Pod Insights The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast 553. Why Do Smart People Double Down On Bad Ideas? | Dr. Gad Saad About this episode Dr. Jordan B. Peterson and evolutionary psychologist Dr. Gad Saad reunite for a conversation that blends ancient myth, evolutionary theory, and cultural psychology. Together, they dissect cognitive dissonance, the dangers of willful blindness, and the evolutionary logic behind sacrifice, delayed gratification, and identity formation.
This episode was filmed on May 23rd, 2025.
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Transcript 12,428 words · 8 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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2:17 Speaker 04 De tous les phénomènes humains que j'ai étudiés dans ma vie, qui est celui qui m'a surpris le plus à propos de la nature humaine ? L'inhabilité des gens de changer leur esprit malgré des preuves évidentes contrairement à ça.
2:29 Jordan B. Peterson? Pourquoi les gens se réduisent-ils au double au lieu de changer ? Même face à des preuves accélérantes d'erreur.
2:36 Speaker 04 Je suis dans le domaine de défendre la vérité et de persuader les gens de s'opposer à des idées. Mais dans la plupart des cas, c'est "la la la, je ne veux pas le entendre".
2:45 Jordan B. Peterson? Vous parlez de gens qui se tournent à l'œil aveugle. Il n'y en a pas un aveugle comme ceux qui ne verront pas.
2:50 Speaker 04 Paradoxalement, ce qui se passe souvent quand je vous expose à des informations contraires, cela ne solidifie que votre position. Parce que bien que l'oiseau ne vire pas littéralement sa tête dans le sable, la métaphore est très efficace, qui est : "Je ne veux pas faire face à la réalité".
3:07 Jordan B. Peterson? Oui, c'est une aveugle volontaire.
3:08 Speaker 04 C'est une aveugle volontaire.
3:25 Jordan B. Peterson? Hey tout le monde ! J'ai eu la chance de rekindler ma relation avec le Dr Gad Saad, qui est professeur de marketing à l'université Concordia de Montréal. C'est une position drôle à prendre parce que la marketing est une entreprise très capitaliste et Concordia est une institution très réveillée. De toute façon, Gad a été un gars de Gad à Concordia depuis un temps. Pas moins parce qu'il applique les tenants de la psychologie évolutionnelle à l'analyse de la motivation humaine. C'est pourquoi il est intéressé par la marketing parce que la marketing est l'étude de l'application pratique de l'analyse de la motivation. Gad a écrit plusieurs... deux en particulier.
4:09 Jordan B. Peterson? Deux livres en particulier qui ont fait son accord dans l'imagination populaire. Le dernier s'appelle "La tête parasitaire", où il démontre sa théorie du virus de la tête réveillée, une notion qui a été propagée assez largement par Elon Musk, qui est assez heureux de la théorie, pas moins parce qu'elle compte pour la pathologie qui a édité son fils de lui dans un ensemble de affaires très tragiques ou de circonstances qui est de plus en plus et de manière désespérée commun entre les familles de tous les coins. Il a aussi écrit un livre, Gad, appelé "La vérité triste sur la joie". De quoi parlons-nous aujourd'hui ? Well, we talked about parasitism, which is a very deep problem.
4:52 Jordan B. Peterson? There are evolutionary biological theories that sex itself evolved to help organisms stay ahead of the parasites. Those organisms that utilize the resources of a host without adding to its capability for survival. Quite the contrary. Well, Gad was very interested in parasitic ideas and how they spread and the invasion, you might say, of the parasitic ideas into the university. And so that's really what we concentrated on, all things considered. How do we understand and defend?
5:30 Jordan B. Peterson? How do we understand the relationship between our ability to generate storehouses of immense value on the merit side, on the accomplishment side, on the brand side? How do we defend those against the encroachment of destructive parasitism? And how do we do the same thing with our own psyches and communities? That's the topic of today's podcast. Dr. Sad, it's been a while.
5:59 Speaker 04 How are you doing? You're looking sharp as always with that gorgeous three-piece suit.
6:04 Jordan B. Peterson? Hey, man, I've got a deadly suit maker. LGFG.
6:09 Speaker 04 By the way, I don't know if you know this. They gifted me a red velvet suit, which they delivered straight to me in Montreal, which I've only worn one in public at Mar-a-Lago.
6:23 Jordan B. Peterson? Oh, well, there you go. That's a good, that's a good and rare combination of events.
6:30 Speaker 04 There you go.
6:31 Jordan B. Peterson? When were you at Mar-a-Lago?
6:32 Speaker 04 In early December, so he'd already won the elections, but he hadn't yet been inaugurated. And it was a mega event, so Make Education Great Again.
6:44 Jordan B. Peterson? Make Education Great Again. There's a complicated problem.
6:50 Jordan B. Peterson? Yeah, I know, Trump is at, Trump in theory is at war with the universities, particularly Harvard at the moment. I guess they're locked in some legal wrangle with Harvard claiming that somehow the federal government owes them the money that they've been paying them when they used to be a university. And so...
7:07 Speaker 04 They only have fifty-three billion dollars of endowment, Jordan. They need the government's help.
7:13 Jordan B. Peterson? There are, there are stringent restrictions on how poor Harvard can use its endowment. And so they need to go cap in hand to the federal government to beg for largess from the bricklayers and the electricians, even though they despise them to the core.
7:31 Speaker 04 Indeed, indeed. Do you remember your time at Harvard fondly or not so fondly?
7:38 Jordan B. Peterson? Unbelievably, unbelievably fondly. Yeah. Look, for a long time, as you know, it was a pretty good deal to be a university professor at a functional institution. And in the ninety, it was a great deal, let's say that. In the nineteen nineties, when I was there, the senior faculty, the smartest people I ever met in my life were the older senior faculty at Harvard. Unbelievably well-educated, you know, classically and scientifically. And then the young professors who rotate out, because that's how Harvard worked, right, on about a seven-year rotation, they were hell-bent on their research careers and not in the careerist
8:22 Jordan B. Peterson? manner, you know, they all had a upset, the kind of obsession that you need to have if you're a scientist. And then the graduate students were, well, they were like graduate students everywhere, and some of them were superb, and the undergraduates were top-rate. And then the administration served all that, and it was beautiful. You know, our faculty meetings, everybody tried to get them over with as fast as possible so they could get back to the lab. Lots of the professors had showers in their labs so they could work, you know, the requisite sixteen hours a day that you have to work if you want to be at the top of your game. And that's what it was like. So, you know, it was a privilege to be there.
9:01 Speaker 04 Yeah, I came close to actually getting the coveted Harvard Business School position out of my PhD at Cornell. And so I had made the first round cuts. And then I made the cuts what's called the campus visits, where they invite, I think, the top three or four candidates. And then apparently, rumor has it, I don't have absolute confirmation, but the diversity, inclusion, equity stuff was already happening in 1993 because it came down, as I hear the story between me and another person, she ovulates, I don't, and so she ended up getting the job. But I came close to being with you right there at Harvard in the 90s.
9:40 Jordan B. Peterson? Oh, that would have been, that would have been an interesting early convergence.
9:44 Speaker 04 That's right. The world had to wait an extra few years before we met.
