Kind: captions
Language: en
battle not with monsters lest ye become
a monster and if you gaze into the abyss
the abyss gazes also into you right but
i would say
bring it on
if you gaze into the abyss long enough
you see the light not the darkness
are you sure about that
i'm betting my life on it
the following is a conversation with
jordan peterson an influential
psychologist lecturer podcast host and
author of maps of meaning 12 rules for
life
and beyond order
this is the lex friedman podcast to
support it please check out our sponsors
in the description and now dear friends
here's jordan
peterson
dostoevsky wrote in the idiot spoken
through the character of prince mishkin
that beauty will save the world
soulja nissan actually mentioned this in
his nobel prize
acceptance speech what do you think this
yes game meant by that was he right
well
i guess it's the divine that saves the
world let's say you could say that by
definition
and then you might say well
are there pointers to that which will
save the world or that which eternally
saves the world and
the answer to that in all likelihood is
yes and that's maybe truth and love and
justice
and
the classical virtues beauty
perhaps in some sense foremost among
them it's a that's a difficult case to
make but definitely a pointer which
direction is the arrow pointing well the
arrow is pointing up no i think that
that which it points to is what beauty
points to it transcends beauty it's more
than beauty and that speaks to the
divine
it points to the divine
yeah and i would say again by definition
because we could define the divine in
some real sense
so one way of defining the divine is
what is divine to you is your most
fundamental axiom and you might say well
i don't have a fundamental axiom then i
would say that's fine but then you're
just confused
because you have a bunch of
contradictory axioms and you might say
well i have no axioms at all and then
i'd say well you're just
epistemologically ignorant beyond
comprehension if you think that because
that's just not true at all but you
don't think a human being can exist
within contradictions
well yeah we have to exist within
contradiction but
when the contradictions make themselves
manifest
say in confusion with regard to
direction
then
the consequence of that technically is
anxiety
and frustration and disappointment and
all sorts of other negative emotions but
the cardinal negative emotion
signifying
multiple pathways forward
is anxiety it's an entropy signal
but you don't think that kind of
entropy signal can be channeled into
into beauty into love why does beauty
and love have to be clear ordered
simple well i would say
it probably doesn't have to be
it can't be reduced to clarity and
simplicity
because when it's optimally structured
it's a balance between order and chaos
not order itself if it's too ordered if
music is too ordered it's not it's not
acceptable it sounds like a drum machine
it's too repetitive it's too predictable
it has to have well it has to have some
fire in it
along with the structure
i was in miami doing a seminar on
exodus with a number of scholars and
this is a beauty discussion
when moses first encounters the burning
bush
it's not a conflagration that
demands attention it's something that
catches his attention
it's a phenomena and that means to shine
forth and moses has to stop and attend
to it and he does and he sees this
fire that doesn't consume the tree and
the tree the tree is a structure right
it's a tree-like structure it's a
branching structure it's a hierarchical
structure
it's a self-similar structure it's a
fractal structure
and it's the tree of life and it's the
tree of the knowledge of good and evil
and
the fire in it is the transformation
that's always occurring within every
structure and the fact that the fire
doesn't consume the bush in that
representation is
a an indication of the balance of
transformation with structure and that
balance is presented as god and what
attracts
moses to it in some sense is the beauty
now it's the novelty and all that but
like a painting is like a burning bush
that's a good way of thinking about it a
great painting it's too much for people
often you know i my house
was and will soon be again completely
covered with paintings inside
and
it was hard on people to come in there
because
well my mother for example say well why
would you want to live in a museum
and i'd think well i would rather live
in a museum than anywhere else in some
real sense but
beauty is daunting it scares people
they're terrified of buying art for
example because their taste is on
display and they should be terrified
because generally people have terrible
taste now that doesn't mean they
shouldn't foster it and develop it but
and you know when you put your taste on
display it's a real really exposes you
even to yourself as you walk past it oh
dear every day
this is who i am yeah well and and look
how mundane that is and look how trite
it is and look at how cliched it is and
look at how sterile or too ordered it is
or too chaotic or how quickly you start
to take it for granted because you've
seen it so many times well if it's a
real piece of art that doesn't happen
you notice the little details the whole
is greater than the sum of the parts i
mean there are images
religious images in particular so we
could call them deep images
that people have been unpacking
for
4 000 years and still have i'll give you
an example
this is a terrible example
so i did a lecture series on genesis
and i got a lot of it unpacked but by no
means all of it
when god kicks adam and eve out of the
garden of eden
he puts cherubim with flaming swords at
the gate to stop human beings from
re-entering paradise
i thought what the hell does that mean
cherubim and why do they have flaming
swords i don't get that what is that
exactly
and then i found out from matthew pagio
who wrote a great book on symbolism in
genesis that cherubim are the supporting
monsters of god it's a very complicated
idea
and that they're partly a representation
of that which is difficult to fit into
conceptual systems
they've also got an angelic or demonic
aspect
take your pick why do they have flaming
swords well a sword is a symbol of
judgment and
and
