June 29, 2018 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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🎵Outro Music🎵 🎵Outro Music🎵 | |
| Alright people. | ||
| We are live on the YouTube. | ||
| I've got the lobster, and I've got the hair. | ||
| Sounds like some sort of 70s... Could that be a rock band, or is that like... It could be some kind of violent flick, or a mafia movie or something. | ||
| Or a violent rock band. | ||
| A violent rock band. | ||
| Yeah, all right. | ||
| I've wanted to get you guys together. | ||
| You two have never been seen on camera before. | ||
| I think that's true. | ||
| As far as you know. | ||
| I did appear in front of Jordan, but we never intersected on stage at the Masonic when you decided I should open... When you played your mean harmonica? | ||
| The harmonica solo. | ||
| Out of all the zany moments that we've had in the last two months, would you say that bringing Eric Weinstein, mathematician, out on stage at the Masonic to play the harmonica and have 3,000 people give him a standing ovation, would that be the top That was good. | ||
| That was good. | ||
| It worked really well, too, because it turned out he actually could play the harmonica, which is a good thing if you're going to try it in front of 3,000 people. | ||
| It was a first for me. | ||
| I didn't play in front of a smaller crowd before. | ||
| It was a bit of an eye-opener. | ||
| It was pretty sweet. | ||
| It was a good night. | ||
| Yeah, all right. | ||
| I want to cover 100% new stuff for the next two hours. | ||
| There's a bunch of stuff, obviously, that we've been hitting on on tour and some things that we've been sort of catching up on as this has all been going on. | ||
| So I thought the place to start, I think, would be something that I've been starting a lot of the shows with when I go out there and I do a little intro. | ||
| And I get everybody going, warming up for Jordan. | ||
| The idea that we're starting to win, and when I've been saying win, there's a feeling in the crowd of like, whoa, maybe all of this madness that we've all been talking about for all these years, maybe enough people have woken up now that there is something shifting. | ||
| So I've brought that up a bunch, and you've sort of picked up on it on a couple of the shows and talked about why winning isn't necessarily the way we should view this, or what winning actually is. | ||
| So I thought that would be a good place to kick us off. | ||
| Well, it's more what winning actually is, you know, because one of the things that has to be contended with in the current situation is that Especially in the United States, but also in the rest of the Western world, there's a political divide. | ||
| Americans have been voting 50% Republican and 50% Democrat for four elections, pretty much split right down the middle. | ||
| And there can't be any final victory by one side over the other, because everyone has to live together. | ||
| So the victory is, how can we continue to live together peacefully and productively? | ||
| And we have to figure out the pathway forward to that. | ||
| But then I think there's another kind of victory that's deeper than that, that's on the horizon, which is that I think the narrative that underlies our culture as a whole has to shift. | ||
| And I started to think about this when I was working for a UN committee about five years ago. | ||
| I worked on a committee on sustainability for the Secretary General and I had a chance with the people that I was working for and with in Canada to rewrite the underlying narrative, because it was very pessimistic. | ||
| It was a real Cold War narrative, North against South, and capitalists against socialists, and doom and gloom on the horizon. | ||
| And it seemed to me to be outdated, really, by about 40 years. | ||
| And I started to read a lot of the economic development and ecology literature, and mostly what I found was that Things are getting better globally so fast and on so many | ||
| different dimensions that it's almost inconceivable And yet no one seems to know that and in the aftermath of | ||
| that There's been about six books published in the last five | ||
| years that like Pinker's book and I think we got it right over here somewhere | ||
| Yeah, right, but but but by no means that's by no means the only book | ||
| detailing out a revolution in living standard progress and Technological progress for that matter around the world. So | ||
| I think there's two victories to be held here to be had here. One is to | ||
| Pull us, everyone, out of the pessimistic, apocalyptic, Cold War narrative that enveloped us for four or five decades, and to notice that the future could actually be bright if we were careful. | ||
| And the second is to make sure that the political dialogue in the West doesn't polarize to the degree that we start doing things that are fatally stupid. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Alright, so let's talk about the second part first, because I think that's where we've really been focusing, the political part. | ||
| So, it's interesting to note this 50-50 divide. | ||
| I don't think that's a reason. | ||
| I guess I have a strongly different take, and maybe it's the same. | ||
| We'll have to figure that out. | ||
| To me, the 50-50 mark is going to more or less hold as long as these two parties can calculate what's the minimum they have to give up to win an election. | ||
| And so the key issue is, what does the 50-50 composition look like? | ||
| And unfortunately, what it keeps looking like is the two parties becoming more and more nightmarish in my | ||
| mind and less trustworthy. | ||
| So the 50-50 continues to hold, but what it represents is a tension. | ||
| The tension increases. | ||
| Is getting much worse. | ||
| So the key issue is that those of us who are sort of center, I mean, I don't love the left-right spectrum, but let's | ||
| just use it as shorthand. | ||
| The center-left and the center-right have to see each other as our natural allies, and the center-left has to clean house and get rid of the nutty left, and the center-right has to get rid of the far right. | ||
| And that's the optimistic scenario. | ||
| I think winning is incredibly important. | ||
| Okay, well that's an interesting way of conceptualizing it. | ||
| Let me go a little bit further. | ||
| I think that we have to stop being apologetic about winning and what winning means. | ||
| Winning means that the advance guard of the radical center has to make this a safe and habitable space again. | ||
| And so in order to do that, the reason I try to focus most of my negative energy on the left is that it's my responsibility to clean house on the radical, bad, progressive movement that is Almost certainly going to fuel the far right. | ||
| It's not efficient for me to go after the far right because, I mean, of course I'm going to be anti-Nazi and anti-skinhead, right? | ||
| But... Well, we've talked about that a lot, too, because when we do the events, you know, all these hit pieces that come out, and we'll talk a little bit about that, when they say that your audience is all these angry white men and all of this nonsense, which every night it is proven to be false, It's like, yeah, you address that every night, talking about the bad identity politics of the right, but it's not something that fully... Well, the thing that's strange, and that ties into what you're saying as well, is that it isn't obvious to me who the dangerous right are. | ||
| You know, it's obvious to me who the dangerous left are, because they occupy the universities. | ||
| It's not just the universities. | ||
| This is so misthunk, if you will, that we have to really break the frame and reweave it. | ||
| The journalists keep saying, oh, you guys are focusing on a tiny problem afflicting a few universities that mostly nobody's ever heard of. | ||
| Yeah, that's definitely not true. | ||
| Well, the first thing is, is that it deflects the problem from the number one problem isn't the universities, it's journalism. | ||
| And so the idea is that the journalists are saying, you guys are complaining about this small story in the university. | ||
| It's like, no. | ||
| You're getting it wrong. | ||
| We're complaining about the number one story, which is the sense-making apparatus having gone haywire. | ||
| And if you think about these journalists that we're now dealing with as like the hermit crabs that have crawled into the shells that we used to know, right? | ||
| So whether CNN or NPR or National Review or whatever these structures are, it's a different group of hermit crabs. | ||
| The shells are the same. | ||
| And the great danger is that if you recognize the font at the top of the LA Times and the New York Times, you think you're getting the same product, but the product has become radically different. | ||
| And there was a problem back then. | ||
| I'm not saying that there wasn't. | ||
| And, you know, of course, the issue is that when we criticize journalists now, They think we are criticizing journalism. | ||
| Far from it. | ||
| We are praying for journalism. | ||
| The idea is that we are fighting this thing where they've got their fingers so clearly on the scale that everything is being tipped and what you're getting is a more distorted reality. | ||
| There's some point at which, and we have to talk about What happened with, I don't know how to pronounce it best, iatrogenics in medicine, right? | ||
| The idea that doctors have created a huge amount of the harm found in hospitals. | ||
| Medical errors are the fourth leading cause of death. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So now we have to talk not about iatrogenics, which is that which originates from the healers, but journogenics, which is what is the harm done to the truth by journalists? | ||
| So I have a technological slant on that to some degree. | ||
| Because one of the things that I think is happening, because I've watched large organizations degenerate, | ||
| because I've worked as a consultant for a lot of years now, it's really interesting to see how fast a large | ||
| organization that you think is semi-permanent can disintegrate. | ||
| It can happen, well, certainly within the span of a couple of years, and sometimes a lot faster than that. | ||
| Yes, well, and I think one of the things that seems to be happening to me is that as television dies under the weight of YouTube primarily, but let's say online video, and perhaps also podcasts, is that The remaining journalists, the hermit crabs who occupy the old shells, which is a good way of thinking about it, get increasingly desperate for attention. | ||
| And so they're pushed by economic pressure, in some sense, and situational pressure, to exaggerate the danger. | ||
| And it's a clickbait phenomena, essentially. | ||
| And it seems to me to be akin to what's happened with reports on the crime rate. | ||
| So, you know, over the last 25 years, The five major indices of violent crime have declined by fifty percent, which is absolutely, in the United States, a staggering decrease. | ||
| But the rate of reporting of violent crime has gone up substantially, and so people think that things are more dangerous now than they were, even though they're safer now than they have been since the early sixties, and they were safer then than they'd ever been in history. | ||
| So I think one of the things, and it's interesting to think about the technological forces driving this, because YouTube and podcasts do pose a fatal threat, I would say, certainly to television. | ||
| And so it makes sense to me that as the journalists become less professional and less in demand, and their message is chasing a diminishing audience, that they're going to get noisier and noisier about what's going on. | ||
| And the trick for everyone else who's being immersed in that is to stay sane and sensible while | ||
| the death throes play themselves out. | ||
| So wouldn't you naturally think though that more of them would start seeing this? I mean, | ||
| what we now see so clearly and that more of them would be jumping ship or is that old shell so | ||
| tainted or corroded that getting out of that thing is almost impossible? | ||
| It has to do with systems of selective pressure. | ||
| So Jordan raises an excellent point that the dying throes of an institution tend to be its most violent because it's in go for broke mode. | ||
| It's not worrying about tomorrow. | ||
| It's worrying about maybe buying another month or two or who knows what. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| But there's another issue, of course, which is that the formats are set. | ||
| So your news comes to you in a form that is more or less the same every day, and so you know how to consume it. | ||
| So everybody who listens to NPR has a pre-grooved template in their brain. | ||
| I'm going to get the top stories at the top of the hour, and then there are going to be this many pieces, and there'll be like a feel-good story. | ||
| So you know exactly what you're going to get. | ||
| Here, we don't know what we're going to get. | ||
| Maybe Jordan and I are going to come to blows. | ||
| Something could happen. | ||
| We're hoping! | ||
| You've got to change the drink. | ||
| But the other thing is that in the system of selective pressures, as the business model | ||
| fails, you have a fascinating phenomenon, which people who are willing to accept strange | ||
| blends of payment, so lower financial payment and job security, but higher psychic payment | ||
| stemming from the idea that they are crusading, are going to start to dominate. | ||
| So you're seeing many more people who are willing to substitute activism and the sense | ||
| that they are protagonists in a great story about the resistance, let's say. | ||
| Right, so that actually becomes more and more necessary as the stability and the viability | ||
| of the system degenerates. | ||
| Right. | ||
| If you could offer $200,000 salaries to good reporters in short order so that they could | ||
| start families and buy homes and have an easier life. | ||
| One of the things that you need to do is you need to pay people more if you're unhappy | ||
| with them. | ||
| I've thought that about professors actually. | ||
| If sociology professors had their salaries tripled, they'd be a lot less radically... | ||
| I learned this from the New Orleans Police Department, where at some point they had corruption | ||
| where people were ordering mob-style hits over police radio. | ||
| And I think what happened was that the new police chief came in and he said the first thing he did was raise salaries. | ||
| And the idea being that you have to have skin in the game, thanks to Nassim Taleb, as that phrase is proliferated, thanks Nassim, wherever you are. | ||
| And you need to give people something to defend, and so it's very important to pay the people that we are decrying all the time more money. | ||
| Yes, so we could say everybody who's listening should go online and donate to Quillette's Patreon page. | ||
| Yeah, Quillette's doing great work. | ||
| Quillette is doing great work. | ||
| But I'm saying that we should try to figure out how to get Vox more money as well. | ||
| And we should try to figure out how to get Slate and Salon and all of these things so that you can afford to pay people in ways in which they don't have to take a large portion of their payment as psychic gratification from having felled imaginary dragons. | ||
| But just to be clear there when you're saying that, you're not saying that the current people who have screwed this whole thing up deserve more money, right? | ||
| Well, actually, you're going to find I have a very strange position on this, which is, you know, my friend Peter Thiel and I talk about this all the time. | ||
| His model is that, you know, at some level when the economy isn't working, people engage in this kind of nonsensical fratricide of a type. And my point is slightly different, | ||
| which is this bad nature is always there, but it's like a compromised immune system. When the | ||
| economy starts to fail, you start to become aware of all of the pathogens in the | ||
| world because it can't fight them off. | ||
| And so it's very much the issue that if you're the guy with a compromised immune system, you're the only one aware of all the pathogens in the world. | ||
| And so at the moment, our collective economic immunity system is failing. | ||
| And I actually am much more pessimistic than you are, Jordan. | ||
| I see lots of reasons to be happy about the decrease in violence, but one of the problems with the accounting in these theories is that the sword of Damocles that hangs over our heads, you know, has gotten quite large, | ||
| and the number of threads holding it up seem very few in number. | ||
| And so you have to do the potential energy accounting, as well as the realized violence, | ||
| and also understanding that the nature of income inequality and differential access to financial markets and technology | ||
| is creating a lot of very justifiable concern that the post-World War II stability | ||
| is constantly in jeopardy. | ||
| And if we don't... | ||
| I personally think we should think about a once every five years above ground nuclear test to remind ourselves of what it is that we've pushed underground and we haven't seen for years because we are engaged in some kind of magical thinking that the world is fairly stable and that can turn on a dime. | ||
| So what kind of out do you think we could, for this crew of journalists that we're talking about, that we want to be doing more journalism. | ||
| We don't want them to be attacked or any of those things, of course. | ||
| What is the out? | ||
| So I get it, you could fund them in a way that gives them a little more breathing room. | ||
| But one of the things that I'm seeing when we're on tour is everyone that comes up to me after says, wow, you just gave us a little room to think. | ||
| So is there a way we, instead of beating these journalists, instead of getting the win where you crush them so that they're losers, what's the way that we can give them maybe a little room to get better? | ||
| Well, I mean, it's sort of standard behavioral practice in some senses. | ||