9:49 Jordan B. Peterson? Yeah, well, that DEI issue, you know, you sat on many hiring committees, I presume, and it was certainly the case that really, all the way back, as far as I can remember, even into the 80s, if there was a candidate who was of minority status, whatever that minority happened to be, the hiring committees, even that early, would bend over backwards to bloody well make sure that they got the job, you know, and I would say from the 80s through about 2005, 10 maybe, merit was still essentially prioritized, but all that other idiocy had come creeping in. And of course, by 2010, you might as well just thrown
10:33 Jordan B. Peterson? up your hands in despair and headed for the hills, which, you know, essentially I did six years later. And I think it was, we'd gone to the point where, and it's probably still like this, I think it was 70% of early applicants, like early-stage career applicants for junior professorships in STEM fields in California, which was an excellent state system for a very long time, they're turfed out of the competition before their research dossier is evaluated. And of course, and that's from their DEI statement, yeah.
11:10 Speaker 04 Well, it's only gotten a lot worse since you left. So let me give you, or for your listeners and viewers, a few recent stats. So the Aristotle Foundation released a few months ago, a study at Canadian universities. And they looked at, they did a content analysis of Canadian job openings. And in 98% of the posts, the postings, there was mention of diversity, inclusion and equity. I mean, if it were 20%, it would be a disaster. But imagine where it's 98%. I think it was something like 477 out of 489 postings involved diversity, inclusion and equity.
11:53 Speaker 04 And to that point, you know, as you probably might remember, I held a university-wide chair for 10 years. And it finished in 2018. When I then started thinking about applying for, you know, the next term, the next five-year term. I then decided against it because I was under the requirement to provide a diversity, inclusion and equity statement, which I wasn't willing to do. So it has now been probably five, six years since I last had university-based research funds. And so in a sense, I've been forced out in my ability to pursue my research
12:35 Speaker 04 because of many of these ideological commitments that you have to publicly proclaim. It's horrifying.
12:43 Jordan B. Peterson? There's a time in every child's life when he or she realizes they stand on the precipice of adulthood. It's during this window that learning responsibility becomes crucial. We're trying to figure out how to get him through this part of his life, become a responsible adult. They don't learn how to be autonomous in your household when they're teenagers. How do you expect that they're going to be able to take care of themselves when they leave home? It'd be really good to get this under control. You have to sit down with your husband or wife and you have to see not only where you think things have gone wrong very concretely around specific episodes, but you have to flesh out a vision of what you would rather see instead.
13:21 Jordan B. Peterson? You're gonna get pushback, but better late than never.
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13:55 Jordan B. Peterson? Yes, well, and I've been watching Harvard struggle with Trump and the research community as well bleat and beat their chest about the fact that the only reason that the researchers ever provided the requisite DEI statements was because the government had made it mandatory. It's like, so I guess mandatory cowardice is an excuse for, for what? For selling your soul to the devil?
14:21 Speaker 04 Yeah, it's amazing. I'll give you another amazing example. I've been on leave now from Concordia, which, you know, the university was kind enough to grant it to me.
14:32 Jordan B. Peterson? They were probably relieved, yeah.
14:34 Speaker 04 I didn't want to say it, but thank you for saying it. They were probably all celebrating.
14:38 Jordan B. Peterson? Yeah, I'm sure they were. That left-wing hellhole, that university, that terrible pro-Hamas, constant protesting home of the resentful and miserable, that Concordia?
14:51 Speaker 04 That Concordia. Their five-year strategic mission is to indigenize, and what's the other term? I can't remember the other term. To indigenize the curriculum. So imagine, how do you indigenize number theory? How do you indigenize differential equations? How do you indigenize evolutionary psychology?
15:14 Jordan B. Peterson? One little, two little, three little Indians? Is that how you do it?
15:19 Speaker 04 You're gonna get me into trouble.
15:21 Jordan B. Peterson? It's me saying it, God, and I've already been in plenty of trouble.
15:25 Speaker 04 Fair enough. So, you know, it's very, very difficult to live in the ecosystem. I, I think when I first heard that you were leaving academia, I, I, I felt a bit of tension within myself and that on the one hand, I was, "Oh no, you know, Peizan is leaving." On the other hand, I felt somewhat envious of you in that while I remained in the ecosystem of Infinite Lunacy, you were out, man. How, how you feel now that you've been out for a few years?
15:55 Jordan B. Peterson? Well, it's worked out very fortunate for me because, well, for a variety of reasons. I mean, first of all, I've been on a non-stop lecture tour, really since 2018, punctuated by various, you know, fits of illness. But, and so, what's my alternative? I can teach 150 kids in a classroom that looks like some sadistic architect designed it, what, for denizens of hell, all fluorescent lights and concrete blocks and hozable architecture. And they can sit in desks and be numbers in a 60,000-person,
16:39 Jordan B. Peterson? what, what, monstrosity of gigantism while being lectured by the DEI mavens? Or I can travel around the world to speak to paid audiences about exactly what I want to talk about and do something different every night. So that's a pretty good deal. And then we set up Peterson Academy, which is thriving. I just finished teaching, recording a new Maps of Meaning course. That was my cardinal course, I guess, at Harvard and the University of Toronto. And, and it'll be produced at the highest possible quality and then shown to our 45,000 students. And that's growing extremely rapidly. So, you know, that's the upside and there's lots more upside associated with that.
17:24 Jordan B. Peterson? But the downside is, I had a pretty good research career, Gao. You know, and that's the one thing I haven't been able to replace. Well, that and my clinical practice, you know, because I'm too evil to have a clinical practice, so. Oh, by the way, I should tell you this. This is pretty funny in the most darkly horrible quasi-totalitarian idiot Canadian state manner.
17:52 Jordan B. Peterson? So, you know, the College of Psychologists have deemed me, what would you say? I need to be reeducated out of my climate apocalypse skepticism and my disdain for the trans activists and my belief that maybe we shouldn't cut the breasts off 13-year-olds. You know, all those terrible things that sane people know to be true deep inside of them, like the fact that there are actually men and women.
18:20 Speaker 04 You know, I was asked on a show about a year ago of all of the human phenomena that I've studied in my life or I'm aware of, which is the one that has surprised me the most about human nature. And I paused for a second and I answered, "The inability of people to change their minds despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary." Justin Trudeau comes in, he does a disastrous job. What do Canadians do? Re-elect him. "That's not enough, let's do it a third time." Then he steps down, "Maybe it's time now to do some auto-correction." What do Canadians do? They re-elect the party that put them in the position that we're in right now. So, I think that that answer that I gave, it was a British psychiatrist who was hosting
19:05 Speaker 04 me. I think it's that much more apropos today. It is almost impossible to get someone to change their opinions once it is anchored solidly into their personhood. So, there you go.
19:17 Jordan B. Peterson? Hey, I've got a biblical reference that will clear that up for you.
19:20 Speaker 04 Okay, shoot.
19:22 Jordan B. Peterson? So, one of the mysteries in the story of Exodus is why it takes the Israelites three generations to cross a relatively trivial stretch of desert. So, what's the narrative?
