Woodstock for the Adventurous and Responsible | Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying | EP 483

But even for somebody like me who is fundamentally secular in my understanding of the universe, it is pretty clear that there is something that is reasonably described as a spiritual dimension to the battle that we are engaged in. Not only does the opposition appear to be playing with demonic tropes for reasons I can scarcely imagine, but something well beyond our well-being as a modern people is at stake. Our ability to continue is at stake.

Hello everybody. I had the opportunity today to speak to Brett Weinstein and Heather Heying, with whom I've had many discussions. Um, always a pleasure. We concentrated on two issues today and then branched out into many others. The first is Brett's plan to have a celebration in Washington, D.C. on the 29th of September. Um, the movement is Rescue the Republic. The website is jointheresistance.org, www.jointheresistance.org. On X, the handle is @rescueRepublic.

Okay, so that's on the 29th of September. What is that? Well, that's what we discussed. That was one of the main issues we discussed. It's a celebration that brings together musicians, comedians, and speakers. What would you say of the alternative media, of the alternative entertainment enterprise, of the alternative political system that seems to be gathering itself around Trump? Kennedy will speak there; Tulsi Gabbard, for example. All the speakers haven't yet been identified. I'm going to attend, so this is an invitation to all of you to come to that on the 29th. You can get, as I said, you can get information at jointheresistance.org.

So we talked about that, and then we talked more philosophically, scientifically about the convergence that Heather, Brett, and I all see between the advanced findings of evolutionary biology and the proclamations—let's say the historically grounded proclamations—of the theologians and the religious types. And that was associated with a conversation we also had about Peterson Academy, this new online university that launched three weeks ago. Heather and Brett lecture there, but so do a number of the figures on the more cognitive science and theological side who seem to be integrally involved in this integration—John Verve and Jonathan Pasho perhaps first and foremost among them.

And so we tangled all that together in our discussion. And so, uh, join us for a evolutionary biological SL theological analysis of the current political situation, as well as something like a call to celebration September 29th in Washington, D.C.

Well, it's good to see you too, Brad. I think the last time we spoke publicly was about five months ago. We talked about the Darian Gap and postmodernism. And I know that, um, well, there are a variety of things we have to talk about today. I wanted to open maybe just to, uh, congratulate you guys on your Peterson Academy lecture, which is among the most popular offerings on the site.

And so we launched that three weeks ago with pre-enrollment. The formal launch was on September 9th. We have 31,000 students at the moment, and so— and it looks like it's going extremely well. We’re curating the social media part of it carefully. We want to produce a social media network; I think we have produced it actually. That's very positive, you know, without being naive and sentimental, and we're very careful about, um, what would you say, rewarding the kind of behavior you might like to see if what you were trying to do was promote university-level civilized discourse.

And we're hoping as well that the—because this is an open question technologically, you know, like what are the preconditions for an iterable, non-degenerating social media game in the long medium to long run? And the answer is nobody knows, right? Nobody knows the answer to that question. So we’re hoping that the fact that there's a substantial entry fee— I mean, it's a reasonable fee and the price that we've set Peterson Academy at seems to be very acceptable to our students. We've got positive feedback on that.

But it's a high enough bar, as far as I'm concerned, so that it'll screen out the bots and the trolls and the bad casual corporate actors and the manipulators. And then, you know, we're also monitoring behavior without being too heavy-handed about it to make sure that, you know, the all-caps crowd and the derisive psychopaths don't get free reign, which seems to be what happens in a social media network that's free.

Anyways, we've got 20 courses up already; we've got 30 more in the pipeline, like—recorded already, and then we're sketching out a full two-year curriculum. It all looks great, and your course has proved to be particularly popular, and so hooray for that!

Well, it’s fantastic to see you Jordan. Uh, congratulations on launching Peterson Academy; that's a huge accomplishment in and of itself. And we're very excited that, uh, our course is apparently popular on the site. It’s fascinating how you described the social media approach, which is not something, um, I was otherwise aware of. But of course, I'm aware of the social media landscape in general and how one has to negotiate these things, and it feels to me like an amazing—I don’t know if it's counterpoint or a follow-on to some of what we're trying to do in the course that we have done for Prod and Academy so far—which is we're trying something new.

It’s not what we do in that I think we called it the evolutionary inference course; it's not something we've done before where we invited students to play what we're calling evolutionary Jeopardy, um, following from the observation that when you see an organism in the world, they are manifesting evolutionary answers to ecological questions, conditions, constraints, opportunities—uh, that you may not be aware of.

And our job as biologists and, um, also, you know, as a psychologist—uh, in the human landscape is to figure out what the conditions, constraints, opportunities, what the questions were that produced the thing that you've now got in front of you. And so that's all assuming that you have an answer for which there is a plausible, credible, not necessarily static, but, um, consistent to some degree across time question that you are now seeing the answer to.

Whereas what you're trying to navigate with Peterson Academy and the social media landscape is, oh my goodness, you know, is there a stable ecological condition, as it were, that there is an answer to that can't be gamed? That’s exactly right! That's exactly right!

Well, I actually think to some degree that that's—the deeper you go into the philosophical hierarchy, the farther down the hierarchy you go towards fundamental assumptions, the more what you're actually seeing are um iterated attempts to answer exactly that question.

So the question would be something like, what's the optimal game playable by the largest number of people, extending over the largest span of time, perhaps that incrementally improves as you play it, right? And what are the preconditions for that? And one of the things I've been thinking about with regards to the social media landscape is that what we're contending with with the big tech networks that are free is the proclivity of attentional resources to be parasitized by psychopathic predators, essentially, but by predatory parasites—which, by the way, is the definition of a psychopath.

The predatory parasites will game attentional resources if they have free reign to do so because they're extremely valuable. And so you need barriers of a variety of sorts or consequences with regards to that non-reciprocal behavior, or the system gets gamed entirely, I believe, by the parasitical predators, and then it comes crashing down now.

And I would also say possibly that they’re in favor of it crashing down in some deep way because their mode of reproduction—even short-term mating, let’s say, short-term exploitative mating—is actually likely more successful in extremely chaotic conditions. So now the issue would be, well, how do we set up a communicative landscape that rewards truly reciprocal altruism, let's say, and that keeps the predatory parasites at bay?

And we actually don't know how to do that in virtual space, especially with the anonymous types because we can't reputation track them, right? Because it's impossible to do iteration because attention inherently looks at a short time horizon and goes, oh, that feels good. With iteration, individuals who are actually interested in learning, in playing part in this—a— in this ecosystem that you're creating, but don't know how to get out of their own way, they need iterative feedback that is reward.

And if, if individuals are kind of trying to do the right thing but they're anonymous in this space, there's no way to get the iterative feedback, uh, that will enable them to seek the long-term, the long-time horizon, right?

Right! Oh, I I hadn't thought about it so much as a decrement on the reinforcement side. I—although, you know, I can see exactly what you mean by that. Because they don’t accrue the reputational gains as a consequence of their anonymity that would come to a fair player in a normal situation, but they also don't accrue the punishments, right?

