Jordan Peterson

00:04two one boom welcome back Mr Peterson thank you how are you not too bad how are you doing I'm doing good man you look like uh um a man who is dealing with a considerable amount of stress but is handling it well yeah well I hope that's true I think the first part of it true I hope the second part is true I read that you were denied a grant for the first time in in your history as an academic yes and you think this is all based on your outspoken and very public um denouncing of the political correctness and of all this stuff that you've been going through over the past more than a year now I don't know because I haven't got the full commentary on the grant yet I only found out that it was denied and it takes the granting agency a while to send out the full report I've heard from other people I know some other people who I would consider relatively high-profile

01:06researchers who Al also didn't get funded this round so there might be multiple reasons but I can't help suspect that the fact that the Grant application concentrated on delineating the personality characteristics of politically correct belief might have had something to do with it yeah still a taboo subject it's fascinating that thinking and and thinking and Ponder Ing and examining certain types of behavior would still be a taboo subject yeah what is amazing all right and becoming more taboo all the time I would say I don't think the universities are have I think they're getting worse still and it'll be a while before they get better I I shouldn't say that so globally but it's certainly the case with the humanities and much of the social sciences well it seems globally I mean uh not necessarily in terms of uh all the different subjects but certainly in terms of what

01:56you uh teach and what you're involved in and um it just it's so I mean I hate to use the word but it's so regressive to put restrictions on the examining of thinking in a university I mean it's kind of crazy I mean what what you went through in one of your Mo most recent public speeches where they allowed these kids to be in the room with you with bullhorns and they were screaming Jamie see if you could find the video that was the name master that was at MCM University yeah and you were giving your speech and there were supposed to be some other people involved they backed out and you decided to continue on so you're standing there in front of these people that were there to hear you talk and there's a group of kids with bullhorns like literally and shouting and yelling and chanting with signs in the room M just completely disrupting what you're doing and they allowed this all to

02:55happen MH air horns as well so yeah they were blowing air horns quite close to me that was the one thing I really objected to because her horns actually happen to be quite loud no not only that it's actually an assault on your ears it's very bad for your hearing like you're not supposed to be in a room with those without hearing protection they're supposed to be like for like scary things like play some of this Jamie so we can hear how crazy it is psychologist is that once you start to regard yourself as yelling shut him down no freedom for hate speech and the hate speech thing has like the Prince symbol meets some sort of Martian language like what the is that that they have on that no no freedom for hate speech I guess it's a polygender s symbol of some sort there's a fist in it um but one of the things that was really not so good about all of that was that a

03:56lot of the people who were protesting were standing behind a hammer and sickle Banner you know which just absolutely amazes me because I I still haven't been able to quite figure this out I can't figure out why you couldn't do that with a Nazi symbol but you can do that with a hammer and sickle you know it's there's a reason there and maybe it's because the Nazi Doctrine was so explicitly racist but God the it's not like the hammer and sickle wasn't equally murderous or actually quite profoundly more murderous as it turned out so and I how how people cannot still know that is beyond me and and to Rally behind a banner like that without realizing what they're doing or even worse realizing it and still organizing themselves behind it and then complain about hate speech no there's no real communicating with with people who are demonstrating like that they're in a kind of Trance you

04:48know and I went up to try to talk to a couple of them and um but when you look at people who are in that state of mind they're not looking at you as if you're a human being you know you're the you're the target of their conceptualizations you're the realization of their conceptualizations of course they didn't listen to anything I said well hardly anyone did although I got to talk outside because I took everybody outside and then spoke out there for a while and when you were outside were there still yelling and borns deal but what happened I went outside and I stood on a couple of benches so and and the people that wanted to hear kind of made a circle around me and that more or less by chance pushed all the protest to the back so they could so that I could address the people that actually wanted me to actually wanted to listen to what I was saying and so did you have a

05:38dialogue with them or did you give a speech and how did that work I didn't have a dialogue at all with the protesters I mean with the people that came to see you yeah that worked out okay once I got outside and I I mean I wasn't particularly upset with the fact that the protesters had showed up I mean practically speaking because I'm in this peculiar situation where if the protesters show up that's good and if they don't show up that's good too it's good if they show up because I have access to to a YouTube audience obviously and then it gets filmed and the films get put together and that get puts that gets put online and generally speaking when the social justice types have come after me they've done a pretty admirable job of discrediting themselves and so that seems to be all to the good and then if they let me speak well then I get to speak and I can put that on

06:26YouTube so it's it's a very strange situation for me because as long as I don't do anything too stupid or anything any stupider than I have done let's say I seem to come out okay and like I'm not I'm certainly not counting on that continuing and I'm not uh I'm I'm surprised by it but so far it seems to be working out so you know hooray well I think the way you handled it is admirable the way you kept your cool and just continued talking and and didn't flip out and didn't didn't give in didn't come to the provocation it's cuz they're obviously provoking you and they're obviously I just don't understand how the university allows them to do that how they allow them to be in that room first of all with those air horns which are really bad for anybody in that room who's near them it's causes hearing damage yeah well and the one person who was who was a horning

07:19me was really quite um uh I would say let's say forward about it you know they were coming close enough to me to to to do some damage and and and but you know I I have seen the odd person at those Ries that really isn't well put together you know people I look in their eyes and I think no you're you're definitely here for the wrong reasons and I think it's more characteristic often of the guys that I see at the events rather than the women I mean I'm not sure about that I'm obviously speculating but you know I have a reasonably good clinical intuition and some of the guys I see at those events there I don't know what their story is man I don't know what up to I guess they're what are they trying to do be allies of the women for their own nefarious purposes I mean that's what it looks like to me you know well there's certainly an issue with that there's it's a it's a Common Thread with

08:11men that especially in the male feminist category that they they align themselves with these women as allies and as this you know they take this moral High ground and they're this person that's going to show you know other men how to do feminism and how to behave with women and they they're really just sort of they're mining the situations for social points yeah you know well for social and sexual points my guess absolutely there's something seriously creepy about it I mean I saw too that that that guy at uh the um Berkeley the recent Berkeley demonstration the guy who hit um someone with a bike lock remember in a bag and he was hiding behind some women and then he darted out and just nailed the guy with a bike Lo with what turned out to be a bike a guy was just hanging there talking he wasn't being violent he wasn't doing anything and by the way that guy turned out to be a

09:05professor they found that guy yeah and so has that been verified all of that there's photographs of him there's photographs of his face they compared the his eyes to the professor's eyes they know that the guy was there and then the guy aligns himself with Marxism and he's this like communist SLS socialist Professor who's very adamantly against uh right-wing ideology and this kind of so he um they're pretty sure that that's the guy yeah yeah well I kind of followed that and I noticed all that I mean for as far as I'm concerned watching what he did that's the true face of those people it's assault I mean he hit a guy with a deadly weapon yeah I mean I I also thought it was blackly comic that it was a bike lock I mean that that just figures you know so well it's just the idea that you could just walk up to someone you don't like the way they think and hit them in the head with a

09:56metal thing is just so it's so so crazy and so delusional and so indicative of someone who looks at a person as the other you're not looking at it as a human being who disagrees with you like and not not only that a young human being like talk about a lack of empathy I mean you're expecting this 20-year-old guy or however old the guy was got hit in the head you're expecting him to have his ideology down solid and not be influenced by peers or not be curious about what this argument is about the guy wasn't even yelling anything he was just standing there yeah well that's kind of what I thought about this the protesters at McMaster too you know it's partly I don't get upset it's like I look at these kids that are out there protesting you know apart from the professional professional protester types and I think well Jesus they they've been served so badly by the

10:42education system that it's absolutely beyond belief you know they're basically being sent out as avatars of this pathological post-modern Movement by their professors who are themselves too cowardly to show up generally speaking and certainly aren't aren't brave enough to debate me or if they do show up like this guy with a mask on hitting people in the head who was a professor yeah well they don't believe in dialogue you know it's not part of their uh it's not part of the postmodern ethos to have a dialogue with people you don't agree with so you weren't able to talk to anyone that opposed you not so far not in any serious sense were you able to talk to anyone that had the hammer and sickle sign and and ask them like do you understand what this stands for what does this mean to you like what what what are you trying to project by having this sign yeah no no wasn't wasn't

11:28possible at that venue I mean like I said whenever I got close to anybody that was protesting it there was no one-o-one human interaction you know I mean I can tell when someone's going to be willing to communicate with me and when they're they've kind of got cold eyes like a codfish you know whatever they're looking at has nothing to do with me or very little to do with me well that seems to me to be one of the weirder aspects of this thing that you're going through this this these these this series of altercations that you're going through is the lack of discourse and there was this one that you went on on television we talked about the last time you were here with this very bizarre androgynous person that was saying there's no gender there's no biological basis for gender which is just complete Insanity and you shooting that down it might be insanity

12:20but it's Canadian law now or soon to be federally so it's Insanity for sure but but it's the kind of insanity that's going to have legal Force very soon what is specifically that the policy well with Bill c16 which was the bill that I was complaining about um or criticizing let's say there's a variety of surrounding policy documents that are derived from the Ontario Human Rights Commission and they they indicate quite clearly that you're to regard biological sex gender identity gender expression and sexual proclivity as varying independently which of course they don't by any stretch of the imagination they're so tightly correlated that well you can't use correlation to imply cause or to infer causality but Jesus when the correlations are above 0.95 you have to start wondering if there's actually not some causal link and it's absurd to me that we really even have to have that

13:15discussion but the notion and this is being taught to school kids this this isn't this is mainstream Doctrine Joe I mean the gender look up the gender unicorn that's a fun thing to look up I mean what is the gender unicorn the gender unicorn is this little happy symbol that's being marketed to to children I you know in Elementary School uh describing to them the fact that biological sex gender identity gender expression and sexual proclivity vary independently they're going after them very young and so that's part of the that's part of the school system now in many many places so in many ways it's sort of an indoctrination they're trying to you might say that yeah the gender unicorn here we gender unicorn man check that thing out gender identity female woman girl male man boy other gender gender expression feminine masculine other sex assigned at Birth female male

14:07other INX ooh like aliens physically attracted to men women other other gender s emotionally attracted so what you do if you're a kid is you put a little marker there on the Arrow to show where you're located on all those independent dimensions and obviously if you look at the at the style of the gender unicorn you can tell what sort of age it's aimed at cuz that looks like it's aimed for certainly not aimed at kids over I would say 10 yeah why does the gender unicorn have a double helix DNA symbol where its penis or vagina should be that's to indicate that there's no there's no such thing as biology I presume but why that's how ironic yeah you might say so yeah it's it's a weird place to put it over the crotch of the Unicorn yeah I there's there's an indefinite number of weird things about that yes there's the gender Ginger gender bred person that's

15:05a oh gender breed person has uh a male symbol female symbol and then a what am I all together with a circle where the is that a hole it's not a hole Circle it's a strange problematic place for the circle I would say very assumptive I would say so yes yes I don't like that at all I feel triggered well the whole thing is it's so bizarre but what's even more bizarre is the lack of dialogue I feel like you're in a weird position where there's uh a tremendous amount of support for you outside of the academic system uh people like me people like so many people that support your YouTube videos so many people that read about you online um you're experiencing all this backlash at like mcms and these sort of things but there's people are not engaging you and the way they're they're keeping from engaging you is saying that you are demonstrating hate speech like that big sign well there's

16:04hate speech there's racism the reason I've been called a racist is because I complained I criticized the University of Toronto's decision to use the Toronto chapter of black lives matter as policy advisers and the reason I did that was because the two women who founded black lives matter in Toronto um let's say they they have let's say they have questionable reputations and leave it at that that and so apparently that makes me racist because well you question them because blch one of them um has publicly stated that you know white people are inferior to black people because they don't have enough melanin In Their Skin and melanin is the chemical that communicates cosmically so that you're spiritually enlightened that was one essential claim and um the other one is is embroiled in lawsuit with the University of Toronto students union for essentially she's been accused of embe

17:01embezzling with a couple cronies about $400,000 from the coffers of the students union so I felt that perhaps those weren't the best people to for the University of Toronto to be associating with when they're formulating their anti-racist policies well clearly that makes you racist clearly clearly well and transphobic as well uh all together yes in one little lump sump thing but what's what's really fascinating about that is like you're not saying anything about black people you're saying about two individuals two individuals that you're and you're you're having very specific things you know everybody that makes up a group is the same you see you have to understand that except men and women right that's right except men and women men and women can be anything well there's an interesting angle on the transsexual thing too because these activists they stand out and claim that

17:49they're standing for oppressed communities right and first of all they identify the identity group that they're that activate activating on on the part of as a community and then they imply that it's a homogeneous community and then they state that because they happen to be members of that Community by their own admission let's say or by their own declaration that's a better word that they are now legitimate representatives of that community and one of the things that's been quite fascinating to me since this has occurred is that I've had a very a comparatively large number of letters from transgender people about 35 so far and every one of those except one was positive they're not happy about like the my sampling of the trans Community which isn't you know it's not a random sample or anything like that but 35 letters is a lot when the community of people is

18:41actually quite small and they're not happy at all that they don't they don't they're not happy to be so publicly discussed now because many of them would just assume have some privacy you know and they're already having trouble fitting in they don't regard these people as legitimate Representatives um they don't believe they're not homogeneous in their political viewpoints you know and and they're not necessarily fans of the people who are playing gender bender games because many of the transsexuals who are let's say serious about it you know for for lack of a better way of describing it aren't happy that this has become a kind of a fad essentially and that they're being used by the politically correct types to further their political agenda so that's quite cool too because it it isn't obvious to me at all that the attitude that I have towards the situation is

19:29actually different in any genuine sense than the attitude that at least a substantial minority of the transsexual people themselves have and there's plenty of them on YouTube who are complaining about the social justice appropriation of their of their identity well I don't even know if they have a movement they're not a community right I mean that they're not a community I mean a community is in continual contact with one another they have something that directs their actions in I mean but you know on the on the on the postmodern end of the spectrum if you have some identifiable group feature then that means you're one of that group and that everything that you do indicates indicates only that I mean there there are believers in in race and gender and and sex they believe in the reality of those of those categories far more than anybody on the right as far as

20:24I can tell so it's very peculiar and and unnerving so so and and widespread and powerful and all of those things so well it's it's very peculiar that they are not into labels unless it suits their purposes they're not into labels or into uh generalizing Behavior unless it suits their purpose and also another thing that's weird to me is that whenever something becomes an issue that becomes discussed that becomes a hot button issue which clearly transgender rights whether it's uh the North Carolina Bill to keep transgender people out of the bathrooms that associate with that identif you know that they identify with with whatever gender it is whenever there's some sort of a hot button issue there becomes uh this thing where a bunch of people seek attention through those issues and these people uh use whatever issue it is to be it it becomes like a part of their identity like

21:24becoming an activist and and and really being very vocal about it whereas the the the actual cause itself gets muddied in the cult of personality and it gets muddied in these personal wishes and ideas that the people who are seeking to get attention by communicating about these ideas sort of uh soak in you know it it it just becomes a a lot about human nature and human behavior more than it is about the actual issue itself yeah well it's an opportunity each of these hypothetically contentious issues is an opportunity for a certain kind of sterile drama to unfold and the drama is always the same I mean you can see that in the in the um demonstrations say with regards to my talks it doesn't matter what I'm talking about and it actually doesn't matter what I've ever said all that matters is that there's an occasion and an excuse to trot out the ideology and to and to pathetically mouth the