19:40 Jordan B. Peterson? Explanation. So it's twofold. Remember in the account when Moses, after Moses encounters the burning bush and gets to the bottom of something and learns, which is what that story means, he goes back to get the Pharaoh to change his mind. But he doubles down the Pharaoh, and that's the consequence of the ever accelerating sequence of plagues. And the first eight plagues destroy the present, and the last plague, which is the death of the firstborn, destroys the future.
20:22 Jordan B. Peterson? And it isn't until the present and the future are destroyed, heaven and earth both, plus the future, that the Pharaoh relents. And even then, he doesn't, right? Because he sends his army after the Israelites once they do depart. Right now, the question is, why do people double down instead of changing? Even in the face of accelerating evidence of error? Okay, so the Israelites leave, right? So now they are escaping their tyranny and their slavdom. And that's a dynamic, right? Because there's no tyrants without willing slaves and vice versa. And so the Israelites have plenty to learn too.
21:03 Jordan B. Peterson? And so the first thing that happens to them is the chaos of the Red Sea, and that's chaos and blood. Why? Because when you change your mind, the first thing that happens is things fall apart. And so, right, and then they cross the Red Sea and they manage that successfully. So that's that chaotic threshold. And then they wander in the goddamn desert for three generations. Right? Why? Because at least under the tyranny, they knew what to do. And in the wilderness, they are fractious, resentful, immature, and unable to govern themselves. And it takes three generations before they recover. So, and you know, I talked to Carl Friston about this, and Carl's a
21:47 Jordan B. Peterson? neuroscientist of some repute. And he has an entropy theory of anxiety, which is a, and I had worked on a parallel theory in my lab in Montreal. We published a paper on it, not too long before I departed for parts unknown.
22:06 Jordan B. Peterson? Your beliefs are game principles, like game rules, that bring order to complexity. And if you're wrong, you have to modify. And the consequence of modification first is an encounter with unstructured entropy and chaos. And that, the apprehension of that, locks people into their tyranny, self-composed, familial, cultural, whatever. So it's always, it's never from where you are to the promised land. It's always from where you are, through the threshold of chaos, into the goddamn desert, and then maybe forward.
22:51 Speaker 04 So in chapter seven of The Parasitic Mind, where I talk about how to seek truth, I open up the chapter with a long quote by Leon Festinger, the pioneer of theory of cognitive dissonance. And it exactly speaks to your point. So the chaos that you're talking about with the Red Sea and so on in the biblical story is the chaos that you experience internally when you are faced with a dissonant amount of evidence that is contrary to the one that you hold so dear to you. And so it is no accident that this incredible quote by Leon Festinger, I obviously don't have it memorized here, but basically he's saying that
23:34 Speaker 04 there is no ends to which people will go to in order to maintain the coherence of their current belief system, irrespective of the amount of contrary evidence that they are exposed to, because then that triggers cognitive dissonance. And as a matter of fact, paradoxically, what often happens, as I'm sure you know, Jordan, when I expose you to contrary information, it only solidifies your position. So you could imagine how disheartening it is, right? I'm coming at you with a mind vaccine that hopefully gets you to perhaps revisit some of your cherished beliefs.
24:15 Jordan B. Peterson? You mean like a university professor should?
24:18 Speaker 04 Like a university professor should. And what ends up happening is exactly opposite to that. It only emboldens you in your position. It only solidifies that you were right, despite the fact that I've shown you that you were perfectly wrong. And so at times, it can seem like an insurmountable struggle, because I'm in the business of, you know, defending truth and persuading people of opposing ideas. But in most of the cases, it's la la la, I don't want to hear it. And that's why I talk about ostrich parasitic syndrome in the previous book. Because while the ostrich doesn't literally bury its head in the sand, the metaphor is very apt, which is, I don't want to face reality.
25:00 Jordan B. Peterson? Willful blindness.
25:01 Speaker 04 It's willful blindness. And so it's a very, very difficult game.
25:05 Jordan B. Peterson? In the Egyptian mythology, the god of the state, they had a god of the state, Osiris. And Osiris was a great exploratory and nation founding hero in his youth. Awake and alert and curious, able to transform and to bring order. But as he ages,
25:29 Jordan B. Peterson? he becomes ossified. And that sped along by the fact that he's willfully blind. That's in the Egyptian theology. Now, he has a brother, an evil brother, Seth. And Seth is the origin of the word Satan, by the way, through the Coptic Christians. And Seth is the eternal evil brother of the willfully blind king. And when Osiris is sufficiently old and sufficiently willfully blind, which means unwilling to understand the usurping motivations of his evil brother, Osiris chops him up into pieces and spreads his parts around Egypt.
26:16 Jordan B. Peterson? In fact, the Egyptians regarded each Egyptian province as a piece of Osiris. Right? So that body would come together as an integrated state. When... He can't kill Osiris, because Osiris is a deity. So there's no killing him, but you can make sure everything falls to pieces. So that's the blindness of institutions once established. They ossify, and then they turn a blind eye to the machinations of the usurper. Right? Okay, so Osiris is now scattered all across the landscape. And so things have fallen apart. Right? People say that about their own life: "Everything fell apart."
26:59 Jordan B. Peterson? His wife is queen of the underworld, Isis, and she rules the domain of the underworld and chaos, which is where you go when things fall apart. And she makes her appearance, right? So that's the renewal of the social order by what? The plenitude and terror of nature. And she finds Osiris's phallus, so the vessel of the seminal idea. And she makes herself pregnant and has a son. The son is Horus. Horus is the Egyptian god of the eye, the famous Egyptian eye with the fully open pupil, and he's also a falcon, because birds of prey have the most acute vision.
27:41 Jordan B. Peterson? And Horus is willing to see. And he can see evil. And so he goes back to Egypt when he grows up, like King Arthur. He grows up alienated from his evil community, and he goes back to fight Seth. And they have a terrible battle, and Seth tears out one of his eyes. And they continue to fight, and Horus gets the eye back, and he banishes Seth to the nether regions of the cosmos. No killing him, because the force that usurps and parasitizes never dies. Okay, now he's got his eye back. Now you think he could just slap it in his head, and then he could rule.
28:26 Jordan B. Peterson? That's not what happens. He goes to the land of the dead, back to the underworld voluntarily, and he finds Osiris, his father, languishing in the underworld. You know, in a ghostly and desiccated state. And he gives him his eye! So he provides corrupt tradition with the capacity to see. And then Osiris awakens and they unite. And it's the union of Osiris and Horus that is the proper sovereign of the state and the soul of the pharaoh.
29:00 Speaker 04 Nice.
29:01 Jordan B. Peterson? Isn't that something?
29:02 Speaker 04 That's nice. I guess that's why you love, you love to study ancient themes to link them to current realities, right?
29:10 Jordan B. Peterson? Well, it's so brilliant. The Mesopotamians too worshipped vision, attention for exactly the same reason. It's exactly what we're talking about. You know, you talk about people turning a blind eye. There are none so blind as those who will not see. The deity of the revivification of the corrupt state for the Egyptians was literally the open eye. Pay attention, right? And for the Mesopotamians, it was twofold. Pay attention and speak the proper words.
