I'm Dave Rubin and joining me today is an author lecturer a psychologist and the world's pre-eminent Lobster expert. Jordan. Pederson, my old friend. Welcome back to the Rubin report.
Hi, Dave. So good to see you and to be doing this again.
All right, here we go. Again. We've done this a couple of times. I thought we do it a little differently. This time instead of just me tossing.
And you up for some questions if we did a little kind of push and pull and turn through some of these ideas, but I guess where we start first is you're in Toronto. I'm in Los Angeles. We live in places that are seemingly really out of touch with a lot of the things we talked about. People ask me about that a lot. How's life in Toronto right now?
Well, in relationship to the covid. Restrictions, I talked to a senior advisor to one of the provincial governments, a couple of weeks.
Go. He told me flat out. That the covid policy here is driven by nothing but opinion, polls related to the popularity of the government. No science. No endgame in sight. No real plan. And so what that means is that the part of the population that's most afraid of covid. I know it's what fifty percent of Democrats believe that you have a 50% shot at getting hospitalized, if you catch covid and 25 percent of Republicans. And so I suspect it's similar in Canada and so policies being driven by people who are more afraid than
They should be. And it's, well, it was very disheartening conversation because I trust this guy and he he knows what he's talking about. And so, you know, I'm I wouldn't say I'm cynical about government's. Exactly. Because cynicism is it's a cheap shortcut to approximating wisdom. Let's say, and you have to be judicious in your criticisms, but I still found that extremely disheartening because I thought, at least policies that I don't agree with the restrictive policies.
We're at least driven by something. Remotely resembling a scientifically informed plan and he was irate at what had been happening enough to consider resigning, so, it's pretty
appalling. So what does that tell you? Just at a psychological level about fear in general. If this isn't driven by science and people hear things on the media and then suddenly they say, okay. Yes. Please lock me in my house. Please. Keep me in a mask forever. Please. Keep me not going to holidays with my family. Just psychologically what?
Has that unearth anything that maybe you thought wasn't as
intense. I think I think the thing that surprised me the most probably was how rapidly we stampeded to imitate a totalitarian state in the immediate aftermath of the release of covid. Now, you know, if you think it through a little bit, no one really knew how serious the virus was going to be. And so, it was an unknown threat. And so you can imagine a herd of animals or a school of fish for that matter because this
kind of phenomena is universal throughout the animal kingdom. The cost of overreacting to a threat is generally minimal compared to under reacting to a real threat, right? Overreacting to a hypothetical threat is cheap, compared to under reacting to an actual threat. Because if you underreact you can die. Whereas, if you over react, you generally just get tired for a minute. So a hurdle, Stampede because the most neurotic member of the herd jumps first, and then they'll instantly follow them. And that's kind of what we did in the early.
Is of the pandemic, the Chinese acted first. Now, unfortunately, they are a totalitarian state and we all followed, and that's excusable. In some sense, because we didn't know what sort of threat we were facing, but then the breakdown it's really appalling in Canada, the breakdown of our rights. Let's say for Mobility for freedom of speech, Etc. It's particular to Grating to me in the Canadian context because way back in the 80s, prime minister Pierre. Trudeau.
You do our current prime minister's father who was quite an intellectual. He was very enamored of French civil law and he grafted a Bill of Rights on top of the Canadian Federal common law structure essentially. And I didn't like that at all. I thought that was a bastardization of a great English. Common law tradition. I'm not a fan of bills of Rights because they're predicated on the idea that you have a finite set of Rights and that the social contract Awards them to you or the government. And I think that's backwards. It's like you have all the rights there are
Except those that are expressly forbidden by detailed legislation that mostly was generated from the bottom up. That's the English common law tradition. Anyways, everybody celebrated, the Bill of Rights. Are you protected and oh my God, we all our rights are protected now forever, you know, it was Pierre Trudeau's, major accomplishment. Hypothetically. Now, we have his son and it's like yeah, what's it good for my father isn't vaccinated. He decided not to part because they were telling him he had to
and he has his other reasons. I have family members who aren't vaccinated for health reasons who also had covid twice and didn't really feel they needed to be vaccinated again. In any case. It's extraordinarily annoying to see this happening and to then find out that there's nothing behind it, except like the most instrumental and cowardly random polling is extremely disheartening, and also maddening. And also,
During all of those things at once.
And do you think it's possible that the polling is out of whack to, I mean, you've been arrested, you've been doing polling forever, right? I mean, this is, this is one of the first it's
out of whack. Jesus Christ, you know, I mean, how do you get accurate polling data? Well, okay, over what time frame, you're going to pull every day. How about every hour? How about? Every minute every week. Every two weeks who answers the phone calls when you do the polls? How did you construct a questions? Are you eliciting? A particular kind of answer because you paid insufficient
attention to the way. The question was posed, etc. Etc. So it's not guidance from the polls. It's it's a quasi informed random walk, which is a lot easier than thinking it through. But to to see that happening in spite of the much-vaunted protection for our rights, like, you know, Canadians who are vaccinated now, cannot leave the country Jack, what the hell? Why is that? And I'm look, I got vaccinated and people took me to task for that and I thought
All right. I'll get the damn vaccine. Here's the deal. Guys. I'll get the vaccine. You fucking leave me alone. And did that work? No, so stupid me. You know, that's how I feel about it.
It's like, well, now I have to get tested for covid-19. Come back into Canada. I have to get tested before I leave Canada. Now, you know, that might be the latter issue. That's an issue with the Americans. And so that's outside of the Canadian purview, but the restrictions to get back into Canada or even more stringent. It's like, well, I did get the vaccine that if you're not going to leave me alone.
And I don't think the evidence that unvaccinated or that vaccinated people are less contagious. Let's say I don't think it's very compelling. Yeah. So why are the vaccinated all of a sudden the unvaccinated all of a sudden a danger and I certainly don't understand the push to get children vaccinated. I think that's I think that's
I think that's absolutely reprehensible. And I also can't figure out Norman doidge. Wrote a piece in tablet called needle points. And one of the things he pointed out was that if you take that top, 25 least trusted institutions in that group. The most distrusted institutions include big Pharma and for good reason. And he details out the lawsuits that big Pharma has had to pay because of misbehavior on on their part. Broadly, speaking multiple.
