In this episode, we talk about Harvey Weinstein's downfall, giant cuttlefish, and why you should be scared of them. We also talk about aliens and why we should be worried about them. This episode was brought to you by Gimlet Media and produced by Riley Braydon Karnacz aka . Our theme song is Come Alone by Suneaters, courtesy of Lotuspool Records. Music by PSOVOD and tyops. Our ad music is by Build Buildings. Special thanks to our sponsor, Cephalopod Creations. Logo by Courtney DeKorte. Theme by Mavus White. Mix by Skandalous. Art by Jeff Kaale. We are part of the Robots Radio Podcast Network. See all the great network shows on the air. Episode Music: "Space Travel" by Borrtex "Goodbye Outer Space" by Cairo Braga "Outer Space Warning" by Fountains of Sisyphus "Outrageous" by The Baseball Project and "Outro Music by Zapsplat "Outtro Music by D'Andra" by Puddles, edited by Ian Dorsch, recorded live at the Electric Light Orchestra, recorded in Los Angeles, CA, and performed live at UC Berkley, CA. Thank you for listening to this episode of Robots Radio, we hope you enjoy it! And thanks to everyone who reached out to us and sent us their support, and all the support we got through the effort to make us a chance to make this podcast possible. to make it happen. Thank you so we can do this happen. -- Thank you to all the work we did it. and we appreciate you all of our efforts, thank you so much, everyone who sent in their support and support us, and we're looking forward to getting this podcast out there, we really appreciate it, and thank you, and thanks for all the love and support we can get it out there. - Thank you, everyone, and keep sending us out there! -- thank you for all of your support, love, support, support us back, love you, bye bye bye, bye, and bye bye -- and see ya, bye. bye bye. <3, bye! - EJ & good bye. - Joe, EJ and EJ - MURDERER, ETC.
00:00:32.000Like two more women, Angelina Jolie and they both came out today.
00:00:37.000Yeah, I don't think it's going to stop there.
00:00:40.000Seems like you might have had a little bit of an issue.
00:00:44.000Isn't that amazing that someone can get away with something like that for so long and then one or two people come clean and the walls come down.
00:00:52.000The oppressive fist of just his fucking tyranny.
00:01:22.000And it's also like super left-wing guy, you know, like really politically connected to social justice ideologies, fighting gun control, I mean, you know, promoting gun control and stumping for Hillary and all this.
00:02:12.000What I was going to talk about there was that you can actually have, in other species which aren't nearly as controversial as humans, a rational basis for something like transphobia in an evolutionary context.
00:02:27.000So the giant cuttlefish, which I think is called sepia poma, I'm not a biologist, the males are incredibly large.
00:03:29.000Underneath and we've now proven I believe that these sneaker males inseminate the females while the Larger males are getting duped now are the larger males larger because they just have better genetics or are they larger because they're older?
00:03:45.000Well, you know the question about better genetics Key question is who leaves the lineages that matter over time?
00:03:53.000So if you're wasting all of your Energy on a strategy and in fact what you're doing is you're providing protection for sneaker males to get busy with the females who seem to be equally happy to reward a devious male as a strong one.
00:04:13.000You know, I'm put in mind of the old Willie Dixon blues song, I'm a backdoor man.
00:04:19.000The men don't know, but the little girls understand.
00:04:22.000You know, definitely females favor a variety of strategies, whether communicating strength and dominance, cleverness, or anything that females are likely to decide will benefit their offspring.
00:04:38.000Yeah, that's a great name for them, too.
00:04:43.000The technical term for those small males?
00:04:45.000I've seen it in lizards, and I don't know the sepia pama giant cuttlefish system, but I'm obsessed with cephalopods, so I should probably go back and do some homework on them.
00:04:55.000I didn't know we would be starting out with...
00:05:39.000I mean, I think that there's a secret international conspiracy.
00:05:46.000People who have realized this and just freak out on cephalopods.
00:05:51.000They know every crazy thing that cephalopods have been proven to understand.
00:05:58.000You know, where their cognitive capabilities just sort of wow us.
00:06:03.000Yeah, the cognitive capabilities, their camouflage capabilities, the strategies that they use for attacking bait fish.
00:06:10.000And there's a video that I put up on my Twitter really recently of a cuttlefish that opens up like a flower and shoots its tongue out and gets this fish and then just sucks it into its body.
00:06:21.000And it's like you're looking at some kind of an alien.
00:06:28.000You know, it's really on a different branch of the phylogenetic tree.
00:06:31.000And I think that, you know, the dazzle patterns, where you just start seeing these neon signs that are effectively made out of the chromatophores, And if you've seen the videos where people put them on against, like, really artificial patterns, like chess boards or chintz or things,
00:06:48.000then the cuttlefish has to figure out, okay, how do I blend in with that?
00:07:09.000But I think what they do is they actually sort of do much less than we are imagining.
00:07:14.000And they use the fact that our brains are interpolating.
00:07:19.000So they're in part not matching the background as well as we think, but they're doing it well enough that our brains sort of make up the difference.
00:08:43.000I've heard a real legitimate argument for people that are opposed to eating animal protein that mollusks, especially like clams and mussels and things along those lines, are more primitive in terms of their ability to recognize or have any sense of what pain is,
00:09:02.000any sort of communication, any sort of...
00:09:05.000Interpretation of danger that all they do is just close right and that in closing We've interpreted that to mean it's an animal and that this animal life form is like it's like eating a living thing versus like eating plants But I've heard it argued actually Sam Harris is the first one to bring it up.
00:09:22.000This is actually a moral argument that They sense less than plants do.
00:09:27.000And that they are more primitive than plants are.
00:09:32.000But yet, from the mollusk family, you have octopus.
00:09:36.000And there's a good argument that you probably shouldn't be eating octopus like you shouldn't be eating monkeys.
00:10:01.000Sometimes they, I forget, they call them red devils, like the coast of Baja, California, and they're just social and they're terrifying because they attack in groups.
00:10:17.000I mean, obviously, the chromatophores must have some ability to do signaling.
00:10:21.000And I think that, you know, with respect to...
00:10:24.000We have to figure out whether it's really intelligence that causes us to become empathic.
00:10:33.000Because, you know, obviously, if you're at war and you think highly of your enemy, you have to guard against your own empathy so that you can be an effective warrior.
00:10:42.000You have to ask the question, you know, if monkeys and apes are among the most intelligent beings, do I actually feel some revulsion for just how savage chimpanzees are as compared to, say, bonobos or gibbons?
00:10:56.000Isn't that the real argument, or the real fascinating conversation, is what happened in the evolutionary chain?
00:11:04.000Like, why did bonobos become these peaceful, sexual creatures, and chimps become these warring, savage psychos?
00:11:18.000But there's an interesting system in dung beetles where if you look at the armaments that they have on their head for warring between males...
00:11:32.000There's a conserved quantity between the length of the copulatory apparatus and the size of the weaponry.
00:11:38.000So the more weapons, the smaller the penis is.
00:11:42.000And so, you know, there are all these crazy trade-offs in apes between relative testicular size and penal size.
00:12:50.000Anytime you bring sentimentality in, you usually screw up a good theory.
00:12:56.000And so, you know, I worry that our comparisons are driven by our needs to locate ourselves farther away from chimpanzees and closer to something that we feel comfortable with.
00:13:10.000So, our idealizing the bonobos is not necessarily based on what they actually are, but based on our little sort of hippie version of life.
00:13:18.000Like, look, we could be like the bonobos, loving and sexual and affectionate.
00:13:23.000Or we could be like the warring, horrible, horrible chimpanzees.