the separation of the wheat from the
chaff use a sword to cut away
to cut away
and to carve
and a flaming sword is not only that
which carves it's that which burns
and what does it carve away and burn
well you want to get into paradise
it carves away everything about you that
isn't perfect
and so what does that mean okay well
here's part of what it means this is a
terrible thing
so
you could say that the entire christian
narrative is embedded in that image
why
well let's say that flaming swords are a
symbol of death
that seems pretty obvious
let's say further
that they're a symbol of apocalypse and
hell
that doesn't seem completely
unreasonable
so here's an idea
not only do you have to face death
you have to face death and hell
before you can get to paradise
hellish judgment
and all that's embedded in that image
and and a piece of art with an image
like that has all that information in it
and it shines forth in some fundamental
sense
it it reaches into the back tendrils of
your mind at levels you can't even
comprehend
and grips you
i mean that's why people go to museums
and
gays at paintings they don't understand
and that's why they'll pay what's the
most expensive objects in the world if
it's not carbon fiber racing yachts it's
definitely classic paintings
right it's high level technological
implements
or it's classic art well why are those
things so expensive why do we build
temples to house the images even secular
people go to museums
i'm secular well are you in a museum yes
are you looking at art yes well
what makes you think you're secular then
it's arguable that the thing
many many centuries from now that will
remain of all of human civilization will
be our art
not even the words well you know the a
book has remained a very long time right
the biblical reasons that long uh
humanity that's right
but that's in the full arc of living
organisms perhaps will not well we have
images that are we have artistic images
that are at least 50 000 years old right
that have survived
and some of those are
they're already profound in their
symbolism
yeah we found them and and and
they've lasted they've lasted that long
and so and then
think about europe
secular people all over the world make
pilgrimages to europe
well why
because of the beauty
obviously i mean
that's self-evident
and it's partly because there are things
in europe that are so beautiful they
take your breath away right they make
your hair stand on and they fill you
with a sense of awe
and
we need to see those things it's not
optional we need to see those things the
cathedrals was in the cathedral in
vienna and it was terribly beautiful you
know terribly well it was terribly
beautiful is beauty painful for you
is is that the highest form of beauty it
really challenges you oh definitely
yeah yeah i got a good analysis of the
statue of david michelangelo says you
could be far more than you are
that's what that statue says
and this cathedral you know down we went
down into the into the
under structure of it and there were
three floors of bones
from the plague and there they all are
and then that cathedral is on top of it
it's no joke to go visit a place like
that
no it's it it rattles you to the core
and our
our
religious systems have become
propositionally dubious
but there's no arguing with the
architecture although modern architects
like to with their sterility and their
giant middle fingers erected everywhere
but
beauty is a is a terrible pointer to god
and you know a secular person will say
well i don't believe in god it's like
have it your way
you gotta
you cannot move forward into the
unforeseen horizon of the future except
on faith
and you might say well i have no faith
it's like well good luck with the future
then because
what are you then nihilistic and
hopeless and anxiety-ridden
and if not well something's guiding you
forward it's faith in something or
multiple things which just makes you a
polytheist which i wouldn't recommend
well let me ask you one short-lived
biological meat bag to another
who is god then
let's try to sneak up to this question
if it's at all possible is it possible
to even
talk about this
well it better be because otherwise
there's no communicating about it right
it it has to be something that can be
brought down to earth
well we might be too dumb to bring it
down it's not just ignorant it's also
sinful
right
so because there's not knowing and then
there's not wanting to know or refusing
to know yeah and so you might say well
could you extract god from a description
of the objective world
right is is god just the ultimate unity
of
of of
of the natural reality and i would say
well
in a sense there's some truth in that
but but not exactly because
god in the highest sense is the spirit
that you must emulate in order to
thrive
how's that for a biological definition
spirit is a pattern
the spirit that you must emulate in
order to thrive so it's a kind of uh in
one sense
when we say the human spirit
it's that it's an animating principle
yeah it's a meta it's a pattern
and you might say well what's the
pattern okay well i can tell you that to
some degree
imagine that
like you're grip by beauty
you're gripped by admiration
so and you can just notice this this
isn't propositional you have to notice
it it's like oh
turns out i admire that person
so what does that mean well it means i
would like to be like him or her
that's what admiration means it means
there's something about the way they are
that compels imitation
another instinct
or inspires respect or awe
even
okay what is that that grips you
well
i don't know well let's say okay fine
but it grips you and you want to be like
that kids hero worship for example so do
adults for that matter unless they
become entirely cynical i worship quite
a quite a few heroes yeah well there you
go proudly yes well there you go and
there's no that worship that celebration
and proclivity to imitate is worship
that's what worship means most
fundamentally now imagine you took
the set of all admirable people and you
extracted out ai learning you extracted
out the central features of what
constitutes admirable
and then you did that repeatedly until
you purified it to what was most
admirable
that's as good as you're going to get
in
