Transcript: How the Internet Is Breaking Our Brains: Sam Harris on Dr. Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

We’ve had some very big podcasts like Tucker’s and Joe’s platform Holocaust deniers and revisionists. And it’s been quite insane out there. And it’s just—I mean, that’s just one piece of it. I mean, you can talk about COVID or Trump or Ukraine or, I mean, pick your ugly object out there.

There’s just a radical divergence of opinion into these echo chambers we build for ourselves. And it seems to be very difficult to cross political lines. It’s somehow deeper than politics, actually. So anyway, I’m just increasingly worried about that. And I’m trying to hold up my side of the conversation in ways so as to cross those lines, but I’m just noticing that it’s proving impossible in many cases.

The Tower of Babel and Cultural Fragmentation

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah, okay, well, that’s—I am aware of that. It’s actually part of the reason I thought it would be useful for us to talk today. So I want to think about how to respond to that to begin with.

Well, I think the first thing that we should probably note is that this is a consequence of hyper-connectivity and stunning ease of communication.

SAM HARRIS: Right.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: So, I mean, it’s obviously the case that the landscapes of communication that once held us together for better or worse are now so multiplicitous that they’re new. They’re new, they’re numberless. And so what does that mean?

I think what it means in part, and this is where I think our conversation might get particularly interesting, is that we don’t have a shared story anymore. And I think a culture—I think a culture is literally a shared story, and a story is a structure. This has been part of our ongoing discussion for a very long period of time. Right. The relationship between the perceptual framing that is constituted by a story and let’s say, the domain of objective facts. Right. This is a very thorny problem.

But it seems to me that you have a culture when people share the same story or the same stories, they have the same shared reference points. And with an infinite landscape of communication that fragments indefinitely and then no one—see, Sam, let me tell you, I might as well, just to annoy you, just to get the ball rolling.

I spend a lot of time thinking about the story of the Tower of Babel. There’s two stories in Genesis that describe how things go wrong. And one story is the Flood. And that’s the consequence of absolute chaos bursting forward, essentially. But the Tower of Babel is a story about both totalitarianism and fragmentation.

So what happens is the engineers get together because that’s who it is. It’s the city builders, the tool makers, those who create weapons of war, the city builders, the engineers. They get together and they build these towers for the aggrandizement of the local potentates. So there was competition in the Middle East of that time to build the highest tower for the glory of the local ruler and that presumption.

So you can think about that as misaligned aim on the sociological front. The consequence of this misaligned aim is a kind of—because the aim of the culture is wrong, words themselves lose their meaning. That’s what happens in the story, right? Everybody ends up speaking a different language and then the towers fall apart.

So it’s because the stories are—the story that’s being told is one of human self-aggrandizement. That’s part of it. And the culture pathologizes and then disintegrates. And so I see that happening in our culture. There’s a technological element of it, obviously, that technological utopians are driving this, the transhumanists are driving this, and we’re aiming at the wrong goal.

And the consequence of that is that our language is falling apart and we don’t share the same reference points. That’s part of what’s happening. So I’m curious about what you think about that. How that fits in with your concern, your emergent concern.

When you say fragmentation, Sam, what is it that you think is fragmenting? Because it’s not the objective view of the world precisely. Although the scientific enterprise even seems to be shaky and corrupt and falling apart in many ways.

The Loss of Cultural Immune System

SAM HARRIS: Well, so I agree with that. I think the analogy to Babel is quite apt. I don’t think bringing Doge into Babel would have helped much. I think it is technological. Yeah. I mean, there’s just the fact that there’s—because of the—I think largely this is a story of social media, but it’s really the Internet generally.

Because of the information technology we have built, people can find endless confirmation of whatever their cherished opinion is. And it’s no longer—there’s some cultural immune system that has been lost. Right.

If you had to go to the physical conference out in the real world to meet the other people who were sure they had been abducted by UFOs, well, then you’d be meeting these people, you would see the obvious signs of dysfunction in their lives. And you would—there’d be more friction to the maintenance of this new conviction just based on the collision with other ancillary facts that have social relevance to you.

But online, again, this even precedes social media. This is true of the Internet back in the late 90s. You can just go down a rabbit hole and find endless confirmation. That’s fairly anonymized. Right. The 20-minute documentary that blew your mind and convinced you that the World Trade Center towers were brought down by the Bush administration—you didn’t know that that was made by some 18-year-old in his mother’s basement. And you didn’t have to know that. You were just looking at the product online.

But if you had had to meet this person, all of a sudden you’d realize that this is—the maintenance of this fiction becomes quite a bit harder. So we’re living now, I think, in the second generation of that moment where it really is bottomless. I mean, the ocean of misinformation and half-truth and misunderstanding is bottomless.

And the tools we have built to rectify misunderstandings and to spot lies and to be better truth seekers are there, but they have been in some sense—there’s just, this is asymmetric warfare. They’re no match for the information waste product that can be produced more quickly.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Right.

SAM HARRIS: I mean, this is just the old—

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Well, it’s easier to produce noise than signal, obviously.

SAM HARRIS: Yeah. Or pseudo-signal. Yeah. I mean, there’s so much that purports to be signal. Right. And again, this is probably socially more inconvenient for you than it is for me. But I mean, many of your bedfellows or former bedfellows are the principal parts of this problem. I mean, they’re the gods and goddesses on this landscape.

I’m thinking of someone like Candace Owens, who’s quite literally trafficking in blood libels now on her incredibly popular podcast. I mean, she’s just gone berserk as far as I can tell. And yet what is the style of conversation that would disconfirm all of that for her audience at this point? I don’t know.

Because I think what’s happened is we’ve trained up a culture of people or cultures of people—they simply don’t care about facts, really. They want a story that aligns with their, in some sense, their confirmation bias. I mean, they have certain things they want to believe, there’s certain ideas they like the taste of, and then they just want people catering to that appetite. And there’s a good business in that.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: I know as a clinical psychologist that any given teenager is going to fall prey to peer pressure from time to time. If you listen hard enough, people are likely to tell you everything. Our son, who’s in seventh grade, he’s—

SAM HARRIS: Starting to fall in with a bad friend group.

The Problem of Axiomatic Frameworks

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Well, part of that, I think, is the consequence of the fact that we have to ground our perceptions in an axiomatic framework. And I mean, this has been my concern with the primacy of the story right from the beginning. And I think the deeper question is—a deeper question is—is there some necessary structure to that fundamental axiomatic framework?

The postmodernist claim was that—the postmodernist claim, the fundamental postmodernist claim is that there is no uniting meta-narrative.

SAM HARRIS: Right.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: The post—we live in the postmodern world now. The postmodern world is a place of local truths. And the post—the French intellectuals—they not only decided, they decided that that was necessary and an improvement. And now we see the consequences of that. We’re in a landscape of infinite narratives.

And the question is, how do you define a rank order of narratives such that some are valid and some are invalid? The idea of misinformation is obviously predicated on the notion that certain narratives are invalid. And that seems self-evident to me. I wouldn’t exactly call myself a fan of the direction that Candace Owens has decided to walk down, but I’m not going to say anything more about her.

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

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

There was a certain—while there were fewer people, there was more ethnic homogeneity, at least in the local environments in the world. There were information brokers that were extraordinarily powerful: the universities, the newspapers, the TV stations, the radio stations. And they weren’t very easy to get access to. And they had gatekeepers.

