Minefields and the New Political Landscape | Bret Weinstein | EP 158

[Music] I have the pleasure today of speaking with Dr. Brett Weinstein, who I met about five years ago; an evolutionary biologist who taught at Evergreen State College until political circumstances made it impossible for that to continue. Brett served as the moderator for two discussions I had with Sam Harris, is that right?

That is correct.

In Vancouver. I think that was when that was the first time we met in person, wasn't it?

I believe we met prior to that at a conference in Vancouver also—a young libertarian...

Oh, oh yes, that group and the UBC group, right? That was before, yeah. Well, and we haven't spoken since Vancouver, is that right?

It must have been more recent than that; in fact, I'm certain it was, but it's been quite some time. Well, I thought it might be interesting for us to catch up and to share that process of catching up on my YouTube channel. So, and Brett, you have a YouTube channel and you have a podcast which the image of which I believe is on the wall—a beautiful wall behind you. That's your kitchen?

That's all done in cedar like that?

No, that's one half of my office that we, at the beginning of COVID, my son and I—my son produces our podcast and we built the studio in this room, making runs back and forth to the hardware store and bugging out of the prior space that we were in.

So anyway, yes, we erected this in about two days and you know, the sync works and it's all functional but it's basically my workspace in my office—it makes a lovely background. You have some skulls back there too.

I sure do! I have skulls in my office.

Interestingly enough, what are they?

Well, let's see. We have back there a bear and a seal and the juxtaposition is important to Heather and to me because seals are actually bears—they evolved—they returned to the sea and their skulls are extremely difficult to distinguish, except for the teeth; you can tell by the teeth. But otherwise, a seal skull looks like a bear skull to an amazing degree.

So which one is the seal?

Let's see, yeah. Well, I'm going to guess that it's the one on my right. The seal is the one closer to the plant.

Yes, okay, because I have a bear skull which looks more like the one on the left. So, when did you start your podcast?

Well, the podcast started—geez, I'm not good at remembering these things exactly—but the podcast started must be about two years ago and then it went through a radical transition at the beginning of COVID where instead of just being a show that we taped, we moved it into this room and Heather and I started doing weekly live streams which we still do, or I still do separate discussions with people. But the weekly live streams have become a really important component.

And what's the live stream? What do you do on the live stream?

Well, what we do is we point the evolutionary lens at important topics—everything from the woke revolution to the fragility of civilization, what future governance might look like—basically whatever interests us, and it's accumulated quite a following. It's been—you know, it's never something that we intended to do, but it turns out that there, as you know better than anyone, there's a huge hunger for people who know something, are willing to talk courageously in public, and won't mislead you. We can all be wrong, but it's rare enough that somebody will tell you explicitly what they think and why. And you know, if you do that, it's amazing how many people will find you.

Yeah, well people do have some desire for the truth, painful though that might be. And you said you didn't expect to be doing this on a full-time basis; there's no doubt that life is full of all sorts of twists and turns that you don't expect.

Well, that's certainly true and that actually brings me—you know, the way you introduced this discussion didn't give me a chance to say by far the most important thing here which is it is so great to be talking with you, Jordan. We were so worried about you and I'm sure you're getting that message loud and clear, but at another level, it's probably hard to appreciate how profound your absence from the discussion has been over the last year. I know you've been to hell and back, and we've been experimenting with hell on earth here while you were away. But it is really, really good to be with you.

And anyway, I think it's very important that just be the baseline for the conversation. Welcome back!

Thank you, that's so nice of you! And people have been so welcoming to me, you know, with the exception of the odd journalist, let's say, but online people are so good to me that I can't believe it.

It's well—there's many things I can't believe; that's certainly one of them. It's very nice to see you and you're looking well.

Thank you, you as well!

Yeah, well that's deceiving unfortunately but--

Well at least you're headed in the right direction, can we say that?

That's the theory. And I'm able to work a bit; I'm working about two hours every three days now I would say, doing this sort of thing, which I also didn't expect to be doing as my major... what would you say? As my major occupation? My area of occupation has shrunk to a staggering degree over the last two years and that's been quite difficult to contend with.

Well, I hope it's temporary.

But I mean from the outside, enough so that I can't be as functional as I used to be. But I can't sit around and do nothing because it drives me completely out of my mind to do nothing. I'm used to being occupied all the time. And so, but I'm very happy that I'm able to do these discussions and so far that's been going well.

So I'd like you to walk me through what's happened to you since the events in Evergreen and bring everybody up to date on my end. So maybe you could start with what happened at Evergreen, although I suspect many of the people watching this do know. Does that seem reasonable?

Sure, um, yeah, we can start there. I think we should probably err in the direction of being sparse with the details and see where it leads us.

So in 2017 I was teaching at Evergreen as was Heather, my wife, and she was literally Evergreen's most popular professor. I wasn't too far behind; I was very popular as well. Our classes were always overfull and we accepted more people than we had to and had to turn some away.

Anyway, and then in actually 2016 the new president of the college, George Bridges, began an initiative—or a set of initiatives—surrounding diversity, equity and inclusion. And these initiatives included the impaneling of a committee that was supposed to look into racism at the college, its impacts, and to propose solutions. And as it became clear what they were alleging and proposing, Heather and I became very alarmed. And I began to speak out, at first in faculty meetings. And then when the ability to speak out in faculty meetings became non-existent, I took to our faculty and staff email list to talk about the threat to the college that was created by these initiatives. And that of course brought about exactly what you would imagine: accusations that I was motivated by some kind of racism or white supremacy or white fragility or who knows what the accusations were exactly.

But in any case, I fought back anyway and my sense was I had tenure and I was well liked and I was well known at the college; I had been there for 14 years and so I didn't think they had the power to get rid of me and that gave me the ability to say what needed to be said about these proposals.

Well, the upshot is that ultimately protesters—50 students that I had never met—showed up at my classroom, accused me of racism, and demanded that I either be fired or resign. I told them I wouldn't, and riots broke out at the college in which faculty and administrators were kidnapped. I was apparently hunted car to car on campus by protesters; the police were stood down by the college president, and we were basically left to fend for ourselves with student patrols roving the campus with weapons, baseball bats and the like. So it was a chaotic scene; there was a lot of interest in it because it was very colorful.

But of course, most people back in 2017 dismissed this as, "yes, an overreaction," but you know how college students are. And those of us who saw it up close knew that that couldn't be the case; that it would ultimately spill out into civilization. And we of course were right and now it's everywhere; we see it taking over institution after institution in the U.S. and Canada. We see it making tremendous strides in government and there's no telling where it ends.

And what is—I mean I have a bunch of questions that come out of that. So I'm going to lay out three. Why in the world did this bother you enough so that you took a stand, especially given your political leanings? Because you were—which I'm not criticizing, by the way—I'm just stating that it isn't obvious to begin with why it would be you that would take a stand rather than someone else. But you did and so I'm curious about why; and what is it that you saw coming? What is this ‘it’ that you're referring to? You've had a lot of time to be thinking about this now; it's been four years.