00:13:27.000Well, you know, it's also the case that how great does it feel to be sexual if you're being sexually outcompeted by others?
00:13:33.000It's always unfun to be, you know, low status.
00:13:38.000And nature has different ways of punishing and rewarding status and achievement in various different species.
00:13:47.000So my guess is that there is a kind of conserved...
00:13:54.000You know, unpleasantness in losing each particular game and a pleasure in winning each particular game.
00:14:00.000Right, and that's essentially how nature keeps moving forward, right?
00:14:05.000You know, to the extent that you're wasting energy warring when you could be being constructive or being more strategic, you're going to get out-competed by whichever members of your species figure out the puzzle first.
00:14:22.000And so I think that You know, there's this concept of the naturalistic fallacy of viewing that which, you know, if you assume that we carry some sort of Judeo-Christian baggage and all of this was thought to come from a creator who was thought to have positive characteristics,
00:14:43.000then, well, obviously the natural world is God's work.
00:14:47.000But, I mean, if you actually look at the systems that fascinate me, The creator would have to be about the most twisted consciousness you could possibly imagine.
00:14:58.000Well, it seems like it's the long game the creator's playing.
00:15:01.000The creator's not playing the game that favors the health and the welfare of the individual in the current day.
00:15:07.000It's the matter of figuring out how to get through this brutal game and advancing and evolving along the way to the point where someday in the future you find a more complex and evolved system.
00:15:23.000You know this is the most complex and evolved this us you and me humans Most complex and evolved system in terms of its ability to change its environment that we've ever come across and we're not too happy with ourselves Yeah, although, I mean, I do think that despite our barbarism,
00:15:39.000we are that which can contemplate the game.
00:15:42.000And, you know, at some point, you've obviously had my brother on the show.
00:15:48.000I asked him as an evolutionary theorist, Brett, what are you doing?
00:15:51.000You know, you're married to one woman and you've had two kids.
00:15:54.000As an evolutionary theorist, don't you think you're throwing the game?
00:15:57.000And his response was, I think, brilliant.
00:16:09.000So for him, it was almost like a sort of a proof that if you really get, you know, another one of his good quotes is that life when properly understood is a spelling bee that ends in genocide, that we're also focused on our nucleotide sequences to Do you really care about the particular way in which you digest lactose,
00:16:34.000different from how I do it, that you want to go to war with me so we can spell the future using your version rather than mine?
00:16:43.000Maybe you'd feel this way about your ideas, about your songs, your stories, but really, you really want to fight over things that neither of us care about.
00:18:09.000Do I care that I want it to survive enough against some brown-eyed person?
00:18:14.000It would be interesting if you had a checklist of like what things that you would agree upon, like you and the wife get together and say, okay, so athletic ability, what do you think?
00:18:24.000You know, whose side are we going with?
00:18:59.000But I think to the general public, it has no idea that CRISPR even exists, and it's potentially world-changing.
00:19:05.000I mean, you are literally looking at the tools that will eventually lead, much like You know, Alexander Graham Bell's invention led to you having the internet in your pocket, right?
00:19:17.000I mean, you're looking at the tools that will one day lead to us engineering some completely new organism that you're going to call human beings.
00:19:26.000Yeah, I think that's going to be a long time off.
00:19:30.000But Alexander Graham Bell was a long time off.
00:20:33.000I'm optimistic about certain things that turned out to be a lot easier than we expected.
00:20:37.000I think that a lot of things that we thought were going to require artificial general intelligence are going to succumb to much simpler systems.
00:20:45.000And so, you know, you might have thought that, for example, if you played through the great chess games of the 1800s, like Morphy and Anderson and things, you might say, well, that's just a uniquely human activity.
00:21:23.000I mean, maybe you could, but I don't think you really could figure out a way to engineer or have a computer engineer something that makes you feel like Led Zeppelin the Immigrant Song.
00:21:34.000You know, there's just like a bizarre feeling to someone's art that comes through when you listen to it and you're like, oh, this is fucking great.
00:21:43.000You know, like where I don't I don't necessarily know you could do that.
00:21:47.000With something that doesn't understand emotions or is using a replica of emotions.
00:21:53.000Whereas chess, you know, a rook can move this way.
00:22:54.000So if you take a guitar string and you split it into four equal parts, you put your finger over one quarter of the string, and then you start just plucking the string and hovering above...
00:23:11.000The string, so you don't actually push it to the fretboard.
00:23:14.000Those notes occur naturally as the harmonics in the expansion of the vibrating string.
00:23:20.000So those notes were not really chosen by Roy Orbison or whoever wrote the song.
00:23:25.000They were really chosen by a Fourier series.
00:26:16.000And start playing with things that you can't even imagine are possible.
00:26:20.000So I do think that there's a very close relationship between algorithms and emotion.
00:26:27.000And I just did this one for an old tweet of mine where I wrote a Python program that actually runs from the tweet.
00:26:37.000So the entire program is in the tweet.
00:26:39.000And its purpose is to generate the chord progression for Pachelbel's Canon, which is If you want people to cry at a wedding, that's the chord progression to play.
00:26:48.000And so the idea that it's actually an algorithm that breaks your heart is very frightening.
00:26:56.000We're dealing with some insane noise in the background here, folks.
00:27:01.000These are the last days that we're in the studio, by the way, which is hilarious, that it's sort of highlighting why we need to get the fuck out of here.
00:27:36.000Me, as a human, I probably have some bias, some stupid idea that creativity is impossible to recreate.
00:27:45.000You know, that whatever leads to a person being able to make some beautiful song or create some amazing book is impossible for some sort of a computer to figure that out on its own.
00:28:00.000Well, I would go and hang out in a modern recording studio and watch them move the beat around and mutate it and change it.
00:28:08.000Or if you think about that moment where Cher said, hey, I don't think autotune should be used to correct my voice in a sly way.
00:28:15.000I'm going to use this as the instrument itself.
00:29:14.000So you can have nasalization on and off, vocalization.
00:29:16.000So vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv Then your tongue can be in one of five positions and it can be fully elevated,
00:35:38.000Often just called tabla, but tabla is the sort of soprano drum, and then the bayon, I guess you play with sort of the heel of your hand, so you strike it and you go...
00:36:19.000A book by a guy named Neil Sorrell that I picked up in college, and I just opened it up, and it went through an entire performance of North Indian classical music.
00:36:33.000And I was just, you know, my jaw was on the floor.
00:36:35.000How is this entire form of classical music, much closer to our jazz, so much more impressive?
00:36:42.000I mean, visually, to watch one of these drummers and one of these soloists Like, the soloist will try to lose the drummer, and the drummer's got these mirror neurons that can't be beat, and they'll just, like, follow him everywhere.
00:36:54.000And so you're just, you know, you're some poor white kid in America saying, nobody told me this existed.
00:37:03.000Isn't it weird how we just choose like a certain series of instruments that represent rock and roll, certain series of instruments that represent jazz, you know?
00:37:11.000It's really, it's strange when you think of the wide range of musical instruments that exist all over the world that are just never utilized in modern music.
00:38:52.000But I think what it was, was they had introduced cattle at some point in the history of Hawaii.
00:38:59.000And when they introduced cattle, they're like, hey, how do you keep these fucking things from wandering all over the place?
00:39:04.000Man, we've got to find some cowboys to teach us how to do this shit.
00:39:07.000And they got some, it was either Mexican or South American cowboys, to come over and Show them how to wrangle these cows, how to corral them, how to take care of them.
00:39:18.000And then when they did, these cowboys came over and introduced the ukulele, which is really kind of uniquely Hawaiian in America when we think about it.
00:39:28.000You know, you hear like a sound of like the ukulele.