And at least some of the time, those gatekeepers seemed meritorious as well as arbitrary. And it could easily be that the fragmentation of the landscape is a consequence of technological revolution and also perhaps of the—well, you had pointed to the irresponsibility of the participants in that landscape.

I mean, I think it’s also, or even more primarily, that they’re flooded with information and finding it very difficult to keep up.

The Old Norms and Standards

SAM HARRIS: Well, they’re also just not disposed to function by the old norms that the gatekeepers—I mean, for all their faults, they had standards. Right. I mean—

The Failure of Gatekeeping Institutions

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: But, Sam, I agree with you, but I also would say that those institutions, the gatekeeping institutions, have also revealed themselves as catastrophically flawed in the last five to ten years. I mean, I’m interested in your take on this.

Like, you brought up October 7th and the rise of anti-Semitism, and I’ve been tracking that with a couple of friends of mine, and we’ve been spending a lot of time fighting it off in all sorts of ways, some of which are public and some of which aren’t, and I’m appalled by it. What’s happened in Canada on the anti-Semitic front since October 7th is something I never thought I’d see in my lifetime. It embarrasses me to the core.

My goddamn government came out the other day, those bloody liberals, and they talked in the aftermath of October 7th about combating Islamophobia, as if that’s Canada’s problem, which it isn’t. And then, you know, you saw what happened across the United States and Canada with regard to the universities, Columbia University in particular, and their absolute silence and complicitness while these terrible demonstrations were going on. Not that I think that the demonstrations themselves should have been… well, we can talk about that. Letting terrorist radicals take over the universities doesn’t strike me as a very good solution.

So I’m curious about what you think about that because, well, I think the gatekeepers have abandoned the gates. Like, I don’t trust anything the New York Times prints at all. I think they’re reprehensible. The universities, I think, are beyond salvaging. I can’t see how they can be fixed. Anyways, man, lay it out. Tell me what you think.

SAM HARRIS: I think all the way up until those last two statements, I can sign on the dotted line. I think all of these institutions have embarrassed themselves in recent years for the reasons that I think you and I would fully agree about. This became most obvious during COVID, but October 7th is more of the same.

But I would just point out that the antidote to that, to the failures of institutions, is not new standards. It’s really to apply the old standards. I mean, we need the institutions.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Spoken like a true conservative.

SAM HARRIS: Yeah, yeah, yeah, fine. Well, I mean, so it’s…

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: No, no.

The Importance of Standards and Institutional Integrity

SAM HARRIS: But the antidote to failures of science, say, or scientific fraud, is not something other than science. It’s just more science, real science, good science, scientific integrity. And so it is with journalism or any academic discipline or anything that purports to be truth-seeking. We have standards and there’s nothing wrong with our standards.

What’s dangerous about the current information landscape where we have just this contrarian universe where anything that is outside the institutions is considered to have some kind of primacy, right? Where everyone is kind of a citizen journalist, a citizen scientist, where you just kind of flip the mics on and talk for four hours and that’s good enough. What that’s selecting for are the people who have no standards to even violate. Right? I mean, these people are incapable of hypocrisy.

I mean, the one thing that’s good about the New York Times and Harvard and any other institution you would point to that has obvious egg on its face at the moment is that at a minimum, they’re capable of being shamed by their own hypocrisy. And the people who aren’t in the… I would agree with you that there’s been some institutional capture where we have people in those institutions who just shouldn’t be there. Right?

But we would make that judgment again by reference to these old standards of academic or journalistic integrity. But Candace Owens just doesn’t have that. Right? And I, you know, sorry to beat up on her exclusively. I can move to other names if you want, but I mean, she’s…

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: No, it’s not. It’s not. The reason that I’m not inclined to discuss her isn’t because I agree with what she’s doing. It’s because I think the best way to deal with what she’s doing is not to discuss her.

The Problem of Misinformation in New Media

SAM HARRIS: Okay. But, well, I could say the same thing about Tucker Carlson. Right? And whether you agree with me or not, this is my view of him, that he’s not in the truth-seeking journalistic integrity business. He’s got some other political project that entails spreading a fair amount of misinformation quite cynically and consciously and smearing lots of people.

And in the case of, you know, I don’t know how deep his anti-Semitism runs, but in the case of that particular topic, midwifing a very misleading conversation with an amateur historian who he considers the greatest historian working in America today, Daryl Cooper, the podcaster. And you know, the opinion expressed, again, this is at the highest possible level in our information ecosystem to the largest audience.

Few historians in human history have ever had a bigger audience than Daryl Cooper had on Tucker’s podcast and then quickly followed by his appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast. Right. And on that podcast, he spread the lie that, you know, the recycled David Irving point that the Holocaust is not at all what it seemed, and you wouldn’t believe it, but the Nazis really never intended to kill the Jews.

They just rounded up so many prisoners in their concentration camps and found that they just didn’t have enough food during winter to feed them, and they just were put in this impossible situation. And might it not seem more compassionate to euthanize these starving prisoners in the end? Right. I mean, that’s how they accidentally stumbled into the final solution. Right. That’s what he spread again to the largest possible audience.

And in Tucker’s case, you had a very, I would say, sinister midwifing of that conversation. In Joe’s case, he just doesn’t know when he’s in the presence of recycled David Irving and is just happy to have a conversation with a podcaster of whom he’s a great fan, but yet he’s still culpable for not having done enough homework to adequately push back about what’s being said to his, again, to his audience, which is the largest podcast audience on earth.

So journalistically, and I know Joe doesn’t consider himself a journalist. He considers himself a comedian who’s just having fun conversations. Great. But what that is tantamount to at this moment, especially in the context of the worst eruption of anti-Semitism we’ve ever seen in our lifetimes globally, that’s tantamount to taking absolutely no responsibility for the kind of information that is flowing unrebutted into the ears of your audience. Right. That’s why I got angry at Joe. Right. I love Joe. Joe is a great person. He’s completely in over his head on topics of that sort. And it has a consequence, it has an effect.

The Challenge of Responsibility in the Digital Age

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Well, you know, one of the problems I suppose in some ways, Sam, is that in this new information landscape, we’re all in over our heads.

SAM HARRIS: Yeah, but some of us are alert to that possibility and worried about it and taking steps to course correct and notice our errors, apologize for those errors.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Okay. Okay. Well let’s also try to make a distinction here. You know, I mean, there is a distinction that’s important to make between accidentally wandering into pathological territory, you know, and causing disruption because of the magnification of your voice. And there’s a big difference between that and exploiting the fringe for your own self-aggrandizement. And there’s plenty of the latter online.

And I’ve been concerned for some substantial amount of time that online anonymity also drives that. I mean, you talked about the utility of embodied interaction in separating the wheat from the chaff, right? So one of the things you see online is, as you pointed out, if you have a crazy idea, you can find three hundred other people who have even a crazier idea of the same sort, and you can get together with them, which you couldn’t have done twenty years ago because there’s only one of them per hundred thousand scattered all around the world. But they can aggregate together quite quickly online.

The places that females gather online, for example, are rife with that kind of pathology. And all sorts of psychogenic epidemics spread without any barrier whatsoever in consequence, because young women in particular are susceptible to psychogenic epidemics. And so that’s a huge problem.

