Video from Darkhorse Podcast Clips
"What i wanted to argue is that we've got a built-in defect that has caused us to put our very future in jeopardy and I don't just mean the future of the west I mean the future of the world which is imperiled by the failure of the west and the defect is this all creatures, all products of evolution seek opportunity to improve something even a bacterium is likely only to replace itself in the world unless it finds an untapped opportunity. An orange sitting on the counter is an untapped opportunity and if a fungus or a bacterium can find it then its numbers can grow exponentially and that population then becomes the basis for finding the next orange or the tub of yogurt or whatever so creatures are looking for non-zero-sum opportunities and they are not looking therefore for things that work really really well because there's no opportunity in them. If you've got something that's perfect there's no opportunity for improvement and so obsessing on it is a waste of time. Now we don't have anything that's perfect but what we do have is a system that has been spectacularly good at being productive and has been spectacularly better than everything that preceded it in distributing well-being in a fair way. Now what I did not say was that our system is fair I don't believe it's fair, it's terribly unfair, but it's fairer than anything that has preceded it and the solution to its unfairness is to make it fairer than it is, not to destroy it! But what I believe has happened is that very foolish childish people have obsessed on the degree to which our system does not fully succeed and they have invented instances in which it is claimed to have failed when it didn't and they have used this as an argument to unmake all of the underlying structure that actually does work right, and you and I tried to prevent this. We've tried to explain look we're not saying the system is fair and this is one of the strengths of liberals is that we do understand the unfairness of the system and we aspire to see it become more fair, but we're not naive liberals. We understand that it has actually done a really good job it has liberated many people who were not liberated before and it has been a beacon of hope for exactly that reason and so to the extent that it is not as fair as it might be let's fix it right let's make it better but let's not gamble on the idea that the unfairness is so riddled through its core that we have to destroy it and that something magically wonderful will replace it, that's not going to happen the chances that something that replaces it will be fairer rather than worse are really really low and in fact you can see that in the dual threat of Russia and China waiting for us to be weak enough that they can do things in the world they would not have done before and so what I'm getting at is that this bias in evolved creatures and therefore in human beings in focusing on that which doesn't work because places that something doesn't work are an opportunity to improve something and therefore a bias against looking at things that do work has caused foolish people to jeopardize the west having no idea that every problem that animates them is likely to get worse if they succeed.
They have now put us in that jeopardy and um it is so incredibly naive of them and so not their right to have done this that I think many of us who did see this coming and said so right it's not college campuses it's not a free speech crisis.
You are making claims about civilization that are going to affect our engineering schools and our medical schools and our ability to govern based on something scientifically robust and our public health response our public health response our military and you can see it right if you want a if you want a civilization in which people are liberated to explore the possibility that there are 30 genders, right if you want people to explore the idea that you can shift your sexual preference with each day of the week right I don't think that's smart but if you want a society that's free enough in which you can explore that hypothesis and see whether it turns out to make things better.
Then what you need is a really masculine military to guard your borders so that your enemies don't take advantage of your little experiment and instead we did it to the military too right we basically flung the gates of the city open to our enemies and one thing that I think.
It's just a hypothesis and I'm not saying you know to say that it is a hypothesis is not to say that I believe it is true right it's to say that it might be true and I'd like to know but one possibility is that somehow our level of stupidity exceeds what could naturally be explained by confusion that in fact you know riddled throughout our technology and our media environment are components that were built by people whose interests are not our interests
and maybe our level of stupidity is not organic." from transcript.