22:22same unbelievably sterile and chaotic phrases you know I mean the I think the people at McMaster the protesters could only muster about three chance and two of them were seriously obscene and I mean which I don't care about except that it's so mindlessly unimaginative you know it it's they're operating at such a low level of of intellectual effort and and of course egged on by their pathological postmodern professors who are hiding behind them like like scared scared weasels so yeah they shut him down that was the big one transphobic homophobic all these things without substance because there's no piece of was the other one that was quite that was quite uh transphobic piece of or just pie yes no no it was more the more more specific yes it was more specific which was you know rather flattering and all of that yeah so it's you don't seem to have any hate

23:17towards trans people at all no I mean from discussions I've had with you both on and off the air the idea of you being transphobic seems so inaccurate because you seem pretty accepting about anybody whether it's a a trans person a gay person it's not the issue is it well I'm more concerned about whether or not people are honest I mean you know that's what I that's what that's my fundamental orientation and so or my fundamental concern I mean I don't expect people to be 100% honest because of course who is you know I mean that's a hell of a requ high standard to hold anyone to but um all of that is smok and mirrors and I think the people who are after me know it well let's let's let's get through some of that then just to just to sort of establish it for people maybe that don't know what issues do you do you have any issue whatsoever with someone being transgender no I don't have any

24:08issue with that what I I have an issue with is that is that I don't like to see the postmodern neo-marxists use the transsexual issue as a lever for pushing forward their political nonsense and I said that right from the beginning in the in the videos I made to begin with the reason I wouldn't use the words Z and Zur and is and all those other madeup words however many there are now is because I'm not willing to seed the linguistic territory to postmodern radicals I'm not doing that and they say well we're doing it on behalf of the oppressed transsexual people and I think yeah well that's what you say but there's no reason I should believe that I don't believe anything you say I think you're contempt cowardly uh ideologically motivated cult-like corruptors of the youth so why would I use your language let's let's unpack that because one of the things that I

24:59find fascinating is how few transgender people want to use those words the transgender people seem to want to identify with whatever gender they like if if you are a male to female transgender person you would prefer to be called a she right like Caitlyn Jenner right right and pretty much everybody calls the the artist formerly known as Bruce Jenner Caitlyn Jenner right that's that's just it's like if you had a look at how many people just openly accept that it's Prett it's it's pretty well accepted right M most transgender people prefer that they prefer uh female to male I prefer they prefer to be a man now I'm a man now okay Bob dick whatever your name is that's and there's not a lot of zzer talk maybe I'm out of the loop no you're not out of the loop the other thing is those are all third person pronouns it's like I don't I'm not going to call you a third person

25:48pronoun while we're sitting here you I never would if I'm referring to you when I'm talking to someone else call their name right well I could use your name your name I might use he then but I don't know well it's just all of it is palpably absurd I think it's always hard to get the level of analysis for this sort of issue correct you know because the people who are pushing it Forward say well we're against harassment and and uh and discrimination and and they attribute all the moral virtue to themselves but then what I see is that they're utilizing a a group a very small minority group who already have enough problems in my estimation for for nothing other than straightforward political purposes I don't buy the um the warm-hearted you know allinclusive love that the people who are pushing this sort of thing forward claim to display I don't see that at all I what I see

26:42mostly As resentment and the desire to undermine and and I'm quite familiar with the postmodern philosophy not as familiar as I could be and also reasonably familiar with its underlying Marxism and there's nothing touchy feing about any of that I can tell you the postmodernist the best you can do with po postmodernist philosophy is emerge nihilistic that's the best the worst case is that you're a kind of anarchical social revolutionary that's directionless except that you want to tear things apart or or that you end up depressed which I see happening to students all the time because the postmodernists like rip out the remaining F structures of their foundations of their ethical foundations so just to be really clear for anybody tuning in your issues are absolutely not with someone who identif I with a gender other than their biological gender as long as they're not using that to to

27:33promote a political agenda but I don't care about the gender thing I mean that's that's doesn't mean anything well it's someone it's it's it's a personal issue person issue it's a personal issue and um and I would also deal with it on an individual to individual basis because it varies just as much as they're extremely masculine men extremely feminine women and there's a broad spectrum of human beings in between and each one should be dealt with on an individual basis yes based on what they want but when you're talking about these madeup words what it seems like is that some people trying to push these madeup words and turn them mainstream now the question is what's the motivation behind that is this a necessary thing are there so many people that are of asexual or of some sort of uh I mean what would be a z or a Zur what is that supposed to be is that

28:27supposed to be a male or a female is it supposed to be asexual or is it supposed to be a nonconformist I mean what is it well it's supposed to be someone who whose gender isn't specified right who's neither male nor female or maybe they say they say technically in the in the policy guidelines is um anywhere or nowhere on the Spectrum and that's actually in the policy guidelines in Ontario anywhere or nowhere right and the nowhere I mean these are these are policies that are that are going to determine law right that within which the law is going to be interpreted I don't even know what nowhere on the spectrum means I don't understand what that means doesn't mean anything it's nonsense it's nonsense so you have um so here's the options right there's uh someone who identifies with the opposite gender of their biological birth so there's a man NE for instance who

29:19identifies as a woman everyone's cool with that whatever your name is whatever you would like to be called whether it's Wendy or Mike or whatever it is that would be the noise that you want people to make with their mouth that means you that's it right now whether you're a he or a she outside of that that's where things get squirly so third person is the only issue the only issue is like say if we were talking to Jamie jimie just decided to he's gonna be Jamie now he's still Jamie Jamie's a girl's name too I know girls named Jamie so he could be Jamie and Jamie decides he's a woman and uh now he wants to be called she we're like okay okay she all right Jamie now you're she but when it gets to like Zur and z and the 78 different gender pronouns it seems to a person outside of it person who's cisgendered it seems pretty pretty bizarre and it seems pretty Preposterous

30:17and it seems pretty indulgent and it seems like there's something else going on and this is well that's the thing it's the it's the something else going on part that that that is what concerns me there is something else going on it if there wasn't something else going on um a relatively obscure professor's amateurish YouTube videos on a a relatively obscure piece of Canadian legislation wouldn't have had any effect right it would have just disappeared but it didn't and that's because there's more going on than than the straightforward issue surrounding the pronoun use and everybody knows it or everybody feels it at least well what it seems like from someone who's outside of Academia someone like me is it seems like like you're pushing back against something that they are really trying hard to establish and that it's some kind of control it's some kind of

31:08control with how people behave and communicate and it's not it's not like a societal thing it's a very small isolated group of people that seem to be trying to indoctrinate others into their ways and they become they're becoming very vocal and very angry and in a like verbally violent about your opposition to their controlling the way they that other people they don't like poking holes in their ideology and the the post the post here we could lay it out quickly you know because I've been I've been thinking about how to communicate this properly and so the thing about the postmodernists and I'm going to speak mostly about jacqu dereda because I'll consider him the central villain now he actually he he may they make a point explain who he is please oh he's a he's a French philosopher French intellectual who became quite popular in the late 1970s and then was introduced to North

32:04America through the Yale Department of English and of course English literature is one of the disciplines that has become entirely corrupt and so dareda was a Marxist to begin with but that fell out of favor because it turned out that Marxist political Doctrine kept producing evil Empires and even radical left French intellectuals were forced to admit that by the mid 1970s you know they'd put their head in their in the sand for 20 years 50 years really uh thoroughly in the sand and made sure their ears were full too but by the mid 1970s the evidence that that was the case was so overwhelming that even a French intellectual couldn't deny it anymore and so they started to play slight of hand with the Marxist ideas so instead of trying to promote the revolution of the working class against the against the capitalist class let's say they started to play identity

32:56politics and said well we can just separate everybody into oppressed versus oppressor but we don't have to do it on economic grounds and so we and we can call it power instead of Economics so that was part of it and then the other thing but the fundamental critique that dareda focused on this is this is this is really worth laying out because that the problem that he discovered the postmodernist discovered was discovered by a variety of other people at the same time in other disciplines so for example among the PE people who were studying artificial intelligence since the early 1960s it was always supposed that we'd be able to make machines that could move around in a natural environment without too much problem and the reason we could do that was because the world in some sense was just made out of simple objects there they are and all you have to do is look at them and you see them

33:42and that's vision and then the complex problem is not how to see or what to see but how to act in reference to what you see but it turned out that the AI people ran into this problem essentially sometimes known as the frame problem and the frame problem is is that there's almost an infinite number of ways to look at a finite set of objects so the fact that that vision for example turns out to be way way way more complicated than anybody ever ever estimated in fact you can't actually solve the vision problem until you solve the embodiment problem so uh an artificial intelligence that doesn't have a body can't really see because seeing is actually the mapping of the world onto action and so that was figured out more more or less by a robotics engineer called rod Brooks but but what's at the bottom of this is the idea that any set of phenomena can be seen a very large number of ways so

34:35like there's a bunch of pens in front of me here you know and when I look at them my brain basically notes that they're a grippable object with which I can write so I see the function like like if you look at a bean bag you see a chair not because it's got four legs in a seat in the back but because you can sit on it and and most of what we see in the world we actually see functionally rather than see as an object and then interpret the object and then figure out what to do so the function of the object constrains our interpretation but there's an endless number of interpretations so for example if I was going to paint that you know paint on canvas this set of pens and try to do it in a photorealistic way I would be looking at tiny details of these objects the the multiple shades of red that are there and the multiple shades of of white and black and you

35:22know I would decompose it in many many ways and so the AI guys ran into this problem which was that looking at the world turned out to be exceptionally complex and that's still being solved now okay in in literature the same thing happened what what the postmodernists realized was that if you took a complex book let's say the Bible for example or a Shakespeare play there's an endless number of potential interpretations that you can derive from it because it's so complex and so sophisticated so imagine that well you can interpret the word you can interpret the phrase you can interpret the sentence you can interpret the paragraph you can interpret the the the chapter let's say you have to interpret that within the confines of the entire work then of the entire tradition and then within the context of discussion that you're currently having and all of those things affect how

36:14you're going to interpret the play so there's an so that their conclusion was well there's an infinite number of ways to interpret a text and then their conclusion was well there's an infinite number of ways to interpret the world and there's there's a way in which that's correct and so the next conclusion was there's no right way to do it so you could do it any old way and then their next conclusion was oh and this is where the Marxism creeped up again oh people interpret the world in a way that facilitates their acquisition of power now that's where the bloody Theory starts to get corrupt because yes a bit but also no right because and this is why they're wrong this is why they're wrong you see the world is complicated beyond our ability to comprehend so there is a very large number of ways you can interpret it but but you have to extract out from the world a way a game from your

37:12interpretation that you can actually play so if the lesson that you extract from Hamlet is you should kill your family and yourself then we might say that that's not a very functional interpretation right cuz first of all people are going to object to that right it it ends your life it ends many people's lives people are going to object to it and it isn't a game that you can play over and over again in the world so when we're when we're interacting with the world you see what we're trying to do is to extract out a set of tools that we can use to function in the world because we're constrained by the world so that we don't suffer too much and so that the things that we need in order to continue can be provided and we need to extract those out in a way that other people will so that other people will cooperate and compete with us in a peaceful and maintainable way so

38:02then you think well we have to extract out an interpretation that allows us to live and Thrive over multiple periods of time in multiple environments while we're doing the same thing with other individuals who are motivated the same way so there's a tremendous number of constraints on our interpretations and the postmodernists don't care about that at all all they do is say well no no you can interpret the way the world the world any way you want all people are ever doing is playing power games based on their identity and there's going to be no cross talk between the power hierarchies it's not even allowed that's why they don't engage in dialogue see just to talk to like let's say if you're a if you're a postmodernist just to have a discussion with someone like you you know a heterosexual what do they call a cisgendered male of power you know and and white to boot it's like that's

38:53that's an evil act in and of itself because all you're doing by engaging in dialogue with with that person is validating their their power game that's all you see and this isn't this isn't this is no aberration that these people don't engage in dialogue that it's no aberration it's built right into the philosophical system they regard the idea of the idea that if you're in one power group and I'm in another the idea that we can step out of that group engage in a dialogue have our worlds meet and produce some sort of uh understanding of each other yeah yeah some sort of negotiated understand standing no that's part of your your oppressive patriarchal game that idea that whole idea is part of your game so if I even engage in the dialogue I'm playing your game you win it's a complete assault it's complete you people don't understand that postmodernism is a complete assault

39:48on two things one it's it's an assault on the metaphysical substrate of our culture and I would say that the metaphysical substrate looks something like a religious substate so it's a direct assault on that and the second thing it's an assault on is everything that's been established since the enlightenment rationality empiricism science everything Clarity of Mind dialogue um the idea of the individual all of that is is not only you see it's not only that it's up for grabs that's not the thing it's to be destroyed that's the goal to be destroyed just like the Communists wanted you know wanted the revolution to destroy the the capitalist system system it's the same thing these people now you might say well does every social justice Warrior activist know this it's like well no of course not it's not not any more than any every Muslim knows the entire Muslim Doctrine or Islamic

40:41Doctrine or every Christian knows the entire Christian doctrine you know it's fragmented among people but then when you bring them together the fragments unite and the entire philosophy acts itself out so you don't think that this is a nefarious plot by a few well planned out individuals that have some sort of an an agenda that they're going to promote this ideology because and they understand what they're doing you you feel like it's what you're saying that there's a bunch of different factions a bunch a bunch of different parts to this and it could be uh a lot of it is that people feel disenfranchised socially um they they are empowered by their positions in universities and by these insulated environments and groups they're uh in icated by the power that they have over young people and shaping their minds and and and and imposing their ideologies

41:35they receive feedback from these kids it builds up everything strengthens they Shore up the walls around them and they push this forward and then when they have something like this speech that you gave at McMasters and they get to actually act it unites them it unites them and this is what you're getting from this glazed eye you know Cod look you Des well it's as if it's like Richard Dawkins idea of meme you know if you imagine that in your in your neural neural structure whatever ideas that you're manifesting are represented neuron by neuron let's say it's a web of neurons not any one neuron has the entire idea set this is obviously an oversimplification but you get the point there's a network from which the idea emerges well the meme idea is is that an idea can rest upon mult multiple individuals as if each individual is a neuron and so I mean there are people who are more or less

42:36fully informed as to the nature of postmodern Doctrine and they're pushing it Forward consciously and unconsciously they're they're consciously pushing it forward and acting it out and so there are individuals who are more representative of the entire set of ideas and individuals who are less representative but if you get them together in a group the thing that animates them unites them is the common set of ideas and those ideas were produced by the post-modern French intellectuals in the in the mid-70s roughly speaking jacqu dereda Michelle Fuko um Fuko was the person who famously pronounced that psychiatric diagnostic categories were primarily social in origin rather than biological and you know I read fuko's work I think it was Madness and civilization where he he Advanced that particular um Doctrine you can actually read Fuko unlike Dara and La uh but I just found what he was

43:30writing obvious it's I knew from my clinical training that psychiatric categories have a heavy sociological construction partly because Psychiatry isn't a science medicine isn't a science it's an applied science those aren't the same thing at all and you know a pure science is is a pure science it deals with scientific categories like adoms uh but an applied science well it's a compromise between all sorts of different things and mental illnesses themselves are shaped by the social environment even though often they have a biological roote the way they manifest themselves is clearly shaped by society and language I didn't find his work the least bit um surprising I thought well really I mean everyone who's a sophisticated Medical Professional psychiatrist psychologist everyone knows that it's like I mean there's a book called discovery of the unconscious by a

