The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - Physicist Dr. David Deutsch Returns - Science, Mathematics & Jew-Hatred (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_749)

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00:01:16.060 Hi everybody, this is Gatsad for The Sad Truth. It was only about two weeks ago that I had this

00:01:21.900 unbelievable gentleman on the show, Professor David Deutsch, who is a pioneer of quantum computing and

00:01:30.700 many other things and many other awards. I won't repeat them, but he was kind enough to send me this

00:01:35.900 little beauty, which I haven't read yet, and his other book, The Fabric of Reality, you should also

00:01:41.380 read. Welcome back, David. How are you doing?

00:01:44.780 Nice to be back. Thanks very much.

00:01:46.640 Oh, you know, I wish that millions of people would have watched our chat, although it is starting to

00:01:53.580 grow in numbers. I did write on social media, and I wasn't trying to frivolously compliment you,

00:02:00.140 but it was one of the most delightful conversations I had, if only because you allowed me to go back into

00:02:06.280 my computer science and touring days and so on. So I thought we'd start off kind of wrapping up our

00:02:12.920 technical conversation, and then we'd go into what we didn't get a chance to do last time,

00:02:18.140 which is talk about some political issues, Jew hatred, and so on. As we start, the first thing

00:02:23.780 I want to do is point to some people that we mentioned last time. Look at this beauty. Here's

00:02:29.140 Kurt Goodell, Kurt Goodell, which we had mentioned linking him to Turing and how they approach roughly

00:02:38.080 the same problem from different perspectives. I thought that was a brilliant insight on your part,

00:02:42.260 so that there's that one. Stop me anytime you want to make comments about any of these guys.

00:02:47.120 Maybe it's just me flexing my obsessive tsonduku, which is a Japanese term that means someone who is

00:02:55.900 obsessively a book collector, which I definitely suffer from that psychiatric condition. This is an

00:03:02.840 unbelievable book by Jim Holt discussing the walks that Goodell and Einstein would go on. If you have

00:03:13.700 any stories to tell, interject, because I'm just going to go through these books and then we could

00:03:18.080 start. Anything so far comes to mind? Well, Wheeler used to tell the story, and I'm sure this is

00:03:27.220 well-known to everybody about Princeton. They all got increasingly worried about Goodell because he got

00:03:35.800 increasingly kind of paranoid and crazy and so on. And that included Einstein getting worried. And so,

00:03:44.140 they would go to his house and he started refusing food because he feared it might be poisoned and so on.

00:03:52.560 And so, I mean, of course, I didn't know any of these people personally. It was before my time.

00:04:01.180 So, I only know stories that people have told me.

00:04:04.100 Right. Well, actually, I'm glad you mentioned the point about Goodell's paranoia, because I thought

00:04:10.220 about doing an episode where I specifically talk about that within the same mind that can create

00:04:16.780 the profundity that we talked about last time, Goodell's incompleteness theorem and so on,

00:04:21.800 that same mind is able to completely misfire into thinking that, you know, now that my wife is dead,

00:04:28.740 there is no food taster around and they're after me. And that juxtaposition of the most brilliant of

00:04:34.540 mind and the most paranoid of mind residing in the same cranium is a truly incredible thing.

00:04:39.720 And even more so, because to do the work that he did on logic, he needed to have a much firmer grip

00:04:48.880 on the notion of truth than most people do, because he had to realize that things can be true,

00:04:57.520 but not provable. Things can be true, but not knowable. And all that had to be clear in his mind,

00:05:05.300 otherwise his work wouldn't have made sense. So has any, I mean, I'm sure that someone has,

00:05:10.700 but has anybody precisely did the analysis on exactly what you just said? You know,

00:05:17.280 in a psychiatric perspective or psychoanalytic perspective, do you know?

00:05:20.420 I wouldn't know. I mean, I'm not, I'm not a historian. So you'd think somebody should have,

00:05:28.420 right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And therefore you probably also think they probably haven't.