29:42 Speaker 04 Free associating here. One of the greatest guests I've ever had on my show is a gentleman who, when you translate his pseudonym in English is Eye of Mosul. In Arabic, it would be Eye al Mosul, which was, he was a guy who was literally documenting the atrocities that were being committed by ISIS in Mosul at great threat to him. And he was using the vision, the eye symbol to capture exactly that. You should go, if you ever have a chance, you should go and listen to our chat.
30:27 Speaker 04 Because when people say, you know, I'm too afraid to speak on campus because of reasons X, Y, Z. I usually refer them to someone like this gentleman and several other very courageous people who literally put their lives in imminent danger in order to document some of the difficult realities that people face in the Middle East. And yet, most people here are too afraid to speak out because they might be Unfended by someone on Facebook. And so I always try to contextualize the dangers that people feel in the West compared to some of the dangers that freedom fighters feel. And actually, I remember in, do you remember our chat, our event that was originally canceled
31:09 Speaker 04 at Ryerson, which we subsequently held a few months later in 2017 in Toronto?
31:15 Jordan B. Peterson? Yeah, yeah.
31:16 Speaker 04 I remember that in the Q and A period, someone asked each of the people on the panel, including you and I, who would be some of the freedom fighters that we each most admire? And in my case, I gave examples of people in the Middle East who speak out at truly extraordinary great personal risk. So there you have it.
31:41 Jordan B. Peterson? Yeah, well, you know, God, the thing about risk, risk is a funny thing because there's the risk that you accrue by speaking out, and then there's the risk that you accrue by being silent when you have something to say. Yeah, well, that's the Jonah story, right? The dragon from the abyss will drag you to hell if you refuse to speak when your conscience tells you to.
32:04 Speaker 04 To your, to that exact point, when people ask me, why is it that you speak out? I usually tell them that when I go to bed at night and I have to put my head on the pillow, the only thing that stops me from having a bout of endless insomnia is to know that I was fully true in defending the truth. If I were to modulate my speech, if I were to regulate what I say or don't say, even though the world might not know it, I would know it. And therefore, since I'm my harshest critic, since I have a very exacting code of personal conduct, I simply can't modulate. And so it's exactly to your point, which is, I would feel inauthentic, I would feel
32:48 Speaker 04 fraudulent if I were to not speak when I'm tasked to speak. And I only wish more people were to do that.
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34:12 Jordan B. Peterson? Yep, there's no pillow like a good conscience, as they say. Yeah, yeah, you know, the other, you said that you have an exacting personal standard, but would it not? I'm very curious about your response to this. Would it not be the case that you could say with equal truth that an exacting conscience has you in its grip?
34:35 Speaker 04 Yeah, that's a great question. So in the last book, in my happiness book, I have an entire chapter on the inverted you, which is sort of the universal law of maximal flourishing. Too little of something is not good, too much of something is not good. And life is about finding that sweet spot, which of course Aristotle had already explained to us via his golden mean. Right, exactly. A soldier who's too cowardly is not good. A soldier who's a reckless martyr is going to die very quickly. And somewhere in the middle stands the golden mean. So to your question, I argue that my perfectionism, which is one manifestation of... Perfectionism is a manifestation of my exacting standard,
35:19 Speaker 04 actually puts me beyond the sweet spot. And let me give you an example. When I received the galley proofs, let's say to my latest book, most authors would view that as an opportunity to celebrate. This is the last, final step before the book goes out into production. To me, I go through an infinite amount of angst, because this is the last time that I could ever find that misplaced, you know, comma, or that typo on page 337. And so I end up spending probably five times as much time as with the typical author when they're going through the galley proof, because of my exacting nature, because of my maladaptive perfectionism.
36:02 Speaker 04 So even for a trait that you would think is a noble trait, right? You're conscientious, you have attention to detail, even that could be in the maladaptive part of the curve.
36:15 Jordan B. Peterson? Yeah, well, I wonder. I wonder, it's a strange thing, eh? Because you have to adjudicate adaptive with a specified timeframe. And timeframe is a tricky matter, right? Because, look, why do people go along with the horde? When, even when their conscience is suggesting the alternative? And the answer to that is, I think, you tell me what you think about this as a student of evolutionary biology and motivation? Because timeframe is a crucial issue here, right? That's why we delay gratification. That's why there's a distribution of future preference.
36:58 Speaker 04 I was, forgive me for interrupting you. I was literally, before I came here this morning, I was working at the café on my forthcoming book. I was working on a section on delayed gratification. But go ahead, continue.
37:09 Jordan B. Peterson? Okay, well, so here's a hypothesis, is that service to an exacting conscience is the longest-term game.
37:21 Jordan B. Peterson? Así que... Yo iba a decir, mencioné antes de empezar el podcast que quería contaros una historia sobre Abraham. Y tal vez pueda hacerlo ahora, si no te importa. Porque recibí los comentarios de Bret Weinstein sobre esto, por cierto. Porque estoy muy curioso de su significado evolutivo. Creo que es el antídoto de la noción del genio egoísta. Y creo que es evolutivamente sintonioso. Así que... Déjame decirte... Digamos que a medida que te madeces... Comencemos esto primero. Cuando eres immature, tu tiempo está muy corto. Y así estás después de la gratificación inmediata. Ese es el caso con los niños de dos años y gente radicalmente immature. Quieren lo que sea...
38:05 Jordan B. Peterson? Quieren lo que en ellos se exige de estar saturado ahora. Y no pueden olvidar esa gratificación por consideración futura o de otros. Y eso es algo similar, ¿verdad? Tú en el futuro es casi como alguien más ahora. Es una hipotética, ¿verdad? Y así los psicópatas, por ejemplo, sirven muy mal a sus seres futuros. No aprenden de la experiencia y se meten en problemas en busca de gratificación inmediata. Son radicalmente antisocial. Es una propagación o una extensión de inmadurez. Creo que eso es lo que es el marxismo también, por cierto. La propiedad es el robo.
38:47 Jordan B. Peterson? Eso es bastante conveniente si quieres lo que otras personas han sacrificado. Bien, así que... Abraham, trataré de hacer esto breve. Abraham es dependiente y immature cuando la historia empieza. Vive con sus padres ricos y nunca tuvo que levantar un dedo, aunque está en su séptima década. Y luego llega una voz a él. Y podrías pensar en ella como la voz de la llamada, o la voz de la aventura, o la voz de la consciencia. Todos funcionan igualmente bien. Y dice a él: "Tienes que dejar tu zona de confort. Tienes que dejar lo que te acostumbras a y lo que te sirvió. Y tienes que viajar hacia el mundo".
39:33 Jordan B. Peterson? And have the terrible adventure of your life. And if you do that, I will make you a covenant. This is the Abrahamic covenant. And I took it apart in "We Who Wrestle with God", and I've been lecturing about it, thinking it through, because I think there's something unbelievably profound in it. So God makes Abra... God comes to Abraham as the voice that tells him to step out of his zone of comfort and to move forward radically. Okay, so that's a definition of the divine, by the way, in that story. Right? It's not a call to belief. It's a definition of the highest calling. Okay, so here's the deal. God tells Abraham, "If you do this,
40:15 Jordan B. Peterson? so let's say you follow the pathway of developmental impetus, you'll become a blessing to yourself."
