may be wrong, but they're not saying something... Do you want to talk about double island rules? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
| So, a friend of ours, Mike Brown, A friend would lend us his island and we would run a science camp on this island. | ||
| A friend would lend you the island? | ||
| He's a good friend. | ||
| He's a good island. | ||
| An amazing guy. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| No, this is like our adopted uncle. | ||
| Just a very wise man. | ||
| And he was the CFO of Microsoft and ran the NASDAQ. | ||
| And one of the rules on the island is that if you had a group of really interesting people You had to have two rules in order to have a productive discussion. | ||
| One is that a very smart person who is saying something obvious should be assumed to be saying something subtle until proven otherwise. | ||
| And that an intelligent person who is saying something that is wrong should be assumed to be saying something counterintuitive until proven otherwise. | ||
| And that those two rules cleaned up a lot of confusions. | ||
| So there are these hacks and tricks to make sure that your conversations don't get bogged down in displays of ego. | ||
| All of us, when we're insecure, we start peacocking, and you have to be able to call each other out, so you have to have some terms to go metacognitive. | ||
| Another thing that I think we worked up together, but has another name, sometimes people call it the pre-trans fallacy, I used to call it the Victor-Victoria problem, because of this movie, Victor-Victoria, the story of a woman playing a man playing a woman. | ||
| And so the problem was, is that if you saw a woman, did you see a female impersonator? | ||
| Or did you see a woman playing a female impersonator? | ||
| Right? | ||
| And so Brett's version of this is the one that I use the most, because I think it's the best, which is, is a whale a fish? | ||
| It's a very innocuous question. | ||
| And almost everyone who's educated... Can I give you the soup? | ||
| It's a mammal. | ||
| Well, that's certainly true. | ||
| But is it a fish? | ||
| But is it a fish? | ||
| See, I was giving you the most simple answer. | ||
| Is it a fish? | ||
| By what definition makes something a fish? | ||
| So this is the middle brow answer that almost everyone gives, and the idea being that the lowest level, you know, the whalers used to say the whale fishies because morphologically swims like a fish, looks like a fish, got a tail, obviously a fish. | ||
| One level up from that, you say, Oh no, it's a mammal. | ||
| It crawled back into the sea many years ago and evolved in water and it breathes air and has live birth. | ||
| But the problem is one level above that, the thing reverses back because you're bracketed on Darwin's phylogenetic tree between lampreys, which are clearly fishes. | ||
| All I'm doing, Brett, is stealing your thunder. | ||
| And coelacanths, let's say. | ||
| And so all mammals are fishes. | ||
| And so if somebody says that a whale is a fish, you don't know whether you're dealing with somebody who's just completely uneducated or somebody who does this for a living. | ||
| And that confusion of not knowing whether you're sophisticated relative to somebody's point or unsophisticated is one of the ways in which great conversations just derail. | ||
| So you have to make a list of everything that stops a great conversation from occurring. | ||
| Or another one would be, you know, that you have one term that's playing Two different roles. | ||
| I think Daniel Dennett called this a deepity in one context or in another case. | ||
| So sometimes you have to find two dissimilar things that are the same things when sourced from the same abstraction. | ||
| Other times you have to de-conflate two things that have the same name. | ||
| So there's some large toolkit for keeping high-level conversation from going awry that can be pushed out, but fundamentally, you know, you're no longer in a position to teach this stuff to students because you have to be outside of the university. | ||
| And I think if you look at Brett's situation in Microcosm, you know, what pressures is Jordan under or Lindsey not to teach something that's super interesting and to compete in the world of ideas? | ||
| Where will we teach this? | ||
| That's the question. | ||
| In some sense, we're teaching it here. | ||
| in the Rubin Report by example, and I'm sure every time we make a mistake, | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| somebody will note it, and they'll make that a little clip, and they'll play that in infinite rotation. | ||
| Which is a beautiful thing. | ||
| It can be. | ||
| I mean, this is what, you know, Peterson wanted to do the online university. | ||
| Greg Gutfeld wrote a really interesting piece, I think he referenced both of you guys, actually, | ||
| in the piece, about how, you know, in college, you can learn some stuff from teachers, | ||
| but there's so much wrong that you're being taught now. | ||
| He said, wait a minute, you all have YouTube, you have an iPhone and you can download podcasts. | ||
| And it's like, man, you can learn from Peterson and Weinstein and Weinstein and whoever else there is. | ||
| And the tools are yours. | ||
| You might lose something by not being, you know, the formative parts of growing up. | ||
| It's like raw milk cheese. | ||
| Mostly it's delicious and it's really, really good, and occasionally there's a little bit of danger. | ||
| So, you know, fundamentally, if you want pasteurized Kraft singles, that's up to you, but you're not going to get the good stuff. | ||
| Are you not getting offers left and right? | ||
| I have, I mean, I don't know how much you're free to talk about, but you know, it's like, I would imagine that there's gotta be some brave administrators out there. | ||
| Brave, you know, people that have the donors and everybody behind them are going, holy cow, can we not? | ||
| Stand for free speech and free expression and bring in a bright biologist as well. | ||
| Well, I did get an offer from a school in South Carolina. | ||
| That was nice. | ||
| I'm not in a position to move my family to South Carolina, but the interesting thing is I'm getting tons of offers. | ||
| But they're small, offers to come talk here, there, to sit on a panel, these kinds of things. | ||
| In terms of replacing the two incomes that my family lost when we resigned from Evergreen... Yeah, to me, I don't think a lot of people know that part of it, by the way. | ||
| Your wife resigned as well. | ||
