555. How the Internet Is Breaking Our Brains | Sam Harris
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This is Dr. Jordan B. Peterson. Watch Parenting, available exclusively on Daily Wire Plus. We're dealing with misbehaviors with our son. Our 13-year-old throws tantrums. Our son turned to some substance abuse. Go to dailywireplus.com today. I'm increasingly worried that we have effectively rendered ourselves ungovernable based on the way we have shattered the information landscape. This is a consequence of hyper-connectivity.

and stunning ease of communication. You can just go down a rabbit hole and find endless confirmation that's fairly anonymized. We have to ground our perceptions in an axiomatic framework. The old

norms that the gatekeepers, I mean, for all their faults, they had standards. I don't trust anything the New York Times prints at all. The gatekeeping institutions have also revealed themselves as catastrophically flawed. The antidote to that, to the failures of institutions, is not new standards. It's really to apply the old standards.

I've spent a lot of time over the years speaking with Sam Harris. We've spoken publicly half a dozen times and privately far more than that.

We're coming at the same problems, I would say, from quite different perspectives and establishing some concordance over time. Today, we went down the rabbit hole of rabbit holes, I suppose, discussing the fragmentation of the narrative landscape today.

on the social media front and what that means for cultural incoherence, weakness, demoralization, deceit, self-deception, and inability to understand one another. And so join us as we attempt to clarify the catastrophe of infinite plurality.

Well, Mr. Harris, it looks like it's time for our approximately annual conversation. Yeah, nice. You're the clock that ticks once a year. Yeah, well, I suspect that's more than enough. So tell me what you're thinking about lately, Sam, on the intellectual side and what you're doing. Well, it is actually relevant to the chaos in our politics at the moment. I'm increasingly worried that

we have effectively rendered ourselves ungovernable based on the way we have shattered the information landscape. And I think independent media of the sort that we're indulging now is part of that problem. I mean, I don't know if you're aware of it or not, but I've been fairly vociferous in criticizing some of our mutual friends and

In my case, some may be former friends, but fellow podcasters and people in independent media. And I just think they've been part of this shattering. And it's been fairly obvious. And the cases are different. But many people have been quite irresponsible in the way that they have platformed people uncritically and let them spread information.

truly divisive and dangerous misinformation. I'm thinking especially of

in the aftermath of October 7th and the global explosion of anti-Semitism, we've had some very big podcasts like Tucker's and Joe's platform, Holocaust Deniers and Revisionists. And it's been quite insane out there. And it's just, I mean, that's just one piece of it. I mean, you can talk about COVID or Trump or Ukraine or, I mean, any, pick your...

your ugly object out there, there, there's, um, there's, there's just a radical divergence of opinion into these echo chambers we build for ourselves. And it seems to be very difficult to, to cross, uh, political lines. Uh, I mean, it's, it's somehow deeper than politics actually. Um, so anyway, I'm just increasingly worried about that. And, um,

I'm trying to hold up my side of the conversation in ways so as to cross those lines, but I'm just noticing that it's, in many cases, it's proving impossible. Yeah, okay. Well, I am aware of that. It's actually part of the reason I thought it would be useful for us to talk today. So I want to think about how to respond to that to begin with. Well, I think the first thing that we should probably note is that this is a consequence of...

hyper-connectivity and stunning ease of communication, right? So, I mean, it's obviously the case that the landscapes of communication that once held us together, for better or worse, are now so multiplicitous that they're numberless. And so what does that mean? I think what it means in part, and this is where I think our conversation might get particularly interesting, is that

we don't have a shared story anymore. And I think a culture, I think a culture is literally a shared story. And a story is a structure. This has been part of our ongoing discussion for a very long period of time, right? The relationship between the perceptual framing that is constituted by a story and, let's say, the domain of objective facts, right? This is a very thorny problem. But it seems to me that

You have a culture when people share the same story or the same stories. They have the same shared reference points. And with an infinite landscape of communication, that fragments indefinitely. And then no one... See, Sam, let me tell you, I might as well, just to annoy you, just to get the ball rolling. I spend a lot of time thinking about the story of the Tower of Babel. There's two stories in Babel.

in Genesis that describe how things go wrong. And one story is the flood, and that's the consequence of absolute chaos bursting forth, essentially. But the power of Babel is a story about both totalitarianism and fragmentation. So what happens is the engineers get together, because that's who it is. It's the city builders, the tool makers, the

those who create weapons of war, the city builders, the engineers, they get together and they build these towers for the aggrandizement of the local potentates. So there was competition in the Middle East of that time to build the highest tower for the glory of the local ruler. And that presumption, so you can think about that as misaligned aim on the

sociological front. The consequence of this misaligned aim is a kind of, what? Because the aim of the culture is wrong. Words themselves lose their meaning. That's what happens in the story, right? Everybody ends up speaking a different language and then the towers fall apart. So it's because the stories aren't, the story that's being told is one of

human self-aggrandizement, that's part of it. And the culture pathologizes and then disintegrates. And so I see that happening in our culture. There's a technological element of it, obviously, that technological utopians are driving this. The transhumanists are driving this. And

We're aiming at the wrong goal, and the consequence of that is that our language is falling apart, and we don't share the same reference points. That's part of what's happening. So I'm curious about what you think about that, how that fits in with your concern, your emergent concern. When you say fragmentation, Sam,

What is it that you think is fragmenting? Because it's not the objective view of the world precisely, although the scientific enterprise even seems to be shaky and corrupt and falling apart in many ways. Well, so I agree with that. I think the analogy to Babel is quite apt. You know, I don't think bringing Doge into Babel would have helped much.

I think it is technological. There's just the fact that there's, because of the, I think largely it's a story of social media, but it's really the internet generally, because of the information technology we have built, people can find endless confirmation of whatever their cherished opinion is. And it's no longer...

there's some cultural immune system that has been lost, right? If you had to go to the physical conference out in the real world to meet the other people who were sure they've been abducted by UFOs, well, then you'd be meeting these people, you would see the obvious signs of dysfunction in their lives, and there'd be more friction to the maintenance of this

this new conviction uh just based on the the the collision with other ancillary facts that have social relevance to you but online and again this even precedes social media this this is true of the internet back in the late 90s um you can just go down a rabbit hole and find endless confirmation that's that's fairly anonymized right you don't you the the uh

20 minute documentary that blew your mind and convinced you that that the World Trade Center towers were brought down by the the Bush administration and

you didn't know that it was made by some 18-year-old in his mother's basement, and you didn't have to know that. You were just looking at the product online. But if you had had to meet this person, all of a sudden you'd realize that this is... the maintenance of this fiction becomes quite a bit harder. So we're living now, I think, in the second generation of that moment where it really is bottomless. I mean, the ocean of misinformation...

and half-truth and misunderstanding is bottomless. And the tools we have built to rectify misunderstandings and to spot lies and to be better truth seekers are there, but they have been... In some sense, this is asymmetric warfare. They're no match for the information...