in terms of a representation of god
and you might say well i don't believe
in that it's like
well
what do you mean yeah it's not a set of
propositional facts
it's not a scientific theory about the
structure of the objective world and
then i could say something about that
too because i've been thinking about
this a lot especially since talking to
richard dawkins
it's like okay
the post-modernist types
going back way before daradan foucault
maybe back to nietzsche
who i admire greatly by the way
he says god is dead
it's like okay
but nietzsche said god is dead and we
have killed him and will not find enough
water to wash away all the blood so that
was nietzsche he's no fool he's got away
with words he certainly does
and so then you think okay well we
killed the transcendent
well
what does that mean for science well it
frees it up because all that nonsense
about a deity is just the idiot
superstition that stops the scientific
um
what process from moving forward that's
basically the new atheist claim
something like that it's like wait a
second
do you believe in the transcendent if
you're a scientist
and the answer is
well not only do you believe in it you
believe in it more than anything else
because if you're a scientist
you believe in
what objects to your theory
more than you believe in your theory now
we've got to think that through very
carefully so your theory describes the
world and as far as you're concerned
your description of the world is the
world
but because you're a scientist you think
well even though that's my description
of the world and that's what i believe
there's something beyond what i believe
and that's the object and so i'm going
to throw my theory against the object
and see where it'll break
and then i'm going to use the evidence
of the break
as a source of new information to
revitalize my theory so as a scientist
you have to posit the existence of the
ontological transcendent before you can
move forward at all but more
you have to pause it that contact with
the ontological transcendent
annoying though it is because it upsets
your apple cart is exactly what will in
fact set you free
so then you accept the proposition that
there is a transcendent reality
and that the that contact with that
transcendent reality is redemptive in
the most fundamental sense because if it
wasn't why would you bother making
contact with you're going to make
everything worse or better
why does the
contact with the transcendent
set you free as a scientist because you
assume that you assume i mean freedom in
the most fundamental sense it's like
well freedom from want freedom from
disease freedom from ignorance right
that it informs you
the logos in it of science
it is definitely that
yeah it's it's the what it's the
direction let's say the directionality
of science that's a narrative direction
not a scientific direction and then the
question is what is the narrative well
it posits a transcendent reality it
posits that the transcendent reality is
corrective it posits that our knowledge
structure should be regarded with
humility it posits that you should bow
down in the face of
of the transcendent evidence and you
have to take a vow you know this as a
scientist you have to take a vow to
follow that path if you're going to be a
real scientist it's like the truth no
matter what and that means you posit the
truth as a redemptive force
well what does redemptive mean well why
bother with science well so people don't
starve so people can move about more
effectively so life can be more abundant
right so it's all ensconced within an
underlying ethic so the the reason i i
was saying that while we were talking
about belief in god it's like this is a
very complicated topic right do you
believe in a transcendent reality see
okay now let's say
you buy the argument i just made on the
natural front you say yeah yeah that's
just nature
that's not god
and then i'd say well what makes you
think you know what nature is
like see the problem with that argument
is that it it already presumes
a materialist a reductionist materialist
objective view of what constitutes
nature but if you're a scientist you're
going to think
well in the final analysis i don't know
what nature is i certainly don't know
its origin or destination point i don't
know it's teleology i'm really ignorant
about nature
and so when i say it's nothing but
nature
i shouldn't mean it's nothing but what i
understand nature to be
so i could say will we have a fully
reductionist account of cognitive
processes
and the answer to that is yes but by the
time we do that our understanding of
matter will have transformed so much
that what we think of as reductionists
now won't look anything like this what
we think of reductionism now
matter isn't dead
dust
i don't know what it is
i have no idea what it is matter is what
matters there's a definition that's a
very weird definition but
the notion that we have
you know that if you're a reductionist a
materialist reductionist that you can
reduce
the complexity of what is to your
assumptions about the nature of matter
that's not a scientific your specific
limited human assumptions of this
century of this week that
so in that in some sense
without god
in this complicated big definition we're
talking about
the there's no humility or
it's not enough there's less likely to
be
or rather science can err in taking a
trajectory away from humility well
without something much more powerful
than uh individual human yeah well then
and we know you know the frankenstein
story comes out of that instantly and
that's a good story for the current
times it's like
you you're playing around with making
new life
you bloody well better make sure you
have your arrows pointed up
and it's interesting because you said
science has
um an ethic to it
i think it's embedded in an ethic well
there's a
you know
science is a big word yeah and it
includes a lot of disciplines that have
different traditions so biology
chemistry
uh genetics physics
those are very different communities
and i think biology especially when you
get closer and closer to medicine into
the human body
does have a very serious first of all
has a history with nazi germany of being
abused and all those kinds of things but