00:43:43.000Okay, so if you're trying to silence the very small number of people who are probably your guests Mm-hmm The right thing to do is to make sure that they're proximate to lots of terrible stuff.
00:47:14.000And if you really pay attention, and I think there's been some sort of a study done on what percentage of the frog is actually used for Donald Trump or racism or alt-right, and what percentage of the frog is used just for a goof.
00:47:28.000It's the vast majority is like feels good man type things.
00:47:48.000There's still a lot of stigma around reproducing swastikas with the color scheme and the orientation of the Third Reich.
00:47:58.000Have you seen that the gay folks, for a very short period of time, were trying to co-op the swastika and turn it into a rainbow swastika to take it back?
00:50:41.000Anyway, you know, so we become aware of words that open up new territories, like the concept of Sanuk in Thai.
00:50:51.000Lots of people go through Thailand, come back, and they need the word Sanuk, which is the quality of fun that something has to have in order for it to be worth doing.
00:50:59.000Like, did you pay your electrical bill?
00:51:06.000That's a concept or chutzpah, you know, coming from Yiddish or, you know, Turkish has yakimos, which is the trail of light left on the water by the moon.
00:51:16.000And so once you have a word for yakimos, It's very hard not to use it, even though nobody in English-speaking context knows about it.
00:51:26.000Just the way the word selfie, if you recall when that came in, we'd seen all these weird pictures of ladies in restrooms taking pictures of themselves in the mirror.
00:52:58.000Yeah, you flush the birds out with dogs, the birds go up in the air, they shoot them out with a shotgun, the birds hit the ground, the dog gets it and brings it back to you.
00:53:41.000They're like sliding in closer to proximity to the females by, you know, by trying to sort of espouse some ideals that they think would be more attractive to the females because they don't find them in nature.
00:54:14.000Yeah, but it is really amazing how we're conscious and we're aware of all these issues that we deal with, but yet we're still, to a certain extent, At the whim of these genes, of these poles that we have inside of us.
00:54:31.000That's like the argument that people always make for why some people find subsistence living, like those shows in Alaska, so oddly comforting.
00:55:40.000I like all the trappings of civilization, but I do enjoy going to nature.
00:55:45.000I have no desire to be a trapper and fucking, you know, flying around in a bush plane landing places and checking my steel traps for minks and stuff.
00:57:26.000Anyway, we go out on this trail, and we're visiting this PhD mathematician in the jungles, and it is, without question, the most mosquito-ridden place I've ever been in my life.
00:59:43.000So anyway, there's this product called Thermacell that outdoors people use, and what it is is it's like a small pad that looks like a large square-like piece of gum or something like that, and you slide this blue pad under this screen, and then you ignite it by pressing a button.
01:00:00.000This little heating element goes off, and it has like a little fuel canister that keeps this very tiny fire.
01:02:55.000How come nothing, you know, I've asked this before, but when we were kids and you'd read comic books about, like, radiation, they always helped people, turned people into fucking superheroes.
01:04:04.000I had Brian Fogle on last week, who is the director and producer of this documentary on the doping, the Russian state-sponsored doping program.
01:04:30.000The guy who engineered the whole thing, like the main scientist, is in the United States now under protective custody in hiding.
01:04:36.000And Putin is trying to drag him back to Russia by stealing the homes from his family, stealing his wives home, turning him into homeless people in some sort of a lure to get him to sacrifice himself to come back for the health and safety of his family.
01:04:53.000Do you remember what happened when Saddam did that?
01:05:44.000You ever seen Christopher Hitchens, um, narrating the original bath party, um, I don't even know what to call it.
01:05:55.000Theatrical video where, like, half the bath party was called out as being revealed traitors, and then the other half of the bath party was given sidearms with which to execute them, making them complicit in the founding murder.
01:06:49.000That would be a kind of message violence.
01:06:56.000Or, for example, forcing families to pay for the ammunition with which their family members were executed to make them complicit and emphasize their weakness.
01:07:32.000That the pilots were raining down death in two particular forms, rubble and fire on people in the ground.
01:07:40.000And Isis captured one of the Jordanian pilots and decided that they would theatrically execute him with a version of exactly these two things that he was meeting out from the air.
01:07:54.000And so the whole point of it was to create the cinematic imagery to sear into people's mind what it meant to oppose ISIS, that ISIS was in fact just in a sort of eye for an eye kind of way.
01:08:11.000You know, my belief is that we don't understand the role that message violence plays, in part because we are now denying it.
01:08:21.000If you think about Vietnam, we have all of these images that were burned into all of our minds with Pulitzer Prize winning photographs.
01:08:30.000But in the modern era, you don't have images like that from Iraq.
01:08:35.000Because there was a decision that we could not afford, in some sense, to have the kind of opposition that we had to Vietnam when people suddenly said, wait a minute, you're doing what in my name?
01:08:48.000There's an issue that has always puzzled me, and this issue is people that lean left, people that consider themselves progressives, have a very distinct, very obvious bias against criticizing Islam,
01:09:05.000criticizing Islamic terrorism, criticizing Islamic suppression of women, criticizing these cultures.
01:09:34.000is embrace the the cultural differences that these people exhibit concentrate instead on the positive aspects of their community and the good things about Muslim culture and Islamic culture and not really does not bring it up at all like you very rarely hear people on the left talk about how oppressive and horrific some of the conditions that women and homosexuals are forced to live in in Muslim cultures Right.
01:10:02.000And I've always wondered if that's what that is.
01:10:04.000Because no one in modern day, no one ideology is more brutal in their reprisal.
01:10:48.000Yeah, if you go to Deuteronomy, I think it says something to the effect of if someone comes to you and says, hey, let's worship gods not known to the fathers, set upon them with a stone before anyone else gets there.
01:10:58.000But are you supposed to do that to someone who is already converted to...
01:12:02.000So her point was, yeah, and we don't execute anybody, because in effect, that portion of the code never runs.
01:12:10.000So the Jews have figured out how to have bad code that is almost permanently inoperative.
01:12:19.000If I could stop you there for a second, one of the unique things about Jews is that there are so many Jewish people that I know that still consider themselves Jewish, but are almost totally atheists.
01:12:31.000Like my friend Ari, he was doing this video recently, or this podcast recently, we were doing this challenge where we can't drink.
01:12:40.000Smoke pot or do anything for a month and we have to do 15 hot yoga classes and he's going crazy and screaming during his podcast I am a Jewish performer and I live in New York City.
01:12:52.000I like drinking But he's he's the biggest atheist I've ever met in my life right or if not an atheist he's certainly At the very least agnostic at the very least he's definitely not a someone who considers himself a religious person Yeah,
01:13:09.000but he was you know, he was and he escaped the the claws of it when he was young But it's Jews many times think of himself.
01:13:17.000It's almost a tribe as much as it is a religion like if you sit down and corner most Jews that I know about like Look,
01:13:40.000if you met anybody following the Old Testament, you wouldn't recognize them as a Jew.
01:13:48.000I used to live in an ultra-Orthodox neighborhood in Jerusalem, and at some point I was writing on the Sabbath, my final list for leaving, and the kids in the building next door started shouting in Hebrew, it is forbidden to write on the Sabbath, kill him.
01:14:56.000You know, if you're really stupid, for example, do you believe that the Supreme Court is nine black-robed super geniuses who can channel the original intent of the founding fathers?
01:15:11.000I mean, there's a grown-up way of loving your country, and there's a childish way of loving your country, and there's a grown-up way of believing in your religion, and a childish one.
01:15:20.000And the childish one is like, yeah, it's all literally.
01:15:23.000But what is the grown-up way of believing in a religion?