It’s also the case that in real world conversation, if I’m talking to you, you know, it’s me, and I have to live with the consequences of what I’ve said to you, assuming we ever meet again. And I have to live with the fact that other people hear about it as well. But if I’m anonymous, then I can say whatever the hell I want. I can gather the fruits of that and I can dispense with any of the responsibility.

And so my sense is that online connectivity magnifies our voice to a degree that it’s virtually impossible to be responsible enough to conduct ourselves appropriately because the reach is just so great. And anonymity literally gives the edge to the psychopaths, predators and the parasites. And this is a huge problem.

The Economics of Online Communication

You know, as biologists, we could think about it as biologists for a moment, Sam. I mean, I would say two things. When the cost of communication is zero, the parasites swarm the system, right? Because the communication is a resource, and abandoned resources attract parasites. And what is it now? Fifty percent of Internet communication is bots. And a huge part of the reason for that is that communication is free, but it’s not free, right? Because you have to attend to it. It actually has a cost. So the price of free is the wrong price.

You know, let me give you an example of this. Just tell me what you think about this. You know, one of the things I’ve done recently with my daughter and her husband mostly, and a bunch of professors, is start this Peterson Academy. And we have an online social media element to that which tracks about fifteen thousand regular users, and we keep a pretty close eye on it.

And we refunded the money of ten of our students because they were causing trouble on the social media platform. Ten out of fifteen thousand, that’s all. And it markedly improved in their absence. And so, you know, there’s an interesting dynamic there.

You know, we don’t know what online anonymity does. We don’t know what free communication does when the actual price isn’t zero. It certainly serves the parasites extraordinarily well. And we are learning that bad information is easier to generate and spread than good information.

SAM HARRIS: Right.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: None of this is personal. Right? None of this, really. I know we’ve already talked about the fact that all of this edgy conversation can be monetized and used to attract attention towards bad actors. Let’s leave that aside. I agree with that completely. I think it’s appalling.

But there are structural problems here that are even deeper. And I think, well, anonymity is a huge problem. But then also I think, well, what the hell are we going to do? What kind of world would we define and live in rapidly if every bloody thing that you had to say online was verified with a digital identity? I mean, they’ve taken a lot of steps in that direction in China. That doesn’t look very good to me.

The Structural Problems of Social Media

SAM HARRIS: Well, I think the structural problems run even deeper because I’ll agree with everything you said about the effect of free and the effect of anonymity. And I draw two lessons from your experience with your online forum.

One is that having it behind a paywall made it much cleaner than it otherwise would have been. You only found 10 people you had to kick out to clean the whole thing up. But the other point is that those 10 people can really have an outsized, toxic influence on a larger culture. So I think we want social media platforms that draw that kind of lesson.

But it’s not just anonymity, and it’s not just people who are grifting or otherwise incentivized to be liars or spreaders of misinformation. There are people with reputations you would think they would want to protect. I mean, people with the biggest possible reputations and the biggest possible careers, who in the presence of social media, have gone properly nuts.

And I would put as patient zero for this contagion, Elon Musk. I mean, Elon has, I’ve witnessed a complete unraveling of the person I knew, and I believe I knew him fairly well under the pressure of extraordinary fame and wealth, but really kind of weaponized by his addictive entanglement with Twitter.

I mean, he was so addicted to Twitter that he needed to buy it so that he could just live there. Twitter was his whole life before anyone heard about his impulse to buy it or anyone heard about his concern about the Woke Mind virus. I mean, before COVID he had gone off the deep end into Twitter being everything.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: How do you know this?

SAM HARRIS: I know this because I was his friend at the time and I was there in his very close social circle when Twitter was causing obvious problems for his life and his businesses. When he would tweet “420 funding secured,” and the SEC raised the offices of Tesla and seizes everyone’s computer. I mean, he was screwing up his life through Twitter, and yet it was unthinkable that he would get off of it. So potent a drug was it for him.

The Biology of Addiction and Social Media

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Let me ask you about that. Let’s think about this biologically. Again, one of the ways you could define addiction is as the pursuit of positive emotion that’s bound to a very short time frame. So you get addicted when you optimize positive emotion over a very short time frame.

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

SAM HARRIS: And also the reward component appears to correlate subjectively not with the peak in actual pleasure of the resulting stimulus, but in the peak of the expectation that the pleasure is about to arrive.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah. Well, the dopaminergic system is an expectation system and cocaine. Okay, so now, so here’s what we have with social media, with the bots, with the AI algorithm optimizers.

So this is what’s happening, you can see it happening to YouTube too, is that the systems are optimized to grip attention, but the battle is for shorter and shorter durations of attentional focus. So the battle is not only for attention, but for the shortest possible amount of information that will grip the maximum amount of attention.

Now, the AI systems are using reinforcement learning to determine how to optimize that. And that’s driving that fragmentation. You can see it on YouTube, because YouTube is tilted more and more towards shorts like TikTok. These fragmentary bursts of maximally attractive information. And they could capitalize on rage, because rage has a positive emotion element.

Now, I want to put this into the context of what you said about Twitter. And you and I could have a conversation about X and Twitter that’s personal as well. So you said Elon got hooked on X and enough to buy it. And so let’s assess that situationally and biologically.

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

SAM HARRIS: Yeah. Hasn’t it, at various points convinced you that you should no longer use it? Haven’t you gotten on and off multiple times?

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Multiple times. Multiple times.

SAM HARRIS: I learned that lesson exactly once, but it really did stick. I have not looked.

Peterson’s Complex Relationship with X

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah, well, that’s partly what I want to talk to you about. I mean, so part of it is I get a lot of my podcast guests and my ideas for podcast guests from X. Because I follow about 2,000 people, but I’m very extroverted, and there’s an element of impulsivity that goes along with extroversion.

I’m very verbally fluent, and so I can think up new ideas in no time flat, and I’m likely to say them. And so it’s very easy for me, if I’m on X, to react to a lot of things. And so, well, but it’s weird. It’s a weird thing because some of my impulsive moves, so to speak, which have got me in quite a lot of trouble, I’m not the least bit unhappy about.

You know, you cannot believe how much flack I got for tweeting out something arguably careless on October 8th.

SAM HARRIS: What was that? I’ve not been on Twitter. I never saw that. What was the tweet?

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: “Give him hell, Netanyahu.” Yeah, right. So that took eight months of cleanup work to deal with. Seriously.

SAM HARRIS: It was.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: No, it was. And I got kicked off.

SAM HARRIS: Yeah, you’re not going to get any dispute from me about that. I mean, Netanyahu, just to close the loop on that. Netanyahu is obviously a very polarizing figure and probably a fairly corrupt figure, and he’s got lots of problems that have implications for Israeli politics.

But I’m not convinced that even the perfect prime minister, who has no optical problems, judged from our side, would have waged this war any differently. I mean, I just don’t know what they should have done differently at every stage along the way. I don’t know that any other prime minister would have taken a different path.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Well, the situation to me looks like, can you tell me what you think about this? And then we’ll go back to the problem of AI optimization of grip of short term attention and the manner in which X in particular falls into that category.

So my sense with the situation, Israel has been right from the beginning that Iran in particular would and has set up the situation. So if every single Palestinian was sacrificed in the most torturous possible manner to irritate, annoy and destroy Israel and agitate the Americans, that would be 100% all right with Iran.