And I mean the other thing I want to ask you about is your life was thrown completely upside down— you and your wife. You don't have your job at the university anymore either of you, despite the fact that you were tenured professors. It's not an easy thing to get another toehold in academia once you've been a tenured professor somewhere, especially if you've gone through what you went through because no hiring committee anywhere is going to give you any consideration once you've been—once you've been tarred by scandal, regardless of what your role in it was. They're far too conservative to ever do anything like that.

And so, okay, so let's— I don't know if I can remember the order in which I asked those questions, but I think the first one was why in the world did you why in the world were you compelled to object? To object—and what is it that you were objecting to, do you think?

Well, it's a funny question for you to pose to me because I have the feeling that the answer will be entirely native to you. I literally don't believe I had any choice. People frequently ask me why I stood up and my sense is if I think through the alternative, I simply can't live with it. I can't sleep.

Yeah but that doesn't seem to bother most people, so I don't get that. Like why you?

Well, right. I mean, I guess that's the thing I'm discovering. So you alluded to my political leanings and you and I both know what you mean by that. I'm a liberal, and I would actually describe myself sometimes as a reluctant radical. By that I mean that I believe we must engage in radical change if we are to survive as a species, but I also know that radical change is very dangerous.

And so it's not like, you know—I find most people who would call themselves radicals feel like radical change is always called for and I don't. My sense is I hope to see change that makes civilization good enough that I get to be a conservative; that I get to say actually we're doing so well that we have no choice but to preserve this—if we try to improve it, we'll mess it up. That's where I want to go.

But what I'm discovering is that the bedrock of my liberalism is nothing like the underpinnings of the so-called liberalism of most of the people on the left side of the political spectrum. My liberalism comes from a sense that yes, compassion is a virtue, but that policy must be based on a dispassionate analysis of problems.

It is based on an understanding that the magic of the West comes from a tension between those who aspire to change things for the better and those who recognize the danger of changing them at all. And so, in any case, I think the short answer is we look around the world and everybody makes arguments that sound as if they come from first principles, but most people do not arrive at conclusions from first principles, and if they extrapolate at all, they don't do it very well, and that results in a severe compartmentalization of thought.

And that means that when confronted with changes that threaten a system on which we are dependent, most people don't recognize it, and if they do recognize that, they wouldn't know what to do about it.

So, how can I put it in plain terms? I had no choice because I was as if on a ship where somebody had proposed to fix our course through a field of icebergs and navigate based on some absurd theory with no grounding in fact. Somebody had to object and I was a little surprised at how few and far between the objectors were.

But you know, if I'm to be totally candid about it, at the point that things went haywire at Evergreen, I had watched video of you reacting to protesters in Toronto, and it had made so much sense to me at a number of different levels. You know, I recognized you as somebody who knew that although the initial proposals were arguably symbolic, that they were connected to things that ultimately were very much about an exercise of power and a transfer of well-being, and that it was therefore—you felt obligated to stand up and say no, which resulted, as you know better than anyone, in you being mocked for overreacting. And then here we are years later and it turns out that you saw with absolute clarity what others couldn't even imagine.

Yes, but I certainly didn't see what was going to happen to me, right? You know, so I don’t think it’s... I wasn't possible to see what would happen with specificity, but I th—am I correct in seeing that you knew that something very dramatic was likely to come from your standing on principle and that that didn't provide any license to do anything but make that stand?

I really can't say; you know, it's a while ago now, so that's part of it. But so much has happened to me that's been so strange in the last four years that I have a very difficult time making any sense of it. I can't even really think about especially the last two years; I can't really think about them in any consistent and comprehensive way.

I mean, my family situation has been so catastrophic and my illness and my wife's illness; it's just been—although she recovered completely, thank God—it's just been so utterly catastrophic that my thinking about it is unbelievably fragmented. I'm struck dumb still, to some degree, by all of what emerged as a consequence of me making the first videos that I made.

You know, I went downstairs, talked to my wife and my son—my son was living at home at that time temporarily—and I said this piece of legislation is really bothering me because it calls for compelled speech. I looked at the background documents and something wasn't right and I said I need to say something about it; they said, "Well, go for it. You know, we'll see what happens," and all hell broke loose and continues to break loose, for that matter.

Which is one of the things that's so bloody strange about it; it doesn't seem to end. And I would have thought when it first started, I thought oh, well you know, I'd be a flash in the pan for a week or something, or two weeks or a month, or six months, or a year or two years—but it doesn't stop and I really can't understand that. It's beyond my comprehension.

Now I guess it's partly because I continue to communicate my thoughts to some degree, even talking to mainstream media people, although increasingly less and perhaps not at all from here on in. I mean I had an interview with the London Times two weeks ago, three weeks ago; it was published, and you know it was just another complete absolute bloody nightmare for my family, my daughter in particular, because they took her to task in an extraordinarily nasty way.

And you know, and the journalist who did the interview was completely—she, you couldn't invent her. You know, not only the way she—she was so deceitful in what she did, but I learned more about her background afterward as a consequence of another journalist who wrote about her, and you know, she's a very singular person to say the least.

And so I did feel at the time like you did, I guess, that I was more afraid of not speaking than I was afraid of speaking. And I have something against being told what to say. It's like I'll pay the price for what I have to say; I'm not going to pay the price to say what you want me to say— you go say it yourself and see what the hell happens.

And you know, maybe that's just a kind of incomprehensible stubbornness in some sense. Although I did—I think I did see what has—I did see the beginnings of what has unfolded since then; although I can't even really put my finger on what it is that's happening.

[Music]

Well, I wonder a little bit about, you know, in some ways, you know there's nothing good about why you were absent from the scene; but there may be something good about your having not been there for every moment of it and being able to come back to the discussion with something like fresh eyes.

Because a lot of this is developmental and you know you say you're surprised that this is continuing and I must say I'm having the same experience. I feel like I was picked up—you know, my whole family was picked up by a tornado and we haven't been put down. And you know I sort of feel like we were joined in the tornado during 2020; it was such a crazy year that a lot of people whose lives were continuing in some normal fashion are suddenly aware that things are wildly off-kilter.

But actually this raises a question. I think one of the things that I know from my own life and you know I know of course a bit about your life because of the fact that it's public and because I've met Tammy and have had a chance to interact with you in that context as well. But the question I have is I wonder about the difference between a person who might think the way you or I would think about bad policy and you know compelled speech and that sort of thing, the difference between a person who might think such a thing in isolation and a person who has a proper familial context in which to actually check in.

So in other words, I have the sense that in part the reason that I'm able to just simply describe things as they are and do so unflinchingly is because my family understands the same puzzle. And they may have different elements that they see with clarity but there's no question I can—you know I can go to Heather and I can say you know I ran into this thing today and here's what I'm concerned it implies and we can have a rational discussion about it without anybody accusing anybody of moral defects or any of the things that have become so common.

And so in your case, I know that you have a familial network that provides you that same kind of reality check and then I wonder looking at the generation of people advancing the woke revolution and I see the failure of that very thing and I can't help but wonder if it isn't connected. In other words, the idea that pair bonding, that marrying and producing a family has become something that most people don't even consider an essential part of life; it's not the objective of the exercise, it's a choice that some people make at best.