01:15:28.000Well, I mean, in part, it's got a lot of hidden instructions.
01:15:34.000It's not resolved so that you have these sort of dialectical tensions that...
01:15:39.000So you have, like, ethical guidelines as opposed to, like...
01:15:43.000Yeah, it's not telling you exactly what...
01:15:44.000...laws brought down from on high in giant stone tablets.
01:17:35.000So when you have the top marriage prospects, do you marry them off to the richest or the smartest?
01:17:44.000So in Judaism, there is some weird way in which intellectual prestige proxies for material wealth.
01:17:55.000So if you have somebody who's insanely smart and not very rich, it can be very prestigious to marry your daughter, let's say, to that student of the Torah.
01:18:05.000So there are all sorts of cultural strange aspects of this.
01:18:11.000Is it because money lending was prescribed and forbidden to Christians that this particular facility with mathematics was highly selected for when nobody else was selecting for it?
01:18:22.000I don't know what the answer is, but I do know that, like in my case, getting a PhD in mathematics using an Ivy League education for that, or in my brother's case, giving up an Ivy League education to make a point standing up for social justice.
01:18:39.000These are sort of self-destructive things in most cultures.
01:18:43.000Standing up for social justice against social justice warriors, which is really hilarious.
01:19:36.000I suggest if you're interested, you could either Google his name and get the story from a multitude of sources, or listen to the original podcast where he sort of laid it out.
01:19:46.000It was before the settlement with the college, before he wound up leaving, and I really hope that he goes the Jordan Peterson route, meaning that he starts putting up these lectures and some of these ideas that he has, just putting them up online, just putting videos up.
01:20:02.000I know he's got a Patreon page now, correct?
01:20:25.000I have a recommendation for him from his old advisor, who I think said he's the top student in 40 years of advising.
01:20:35.000We have to recognize that if you want this stuff to stop, you have to make it not pay to drive super smart people who are courageous enough to be open in their thinking.
01:21:23.000Look at his work on elongation of telomeres in laboratory animals where he predicted what Nobel laureate Carol Greider found from first principles that the mice that are being used to test our drugs have wildly exaggerated telomere lengths, giving them amazing capacities for histological repair,
01:21:41.000but possibly putting drugs to market that shouldn't be there.
01:21:45.000This is somebody you want to be taking intellectually serious and stop treating this like the clown act that they're running.
01:21:55.000Well, Evergreen College is an amazing example of what can go wrong if you let these crazy children sort of dictate The way human beings are allowed to behave and the way discourse takes place on campus.
01:22:09.000To the Cliff Notes, what I was going to say, they wanted to have a day of absence.
01:22:13.000They traditionally had a day of absence where people of color would take the day off to school where people would miss them.
01:22:18.000Sort of like, didn't they engineer that in LA, A Day Without Mexicans?
01:22:25.000I'll just tell you right now, LA shuts down without Mexicans.
01:22:28.000But instead of doing that, the social justice warrior mentality that thinks that every white man is some sort of an oppressor and you need to figure out a way to eradicate them from the world, they decided to go the opposite route and force white staff and white students to stay home.
01:22:47.000Your brother rightly protested, saying that is inherently racist.
01:22:51.000Like, what you're proposing is He's an anti-racist.
01:23:17.000And the way you know that it's a cult is you ask for the definition of racism.
01:23:20.000And if somebody tells you it's power Plus prejudice.
01:23:25.000And therefore, certain groups can't be racist because they have no power.
01:23:30.000That's how you know somebody's in the cult.
01:23:31.000Because if you look it up in the dictionary, it doesn't say anything like that.
01:23:35.000Another one would be, gender has nothing to do with sex.
01:23:39.000Go to the Oxford English Dictionary, look at the difference between 3A versus 3B. Gender and sex have been closely tied.
01:23:48.000And sometime in the 1940s, a couple of fields in the US started using gender to be behavior, sex to be that which is your dedicated genotype, phenotype.
01:23:58.000What is going on is that these people are changing the definition of words.
01:24:05.000In order to push a cult into the exact place where it must not go, it must not go in the diversity office, it must not go in HR. You cannot have this openly racist, openly sexist cult in the place which is the immune system.
01:24:23.000And so that's the key thing, is that we're used to thinking of our immune system as being there to protect us.
01:24:29.000But if you think about an autoimmune disease, It's when your immune system starts attacking the self that you're in real trouble.
01:24:36.000So learn the signs and learn the tells.
01:24:39.000You don't have to sign up for Jordan Peterson's postmodernism.
01:24:41.000Just ask somebody whether black people can be racist against whites.
01:24:46.000And as soon as you hear power plus prejudice, you know you're talking to a cult member.
01:24:51.000As soon as you hear that gender and sex have nothing to do with each other.
01:24:55.000And you have recourse to dictionaries, and you start talking about the history, and somebody starts saying, well, that's your white fragility, that's your white privilege, why are you in denial, why aren't you accepting allyship?
01:25:07.000Okay, so suddenly it's like, okay, it's Xenu and the volcanoes and the clams again.
01:25:14.000And, well, one great piece of evidence about that was this whole Google memo thing.
01:25:20.000The Google Memo thing, the difference between what that guy actually wrote on the memo and what was published in so many different publications, so many different online websites, is just straight up libelous.
01:25:31.000Like, that guy, I mean, I know he's going to sue Google, but he could probably sue a host of people once he's done with that.
01:25:37.000Because they changed what he wrote and turned him into this horrible, evil, sexist person to the point where the CEO of YouTube was saying that she read it and it made her sad.
01:26:01.000The error that he made was that he used a reserved term, neuroticism, in the Big Five personality inventory, where it is a reserved term denoting a particular psychometric.
01:26:12.000And so rather than saying men are less conscientious He said women are more neurotic.
01:26:27.000But again, you know, I had not quite remembered that the big five personality inventory, you know, is openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.
01:26:39.000But, you know, when you see something that careful, I mean, most people just didn't read it.
01:28:11.000The thing about what he did was he was trying to write a pro-diversity memo.
01:28:18.000If you lie about the differences between men and women, what are your odds that you will be able to hack a solution to getting all the brilliant women in our country who care about STEM into the workforce?
01:28:38.000We need to figure out, as a society, do we need to pay women more so that we can get them out of working in the home and taking care of older parents and young children during their prime years?
01:28:50.000We need to be very creative about the actual differences between men and women.
01:28:54.000Should we have a rule, not equal pay for equal work, but equal pay for unequal salary negotiation?
01:29:01.000Please elaborate on that, because that is an issue with why women sometimes make less than men, is that they don't have the same sort of aggressive salary negotiating tendencies that a lot of men do.
01:29:21.000Look at Chekhov's short story called The Nincompoop, in which it's an employer and a domestic worker in his home.
01:29:31.000And he talks to her about all of her wages, and then he starts taking away little bit by little bit for, you know, you broke a cup and you were a little bit late, and he whittles her compensation down to nothing, and she accepts it.
01:30:10.000Or you could say, actually, that was an attempt to talk about a problem about needing to be more aggressive and more assertive.
01:30:18.000So, you know, getting back to the Damore issue, Damore needed to set this thing up at Google differently.
01:30:27.000So I took my son to the local pinball arcade.
01:30:31.000And just think of it as a bunch of workstations where nobody's getting paid.
01:30:35.000Instead, you're paying for the privilege of staring at this thing for hours with the bells and lights doing something with balls and mechanical systems.
01:30:43.000There are not a lot of women trying to integrate the pinball arcade because it's a loser activity.
01:31:20.000What Damore said was, it's not cognitive ability, you idiots, it's interest and temperament, which is hugely liberating.