SAM HARRIS: I think someone once said that the mullahs in Iran will fight Israel to the last Arab. I think that’s the line that captures it.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah, well, that’s exactly how it looks to me. And so I look at that situation and I say, well, what do you do in a situation like that that’s moral if you’re Israel?

Anyways, I don’t want to go down that rabbit hole too deeply. Yeah, yeah, well, but okay, so I’ve had this complex relationship with X and some of it’s been real useful because I follow a lot of people there and I keep an eye on the mainstreams of the culture and I extract out my podcast guests and I can see where the real pathology is emerging and I can keep an eye on it.

And the price of that is that now and then I stick my foot in it in a major way and sometimes that’s good and sometimes it’s not. And now I’ve sort of built a variety of fences around me that are part of my organization. They’re kind of these intermediary structures that we’ve been talking about that put a lag in between what I read and how I respond.

SAM HARRIS: Well, that’s one.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Well, and this is part, it’s the destruction of those things that we’re starting to talk about here because there’s never been a time in human history where you could publish your first pass opinion about anything to 20 million people in one second. No one could ever do that. And we’re not neurologically constructed to live in a world where you can yell at 10 million people whenever you want about anything.

The Psychopathic Nature of Online Behavior

SAM HARRIS: Yeah. The problem for me is that, so what’s happened now, going back to this core topic of what in particular is wrong with X and the time course at which people are reacting to information and producing information in turn, there’s a lot wrong with that and what it’s done to our culture and what it’s done to specific people.

I mean, again, Elon, for me is the enormous, the 800 pound canary in the coal mine is that it is, it’s effectively made them behave like psychopaths. I’m not saying, I mean, if you just look at X and this is what convinced me to get off of it, you would think there were many more psychopaths in the world than there are.

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

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Right, right, right. Well that’s an interesting definition of a pathological sub environment, isn’t it? You can tell a family is pathological when the rules that apply in the family don’t generalize to the outside world.

And you’re pointing out that the game dynamics of Twitter have that aspect is that the game that’s being played in Twitter doesn’t suit the world. Well, it’s not an iterable game in the world and it could easily be the fact that it maximizes for short term emotional reactivity is exactly what gives it that psychopathic edge.

Because the definition of a psychopath in many ways is the person who will sacrifice the future and you for immediate gratification. That’s the pathology of psychopathy is a form of extended immaturity.

The Aggressive Immaturity on Display

SAM HARRIS: Yeah, well there’s a lot of aggressive immaturity on display on X. And again, Elon is one of the primary offenders. I mean, one instance for me that made this especially clear, and the role played by X especially clear, was when he jumped up on stage during one of these campaign events, or I forget if it was campaign or I guess the election had already been won, but some event with Trump and Elon.

You know, quite famously, quite infamously, did what appeared to be a Nazi salute twice to the crowd and got a reaction from much of the world of horror and insult. And now honestly, you know, as his former friend and as somebody who just imagines his worldview has not fully disintegrated into a tissue of weird Internet memes, it was impossible for me to believe that he was sincerely announcing his solidarity with the project of Nazism by making those salutes.

Right. So I didn’t view those as Nazi salutes even though just ergonomically they were in fact Nazi salutes. I just thought, okay, I don’t know what he’s doing, but the idea that he’s picking this moment to say “I’m a Nazi” seems frankly impossible.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: So.

SAM HARRIS: I was interested to see what he was going to do in response to the controversy, what he did in response. And again, this controversy is coming in a context that doesn’t look at all good for my very charitable interpretation of his behavior, because it’s in a context where he’s funding the far right party in Germany, assuring us that there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that party. Whereas the party does in fact contain whatever Nazis there are to be contained in Germany.

Not that it’s only a Nazi party, but it is, in addition to everything else, it’s got the Nazis. He’s playing footsie with lots of fairly aggressive anti-Semites on his own platform. He’s with great fanfare, he had brought back Nick Fuentes and Kanye and these people are anti-Semites, if not actual Nazis.

So he is facilitating a very unhappy recrudescence of anti-Semitism on the platform he owns. And now he’s doing Nazi salutes in public. So what does a genuinely not anti-Semitic, well-intentioned person who cares about his reputation and is still capable of embarrassment do in the aftermath of this?

Well, it would have been just trivially easy for him to have said something totally sensible and apologetic that would have been honest and would have taken the sting out of the moment. Perfectly. He could have said, “Listen, I know how that looked. I don’t know what I was doing up there. I was just captured by the energy of the moment. Obviously I was not doing a Hitler salute. I’m not a Nazi. I’ve got no interest in amplifying their message on X or anywhere else. If you’re a Nazi, please don’t follow me. I hate your whole project. You’re completely wrong about everything.” Right. End of tweet.

Right. He did nothing like that. All he did was troll his audience making Nazi jokes and puns on X. So you can fault his character for that. But what I also think we should fault is the medium itself. Right? This is the way his brain is conforming to the technology.

The Fundamental Attribution Error

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: First we see that. Yes, well, look, you know, the fundamental attribution error is the one thing social psychologists have discovered that’s actually valid. That’s a bit of an exaggeration. But the fundamental attribution. Yes, a dozen things.

The fundamental attribution error is the proclivity to attribute to character what’s actually a consequence of situation, you know, and we should be very careful, and I think we are at the moment, be very careful to assure that our first presumption is that it’s the pathology of the technology that’s the fundamental driver.

SAM HARRIS: And that people are still wrong in it. That’s my account of what has happened to Elon Musk almost in its entirety. I think Twitter has, he is the greatest living casualty of what Twitter does to someone who becomes properly engorged by it. And that’s, yeah, so, but, and one of the reasons why I got off, frankly, was apart from my own misadventures on the platform, which were nothing like Elon’s, I looked in the kind of the funhouse mirror of what was happening to him in his life, and I thought, here’s a very smart guy who’s got much better things to do than f* up his life in this way.

And yet he can’t seem to stop. How much am I like him? How much is there this component of addiction and dysregulation and failures of impulse control and a need to just get my thoughts out on a time course of seconds rather than more carefully, you know, over the course of days.

I mean, because it was so, and so then I yanked it for that reason. And the one thing I found is that when you don’t have it as an outlet, right, when you literally can’t publish that quickly, then things have to survive a much larger informational half-life. So then there’s this thing online that happened that I’m tempted to react to. It has to survive until I do my next podcast, which might not be for three or four days. Right. And so, and you know, obviously 90% of the things I thought I had to react to don’t survive that time course.

Building Inhibitory Structures

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah. You know, I made a deal with my wife that was like that because, you know, I can see things going sideways, I think, with a fair degree of accuracy. And that disrupts me emotionally now and then, and I made a deal with my wife several years ago that I can’t complain about anything I won’t write about.

SAM HARRIS: Right.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Well, yeah, well, it’s the same thing and it bears on the same issue that you’re describing is that if it’s not important enough to write about, then you should ignore it. Right. You’re not actually, it’s not significant enough. It’s not significant enough to sacrifice some genuine time and thought. You shouldn’t be commenting on it.

And that’s kind of a maturity, but it’s also, it’s a weird thing because it’s not exactly like, it isn’t something that people had to contend with previously because you couldn’t publish immediately. There were barriers of cost and difficulty and gatekeepers and distribution. And so that wasn’t something you had to think up for yourself.