Because you can't reputation track them, and, and, you know that, that actually brings up another issue that might be pathologizing our social communication networks, which is that the algorithms don’t know what time frame over which to optimize attentional grip. So that the game remains playable, and so what seems to be happening at the moment is that we have the worst of hedonic gratification allied with the worst of psychopathic enabling, and those two things go together.

And so if the algorithms are maximizing, what would you say, grip of attentional spans of 15 to 30 seconds, let’s say, all they’re going to do is reward, they’re going to reward, they’re going to reward short-term manipulation of attention in a manner that doesn’t iterate well across time. It’s kind of like corporations focusing obsessively on quarterly reports when they should be devoting at least some of the resources to thinking about whether or not they’re going to be around in 10 years.

Now, the problem is, as you guys know, that the farther out in time you attempt to plan for, the more likely your plans are to go astray because you—the error of your predictions increases as you move out into time. So, um, that’s so—I mean these—go ahead, Brett.

That’s not the only issue, and so, uh, this is an interesting discussion because it really, um, in some sense, treads through some reasonably well understood evolutionary ground and into a landscape that is not politically understood to be analogous, but should be. Um, many years ago, uh, when Game B was, uh, an active group of people meeting to discuss how to create, uh, good governance, I focused on the question of how to prevent the evolution of corruption, and I had a hard time persuading people that that was actually job number one.

Their sense was, well, we don’t even have a system that could be corrupted yet, so let’s deal with that later. And the key insight is if you focus on it later, you’ll lose—yeah, right? What you have to do is create a landscape of incentives that is ruinous for those who attempt to corrupt it. And the reason that that is the key element is that if you don’t do that, what will happen is you will create an evolutionary arms race in which those who are wishing to corrupt your system for whatever reason are seeking those quadrants where you can’t detect them, and even if you detect them in nine out of ten quadrants, they’ll find the one that you don’t, and that’s where they will evolve into the next phase of the game.

If you want to prevent that from happening, what you have to do is zero out their account so early that there's no evolutionary feedback that makes them better at gaming the system over time. And so what you’re talking about in the online environment is there are really two elements to it: one, can you create a cost so that there’s not effectively an infinite ability to throw disposable accounts at a problem in order to find the loophole?

Exactly, exactly! Yeah, free—that’s free evolutionary experimentation, A with no cost of illness, pain, or death. Well, why the hell wouldn’t that proliferate like mad? Of course, it would. And wait till the AI systems get a handle on it, right? Then we really lose control of it.

Oh man, that’s for sure. So what we need—and I actually would predict that what we will see across civilization as AI enables aural actors at a new level is we will see the prioritization of things that cannot be faked with the augmentation by AI. In other words, there will be a prioritization of, uh, music in which it is not a, um, a repeat of something on the album, but it is something generated in real time and therefore that did not involve the consulting of AI.

We will see, you know, interactive comedy rather than, uh, somebody doing a five-minute bit that could have been augmented by AI. But I mean live events—live events—live events are going to become pre— even more premium than they are because they’ll be the only things that people can see are actually real.

I think that’s already happening, actually. Yeah, well, go ahead, go ahead, Heather. Sorry, but this is—I mean this is already the landscape in which we know that education works best, right? Low polish, uh, not reproducible—exactly. Like you can, you can go in with a curriculum to a class in one year, and the next year the—what you think is exactly the same curriculum, but if you’re doing your job as an educator and the students are, of course, different, it’s not going to be the same course.

And, you know, this is the mistake of textbooks, right? You know, textbooks are a useful tool, but they are incredibly limited in terms of what they can actually offer a student who is looking to understand their dynamic long-term place in the world.

So we could start by talking about [Music] depression. Depressed people are sad and frustrated and disappointed. They tend to feel all negative emotions simultaneously in a manner that’s paralyzing. Depression is fundamentally a biochemical disorder. One of the things I tried to determine as a good behaviorist was whether the person who was suffering was suffering because they were ill in the strictly physiological sense or whether they were suffering from the cumulative micro and macro catastrophes of life.

The probability that tossing an antidepressant into the mix is all of a sudden going to fix life that are absolutely catastrophically out of order is zero. The more unstable your life is, the less serotonin your brain produces, and that makes you hypersensitive to negative emotion and suppresses positive emotion. You take the problem I'm suffering and then you think, well, why are you suffering?

It’s exposure therapy, and then you can practice encountering the obstacles that are stopping you, and it'll make you braver, and it'll help you deal with your problems. Voluntary confrontation with the forces of darkness and chaos is the fundamental story of [Music] life.

Well, so one of the things we're wrestling with at Peterson Academy, obviously, is like I see no reason—I don't see much distinction, and maybe I'm wrong about this, but I don't see much distinction between lecturing to a thousand people and lecturing to say a hundred thousand people. Like once you get past the expanse where you're semi-minar like somewhere past that, it becomes— they become roughly equivalent.

Now the problem with recorded lectures like the ones that you guys offered is that they take away the dynamism of the interaction between the professors and the students in the moment, right? And that’s some of that transformation that you described. The benefit, of course, I think is that because we can curate that while there’s reach and cost, those are major benefits, right? But there's also the case that we can very carefully curate the lecturers, so we can make sure that they're of the highest possible quality.

Now what we want to do in addition to that is we want to set up a social landscape like what one of the things we’d like to see at Peterson Academy is that the students—once there’s enough student enrollment, assuming that happens—that people do think set up, uh, what would you say, social locutions like watch parties, you know, where 20 or 30 people could get together and watch a lecture when it when it first emerges.

And we’re trying to also figure out how to incorporate—you could imagine a three-day convention, for example, where we bring, you know, several thousand people together or more than that with a dozen professors and run it for three days. And we want to flesh out the social element, and that’s partly why we concentrated a lot on the development of the social media network too.

So because obviously what you get at university is the provision of information in books and textbooks and lectures, but there’s a peer component and a mentorship component that’s more difficult to duplicate online. But I don’t think it’s impossible, especially because the universities have dropped the ball in that regard. They're not very good at actually facilitating the social element in higher education. They're not good at fostering the development of productive peer networks. They sort of let that happen by happenstance.

So I think we can do a better job, and so we're very, very cognizant of that particular problem. And, you know, it’s a major focus of address as we move forward. But, um, we've got all sorts of things planned for in-person events, and given that the cost of our what we hope will develop into a full high-level university equivalent education, the cost is so low we should be able to offer people relatively special experiences to go along with it that will fill that vacuum.

So yeah, so Brett, the part of the solution to the problem that you raised with regards to the proliferation of evolutionary actors, let’s say in the pathological space, is cost of entry, right? This is it could be that free social media networks are doomed from the outset, and I think there’s got to be something to that. And tell me what you think about that.