| This is something that was established by Skinner a long while back, even though he used threat and punishment as ways of altering the behavior of his experimental animals. | ||
| He also used reward. | ||
| But reward's a lot harder to use, because what you have to do is you have to watch very carefully, and then when you see an increment in the behavior that you want to promote, you have to reward it. | ||
| But it requires a tremendous amount of attention, and subtle attention, and so one of the things that we can certainly do, and that I've been trying to do to some degree with my Twitter account, is to is to distribute good news, good credible news, and good journalism when I see it, which is partly why I started to get engaged, say, with Quillette, because I think they're doing a credible job. | ||
| But one possibility is to distribute those pieces that seem to be increasingly reasonable, and another is to also leap to the defense of people when they're taken out as individuals. | ||
| And because one of the things that's happening now is that when an individual stands up and says something, especially that annoys the radical left, is that they tend to get mobbed and taken out. | ||
| And that's a bad thing. | ||
| It would be good if we could figure out ways of defending people against that. | ||
| I mean, Brett has been defended to some degree by the emergence of this group of people that Eric has been describing as the intellectual dark web, and so there's some strength in numbers there that might be usefully applied. | ||
| Can you just quickly talk about that, just on the personal level, because I think one of the most moving things that I've heard on this show is when I had you on, and I think it was with Brett, and you said that standing with him was really one of the most validating things that you've ever done in your life. | ||
| And it's such an example of what you've been talking about on the tour, that if you want to fix the world, then fix yourself a little bit. | ||
| And then the more that you do that, you might start affecting things around you. | ||
| And I think that that's, by helping your brother in this case, you were sort of helping the world. | ||
| Well, yeah. | ||
| That's nice, but the returns to me were high. | ||
| It has nothing to do with follower counts on Twitter or anything like that. | ||
| Of course, of course. | ||
| I don't think that you, you know, we should talk about positive models of masculinity. | ||
| Standing shoulder to shoulder with somebody in a fight is an important part of what it means to be complete in a masculine sense. | ||
| And I think that we are all incentivized by shows like Survivor, or The Last Contestant, or whatever all this stuff. | ||
| And they do the promos with the contestants on these shows, like, I'm not here to make friends. | ||
| I'm here to win. | ||
| OK, well, what is that? | ||
| That's corporate America teaching us how to stab everyone else in the back on your way to the top. | ||
| Which actually doesn't work very well, by the way. | ||
| It doesn't work at all. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Or not for that long, I guess. | ||
| If you can't follow, you can't lead. | ||
| And if you can't make friends, you're alone and vulnerable. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Maybe Stalin is the best example of a really malignant person who managed to kill everybody including, I think, his wife. | ||
| But it's very rare that anybody Yeah. | ||
| you know, does that really what these things are. | ||
| Because you have to remember that fragging is a possibility. | ||
| The lowest person in your organization can take you down if they're not happy. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And so I think that what people need to understand is that there is this lost art of standing with somebody | ||
| of standing with somebody that you don't 100% agree with, who says things that are like, | ||
| that you don't 100% agree with, who says things that are like, | ||
| you know, there are definitely things you do on stage that I'm not comfortable with. | ||
| there are definitely things you do on stage that I'm not comfortable with, | ||
| but if somebody comes to attack you, fundamentally, I know that all of those points | ||
| But if somebody comes to attack you, fundamentally, I know that all of those points I can bring | ||
| I can bring up to you face to face. | ||
| I assume it's true in reverse. | ||
| And so this idea of standing with people, Dave, you've been going down a libertarian path | ||
| that I'm uncomfortable with often, but somebody says, you know. | ||
| We hash it out publicly and privately. | ||
| Publicly and privately. | ||
| And there's stuff I'll do privately with you that I won't do publicly, | ||
| because I think that it is important to learn how to stand in units, | ||
| because otherwise you just get picked off. | ||
| And this is, you know, there's a topic that I wanna bring up a little bit later, | ||
| which is what do I think the IDW, since you've discussed it, gets wrong? | ||
| And one thing I think we get wrong is that the tribalism that we keep seeing is so toxic that we decide that we are anti-tribal. | ||
| It's not the right model. | ||
| You want to be adaptively tribal. | ||
| And adaptively individualistic. | ||
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Right? | |
| These things matter. | ||
| Groups matter. | ||
| Groups have specialized knowledge. | ||
| Very often, you know, my group has certain stuff, your group has a different, we engage in trade. | ||
| It is important to understand that tribalism can be adaptive. | ||
| And so, it's very troubling to me that the dumbest voices on the other side are causing us to overreact too simplistically. | ||
| So, standing with my brother, Yeah, there's a reason that, you know, people say he's like a brother to me, because it means that you will put yourself at great risk. | ||
| And, you know, I've taken a lot of slings and arrows for Brett, and there's a pleasure in it. | ||
| I'm not going to say that it didn't lead to sleepless nights and that I don't worry about friends that I've lost, but it's also, you know, in some sense good to know. | ||
| And people respond positively because it's in our It's in our makeup to say, well, that guy didn't run from a fight. | ||
| So do we basically have to just model it out for people in our behavior? | ||
| So, for example, when the New York Times piece came out on you about three weeks ago, the enforced monogamy piece, now the author of it, I'm not even going to mention her name, but if you want to, you can go ahead. | ||
| She sat in the green room with us, I think, on the first night in Toronto. | ||
| She was all smiles, friendly. | ||
| You even said to me how much you like her, and you introduced me to her, and we were chatting. | ||
| She seemed perfectly pleasant and lovely. | ||
| And then, of course, this piece comes out. | ||
| It implies that you're for forced monogamy, which is... Why don't you just explain that real quick? | ||
| Just do a one-minute recap on what you were talking about. | ||
| Well, the implication was, and to the degree that this has been let's say, exaggerated in the aftermath of the peace. | ||
| The implication was that I was promoting the idea that, you know, perfectly innocent women would be lined up by the | ||
| state and distributed en masse to undeserving males | ||
| so that they wouldn't be violent. | ||
| We've only done that at one show, right? | ||
| Yeah, well, exactly, exactly. | ||
| And it didn't go that well. | ||
| It did not go well, yeah. | ||
| And that was quite curious, because that part of the conversation I had with the journalist lasted probably two minutes out of what was essentially a two-day interview. | ||
| And it was obviously something that triggered her imagination, in the sense that she saw that she could use it For for I don't know for political purposes or something like that in the piece but it was so palpably absurd because the and I would say amateurish in some sense as well because the position that she accused me of holding a I didn't hold so that that's the first problem be No one holds like if you're going to try to pillory someone in a manner that's at least vaguely believable you should accuse them of holding a view that at least | ||
| Some person has held at some point, and no one has ever held that view. | ||
| And then the other thing that was quite off-putting, let's say, is that she's not stupid. | ||
| She knew perfectly well what I meant by enforced monogamy, by the term. | ||
| It's an anthropological term. | ||
| It's been used for a hundred years. | ||
| And the idea that polygamous societies, which would be the contrast, say, to monogamous societies, the idea that they're more violent is... No one disputes that! | ||
| Yeah, it's it's like a it's a anthropological Sociological and psychological truism and it's also one | ||
| that's been it's not like the left has been promoting polygamy You know, so so it was it was | ||
| well the the the the article Surprised me to say the least | ||
| But you made an interesting move after that which ties this all together because you did a little checking on the phrase in the archives of the New York Times. | ||
| The whole point to me was if I could take Jordan out of the equation and I could make it into the New York Times wrestling with itself, I was pretty sure that the New York Times would have some record of having used the phrase enforced monogamy at some point. | ||
| And so I went to the search engine and I put in, quote, enforced monogamy, close quote. | ||
| And sure enough, there were two relatively recent references within the last 20, 25 years, both of them positive. | ||
| I believe coming out of evolutionary theory in Drosophila, where it's a less common term in evolutionary theory, but it has leaked into the evolutionary literature. | ||
| And the other one coming from Afghanistan, where you have polygamous marriage, and that leaves too many violent young men with nothing to do, and that can be useful if you're conquesting other lands, saying, well, you have no wife here, but there's territory over there. | ||
| And this is exactly, you know, the New York Times was celebrating the idea that in a culture that was at that stage in its | ||
| evolution, enforced monogamy was something that went hand in hand with | ||
| women's rights. | ||
| Because of course, having fewer violent men with no romantic prospects | ||
| is in general good for the safety of women. | ||
| And so the whole thing is... | ||
| Which is actually my point. | ||
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I know. | |
| I know. | ||
| But the point was, can I take Jordan out of it and say the New York Times is wrestling with itself and not fairly? | ||
| And this is the great danger is that that finger is on the scale. | ||
| Now the other thing is that that particular journalist first met, was talking with Brett. | ||
| well before talking with you. | ||
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Sure. | |
| And then Brett sent this journalist to me. | ||
| And by the way, I don't think that we should not talk about the name of the journalist, | ||
| since the journalist is certainly using your name. | ||
| And the idea, so it's Nellie Bowles. | ||
| And I found her engaging, charming, very quick, intelligent. | ||
| The thing that I didn't appreciate, and I got fairly far into my discussion with her, | ||
| and I was off the record, is she began with the gambit, well, of course I'm gonna be running your tweet | ||
| on James Damore, which went viral and was widely misinterpreted, | ||
| and again, in a deliberate fashion. | ||
| My tweet was responding to somebody saying, you know, if human resources, somebody else from Google tweeted, if human resources won't do something about this, then, you know, they're going to have trouble on their hands. | ||
| And I was like, OK, you're telling people to run to human resources because James Damore is looking at Big Five psychometrics for personality and asking the question, how do we increase the accessibility of Google to female coders? | ||
| And whether you agree with his technique or not, I think that that was clearly his point. | ||
| So the idea is I'm going to bring up this tweet that has been widely mischaracterized of yours, Eric. | ||
| You know, what became clear was she had the idea that she wanted to find the men's rights activist community. | ||
| And she said something about, well, you're MRA. | ||
| And I didn't even know what that meant. | ||
| So I said, NRA? | ||
|
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I thought it was National Rifle Association. | |
| And she's like, you know, men's rights activists. | ||
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I said, what? | |
| Well, that was just you being disingenuous, because of course you know what men's rights activists are. | ||
| Right, well, I have a secret. | ||
| The secret that you are one. | ||
| OK. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But the point would be, you know, it's like, you believe in human rights, yes. | ||
| Well, you know, men are human, so you believe in men's rights. | ||
| And you believe that one should be active. | ||
| So at some level, it's a reserved term for people who are very often kind of veering a spectrum of people who are talking about bad aspects of family law versus people who are downright misogynist. | ||
| And I was just aghast, which is like, why are you trying to shoehorn me? | ||
| into this pre-existing thing. | ||
| Well, that's the question. | ||
| It's the motivation for the shoehorning. | ||
| So this is the big issue coming, you know, it's hard to track all the threads. | ||
| Let me just get back to it. | ||
| What we don't understand is that they've invested in all of this cognitive Lego, right? | ||
| So they've, you know, Equity, or toxic masculinity, or whatever these things are. | ||
| And so everything in high dimensional space gets shoved into this completely inappropriate kind of cognitive lego. | ||
| Furthermore, the format of these things, like I recently got asked to do a bit on a show on television on an established network. | ||
| And they said, you know, we're really blowing it out. | ||
| We've got the message that this new form of long-form interview is the wave of the future. | ||
| It's like, well, how much am I going to get? | ||
| We might go from five to eight minutes. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And so the idea is, like, I said, well— You can't say hello in five minutes. | ||
| Well, but this is the point, right? | ||
| It's like, I have access to three hours when I want it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Well, that's insane. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's like, they can't move that much. | ||
| And so for a long— No, well, that's partly why the format's dying. | ||
| Because— And it's also, I think, one of the reasons that we think we're stupider than we are. | ||
| I like this point a lot. | ||
| Including our audience, is that, you know, because TV... One of the things I have noticed about television in general is that it's predicated on the presumption that the audience is stupid. | ||
| But if you have to force everything through a channel whose maximum dimension is six minutes, then everyone's going to look stupid. | ||
| Well, this is the thing. | ||
| If you think about what happened where television went from being the dumb medium To the incredibly smart medium, when you went from TV dramas of a half an hour, or maybe an hour in length, to many, many shows over a season, developing characters at a level that a film can't touch. | ||
| Yeah, and literature approaches. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| So the idea is that in The Sopranos or Mad Men or Game of Thrones, people are following incredibly difficult and rich plots, And you have to go back to this old adage, which nobody ever lost a dime underestimating the intelligence of the American people. | ||
| Well that's only true if you don't understand opportunity cost, because people have been not losing dimes, but millions. | ||
| By not understanding that anyone who can follow Game of Thrones, how is it that this thing that we're about to do, I have no idea why, we're just having a conversation, there's going to be over 100,000 views of this thing, I think, very quickly. | ||
| I've got one video on my channel of any substance, one video, it's got nearly 60,000 views. | ||
| People are hungry for this thing they're being starved for. | ||
| And what they don't understand in the regular media is that their format is killing them. | ||
| And this is something we really have to pay attention to because a tremendous amount of what's going on is the consequence. | ||
| You know you said that A complex reality is being shoveled into a tiny dimensional space, and so there's some ideological reasons for that. | ||
| But I think some of that is being fed by the channels of the media, because it's a lot easier to take a complex situation like that and shovel it into a pre-existing a priori interpretive space, because everyone already understands it. | ||
| So if you've only got a few minutes, then there's a bunch of things that you don't have to explain, because you're just telling the same old story. | ||
| Well, it's worse than that, because what we also don't grasp I was actually thinking that about both of you. | ||
| I don't think we've ever discussed it. | ||
| We can get into it. | ||
| I'm going to say, you don't know what my positions are on immigration. | ||
| You don't know what my positions are on abortion. | ||
| We've never gotten to that, I don't think. | ||
| I was actually thinking that about both of you. | ||
| I don't think we've ever discussed it. | ||
| We can get into it. | ||
| We can. | ||
| But the way this commentariat works, and I've been waking up to the idea that this layer | ||
| even exists because I didn't think about it too much, is that mostly these people have | ||
| consistent takes. | ||
| That is, they are counted upon to take a complicated reality and, you know, give us the Tom Friedman point. | ||
| Give us the Paul Krugman point. | ||
| You know, give us the Ezra Klein view. | ||
| And you're thinking, well, why is there a sort of regular, consistent view on these | ||
| things? | ||
