483. Woodstock for the Adventurous and Responsible | Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying
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Hello, everybody. I had the opportunity today to speak to Brett Weinstein and Heather Haying

with whom I've had many discussions, always a pleasure. We concentrated on two issues today and then branched out into many others. The first is Brett's plan to foment a celebration in Washington, D.C. on the 29th of September.

The movement is Rescue the Republic. The website is jointheresistance.org, www.jointheresistance.org.

On X, the handle is @RescueRepublic. Okay, so that's on the 29th of September. What is that? Well, that's what we discussed. That was one of the main issues we discussed. It's a celebration that brings together musicians and comedians and speakers

What would you say of the alternative media, of the alternative entertainment enterprise, of the alternative political system that seems to be gathering itself around Trump? Kennedy will speak there, Tulsi Gabbard, for example. All the speakers haven't yet been identified. I'm going to attend. So this is an invitation to all of you to come to that on the 29th. You can get, as I said, you can get information at

Jointheresistance.org. So we talked about that. We talked about, and then we talked more philosophically, scientifically about the convergence that Heather and Brett and I all see between the advanced findings of evolutionary biology and the proclamations, let's say, the historical, historically grounded proclamations of the theologians and the religious types. And

And that was associated with a conversation we also had about Peterson Academy, this new online university that launched three weeks ago. Heather and Brett lecture there, but so do a number of the figures on the more cognitive science and theological side who seem to be integrally involved in this integration, this new integration. John Vervaeke and Jonathan Paggio-Ross.

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

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

With pre-enrollment, the formal launch was on September 9th. We have 31,000 students at the moment. And it looks like it's going extremely well. We're curating the social media part of it carefully. We want to produce a social media network. I think we have produced it, actually, that's very positive, you know, without being naive and sentimental. And we're very careful about that.

What would you say? Rewarding the kind of behavior you might like to see if what you were trying to do was promote university-level civilized discourse. And we're hoping as well that the, because this is an open question technologically, you know, like what are the preconditions for an iterable, non-degenerating social media game?

in the long, medium to long run? And the answer is nobody knows, right? Nobody knows the answer to that question. So we're hoping that the fact that there's a substantial entry fee

I mean, it's a reasonable fee, and the price that we've set Peterson Academy at seems to be very acceptable to our students. We've got positive feedback on that, but it's a high enough bar, as far as I'm concerned, so that it'll screen out the bots and the trolls and the bad casual corporate actors and the manipulators. And then we're also monitoring behavior without being too heavy-handed about it to make sure that

You know, the all-caps crowd and the derisive psychopaths don't get free reign, which seems to be what happens in a social media network that's free.

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

Well, it's fantastic to see you, Jordan. Congratulations on launching Peterson Academy. That's a huge accomplishment in and of itself. And we're very excited that our course is apparently popular on the site. It's fascinating how you describe the social media approach, which is not something I was otherwise aware of, but of course, I'm aware of the social media landscape in general and how one has to negotiate these things. And it feels to me like an amazing

I don't know if it's counterpoint or follow on to some of what we're trying to do in the course that we have done for Peterson Academy so far, which is we're trying something new. It's not what we do in that, I think we called it evolutionary inference course. It's not something we've done before where we invited students to play what we're calling evolutionary jeopardy, following from the observation that when you see an organism in the world,

they are manifesting evolutionary answers to ecological questions, conditions, constraints, opportunities that you may not be aware of. And our job as biologists and also, you know, as a psychologist in the human landscape is to figure out what the conditions, constraints, opportunities, what the questions were that produced the thing that you've now got in front of you. And so that's all assuming that you have an answer for which there is a plausible, credible,

not necessarily static, but consistent to some degree across time question that you are now seeing the answer to, whereas what you're trying to navigate with Producer's Academy and the social media landscape is, oh my goodness, you know, is there a stable...

ecological condition, as it were, that there is an answer to that can't be gamed, that can produce... That's exactly right. That's exactly right. Well, I actually think to some degree that the deeper you go into the philosophical hierarchy, the farther down the hierarchy you go towards fundamental assumptions, the more what you're actually seeing are

iterated attempts to answer exactly that question. So the question would be something like, what's the optimal game playable by the largest number of people, extending over the largest span of time, perhaps that incrementally improves as you play it, right? And what are the preconditions for that? And one of the things I've been thinking about with regards to the social media landscape is that

What we're contending with with the big tech networks that are free is the proclivity of attentional resources to be parasitized by psychopathic predators, essentially, but by predatory parasites, which, by the way, is the definition of a psychopath. The predatory parasites will game attentional resources if they have free reign to do so because they're extremely valuable predators.

And so you need barriers of a variety of sort or consequences with regards to that non-reciprocal behavior or the system gets gamed entirely, I believe, by the parasitical predators and then it comes crashing down. Now, and I would also say possibly that they're in favor of it crashing down in some deep way because...

their mode of reproduction, even short-term mating, let's say short-term exploitative mating, is actually likely more successful in extremely chaotic conditions.

So now the issue would be, well, how do we set up a communicative landscape that rewards truly reciprocal altruism, let's say, and that keeps the predatory parasites at bay? And we actually don't know how to do that in virtual space, especially with the anonymous types, because we can't reputation track them. Right, because it's impossible to do iteration.

Because attention inherently looks at a short time horizon and goes, "Ooh, that feels good." And with iteration, individuals who are actually interested in learning, in playing a part in this ecosystem that you're creating, but don't know how to get out of their own way, they need iterative feedback that is reward.

And if individuals are kind of trying to do the right thing, but they're anonymous in this space, there's no way to get the iterative feedback that will enable them to seek the long term, the long time horizon. - Right, right. Oh, I hadn't thought about it so much as a decrement on the reinforcement side. Although, you know, I can see exactly what you mean by that, 'cause they don't accrue the reputational gains as a consequence of their anonymity that would come to a fair player in a normal situation.

but they also don't accrue the punishments, right? Because you can't reputation track them. And, you know, that actually brings up another issue that might be pathologizing our social communication networks, which is that

The algorithms don't know what time frame over which to optimize attentional grip so that the game remains playable. And so what seems to be happening at the moment is that we have the worst of hedonic gratification allied with the worst of psychopathic enabling. And those two things go together. And so if the algorithms are maximizing attention,

what would you say, grip of attentional spans of 15 to 30 seconds, let's say, all they're going to do is reward— they're going to reward

they're going to reward short-term manipulation of attention in a manner that doesn't iterate well across time. It's kind of like corporations focusing obsessively on quarterly reports when they should be devoting at least some of the resources to thinking about whether or not they're going to be around in 10 years. Now, the problem is, as you guys know, that the farther out in time you attempt to plan for, the more likely your plans are to go astray because you're

the error of your predictions increases as you move out into time. But, so, I mean, these, go ahead, Brett. That's not the only issue. And so, this is an interesting discussion because it really, in some sense, treads through some reasonably well-understood evolutionary ground and into a landscape that is not politically understood to be analogous, but should be. Many years ago, when Game B was launched,

an active group of people meeting to discuss how to create good governance, I focused on the question of how to prevent the evolution of corruption. And I had a hard time persuading people that that was actually job number one. Their sense was, well, we don't even have a system that could be corrupted yet, so let's deal with that later. And the key insight is that