40:23 Jordan B. Peterson? So that's a good deal. And that would imply that the instinct that moves us out into the world, followed properly, is the best guarantee of our future security and opportunity, which has to be the case. Those things have to line up. Okay, so that's offer one. Offer two is, you'll... You'll... Your name will become renowned among those who know you for valid reasons. So you'll establish a reputation that's genuine and deep. Number three, all your enemies will flee before you and nothing will be able to withstand your movement forward.
41:09 Jordan B. Peterson? Number four, you'll establish something of lasting permanence. In Abraham's case, he establishes what I think is the pattern of paternal
41:22 Jordan B. Peterson? prowess that radically guarantees the multi-generational survival of his offspring. And he's guaranteed the...
41:32 Jordan B. Peterson? To be the father of nations. And the final kicker, and this is brilliant. You'll do it in a way that brings nothing but abundance to everyone else. So imagine that this would imply that the impulse that moves us past that zone of convenience that people will tyrannically cling to, that the manifestation of that spirit is the same process that brings peace and opportunity to life, that guarantees reputation, that makes you implacable and unopposable in the medium to long run, that allows you to establish something multi-generationally permanent, including a biological legacy,
42:17 Jordan B. Peterson? and that brings abundance to everyone else. So that speaks of an alignment with the instinct to move forward. That would be the instinct that's counter to tyranny. That tyranny we described earlier. That aligns all that with the pattern that would radically increase the survival of your progeny if that pattern is duplicated as it cascades down the generations.
42:42 Speaker 04 Yeah, I mean, I don't know if I have a ready answer regarding this specific biblical story, but I can certainly incorporate an evolutionary angle to these temporal decisions, these intertemporal delaying gratification. So let me tell you about two great studies. These are not my studies, but they're quite evolutionary in spirit. So usually, when you study intertemporal decisions, you make people go through a bunch of tasks where you set up the tension between, "I can give you $100 now," or "you can wait seven days and I'll give you $130." And then depending on the pattern of responses that you and I give, I can calculate your lambda parameter,
43:25 Speaker 04 which basically captures how much of a delayed or immediate gratifier you are. Okay, fair enough. Now, most psychologists, and certainly economists, have presumed that that lambda parameter is an invariable part of your personality. So Jordan Peterson might be an immediate gratifier. Gadsad might be a delayed gratifier, and that becomes invariant. Well, it turns out that the story is a bit more complex in an evolutionarily relevant way. So for example, if you make people drink a sugary drink or a placebo, I can get you to alter your lambda parameter. So people who are satiated, physically satiated because they had a sugary drink,
44:10 Speaker 04 are more likely to delay their immediate rewards because they are literally satiated.
44:16 Jordan B. Peterson? Makes perfect sense, sure.
44:17 Speaker 04 Now, and listen to this one. So that's related to survival, right? Because I'm drinking something which is a consumatory thing. Now let's prime the mating module. If I show men and women photos of sexy opposite sex targets.
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45:00 Speaker 04 That priming doesn't work for women for obvious evolutionary reasons, but for men, if you prime them with photos of scantily clad sexy women, their lambda parameter changes such that they now want, they want it now. So in other words, they become a lot more driven by immediate gratification, even if it's in a different domain.
45:23 Jordan B. Peterson? That generalizes. Oh, that's interesting.
45:24 Speaker 04 Exactly. So I'm either catering to your mating module or to your survival module. And because these are evolutionarily relevant triggers, I can alter what most scientists thought was an invariant lambda parameter. And so to your point, your intuition of asking an evolutionist about intertemporal choices, there really is an evolutionary story to that.
45:50 Jordan B. Peterson? Well, well, you know, that's also reflected in the Abrahamic story because...
45:57 Jordan B. Peterson? Abraham's relationship to this voice that calls him forward is sacrificial. He has to give up something in the present that's valuable. That's why that, that's why this took me a long time to figure out, Gad. I didn't know to begin with that the reason that the deepest relationship in these ancient stories is catalyzed by sacrifice was because people were trying to work through this paradoxical idea that if you give up something in the present of value and you do that properly, whatever that means, because that becomes a mystery, then you can stabilize the medium and long term and also the community.
46:41 Jordan B. Peterson? And so, you think about what this means, if this is right. And like, it's evident to me from comparing multiple stories that sacrifice is the ritual of delay of gratification, right? It's the ritual of work, right? And work is the sacrifice because you, you give up your pursuit of immediate gratification in the present to stabilize your future and to fill it with opportunity. And so, and what sophisticated communities are dependent on sophisticated sacrifice. And then the question becomes sacrifice in service of what?
47:21 Jordan B. Peterson? In the Abraham story, it's in the service of the instinct that moves you adventurously forward, which is a lovely way of conceptualizing it. But the fact that the sacrifice is involved, so what happens too is that Abraham pursues a sequence of expanding adventures, each of which demands a more exacting sacrifice. And that culminates in God's request that he'd sacrifice his son, right? You could say to the spirit of adventure. Of course, Abraham gets to keep his son, which is the moral of the story, I think, which is that if you're willing to...
47:59 Jordan B. Peterson? Sacrifice even your children to what's highest, then you'll get them back, right? And you'll win, but it's a long-term game. You know, we did experiments with that Lambda technology. And we showed that, and this is, I think, very much in keeping with what you described. If you put people in a state of enhanced positive emotion, they're more likely to discount the future. Because that's the activation of that appetitive system. And it's also the case that extroverts are more, will discount the future more heavily than introverts. And extroverts are in a state of enhanced positive emotion. And so, right, an extrovert is pursuing opportunity in the social realm pretty much all the time.
48:42 Speaker 04 And so... Sorry, the capacity to delay gratification turns out to have unbelievable beneficial downstream effects, whether it be to your likelihood of success in life, whether it be to your health, whether it be to your happiness. So let's just take a few examples. You and I sacrificed going out and partying when we were young, when many of our friends did so. We probably stayed in school. I don't know when you finished your PhD. I finished my PhD in my late twenties, when many of my friends would have already been earning paychecks for five, six, eight years. But by sacrificing that, when you look at us when we're both 60,
49:27 Speaker 04 probably one would argue that I've made up for whatever I sacrificed back then, and as you have. The marshmallow test, which of course you're very familiar with, there is research that shows that the children who were able to, you know, pass the marshmallow test, to really not take that extra marshmallow when the experimenter was looking. If we track those children who had that delayed gratification reflex later in life, they were more successful. So it applies to everything. Think about weight gain, right? When I, when I stop myself from having the immediate dopamine head of that extra piece of chocolate cake.
50:11 Speaker 04 I am sacrificing the immediate pleasure today for making sure that in 10 years I'm not much overweight, which by the way, I greatly failed at many years ago when I ended up being 256 pounds, but not having the height of a football linebacker. And so many of our downstream either successes or failures stem from the original thing that we're talking about, which is are you able to sacrifice something today for something positive tomorrow? I mean, would you agree that it's probably one of the traits that is most causative of our future successes or failures?