waste product that can be produced more quickly, right? I mean, this is just the old problem. Well, it's easier to produce noise than signal, obviously. Yeah, or pseudo-signal. Yeah, I mean, there's so much that purports to be signal, right? And again, this is probably socially more inconvenient for you than it is for me, but I mean, many of your bedfellows or former bedfellows

are the principal parts of this problem. I mean, they're the gods and goddesses on this landscape. I'm thinking of someone like Candace Owens, who's quite literally trafficking in blood libels now on her incredibly popular podcast. I mean, she's just gone berserk as far as I can tell. And yet, what is the style of conversation that would disconfirm

all of that for her audience. At this point, I don't know, because I think what's happened is we've trained up a culture of people or cultures of people that simply don't care about facts, really. They want a story that aligns with their, in some sense, their confirmation bias. I mean, they have certain things they want to believe. There's certain ideas they like the taste of. And then they just want people catering

to that appetite and there's a good business in that. Well, part of that, I think, is the consequence of the fact that we have to ground our perceptions in an axiomatic framework. And I mean, this has been my concern with the primacy of the story right from the beginning. And I think the deeper question is, a deeper question is, you know, is there some

Is there some necessary structure to that fundamental axiomatic framework? You know, the postmodernist claim was that... The postmodernist claim, the fundamental postmodernist claim is that there is no uniting metanarrative, right? We live in the postmodern world now. The postmodern world is a place of local truths. And the French intellectuals, they not only decided that... They decided that that was...

necessary and an improvement, and now we see the consequences of that. We're in a landscape of infinite narratives, and the question is, how do you

How do you define a rank order of narratives such that some are valid and some are invalid? You know, the idea of misinformation is obviously predicated on the notion that certain narratives are invalid. And that seems self-evident to me. I wouldn't exactly call myself a fan of the direction that Candace Owens has decided to walk down, but I'm not going to say anything more about her. And so, you know, what I've been trying to struggle with is

and this has been the basis of many of our discussions in the final analysis, is what is the proper grounding for a narrative framework? And I mean, my understanding of your position is that that's why you've turned right from the beginning to the world of objective fact, so to speak. But the problem is, is that

There's a lot of facts, and which ones to prioritize and which ones to ignore is a very thorny question. And, you know, one of the things you referred to obliquely was that, well, when you and I were young, because we're about the same age, I think you're four years younger than me, we had narratives that united us as a culture. There was a certain, well, there were fewer people. There was more ethnic homogeneity.

at least in the local environments in the world. There were information brokers that were extraordinarily powerful. The universities, the newspapers, the TV stations, the radio stations, and they weren't very easy to get access to, and they had gatekeepers, and at least some of the time, those gatekeepers seemed meritorious as well as arbitrary.

And, you know, it could easily be that the fragmentation of the landscape is a consequence of technological revolution and also perhaps of the, well, you had pointed to the irresponsibility of the participants in that landscape.

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They're flooded with information and finding it very difficult to keep up. Well, they're also just not disposed to function by the old norms that the gatekeepers— I mean, for all their faults, they had standards, right? Right, I know, but— The New York Times had a standard. But, Sam, those—I agree with you. But I also would say that those institutions, the gatekeeping institutions, have also—

revealed themselves as catastrophically flawed in the last five to ten years. I mean, I'm interested in your take on this. Like, you brought up October 7th and the rise of anti-Semitism, and I've been tracking that with a couple of friends of mine, and we've been spending a lot of time fighting it off in all sorts of ways, some of which are public and some of which aren't.

And I'm appalled by it. What's happened in Canada on the anti-Semitic front since October 7th is something I never thought I'd see in my lifetime. It embarrasses me to the core. My goddamn government came out the other day, those bloody liberals, and they talked in the aftermath of October 7th about combating Islamophobia as if that's Canada's problem, which it isn't.

And so, but, and then, you know, you saw what happened across the United States and Canada with regard to the universities, Columbia University in particular, and their absolute silence and complicitness while these terrible demonstrations were going on. Not that I think that the demonstrations themselves should have been, well, we can talk about that. Letting

Terrorist radicals take over the universities doesn't strike me as a very good solution. So, I'm curious about what you think about that because

Well, so, like, I think the gatekeepers have abandoned the gates. Like, I don't trust anything the New York Times prints at all. I think they're reprehensible. The universities, I think, are beyond salvaging. I can't see how they can be fixed. Anyways, man, lay it out. Tell me what you think. I think those—all the way up until those last two statements, I can sign on the dotted line. I think the—

All of these institutions have embarrassed themselves in recent years and for the reasons that I think you and I would fully agree about. This became most obvious during COVID, but the October 7th is more of the same. But I would just point out that the antidote to that, to the failures of institutions is

is not new standards. It's really to apply the old standards. I mean, we need the institutions... Spoken like a true conservative. Yeah, yeah, yeah, fine. Well, I mean, so it's... No, no, but... Yeah, but the antidote to fails or failures of science, say, you know, or scientific fraud...

is not something other than science. It's just more science, real science, good science, scientific integrity. And so it is with journalism or any academic discipline or anything that purports to be truth-seeking, we have standards. And there's nothing wrong with our standards. What's dangerous about the current...

information landscape where we have just this contrarian universe where anything that is outside the institutions is considered to have some kind of primacy, right? Where everyone is kind of a citizen journalist, a citizen scientist, where you just kind of flip the mics on and talk for four hours and that's good enough. What that's selecting for are the people who

have no standards to even violate, right? I mean, these people are incapable of hypocrisy. I mean, one thing that's good about the New York Times and Harvard and any other institution you would point to that has, you know, obvious egg on its face at the moment is that

At a minimum, they're capable of being shamed by their own hypocrisy. And the people who aren't in the... I would agree with you that there's been some institutional capture where we have people in those institutions who just shouldn't be there, right? But we would make that judgment, again, by reference to these old standards of academic or journalistic integrity.

But Candace Owens just doesn't have that, right? And I'm sorry to beat up on her exclusively. I can move to other names if you want. But I mean, she's a principal offender. No, it's not. It's the reason that I don't...

the reason that I'm not inclined to discuss her isn't because I agree with what she's doing. It's because I think the best way to deal with what she's doing is not to discuss her. Not notice her. Okay. But I could say the same thing about Tucker Carlson, right? And you might, whether you agree with me or not, this is my view of him, that he's not in the

truth-seeking, journalistic integrity business. He's in the, he's, he's got some other political project that entails spreading a fair amount of misinformation quite cynically and, and, and consciously and smearing lots of people. And in the case of, you know, I don't know how deep his anti-Semitism runs, but in the case of, uh, of that particular topic, midwife in a, a very misleading conversation with an amateur historian, uh,

who he considers the greatest historian working in America today, Daryl Cooper, the podcaster. And

The opinion expressed, again, this is at the highest possible level in our information ecosystem. It's the largest audience. Few historians in human history have ever had a bigger audience than Daryl Cooper had on Tucker's podcast and then quickly followed by his appearance on Joe Rogan's podcast. And on that podcast, he spread the lie, the recycled David Irving argument.

point that, you know, the Holocaust is not at all what it seemed and you wouldn't believe it, but the Nazis really never intended to kill the Jews. They just rounded up so many prisoners in their concentration camps and found that they just didn't have enough food during winter to feed them and they just were put in this just impossible situation and

And might it not seem more compassionate to euthanize these starving prisoners in the end, right? I mean, that's how they accidentally stumbled into the final solution, right? That's what he spread, again,

to the largest possible audience. And in Tucker's case, you had a very, I would say, sinister midwifing of that conversation. In Joe's case, he just doesn't know when he's in the presence of recycled David Irving and is just happy to have a conversation with a podcaster of whom he's a great fan.