| Like, I've watched Jordan, I've watched you change your mind in real time as somebody | ||
| makes a good argument. | ||
| And it's a little bit painful because somebody was listening to you and then they say, well, | ||
| how do I have faith in your argument? | ||
| And then my answer is, how do you have faith in any of this stuff? | ||
| All of this stuff can reverse it. | ||
| Won't you have more faith if somebody can reverse themselves? | ||
| You know, I'm thinking about this thing about the baking a cake for a gay couple. | ||
| Well, look what happened, and we'll get back to Nellie Bowles, because I want to return to that. | ||
| But, you know, one of the things that was really interesting to watch in Vancouver, I just had two discussions with Sam Harris, and the discussion was set up from a promotional perspective by a promoter, who was doing his job, as a kind of a combat situation, right? | ||
| There was going to be a victory. | ||
| It would be Sam or me in the final analysis. | ||
| Versus, actually. | ||
| Versus, right, right, right. | ||
| But what happened was that Sam and I actually had a discussion where we were trying to lay out our points to understand each other's points. | ||
| And we set this up. | ||
| It was one of Brett's ideas, actually, because Brett, your brother, moderated. | ||
| When the second discussion opened, what he had us do was summarize each other's arguments. | ||
| So I put forth Sam's arguments in the strongest possible terms. | ||
| And he did the same. | ||
| And that worked just fine, by the way. | ||
| But what was so interesting was the audience would have settled for a debate that culminated in the victory of one | ||
| of us over the other. | ||
| But instead what happened was they got engaged in a discussion that we had both | ||
| designed to push both of our capabilities of thinking farther along. | ||
| And so, and we weren't sure if that would work because we weren't sure if we could | ||
| talk, but it turned out that we could and partly thanks to Brett's help. | ||
| And then, the original format was, we were going to talk for an hour, for the first one, and then we were going to open it up to Q&A. | ||
| But the discussion got very intense, and I likened it to an approximate level of a pretty good PhD defense. | ||
| You know, if you have a good student who's defending, and you know they know the literature, you can really go after them, because it gives them a chance to show their mastery, right? | ||
| So it can be a real positive thing for them. | ||
| And so it was like a dual PhD defense, D-U-A-L and D-U-E-L at the same time. | ||
| But the audience was right there with us. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And then at the end of the hour, Brett asked them, should we switch to the Q&A or should we continue the discussion? | ||
| Because we're in the middle of something. | ||
| And overwhelmingly, the sentiment was, continue the discussion. | ||
| And so we did model the process of, I wouldn't say respectful dialogue, because first of all, that's a cliche. | ||
| And second of all, that wasn't what this was. | ||
| What we were doing was actually engaging in the process of trying to make both of us smarter than we were. | ||
| And people are in for that. | ||
| They're on board for that. | ||
| And they would prefer that to the cheap victory by all appearances. | ||
| So what do you think that says then, if the audience that was there, and from what I can see with our audiences, that they care more about unlocking some truths than they do about the victory when | ||
| we live in a time where everyone wants to dunk on everybody constantly. I keep | ||
| seeing the phrase pop up, people get you, I dunked on you. Yeah, but that's... | ||
|
unidentified
|
nobody wants it, but they keep shoveling it. Nobody wants it. I mean... Well, it's better | |
| than being bored, and it's better than stasis, and it's better than capitulation. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| But it's not as good as what could be if you got what was optimal. | ||
| And I see this with my own videos. | ||
| People keep chopping them up and say, you know, Peterson demolishes, you know, and obviously that's clickbait. | ||
| But that was also one of the things that made me think about the degeneracy, degeneration of journalism per se into clickbait. | ||
| I mean, that's emerging spontaneously on YouTube as a method for attracting attention. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And these people, as they get more desperate, as their modality dies, Then it's not surprising that they turned to their oversimplifications for the reasons you outlined, but also to attract attention. | ||
| Wait, real quick. | ||
| Is it possible that it worked for a while, that that sort of exposure and clickbait nonsense made sense sort of at the beginning of the Internet? | ||
| Because we were all so stuck in the old structures that we needed something to really wake us up, but now we're sort of past that. | ||
| You don't think so? | ||
| You don't think we're past it enough that it doesn't work anymore? | ||
| If you want to avoid having me as a guest in the future, here's one of the standard moves that I make. | ||
| Stop talking about what's good and bad and start putting the phrase adaptive and maladaptive in front of different modalities. | ||
| We like adaptive dunking. | ||
| I've got this problem with this guy Noah Smith. | ||
| I don't know what his problem is. | ||
| He's an economist, he's Engaging, he's relatively charming. | ||
| He has got a position on immigration where he just loves immigration. | ||
| You can't have too much immigration. | ||
| Immigration is just the best thing in the world. | ||
| Maybe it has some problems in some sector, but in general it's a free lunch. | ||
| And I've done work on this to try to show, no, it's a much more complicated situation and behind the scenes it's being abused as has nothing to do with immigrants. | ||
| It's Americans transferring wealth into their own pockets from other Americans using immigrants. | ||
| We can get into this later. | ||
| I've tried. | ||
| I've had lunch with the guy. | ||
| I've shown him my papers, my research. | ||
| He absolutely does not want a discussion. | ||
| What does he want? | ||
| Well, he wants to advance an idea that immigration is a pure good and that the National Academy of Sciences has found that we get this benefit from it. | ||
| And it has to do with, one, rights, which don't show up in a maxim and in an economics framework. | ||
| It has to do with something involving the securitization of rights so that people don't have their rights taken as if by eminent domain. | ||
| He knows all this stuff. | ||
| And he just chooses to continue down this path. | ||
| And Sam has seen this with Reza Aslan and with Glenn Greenwald, who in some ways I always | ||
| thought of as pretty positive. | ||
| And then he gets a bug in his head and you get these incredibly negative people who don't | ||
| want to come into a discussion. | ||
| And it's important to reserve the dunking on modality for when people are really not acting as good actors. | ||
| Yeah, well, that's kind of what I did with, I decided to take a lawsuit out against | ||
| Wilfrid Laurier University two weeks ago. | ||
| And that was, and I've been trying to reserve my Twitter defense, let's say, or attack, | ||
| because it's not always easy to distinguish between those. | ||
| Like, I've learned to leave people alone when they make untoward comments, | ||
| unless they are journalists of some repute or professors of some repute. | ||
| In which case I think I have a moral obligation not to remain silent. | ||
| And so it's not so easy to figure out when you should defend yourself and when you should shut up. | ||
| Never is the wrong time to defend yourself. | ||
| I would prefer that we don't defend ourselves because it's as you always have this problem of special pleading. | ||
| Are you defending yourself because you believe in the ideas or are you defending yourself because it's a possible threat to your own reputation? | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| And so that's one of the reasons I came to your assistance on the enforced monogamy thing because I didn't want you having to make that point. | ||
| And if at some point in the future I get into trouble and you think that I have merited my position, perhaps you'll return the favor and we can figure out the game theory later. | ||
| But that's what culture actually does. | ||
| But doesn't that also just feed the beast in a certain way? | ||
| A professor goes after you who has no notoriety but just wants to get in on the game. | ||
| Well now you've defended yourself. | ||
| Now next thing you know, Vox or Buzzfeed is writing about the professor nobody knows and Jordan Peterson. | ||
| Well that's a danger for sure. | ||
| I am also, I am not a huge fan of the dunk on mentality as a opening gambit. | ||
| I am slow to anger in these situations. | ||
| I tend to give people three benefits of the doubt before I start. | ||
| Yes, which is what you should do. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And so, you know, for example, I had Ezra Klein and his wife over for Shabbat dinner with Gadsad. | ||
| You know, after the Sam Harris thing, and I wanted to understand Ezra's position. | ||
| And Ezra had, in fact, Vox had done a piece where I talked about the need to blend hypercapitalism | ||
| with hypersocialism in the future, because I think, I think about this thing of anthropic | ||
| capitalism, the capitalism that worked in the 19th and 20th centuries may have been | ||
| an accident for where the parameters were set in our market so that it could function | ||
| as well as it did. | ||
| And you know, Ezra, I don't want to get into all the personal details of the interaction, | ||
| but it was fascinating talking to Ezra and his wife as to how they see the world and | ||
| getting a behind-the-scenes look at what generates Vox. | ||
| So I think it's very important to try to be charitable in understanding other people and | ||
| understanding their motivations. | ||
| But there is a point when you've hit something three, four, five times, the person's evidence comprehension, and then they go into this mode. | ||
| Like you talked about this with Kathy Newman, where you had one kind of interaction with her before, and then suddenly somebody said, three, two, one, go! | ||
| And it's like, so what you're really saying is, well, where did that personality come | ||
| out of? | ||
| And that has to do in part with the masks that we all put on. | ||
| I think that one of the things is, I know you guys both personally, this mirrors how | ||
| we talk in a different context. | ||
| But when Vox's The Weeds discussed the intellectual dark web, I thought it was incredibly confused. | ||
| Very interestingly, after the Barry Weiss article, almost no one from the standard media | ||
| called me up to clarify, to sort of learn more, because Barry was the owner of this | ||
| thing. | ||
| And so it was assumed that Barry had named it, that this was Barry's beat. | ||
| And so Barry was the go-to person, as if we were all owned by the particular member of | ||
| the commentariat who decided to actually blow this up and make it large. | ||
| We have to become more charitable. | ||
| I do think that in part, part of the problem that we've been having with the sort of madness | ||
| in the progressives is that, first of all, unlike the Charlottesville right, the progressives | ||
| are in the establishment, whereas the tiki torch holders are like off in their mother's | ||
| garage. | ||
| And that's a big, big difference. | ||
| And so, one of the reasons we're animated is that, you know, you remember that line, it's coming from inside the house? | ||
| It's coming from inside the house. | ||
| On the other hand, I do see a lot of points that these people have that they're just terribly misinstantiated. | ||
| The problem of the progressives, in my estimation, I, you know, my family has been progressive since the 20s, is that they're terrible at what they do. | ||
| They're just not good progressive. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's like a really malignant bad form of... Let me give you an example. | |
| English is odd. | ||
| In that it is inflected for gender only in the third person singular. | ||
| Now, Turkish, for example, is not inflected for gender. | ||
| There's one pronoun, o, for he, she, it. | ||
| So you don't have this problem in Turkish when you are referring to a character in a story who's not present. | ||
| We had this problem for, in English, for inflection for marital status, which was true for females and not males. | ||
| Mr. was Mr., but Miss and Mrs. gave you more information. | ||
| So there was a one-time backwards incompatible change that got made with Ms., and it still rankles because it doesn't sound great, but I think it was a good idea to give women Okay. | ||
| If you wanted to actually do the pronoun thing for English, would you start with trans or would you start with intersex? | ||
| Now, if you started with intersex, everyone is intellectually sympathetic with intersex. | ||
| There are people whose gender, or whose sex, is ambiguous, right? | ||
| Because of the way in which development sort of takes female and turns it into male if the SRY protein is present. | ||
| Everyone who understands this, just to be clear. | ||
| Not everyone who hears about this, but everyone who has... In general, no matter how conservative Somebody is. | ||
| If I tell them there's a person born with ambiguous genitalia or they've got an SRY protein on an X chromosome or they have a malfunctioning one on a Y so that they appear to be the opposite phenotype for their genotype, There's compassion. | ||
| This person was born, a soul was born without the expected assignment. | ||
| And there's no question about development and should we be steering, you should be more male, you should be more masculine, more feminine, in order to avoid like the sky-high suicidal temptations for people who feel that they are one thing while evidencing that they are something else in the physical. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| You'd make the change based on intersex. | ||
| You'd make a one-time backwards incompatible change to the language with a pronoun like Turkish has. | ||
| And then trans would have what it wanted without this craziness of everybody gets to design their own personal pronoun, which is a disaster. | ||
| Like in a computer science course, you would never allow people, you'd give them a choice | ||
| so that the coding can go through. | ||
| Everybody can't have their own pronoun. | ||
| Right? | ||
| And so that's how you do it. | ||
| And if you wanted it to win, that's how you'd push it through. | ||
| Now, what they want is something else. | ||
| They want to say something like, trans women are no less women than women who are born biologically | ||
| female. | ||
| Well, that's not true, right? | ||
| I understand. | ||
| It is the case that every single culture, every traditional culture of which I'm aware, there is gender ambiguity. | ||
| In South Sulawesi, you have a priestly class from it. | ||
| In India, you have the Hijras. | ||
| Turkey's national treasure, Zeki Muran, was more feminine than Liberace. | ||
| I just came from Italy, where the—in the Uffizi Gallery, there's an entire room called | ||
| the Hermaphrodite Room, dedicated to a beautiful statue of an ostensibly female recumbent model | ||
| with a male genitalia. | ||
| There is—you know, the Shah—not the Shah of Iran. | ||
| The ayatollah in Iran came out with a proclamation that it was OK to have gender reassignment | ||
| surgery. | ||
| So, we—it's not like traditional cultures don't know about this. | ||
| It's not like we haven't made accommodations. | ||
| It's always been an issue, whether it's the Ketuis in Thailand, which are among the | ||
| best spoken and most educated people that you meet as a traveler. | ||
| The issue is that we somehow wanted to make a wedge issue out of this. | ||
| I am going to force you to say things that aren't true as an evidence of my power, as | ||
| opposed to— Well, that's why—exactly why I opposed the legislation in | ||
| Canada to begin with, because part and parcel, what came along with that as part and | ||
| parcel of it—and this was no accident—was a legal insistence that gender differences | ||
| were socioculturally constructed. | ||
| It's like, well, they're not! | ||
| And I thought, well, what the hell? | ||
| Why are we enshrining that viewpoint into law? | ||
| I mean, that's not to say that gender expression doesn't vary substantially because of sociocultural conditions, because you have to be a fool not to see that that's the case. | ||
| But that's another situation where the multi-dimensional complexity seems to exceed the processing capacity of the ideologues, is that there's more than one factor at work. | ||
| No, no, they know what they're doing. | ||
| Like, for example, should a skirt be seen as feminine or masculine? | ||
| Well, we know from India, where the lungi is popular, for Scotland, where there's a kilt, that this is a variable. | ||
| In other words, you shouldn't hard-code skirts are for girls. | ||
| Right? | ||
| And so the idea is that there's a huge developmental aspect to learning, here are the assignments in your culture. | ||
| Now, at some point you want to steer people into, we have a huge interest in the breeding family as the core of lineage in a society. | ||
| And we need to care both about gays, about People of uncertain gender, non-binary people, etc. | ||
| But we can't lose sight of the fact that we also have to care about the breeding family in distress. | ||
| And we also have to provide people with an easy pathway to a reasonably stable identity, to not confuse them to death. | ||
| This is the point, is that they have an argument. | ||
| I think we are learning that gender discomfort is far more common than we ever thought, | ||
| although far less prevalent than the discussion seems to suggest. | ||
| You do have a societal interest in steering people to roles if it's possible, | ||
| but once somebody is like committedly non-binary, a switch has to flip on us. | ||