44:24guy named hre Alber that was written in the believe in the' 60s great book on history of psychoanalysis and like he covers the shift in diagnostic categories across time it's self-evident so anyways there's all these French postmodernists they were all marxists most of them were student revolutionaries in France in the late 1960s before that all fell apart and they did two things they they pulled out this uh frame problem issue the issue of multiple interpretations and said well there's nothing that's canonical there's no overarching narrative there's no real interpretation and I already said Why That's wrong and then the other thing they said was they they did this this slight of hand so instead of the working class against the bisi it was it was race against race or or gender against gender unbelievably divisive it's all they believe in his identity there's no individual man

45:15that's gone with postmodernism this isn't an accident all of this stuff it's not random it's driven by these ideas like ideas are always at War always and we're in a war between these ideas I mean Marxism we already know was a tremendously powerful Doctrine and this is its newest manifestation what is the motivation behind the individuals that are at the heart of this movement well I would say that the motivations are as complex as as human motivations are in general but they seem to have solidified into a movement right well I think the dangerous part of it is that the it's it's a kind of it's almost like a scapegoat mentality it's it's almost like psychoanalytic projection that's another way of thinking about it it's like one of the things that I've come to learn and one of the things I talk about a lot is that the the battle between good and evil so to speak isn't

46:14between States and it's not between individuals precisely although it manifests itself at those levels it's an internal battle a moral battle that happens inside people and so people have a broad capacity for malevolence and for and for benevolence and that's a terrible War for people and it's a terrible thing to understand and realize in fact often when people realize their capacity for malevolence if they're not prepared for it they develop post-traumatic stress disorder so that happens to soldiers in battlefields so they go out they're innocent guys you know naive guys young guys and they go out onto a battlefield and and they get put in a really stressful situation and you know they they step outside them C and they do something unbelievably vicious and brutal and then they're broken they can't take that manifestation of themsel and put it with like Iowa cornfed you know nice guy and

47:12no wonder because one is like a flesh eating chimp chimpanzee on a war Rampage and the other is you know a a relatively well brought up and polite Farm Boy from the middle of the United States it's like how in the world are you going to put those two things together well you can't that's post-traumatic stress disorder and to treat that my experience with post-traumatic stress disorder is that you have to teach people a philosophy of evil of Good and Evil because otherwise they can't recover and I've had I've had by the way in the last four months I've had two letters from PE from Soldiers with PTSD and I met two personally who said that watching my lectures had had brought them back together because they they they couldn't understand how what they had become before looking looking deeply at at the at their malevolence now so I would say with regards to this movement

48:05this postmodern movement the malevolent aspect of it there's there's a couple of them one it's unbelievably authoritarian I got a letter today from a university student in Italy I don't know what university but she'd been having kind of a flame war on Facebook with u with a social justice Warrior and at the end she recommended that this particular or social justice Warrior seek out a local mental health counseling unit and put a link to it in the in the exchange and then she got a letter from the University I I guess the the other person that the sjw type turned her in but she got a letter from the University saying that that violated University policy and constituted harassment and that she should seriously consider retracting it and um that you know future employees employers might be looking at what she posted and it was inappropriate to put that on a public

48:57site and it's like I thought wow if you how could you be so clueless as a as a administrator say to think that your monitoring of your students private utterances your monitoring it at an Institutional level and your intervention and threat at an Institutional level is less dangerous than letting two students you know troll each other on on a on a public social Forum it's just I just I don't know what to think about it it's just unbelievable it happened in it's happening all over the place this sort of thing and so there's the authoritarian element to it which is a hatred of I think it's a hatred of competence because competence produces hierarchies that aren't based on power I think it's a hatred of clear intellect um a hatred of clear intellect how so what do you mean by when you say clear intellect well you have a clear intellect as far as I'm concerned I

49:56think that's why you're so popular is because you pay attention and say what you see and you're not too concerned about doing anything other than that I mean of course you have an agenda because everyone has an agenda you can't help but have an agenda if you're alive but you can temper the agenda like you can be clued in enough to try to listen and learn and watch and and pay attention to what your own senses are telling you and try to articulate that and that that's what the logos is technically speaking and the reason I'm bringing this up is because jacqu Dera described Western culture in in a famous phrase he described it as phow f logocentric p h a l logo l o g o Centric pH logocentric and it needs to be brought down well the phus part that's male the logo part that's logos now that's partly logic because the word logic comes from the word logos but

50:52logos is a deep May much much older concept than logic like logos is it's essentially it's a theological concept and that's where things get complicated but you could describe it as uh as the manifestation of Truth in speech and the postmodernists they don't like any of that so foul logo centc it would be the ultimate mansplaining yes right like any man who expresses uh or tries to correct a woman in any way becomes a man's maybe to correct anything anyway yeah particularly with like you Weare the uh Ted Cruz Sally Yates testimony that's been going on in America pretty fascinating no no I'm not aware of that I saw an example of that in an Australian uh Congressional debate where a guy was accused of mansplaining by one of his colleagues and really like tore a strip off her quite nicely yeah so what's happening in the states well Yates is just been pretty brilliant she

51:52was fired by the Trump administration because she re rejected this idea aidea of um what was the uh the very specific thing was about uh restricting immigration about uh shutting down uh different uh people that are trying to come into the United States and um she had this debate with Ted Cruz where she you know just brilliantly shut him down with you know her knowledge of the Constitution and knowledge of what is and what is not legal or should or should not be allowed to happen and she was fired for it and he was grilling her and his you know he's a very smart guy Ted Cruz although I don't agree with him and I agree more with her the way it was going down this debate was described as mansplaining because it was a man talking to a woman this is a recent example yeah well I also read about something like that with regards to the Supreme Court yeah because somebody did

52:44an analysis showing that the female Supreme Court Justices spoke less than the male Supreme Court Justices immediately attributed that to sexism because you know how oppressed female Supreme Court Justices are so um the the I still want to get back to this that the hatred or the uh dislike of clear thinking y do you think that this comes from people I'm not not even sure I completely WRA my head around this but do you think this is from someone with uh they understand that their logic is Muddy they understand that their uh imposing of this muddy logic is illogical in some sort of a way feel it they feel it they feel it rather than think it I mean that that's the other thing is that there isn't a lot of clear thinking on the side of the social justice types because a lot of what they're doing is is reacting at an emotional level yeah well they're the best personality predictor

53:41of of of uh politically correct belief because we've done this study although it's not published yet is trait agreeableness and agreeableness I would say the best way to think about it is that it's the maternal Dimension that's an oversimplification but not much of one um um and so anybody that and and the maternal Viewpoint is something like anybody who's part of my ingroup is uh an infant in trouble and anyone who's outside of it is a predatory snake it's something like that and so you're seeing that manifest itself in a political Doctrine well you're clearly seeing that today with what's going on uh with these uh like like say the Berkeley Milo rally where uh people who uh are on the left who you would think of as being proman uh pro- uh you know antiviolence are more than capable of committing violence against women who support Trump because then they categorize them as

54:39Nazis and we're supposed to punch Nazis and I mean there's been a bunch of instances where you've seen video footage of people getting pepper sprayed and hit with sticks because they were wearing the wrong you know they're wearing a it wasn't even a make America great again hat it was actually a make Bitcoin great again Happ there's a very famous video of a girl getting pepper sprayed yeah I think I've seen that one it's crazy and by the left and by people who are supposed to be you know quote unquote Progressive and people were supposed to be Pro women's rights you know anti-violence against women anti-domestic violence but yet they have no problem doing it to this other person because this person becomes the other because they're on the other side yeah well this we I was talking about this line between good and evil you know that runs down people's hearts

55:24it's well it's a it's a terrible fault line and it can be shocking to see that it's the case and so it's much more convenient for people to divide the world into the righteous and the and the damned let's say and then to to persecute the Damned well it's it's convenient too because you whatever resentment and hatred and bitterness you have in your heart and you have plenty of that generally speaking if you're a social justice type because you regard yourself as oppressed and then like that's a great starting point for resentment and hatred right to be to be a victim um we know that that one of the precursors to genocide and I'm not saying at all that we're near that state I'm I'm not saying that but one of the precursors to genocide in in a genocidal state or in a pre genocidal state is the the acceptance of victim status by the eventual perpetrators because the idea

56:16is well like we're innocent we're being persecuted now those people are going to get us So eventually that becomes what we'll get them first and it gives you so you have a target for all your resent and your hatred and it's a justifiable moral Target and so all the part of yourself that you don't recognize as contributing to whatever problem you think you know now pollutes the world you can ignore all that you're on the side of the good there's no moral effort required and then you have someone to conveniently hate and hit and hurt and all the while you can look at yourself in the mirror and say I'm I'm on the side of the good I'm just punching Nazis right right well is there or hitting them with bike locks you know while you dart out behind a woman who's conveniently standing in front of you is there an evolutionary origin for what we were talking about in regards to

57:06uh a soldier being able to commit these horrible atrocities in the name of War to the these people that are able to look at someone who has a differing ideology as the other and attack them as almost like a subhuman is there some sort of an evolutionary origin for this disassociative sort of of thinking and behavior that some people seem to I mean it seems like a very common thing throughout history sure anything that isn't part of your dominance hierarchy is a snake it's that and and it actually makes sense from from an evolutionary perspective I mean first of all we are tribal primates right and and our optimal group size seems to be something like 250 we can keep track of about that many social relationships and that's that's also also that's right exactly and that's correlated with brain size right yeah so all right and so you might say well why

58:02that size and then you might say well a hierarchy has to be optimized for two functions and one is well you want to be able to climb the damn thing so if it's really really big the probability that you're going to climb it is really low and if it's too small well who cares if you climb it so you want it yeah you want it somewhere that that's big enough to climb and and powerful enough to make the climb worthwhile and so so and so there's some optimization there now so you might think of everything within that hierarchy as explored territory and the reason for that is that explored territory is where when you do something you get what you want so so think about the conditions under which the limits of your knowledge manifest themselves I mean there's also sorts of things you don't know a you know a trillion things but you're not sitting there like torturing yourself to

58:55death because there's a trillion things you don't know but then if you go out in the world and you act something out and the outcome isn't what you desired then that register is an error so let's say you're at a party and you tell a joke and no one laughs well the party see think about what happens to the space around the party when you tell the joke the second before you tell the joke you're in one place and the second after you tell the joke when there's an awkward silence and everybody is looking embarrassed you are no longer in the same place you've stepped outside the protective um Embrace of of that particular hierarchy and you've made yourself an alien and the the thing that people use to process the alien is the is the snake detector the serpent detector the dragon detector and it's always been that way because anything that's outside the hierarchy is a threat

59:44any stranger any strange idea any any any animal manifestation any noise any spirit it's and it's a it's a threat to the Integrity of the dominance hierarchy and in many many ways so for example it's deeply rooted because that was your question what's the evolutionary basis there's a great paper published in a journal called plaus one p S1 about five or six years ago looking at something absolutely terrifying in my estimation which was there's this there's this idea that part of what motivates the authoritarian end of political conservatism so let's say the right-wing fascist end is associated not with fear but with disgust disgust is an entirely different emotion and so these researchers did this fascinating study where they went to a number of different countries and also looked at States within the same country looking at the relationship between the

60:37prevalence of infectious disease and authoritarian attitudes at the individual level the higher the Infectious Disease rate the more authoritarian the political views and and the correlation was really high it wasn't like 0.1 it was 7 it's one of the highest correlations between two phenomena I've ever seen in the social stud Sciences and you might say well why well here's one reason I said that the strange idea and the stranger and the pathogen let's say are all the same thing well it's all because they're external threats to the structure of the dominance hierarchy you know when the when the Spaniards came to the new world 95% of the natives died they died from smallpox they died from measles they died from MPS they died from chickenpox because you don't know what the hell is coming at you when you let something new inside the dominance hierarchy whether it's an idea or a

61:27disease you know words or a virus I think that was Lori no that was uh what's that heroin addict author bur buroughs yeah that was his phrase Lori Anderson made a nice video about that words are a virus and so we respond to them with the same circuitry that we use to detect pathogens and I'll tell you something even more frightening when we were working this out because it's associated with this trait called orderliness which is actually good predictor of of right-wing political belief I went back and looked at Hitler's table talk it's a book Hitler's table talk and he wrote that it it was derived from notes that were taken by his secretaries between 1939 and 1942 when he was eating dinner and spontaneously expounding on the structure of reality um he was very open Hitler very creative person but also extremely orderly um and I looked at the metaphors that he was using to describe

62:21the Jews and the Gypsies and all the other people that he burned and and destroyed and it was all pathogen it's all pathogen metaphor the Aryan race is a body it's a pure body the blood is pure the Jews are rats or insects or or lice or disease and so are the Gypsies and everyone else and they need to be eradicated and burned out essentially and here's something even more frightening so when when Hitler when Hitler first took over Germany he was kind of a public health freak he also washed his hands a lot every day and he was also a worshipper of willpower so he was a really orderly guy and uh he started this public health campaign in Germany and he put together these vans that would go around like screening people for tuberculosis which you know was a perfectly fine idea but then they started a beautification program of the factories because he didn't like how

63:12messy the factories were in Germany so we had people clean them up you know sweep them out and plant flowers out front and and fumigate them with for rats and insects right parasites oh and the Jews were always compared to rats and insects as well they used cyclon B to do the insecticide well cyclon B that was the gas that was used in the in the death camps so it went like pathogen insect rats then it went into the asylums you know so so that people who were mentally deficient they were like parasites and rats and then it was Jews and Gypsies and parasites and rats they were using zyon B and not zyon a I I believe they were using zyon B I don't know I I know that that the gas was or zyon a was the gas that was formulated with a very extreme smell so that people would smell it and know because it was extremely toxic zeyon B it all came from Fritz hober hobber was

64:08the the guy who created the hober method of extracting nitrogen from the oxygen that we use for fertilizer today hober uh created zycon a and made it extremely toxic smelling so that you would know to avoid it zeyon B that that whatever element was removed from the so that it would be used in gas Chambers they' have no idea they were being gased who was a Jew ironically did not know that his zycon a was eventually going to be used on his own people yeah well I I suspect they probably use zyon a doing the fumigations you know but but the thing is is that well so you know you said what's the biological basis and the biological basis is that like we're basically wired in some sense also to to for the domain of order or the domain of chaos that's another way of thinking about it the domain of order once again is where you are when what you're doing is working because you see because our our

65:06environment isn't just natural it's also social so not only do you have to deal with the vagaries of the natural world properly so that it gives you what you're aiming at that's how you know if you're right it gives you what you're aiming at but you have to do it in a way that other people approve of and support that's a very tight constraint we talked about that as a constraint on the interpretation of the world but then now and then something happens to disrupt that stability so that's like the white circle that's the black circle in the white serpent in the yinyang symbol you know how the how the white one that's order the white one has a black dot in it and that's because chaos can come pouring through into order at any moment and you have a circuit that detects that and that's the same circuit that detects snakes or predators and obviously why wouldn't it be you know an

65:52intruding Force an intruding Force has to be responded to right now right so there's a a need for a demand instantaneous response instantane and almost like you were saying of those kids like almost a an unhuman or a disassociative sort of uh the the ability to act almost as if like like something other than a person without reason or dehumanization right and and the dehum the thing is is another thing that's so funny is that we think that the natural response to looking at a human being is humanization and that isn't right like the default person in some sense isn't human the default member of your tribe is human I mean most tribes around the world the name for their tribe is the people implying that they're the people and all those other things out there are barbarians right they're they're forces of chaos they're The Stranger they bring disease and trouble now I don't want to be too