it has a history of taking this stuff
seriously what doesn't have a history of
taking this stuff seriously is robotics
and artificial intelligence which is
really interesting
because
you don't uh you know you called me a
scientist but
and i i would like to wear that label
proudly but often people don't think of
computer science as a science but
nevertheless it will be i think the
science of one of the major scientific
fields of the 21st century and you
should take that very seriously
oftentimes when people build robots
or ai systems they think of them
as
toys to tinker with oh isn't this cool
well i feel this too isn't this cool it
is cool
but
you know uh at a certain moment you
might
isn't this nuclear
uh explosion cool yes it is or birth
control pill cool it's like or or
transistor cool yeah well the other
thing too and and this is a weird
problem in some sense the robotics
engineer types they're thing people
right i mean the big classes of interest
are interesting things versus interest
in people some of my best friends are
thing people yeah right and thing people
are very very
clear logical thinkers and they're very
outcome oriented and practical
now and that's all good that makes the
machinery and keeps it functioning
but
there's a human side of the equation and
and you get the extreme thing people and
you think yeah well what about the human
here and
when we're talking about we've been
talking about the necessity of having a
technological enterprise embedded in an
ethic and you can ignore that like most
of the time right you can ignore the
overall ethic in some sense when you're
toying around with your toys but when
you're building an artificial
intelligence it's like well
that's not a toy
that might be
toy becomes the monster very quickly
yeah yeah yes yes and and this is a
whole new kind of monster
and maybe it's already here
yes and you notice how many of those
things you can no longer turn off
and what is it with you engineers and
your inability to put off switches on
things now
it's like i have to hold this for five
seconds for it to shut off or i can't
figure i just want to shut it off click
off well what is it with you humans that
don't uh put all switches on other
humans because there's a magic to the
thing that you notice and it hurts
uh for both you and perhaps one day the
thing itself to turn it off
and so you have to be very careful as an
engineer adding off switches to things
um i think it's a feature not a bug the
off switch
the off switch gives a deadline to us
humans to systems
of existence it makes you uh it's you
know death
is the thing that really brings clarity
to life and i do think yes hence the
flaming swords the flaming sword i do
like your view of the flame with the
bush and perhaps the sword as a thing of
transformation it's also
it's a transformation that kind of
consumes the thing in the process well
it depends on how much of the thing is
chaff
you know this is why you can't touch the
ark of the covenant
for example and this is why people can
have very bad psychedelic trips
it's like if you're 95 dead wood
and you get too close to the flame
the five percent that's left might not
be able to make it
so you think it's all chat but i think
there is some aspect of destruction that
is
that's you know the the bukowski line of
uh do what you love and let it kill you
right don't you think it that
destruction is part of that's humility
that's humility you bet you bet you bet
it's like
invite in the judgment invite in the
judgment because maybe you can die a
little bit instead of dying completely
yeah you know that's i think it's alfred
north whitehead
we can let our ideas die instead of us
right we can have these partial
personalities that we can burn off
and we can let them go before they
become tyrannical pharaohs and
everything and we lose everything
and so yeah there's this optimal bite of
death and who knows
what it would mean to optimize that like
what if it was possible that if you died
enough all the time
that you could continue to live and the
thing is we already know that
biologically because
if you don't die properly all the time
well it's cancerous outgrowths and and
like it's a very fine balance between
productivity on the biological front and
the culling of that right
life is a real balance between growth
and death
and so what would happen if you got that
balance right well we kind of know right
because
if you live your life properly
so to speak and you're humble enough to
let your stupidity die before it takes
you out you will live longer that's just
a fact
well but then what's the ultimate
extension of that and the answer is we
don't know we have no idea
well let me ask you a difficult question
because as opposed to the easy ones that
you've been asking so far well uh
dostoevsky is always just the warm-up
so if death if if if death every single
day is the way to progress through life
you have become quite famous death in
hell
death in hell yeah yeah because you
don't want to forget the hell part
uh do you worry that your fame
traps you
into the person
that you were before yeah well yeah
elvis became an elvis impersonator by
the time he died yeah do you fear that
you have become a jordan peterson
impersonator that do you fear of in some
part becoming
the famous suit wearing
brilliant jordan peter this the
certainty in the pursuit of truth
right i think i worry about it more than
anything else i hope
i hope i do i better has fame to some
degree when you look at yourself in the
mirror
in the quiet of your mind has it
corrupted you
no doubt in some regard i mean it's very
difficult thing to
avoid you know because
things change around you people are much
more likely to do
what you ask for example right and so
that's a danger because one of the
things that keeps you dying properly is
that people push back against you
optimally this is why so many
celebrities spiral out of control
especially the tyrannical types that say
run countries
everyone around them stops saying yeah
you're you're you're deviating a little
bit there they laugh at all their jokes
they open all their doors they they
always want something from them the red
carpet's always rolled out it's like
well you think would that be lovely it's
well