If you focus on it later, you'll lose. Yeah, right. What you have to do is create a landscape of incentives that is ruinous for those who attempt to corrupt it. And the reason that that is the key element is that if you don't do that, what will happen is you will create an evolutionary arms race in which those who are wishing to corrupt your system for whatever reason

are seeking those quadrants where you can't detect them. And even if you detect them in 9 out of 10 quadrants, they'll find the one that you don't, and that's where they will evolve into the next phase of the game. If you want to prevent that from happening, what you have to do is zero out their account so early that there's no evolutionary feedback that makes them better at gaming the system over time. And so what you're talking about in the online environment

is there are really two elements to it. One, can you create a cost so that there's not effectively

An infinite ability to throw disposable accounts at a problem in order to find the loophole. Yeah, right. Exactly, exactly. That's free evolutionary experimentation with no cost of illness, pain, or death. Well, why the hell wouldn't that proliferate like mad? Of course it would. And wait until the AI systems get a handle on it. Right.

Right. Then we really lose control of it. Oh, man, that's for sure. So what we need, and I actually would predict that what we will see across civilization as AI enables amoral actors at a new level, is we will see the prioritization of things that cannot be faked with the augmentation by AI. In other words, there will be a prioritization of things

Music in which it is not a repeat of something on the album, but it is something generated in real time and therefore that did not involve the consulting of AI. We will see interactive comedy rather than somebody doing a five-minute bit that could have been augmented reality.

by AI. Live events. Live events. Live events are going to become even more premium than they are because they'll be the only things that people can see are actually real. I think that's already happening, actually.

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

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

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

they become roughly equivalent. Now, the problem with recorded lectures like the ones that you guys offered is that they take away the dynamism of the interaction between the professors and the students in the moment, right? And that's some of that transformation that you described. The benefit, of course, I think is that

Because we can curate that while there's reach and cost, those are major benefits, right? But there's also the case that we can very carefully curate the lecturers so we can make sure that they're of the highest possible quality. Now, what we want to do in addition to that is we want to set up a social landscape. Like one of the things we'd like to see at Peterson Academy is that the students, once there's enough student enrollment, assuming that happens, that people do set up courses.

what would you say, social occasions like watch parties.

you know, where 20 or 30 people could get together and watch a lecture when it first emerges. And we're trying to also figure out how to incorporate, you can imagine a three-day convention, for example, where we bring, you know, several thousand people together or more than that with a dozen professors and run it for three days. And we want to flesh out the social element, and that's partly why we concentrate a lot on the development of the social media network too. So,

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

fostering the development of productive peer networks. They sort of let that happen by happenstance. So I think we can do a better job. And so we're very, very cognizant of that particular problem. And it's a major focus of address as we move forward. But we've got all sorts of things planned for in-person events. And given that the cost of what we hope will develop into

full high-level university equivalent education the cost is so low we should be able to offer people relatively special experiences to go along with it that will fill that that'll fill that vacuum so yeah, so Brett the part of the solution to the problem that you raised with regards to the proliferation of evolutionary actors let's say in the pathological space is cost of entry right this is it could be that

free social media networks are doomed from the outset. And I think there's got to be something to that. And tell me what you think about that. Well, I do think there are ways to structure it that can solve the problem without cost being the key element. Cost is useful, but of course, you don't really want to enable people

anything that has effectively indefinitely deep pockets to be able to get around your barrier to entry. In other words, if you're talking about, let's say, political dialogue on social networks of consequence,

If there are trillions of dollars at stake in a given election, then somebody might be able to spend the millions or tens of millions to game your network, even though it doesn't make sense from a profitability perspective for them to do it. So you want to have a system that negates this. And one way to do that is to use, to basically create a stigma for inauthentic behavior. Right.

for parroting things, cutting and pasting things, consulting AI in some way that causes your comment to be derivative. And so Reddit is now completely gamed. There's no question about it. But it did have a couple of elements that worked really well.

Allowing users to essentially down-regulate that which was not useful and up-regulate that which was insightful, it's something that could be resurrected. If you can figure out how to stop the down-regulation from being gamed by collectives of activists, for example, right? Right.

Yeah, yeah. Well, at the moment, you know, what we've done so far, and we're going to make this as transparent as possible as we move forward. Hey, with 30,000 students, we've had three bad actors. That's all. And our policy at the moment is we're watching, you know, we're watching the social media interactions constantly to see what's going on.

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

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

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

emphasizes quality. Well, I have a couple suggestions for you in this regard. One, I often have trouble compelling people of this point also, but the key or one of them to making such a thing function if it is a private space is very clear, simple rules at the door that allow for

effectively complete discretion in the enforcing of common sense measures. In other words, what you want is to say, look, by signing up for this, you are agreeing to act in good faith. Here is what that means. You're allowed to play devil's advocate, but you're not allowed to misrepresent your position or the reasons for it.

How will we adjudicate questions? Well, we will try to adjudicate them out in the open, but if there are cases, which there will be, where we can't, we will do it by a jury. It will be chosen by this mechanism.

Should we find problems with the jury mechanism? We have a council of people we believe are of excellent character who will be the final arbiters, something like that. So that at the point somebody says, you're censoring me,

The answer is actually, here are the rules that you signed up for. And this is not an end user license agreement that was designed for you to glaze over and click yes. This was actually designed for you to read it, to understand it, and for it to change your approach to the system itself. It was designed

to impress you and invite you and cause you to be deliberate. Larry Arnn does that at Hillsdale when all the undergraduates show up. And it isn't some pro forma thing because Arnn is very involved with the undergraduates themselves directly. He's the president of the university. And so he makes this a personal priority. And they have an honor code.

And part of the honor code is that there is a code of behavior at Hillsdale, and it isn't the same as, say, state universities. And there's a state university just down the street, so to speak, and you're more than welcome to go there. But if you're going to go to Hillsdale, then this is the code you're going to abide by. They have a 1% dropout rate in their first year.

Wow. Right? Absolutely. Wow. And so we're going to write an honor code for Peterson Academy, and it's going to be short, and we're going to hope that people read it and pay attention to it carefully. That's a great idea. Yeah, yeah. Go ahead, Heather. We actually, we did this.

Within Evergreen. So Evergreen obviously was a deeply flawed institution, but it had remarkable pieces within which we were able to do some remarkable things. And one of the things that was required of professors in programs, these full-time programs that faculty taught and that students took, was we had documents that were, strangely, there was a lot of religious overtone in the language there, called covenants.

And every, the faculty in any given program wrote an original, supposed to be, covenant for that program that all the students read and signed on to and agreed to. And it was, you know, very much, you know, within a program at Evergreen, it was very much like what you're describing as Hillsdale writ large. So within a program, we could say, you know, here are the rules of engagement.