| You weren't just gonna... | ||
| Leave her to be hung out to be dry. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| There was no way. | ||
| I mean, she was on sabbatical as this whole thing unfolded, so in some way she was artificially insulated from the meltdown that happened. | ||
| But there was no way for either of us to stay on alone. | ||
| And I have zero regrets about leaving. | ||
| I miss teaching, but I have the sense that things were so toxic. | ||
| And in fact, I have friends who are still on the inside who send me updates on what's going on. | ||
| And, you know, it's gotten worse. | ||
| They've doubled down on every... | ||
| Is it fair to say that I was warning you about this for years? | ||
| You absolutely did warn me about this for years, and your point was that a state, a tenured position at a state college seems like bedrock, but the way this could turn around and evaporate out from under you will not be obvious until it happens, and then it did happen. | ||
| In any case, yeah, we lost both of our income streams because Heather was actually Evergreen's most popular professor at the point that we resigned. | ||
| I wasn't far behind, but that does put the pressure on to figure out what we do next. | ||
| And I will say, people seem to think that colleges should be vying to hire us. | ||
| I have the sense that, in fact, The whole thing unfolds as a kind of double-edged sword, where on the one hand, I think we've established that we have something valuable, that we know how to teach in a way that really gets students motivated. | ||
| On the other hand, I at least publicly have demonstrated that I'm willing to stare down the president of a college and call him out for putting us in danger, and there's a question about, I guess, what kind of personality defect would result in a person being willing to do that, and do I want to hire such a person? | ||
| I don't think that's actually what's the case, but I do think somebody deciding to hire me in particular is probably running a cost-benefit analysis in which, even if they're favorable to the idea, their fear about what could unfold and make them look terrible might be... I'm going to challenge you a little bit. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Fundamentally, I don't think that the issue should be whether they offer you a position straight away. | ||
| I think that what they don't know is that they should invite you to give a lecture on the latitude-diversity gradient. | ||
| They should invite you to figure out Will you give a lecture on predicting radically elongated telomeres from first principles due to breeding protocols in laboratory mice? | ||
| They should ask you, what is it that we don't understand about random mutation not being the engine of selection? | ||
| There are all sorts of technical puzzles that Brett's been very active on, where he may be right, he may be wrong, but you have to actually ask, and what they're going to use that's incorrect is they're going to use publications. | ||
| And because publications is this weird thing where if you're in the group, it's not that hard to publish. | ||
| And if you're outside the group, you waste infinite amounts of energy getting past reviewers. | ||
| And the people who are in the group say, I don't understand. | ||
| Why didn't you publish your stuff? | ||
| But they don't understand that fundamentally that it works very differently whether you're in grouped or out grouped. | ||
| I believe that the right thing to do is to have every evolutionary biology department ask itself the question, have they invited you to give a lecture on one of these technical topics? | ||
| Yes or no? | ||
| If no, then why not? | ||
| If yes, what did you like? | ||
| What didn't you like? | ||
| But fundamentally, it used to be the case that you could have a career and publish very little and have very big ideals. | ||
| You know, like Kurt Gödel published very little. | ||
| Other people published a ton. | ||
| That's the thing that hasn't happened, and it's a sign that fundamentally the departments aren't feeling strong and vital. | ||
| Because who the hell is an administrator? | ||
| What's a college president? | ||
| College presidents are people who raise funds. | ||
| The heart and soul of a great university is a department chair with a middle finger and a slush fund. | ||
| It says, we don't care about the administration. | ||
| We will sneak you into this place. | ||
| The great days of Columbia were when Isidore Rabi held a little enclave for everybody who was employed at high schools or CCNY who was worth their salt. | ||
| They could come and play at Columbia because fundamentally he was going to disintermediate the administration. | ||
| If the administration is the gatekeeper of your university, You are a second-rate institution. | ||
| Fundamentally, the power either resides with the researchers and the professors, or it resides in some place that's not capable of keeping up the standards of a great university. | ||
| That's a very important distinction. | ||
| So, places like Chicago, which are famously disagreeable, Which have a bad attitude are good places for somebody like Brett. | ||
| Some place that is fundamentally trying to make itself look good in the rankings and thinking about building beautiful new buildings. | ||
| You know, that's not a great place. | ||
| And my question is, how many great universities do we have left that have that courage to stand up where the professors are in charge and the administrators of the service class? | ||
| So, I would also point out this publication thing is It's particularly difficult because many good people think you can use this as a proxy because in general you can't, right? | ||
| Somebody with no publication record is often not serious. | ||
| But in my case I did publish my telomere paper and the story of what happened on the road to getting it published and then what happened after it was published is so preposterous that it resulted in my effectively becoming allergic to the idea of playing this game and the truth is I walked away from my graduate program and I started teaching and I kept doing my research work but I wasn't really even interested in having a degree from a system that would behave this way on such an important topic that actually held human health in the balance so there's a way in which | ||
| I don't think people know exactly what to do with me. | ||
| I went back and I got my degree at the point that Evergreen said, | ||