Denise over the last 20 years and they're the biggest lawsuits in American history, which is really saying something, because your court system is set up, so that big lawsuits are really possible. Right? And so, I see the leftists all of a sudden. It's like, big Pharma. Yeah, trust them. Like what, what, what really you guys? This is, I don't understand that at all, like, and psychologically. So what's going on here? It's like, well, I think the underlying phenomenon.
Is something like phenomenon is something like, well, as long as it's for health and safety, it's always good and you know not to get conspiratorial here. But the same damn thing is going to happen with the climate change. Push. Absolutely. They're already re it's already being reconfigured as well. It's the biggest public health issue of our time. It's like no, I don't think so. I think overreaching bureaucrats are the biggest Health. What would you say that the biggest challenge to our health of our time?
And I think that's especially true of the cop 26, Bunch. You know, the Chinese just announced today. I believe it was today. They're billing 150 new nuclear reactors like not one 150, and we can't get her act together in the States and Canada for that matter to build like one and in California. They're going to shut what 10% of the power their down. It's like no nuclear. Well, what are we going to replace it with wind? Yeah. Well only if we put windmills in front of the politicians pushing for wind, you know.
Imagine how much wind it would take to blow your car down the road?
so, it's so
It's and so if those people at the climate change Summit, where serious, what they would be and we could be very, very specific about this. Here's what you do. If you're a leftist who's concerned about the environment and the poor symbol taneous lie. Okay, you make power energy as cheap as possible for everyone because there's no difference between energy and wealth and because rich people can't horde energy. It's not a perrito problem, right? Because all the energy doesn't end up in the hands of
Whew, so you try to build nuclear reactors, perhaps, there's a bit of a problem getting rid of the waste and there's a lot of bureaucratic wrangling around that's not a solved problem entirely, but we don't have a better option, the nuclear in the long run. And so you make power as cheap as possible. So if you want to save the climate, you want to make Power everywhere in the world is cheap as possible as fast as possible to make people as rich as possible because the Richer they get the more they care about the environment and that pattern is clear in China and India, which have greened substantially in the last
The years, those two countries have greened an area, the size of the Amazon in the last 20 years. And that's an addition, by the way, just so everyone knows here's a cool. Little fact, you know that as carbon dioxide levels rise, plants. Can grow in drier environment. Dryer environments, semi-arid, like deserts, like, like the sandbanks on oceans and lakes, stabilizing that as well. And so, because the carbon dioxide levels have risen, the plants can close their pores.
Breathing pores and so they don't evaporate water as much. And so, an area the size of Alaska has greened in the last couple of decades in addition to what China and India planted and so, you know, so what I worked for the UN secretary General's committee on sustainable development and to some degree cop, 26 is an attempt to bring a corporate world in line with those developmental goals, and there was a bunch of problems with the project because there were two hundred goals and that's too many have to prioritize them and no one was
He's willing to accept Bjorn lomborg and that's a different conversation. But what I learned because I read about 200 books at that time on the environment and sustainable development. And what I learned was things are way better than anybody thinks. We haven't glorious future in front of it us if we want to. The best way to save the planet is to make poor people rich as fast as we possibly can. So that means we can have our cake and eat it too. And isn't that absolutely lovely? And the biggest environmental issue that's facing us isn't global warming. It's over fishing in the ocean. So
Far as I'm concerned because that's that we could actually stop. It's actually extremely damaging and we know how to stop it and Trudeau to his credit. By the way has
Produced a series of marine protected areas along Canada's Coastline that weren't there before. Now. I don't know how protected they are and how thorough that legislation is. But that's something that that he's done. That, that actually counts as a credible accomplishment in my estimation. But, but go ahead. Dave.
Well, I, so first off, I, you know, I've interviewed Bjorn a couple times but we his last book, basically, illustrates. I mean, it's mostly illustrations. That lay out almost everything you're saying here. So I just want people to know you're not making.
Up will link to that interview so they can know so they can see it. But yeah, go
ahead. Okay, so well look, so there's these two hundred development goals and sustainable. It's like, okay. Well, what is sustainable mean? And over, what time frame that's actually incredibly complicated, right? Because time frame is a real problem. Do we mean sustainable over 5,000 years? Well, why should we care? Because God only knows what the world's going to be like in five thousand years. Just look at what computer Technologies doing. We can't plan out that far. So that's probably too long a hundred years.
We're all dead then and you might think well we should care. It's like yeah, perhaps but how should we care? Because we can't predict that far out. So the time frame is really crucial and it's and then the fact that there are two hundred goals. That's that's like zero goals. Like if you were trying to do 200 things, first of all at any moment, you wouldn't be able to do anything because at any moment you can only do one thing. And so you have to prioritize and I asked repeatedly when I was working on this committee, why aren't
These goals prioritized and the answer was, well, they all have separate constituencies who are fighting for that particular value and they get annoyed if there's any like, sequential approach. It's like, okay. Well that just means we do nothing because 200 goals is just chaos. And then I found Lumber and and so what Laurinburg does he hires teams of economists to assess the goals in a given country or globally for that matter by cost-benefit and you can, you can argue about that because there's assumptions that you have
have to use that are built into your analysis, right? There's always a priori axioms and prejudices and biases and so forth and constraints, but he does it with 10 different teams of Economist. So that's kind of good. And then he averages across the whole set of the economist's. And then you might say, well, it's an economic analysis and that doesn't take anything into everything into account. It's like a, everything can't be taken into account and be do you have a better idea? And if not then, well, what good is your
Is a
like I haven't seen a better idea than long, Berg's idea. But from anyone. So
is part of the problem that people because our institutions have in so many ways failed us, and I know you obviously talked about it and wrote about it in your last book that we shouldn't just needlessly want to burn down these institutions. But they've, they've sort of failed us to the point that when they do these conferences, like these climate conferences. I was listening to Obama's speech yesterday, and he's going on and on
On about how we're going to have to sacrifice and all that. Meanwhile, he just
bought who's going to have to sacrifice, who's gonna have to
sacrifice and exactly one dollar house. He just bought a fifteen million dollar house on the water. In Martha's Vineyard. I was just down in Miami. Trust me. There's a place million-dollar
Mansions. Well, there you go. Dave, that's a sacrifice because he didn't buy a 40 million dollar mansion,
right? So we should be thankful for him as he flew, but not so let's talk about sacrifice. Yeah. Okay. So yeah, let's
let the old people freeze in the dark.