That that has left people very isolated from any reality check which makes them very vulnerable when they are threatened with an accusation like you're a racist, you're a transphobe, that sort of thing.

Now you definitely need in this book—this is my new book by the way, and so it's coming out March 2nd, and I sort of clung to this like a life raft over the last couple of years while I was writing it.

There's a section in here about sanity; and it's a critique to some degree of psychoanalytic thought because the psycho— not that I admire the psychoanalysts tremendously, but they tended to think of sanity as something that was organized inside your psyche or let's say inside your brain for that matter, or maybe even a reflection of healthy brain function.

But sanity is to a large part outsourced, and what I mean by that is that if you're fortunate and you're well socialized, other people find you acceptable enough to include you in their networks and then all you have to do is pay attention to the functioning of that network and regulate your behavior as a consequence of the feedback you receive, and you more or less stay sane.

And so like if you have a family and you have friends then they'll help you make sure that your jokes are funny and not mean because they'll laugh when they're funny and they'll raise an eyebrow when they're mean and then you can check in with that and they'll help you figure out if you're dominating the conversation too much and they’ll push and prod you as you do the same to them and everyone stays relatively organized.

And when all this hit to begin with, I had quite a large network of people which expanded at some point to include people like you and the so-called intellectual dark web members, and they were helping me check in on my sanity all the time; you know, helping guiding me, guiding me through the interview process of analyzing my errors and commenting when I did something hypothetically right.

And my family played an integral role in that and so that was extremely helpful. I never thought about that as a precondition for saying what I said but I think there's something about that that's right. It's certainly the case that like I have tremendously supportive parents still; they're both still alive, they're still tremendously supportive at a very deep, deep level and I think that that was a real gift that I had that many people don't have.

You know, I've been struck—one of the things that torments me constantly is—and I think it's really hurt me to discover this—I had no idea how deep the desperation was for people who lack encouragement. It's just because every time I talk about this it makes me tear up because of what I've seen, I think.

But all these people that I've met now, you know, I spoke when I went on my book tour, which was an unbelievable event—unbelievably positive event—but also I would even say to somebody, traumatic. Traumatic—a traumatic positive, like it was just too much. I really loved it but to see the depth of hunger that people had for an encouraging word was unbelievably tragic.

And for people to come up to me repeatedly, over and over and over, hundreds, maybe thousands of times and say, "You know, I was in such desperate straits, looking for some encouragement, unable to find it," and then, you know, "I came across your lectures." I thought, “Jesus, it’s pretty thin gruel to feed a starving population.”

I mean, I'm absolutely pleased beyond belief that people have found what I've done useful but that doesn’t decrease the impact of the realization of just how hurt—how much hurt there is; and it is hurt, this grounded lack of encouragement. I have that—I’ve been encouraged my whole life.

So man, that could easily be part of what now—you know, I also thought somewhat calculate in a calculated way about this, like—and I don’t know how far this goes back—but I've also organized my life so that I was standing—I had legs out in many directions. I had a clinical practice, I had a business, I had my professorship, I had my writing, you know. I had multiple sources of income, pretty independent areas.

And so I—and I did that in part to maximize my capacity for freedom. I thought, well—and this wasn't something I think I thought explicitly; you know, it was part of what unfolded in my life across time. It wasn't easy to take me out, although I've been taken out a lot—like far more than I thought might be possible.

I can't separate that exactly from intrinsic health problems, you know, but I—despite my—you know, it isn’t obvious to me that I can go back to the university. I'm still employed there; I'm on leave. They would take me back; I don't know if I can do it.

I don't have my clinical practice anymore, which I really miss. I love doing that, and that was 20 hours a week, you know, so that's a lot of time. I finished writing this book, but I'm not writing right now, and so a lot of—I don't have any pressing financial concerns and so that's a—a huge privilege, a huge benefit. Thank God for that.

But despite me being distributed like that, I was still taken out pretty hard. So, yes.

Well, you know, I confess I have wondered while you were incommunicado over the last year whether that was just Goliath’s good fortune or if there might be something more to it because you were such a singular voice at the point that Tammy got sick, and then you did that.

Obviously, it was a tremendous blow to those of us in intellectual dark web space in our ability to fight and to hold the line. But you clearly have been taken out— in your words, deliberately multiple times, and you know how it comes about. I don't know; it's amazing to me that it continues to happen.

And the thing that's so damn weird is that exactly the same thing continues to happen, you know, and it was just replayed with this Times article. Now I have thought I had a lot of interviews lined up for this book, and once the Times article came out, I reacted to it, my family reacted to it and we dealt with it effectively the same thing happened that had happened to me before when journalists had written a hit piece about me.

It was extremely stressful because when it happens, you do not know which way it's going to go, and you know you can get unlucky, and a number of bad things can happen to you simultaneously; all that has to happen is for that to happen once to exceed your capacity to deal with the number of bad things and you're out.

That's basically an accident. I really think that's what happened to me in the last few years is that everything that happened socially was unbelievably stressful, positive and negative. You know the positive end of it was extremely intense and amazingly compelling and interesting, but the negative end was really, really stressful, you know.

And I notice what happens to people generally speaking, and I don't think I'm making this up, is you know, I've watched the typical person who gets mobbed on Twitter will get mobbed by 20 people and it'll last for two or three days and they'll apologize like mad. They're so stressed out they retreat right away and it's really hard on them, you know.

And that happened to me, like I don't know how many times, 100 times, 200 times, and really publicly, you know. I've been called every bloody name in the book, and that's been really literally—I mean I remember one day where I was called a Jewish shill and a Nazi, the same day, you know, by two competing publications, and I thought maybe they canceled each other out, you know.

But—and that's been very hard on my family, you know, and although they’re doing reasonably well under the circumstances, but then you know Tammy got sick terribly and in a really nasty way and then her surgery was—complications multiplied and she was near death daily for months. And then this proclivity I had for depression seemed to have become untreatable, and that took me out.

And so, and I'm still struggling with that, you know. I get up; I can hardly stand up when I wake up in the morning. I feel so bad I can't believe I can be alive and feel that bad. I stumble downstairs and I'm in the sauna for about an hour and a half, and then I can stand up long enough to have a shower, which I do for about 20 minutes and I scrub myself from top to bottom trying to wake up, and then I can more or less get upstairs and I eat, and then I go for—I walk like 10 miles every day because I need to do that in order to deal with this, whatever it is that's plaguing me.

And I can get myself to the point where by this time in the afternoon I'm more or less functional, but then it repeats the next day. And so—and it's—oh my God, that's terrible!

It is, it's terrible! It's so terrible! It's so terrible that I can't think about it without it being traumatic, so I have a hard time figuring out where to place my mind, because this has been happening, it's been happening every day really for two years.

I think it's fair to say that every single day of the last two years has been worse than any day I had previous to that.

Oh my goodness! And what a predicament you're in then because, you know, I can hear—I would guess it anyway knowing you and knowing of you in the way that I do, but you're caught in this predicament where that's really intolerable and frankly most people wouldn't tolerate it, but you also know that there is, you know, both at the level of your family and at the level of those who admire you and listen to you and are, you know, waiting to hear the little bits of affirmation that they need, the little bits of guidance that they were unable to get in the world, you know, how much good comes from your facing that.