| we would like to hire you permanently because you're so popular with students, | ||
| but we can't hire you unless you have a PhD for accreditation reasons. | ||
| So anyway, I did go back and get the degree. | ||
| That was also an amazing situation where I had polarized my department. | ||
| How did I polarize my department? | ||
| I polarized my department by following things where they naturally led and | ||
| not being afraid to cross disciplinary boundaries to address questions, | ||
| which made me really popular with some folks and really unpopular with some other folks. | ||
| And at the point that I went back to get my degree, my advisor, Dick Alexander, | ||
| and Jerry Smith, somebody who had been an ally, he's a paleoichthologist, came out of retirement to fight a | ||
| battle to get me a degree. | ||
| Um... | ||
| There's something I can say on your behalf that you're really not in a position to. | ||
| So I knew Brett's advisor, Dick Alexander, who, one of the great four or five evolutionary theorists of recent times, A guy who predicted eusocial behavior and naked mole rats from first principles, so unbelievable intellect. | ||
| I held a conference at the Perimeter Institute where we were going to try to fix economics by taking an interdisciplinary approach, and I got to know him a little bit. | ||
| He started talking to me about how Brett was his top student, and I said, did you ever write this down? | ||
| He says, no. | ||
| I said, will you write a letter of recommendation for Brett It's telling me where he stands. | ||
| I don't want to influence it all. | ||
| So he wrote this beautiful letter of recommendation saying, you know, I've been teaching for 40, 45 years, whatever it is, this is my top student of all time. | ||
| And, you know, that top student isn't interested in getting a degree, necessarily, isn't interested in necessarily expending more and more energy on meaningless games with referees at journals that are clearly gated. | ||
| And now is the time to actually re-evaluate that. | ||
| And the cheap way to do this is just say, Hey, do you want to come give a talk in our evolutionary theory group? | ||
| Because evolutionary theory, as I tweeted recently, is always at odds with identity politics because it fundamentally weaves together diversity, which they like, with differential success, which is a proxy for inequality, with heritability, which is a proxy for privilege. | ||
| And so evolutionary theory has been taking on the chin intellectually. | ||
| It's been swimming upstream for a long time. | ||
| Fundamentally, invite him for a talk or don't. | ||
| But know why you did or why you didn't. | ||
| And that's, I think, the right way to begin the process. | ||
| But I've been not very surprised, but I've been very disappointed that the university system can't rally because Evergreen was simply farther ahead in a process that seems to be affecting almost all institutions of higher learning. | ||
| All right. | ||
| I want to get to some audience questions. | ||
| Let's do it. | ||
| Because I know we have a gajillion. | ||
| Is there anything else that you absolutely want to hit? | ||
| We can do it next time. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| You have anything? | ||
| No, I don't think I do. | ||
| What I will do, though, is we'll take a one-minute break. | ||
| I feel I owe you both, you know what, I can tell, the Weinstein brothers like water, because you both finished your water within about 10 seconds. | ||
| I was gonna give you some of my water. | ||
| Do you have a little scotch or something? | ||
| Oh, we can do it over drinks, all right. | ||
| Let's do it over drinks. | ||
| All right, we're gonna take one minute, we're gonna set up some drinks, maybe a pee break, we'll see what happens. | ||
| Give me two minutes max, one to two minutes. | ||
| Stay right there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ | |
| All right, the idea revolution, now with booze. | ||
| All right, first off, guys, it's a truly, it's a joy and an honor to do these with you and be friends with you guys and everything. | ||
| Thanks for having us. | ||
| This is amazing. | ||
| For the record, Eric and I are on the whiskey and Brett is on the rum. | ||
| You know, do what you may with that information. | ||
| All right, here we go. | ||
| Super Chat, looking forward to round two. | ||
| All right, there you go, that wasn't a question. | ||
| Do you think the uncanny valley could be a perception issue writ large as opposed to just a robot slash CGI, as opposed to robot CGI facial appearances? | ||
| More specifically, is there a point where people start perceiving shortfalls from the ideal so acutely that progress goes unnoticed? | ||
| I think you both saw the question sort of. | ||
| Yeah, whoever's asking that is definitely on to something. | ||
| Yeah, okay, very good. | ||
| Let's do it. | ||
| This is interesting, and I think I've sort of said this to you once before privately. | ||
| Brett, as a lifelong progressive, aren't you partially responsible for what happened at Evergreen? | ||
| Is this just karma? | ||
| No, Dave, I'm totally responsible. | ||
| Yeah, this is a thing. | ||
| Everybody assumes this, but the fact is I've been fighting postmodernism since 1992. | ||
| I never wavered. | ||
| I taught, I armed my students with the proper tools to see right through this stuff. | ||
| So you might be able to hold me responsible for allowing this to go on elsewhere in the system without recognizing the danger, but you certainly can't hold me responsible for Participating in it because I didn't. | ||
| I actually spoke up from the beginning. | ||
| You know, sometime we'll do you with Peterson here and we'll talk about how progressivism and postmodernism... Let me just also say that Brett has been fighting this throughout and I've been saying that from... I've been seeing it from afar. | ||
| There is zero responsibility. | ||
| This is not a new position. | ||
| This is an old position. | ||
| And Brett was probably early in my life telling me, you have to watch out for this, Eric. | ||
| In fact, I failed a class in 1992 for standing up to post-modernism with a biological perspective. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Then I fully accept your answer. | ||
| Well, this one we're going to have to kick to another one, but Eric, can you please tell us more about your insightful four-quadrant model and the type of individuals who fit within each group? | ||
| Well, first off, you can catch that on this show, and you can catch it, you also discussed it with Sam, and you did a little bit with with Rogan, if I'm not mistaken. | ||