That's what's going to happen in Europe, if we get a cold winter.
So who's going to sacrifice here? Well, I can tell you the answer to that. Let's play leftist here for a minute. Okay, so there are hierarchies. I'll I think their competence hierarchies but they're corrupted by power, to some degree. Hmm. And how much is worthy of investigation and we should always clean them up. I mean, you just did that in some sense, when you said, our institutions are corrupt, right? And we have to be very judicious. Which institutions where are they corrupt? How are they, corrupt at a level of detail and in a analyzed in a manner that allows us to fix?
Them, instead of replace them wholesale, right? So okay, in any case, in a hierarchy when there's stress illness and death climb from the bottom up.
that's partly why you want to be near the top in a hierarchy because it's actually
cycle physiologically easier. Well, obviously because otherwise why would you strive for? I mean, there are other reasons, you know, maybe you want to do good for other people. Maybe you're motivated by power. Maybe you're a psychopath. Maybe you're acting instrumentally, there's lots of other reasons, but one of the consequences of success is that you don't die. So who dies first? Well as soon as you stress the system, let's say we double Energy prices. Well, who's going to? What's the sacrifice? Well old.
People because they're more susceptible to say death when the air conditioner when they can't afford air conditioning when they can afford heat and so yeah, but there's too many people on the planet anyway, so, you know, what the hell you call a few few, whatever, you know, they're just poor people. And this is the thing that bugs me so much. It's like, okay leftists.
Which side are you on here? It's like, are you gonna are you going to sacrifice the poor to your hypothetical future Utopia? Yeah, but they're all going to die. Anyways, because the planets going to burn. No, it's not the ipcc. Never said that. That. So Bjorn Bjorn is modeled out, you know, a reasonable amount of climate change in meaning temperature, increase over the next hundred years. He's taken. What's promoted as the scientific
There is no consensus in science. That's not how science works. It's not a consensus Enterprise, but nonetheless, he's playing along with it. Okay, we'll take your figures. It's going to produce somewhat of a decrement in GB in global economic growth, but growth is about 4% a year. And so even if that declines a chunk because of global warming, is everyone still going to be like five times as rich as they are now in 100 years if we don't screw things up, and so maybe
They'll be four times as Rich. Well, that's a cost and fair enough, you know, and if we can ameliorate it, we shouldn't probably should probably try not to change natural environments any faster than we have to write because of unexpected consequences. It's a reasonable argument but like here's another thing this this Net Zero. Okay. So as you hear someone say anything like that 0, you know, they're not thinking it's like
zero-tolerance drug deaths. 20. We shouldn't be trying.
Get cool. Yeah, right exactly, exactly. Well and we don't
have zero tolerance for drugs. Zero is the wrong number zero pollution.
Well, no, you know, cows. There's there's manure from cows.
People go to the bathroom.
There's not zero pollution.
So Net Zero, it's just, it's an empty talking point to put up a flag that you're on the right side. It's not differentiated careful, thoughtful thorough, detail-oriented thinking at the level that will actually produce Solutions. And there's no discussion about, like, what are we aiming at here? Well, how about, copious energy for everyone as clean as possible. But, but in that order, copious energy for everyone lowest possible price, resilient stable.
Systems and to the credit that to their credit, the Democrats, and their infrastructure Bill are building resilience goals in in relationship to the power grid. And that's necessary because we should be stress testing those systems constantly, but if you're on the left and you care about poor people, the only thing you should really care about is cheap energy. And why is that? Let's be very precise about this. Okay, what makes people
Prosperous and secure work. What is work? It is the expenditure of energy. What is energy work? What is work wealth? You want to deal with absolute poverty, or even relative poverty, for that matter. Energy is everything. And here's, you know, here's another fact. So, you know, you Americans have actually knocked your carbon dioxide output down 14% in the last couple of decades. You know, why?
Fracking.
Because it's it made natural gas, cheap and replace dirty or forms of energy. Plus it made you way less reliant on OPEC and the Russians and how is that not good for planetary stability. You talk about the environment. How about not a third world war?
Because that's not so good for the environment. And so frakking not carbon dioxide output. The u.s. Down 14% who would have predicted that and in shell and Berger's book apocalypse. Never he, he interviewed an MIT scientist. He said, you really want to knock carbon dioxide output down. Make India and China, but India, he was speaking of more, particularly switch to call as fast as possible. You think, Cole why it's better than wood.
And we know the pattern would that's not so good. He's cut down trees, you cut down forests. It's really polluting especially indoors and that kills a lot of people stunts. A lot of children's growth, you know, I mean, growth in them in the broad sense because indoor pollution is much more deadly than outdoor pollution generally speaking. So, and would well, you have to cut down forests. It's inefficient. It puts particulates in the atmosphere as well. So you switch to Cole Cole's better. It's not wood to begin with, and then it's not where near as polluting and coal.
Oh, jeez. I've got quite clean. Now. You still have to mine the call and there's an environmental cause for that. Well, then you switch from coal to natural gas. Natural gas is pretty, damn good. There's lots of it. It's plentiful as clean. And then maybe, you know, if we can get her act together and have some sense, we could switch from natural gas to vision.
Well, then we could have energy for everyone at the lowest possible cost and then what happens when people get rich and then what happens, they care about the environment. So how is that not the right solution to? Let's not call it climate change because that that's annoying. It's like let's not produce any more waste than we have to. Well. We try to live fair enough, you know, that's a reasonable goal. But all I see coming out of the these cop 26 conferences, that thing sort of thing is here's a bunch of people doing
Wrong and let's stop them. It's like, yeah. Yeah, right guys. What are you trying to do something
instead? So okay. That's exactly where I wanted to go with this. Are we just at the point where the Machinery, the institutions, the mediatek, the whole Machinery of how we communicate to each other has broken down to the point. That if everything you said right there you you stepped into an office and you were sitting down with all of those people or even just AOC and the people here that want the green New Deal and you laid all that out that they do, don't they?
They do basically no say yeah. Well, you know, okay, good for him. He's got some studies.
No, I don't believe that. I believe that, I think we have to be judicious in our institutional criticisms of all, there's a bunch of reasons for that. First of all, that infrastructure, bill, that was just passed. That's nowhere. Near as stupid as it could have been. And if you look at the White House messaging, while that's something, isn't
it? It's something, it's something,
it's something man. And if you look at the White House messaging, it's about 2% diversity inclusivity at equity.