00:05:33.500 Fair enough. Now this other gentleman, we also talked about one of my other heroes,

00:05:37.280 because he is the ultimate polymath. This guy, this gorgeous guy, John von Neumann obtained his PhD

00:05:44.760 at 23. So for you guys who are lagging, get off, get off your couch, 23 years old. Now I'm going to,

00:05:53.260 I'm going to do four guys that are specifically physicists. We're going to start with the granddaddy

00:05:58.520 of them all. I'm very proud of this book, 1968. Oh boy, look at this. Now let's start with Isaac

00:06:05.920 Newton. I just saw a little clip by Brian Green, you know, the, the string theory guy where he was

00:06:12.840 doing a comparison between Einstein and Newton, as you might typically expect. And he was actually

00:06:22.600 arguing that in a sense, notwithstanding that Einstein is no dummy, that it, Newton was more

00:06:30.420 impressive because he, while he said, you know, he's standing on, on the, on the shoulders of giants,

00:06:35.320 he really was much earlier where there wasn't as much stuff. I mean, he's coming up with the stuff

00:06:39.960 to solve the problems. So what's your view as a professional physicist? If you had to, I know maybe

00:06:46.320 you don't like to play those games, but if you had to compare those two guys, do you put one as

00:06:51.760 a bit ahead of the other or, or you can't? I think it's, I think it would be generally conceded

00:06:58.160 that Newton had the sort of, what would you call it, the more powerful mind of the two. In fact,

00:07:05.400 I don't know that one should describe Einstein as having a powerful mind. I mean, he, he, he was

00:07:14.340 bold and able to challenge, I think he was able to challenge much more in the pre-existing theory that

00:07:24.300 existed before him than Newton was. Newton was in a way, he really was building on Galileo and, and,

00:07:34.740 um, and he was saying, yes, Descartes is wrong. Uh, but the kind of explanation that he gave

00:07:45.240 for physics was the same kind as, as Descartes. He was just saying Descartes is wrong. It's not

00:07:50.500 vortices, it's forces, you know, whereas, whereas, uh, Einstein, uh, and, and Newton of course was,

00:07:58.720 was also a significant figure in the history of mathematics. He was an amazing mathematician. Well,

00:08:07.160 um, Einstein was not an amazing mathematician. He, he, uh, had to ask the advice of mathematicians,

00:08:15.020 um, to formulate, to, to formulate his theory properly. Um, uh, so I think they were different. I,

00:08:24.740 I think, um, um, I would say Einstein was the greatest physicist of all time. Newton may well

00:08:33.000 have been the greatest, um, what would you call it? Uh, thinker or, or at least, uh, STEM thinker.

00:08:43.580 STEM thinker, yeah, before that acronym existed. All right. Fair enough. Uh, let's move on. Now,

00:08:49.300 these, these are not, well, I guess maybe not quite at the same level. I just recently got this

00:08:54.600 one. What do we, Oh, I don't know if you can read it. Edward Teller, I think a Nobel prize winner.

00:09:00.180 Now, would he forgive my ignorance? Would he have been someone that you could have met or this was

00:09:05.180 I did meet him once, uh, at a conference, but not enough to have a conversation. He, he would, uh,

00:09:12.680 I was at a conference where, uh, um, I was speaking and, uh, Wheeler was there. Wheeler had organized it.

00:09:22.160 Teller was there and was sitting at the back, booming out criticisms.

00:09:28.040 Ah, one of those guys.

00:09:30.040 Yeah. And, uh, I think I met him to the extent of shaking hands, but no more than that.

00:09:35.180 Well, it's interesting that you say, uh, uh, you know, about the guy sitting in the back, uh, you know,

00:09:40.760 levying all sorts of criticism because this guy, although it wasn't in this book, we did mention

00:09:45.640 him briefly last time. And you said that you met him, Richard Feynman tells a story and not in this

00:09:51.840 book, this is a biography, but in his, surely you must be joking. Mr. Feynman. He tells a story where

00:09:57.520 he went, he was, you know, uh, a doctoral student, I think, was it at, was he at Princeton or yes?