| I don't remember that, but the Knife Media just came up. | ||
| Oh, they just wrote a huge piece. | ||
| They just wrote a huge piece on it, and they gave four or five worked examples, | ||
| and then they said for homework, apply it to Ayan Hirsi Ali, James Damore, Peter Thiel. | ||
| So I think they're running with it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I would just add, it is hard to get the first time, but like many complex ideas, | ||
| running yourself through it a few times so you get it is the key, | ||
| and this one is so important to be able to unspin the fake news, | ||
| that it's really even if it takes you three times through it's well worth it. | ||
| The Kathy Newman, Jordan Peterson interaction is the thing that, to be honest, is making it make much more sense to many more people. | ||
| I was just gonna say, the Knife Media piece that they did on it, because they used so many graphics and everything, I think really did help. | ||
| I was just listening to Brett's second appearance on Rogan's show and was wondering if he thinks that the intellectual dark web is new game B, and if so, how does he think we might best test the theories and ideas that the intellectual dark web puts out? | ||
| The Intellectual Dark Web is definitely a Game B to the Academy's Game A. And the thing is, the way to think of it, is that Game B, I mean, Game B was actually never intended to be the name of anything. | ||
| It was a placeholder for a superior alternative to a feeble system, a system that has become strong but feeble at delivering the goods. | ||
| And that's what civilization looks like. | ||
| So yes, an endeavor to think more clearly than the system can think itself is a type of Game B, and there are many others. | ||
| I think this one's actually for me. | ||
| Have you ever had a prospective guest attempt to dictate what could and couldn't be discussed in advance of a show? | ||
| If so, did you agree to their terms and still have them on or politely tell them to devour a bag of dicks? | ||
| Patreon love coming soon. | ||
| Never, 100% never. | ||
| I always say to my guests that there are no rules and that we don't edit for content. | ||
| One time I had a professor say that there was a specific period of history he didn't want to talk about because he wasn't an expert in it. | ||
| Eric seemed to say that 2008 burst the deregulation narrative. | ||
| How do you answer economists that say we caused a credit-fueled and regulatory-directed boom-bust? | ||
| That one's gonna be hard to do quick. | ||
| Yeah, it's hard to do quick. | ||
| You know, I think that to some extent, as an emergent phenomena, we found stories and narratives to compress volatility temporarily only to have it roar back. | ||
| I think that the problem is that the lack of a credible source of growth does make liars of all of us when we are in the institutions. | ||
| Particular individuals lied more than others and that helped to fuel it. | ||
| Maybe some people thought that self-regulation could work, but that was fraught with principal-agent problems, and if you don't bail out the system, maybe you teach the system a lesson, but it's too costly, given how everything is. | ||
| I don't know how to do that. | ||
| Yeah, you can't really do that quick. | ||
| Oh, I had one that I loved, and then the screen moved. | ||
| Oh, I love this. | ||
| As children, what was the biggest situation you both teamed up against to accomplish? | ||
| Well, I don't know how to answer that question. | ||
| Maybe Eric will have something. | ||
| But I will say, because of the different ways that Eric and I responded to our scholastic dysfunction, Eric was five years ahead of me in school. | ||
| He's three and a half years older, but he was five years ahead in school. | ||
| So, in some ways, there was less overlap than there might have been in situations that otherwise would have emerged. | ||
| Do you have anything? | ||
| Nothing that I can talk about. | ||
| I'm a former state director of Wolfpack. | ||
| I stepped down for reasons similar to you, Dave. | ||
| Should I publish my experiences? | ||
| Publish your experiences. | ||
| Let's see. | ||
| Theresa May just announced she will present new measures to tackle, quote, abuse speech to protect, quote, female, BME, and LGBT people. | ||
| What are your thoughts? | ||
| I mean, I'm pretty sure we're probably all in agreement. | ||
| Well, I may be in a different position than the rest of you. | ||
| My belief is that I'm pretty absolute on free speech when it comes to ideas. | ||
| And when it comes to privacy or abuse, my feelings are slightly different. | ||
| And we have a Fourth Amendment as well as a First Amendment. | ||
| And what can be done online is fairly terrifying. | ||
| We have to balance things that are actually precursors to violence or really very dangerous forms of speech. | ||
| But in general, for ideas, there should be very little, if any, protection. | ||
| And Europe has a different history with hate speech than we do. | ||
| in part because of the Second World War, but I think that we should not abandon our own | ||
| experiment with not having hate speech as a protected category for the world of ideas. | ||
| We do have to worry about speech that represents some clear and present danger | ||
| or turns over privacy. I don't want somebody being able to say that they can turn over all of your privacy | ||
| because it's free speech and protected. | ||
| I break a little bit with our community in that I'm not a free speech absolutist. | ||
| When we say free speech in the U.S., we have lots of adjustments to free speech. | ||
| Yeah, although I think most of the people relatively around us are for the Fourth Amendment, but that's a whole other... But we may have to reinterpret what that means in an era where anybody can publish anything and then the whole world can see it. | ||
| Could Brett be the biology answer to Jordan's liberal arts program, money permitting? | ||
| P.S. | ||
| Eric, I mean absolutely no offense, but I think your facial cysts may harm your message. | ||
| Brett, your apathy to university reminds me of me. | ||
| What was the question? | ||
| Could you be the biology answer to Jordan's liberal arts program? | ||
| You mean, could I play the role of the biologist in that endeavor? | ||
| Well, of course. | ||
| The thing about biology, though, is... | ||