How do I put a lag in my life before I communicate with a million people or 5 million people? And so you’re basically building these inhibitory structures out of whole cloth. And now you pulled out of Twitter quite a while ago. Now it’s a couple years ago.

SAM HARRIS: Yeah.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Right.

SAM HARRIS: Okay, so two and a half years, something like that.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah.

SAM HARRIS: It was actually right when Elon took it over, but it wasn’t because he took it over. I mean, the timing there was fairly accidental. I was getting ready to pull the plug, and then I just saw how much chaos was being introduced into his life around it, and I just thought, all right, this is a sign. And so I yanked it.

And, I mean, one of the benefits, apart from just introducing this different time course into my life by which I interact with information, I just don’t like, you know, there’s this phrase, you know, that “Twitter isn’t real life.” And then at a certain point, many of us realize, okay, that’s too sanguine a thought because we’re noticing people losing their reputation so fully that, you know, they get on an airplane.

I think it was the Justine Sacco incident, where she got on an airplane and half the world was tweeting about her. And she arrived at her destination, only to find that she had been properly canceled and lost her job, etc. So obviously, Twitter can, you know, whether you’re on it or not, it can, under the right circumstances or the wrong ones, become real life.

When Twitter Isn’t Real Life

But the truth is, given the platform I’ve built, given the, I mean, just frankly how lucky I’ve been to find an audience and to build a readership and a podcast listenership, Twitter really isn’t real life for me, right? I’m still, Elon still attacks me on Twitter by name, and I find out I’m trending on Twitter, you know, years after I’ve left, and it matters not at all for my life, it matters not at all for my business. Nothing happens, right?

And yet if I were on Twitter, there would be this illusion of emergency, right? If I was on there looking at it and looking at the, you know, looking at the biggest, literally the biggest bully on Twitter has just punched me in the face. And I’m seeing the aftermath of it, the temptation to respond to that and to make and to feel that not only do I have to respond there, but I have to respond on my podcast.

And then now this is how I’m spending my week. Because this thing just happened on Twitter. It would be almost impossible not to be taken in by that and not to be just convinced of the necessity of it, because all of this is really important. I mean, we’re talking about millions of people.

I mean, literally, there are videos denigrating me for things I’ve never said or believed that Elon has amplified. And these videos have 50 million views. Right. And I just happen to be lucky enough to have built a life and a career where that matters not at all. Right. But for somebody else finding themselves in that situation, I can well imagine. All right? This is just, this is the destruction of my reputation in a way that matters.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Well, that’s what it looks like. Sure. And you said, it’s virtually impossible to resist that temptation. I mean, who are you to deny the impact of the opinion of 50 million people? You know what I mean? I mean, that looks like an insane pride, in a way, to ignore that. But the point that you’re making is that it’s very difficult to.

SAM HARRIS: Well, it’s very easy to ignore it when it actually isn’t making contact with my views. Right. If I had said that. Right.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: But it’s hard to see that it isn’t, because it’s so, it appears so powerful. You know, we’ve found, as a social media platform, that Twitter is the worst of all social media platforms for sales conversion.

The Algorithm’s Influence on Information Consumption

SAM HARRIS: Yeah. I can imagine in our experience, you’re next to somebody getting beaten to death in a liquor store. I mean, when I go on Twitter, since I don’t have an account, so I have a naive account, it’s not following anyone, and I almost never click anything. So I really see the pure algorithm, when you just kind of just look at the homepage scroll. Or as pure as it gets. I mean, maybe it’s got some information on me based on my IP address or something.

But if I ask myself, what is this algorithm trying to get me to be or to believe, honestly, I can tell you that it is trying to get me to be a racist ahole and a fan of Elon’s. Right? So it’s given me a lot of Elon. And then it’s given me a lot of black teenagers beating up a single white teenager or people of color robbing stores and getting shot in the face. I mean, it’s just like 4chan level awfulness and then the occasional unlucky brand advertising to me in that context.

I mean, it’s just a monstrosity of a platform from which to actually try to sell things. But yes, if I were on Twitter following 2,000 smart people as you are and feeling that they are curating for me the best of their information diet, I would have that experience. I know what that experience is like because that’s what I was doing. That’s why I was on it for whatever, 12 years and couldn’t convince myself to get off.

Seemed like a professional necessity. It seemed so good in the sense the incoming stuff was so good because again, I had chosen who to follow and all these people were reading great articles and forwarding them and having great short takes on them, and it was all that stuff was great.

But I have managed to get a surrogate of that in the way I find information otherwise. And what I don’t have is the emergency, like the ruined vacation where somebody, some genius over at the New York Times has called me a racist and now I have to spend the rest of my vacation with my family trying to figure out how to respond to this. I’ve tweeted back at them and it’s escalated and now we’ve just nuked each other.

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

The Pathologizing Effects of Social Media

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Well, you made an allusion when you were talking about what you regard as the unfortunate effect of X on Elon and maybe on other users. So let’s assume that you were afraid that the sort of things that you were seeing happening to others more than merely Elon, let’s say, in your estimation, were also happening to you.

And so what do you think in retrospect? What do you think it was doing to you? You just talked about the effects on your family on vacations. I’ve experienced a fair bit of that. I understand exactly what you’re saying. And it does seem like the world’s burning and you better do something about it right now.

And it’s no wonder it seems that way because it’s lots of people. And generally in our normative ecosystems, if lots of people appear to be upset with you or around you, you should pay attention. But Twitter isn’t the real world. We don’t know what the hell it is. You know, it looks more and more like a world of demonic bots and God only knows what that world is.

But what did you see, especially now that you’ve been away for a while? What elements of your character do you think were pathologized and that were brought to the forefront?

The Fragmentation of Attention

SAM HARRIS: Well, yeah, it was the first time because of this. I was, I considered myself a fairly careful user of it. I mean, I was not at all like Elon. I was not addicted to it in that way. I was not tweeting hundreds of times a day. I think I averaged something like three tweets a day over the course of my use of it. And that would come in spurts. I mean, so there would be, I would not tweet for three days and then send out a dozen tweets because it was some hot topic.

I was always fairly careful so that I honestly don’t think I ever said anything on the platform that I regretted. Right. I mean, if I ever made a mistake, I apologize for it. But I never, I treated it like writing. I was aware I was publishing in that channel, however quickly and impulsively I was. I’m a much, I’m enough of a writer and an academic to feel like, okay, this is yet another occasion where embarrassment is possible and you don’t want that. So I never, I don’t remember ever really screwing up on the platform.

And yet what happened there was, I mean, I can honestly say that for a decade, the worst things in my life, and in some sense the only bad things in my life came from Twitter, came from my interaction with Twitter. I mean, apart from family illnesses, leaving that aside, my life was so good and yet I had this digital serpent in my pocket that I would consult a dozen times a day, 20 times a day, maybe 100 times a day.

So again, I might have only posted once or twice, but if something was really, if the news cycle was really churning, I might be looking at this. My consulting of this newsfeed effectively was interrupting my day. Not just every hour, but maybe every five minutes of many hours. Or for 10 minutes of that hour. And so it was segmenting my day, however good or productive that day was or should have been.