And, but yet he's still culpable for not having done enough homework to adequately push back about what's being said to his, again, to his audience, which is the largest podcast audience on earth. So it's, it's journalistically, and I know Joe doesn't consider himself a journalist. He's considered himself a comedian who's just having fun conversations. Great. But

What that is tantamount to at this moment, especially in the context of the worst eruption of antisemitism we've ever seen in our lifetimes globally, that's tantamount to taking absolutely no responsibility for the kind of information that is flowing unrebutted into the ears of your audience, right? That's why I got angry at Joe, right? I love Joe. Joe is a great person.

He's completely in over his head on topics of that sort, and it has a consequence. It has an effect. Well, you know, one of the problems, I suppose, in some ways, Sam, is that in this new information landscape, we're all in over our heads constantly.

Yeah, but some of us are alert to that possibility and worried about it and taking steps to course correct and notice our errors and apologize for those errors. Okay, well, let's also try to make a distinction here. I mean, there is a distinction that's important to make between accidentally wandering into pathological territory and causing disruption because of

the magnification of your voice. And there's a big difference between that and exploiting the fringe for your own self-aggrandizement. And there's plenty of the latter online. And I've been concerned for some substantial amount of time that online anonymity also drives that. I mean, you talked about the utility of

embodied interaction in separating the wheat from the chaff, right? So one of the things you see online is, as you pointed out,

If you have a crazy idea, you can find 300 other people who have even a crazier idea of the same sort, and you can get together with them, which you couldn't have done 20 years ago because there's only one of them per 100,000 scattered all around the world, but they can aggregate together quite quickly online. The places that females gather online, for example, are rife with that kind of pathology, and all sorts of psychogenic epidemics spread online

without any barrier whatsoever in consequence, because young women in particular are susceptible to psychogenic epidemics. And so that's a huge problem. It's also the case that in real world conversation,

if I'm talking to you, you know it's me. And I have to live with the consequences of what I've said to you, assuming we ever meet again. And I have to live with the fact that other people hear about it as well. But if I'm anonymous, then I can say whatever the hell I want. I can gather the fruits of that and I can dispense with any of the responsibility. And so my sense is that

online connectivity magnifies our voice to a degree that it's virtually impossible to be responsible enough to conduct ourselves appropriately because the reach is just so great. And anonymity, anonymity literally gives the edge to the psychopaths, predators, and the parasites. And this is a huge problem. You know, as a biologic, we can think about it as biologists for a moment, Sam.

I mean, I would say two things. When the cost of communication is zero, the parasites swarm the system, right? Because communication is a resource, and abandoned resources attract parasites. And what is it now? 50% of internet communication is bots, right?

And a huge part of the reason for that is that communication is free. But it's not free, right? Because you have to attend to it. It actually has a cost. So the price of free is the wrong price. You know, let me give you an example of this. Just tell me what you think about this. You know, one of the things I've done recently with my daughter and her husband mostly, and a bunch of professors, is start this Peterson Academy. And we have an online social media element to that, which...

tracks about 15,000 regular users. And we keep a pretty close eye on it. And we refunded the money of 10 of our students because they were causing trouble on the social media platform. 10 out of 15,000. That's all. And it markedly improved in their absence.

And so, you know, there's an interesting dynamic there, you know. We don't know what online anonymity does. We don't know what free communication does when the actual price isn't zero.

It certainly serves the parasites extraordinarily well. And we are learning that bad information is easier to generate and spread than good information, right? None of this is personal, right? None of this really... I know we've already talked about the fact that all of this...

what would you say, edgy conversation can be monetized and used to attract attention towards bad actors. Let's leave that aside. I agree with that completely. I think it's appalling. But there are structural problems here that are even deeper. And I think, well, anonymity is a huge problem. But then also I think, well, what the hell are we going... What kind of world would we define and live in rapidly if...

Every bloody thing that you had to say online was verified with a digital identity. I mean, they've taken a lot of steps in that direction in China. That doesn't look very good to me.

well i think the structural problems run even deeper because yeah i agree with i agree with everything you said about the effect of free and the effect of anonymity and i you know i draw two lessons from your your experience with your um online forum one is that having having it behind a paywall made it made it much cleaner than it otherwise would have been you only found 10 people you had to kick out uh to clean the whole thing up but the other point is that those 10 people

can really have an outsized toxic influence on a larger culture. So I think we want social media platforms that draw that kind of lesson, but it's not just anonymity and it's not just people who are grifting or otherwise incentivized to be liars or spreaders of misinformation.

There are people who, with reputations, you would think they would want to protect. I mean, people with real, the biggest possible reputations and the biggest possible careers who, in the presence of social media, have gone properly nuts. And I would put as patient zero for this

contagion, Elon Musk, right? I mean, Elon has, you know, I've witnessed a complete unraveling of the person I knew, and I believe I knew him fairly well, under the pressure of

extraordinary fame and wealth, but really kind of weaponized by his addictive entanglement with Twitter. I mean, he was so addicted to Twitter that he needed to buy it so that he could just live there, right? I mean, that was... Twitter was his whole life before...

anyone heard about his impulse to buy it or anyone heard about his concern about the woke mind virus. I mean, before COVID, he had gone off the deep end into Twitter being everything. How do you know this? Like, I'm not disputing this. I know this because I was his friend at the time and I was there, you know, in his very close social circle when...

you know, Twitter was causing obvious problems for his life and his businesses. When he would tweet, you know, 420, you know, funding secured, right, you know, and the SEC, you know, raids the offices of Tesla and seizes everyone's computer, right? I mean, he was screwing up his life through Twitter,

and yet it was unthinkable that he would get off of it. So potent a drug was it for him. Let me ask you about that. Let's think about this biologically again. One of the ways you could define addiction is as the pursuit of positive emotion that's bound to a very short time frame. So you get addicted when you optimize positive emotion over a very short time frame. So, for example,

The addictive propensity of cocaine is dependent on the dose, but also the rate of administration. So the reason that snorted cocaine or injected cocaine is more potent than the same dose of swallowed cocaine is because it crosses the blood-brain barrier faster and raises the dopaminergic pitch quicker. So there's a rate and... Also, the reward component...

appears to correlate subjectively not with the peak in actual pleasure of the resulting stimulus, but in the peak of the expectation that the pleasure is about to arrive. Yeah, yeah. Well, the dopaminergic system is an expectation system. Yeah. And cocaine, okay, so now, so here's what we have with social media, with the bots, with

with the AI algorithm optimizers, right? So this is what's happening. You can see it happening to YouTube too, is that the systems are optimized to grip attention, but the battle is for shorter and shorter timeframes.

What would you say? For shorter and shorter durations of attentional focus. So the battle is not only for attention, but for the shortest possible amount of information that will grip the maximum amount of attention. Now, the AI systems are using reinforcement learning to determine how to optimize that. And that's driving that fragmentation. Like you can see it on YouTube because YouTube is tilted more and more towards shorts like TikTok.

right these fragmentary bursts of maximally attractive information and they could capitalize on rage because rage has a positive emotion element now i want to put this in into the context of what you said about twitter and you and i could have a conversation about x and and twitter that's personal as well so you said you know elon got hooked on x and and um enough to buy it and so

Let's assess that situationally and biologically. Now, I've spent quite a bit of time on X. In fact, it's the social media platform that I've used personally the most. It's the one I'm most familiar with. And I would say it's been a very complex platform for me.