What sounds like a completely excruciating existence!

Yes, but it's perverse beyond comprehensibility, which is sort of the hallmark of a traumatizing experience because it is exactly that. And I look at it and I can't get my—I can't wrap my mind around it.

Well, and also that my degree of exposure—you know, when I decided to make those videos, I was playing with YouTube, and I was playing with fire—like YouTube is fire in a way, social media is fire in a way that is unimaginable; it's so powerful.

YouTube demolishes the printing press in terms of its long-term significance; I mean because now we can—now you can do with video and audio what you did with print, and it's way easier. You have access to a massive audience with no intermediaries whatsoever, and you know, I—and I don't know really how to grapple with that either, how to comprehend it.

Well, I mean actually this brings me to one of the things I've been hoping to talk to you about for the longest time. So I think there's a part of you that finds—you've always been very gracious about it and welcoming, but finds my liberalism a bit paradoxical.

No, no, look I don't—I understand the catastrophe of the Pareto distribution. I don't like it; it—there is this proclivity for capital to accrue in the hands of smaller and smaller numbers of people. It's just capital; it's all goods—you get this terrible problem of distribution that it's like a natural law.

And the fact that people object to that is completely unsurprising, and the fact that if it goes unchecked it destroys societies is—that I don't think that's a hypothesis; that's demonstrably self-evident.

So I don't find—the concern, the compassionate concern for working-class people and their well-being the least bit incomprehensible. It's the solutions that are the problem; it's like, well, what should the solutions be?

And well that's where things get very, very complicated. It's not well thought perfect, and I'm sorry if I implied something that wasn't even my perception.

I think you are to an extent a conservative, but I find you—if I listen to you, it's not a simple kind of conservative.

I'm a conservative for the same reason you are; you already pointed out—like if you're a social scientist and you don't understand the law of unintended consequences, you are not a very good social scientist.

I learned from my clinical research and from studying clinical research for so long and publishing it too, is that you think your intervention is going to do what you think it's going to do, but it isn't; it's going to do something else.

And you have to build in—if you have an intervention that you think is going to have beneficial results, you have to build in an assessment to see if it has those results.

And like I talked to the woman who headed the— the name of the was done in—not in Cambridge but in Massachusetts; it was a longitudinal study of anti-social children—the first longitudinal study.

It was done in a working-class neighborhood just outside of Cambridge; I used to live there and I can't remember the name at the moment, but in any case, this team intervened with kids that were likely to have a—they came from broken homes, broken neighborhoods, anti-social neighborhoods.

This was done in the 1930s and they intervened at the level of the child and at the level of the teachers and at the level of the parents and ran this multiple year project to reduce risk for negative outcomes among this population, randomly assigned participants to groups and by all accounts from the participants, the children, the parents, the teachers and the professionals who were running the investigation, it was a resounding success.

They looked at the results and the intervention group did worse on virtually every outcome measure, and they figured out later that the reason for that likely was that they took the anti-social kids and grouped them together in summer camp. They took them out of the city to put them in camp. They thought that would be a good intervention, but grouping them together seemed to produce a competition for anti-social behavior and it overwhelmed all of the other interventions.

That was Joan McCord's famous study and I talked to Joan McCord a lot about that, and— but you see that all over the intervention literature; it's very hard to fix. It's very hard to define a problem correctly, it's very hard to define—develop an intervention that's—that addresses that problem and only that problem.

And then it's very hard to get the intervention to do what you want it to. And that's what makes me conservative to the degree that I am.

So yep, no, I think that's incredibly wise. I would add one thing to your list: it's not just that it's hard to get an intervention to do what you want it to do; it is that it is hard to get it to do what you want it to do at scale. These things also tend to evolve. So even if you did manage to solve it, right? And so the problem of unintended consequences, coupled with the problem of perverse incentives, and therefore bad policy that is effectively corruption is a very frightening problem.

And so I do think we are caught in a basically damned-if-you-do damned-if-you-don't scenario. We can't stay here and you know you're—I agree with you, the um, social media for lack of a better term for it, is going to dwarf the printing press for various reasons, some of them because it's so easy.

Yeah, but also because it's of a fundamentally different nature. Right? When you're reading a book, it may be that somebody writes something that's bad for you to absorb, but you know you're reading a book because the experience of it, the perception of it is of a book.

Whereas social media increasingly fools the mind into—you know, the interaction you and I are having is more or less a face-to-face interaction, but a lot of interactions that look like face-to-face interactions don't have these characteristics.

And at best, the impact on the mind is arbitrary. So you know, we're watching things like amplifiers of threat, and you know, this goes back to the thing we were discussing earlier with Twitter. Here's a good example of unintended consequences: it’s like, what don't we know?

Okay, we don't know what regulates human communication. We know that if you restrict the bandwidth, people don't understand each other as well, but we don't know how communication functions. It's too complicated, okay?

So we absolutely don't know what happens to communication at a large scale when you restrict people to 140 or 280 characters and then put them in a network of millions of other people. We have no idea.

And it could be that you tremendously bias the discourse towards impulsive anger. It looks like that if you look at Twitter, I mean—and because it's a 140 or 280 character, you can whip something off very quickly.

And so it's almost as if the technology is implicitly commanding you to be impulsively aggressive. And then we don't know what it means when only those people who are motivated to be impulsively aggressive that day are those that are communicating and then when you only see those communications. Even though you know 10,000 people might read your tweet, only 100 who are irritated for some reason respond—we don't know any of that.

And we completely underestimate the power of the technology because it looks harmless; it just sits there on your phone and doesn't do anything. And so, you know, God only knows what kind of tower of Babel that is.

So right, and not only that, but the fact that the algorithm changes and we don't get any notice of it—not only do we not have access to whatever the algorithm's content is, but we don't know when it changes, which means it's impossible for us to even track the impact of our own behavior, because we can't run a controlled experiment.

It's like predicting the stock market; it's an illusion that you're dealing with the same thing every day. It's complete—and then of course we don't know, you know, the algorithms increasingly have a life of their own and increasingly they're governed by artificial intelligence.

And it builds in—it builds in—it derives implications that we don't even understand, and as you pointed out, it all changes so quickly that we can't keep up with it.

In any event, so yes.

So then the conversation—and I'm certain it's going to take multiple tries for us to get there; hopefully we'll have the opportunity for multiple discussions, but the question is, all right, you're a conservative but you're a wise conservative that understands the importance of liberalism, understands the necessity of tension between the desire not to mess things up with unintended consequences and the desire to solve problems that are actually solvable.

And I would argue the necessity to solve certain problems which will be fatal if we don't solve them. But the combination, in other words, I think there's a new dialogue that has to happen. Those conservatives who understand the puzzle need to get together with those liberals who understand the puzzle and figure out what the new insights are because we are somewhere so novel that if there's one thing we can say, it's that our system is unstable and it is putting us in great jeopardy, which means that even if your impulses are conservative and you point out correctly that I have some conservative impulses, even if your impulses are conservative, we aren't anywhere, right?