66:49Bleak about it because this is the basic debate between conservatives and liberals to some degree is the conservatives take the stranger equals pathogen route more frequently and they're less uh attracted to the idea of the free of of of or they were conventionally that trade with the Foreigner has benefits that outweigh the the the um the risks and generally speaking liberals have the opposite attitude um so but that's because those two things are both true one is that man it's really useful to trade with strangers because they have all sorts of cool things you don't have but B well it might be real dangerous because you don't know what those things are infected with like realistically speaking let's say but then also metaphorically speaking you know here's an example of how how a how a an object can be a virus think about the automobile like if you wanted to

67:50introduce something into a communist country that screamed uh the Paramount status of the individual You couldn't possibly create something that broadcast that more clearly than a car right the car is driven by one person the person is completely autonomous they're completely sealed off they don't need any state support or sanction whatsoever to move around in the car it's like if you wanted to in if you wanted to uh rescue the Communists from their Collective uh pathology the best thing to do would be to par shoot in automobiles because the automobile just screams individual autonomy and so when you when you get a um an artifact from a foreigner you don't know what that's contaminated with let's put it that way and so we have a circuit for dealing with that and it's a it's a it's the thing that Associates The Foreigner with the force that eats the sun when it sets

68:50at night that's the most archaic way of thinking about it but it's the snake or the predator M so and what do you do with a snake or a predator man you burn it you kill it you crush it it's like there's a there's a destructive force that comes along with it with that that's absolutely well it's morally righteous cuz yeah you you know if it's a poisonous snake and it's threatening the village obviously you kill it and then you're celebrated for it so in a sense the same dehumanizing force that allows people to act that way in war also allows people to disassociate between anyone who doesn't agree with their ideology in a school setting in a university like what happened at MC that's why I don't like that's why I don't like ideologies yeah because the ideology divides the world into those safely ensconced within our dominance hierarchy and serpents and so that's dangerous and and

69:50the reason that that this doctrine that I described about the line between good and evil running down the individuals part I mean I got that particular line mostly from Alexander Solan niten but it's also a it's a it's an idea that's been developed intensively in the West for thousands and thousands of years and I mean maybe it's been developed since far before we we invented the stories in Genesis because of course the serpent see in Genesis of course Genesis is like a paradise right so you can think about it as a well functioning hierarchy it's also a balance between Chaos and Order it's got walls and it's a garden so but there's a snake that pops its head in and that's the same as that as I said that black dot inside the White Serpent and the yyang symbol it's that no matter how doesn't matter how perfect the the environment is set up something that

70:41doesn't fit is going to make its way inside it's one of the oldest stories of of mankind and you see the thing that makes it itself manifest inside in the Genesis story is a snake now that snake turns out to be Satan which is like how the hell does that happen it's a snake like what where does that come from it's it's not actually in the biblical writings to any degree it's part of the surrounding mythology well it's partly because people started to figure out that the worst snake wasn't a snake the worst snake was the snake that was inside a person because a malevolent person is way more of a threat than just a snake like a snake wants to bite you and it wants to eat you and all of that and and they were hell on our extremely primordial ancestors but where the human race has been trying to figure out where the threat is forever well first of all it was external right it was all

71:32external it was the snake it was the Barbarian but then it got localized to some degree inside the individual it's like that's a bad person that person has a snake in them and then the idea kind of came out this is so cool the idea is that well the snake that's inside bad person a and the snake that's inside bad person B is somehow the same so that's where the idea of of an articulated morality starts to to come from is there's an equivalence of evil across individuals so then the idea of evil itself starts to become abstracted at the same time that the idea of good does while evil gets associated with Satan and Satan gets associated with the snake it's it's mindboggling I mean these are how these see we were chimps for Christ's sake you know it took us a long time to develop up say an ideal just to say the word an ideal implies a counter ideal say well those things were embod

72:25way before they were ideas and after they they were embodied first not as bad but as a bad thing or a bad person bad had to be extracted out of that and even that was extracted as a drama first you know it's like the bad guy in a movie he isn't a bad guy he's a composite bad guy you know he he's he's a literary bad guy and the good guy isn't just a good guy he's a literary good guy he's a hero he's got way more heroic attributes than the typical person and that's where abstract ideas are born so anyways back to your question you you said um what's the evolutionary basis for that sort of disassociative behavior and thinking yeah so I'm afraid that that was a big rabbit hole man no it's a great rabbit hole and it it makes a whole lot of sense that there's an actual that there and I knew you probably knew this which is why I asked you I knew you had an

73:18answer rather that there is some sort of an evolutionary basis for that sort of that ability that people have to look at someone as the other you bet well also how the hell are you going to respond in war if you don't have that right that was always an issue with people uh with invading tribes and like you said with other external threats whether it was animals or insects or snakes or anything that could kill you yeah well and I mean in in a in a primordial situation I mean guys are in Warrior mode a good part of the time and modern people don't even know what that's like that's why they go out and they go into Warrior mode and they get post-traumatic stress disorder because it's so unlike the way they configure themselves that that they can't even they can't even bridge the gap between the two identities and for um just for sake of clarity I think for some folks um post-traumatic stress

74:07disorder has actually come from not just that but also from the threat of being attacked um from what I understand um people like special ops people people like Rangers and Navy Seals and the like are less likely to develop post-traumatic stress disorder because they're acting versus reacting that whereas people that are on uh that are going on like um patrol and then they get blown up like those people apparently have a far more likely issue with post-traumatic stress disorder because they're constantly worried about these external threats and then they when they come back to civilization they have a very difficult time uh getting back to Baseline yeah they're in prey mode really in a very serious way yes yeah so it's it's not just acting but it's also reacting that the reacting issue sometimes is even more problematic for the individual than the acting mode

75:01yeah well there's there's there's a funny dichotomy there because very frequently if you're going to um encounter a stress it's best to do it voluntarily because you use a whole different circuit use the approach circuit and so I mean that sounds paradoxical what you just said because I said that you know people often observe themselves doing something get post-traumatic stress disorder and then you said well yeah but if people act they're less likely to but that's that's part of a more General phenomena which is that in the face of a stressor you're you're better off psychophysiologically to act voluntarily it's either you're either going to be the thing that advances on the on the anomaly or it's prey that that's that's roughly the way to think about it and to be a prey animal is a terrible thing because it's Doom it's paralysis like literally speaking it's it's like in the Harry

75:50Potter series with the Basilisk right you look at the Basilisk and it turns you to Stone well why well because that's what happens to a prey animal when a horrible Predator looks at it it's frozen it's turned to stone that's Medusa with all her snakes right she looks at you man mother nature looks at you the the like the devouring part of Mother Nature opens her eye on you it's like you're paralyzed that's an old old story that is a really interesting thing that I never considered that Medusa does have this head of snakes and she looks at you she turns you into stone and that is the biggest issue with people it's not fight or flight people think it's fight or flight it's fight flight or freeze right the freeze thing is very common with people and I've seen it I've seen it with people that just they don't know what to do when they're in a stressful situation and instead of

76:39reacting they freak out y yeah they freak out or they freeze you know so they just they lock out yeah well you can see that if we go back to that example of say someone tells a joke maybe they're kind of socially anxious and they finally manag to mumble out a joke and it falls flat it's like to freeze in the face of that very common reaction you know the person freeze then often they'll break into tears and run so well if they're socially anxious that's exactly what's going to happen cuz they've now they also know that they've been turned into a predator let's say a snake Predator by the whole community and that's very shaming and so that that's that that is dumped on top of them I mean that's socially anxious people are afraid of that all the time that they're going to be regarded by the group as an outcast or Pariah right and it it's very hard on people and the

77:27paranoid amongst them are always thinking that people are talking about them and trying to make them the other right right yeah yes a very uncomfortable state of mind yeah this is a very I think this is a very important subject and in explaining it this way I think for the open-minded whoever is willing to listen to this who maybe might have opposed some of your ideas before I think they'll get a better understanding of what's really dangerous about this lack of dialogue and this lack of engaging and this shutting you out and making you the other as it were yeah well I mean it's what postmodernism is fundamentally concerned about they don't believe there's any other way of operating in the world than that you see and and this is this is one of the things that I think Western Civilization has contributed so brilliantly to to the expansion of knowledge in the world is

78:19what's the what's the cure for the inadequacies of the group well you might say the perfect state so one of the ways I'm going to do a series of lectures on the Bible starting May 16th and and for reasons that I outlined to some degree when I was talking about Genesis a little bit earlier but in the Old Testament for example the Israelites are always trying to make their peace with God so they're trying to live in the world without getting walloped constantly by natural events and by you know invading forces and which they attribute to God's will yes yes that whatever's beyond their understanding in some sense they're more sophisticated than merely this but whatever is beyond their understanding but they're kind of conceptualizing being as such and trying to figure out how to deal with it and one of the hypothesis they come up with is something like well you can bargain

79:06with it and the thing is you can that's one of the things that's so cool and partly the reason you can bargain with reality is because the reality that you encounter As you move forward in time is partly the world but partly the abstract social system and so you can bargain with the future abstract social system all the time you do that every time you make a promise you do it every time you sacrifice one thing for another you know so you you forego a impulsive Temptation and that gives you a moral claim that you can redeem in the future that happens all the that's what money is for God's sake and you know we discovered the future at some point as I said we were chimpanzees at one point we discovered the future then we discovered that you could bargain with the future as if it was a person that's amazing it's amazing and that's partly where the idea of God as a personality came from I

79:57should Flip Flip that that idea that you could bargain with the future came out of the idea that God was a personality because the God as a personality idea came first but it was a it was a it was a developmental stage on the way to even being able to say the future you know we we have no idea how it's like a 6 million-year path from chimpanzee to to self-aware human being you know and we don't we have no idea where these unbelievably sophisticated ideas that we have come from like the idea of sacrifice do you know how much blood was spilled before human beings were able to sacrifice abstractly instead of killing something we had to act out God enjoys you killing something because he's happy with the blood we had to act that out for God who knows 20,000 years 100,000 years before we got anywhere near the idea that you could do that abstractly so when I look at these old

80:55stories I look at them like an evolutionary biologist now I'm not trying to reduce them in any way because what we don't understand about Evolution that could make a very thick book and there's other strange things about religious phenomenology that we don't have a clue about you know like the fact that the drugs often called entheogens or psychedelics can reliably produce mystical experiences like no one has any idea what to make of that you can just discount it it's like yeah well you know they're drugs yeah sure people be using the things for who knows 50,000 years 150,000 years they might be the source of all our religious ideas I don't I'm not saying that they are but they could well be and so why do we have a capacity for mystical experience who knows it it's It's associated with the sense of awe It's associated with the same feeling that you get when you listen to

81:46particularly dramatic music or when uh or when something moves you deeply and you know the hair on the back of your neck stands up you know what that is that's pyo erection that's the same thing that happens to a cat when it looks at a particularly big dog it's awe you feel that when there's a swell of Music awe your the hair stands up on the back of your neck it's like you puff up just like a cat except you know like a bald cat so what do you make of this idea that well not the idea but the the reality that these entheogens closely mimic human neurochemistry no they do there's absolutely no doubt about that but why do you what do you think the reason for that is well part of the reason is is that we share an evolutionary pathway with all these things that we eat you know plants and fungi and you know look we're we're linked evolutionarily to every form of

82:37life on the planet you know and and like serotonin in lobsters has the same effect on lobsters as it does on human beings so if you up their serotonin levels artificially the lobster gets stands up more erect and and stronger and is much more willing to fight and if you increase the serotonin in the Lobster's nervous system then it gets all depressed and runs away and hides think think about that I mean we we split off from lobsters about 350 million years ago and they still live in dominance hierarchies that's how old the dominance hierarchy is there's PL that's older than trees it's older than flowers it's permanent right we've evolved for the hierarchy and the spirit of the hierarchy that's that's the Old Testament God that's at least part of it the spirit of the hierarchy so the these things are well they're mind-boggling to me which is partly why I'm investigating them but

83:29all of our wiring is conditional on that so and I mean women use the dominance hierarchy to select mates so it's so strange because you know people think of evolution from a natural selection perspective almost always but sexual selection plays a huge role so here I'll lay out something wild for you okay so we know that you have twice as many female ancestors as male ancestors now people will have a hard time with that but you could imagine that um roughly speaking that would happen if every single woman had one baby and only every second man fathered a child so for men it would be you either have two kids or zero well that's basically what it is on average across time if you're a man you have two children maybe with two different women or zero if you're a woman everyone has one that's how it averages out so there's more disparity of success among men and that's very

84:22common in the animal kingdom by the way now the question is how do women select their mates now unlike female chimps female humans are choosy maters female chimps will mate with any chimp they go into heat they'll mate with any chimp the dominant males are more likely to mate with them but that's because they chase away the subordinates it's not because the females exercise Choice human females exercise choice and that's one of the things that differentiated us from chimpanzees but how do they do it well they look at the male dominance hierarchy and that's where men are competing now you could say they're competing for power but that's pretty corrupt way of looking at it like they're competing for let's say influence they're competing for leadership and so in some sense the people at the top of the hierarchy if their men are elected by the other men now I know there's brutes and there's

85:12predators and all of that but I'm talking on average across time it's like the men organize themselves and there are influential men that rise to the top and the women take them now you think about that what that means is that over the millions of years that a dominance hierarchy with those properties existed so let's say since we split from chimps let's say that's 6 million years that means that the male dominance hierarchy is the environment that pushes The Mating male to the top so that means the male that's most likely to take precedence in the do in the male dominance hary is the one most likely to leave a genetic contribution so that means that the male dominance hierarch is a selection mechanism mediated by the female so what that means is that as we've moved forward through 6 million years of time men have become more and more well adapted not only to the

86:05presence of the male dominance hierarchy but to the ability to move up it and that's the central Spirit you could say in some sense that's the central Spirit of the individual the individual is the thing that can move up dominance hierarchies it's the thing that's at the top it's the I at the top of the pyramid and it's been selected for and then what's happened is that we've watched so we get better and better and better for biological reasons culturally mediated at figuring out how to climb across a set of dominance hierarchies so we can leave a genetic contribution that's what's happened to human beings now imagine that that's happened for 6 million years so now imagine that we started to watch that because we're curious creatures we're always trying to figure out who we are and then as we watched that we started to tell stories about what the people who could climb

86:54the hierarchies were like those were Heroes that's where hero mythology came from and the biggest hero is the person who go out and kill the snake well unsurprisingly because that was a big hero man and maybe when we were living in trees that was a hero so the the big hero is the person who goes out slays the Dragon Gets the gold brings it back to the community and distributes it he's also the person most likely to go up the dominance hierarchy he's the person most likely to find the Virgin right cuz it's a virgin that you free from the dragon and you get to claim her right and so the dominance hierarchy is a mechanism that selects Heroes and then breeds them and so then we watch that for 6 million years we start to understand what it means to be the hero we start to tell stories about that and so then not only are we genetically aiming at that with the dominance Hier as a selection

87:47mechanism mediated by female choice but our stories are trying to push us in that direction and so then we say well look that person's admirable tell a story about him and we say this person is admirable tell a story about him and this person is admirable and at the same time we talk about the people who aren't admirable and then we start having admirable and non admirable as categories and out of that you get something like good and evil and then you can start to imagine the perfect person that would be not only so it would be you take 10 admirable people and you pull out someone who's meta admirable and that's a hero that becomes a religious figure AC across time that becomes a savior or Messiah across time as we conceptualize what the ideal person is and we in the west here's how we figured it out we said the ideal person the ideal man is the person who tells