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Yeah, hasn't it at various points convinced you that you should no longer use it? Haven't you gotten on and off and on and on? Multiple times. Multiple times. Multiple times. I learned that lesson exactly once, but it really did stick. I have not looked back. Yeah, well, that's partly what I want to talk to you about. I mean, so part of it is, you know—

I get a lot of my podcast guests and my ideas for podcast guests from X, because I follow about 2,000 people. But I'm very extroverted, and there's an element of impulsivity that goes along with extroversion. I'm very verbally fluent, and so I can think up new ideas in no time flat, and I'm likely to say them. And so it's very easy for me, if I'm on X, to react to a lot of things.

Yeah, foot, meat, mouth. Well, that, but it's weird. It's a weird thing because some of the things that, some of my impulsive moves, so to speak, which have got me in quite a lot of trouble, I'm not the least bit unhappy about. You know, I got, you cannot believe how much flack I got for tweeting out something arguably careless on October 8th.

What was that? Not being on Twitter, I never saw that. What was the defending tweet? I think I said, give them hell, Netanyahu. Yeah, yeah, right. So that took like eight months of cleanup work to deal with. Seriously, it was not, it was, and...

But, but, but, but, and well, and I got kicked off X. Yeah, you're not going to get any dispute from me about that. I mean, Netanyahu, just to close the loop on that, Netanyahu is obviously a very polarizing figure and probably a fairly corrupt figure. And he's got lots of problems that have implications for Israeli politics. But I'm not convinced that even the perfect prime minister who has no optical problems, judged from our side,

would have waged this war any differently. I mean, I just don't know what they should have done differently at every stage along the way. I don't know that any other prime minister would have taken a different path. Well, the situation to me looks like, and you tell me what you think about this, and then we'll go back to the problem of

AI optimization of grip of short-term attention and the manner in which X in particular falls into that category. So my sense with the situation in Israel has been right from the beginning that Iran in particular

would and has set up the situation. So if every single Palestinian was sacrificed in the most torturous possible manner to irritate, annoy, and destroy Israel and agitate the Americans, that would be 100% all right with Iran. I think someone once said that the mullahs in Iran will fight Israel to the last Arab.

I think that's the line that I... Yeah, yeah. Yeah, well, that's exactly how it looks to me. And so I look at that situation and I say, well, I think, well, like, what do you do in a situation like that that's moral if you're Israel? Anyways, I don't want to go down that rabbit hole too deeply. We might get there, but let's go to... Yeah, yeah. Well, but that... Okay, but so I've had this, like...

complex relationship with X and some of it's been real useful because I follow a lot of people there and I keep an eye on the main streams of the culture and I extract out my podcast guests and I can see where the real pathology is emerging and I can keep an eye on it. And the price of that is that, you know, now and then I stick my foot in it in a major way and sometimes that's good and sometimes it's not. And

And now I've sort of built a variety of fences around me that are part of my organization that, you know, they're kind of these intermediary structures that we've been talking about that put a lag in between what I read and how I respond, you know.

Well, that's one, you know, and this is part, it's the destruction of those things that we're starting to, you and I are starting to talk about here. Because, you know, there's never been a time in human history where you could publish your first pass opinion about anything to 20 million people in one second, right? No one could ever do that. And we're not, we're not, we're not neurologically capable

constructed to live in a world where you can yell at 10 million people whenever you want about anything. Yeah. The problem for me is that, so what's happened now going back to this, this core topic of, of what, what in particular is wrong with X and the time course at which people are reacting to information and producing information in turn, um,

There's a lot wrong with that. And what it's done to our culture and what it's done to specific people, I mean, again, Elon for me is the enormous, the 800-pound canary in the coal mine, is that it has effectively made them behave like psychopaths. I'm not saying... I mean, if you just look at X, and this is what convinced me to get off of it, you would think there were many more psychopaths in the world than there are, in fact. I was seeing people...

who I knew in every other context would be psychologically normal or at least normal enough, behave like a psychopath to me, toward me, in front of me. And in some cases, these are people I actually knew. In some cases, the people I had dinner with. And I knew what I was seeing on X would have been impossible across the table from me at dinner.

Right, right, right. Well, that's an interesting definition of a pathological sub-environment, isn't it? Like, you can tell a family is pathological when the rules that apply in the family don't generalize to the outside world. And you're pointing out that the game dynamics of Twitter have that aspect, is that the game that's being played in Twitter doesn't...

suit the world well. It's not an iterable game in the world. And it could easily be the fact that it maximizes for short-term emotional reactivity is exactly what gives it that psychopathic edge, because the definition of a psychopath in many ways is the person who will sacrifice the future and you for immediate gratification, right? That's the pathology of the

Psychopathy is a form of extended immaturity. Yeah, well, there's a lot of aggressive immaturity on display on X. And again, Elon is one of the primary offenders. So one instance for me that made this especially clear and the role played by X especially clear was when he...

when he jumped up on stage during one of these campaign events, or I forget if it was campaign or I guess the election had already been won, but some event with Trump and Elon, you know, quite famously, quite infamously did what appeared to be a Nazi salute twice to the crowd and got a reaction from much of the world of horror and insult. And now...

Honestly, as his former friend and as somebody who just imagines his worldview has not fully disintegrated into...

a tissue of, of weird internet memes. It's, it was impossible for me to believe that he was sincerely announcing his solidarity to, to the project of Nazism by, by making those salutes, right? So I, I didn't view those as Nazi salutes, even though just ergonomically they were in fact Nazi salutes. And,

I just thought, okay, I don't know what he's doing, but the idea that he's picking this moment to say I'm a Nazi seems frankly impossible. So I was interested to see what he was going to do in response to the controversy. What he did in response, and again, this controversy is coming in

in a context that doesn't look at all good for my very charitable interpretation of his behavior because it's in a context where he's funding the far-right party in Germany, assuring us that there's absolutely nothing wrong with that party, whereas the party does in fact contain whatever Nazis there are to be contained in Germany. Not that it's only a Nazi party, but it is in addition to everything else, it's got the Nazis.

He's playing footsie with lots of fairly aggressive anti-Semites on his own platform. He's with great fanfare. He had brought back Nick Fuentes and Kanye, and these people are anti-Semites, if not actual Nazis. So he is facilitating a very unhappy recrudescence of anti-Semitism on the platform he owns, which

And now he's doing Nazi salutes in public. So what is a genuinely not anti-Semitic, well-intentioned person who cares about his reputation and is still capable of embarrassment do in the aftermath of this? Well, it would have been just trivially easy for him to have said something totally sensible, right?

and, and apologetic that would, would have been honest and would have taken this, the sting out of the moment perfectly. He could have said, listen, I know how that looked. I don't know what I was doing up there. I was just, you know, captured by the energy of the moment. Obviously I was not doing a Hitler salute. I'm not a Nazi. I've got no, uh,

no interest in amplifying their message on X or anywhere else. If you're a Nazi, please don't follow me. I hate your whole project. You're completely wrong about everything, right?

End of tweet, right? He did nothing like that. All he did was troll his audience making Nazi jokes and puns on X. So you can fault his character for that, but what I also think we should fault is the medium itself, right? This is the way his brain is conforming to the technology. First, we should fault that. Yes. Well, look, you know the fundamental attribution error, right?

It's like the one thing social psychologists have discovered that's actually valid. That's a bit of an exaggeration, but...

But the fundamental attribution— Yes, a dozen things. The fundamental attribution or error is the proclivity to attribute to character what's actually a consequence of situation. You know, in these—we should be very careful, and I think we are at the moment, be very careful to assure that our first presumption is that it's the pathology of the technology that's the fundamental driver—

And that people are swept along in it. That's my account of what has happened to Elon almost in its entirety. I think Twitter has...