Well, I do think there are ways to structure it that can solve the problem without cost being the key element. Cost is useful, but of course, you don’t really want to enable anything that has effectively indefinitely deep pockets to be able to get around your barrier to entry. In other words, if you’re talking about, uh, let’s say political dialogue on social networks of consequence, if there are trillions of dollars at stake in a given election, then somebody might be able to spend the millions or tens of millions to game your network even though it doesn’t make sense from a profitability perspective for them to do it.

So you want—yeah, right? You want to have a system that negates this. And one way to do that is to use, uh, to basically create a stigma for inauthentic behavior—for parting things, cutting and pasting things, consulting AI in some way that is, uh, that causes your comment to be derivative. And so Reddit is now completely gamed; there's no question about it, but it did have a couple of elements that worked really well, allowing users to essentially downregulate that which was not useful and upregulate that which was insightful is something that could be resurrected.

I think it was—if you can figure out if you can figure out how to stop the downregulation from being gamed by collectives of activists, for example. Right? Yeah, yeah. Well, at the moment, you know, what we've done so far, and we're going to make this as transparent as possible as we move forward, hey, with three—with 30,000 students, we've had three bad actors—that's all. And our policy at the moment is we’re watching the social media interactions constantly to see what’s going on.

Our policy at the moment is that if you’re not playing fair, we just give you your money back. Now that’s not good enough. Like, I think there should be a system where it's three strikes, and then there’s actually something like an independent jury, and then there’s an appeal process, right? And that all has to be 100% transparent because otherwise, the regulation process becomes sensorial and, and, and will degenerate across time even if you start with—even if you start with the best of all possible motivations.

But I also think too that having established the ground rules implicitly already and the fact that everybody’s playing fair at the beginning, we’re also setting the parameters of expected behavior on the site. You know, and one of the things we’re kind of hoping for in the long run is that we can—you can imagine a net of communications that was composed of the of everything that was of the highest quality.

I mean, part of the problem with the free-for-all that’s the internet right now is that it’s the—there’s no hierarchy of curation, and so it’s an infinite library in some ways, but almost all of its—not almost all of it; a large proportion of it is pointless junk, and a fair bit of it is pathological beyond comprehension. And so obviously something needs to be done about that across time.

And it seems to me that one good approach is to build something parallel that emphasizes quality. So, well, I have a couple of suggestions for you in this regard. One, um, I often have trouble compelling people of this point also, but the key or one of them to making such a thing function if it is a private space is very clear, simple rules at the door that allow for effectively complete discretion in the enforcing of common-sense measures.

In other words, what you want is to say, look, by signing up for this, you are agreeing to act in good faith. Here is what that means. You’re allowed to play Devil's Advocate, but you're not allowed to misrepresent your position or the reasons for it. How will we adjudicate questions?

Well, we will try to adjudicate them, uh, out in the open, but if there are cases, which there will be, where we can't, we will do it by a jury. It will be chosen by this mechanism. Um, should we find problems with the jury mechanism, we have a council of people we believe are, uh, of excellent character who will be the final arbiters, something like that.

So that the at the point somebody says you’re censoring me, the answer is actually here are the rules that you signed up for and this is not an end-user license agreement that was designed for you to glaze over and click yes. This was actually designed for you to read it, to understand it, and for it to change your approach to the system itself that was designed to, uh, to impress you and invite you and cause you to be deliberate. Larry AR does that at Hillsdale when all the undergraduates show up, and—and it isn’t some pro-or of thing because Aaron is very involved with the undergraduates themselves directly. He’s the president of the university, and so he makes this a personal priority and they have an honor code. And part of the honor code is that there is a code of behavior at Hillsdale, and it isn’t the same as, say, state universities, and there’s a state university just down the street.

So to speak, and you’re more than welcome to go there. But if you’re going to go to Hillsdale, then this is the code you’re going to abide by. They have a 1% dropout rate in their first year. Wow. Right? Absolutely. Wow.

And so we’re going to build—we’re going to write an honor code for Peterson Academy, and it’s going to be short, and we’re going to hope that people read it and pay attention to it carefully. That's a great idea. Yeah, yeah.

We go ahead, Heather. We actually did this within Evergreen. So Evergreen obviously was a deeply flawed institution, um, but it had remarkable pieces within which we were able to do some remarkable things. And one of the things that was required of professors in programs—these full-time programs that—that faculty taught and that students took—uh, was we had documents that were, um, strangely, there was a lot of religious overtone in the language, they were called covenants. And every—the faculty in any given program wrote an original supposed to be covenant for that program that all the students read and signed on to and agreed to.

And it was, you know, very much—you know, within a program at Evergreen, it was very much like what you’re describing as, uh, Hillsdale at large. So within a program, we could say, you know, here are the rules of engagement. Here is effectively my promises to you as faculty to students and what you are promising to each other and to me in return. And there are plenty of other choices to go to within the Evergreen, you know, ecosystem if this doesn’t suit you, you know, you can—you can go any number of other places.

And while, you know, Evergreen WR large say, you know, in this case, the analogy being like the higher ed universe, the higher ed system at large was deeply flawed and had, you know, a lot of people, uh, leaving very quickly, our programs didn’t, right? This, you know, this worked extraordinarily effectively, and, um, you know, I don’t know—I’m pleased to hear, um, that it’s working at Hillsdale; I’m excited to hear that you’re trying to do it, that you’re going to be working on it at P Academy.

I don’t know. My question is always one of scale. Like to what degree of do the interpersonal—when I can look you in the eye—you—when I can look our 50 students in the eye and know something true about each of them within the first week, beyond their name, like something about each one of them, then we have a relationship such that the first time I have to say to you what were you doing or no, I think you’re wrong, they don’t mistake me for some, you know, rando authority Aaron who is just looking to get to the end of the quarter and to get my paycheck. They know that I have something real about them, uh, in my, you know, in my head and my heart.

So that’s—that’s the thing that’s not replicable at scale. Um, but, but maybe there are ways around that.

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Well, we’re going to find that out. I mean, so one of the things we might distinguish conceptually is the difference between censorship and refereeing, right? I mean nobody thinks of a referee in a hockey game as a censor, and so, but he does forbid things, okay? So then what’s the difference?

Well, I think we outlined a lot of the difference is, like, what we’re—what we’re doing is best, say in an educ—in an iterable educational environment is best construed as a sophisticated game. There has to be rules for the game. They have to be rules that make sense. They have to be the rules that make the game playable in a manner that makes people want to play it voluntarily, right? So that’s one of the—that’s one of the hallmarks of a valid rule set is people who abide by it voluntarily.

Then the rules have to be known, and there has to be a mechanism that’s clear and transparent for enforcing the rules. That’s not censorship, right? Because everybody—it’s no more censorship than the referees’ role in a game.

And I do think that that’s the right analogy. I have two more suggestions for you in this regard. One is it will be the lesson of civilization. In fact, it is effectively impossible to write that set of rules and anticipate the way in which it will be gamed, especially if you have enabled actors that evolve in response. The way to succeed is to leverage that same evolutionary force in the immunity of your system.