Here is effectively my promises to you as faculty to students and what you are promising to each other and to me in return. And there are plenty of other choices to go to within the evergreen ecosystem if this doesn't suit you. You can go any number of other places. And while evergreen writ large, say, in this case, the analogy being like the higher ed system writ large,

It was deeply flawed and had a lot of people leaving very quickly. Our programs didn't, right? This worked extraordinarily effectively. And I don't know. I'm pleased to hear that it's working at Hillsdale. I'm excited to hear that you're trying to do it, that you're going to be working on it at Peterson Academy. I don't know. I don't know.

My question is always one of scale. Like, to what degree do the interpersonal—when I can look you in the eye, you know, when I can look—when we were teaching together, I can look our 50 students in the eye and know something true about each of them within the first week beyond their name, like something about each one of them. Then we have a relationship such that the first time I have to say to you, what were you doing? Or, no, I think you're wrong.

They don't mistake me for some rando authoritarian who is just looking to get to the end of the quarter and to get my paycheck. They know that I have something real about them in my head and my heart. So that's the thing that's not replicable at scale, but maybe there are ways around that.

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

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

Then the rules have to be known, and then there has to be a mechanism that's clear and transparent for enforcing the rules. That's not censorship, right? Because everybody—it's no more censorship than the referee's role in a game, and I do think that that's the right analogy. I have two more suggestions for you in this regard. One is—

It will be the lesson of civilization, in fact, is that it is effectively impossible to write that set of rules and anticipate the way in which it will be gamed, especially if you have enabled actors that evolve in response. The way to succeed is to leverage that same evolutionary force in the immunity of your system.

So if you, the simplest case would be that you deploy two related rule sets with a difference that you don't know whether it will play positively or negatively and you monitor the outcome and then you basically, you spawn the one that functioned better. And then an even more out there idea is

is that you allow, you divide, you know, you could divide it into more than two, but let's say you divided your population of participants into an A group and a B group, and you let...

The A group govern B's landscape and the B group govern A's landscape. And you let the people within each of the landscapes dictate whether or not the rules are working. I cut, you choose. Right. It's I cut, you choose. Okay, I'll think about that. I'll think about that. What do you think of Musk's solution with community notes? Because what he's really doing with that, you could say, is bringing the

possibility of distributed cognition to the problem of bad actors. And it's analogous, as far as I can see, to the free market solution of pricing. It's something like that. And so is that

Well, what do you think about that solution? It's more difficult to game, although Wikipedia had that, and it's being gamed eventually, right? Right. That's the thing. You need to enable a system that is capable of adapting faster than those who are trying to game it. Yeah, that's the parasite problem. Right. So Musk's solution actually did work.

at first, and increasingly doesn't. And the problem is that it is too static and therefore gammable. Right, right, right. But it also defaults to what the majority believes. Yeah, yeah. Right? So, you know, the rare new insight will get disappeared by such an approach. Right, right. And that's a big problem. And that's actually the problem of populism, right?

Yeah, exactly. So, you know, I've been investigating the manner in which traditional religious structures solve that problem. And what they do is they have two axes of verification, you could say. And one is appeal to the population that's now, say. But that has to be allied with a vertical orientation, which is something like

continual reference to the traditions of the past that made iterable games possible. It's lineage. It's lineage. Lineage. Lineage and the texts that your ancestors wrote. Well, it's half of lineage. That's the problem. It doesn't look forward. So in our last discussion, Jordan, we talked about my version of the sacred versus the shamanistic. And I know you have a related but different version of it. But

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

And what we do not want to do, and Heather was just alluding to this, is you do not want to set up any system that says that because a perspective is vanishingly rare, it is wrong. Right.

Wrong. Yeah, right. Because sometimes that's wrong. In fact, every great idea starts that way. Exactly. The last thing you want to do is frustrate the process that generates valid new ideas that change everything. Well, that's like eradicating beneficial mutations. Right, exactly. So what you want to do is... Probably at the same ratio, too, honestly. Yeah, right, right. You need three axes where you were describing two.

Right? There's how it plays in the present. There's how it references to what we understand from the past and how well does it predict things in the future. And we want to be specifically aware that something that successfully predicts things in the future that nothing else predicts is likely to have a kind of validity, whether we understand what it's based on or not. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. All right. Let's turn our attention away from that problem for a moment to what you guys are doing now.

on the political landscape right at the moment. And so you have a rally planned in Washington on September 29th. And so would you walk us through, well, let's start with who's involved in exactly what this is and what its aims are and just tell the whole story.

Sure. And I will say I struggle with the terminology. This, to me, is post-political, non-ideological. Yes, it's technically an event, but it's an event, or we are hoping it is an event in the same way that Woodstock was a music festival. We are hoping, actually, that this is

a moment at which we first see a sea change in the way we conduct ourselves and interact with each other. I think of it actually as hopefully the bookend that closes the era that opened with Woodstock and opens the next era in which we recognize just how much we have in common, just how much we have to lose if our system fails, which it seems to be doing in front of our eyes.

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

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

Okay, so if you do miss anyone, that's where people can go for the additional information, and we'll post that in the description of the video as well. Yes. Okay, so fire away with regards to participants. Okay, and I will also say that there are people who are in the process of agreeing to come who aren't listed yet, so stay tuned. Even somebody who's not listed today may be tomorrow. Okay.

So we have Bobby Kennedy coming to speak. We have Tulsi Gabbard. We have Laura Logan. Heather and I will be speaking. We have Russell Brand. We have Matt Taibbi. We have Jamie Dore. Rob Schneider. Rob Schneider. We have...

Several musicians. Yeah, we have Skillet coming. We have Five Times August, who was a tremendous voice during the COVID madness. We have Tennessee Jet coming. Deepak.

Are they going to play, any of these people going to play as well as talk? Yeah, we have speakers, we have comedians, and we have musicians. Great, great, great. That's a good approach, that multimodal approach. And that does make it different than the standard, let's say, political rally approach.

Right, and I think partly what that does, we did that a bit at this ARC, Alliance for Responsible Citizenship meeting in London. You know, I was very insistent on the musical and artistic element, and I think it's because the propositional...

it has to be surrounded by the imagistic and aesthetic. That's more like the domain of dream, right? It's like the way that I look at cognitive architecture is that there's a propositional landscape, which we've actually modeled pretty well now, I would say, with large language models. But outside of that, there's an imagistic, aesthetic, and dreamlike landscape. That's the landscape of the imagination. And outside of that is the embodied procedural realm,

And a full event covers all three of those domains. You can't assume that the propositional alone is going to carry it. And I think it's partly because the propositional is easier to

In some ways, it has flaws and it's easier to, it's easier to dement it and capture it than it is to capture the imagination and the procedural landscape. Anyways, if you flesh it out with those additional sources, it's also a much richer experience for the people that are involved. So that's...