| We have to become compassionate and recognize that we have a soul that we have to take care of. | ||
| And we do have to make some allowances. | ||
| If you know anybody who's intersex, for example, you know that it's a terrifying state, that they face violence. | ||
| I mean, you know, why don't you see dudes kissing? | ||
| I always claim that it's the implied threat of violence, where if it makes people uncomfortable, you don't see people holding hands quite so comfortably, and you don't see people Being themselves. | ||
| So, if we, for example, in the IDW, stood up for intersex, and said, this is the right way to do what you're doing, I think it would be an absolute service to the world, because that's something we could push through. | ||
| I don't think that the conservative Christians in this country are going to have it die hard. | ||
| They're going to feel like, well, if the Lord made people in that way, we have to accept all the products of God's creation. | ||
| Where do you fall on that? | ||
| Because this is where people say, well, Jordan's against trans people and gay people. | ||
| I mean, all the nonsense. | ||
| Yeah, well, the situation in Canada was quite clear. | ||
| The federal government, following the provincial governments, decided that it was okay to impose requirements for the regulation of speech. | ||
| And I didn't care what the reason for that was. | ||
| I thought that it was a terrible legislative move. | ||
| And partly because it wasn't only compelled speech. | ||
| I read the policy guidelines that were the framework within which this bill was to be interpreted. | ||
| There's pages and pages of them, all on the Ontario Human Rights Commission website, which was linked to the federal website, where they had announced how this bill would be interpreted. | ||
| And it contained all sorts of terrible things, like the insistence that gender was a sociocultural construct. | ||
| And it's in part a sociocultural construct. | ||
| That's great. | ||
| And these things are... You cannot do that! | ||
| Because all of a sudden the legislation seemed to imply that a discussion about the biological differences between men and women might be regarded as hate speech. | ||
| And I also think we're a fair ways along that pathway in Canada. | ||
| So I don't think that my fears about the bill were unwarranted and I think that what happened at Wilfrid Laurier University is an absolutely perfect example of that. | ||
| So I think that my stance on that piece of legislation was substantively correct. | ||
| The problem is that Or the treachery that was involved in the bill, because I see the bill as an attempt by the radical left to gain linguistic dominance, increasing linguistic dominance over the conversation as a whole, using trans people as the sacrificial victims. | ||
| And by the way, I got no shortage of letters from trans people saying, I'm not so happy being used as a sacrificial victim for the left to advance its linguistic hegemony. | ||
| I got a lot more letters like that from trans people than I did from trans people criticizing what I did. | ||
| So, and I also think that this would have all died away very rapidly if all it was about was one professor's objection to the rights of trans people. | ||
| That had very little to do with it. | ||
| Let's just take this bull by the horns right now. | ||
| Am I correct, and you and I have not discussed this, that Your point would be that law is the wrong place to do it and that culture would be the right place to do it? | ||
| Yes, absolutely. | ||
| And this has to be bottom-up, like the Ms. | ||
| thing was. | ||
| I understand that. | ||
| So my point is... Law is absolutely the wrong place to do this. | ||
| So why not let it come from us? | ||
| I mean, in other words, this thing has been so crazily interpreted by the press. | ||
| This is absolute malpractice, as far as I'm concerned, by our journal. | ||
| This is journagenic Malpractice. | ||
| Well, I should speak up for some of the journalists in Canada, because the Post Media Group, there's 200 newspapers, came out in support of my stance. | ||
| So there are journalists who aren't doing that. | ||
| But my point is that the fact that we're still having to discuss this is a tax on all kinds of discussion. | ||
| The more time I have to spend saying, I'm not all right, you know, I don't want to talk about the fact that I'm in an interracial marriage because I oppose these equity proposals that are complete abominations. | ||
| Remember when you and I were in Tempe, Arizona at the comedy club and I said something like, We shouldn't be celebrating this. | ||
| I'm in an interracial marriage, and everybody, like, trained seals, is clapping. | ||
| I said, stop it. | ||
| I said, unless a few of you are admissions officers to Ivy League schools, in which case I'll talk to you later. | ||
| I know it's a terrible thing to take credit for that. | ||
| It's like you happen to fall in love with a person of color. | ||
| Yeah, that's not a moral victory on your part. | ||
| Is there a medal, you know, in your future? | ||
| You don't want it. | ||
| Now, what I'm trying to say is something slightly different, which is, I want in On the positive aspects of the social transformation. | ||
| I know that my intersex people are hurting. | ||
| And I know that trans people are present in every culture without the social justice stuff. | ||
| And we should be spearheading what the incompetent progressive left can't get done. | ||
| Is that what we're doing? | ||
| Well, it's one of the things that I want to be doing. | ||
| Gay marriage turned on a dime over a very short period of time. | ||
| Like smoking, right? | ||
| Somehow there's no smoking in bars. | ||
| It's almost incredible if you're old enough to think about that. | ||
| We should be spearheading this thing because they can't get the job done. | ||
| What is our point? | ||
| Not in law. | ||
| Yep, not in law. | ||
| But do it in culture. | ||
| You can't have everybody do his or her own pronouns, which is an absolute disaster. | ||
| But we could settle on, you know, you could do hey and they, you know, pronouns or something like this. | ||
| I don't know what the right thing, get a linguist to figure out the minimally intrusive one-time backwards incompatible change to the language. | ||
| It's going to be painful. | ||
| I'm not looking forward to it, but we could get it done. | ||
| So one of the things that I've been doing in my public lectures is talking about the appropriate and responsible position of the left. | ||
| So, you know, it seems to me that if you're pursuing goals that have value, which you have to do, because you have to do things in order to stay alive, you have to pursue goals of value. | ||
| If you do that in a social space, which you're compelled to do, then you're going to produce hierarchies, because people differ in competence. | ||
| And you actually want to produce hierarchies that are based on competence, because they're efficient tools for getting that particular job done. | ||
| And so it's a reasonable position for people in the center and on the right to say, | ||
| stand behind the hierarchies. | ||
| But by the same token, hierarchies can tilt towards corruption and tyranny, | ||
| and they tend to dispossess people because talents are distributed unequally. | ||
| So the left, the position of the left, that's the appropriate position, | ||
| is to speak up for the dispossessed to keep the hierarchies flexible enough | ||
| so that they don't turn into tyranny. | ||
| And so then you have a dialogue between the right and the left that's necessary to maintain the hierarchy, but also to prune it and keep it healthy. | ||
| And so, one of the things that we could conceivably contribute to, is to improve the health, as you're pointing out, conceptually and otherwise, of the dialogue on the left. | ||
| It's like to give the devil his due, so to speak, and to say that, of course there's a place for the left. | ||
| The question is, when do they go too far? | ||
| Which is what I've been trying to push the moderates on. | ||
| Jordan, think about this. | ||
| This is beyond communism. | ||
| If you think about one phrase that sums up the theory of communism, what would you say? | ||
| The most famous phrase. | ||
| Well, probably from each according to their ability to each according to their need. | ||
| Now look at the first part of that phrase. | ||
| From each according to their ability. | ||
| Right, so the idea is that there are different abilities acknowledged in the very core of communism. | ||
| This is beyond that. | ||
| Yeah, right. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Oh yes, well I actually think, well I think the most pathological The deepest unidimensional pathology that characterizes the radical left is actually an attack on competence itself. | ||
| And so, when I was at the Aspen Ideas Festival a couple of days ago, I made the case that our hierarchies in the West are determined at least in part by competence. | ||
| Right now, the degree to which it's pure competence can be disputed, but intelligence and conscientiousness are the best predictors of long-term life success, even though they don't predict more than about 25% of the variance. | ||
| But the buzz surrounding what I said was that Jordan Peterson is validating the current patriarchy by making the radical claim that it's predicated on competence. | ||
| It's like, well, why would they twist that argument? | ||
| Because it isn't what I said. | ||
| I said that their competence is a partial contributor to our successful hierarchies. | ||
| And I think the reason is that the very idea of differential competence is unacceptable to the most radical... Well, hang on for a second. | ||
| Let's look at two separate systems, because I think that what people do is they focus on one rather than the other, and I've had to learn how to do this. | ||
| If we look at chess, which can be made blind, where you don't know who you're playing across the Internet, And we look at musical editions for classical orchestras, | ||
| where you can put people behind a screen. | ||
| And I think this became popular in the 80s, 90s. | ||
| A particular bassist who was also a psychologist may have been instrumental in getting this changed. | ||
| When you introduced the screen, women's participation in orchestras went up. | ||
| Right? | ||
| So it was a very positive social program because competency was apparently being suppressed by prejudice. | ||
| It was a structural problem. | ||
| Now, maybe it didn't go as far as people wanted. | ||
| Maybe it didn't get to 50-50. | ||
| I don't know what the stats are. | ||
| I can look in on that. | ||
| When you do it in chess, I don't believe it has a positive effect. | ||
| When they did it in the Australian Civil Service for blind CVs, it had the opposite effect. | ||
| Women got under-selected. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Even the language. | ||
| But what you're saying is that this is situation-specific. | ||
| The point is that the people who want to talk about chess, where out of the top 100 players, last I checked, it was 99 to 1, male to female. | ||
| Which is so, like, even with structural bigotry, man, that's hard to explain. | ||
| In the other case of the classical orchestras, What was it, 20% increased participation of females? | ||
| That's a giant amount! | ||
| And they're both true! | ||
| And so the problem is, when you push everything and you shove it into the low dimensional space, you have this idea of, is this structural misrepresentation or is it something else? | ||
| Well, it's both, and it's situationally dependent. | ||
| My wife had to make a point to me, which I was blind to, because in physics, Almost nothing matters other than like horsepower and creativity. | ||
| You don't care whether somebody's red, green, blue, male, female. | ||
| It's just like almost nobody's got interesting ideas. | ||
| It's so hard to make any progress whatsoever. | ||
| You just want to take the far right tail of the distribution and you don't want to be harassed about anything other than that. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| Math is like that too. | ||
| Math is potentially even more. | ||
| My wife had to say to me, you know Eric, not everything looks like theoretical physics or differential geometry. | ||
| In fact, if you think about community policing, it can be extremely important to have diversity. | ||
| Because why do you want one ethnic group policing another ethnic group, or all cops being male? | ||
| You want diversity in order to have good relations, so that people see themselves reflected on the force, and if there is bigotry and prejudice, it manifests itself. | ||
| It's harder to manifest if people are, in fact, diverse. | ||
| So that was a bit of a wake-up call. | ||
| The other thing came from the Harvard math department, where for a period of time it appeared that they would let in one woman A year into the PhD program, and then she would have a terrible year and she'd drop out. | ||
| And then one year a woman deferred her admission, and so they added another woman, and you had two women in the first year, and the two of them reinforced each other's reality. | ||
| Like, you know, I think I just said something and everybody ignored it, or I made a point and then somebody else went to the chalkboard and wrote it down as if it was his idea. | ||
| And this group of two women Stayed in the program, and that meant that the next year there was one woman let in. | ||
| Okay, now there's a group of three. | ||
| And that was a situation in which there was an organic change in the apparent ability of women. | ||
| Now, we need to be differentiating. | ||
| We can't keep reacting to the madness of the left. | ||
| Multivariate analysis. | ||
| Right. | ||
| We have to be the ones who are saying, look, Let me steal, man, your point. | ||
| You're making a terrible version of this argument. | ||
| I think I can even do better, and you're welcome. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Because the other thing it's doing is it's deranging our conversation. | ||
| This is why I had you talk to Ben and ask him point blank about whether he would use The pronouns, and his point was, I will in general be happy | ||
| to use somebody's preferred program, except if we're discussing trans issues, in which case it | ||
| is to cede the argument. | ||
| Right. | ||
| He doesn't want to publicly cede the argument, but privately he wants to be heard. | ||
| He's open about it. | ||
| And this is what, we have to stop reacting to the crazy making substrate. | ||
| So basically, you think that for the people that are keeping their foot on the pedal at the highest possible level, we sort of just have to let that go. | ||
| But do you think it would be enough? | ||
| So let's say tomorrow you started. | ||
| We finish this show today and you say, alright, I'm gonna start being the champion for all the compassion that trans people... I mean, I know you're compassionate to all people, but I'm gonna be publicly more compassionate to trans people and intersex people and address all of the issues that you just brought up. | ||
| If there's another set of people that are never gonna throw you a bone on that, that are never gonna... | ||
| Give you a little outreach on that. | ||
| Does it actually do anything or you think it just allows us to get the refugees that'll kind of wake up around it? | ||
| I think that we're being drained of our empathy. | ||
| I mean, let me let me say I am being drained of my empathy. | ||
| You know, there was a there was a tweet that the Kentucky Planned Parenthood put out where it was one of these. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Remember it was some some men have have a uterus and they repeated it like 11 times. | ||
| Yeah, that's the big thing. | ||
| And If they'd written, some trans men have a uterus, or if they'd written... | ||
| Something, but we have to be compassionate to people who identify as, you know, whatever. | ||
| I would be okay. | ||
| But the idea of some men have, well, there's actually something called Persistent Mullerian Duct Syndrome, where people who are phenotypically male at birth appear to have a uterus because of the mysteries of development. | ||
| And again, the fact that males and females are one protein away from each other, and treating each other like we're separate tribes as opposed to, you know, Fisher-like complements, is absolutely insane. | ||
| And so I find myself making fun of these people, and I had some tweet about, you know, either we're talking about persistent Mullerian duck syndrome, or you're just eating crayons, hoping you're pooping a rainbow. | ||
| And, you know, I thought about this, and I thought, I'm so unsympathetic with your trying to smuggle ideology into my world. | ||
| Yeah, we're using compassion. | ||
| Into the laboratory. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| And, you know, this is It's reprehensible to smuggle in ideology under the guise of compassion. | ||
| But you know, this gets back to this issue that we have been having this expert conversation in the literature where all sorts of things that cause people to clutch pearls on their fainting couches are absolutely parts of the literature in biology and psychology and anthropology, all of these places. | ||
| And now, everything is discussed everywhere. | ||
| So when you hear, you know, that there are group differences, It's shocking if you haven't been part of the professional civil conversation. | ||
| And I think that that's a big problem is that this is this esoteric versus exoteric speak, which is The sort of intellectual elite in the universities have this private way of talking amongst themselves in journals, and then this public way of talking. | ||
| And this is absolutely essential in some areas, but it's being abused in others. | ||
| So, for example, the trade theorists know that what they talk about, about the importance of free trade based on Ricardian equivalence and comparative advantage, is a bullshit argument. | ||
| It's a very crude thing that's very hard to argue with mathematically. | ||
| But behind the scenes, they're having a completely different conversation. | ||
| And they have the idea of, we're entitled to do this. | ||