So if you—the simplest case would be that you deploy two related rule sets with a difference, that you don’t know whether it will play positively or negatively, and you monitor the outcome and then you basically spawn the one that functioned better.

And then an even more out-there idea is that you allow—you divide, you know, you could divide it into more than two, but let’s say you divided your population of participants into an A group and a B group, and you let the A group govern B’s landscape and the B group govern A’s landscape, and you let the people within each of the landscapes dictate whether or not the rules are working.

I cut, you choose, right? It's a—I’ll think about that. I’ll think about that. What do you think of Musk’s solution with Community Notes? Because what he’s really doing with that, you could say, is bringing the possibility of distributed cognition to the problem of bad actors, and it’s analogous, as far as I can see, to the free market solution of pricing.

Is that well—what do you think? What do you think about that solution? It’s more difficult to game, although Wikipedia had that, and it's been gamed eventually, right? That’s the thing—you need to enable a system that is capable of adapting faster than those who are trying to game it. And that’s the parasite problem, right?

So Musk's solution actually did work at first and increasingly doesn’t, and the problem is that it is too static and therefore g—right, right, right? But it also defaults to what the majority believe, yeah yeah right?

So, you know, the rare new insight will get disappeared by such an approach, right? Right, and that’s a big problem, and that’s actually the problem of populism right now, exactly, is that, so you know, I’ve been investigating the manner in which traditional religious structures solve that problem.

And what they do is they have two axes of verification, you could say, and one is appeal to the population that’s now saying—but that has to be allied with a vertical orientation which is something like continual reference to the traditions of the past that made iterable games possible. It’s lineage. So it’s lineage, lineage, lineage, lineage, and the texts that your ancestors wrote.

Well it’s half of lineage, that’s the problem. Ah, it doesn’t look forward, so in our last discussion, uh, Jordan, we talked about, uh, my version of the sacred versus the shamanistic, and I know you have a a related but different version of it.

But the orthodoxy that comes from the past has the virtue of having stood the test of time, right? Which is a not to be undervalued. That is a tremendously powerful indicator of validity of one kind or another. But the other thing is predictive power.

And what we do not want to do, and Heather was just alluding to this, is you do not want to set up any system that says that because a perspective is vanishingly rare, it is wrong. Wrong, yeah, right? Because sometimes that’s wrong. In fact, every great idea starts that way.

Last thing you want to do is frustrate the process that generates valid new ideas that change—that’s like eradicating beneficial mutations, right? Exactly. So what you want to do probably at the same ratio, too, honestly, right? Right you need—you need three axes where you were describing too, right? There’s how it plays in the present, there’s how it references to what we understand from the past, and how well does it predict things in the future? And we want to be specifically aware that something that successfully predicts things in the future that nothing else predicts is likely to have a kind of validity whether we understand what it’s based on or not.

Yep, yep, yep, yep. All right, all right. Let’s turn our attention away from that problem for a moment to what you guys are doing on the political landscape right at the moment. And so you have a rally planned in Washington on September 29th, and so would you walk us through—well what—let’s start with who’s involved and exactly what this is and what its aims are, and just tell the whole story.

Sure, and I will say I struggle with the terminology. This to me is post-political, non-ideological. Yes, it's technically an event, but it's an event— or we are hoping it is an event in the same way that Woodstock was a music festival. We are hoping actually that this is a moment, uh, at which we first see a sea change in the way we conduct ourselves and interact with each other.

I think of it actually as hopefully the bookend that closes the era that opened with Woodstock and opens the next era in which we recognize just how much we have in common, just how much we have to lose if our system fails, which it seems to be doing in front of our eyes.

The rally—the event—is called Rescue the Republic. The idea was originally framed as save or defend the West. We recognize the crisis is so, so charged within the US that we decided to focus on the Republic, save the—rescue the Republic first in order to save the West.

And, well, you asked who is involved. Um, I’m going to undoubtedly forget important people who, uh, have, uh, agreed to come and speak on our behalf. Well, where can people find the full list? Ah, they can find all the information at jointheresistance.org, jointheresistance.org, and they can follow us on Twitter at rescueRepublic.

Okay, so if you do miss anyone, that’s where people can go for the additional information, and we’ll post that in the description of the video as well. Yes, okay, so fire away with regards to participants.

Okay, and I will also say that, um, there are people who are in the process of, uh, agreeing to come who aren’t listed yet. So stay tuned—even even somebody who’s not listed today may be tomorrow.

So we have Bobby Kennedy coming to speak. We have Tulsi Gabbard. We have, uh, Laura Logan. Heather and I will be speaking. We have Russell Brand. We have Matt Taibbi. Uh, we have, uh, Jimmy Dore. Um, Rob Schneider. Rob Schneider. Uh, we have several musicians.

Yeah, we have Skillet coming. We have Five Times August, who, uh, was a tremendous voice during the COVID madness. Um, we have Tennessee Jet coming. Uh, Deac—boy, are they going to play? Any of these people going to play as well as talk to you?

Yeah, we have, uh, speakers. We have speakers, we have comedians, and we have musicians. Great, great, great! That’s—that’s a good approach—that multimodal approach, and that does make it different than this standard, let's say, political rally, right?

And I think partly what that does, we did that a bit at this ARC Alliance for Responsible Citizenship meeting in London, you know, I was very insistent on the musical and artistic element and I think it's because the propositional has to be surrounded by the imagistic and aesthetic that’s more like the domain of dream, right?

It’s like the way that I look at cognitive architecture is that there’s a propositional landscape which we've actually modeled pretty well now, I would say, with large language models, but outside of that there’s an imagistic aesthetic and dreamlike landscape that’s the landscape of the imagination, and outside of that is the embodied procedural realm, right? And a full event covers all three of those domains.

You can’t assume that the propositional alone is going to carry it, and I think it’s partly because the propositional is easier in some ways—it has flaws and it’s easier to dement it and capture it than it is to capture the imagination and the procedural landscape.

Anyways, if you flesh it out with those additional sources, it's also a much richer experience for the people that are involved. So that’s— it’s more—it's more engaging, it’s more fun, and that’s not trivial. If the fun isn’t— you know, that short-term hedonic immediate gratification that we were describing earlier, if it’s allied with something like upward striving, it’s much more profound and—and impactful, more integrated, and more human and more holistic because what you’re calling the propositional I might call, uh, you know, features of the Enlightenment, of the rational, of the logical, of the logical and the analytical.

Whereas, uh, we have sort of lateral to that but no less important narrative and art and creativity and, uh, by sort of moving between these two spaces we have the opportunity for discovery that we may not have in either place.

Yeah, and also the— what you’re calling the propositional, what I think of as sort of the—you know, the fruits of the Enlightenment—um, are, are easily made into reductionist tenets that then become metrics that are quantifiable. And numbers are necessary and important for us to understand our world, but they are not sufficient, and they can be made to seem sufficient, and that’s one of the lessons I think of COVID, um, and frankly to some degree of this political moment we’re living in too.