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51:56 Jordan B. Peterson? Look, I don't, I don't even have to agree. The literature on that is crystal clear. So that while the most, the best predictor of long-term success in a complex, organized society is general cognitive ability, right? And that's probably something like, it's, it, part of what that is, is just speed of thought. It's, that's not all of it, because depth of thought, ability to juggle multiple concepts simultaneously, you know, there, but it's a pretty, it's a unitary phenomenon, general cognitive ability. It's, it's indexed with the SATs and the GREs and the MCATs, all of these tests of cognitive merit. But the next best predictor is trait conscientiousness.
52:38 Jordan B. Peterson? And conscientiousness is orderliness and industriousness. And both of those are markers of the willingness to... It's complicated, eh, Gad? Because we looked at the relationship between trait conscientiousness and future discounting. And in the future discounting tasks, we couldn't find a relationship. So whatever future discounting is indexing with regards to the ability to delay gratification is not exactly the same component of sacrificial willingness that conscientiousness indexes. You know, we probably tried 50 laboratory tasks, trying to find an actual task that trait conscientiousness predicted. And we couldn't find one.
53:23 Jordan B. Peterson? We couldn't find one, not a task. Self-report works, other report works. You know, you can derive a pretty good index of someone's suitability for a complex, exacting managerial position with a big five-personality inventory, if people don't cheat it. But be damned if we could find an actual behavioral task that indexed it.
53:46 Speaker 04 Did you publish those null effects?
53:49 Jordan B. Peterson? Yes. Have you tried publishing null effects?
53:52 Speaker 04 Well, that's the reason why I asked this. Because, you know, one of the great stories of, you know, my null effect story is, back in, I think, the late 90s, there was a special issue in the journal, which I'm sure you've heard of, Cognition and Emotion. You know, a top journal, where I was trying to study the relationship between dysphoria and decision-making. And I wanted to see whether being in a dysphoric state would make you tackle a decision-making task with greater conscientiousness or lesser conscientiousness. And there were theories that could predict either, right? So some people thought, when you're dysphoric,
54:37 Speaker 04 you're sort of in a learned helplessness mode. Life sucks, who cares? I'm not going to put much effort into the task. Whereas there's another research stream that argued the exact opposite, which is... When I feel dysphoric, one of the ways that I can gain control and mastery over my environment is to put in more effort into the decision.
54:56 Jordan B. Peterson? Right, right, sure.
54:58 Speaker 04 And so I came into the research without any a priori hypotheses, precisely because I didn't have a good sense of what I should expect. I said, "Let me just do exploratory research and see what I get." And I think I had measured something like sixteen or seventeen dependent variables, different dependent variables. And I had two groups, the non-dysphoric and the dysphoric. And I think on all of the measures, except one, I had gotten no differences between the two groups. So there was... Yeah, let me just finish this.
55:32 Jordan B. Peterson? Please do, yeah.
55:33 Speaker 04 And so I had sent the paper to a special issue of cognition and emotion, and the special issue was on the application of emotions in decision-making. So it couldn't have been more perfectly suited. And the guest editor at the time, who's a famous psychologist, whose name you would easily know, but turned out to be an utter abject asshole, because I recently gave a talk somewhere on some, you know, some of the parasitic stuff. But he really hated me because, you know, he was of a different persuasion. He's an ardent leftist. But in any case, he said, he wrote back to me and said, "Look, I would love to accept this paper, but unfortunately, God,
56:15 Speaker 04 it is laden with nothing but null effects." To which I answered, "But don't you think that the ubiquity of the null effects in this case is worthy of it being documented in the literature?" And apparently, I wasn't able to convince him. So that's what happens.
56:31 Jordan B. Peterson? Let's take that apart for a minute, because I think we can probably understand why, at least in part. So if you look at the big five structure, the emotions load on extraversion and neuroticism, right? So you have extraversion, neuroticism, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness.
56:50 Jordan B. Peterson? Extroversion and neuroticism pretty much cover the whole domain of emotion. So extroverts, extroversion is the behavioral manifestation of either lower threshold for positive emotion or more positive emotion. And neuroticism is the behavioral expression of more negative emotion or lower threshold for negative emotion. So all the emotional phenomena load on extroversion and neuroticism. It's possible that the, that the delay discounting tasks that we were referring to are primarily modulated by emotion.
57:27 Jordan B. Peterson? Right? And, but that conscientiousness, remember, these are orthogonal traits. So conscientiousness doesn't look emotion dependent. Because if it was, it would load on extroversion or neuroticism. So there's some aspect, we, we did one study where we found a behavioral effect of conscientiousness. That was only one. Breadth of attentional focus. So conscientious people could focus their attention on a smaller place. Now, to some degree, they sacrificed breadth of attention for that, as you'd expect. Openness modulated that, creativity, let's say. But it was focus of attention.
58:10 Jordan B. Peterson? And you can, you can see that that could be quite different psychophysiologically from, from the effect of emotion on modulation of delay of gratification. So maybe that's a, you know, that might be a rabbit hole worth wandering down. You could, you could think, when your attention is highly focused, the disciplinary element of that is to keep all those competing motivational states out of the game. Right? And that seems to be, I think, you tell me what you think. That seems to be something like what we refer to when we refer to willpower. It's like maintenance of a frame of reference,
58:52 Jordan B. Peterson? a narrow, goal-directed, task-oriented frame of reference, despite competing temptations. And again, trait conscientiousness is a very good predictor of long-term success, especially, it's the best predictor, apart from IQ, of wealth and security. It's a pretty good predictor of longevity. It's a pretty good predictor of marital stability. Like, what do they say, "All good things come to those who wait"? So if you're gonna hire someone, trait conscientiousness is the first thing you look at after raw intelligence. But it doesn't look emotion-dependent, which is what you discovered. That's what you showed.
59:32 Speaker 04 Yeah, yeah, that's exactly right. Maybe I need to revive that paper, because I never published it. But are you familiar with Frank Soloway's work? Do you know who that is, Jordan? Does that ring a bell?
59:42 Jordan B. Peterson? The name rings a bell. Tell me the work, maybe I'll remember.
59:45 Speaker 04 Because you mentioned the Big Five on a few occasions, so I thought you might get a kick out of it, and certainly your viewers and listeners. So Frank Soloway is a historian of science, but also a Freud biographer.
1:00:00 Jordan B. Peterson? Oh, right, that's where I know him.
1:00:02 Speaker 04 Yes, but his real claim to fame, a brilliant book, came out, I think, in 1996. The book is titled "Born to Rebel", and you'll see in a second how I'm gonna tie it to the Big Five. So Soloway argues, he sort of flips the script on the typical birth-order literature. Usually...
1:00:25 Jordan B. Peterson? Right, that's right, that's where I know him, too.
1:00:29 Speaker 04 So the birth-order literature basically works via the differential behaviors that parents are going to bestow on their children as a function of their birth order. So the parent might behave differently to the first born, to the second born, and so on. Well, Soloway completely flips that upside down by arguing that, no, and he actually uses an evolutionary explanation, he argues that one of the most fundamental, original evolutionary problems that a child has to solve is what's called the Darwinian niche partitioning hypothesis. It's a mouthful, but let me explain it. So when a child is born...