01:31:31.000If it's not basically cognitive ability, if men are as smart as women, but men can do something for hours and hours, often uncompensated, in a kind of robotic, monomaniacal, tunnel-focused kind of a way, is that Not necessarily a great thing.
01:34:57.000It's going to take another couple of weeks.
01:34:59.000That's a weird way of putting it, though, because that's a results-oriented way of putting it instead of an ambition-oriented way of putting it.
01:35:12.000Assume that you lose out in a bid if somebody else is going to promise more than you.
01:35:17.000And then if you can't over-deliver, given that you've already over-promised, then you can't actually delight people so that they're going to want to do multiple.
01:37:48.000But if you actually, you know, feel called, you can summon the will, you can summon the intellect, you can summon your friends, your resources to somehow get across the adaptive valley.
01:37:59.000But isn't it a problem that it leaves open the possibility that you won't be able to get across that valley?
01:38:04.000Whereas with someone who is an expert in the field and who's worked very hard through apprenticeship, through schooling, whatever it is, to get to become an expert in this field can tell you definitively, yes, Eric, I can fix your computer.
01:39:52.000Jim Watson said this thing, which I think is just brilliant, which is, if you're going to do something amazing, you are by definition unqualified to do it.
01:41:55.000In other words, when you start hearing people say, why aren't there more female founders of billion-dollar-plus tech companies, my feeling is that a lot of those people who do found such companies are in this kind of fast-and-loose outlier idiom.
01:42:15.000And very often females, specifically because of the crazy demands of child rearing, which is like something you cannot screw up.
01:42:41.000If you are not happy because you are not represented in the outlier category, understand that not screwing up is not a behavior pattern that leads to outlier-level results.
01:42:55.000So they almost have to go away from their natural instincts and adopt a different pattern of behavior to achieve extraordinary success.
01:43:02.000Yeah, I mean, I would like to tell a lot more men, hey, you can't keep promising and failing to come through.
01:43:08.000So, you know, it would be better if we had higher regularity from some men who chronically over-promise and chronically under-deliver, and we had more women who were trying to swing for the fences if the feeling is, why are we not represented at the highest level of certain kinds of activities?
01:43:29.000So what I'm trying to get at is that we are not currently feeling safe enough to have these style of conversations where we're saying, look, to what extent are we holding ourselves back?
01:43:46.000Are we talking about the glass floor as well as the glass ceiling?
01:43:50.000So, you know, the bricklayer unions is a famous example, where if you look for pictures of bricklayers, you'll generally see a bunch of guys, very few women, and there's no complaint that these have not been integrated.
01:44:03.000So there are ways in which you don't find women in the pinball arcades, you don't find them in bricklayers unions, and you find fewer of them founding, you know, multi-billion dollar tech companies.
01:45:16.000You know, a book came out called The Physics of Wall Street that I encourage women to read.
01:45:25.000The chapter called A New Manhattan Project.
01:45:29.000And the epilogue discusses her contribution.
01:45:33.000And, you know, in fact, we sort of walked away from it in part because she didn't want to go to war.
01:45:39.000And there's nothing wrong with not wanting to go to war.
01:45:42.000But that is a very big temperamental difference that is not a cognitive difference.
01:45:47.000And that's what I think Damore was saying.
01:45:51.000Now, I think you and I would both agree that we would never want anyone to discriminate against women for a job that they're qualified for and that they're looking to get into.
01:46:01.000If they're good at it, we would like to see people, we would like to see a quality of opportunity, right?
01:46:09.000I mean, if you think about how many women are offline and you think of it as like, just stop thinking about it in terms of like social good and think about it as- Offline?
01:46:26.000You were just talking about Jews in physics.
01:46:30.000One quarter of 1% of the world's population won 25% of the Nobel Prizes in physics.
01:46:36.000Very few Asian females have Nobel Prizes.
01:46:41.000If I were trying to figure out, like with oil fields, I wouldn't go to Texas to try to find more oil because I'd figured it'd be pretty well picked over.
01:46:56.000Let's say Asian females have a huge percentage of the world's neurons basically untapped.
01:47:02.000If you want to make tons of money, if you want to cure cancer, if you want to do all these things, figure out how to bring those neurons fully online.
01:47:08.000So it's not just a question of nobody wants to keep them out.
01:47:15.000Right, but has it not been proved that gender and sex have a role in what people are attracted to or interested in?
01:47:23.000So why should we assume that just because we have these systems, whether they're economic systems, whether it's starting a business or whether it's working in tech, Why should we assume that women would want to do that?
01:47:38.000Why should we encourage them to do that if they're not interested in it?
01:47:41.000And why do we put so much value in it just because it generates an incredible amount of money?
01:47:45.000Do you think that maybe what we're looking at is natural patterns?
01:47:51.000There's natural patterns where, I mean, this is what Damore argued, that men gravitate towards certain things more often than women.
01:47:58.000And that was one of the things that was so disturbing to me that was overlooked about his memo.
01:48:02.000He had a full page and a half dedicated to trying to encourage in various ways to try to encourage women to get into tech.
01:48:11.000The other thing that they didn't do is no one, I mean, not no one, but many of the people that republished his work and took snippets of it, they didn't publish the citations.
01:48:25.000Yeah, but what it is, is back to your cult analogy.
01:48:29.000These people are in a cult, and this was a challenge to the ideology of the cult.
01:48:35.000But look, let's look at it from the felt experience.
01:48:38.000And the felt experience is, if you've already struggled as a woman against incredible odds to be in tech to begin with, You know that there's somebody whispering, yeah,
01:48:59.000So you have to appreciate that the lived experience of the women inside of Google is that they know that some percentage of those guys who are saying, hey, I just want to talk about studies, are actually pissed off.
01:49:39.000But the issue is, what if I need to do some amount, some relatively minimal amount of kind of intellectual terraforming to get all of these female neurons to work on all of these amazing problems?
01:49:54.000So what if the people who have the answer for, let's say, cancer or AGI or who knows, happen to be female?
01:50:04.000What if I needed to do some things in order to make the environment more attractive?
01:50:08.000Like, for example, programming in teams has, to some extent, replaced cowboy programming, where it's just some guy with his code and a set of headphones, and he goes to it.
01:50:22.000Okay, so that's what he was talking about.
01:50:24.000To what extent can you actually change the nature of work to bring these extra neurons online?
01:50:33.000Now, that's the right reason to do this.
01:50:43.000If it's highly compensated, everybody wants in.
01:50:46.000If it's poorly compensated, only people who are sort of addicted to it would want it.
01:50:52.000And it happens to be sort of high status at the moment, and so there's this feeling of, okay, this must be an all-boys club.
01:50:58.000And maybe it grew up as an all-boys club, and maybe it has particular attributes.
01:51:02.000But the thing that I'm looking at that may be different from what you're looking at Is that I'm thinking about particular high ability females who have left the game or who have sort of gone into a lower intensity mode because they're just sick of being in an all-male environment.
01:51:20.000So if I can interject, you're trying to discourage attrition.
01:51:24.000I'm trying to discourage attrition of the amazing people who have something deep and powerful and important to say.
01:51:30.000So the environment of these places is contrary to them establishing whatever strengths that they have?
01:51:37.000I would rather not talk about women, and I'd rather talk about something I know very, very well, which is myself.
01:51:44.000So four and a half years ago, I gave some talks on physics, which were terrifying to me because I wasn't trained as a physicist, and they got a lot of attention and publicity at Oxford.
01:51:55.000I don't like the unpleasantness of intellectual one-upsmanship and negging, if you will, that takes place in particle theory.