And that's not too bad because zero is asking for too much as we already discussed and you know, I've talked to lots of Democrats and lots of Republicans and there are people of Good Will who are competent on both sides and they're trying we do people don't understand here. So your Congressman federally, you know, all right, so I went to Washington and I talked to the whole bunch of them trying to find out. I read this book a long time ago and called system Antics. It's a great book by John Gall. It's a great book system antics.
One of its dictums is the system does not do what its name says it does. And so then the question is, what does it do? Well, then you have to look so like I worked at Social Services for the Alberta Government when I was a kid and Social Services, what do they do? Well, I was tasked weirdly enough. When I was about 19 to find out to update a big Consulting, companies analysis of spending, of the social services department. They had paid them, some hundreds of thousands.
Of dollars. And I was just working as a summer intern and they said update this and I thought huh? Okay, and so I phoned around trying to get the figures and no one knew what they were, the system had no idea where the money it was spending went. So I was trying to get stats. Like, how much of the welfare money spent actually goes to recipients. Couldn't find the data, then I realized. Okay, Social Services. What does it do? We'll probably spends 95% of its money on bureaucrats who are implementing social service programs.
Then I thought why should I be cynical about that? It's like, well, no, it's actually hard to distribute money. And if five percent of it goes to its Target that might not be too bad. It's not great by the way, but but it's better than running at a deficit or zero and so and many Charities are like that. If they get 10% to the recipients, they're doing pretty well and you can be cynical about that. In any case, when I went. So in any case, when I went to Washington, I thought, okay. These are congresspeople.
What do they do?
Well, hypothetically, they analyze Paul say they said out strategy. They talk to their constituents know they spent 25 hours a week, fundraising 25 hours, a week. Both both sides, both sides. They can't do it in their Congressional offices because that's illegal. So they have other offices in these industrial warehouses, you know, with drop ceilings and they basically are telemarketers 25 hours a week. Well, how the hell can those people get anything done? And then I had lunches where there was some Democrats and some Republicans generally more junior members just
To get to know each other and I had them. Go around the table and say why they went into public service and you couldn't have asked for more patriotic heartfelt, Declarations of virtuous intent and you couldn't tell the Democrats from the Republicans, not on the basis of that. And so then they and then you say, well, why do they fundraise 25 hours a week while they have to be elected every two years and then the party apparatus because they don't really know how to spend money effectively.
Communicating with people to get them to vote for them. They think money will do it. They won't support them unless they raise a certain amount of money. Well, how the hell can those people do their job? And so, will you sit down and you talk to them and the vast majority of them. Are there even self-sacrificing? It's like it is not a job. I would want. There isn't a lot of security in it. If you're competent, you could go do something else and be paid more in be harassed. A hell of a lot less their triumphs. And when
Layout, the sorts of arguments that I'd be laying out. I rarely talk to anyone who's competent of Goodwill. And I don't care whether on the Democrat or Republican side. That doesn't see the logic in this. And so, what are we going to be aware of on the, on the conservative? And then on the left is to end is, especially you guys in the states is do not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Like I went to New York City here, four days ago. That's a great City. You have a great
Country. It's a work of art. Don't screw it up with with facile criticisms. Like there are things wrong because there always are. But you got the devils in the details, man, you got to do a detailed analysis. It's like, you know, the left is say, well, the whole judicial system is corrupt. What's the evidence? Well, the disproportionate incarceration rate. It's like, you know, that's a fairly damning indictment. Okay, where exactly is it going wrong? Exactly?
Cisely procedurally, so that we could fix it. Well, the whole thing has to be burned to the ground. It's like, yeah. Well, no, and you aren't thinking so you're not helpful and then you take a problem like that apart the differential incarceration rate, man. That's a Rat's Nest. It's complicated man. You know, it goes, it's tangled up with slavery. It's tangled up with Jim Crow. It's tangled up with differential exposure to literacy in childhood.
It's tangled up with single parent, families, violent communities, the drug war drug policy, just to name a few and then, you know, we could say whatever whatever implicit racism still exists, because that's not 0.
It's very, very complicated and people don't want to detail a detailed on the ground analysis of such problems. What they want to do is label it with a low-resolution representation. So like a one pixel representation and then they want to contrast that with the wrong one pixel representation. Then they want to feel the moral virtue that they should have would have felt if they had actually solved the
problem. So so how do we fix the resolution? And when I ask you this, I include myself in this, you know, I'm talking about news.
Every day on the show. I try to do it in the most honest way possible. Obviously. I have my biases. I'm not pretending that. I have no opinions. But you know, often often when you get bludgeoned over the head with sort of the the low-resolution stuff enough, your resolution starts getting screwed up. So how do we Arbitrage those two position? Not
just bias, right? It's not just bias. It's also heuristics and there's a difference, like a heuristic is a functional simplification and we use heuristics all the time like,
The image you see of me as a heuristic because you are not seeing me. Well, first of all, I'm not there s. Even if you were seeing me, if we were in person, you'd still be seeing a heuristic. Because you don't see my subatomic structure. You don't see my cellular structure. You don't see the context that I'm embedded it. You see it. You see an iconic image that stands for the reality. That's too complex to perceive. And so it's not easy to tell when you're using an appropriate heuristic and the basic rule of thumb is used the
Simplest thumbnail. You can use that will get the job done. Now. The question is that, then the question is, well, what is the job? And you have to ask yourself? Well, how much honored moral superiority? Are you actually striving for and answer? Generally is a lot and that's that's how I hear his take turns into a bias. And it's so it's partly ignorance. Some of its malevolence and willful blindness, but it's partly a ignorant says like, you just don't know.
Right, you don't even know what you don't know. And so and then you think well, isn't it interesting that you have people who will pontificate about fixing the electrical system, the power system who couldn't wire up a plug-in in their house and you think well, does that matter? It's like well, yes in some sense. It does matter because unless there's a chain of causality built from the highest level abstractions right down to the power outlet itself. The plan in some sense is deeply flawed.