88:36the truth and what that means is that's the best way of climbing up any possible dominance hierarchy in in the way that's most stable and most lasting that's that's the conclusion of Western culture so in a sense psychologically when you're talking about postmodernists and their rejection of these classic male structures what they're doing is realizing that they're not going to compete in the the classic as stated male hierarchy so they're creating their own version of it sure that's the creative element sure well we we you we asked earlier what's the motivation of these pathological guys who are out there like bolstering up the feminists yeah well you know they don't compete any other way they don't compete they figured out how to compete they compete as allies let's say mm very sneaky wow yeah wow sneaky yeah and that's how everybody always describes

89:27him too when you I mean it's almost like a we I avoid doing it because I just it just almost feels gross to label them like that but that's that is the way you think of male feminists you think of them as sneaky and and yeah it's creepy and discrimin discriminatory towards classic male Behavior yeah well no wonder yeah they haven't got a hope of competing in that hierarchy wow that's deep that is deep this is going to be hurtful to a lot of people there A lot of people listening to this right now very upset yeah well you know you you asked earlier why why the postmodernists don't like blunt speech yeah well that's why man you know it's like the truth is something that burns it burns off Deadwood and people don't like having their Deadwood burnt off often because they're like 95% Deadwood and and I'm not being believe me I'm not being sned about that it's no joke when you start

90:25to realize how much of what you've constructed of yourself is based on deception and and lies that is a horrifying realization and it can easily be 95% of you you things you say things you act out you know it's well you see that in Pinocchio which I often you discuss you know Pinocchio when he gets corrupt as he as he matures he first learns to lie and then he becomes a brain jackass on Pleasure Island it's like and and he's threatening by the underground authoritarians right they're going to sell them to the salt mines it's like yeah that's for sure it's exactly right man so then you figure out you're a brain jackass and you're lying all the time that's a terrible realization and then all that needs to be burnt away and the people don't like that you know it's now you've been in battled in this conflict for quite a long time and I've got to imagine that

91:18the way you look at the world the way you you see things many many steps ahead do you see any sort of a logical conclusion to this process do you see any light at the end of the tunnel or do you see an impossible to avoid conflict like do you what what do you see when you look at this whole thing long term well I would say I can't look at it long term and the reason for that is that and this is why I get a kick out of all the kek kistan boys you know I do believe that we're in a period of Chaos what's a kist k oh kek is a mythological country that's ruled by chaos by the god kek who's a frog by who's a frog as it turns out um so uh I don't I don't know about this oh well you need to look them up that's a big internet thing kakistan yeah yeah yeah big internet thing all I know about the frog is the Frog the Trump frog the Peppe the Frog who they've who is apparently so distraught

92:17that his frog has been used to uh align K yeah he killed him off but good luck he didn't all right so the the people who were um who were using Peppe I haven't got the story quite right but I'll get it mostly right the people who were using Pepe as a meme it is used yeah that's Republic of kistan so they used this symbol K e k to replace LOL and the reason they did that was because k e k in Korean means LOL and so it was just this little joke kek k e k well then somebody found out out these were people who were using Pepe remember it's a frog then people found out that kek was an Egyptian God and he was a frog and he was between categories sort of like a transsexual by the way he was between categories and so now they have this Republic of kek and it's ruled by this Egyptian god whose name is kek who's a frog hold on go back go back don't don't keep changing this Jamie's

93:17doing this in the background while you're talking but look at this there's a frog with a make America great again hat and he's he's got like a tombstone it says those who served in the meme War 2015 and 2016 we are the gods of the great meme War we are the posters the Legion of kek we are the internet the death of the normies ls and CAC We Are One what in the is going on that that is the question and that's the question you asked me and my answer was I don't know we're in a period of chaos we're in a period of chaos and in a period of chaos the time Horizon shrinks because no because the outcome is uncertain well this seems to be truly embracing chaos I mean just that statement the Frog the Donald Trump thing with the hat on this this is one of the things that seems to me to be a reoccurring feature in this whole uh chaos ballet that we're watching play

94:14out is that people are enjoying the fact that Donald Trump sucks as a president they don't feel threatened by it they like it and they don't don't like it because they want to burn this to the ground and torch this thing and like a phoenix wheel rise from the fire no no it's not that it's that they they are enjoying that it's falling apart this is why they we are the posters do you know what posting is yeah Jamie explain posting you're really good at explaining it yeah you're you posting for like literally no reason other than to get someone mad it's almost like trolling but it's like a a separate level of trolling right that's a good way to say it that's a good way to say provocation for own sake Jamie's the first person to uh tell me about posting I wasn't aware till about what a year ago yeah I think it was yeah pre-election time I did not know so I mean there's rules for

95:05operating in chaos right cuz that's when you're in the belly of the Beast or the belly of the whale and you're underwater you're in the Underworld you're in the underworld in chaos and so that's a really cool thing to know Joe so imagine that the the normal world of mankind is inside that dominance hierarchy where everything is going well because nothing abnor noral is happening you're getting what you need and you want and your conscious knowledge suffices right okay but then something tilts and that structure no longer works so where do you end up you end up in the Underworld that's what happens when your partner of 20 years has a has a a long-term um Affair and you find out about it it's like you thought you knew where you were but you didn't and now that you found out you don't know where you are well when you don't know where you are you're in the Underworld oo right and that's

95:53that's where the unconscious forces play those are the gods it's why there's gods in the Underworld and people go to the underworld all the time it's chaos and fear and depression hopelessness and imaginativeness it's everything it's chaos this realm is terrifying to people terrifying and promising terrifying and promising cuz dragons have gold because it's always the the unknown has two things just like the future it's like look out it'll do you in and look out it offers everything to you that's the underworld that's why the hero always goes into the underworld to find a cave full of gold that's guarded by a dragon in The Hobbit literally yeah well and that's be wolf right that's the oldest story of mankind it's really the our oldest story wow and so that the underworld is chaos it's it's chaos and down there there's all sorts of play of possibility and the reason the Frog was

96:46the was the guardian of chaos is because the the frog is this thing that doesn't fit into categories you see because it's partly water it's part land it's tadpole yet it's it's adult right so it's like a fish and then it's like an animal it doesn't fit and it's things that don't fit that blow apart the categories right well that's what the transsexuals do to the category of gender for example and that puts you in this state of chaos it puts you in the state of chaos and that's what we're in now we're in a state of chaos and so what are the rules for operating in a state of chaos well as far as I can tell the fundamental rule when operating in chaos is tell the truth so for for example if you for the people that want to navigate this successfully yep all you've got that's what you've got as a as a shield and a weapon and and uh and that that's the guidepost that's

97:36the that's the way through well and you see that in Hero Stories all the time you know so it's it's a it's allegiance to the truth but truth is a strange thing it's a very strange thing often the hero in a in a story has to um assimilate their Dark Side before they're capable of telling the truth right in The Hobbit for example he has to become a thief right because he has to get tough that's the thing that's the thing also the thing about telling the truth is that it's not for it's not for the naive not at all and partly it's because it burns off Deadwood it's partly because it hurts people's feelings it's a sword so you have to be a warrior wow a truth warrior in this time of Chaos right what emerges from this right sometimes sometimes it's catastrophe that's the thing about these categories they're real they're real and you know the optimists that I hear say

98:37well the pendulum swings and then it swings back and I think yeah well sometimes it it takes a 100 years to swing back and it takes a hell of a lot of people out on the way and sometimes it never swings back at all so you know sometimes people go out to fight a dragon and it just eats them or it burns them and that's the end of that right and like we're in an unstable period of time at the moment in a transition period of some sort I can't put my finger on it but I know that that's partly why what I've been saying has been resonating with people because obviously it's not about pronouns well it is it is except language turns out to be a about a lot more than like you can't take a little thing like the desire to transform pronouns and think that that's a little thing it's not a little thing it's also your disagreement with this use of these new gender pronoun words they're trying to

99:31force on people has opened up this discussion where you can Enlighten people on your very deep understanding of human psychology it's not just simply this gender pronoun disagreement you're transphobic you're a racist you're a transphobic piece of it's this opportunity now because of this I mean essentially they with the wrong dude I me to really to say it the right way because your understanding this like a t-shirt like that it's not shallow in any sense of the word I mean to engage you in this this battle of rhetoric is it it's it allows you to expose your very deep understanding with the problems that are going on right now with human beings in general well it it looks like that to me because what happened S as far as I can tell with with my YouTube channel say is that people are often pulled in because of the social justice Warrior stuff but then they see I have all these other

100:32videos and they're curious about me partly because people are calling me names and so then they watch a video or two and they think hm I haven't heard that before yeah you know and then they watch a bunch of them and then they write me and say man that was really helpful and I say thanks I'm really happy about that because I am are you in an unmanageable position now though as far as like responding to people oh I can't like I try to respond to people but I can't I have no it's not possible I would imagine like over the last few months it must be just overwhelming yeah yeah well I've given up trying to keep up on on my email it's just not my wife helps me with that and I've had some other people help me but you know what I do is I I look and I try to say thank you to people and write them a couple of lines when I have a moment but you know because I can't get to all of it they

101:20just come in by the thousands yeah yeah I know that position right and it's too bad because people are writing me very heartfelt long letters they're often brilliant frequently like amazing letters telling me you know their experiences with the authoritarian left or or or the way they've been you know cornered in in one way or another or or how starting to clean up the room changed their life that's quite fun because it's something I always tell people to do instead of going out and protesting Jesus I just can't stand clean up the room yeah meaning well my sense is that if you want to change the world you start from yourself and work outward because you build your competence that way it's like I don't know how you can go out and protest the structure of the entire economic system if you can't keep your room organized yeah isn't that an issue with people

102:07though that they always want to enact some sort of control over the outside world when their inside is all up those the people that are the most adamant about it well I think there's some truth in that um I think there is truth in that I mean people try to change outside world for lots of ways but many of those ways aren't just pure good but you know I thought about well I made a video call which was called message to Millennials where I was it was called how to change the world properly a bit of on the pretentious side I suppose but um I was trying to produce something that was a counterposition to this idea that what you should do is go out and fix up other people you know that's just not right and there's a new testament line about that something about you know not worrying too much about the log your neighbor's eye or about the speck in your neighbor's eye when you have a log

102:57in your eye it's like yes no kidding but you know do you really want to do you really want to face that and so what I've thought about is that well what you start to do is you start to tell and act out the truth locally like within the domain of your actual competence you know cuz the world presents itself as a series of puzzles some of which you're capable of solving and some of which you're not and you have many puzzles in front of you that you could solve solve but you choose not to you know that those are the things that weigh on your conscience it's like you know I should really do this but you don't it's like so I had this idea a long time ago because the world is a pretty Dreadful place I thought well what would the world be like if people stopped avoiding the things they knew they should do you know because the question is how much are we contributing to the fact that

103:45life is a is an existential catastrophe and a tragedy how much is our own corruption contributing to that that's a really worthwhile question things you leave undone because you're angry you're resentful you're lazy you have inertia well you consult your conscience and it says well you know that place over there could use a little work it's the same as working on yourself and so you clean that up because you can then things are a little clearer around you and you're a little better off because you've practiced a bit and and so you're a little stronger and then something else manifests itself and says well maybe you could like take a crack at fixing me up too so you decide to do that and then that gets a little bit more pristine you know and soon and it's it's humble because you're not exceeding your domain of competence you know it's like don't be fixing up the economy

104:3518-year-olds you don't know anything about the economy it's a massive complex machine Beyond anyone's understanding and you mess with it at your peril so and can you even clean up your own room no well you should think about that you should think about that because if you can't even clean up your own room who the hell are you to give advice to the world that's a very very important thing for people to hear it's a very important thing for people to hear so many times I mean here's a a perfect example that people will understand and be able to resonate with it'll resonate with them rather um when you see people that have a lot of uh inspirational memes on like Instagram and Facebook they're almost all up elron hubard was completely insane and was self-diagnosing and one of the things he was trying to do I mean if you read uh Lawrence Wright's book going clear he

105:34was clearly trying to fix himself in creating this religion this uh religion that was a lot of it based on self-help principles that he took from other sources that you see from a lot of these people that are like I mean there's just there's legitimately motivational people that uh find great benefit in being an example a powerful strong example and they find great comfort in showing people um the their methods that they've used in order to uh improve their life like your own self- auditing system that you're promoting yeah so it's not just it's not that they're all that it's all uh it's all um not real or you know no there's it's not like there's no way that people can improve this the people can improve themselves I think to a degree that we don't understand you know because a human being for better or worse is is something potential as well as something

106:34actual and that's really weird that idea of potential because it's not act actually measurable or tangible but we we seriously believe it's something like the idea of spirit you know but potential yeah but people believe in it you see because I might say well you're not living up to your potential and you might disagree but you would definitely understand the statement right and they think well what is this potential it's like it's not actual it's not real but it is isn't it though if you see someone especially um artistic like you see someone who may be uh self-sabotaged with drugs or alcohol or personal chaos but they uh can create amazing music but they never get it out you see that often times with artists and often times um you see that after initial success you'll see some amazing um motivation early in their career then initial success and then self- sabotage after

107:28the fact not realizing their potential obviously they've hit some sort of a frequency where they resonate with people that appreciate them authors you see that with musicians comedians all sorts of people that create things and then they're not living up to their potential because they've allowed the demons to take over the inner workings of their mind you know so and again I'm not talking there's a lot of of sincere people that are motivational people that I follow I think there's a lot of people out there that are and they take uh great pleasure in expressing to other people the things that have benefited them so I don't I don't want to sell them short well see this is part of the reason I like the psychoanalysts say Freud and Yung because and I would say particularly Yung because I I don't haven't read anyone I regard as deeper than Yung he's terrifying truly

108:18terrifying but but here's one of the things that differentiates him from the typical self-help person I really love this is that he believes that the pathway to completion as a human being is through the is through the um embodiment of the monster embodiment of the monster that's the discovery of the Shadow you see so Yung didn't believe that you could be a good person until you realized your capacity for evil I don't mean acted it out in the world but understand that it's it's possible well not only understand it but then to bring it under your control M you see because there's a big difference between someone who's naive and is a good person they're naive they're good person because they can't not be they're like a domesticated house cat there's nothing they don't even have the capacity to be bad so there's no morality in that the morality comes when

109:12you're a monster and you can control it and that's the union encounter with the shadow so Yung said for example that the roots of the Shadow go all the way down to Hell and what he meant by that is is that you well you can think about it literally you can think about it metaphorically we just think about it metaphorically it's like if you start to understand who you are then you understand the Nazis and who wants to understand the Nazis you know I can understand sex criminals I can understand them right right I can understand Nazis and the reason for that is because I can see that as an aspect of myself truly but one of the things that's so it's terrifying to realize that which is why it's terrifying to realize the shadow which is why people don't do it it's no wonder they don't do it you know it's it's a horrible thing to realize that you're human and what Being Human

110:08means like Angel like Christ to Satan that's the human being and you might say well those aren't real it's like okay well they're figments of the imagination that the human race constructed to describe themselves fine does that make it less frightening I don't think so so and it's it's not it doesn't make it any less frightening if you take those two extremes seriously and you might say well who's going to take the Christ extreme seriously it's no problem man dispense with it you try getting rid of the other side see how you do with that so yung's idea that you find so compelling was essentially that one has to understand their potential potential for horrific behavior that it almost exists in all of us that it's a facet of of Just The Human Experience well look I know partly why you're so popular it's cuz you're a monster I mean look I I watched what you did to the Kardashians