We're on a precipice in a windstorm, and at some level we have to make enough progress relative to the fundamental instability of the system. And the fundamental... you know, here let me take an example: the point you make about social media and the human psyche, you could make exactly the same point about pharmaceuticals and physiology; that we know very little about the way the body actually works.

Yeah, I could sure make that case.

All right, yeah, I'll bet you can. The hell you've been through makes this point very clearly, but you know I'm constantly struck by the fact that our narrative about medicine proceeds from an entirely false premise, which is that we know a great deal about the body and have all of these useful interventions.

What we have is a lot of interventions where sometimes we know what one of their effects is; we very rarely understand why the spectrum of collateral consequences are what they are.

And all of these systems are linked together and nobody is tracking the long-term implications of anything, so we have this sort of obsessive focus on the things that you can detect on very short time scales and almost a studied ignorance of what the same pharmaceuticals or procedures do to us long term.

Right? And we then, I suspect, if you did the statistics properly, I suspect that that medicine—independent of public health—kills more people than it saves. I suspect if you factor in phenomena like the development of superbugs in hospitals, for example, that overall, the net consequence of hospitals is negative. Now that's just a guess and—and it could easily be wrong, but it also could not be wrong, and that is a good example—or that's where my thinking about what we don't know has taken me with regards to the critique of what we do.

The fact that it’s even plausible is a stunning—you know medical error is the third leading cause of death!

Yeah, you know, and that doesn't take into account the generation of superbugs, for example, the generation of superbugs or you know, if you're thinking broadly about it—let's, I don't know where you stand on this issue, but I have been tracking the lab leak hypothesis for COVID, and it is very distressing to me that as much as it's an unsettled question, the evidence for the lab leak gets stronger over time.

All of the competing hypotheses fall one by one and are replaced by some alternative that hasn't yet been falsified, but that's very ominous to me. And if this is the case, if this was a bug that was modified in the lab through gain-of-function research and escaped, then you have to add that to the balance sheet with respect to the costs of medical errors.

Because it looks like if this was an escapee from the Wuhan lab, that it was an escapee from experiments designed to create a vaccine to protect us from future coronaviruses.

So we can't say that with specificity, but if we look at the circumstantial evidence of what was being studied, how it was being studied and what the likely purpose of those investigations were, then this is, you know, the mother of all self-inflicted wounds, and it is downstream of naive thinking about the cost-benefit ratio of enhancing the infectivity of viruses.

I know I did know that, and that's something that you've been tracking and pursuing. I don't have an opinion about it because I don't know enough about it to have an opinion.

So, I'd also, with regards to conservatism, you know, I don't know if approaching how people should deal with the problems in their lives from a psychological perspective—the viewpoint of a clinical psychologist, I wonder if that kind of automatically makes you conservative in some way.

Because my locus of concern has always been the individual and so—and an individual well-being, and you know, being trained as a behavioral psychologist, I always took as my unit of analysis the enhancement of well-being of health—let's say at the individual level—and maybe translated into the political.

And when that's translated into the political landscape, maybe that looks something like conservatism. I don't know. I mean I never thought about this; I never thought about what I was doing in political terms to begin with.

Like even my initial statement about Bill C-16 and compelled speech wasn't supposed to be something specifically political. I just thought the political had escaped its boundaries. It's like no, you don't get to infringe on free speech. You're no longer in the political realm at that point; that's a different realm. Get the hell back where you belong—that's how it looked to me.

But you know, everything—that's another thing that's very peculiar about our culture at the moment; it's almost impossible to have a discussion about anything and have the coverage not be politicized.

And I think that's partly a function of how the media—the legacy media worked because they tended to view everything through a political lens, and also a consequence of this insistence, and this I think comes primarily from the radical left, that everything is political.

And I don't buy that. It's like you can say that everything has a political aspect, but that's a completely different claim than everything is political, which is a totalizing claim.

And I also, as a social scientist, don't like totalizing claims because most things are multivariate, complex, and so...

Well, so yeah, I think we can prove that you can politicize everything, but not everything is political and that the tendency to view everything in political terms destroys our ability to properly navigate questions on which we actually ought to have alignment.

And this is a very disturbing pattern to see every question, including COVID itself, turned into a team sport because that is of course sabotaging exactly the ability to reason through our various options and then to get us to move in a coordinated direction to actually address the pandemic.

And in some sense, I suspect we are headed to having to accept COVID as a permanent fact of the landscape when that was not a foregone conclusion. That in effect our politicizing of this issue is going to leave us with a bug that we can't ever get rid of.

Why do you think that? Like, I mean, I've been hoping that and watching Israel in particular; there seems to be some indication that they've got the vaccinations ramped up to the point where they're having some effect on the rate of transmission of the virus, which is a positive thing.

And you know, I keep hoping that the vaccines are—there's enough of them and they're getting out there fast enough so that we might be able to keep the bug under control.

You're not so optimistic about that apparently.

No, I'm not because, for one thing, I know that it's—you know, it's been obvious from the beginning it was going to evolve and that the key to managing its evolving out of our control was limiting the number of people who had it and limiting their ability to spread new variants around the globe.

And we've done a terrible job of this somehow. You know, a year in, it is only beginning to be, it is only beginning to dawn on us that new mutants that are harder for our immune systems to recognize are essentially a certainty and that the key to ever regaining control is to ensure that when these things arise somewhere, they don't immediately find their way around the globe.

So I guess what I would say is I think we tend to—you know even the idea of compromise in a political sense is the wrong approach with something like COVID. We should have been much more aggressive earlier on so that our total level of compromise with respect to civil liberties could have been much less.

In other words, if early on we had engaged in a really intense six-week lockdown and we had ramped up our capacity to test for COVID with precision so that after six weeks basically, the idea of six weeks would be it's very hard to control COVID inside of a household; it tends to bounce around, but that it will tend to burn itself out in most households within something like a six-week period.

That if we had engaged in that and then used track and trace to find and control outbreaks following such an intense lockdown, we might not have had to deal with a full year of the half-assed measure.

And the sense is—the sense that I have is that we're getting, you know, maybe it's a Pareto distribution, maybe we're suffering 80 percent of the harm of lockdowns and getting 20 percent of the value that we might get for having, you know not gone the full distance.

And, unfortunately I think the prerequisite to our behaving rationally is having our experts completely liberated from market forces, from political dynamics, and free to tell us what it is that we need to know. And then getting on the same page and having a proper rubric for evaluating what has worked and what hasn't.

And instead, what we've had is a thoroughly politicized discussion from the get-go in which even our countermeasures are fought over on the basis of you know if you— you know why is it that a—you know, a Trump voter is much more likely to be a masked skeptic? A question of mask is an empirical question; it shouldn't have anything to do with your political leanings.

And yet it undeniably does in North America, and that has robbed us of the kinds of controls that we might otherwise have instituted.

I wanted to ask you—we talked—I want to bring the just discussion, if you don't mind, back to something that we were touching on earlier; that your initial objection when you were at Evergreen to whatever it was that was developing in the background. And now we've had four years to see whatever it is manifesting itself.