And then and then we have another problem. David. So look when I worked on this un committee, I was on the Canadian subsection of the committee. There was only one Canadian subsection and I was pulled in by the man who ran that and I worked on it for about two years and I was serious about it. And I rewrote Fair chunks of that document, this the sustainable goals guide partly because it was stuck in like 1985, with this old Cold War, mentality was terribly written. So I just rewrote a bunch of it. And what happened was a lot of those rewrites stuck.
Chuck. And that was shocking. It's like what the hell, how did that happen? And the answer was, well, I did the work and in order for someone to change it. They would have had to rewrite it. And then you think we'll why didn't they? And the answer is well, they didn't really have time. So these things work in a weird way. So so this, this guide to sustainable development has become sort of the centerpiece of I wouldn't say cop 26, exactly. But similar large.
L Endeavors to sort of steer where the planets going. Okay. So how is that put together? Well, the UN secretary-general nominated to bunch of ex-presidents and X prime minister's like high-end people. Right? But the thing about those people is, they're busy. Like, their days are scheduled doesn't matter if their former presidents or prime ministers, their days are scheduled to the minute for like 16 hours. Well, they don't have time to sit and analyze the sustainable goals. Development. Sustainable development goals.
And so, then it falls down the hierarchy of bureaucracy until it lands on the desk of someone who actually either wants to, or has time to do it. And God only knows how many tears down at house to fall before that person takes it on. And then, are they trained to do this? Well, no, the only person I know that trained to do it would be long Burg.
You know, and he doesn't have the expertise necessary to really do it, but he's still the one I would say knows better than anyone. Broadly speaking that I've met.
And it's not like we have training schools to prepare people to prepare documents on sustainable development. Over the next hundred years for the planet. It requires so much expertise.
And so these things are cobbled together, you know, and it's not even that conspiracy, you know, you don't have to pause it a conspiracy. Now ideas can take on a conspiratorial formal by their sell themselves. You know, this is no conspiracy. It's so badly done that it's quite
frightening. So then where would you peace? The, the algorithmic part of this. The tech part that then you have a bunch of people that are not quite qualified to be. Well, they can be discussing it but
Apps analyzing it or giving the policy prescriptions that are constantly fighting about these things all day and then keeping a whole bunch of other people in a Perpetual state of confusion or fear. I mean, that's the piece of this that emerged just in the last 20 years that seems to hide the rest of it. Like it's it's higher in that hierarchy than
Pokemon. I need more specificity. So what do you mean exactly? Are you talking about the political battles around this sort of thing? Or
I'm talking about the political battles. I'm talking about, the cultural battles, all of it, the
Stuff that that generates, the clicks that keeps us all watching things that keeps us all, looking at our phones. Well, often is done by a class of people that are not the ones that you're saying, should be sort of analyzing this stuff properly.
Well, okay, let's look at what the tech companies are doing. Well, let's let's play Angels advocate for a minute. Okay, they are really trying to deliver you. Something you will attend to.
They really are trying to do that and they are building unbelievably powerful AI machines to analyze, even your bloody eye movements to see what you're looking at. You think. Oh my God, that's scary. It's like yes, and no, they are also trying to figure out what you want and need and deliver it to you as fast as possible Amazon. Click bang at your doorstep.
Yeah, okay. Well, they know a lot about you but turns out, you actually have to know a lot about someone in order to be able to do that. So can we trust them? Can we trust us? Well, not if we're lying.
Like that's the that's the critical issue here. It's not even ideologies. Exactly. Although we could get into that. It's lying that corrupts all of this, that turns a heuristic into a bias that turns information into misinformation. And so these companies that are trying to serve us to the degree that there's deceit and let's say the naked desire for power and control as kind of a psychopathic Edge to the degree that that's operative. All these systems get contaminated and we definitely have to be
be on the lookout for that but we can't demonize the corporation's. The tech corporations in the same way. I mean, look what we're doing. Yeah. I'm like how 3,000 miles away from you and you and I are having a conversation that a million people are going to watch that. We can publish in five minutes and that will be distributed like a book used to be instantly. It's like my God, what a miracle like, and here's another miracle. This is something man. So I have these teams of
Translators working on my YouTube content and that's been put together by a very diligent team who have familiarized themselves in 13 languages with the idiom of the languages. It's not Google translate. It's proved very hard to take English YouTube content. Let's say video content and translated to other languages because it hasn't been thought through carefully enough. And this is particularly being the case for my Russian translation T. And so three weeks ago. I talked to my Head Rush.
And translator who I had met before, very bright guy and we had a real-time conversation because Zoom has now enabled a feature. So if you have a simple taneous translator, it'll suppress the Russian and only let you hear the English. And so now, with a real-time translator, I can talk to anyone in the world.
And then I can record that. I mean, this is a technological Marvel. That's unparalleled. It's unbelievable. It's just like one thing that Zoom added as a feature, you know, in the last couple of months. This demon has a this simple over simplification and demonization. This has to stop, you know, here's something horrible. I talked to Andy. No yesterday. Okay, and I said, look, I talked to a bunch of Democrats influential Democrats about antifa an asset antifa.
Is illusory and I thought, okay, you believe that but you believe there's a conspiratorial force. That's very powerful on the right. That's real. Okay, so they believe that but they don't believe in teeth is real. So we give the devil his due. Well, what do you mean real? Exactly? Okay, so I asked Andy know, who's been like half, he's been beat mostly to death twice and been severely hurt twice while reporting on this. He's a brave guy. I said, well, you know, these lefties, the
It's, these are reasonable people. I'm talking to. There are certainly people who are as morally, good as me. Let's say so.
What what do they mean? Is it illusory? Well I said well how many actually organized antifa groups? Are they like organized? So there is identifiable group with identifiable people. They're kind of working full-time on this. They have a leader. They have a website, you can point to them. He figured maybe 20. I said, well, like how many people do you think in each of those groups are committed to the antifa? Ethos? Whatever. That is fascist Anarchist left wing.
Paramilitary, like who the hell are these people? Are they left or right? Or does that matter? Or maybe there are weird mixture of both and it's to their advantage to have the left, think they're right. And the right thing, they're left because really what they're after is chaos and that could easily be the case. In fact, I'm sure it is the case. He figured all maybe in each of those groups. There's 20 to 30 people 40, maybe so there's like 800 of them.