111:09on your on your uh and Jenner on your comedy show man you did this whole gargoyle thing yeah you remember you laugh yeah see you could even laugh about that I mean it was it was horrifying to behold you were crouched up on the back of this chair like a it's horrifying to do oh yeah I couldn't believe you did it it well the problem of doing it is this is going to sound up but while I'm doing it I'm not thinking I'm doing a comedy sketch this is what's up about it while I'm crouched there I'm thinking like a demon like while that's the reason why I do it that way like and the reason why I do it in like I'm very flexible right so it's one of the reasons why I do it in almost cuz I want it to be in an almost uh in a way that you don't imagine human beings moving you know that you it's like it it confuses the mind because it's not standard human movement and

112:05then on top of that the way I'm thinking and this like explosive like when he yells out nonsense and I say he because it's I don't think of it as me I really think it's it sounds so pretentious but while I'm doing that my brain goes into another place know it's really you can't do you can't do that unless you're a monster it's a f but it's also the thing see because I'm very happy when I retired it by the way oh yeah I I I was really quite taken uh I was very impressed by it I mean I thought it was hilarious to begin with but the fact that you would go there I thought that was really interesting and comedians are like that cuz they go into Dark Places they're tricksters they're a mediator between the normal world in the world of the Gods they're tricksters so it was very funny to watch you do that and I wondered how far you would let yourself get into it but I think part of the

112:55reason that you're appealing to people if if you don't mind me my me saying this you know I'm not trying to be um forward particularly but I thought about it a lot is that you're a tough guy and you tell the truth but it's both of those together that's what's doing it because you know people don't look at you and they and think like holier than thou preacher that isn't what they think they think tough guy who's trying to figure things out like right on that's good that's a good you're a good figure for the times because this whole war against the fello centrism you know need calls forward people who are like you if we're lucky and those are guys who have this Warrior end cuz you know you're a fighter so and you if you're going to be a fighter you have to want to win and you have to want to hurt people I mean not for the sake of hurting them that's what makes you different than an evil

113:50person but you have to have that Capac P you have to develop that and you know that's the step on the way to Enlightenment weirdly enough because that isn't what people think well I definitely think that truth is a valuable commodity in this very bizarre time and I think that's also one of the reasons why you're very popular is that you have stuck your neck out in a world that does not encourage it nor nor Academia not only does it not encourage it encourages the exact opposite encourages you to stick your head you know in in the books and just to in in some way shape or form go with the tide like whichever way it is and you know get your tenure and just yeah well it's intellectual Pride yeah you know but I don't consider myself an intellectual precisely what do you consider yourself what is an intellectual if you're not how about nobody well the thing see because my ideas aren't

114:46disembodied I act them out but to be kind romantic in some sense well I don't live in my head exactly do to some degree but what does an intellectual do then so do you think of it as a pejorative when you think of the term intellectual do you think of it as it a limited person well it's a funny thing when in this book called thus spake zarathustra Nicha has his his zarathustra come down from a Mountaintop after being enlightened and he sees this he goes into the Public Square and there's this little tiny being there like an inch high and has a gigantic ear on it and it it's talking and people are gathered around listening and that was sort of nich's metaphor for an intellectual it's like mostly little except maybe the rational faculty or something like that expanded to monstrous Dimensions unbalanced in that manner and and and and prone to become the subject of totalitarian ideology

115:44that's the worship of the rational mind that the Catholic Church always warned against you know it's it's not like the Catholic Church of course I have to say this I won't even say it but you don't need to that's right that's right so but the point is they had a warning and the warning was that the rational mind likeed to fall in love with its own Creations ah right so the term intellectual the problem is that it it identifies one aspect and it it it sort of defines one aspect of behavior and thinking only one yeah it's the intellect well what happens is it's like it's like the intellect is raised to the to the status of highest God that that's the right way to think see the the god idea here's another way of thinking about it that's quite cool I learned this from Yung and you you can take it for what it's worth um the highest ideal that a person holds consciously or

116:39unconsciously that's their God it functions in precisely that manner and people might say well I don't believe in God it's like well it depends on what you mean like and and I'm not being I'm not being foolish about that it's like we're very complicated creatures and we're run by all sorts of very strange things down there in the unconscious you know and the Greeks thought we were the play things of the Gods because we serve lust we serve thirst we serve hunger we serve rage you know and those things all transcend us so that's why they were Gods you know Rage that's the war god well why is it a god well it exists forever it exists in all people it takes them over and directs their behavior it's a god well you can you can quibble about the details no it's not a God okay fine it's a psychological Force right do people get too hung up on that one word well

117:34they don't they don't really we have to think about it functionally to some degree we have to think about what that idea means what I mean we we've had that idea forever it isn't just some Superstition Jesus we got to be more sophisticated than that man right you know and that's partly well this is partly what what I think is unfortunate about the new atheists let's say is they don't take the damn problem seriously they think well Christianity that's just a bunch of superstition it's like really no sorry that's just not deep enough man so what it really is is the accounts of people trying to work out the issues of being a human let let me give you another example this is so cool this is so cool it's north R fry who was a Biblical scholar in in at the University of Toronto this was this was one of his elucidations of the structure of the Bible the Bible's actually a

118:32story and which is weird because it's a whole bunch of different books written by a whole bunch of different people edited kind of willy-nilly over thousands of years and then assembled you know by committee it's a really strange book but it has a narrative structure so and that sort of emerged as a collective decision across these thousands of years so the the Old Testament here's the rough story in the Old Testament Israel is sort of a middle power and it rises to power so and domination and then it a prophet arises and says look you guys are all successful now you're starting to get corrupt you're not paying attention to the widows and children you're not running your state according to the superordinate principle you might say well the superordinate principle doesn't exist it's like okay okay keep running it that way and see what the hell happens that's what the prophet

119:27says usually at the risk of his life he says that to the king it's like fine you don't believe in God you don't believe in the superordinate principle let's say that the superordinate ethical principle no problem keep doing what you're doing let's see what happens well what happens is Israel gets wiped out you know and then for Generations it's enslaved or its population is being destroyed and then it sort of climbs back up to power and then it gets powerful for for a brief period of time and it gets corrupt and a prophet comes up and says remember that superordinate principle that you made a covenant with you're not paying any attention to it anymore you better look the hell out and everyone ignores It and Bang so it's it's order corruption chaos order corruption chaos that happen six times now so here's an there's an idea behind it the idea because the state keeps Rising

120:18there's an idea that emerges out of that that the aim is the perfect State that's a utopian dream that arises out of that let's call it learned process over thousands of years if we could only get the state perfect if we could only get the state of perfect well let's say like the state of Israel or the or the Russian State the communist state if we could only bring Utopia in at the political level our problems would be solved well then what happens is there's a transition in conceptualization that happens with the New Testament and the New Testament conceptu ization is wait a minute the state isn't salvation the individual is salvation now you say well we're going to just throw that out are we that was a hell of a discovery man it was a and then there's more to it it's not only is the individual salvation it's the truthful individual that's salvation you

121:13think of how difficult a concept like that is to develop if there's anything less self-evident than that you know cuz you think well who's going to run the dominance hierarchy it's like the biggest bloody monster with a club it's like no it turns out those are unstable those societies are unstable they don't work they collapse into chaos they get corrupt they lose sight of the superordinate principle whatever that is the stable solution is the individual that tells the truth and it's taken us forever to figure that out and that's partly what the postmodernists are after that's their antio centrism that's why they skip off and hide in their ideology they're afraid to come out they're afraid to be seen they're afraid to speak because they have nothing to say so we have to get sophisticated about this stuff or we're going to throw it away without understanding it it's it's

122:08unbelievable like that story is it's it's it's the story upon Western Civilization it's the story upon which Western Civilization is founded that's why n said when God was dead that every everything would collapse into chaos he didn't say that triumphantly he knew what was going to happen so did dovi that's why I admire those people so much they knew what was coming so what I've been trying to do and I've been guided in large part by Yung because he was the first see Yung took n's problem seriously n said look we're losing our faith we're losing our our ability to relate to this superordinate ethical principle and he actually blamed Christianity for killing itself with the with the sort of truth that it had produced uced said so we're going to lose this and it's big trouble make no mistake about it because our whole society is founded on those principles we get rid of the animating

123:00Spirit at the base of it we're going to lose all of it so and N thought well we're going to have to become superhuman to manage it that's that's where his concept of the Overman comes from or the Superman which the Nazis sort of pulled off and parody I would say now Yung you see Yung was a student of niches not directly but very much influenced by him Yung thought that n was wrong that we couldn't create our own values because look it's so hard to create your own value like let's say you're kind of an overweight guy and you decide to go to the gym for your New Year's resolution it's like you don't you go twice and then you stop and it's because you can't create your own values right it's hard you're not your own slave you can't just tell yourself what to do you have a nature and so Jung's idea was well that we had to go back to the mythology we had to go back to the stories we had to

123:50go back into the underground unconscious chaos and lift out what we had forgotten and that's what he was trying to do with his psychology and he's done it very effectively very very effectively he was a revolutionary thinker but very difficult to understand and so I've been working with yung's ideas for a long time trying to I would say make them more rational and articulate not and believe me that's no critique because every time I go back to Yung which I do from time to time thinking I've kind of mastered him I learned a bunch of stuff that I didn't know so but so what I've been trying to do is to resurrect God I'm trying to resurrect the dormant logos I suppose if you have to put it that way that's what I'm trying to do and it's mostly and mostly in men and they're starving for it cuz I why mostly in men I don't know that just seems to be what's happening

124:46like about 90% of my viewers on YouTube are men but then when I go speak publicly it's all men what the hell are they doing coming to hear somebody speak men don't do that right women do that and so and then I talked to them about truth and responsibility and their eyes light up because it's like no one ever mentioned that before and it's it's it just boggles my mind I'm I'm asking because uh I feel like that's a that is a gigantic theme today that men searching for some sort of reason or some sort of uh I guess without using without a better word path some sort of path I mean it seems to be very very prevalent today and almost uh all all walks of life that men feel disenfranchised with this world that they find themselves stuck in oh there's a reason that superhero movies are so popular you know that's polytheism that's the return of polytheism for all

125:44intents and purposes I mean what the hell are those things they're daming Gods obviously one of them's Thor for God's sake I mean how more OB could it be right you know and so you might say well who's the leader of the demigods cuz that's the person you really want to follow right yeah yeah well The evolutionary answer to that is well the evolutionary answer to that as far as the Christian route went was Christ but there's been lots of embodiments of that for the Mesopotamians it was mardic mardic was the Savior figure he had eyes all the way around his head and he spoke magic words that was his fun that's what made him different from all the other gods and he was elected by other all the other gods to be their King and then he went out and fought Tiamat who's a great dragon and made the world out of her pieces one of his names was he who makes ingenious things out of the combat with

126:34tyat well that's what human beings do is they go out into the unknown into chaos and they make ingenious things out of it that's what we do and so that he's the found mic was the founder of of of Mesopotamian civilization and you could think about all those tribes came together to make Mesopotamia they all had a God and so then those Gods went to war and out of that war of gods a a metag god emerged that was Marduk and Marduk is one of the sources for the figure of Christ that happened all over the place like you see the admirable man then you see 10 admirable Ben and you think wow those guys have something in common that's what you remember about them you see you remember the heroic things they've done because they stick in your memory because they fit the pattern and then you start telling the story about the heroic things that a bunch of them did it all

127:22amalgamates together and then you come out with your culture here your God then there's like 50 tribes they each have their own Gods well what what are you going to do then the gods go to war over centuries and then they elect a new God Marduk in the case of the Mesopotamians and he's the thing that goes out and fights the dragon of chaos and makes the world it's like yeah that's exactly what he is you do that with truth cuz truth introduces you to chaos why do you think though it's so much of an issue with males as opposed to females in our society maybe females already have enough to do really really like maybe maybe men have to take this on voluntarily that's what it looks like to me cuz like you can you can screw around till you're 50 you can still have a family you got time and and you can sit down and do nothing if you want you can do it so but you shouldn't cuz it's it's

128:19horrible to do that and people who do it know it like it's it's meaningless it's well it's funny thing about meaninglessness there's no such thing when people say their lives aren't are meaningless that isn't what they mean they mean I'm in pain and anxious all the time that's what they mean those are meanings man you don't get neutral you know I'm just sitting around I'm not feeling anything it's like no no one sorry that doesn't happen right so when you you say do nothing that your life is meaningless if you're doing nothing what do you mean by doing nothing well by not accepting any respons by not lifting a great load by not acting out the archetype of the hero that's what people are that's what men are if they're anything they're mythological Heroes if they're anything through some path whatever it be there's lots of paths I mean so look there's an old medieval

129:08idea this is the idea of the imitation of Christ this is something that Jung elaborates on a lot he he believed this is one of the things that he said was that you're you're the the proper goal of a Christian roughly speaking is to enact the The Meta pattern of Christ's life in their own to make it their own story and so what did he mean by that well part of it is see one of the things that characterizes the mythological figure of Christ let's say is that he takes on the burden of mortality voluntarily he accepts it as a precondition of existence and we have to do that because otherwise we get resentful like life is hard make no mistake about it people's lives are tragic you know if you pick a random person off the street and you ask them about their life man usually there's things that have happened they you know they just begger the imagination it's no

130:01wonder people are angry and resentful and bitter but the way out of that is to accept it to accept your mortality and that helps you transcend it that's partly what the crucifix symbol means because it was it was it was accepted voluntarily you have to accept your death voluntarily that's part of the path of the hero it's a very difficult thing to do obviously obviously what's your alternative yeah obviously you know I think uh people are constantly searching for that thing that you just described the thing of meaning you know having meaning in this life and that meaning has a different definition for everybody I mean everybody's meaning is I mean your meaning might be very different than mine or Jim's I mean you kind of have to have your own path and I think that's also one of the reasons why people are so confused is because you're thrust into an early age into a very

130:53rigid system of education and then of jobs and then of career structure where you're in this place and most people don't feel like that's what they're supposed to be doing and we feel very alienated by the very structure of society that we are embeded in course of course of course well one of the you know there's two primary masculine mythological figures and one is the wise king and the other is the king who devours his own son right that's the destruct that's the that's the patriarchy that the feminists are always talking about well of course it's always there so Society is a destructive force it doesn't care about you as an individual it it needs you to be part of society it needs you to adopt the norms and to squelch your peculiar individuality and to be a cog and to be socialized and you know to hem yourself in and control yourself and not be impulsive and yeah it's a tyrant but the

131:47thing is society isn't only a tyrant that's the thing it's like how about a little gratitude in there well you know people have a hard time with this because we like it when a thing is only one thing but Society is always two things it's the thing that alienates you and the thing that's your benevolent father always now you know it tilt sometimes it tilts harder towards the Tyrant and that's not so good but that's an archetypal reality so you know what do you have to contend with in life this is why these are archetypal realities because everyone has to contend with them you have to contend with yourself and the adversary that's inside you that that seems to oppose your every movement the fact that you're not that you just can't move forward smoothly through life without being in conflict with yourself so there's a hero in the adversary on the individual level and then on the

132:37social level there's the wise king and the Tyrant you're always going to run into that I don't care if you're a banto tribesman or a uh you know New York lawyer all those things you're going to run into and then in the natural world you're going to run into the destructive element of nature right that's the Gorgon you get you you let that thing get a glance at you and you're one like frozen puppy but also there's the benevolent element of nature that's feminine that's Mother Nature both of those extremes so and that's the world that's the archetypal world and it's because it's Eternal as far as human beings are concerned those things are always there that's our true environment it's not these things we see around us they're they're lasting no time these other things last for forever and that's what we're adapted to we're we're adapted to the things that last