He is the greatest living casualty of what Twitter does to someone who becomes properly engorged by it. And that's, yeah. And one of the reasons why I got off, frankly, was apart from my own misadventures on the platform, which were nothing like Elon's,

I looked in the kind of the funhouse mirror of what was happening to him in his life. And I thought, you know, here's a very smart guy who's got much better things to do than fuck up his life in this way. And yet he can't seem to stop. How much am I like him? How much is there this component of addiction and dysregulation and failures of impulse control and a need to just, you know,

get my thoughts out on a time course of seconds rather than more carefully, you know, over the course of days. I mean, because it was... And so then I yanked it for that reason. And the one thing I found is that when you don't have it as an outlet, right, when you literally can't publish that quickly, then things have to survive a much larger...

informational half-life. So then there's this thing online that happened that I'm tempted to react to. It has to survive until I do my next podcast, which might not be for three or four days, right? And so, and, you know, obviously 90% of the things I thought I had to react to don't survive that time course. Yeah, you know, I made a deal with my wife that was like that because, you know, I can see things going sideways forever.

I think, with a fair degree of accuracy. And that disrupts me emotionally now and then. And I made a deal with my wife several years ago that I can't complain about anything I won't write about. That's a good filter, yeah. Well, it's the same thing. And it bears on the same issue that you're describing, is that if it's not important enough to write about something,

then you should ignore it, right? You're not actually, it's not significant enough. It's not significant enough to sacrifice some genuine time and thought. You shouldn't be commenting on it. And that's kind of a maturity, but it's also, it's a weird thing because it's not exactly like, it isn't something that people had to contend with previously 'cause you couldn't publish immediately.

There were barriers of cost and difficulty and gatekeepers and distribution. And so that wasn't something you had to think up for yourself. Like how do I put a lag in my life before I communicate with a million people or 5 million people? And so you're basically building these inhibitory structures out of whole cloth. And now you pulled out of Twitter

quite a while ago now. It's a couple of years ago. Yeah. Right? Okay, so... Two and a half years, something like that. It was actually right when Elon took it over, but it wasn't because he took it over. I mean, the timing there was fairly accidental. I was getting ready to pull the plug, and then I just saw how much chaos was being introduced into his life around it, and I just thought, right, this is a sign. And so I yanked it, and...

I mean, one of the benefits, apart from just introducing this different time course into my life by which I interact with information,

I just don't like, you know, there's this, there's this phrase, you know, that Twitter isn't real life. And then at a certain point, many of us realize, okay, that's, that's too sanguine a thought because we're noticing people get, you know, losing their reputation so fully that, you know, they get on an airplane, like the, I think it was the Justine Sacco incident where she got on an airplane and half the world was tweeting about her and she, she arrived and at her destination only to find that she had been properly canceled and lost her job, et cetera, et cetera. Um,

So obviously Twitter can, you know, whether you're on it or not, it can, under the right circumstances or the wrong ones, become real life. But the truth is, given the platform I've built, given the, I mean, just frankly how lucky I've been to find an audience and to build a readership and a podcast listenership, Twitter really isn't real life for me, right? Like I'm still, Elon still attacks me on Twitter by name and I find out I'm trending on Twitter, you know, years after I've left.

And it matters not at all for my life. It matters not at all for my business. Nothing happens, right? And yet, if I were on Twitter, there would be this illusion of emergency, right? If I was on there looking at it and looking at the, you know, looking at the biggest, literally the biggest bully on Twitter has just punched me in the face and I'm seeing the aftermath of it.

The temptation to respond to that and to feel that not only do I have to respond there, but I have to respond on my podcast, and now this is how I'm spending my week because this thing just happened on Twitter. It would be almost impossible not to be taken in by that and not to be just convinced of the necessity of it because all of this is really important. I mean, we're talking about millions of people. Literally, there are videos...

denigrating me for things I've never said or believed that Elon has amplified and these videos have 50 million views, right? And I just happen to be lucky enough to have built a life and a career where that matters not at all, right? But for somebody else finding themselves in that situation, I can...

well, imagine, all right, this is just, this is the destruction of my reputation in a way that matters. Well, that's what it looks like, sure. And like you said, it's virtually impossible to resist that temptation. I mean, who are you to deny the impact of the opinion of 50 million people? You know what I mean? I mean, that looks like an insane pride in a way to ignore that. But the point that you're making is that it's very difficult to

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Well, it's very easy to ignore it when it actually isn't making contact with my views. Right? It's like if I had said something— Right, but it's hard to see that it isn't because it appears so powerful. You know, we've found as a social media platform that Twitter is the worst of all social media platforms for sales conversion. Yeah, I can imagine. In our experience. That's because you're next to somebody getting—

beaten to death in a liquor store. I mean, when I go on Twitter, since I don't have an account, so I have a naive account. It's not following anyone and I almost never click anything. So I really see the pure algorithm when you just look at the homepage scroll or as pure as it gets. I mean, maybe it's got some information on me based on my IP address or something. But

If I ask myself, what is this algorithm trying to get me to be or to believe? Honestly, I can tell you that it is trying to get me to be a racist asshole, right? And a fan of Elon's, right? So it's given me a lot of Elon, and then it's given me a lot of...

like black teenagers beating up white, you know, a single white teenager or people of color robbing stores and getting shot in the face. I mean, it's just awful, like 4chan level awfulness. And then the occasional, you know, unlucky brand advertising to me in that context. I mean, it's just, it's a monstrosity of a platform from which to actually try to sell things. So it's...

Yes, if I were on Twitter following 2,000 smart people, as you are, and feeling that they are curating for me the best of their information diet, I know what that experience is like because that's what I was doing. That's why I was on it for whatever, 12 years and couldn't convince myself to get off it. It seemed like a professional necessity. It seemed...

so good in the sense, the incoming stuff was so good because again, I had chosen who to follow and all these people were reading great articles and forwarding them and having great short takes on them. And it was, all that stuff was great, but I have managed to get a surrogate of that in the way I find information otherwise. And, um,

And what I don't have is the emergency. Like, I mean, the ruined vacation where somebody, you know, like somebody, some genius over at the New York Times has called me a racist. And now I have to, you know, spend the rest of my vacation with my family trying to figure out how to respond to this. I've tweeted back at them and blah, blah, blah, blah. It's escalated. And now we've just nuked each other. And...

And it looks real. Yeah, it looks real, but it feels real, and it is real if you spend your time that way. That's the thing. If you spend your time that way, which I did for years, it is real. It is the substance of your life. It is the manner in which you—it's the thing you bring back to the conversation with your wife five minutes later or five hours later, more likely, and it's in your head. And it was a ghastly—

use of attention. That's what I finally realized. Well, you made an allusion when you were talking about what you regard as the unfortunate effect of X on Elon and maybe on other users. So let's assume that you were afraid that the sort of things that you were seeing happening to others, more than merely Elon, let's say, in your estimation, were also happening to you. And so what do you think

In retrospect,

what do you think it was doing to you? You just talked about the effects on your family on vacations. I've experienced a fair bit of that. I understand exactly what you're saying. And it does seem like the world's burning and you better do something about it right now. And it's no wonder it seems that way because it's lots of people and generally in our normative ecosystems, if lots of people appear to be upset with you or around you, you should pay attention.