1:01:12 Speaker 04 All niches are unoccupied. There is the "I'm a good boy" niche, "I'm a rebel" niche, any other ones. So I've got the full litany of possible niches to occupy. But as the next child comes along, if he or she wishes to occupy a unique, uncharted niche, then there is one lesser. And as you go down the shipship, there are fewer and fewer niches available. And therefore, he decided, he argued and demonstrated that when you get to the last born, because they face a much more difficult problem in that all of the niches are now occupied,
1:01:55 Speaker 04 that forces them to become, score higher on openness amongst some of the other personality traits. And because last born score higher on openness, he then tests the 28 most radical scientific innovations throughout history and demonstrates that for 23 out of the 28, the ones who espoused the radical scientific theory were later borns or last borns. And the ones who were part of the orthodoxy were the first borns. And I usually end this little lecture with, "Do you want to guess what Professor Saad's birth order is?"
1:02:37 Jordan B. Peterson? Are you first or last?
1:02:38 Speaker 04 Last, of course.
1:02:40 Jordan B. Peterson? You're last, you're last.
1:02:41 Speaker 04 How else could I have made all those advances if I wasn't the non-orthodox thinker? But, but I think, what do you think of this theory? Does it resonate with you?
1:02:51 Jordan B. Peterson? Well, one of the things that came to mind for me there was the, there's also, you know, a parallel literature that indicates that the more older brothers you have, the more likely you are to be gay.
1:03:05 Speaker 04 Well, then I'm in trouble because I've got two older brothers.
1:03:08 Jordan B. Peterson? No, well, it doesn't really kick in until you have more than that, but I was just trying to put that together in my mind with this particular hypothesis and with the increase in openness. Because it is quite a marked, it's a marked phenomena. And as far as I know, it's valid. I don't know how robust the birth order literature is. I remember Galloway's book now. But I like the, Sulloway, Sulloway, sorry. I like the niche idea. It's certainly the case that that's one of the things also that typifies human beings above all. You could think about the competition with children there
1:03:46 Jordan B. Peterson? as their experimentation with different characterizations of themselves to garner attention. Right? And one of the things that garners attention is novelty.
1:03:58 Speaker 04 That's exactly right. Look, in a, say in a nest, you have multiple hungry mouths that are opening, and I want to get the attention of the parent. And in many cases, of course, as you know, there is, you kill your sibling, right? You throw them off the nest so that now all of the attention could be garnered to you. Well, in the human case, notwithstanding some of the biblical stories where you literally kill your brother, the way that we compete, it's in a sense the inaugural marketing problem, right? In marketing, you talk about segmentation and targeting a niche. Well, when I'm trying to position myself in a unique niche
1:04:40 Speaker 04 vis-à-vis competing for my parents' attention, that's a marketing problem. How do I position myself so that I'm in a different niche from the rest of my siblings?
1:04:50 Jordan B. Peterson? Sure, and those open beaks, they're evolutionarily primed targets. If I remember correctly, Cuckoos, who...
1:05:00 Jordan B. Peterson? They have a bigger and redder open mouth. And so they're more likely to be stuffed full of food. And the mother birds don't notice because they're so focused conscientiously on the target. And the cuckoos throw the other chicks out of the nest.
1:05:17 Speaker 04 Let me, let me mention this because some of your viewers and listeners may not know this. This is actually called brood parasitism, right? This is where one species has literally evolved the darkest of parental strategies, which is I can't be bothered raising my own children. Therefore, let me parasitize the parental instincts of another species. Place the egg there and those suckers will raise it. Now, by the way, that has to happen before a certain ontogenetic stage. So if, if, if it happens before it, then the parents will keep feeding that chick, the cuckoo chick, even though as it's growing up,
1:05:59 Speaker 04 it clearly looks morphologically different than the other ones. It will still do it. But if, if you come in too late into the, the, the, uh, the nest, then they will catch on. So.
1:06:13 Jordan B. Peterson? Oh, that's interesting.
1:06:15 Speaker 04 You see what I mean?
1:06:16 Jordan B. Peterson? I see.
1:06:16 Speaker 04 And so it's just incredible. And this is what frustrates me so much, by the way, about the people who hate evolutionary theory. Because the amount of exquisite scientific explanations and predictions that evolution offers is so bafflingly great. And yet people accuse us of just engaging and just so storytelling. It's really galling.
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1:07:57 Jordan B. Peterson? Yeah, yeah. So, let's go down the parasitic rabbit hole for a bit. So, I'm gonna make some propositions and you tell me if you believe that they're valid. The first ground truth, I would say, is that I've read an array of evolutionary literature. This isn't the only hypothesis, but it's a good one, that sex itself emerged so that creatures who were replicating could escape the problem of parasites. So, the theory goes is that the parasitic form is simpler than the form of the host, generally speaking, and that can give it a reproductive speed advantage.
1:08:39 Jordan B. Peterson? And so, the parasite can overwhelm the host and the host perishes ignominiously with no offspring under those circumstances. So, what the host does is mix up its genes so that the parasite is stymied in its attempt to adapt to the host across generations. And the parasite problem is so deep that the host is willing to sacrifice 50% of its genes, of its variable genes, which is what happens in sex, rather than, say, a parthenogenetic reproduction where you just clone yourself.
1:09:15 Jordan B. Peterson? So that's how deep the parasite problem is. So is that reasonable so far?
1:09:19 Speaker 04 Yeah, it is, it is. And I'm trying to think whether that, the theory that you just enunciated, if it's not Bill Hamilton who came up with it. Does that sound right?
1:09:30 Jordan B. Peterson? It might be Hamilton, yeah. I think it might be Hamilton.
1:09:32 Speaker 04 Yeah, yeah.
1:09:33 Jordan B. Peterson? Okay, so let me add one.
1:09:34 Speaker 04 Yeah, go ahead, go on.
1:09:35 Jordan B. Peterson? Well, I just want to add one more layer, because this, this'll tie it into your book and into the experiences that we've had. So, you know, there's, this is a weird way of introducing this, but I'm going to do it anyways. So I, I've, I spend a lot of time showing my students at the University of Toronto and Harvard, the movie Pinocchio. Because Pinocchio is a deadly, accurate representation of development and its perils. It's really remarkable. But there's weird things about it, very weird things, that, that are hard to explain. The fact of the bug that's the conscience, the fact that Pinocchio starts as a marionette, pulled by forces that are beyond his control, right? You know what he's tempted by? It's so funny, Gad.
1:10:20 Jordan B. Peterson? He's tempted to become an actor. So that's a narcissist. He's tempted to become a liar. So someone who falsifies. And he's tempted to use his hypothetical illness and victimization as a ticket to the land of the delinquents and the death of society. That's the way the narrative lays itself out. In any case, this is the odd part that's relevant to the parasite issue. Um, there's a scene in the movie where Pinocchio rescues Geppetto from the belly of a whale. And everyone swallows that, so to speak, as perfectly understandable, even though it makes no sense whatsoever. So I've been thinking, I've been thinking about this,
1:11:05 Jordan B. Peterson? because I couldn't crack that. I've been thinking about it for like 30 years. What the hell is that? What does that signify? And why does it sit well with an audience, given its perplexing and absurd nature? Well, okay.