133:26forever so but yet we go through this finite life searching for meaning well and it's funny to to to note where meaning seems to locate itself you want a meaning that justifies the suffering it's something like that that's a Transcendent meaning it's like this this is hard but it's worth it okay so what do you do pick something worth it right that's partly what I try to get people to do with that future authoring program to say okay look here's a place to start you got your miserable self right now it's like 3 to 5 years Out imagine what your life could be like if you had what you would give yourself if you were taking care of yourself What would life be like just come up with an idea even about that and so then people do that and then they write out a plan to attain it and then the college kids are like 30% more likely to stay in University if they do

134:24that especially if they're men cuz men need a purpose I think women have a purpose or they now they have two purposes you know they're going to have a family that's a major purpose man like just give birth it's that's no joke and then you're devoted to something for like 20 years you got your adventure right there yeah but a lot of women find great offense in someone saying that especially a man saying that man explaining that a woman's purpose is to breed right right I mean isn't that a a giant issue that a lot of women have I didn't say that was the only purpose I know you didn't oh yeah people have an issue with it but it's like grow up you know if you're a sophisticated person as far as I'm concerned how many important things are there in life well one of them is family like it's as simple as that now you might say well family isn't the end all solution it's like yeah well thanks

135:17for pointing that out you know I've dealt with plenty of patholog olical families but it's a huge part of life you have a mother and a father you have children it places you in the world and if any society that look there's a reason societies worship the virgin mother and the child it's because societies that don't die and so people say well you know that relationship between mother and child isn't the only thing okay fine it's still a sacred thing and and you miss it you miss it if you're female you miss that at your peril now that doesn't mean there aren't women who shouldn't miss it because maybe they have another purpose that's that transcends that but that's rare it's very very rare and and I would caution any women listening if they're young not to be duded into the idea that their career is will be of such high quality that it's self-evidently trumps

136:08having a family you you have to have a hell of a career before that's the case so don't you think that's unique to the individual though that some people just they'll be more s satisfied and I mean depending on what they're doing artistically or creatively or whatever it is yeah you can't make rules for the exceptional right you know they do what they're going to do those are open maybe those are open people they have genius level IQ like they're they're spectacular in some Manner and so there's a reason they're going to step outside the norm they're shape shifters no problem there's always going to be people like that and we need them how they know when they're that well telling the truth is a good start CU then you don't fool yourself about who you are you know that's another one of the things I tried to Think Through is why you should tell the truth so it's not self-evident man a

136:59smart kid the smarter the kid the earlier they learn to lie lying is very powerful because you can manipulate the world with your language and then you can get what you want lots of times or escape from things that you don't want so why not lie all the time well I think the reason is there's a bunch of reasons but one of them is is that you can't trust yourself if you lie and there's going to be times in your life where you have no one to turn to accept you and so if you've stuffed yourself full of lies then you're going to be in a crisis one day and you're going to have to make a decision and you're going to decide wrong and you're going to be in real trouble because you won't have the clarity of Mind necessary to make the proper judgment cuz you you filled your imagination and your perception with with rubbish so and if you really think that through you see there's this old idea in

137:43the Old Testament that fear of God is the beginning of wisdom and I kind of understand what that means because one of the things say we do with the future authoring program we offer people a little Heaven it's like okay construct your ideal aim at it come up with a plan you going to modify the plan no problem you're going to do a bad job of it no problem just do it okay so then now you've got a goal it's now your approach systems technically speaking the positive emotion systems that motivate you are you are engaged because they're engaged in relationship to a goal and the more Transcendent the goal the more they're engaged but that's not good enough it's to run towards something you like but it's even better to run away from something that terrifies you so then we ask people okay so here think about this real carefully take all your faults and your inadequacies and your your hatred for

138:33life all of that and then imagine that gets the upper hand and then think about where you could be in 3 to 5 years and everyone knows hey some people know they'd be a street person some people know they'd be an alcoholic some people know they'd be a prostitute or a drug addict like everybody's got their own little hell they could descend in to with Fair degree of rapidity and a fair bit of enjoyment and people know that and so I say well delineate that out too so you know where you're headed when you fall off the path and so then you're running away and running towards it's like yes well that's Heaven and Hell and you need it and they're real they're as real as anything that you can it depends on what you mean by real I suppose but they're as real as you make them how about that and people can make help pretty real people do seem to construct these pitfalls for themselves I mean

139:26self- sabotage is one of the most common things that you find in people that are struggling I mean you would think that someone who is struggling the last thing they'd want to do is help themselves towards their own demise but it's super common yeah well I I thought about that too and so you you tell me what you think about this cuz if you talk to people they say well I I want to have a meaningful life generally people want that but then you think well then what why aren't you and then you think well what does it mean to have a meaningful life exactly and then you think well maybe it means that you have to take on responsibility because you're your sacrifices have to be worth something right it has to have some it has to have some meat what you're aiming at it has to be something that can elevate your wormlike self to the level of tolerability you know you can say well

140:20yeah I've all these flaws but look at what I'm trying to do that's the real ground of self-respect well I missed I'm off the track with the question the ground of self-respect I can't remember what you asked me so we'll have to go to a different topic what how did we get on this we were um you asked about the evolutionary basis of we that was a long time ago I know it's a rabbit hole that just doesn't disappear but where were we just now um remember where we were just now no sorry I'm distracted by something else that's happening right now I give you let you know what is it Comey just got fired by Trump a little bit ago and uh Twitter is a Ablaze about what's going on right now this a little off topic but I mean uh you want to talk about a figure oh I know we were talking about men yes we were talking about men and what motivates them yes and so then we were I

141:26was talking about the fact that you know when I'm speaking publicly now most of my audience is men and that their eyes light up when they're so we we were talking about the necessity of taking on the burden of a responsibility because people not only are we should we be acting out the archetype of the hero but we should be caring a weight while we're doing it because we're we're like pack animals we're not happy without a wait and I think it's I do think it's it's something like have to justify your miserable existence do you think this is my theory about that um I believe that there's certain human reward systems that we uh have ingrained in us and that have allowed us to survive this long and that these reward systems a lot of them entail overcoming struggle because struggle was inexorable it was a massive part of existence and that without struggle our body is almost like well

142:22how come we not how come not overcoming something so it's almost like a trick like you have to trick your body and you trick your brain and trick your Humanity your your very existence into having some sort of a purpose in order to be at a baseline yeah well I'm I'm more well yes it does make sense but I I don't I don't think I don't think it's a trick here here's why I I think that because I think there is something irreducible about suffering I think it it it it it speaks for itself as a reality an unquestionable reality no nobody says to a to a child that's in severe pain that it isn't going to matter in a million years right right the the pain trumps everything right so then it seems to me that attempts to alleviate suffering Trump everything so if you want a responsibility it's like there you got one try arguing your way out of that it doesn't matter fine your suffering

143:16doesn't matter then that's for sure no none of the suffering matters you're going to go down that road are you you know you know what you know what the face of someone who says that no suffering matter matters looks like it's not pleasant so there there's no neutral position with regards to that so you see the world is full of unrequitted suffering let's say and who knows how much of it is unnecessary certainly the stuff you create seems to be unnecessary especially if you create it purposefully and people are doing that all the time so if you need a burden it's like how about how about about dampening down the unnecessary suffering a little bit how about trying hard to do that for the rest of your life see if that'll do it and God only knows how far you'd get you might get a long ways man when when people talk about meaning though when when you're talking about suffering and

144:08this this idea like there's what is what is going on in the mind that desires this difficult Pursuit like what what is going on like why is that a part of being a person like why is it a part of your ultimate happiness to have these obstacles to overcome and these character developing moments character building episodes in order for you to manage life and to get through life with the most amount of Happiness there's a story about this I think it's a frog and a scorpion yeah you know the story well the Frog tell please yeah well the Frog the Scorpion you know convinces the Frog to give him a ride across the river and the Frog says well you're a scorpion it's like you know I'm not going to do that because you're going to nail me with your tail and the Scorpion says no no if I do that when we're in the river we'll both drown so why would I do that so the Frog agrees to Ferry the Scorpion

145:04across and they get halfway out and the scorpion stings him and the Frog says turns to him with his dying breath and says why' you do that and the Scorpion said well it's in my nature and that's the answer to your question is that it's in our nature that's what an archetype is we're the hero archetype is the story of men right but do you think that that nature is because that is how we survived how over the millions of years we evolved from lower hominids to being a human being is that we needed to have the mechanisms in in our very existence to overcome struggle all Joel maybe we chose it you know you think well I mean I think it is part of the evolutionary process but look the thing about now sexual selection or the mechanisms that we talk about say whereby the dominance hierarchy is the selection mechanism for for the transfer of genetic material

145:55there's a choice in that like if a group of guys gets to get together and a leader emerges someone everyone respects it's like an election everyone voted on it we chose that particular type of person well who is that well that's the heroic type human beings have chosen that and then the women think oh look a heroic type it's like they grab them before someone else gets them and so that's been going on forever so did we choose it well the action of our choice across Millennia selected it these are things evolutionary psychologists biologists don't think about they don't think about the role that Consciousness played in determining who survived and how and why it's been going on for a long time well they certainly know about sexual selection by female choice you know but the full implications of that haven't been thought through like I've just really started to Grapple with the

146:47idea that the male hierarchy is a sexual selection device it's like the men are voting on well who which of us deserves to go sleep with a woman it's like well you don't you're kind of a weasly little snake so you know no not you it's like oh Joe Joe looks like quite the guy let's put him at the top of the hierarchy that's what men have been doing with each other forever isn't there more to it than that there's a lot to that because the question is who is it that they're electing but is it really just about sexual selection that's a good question Joe Freud thought so like it's half about that let's say half well you know there's the survival of the individual and the survival of the species so those are the two things but in the but even with that sexual selection even with that say if a person does rise to the top of the social hierarchy in that small uh dunbar's number of 250 people

147:48um it's the person is that enough does that person still need purpose do they still need something in or some difficult struggle in order for them to feel fulfill for most of for most of human history that just wasn't a problem because you had struggle constantly right man yes absolutely is that the problem today that is that the problem our lack of problems sure it's something kard pointed out like 150 years ago he said there'll come a time when everything has been done so well for everyone that the only lack the only felt lack will be for lack itself are you concerned because of that and because you're very acutely aware of this issue are you concerned with this potential future that we have in front of us with artificial intelligence and virtual reality and this need to live in a world that's not real like I mean how many kids today listening to this exist

148:35for a massive amount of their day watching video games playing video games yeah playing the archetypal hero online yes I had a friend and this is a just a classic story I'll never forget this this statement that he said to me he was one of the managers at The Comedy Store who's a very nice guy but he was addicted to video games which I have been in in the past I was addicted to video games for a couple years I'd play them all the time I love them they were so much fun but this guy he had it bad I was I had a career while I was doing it I managed to figure it out that this was a massive waste of my time and get through he didn't and when one day he was like I mean pale like he hadn't been outside in days and he was hanging out in the back of the comedy store and we were talking and he was addicted to I think it was EverQuest which is this crazy roleplaying game that you just do

149:27and you just people would play it 18 hours a day and he said something I'll never forget he said I'm so successful in the Video Game World and so unsuccessful in the real world and he was like sitting there like shaking his head I was like Wow in the real world he was like very unfulfilled couldn't find a girlfriend was struggling financially in the Video Game World he was like some warlock was out there slaying dragons and in and he found great reward in that video game world I'm very concerned that we will literally almost be like in The Matrix plugged into some artificial electronic thing which I think these the these video games that people are playing all day long they're a precursor to that don't get me long if you have great self-control they're very enjoyable they're fun they're great social time with you and your friends you get together you play and you have a great

150:23as long as you're actually being productive and active in our everyday life I don't really think they're a problem but my concern is that they are a precursor and that we are seeing the beginning steps to this artificial world that that we will be embedded in in the very near future well you know we we decided already that we're in a period of chaos yeah and you know part of the reason I'm loath to make any predictions is I mean that's one of the reasons it's like how many things need to be going sideways at the same time right lots of things are going sideways I have no idea what's going to happen I mean we're building autonomous cars 70 like that's the biggest employment category driver yeah so what then you know but why why worry about that there's 20 other things that are happening that are just as revolutionary right so what's going to happen who knows I have no idea I I

151:18think maybe I know how to steer the boat you know that's all you try to tell the truth and maybe you'll get through it and act it out as well because what else do you have isn't that another fantastic sign of chaos I I mean I say fantastic not in a positive way but that Donald Trump is our president now the president has who has had the biggest problem with the truth that we've ever experienced we've never experienced a president like this where we know that he has a problem with the truth and it's it's it's open it's it's it doesn't seem to us funny he has an unstructured problem with the truth he was preferred as a candidate to someone who had a structured approach to untruth right right so it's like pick your type of lie right you can pick the IDE ideology power aiming lie or a new kind of lie or or yeah a more personal lie say if you're going to be cynical

152:13about it well a new kind of lie too that didn't fit the standard structure that we're accustomed to and felt very disenchanted with yeah or maybe a nakedly self-serving lie it's like oh thank God that's such a relief after the totalitarian ideology lies oh God when you say it that way it's so up that's obviously it though yeah well that's definitely part of it and I mean lots of people did I know people went into the voting booth and their hand was hovering over Hillary you know and it was shaking and they thought oh to hell with it Trump wow and so and you know it's a sentiment that I can appreciate yeah so and so here we are but that's that's only the tiny that's only the tail end of the Dragon I mean yeah there's who knows who can look ahead this is a strange time we're in and maybe it's associated with Kurtz's prognostications you know I mean he he

153:10talked about the consequence of an Ever accelerating technological transformation and you know I mean look just in the last 50 years we've had the birth control the hydrogen bomb and the transistor thrown at us it's like man those are some pretty wild tornadoes yeah and and and that's just scratching the surface yeah the last 100 I mean if you just go back to the beginning of the 20th century to today I mean it's it's unbelievable yeah well you know in 1895 the average person in the west lived on a dollar a day in today's dollars in 1895 yes really in today's dollars yeah yeah wow yeah wow no kidding no kidding well that's the other thing that people when they find out how little the rest of the world lives on they find out that the top 1% of the world makes about $34,000 us yeah well it depends on I know if you're you know for many people someone who's rich is someone who has

154:10more money than them right right which is one of the things I really find funny about the like the radical left protests on the campus is like down with the 1% it's like hey sunshine you're part of the 1% you're just you're actually a baby on10th of 1ent or maybe 1 100th of 1ent you're just angry because you're not there yet but you will be when you're 40 and you know it and so does everybody else and now instead of regarding yourself properly as a fledgling member of the elite you want to have it both ways you want to be fledgling member of the elite and champion of the under underprivileged so how narcissistic can you get you want to have all the benefits of having all the benefits and you want to have all the benefits of having none of the benefits because just all the benefits isn't enough for you one thing that is a reoccurring subject that I find incredibly fascinating and

155:01it keeps coming up and um it's been brought up even more so lately because of artificial intelligence and automated vehicles and all these different things that are happening that they going to be an erosion of jobs and a subject keeps reoccurring and that's Universal basic income the idea of giving people giving everyone a certain amount of money whether it's $12,000 or $188,000 what do you what are your thoughts on that I don't know what to think about that you know it certainly it would require a revolution in the way people considered their lives yeah and then maybe that re like what would what do people do with Leisure Time what should you do with it well leisure time it's like what is leisure time exactly is it is it sitting in a closet like a like a disc discarded Android I mean that's often how people re respond when they retire right but would they have to retire or would they