I was constantly chopping it up by how I was engaging with this scroll. Again, mostly consuming, but often in response to the one or two things I had put out. Yes, there was a dopaminergic component to that. Obviously, I said something that I thought was clever, that was perceived as clever by my fans, and perhaps to the detriment of my enemies. And that all seemed exactly what I wanted in the moment.

But even when it was at its best, right, even when there was just good information coming to me and I was responding happily with good information back, even the non-toxic version of it was a style of, was intrinsically fragmenting of my life. It’s like I don’t pick up, I don’t read a book that way. I don’t have a book that I pick up for two and a half minutes and then I put down and then try to have a conversation with my kid and then say, okay, hold on one second and pick up the book again. It’s like that’s not how you, that’s not how anyone reads a book. Right.

And yet Twitter far too often became that sort of thing in my life. Right. And it’s like a parasite.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: It’s like it parasitizes the exploratory instinct. It’s something like that.

SAM HARRIS: Right.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Because, and maybe look, you know, for a long time I didn’t have a cell phone. I was a late adopter of cell phones. And I didn’t watch the news probably really from like 1985 till about 2005. I had cut myself off from news sources. I didn’t read newspapers. And the reason that I didn’t do that…

SAM HARRIS: Things happened in there. Did you catch 9/11? Did that miss you?

The Value of Delayed Information

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Well, you know, I used to read, for example, I would read some credible magazines like the Economist when it was still credible, because I don’t really think it is anymore.

SAM HARRIS: Wasn’t that amazing? Isn’t it amazing to consider that magazines like Time and Newsweek could wait a week, could expect that their audience would wait a week to be informed about the news of that week? That just seems extraordinary to me now.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Well, well, my conclusion about that was that if it isn’t important in a week, it’s not important.

SAM HARRIS: Right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, right.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: And so I substituted these longer lag time news aggregators for TV in particular or radio. It’s like if it’s today’s news, it’s not news. Maybe if it’s not important in a month, it’s not news.

SAM HARRIS: Right.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: And that’s part of that intelligent filtering and I guess part of the reason that X is dangerous and social media is dangerous, X in particular, is that, you know, that proclivity to forage for information is in general an extremely useful instinct. Right. It’s the instinct to learn.

But what we’re learning, you might say that the shorter the period of time over which the information is relevant, the more like pseudo-information it is. And so then any system that optimizes for the grip of short term attention is going to parasitize your learning instinct with pseudo-information.

The Culture of Misinformation

SAM HARRIS: Yeah, it’s also…

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: And the algorithms are going to maximize that.

SAM HARRIS: The half-life is one thing, but also the culture that is informing these algorithms, the actual human behavior that the algorithms are skimming and boosting is increasingly a bad faith style of conversation. I mean, so many people, especially the anonymous people are in the misinformation business. I mean they will just cut together a clip that is designed to mislead and that is the clip that will get spread to the ends of the earth.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Well, maybe is it designed to mislead or is it designed to optimize their particular grip on short term attention for their own gratification, for their own aggrandizement? Like the psychopathic move? And let’s say that it’s facilitated by these short term attention aggregators that are driven by bots that are learning how to do this.

The psychopathic proclivity, the narcissistic proclivity is going to say whatever puts you at the center of attention, whatever it is. Now if you’re governed by some kind of ethos that is outside of attention seeking, then that’s a different story. But the game, if the game is that the machine optimizes for short term attention, then it’s going to reward all the players that are doing whatever it takes to grip short term attention.

The Problem of Deceptive Editing and Digital Manipulation

SAM HARRIS: Yeah, but the thing is people, you know, whatever it takes though is to get somebody seeming to say something totally outrageous. And in context it might have made perfect sense, or at least be a very different point than the one that’s being advertised by the clip. But the clip short of context is just calculated to mislead in that the person who has edited that clip knows that the naive viewer can only draw one conclusion from the utterance as presented.

And they’re not, and even if they’re well intentioned and fairly alert to this problem, almost no one is going to go back to the original podcast and look at the comment in context. I mean this just happened to Rogan I believe. I think he had Bono, the singer for U2, on his podcast and Bono said something critical of Elon, I believe. And this got chopped up in a clip that was just, it made it look like Joe really disagreed with Bono and was critical of him.

And so the clip just got exported as like “look at, you know, look at Bono getting owned by Joe Rogan” or whatever. But that’s not what the conversation was at all. Like Joe conceded, you know, had most of the point that Bono was making. It was just, it was false. It was a false picture of what happened there. And the person who makes that clip just knows that if they frame it as a smackdown, people are going to love to see that. And it doesn’t matter that they’re lying about what happened and damaging people’s reputations in the process.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah, well, and that’s especially true if they’re anonymous and their reputation bears no consequence of their lies, you know? Well, the other thing that’s happening. I don’t know how much this is happening to you, but, and this is another example of the parasite problem. So increasingly, my voice and my image are being used not exactly in the way that you’re describing, although that’s happening a lot.

SAM HARRIS: Yeah, I’m selling cognitive enhancers somewhere as an AI version of myself.

The Rise of AI Impersonation

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Okay, okay, well, that’s happening a fair bit, too, and sometimes worse than cognitive enhancers. But the worst thing that’s happening now is that these sites that are operating under my name, using my image and my voice, are providing pseudo philosophical content and pseudo psychological insight as if it’s me.

And so it’s like what I’ve said has been put through a filter of stupidity and reorganized in my voice. And this is happening constantly. Like, YouTube has already taken 65 channels down that are doing this. And so this is another example of that parasite problem. You store up a reputation, and then the parasites swoop in and pull off the attention that the reputation has garnered and monetize it, and they can escape into the ether because they do it anonymously. And so this is going to become a stunning problem.

SAM HARRIS: It’s a big problem. I can see that the perfect version of it is at most a year away. I mean, it might only be a couple of months away. We’ve experimented with this on our side, too. Just like, for instance, in my meditation app, Waking Up, we’re now experimenting with translation to other languages. And AI’s got me speaking 22 languages perfectly in my voice, and it really sounds like me speaking those languages.

And the translation from what we can tell so far is fairly impeccable. So we’re going to roll out a Spanish version of the app in the not too distant future just to see what happens, but it’s getting too good. So I think the lesson that consumers of information who care to have real information are going to have to learn is that you can’t trust if you’re looking at Jordan Peterson on YouTube, you simply cannot trust that it really is Jordan Peterson unless it’s coming through one channel that you know you can trust.

So now we’re back to the age of gatekeepers. Ironically, we’re back to the age of gatekeepers. It’s not on your channel or Joe Rogan’s channel or Chris Williamson’s channel, if it just purports to be them, but on somebody else’s YouTube account. You can’t trust it.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah, well, it might also be, Sam, that the real solution to that is payment. Like, if it’s, the rule is going to be…

SAM HARRIS: Maybe this is the rule is going to be all my stuff is free.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Right. If it’s free, it’s a lie.

SAM HARRIS: Right? Yeah.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: That’s the world we’re rapidly moving into. And, or if it’s…

SAM HARRIS: Except someone’s going to be able to create, and until you find them and stop them, someone will create the fake Jordan Peterson Academy that has a paywall. That looks like you, sounds like you. And, you know, it’s only $5 a month, and so they’ll monetize that way, and that’ll still be the problem.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Has that been happening with your meditation app, with your enterprise yet?