But Twitter isn't the real world. We don't know what the hell it is, you know? It looks more and more like a world of demonic bots, and God only knows what that world is. But what did you see, especially now that you've been away for a while, what elements of your character do you think were pathologized and that were brought to the forefront because of this? Yeah, I considered myself a fairly...

careful user of it. I mean, I was not at all like Elon. I was not addicted to it in that way. I was not tweeting hundreds of times a day. I think I averaged something like three tweets a day over the course of my use of it. And that would come in spurts. I mean, so I would not tweet for three days and then send out a dozen tweets because it was some hot topic.

I was always fairly careful so that I honestly don't think I ever said anything on the platform that I regretted. If I ever made a mistake, I apologize for it. But I treated it like writing. I was aware I was publishing in that channel. However quickly and impulsively, I'm enough of a writer...

and an academic to feel like, okay, this is yet another occasion where embarrassment is possible and you don't want that. So I never, I'm not, I don't remember ever really screwing up on the platform. And yet what happened there was, I mean, I can honestly say that for a decade, the worst things in my life, and in some sense, the only bad things in my life

came from Twitter, came from my interaction with Twitter. I mean, apart from like a family, you know, family illnesses, you know, that's leaving something, leaving that aside. My life was so good. And yet I had this, you know, digital serpent in my pocket that I would consult a dozen times a day, 20 times a day, maybe a hundred times a day. So I, again, I might've only posted once or twice, but

But if something was really, you know, if the news cycle was really churning, I might be looking at this, my consulting of this news feed effectively is,

was interrupting my day, you know, not just every hour, but maybe every five minutes of many hours, right? Or for 10 minutes of that hour. And so it was segmenting my day, however good or productive that day was or should have been, I was constantly chopping it up by how I was engaging with this scroll. Again, mostly consuming, but, you know, often in response to the one or two things I had put out.

Yes, there was a dopaminergic component to that, obviously. I said something that I thought was clever, that was perceived as clever by my fans, and perhaps to the detriment of my enemies. All of that seemed exactly what I wanted in the moment. But even when it was at its best, even when...

There was just good information coming to me and I was responding happily with good information back. Even the non-toxic version of it was a style of, was intrinsically fragmenting of my life. You know, it's like, I don't pick up, I don't read a book that way. I don't have a book that I pick up

for two and a half minutes, and then I put down and then try to have a conversation with my kid and then say, okay, hold on one second and pick up the book again. It's like, that's not how anyone reads a book, right? And yet Twitter far too often became that sort of thing in my life. Right, right. It's like a parasite. It's like it parasitizes the exploratory instinct. It's something like that, right? Because, and maybe...

Look, you know, for a long time, I didn't have a cell phone. I was a late adopter of cell phones. And I didn't watch the news, probably, really, from like 1985 till about 2005. I had cut myself off from news sources. I didn't read newspapers.

And the reason that I didn't do that was because I realized... A few things happened in there. Did you catch 9-11? Did you miss that? Well, you know, I used to read, for example, I would read some credible magazines like The Economist when I still was credible because I don't really think it is anymore. But wasn't that amazing? Isn't it amazing to consider that magazines like Time and Newsweek could wait a week, like could expect that their audience would wait a week to be informed about...

about the news of that week. That just seems extraordinary to me now. Well, well, well, my conclusion about that was that if it isn't important in a week, it's not important. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Right. And so, and so I substituted these longer lag time news aggregators for TV in particular or radio. It's like, if it's today's news, it's not news. It

Maybe if it's not important in a month, it's not news, right? And that's part of that intelligent filtering. And I guess part of the reason that X is dangerous and social media is dangerous, X in particular, is that, you know, that proclivity to forage for information is in general an extremely useful instinct, right? It's the instinct to learn. But

What we're learning, you might say that the shorter the period of time over which the information is relevant, the more like pseudo-information it is. And so then any system that optimizes for the grip of short-term attention is going to parasitize your learning instinct with pseudo-information. Yeah, so it's also... And the algorithms are going to maximize that. The half-life is one thing, but also the culture...

that is informing these algorithms, the actual human behavior that the algorithms are skimming and boosting is increasingly a bad faith style of conversation. I mean, it's just people are, so many people, especially the anonymous people, are in the misinformation business. I mean, they will just cut together a clip

that is designed to mislead, and that is the clip that will get spread to the ends of the earth. Well, maybe, is it designed to mislead, or is it designed to optimize their particular grip on short-term attention for their own aggrandizement? Like, the psychopathic move, and let's say that it's facilitated by these short-term attention clips,

aggregators that are driven by bots that are learning how to do this, like the psychopathic proclivity, the narcissistic proclivity is going to say whatever puts you at the center of attention, whatever it is. Now, if you're governed by some kind of ethos that is outside of attention seeking, then that's a different story. But

If the game is that the machine optimizes for short-term attention, then it's going to reward all the players that are doing whatever it takes to grip short-term attention. Yeah, but the thing is, whatever it takes, though, is to get somebody seeming to say something totally outrageous. And in context, it might have made perfect sense, but...

but or at least be a very different point than the one that's being advertised by the clip. But the clip, shorn of context, is calculated to mislead in that the person who has edited that clip knows that the naive viewer can only draw one conclusion from the utterance as presented, right? And even if they're well-intentioned and fairly alert to this problem,

almost no one is going to go back to the original podcast and look at the comment in context. I mean, this just happened to Rogan, I believe. I think he had Bono, the singer for U2, U2 on his podcast. And Bono said something critical of Elon, I believe. And this got chopped up in a clip that was just, it made it look like

Joe really disagreed with Bono and was critical of him. And the clip just got exported as like, look at Bono getting owned by Joe Rogan or whatever. But that's not what the conversation was at all. Joe conceded most of the point that Bono was making. It was a false picture of what happened there. And the person who makes that clip just knows that

If they frame it as a smackdown, people are going to love to see that, and it doesn't matter that they're lying about what happened and damaging people's reputations in the process. Yeah. Well, and that's especially true if they're anonymous and their reputation bears no consequence of their lies. You know, well, the other thing that's happening, I don't know how much this is happening to you, and this is another example of the parasite problem. So, increasingly...

my voice and my image are being used not exactly in the way that you're describing, although that's happening a lot. I'm selling cognitive enhancers somewhere as an AI version of myself. Okay, well, that's happening a fair bit too, and sometimes worse than cognitive enhancers. But the worst thing that's happening now is that these sites that are

operating under my name, using my image and my voice, are providing pseudo-philosophical content and pseudo-psychological insight as if it's me.

And so it's like what I've said has been put through a filter of stupidity and reorganized in my voice. And this is happening constantly. Like YouTube has already taken 65 channels down that are doing this. And so this is another example of that parasite problem, right? You store up a reputation and then...

The parasites swoop in and pull off the attention that the reputation has garnered and monetize it. And they can escape into the ether because they do it anonymously. And so, like, this is going to become a stunning problem. I mean, it's a big problem. I can see that, you know, the...

the perfect version of it is at most a year away. I mean, it might only be a couple of months away. We've experimented with this on our side too. For instance, in my meditation app, Waking Up, we're now experimenting with translation to other languages. AI's got me speaking 22 languages perfectly in my voice, and it really sounds like me speaking those languages.

And the translation from what we can tell so far is fairly impeccable. So we're going to roll out a Spanish version of the app in the not too distant future just to see what happens. But it's like it's getting too good. So I think the lesson that consumers of information who care to have real information are going to have to learn is that you can't trust, if you're looking at Jordan Peterson,

on YouTube, you simply cannot trust that it really is Jordan Peterson unless it's coming through one channel that you know you can trust. Ironically, we're back to the age of gatekeepers, right? If it's not on your channel or Joe Rogan's channel or Chris Williamson's channel, if it just purports to be them but on somebody else's YouTube account, you can't trust it.