00:10:05.040 Yeah. I think so. Uh, and so he's, he's giving the departmental talk, which, you know, I certainly

00:10:11.380 had to do when I, before I go out onto the academic market, which is a very sort of ominous thing.

00:10:16.240 Cause all, all of the big brains are there to tear you to pieces. Now, in his case, all the people

00:10:21.340 who are there in the audience happen to be some of the biggest physicists of the 20th century.

00:10:25.160 And so as he's presenting his stuff, there were some guys that were very much a lot, uh, teller

00:10:33.300 that you were saying, just kind of hammering him and so on. And this gentleman from, you know,

00:10:38.080 the back row or something turns out to be Einstein says something to the effect of, don't you think

00:10:44.240 we owe the young man the courtesy to allow him to, you know, finish his thoughts. And then we could

00:10:48.960 start asking him. And then apparently after that, not a single peep out of anyone. So you don't have

00:10:54.400 to shout loudly for people to respect you. Had you heard that story? No, no. It's a, yes.

00:11:00.740 Sounds good. Those, those sociology of science stories. I mean, we're a storytelling animal.

00:11:06.040 So hearing those stories is, is, is really a, an orgasm to the ear. And I guess the last

00:11:10.920 guy I'm going to bring up, and then one other quick book, uh, Heisenberg, how do we, what

00:11:17.180 do we, what do we feel about him? Oh, well, so he's a very controversial figure, both in physics

00:11:23.440 and, uh, outside physics. So, uh, now I could tell a story about Wheeler and him, but I'm afraid

00:11:32.040 I have forgotten the punchline of the story. All I remember is that after the war, Heisenberg

00:11:41.520 was kind of shunned by the other physicists who, who had either, were either Western or had

00:11:47.980 fled to the West. Um, and, um, Wheeler and his wife were once at a conference in, I forget

00:11:58.600 where, Copenhagen, something. Uh, and, um, they went into a cafe and there was Heisenberg.

00:12:06.040 And, um, so the question was, should we go and sit with him, you know, cause they knew

00:12:16.400 him very well and, and, uh, fellow physicist and, uh, and so on or not. And I don't know

00:12:22.960 the punchline.

00:12:23.580 Oh, come on. All right. I'll have to track it down to see if I could find it and I'll,

00:12:28.840 maybe I'll post it in the description last book. And then we, we get onto other things

00:12:32.760 that this one is not exactly in your area, but, uh, Fermat's last theorem. Now the reason

00:12:38.880 I just got this book, by the way, uh, so I haven't read it yet. I have a personal story

00:12:43.980 linking, uh, to, to the solving of Fermat's last theorem. So when I was an undergraduate, uh,

00:12:50.760 student in mathematics, you know, obviously all the students are, you know, pretty brainy,

00:12:56.740 but even within that ecosystem, there's always someone, you know, that becomes sort of legendary

00:13:02.920 that's above everybody else. And this, uh, gentleman, I don't think he'd mind if I mentioned

00:13:08.240 his name because it's a compliment. His name is, uh, Henri Darmont, D-A-R-M-O-N, who's now

00:13:13.840 a, a, a full professor at McGill university where, where I had studied. Actually, I had his father

00:13:20.180 as my professor when I was doing an MBA at McGill. Uh, anyways, uh, when he, when Henri Darmont

00:13:27.520 finished his PhD and I think was doing a postdoc, maybe at either Harvard or Princeton, Andrew Wiles,

00:13:34.740 who ended up solving Fermat's last theorem had, uh, sent out the proof to some people to go through it.

00:13:42.020 And as the story goes, as I heard, Henri Darmont was one of those young postdocs who had actually,

00:13:49.400 you know, his eyes had gone over the proof before others had. So that's my claim to fame in terms of

00:13:55.120 being linked to Fermat's last theorem. The other thing I was going to say about it, and then I'll

00:13:58.940 cede the floor to you. What amazes me about Fermat's last theorem is that I could literally explain

00:14:06.900 the structure of the problem to my now 12 year old son and the difference between simply being able

00:14:15.840 to pose the problem and then solving the problem is arguably the biggest distance possible, right?