That, uh, you throw enough—the numbers—don’t worry about it; I’m the expert—just trust me at people, and many of them kind of go, “Okay, yeah. I’m just not educated enough to understand that. You’ve got the numbers; you’re the expert; we’ll go with that.”

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Well, it’s also possibly the case that that also accounts for maybe why democratic tradition or the Republican tradition works, you know, is because intellectuals are propositional experts, but that doesn’t make them wise. And wisdom, I suspect, has something to do with the alignment between the propositional and the imagistic and the procedural. So it’s an embodied—it’s an embodied quality, and it’s a quality of the imagination.

There’s no shortage of people who aren’t educated and who aren’t very articulate who can still tell the difference between right and wrong, and they can do it pretty well unerring. I mean dogs can do that to some degree, right? I mean they’re not so bad at sniffing out pathological character, but they can’t propositionalize.

And in the propositional space to assume that they’re superior in terms of their grip on knowledge, even outside their specialized domains, but that they’re also wiser and more moral, and there’s no correlation between cognitive ability and conscientiousness—zero. There’s no correlation between intelligence and intelligence looks like it’s orthogonal to all the personality traits.

And so it’s a funny thing that there’s no relationship between general cognitive ability and wisdom or morality. So if you’re really smart, you can go bad very badly—very, very badly.

Well, I wonder—I wonder if that’s going to hold up, actually. There are reasons to imagine that you might start seeing a correlation between intelligence—the fly in the ointment being how good are you at actually measuring that. We have proxies for measuring your capacity to succeed, but to succeed in an oral system maybe it’s not such a good proxy for intelligence.

But, um, back to the earlier point, I want to point to something that Tom Stoppard said about, uh, about humor. He said “laughter is the sound of comprehension.” And right, that’s good. My point would be that the comedians—this will become less and less true the more they leverage AI to figure out what people will laugh at—it will become a self-referential land of nonsense.

But for the moment, while AI is decidedly not funny and it’s really terrible at being funny so far, the comedian is traversing an edge between what we are conscious of and what we are barely conscious of. And when the comedian delivers a joke that causes the room to erupt in laughter, the comedian has found something that everybody in the room is aware of, but they are not aware that everybody else is aware of it.

And so the room comes to understand itself as of like mind all at once, right? That’s an extremely powerful, very ancient property often of like mind about something forbidden. I think of that as that’s often the translation of the procedural or imagistic into the explicit, because that’s—the comedian gives words—they give words to something in coate.

It’s like—it’s captured in the relationship between the ideas that already exist, right? And then the comedian puts his finger on it just like someone who coins a word does. You know, all of a sudden words pop up, and we need them, and they spread like mad because they've specified something that was a gap in our propositionalization, and everyone recognizes it.

It’s implicit, yeah, and it’s funny too because—and this is a strange thing—is that it isn’t obvious at all that that capacity for spontaneous laughter can be gamed. You know, I mean you can get—are there cruel forms of laughter? There are, but it’s such an unconscious response, right?

It’s pre—it’s—you laugh despite yourself often. Yeah, you certainly laugh before you think about whether you should laugh. So there’s something—if you think about whether you should laugh, then you will commit a humor sin, which is laughing at the wrong moment.

It’s interesting that there’s a cost to laughing when the punchline hasn’t been delivered or after, you know, everybody else is laughing, and it’s like you’re trying to cover the fact that you’re really not—you’re not one of us.

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Yeah, that inappropriate laughter has been pointed out as like, that’s one of the things that comes up as a critique of Kamala Harris consistently, right? Is—for better or for worse, she’s touched with the brush of inappropriate laughter.

And you’re— you’re pointing out that that’s the gaming of something that’s an evolutionarily designed marker of, of something like cognitive integrity. Laughter itself has been gamed, and I would say that actually one of the most troubling inventions that human beings have devised—this is going to sound preposterous—but one of the most troubling inventions is the laugh track.

Yeah, no kidding. The—and the idea that you can be induced to believe that something was humorous that you did not find humorous on your own actually starts leading the population in the direction of believing things very deeply that they would never have accepted in the first place.

So it may be used just to sell, you know, deodorant and cereal on some trivial sitcom, but the capacity to induce humans to come to conclusions they wouldn’t otherwise reach by making it sound as if they were in a room full of people laughing in agreement, that’s a very troubling thing, right?

Right, right, Heather. To go back to your quote from Stoppard, the brilliant Tom Stoppard, “laughter is the sound of comprehension,” is that it? Um, I think I agree.

But I think in your telling of the story of what happens as comedians talk, um, actually, um conflates two things, both of which are important, and we've been talking about the individual coming to consciousness. The comedian says something in the individual’s brain; they go, oh, I didn’t know that was subconscious until now. And now it’s explicit, now it’s conscious—I didn’t know, um, but there—silly me, silly me, or, oh God, they can see that or you know—whatever it is.

But then there’s also the population level, and you alluded to this in what you said, but I think it’s no less important than—maybe exactly what you know, a rally for instance is meant to do and exactly what we need right now. And you know, I’m sure you experienced this Jordan, we certainly experienced this where, um, people will come up to us and say, “You know, thank you for saying the things that you say. I don’t feel alone. I—I didn’t know or that I couldn’t say. I couldn’t say.”

I—I had come to understand this, but I thought I was the only one in the universe, yeah. And so, you know, taking it back to, um, comedy, uh, in a— a group of anonymous people—a large group of anonymous people— if everyone laughs at the same moment, not only did that maybe bring yourself to consciousness of that thing at that moment, or maybe you already knew it, but if everyone laughs, you know, “I am not alone. I am in sync. We are synchronized; we are seeing the same things.”

Even with regard to the unspeakable, even with regard to the unspeakable. And so right away that gives you a momentum and an opportunity for action that maybe you did not know was possible before. Uh, so I think that's an addition—additional—the individual and the population are not the same.

Oh absolutely, and um, I think comedy potentially activates both, yeah. It’s the power—it’s the power of the room or the population that comes to understand itself as aligned. And I would point out it’s a little harder to describe this with respect to music, and I would say music has been radically distorted by technology, beginning at the player piano.

But the ability to listen to music and have it be the same no matter how many times you play it is a very unnatural way for music to exist. Music used to be a living entity. Even, uh, you know, a tribe that was singing the same song that had been sung a thousand times—it was different every single time, and it was therefore capable of adapting to the changing mood of the people who were participating in it.

Um, so what we moderns, who are drenched in music all the time, we don’t even notice it sometimes; it’s soundtracking some story we’re watching, and we’re not thinking about the fact that there’s music.

But what we miss being so thoroughly surrounded by music is the incredibly powerful and rarified experience when the band or whatever it is, the musician or the band is actually in some indescribable way tied into the audience and the room is electric, and everybody is synced and everybody is feeling a powerful emotion, and they know they are feeling it together, right?