| It is such a gigantic field, just by virtue of the number of organisms, the number of systems within those organisms, what happens when you put the organisms together, that there's no such thing really as a biologist. | ||
| You can't be expert in it all. | ||
| But, if you wanted to pick a place to go to see the landscape clearly at all those different scales, evolution would be the one. | ||
| It's the unifying principle behind all the other kinds of biology. | ||
| So, yes. | ||
| This is really good. | ||
| If I could just take one second on that one. | ||
| There are always a small number of people who comment on my facial moles, for example. | ||
| And I just wanted to say something actually directly into the camera, in particular for all the young women out there who are concerned that their appearances are used to limit them and to denigrate them. | ||
| And my feeling is This is none of anybody's business. | ||
| If you want to make these comments, feel free. | ||
| But most importantly, this is no bar. | ||
| This is no problem. | ||
| And if this is what you're fixated on on this show, you're really telling us much more about your own level of intellectual engagement. | ||
| And, you know, particularly young women, stand up for yourselves and don't let anybody give you any guff. | ||
| You're fine the way you are and nobody really cares. | ||
| Thanks. | ||
| Well, I appreciate you taking that moment. | ||
| And as you can see, I'm reading these on the fly. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, no, it's good. | |
| All right. | ||
| Your complaints about the journal gatekeepers for biology are very often arguments used by the dissident scientists in climate change. | ||
| Do you think that is fundamentally different or the same effect could be happening there? | ||
| There's a lot there, but it's a good question. | ||
| Well, it's about time this came up. | ||
| Let me put it this way. | ||
| I'm a believer in anthropogenic climate change, but I am very concerned about what I don't know. | ||
| What I have seen in biology tells me that the incentive structures inside of publishing and inside of career making in academia cause corruption. | ||
| I can guarantee you there is corruption inside of climate science, and I do not know enough climate science to be able to tell you which stuff you can trust and which stuff you can't. | ||
| I believe that the consensus that we are causing this, the stuff I can check, you know, we | ||
| have a very simple chemical model of what the alterations to the atmosphere that come | ||
| from CO2 and methane would cause in terms of heat trapping, so that we know that this | ||
| is true chemically at a level that doesn't require fancy models, right? | ||
| And we know that we're changing the composition of the atmosphere with respect to those compounds. | ||
| So the globe ought to be warming. | ||
| Is it warming? | ||
| It appears to be. | ||
| Is there liable to be a bias in favor of papers that flatter people's pre-existing expectations? | ||
| There will be. | ||
| And so this is part of the predicament, is there's too much resting on our ability to detect what's going on to allow a corruption of the system to pollute what we know. | ||
| But I would say If we go back to what we were talking about earlier, about the fact that the failure across civilization is really a bunch of symptoms of a small number of problems, my feeling is we should go great guns after the climate issue. | ||
| Even if it turned out not to be true, the things that you would have to do to fix it are necessary to the solution making that we would have to do anyway. | ||
| And so my feeling is... So in other words, even if it's exaggerated, it's still doing solar, doing green, all of these are good things in general. | ||
| But let me say, I know a lot of smart people who have skepticism at one level or another about the climate stuff. | ||
| A lot of us are nervous about what we don't know in that space. | ||
| What I would say is we should go after it because if you're wrong about the climate change being anthropogenically driven and dangerous, and you address the problem, you've still solved something important, and if There's no question that that is the place where the smart money would go, even if you have a tremendous amount of uncertainty about the models and the data. | ||
| I'll just throw in a bonus question there on this one, but it's interesting because I know how thoughtful you are and careful with your words, but when it comes to this one, and even the way you said you've been waiting to answer this, there's something about this topic that brings out something so insane in people. | ||
| That literally, for all the controversial people that I've had on my show, the most hate I ever got was because of this book right here, The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels, with Alex Epstein. | ||
| And he wasn't even denying climate change, but there's something about that, that even for people in your respective fields... Right, so it's phrased as, surely you don't disagree with the consensus of 98% of scientists, and the answer is, anything that sounds like that, is going to immediately trigger a counter-reaction, which is, why are you approaching that topic in that very tortured and very strange fashion? | ||
| And the problem is very similar, I think I pointed out, to maybe we jumped the gun tying HIV to AIDS, and because the gun was jumped, a lot of people said there's not enough evidence, and they hung on with that too long. | ||
| So just like with the Nunez memo, I can see you're playing politics. | ||
| Does that mean I shouldn't take the topic seriously? | ||
| I can see that the IPCC may be strong-arming people or creating an artificial level of consensus. | ||
| Does that mean that the underlying problem isn't a problem? | ||
| This is one of these typical problems that the indicia is one of coercion and people who are anti-coercion in general will go the opposite way and often be led into error. | ||
| So I would also point out, there's something that in particular caught my attention, which is a story that unfolded in the Yamal Peninsula in Russia, in Siberia, where some, actually ironically enough, some petroleum workers were flying in a helicopter and noticed a geological phenomenon that they couldn't identify. | ||
| And it had turned out to be a couple of giant craters. | ||
| And for a while we didn't know what they were. | ||
| And the hypothesis was that these were actually explosive releases of methane due to novel warming. | ||
| And that hypothesis survived a hypothesis test, which is they went down into these craters and measured methane levels, which were through the roof. | ||