155:58have their needs taken care of as far as food and shelter and then be able to pursue something that they actually enjoy and are interested in because the job that they were stuck in doesn't exist anymore well that's the question and I would say I would say at the moment the data aren't great you know what happens to a lot of men who are unemployed now they they've let's say they've they've had that thrust upon them invol arily but most people who we would be talking about would be in that situation is that you know they they get depressed they sit on the couch they develop chronic pain problems they start taking um opiates for the pain problems and then soon they're hooked like it's it's not a pretty I mean I know that that everyone isn't doing that but lots of people are doing that man right yeah but that's unemployment is isn't kind of a different thing because I don't know

156:45well my thought is that unemployment if if you've got something like Universal basic I mean we're we're talking about a complete revolution in the way Society is structured right because if automation does come along and artificial intelligence does come along and it really is a situation where a lot of the things that people do to occupy their time in order to feed themselves and shelter themselves they don't exist anymore it's it's unnecessary so you're not talking about unemployment like Bob you're not a good enough lawyer you've been fired and now you're like God I'm a failure I'm depressed I am unemployed we're not talking about that we're talking about literally society as we know it having a complete reset y yeah well I don't I have no idea what to say about that I mean I don't either that's why I asked you well well look I mean there are people here's the optimistic

157:34end I'll speak as a determinist I'm not a determinist but I'm going to speak that way anyway so there are lots of people who are creative they're high in trade openness from the big five perspective they're going to go do creative things but there are lots of people who aren't creative so I don't know what they're going to do because it isn't going to be creative things what do you think people why are people creative and non-creative like are there people that are just that it's never been nurtured in them that they have the potential to be creative or you don't think so no no that the literature is pretty clear on that I mean the traits are highly heritable they're modifiable but if you're really non-creative it's like it ain't going anywhere for you and the reason for that is creativity isn't like it's not all sweetness and love man I mean the reason

158:21there are non-creative people is cu creative people often died they're out doing like screwy things they attract attention from people they shouldn't attract attention from like the authorities you know the creative people are revolutionary well tyrants don't really like revolutionaries there's lots of reason not to be creative even now like creative people it's hard to monetize your creat creativity artists have a hell of a time surviving right and and so so creativity as such is a it's a double-edged blessing for sure and part of the reason that lots of people aren't creative is because it's a lot let's think about it from an evolutionary perspective is because it's a hell of a lot easier not to be decked out in bright colors when the Predators come along right you want to stay camouflaged against the herd like a zebra you don't want to stand out I I'll

159:11tell you a little story about that so I think I got this from Robert spolsky and if I didn't I apologize but so let's say you're a biologist you go study some zebras you think people think well those zebras are camouflaged cuz they have black and white stripes well no that's not camouflage lion is camouflaged it's golden it looks like the grass you can see a zebra like 15 miles away it's black and white okay so you're looking at some zebras and you think yeah I need to look at one zebra to figure out what it's doing because I'm trying to understand zebras so you look at a zebra and then you take some notes and you look up and you think oh God which zebra was that because the camouflage is against the herd just the idea that the camouflage is against the herd that's such a useful idea to have in your mind that camouflage is against the herd so you go up to the zebra in your Jeep and

159:57you've got a stick with a rag on it you you put a nice dob of red paint on the zebra's haunch or you clip its ear like with a cattle clip and the first thing that you know you get the hell out of there and the lions kill it cuz they can identify the thing that stands out and organize their hunt around it and so that's why there aren't creative people I think that is saos and I think it was an ear clip I I remember this discussion yeah that um it's also um that the edge detection uh like there's a there's a type of c um pattern a camouflage pattern called ASAT an ASAT camouflage doesn't look like uh trees you know and people think of uh pull up ASAT pattern uh first light l i t um yeah that's a military C camouflage pattern all season allterrain canadi developed that hey and new Yan stole it congratulations true yes it's one of our I feel like we're all one I don't believe in borders um

160:56it's actually for Animals there you can see ASAT and the reason is animals um can't they they only see in black and white like predat uh prey animals like deer and um it's Edge detection that they're looking for and these things the hard lines of the black and the brown and the lighter colors it throws off the that's that's Fusion that's a different color um that's a different type of camo but the ASAP is what we're talking about which is right above it that leg right right no see yeah right there bam yeah that's it and I'm also wrong Canadians didn't invent this it was the other stuff the uh the military oh they've invented a bunch of stuff I'm sure yeah I'll give you guys that I'm a fan of Canada man I love it I I really do love Canada I think people up there are just so much nicer it's uh I struggled to try to figure out why I've thought about it many many times but I think people in

161:47general in Canada are I always say there's 20% less douchebags in Canada I mean there's everywhere you go but I feel like Canada for whatever reason people are extremely polite yes yes I would say well I don't know I don't see I'm not sure I'm not convinced of it because I often think the same thing when I come down to the US people are more polite well that they're yeah that their level of customer service for example is better and but I think one of the differences between Canada and the US is like all of Canada in some sense is like the Midwest of the United States we don't we don't have this extreme cure that the US with the like the lows and the highs we're all we're like elevator music you know compared to a full Symphony and there's can be some really tragic parts of a symphony so you know if if you want peace order and good government that's our constitutional

162:38Credo then you know Canada is your place but it's a middle class middle-of the road society and that has some benefits you know it's nice and welcoming and and not too experimental and kind of calm and secure and those are good things um it's I don't think it's a place that is great at dealing with Excellence but you know that's interesting do you feel like Excellence is suppressed because people don't like when someone stands out too much uh yeah I think that's true everywhere but I think it's more true of Canada than it is of the US I think it's celebrated a lot in the US I mean I think there's always going to be some resistance especially from people that don't feel like people always measure themselves against someone if there's someone who's out there is just you know some um genius in some form or another there's always going to be people that measure

163:29themselves against that person and find themselves coming up short and so they try to attack that individual someone who has just catastrophic success in some sort of a way yeah well I think that's another reason for the en for people to be enemies of clear thought as well because clear thought is a good Pathway to success and so if you can go after people who I think clearly it's another way of keeping the dominance hary nice and flat for your for your delectation let's say so so that's the enemy of competence element that I see as part of the social justice Warrior movement right right and extreme lack of financial success and yeah and even creative success well and even the insistence that hierarchies are always based on power it's like neuro the hierarchy of neurosurgeons is not based on power or yeah it is obviously you know hierarchies are based to some

164:19degree on power we don't have to be juvenile about it but you know the best neurosurgeons actually know how to do surgery that's not just a power thing right the best Farmers hey they grow food so there's no there's no appreciation for actual the real world well there's no real world in postmodernism anyway so that doesn't matter but there's no appreciation for competence or the fact that there is individual difference in competence even though they're always talking about diversity and there's a downplaying of competition and the importance of competition itely oh yes yes well that's yes and that's something that's particularly I think hard on men because men compete yeah and they compete partly because women like winners I mean that's part of the reason so and you're shamed for that in this postmodernism view of the world oh yeah well you know the schools increasingly

165:08are non-competitive places it's like for a guy that means well let's tune out and go watch video games because like if I can't win at this why should I play well to cooperate it's like well you know fair enough man but I'd actually like to try to win at something oh well how evil can you get well it's toxic masculinity Jordan that one drives me crazy like what does that mean toxic masculinity toxic has it has nothing to do with masculine or feminine if something's toxic it's toxic there's no toxic masculinity if someone's evil they do something horrible of they genas Khan or Adolf Hitler that's not toxic masculinity that's an evil person it has nothing to do with the masculine or feminine yeah well you know it depends on what your political agenda is I mean men are more likely to be the type of person that does something awful in terms of dominating or war or violence

166:04it's it's almost in our nature in some way because of all the things we discussed before well we're more we're more likely to do something that's really evident there's plenty of bullying that goes on behind the scenes among women absolutely you know it can't manifest itself and naked physical aggression and I actually think that's hard on women in some ways I mean my my daughter for example is always mad at my son um because like not chronically but you know he'd have a a dispute with one of his friends and maybe it would get physical and then that'd be the end of it and they'd be friends again you know there was a way there was a way of bringing it to a conclusion and and without that then things can smolder on forever and that's really rough you know it's it's some sometimes simplest solution is a fight often and you know I'm not advocating violence I know what

166:56you're saying I know but I'm embarrassed that I would even think that I have to you know put some little quote marks around you're talking about the developing person too you're talking about young people it is a it is an issue this simmering and stewing of of of disputes where they never come to AE and they never get resolved yeah yeah it's a terrible thing it's a terrible thing it's that's part of hell for sure to have these things that are just grinding away at you all the time you know it's not it's definitely not it's not a good place to be in and good motivations don't come out of it that's for sure you've made some some statements and we we've had some you've had some conversations about your role in Academia and that you might not necessarily be in structured Academia forever that that this might be an issue like that this is coming to a head yeah

167:49do you feel that way now well the university I I think what happened was the University reacted towards me because a bunch of people got irritated and organized you know in their irritated way and said that I was a bad person and something should be done about me and there was enough of them so the university thought they needed to react to that pressure that's a charitable way of of interpreting it but reasonable but then a bunch of people wrote the university and said wait a second I agree with what that guy's doing you should leave him alone and not only people from the general populace but soon after I posted the original videos like the Press was kind of ambivalent about me for a while in in the first two weeks or three weeks say after I released those videos and there were the protests but then they started to look into what I was doing and they thought oh turns out that you know

168:40freedom of speech actually happens to be quite important to journalists too and they came out like really radically in support of me some of the major journalists in Canada and and and a whole the whole post media system which was about 150 or 200 newspapers and so the university had a reason to back off and maybe they were happy to back off I mean the dean I was negotiating was you know he wasn't a bad guy he was an older guy I think he's in his 70s just responding to pressure yeah and he didn't want a bunch of trouble and you know and he wanted the problem to go away you know and that's what you do want for problems to do but anyways all this public support I got gave the university a reason to leave me the hell alone so they decided to do that and partly I suppose I was always reasonable during the negotiations because I'm a reasonable person and so you know when

169:34they met me they realized that I wasn't the particular kind of monster that I had been accused of being right and uh so the universities left me off and then so I was I had a like a Health crisis in December that more or less rectified Itself by the beginning of January but I wasn't sure that plus what had happened to me because of these videos and all the crazy response to them um I wasn't sure I was in a sufficiently together position to go back lecturing in January I didn't even know for a while until December if I was going to be let's say allowed to continue to lecture this was very uncertain but I decided that it was better to get back on the horse so to speak and so I started lecturing and the students were very welcoming so thank God for that what is it like now when you're in school is it a a completely different experience and before you're notoriety

170:28exploded well there's lots of things that are different about it I mean this lots of students there are lots of people who come to my classes just to sit in the classes there's people who are stopping me all the time in the hallways and wanting to introduce themselves and that happens a lot in public in in in the strangest situation so I'm rather unused to that um the feeling at the University well I haven't processed any of that yet I mean I would say I'm about 7 months behind in my understanding of my own life W you know because things happened so many things happened from September to now that I haven't had a time to think about any of them you know it's just and it's been a continual an absolutely continual um treadmill of trying to keep up M with the requests for speaking and the email and and I'm I'm supposed to be making these YouTube videos because I

171:26have people who are supporting me for doing that so I'm trying to keep that up and then I'm trying to go speak when people invite me but not all the time because of course that's a lot of travel and so I'm trying to recalibrate my life I'm trying to figure out okay I got 10 million views on YouTube well what am I supposed to do with that piece of information I I've got 250,000 like subscribers so what is what does that mean what what does that mean for what I should be doing maybe I should be doing nothing but making YouTube videos for them right I don't know it's a tremendous it's unbelievable it's like it's it's unparalleled yeah just I mean think about it from in terms of is there any other academic that has ever done anything remotely like that where you have 250,000 subscribers on YouTube in a relatively short amount of time and then millions and millions of views on your

172:15videos I know I don't know I I mean well and it's it's it's defined territory right because who knows what YouTube is right I mean you know you your your presence I don't know what you make of your presence I mean you told me I think that you're getting something like 70 million downloads a month it's more than like 120 now okay so you're getting a billion downloads a year something like that more than that so what right yeah so what the hell so I can ask you what do you make of that like are you the are you the are you the most powerful interiew on the planet or are you the most powerful interviewer that the planet has ever seen because it well the numbers would suggest so nobody's had who has a billion of anything no one you know it's never happened so what the hell so what are you doing and why is it working and where are all these people and God well

173:10what I do is just keep doing it m that's all I do I just do what I do yeah and I don't think too much about it I enjoy it I try to talk to people like yourself that I really enjoy talking to or the guy before you was a a bow hunter which I enjoy talking to him too very very very different conversation tomorrow I'm talking about a guy who's a debunker or talking to a guy who's a he runs a site called metabunk we're going to talk about people that believe the Earth is flat uhuh literally we're going to spend about two hours debunking the Flat Earth theory that is all over the internet I don't know if you realize that yes I've I've seen it I've seen there is a rabid anti-intellectual Vibe that's going on today and this is this flat Theory it's no wonder you know it's no wonder because the in many of the prominent intellectual types have become prisoners of their own

174:04imagination you know it's and this is partly what breeds that that Terror of intellectualism there's there's something there's something about it that's we don't want to get too far away from our bodies we don't want get too far away from our souls that's another way of thinking about it and you know there there is this idea that as I said before that the Catholics always warned about is that the rational mind falls in love with its own Productions or even more that it tries to elevate its Productions to the status of God and that's I mean that's really what what Milton was warning about at least in some sense in his in his book Paradise Lost you know these Utopias are human creations and then people be fall prey to them it's like idol worship it really is very much like idol worship and and it's no wonder people get skeptical of of the intellectuals because they're

174:54producing these Utopias that are fake that they inhabit they're almost like the abstract equivalent of video games you know so I think you're right about that but I also think there's something else going on I think people are aware of this chaos that we described earlier and they're terrified and they're clinging to nonsense because of that Terror and they're they're embedding themselves in these fruitless Pursuits chasing their own tail hey I'm I'm on board with that man that chasing it your own tail that's a symbol of chaos yeah chaos is the dragon that eats its own tail so that came spontaneously to mind when you thought about that it's CU it's a downward spiral man yeah yeah and the thing is is that as you as you Retreat from the chaos into your own little prison you get weaker and weaker and the prison gets smaller and smaller and the chaos gets bigger and bigger it's really

175:45an ugly pathway and you get more and more bitter and resentful and much more afraid of having your Prison Walls breached it's a downward spiral and much less interested in pursuing the truth or any sort of objective reasoning and much more interested in confirmation bias to the extreme that's right that's exactly what happens I detailed out that process in my book maps of meaning exactly that it's this feedback loop he cuz you the the the weaker you are the thicker the walls have to be but the thicker you make the walls the less challenge you you face and the weaker you get so then the walls have to get thicker and then you get weaker and the walls have to get thicker and it's not a pretty it's not a pretty picture man so H yeah that's what I think too yeah because and on that note we just did three hours we just did it this is my favorite podcast of all time oh I just

176:44want to tell you well thank you thank you was awesome I could I say say it was my favorite podcast of all time I have a much smaller domain of podcast comparisons we we did this is like number 900 what what is it 58 958 I think you uh touched on some things that made me think in a very unique way today so thank you very much for that I'm going to listen to this one a couple of times well thank you very much both for both occasions I mean you provided a tremendous boost to my presence so whatever comes of that is to be blamed partly on you all righty all right thanks brother you bet really appreciate good thank you Jordan Peterson ladies and gentlemen see you tomorrow