They are being stimulated by the same thing, and they are feeling the same way. And even if you record that thing and you play it for somebody and you say, “Look at how great this was,” they don’t get the same feeling of discovery that that room had.

And it’s—it's like the comedy, and it’s—it’s important. And it’s part of why Rescue the Republic is structured around, you know, yes, the propositional, it has to be there, we have to articulate what it is that we fear and what it is that we hope, um, but comedy and music are much deeper mechanisms of conveying the sense of unity, which is really what this is about.

It’s not a political rally; this is about a unity movement discovering that actually we value Western civilization, we fear that it is coming apart, and we are going to put our differences aside in order to participate in protecting it from what threatens it and putting it back on the course that was that we were set upon by the Founding Fathers.

I have a friend, uh, Greg Orwits, who started this messaging organization called "Us, Colon the Story," or “Us, Colon the Story,” either way. And he’s been doing a lot of sophisticated polling, and he’s identified a very large number of statements where there is above 85% agreement among Americans.

You know, and this is actually tied into this psychopathic manipulation story that we started with because you could imagine that, tell me what you think of this hypothesis, is that we’ve got 3 to 5% psychopathic actors in any given population, okay? Now the question is, how do they manipulate? How do they maneuver?

And the answer is, well, they use language in a purely instrumental manner, so they’re only after their own advancement, um, and even in a non-endurable way, they’re only after their own advancement. So they’ll use whatever words are around to gain that end, so that you now—you can imagine that the most contentious elements of the political discourse then are going to be hijacked by the psychopaths.

Psychopaths on the left, they’re going to game—they generally game compassion, as far as I can tell. And the psychopaths on the right, they gain group identity; at the moment they’re probably gaming free speech, and they put themselves forward as avatars of these moral virtues, but it’s, it’s completely illusory because they’re just manipulating, and then they make it—

They make it appear that the political divide is much greater and much more intense than it is. And that, that tends to polarize and so, you know, we know that things started to come unglued around 2014, 2015, something like that seems to be the real onset of this malaise that grips us at the present time. I don’t think it’s chance at all that that was about the same time when these mass scale social media communication networks emerged and allowed the psychopaths free reign.

So, I mean Greg’s polling data is quite market because even on the most contentious issues, for example abortion, there’s widespread American agreement on the essential parameters of the laws. And so, okay, now I want to ask a more personal question. You and I, the three of us, we’ve been going back and forth to some degree of about this event in Washington and, um, since talking to you, especially on the X live, the space—we could also discuss the spaces?

Yeah, the spaces. Um, you know, that reignited my interest in attending. And so I want to know two things: I want to know what will your people—the speakers—be doing, and what is it you think that if I showed up, what do you think I could add to the discussion specifically?

Um, the second question is both easier and harder to answer. You will bring what you bring, and it will be powerful and, uh, will catalyze the event in ways that nobody else can do it. So, um, rather than tell you what you should bring, I’m much more interested to figure out what you think you should bring.

But as with respect to the former, we are going to articulate the, um, effectively the eight pillars which we believe are things that all patriotic Americans would easily agree to. These are things that, uh, are jeopardized by what we call industrial complexes.

And, uh, by framing the argument, you know, there’s a practical—what will happen on the day of the event, and then there’s a much larger picture about what it stands for. Most people will not be able to make it to DC, um, but having this picture articulated and watching Americans recognize exactly what you’ve just described, right, and Greg or his effort is excellent, but I would point out we also have an earlier version of this, the hidden tribes report from somewhere, 2018 I think suggested that there was a vast, what they called exhausted middle of people who agreed on almost every important thing that is being drowned out by these fringes that have polarized us even over things that we are not in disagreement about.

So—oh go ahead. Well, so Brett’s been one of the prime—one of the three prime organizers of this, and I am—I have been invited, so I don’t know nearly as much about about the event but, um, is it okay to describe what you mean by the industrial complexes? Because as I understand it, are those are those the mythological giants? That’s what it looks to me.

Well, I will say we—we have been—I won’t even say wrestling because I’m not sure there’s even any disagreement about it. But even for somebody like me who is fundamentally secular in my understanding of the universe, it is pretty clear that there is something that is reasonably described as a spiritual dimension to the battle that we are engaged in. Not only does the opposition appear to be playing with demonic tropes for reasons I can scarcely imagine, but there is a recognition of this being a historical moment in the making, one way or the other, and that, um, something well beyond our well-being as a modern people is at stake. Our ability to continue is at stake.

And so I don’t know how well that answers question. What do you—what do you make of the fact that as a secular thinker, this is the corner that you found yourself pushed into?

See, I noticed something in my clinical practice over the years that as the pathology that my client was embroiled in increased in intensity and severity, the language necessary to encapsulate what was occurring became increasingly religious. And you could think about that, I think you can think about that technically to some degree, is that there are levels of hell, as Dante pointed out.

And maybe there’s something that unites all forms of misery at the bottom—all forms of unnecessary misery, let’s say, at the bottom; and then you can be suffering from manifestations of that psychopathology at different degrees.

But then you could imagine that there’s an evolved language for dealing with those different levels of severity upward as well as downward, and that they—we recognize the language that properly deals with the most severe situations as religious. There’s no difference, in my estimation, between what’s religious and what’s deep. Now that leaves the mystery of deep, but it moves us further in our understanding.

Let’s put it this way. I’m pretty sure I can explain why there appears to be a spiritual dimension to the battle that we are in in perfectly dry, secular, materialist terms without difficulty. In fact, I don’t think it needs to be done. Though, you know, at some level we can say that those religious terms are responsive to the critical battles and turning points in history and they have encoded something very deep about how the population that got through those predicaments understood itself, and that we should probably be tapping into those, uh, those toolkits which frankly can go, you know, hundreds of years without being needed.

And so they are not the stuff that is familiar. We have to reach into something that goes beyond the regular toolkit. I can say that in secular terms, but I guess my point would be, I actually find no need to do it at the moment.

The point is actually, you know, the last thing you want—in—in—if you were on a battlefield and you were fighting a battle for your survival, that is not the time for somebody to be talking about, you know, the conservation of energy and the kinetics and blah, blah, blah.

The point is, that’s the time to figure out how to defeat your enemy in the most practical terms that you can. There are other times to describe, you know, the trajectory of the missiles and the way the aerodynamics might be optimized, I think.

If I—if I may, I feel like you’re conflating secular with, uh, reductionist rationality. No, because I think we need narrative for sure. But, uh, if I may try to steelman the position that maybe we shouldn’t entirely go into the religious and spiritual narratives here in trying to, you know, reunify the Republic. It’s that many of the people who can’t see, who are seeing pieces of it, but are still sort of blinkered by, um, you know, the—especially the political party to which they have always belonged and cannot imagine going anywhere else, um, proudly understand themselves to be not religious.