Okay, so that means they don't exist in some sense. So if you took a city, the size of Halifax, which isn't a big city, but it's a city. There'd be one guy like that in the whole city. So does it exist? Well, not really. It's not a organization. He talked about Rose City, Aunt, if as the sort of epicenter of this trouble, but here's what we're really facing. It isn't left wing radicals, who are trying to take over cities. That's a way of looking at it. It's
agents of chaos who's in, who in whose interest, it is to sow Discord as thoroughly as possible. And then the question is, well, how do in this age of interconnectedness? How do we protect ourselves? We Republicans and Democrats alike, the 95% of people who make up the reasonable middle. How do we protect ourselves against 800 malevolent Psychopaths? And that's the endless question of the human race, so, I want to
In something off Sideways from that just momentarily manner, less agreeable than women. It's a, it's a, it's a reliable personality difference. It's only about 60 40. So, if you picked a man and a woman out of a crowd, and you tried to figure out who was least agreeable, if you bet on the man, you'd be right, 60 percent of the time. That's not that much, but it's not nothing. It means all the really disagreeable. People are men right out of the extremes. Okay, so and women actually like disagreeable man more than agreeable men.
So there's a preference which is why we're like that because women are powerful agents of sexual selection and they decide that that's how disagreeable man should be. Why? Okay. So here's the trade-off, right? The more disagreeable. You are the less empathic and compassionate and polite. You are so the less in some sense, the less generous, the less concerned with others, the more concerned with yourself, and your victories. Okay. So why would women pick men who are more disagreeable than them?
Well, that's the beauty and the beast problem in some part right now, as you want a disagreeable, man, but you want them to be tameable. So it means you don't want them to be. So disagreeable. He can't be generous and caring and share, but you don't want them to be so agreeable that a psychopath can take them out.
And I mean, this is a technical issue. Because so you might say, so no also talked about what happened in one of these cities that set up one of those sort of autonomous zones the mayor. I think it was can't remember the city.
Probably. Seattle was chop.
I see you have a Seattle. It was Seattle. You're exactly right. The mayor said something like, well, maybe it'll be sort of like, a Summer of Love. It's like, yeah, maybe. But we remember how the Summer of Love ended, by the way. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Hells Angels biker gangs at the Rolling Stones concert. So anyways.
Summer Love, okay, so everybody's agreeable and they're getting along and they're handing out food which isn't free by the way, but is free in the States because we're so efficient. Essentially, It's All Summer, Love Stuff.
Yeah, but what about the Psychopaths? Well, when did they come out? How about it night?
So, like this is naive beyond belief and there are computer models of this. So, if you set up communities of hyper agreeable, people, all they do is share and, you know, their days, he's growing out of their orifices. What happens? You throw one shark in the water and everyone gets eaten. Okay, so women have this tough problem because they have to protect their infants and they can't really do it because there are smaller and they're, you know, they're concerned with their infants. They're occupied. They need men to guard them.
Well, that means they need men who can be guard so that they have to pay a price and agreeableness the women do. And, you know, sometimes I've seen couples where the man is just so masculine and the woman so feminine that they can't even communicate their like from different planets, Mars and Venus. They just can't bridge the gap. And so this is a really tough evolutionary problem. It's like, you have to have generosity, you have to have toughness because you got to keep down the cheaters and the miscreants, they have to be held under control and you're naive.
To think that that's not the case psycho pass. By the way, Psychopaths very in the general population, between about 1, in 5 percent, and seem to stabilize it about three percent. And so that's also a big critique of the leftist notion that hierarchies are nothing but Power, because if that was true, Psychopaths, would be much more prevalent than they are in way more successful. And what happens is once the Psychopaths, get past a certain percentage of the population, people wake up to them and the tough guys, stop them.
And like is that really surprising to anyone? It's like the tough policeman, stopped them the tough, military go, stop them. There's no such thing as tough guys. And isn't it the case that they're actually tougher than tough women?
And so, what are we children here or are we going to look at this straightforwardly and
clearly? Yeah, and that's all that is what. It's so much of the seems to boil down to, to me, that we just seem to be afraid to confront these. What I don't think are actually that it's not that they're not complex issues, but they're things that we used to talk about. Honestly. I mean, you know, how frustrated I've been with, you know, with a lot of the sort of liberal Intelligentsia that in many ways. I think ushered so much of this in there. Well, I know now saying, oh well, now we've got a
But it's like,
guys. Yeah. Well, I'm still appalled at the faculty.
And you know what? I saw happening when I was a faculty member, I retired this year. In some sense. I'm teaching like hundreds of thousands of people now, instead of hundreds. And so that seems like a better idea. But what I saw the faculty do in my career, not at Harvard, by the way, was continually cede territory to the administration one cowardly decision at a time, one cowardly micro decision at a time, and I really think that's the sin of the left. The moderate left. It's cowardly retreat.
Micro issues, the sin on the right is probably the right has bigger sins and they're more obvious, and they're sort of clumped together, you know, so but the left, it's like this continually Retreat. So first of all, the faculty retreated and the administration took over, which was a really bad idea. I used to fight with my faculty members at the University of Toronto. The administration would do something arbitrary. Like, say well, how about your third year seminars fourth year seminars have like 30 people in them instead of 15.
I was like well, then they're not a seminar. Hmm. So then I say well, how about we just say no hire more faculty? Just no, we will not do that. Well, they would, they would have capitulated instantly the administration if we were to said, no, for sure. But they never said no and I said well, why won't you say no. Well, they won't give us what we want then. Well, they don't give you what you want. Anyways, I saw endless number of five-year plans come and go where nothing that was promised was ever.
Delivered, I'm not being cynical about this. I mean, the University of Toronto ran pretty reasonably for overgrown and heavily bureaucratized institution. So it was all these Retreats while then these insane ideas came in, you know, and here's the fundamental idea.
And it really deals with the mystery. I'm writing this new book about it called, we who wrestle with God. We don't know how we manage the act of perception. We actually don't know. It's really complicated. That's why we don't have general-purpose robots is because perceiving the world turns out to be way more complicated than anybody ever imagine. Because we kind of think, well, there's objects out there and you just see them. It's like, if you take a picture of a landscape and you put it in Photoshop and then you, blow it up. You can't tell where the lines are between the objects.
Well, the real world is kind of like that. It's like an even defining. Simple things is like what's a table?