SAM HARRIS: Not that I’m aware.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: That’s…

SAM HARRIS: No. I mean, I just think I’m just aware of seeing short clips of me seeming to hawk, you know, psychotropics that I’ve never heard of, and it’s just an AI version of my voice. It’s real footage of me stolen from somebody’s podcast, and then an AI workover of that, you know, that turns into like an Instagram ad.

Digital Identity Theft as Kidnapping

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah, Well, I talked to some lawmakers in D.C. about a year and a half ago about the fact that this was going to happen, hoping that they would, well, it takes a long time to take notice and take action, but, you know, it’s essentially the digital, it’s the digital equivalent of kidnapping.

Like, I think people should be put in prison for a long time for stealing your digital identity and monetizing it. Like, it is very much akin to kidnapping because what they’re doing is they’re draining the value out of your reputation. That’s essentially the game, you know.

And so what’s happened to your life? There’s a couple of things I’d like to investigate here. First, you know, I’d like to return to something that you and I talked about, that we wandered around a fair bit in our previous conversations. You know, partly because you were concerned about the distinction between good and evil. Let me put words into your mouth. You were hoping to find an objective basis for morality, a way of grounding morality in the objective world.

And I have a thought about that that’s relevant to our current conversation. You know, so tell me if you accept this proposition. Part of the pathology of Twitter is that it operates by game rules that not only don’t apply in the real world, but that when exported to the real world, pathologize it. Is that fair?

SAM HARRIS: Yeah.

Morality as Iterable Game Theory

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Okay. I like that a lot. Okay, okay. Right. Okay. So here’s a way of, I think, bridging the gap between the way you’ve been thinking about the world from the moral perspective and the way I’ve been thinking about it.

So, you know, I’ve always understood that you had a very deep concern about moral judgment and that your attempt to provide a scaffolding of objectivity for morality was grounded in that even deeper concern. And I thought that I could understand why you did that. And I didn’t agree with the conclusions that you drawn, but I agreed with the overall enterprise.

And it struck me recently, and I think we’ve already obliquely made reference to it in our conversation, that there’s another way of conceptualizing this relationship between morality and objective fact, and that might be more fruitful to look into the realm of something like, well, it’s like theory of iterability. It’s generalizability. It’s maybe a variant of something like game theory.

Like, imagine that, so let me give you an example, Sam. It’s a pretty famous example. You know those trading games where behavioral economists sit people down and say, two people, they say, “I’ll give you a hundred dollars. You have to make an offer to the…” Okay.

SAM HARRIS: Yeah.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: So the finding across culturally is that people generally approximate a 50/50 split, right?

SAM HARRIS: Yeah. And they’re highly, they’re not game theoretic with respect to unfair trades. Like, they don’t want to accept unfair trades even when it would just narrowly be to their advantage to accept them.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Exactly, exactly. Okay. Okay. And that’s true even if they’re poor. So if you put a poor person in a situation where they have to accept an unfair trade that would be to their immediate economic benefit, they seem even less likely to accept it.

Now, I think the right way to construe that is that if you and I engage in an economic trade, we’re doing two things at the same time. The first is what the classical economists would say is we’re trying to maximize our short, our gain, let’s say. But the problem with that notion is that we aren’t playing one game or while we’re playing one game, we’re also setting ourselves up to play a very large and unpredictable sequence of games. Those are happening at the same time.

And so we don’t want to just optimize for gain in the single game. We want to optimize our status as players in a large series of unpredictable games. And so we want to put ourselves forward as fair players so that people line up to play other games with us.

Okay, so then imagine that the hallmark of morality is something like generalizable iterability across contexts, right? Because this would allow for, and so you could think about a more truly moral system is the most playable game and an immoral system augurs in. And when, like when we’ve seen we’re talking about this to some degree with regard to X, because our proposition is that fundamentally because it’s optimizing for short term attention grip and it benefits the psychopaths and the short term gain accruers, the parasites and perhaps the predators, that it’s fundamentally a non playable game.

And that if its consequences generalize outside the world of X, that it pathologizes the environment. And the reason for that is it’s not optimally iterable. And so the pattern of morality that would be grounded in the objective world isn’t in the world of objective fact. It’s in the world of optimized iterability across people and contexts.

Morality as Navigation Problem

SAM HARRIS: Well, I would just say that there are some set of objective facts that subsumes that picture, right? I mean, the world is the way it is. The social world of social primates such as ourselves is the way it is. It admits of certain possibilities and certain other things are impossible given the kinds of minds we have.

Our minds could change in all kinds of ways. They could change by being integrated with technology. They could change by genetically being manipulated. At some point in the future there’s this landscape of possible experience that the right sort of minds could navigate. And we’re someplace on that landscape and we’re trying to find our way.

And so I view morality as, at bottom, a navigation problem, right? And it’s got this iterative quality that you describe. It’s, the question is, it’s always, you know, where can we go from here? Where should we go from here? Where should we go from here, given all the possible places we might go from here, both individually and collectively?

The Nature of Stories and Navigation

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Okay, well, you know, the reason that I got obsessed with stories to begin with, Sam, was because I realized 30 years ago that a story was a description of a navigation strategy. That’s what a story is. And so then the question is, okay, let’s see if we can formalize this a bit more.

The story has, let’s say an optimized story has to iterate and improve. So for example, if you construe your marriage properly, it exists stably, but that’s not as good as it could get. It could exist stably and improve as it iterates. And then you can imagine that there is a small world of games that are playable in the actual natural and social world that improve as they iterate. And those are those games pointers to that. Those games are moral pointers.

And I think that that’s what the core of the religious enterprise dives into and elaborates upon. I think that’s what makes it the religious enterprise is that it deeply assesses. So if, imagine this, imagine that your proposition, the proposition you laid out is accurate, is that the fundamental concern is navigation. How do we get from point A to point B?

Well, a story, you can think about this and tell me what you think, but I believe that a story is a description of a navigation strategy. If you go see a movie, you infer the aim of the protagonist and you adopt his perceptual frame and his emotional perspective. That’s how perception works.

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

And there’s a hierarchy of value in consequence of that that is obliquely associated with the world of fact because it has to operate in the world of fact, but that isn’t fundamentally derived from data that’s directly associated with the facts.

Objective Truths and Better Games

SAM HARRIS: Well, not operationally, but potentially so. Just not in fact. It’s just, that’s just not. I’m never claiming when I say that there are objective truths to all of these questions that those objective truths will be delivered by some guy holding a clipboard wearing a white lab coat, but there are things we just know to be true. And it would take a lot of explaining to get to the bottom of how we know them to be true.

But I mean, just, they’re very simple claims. We know that life in, you know, the best and most refined and most ethically positive, some developed world context. Right. You know, you and me and our most conscientious friends at the nicest resort after having done a great day’s work, we’re enjoying a great meal and talking creatively and positively about how to improve the world.

We know that’s a better game than, you know, trying to find some child soldiers to torture the neighbors in some malarial hellhole, you know, in sub-Saharan Africa, and so that we can extract, you know, some heavy metals, you know, the extraction of which is polluting the environment and causing the life expectation to be 30 years lower than it is in where we live. Right.

I mean, so there are different fundamentally discordant human projects that are available to some very lucky people and unavailable to others. And luck is by no means evenly distributed in this world. So there are better and worse games, right. By any measure of better, you want to ethically better, artistically better, entrepreneurially better, economically better, it’s just, you know, better, better, better with respect to the health outcomes, et cetera, et cetera.