And you know, the—we aren’t religious; we are secular; we are evolutionary biologists with a deep respect for religion and that doesn’t seem to offend, uh, most secular people. But if all of our stories are inherently spiritual-seeming or religious-seeming, that will make it easier to dismiss us.

I think we’ve been wrestling with exactly that issue with ARC. So we have a—I have a proposition for you that’s analogous, I would say, to the idea of minimal necessary for—of course, I think that can be propagated into other domains of conceptualization effectively. Minimal necessary emotion in political discussions—that's helpful.

But then I would also say, like the gospel injunction to render unto Caesar and—and, and differentially render unto God is also appropriate because my rule of thumb is not to use religious language to explicate anything that can be explained without it.

Like it should be reserved for those situations where there isn’t any other language that appears to suffice. Like for me, for example, the horrors of the Auschwitz guard who enjoyed his occupation was best described in the language of good and evil—there wasn’t anything else that seemed to suffice.

Now there are lesser sins you might say that that you can speak about in a much more secular and maybe causal and reductionistic way, but there are—there are situations where only the religious language should be utilized, and I would say also perhaps reserved for those circumstances because otherwise it gets cheapened, and that’s perhaps precisely why you don’t cast pearls before swine, let’s say, right?

You save the heavy guns for when they’re necessary, so. And there’s another issue that we’re skirting around here to some degree, which is also exceedingly complex, right? Because Heather, you made reference to the necessity of narrative.

You see, I think one of the things the postmodernists got right, like fundamentally and profoundly right—and this is partly why we have this culture war raging—is because, as despicable as they are in many regards, as nihilistic and as Marxist as they are in many regards, the postmodernists put forward the proposition that our fundamental frames of perceptual reference were narrative in structure.

And so we seem to have this situation where we have a narrative mode of apprehension and a scientific mode of apprehension, but that the narrative mode is more fundamental. I think the scientific is nested inside the narrative, and I don’t think that that can be— I don’t think that there’s any way of altering that.

Now, I think the postmodernists went wrong here—like they got the problem right. We live in a narrative. I—I think actually that a narrative is a description of the structure that we use to organize our perceptions.

So that means even the perceptions that us as a scientist are prefigured in by this underlying narrative. There are narratives that work well with the scientific endeavor, like the idea that—the a prior narrative idea that the universe is pervaded by a logos that is intelligible, right? That’s a starting point for the scientific endeavor and that investigating that logos is benefit—that’s another narrative.

And when you have those two, you can begin the scientific enterprise. But I think what the postmodernists did wrong was after having discovered that we saw the world through a narrative, they leapt to the essentially Marxist presupposition that that narrative was necessarily and inevitably one of power.

That’s right, and I think that’s technically wrong. I mean partly for the reasons we talked about at the beginning of this podcast, as psychopaths play the power game and they’ve never been successful enough to get about—to get above about 5% of the population, like it is a local minima power, but it’s not an optimized game.

And I think what we’ve done in the West is we’ve actually figured out a good way of distributing an optimized game that isn’t based on power, even though it can be corrupted by power in a way that everyone can play and in a self-sustaining and self-improving manner.

It doesn’t mean the power critique is irrelevant because I think when those systems degenerate, one of the primary ways they degenerate is in the direction of power and compulsion. We saw that during COVID, for example.

We see that with these gigantic monstrosity amalgams of state and corporation that are tromping around the world, you know, destroying people underfoot. Those are the industrial complexes.

Yes, exactly, exactly! Oh, and with regards to the tilt towards the demonic, so imagine this. I think—I think that’s actually easily explainable. So, you know, the— the large language models have basically shown us that you can map ideas in their associations, and so that’s essentially what they do—they calculate the statistical regularity between words, but also between phrases and sentences and paragraphs, and it’s incredibly computationally complex.

But they’re pulling out the pattern of the logos, let’s say, but then you can think associated with that complex—this is what the psychoanalysts like Jung really put their finger on, and really especially Jung—there are IMs, there are like a cloud of images and dramas that are also statistically associated with those webs of ideas.

And so then you imagine if you allow a certain set of—a certain complex of ideas to inhabit you, if you invite that in, what comes along is a whole imaginative landscape that’s part and parcel of the domain of your imagination that you don’t fully comprehend.

Like that’s the invitation of something that’s been classically regarded as possession, and it’s the right way of thinking about it. You know, you’re— I think you’re inevitably possessed by the spirit that characterizes your most fundamental aim.

I don’t think there’s any way around that, and that’s a—that’s a terrifying thing to understand if you actually understand it. I’ve been thinking about prayer in that regard, you know. So this is a strange idea, but let me elaborate and tell me what you think about this.

So what you do when you call in the large language model is you call—you put forward a call to make a form of knowledge that’s implicit in the statistical relationships between the ideas explicit, okay? But what you make explicit in that manner is dependent on your aim.

It’s dependent on the question you ask. So you could say that with a large language model they game them so they’re politically correct, but independently of that, that the answer you get will be dependent on the question that you ask.

So then you could say, well, the answer you get is dependent on the spirit of the question that you ask. I think the same thing that happens to us in relation to our own unconscious is that the answer you get—the revelatory answer you get when an idea emerges in the phenomenological landscape—you get an answer from the spirit you call upon by the spirit of your question.

So think—this has a very weird implication. I’m very curious about what you guys think about this, and I’m not saying that this is definitive, but it means in a way that if you strove—strived to gather information in the manner that was aiming at the highest possible good, right? Truly, then the revelations that you receive from the conscious are going to be in that spirit.

And what that means—this is such a weird thing to contemplate. You know, because you can imagine—so, and you know that you do this when you’re trying to generate hypotheses as a scientist, right? If you’re a real scientist, you sit and you think, okay, what’s my wish? What’s my prayer? I hope that I can evaluate this landscape of data—that be the perceptual landscape—I could hope I can negotiate it in the spirit of truth, not being contaminated by my ambition, my desire to raise myself in the esteem of my colleagues, um, to take revenge on people who criticized my ideas in the past, to show pridefully that I’m intelligent.

I want to move all those spirits out of the inquiry landscape, and I want to generate a hypothesis that’s in the spirit of the truth. And I think the better you are at clearing your head, so to speak, the more likely you are to do that.

So anyways, I will leave that to you guys to respond there. Let me just go to the last point first, and then, uh, I—I was thinking exactly this, that, um, many years ago when people were claiming that what we needed was more diversity in science because that would solve the problems that they saw in science, you know, more diversity of, you know, sex and race and such, the answer that I quickly arrived at was, um, that should not affect the answers that we are getting, but it would affect the questions that are being asked.

Because scientists get to choose the questions that they are asking, precisely in the way that you are saying. And the scientific process is the best way we have— inefficient and flawed as it is—to arrive at answers that, no matter who was asking the questions, they get to the same answers.