01:52:08.000And so I've sort of stayed away For four and a half years because I didn't like how unpleasant and hyper, like, exaggeratedly masculine it was.
01:52:22.000Well, because it's a huge prize, right?
01:52:24.000I mean, if you're trying to gain Einstein's mantle, it's still a game worth winning because, you know, Einstein was times man of the century.
01:52:32.000So because of this huge prize, there's also a lot of critical thinking and a lot of criticizing.
01:52:37.000Yeah, but there's a lot of just wasted...
01:53:27.000And you think women, they would be more so likely to avoid and you would lose the contributions of a lot of these brilliant minds.
01:53:35.000I'm just trying to say that part of the problem is, is that every time you have an extremely kind of overly, like an exaggeratedly toxic culture, You get attrition from people who are really good at it or just don't like to go into work.
01:55:18.000Probably because he said something uncharitable about Islam, which we have to get back to.
01:55:23.000But the key point was that I had three biologists, Damore, Dawkins, and Weinstein, who had all been de-platformed.
01:55:31.000So I let off a tweet about You know, for God's sake, stop teaching people that they should run to HR rather than code, which had nothing to do with harassment at all.
01:55:42.000It was really just about seeing a woman who deleted her tweet, and I haven't talked about this until now because I felt that I... I reacted to her deleted tweet, and then I still have it on my computer, but I didn't want to bring it up, and then I was left sort of holding the bag.
01:56:01.000It was something like, Don't teach my daughter to run to HR for financial freedom rather than code, thanks to dad.
01:56:11.000And that was interpreted as like, oh, suck it up if you're being harassed in the workplace.
01:56:16.000Do not suck it up if you are being harassed in the workplace.
01:56:20.000I don't know how to make that clearer.
01:56:23.000But it's about, if somebody's talking like a biologist, and they're saying, oh, well, there's prenatal testosterone, and there are these psychometrics, and these are the conserved differences across cultures, that's not a reason to go to HR. That's a reason to figure out whether the person is making sense,
01:56:42.000not making sense, to take them on on the arguments.
01:56:48.000Well, I think discourse and free speech is incredibly important.
01:56:52.000When you distort what that guy was saying and you turn into this hateful attack on women, you've shut down discourse and you've discouraged anybody else that has any sort of unusual opinion or unusual observation from coming forth because you're essentially limiting free speech to free speech that you agree with.
01:57:34.000All have lower level misinterpretations, right?
01:57:37.000And so, you know, in this circumstance, it's also important to realize that after so many years of putting up with sort of whisper campaigns, it is understandable that women are sick of this shit.
01:57:52.000So the key question is, are we going to just de-platform all the biologists?
01:57:56.000Are we going to pretend that there are no differences?
01:57:59.000Are we going to pretend that gender and sex have absolutely nothing to do with each other?
01:58:04.000Like, this sort of fantasy life that you can try to lead in a progressive context is going to destroy the underpinnings of Western civilization.
01:58:16.000And I have nothing against Eastern civilization, but I'm an exponent of Western civilization.
01:58:21.000And, you know, this gets back to the issue of will we be able to talk anywhere in a safe enough fashion?
01:58:28.000That we can have really meaningful conversations so that we can actually fix these fucking problems.
01:58:34.000Right, and the only way you're gonna fix these problems is if you cut out all this The ideological biases on the right and the left.
02:00:50.000It's very important that these people not be made unwelcome, because fundamentally we're going to leaven this untried social justice stuff in absolutely everything.
02:00:59.000Well, not only that, he was labeled as a misogynist over and over and over again, and you're not even giving the guy a chance to have open communication.
02:01:08.000Like, if you sit down with him, instead of firing him...
02:01:10.000The big problem is that if you say, come to the seminar, we're going to teach you things, the things are wrong, and now we want your feedback, you're just setting certain minds up for this thing.
02:01:32.000No, because I'm part of this constellation of people.
02:01:35.000But we keep doing this, we keep making a mistake in my opinion, which is we keep seeing these wrong things that happen in this space, and we lose the empathy in some sense because people are not representing themselves well.
02:01:50.000So I believe, having watched my wife in economics, That it is really corrosive to go in every day to work in an environment which does not feel welcoming to you.
02:02:15.000They're saying they're giving people time off because this diversity memo that he put out is very- So this is the thing about the soft targets versus hard targets, right?
02:02:22.000So the idea is that he was a soft target.
02:02:24.000But many of these women may have had a manager who passed them over for promotions three times when they'd been the major contributor.
02:02:32.000Right, but it sort of reinforces irrational ideas about his memo without actually reading the core components of it and looking at it objectively.
02:02:39.000That's why I was outspoken on his behalf.
02:02:45.000Even while I am outspoken on Demore's behalf, I believe that fundamentally we are in danger of breaking empathy with people who do not express themselves in our idiom.
02:03:27.000So part of the problem is, is that we are waiting for the strongest voices To rise above the din and say, look, we can't be this aggressive about everything all the time.
02:03:41.000We have to actually think, what's a misdemeanor?
02:03:48.000So, just to boil it all down, you don't think there's any issue with inviting women to take time off from a memo that you didn't even disagree with?
02:03:58.000I absolutely think that there's a problem there, but I don't think that that's the right place.
02:04:27.000And to say, look, we need to be able to talk about this without silencing each other, without terrifying each other, without assuming that we've heard the other's argument.
02:04:37.000Have some public speeches where you have people oppose his ideas and have him discuss them.
02:04:41.000And make it public so that maybe people can learn from it.
02:04:44.000Instead of making it this gigantic campaign against one guy's idea and just destroying his credibility in a very sort of perverse way, how about just Google has YouTube.
02:04:57.000They have all the resources in the world to turn this into an educational experience.
02:05:32.000Well, it's sort of the same type of thinking that got your brother in hot water in Evergreen.
02:05:38.000But what I'm trying to get at is that we, who understand this problem, I think, better than others and are willing to talk about it in public, are losing empathy because we're so sick of being worn down by these terrible arguments.
02:05:55.000And so, you know, can we pop all the way back up to your original point about Islam?
02:06:05.000You asked the question, why is the left seemingly weirdly supportive of practices that include female genital mutilation, honor killing, terror, etc., etc., etc.?
02:06:18.000And I think it has to do with the fact that there is a fundamental inability to discuss these issues Because nobody has given us the right tools and language.
02:06:34.000So the issue of political Judaism, political Christianity, and political Islam is one category.
02:06:41.000And then there's just sort of cultural Judaism, cultural Islam, cultural Christianity.
02:06:47.000Now, quite honestly, You can easily be embedded in a Muslim community that is not devoted to political Islam and feel that you're very much in another Abrahmic faith similar to Christianity and Judaism.
02:07:05.000On the other hand, there is a much bigger issue, which is that Islam has a totality to it that Judaism no longer has and that Christianity perhaps never had.
02:07:17.000As Sam Harris points out, the line, render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, cleaves off the potential for political Christianity at the same level as political Islam.
02:07:28.000So you're dealing with this different object that doesn't quite seem to have the same characteristics as the others, and you haven't been given any tools to sort of pull it apart.
02:07:37.000You've also been taught that if you're proud of European civilization, That you are pro-white.
02:07:49.000I care about European civilization just as I care about European barbarity.
02:07:53.000Having sat through European barbarity, I'm not gonna give up on European civilization.
02:08:00.000So, in part, what you have is you have people who are making the vanilla confusion, where they imagine that vanilla, we use it to mean the absence of anything interesting.
02:08:13.000But in fact, it's like the most interesting spice.
02:08:16.000It's this particular orchid that's incredibly flavorful.
02:08:53.000So when I meet somebody coming from China, I expect them to be an exponent of Chinese culture.