00:14:22.160 Because there are a lot of problems in math that might be very difficult to solve, but the lay person

00:14:28.860 can't understand even what the problem is here. You've got the extreme. It's very easy to state

00:14:34.000 if almost impossible to solve. Any other similar problems that you think fit that model?

00:14:40.200 Well, in mathematics, uh, there are plenty like the, the four color problem, for instance.

00:14:44.720 That's true. That's true. Um, the, uh, in physics, um, it's kind of, uh, it's more the other way

00:14:54.600 around that there are problems that are very easy to state like is space finite or infinite, right?

00:15:01.540 And it sounds as though, you know, it should be straightforward to either work that out or

00:15:07.800 look through a telescope or, or whatever, but it's not, it's the, the more you look at

00:15:13.320 it, the more complicated it gets. And physicists have kept changing their minds on this, on this

00:15:19.180 issue, uh, you know, uh, on a timescale of a couple of decades. So that's why I always, um,

00:15:25.900 I'm, I'm always reluctant to give an opinion on things like, is it really true that knowledge

00:15:33.300 can continue forever, literally into infinity? And I, I try to explain that, that, um, it's not

00:15:44.020 really a meaningful question because it depends on which cosmological model you believe or you,

00:15:53.020 you favor, I shouldn't say believe, um, uh, and, and cosmological models are being overturned on a

00:16:02.040 timescale of, you know, less than a generation. Right. So, uh, uh, one would look very silly

00:16:09.000 pontificating on the basis of the current theory. Right. So, uh, that, that's, I, I think it's,

00:16:17.060 that that's, that's different from mathematics. Um, for a start when, when in mathematics, when

00:16:22.500 something is proved, um, there's after a while, I mean, even Andrew Wiles, his proof was, was

00:16:29.680 first criticized and then he had to fix the mistakes. Uh, uh, but you know, after a while,

00:16:35.660 after, after the consensus has settled down, um, the mathematical, uh, proofs are very rarely,

00:16:44.380 um, overturned. What often happens though, is that they become uninteresting. So, you know,

00:16:52.900 people, people, uh, realize that there are wider ways of looking at these mathematical objects and,

00:17:00.520 and, um, you know, there's, there's a Pythagoras's theorem and, uh, there's better versions of

00:17:09.000 Pythagoras's theorem and, and, and so on. But what's interesting, I mean, you said that sometimes

00:17:15.200 we solve something and then it becomes uninteresting. And there's a similar point to be

00:17:20.160 made as relating specifically to Fermat. When people ask me, well, you know, should we judge

00:17:25.880 the value of research by its, uh, applicability potential? And then I usually bring up the example

00:17:33.040 of many of Fermat's, uh, solutions, uh, sat for hundreds of years collecting dust until you then

00:17:41.800 had cryptography where suddenly you have an application to these otherwise completely esoteric

00:17:48.060 problems that nobody cared about for hundreds of years. So what are your thoughts on that? Do you

00:17:51.900 think, are you a, an epistemological purist in the sense of there is knowledge to be discovered.

00:17:57.920 All I care about is discovering it. I leave it for someone else to care about how I apply it.

00:18:03.660 Or are you of the slightly less purist version? No, no, there's, there needs to be applications to

00:18:10.040 what I'm thinking about. I think there's a danger to, uh, researching into something that one isn't

00:18:15.840 interested in. So this question of, of, um, of, is this a fundamental importance or will it be of

00:18:25.060 fundamental importance? 200 years hence or forever or whatever? Those are dangerous questions.