1:11:21 Jordan B. Peterson? So, a carcass is a storehouse of value. Right? So that's why we were herders, obviously, or hunters. And if we hunted mammoths way back fifteen, twenty-five thousand years ago, we would take down a carcass that was too big for us to consume, and we would store it in the bodies of our co-hunters. And that was reputation, right? Right? Our reputation as an avid sharer made it more likely that we would live through periods of famine, because we're collective hunters.
1:12:01 Jordan B. Peterson? Okay, so that's how a carcass might be distributed and transformed into reputation. In any case, the largest of all possible carcasses is a whale carcass. So a whale carcass is a storehouse of value.
1:12:16 Jordan B. Peterson? When the spirit that gave rise to the provisioning of the carcass dies, the dying father is inside the whale, and that's why the puppet who's trying to transform has to rescue it. That's the university scad. So this is what's happened, as far as I'm concerned. Tell me what you think of this. Since World War II, particularly, we set up a very conscientious society. It was based almost entirely on merit, you know, absent corruption, from, say, oh God, I don't know when, but certainly from 1945 to, say, 2010, 2005, something like that. And in consequence, we stacked up an awful lot of whale carcasses.
1:13:01 Jordan B. Peterson? And the parasites moved in.
1:13:04 Speaker 04 Yeah, I mean, I liked sort of the metaphor, the explanation of how using the sharing mechanism, because I can't consume, that is literally out of reciprocal altruism, right?
1:13:23 Jordan B. Peterson? Right.
1:13:23 Speaker 04 It's Bob Trivers. Exactly. And actually, I was wondering, because earlier we were talking about your time at Harvard, Trivers got his PhD.
1:13:36 Speaker 04 At Harvard and E.O. Wilson, who was also at Harvard and recently passed away. I recently read his autobiography, Naturalist, which I highly recommend for anyone.
1:13:47 Jordan B. Peterson? Oh, yeah, yeah.
1:13:49 Speaker 04 It's beautifully written, really gorgeous autobiography. E.O. Wilson used to say that when, you know, E.O. Wilson was no intellectual slouch, right? I mean, he was a very bright guy. And he used to say that when Bob Trivers would walk into his office in his sort of manic phase, discussing all kinds of brilliant ideas, he would be so exhausted after that meeting that the day was over, he had done enough, and he would just go home. That gives you a sense of the kind of brilliance that you might find in some of these carcasses of whales that we call universities today. And I only wish, I long for the day that we can go back to, you know, those kinds of institutions
1:14:34 Speaker 04 rather than my having to indigenize evolutionary psychology.
1:14:39 Jordan B. Peterson? Right, right. Well, that's a good place to close. Well, we can imagine this, Gad, then. So here's two types of value. There's the value of what's been stored. So that's the carcass. That would be the Harvard Endowment. That would be the brand value of the Ivy Leagues or the brand value of a PhD. All of those are carcasses.
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1:15:25 Jordan B. Peterson? And so they can be... Stripped to the bone by the parasites who care nothing for the future propagation of that enterprise. They're just going to take everything and run. And the cowardly professors have turned a willfully blind eye to the invasion of the parasites, the grievance studies, the resentful mob who deprioritized the merit that built the institutions. Okay, so the carcass is one place of value. The other place of value that's more, that's deeper, is the spirit of the enterprise that gave rise to the storehouse of value. Right?
1:16:08 Jordan B. Peterson? And the universities are also attacking that. They're parasitizing the brand and they're destroying the principle upon which it was founded, which was pure, it was basically intellectual capability and conscientiousness. You know, we studied scientists to find out what predicted long-term research productivity. And we thought maybe it would be, we knew IQ would matter.
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1:18:48 Jordan B. Peterson? Because it matters about everything that's complex. Openness, which is creativity, didn't predict at all. Not above IQ. In fact, there was a slight negative prediction, but conscientiousness was a walloping predictor. Now, openness and IQ are positively correlated, so if you're smarter, you tend to be more creative. But above and beyond intelligence, openness didn't matter. And I think that's reasonable, because most diligent science isn't done by radical geniuses, right? There are some who are revolutionary in this open manner, but most of the incremental science, I think the reason science is so powerful
1:19:30 Jordan B. Peterson? is because you can turn it into something that conscientious people can do, right? Just by diligent pursuit.
1:19:36 Speaker 04 Although, I think the biggest thinkers are those who have a bent towards being generalists, because the biggest breakthroughs in science happen at the intersections of disciplines, right?
1:19:51 Jordan B. Peterson? Yeah, that's right.
1:19:52 Speaker 04 So yes, while it is true that the hyper-specialist is the one who does the important incremental work, the really big ideas, and this goes back to, I think we maybe discussed this in the past, or maybe we didn't, I mentioned earlier E.O. Wilson. So E.O. Wilson wrote in the late 1990s, one of my favorite books of all time. The book was titled Concilience, right?
1:20:15 Jordan B. Peterson? Concilience, yeah.
1:20:16 Speaker 04 Unity of Knowledge.
1:20:17 Jordan B. Peterson? It's a great book.
1:20:17 Speaker 04 And I think both of us, you and I, in our own distinct ways, are really concilient thinkers. When you're doing your... Relationship between biblical narratives and linking it to contemporary realities or to psychological realities. You're engaging in an endeavor of conciliance. You're building bridges between ancient stories and current truths. You're building a link between science and religion. And so you are being concilient. In my own work, I have published in many, many different disciplines, which people told me not to do because they thought that that's the exact way to not build an academic, successful academic career.
1:21:02 Speaker 04 But I didn't care because I was intellectually curious. I want to go where I want to go. And so I think that while it's all great for people to be incrementalists and hyper-specialists, I think the truly big guys, the ones who really stand the test of time, are the big concilient thinkers.
1:21:21 Jordan B. Peterson? Yeah, well, that adds that additional element of exploration and revolutionary explanation. That's a good time, I think, to bring this portion of the enterprise to a close. You're working on a new book. Let's just focus on that for a minute, which I'm very interested in. Maybe we'll talk about it on the Daily Wire side. That would be a good thing. Suicidal empathy, right? And so I've got some notions I would love to talk to you about in relationship to that. The maternal, the un-stated maternal instinct gone mad.
1:21:59 Speaker 04 The devouring mother?
1:22:00 Jordan B. Peterson? That's exactly it. The devouring mother. Let's talk about that on the Daily Wire side.
1:22:06 Speaker 04 Sounds good.
1:22:07 Jordan B. Peterson? All right. Yep. Very good to see you, Gad. And so tell people just at the end here, the names of your last couple of books.
1:22:16 Speaker 04 So the latest book is called The Saad Truth About Happiness: Eight Secrets for Leading a Good Life. The one prior to that was called The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense. And the ones before that are all within the evolutionary psychology realm, the evolutionary basis of consumption, evolutionary psychology in the business sciences, and the consuming instinct.
1:22:40 Jordan B. Peterson? Right. Well, it's a pleasure talking to you, sir. And we'll join you again on the Daily Wire side. For everybody who's watching and listening, as you know, we do another 20 minutes to half an hour on the Daily Wire side. And we're going to talk to Gad today about Suicidal Empathy, which is the title of his new book. Pleasure to see you, Dr. Sad. It's always worth talking to you.
1:23:00 Speaker 04 You, too. Thank you so much.
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