02:08:59.000Well, I don't wish to say, well, I don't have the right to have my own culture because I have to erase myself Based on this confusion between this canon that is incredibly valuable and the skin color that is completely irrelevant to me.
02:09:15.000I would much rather have Western civilization running between the ears of people who don't look anything like me and be proud of what the software has produced than have a bunch of people who look like me who don't think in any way that I recognize.
02:09:34.000The original point was, why does the left, why do progressives fail to criticize the homophobia, the sexism, the honor killings, all the horrific acts?
02:09:46.000So let's talk about a particular example.
02:10:30.000And this is where we get into real trouble, because for some reason, we don't perceive that there is almost an intellectual civil war within Islam with forces for modernity and forces that are trying to reboot, you know,
02:10:49.000So do you think that we associate Islam with maybe even a smaller faction of it than we really understand, like the ISIS faction, the Taliban, things that we're terrified of,
02:11:05.000the people that are throwing gay folks off buildings?
02:11:07.000We somehow weirdly view them as more authentic.
02:11:34.000Particularly text-oriented, very literal interpretations.
02:11:39.000I think we've gone down a terrible path where we've sort of weirdly not understood that there is a conflict and that we actually have a dog in this fight, and the dog in this fight is those who are trying to create cultural Islam and cleaving off political Islam.
02:11:57.000I don't want to live under Sharia law.
02:12:01.000And I don't want to feel bad about this.
02:12:03.000I don't want to live under anybody's religious law.
02:12:05.000I don't want anyone to live under Halakhic Jewish law.
02:12:08.000And this is a mainstay of Western civilization.
02:12:12.000And when we can't feel comfortable about that, which is like, well, who are you to say whether we should live under Sharia law?
02:12:18.000The answer is, I come from a culture myself.
02:12:23.000We do not live under religious law, period, the end.
02:12:26.000It's fascinating to me how many different ideologies exist, and how much they vary, and how people can just slot right into those and accept them as the end-all, be-all period.
02:13:01.000It's so uncommon to not have an ideology.
02:13:04.000I mean, it seems like this idea of, well, the numbers that we have of atheists and agnostics in America today, I mean, is this unprecedented?
02:13:13.000Is this the most, the largest group of human beings ever that are looking at things and going, maybe nobody has the answer.
02:13:21.000Well, I, but I also think that a lot of those agnostics and atheists have more religious That's what I was going to get to next.
02:13:45.000Why is it that so many people who are atheists and agnostics adopt religious tendencies in terms of cultural behavior and what they're willing to accept and not willing to accept?
02:13:56.000A lot of the stuff that you see that you're calling earlier when you were saying people that describe racism and you know, do you describe it as power and influence?
02:14:06.000These cult member ideas You're a lot of times getting these cult member ideas from people that will tell you that they're not a part of an ideology.
02:14:16.000They're not religious, but they're exhibiting dogmatic religious ideology.
02:14:23.000So that was my question is, is it just a thing that we are inherently programmed to slot into?
02:14:41.000Well, it was confusing, and Sam would have appeared to have won that one pretty decisively because Jordan tried to fold in fitness to the definition of truth, which does not work.
02:15:49.000But what I was going to say is that Jordan Peterson's really deep point, if I understand it, so Jordan, if you're out there, please correct me, is only archetype.
02:16:01.000of the kind found in religion is sufficiently rich and deep to explain why humans behave the way they do.
02:16:09.000There's no scientific theory that's good enough.
02:16:13.000There's no purely philosophical tradition.
02:16:16.000So as of the moment, we are stuck with deep cultural archetype.
02:16:21.000Maybe Shakespeare would be the only thing comparable to the religious canons.
02:16:25.000And the claim that you're making implicitly, and that Jordan is making perhaps more explicitly, Is that there's something about our brains, maybe that we were parented and so we need to give the parenting apparatus over to something else, I don't know, that fundamentally finds its way to religion.
02:16:44.000Even if the computer that is our brain knows that it's making leaps that don't make sense.
02:17:59.000And you go to some, you know, you're going to a place, whether it's a temple or a chapel or, you know, you're going to this place, this uniquely ornate environment.
02:18:10.000You know, we have particular words, for example, the rabbis tell us, you know, we usually don't say this because this is what we have stolen from the angels.
02:18:17.000But this is the one time in the year when we can actually shout it.
02:18:25.000To your original point, so you have some weird tradition that makes no sense, that produces a ridiculously disproportionate number of the Nobel Prizes, let's say, in science.
02:18:38.000Would it be scientific to throw that away?
02:18:42.000So if you were a good scientist, you'd say, I don't know what's going on with these weird rituals.
02:18:46.000It could be the funky chicken or the hokey pokey, but if most of the people who win Nobel Prizes were found to do the hokey pokey, I'd probably put more effort into it.
02:18:58.000Maybe it's not attached to the ideas that spawn from these religions at all.
02:19:04.000Maybe it's that these people have the freedom to think about these other things because they have intense confidence in their future and their destiny and their God and their traditions and their ethics and they're all so carved out that this...
02:19:18.000I've always thought of religion in some ways as almost being like a moral scaffolding.
02:19:22.000Like, okay, well you got like a real clear structure to operate under and that...
02:19:28.000It frees up resources to do other things.
02:19:31.000I mean, the problem is that The atheist critique, which is like, there is no bearded dude in a cloud granting your wishes or listening to what you...
02:19:46.000Everybody who says there's no God and nothing happens when you die, like, you don't know that.
02:19:51.000To say that is no different than someone saying they know for sure there's a God in the cloud with a harp and St. Peter, and you've got to go look at a list.
02:19:58.000If we conjure Sam, and we try to steal man Sam, Sam will say...
02:20:02.000Okay, but there's all these explicit ways that you're supposed to worship God, and they can't all be right because they're mutual incompatibilities, and so how do you choose one among many, and if n is allowed to get...
02:21:30.000Yeah, look, I like all kinds of music.
02:21:32.000But I wonder when it comes to archetypes, whether or not...
02:21:37.000When I was getting to when I was talking about your sons and your children whether or not their behavior is genetic whether or not it's learned experience whether it's a combination of all things how much of what we have is just and these this sort of inclination towards ideologies is because pretty much everybody had them for the thousands and thousands and thousands of years that we had civilization and we are in some way Shape or form the product of all that stuff even
02:22:07.000genetically like whatever memories and I don't totally understand genetics But what I do understand is that there's a lot that we don't know about why ideas get transferred from father to son from children from parents to children and There's things that get transferred even to adopted kids right that come directly from their parents right in a very eerie way where you go well is there some like what our instincts and Why are children afraid of spiders and monsters?
02:22:51.000And Rupert Sheldrake had a great point about that.
02:22:54.000If you talk to children in New York City, they're not afraid of child molesters or murderers or things that they might encounter, car accidents.
02:23:20.000Probably it had to do with the fact that the first thing that you want to teach your children is, hey, if I'm not around and daddy remarries somebody who has no interest in you genetically, here's the emergency break glass in case of emergency plan,
02:27:18.000I can say in my family for sure that my family stopped being religious when my great-uncle Sasha died.
02:27:26.000I was killed right at the end of World War II and my great-grandmother said no compassionate God would kill somebody so stupidly who had so much to give to their family and change the family from some kind of orthodoxy to orthodox atheism.
02:27:44.000And then, you know, for three generations you have Jews marrying Jews with nobody believing in anything.
02:27:50.000Why are they continuing to marry Jews?
02:27:52.000Why are they celebrating these holidays?
02:27:54.000Well, it's because, fundamentally, a switch got flipped.