| And the answer, from my perspective, is you just replaced one concept, which was... | ||
| Caldor Hicks improvement with Pareto improvement. | ||
| Pareto improvement makes everybody better off. | ||
| Caldor Hicks leaves some people worse off and some people better off, and you'd have | ||
| to tax the better off to compensate for the worse off. | ||
| Well, we're having a countrywide freakout because the economists have developed two | ||
| separate conversations, one for the public, where they push out things that are not necessarily | ||
| good for the median individual, very bad for particular communities, and a separate conversation | ||
| that they're having amongst themselves, and they're serving these interests. | ||
| Well, we have to do something about this. | ||
| We can no longer, this goes back to your Gutenberg point in the technology issue, we cannot have this level of division between the private and the public | ||
| conversation. | ||
| I know more about what's wrong with the immigration in the high-tech sector than the National Academy of | ||
| Sciences wants to discuss. They are at the center, effectively, of a | ||
| conspiracy in the 1980s and early 90s | ||
| to change the laws of the United States in order to make it impossible for young scientists to bargain | ||
| with PhDs in hand with their employers to get the six-figure salaries that the | ||
| the market was going to give. | ||
|
unidentified
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I'll see you next time. | |
| We can play a game where the National Academy is having a private conversation with me, where they've had me four or five times over there, and they're not going to have any reflection of this in the public. | ||
| But I now have, you know, 100,000 Twitter followers, and I know why people are angry about immigration. | ||
| It has nothing to do with immigrants. | ||
| It has to do with transfers. | ||
| It has to do with the fact that our ruling classes have been figuring out how to transfer money from one group of Americans to another group of Americans, and if they could use puppies, They'd use puppies, because you can't object to puppies. | ||
| Okay, well, the problem is, is that you now have a group of people who are able to have these conversations to say, let me show you the playbook. | ||
| Let me show you what's really going on in these technical discussions. | ||
| There are differences between groups that are measurable. | ||
| I don't think any of us really want to be talking about race and IQ, particularly. | ||
| But when you try to say there is absolutely no evidence to show, well, that's not going to be true. | ||
| And the scientists are going to have to say, look, I don't write reality. | ||
| I report on what the literature says. | ||
| Let me tell you what the literature says. | ||
| And the literature says some things that we don't want it to say. | ||
| But there's nothing new about that. | ||
| Lots of science is very upsetting. | ||
| Evolutionary theory is upsetting. | ||
| Psychology is upsetting. | ||
| And this upsetting literature, we haven't figured out what we are going to do culturally as it becomes available to everybody. | ||
| And we have people who are sort of gleefully talking about things like race and IQ. | ||
| And I want to tell them, cut it out. | ||
| We don't really know everything, but we're getting more and more knowledge, and I'm worried about where it can go. | ||
| And we have other groups of people who say, There's absolutely nothing to this race and IQ thing. | ||
| I'm just thinking, oh, this is like asbestos. | ||
| You're now making an attempt to stir up the asbestos to try to get rid of it, and you're going to loosen all these fibers rather than doing this professionally and scientifically the right way. | ||
| So I do think that there's an issue about the esoteric, the exoteric, and what it is that we are going to do as experts to handle the knowledge that we've been sort of exposed to. | ||
| And that the public hasn't. | ||
| And it's coming out in the worst ways. | ||
| And this is part of what's fueling the whole Make America Great Again situation, which is the public knows something is off with their expert communities. | ||
| The expert communities are not being honest about what's in the literature. | ||
| So I would say that right there. | ||
| is the magic of what it's been such a pleasure being part of with you for these last two months or so. | ||
| That you're giving people a little bit of hope. | ||
| All of these people know something's not right. | ||
| The information we're getting is not right. | ||
| The language we're speaking is not right. | ||
| The way we're talking about government is not right. | ||
| Everything that Eric just said right there. | ||
| And you're giving them a little room every day to Well, maybe there's two things that are happening. | ||
| One is because of the long form, it's actually possible to have more in-depth discussions about these things. | ||
| And the other is that because my lectures, let's say, and the discussions that I've been having focus on the development of ideas rather than on the ideas themselves, that that gives people a bit of breathing space. | ||
| One of the questions that I'm really curious about is, and I'd like to know what you think about this, is what do you think it is that's fundamentally driving the radicalness of the left? | ||
| Because it does seem so counterproductive, even to the left's own stated positions. | ||
| Because when I was in Aspen, for example, I talked about the literature on biological differences between men and women in psychology. | ||
| It's like, mostly men and women are similar, even in the dimensions where they differ most, there's way more overlap than there is difference. | ||
| So aggression is a good example. | ||
| of that. | ||
| So, if you take a random man and a random woman out of the population, and you had to bet on who was the more aggressive, if you bet on the man, you'd be right 60% of the time. | ||
| But that's not that much. | ||
| But then, all the action's at the tails, right? | ||
| So, you don't care about how aggressive the average person is, you care about how aggressive the really aggressive people are, and they're all male, and so you end up putting them in prison, which accounts for the massive differential between men and women in prison rates. | ||
| And so you can have small differences at the mean and radical differences at the extremes. | ||
| And the fact that people don't understand that is partly willful blindness on the part of the ideologically committed, but also partly because it's somewhat complex statistically. | ||
| But then I think about the audience that I was addressing at Aspen. | ||
| They weren't happy about me talking about biological differences in personality between men and women. | ||
| And I thought, well, what the hell do you want exactly from your leftist perspective? | ||
| It's like, why is it so necessary for you to make the presumption that there cannot be any differences whatsoever between men and women? | ||
| It's like, well, first of all, there are, so that's a big problem for your theory, but why all of a sudden has this become an axiomatic position of the left that these differences can't exist when what you want to do in principle is free up people to make choices, I think, to make choices in a market that would allow for those choices in keeping with their intrinsic nature? | ||
| Like, why did that... I don't understand why that shifted. | ||
| And what's interesting is you're talking about the intellectual liberal elite. | ||
| That's the type of people you were talking in front of, right? | ||
| It's not that you were just talking in front of just a group of lefties or a group of righties or anything else. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| You were talking about, you know, the primos. | ||
| This is the commentariat. | ||
| Yeah, right, exactly. | ||
| So what do you do with that? | ||
| Well, let me come straight at it. | ||
| We on the left I had an idea that if we could get rid of cultural bias in IQ testing, if we could get rid of misogyny that was structural in the workplace. | ||
| That we would get a particular kind of outcome. | ||
| And we did make things better in many ways. | ||
| But it didn't go as far as we were expecting. | ||
| And so this is what people are wrestling with. | ||
| I hesitate to call it this, but I think it's the most powerful way of saying it. | ||
| It's the great oppression shortage of 2018. | ||
| And the problem is that there still is structural oppression. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Look at Robert Moses' design of New York City's highways, bridges, and byways, famously trying to keep buses from going to Jones Beach. | ||
| I guess, is it Jones Beach? | ||
| Yeah, no, to Jones Beach. | ||
| He literally, I mean, I grew up in Long Island. | ||
| The buses, the bridges going over the L.A. | ||
| at that area are lower because they didn't want buses bringing people from the inner city. | ||
| Right, the bridge spills out into Harlem so that it doesn't affect real estate prices somewhere else on the east side. | ||
| So there really is structural oppression the way there was when there were literacy tests for voting which were constructed so that no black person could pass because it was impossible. | ||
| But there's less of it now. | ||
| And there's not enough of it to explain some of the differences. | ||
| And the great fear is that the left Okay, fair enough. | ||
| Why is it a problem if it stalls out though? | ||
| Is it because there's all sorts of radical activists who then don't have anything to do? | ||
| whatever, is going to stall out if we start to think of these things as differences. | ||
| So, why is it a problem if it stalls out though? | ||
| Is it because there's all sorts of radical activists who then don't have anything to | ||
| do or is there a deeper problem? | ||
| That's part of it. | ||
| That's what you're seeing with the Southern Poverty Law Center, which is that you have | ||
| an institution that fundamentally accomplished much of its mission, but then it still had | ||
| a large kitty and idle hands. | ||
| Sounds like humanities departments to me. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Okay, we can get to that. | ||
| But I also want to steel man the other position so that you have something to fight against or to wrestle with. | ||
| If I think about, I do something different with women in the workplace with respect to trying to figure out what is unfair to them because there are things that are very unfair to them. | ||
| And one of the things I do is to say, tell me about the great ideas of females and the great contributions that are sitting there on the table. | ||
| in part because they had a female discoverer. | ||
| Right, so you could look at Vera Rubin's work in, which never got a Nobel Prize, | ||
| everybody knows about it in astrophysics. | ||
| But I went through one of these things with my wife, where we did this thing with gauge theory and economics | ||
| in the Harvard Economics Department, and I think it was one of the most sensational breakthroughs | ||
| in mathematical and bedrock economic theory in the last 25 years. | ||
| And I'll just be very clear. | ||
| Every time people want to figure out how to tax Americans more and cut their benefits, Without paying the price of touching the so-called third rails of politics, they realize that the CPI indexes both tax receipts and entitlements. | ||
| So payments like Social Security and Medicare. | ||
| And if you can show that the CPI is overstated, then the idea is that you get to take in more tax revenue and you get to pay old people and sick people less. | ||
| And so it's a very popular game in Washington. | ||
| To gerrymander the measurement. | ||
| To gerrymander the measurement. | ||
| Now the two ways that you do that One is that you go from a fixed basket where you have, let's say, basketballs and glasses, and you figure out what the price of that basket is over time, to something which is, what is the utility? | ||
| So the idea is maybe I want slightly more glasses or basketballs. | ||
| You could do it with coffee and tea. | ||
| I'm willing to trade off some amount of coffee for some amount of tea to get my caffeine fix if there's a problem or a bumper crop in Brazil. | ||
|
unidentified
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Okay. | |
| The other thing you do is that you keep updating these baskets, and that's called chaining. | ||
| Well, you can't do both of those things together, because there's a presumed impossibility result that you can't have a chain cost of living Index. | ||
| Except that my wife and I solved that problem in the mid-1990s, at the same time that the Boston Commission was trying to back out an exact 1.1% overstatement, because that would save a trillion dollars. | ||
| So in other words, you have to understand, they were given the task, go find a 1.1% overstatement and justify it so that we can cut benefits and raise taxes. | ||
| And my wife got in the middle of that bank robbery as it was being attempted, and so she got thwacked. | ||
| Now, I wanted to fight these sons of bitches. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| In particular, there's a professor named Dale Jorgensen who spearheaded the attempt to really crush her when she was getting her dissertation. | ||
| This is great work. | ||
| And the cost of it, Jordan, is that there's great work done by women that is sitting there because fundamentally the women don't want to fight the way you and I would fight for our work. | ||
| Because it's not necessarily fun. | ||
| It's unpleasant. | ||
| And, you know, with me, I have a very aggressive response to this. | ||
| It's like, how dare you talk about my work? | ||
| Do you know how much better my work is than your work? | ||
| And let's do this! | ||
| Well, that's a complicated thing, too, because, you know, for a piece of brilliant work to rise up to the point where it's universally acclaimed, It takes a lot more than merely the brilliant work. | ||
| It's like putting a product out into the marketplace, like a consumer product. | ||
| You might have a brilliant product, but the fact that you have a brilliant product is about 5% of what you need to have a successful product, because the rest of it is sales and marketing. | ||
| And then, if so, you might say, There's many ideas that we haven't taken stock of that we should have taken stock of. | ||
| Those that we have taken stock of are this weird combination of brilliant idea, plus brilliant and forceful marketing, plus luck. | ||
| And so, if it's the case, for example, that because women are less assertive, they're less likely to fight those ideas forward, although equally likely to generate as many brilliant ideas, then that's going to cause a decrement in their movement forward. | ||
| Well, that's what I'm trying to say, which is that fundamentally the reason I ask for, don't tell me about the women being suppressed, tell me about the ideas of women, so I can use my aggression. | ||
| As long as we have a male-dominated system, you have men who want to fight for great ideas. | ||
| Well, but then the question is, do we have a male-dominated system, or do we have a dominance-dominated system? | ||
| Let me tease this apart. | ||
| I have been in, I think, five almost all-male fields. | ||
| I've touched mathematics, theoretical physics, economics, finance, and tech. | ||
| And they're not all male, but they're male-dominated fields. | ||
| One of those fields, I found, had a cancerous Attitude towards women that was just visible. | ||
| So I got a chance to see in finance all of the bad behavior that people talked about, about the objectification, about, you know, locker room talk, which was just absolutely natural. | ||
| Not in every context, but it was often enough. | ||
| In the other fields in general, like in math, I don't think I ever heard people making nasty comments About women. | ||
| So in the same weird way, it's not like I'm deaf to it, because I can hear it in one case, I didn't hear it very often in the other case. | ||
| In physics, I didn't hear many nasty comments about women, but it was incredible. | ||
| Particle theory, for a period of time, was incredibly aggressive. | ||
| Like, labor economics was super aggressive, symplectic geometry inside of math was super female-friendly. | ||
| So there is definitely this difference in texture between these different places in male-dominated fields. | ||
| And having seen relatively benign male-dominated fields and hypertoxic male-dominated fields, I can tell you that I don't love going into a particle theory seminar Well, you would say to some degree that would indicate that the system has become somewhat corrupt in the ways that systems can be corrupt, and that what's pushing you forward in those fields is less about competence and more about, let's say, dominance. | ||
| Well, I don't know either, but you could generate that as a hypothesis. | ||
| But I'll tell you one of the things our psychometric work has revealed. | ||
| This is quite interesting. | ||
| When we've looked at differences in men and women with regards to outcome, and then controlled for personality, the personality differences almost always obliterate the gender differences. | ||
| Which means it's actually not a gender difference, it's a personality difference. | ||
| Okay, but let's flip that. | ||
| It isn't always the case. | ||
| No, no, I understand that. | ||
| So I think that that's very important, but now you're going to get... Because I could say that the ideas of agreeable men in these fields might be as likely to be pushed aside. | ||
| I totally agree with you. | ||
| I totally agree with you. | ||
| Now, here's the next part of it. | ||
| Many... Let's not do it as male-female. | ||
| Many agreeable people have the idea that the problem is that the fields are so tilted towards disagreeability. | ||
| Now, I don't happen to believe this. | ||
| We are losing good ideas because agreeable people can't make progress. | ||
| And in those circumstances, the claim isn't, let's just have an open competition and see what rises to the top. | ||
| It's, let's change the structure of things. | ||