Well, it's a flat surface with four legs. Well, okay, is it dollhouse table a table? How about if you put a plate, full of food on a stump and sit down to it, is that a table? What if this stump is actually kind of slanted, what if it has a soft surface, like maybe you put a plate on a beanbag. Is that now a table? Well, if a table might not be a flat surface with four legs or one leg or three legs or triangular surface, it might be a place you put a plate full of food.
On to sit down and eat out, which is a functional definition and it turns out that most of the things we see are actually functional icons rather than objects. And then you can't get a machine to see that because they're not embodied in any case, the mystery of perception. How do we categorize? It's a great mystery and they'll answer the left lap to in the face of this immense mystery, which is how can finite creatures comprehend the infinite well enough to function. That's the
Mystery, their answer was, well, our categories are based on the expression of Will To Power.
And you know, that's actually partly true.
Because part of our motivation is to move up higher or keys, but that can be based on competence and all of our institutions are corrupted by power and deceit. So if they would have said
Part of our categorization is Will To Power. No problem. It would left the mystery open. And this is a huge mystery. It's a religious mystery in the final analysis, I believe. And you know, if you if you have faith you believe that it's something like the spirit of goodness itself that does categorization that lays out our basic perceptions and that would depend on your motivation. So we could say like if you are oriented in the highest manner, you could be oriented then
The contents of your categories would be subservient to the good and I think you have to be immensely cynical to think that will to power is a more powerful force than that. And that sort of cynicism that devours the world.
And so we don't want to do that. That's and I can see why the University's fell into that because this was, I think this was the biggest mystery that emerged philosophically in the last half of the 20th century. It's like, oh my God. See, because what happened on in the English Department. That was, well. We don't know how we perceive even like a simple landscape. Okay. Well, how about a text? Oh, well, wait a minute. How many ways can you interpret a text? Oh, a near infinite, number of ways.
Is true. Technically a near infinite number of ways. Well, okay, which of those
Interpretation should take priority.
Well, we don't know how we figure that out. And so well, how do we know? It's not just the naked expression of power.
Well, sometimes it is.
And that's the idea. It's like this is a problem. Now, it's the wrong solution because it isn't the naked will to the fundamental human motivation is not the naked Will To Power. Here's the fundamental human motivation. It's
I'll tell you a quick story. If you don't mind. Hopefully it'll be quick. I went to see die meistersinger in New York the Opera. Okay, so it's a very cool this Opera. I'm going to write about it in detail in this book. But here's the basic story. There's a town called Nuremberg and there's a bunch of guilds in the town Trek Craftsman, cobblers, like blacksmiths guys who work who make things right? So they're glued right to the bottom. They know how to wire the electrical outlet.
Now they've all organized together and elected a Meister, a master singer in each guilt. So the head of the guild, isn't one of the Craftsman, although he is a Craftsman. He also has to be a singer. Okay, now, all these Guild, guys, get together the singers and they elect each new singer. And so the story is set up so that
A new singer is going to be elected. And one of the Craftsman singers says, he'll stake his entire fortune and his daughter on this new contest Hill. Award is daughter to the new Master singer. Although she has a choice. She doesn't have to do it by the way. So this isn't like patriarchal oppression. It's a father trying to offer his daughter. The best after judicious consideration fully cognizant of the fact that he loves her and allowing her her choice, encouraging her choice, a night comes.
Who's wandered around in the natural world and he's such a great singer that they can't help but recognize his talent, but he breaks all the rules and the girl falls in love with him. Okay. So the this guy who puts up his fortune. He says I'm willing to subordinate my fortune because people have criticized me for only pursuing money. I'm willing to subordinate, my fortune to the pursuit of this highest art.
And I'll put my daughter on the line for two. It's like it is real. Okay, so the rest now, so the man all get together in these guilds and they try to elect that the top figure. And this guy's name is
Alright, the next thing that happens is that the Guild's degenerated into competition, because they're all fighting for this girl. And that's what happens among men. It's like they do get together. They do elect someone whose highest among this them and then the highest get together and elect what is highest yet? That's what unites us that's real and we do fragment because of competition so that can fall apart. Anyways, the Opera is a masterful exploration of all of that, but it isn't will.
Power that is at the basis of categorization. It's something like respect for the Divine word and that's indistinguishable from truth from truth.
And that's is set against that set against the will to power and it's way more. Try it out from your own life do things for power. See what happens. That's hell because even if you get what you want by the time you get it, you'll be a psychopath. No, love nothing, just corruption everywhere around you.
Truth, that's a whole different thing and we're so powerful. Now, we better tell the truth.
We could have Paradise laid out in front of us if we're careful, or we could let everything
burn.
Do you think you've made Headway on this when you've talked? I watched just about a week ago, with your chat with Steven Pinker and Jonathan. Hey, two guys who I hold in, the highest like intellectual regard. I've had them on the show. I like them both very much. They come from the more atheist perspective on this, you know, we've talked about this a million times. Yeah, so things like right, right. Okay, so that that's it. That's what your argument is that, that I'm going
to Cambridge and Oxford to talk about this. Like in detail what? I just laid out.
Like, because I what I want to do is especially when I go to the UK in these conversations as I want to lay a tech, I lay out a technical argument for sacred depth. So, imagine this, we have a intuition that there's depth in literature because we think well, that's a shallow story and that's a deep store and we think well that was really compelling and gripping. It hit me at a profound level right versus. Well. That was just light entertainment light, right. We all have those intuitions.
So, what is this depth? And how far down does it go? Well, it goes down to the bottom of things. What's at the bottom? Well, what's at the bottom is by definition religious?
And why would I say that? Well, it's because when things move you at that level, that's how you experience. It's not thought it's way deeper. So it's like you go out. I go out of my dark at night up north where I am now and it's dark. And the expanse of the heavens is laid out above me and I look up, well, I'm not thinking religious thoughts. I'm confronting infinite the infinite itself and that moves you inside, and I would say it.
And moves you to imitation, you know because you know what it means to have your head in the Stars, right? I mean, it means to be oriented up in the highest possible Manner. And so we're so compelled to imitate again at an instinctual level, that we can even imitate the infinite that we see spread above us in the night sky. And that's a religious calling. And all this talk about whether you believe in God, and it's all proposition lized. It's like, well, it's it, misses the point. It's, that's why I don't ever answer. When people say, Do you believe in God? I say, what do you mean by believe?