02:27:57.000But my guess is that the Orthodox were always questioning whether there was a God.
02:28:01.000The atheists are always questioning whether there's a God.
02:28:05.000At some level, because our brains are not just simple computers to be, you know, rid of bias.
02:28:14.000So my four things that I care about are truth, fitness, meaning, and grace.
02:28:19.000All of those trade off amongst each other.
02:28:22.000And when I said something like this on Sam Harris's program, a lot of the people who wrote in said, oh, you know, it shows that he doesn't care about truth.
02:28:30.000And, you know, I felt like, no, it just shows that you guys don't understand how important...
02:28:38.000Sam would like to make an argument that the better and more rational our thinking is, the more it can do everything that religion once did.
02:28:47.000So, if you've had a DMT or an LSD experience, that can give you meaning and transcendence.
02:28:55.000You know, if you can think your way more accurately through a problem that should increase your fitness, You know, maybe grace is something that's independent and you have to figure out whether that's important to you, but that's a choice and an elected objective.
02:29:10.000And my belief is that a lot of these things are actually preset and that there's more antagonism between them.
02:29:19.000But it's only because there's a room in my mind that I try to keep very, very clean and analytical, that I sort of make the first among equals.
02:29:27.000But I have needs for these other things.
02:29:30.000There are times when the truth doesn't give me enough meaning, and I'll start storytelling.
02:29:37.000Okay, we're surrounded, we've got to fight our way out, all that kind of narrative.
02:30:11.000Like, what biological processes are responsible for certain types of behavior?
02:30:17.000You know, what really is happening to human bodies under certain conditions?
02:30:21.000What is really happening to the earth?
02:30:23.000What is really happening as far as, you know...
02:30:26.000Yeah, my friend Peter Thiel critiques me on this point, just as you have, where he says, you, Eric, undervalue and underweight the role of truth.
02:30:35.000But I worry that we're not even having a conversation.
02:30:39.000My personal physics hero, Dirac, was the guy who came up with the equation for the electron.
02:30:46.000Less well known than the Einstein equations, but arguably even more beautiful.
02:30:54.000In order to predict that, he needed a positively charged and a negatively charged particle, and the only two known at the time were the electron and the proton to make up, let's say, a hydrogen atom.
02:31:06.000Well, the proton is quite a bit heavier than the electron.
02:31:10.000And so he told a story that wasn't really true, where the proton was the antiparticle of the electron.
02:31:19.000And Heisenberg pointed out that couldn't be because the masses are too far off and they'd have to be equal.
02:31:24.000Well, a short time later, the antielectron, the positron that is, was found, I guess, by Anderson at Caltech in the early 30s.
02:31:32.000And then an antiproton was created sometime later.
02:31:35.000So it turned out that the story had more meaning than the exact version of the story.
02:31:43.000So the story was sort of more true than the version of the story that was originally told.
02:31:48.000And I could tell you a similar story with Einstein.
02:31:50.000I could tell it to you with Darwin, who didn't fully understand the implications of his theory, as is evidenced by his screwing up particular kind of orchid in his later work.
02:32:04.000Not understanding that his theory completely explained that orchid.
02:32:08.000So there's all sorts of ways in which we get the truth wrong the first several times we try it, but the meaning of the story that we tell somehow remains intact.
02:32:21.000And I think that that's a very difficult lesson for people who just want to say, look, I want to, you know, like Feynman would say, look, if experiment disagrees with you, then you're wrong.
02:32:30.000And it's a very appealing story to tell to people, but it's also worth noting that Feynman never got a physical law of nature.
02:32:37.000And it may be that he was too wedded to this kind of rude judgment of the unforgiving.
02:32:47.000Imagine you were to innovate in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.
02:32:50.000The first few times, it might not actually work.
02:32:53.000But if you told yourself a story, no, no, no, this is actually genius and it's working, and you're like, no, you just lost three consecutive bouts.
02:33:01.000Well, that may give you the ability to eventually perfect the move, perfect the technique, even though you were lying to yourself during the period in which it was being set up.
02:33:09.000It's a little bit like the difference between scaffolding and a building.
02:33:13.000And too often, people who are crazy about truth reject scaffolding, which is an intermediate stage in getting to the final truth.
02:33:21.000Well, the problem with that analogy is that some techniques work, but they just don't work for you.
02:33:26.000And the reason why they don't work for you is you don't know them good enough yet.
02:34:12.000We've had these fight companion podcasts and people have fucking potato chips and they're eating potato chips on the podcast and I just would get, my Twitter would be filled with people fucking furious.
02:34:59.000Even if I show you how, you're not going to be able to do it.
02:35:01.000If I show you how to kick people in the head, do you think you're going to be able to kick someone who actually knows how to fight in the head?
02:35:09.000You're not going to have your neural pathways carved to the point where that thing just slices right in there.
02:35:14.000You're not going to know how to set it up.
02:35:15.000You're not going to have the confidence and the experience to execute it.
02:35:21.000The difference between that and the truth is very different because it doesn't require some sort of physical process for you to master before you can execute it with sufficient prowess to actually be successful.
02:35:34.000Well, I think, you know, this has to do with placeholder truth.
02:35:37.000You know, the famous example of trichinosis in pork, where if you believe that God hates those who eat the pig...
02:36:04.000So all of these things have to do with...
02:36:06.000I'm not quite sure that I can explain to you why this is a bad thing.
02:36:11.000But let's have a placeholder and then we'll refine it over time as we come to understand what it is that we're doing.
02:36:18.000Unless we're rigid with our ideology and we go by some ancient scripture and that ancient scripture says that anything with a cloven hoof that eats its own cud, you know, like there's all these weird laws like this is what you're allowed to eat.
02:36:30.000This is what you're not allowed to eat.
02:36:32.000Except that's very often not how things work.
02:36:36.000So my fear is, is that It's a little bit the Emily Littella effect on religion, where the atheist concept of a religious person is usually the sort of robot that just looks things up in the text.
02:36:49.000And in fact, what you often find is that you're rewarded for brilliance in a religion by not having to follow the rules nearly as closely if you become adept at argument.
02:36:59.000Sort of like really Christian people with a cross tattooed on them?
02:37:05.000For example, in Islam contract marriage, where you need to get married for a few hours so that you can sate your urges with your wife, who then becomes not your wife a short time later.
02:37:18.000You're arbitraging the letter of the law.
02:37:23.000Against the need for some sort of human realism.
02:37:26.000So they have contract marriages where you like, let's get married for a day?
02:38:14.000And if paid a sufficient amount of money, genius-level rabbis could figure out why it was okay to drink the water during Passover.
02:38:22.000So the issue of getting around your own rules...
02:38:26.000Is a time-honored religious tradition where, you know, any book that is not a book for living and survival and thriving is consigned to the discipline of history.
02:38:38.000And so the fact that these things have been around for so long in general means that they have their own means of evading these self-extinguishing programs that would seem to doom them.
02:38:49.000Well, some of them, those self-extinguishing programs, the way they evade it is through fear, right?
02:38:56.000I mean, isn't that the fear of reprisal, cheating on them?
02:39:00.000And so the idea is of, you know, if you attack on Yom Kippur, does that mean you can't fight back because you're supposed to be atoning for your sins?
02:39:14.000I guarantee you, nobody, you know, if it were so easy to defeat people using their own religious traditions against them, we wouldn't know the name of these religions and we wouldn't know the genius of the books.
02:39:55.000They were down to like one, or there were three shakers at some point, and then there was like one, and they were accepting no new recruits.
02:40:12.000That one year where they just go fucking hog wild, they don't have to follow the rules, and then they usually feel so lost and disconnected that I think the majority of them return to being Amish.