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Yeah. Well, it might also be, Sam, that the real solution to that is payment.

Like if it's, the rule is gonna be, maybe this is the rule. That's my world. The rule is gonna be, if it's free. All my stuff is free. Right, if it's free, it's a lie. Right, yeah. That's the world we're rapidly moving into. And, or if it's- Except someone's gonna be able to create, I mean, until you find them and stop them, someone will create the fake Jordan Peterson Academy-

that has a paywall, right? That looks like you, sounds like you, and it's only $5 a month. And so they'll monetize that way and that'll still be the problem. Has that been happening with your meditation app, with your enterprise yet? Not that I'm aware of, no. I mean, I just think, I'm just aware of seeing short clips of me

seeming to hawk psychotropics that I've never heard of. And it's just an AI version of my voice. It's real footage of me stolen from somebody's podcast and then an AI work over of that that turns into an Instagram ad. Yeah, well, I talked to some lawmakers in D.C. about a year and a half ago about the fact that this was going to happen, hoping that they would...

Well, it takes a long time to take notice and take action. But, you know, it's essentially the digital equivalent of kidnapping. Like, I think people should be put in prison for a long time for stealing your digital identity and monetizing it. Like, it is very much akin to kidnapping because what they're doing is they're draining the value out of your reputation. That's essentially the game, you know? And so...

So what's happened to your life? There's a couple of things I'd like to investigate here first. You know, first, I'd like to return to something that you and I talked about that we beat, that we wandered around a fair bit in our previous conversations. You know, you had, partly because you were concerned about the distinction between good and evil, and don't let me put words into your mouth, you were hoping to find a solution

objective basis for morality, a way of grounding morality in the objective world. And I have a thought about that that's relevant to our current conversation.

So tell me if you accept this proposition. Part of the pathology of Twitter is that it operates by game rules that not only don't apply in the real world, but that when exported to the real world, pathologize it. Is that fair? Yeah, I like that a lot. Okay, okay, right, okay. So here's a way of, I think, bridging a gap between the way you've been thinking about the world

from the moral perspective and the way I've been thinking about it. So, you know, I've always been, I've understood that you had a very deep concern about moral judgment and that your attempt to

provide a scaffolding of objectivity for morality was grounded in that even deeper concern. And I thought that I could understand why you did that. And I didn't agree with the conclusions that you'd drawn, but I agreed with the overall enterprise. And it struck me recently, and I think we've already obliquely made reference to it in our conversation, that there's another way of conceptualizing this concept

relationship between morality and objective fact. And that it might be more fruitful to look into the realm of something like, well, it's like theory of iterability and generalizability. It's maybe a variant of something like game theory. Like imagine that. So let me give you an example, Sam. And it's a pretty famous example. You know, those trading games where

Behavioral economists sit people down and say, two people, they say, I'll give you $100. You have to make an offer to the, okay. So the finding across culturally is that people generally approximate a 50-50 split, right? Yeah. And they're not game theoretic with respect to unfair outcomes.

Like they don't want to accept unfair trades even when it would just narrowly be to their advantage to accept them. Exactly, exactly. Okay, okay. And that's true even if they're poor. So if you put a poor person in a situation where they have to accept an unfair trade,

that would be to their immediate economic benefit, they seem even less likely to accept it. Now, I think the right way to construe that is that if you and I engage in an economic trade, we're doing two things at the same time. The first is what the classical economists would say is we're trying to maximize our gain, let's say. But the problem with that notion is that we aren't playing one game or all

While we're playing one game, we're also setting ourselves up to play a very large and unpredictable sequence of games.

Those are happening at the same time. And so we don't want to just optimize for gain in the single game. We want to optimize our status as players in a large series of unpredictable games. And so we want to put ourselves forward as fair players so that people line up to play other games with us. Okay, so then imagine that the hallmark of morality is something like

generalizable iterability across contexts, right? Because this would allow for, and so you could think about a more, truly moral system is the most playable game, and an immoral system augers in. And like when we've seen, we're talking about this to some degree with regard to X, because our proposition is that fundamentally, because it's optimizing for short-term attention grip, and it

benefits the psychopaths and the short-term gain accruers, the parasites, and perhaps the predators, that it's fundamentally a non-playable game, and that if its consequences generalize outside the world of X, that it pathologizes the environment.

And the reason for that is it's not optimally iterable. And so the pattern of object, the pattern of morality that would be grounded in the objective world isn't in the world of objective fact. It's in the world of optimized iterability across people and contexts. Well, I would just say that there are some set of objective facts that subsumes that picture, right? I mean, the world is the way it is.

The social world of social primates such as ourselves is the way it is. It admits of certain possibilities and certain other things are impossible given the kinds of minds we have. Our minds could change in all kinds of ways. They could change by being integrated with technology. They could change by genetically being manipulated at some point in the future. There's this landscape of possible experience

that the right sort of minds could navigate. And we're someplace on that landscape and we're trying to find our way. And so I view morality as a, at bottom, a navigation problem, right? And it's got this iterative quality that you describe. It's, the question is, it's always, you know, where...

can we go from here, where should we go from here? Where should we go from here, given all the possible places we might go from here, both individually and collectively? Okay, well, you know, the reason that I got obsessed with stories to begin with, Sam, was because I realized 30 years ago that a story was a description of a navigation strategy. That's what a story is. And so...

Then the question is, okay, let's see if we can formalize this a bit more. The story has to, let's say an optimized story has to iterate and improve. So for example, if you construe your marriage properly, it exists stably, but that's not as good as it could get. It could exist stably and improve as it iterates.

And then you can imagine that there's a small world of games that are playable in the actual natural and social world that improve as they iterate. And those games, pointers to those games are moral pointers. And I think that that's what the core of the religious enterprise dives into and elaborates upon. I think that's what makes it the religious enterprise.

is that it deeply assesses. So if, imagine this, imagine that your proposition, the proposition you laid out is accurate, is that the fundamental concern is navigation.

How do we get from point A to point B? Well, a story, you can think about this and tell me what you think, but I believe that a story is a description of a navigation strategy. If you go see a movie, you infer the aim of the protagonist and you adopt his perceptual frame and his emotional perspective. That's how perception works. And then you can imagine that there are depths of games, some are shallow,

And short-term games that maximize for short-term gain and to hell with everything else are shallow. And games that are sophisticated can be played in many situations with many players. They take the future into account and they improve as you play them.

And there's a hierarchy of value in consequence of that, that is obliquely associated with the world of fact, because it has to operate in the world of fact, but that isn't fundamentally derived from data that's directly associated with the facts. Well, not operationally, but potentially so, just not in fact. That's just not... I'm never claiming...

when I say that there are objective truths to all of these questions, that those objective truths will be delivered by some guy holding a clipboard wearing a white lab coat. But there are things we just know to be true, and it would take a lot of explaining to get to the bottom of how we know them to be true. But, I mean, they're very simple claims. We know that life in...