It's more engaging. It's more fun. And that's not trivial if the fun isn't, you know, that short-term hedonic immediate gratification that we were describing earlier. If it's allied with something like upward striving, it's much more profound and impactful occurrence. And integrated and more human and more holistic because what you're calling propositional –

I might call features of the enlightenment, of the rational, of the logical, of the analytical.

Whereas we have sort of lateral to that, but no less important narrative and art and creativity. And by sort of moving between these two spaces, we have the opportunity for discovery that we may not have in either place. Yeah, definitely. And also what you're calling the propositional, what I think of as sort of the fruits of the Enlightenment, are...

are easily made into reductionist tenets that then become metrics that are quantifiable and numbers are necessary and important for us to understand our world, but they are not sufficient. And they can be made to seem sufficient, and that's one of the lessons, I think, of COVID.

and frankly, to some degree, of this political moment we're living in too, that you throw enough, these are the numbers, don't worry about it, I'm the expert, just trust me, at people. And many of them kind of go, okay, yeah, I'm just not educated enough to understand that. You've got the numbers, you're the expert, we'll go with that. Well, it's also possibly the case that that also accounts for maybe why the Democratic tradition or the Republican tradition works, you know, is because...

Intellectuals are propositional experts, but that doesn't make them wise. And wisdom, I suspect, has something to do with the alignment between the propositional and the imaginistic and the procedural. So it's an embodied quality.

And it's a quality of the imagination. There's no shortage of people who aren't educated and who aren't very articulate who can still tell the difference between right and wrong. And they can do it pretty unerringly. I mean, dogs can do that to some degree, right? I mean, they're not so bad at sniffing out pathological character, but they can't propositionalize it. You know, I mean, and dogs are very good at identifying boundaries between different territories and determining what's a threat and what's not. And so...

My point is there are other forms of intelligence that aren't propositional, and it's very easy for those who have the advantage in the propositional space to assume that they're superior in terms of their grip on knowledge, even outside their specialized domains, but that they're also wiser and more moral. And there's no correlation between cognitive ability and conscientiousness, say, zero. There's no correlation between

Intelligence looks like it's orthogonal to all the personality traits. And so, it's a funny thing that there's no relationship between general cognitive ability and wisdom or morality. So, if you're really smart, you can go bad, very badly, very, very badly. Well, I wonder if that's going to hold up, actually. There are reasons to imagine that you might start seeing a correlation between...

intelligence, the fly in the ointment being how good are you at actually measuring that? We have proxies for measuring your capacity to succeed, but to succeed in an amoral system, maybe it's not such a good proxy for intelligence. But back to the earlier point, I want to point to something that Tom Stoppard said about humor. He said, laughter is the sound of comprehension.

Right, that's good. My point would be that the comedians, this will become less and less true the more they leverage AI to figure out what people will laugh at. It will become a self-referential land of nonsense. But for the moment, while AI is decidedly not funny, and it's really terrible at being funny so far, the comedian is traversing

an edge between what we are conscious of and what we are barely conscious of. And when the comedian delivers a joke that causes the room to erupt in laughter,

The comedian has found something that everybody in the room is aware of, but they are not aware that everybody else is aware of it. And so the room comes to understand itself as of like mind all at once, right? That's an extremely powerful, very ancient property. Often of like mind about something forbidden. I think of that as that's often the translation of the procedural or imaginistic into the explicit because that's the comedian gives words explicitly.

that gives words to something inchoate. It's like it's already...

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

This is a strange thing, is that it isn't obvious at all that that capacity for spontaneous laughter can be gamed. You know? I mean, you can get... Are there cruel forms of laughter? There are. But it's such an unconscious response, right? It's pre... You laugh despite yourself often. Yeah. You certainly laugh before you think about whether you should laugh. And in fact... And so there's something... If you...

think about whether you should laugh, then you will commit a humor sin, which is laughing at the wrong moment. It's interesting that there's a cost to laughing when the punchline hasn't been delivered or after you know everybody else is laughing and it's like you're trying to cover the fact that you're really not one of us.

Yeah, that inappropriate laughter has been pointed out as, like, that's one of the things that comes up as a critique of Kamala Harris consistently, right? Is for better or for worse, she's tarred with the brush of inappropriate laughter. And you're pointing out that that's the gaming of something that's an evolutionarily designed marker of something like cognitive integrity. Laughter itself has been ganked.

And I would say that actually one of the most troubling inventions that human beings have devised is going to sound preposterous, but one of the most troubling... Laugh track. Laugh track. That's it. Yeah, yeah, no kidding, eh? And the idea that

You can be induced to believe that something was humorous, that you did not find humorous on your own, actually starts leading the population in the direction of believing things very deeply that they would never have accepted in the first place. So it may be used just to sell deodorant and cereal on some trivial sitcom, but the capacity to induce humans to

To come to conclusions they wouldn't otherwise reach by making it sound as if they were in a room full of people laughing in agreement, that's a very troubling thing. Right, right, right. Heather? To go back to your quote from Stoppard, the brilliant Tom Stoppard, laughter is the sound of comprehension. Is that it?

I think, I agree, but I think in your telling of the story of what happens as comedians talk actually conflates two things, both of which are important. And we've been talking about the individual coming to consciousness. The comedian says something in the individual brain, they go, oh, okay.

I didn't know. That was subconscious until now, and now it's explicit. Now it's conscious. I didn't know. Silly me. Silly me, or, oh, God, he can see that, or whatever it is. But then there's also the population level.

And you alluded to this in what you said, but I think it's no less important than maybe exactly what a rally, for instance, is meant to do and exactly what we need right now. And I'm sure you experienced this, Jordan. We certainly experienced this, where people will come up to us and say, you know, thank you for saying the things that you say. I don't feel alone.

I didn't know. Or that I couldn't say. I couldn't say. I had come to understand this, but I thought I was the only one in the universe. Yeah, right. And so, you know, taking it back to comedy in a group of anonymous people, a large group of anonymous people,

If everyone laughs at the same moment, not only did that maybe bring yourself to consciousness of that thing at that moment, or maybe you already knew it, but if everyone laughs, you know, I am not alone.