| So, what people do not understand about the climate is that the parts that are certain Are very frightening. | ||
| The amount of frozen methane in the Arctic is absolutely gigantic and we are playing with suddenly releasing a huge amount of methane that will take the question of climate completely out of human control. | ||
| Now, do I know for sure that there's nothing in that story that is going to come back to haunt me? | ||
| I don't, because I'm not a climate scientist. | ||
| But as somebody who's capable of checking various parts of the story, the fact that something is going on that is actually creating novel geology. | ||
| In fact, we don't even have a word for what these craters are. | ||
| The closest word we have is pingo. | ||
| Pingo is a phenomenon where frozen water causes the soil to lift up out of a hole, right? | ||
| This is not a pingo, right? | ||
| We don't have a word for what this is. | ||
| An explosive release of methane. | ||
| So, what I would say is, the fact that you've got very simple chemistry that predicts we've got a problem, and then you've got novel geology saying something new is going on, that's enough to scare me into saying, emergency, let's deal with it, even if the complex models are not secure. | ||
| And I would say, stop strong-arming, quite so obviously, quite so much, and you will find that more of the skeptics will sign on I am worried about this, and I do think it's very real, but I also think that anybody can see the heavy hand of coercion in trying to create the consensus, and it's creating one of these backlashes. | ||
| Unfortunately, you get very smart contrarians, like Freeman Dyson, who are going to be the challengers. | ||
| And so fundamentally, I think it's a very dangerous situation where you know where you want to get to, and you decide to cut the corner, and that creates the backlash. | ||
| I mean, I had a little of that myself. | ||
| I was just like, why would I want to deal with this topic again? | ||
| No, I mean, because again, anything you try to tell me I can't talk about is going to create some number of people to say, I've got to talk about that, because that's just strong-arm. | ||
| On a more personal note, I hope you know the answer to this one. | ||
| So what people don't know about you, I think, is that you're an incredible musician. | ||
| And every time I'm with you, you grab something, it doesn't even have to do with music, and you make music out of it. | ||
| I'm not a musician. | ||
| And what's that crazy, wacky thing you have in your house? | ||
| What's that thing? | ||
| The Anclone? | ||
| Yeah, that thing. | ||
| Yeah, people need to Google this thing because you were playing. | ||
| But the question is, what make and model piano do you play? | ||
| And you're a great pianist, too. | ||
| He plays any piano the way I said it. | ||
| You are, just, come on, stop being humble for one second. | ||
| It's a Kawhi upright. | ||
| I had a birthday party and Sean Lennon, who you know, said, do you mind if I bring an instrument? | ||
| I said, no problem. | ||
| He brought an upright piano and he never picked it up. | ||
| And he left it? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So wait, I have to say though, the story about Harry giving Eric a guitar and telling him to tune it but you don't have to play it, that results in Eric having picked up, how many instruments can you play something on? | ||
| I mean, more or less, it's all theory. | ||
| None of it is musical ability. | ||
| It's all theory. | ||
| And then the idea is that each one is just a slightly different interface into this abstraction. | ||
| And so it looks like, OK, you play N instruments, but that's not at all what's going on. | ||
| It's just, here's the underlying secret, and any instrument affords the same opportunity. | ||
| I mean, I've been there. | ||
| You're playing the ukulele. | ||
| You're playing the piano. | ||
| You're playing that thing. | ||
| You're banging drums. | ||
| The word intersection is no fun anymore. | ||
| But the intersection between math, language, and Eric has also picked up many different languages, | ||
| not fluently, but the point is enough to get by, you know, Turkish, Russian, I mean, | ||
| the point is there's something interesting going on with Eric and the ability to abstract | ||
| these very particular things so that he can jump from one to the adjacent one. | ||
| If you agree to cripple yourself so that you will never achieve mastery, | ||
| you can pick up a very large core very, very quickly by rearranging through this trick of sort of 80-20ing, | ||
| you know, do 20% of the work, get 80% of the benefit. | ||
| And almost no education is structured this way. | ||
| But if you actually wanted to educate people like this, you could suddenly have an entire population of presumably learning disabled kids who could suddenly do so much more than they ever imagined. | ||
| Because everybody who plays the guitar, they have a lot of positive reinforcement. | ||
| If you play the piano, you're doing scales and learning to read music in two different staffs for forever before you get to anything interesting. | ||
| And so if you make the world look much more like the guitar where three or four chords unlocks, you know, 85% of the music that you ever want to play, you can do that with anything. | ||
| You can do it with language, you can do it with mathematics, you can do it with biology, we just don't teach that way. | ||
| I believe Tom Lehrer is still alive, not that Mr. Lehrer would want to admit it, alright? | ||
| What are your thoughts, oh no, let's forget that one. | ||
| Star Wars or Star Trek? | ||
| I think I know, I better know your answer at this point. | ||
| I hate to say it, but I'm more Star Trek than Star Wars. | ||
| I know. | ||
| This is where I get tossed out of the intellectual dark web over Star Wars. | ||
| I knew that was going to be it. | ||
| Let's see. | ||
| Thank you, Eric. | ||
| As a gay man, my answer to shallow idiots. | ||
| Your comments say far more about you than they do about anything about me. | ||
| Boom. | ||
| Thanks. | ||
| Let's see. | ||
| scientific objectivity is impossible for whenever challenged | ||
| with what they believe to be true, to engage in the necessary neuronal wiring | ||
| inevitably goes against self-preservation. | ||
| Not a question, but. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, that's, well, if I understood it correctly. | |