not if the red carpet is rolled out to
you well you're on your way to perdition
that's not a good deal you just get
there more efficiently
and so one of the things
that i've tried to learn to manage is to
get have people around me all the time
who are critics
who are saying
yeah i could have done that better and
you're a little too harsh there and
you're alienating people unnecessarily
there and you should have done some more
background work there and
and i think the responsibility attendant
upon that increases as your influence
increases and that's
that's a as your influence increases
then that becomes a lot of
responsibility
so you know and then maybe have an off
day and well one here's an example
i've been writing some columns lately
about things that perturb me
like the forthcoming famine for example
and
it's hard to take those
um problems on
it's difficult to take those problems on
in a serious manner and it's frightening
and it would be easier just to go up to
the cottage with my wife and go out on
the lake and watch the sunset
and so
i'm tempted to draw on
anger as a motivating energy
to help me overcome the
resistance to doing this
but then that makes me more harsh and
judgmental in my tone
when i'm reading such things for example
on youtube
then might be optimal now i've had
debates about with people about that
because i have friends who say
no if you're calling out the
environmental
environmentalist globalists who are
harassing the dutch farmers
then a little anger is just the ticket
but then others say well you know you
don't want to be too harsh because you
alienate people who would otherwise
listen to you it's like
that's a hard balance to get right but
also maybe anger
hardens your mind to where you don't
notice the the subtle quiet beauty of
the world
the quiet love that's always there that
permeates everything sometimes you can
become deeply cynical about the world if
it's the nietzsche thing yeah battle not
with monsters lest ye become a monster
and if you gaze into the abyss the abyss
gazes also into you right but i would
say
bring it on
right because well i also say knowing
that he's absolutely right but
if you gaze into the abyss long enough
you see the light not the darkness
are you sure about that
i'm betting my life on it
yeah it's a heck of a bet well that's
because it might distort your mind
to where
all you see
is it this is is abyss is the evil in
this world i would say you haven't
looked long enough
you know that's back to the you're just
the limited the swords the flaming
swords it's like
so i said the whole story of christ was
prefigured in that image
it's like the story of christ
psychologically
is
radical acceptance of the worst possible
tragedy that's what it means that's what
the crucifix means psychologically it's
like gays upon that which you are most
afraid of but that story doesn't end
there because in in the in the story
christ goes through death into hell
so death isn't enough
the abyss the abyss of innocent death is
not sufficient to produce redemption
it has to be a voluntary journey to hell
and maybe that's true for everyone
and that's like there is no more
terrifying idea than that by definition
and so then well do you gaze upon that
well
who knows
who knows how often do you gaze upon
death your own
how often do you
remember remind yourself that this ride
ends personally personally
all the time because you as a as a deep
thinker and philosopher it's easy to
start philosophizing
and and forgetting that you're
you might die to the angel of death sits
on every word
how's that
i how often do you actually consciously
all the time
uh notice the angel all the time
i think it's one of the things that made
me peculiar
when i was in graduate school you know i
i thought about i was
i had the thought of death in my mind
all the time
and i noticed that many of the people
that i was with these were people i
admired fine they that wasn't part of
their character but it was definitely
part of mine i'd wake up every morning
this happened for years think
time short get at it time short get at
it
there's things to do
and so that was always that's still
there and it's still there with i would
say and it's unbearable in some sense
are you afraid of it like what
relationship yeah you know i was ready
to die
a year ago
and not casually i had people i loved
you know
so no i'm not very worried about me but
i'm very worried about making a mistake
yeah
i heard elon musk talk about that a
couple of months ago it was really a
striking moment
someone asked him about death and he
said just off hand and then went on with
the conversation he said i'd be a relief
and then he went on with the
conversation
and i thought
well you know
he's got a lot of weight on his
shoulders
i'm sure that part of them thinks
i'd be easier just if this wasn't here
at all
now he said it offhand but it was a
telling moment in my estimation so for
him that's a
why live question
the exhaustion of life yeah yeah if you
call it life is suffering but yeah the
hardship i'm more afraid of hell than
death
you're you're afraid of the thing that
follows
i don't know if it follows or if it's
always here
and i think we're going to find out
what's the connection between death and
hell
i don't know
i don't know is there something that
needs to be done before you arrive
you're more likely to die terribly if
you live in a manner that brings you to
hell
that's one connection and terribly it's
as a very deep kind of concept
okay yeah yeah
and that's the definition by the way
what do you make of elon musk you have
spoken about him a bit you might have
struck with admiration
that's what i mean when i was actually
this idea i always think of that as a
primary well it's all it's like do you
find this comedian funny it's like well
i laugh at him
you know what i mean it's not
propositional again
and so
i would there are things i would like to
ask
mr musk about
the mars venture i don't know what he's
up to there it strikes me as absurd in
the most fundamental sense because i
think well it'd be easier just to build
an outpost in the antarctica or in the
desert well how much of the human
endeavor is absurd well
that's what did nietzsche say great men
are seldom credited with their stupidity