You know, the best and most refined and most ethically positive sum developed world context, right? You know, you and me and our most conscientious friends at the nicest resort after having done a great day's work, we're enjoying a great meal.

and talking creatively and positively about how to improve the world, we know that's a better game than trying to find some child soldiers to torture the neighbors in some malarial hellhole in sub-Saharan Africa so that we can extract the...

you know, some heavy metals, you know, the extraction of which is polluting the environment and causing the life expectation to be 30 years lower than it is in where we live, right? I mean, so like there's, they're different, they're fundamentally discordant human projects that are available to some very lucky people and unavailable to others. And luck is by no means evenly distributed in this world.

um so there are better and worse games right by any any measure of better you want to you know ethically better or artistically better entrepreneurially better economically better it's just you know better with better better with respect to the health outcomes etc etc so we're all trying to play the best game we can be a part of we're all trying i mean some people this i take that back many of us are

We're all trying to play the best game we can think of as best. But one of the consequences of my argument is that it's possible to be wrong. It's possible to actually have false beliefs about what is, in fact, better or worse. You can be confused. I also think you're insufficient.

You're insufficiently pessimistic too, Sam, I think, because I don't think everyone is trying to play the best possible game. I think that there are truly negative games where... Well, no, but people are being rewarded in some way. You know, like the sadist...

whose favorite game is to just see, to cause suffering in others and enjoy that suffering. The fact that he enjoys their suffering, right, that's a problem with him, right? He's a neurological monster of a sort. And he's confined to being the sort of mind that finds that very...

low-level game more rewarding than the game I just advertised at the resort with us being creative and productive and positive some. Yeah, well, that's the man who wants to rule over hell, Sam. Right, right. Yeah, so I'm not saying that doesn't exist. Because he thinks... Yeah, okay, fine, fine, fine, fine, fine, fine. But my point is that there are... We're obviously living in a realm where there are better and worse...

by any definition of better and worse that makes sense. Even from within the confines of the games that you're describing? Yeah. Right, because one of the ways of deciding that a game is counterproductive is that if you play it, it doesn't produce the result that it intends.

Right? Right. So that's another kind of universal hallmark of moral judgment. Like, if you're aiming at something and your strategy doesn't get you there, either your strategy is wrong or your aim is off by your own definition. Right? There's no relativizing your way out of that. And then we can say, well, there's a hierarchy of games that

that expand and improve as you play them. And there's a hierarchy of games that degenerate as you play them, even by your own standards of degeneration. Yeah, and the games, the more refined games, actually refine you as a player. I mean, you get changed by the game you play, you know, to your advantage or to your disadvantage. And it makes you more or less capable of playing...

So, I mean, this is what learning, this is what education is, this is what skill learning is, this is what interpersonal skill learning amounts to, this is what the difference between having good relationships versus bad relationships, being in a good culture where it's institutions,

incentivize you to be your effortlessly be the best possible version of yourself as opposed to you know you having to be some kind of moral hero just to be just not a psychopath I mean this is what's so important about incentives and about context like like Twitter that that incentivize the wrong things what we want I mean we don't want to have to take on the burden of

rebooting civilization ourselves based on our own native moral intuitions every single hour of every single day. That's for sure, Sam. That's for sure. We need systems that make it easy for strangers to collaborate effortlessly in high-trust environments

Right? I mean, this is like, we need to offload all of our moral wisdom into institutions and to systems of incentives such that you would have to be a very bad person indeed not to see the wisdom of being a peaceful, honest collaborator with the next person you meet, right? In this, given the nature of the system. You know, whereas, I mean, if you look, I mean, just to sharpen this up, because that can sound very abstract.

If you take an actually normal, decent person who just wants to be good and have positive some relationships with everyone he meets, you put that person in a maximum security prison in the United States,

that person will be highly incentivized to join a gang that has the requisite color of his skin, right? And be essentially a monster because that's the only way to survive in that context, right? To not join a gang, to not join a racist gang is to be the victim of everyone, right? So what you have in a maximum security prison

is a system of terrible incentives that where you have to be some kind of, you know, self-sacrificing saint to opt out of ramifying this awful system of incentives further. We want the opposite of that in situations that we control and in institutions that we build. And, you know, the thing that's so disturbing to me about this contrarian moment is that

So many people have gotten the message, and this is really most explicit since COVID, they've gotten the message that we don't need institutions. We don't want institutions. We just need to burn it all down. And we're just going to navigate by Substack newsletter and podcast. And that's just not going to work, right? We can't be all contrarian all the time. We need...

we need institutional knowledge. Intermediary institutions. Yeah. That, that work. Yeah. So whether we have to build new ones or perform exorcisms on our old ones, that might, you know, that may be a different answer depending on the case, but there's no question. We need institutions that, that are better than most individuals and that may, and that make most individuals, uh,

live up to norms that they themselves didn't invent and would, you know, under another system of incentives, would struggle to emulate. All right, I'm going to bring it in to land, Sam. I think what we're going to do on the Daily Wire side, I want to talk to you, I think, for half an hour about the anti-Semitic landscape.

on the left and the right. And I want to go down those rabbit holes and explore them with you. So that's for everybody watching and listening. I think that's what we're going to do on the Daily Wire side. And because you made some comments earlier about your concerns about the right-wing parties in Europe, for example, and the Nazis that are hiding there. And

I've seen no shortage of right-wing anti-Semitism where it's ugly head, let's say, on X, for example. But I also want to talk to you about the same pathology emerging on the left, because there's no shortage of unbelievable anti-Semitism on the left. And we should sort that out a little bit. And so that's what we'll do on the Daily Wire side. Sam, every time we talk, I think we get a little bit

- Well, we understand each other a little bit better. I think there's something very fruitful for us to continue discussing in relationship, well, to a number of the things you discussed today about the necessity for intermediary institutions. That's the principle of subsidiarity. It's an ancient principle of Catholic social, what would you say, social philosophy. You have to have intermediary institutions. They're the alternative to tyranny and slavery.

The idea that there's a harmony between individual development and proper institutions that has to be established. You know, you can't be a... It's very difficult to be a good person in an entirely pathological social situation. And...

than this idea that there's a hierarchy of games. Because part of what got me interested to begin with in the religious world, let's say, was because I started to understand what constituted the religious as the structure of the depth of games. It's by definition. I'm not talking about what people think about as superstitious belief.

That's not the issue. The issue is that there's a hierarchy of game from shallow to deep, from counterproductive to productive, from unplayable to iterative.

and that that's a real world. And there's a reason for that, that I think is allied with your desire, lifelong desire to investigate the objective grounds of the moral world. Yeah. I mean, there's a convergence there. One thing I would add to that is that also by definition on my account,

Whatever is true there, whatever is truly sacred, the true spiritual possibility has to be deeper than culture. And it certainly has to be deeper than the accidents of ancient cultures being...

separated from one another based on linguistic and geographical barriers, right? So it can't be... No dispute about that. Yeah, it can't be that Eastern Orthodox Christianity is the real answer versus Hinduism being the real answer. Because, I mean, one, they're incompatible answers at the surface level,

Whatever deep truth they may be in touch with, that is something we have to understand in a 21st century context that is deeper than provincialism. That's my argument against religious sectarianism of any kind. We definitely have much to discuss the next time we talk.

All right. So for everybody watching and listening, join us on the Daily Wire side because we'll go down the anti-Semitic rabbit hole. And that'll give Sam and I a little bit of time as well to discuss the political, which we haven't discussed.

which we've conveniently circumvented in a sense, but we had other things to talk about. So join us there. Thank you to the film crew here today in Scottsdale. Thanks, Sam. It's always a pleasure to talk to you. I'm glad you're doing well. It's real good to see you, man.