| I think what the person is saying is that in order to do scientific thinking well, | ||
| you actually have to have a kind of perverse, relationship with your own well-being. | ||
| And in fact, Luca Turin I don't think he's got it quite right, but he said you have to be bipolar because you have to be able to be enthusiastic about a new idea and then to go after it viciously in order to see if it's true. | ||
| And there is something to this, that a willingness to follow the truth wherever it leads is inconsistent with an obligation to protect yourself no matter what. | ||
| And still it moves. | ||
| I mean, that sums it up. | ||
| And still it moves. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| A hundred year prediction closer to 1984 or Brave New World? | ||
| That's a good one. | ||
| Well, I guess it depends which way all this goes, right? | ||
| Neither. | ||
|
unidentified
|
If we get to a hundred years, it can't be either one of them. | |
| If we get to a hundred years, it will be, and I don't mean to claim it, it will be some game B that succeeded from somewhere in the world that taught us what to do next. | ||
| And if we don't do that, what will be left here will be unrecognizable. | ||
| That would be my guess. | ||
| I know you were both traveling today, so I don't know that you can address this specifically, but any thoughts about the current stock market plunge? | ||
| There's... I barely saw the underlying... I mean, my concern is that the level of volatility and the clean path up can't possibly be sustained in a world that's this nutty. | ||
| And so the mystery is not The claim that the world goes crazy, it's that the world goes sane and does so spontaneously, it's the climb up that seems a little bit nutty to me. | ||
| So I would say buy while it's low, unless it's going to go lower. | ||
| He is an expert, I'll tell you. | ||
| Oh, I like this question. | ||
| Tips for someone with learning disorders. | ||
| Yours? | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
| How severe are your learning disorders? | ||
| If they're severe enough, you need to come up with an entirely different tool kit or you won't make it. | ||
| Those tools exist because every subject is much easier than the people who wish to make money teaching it would have you know. | ||
| So for every single subject that can be systematized, there is a systematization that allows you | ||
| to get 80% of the power with probably 5 or 10% of the effort. | ||
| And so the key question is you have to prove that you have the superpower to rearrange | ||
| the subject to disintermediate the people who get paid for teaching it, which will always | ||
| push you towards mastery, which is a question of getting the last 2 or 3% out of the system. | ||
| And so the good news is that you can rearrange any subject to learn most of it very, very | ||
| quickly. | ||
| The bad news is that it will feel terrible because you will be told that you were doing | ||
| the wrong thing and dooming yourself to a life of mediocrity as a jack of many trades, | ||
| master of none. | ||
| But in fact, the problem is that the jack of one trade is the connector of none. | ||
| Good luck. | ||
| OMG, this is easily the most invigorating session yet. | ||
| I feel compelled to rejoice in the new dawn of reason. | ||
| All right, I'll take it. | ||
| This is good for both of you guys. | ||
| What is the most compelling argument you've heard for a creator and the most compelling evidence against it? | ||
| Wow. | ||
| In under two minutes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
The most compelling argument for... Are you gonna think, because I can just go? | |
| Yeah, you go. | ||
| Fundamentally that there has to be a boundary condition or there has to be no boundary condition. | ||
| If there's no boundary condition that results in the creation of everything, then presumably it's cyclic and closed and somehow catapulted into reality out of necessity because that which is not precluded must exist. | ||
| It's not a very terrific argument, but it's a question of logo mocking and the redefinition of the word creator. | ||
| What's the best argument against it? | ||
| It seems to me that everybody who tries to speak about creators with specificity runs into the problem of why your version and not somebody else's version so that the only version that survives is an abstract version. | ||
| And the abstract version fundamentally is largely denuded of the reasons that we talk about creators to begin with. | ||
| Okay, I now have my answer. | ||
| I was going to give you a pass. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, no, I want this one now. | |
| The best argument for a creator is the regular pentagon on the pole of Saturn, which looks like a rendering error in a simulation that didn't invest heavily on the poles of Saturn. | ||
| I thought it was a septagon. | ||
| Is this where you guys come to blows? | ||
| It's not a septagon, it's an octagon. | ||
| But in any case, that's the best argument. | ||
| I've never heard anybody make it, but I looked at it and thought, could it be? | ||
| The best argument against a creator is the fact that there are 300 sextillion stars in the visible universe and that that | ||
| number is so gargantuan that no creator who gave a damn about us could possibly have | ||
| created that much other stuff. | ||
| It just doesn't make sense as a creation. | ||
| Just delay this with the night sky. | ||
| But the point is what we see in the night sky is like actually our local neighborhood. | ||
| It's not even outside the galaxy for the most part. | ||
| So the point is, we're looking at a few thousand stars that are our nearest neighbors, and the universe goes on for 306 trillion stars, which is, I promise you, if you look into how big this number is, it will make your mind hurt. | ||
| The number of You would have to name more than one star per second for every second the universe has existed to even have named them all. | ||
| So what's the point of all that? | ||
| Are you saying it's more than billions and billions? | ||
| Just say billions, yeah. | ||
| That's where I got with Carl Sagan. | ||
| I've listened to Brett speak about evolution as hardware and software. | ||
| Hardware evolves slowly and software can evolve more quickly. | ||
| When talking about software, are the changes at the level of DNA or memetic? | ||
| Oh, the software... Well, first of all, I should be cautious. | ||
| Memetic, I would argue, is cultural. | ||
| So, memes are passed on between members of the same species. | ||