who the hell knows what musk is up to i
mean obviously he's building rockets now
he's motivated because he wants to build
a a platform for life on mars is that a
good idea
who am i to say he's he's building the
rockets man but i'd like to ask him
about it i i i would like to see that
conversation i do think
that
having talked to him quite a bit offline
i think these
several of his ideas like mars like
humans becoming a multi-planetary
species could be
one of the things that human
civilization looks back at as
duh
i can't believe he is one of the few
people that was really pushing this idea
because it's the obvious
thing for for society for life to
survive yeah well it isn't obvious to me
that i'm in any position to evaluate
elon musk like i would like to talk to
him and find out what he's up to and why
but
i mean he's an impossible person what
he's done is impossible all of it
it's like he built an electric car that
works now does it work completely and
will it replace gas cars or should it i
don't know but
if we're going to build electric cars he
seems to be the best at that by a lot
and he more or less did that people carp
about him but he more or less did that
by himself i know he's very good at
distributing responsibility and all of
that but he's the spearhead and then
that was pretty hard and then he built a
rocket
at like one-tenth the price of nasa
rockets and then he shot his car out
into space
that's pretty hard and then he's
building this boring
company more or less as a
what would you call it
it's sort of it's this whimsical joke in
some sense but it's not a joke
he's amazing and you're a link delving
into the uh the depths of the mind and
starlink it's like
go elon as far as i'm concerned and then
you know he puts his finger on things so
oddly
the prob the problem is under population
it's like i think so too i think it's a
terrible problem that we're
the west for example is no longer
at
replacement with regard to birth rate it
means we've abandoned the virgin and the
child in a most fundamental sense it's a
bloody catastrophe and musk he sees it
clear as can be it's like wow and where
everyone else is running around going oh
there's too many people it's like
nope
got that not only see i've learned that
there are falsehoods and lies and there
are anti-truths
and an anti-truth is something that's so
preposterous that you couldn't
you couldn't make a claim that's more
opposite to the truth
and the claim that there are too many
people on the planet is an anti-truth
so you know people say well you have to
accept limits to growth and etc it's
like
i have to accept the limits that you're
going to impose on me because you're
frightened of the future
that's your theory is it
okay
well it's an idea it could be a right
idea it could be a wrong idea i don't i
think anti-truth
oh here i'll tell you why it's the wrong
idea i think
so imagine that there's an emergency
dragon
there's a dragon
someone comes and says there's a dragon
i'm the guy to deal with it
that's what the environmentalists say
the radical types who push limits to
growth
then i look at them and i think okay
is that dragon real or not
that's one question well i asked that
question of myself every time when you
spend time alone is the apocalypse
looming on the environmental front yes
or no i'll just leave that aside for the
time being
i think you can make a case both ways
for a bunch of different reasons and
it's not a trivial concern
and we've overfished the oceans terribly
and there are environmental issues that
are looming large
whether climate change is the cardinal
one or not is a whole different question
but we won't get into that that's not
the issue you're clamoring about a
dragon
okay
why should i listen to you
well let's see how you're reacting to
the dragon
first of all you're scared stiff and in
the state of panic
that might indicate you're not the man
for the job
second
you're willing to use compulsion to
harness other people to fight the dragon
for you
so now not only are you terrified
you're a terrified tyrant
so then i would say well then you're not
the moses that we need to lead us out of
this particular exodus
and maybe that's a neurological
explanation it's like if you're so
afraid of what you're facing
that you're terrified into paralysis and
nihilism and that you're willing to use
tyrannical compulsion to get your way
you are not the right leader for the
time
so then i like someone like bjorn
lomberg or matt ridley or marion toopey
and they say well look we've got our
environmental problems
and uh maybe there's a there you could
make a case that there's a malthusian
element in some situations
but fundamentally the track record of
the human race is that we learn very
fast and faster all the time
to do more with less
and we've got this
and i think
yes
to that idea
and i think about it in it
in a fundamental way it's like i trust
lomberg
i trust tupi
trust matt ridley
they thought about these things deeply
they're not just saying oh the
environment doesn't matter whatever the
environment is
you know the environment i don't even
know what that is that's everything the
environment i'm concerned about the
environments like
which is how is that different than
saying i'm worried about everything
how are those statements different
semantically
well yeah the environment it could be
i'm worried about human society a lot of
these complex systems are difficult to
talk about because there's so much
involved for sure yeah everything
and then these models
because people have gone after me
because i don't buy the climate models
well
i think about the climate models as
extended into the economic models
because the climate model is
well there's going to be a certain
degree of heating let's say by 2100 it's
like okay
some of that might be human generated
some of it's a consequence of warming
after the ice age this has happened
before but fair enough let's take your
presumption
although there are multiple presumptions
and any error in your model multiplies
as time extends but to have it your way
okay now we're going to extend the
climate model so to speak into the
economic model so i just did an analysis
of a paper by deloitte
third biggest