| Okay, so there's a problem with that. | ||
| So let me point out another psychometric problem with that. | ||
| If you look at what predicts success in workplaces, Generally what predicts is IQ and conscientiousness. | ||
| Agreeableness is a very trivial predictor. | ||
| Now one of the things you do see is that agreeable people tend to get paid less for the same work. | ||
| But we don't know why that is exactly. | ||
| We don't know if they don't bargain as well. | ||
| I think that's the simplest explanation. | ||
| It's easier to take advantage of agreeable people. | ||
| It's almost like the definition of agreeable. | ||
| It's the downside of being agreeable. | ||
| But agreeableness is not a very good predictor of workplace success. | ||
| There's actually a corrupt literature that's associated with this because there's a whole literature on emotional intelligence. | ||
| Emotional intelligence puts you ahead in the workplace. | ||
| It doesn't. | ||
| Emotional intelligence is almost indiscriminable from trait agreeableness. | ||
| And trait agreeableness actually puts you behind in the, especially in the managerial domain. | ||
| Now you might say, well that means the managerial domain is prejudiced against agreeable people. | ||
| But then there's some evidence that disagreeable people make better managers. | ||
| And the reason for that is that they can't be pushed around. | ||
| Because, you know, if you're a manager, you might say, well, what you have to do is you have to deal with the concerns of your employees. | ||
| And that would be the agreeable interpretation. | ||
| But sometimes if you're a manager, you have to take the slackers and give them hell. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And that's a that's something that only a disagreeable person can do. | ||
| This is the thing. | ||
| But there isn't much evidence on the psychometric front that agreeableness That agreeableness is a major contributor to workplace success in general. | ||
| So it isn't obvious to me from the psychometric work that the idea that hierarchies in general are contaminated by a preference for disagreeable people, I don't see any evidence for that. | ||
| Well, look, part of the problem with this whole discussion is that you have There are roles in which agreeability works. | ||
| You can have a team where you need a certain balance of these things. | ||
| Yes, it probably works for customer service, for example, to be agreeable. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| And maybe for care of people. | ||
| So all of these things. | ||
| I mean, the world didn't come up with Big Five traits. | ||
| and distribute us across them if they don't have advantages. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Are you colorblind? | ||
| No, but my father is, and he can see animals in the bush better than me. | ||
| That's what I was going to make the point, is that from my perspective, you're contrast blind. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Right? | ||
| And the idea is that when I'm talking about this, that strikes colored normal people as very strange. | ||
| Well, that's a strange way to look at the world. | ||
| But the fact is that these traits are retained because they have different uses. | ||
| Yes, that's right. | ||
| That is the fact. | ||
| If you focus on the right tail of the distribution, the extreme right tail, if you hang out with billionaires, very often, in order to get to billionaire status, you have to be able to oppose large numbers of people and say they're all wrong and I'm right. | ||
| And then you also have to be right. | ||
| And you have to be right. | ||
| That helps. | ||
| Which is even worse, right? | ||
| You have to be right and you have to be disagreeable. | ||
| That's absolutely right. | ||
| But you know, if I look at some of the things that my friend Peter Thiel can do, that I find very few people can, it's like, can you hold a position? | ||
| Even if you know two years from now you're going to be proven right with two years of scorn, the average person is going to crumble. | ||
| Well, that would also be partly trait neuroticism, is that people have to be able to tolerate that level of stress, and that's very, very difficult. | ||
| And this is what I'm trying to get at, which is that people are looking at various reward structures, and they're saying, well, that doesn't match my particular set of traits, and I feel that my traits are valuable, and those traits probably are valuable, but we are not all destined to become Beyonce or Peter Thiel. | ||
| But what seems to be happening, that's exactly right, that's exactly right. | ||
| But what seems to be happening, I think, like if you look at the Scandinavian countries, the more egalitarian Scandinavian countries, that's where you're getting the most radical assortment of occupational status by gender. | ||
| And so I would say, for example, that if you tilt towards agreeableness, which is actually a pretty good predictor of interest in people rather than interest in things, the biggest difference between men and women seems to be an interest. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| Men are reliably more interested in things and women more reliably interested in people. | ||
| The difference is one standard deviation. | ||
| So it's a big difference. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And what seems to be happening in the Scandinavian countries is people are sorting themselves by their temperament, which is what they should do, because your temperament, as you just pointed out, predisposes you to success in some realm and not in others, right? | ||
| You don't get both. | ||
| And failure. | ||
| Yes, and failure. | ||
| So because women are on average more agreeable and perhaps higher in negative emotion, it isn't obvious how that fits into the equation, they're more sensitive to the distress of others and more likely to be compassionate in their care. | ||
| So what happens? | ||
| You open up the landscape of competitiveness to women, they immediately dominate the healthcare fields. | ||
| And that's exactly what's happened. | ||
| Now, part of the problem with that is that healthcare as an occupation doesn't scale well, like engineering does, for example, and so it's very difficult to generate large fortunes in healthcare, and that's one of the things that skews the gender distribution of wealth. | ||
| But it looks like if we left people be, to the degree that we can, they would sort themselves into occupations by temperament. | ||
| And that might be the best solution for everyone. | ||
| It's a question of like when we had our first child, we had a practice where there was a rotation of the OB-GYN who | ||
| would deliver. | ||
| We had this one woman who we were totally on the same page with. We loved her. Everything about her was fantastic. We | ||
| were simpatico. | ||
| And my wife's labor went on and on and on and on. | ||
| Supposedly, we were getting closer and closer. | ||
| Finally, this woman couldn't take it anymore and she said, I gotta go to sleep. | ||
| And the guy that we dreaded, the 6'4 guy with the bow tie, who came from a totally different era, we called him the Undertaker, comes in and he says, she's completely blown. | ||
| You're barely dilated at all. | ||
| We need to deliver this child immediately via cesarean. | ||
| It's like, huh? | ||
| Why? | ||
| Well, this son of a bitch saved the situation for my wife and my daughter. | ||
| And the idea is, I didn't like him one bit. | ||
| Absolutely, man. | ||
| That happens. | ||
| The woman who diagnosed our daughter with arthritis? Same thing. I was really mad at her. Really mad | ||
| at her. She was very disagreeable. | ||
| And she was right. And let's be very clear. Compassion and right are not the same thing. | ||
| The thing, the woman who, the reason that we didn't have flipper babies for thalidomide | ||
| commonly in the United States was one woman, who I think went to the University of Chicago at like | ||
| 16, and she stood up and said, I don't like the data on this drug. And I don't think you drug | ||
| companies have done enough to prove to me that this is safe to prescribe to pregnant | ||
| And she just put up her hand and stopped it. | ||
| I don't know what you... I'm going to use son-of-a-bitch. | ||
| That son-of-a-bitch saved how many... I mean, she's a national hero, and we should be celebrating her. | ||
| But the issue is, is that it's not down to health care, agreeable or disagreeable. | ||
| The problem is that we now have so much information about ourselves, and about the occupations, | ||
| and the reward structures, and there is a lot of structural unfairness, and there is | ||
| a lot of unfairness about, here's your endowment, and you were given different gifts, and then | ||
| there's a certain amount of luck. | ||
| That we are all struggling with the idea that we have so much information and not enough | ||
| oppression to explain this, and we're not necessarily happy with the outcome, we don't | ||
| necessarily want to have an honest conversation about it. | ||
| So then, okay, so there's another element to that too, which is, okay, the question | ||
| might be, to what degree are we required to tolerate a certain amount of ineradicable | ||
| Because that's the argument you're basically making. | ||
| You're saying, look, we can equalize and we can provide opportunity, and we've done, we've hit the point of diminishing returns. | ||
| Now, not everywhere, obviously, and not in every sector, but you could make the case that we've hit the point of diminishing returns, and still There's a tremendous amount of inequality and suffering. | ||
| It's like, and we don't find that acceptable. | ||
| It's yes, yeah, but the problem is the more you push to remove that last bit of ineradicable suffering, the more likely you are to produce a worse kickback in another place. | ||
| That's not an easy thing to contend with. | ||
| And the fact is that we're going to be discussing this, whether or not NBC, CBS or ABC likes it. | ||
| And they can't do anything about shutting this conversation down until YouTube or Twitter, you know, really decides to get heavy-handed and give us the boot. | ||
| And so, fundamentally, we don't sound like what we're supposed to sound. | ||
| Does this sound like an alt-right conversation? | ||
| Does it sound hyper-conservative? | ||
| No. | ||
| It's a very difficult picture. | ||
| And the key problem is, is that the only place it's being explored is in these super luxurious, long-form interviews. | ||
| I have no idea how people tune in. | ||
| Like when we went to Tempe, people were tracking these conversations at a level that we're not tracking these conversations. | ||
|
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It's incredible. | |
| They care. | ||
| They actually care. | ||
| And they know that the cognitive Lego they've been handed is not capable of getting in surgically. | ||
| Look what's happening at Harvard. | ||
| This is such an interesting example about the entire landscape. | ||
| It's like The upshot, it looks like, the upshot of the policies designed to produce something approximating equity, or at least equality of opportunity. | ||
| The gerrymandering of the admissions process has halved the number of Asians at Harvard. | ||
| And then Harvard's of course denying that strenuously. | ||
| They say, well our selection method is too esoteric to be captured properly by the statistics. | ||
| It's like, Oh, that's really how you're going to defend yourself? | ||
| There's nowhere. | ||
| The Harvard math department, I think, had one female mathematician. | ||
| I think it doesn't have a senior female mathematician. | ||
| I could be wrong. | ||
| And I'm sure that the university is trying to put pressure. | ||
| Hey, what's wrong with you guys? | ||
| Get with the program. | ||
| The National Science Foundation is trying to do that across the entire STEM disciplines now. | ||
| And they're really going to muck up math by playing around with this. | ||
| Because the data show, it's quite interesting, the data show that If you look at junior high there's approximately there's some dispute about this there still might be Evidence that there's a small percentage of small Advantage to men at the highest levels of mathematical ability, but I'll leave that aside for now | ||
| The more general data show that there's plenty of gifted women and there's plenty of gifted girls, there's plenty of gifted boys. | ||
| But the gifted boys are gifted in math and not verbally. | ||
| Whereas the gifted girls in math are gifted verbally too. | ||
| And so one of the consequences is that because math is a very specialized sub-discipline... Their opportunity costs are higher. | ||
| Yeah, that's exactly it. | ||
| The girls decide not to pursue math. | ||
| Well, and the thing is that math perfectly well tolerates the females that it understands their work and can't live without. | ||
| I mean, if I think about Emmy Noether or Karen Uhlenbeck or Dusa McDuff, there's a huge number of women who are very well integrated You know, physics people like Lisa Randall. | ||
| I don't even think about there being women mathematicians or women physicists. | ||
| It's just like, that result, this paper. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| So thank God for that. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But the point that I'm trying to get at here is that there are still structural barriers, and there's probably something that isn't a structural barrier like, for example, the incentive structures. | ||
| And if the pay keeps going down, My guess is that you'll get more females in, which is a totally perverse effect that's been studied, that you start going into the female and minority sectors when men feel that they have higher opportunity costs based on their level of aggression, that they can go into management consulting or Wall Street. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| That's a major complication. | ||
| But the key question is, we need to be able to have the real conversation somewhere. | ||
| We also need to have a conversation about why it might be advantageous to be paid less. | ||
| One of the reasons it's advantageous to be paid less is the demands are less on you. | ||
| So if you have other things that you want to do with your life than taking a job that pays less. | ||
| This happens in law all the time. | ||
| All the time. | ||
| I worked as a consultant for legal companies for law firms for 10 years with lots of high-end women. | ||
| And I saw the same thing happen all the time. | ||
| And the law firms know this right to the core. | ||
| And all the women in the law firms know it too. | ||
| Almost all the women bail out of the high-end positions in law in their early 30s. | ||
| Well, why? | ||
| Well, it's partly because If they're making say they're making $350,000 to $500,000 a year, they're charging $1,000 an hour. | ||
| Well, the workload is absolutely insane. | ||
| You better be billing 2,300 hours a year, right? | ||
| If you're going to stay in that position and you're on call all the time and you're basically working 16 hour days. | ||
| So maybe what you want to do instead is find a nine-to-five job that pays half as much, but you get to have a life. | ||
| It's more psychotic inside the universities. | ||
| Here's what nobody really wants to discuss. | ||
| The great danger, according to many of my colleagues well placed in high-level science departments, is they say the following. | ||
| We don't know which females are going to discover the pleasures of family after we've invested them. | ||
| And so the idea is that sometime in their mid-thirties, some number of women, they think, discover, oh my God, I've never been so fulfilled as when I've had my child. | ||
| And some women say, I can't wait to get back to the lab. | ||
| And these are two different reactions. | ||
| So by pushing the point of commitment farther and farther towards middle age, what you're | ||
| doing is that you're actually screening out the fact that you don't know which people | ||
| you're going to invest in and are going to decide that they have something more interesting | ||
| to do in their life in terms of kin work or that compel them more. | ||
| Because kin work also has to do with aging parents, right? | ||
| Now, the fact is that women are more conscientious with respect to child rearing and with aging parents, generically, than men, and so part of the game... Probably a function of being agreeable. | ||
| Yes, of course. | ||
| of fitness where you know the idea is that uncertain paternity and certain maternity | ||
| means that in a highly case-elected species, females are going to be ever more focused | ||
| on kin in this way. | ||
| Maybe that's the reason that the differences in agreeableness evolved. | ||
| I'm not... | ||
| I've never thought about that. | ||
| Well, that could be. | ||
| I never thought about that. | ||
| It's a likely explanation. | ||
| But the issue that fundamentally we would defer tenure as a means of screening out females who are going to invest in fertility. | ||
| Now, it's very interesting if you look at feminist scientists in the 50s, you have women who like had four kids and they spent a life in science. | ||
| And very often you look, you poke and prod at these things. | ||
| Well, there was an army of servants because there was wealth in the family, you know, | ||
| very often. | ||
| And so what my claim is, if you really want to do something profound for women in technical subjects, | ||
| you should pay them more and you should get them help in the house. | ||
| Didn't work in law. | ||
| Well, this is the issue, because to some extent, it's a question of fulfillment. | ||
| Because most of them, most of the women that I worked with, they all had nannies. | ||
| They outsourced all their domestic duties. | ||
| Like, that was covered, man. | ||
| And that was part of the bargain. | ||
| Well, let me tell you, you know a more successful group of people than I do, because very often... Well, they had the money for it. | ||
| If two people can't get jobs together in contiguous states, you know, it's like, I've got a job in Oklahoma, | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| and he's got a job in Alabama, and we try to see each other two weekends a month. | ||