| Our software is largely memetically taken on, but it is also Partially, and not an insubstantial part, generated on the fly. | ||
| As we take on the lessons that our parents and other members of our species give us, we then deploy them in the world and discover how they're not nuanced, and we discover everything from how to operate our limbs to how to understand people's facial expressions. | ||
| So, the point is, software is largely mimetic. | ||
| It is partially learned in a non-mimetic way. | ||
| It is not genetic. | ||
| The analogy is that the genes program the hardware and the hardware just like your home | ||
| computer is Nothing without a software package that allows it to be | ||
| functional All right. We got about three minutes left | ||
| Is monitoring your position on the Pareto distribution a wide way of understanding when to switch games if success | ||
| is a synonym Synonym for production for example, are you in the right | ||
| job or neighborhood or field of study, etc? | ||
| Ooh, I have to be honest with you the Pareto distribution. | ||
| It's a good question, but it's not phrased in an easy way. | ||
| Okay, so Search costs are always high, and part of the problem for some entrepreneur would be to try to figure out how do you really match people with the appropriate mate, the appropriate geographical locale, the appropriate training program. | ||
| Nobody's ever solved that problem convincingly. | ||
| Most of us stumble into our lives, don't think that there's any way of optimizing this yet. | ||
| If you think that you have a way of fundamentally figuring out how to match people up with what they're supposed to be doing, there's a multibillion dollar business for you to found. | ||
| Good luck! | ||
| Let's end on this one because I think for so much of my audience that focuses more on the political side of things, I think it'll be a nice way of getting us there. | ||
| Would we have better luck trying to grow the Libertarian Party or convincing people to eliminate the two-party system and run on individual merits and ideas instead? | ||
| For me, it's just like, well, the party itself actually is ripe for hijacking. | ||
| They have no stars anymore and at least they're on the ballot. | ||
| So I like some idea around that. | ||
| But I wouldn't do that. | ||
| Frankly, I actually wouldn't bank on any of the existing parties, whether they're third parties that you think might be ascendant or whether they're the two major parties. | ||
| I would say we have discovered that the founding fathers built a system that had many of the | ||
| right ideas, but it had some flaws in it, some of which it's clear why they didn't | ||
| spot them. | ||
| But that in order to get to a new realm, we have to go one of two routes. | ||
| One route involves... | ||
| some sort of a major revision, like a constitutional convention. | ||
| And I must say, this is the last thing I want to see. | ||
| I think it would be a disaster. | ||
| You're right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
This moment would be terrible. | |
| It would be a disaster. | ||
| Yeah, it would be a circus. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It would end very badly. | ||
| The other way to do it is a kind of a game B approach, and to look at the structures | ||
| of the system and to understand that you can alter it through a mechanism that is non-coercive | ||
| and that spreads because it makes sense for people to adopt it. | ||
| So nobody legislated that we would all have smartphones. | ||
| They didn't need to because we adopted them to get the benefits of the smartphone. | ||
| What you want to do is recognize that the opportunity to fix civilization, the one that makes sense, involves creating a what used to be called a glide path, or what I would call | ||
| the foothill of an adaptive peak, that causes people to adopt because it makes sense for them | ||
| to do it, and as it unfolds, it deploys something that takes a good first guess at where | ||
| we're going, and then increases in its effectiveness as it assesses how well it did | ||
| relative to values that, frankly, all reasonable people share. I would say, first, take a look at Arnold Kling's | ||
|
unidentified
|
concept of progressives, libertarians, and conservatives. | |
| According to him, the thing that matters most to progressives is oppression, what matters most to libertarians is coercion, and what matters most to conservatives is throwing over the lessons hard won from tradition. | ||
| It would be insane not to be worried simultaneously about oppression, coercion, and loss of tradition. | ||
| So fundamentally, to be libertarian is to have an undiversified portfolio because you're so offended by the excesses of the other two wings. | ||
| So, the answer cannot be libertarianism. | ||
| It cannot be conservatism. | ||
| It cannot be progressivism. | ||
| It has to involve tensions and dialectics between all of these things. | ||
| And if you're going to think about trying to do something fundamentally new, now is not the time to have a constitutional convention because the epistemic contamination and pollution is so pervasive that we don't have the clarity that we would have from something like British oppression. | ||
| But fundamentally, try to listen to somebody else, try to hear the other side of the story, and listen to those three axes, and develop in yourself, to become a full human being, a reverence for the willingness to fight oppression, the willingness to fight coercion, and the need to uphold the lessons that were so hard won, that were handed to you by your ancestors, in their parting gift to you, as we say in the Jewish tradition, L'dor V'dor, from generation to generation. | ||
| And somehow, if you're in any one of those three camps, you're sort of missing the point. | ||
| That's a beautiful answer, my friend. | ||
| This has been a pleasure for me. | ||
| Thanks, dude. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's been great. | |
| I'm gonna treat you guys to some steak. | ||
| How does that sound? | ||
| Excellent. | ||
| Sounds pretty good. | ||
| You guys like steak? | ||
| All right, well, really, well, one more time, really, it's been a pleasure. | ||
| Lime. | ||
| Yeah, I am learning as I'm doing this. | ||
| All right, thank you guys for watching. | ||
| We've got a regular show coming up on Wednesday, and yeah, we'll take, keep throwing in the questions, and I have a feeling they'll be back, and we'll see what we can do. |
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