company in the u.s
300 000 employees major league
consultants they just produced a report
may i wrote an article for it in the
telegraph which i'm going to release
this week on my youtube channel
said well
if we get the climate problem under
control
economically because that's where the
models are now being generated on the
economic front so now we have to model
the environment
that's climate and we have to model the
economy
and then we have to model their joint
interaction and then we have to predict
100 years into the future
and then we have to put a dollar value
on that
and then we have to claim that we can do
that
which we can't
and then this is our conclusion
we're going to go through a difficult
period of privation
because if we don't accept limits to
growth there's going to be a catastrophe
50 years in the future thereabouts and
so to avert that catastrophe
we are going to make people poorer
now
how much poor well not a lot compared to
how much richer they're going to be but
definitely
and they say this in their own models
definitely poorer definitely poorer
than they would be if we just left them
the hell alone
and so then i think okay
poor array
who
well let's look at it biologically
you've got a hierarchy right of
stability and
security
that's a hierarchy or one type
you stress a hierarchy like that a
social hierarchy so there's birds in a
environment and an avian flu comes in
and then you look at the birds in the
social hierarchy and the
the low ranking birds have the worst
nests so they're most exposed to wind
and rain and sun and farthest from
food supplies and most exposed to
predators and so those birds are
stressed which is what happens to you at
the bottom of a hierarchy you're more
stressed because your life is more
uncertain you're more stressed your
immunological function is compromised
because of that
you're sacrificing the future for the
present
an avian flu comes in and the birds die
from the bottom up
that happens in every epidemic
you die
from the bottom up okay
so they say when the aristocracy catches
a cold
the working class dies of pneumonia all
right so now we're going to make people
poorer
okay who
well we know who we make poor when we
make people poorer
we make those who are barely hanging on
poorer and what does that mean
it means they die
and so what the deloitte consultants are
basically saying is well
you know it's kind of unfortunate
but according to our models
a lot of poor people are going to have
to die
so that a lot more poor people don't die
in the future it's like okay hold on a
sec
which of those two things am i supposed
to regard with certainty
the hypothetical poor people that you're
going to hypothetically save 100 years
from now
or the actual poor people that you are
actually going to kill
in the next 10 years
well i'm gonna cast my law with the
actual poor people that you're actually
going to kill
and so and then i think further it's
like well okay the deloitte consultants
have you actually modeled the world or
is this a big advertising shtick
designed to attract your corporate
clients with demonstration that you're
so intelligent that you can actually
model the entire ecosystem of the world
including the economic system and
predicted a hundred years forward and
isn't there a bit of a moral hazard in
making a claim like that
just like just a trifle especially when
so i talked to bjorn lomberg and michael
leon last week i accepted the un
uh
estimates of starvation this coming year
150 million people will suffer food
insecurity
food insecurity
yeah food insecurity that's the bloody
buzzword
famine
well
michael yawn thought
1.2 billion and then that little spiral
because he said what happens in a famine
is that the governments go nuts crazy
the governments destabilize
and then they appropriate the food from
the farmers
then the farmers don't have any money
then they can't grow crops and i think
yeah that's exactly what they do that's
exactly what would happen
and so
john told me 1.2 billion and then bjorn
lombard said the same thing i didn't
even ask him he just made it as an
offhand comment
so
let me ask you about
the famine of the 30s yeah
do you think ukraine in the ukraine oh
yeah
fun fun fun similar
a lot of the things you mentioned in the
last few sentences kind of echo
to that part of human history the holy
door
do you use no one knows about
well
now i've just spent four weeks in
ukraine oh yeah there's different parts
of the world that still
even if they don't know
they know yeah
right they feel
history is runs in the dutch knew
in some sense they had a famine at the
end of world war ii and part of the
reason the dutch farmers are so
unbelievably efficient and productive
is that the dutch swore at the end of
world war ii that that was not going to
happen again
and then they had to scrape land out of
the ocean
because holland that's quite a country
it shouldn't even exist the fact that
it's the world's number two exporter you
know that's the world's number two
exporter of agriculture products holland
it's like
i don't think it's as big as
massachusetts it's this little tiny
place it shouldn't even exist
and they want to put here's this here's
the plan
let's put 30 percent of the farmers out
of business well the broader ecosystem
of agriculture production in holland is
six percent of their gdp now these
centralizing politicians think
tell me if i'm stupid about this
take an industry
you knock it back
by fiat by thirty percent
now it runs on like a three percent
profit margin now you're going to kill
30 percent of it
how are you not going to bring the whole
thing down the whole farming ecosystem
down
how are you not going to
impoverish the
transport systems how are you not going
to demolish the grocery stores
you can't take something like that and
pair it back by fiat by 30
and not kill it i i can't see how you
can do that i mean look what we did with
the covid lockdowns we broke the supply
chains
tried buying something lately
you can't and wait and aren't the
chinese
threatening taiwan at the moment what
are we gonna do without chips
so
i don't know what these people are
thinking and then i think okay what are
they thinking well the deloitte people
are thinking aren't we smart and