I am in sync. We are synchronized. We are seeing the same things. Even with regard to the unspeakable. Even with regard to the unspeakable. And so right away, that gives you a momentum and an opportunity for action that maybe you did not know was possible before. So I think that's an additional. The individual and the population are not the same. Oh, absolutely. And I think comedy potentially activates both. Yeah, it's the power of...

the room or the population that comes to understand itself as aligned. And I would point out it's a little harder to describe this with respect to music. And I would say music has been radically distorted by technology beginning at the player piano. But the ability to listen to music and have it be the same no matter how many times you play it is a very unnatural way for music to exist.

music used to be a living entity even uh you know a tribe that was singing the same song that had been sung a thousand times it was different every single time and it was therefore capable of adapting to the changing mood of the people who were who were participating in it um so what we moderns who are drenched in music all the time we don't even notice it sometimes it's soundtracking some story we're watching and we're not thinking about the fact that there's music

But what we miss being so thoroughly surrounded by music is the incredibly powerful and rarefied experience when the band or whatever it is, the musician or the band is actually in some indescribable way tied into the audience and the room is electric and airy.

every is synced and everybody is feeling a powerful emotion and they know they are feeling it together right and they are being stimulated by the same thing and they are feeling the same way and even if you record that thing and you play it for somebody and you say look at how great this was they don't get the same feeling of discovery that that room had and it's it's like the comedy and it's

It's important. It's part of why Rescue the Republic is structured around, you know, yes, the propositional. It has to be there. We have to articulate what it is that we fear and what it is that we hope. But comedy and music are...

much deeper mechanisms of conveying the sense of unity, which is really what this is about. It's not a political rally. This is about the unity movement discovering that actually we value Western civilization, we fear that it is coming apart, and we are going to put our differences aside to

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us colon the story or US colon the story, either way. And he's been doing a lot of sophisticated polling. And he's identified a very large number of statements where there is above 85% agreement among Americans. You know, this is actually tied into this psychopathic manipulation story that we started with, because you could imagine that

tell me what you think of this hypothesis, is that we've got 3-5% psychopathic actors in any given population. Okay, now the question is, how do they maneuver? And the answer is, well, they use language in a purely instrumental manner, so they're only after their own advancement. And even in a non-interval way,

They're only after their own advancement. So they'll use whatever words are around to gain that end. So that now you can imagine that the most contentious elements of the political discourse then are going to be hijacked by the psychopaths. Psychopaths on the left, they're going to gain, they generally gain compassion as far as I can tell. And the psychopaths on the right, they gain group, gain group identity. At the moment, they're probably gaining free speech and

And they put themselves forward as avatars of these moral virtues, but it's completely illusory because they're just manipulating. And then what they make it, they make it appear that the political divide is much greater and much more intense than it is, and that tends to polarize. And so, you know, we know that

Things started to come unglued around 2014, 2015, something like that seems to be the real onset of this malaise that grips us at the present time. I don't think it's chance at all that that was about the same time when these mass-scale social media communication networks emerged and allowed the psychopaths free reign.

So, I mean, Greg's polling data is quite marked because even on the most contentious issues, for example, abortion, there's widespread American agreement on the essential parameters of the laws. And so, okay. Now, I want to ask a more personal question. You and I, the three of us, we've been going back and forth to some degree about this event in Washington. And since talking to you, especially on the X Live podcast,

The space.

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

Effectively, the eight pillars, which we believe are things that all patriotic Americans would easily agree to, these are things that are jeopardized by what we call industrial complexes. And by framing the argument...

You know, there's a practical what will happen on the day of the event, and then there's a much larger picture about what it stands for. Most people will not be able to make it to D.C. But having this picture articulated and watching...

Americans recognize exactly what you've just described, right? And Greg Hurwitz's effort is excellent. But I would point out, we also have an earlier version of this, the Hidden Tribes Report from somewhere 2018, I think.

suggested that there was a vast, what they called exhausted middle of people who agreed on almost every important thing that is being drowned out by these fringes that have polarized us even over things that we are not in disagreement about.

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

Well, I will say we have been, I won't even say wrestling because I'm not sure there's even any disagreement about it. But even for somebody like me who is fundamentally secular in my understanding of the universe.

It is pretty clear that there is something that is reasonably described as a spiritual dimension to the battle that we are engaged in. Not only does the opposition appear to be playing with demonic tropes for reasons I can scarcely imagine, but there is a recognition of this being a historical moment in the making one way or the other.

And that something well beyond our well-being as a modern people is at stake. Our ability to continue is at stake. And so, I don't know how well that answers the question. What do you make of the fact that as a secular thinker, this is the corner that you found yourself pushed into? See, I noticed something in my clinical practice over the years that –

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

And maybe there's something that unites all forms of misery at the bottom, all forms of unnecessary misery, let's say, at the bottom. And then you can be suffering from manifestations of that psychopathology at different degrees. But then you could imagine that there's an evolved language for dealing with those different levels of severity.

upward as well as downward, and that we recognize the language that properly deals with the most severe situations as religious. There's no difference. In my estimation, there's no difference in the true sense between what's religious and what's deep. Now, that still leaves the mystery of deep, but it moves us further in our understanding. Let's put it this way.

I'm pretty sure I can explain why there appears to be a spiritual dimension to the battle that we are in, in perfectly dry, secular, materialist terms, without difficulty, in fact. I don't think it needs to be done, though. At some level, we can say that those religious terms are responsive to the critical role

battles and turning points in history, and they have encoded something very deep about how the population that got through those predicaments understood itself.

And that we should probably be tapping into those toolkits, which frankly can go hundreds of years without being needed. And so they are not the stuff that is familiar. We have to reach into something that goes beyond the regular toolkit. I can say that in secular terms. But I guess my point would be, I actually find no need to do it at the moment. The point is actually, you know, the last thing you want in, if you were on a battlefield,

and you were fighting a battle for your survival. That is not the time for somebody to be talking about, you know, the conservation of energy and the kinetics and blah, blah, blah. The point is that's the time to figure out how to defeat your enemy in the most practical terms that you can.

There are other times to describe, you know, the trajectory of the missiles and the way the aerodynamics might be optimized. I think, if I may, I feel like you're conflating...

secular with reductionist rationality. No. Because I think we need narrative for sure. But if I may try to steel man the position that maybe we shouldn't entirely go into the religious and spiritual narratives here in trying to reunify the republic, it's that many of the people who can't see the

who are seeing pieces of it but are still sort of blinkered by, you know, especially the political party to which they have always belonged and cannot imagine going anywhere else.

proudly understand themselves to be not religious. And, you know, we aren't religious, we are secular, we are evolutionary biologists with a deep respect for religion, and that doesn't seem to offend most secular people. But if all of our stories are inherently spiritual-seeming or religious-seeming, that will make it easier to dismiss us, I think. We've been wrestling with exactly that issue with ARC.

So I have a proposition for you that's analogous, I would say, to the idea of minimal necessary force. I think that can be

propagated into other domains of conceptualization effectively. Minimal necessary emotion in political discussions, that's helpful. But then I would also say like the gospel injunction to render unto Caesar and differentially render unto God is also appropriate because my rule of thumb is not to use religious language to explicate anything that can be explained without it.

Like, it should be reserved for those situations where there isn't any other language that appears to suffice. Like, for me, for example, the horrors of the Auschwitz camp guard who enjoyed his occupation was best described in the language of good and evil. There wasn't anything else that seemed to suffice. Now, there are lesser sins, you might say, that you can speak about in a much more secular and maybe a causal and reductionistic way, but there are

There are situations where

only the religious language should be utilized, and I would say also perhaps reserved for those circumstances, because otherwise it gets cheapened, and that's perhaps precisely why you don't cast pearls before swine, let's say, right? You save the heavy guns for when they're necessary. So, and there's another issue that we're skirting around here to some degree, which is also exceedingly complex, right? Because, Heather, you made reference to the necessity of narrative. You

You see, I think one of the things the postmodernists got right, like fundamentally and profoundly right, and this is partly why we have this culture war raging, is because

as despicable as they are in many regards, as nihilistic and as Marxist as they are in many regards, the postmodernists put forward the proposition that our fundamental frames of perceptual reference were narrative in structure. And so we seem to have this situation where we have a narrative mode of apprehension and a scientific mode of apprehension, but

that the narrative mode is more fundamental. I think the scientific is nested inside the narrative, and I don't think that that can be... I don't think that there's any way of altering that. Now, I think the postmodernists went wrong. Like, they got the problem right. We live in a narrative. I think actually that a narrative is a description of the structure that we use to organize our perceptions.