| You know, things have gone wildly off the rails. | ||
| But the key point is that employers are playing games trying to figure out | ||
| this change in the life cycle, where some women are very, very happy doing kick-ass work throughout their life, | ||
| Maybe they can figure out how to do it all. | ||
| Some of them can, some of them can't. | ||
| Yeah, it's pretty hard to do it all. | ||
| It's pretty hard to do it all. | ||
| It helps if you have money. | ||
| It does. | ||
| It does help. | ||
| But we're not owning up to what are these gains and what are these differences and where should we be subsidizing? | ||
| We're also not owning up to the fact that the gender difference in pay isn't a gender difference, it's a mother difference. | ||
| Because women take the big hit in their salaries when they decide to have kids. | ||
| It's not just that? | ||
| No, it's not just that. | ||
| And hardly anything is ever just one thing. | ||
| But the whole thing about equal pay for equal work and 75 cents on the dollar, right? | ||
| is that when you poke and prod at that there is an unfairness is a misrepresentation and the point is We're not comfortable having the open conversation about, do we want to subsidize people based on this difference? | ||
| Now, my wife has a really interesting point, and she said, look, I believe in the Fisherian equivalence between male and female as strategies, where males tend to be the high-risk, high-return, moderate-risk, moderate-return. | ||
| And there was a time when wars were common, and men got called up, and women didn't have as high-end prospects, and everybody's working the fields or, you know, washing clothes at home. | ||
| And then her point, and it's really interesting, is knowledge work became wildly more fulfilling very quickly, and the number of wars, and this is my addendum to it, has gone down. | ||
| And so suddenly it's much better to be male, in her way of thinking, than it is female, in a way that was never true before. | ||
| And so there is a novelty effect, which is that Knowledge work is outpacing the fulfillment of child-rearing at some level, because the problems that you can solve, if you're well-placed to do so, have increased in number, and they're very, very fulfilling. | ||
| And they're also disproportionately lucrative, at least in some situations. | ||
| They're disproportionately lucrative. | ||
| And so, I do think that one of the things we have to do You know, look at the Vietnam War Memorial, and I think there are like eight female names on it, and it's just, you know, George, Tom, Chad, you know. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| So, there is this forgetting of the fact that maleness has this huge downside. | ||
| Which is the high-risk part of the high-risk, high-return strategy. | ||
| And, you know, your point about interest in things over people. | ||
| At my local pinball arcade in San Francisco, I take my son there. | ||
| There's a women's room and there are clearly pinball machines that are intended to get a female audience, but it's like 20 to 1, males to females, because it's this kind of robotic activity where you're just putting money into a machine and you're watching a ball and some flashing lights. | ||
| I find it quite entertaining. | ||
| I look at myself and I think, you're saying chicks don't. | ||
| Man, I'm out of my mind. | ||
| Well you know what's interesting too is that that high risk, high return strategy | ||
| is also not that common among men. It's just that | ||
| the people who do the high risk, high return strategy are disproportionately men. | ||
| And so one of the things that I've been trying to struggle with is that, like there's a small number | ||
| of people who are hyper productive in any discipline. That's the Price's Law phenomenon. | ||
| So you see, for example, in scientific publishing the median number of publications | ||
| for men and women is very similar. | ||
| The median number. | ||
| But the people who hyper publish are almost all men. | ||
| Yeah, the Telemons of science for example. Right, exactly. Or that's right, the JS | ||
| Box of science. Right. | ||
| And then the painful part of that is that it's the people, it looks like | ||
| it's the people who are hyper productive that drive the science forward. So the median | ||
| types are actually somewhat irrelevant. | ||
| It's only the hyper productive people that count. | ||
| And they're disproportionately men. | ||
|
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But even then, I've heard you on this point, I want to take issue. | |
| Is Kurt Gödel hyperproductive, or was he? | ||
| And I would say, yes he was. | ||
| Did he publish very much? | ||
| Almost nothing. | ||
| Well, quantity isn't the best index of quality, but it's a pretty good one. | ||
| I don't think so. | ||
| It's correlated at .3 with citation count, independent of number of publications. | ||
| Yeah, but citation count is... I know, I know. | ||
| We've got a really dangerous problem in that the metrics that we've developed, we've put way too much on. | ||
| Well, you could say that that's a universal problem. | ||
| Be careful what you measure, right? | ||
| And I mean, it's hard to measure scientific impact with any degree of credibility. | ||
| This is why I'm so unpopular in this area, which is, I just believe in giving slush funds to highly disagreeable people of high achievement and saying, Go figure out who you want to fund, because a lot of this stuff can't be justified by any metric. | ||
| And by the way... That's why I'm big on the selection end of things. | ||
| You should select qualified people and leave the hell alone. | ||
|
unidentified
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Well, I mean... You guys should be working together on this. | |
| My take on this is that the best way to get radical progress is stop worrying about the median individual. | ||
| Worry about the tiny number of people who break new ground for everybody. | ||
|
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And then you find those... That's a hell of a thing for a leftist to say. | |
| But I mean this goes back to the problem I laid out at the beginning is that if you're going to pursue things of value in a social environment, you're going to produce a hierarchy and there's going to be hyper productivity at the pinnacle of the hierarchy. | ||
| It's a big problem. | ||
| But if you want to produce things, that's the problem you have to contend with. | ||
| And so it is the case that in In most fields that are attempting to advance rapidly, that it's a very tiny proportion of people who are doing the advancing. | ||
| And how could it be otherwise? | ||
| Because otherwise everybody would be doing the advancing. | ||
| I have this trick. | ||
| IQ is a good measure. | ||
| Well, here's another one. | ||
| You ask the leaders in the field effectively who they would block, but they will not publicly short. | ||
| So in other words, Yeah, Joe's on some crazy tangent. | ||
| He's wasting the department's resources. | ||
| Jane fundamentally doesn't play well on this team, and I think we need to send her a strong message. | ||
| Okay, well, why don't we say something publicly about it? | ||
| No, no, I don't want to say that. | ||
| Why is it you don't want to say something? | ||
| Well, because you're frightened that that person has you on the losing end of history. | ||
| So you're trying to block that person in private, but you won't short them in public. | ||
| So you use the people who fundamentally are the regular establishment to tell you who the most dangerous people are. | ||
| And you get those people money and you try to decrease transparency and accountability. | ||
| Because giving people freedom, the old part of this bargain was it's not the best paid career in the world, but you do end up with freedom and the ability to wield a middle finger. | ||
| And that's gone. | ||
| And that's gone. | ||
| The ethics committees have killed that. | ||
| Well, that's my point. | ||
| Bureaucracies have killed it. | ||
| It's gone. | ||
| It's so gone, man. | ||
| But it is our job to rally for unaccountability at a very high level. | ||
| Lack of transparency, you can laugh, but let's go through this, right? | ||
| The fact is, when you have a slush fund and you can make decisions that you don't have to justify based on an H-index or a citation count or any of these poison metrics, You get people who are able to make use of what we still have over places like China. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| What we have over a place like China is we're a little bit richer, not much maybe. | ||
| But we're freer. | ||
| But we're freer. | ||
| And that middle finger, that blessed middle finger. | ||
| Well that's disagreeableness there again. | ||
| Well, I know. | ||
| I mean, you were the one who accused me over dinner of... See, this is also why tenure is necessary, because you could say, well, 95%... I don't believe this, but you could say 95% of people waste tenure. | ||
| They take advantage of it. | ||
| And I would say, that's fine, as long as the 5% who aren't taking advantage of it have their freedom, because they're going to hyper-produce and justify all the rest of their expense. | ||
| Yeah, but nobody has real tenure, because real tenure and academic freedom It was, first of all, sacrificed by the Association of American Universities, AAU, in 1953, at the height of the Cold War, in the face of the Rosenbergs. | ||
| So, first of all, let's be very, very honest. | ||
| The trade group that represents the nation's top institutions of higher learning, the research universities, fucked up. | ||
| And they killed something, and I don't swear very often. | ||
| This is very important. | ||
| They sacrificed academic freedom on an altar when they were facing something like we're facing with left McCarthyism. | ||
| When they were facing real McCarthyism, they buckled. | ||
|
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And the Einsteins of the world stood up. | |
| There's a beautiful testimony of a guy who was facing Senator McCarthy. | ||
| He says, well, I was just talking to my friend Albert Einstein. | ||
| You can see in the transcript, he's like, excuse me, your friend Albert Einstein? | ||
| Yeah, Einstein said, look, you have to be prepared to lose your salary, lose your livelihood, if you're going to be a true intellectual. | ||
| Now, the fact of the matter is, disagreeability needs to make a massive, roaring comeback. | ||
| Right? | ||
| And one of the things I think is just fascinating is how many top departments have invited Brett Weinstein to give a talk on evolutionary theory after watching him tossed out by the radical department... I suspect the answer to that is zero. | ||
| It's almost zero. | ||
| I don't know that... it may be zero. | ||
| So with Lindsay Shepard, her claim with Wilfred Laurier is that the controversy has made her permanently unemployable. | ||
| And when I read that, I thought, that's correct, because no hiring committee will take a risk on anybody touched by scandal. | ||
| But let's look at Doug Prasher, who did Green Fluorescent Protein. | ||
| He was supposed to get a Nobel Prize for it. | ||
| He was acknowledged by the three guys who did as the fourth guy. | ||
| They flew him to Sweden. | ||
| And what is he doing? | ||
| Immediately afterwards, he was driving a shuttle bus in Huntsville, Alabama. | ||
| One year later, after the New York Times covered Doug Prasher's story, he was still driving a shuttle bus in Huntsville, Alabama. | ||
| Talk about Margot O'Toole at MIT, who stood up against David Baltimore and Teresa Imanishikari. | ||
| Destroyed. | ||
| Now, my question is, hey, where are the universities? | ||
| Is it the University of Chicago? | ||
| Is it down to the University of Chicago? | ||
| Where are the places? | ||
| Chicago, if you're out there, we need you. | ||
| We need fundamentally strong departments and weak administrations. | ||
| This is absolutely critical. | ||
| Is that thing on? | ||
| That's on. | ||
| OK. | ||
| We need unaccountability. | ||
| We need strong professors. | ||
| We need strong departments. | ||
| We need weak administrations. | ||
| We need to get people tenure radically earlier, like in their 20s, late 20s, early 30s. | ||
| We need it when people have the ability to make great new ideas. | ||
| This is not appreciated. | ||
| And the fact that fundamentally nobody can hear Brett Weinstein, who has great interesting theories, and you want to shoot him down? | ||
| By all means. | ||
| But you won't invite him to give a seminar on his work at a time like this? | ||
| This is absolute madness. | ||
| And I'm so, you know, just what a privilege to be able to deal with our tiny group of people who can actually Well, he may find a much larger audience than he would have got any other way. | ||
| Well, that's exactly what I was going to say. | ||
| Maybe harkening this all the way back, and then let's do one more thing, and then we're going to bring in Shapiro, but maybe that brings us back to where we started about this speedening of technology, the amount of people that can listen and watch and all of that, and that what Brett may find. | ||
| I just brought Brett up in front of a sold-out comedy club in Bellevue, and when I just mentioned his name, he got a standing ovation. | ||
| How many of those people edit journals of evolutionary theory? | ||
| So we have to get it to them. | ||
| I get it. | ||
| It's a different set that are watching this right now. | ||
| Yeah, but there's something to be said. | ||
| There's something to be said. | ||
| So the publication front is rough, but there's something to be said for being able to bring your scientific expertise to a mass audience who are actually interested in the content of your discourse. | ||
| So I'm not saying it's the revolution in the journals that might be necessary, but it's not nothing. | ||
| It looks like there's the possibility of bringing these things directly to a mass audience that's appreciative. | ||
| Well, I appreciate that, but the thing that nobody gets about what we're doing, because I spend my time attacking Most of the things I'm trying to save. | ||
| I want to save the New York Times from itself. | ||
| I want to save the university. | ||
| How old are you? | ||
| 52. | ||
| No, you don't have enough time left to do that. | ||
| Spoken like a baby boomer, my friend. | ||
| He might know Kurzweil, you know. | ||
| What we need to do is either cure it or kill it. | ||
|
unidentified
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these things need to be... Or we can let it kill itself, which it seems to be hell bent | |
| on doing. Yeah, I don't have time for that. And it's not a pretty death. No. And the fact | ||
| of the matter is, is that it's crowding out what's next. | ||
| And so fundamentally, if it can be saved, if they can be saved, they need to be saved. And | ||
| if they can't be saved, if they fundamentally want to keep their fingers crossed... | ||
| Maybe it'll be fast. | ||
| scales and push everything in this direction and the cowardice is palpable everywhere. | ||
| It's important that they stop crowding out what's next. | ||
| And I think that that's the major decision. | ||
| And you know, quite frankly... | ||
| I think the marketplace might make that decision for them. | ||
| We'll see. | ||
| We'll see. | ||
| Maybe it'll be fast. | ||
| Maybe it'll be fast enough. | ||
| So let's do one other thing before Shapiro is going to join us. | ||
| We're going to take a little break and have lunch, and then Shapiro's going to jump in here. | ||
| So I thought this would be a good segue to him, because we haven't done that much political stuff right here. | ||
| Is this a political movement? | ||
| Is this the beginnings of a political movement? | ||
| No, I don't think so. | ||
| I think what it is is the conducting of proper political discourse. | ||
| And maybe you could say, well, it would be a political movement to foster the conducting of proper political discourse. | ||
| That's possible, but it's a strange political movement because it's a political movement that's concentrating on process rather than content. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think that partly what I'm doing in my tour is the fostering of genuine discourse. | ||
| But I don't think that's as political. | ||
| I don't think of that as a political movement. | ||
| I think of it as a psychological movement or Yeah. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Are constitutional principles in the political domain? | ||
| I would say no. | ||
| They're outside the political domain because they're axioms. | ||
| So they're inside some other domain. | ||
| They're inside a philosophical domain or a theological domain. | ||
| And I think a discussion that's associated with proper political process isn't a political discussion. | ||
| I think it's a meta-political discussion. | ||
| So would a better way to ask the question then be, do we just need a political party or a political group or a politician or whatever to just pick up on this and then incorporate it? | ||
| So that it's not a movement in and of itself. | ||
| I understand what you're saying. | ||
| Well, I went and talked to, what's the name of that group? | ||
| Turning Point America. | ||
| I went and talked to... Turning Point USA. | ||
| Yeah, Turning Point USA. | ||
| I went and talked to their women's meeting. | ||
| They had about 1,200 women down in, we were in Dallas. | ||
| And one of the things I recommended to them was that instead of concentrating on the content of their ideology, because they're branding themselves in some sense as a conservative movement, that they devote themselves to educating themselves as much as they possibly can, because they're going to produce a much bigger impact by becoming better individuals than they are by promoting conservative doctrine. | ||
| That's what it looks like to me. | ||
| Even though there's some utility in promoting conservative doctrine on the campuses, at least as a counterbalance to the overwhelming preponderance of radical leftist thinking. | ||
| But I don't think the fundamental movement necessary here is political, because I think the political is actually part of the problem. | ||