So we’re all trying to play the best game we can be a part of. We’re all trying. I mean, some people, this, I take that back, many of us are, we’re all trying to play the best game we can think of as best. But one of the consequences of my argument is that it’s possible to be wrong. It’s possible to actually have false beliefs about what is in fact better or worse.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: I also think you’re insufficiently pessimistic too, Sam. I think, because I don’t think everyone is trying to play the best possible game. I think that there are truly negative games where…

SAM HARRIS: Well, no, I think the evidence, people are being rewarded in some way. You know, like the sadist whose favorite game is to just see, to cause suffering in others and enjoy that suffering. The fact that he enjoys their suffering, right, that’s a problem with him. Right. He’s a neurological monster of a sort and he’s confined to being the sort of mind that finds that very low level game more rewarding than the game I just advertised at the resort with us being creative and productive and positive sum.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah, well, that’s the man who wants to rule over hell, Sam.

SAM HARRIS: Right, right. Yeah.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: So I’m not saying that because he thinks. Yeah, okay, fine, fine, fine, fine, fine.

SAM HARRIS: But my point is that there are, there’s. We’re obviously living in a realm where there are better and worse outcomes. By any definition of better and worse, that makes sense even from within…

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: The confines of the games that you’re describing.

SAM HARRIS: Yeah, right.

Hierarchies of Games and Moral Judgment

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Because one of the ways of deciding that a game is counterproductive is that if you play it, it doesn’t produce the result that it intends. Right, right. So that’s another kind of universal hallmark of moral judgment.

Like if you’re aiming at something and your strategy doesn’t get you there, either your strategy is wrong or your aim is off by your own definition. Right. There’s no relativizing your way out of that. And then we could say, well, there’s a hierarchy of games that expand and improve as you play them, and there’s a hierarchy of games that degenerate as you play them, even by your own standards of degeneration.

SAM HARRIS: Yeah. And the games, the more refined games, actually refine you as a player. I mean, you get changed by the game you play to your advantage or to your disadvantage, and it makes you more or less capable of playing any specific game.

So this is what learning, this is what education is. This is what skill learning is. This is what, you know, interpersonal skill learning amounts to. This is what the difference between having good relationships versus bad relationships, being in a good culture where its institutions incentivize you to effortlessly be the best possible version of yourself as opposed to you having to be some kind of moral hero just to be, just not a psychopath.

I mean, this is what’s so important about incentives and about contexts like Twitter that incentivize the wrong things. But what we want, I mean, we don’t want to have to take on the burden of rebooting civilization ourselves based on our own native moral intuitions every single hour of every single day.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: That’s for sure, Sam. That’s. We need him.

The Importance of Institutions and Systems

SAM HARRIS: Systems that make it easy for strangers to collaborate effortlessly in high trust environments. Right. I mean, this is like we need to offload all of our moral wisdom into institutions and to systems of incentives such that you would have to be a very bad person indeed not to see the wisdom of being a peaceful, honest collaborator with the next person you meet. Right. In this. Given the nature of the system.

Whereas I mean, if you look, I mean, just to sharpen this up, because that can sound very abstract. If you take an actually normal, decent person who just wants to be good and have positive sum relationships with everyone he meets, you put that person in a maximum security prison in the United States, that person will be highly incentivized to join a gang that has the requisite color of his skin. Right. And be essentially a monster. Because that’s the only way to survive in that context. Right?

To not join a gang, to not join a racist gang is to be the victim of everyone. Right. So what you have in a maximum security prison is a system of terrible incentives that, where you have to be some kind of self-sacrificing saint to opt out of ramifying this awful system of incentives further.

We want the opposite of that in situations that we control and in institutions that we build. And you know, the thing that’s so disturbing to me about this contrarian moment is that so many people have gotten the message, and this is really most explicit since COVID. They’ve gotten the message that we don’t need institutions, we don’t want institutions, we just need to burn it all down. And we’re just going to navigate by Substack newsletter and podcast and that’s just not going to work. Right.

We can’t be all contrarian all the time. We need institutional knowledge, intermediary institutions. Yeah, that works. Yeah. So whether we have to build new ones or perform exorcisms on our old ones that might, you know, that’s a different answer depending on the case. But there’s no question we need institutions that are better than most individuals and that may, and that make most individuals live up to norms that they themselves didn’t invent and would, you know, under another system of incentives would struggle to emulate.

Subsidiarity and the Hierarchy of Games

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: All right, I’m going to bring it in to land. Sam, I think what we’re going to do on the Daily Wire side, I want to talk to you, I think, for half an hour about the anti-Semitic landscape on the left and the right. And I want to go down those rabbit holes and explore them with you.

So that’s for everybody watching and listening. I think that’s what we’re going to do on the Daily Wire side. And because you made some comments earlier about your concerns about the right wing parties in Europe, for example, and the Nazis that are hiding there, and I’ve seen no shortage of right wing anti-Semitism rear its ugly head, let’s say on X for example. But I also want to talk to you about the same pathology emerging on the left because there’s no shortage of unbelievable anti-Semitism on the left. And we should sort that out a little bit. And so that’s what we’ll do on the Daily Wire side.

Sam, every time we talk, I think we get a little bit. Well, we understand each other a little bit better. I think there’s something very fruitful for us to continue discussing in relationship. Well, to a number of the things you discussed today about the necessity for intermediary institutions. That’s the principle of subsidiarity. It’s an ancient principle of Catholic social, what would you say, social philosophy.

You have to have intermediary institutions. They’re the alternative to tyranny and slavery. The idea that there’s a harmony between individual development and proper institutions that has to be established. You know, you can’t be a. It’s very difficult to be a good person in an entirely pathological social situation.

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

The issue is that there’s a hierarchy of game from shallow to deep, from counterproductive to productive, from unplayable to iterative, and that that’s a real world. And there’s a reason for that that I think is allied with your desire, lifelong desire, to investigate the objectives, the objective grounds of the moral world.

Beyond Cultural Provincialism

SAM HARRIS: Yeah. I mean, one thing I would add. One thing I would add to that is that also by definition, on my account, whatever is true there, whatever is truly sacred, you know, the true spiritual possibility has to be deeper than culture. And it certainly has to be deeper than the accidents of ancient cultures being separated from one another based on linguistic and geographical barriers. Right. So it can’t be…

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: No, no dispute about that.

SAM HARRIS: Yeah. It can’t be that Eastern Orthodox Christianity is the real answer versus Hinduism being, you know, the real answer. Because, I mean, one, there are incompatible answers at the surface level, whatever the, whatever deep truth they may be in touch with, that is something we have to understand in a 21st century context. That is deeper than provincialism. That’s my argument against religious sectarianism of any kind.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: We definitely have a. We definitely have much to discuss the next time we talk. All right. So for everybody watching and listening, join us on the Daily Wire side because we’ll go down anti-Semitic rabbit hole. And that’ll give Sam and I a little bit, a little bit of time as well, to discuss the political, which we haven’t, you know, which we’ve conveniently circumvented in a sense. But we had other things to talk about, so join us there.

Thank you to the film crew here today in Scottsdale. Thanks, Sam. It’s always a pleasure to talk to you.

SAM HARRIS: Yeah.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: I’m glad you’re doing well. It’s real good to see you, man.

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