And so you—what is it that's happening, do you think, in our politicized landscape?

I have a guess and it's right up your alley; it's something I'm intending to explore at greater length, but the basics are this: I suspect you and I, I think, would share the opinion that psychological development is among the most important phenomena for understanding human beings, and it is underrated.

We tend to look at the behavior of adults and study it, but we should spend more time thinking about how those adults ended up the way they did in order to really understand them.

And I think for each generation, you have a developmental landscape, and what the governing forces are in that developmental landscape has a lot to say about both the insights and the blind spots of the people who emerge from it.

And so I would say that for Americans of my generation, I'm a Gen X, the market played too much of a role developmentally, and it has created a kind of lens through which we can't help but look at commodified things in a way that is quite unhealthy for you.

I was born in 1969, okay?

For Millennials and maybe even more so for Gen Z, I suspect that there is a pivot to something else. And many people, you know, Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff have certainly talked about iGen—the internet generation—but what I suspect is really going on is that if you are sufficiently plugged into the internet early enough, there comes a point at which your persona on the internet takes primacy.

It is more important than your actual physical life.

Jesus, it's worse than that; it's worse than that! I would say from personal experience there's more of me on the internet than there is in me. My electronic avatars are far more powerful than me personally, you know? And I can watch this because I've been away for a year and a half, and yet my internet presence has steadily increased during that time.

And I look online now and it's 700 million views or something—so now imagine that as the developmental environment for children.

Now here's the connection I want to draw. My contention is that the online landscape is postmodern, right? That if we were just to simply describe it, the rules—the physics of online life are post-modern because it's extracted from the environment.

Right? So for example, like living in a dictionary, if I decided tomorrow that I was a woman—right—I could change my internet presence such that I would present in a female way. I could say, "Hey, anybody who doesn't treat me as female is a jerk."

And the point is I have transitioned completely, right? Now obviously there's no such thing in the physical world. You can transition; you can take hormones or blockers; you can get surgeries.

But no man has ever become a woman and reproduced in a female way.

So the point is the physical world has all kinds of constraints that come from physics and biology which do not translate to the online world.

And for people like you and me, for whom the online world is an add-on world, we think, well obviously real life is the important one and then the online thing has some interface with it which is frightening, but we understand how they relate.

But if you reverse these two things, then what you get is a generation that its problem-solving mind says, actually, of course you can transition—you can transition—and then it is everybody's obligation to live by who you've told us you are, and anybody who doesn't is a bad person.

And what has to be true for that to be the case, right? You know, I had a fantasy a long while ago that people would end up wearing glasses like the Google glasses that would be illegal to take off, and that you'd be mandated to see what people wanted you to see; it was their right to be presented to you in the manner that they chose to present themselves.

You know? And I'm not saying that's a particularly brilliant vision but it's very much in keeping with what you're describing—boom!

Yep, I think it's close!

But if you imagine then that an online world in which effectively we can all be equal tomorrow as long as we say that, that’s the objective, and we can all present as we want, and others can be forced to adhere to it or be thrown off of whatever discussion, then all of this begins to make a great deal of sense.

And so I'm wondering if we are not in effect in a kind of civil war between those for whom the real world has primacy and those for whom the online world has primacy and if that's not the fundamental nature of the battle.

Well, I think it could be the fundamental nature of a part of the battle. I mean part, obviously part of what's going on is whatever this unbelievably rapid rate of technological transformation is doing to us.

I mean, my daughter and some people of approximately her age—so late 20s—are helping me manage social media, let's say.

She's noticed that people five years younger than her have advantages in understanding the newly developed forms of social media that she's already outside of.

And so that process of being hooked into the web and that being the determining factor for your worldview is probably accelerating.

I mean it's going to accelerate, obviously it's going to accelerate because the web is becoming more and more dominant and machines are becoming more and more intelligent.

So they abstract themselves away from the world, and then the question is, well, what's the consequence of that abstraction?

But it's funny that it's postmodern—that doesn't—there's more going on with whatever it is that's happening than technological transformation.

But you think that's the fundamental driving factor?

Well, I think there are a lot of ways you can look at it. Obviously, I don't think this is a real battle. Obviously, the internet runs on hardware in the real world and everybody, you know, when the power goes out we are all reduced to our biological selves, so I don't think there is actually anything to fight over.

One of these worlds has primacy and the other is an add-on and this is not debatable.

But my point is really about the mental confusion that arises from—for most people, I mean if you think about the lives that most people are living, right? Most people at best are working a job in which they trade their labor for money that they get to spend on goods or relatively generic adventures and the part of their life that is interesting and compelling is you know the internet, over which they range freely and engage in battle, and you know, they fall in love, increasingly and whatever else they do.

And so my point is that that is a distortion develop mentally; it misleads the mind into misunderstanding what is necessary.

If you take the postmodern rules of the internet and you now impose them on politics in the real world, you get crises; you get the basic structure of civilization coming apart in front of our eyes, which I really believe that it is, right?

With the homelessness crisis in the U.S., for example, is jaw-dropping and we have a particularly acute crisis on the West Coast in the U.S. that appears to be the result of people being utterly compelled of their own political beliefs to an extent that even as those beliefs are failing around them visibly, they just double down.

So imagining that people who think the internet has primacy are now exerting a force to correct the real world in the direction of their naive internet understanding of things are in danger of crashing the aircraft.

And in some sense, people like you and me are responding to what they're saying about how we should restructure the real world and saying that doesn’t make sense; it won't work; it is going to put us in grave danger.

And you know, there are those who can hear us and we are popular with those who can hear us, and then there are those who regard our pointing out the obvious as a danger to their program who are intent on silencing us.

And so I haven't thought about this obsession with identity from a developmental perspective too. And I thought this insistence by a loud minority that their determination of their identity take primacy is, first of all, it's just—it's wrong technically I think because an identity isn't merely what you feel you are; an identity is way more complicated than that.

As any decent social constructionist should already know, an identity is a role—a set of complex roles that you negotiate with other people so that you can thrive across a very long span of time.

And it can't be something that you impose on other people because then they won't cooperate with you.

Now you might say that you have a right to impose certain aspects of it on other people and you could have a reasonable debate about that, but identity is definitely not merely what you feel it is, and it's certainly not merely what you feel it is moment to moment.

That identity is actually much more like that of a three or four-year-old child, and I mean this technically; it's not an insult!

So when you're a child, you pick up one identity after another and play with them. So for example, my granddaughter, who’s about three at the moment, if you ask her who she is, she has two names—a first name and a second name—and her dad calls her by her second name and her mom calls her by her first name, so she's Ellie or Scarlett, and she's fine with either of those.

But she's also Pocahontas. And if you ask her whether she's Ellie or Scarlett or Pocahontas, she will say Pocahontas. And she has said that for eight months—it's amazing. It's been that persistent in a child of that age; it's quite remarkable.

But what she's doing is playing, you know? And girls will play to be boys at that age, and boys will play to be girls and they're—they play with multitudinous identities, and then they settle into one.