| So, that's how it looks to me. | ||
| I think we're the advance group sent to take a hill. | ||
| for a healthy political discourse that follows us. | ||
| Yes, hopefully that would be the situation. | ||
| Taking Turning Point USA, I was shocked that Charlie Kirk and Candace Owens reached out to me. | ||
| I was like, you do understand who I am. | ||
| And I'm very confused by it because I find that a lot of the rhetoric that comes out of that absolutely unpalatable. | ||
| And the private discourse I think some of that's a lack of sophistication, actually, on the part of the people who are doing it. | ||
| But I think we can move those guys, because just for the record, I just want to say that when they invited me to speaking gigs, Charlie said to me from day one, he said, I disagree with you on a ton of stuff, but I want to invite you here to speak. | ||
| And I go up there and I talk about being gay married and pro-choice and against the death penalty and all of these things and they give me a standing ovation. | ||
| Yeah, but then the problem is that nobody can figure out why I'm talking to Candace Owens because when she's going in red meat conservative mode, I don't recognize the same person who reached out to me. | ||
| Well, I don't think it is the same person exactly. | ||
| I think that there's a fractionation there as well. | ||
| Well, I understand because of the niche and the idea is that there is not yet a niche This came up with Douglas Murray. | ||
| It's a super important point. | ||
| In general, people are in a restrictionist mood on immigration, and they want more protectionism with respect to trade. | ||
| And the question, like, let's take with immigration, is why is it that no politician finds it easy to exploit Yes. | ||
| this without going completely far right or completely open borders. | ||
| Either it's ethno-nationalism or it's all people are equal, why should we discriminate | ||
| from people in any other country? | ||
| The sensible positions are uninhabitable. | ||
| The question is why. | ||
| The claim that I'm making is you have to really know your stuff at the moment if you're going | ||
| to hold a position like we cannot be xenophobic. | ||
| We have to be somewhat restrictionist. | ||
| We cannot close the borders. | ||
| Immigration, I mean, I particularly won't. | ||
| Well, you put your finger on it. | ||
| You have to know your stuff to hold that position. | ||
| But you shouldn't have to know it at this level. | ||
| I mean, in other words, the work I had to do to figure out what the hell happened with technical and scientific immigration is a hidden study from 1986 that nobody outside in the outside world knew about. | ||
| Nobody can devote two years of their life generically in order to figure these things out. | ||
| The problem is, we have to actually take the ground for the middle, get rid of the crazies on both ends, and have an idea that fundamentally... Or at least stop the crazies from taking out the reasonable people. | ||
| That's the issue. | ||
| Because stopping the crazies, that's like, well, probably not, because they're always there, but getting their hands from around the necks of the people who are sensible would be a useful, at least intermediary step. | ||
| I have learned painfully that I have more in common with what would now be considered center-right than I do with radical left. | ||
| And so this idea of reaching across the aisle and saying, you take out your trash, I'll take out mine, is a very important move that is not happening. | ||
| So one of the things that's weird about the Candace Owen-Charlie Kirk situation is, like, when I went to the Aspen Ideas Festival, the people who invited me there, I wouldn't say were, they're not canonical members of the commentariat. | ||
| They're people who are feeling tremendous pressure, and that's partly why they invited me. | ||
| and I did get invited. | ||
| But, and then I discussed the things that I was discussing. | ||
| But I wouldn't say that I felt welcome there at all. | ||
| And so one of the things that's weird about going to talk to these conservative groups | ||
| is like I went down to Dallas and I talked to these women and I, like I didn't give a conservative talk. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I gave the sort of talk that I'm having right now. | ||
| And, but they were, they were conservative but at the same time, | ||
| they were actually listening to what I was saying and they were receptive to it. | ||
| And so then, when I go to talk to the leftist types, it's like they're ideologically possessed, let's say, in the same manner, but they're not open at all. | ||
| Okay, but I experience something slightly different. | ||
| I see exactly this. | ||
| I am more welcome in center-right circles than I am in even center-left circles, because the contamination has gotten much farther from the extreme into the center and the left. | ||
| But there's still this other thing, like, you know, I hear the word libtard. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I'm just like, oh, for Christ's sake, really? | ||
| You know, oh, you want to enslave everybody. | ||
| Oh, your monster turned on you. | ||
| And I just think, OK, this is some pre-programmed set of moves. And you know, in your comment section, there | ||
| is much more of this stuff than I'm used to in other people's comment sections. | ||
| Yeah, comment sections are nuts. | ||
| No, no, no, but I'm saying something about your audience. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That somewhere in your evolution, you have to watch the fact that there is this increase | ||
| in the incivility on the right. | ||
| And, you know, I focus my energy on the left because it's my responsibility. | ||
| I don't think the right is my responsibility. | ||
| Well, these people are struggling with the same problem you laid out at the beginning, though. | ||
| It's like, we can make the case for civility, and should. | ||
| But you say, well, the civility only goes so far until you defend yourself. | ||
| It's like, yeah, well, that's a big problem. | ||
| It's like, exactly how far does it go? | ||
| And then how do you defend yourself? | ||
| And when you're defending yourself, what strategies do you use? | ||
| Now, one of the things I learned, and I talked about this with Dave last night, and it's something I think that we should think about as members of this loose group, is that You don't defend yourself more than is absolutely necessary. | ||
| It's a minimal necessary force doctrine, is the correct one. | ||
| And so lebtard and that sort of thing could probably be shelved as ineffective and counterproductive. | ||
| Although part of the reason that it's coming up, at least in part, is an attempt to defend... No, it's not ineffective and counterproductive. | ||
| It's offensive and stupid. | ||
| Well, okay. | ||
| That's fine. | ||
| But my point is, it's actually technically complicated. | ||
| It's not that easy to mount an effective defense that isn't simultaneously an attack. | ||
| You have to be very... Like, I want to push you back just far enough so you're back, but no farther. | ||
| And I mean, that's worked out in my situation so far, because generally when I've been attacked Publicly in the press even in interviews, right? | ||
| I've been able to use minimal necessary force. | ||
| And every time that's happened, it's worked. | ||
| And so one of the things I would recommend, and this would be to your listeners and viewers | ||
| and perhaps to mine as well, perhaps to yours, is that don't push back any harder than you have to, | ||
| because it gets rapidly counterproductive. | ||
| Well, do it in a balanced fashion. | ||
| My typical thing is if somebody's gonna come on Gangbusters and I give them three opportunities or so | ||
| to cut it out and they refuse to, I, you know. | ||
| Yeah, I like the rule of three a lot. | ||
| Like, then I smack them to the curb and then I offer them a hand up. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| And then the key question is, okay, you're gonna bite the hand up. | ||
| Then we have a further problem, because now you're just on some sort of unbounded descent into hell, and I'm not interested in following you there. | ||
| But I think, you know, that what's really going on, and this is the hardest point to make, is that we need two new sort of hermaphroditic parties that combine elements of right and left that don't look like The terrible situation that we inherited from the baby boomers, no offense, sir, where for a very long period of time, we've been under one group set of ideas that are crashing and burning. | ||
| And whatever the new thing that replaces right and the new thing that replaces left is, is going to have combinations of these things. | ||
|
unidentified
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And so, for example... Maybe situation-specific combinations as well. | |
| Well, this is the thing. | ||
| More differentiated. | ||
| Every smart person I know is pro-market. | ||
| The key question is, do you believe that the market should be allowed to do everything? | ||
| You get these very purist things. | ||
| I'm an Ayn Randi, and I'm a guaranteed free marketeer. | ||
| But then you put things in front of them, and you say, look, should physics be allowed to sign a licensing deal where we charge you for everything we've created, like the semiconductor? | ||
| You know, or the communications equipment that you use to run your life. | ||
| Because if you want to talk to me one more time about tax dollars for science, I'm going to point out to you that you're breaking a compact that we had that you were going to support us and we weren't going to charge you. | ||
| Because if we charge you, we're going to be the ones with the yachts and the fourth homes, and you're not going to be able to pay your physics bill. | ||
| And the point of this is, When you welch on a contract and you start to say, no, no, no, it's the market. | ||
| Well, guess what? | ||
| You know, public goods are part of markets and they're very valuable and they're hard to get anyone to pay for them. | ||
| And so you have to use some amount of violence, right? | ||
| Weber's theory is that a government is a monopoly on violence and that's why it exists. | ||
| When you have these very pure ideological positions that are not tutored by reality or deeper theory, they are very, very difficult to dislodge people from. | ||
| Because you are taking a ton of risk as a small business owner, you are going to be predisposed towards a libertarian mindset. | ||
| Because you're not only making money from your hard work, you're making money from the fact that you're taking on huge amounts of risk. | ||
| And when people don't identify risk management as a source of inequality, we've got a problem. | ||
| On the other hand, There are a ton of people I know in New York who are making money hand over fist by extracting it through rent-seeking, by putting themselves as the toll collectors so that everybody who's got to do business has to pay them off in some sort of legalized form of corruption. | ||
| And those people, I fundamentally think we should have clawed back their property on | ||
| Long Island and come up with clawback National Seashore when we bailed them out in the Great | ||
| Recession and collapse in 2008. | ||
| Well, maybe we'll get lucky. | ||
| And I'm thinking that this is a possibility, is that these increasingly long-form opportunities | ||
| for communication and the rise of podcasts and the rise of audio books and all of that | ||
| is going to produce a more educated and committed electorate and they will be sophisticated | ||
| enough to start to sort out these problems without recourse to these ideological, or | ||
| with less recourse to these ideological oversimplifications. | ||
| Jordan, there's still not coming... I mean, the number of people I know who are privately aware of me and publicly show no awareness of what I'm talking about... I assume the same thing for you. | ||
| Well, it's a running joke. | ||
| But it's tilting. | ||
| It's tilting fast, man. | ||
| It was much more for you. | ||
| I mean, because I think by breaking through... Someone has to get there first. | ||
| No, no, I like that. | ||
| And you broke through with the book and it was... | ||
| You're doing a different thing than anybody else in this network is doing. | ||
| But my point would be that they had to contend with you because they had a mystery, which is why is there a number one bestseller by somebody who's... I mean, how do we explain any amount of this? | ||
| Dave insisted I come to... It's because of all my angry young white men followers, but those aren't the people who are buying the book, right? | ||
| I started taking pictures with all of the people of color and the... | ||
| Well, the talks are up to about 40% women now. | ||
| At least. | ||
| At least. | ||
| The one thing I do see, though, is that Lots of men come alone, but very few women come alone. | ||
| But it's about 40% women now. | ||
| Did I tell you about the group of grandmothers that I met? | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| About a week or two ago, I forget what city it was, and there was this group of grandmothers that get together, and there was about 9 or 10 of them, and all in their 60s and 70s, and they all love you. | ||
| I'm going to go on Dr. Oz in September. | ||
| Oh, then you'll get all the grandmothers. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| You know, one kid came up to me at one of your talks, and he started talking about how important it was that you were there. | ||
| And I said, well, what has this done for your life? | ||
| He says, what hasn't it done for my life? | ||
| He says, you know, I was at home smoking weed, masturbating too much, playing video games. | ||
| And, you know, six months later, I've got a job, a fiancé. | ||
| You know, I think he had some gal who was not interested in him because of his situation, but liked him. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| And he turned his life around. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I thought... This is partly what's so incredibly fun about these events, is that People just tell that story over and over. | ||
| It's so fun, because they come up to me and they say, look, here's six months ago, I was having all these troubles. | ||
| And sometimes it's serious. | ||
| I was suicidal. | ||
| But what really affected me about this conversation was nothing about this guy said loser. | ||
| And what it told me is that some of the difficulties we've had in our markets Particularly post 2008. | ||
| There was this thing that worked less and less well over time. | ||
| And people who were college educated, who were hardworking, who were creative, were still living at home with their parents. | ||
| And I think it's an added kick. | ||
| It's like, you know, when do you hit the nitrous oxide in order to get the car to zoom into hyperspace? | ||
| I think, you know, before I ever met you I had this schtick about the world uncle shortage and that fundamentally we needed a class of uncles and also aunts who aren't exactly parents to put a cigar in your mouth and a single malt in your hand and say, listen kid, this is how the world actually works. | ||
| Get the hell out there and master it. | ||
| Yeah, don't you bucko me, but the key issue is that I think you became the one man answer to the world uncle shortage and I think it's important at some point to deepen the offering because there are many different kinds like fundamentally I need to not focus on cleaning my room because I'm a messy room guy and I need to get my physics out and I need to do certain sorts of things you know to get my life in order that are different. | ||
| Well if you're not doing anything you could start by cleaning your room. | ||
| No no I didn't it's not bad advice. | ||
| No I know I know. | ||
| But it's also the case that we need sane tough funky ants because there's a lot of bad advice being given | ||
| to women and Well a lot of this radical stuff on the left isn't going to | ||
| be sorted out by men if it's going to be sorted out It's going to be sorted out by sensible women who put an | ||
| end to it, and I'm hoping that will happen Well, I understand the sensible women that I'm that I've | ||
| talked to who would like to do that are terrified I'm sure shredded by I'm so glad you said oh absolutely I | ||
| hear that over and over And these are often women who are in positions of substantial power. | ||
| You wouldn't think that they would be terrified of this, but they are. | ||
| This is what one of these women who will remain nameless said to me. | ||
| She said, I've never been afraid of men. | ||
| And I said, well, what are you afraid of? | ||
| And we worked through it a little bit. | ||
| She said, I guess what I'm afraid of is weak women. | ||
| Yes, well, yes. | ||
| What an interesting observation that fundamentally strong people can say, that comment was a little sour. | ||
| It doesn't have to be like, what did you say? | ||
| Because very often... | ||
| How many boneheaded comments? | ||
| I make boneheaded comments, you make bone... If people don't have a chance to play with ideas and to come back from it, if the answer to everything is you're cancelled... Yes. | ||
| Then there's no hope. | ||
| Well, then you're also just not inviting people to play with the ideas that you're actually interested in them adopting. | ||
| That's exactly right. | ||
| If they can't be stupid in their initial formulations of the ideas, then they don't get to think. | ||
| Right on the nose, sir. | ||
| On that note, I want to take my two uncles out to lunch, and then we will bring in my cousin, Ben Shapiro. | ||
| How does that sound? | ||
|
unidentified
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Sounds good. | |
| Sounds good. | ||
| All right, guys. | ||
| So we're going to do the second livestream. | ||
| This is going to end in a second. | ||
| We're going to do the second livestream with Ben at 1 o'clock Pacific. | ||
| And be nice in the comments section, because that's what your uncles want out of you guys. | ||
| All right. |
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