And so like, how is it that we can recognize what our interests are as much as possible and say, okay, I'm gonna— whether or not you’re asking God or, you know, something else or trying to do scientific inquiry, I’m going to recognize that this is me asking a question, and that I come with my own biases and perceptual history and senses, and there’s no getting around that.

I can try to understand it as much as possible, but the question will at the end of the day come from me or from you or from you, and then we can apply tools in, you know, enlightenment tools if you will, um, by which to answer the question that I came up with, uh, in a way such that you then or you or you or you could ask the same question that I came up with and get the same answer, right?

But the question itself changes based on who is asking. Well, so you’re pointing to, I think, something that’s scandalous in relationship to our analysis of the scientific process within the scientific domain.

Now, Thomas popped out of this a little bit, and there’ve been other people working on it, but you know when I was a graduate student, there was a lot that was taught to me with regards to scientific method and And, and data analysis and ethical rigor in relationship to those, but the issue of hypothesis generation was just treated as a given.

And this is really a strange thing because it’s not only half of the scientific endeavor, it’s more like 80%. It’s necessary, not sufficient. Well, yeah, it also—geniuses ask the right questions, right? I mean, it’s a big deal.

And see, you made a—a case for the postmodernist critique of science in some way because—and where science was weak was on the rationale for hypothesis generation. Now, you know, there are people who say, well, it’s just algorithmic; you read the research literature, and you can figure out the next incremental step, and that’s actually true.

You can often figure out the next incremental step, but that doesn’t make you the kind of genius that leaps the field forward. That’s what I call Brick-in-the-Wall science. If you want to continue building the wall that we already have, then you can maybe put another brick in that wall of scientific understanding.

But if it turns out the foundation that you’re building is on the wrong foundation, you’ll never get there that way. Yeah, exactly—exactly! Or you’ll build a Tower of Babel because that’s what that story is about.

Yeah, exactly, exactly! So, and there are levels of “RA” revolution—there are revolutionary levels in hypothesis generation, and the great geniuses are better at identifying patterns at a more fundamental level, and that’s not something that you can predict algorithmically, merely as a consequence of mastery of the relevant literature, even though that’s helpful.

And I think that’s—Heather, I think that’s associated with trait openness because—well, and openness, by the way, does not predict scientific productivity. We did a study, it’s zero—the correlation is zero. Conscientiousness does, and that’s Brick-in-the-Wall science.

But so imagine this—so imagine a neurological network where, um, there’s a probability that any given—this is a function—there's a probability that any given idea will activate another idea, okay? So that would be like fluency. The more fluent you are, the more ideas are activated whenever you’re fed an idea, but then there’s distance from the original idea, and you can calculate this as statistical improbability.

And there are tests of creativity that do this, so the open people are more likely to LEAP to divergent associations with any given idea, and the more open they are, the more divergent those are going to be, and the more divergent they are, the more probability of them being wrong, but also revolutionary, right?

And so, right, right? And so that’s really what we see as creativity, and it’s something like maybe it’s something akin to mutation probability. Like the—oh, the high open people mutate their ideas not only much more frequently but also much more radically.

And Brett, I read a paper a while back that a friend of mine sent me showing that there’s a hierarchy of mutational repair in the genome. Absolutely! It absolutely is—it’s adaptively scheduled, right? So that’s very much akin to what we were discussing earlier about the notion that there are foundational ideas that are established by tradition with a penumbra of variation around them.

And so it turns out that the more deadly a mutation would be to a given gene, the more likely it is that that particular gene will be repaired with 100% accuracy if it mutates. And so that also—that’s a way different view than the simpler of, what would you say?

Yes, way different. It’s radically different. Experimentation occurs on the fringes, which is why we've had this body plan for—what? How long has it been? 60 million years? Is that right? Mammals? 90—100 million years, yeah.

When was the base with this basically symmetric? It’s even older than that, right? Millions—yeah, exactly. So the question is, what’s fundamental and what can be varied without cost?

You’re killing me, Jordan. You have said in the last 15 minutes you’ve said 51 things that each need a podcast unto themselves to explore. So I want to go back to a few of them if I can recall what they were because they’re really important.

Um, one thing just as an opener, I find it very interesting you often speak, uh, about your experience of religion, and I have a very interesting reaction to it, which is, um, I come from the opposite starting place, and I almost never hear you say anything that strikes me as wrong.

So I have the sense that we are converging on a perspective, and I want to talk a little bit. And so the thing that you said happening at Peterson Academy, by the way, we have a bunch of thinkers who are doing exactly that, and it is this new conver—as you—as you would hope, it’s sort of the—the—the best indicator that you’re on the right track.

Either you’re telling yourself a foolish story and everybody’s converged on it, or you’ve discovered something real, and that means it doesn’t matter where your starting point is, you’ll land there.

So, um, your point about God doesn’t need to exist to answer prayers, I’ve long believed this—that’s such a horrible thing to say. No, it’s not. And in fact, I wonder if you will remember that I said something like that to Sam Harris in the debate where I moderated between you two.

He laughed about the idea of a a prayer-answering God, and I gave him an evolutionary account of how that could work in effect. I believe my example would have been something like, were you to pray before going to bed about some problem that you thought needed, needed a divine intervention in order to remedy it, that would likely prime you to dream about that problem and potentially to wake with some insight about it, which frankly waking with insights is a known phenomenon.

So that is one way in which prayer could actually manifest in an improvement in the world that does not require there to be an external being. So let’s just take that as a stem.

The thing I most want to go back to is you’re talking—you laid out a principle, and your principle was that you should not invoke, uh, religious terminology or descriptions where they are not necessary. That is to say, we can explain many things without resorting to those tools and they should be reserved; it’s part of not using God’s name in vain, by the way.

Now here’s the point I want to make to you, and, um, frankly, there’s a part of me—I know that you and me and Richard Dawkins need to have this conversation, and I am sorry to say that he has become cowardly in old age and refuses to have the conversation. That’s a—that’s a tragedy because I believe a tremendous amount of productive, uh, insight would come from that conversation. He’s going to talk to me, uh, he is going to talk to me, but—and I had proposed you as an interlocutor, but he picked another gentleman who might do a credible job.

Yeah, we need better than credible here, and I will tell you that if you go back into, uh, if you go back into Dawkins’ catalog, you will find that he did—I’ve forgotten the name of it—but he did a documentary, basically an atheist, new atheist documentary, and there’s a scene in it that struck me, uh, rather profoundly. The scene is Richard Dawkins is talking to a religious authority, and they are having a pitched argument about the logic of the universe.

And it becomes quite clear if you watch this that Richard Dawkins knows he is winning this argument, but so does the other guy. They are each winning to their own audience, and what they’re doing is they are missing the opportunity to actually discover anything.

And my concern is, I—I know Richard Dawkins’ tradition because I’ve read many of his books; he’s in—I consider him a mentor of mine, and I come from the same—the same tradition.

So he, Richard Dawkins, is very close to seeing something important that he hasn’t seen yet that actually makes