So then the question is: what if you disrupt that play? That's fantasy play.

And then another question might be, well, what if you disrupt it with technology? Not that technology itself is producing a message that's counter to that, but that the fact that children are on technology all the time means they're not engaging in that kind of identity-establishing fantasy play.

And then you might say, well, maybe what you see happening in that case is that it bursts out in late adolescence. And the insistence there that, “My identity is what I say it is,” is actually the scream, in some sense, of an organism that hasn't gone through that egocentric period of play where they are, in a fictional sense, exactly the way they define themselves.

You can't tell my granddaughter, who's three, that she isn't Pocahontas! It's stupid to tell her that because she means it in an experimental sense.

And all you're doing is interfering with her fantasy play.

And so I see a fair bit of this as delayed fantasy play with the kind of pathology that comes up when you delay a necessary developmental stage.

Now that could be wrong, and probably is, but still it looks to me like that's part of what's happening. It's very strange to see this insistence like, I just—it's so conceptually unsophisticated, even the hypothesis that identity is only what you feel that it is, and the intense insistence that that be the case is also another mystery.

It's like, why is it that it’s a foregone conclusion that other people have to go along with your self-definition?

So I think, first of all, that's fascinating, and that fits rather exactly with what I'm getting at.

And I suspect it is adding a dimension where I was vague about the developmental pathway. But you're absolutely right that a child can take on an identity and effectively, within limits, they are allowed to assert that identity and adults will play along with it, encouraging and right.

Now the thing is, there's a process—I'm more familiar with the, you know, the male side of this because I went through boyhood and being a young man—but if you have a misunderstanding about how you present in the world, so you assert that you are one way, then your peers will, you know, if your peers are nice, they will poke fun at you in order to reveal to you what it is that you actually present as so that you can adjust your self-image, right?

And that's part of healthy socialization! Like that's what happens. That's it.

Once you pull out of that egocentric stage where you're playing with yourself, then you have to integrate other people into your play, and then it's a negotiation.

Otherwise, you're not accepted by your peers, and so that's another thing that's very interesting is that it is precisely those children who aren't accepted by their peers that insist that their self-definitions rule.

And then what—one of the things that's kind of terrifying about that is, if you know the child anti-social literature, there’s a percentage of children that are quite aggressive at the age of two; almost all of them are male.

Almost all of them are socialized out of their aggression by the time they're four. The percentage that isn't become persistent lifetime offenders if they're not—if their behavior isn't rectified by the time they're four, which means if they're not transformed into children that are acceptable to their peers, there's no intervention that is being evident in the literature that will reverse that.

So this is both frightening and it's making me happy in the sense that I believe that the model that we are wrestling to the surface here is accurate and it doesn't fit what most people are expecting is going on.

And I think there's a lot of power in understanding it this way, but what you are effectively saying is that there's a period in which self-definition is identity in some sense and then there is a period of correction at which your insistence on who you are meets everyone else's insistence on who you are, and you then learn who you actually are.

And that thing better be a pretty good match for the world!

But then, yeah, it better be, all right? And so I have argued, as an evolutionist, that the—I would say the job of a parent is to mirror the environment that the child will mature into, so that when they get there, they have the software that is an appropriate match for it.

And a lot of mental health issues come down to a mismatch between the software that your developmental environment produced and the environment you actually live in.

And that can happen—why you shouldn't be nicer to your children than the world is. In fact, you're doing them a disservice.

That's the devouring mother from the psychoanalytic perspective, right?

And this gets into some very uncomfortable territory—what, you know, what does good if you're a slave? If you're born into slavery and you produce children, how should you parent them? Should you protect them from...

Well, I would say all of the implications of slavery—let's go through the stage idea again because there's three stages.

I think there's—the egocentric stage where the child is manifesting multiple identities, self-defined and playing. Then—and that's under the protection of parents. The parents put up a walled enclosure, so to speak, within which the child can do that experimentation.

Then the child meets the world of peers; that happens between the ages of four and the ages of 17, 18, something like that, and that's when your identity has to expand to include others in a cooperative and negotiated way. You have to manage competition and cooperation, and your identity becomes socialized.

And then there's a stage beyond that I would say, where you kind of pop out of that socialization and you're no longer necessarily a member of the group. It's like a self-actualized person that, although I don't like that phrase, the self-actualization theorists thought to some degree in this manner—once you're done with your apprenticeship, you can become post-apprentice and then you can take control of your own destiny to some degree independently of your peers.

So hopefully you can get to there, but—and so that's part of the answer to the slavery conundrum; you know, you should be a good member of your group, but you shouldn't only be that.

Well, I think there are two different questions. The slavery issue is the very uncomfortable idea that if a parent is supposed to mirror the adult environment that a child will have to get along in, then a person whose children will mature into an arbitrary environment needs to understand that it's an arbitrary environment rather than being protected from it, right?

In order to, you know, to properly avoid running afoul of the arbitrary authorities in a slave environment, one has to be developmentally brought into how you navigate below the radar; how you—you know, how you play that game.

And so anyway, you would expect the parenting to look very different.

And you know, this idea that childhood is a joyous time where you should be free of all of those adult influences is exactly wrong; it's prep—it's preparation.

So though now if we take this model that I think you and I are agreeing on here about the—and I like your point here—that there are three stages.

You've got, I assert my identity independent of the world; then the world and I negotiate over what my actual identity is; and then I'm not an apprentice anymore and I get to be who I am in the adult world, having been informed by that process.

And you imagine that you've got generations now—one and a half of them, maybe— for whom the online environment was so compelling and so much the source of most of their affirmation that its rules have become sacrosanct to them.

And those rules really do look like—you know, they're, it's a childish world, right? You join some community of people; you tell them who you are; there are rules about them having to respect who you've told them.

You know, it is, if I say I'm Pocahontas, who are you to say I'm not? Right? And that, in some ways, the answer to that question in the real world is: I'm someone you have to get along with in repeated interactions, but that may not be the case at all, online—that constraints you can just pick up and move to the next community.

And that's another thing we should talk about because another thing that's happening online is that I’ve detected this recently is that the online environment is also making everyone acutely paranoid.

And I think the reason for that is that everyone—it’s easy for our thinking to go astray. And as we talked about earlier in this discussion, other people tap you back into shape, and you're surrounded by a kind of random assortment of other people in the real world because you didn't select them.

So because it's random, it provides you with what is in essence relatively unbiased feedback information.

But online, you can choose your compatriots and it's likely to be the case that at your weakest point psychologically, you choose the least demanding compatriots, and so your craziest ideas are the least likely to be challenged.

All right, so there are so many interesting threads here. One of them, my guess is you and I will fall out in the same place here. But if you give me a choice between a community that believes everything I believe and one in which people believe very different things, I'm not going to choose the one in which people believe the things I believe because, for one thing, it's the end of growth and it's deathly.

I want to object slightly.

Okay, I've had—and you've had this experience too—I’ve had the experience of being in an environment where a very large number of people don't agree with me vociferously.

And what I would say is, a little of that goes a long way!