So that means even the perceptions that you use as a scientist are prefigured by this underlying narrative. There are narratives that work well with the scientific endeavor, like the idea, the a priori narrative idea that the universe is pervaded by a logos that is intelligible, right? That's a starting point for the scientific endeavor. And that

investigating that logos is beneficial. That's another narrative. And when you have those two, you can begin the scientific enterprise. But I think what the postmodernists did wrong was

After having discovered that we saw the world through a narrative, they leapt to the essentially Marxist presupposition that that narrative was necessarily and inevitably one of power. That's right. And I think that's technically wrong. I mean, partly for the reasons we talked about at the beginning of this podcast is psychopaths play the power game.

And they've never been successful enough to get above about 5% of the population. Like, it is a local minima, power, but it's not an optimized game. And I think what we've done in the West is we've actually figured out a good way of distributing an optimized game that isn't based on power, even though it can be corrupted by power, in a way that everyone can play and in a self-sustaining and self-improving manner.

It doesn't mean the power critique is irrelevant, because I think when those systems degenerate, one of the primary ways they degenerate is in the direction of power and compulsion. We saw that during COVID, for example. We see that with these gigantic monstrosity amalgams of state and corporation that are tromping around the world, you know,

destroying people underfoot. Those are the industrial complexes. Yes, exactly, exactly. Oh, and with regards to the tilt towards the demonic, so imagine this. I think that's actually easily explainable. So, you know, the large language models have basically showed us that you can map ideas and their associations.

And so that's essentially what they do is they calculate the statistical regularity between words, but also between phrases and sentences and paragraphs. And it's incredibly computationally complex, but they're pulling out the pattern of the logos, let's say. But then you can think associated with that complex, this is what the psychoanalysts like Jung really put their finger on. And really, especially Jung, there's like a cloud of images

and dramas that are also statistically associated with those webs of ideas. And so then you imagine if you allow a certain set of a certain complex of ideas to inhabit you, if you invite that in, what comes along is a whole imaginative landscape that's part and parcel of the domain of your imagination that you don't fully comprehend. Like that's the invitation of something that's been classically regarded as possession. And it's the right way of thinking about it.

You know, I think you're inevitably possessed by the spirit that characterizes your most fundamental aim. I don't think there's any way around that. And that's a terrifying thing to understand if you actually understand it. I've been thinking about prayer in that regard, you know. So this is a strange idea, but let me elaborate and tell me what you think about this. So what you do when you call on the large language model is you call, you put forward a call to make prayer.

a form of knowledge that's implicit in the statistical relationships between the ideas, explicit. Okay, but what you make explicit

in that manner is dependent on your aim, it's dependent on the question you ask. So you could say that with a large language model, they game them so they're politically correct, but independently of that, that the answer you get will be dependent on the question that you ask. So then you could say, well, the answer you get is dependent on the spirit of the question that you ask. I think the same thing that happens to us in relationship to our own unconscious is that

The answer you get, the revelatory answer you get when an idea emerges in the phenomenological landscape, you get an answer from the spirit you call upon by the spirit of your question. So think, this has a very weird implication. I'm very curious about what you guys think about this. And I'm not saying that this is definitive, but it means in a way that if you strove, strived to

gather information in the manner that was aiming at the highest possible good, right, truly, then the revelations that you receive from the unconscious are going to be in that spirit. And what that means, this is such a weird thing. I don't know what to make of it. It means that you could call upon God and he would answer even if he didn't exist. And then I think, well, this is weird because there's an insistence in almost all religious schools

in deep religious representations of the divine is that whatever the divine is, is neither real nor non-real. Right? It transcends those categories. And so, well, I've walked myself into that logical corner and I can't see any way out of it. It's a very peculiar thing to contemplate, you know, because you can imagine. So,

And you know that you do this when you're trying to generate hypotheses as a scientist, right? If you're a real scientist, you sit and you think, okay, what's my wish? What's my prayer? I hope that I can evaluate this landscape of data. Does that be the perceptual landscape?

I hope I can negotiate it in the spirit of truth, not being contaminated by my ambition, my desire to raise myself in the esteem of my colleagues, to take revenge on people who criticized my ideas in the past, to show pridefully that I'm intelligent. I want to move all those spirits out of the

inquiry landscape, and I want to generate a hypothesis that's in the spirit of the truth. And I think the better you are clearing your head, so to speak, the more likely you are to do that. So anyways, I will leave that to you guys to...

And called for an end to political hate.

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I was thinking exactly this, that many years ago when people were claiming that what we needed was more diversity in science because that would solve the problems that they saw in science, you know, more diversity of sex and race and such. The answer that I quickly arrived at was that should not affect the answers that we are getting.

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

And so, like, how is it that we can recognize what our interests are as much as possible and say, "Okay, I'm gonna..." Whether or not you're asking God or, you know, something else or trying to do scientific inquiry.

I'm going to recognize that this is me asking a question and that I come with my own biases and perceptual history and senses, and there's no getting around that. I can try to understand it as much as possible, but the question will, at the end of the day, come from me or from you or from you. And then we can apply tools, enlightenment tools, if you will, by which to answer the question that I came up with

in a way such that you then, or you, or you, or you, could ask the same question that I came up with and get the same answer. But the question itself changes based on who is asking it.

Well, so you're pointing to, I think, something that's scandalous in relationship to our analysis of the scientific process within the scientific domain. Now, Thomas Kuhn popped out of this a little bit, and there's been other people working on it. But, you know, when I was a graduate student, there was a lot that was taught to me with regards to scientific method and data analysis and ethical rigor in relationship to those things.

But the issue of hypothesis generation was just treated as a given. And this is really a strange thing because it's not only half of the scientific endeavor, it's more like 80%. It's necessary, if not sufficient. Well, and also...

geniuses ask the right questions, right? I mean, it's a big deal. And see, you made a case for the postmodernist critique of science in some way, because where science was weak was on the rationale for hypothesis generation. Now, you know, there are people who say, well, it's just algorithmic. You read the research literature and you can figure out the next incremental step. And that's actually true. You can often figure out the next incremental step.

But that doesn't make you the kind of genius that leaps the field forward. That's what I call brick-in-the-wall science. If you want to continue building the wall that we already have, then you can maybe put another brick in that wall of scientific understanding. But if it turns out the house that you're building is on the wrong foundation, you'll never get there that way. Yeah, exactly. Or you'll build a Tower of Babel, because that's what that story's about. Yeah, exactly. And so there are levels of...