shouldn't we be hired by our corporate
employers it's like okay
too bad about the poor
um what are the uh
environmentalists thinking we love the
planet it's like do you
we love the poor do you okay let's pit
the planet against the poor who wins the
planet okay you don't love the poor that
much do you love the planet
or do you hate capitalism
let's pit those two things against each
other oh well it turns out we actually
hate capitalism how can we tell
because you're willing to break it
and you know what's going to happen so
what's going to happen in sri lanka with
these 20 million people who now have
nothing to eat
are they going to eat all the animals
are they going to burn all the firewood
they're stockpiling firewood in germany
it's like so is your environmental
globalist utopia
going to kill the poor and destroy the
planet and that's okay because we'll
wipe out capitalism it's like okay yeah
the the dragon and the fear of the
dragon drives ideologies some of which
can build a better world some of which
can destroy that world yeah what do you
think of that theory about about
trustworthiness if the dragon that
you're facing turns you into a terrified
tyrant you're not the man for the job
is that a good theory it's an
interesting theory let me use that
theory to challenge because what what
does terror look like
let me
table the turns turn the tables on you
you are
terrified afraid concerned
about the dragon of something we can
call
communism marxism
am i terrified of it well terrific okay
okay a tyrant your theories had two
components yeah
i'm not paralyzed i had a dragon yeah
i'm not paralyzed and i don't want to be
a tyrant
the tyrant part i think is missing with
you
uh so you are very concerned the
intensity of your feeling
uh
does not give much space
actually at least in your public persona
for
sitting quietly with the dragon and
sipping in a couple of beers and
thinking about this thing
the intensity of your anger
concern
about certain things you're seeing in
society
is that going to drive you off the path
that
ultimately takes us to a better world
that's a good question i mean i don't
i'm trying to get that right so
we've kind of come to a cultural
conclusion about the nazis
do you get to be angry about the nazis
seems the answer to that is yes
well actually let me push back here
um i also don't trust people who are
angry about the nazis because i mean the
actual nazis well
i i there's a lot as you know there's a
lot of people in the world
um that
uh
use actual nazis to mean a lot i know i
know one of them is very important to me
for example
yes
he's a nazi i think magical super nazi
as it turns out i i think they actually
sort of steal men all their perspectives
i think a lot of people that call you
nazi mean it
so yeah
so but like that there's an important
thing there though because i i went to
the front in ukraine yeah and a lot of
the people
uh
that lost their home or there kind of
uh that got to interact a lot with
russian soldiers ukrainian people
interact with the russian soldiers
they reported that
the russian soldiers
really believe they're saving
the the people
of ukraine in these local villages from
the nazis
so to them
it's not just that the ukrainian
government has or ukraine has some nazis
it's like
it has been
the idea is that the nazis have taken
over ukraine and we need to free them
this is the belief yeah so this
again nazi's still a dragon that lives
yeah and it's used by people because
it's safe to sit next to that dragon and
spread any kind of ideology you want so
i just want to kind of say that we
um
have agreed on the
on the on on
on this particular dragon but i still
don't trust anybody who uses that yeah
but we have issues with boundaries right
no no it's so this is a very complicated
problem right so renee gerard believed
that
it was a human proclivity to demonize
the scapegoat and then drive it out of
the village and yeah i've thought about
that a lot we need a place to put satan
like seriously this is a serious issue
should he be inside the village or
outside
well maybe he should be inside you
right that's that's the fundamental
essence of the christian doctrine it's
like
satan is best fought on the
battleground of your soul
and that's
that's right
that's right can you actually put words
to the kind of dragon that you're
fighting is it is it is it communism
it's the spirit of cain
yeah
can you elaborate
well what the spirit of cain is
so
adam and eve are thrown out of paradise
for becoming self-conscious or when they
become self-conscious
they're destined to work
and the reason for that as far as i can
tell is that
to become self-conscious is to become
aware of the future that's to become
aware of death that certainly happens in
the adam and eve story to have the
scales fall from your eyes
and then
the consequence of that is that you now
have to labor
to prevent the catastrophes of the
future
that's work work is sacrifice
sacrifice of the present to the future
it's delay of gratification it's
maturity
it's
sacrificed to something as well and in
the spirit of something
okay so now adam and eve
have two children
cain and abel so those are the first two
people in history
because the garden of eden doesn't count
and they're the first two people who are
born rather than created so they're the
first two people and that's a hell of a
story because it's a story of
fratricidal murder that degenerates into
genocide flood and tyranny so
that's fun for the opening salvo of the
story let's say
and abel and cain both make sacrifices
and for some reason abel's sacrifices
please god
it's not exactly clear why
and canes don't
now
there's an
implication in the text that it's
because cain's sacrifices are true or
second rate
god says that abel brings the finest to
the sacrificial altar he doesn't say
that about cain so you can imagine that
cain is sacrificing away but he's he's
holding something in reserve
he's not all in he's not bringing his
best to the table he's not offering his
best to god
and so abel thrives like mad
and everyone loves him and he gets
exactly what he needs and wants exactly
when he needs and wants it he's favored
of god
and cain is bearing this terrible burden
forward and working
and his sacrifices are re