Even if you're a courageous thinker, I'm not going to put myself in that category, but even if you're someone who wants to be able to tolerate dissent, there's a limited amount of dissent that you actually can tolerate.

You are going to seek out an environment where most people agree with you but some people don't, some of the time.

And it's kind of like listening to music. You'll like music that's optimally different from what you are enjoying right now, right?

If it's exactly the same, it's boring. If it's too different, you can't hear it; there's an amount of novelty that you can tolerate, but it's not that large.

And so even people who have been trained to look for evidence that disproves their own theories, they're only going to be able to tolerate a tiny bit of that at a time.

It's too destabilizing.

It's too destabilizing!

Well, all right, so I want to link this back up to what you said before about the three stages.

Yeah, so my experience as a scientist is that my most valuable characteristic is the ability to compete to be completely indifferent to the prevailing wisdom on a given point, right?

And I think this—I think this is no personal stake in it. Well, I may even have a personal stake. I may come up with an idea that compels me that it's probably right, a hypothesis, and I may advance it and have every single one of my peers say that's garbage.

And my sense is not one of, “Oh crap! I've said something bad”—my sense is: "Well, wouldn't that be delightful? If I’m as right as I think I am, then the fact that everybody else doesn't get this makes it even better!"

Right?

So my point is that's not normal. I know that's not normal.

And it's not normal for evolutionary reasons that are easy to understand. It takes a lot of training to accomplish that.

Yes! Or a developmental environment that rewards it!

Right! Sure! If you have the right experience, but then again, you know, you said yourself, remember again at the beginning of this conversation, think about the preconditions for that.

Is that in order to open yourself up to that sort of criticism, you have to be supported in all sorts of ways.

You know, and even so, when I'm functioning as a scientist, I am trying to disprove my presuppositions, you know.

I'll test them. It's like something manifests itself in an experiment, then I design three or four experiments to see if I can make that effect go away.

And I do that because I don't want to propagate nonsense, and I don't want to pursue nonsense in my own career.

But in order to tolerate that, think about how we set up the system is you have to be a tenured professor to do science or have the equivalent position in the research lab.

But your economic situation is stabilized; your social status is stabilized. Like you're protected on 50 fronts and then you can open the door and say, "Okay, let's have some novelty come my way."

And that's—that's assuming that you're at a point where you can tolerate any novelty at all, you know?

And more curious, more open, more emotionally stable, more intelligent people are more compelled by novelty and can handle it better.

But still, our ability to handle it is pretty low and we will find environments that mostly reflect back to us what we want—most comforting!

Well actually, this is fascinating! I wonder if there’s not effectively a budget for discordant interactions.

And you know, if we go back to what we were speaking about, it’s that the amount of effort it takes for you to get to the point where you can be productive in the day—the amount that is riding on your doing it—the number of people who are listening to you and who basically need your influence in their life. And you know, in some sense, it you know, it’s a mythological story, and I know you will have spotted that a thousand times over, but just the herculean effort—the tremendous amount that's riding on it and the degree to which you're paying some inhuman price in order just to continue playing your role is profound.

And so the advice to the extent that I have—is just see how you can—see that it shocks me that you say that. I mean that isn't to say I—you disagree.

No, it seems like that from inside here.

Well, I mean I think, you know, but I can’t—I still can’t believe it, so what I think I would do in your shoes and what I hope you will do is you will, you know, I don't think there's anything about that story that isn't right.

I think you're reporting honestly how hard it is, and I know because I've seen it in person and everywhere else I've seen the effect that you’re having on people and I know how important it is in keeping them out of trouble and steering them in the right direction and giving them hope.

And so what I would hope is that instead of reinventing yourself again or updating yourself that you would figure out what the efficient way of showing up in the world in that role is.

And I hope that we're having this conversation—I seem to be able to do this, so I can do this! And so that's what I'm doing.

And I have this book coming out and we’ll see how that goes. But, I mean, I think, you know, I know your audience and they will—they'll accept you any way you can show up for them.

And I think, you know, the key thing is to figure out how to get out of the predicament of having to go through that herculean struggle every day.

Yeah, well, it's beyond—I’ve been struggling with it for two years! I can't get out of it!

I can't—

Well, I mean, I'm out of it to some degree. I'm living at home again; I'm not in the hospital. But the reason I'm not in the hospital is because there's nothing that can be done for me in the hospital; like there's no point in me going to a hospital.

It will just make it worse!

And I've been in like four hospitals, so I know all that happens is I made much worse. And so I live in 15-minute increments fundamentally.

Wow!

Well, um, I hope you can detect how many people are rooting for you. It's mind-boggling. It's un—it's life-preserving that fact, and I can't believe it even after this last London Times interview—the amount of support that came pouring in is just unbelievable.

I can't—I can't wrap my head around it; I don't get it!

Well, but there it is, you know, there it is. But I mean it makes sense, you know, because those of us who have been on your team or paying attention to you for the last several years know who you are.

And I think in some sense, your enemies know what you are. They know that a voice like yours carries a tremendous amount of weight; that their fictions will not survive in the context of a countervailing force like that, and so that's why they come after you the way that they do.

But you know, the fact is, people are getting wiser over time; they're recognizing what an attack looks like. You know, at some level, they vary a little bit aesthetically, but the overall picture is the same.

There’s a new one planned apparently; so the next thing—

Yeah, the next thing—this is something that hasn't happened yet but is apparently coming—a financial expose of my economic existence.

So, you know which will be accompanied by claims that I'm exploiting everyone and...

And well, yes, they're going to come after you for succeeding and for people doing, you know, what they can in order to...

Well, I live such a symbolic existence! I drink sparkling water and nothing else ever and I eat nothing but meat ever.

And so my luxuries—this is so car—it's so absurd! My luxuries have been high-end toothpicks and sparkling water!

[Laughter]

Well, I sometimes wonder when I look at attacks on you if the idea is this: there are certain number of people who haven't spent any time listening to you yet.

And if they did, they would quickly gather that you're not what your enemies are portraying you as, so the idea is there has to be a constant stream of suggestions that there's something deeply wrong with you in order to get people not to check in with that question.

You know, it's like, um—you know, Julian Assange, right? The number of things that have been said about Julian Assange that would make you think, "Well, I don't know what's going on there, but something is doing something."

Yes, right!

And so the idea is—it has the stink that they create around you or Julian Assange or another figure that they regard as very dangerous has to be sufficient to drive most people away from even checking for themselves.

And I don't think it's working in your case, but I do think—

Well, so far it doesn't seem to, but you know there's always the possibility that it'll be the next one that'll work.

And it's not like I have any shortage of things wrong with me—there are things wrong with me. You know, now whether they're ethical things or not, that's a whole different question, but like nobody has a—nobody has an untrammeled conscience, that's for sure!

So—and I'm not too worried about the economic attack; I mean, I’ll just make my—if it gets out of hand, I'll just make all my finances public.

I mean I’ve never made any apologies for being an evil capitalist, so I think actually all the things I've done, I've tried to use market forces to modify because I think it's a really good source of feedback.

You know, like I've produced these processes to help people plan and assess their personalities and you know, we thought about giving them away for free.

But free is actually a really