There are revolutionary levels in hypothesis generation, and the great geniuses are better at identifying patterns at a more fundamental level. And that's not something that you can predict algorithmically merely as a consequence of mastery of the relevant literature, even though that's helpful. And I think that's, Heather, I think that's associated with trait openness.

Because, well, and openness, by the way, does not predict scientific productivity. We did a study. It's zero. The correlation is zero. Conscientiousness does, and that's brick-in-the-wall science. But so imagine this. So imagine a neurological network where there's a probability that any given—this is a function—there's a probability that any given idea will activate another idea.

Okay, so that would be like fluency. The more fluent you are, the more ideas are activated whenever you're fed an idea. But then there's distance from the original idea. And you can calculate this as statistical improbability. And there are tests of creativity that do this. So the open people are more likely to

leap to divergent associations with any given idea. And the more open they are, the more divergent those are going to be. And the more divergent they are, the more probability of them being wrong

but also revolutionary, right? And so, right, right. And so that's really what we see as creativity. And it's something like, maybe it's something akin to mutation probability. Like the high open people mutate their ideas, not only much more frequently, but also much more radically. And Brett, I read a paper a while back that a friend of mine sent me showing that there's a hierarchy of mutational repair in the genome. Mm-hmm.

Absolutely is. And it is adaptively scheduled. Right. So that's very much akin to what we were discussing earlier about the notion that there are foundational ideas that are established by tradition with a penumbra of variation around them. And so it turns out that the more deadly a mutation would be,

to a given gene, the more likely it is that that particular gene will be repaired with 100% accuracy if it mutates. And so that also, that's a way different view than the simpler, what would you say? Of course. Yes, it's way different. It's radically different.

Experimentation occurs on the fringes, which is why we've had this body plan for what? How long has it been? 60 million years? Is that right? Mammals? 90, 100 million years-ish. Yeah. Yeah, and when was the base with this basically symmetric? It's even older than that, right? Oh, 500 million. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So, and it's variations on a theme from 500 million years. Yeah, yeah. So, the question is, what's fundamental and what can be varied without cost? Right.

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

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

So I have the sense that we are converging on a perspective, and I want to talk a little bit. And so the thing that you said— That's happening at Peterson Academy, by the way. We have a bunch of thinkers who are doing exactly that, and it is this new convergence. As you would hope. It's sort of the best indicator that you are on the right track. Either you're telling yourself a foolish story, and everybody's converged on it, or you've discovered something real, and that means it doesn't matter where your starting point is. You'll land there.

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

prayer answering God. And I gave him a evolutionary account of how that could work. In effect, I believe my example would have been something like, were you to pray before going to bed

about some problem that you thought needed a divine intervention in order to remedy it, that would likely prime you to dream about that problem and potentially to wake with some insight about it, which frankly, waking with insights is a known phenomenon. So that is one way in which prayer could actually manifest in an improvement in the world that does not require there to be an external being. So let's just take that as a stem.

The thing I most want to go back to is you're talking, you laid out a principle and your principle was that you should not invoke religious beliefs.

or descriptions where they are not necessary. That is to say, we can explain many things without resorting to those tools, and they should be reserved for... It's part of not using God's name in vain, by the way. Now, here's the point I want to make to you. And frankly, there's a part of me, I know that you...

and me and Richard Dawkins need to have this conversation. And I am sorry to say that he has become cowardly and old age and refuses to have the conversation. That's a, that's a tragedy because I believe a tremendous amount of productive, uh,

insight would come from that conversation. He is going to talk to me, eh? He is going to talk to me. And I had proposed you as an interlocutor, but he picked another gentleman who might do a credible job. Yeah, we need better than credible here. And I will tell you that if you go back into

If you go back into Dawkins' catalog, you will find that he did, I've forgotten the name of it, but he did a documentary, basically, an atheist, new atheist documentary. And there's a scene in it that struck me rather profoundly. The scene is Richard Dawkins is talking to a religious authority, and they are having a pitched argument about the logic of the universe.

And it becomes quite clear if you watch this that Richard Dawkins knows he is winning this argument. But so does the other guy. They're each winning to their own audience. And what they're doing is they are missing the opportunity to actually discover anything. And my concern is I know Richard Dawkins' tradition because I've read many of his books. I consider him a mentor of mine. And I come from the same tradition. So...

Richard Dawkins is very close to seeing something important that he hasn't seen yet that actually makes his own work vastly more important than it has yet been understood to be. I agree with that, absolutely. But anyway, let's put him aside for the moment. The issue that I think is so important is imagine a continuum from the perfectly literal to the perfectly metaphorical.

And let us say that religions, longstanding religions that have stood the test of time are very close to the end of the continuum where they are perfectly metaphorical. And that our best cases, the places where we've been most effective at understanding phenomena,

that we now have a great predictive model of, we're very close to being perfectly literal about. And then most things exist somewhere in between, right? Biology, for example, we do not have a perfectly descriptive model because complexity and because the process of

time erasing evidence has caused us to have a much cruder understanding of biology than we do, for example, of chemistry or physics, right? We're earlier in the study of it. You could say the same thing about psychology. But the point is, it is natural for us to

Not to look at the vast amount we don't know and be paralyzed by it. It is natural for us to tell the part of the story that we can tell rigorously in rigorous terms and to tell what we no longer acknowledge is a metaphorical story to fill in the spaces. This happens even in your science textbook.

But your science textbook doesn't admit that that's what it's doing. That's right, that's right. And so— That was the role that Jung thought dreams played, by the way. That's exactly his theory of dream. And I would say that what you described as that greater ability to see across larger gaps

The point is the dream apparatus, which I would tell you has to be logically a product of adaptive evolution. It has served our ancestors to have it. It plays this function where it is allowed to violate any rule it wants to to explore a possibility.

And presumably many of those little explorations land on nothing. And occasionally one of those explorations lands on a transcendent connection that if your waking mind was free to make those connections at all times, you'd be in big trouble. Okay, okay. So I want to modify my statement about the unreality of God for a moment with regard to what you just said.

Okay, so now imagine this. Imagine that the revelation that you've been praying for when you're oriented towards the highest good makes itself manifest. And then let's say it's valid. Okay, so it's the valid issue that becomes of crucial interest here because

If I have a revelation that's valid, that means I can act it out in the world and it will have the predictive power of the future that you described. It'll be efficacious in the world. You know how you can strike while the iron is hot? That's what you're trying to do in Washington. You think it's the right time. You know how you can aggregate a lot of information? You can have a sense of timing. It's the right thing at the right moment.

Okay, so now imagine that that speaks of the underlying harmony of being itself, right? And so here's a weird thing to add to that initial statement is that even if God is not real in the way that we just described—

the revelations that emerge from that source are deeply real because they speak of the relationship between the individual and the social community and the natural world in a manner that's practically realizable and exactly timed. And so this is, I think, why it's reasonable to think about God in terms beyond the real and the non-real is because there is that element of non-reality. It's something that you...

conjure into existence as a consequence of your quest, but it's also the voice of what's truly deepest because otherwise it would have no purchase in the world. And so...