And they think well, you know what? I mean? It's like no, you don't know what you mean. You have a bunch of assumptions that you don't even recognize that your peppering. The question with to force me into a box to deliver the kind of answer that your question, two bands, given the way you phrased it. It's like no.
You say you don't believe in God. It's like, well God is ineffable.
What do you mean? You don't believe in God? Well, what do you believe in them? Nothing? Well know everything. Well. No, that doesn't work because then you're chaotic. Well, what's your highest value diversity Equity inclusivity? Well, I don't need a highest value. Well, yes, you do because otherwise nothing orient's, you through the landscape of choices. This isn't optional.
So to give the devil his due then. Yeah. When you've, when you've had the conversations with a lot of these guys, you just talked to Sam Harris again. Also, you know, all of these guys are went great.
At the end, you know, people that are not necessarily Believers. Your basic argument. I'm doing a little 101 here. Is that? You're a Believer, whether you believe it or not. That, that your being here is. Yeah.
Okay, let's take care of this is a good example. Harris does not believe in God, but he believes in the devil.
So he's halfway there.
And why do I say? He think he believes devil is the devil?
Yeah. Yeah, but that okay, but that's a mistake. He also believes religion is the devil and that's also a mistake. So what do I mean? When I say that he believes in the devil? Well, all I did the last time I talked to Sam was asking questions. That was away. But and that's something I highly recommend as a as a strategy just find out from the person you're talking to what they think, you know, and don't try to win.
Try to learn well, so Sam is really motivated by the same thing. That motivated me. Like 30 years ago. He looked at the panoply of human atrocity. It terrified him right? Right to the core. It's like, well, anything but this, and he wants something like an objective standard of values. Now, he thinks it can be found in science. I think that's technically wrong, but it's an argument worth having and we don't know how to sort out the relationship between science and values. But the thing is, is that Sam certainly believes in
Evil.
Okay. Well, if you believe in evil, you also believe in good, because good is the opposite of evil, whatever that is.
And while what's God, what's God will God is what's good?
Well, okay. What does that mean? Is he has Spirit? Like I see a spirit in the sky. What do you mean by spirit? So here's a, here's something to think about. This is what I think when I look back at the good man that I've been fortunate enough to know when my life. There's a spirit that shines through each of them. That makes them good. That's how I can tell that each of them is good. Well, the essence of that good, that's no different than God.
It might even be God.
Now, you say, well, what does that mean? That Spirit, Well, it's whatever is common among good, men. Let's say was that real or isn't? What's common among things more real than what's different and why our spirit while it animates them? Like it's an, it's an animating Force. It's not a disembodied abstraction, which is the problem with like conceptions of God, like Einsteins conception. It's so disembodied. It has no connection to the world and that that causes the death of God that abstraction military ally had it.
Documented deaths of God in many cultures across history. It's not only something that happened in the west that Nietzsche announced, and it happens when the idea of God gets so abstracted that. It no longer has any connection with the world.
Well, and those are the things I'm going to talk about it Cambridge and Oxford. It's like, and I'm going to talk to Richard Dawkins.
So that's so cool because I'd like to ask him some questions because Dawkins is smart and he's put forward. Maybe the most coherent biologically oriented argument for Clockwork, determinism. Something like
that. Well, Jordan, I mean, I have to tell you. This is what I mean. I know, you know this, but when we were on tour, I think the thing that you changed me on more than anything else. I talk about in my book, there were two things. It was the importance of being a parent because you would always say most people to live a fully actualized life.
I have to go through that experience. There are some exceptions but most people, but the other one was connecting to belief and I think what, what changed me on this was watching, you do these lectures every night saying the truth saying, I'm just saying what I believe to be true in trying to take my thoughts to the, to the end. And then I'll explore them further the next night, but then seeing that translate into real world change for people, the literally thousands of people who had unbelievable.
Stories about the Terrors that they had been through that had turned their lives around. And I thought that that is the higher good that that is God, that it's not that it's we can do the whole definition game and all that. But but that you especially at the peak of that thing. We're expressing something that was so profoundly true that we all know that maybe we can't exactly get into the box that we can just hand to somebody and say this is it but that that was enough to move me. I think that's I think that's really the argument you're trying to make that you'll
Into Cambridge and Oxford and to Dawkins and everybody else.
Yeah. Well and I would say in your situation. I'm no you're contemplating fatherhood and it's probably the right Spirit to inhabit. You as a political commentator. Let's say a cultural commentators that that's a good way to reconstruct it, you know, to the degree that you can be because you're getting old enough now to that's the right rule, you know, you're not sort of upwards striving hero youth. It's that you're in that transition and like benevolent father. That's
That's a good one, man. And there's no short. There's no limit to the number of people, you can bring that to and there's no limit to how much good that'll do in your own life and, and in relationship to your own children.
So, let me I know you got to go here. So, let me let me just ask you one other thing just to tie all of this together. Now, looking back at these last couple of years, the intellectual Pursuits. Obviously, your health is better at least to some degree, you know, you're getting back out on the road. You're going to start touring and all of this stuff. Do you feel that? This is all really making a dent. Do you feel like that? It's heavy? And it's real and doing some. Yes.
It's more real than anything else. I don't mean what I'm
Specifically, yeah, but the sorts of things that we've been talking about, I think the will to power just folds, in, in its presence. It's so much more powerful. Well, how can it not be if it's actually the truth, how can it not be more powerful than falsehood? How can, what isn't there be more powerful than what is there? And why wouldn't we want to align ourselves with the truth? You know, it's really painful in the short term because there's so much mess. You have to clear up your own and historical mess even
For that matter, but it's better than living in filth.
and so,
Onward and upward today. I said I'm optimistic man. And I've seen great people in your country on both sides of the political Spectrum, striving with all their might to bring things away from the insane edges. Don't lose Faith, don't lose faith in your institutions. They're great institutions. They're great institutions fundamentally. And remember we could have, everyone could have enough to eat. Everyone could have enough energy. Everyone can have an opportunity for the children, all of that.
We have all of that in front of us. We have it right now. We have it in the next 20 years. If we don't get suspicious and paranoid and and power-mad and especially deceitful
Jordan. I will do the best. I can actually know. I'll try to do a little better than the best I can. How about that?
Yeah. Well, that would not be lovely.
It's good seeing you my friend
good to see you Dave.
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