You know, there's an ancient line of Jewish speculation that proposes that God and man are, in a sense, twins, that they each call the other into being, and in a genuine manner. And I think this mode of conceptualization sheds some light on that in a manner that's, you know, somewhat comprehensible. All right, can I try two things on you as long as we're deep down this rabbit hole? And this is a point I have been trying to make to Richard Dawkins, which he cannot hear.

The ancients had no idea about genes. They couldn't, nor would it have helped them to. They don't understand that they are suffering from a kind of delusion which is about the significance of self. Self is a very temporary instantiation of lineage. Evolution does not care about the self because the self is disposable.

The lineage either continues or fails to continue, and evolutionary success is not how much you reproduce. It's how far into the future your lineage is capable of making. That's the story of Abraham, by the way. You're telling me. Yeah, okay, okay. So here's my point. Is heaven real? Yes and no. We have no evidence that there's a place.

On the other hand, if you live so as to get into heaven, what it will do, for reasons that a sociologist, at least a good sociologist, would easily recognize, is it will place your kin and your descendants in an excellent position relative to each other to get into the future. Do you live on after death? Yes, you do. You live on in lineage.

Right? It's not the individual, so it's a modification of the reality. But the point is, how much difference is there between the idea of living on after you die in the way that any biologist would recognize that a successful individual did?

And living on after you die in some storybook form that's much easier to convey to a child or to an uninitiated person. Right? My point is that these – life after death does exist, and every biologist agrees. They just don't put it in those terms. So the question is –

Why are we allowed to draw? Where in that continuum from the fully descriptive and material to the fully metaphorical

Are we allowed to draw the line and say, here is where we have stopped being analytical if it's a continuum? It is a continuum. And the place where I fault my colleagues the most is that they do not understand, they do not acknowledge the degree to which even the models that we have inside of biology are largely metaphorical. Not because we won't ultimately know how biology works, but because we don't know yet, and we

Even just to look back into the recent history of biology, you can see that it is a question of replacing approximate stories, metaphorical stories, with literal stories. And that doesn't break down when we get out towards what is obviously an adaptive tendency of human beings to believe in a spirit realm. Yep.

Well, look, I think that's a good place to stop. I don't want to stop because there's 50 things that we could continue to talk about. I think one of the things we should do at some point, possibly, probably publicly, is I'd like to do a lecture on Abraham.

And then have you guys comment. Because, you know, I think too, Brett, one of the reasons that when you listen to me speak about religious matters that you don't immediately, you know, come to the conclusion that I'm making an error is because, and I really tried that in my new book, is I try not to say anything on the religious domain that I can't simultaneously justify on the biological and evolutionary side. And what's so exciting is they dovetail.

And they inform each other in a manner that's extremely useful. They can both be used as, what would you say, sources of inspiration, definitely. And when you get that conjunction, it's super powerful. Go ahead, Heather. Just one of the things we say is that all true stories must reconcile. Yeah, right.

- Yeah, right. - So that's what you're saying. - I think that's the monotheistic hypothesis. Like in the Old Testament, God is characterized in a multitude of variable manners and they're quite different, ranging from peacemaker, let's say to warrior. But there's an underlying insistence that properly conceptualized all that stems from a fundamental transcendent unity. And I think scientists assume that implicitly, they wouldn't be constantly trying to unify their damn theories if it wasn't the case.

And I do think that Dawkins is missing a stellar opportunity here because he was that far away with his conception of memes. Right. He just didn't take it the next step. The irony is there's one bitter pill for Richard Dawkins. He made a small error in his presentation of memes that he has never gotten over. If he can accept that bitter pill,

The rest of what he laid out becomes vastly more significant in the story of human evolution than he gives it credit for. What's the bitter pill? The bitter pill is in chapter 11 of The Selfish Gene, where he presents the concept of memes for the first time. He says that memes are a new primeval soup.

He sees it as a new evolutionary realm where creatures are beginning to form. That's not what it is. It is actually a solution. It is a solution that has evolved in the space of genes.

that does the genes bidding more effectively than they can because it can adapt so much more rapidly because memes can move horizontally. Well, it's not a lateral solution, it's downstream. Yep. Right, right. It's also faster and incorporates virtual death because you can kill a meme without killing its host.

Right. This is a major, this is a major improvement. You get to be wrong and change and you don't just die. Like that's a big deal because then you can be wrong 10,000 times instead of once. Yes. And it is the answer to why human beings are so transcendently capable.

So, the fact that he's presented a model that really is the core of what is special about humans, and yet he thinks that the idea that the song Happy Birthday is a meme is a good example rather than Catholicism, for example. Yeah, pesky Catholicism. Yes, yes. Well, all right, well…

That was fun. That was fun. I think maybe what we'll do on the Daily Wire side, I told you I had an insane idea that I wanted to talk to you about. I think maybe we'll do that there. We're going to do it as a game because it's a joke, this idea. But that doesn't mean that I know what the idea is, you know, in its essence. And I don't know, that doesn't mean I know what its significance is for one way or another. So...

Well, with that teaser for everybody who's watching and listening to join us on the Daily Wire Plus side, I think we'll bring this to a...

Do you want to just tell everybody to close off the website and the X handle for this rally in this event? What are we going to call it? What's the term? Event? Rally? Rally, I think. Yeah. Happening? There's got to be a better word. This mind-blowing moment in history. Celebration. Celebration is a good one. Yeah, celebration is a good one. It's called Rescue the Republic. The

The website is jointheresistance.org. The Twitter handle is RescueRepublic. And can I make one final pitch? Hey, fire away. Okay. The reason that it is so important to show up is because we actually, in this upcoming American election, are faced with

something that has effectively declared war on our constitution and a brand new coalition that does not look like anything that has existed politically in our lifetime, certainly, or probably ever. And that thing has to win decisively to overcome any capacity to cheat and in order to become a durable movement. And so the point is, this is the place where

to become visible physically. It's undeniable. Either the news will fail to report it, in which case we will know something about what side they are on, or they will report it in some way, hopefully honestly, but if they don't, we'll be able to see their distortion, and that will tell us what has taken place. This is not MAGA. It contains MAGA, but it contains many other factions.

And it is truly powerful. All signals suggest people are putting aside every important ideological difference and standing shoulder to shoulder to defend effectively our lineage and its ability to continue into the future.

All right. Well, that's a very good place to end. Thanks to both of you and to everybody who's watching for their time and attention to the film crew here in Scottsdale. We'll move over to the Daily Wire side, and I can tell you my crazy idea because it's very comical as far as I'm concerned. It's ridiculously comical. All right. All right. Good. All right. So thank you, everybody, for watching and listening. And thanks again, Heather and Brett. It's very good to see you guys.

Great seeing you.