00:18:31.720 Uh, because if the answer is different from whatever you're burning to know, whatever you're

00:18:37.700 burning to find out, then, um, well, that's obviously, uh, a dangerous way to live one's life

00:18:46.000 because, uh, even if you're right, you will have sacrificed your life and not find out

00:18:51.940 until after you're dead, uh, that you were right. Well, what amazes me about your point about

00:18:58.080 sacrificing one's life is that, you know, Andrew Wiles took a problem that he knew for hundreds of

00:19:06.460 years, the top minds had failed at it and had really the, the chutzpah, right. To say, well,

00:19:13.340 you know what? I'm going to take a really huge gamble here. I'm going to go up into the attic where my

00:19:18.780 wife is going to feed me the food underneath the crack of the door. And I think that I'm probably

00:19:25.860 not going to solve it, but I'm going to gamble. I mean, that seems like an extra, I mean, it's either,

00:19:31.460 uh, delusional or a supreme sense of confidence that I'm going to succeed where everybody else

00:19:38.060 had failed. Do you have a sense of which one it was? I think, um, I don't know. I haven't read

00:19:45.080 about his, his, uh, his life in that way. But I think that, um, uh, solving a problem

00:19:56.640 is not, how can I put this? It's not the reason for working on it. That is, if one works on a problem

00:20:07.020 with great joy and discovery, because it, you know, if one works on a problem for a long time,

00:20:13.280 even if, even if one never solves it, one, one realizes approaches that looked right and one

00:20:19.540 then understands why they were wrong. And, uh, and Popper says, you know, the, the, the, um,

00:20:27.600 I can never, I can never say this in the, in the, um, beautiful way that he said it, but something

00:20:33.480 like, uh, that, um, philosophy consists of finding a problem, um, falling in love with it, living with it

00:20:42.560 for, for, for the rest of your life. Uh, whether you solve it or not is neither here nor there you,

00:20:48.960 but you, you live with it. And if you should solve it, he kind of has the tone of, if you should be

00:20:55.240 unfortunate enough to solve it, then it will have a number of enchanting problem children.

00:21:02.700 Right. Uh, and, and I would add usually more than one, right? It, if, if, if, whether you succeed

00:21:10.760 or fail, you will have created problems and you will have created joy for yourself and for anyone

00:21:17.420 else who happens to think the same way of which, you know, there is usually one or more, uh, like

00:21:25.160 Van Gogh at least had his brother who believed in him, but I think he didn't care. He didn't care

00:21:33.320 who believed in him. He wanted to do his thing. You, it's the second time. I mean, the, the first

00:21:39.200 time we chatted, you mentioned Popper with a lot of admiration. Now you mentioned him again. So should

00:21:43.380 I, should I presume that if we played the game, who would you like to, which historical figure would

00:21:48.720 you like to invite over for dinner? Popper would be on top of that list. He would again, I did meet him

00:21:54.420 once. Um, right. The, but, but, uh, it, it wasn't a very productive meeting, although it was quite

00:22:01.840 long. Um, just one-on-one or amongst other people. No, I, I was, I was really the, um, uh, I was a

00:22:12.320 graduate student at the time. It was Bryce DeWitt who went to see Popper and I drove him there in my car.

00:22:20.480 And so I, I went in and I was sort of, I participated in the conversation because it was, it was much of

00:22:28.380 it was about the many worlds interpretation or the Everett interpretation. Popper had, had

00:22:34.220 trashed, uh, several times and DeWitt wanted to explain to him why he was wrong to, why he had been

00:22:42.100 wrong to trash it. And again, I have told this story many times again, like Feynman meeting Popper was

00:22:49.640 one of the highlights of my life. Um, uh, really amazing. And yes, I, I would have dinner with him

00:22:56.500 today if, if he could be brought back to life. Um, he, he seemed to accept DeWitt's points and,

00:23:04.540 and asked the right questions. Uh, and, and at the end he said, well, uh, because of what you say,

00:23:12.440 I'm going to have to change a whole chapter in my book, which is now with the publisher. And, um,

00:23:18.300 I will. So then the book came out, I forget which one it was. And we looked eagerly in the book and

00:23:24.780 it was the same old. Ah, he didn't make the changes. He didn't know. And I don't, I think he

00:23:30.760 must've backslid as soon as we went out the door, he must've backslid. Well, that, that speaks to

00:23:36.640 actually something that I've recently mentioned on several occasions, because the question that

00:23:42.020 was posed to me speaks exactly to this point about the inability of most people to change

00:23:48.120 their positions once anchored very solidly somewhere. Uh, the, the, the question that I was

00:23:54.020 posed was about a year ago. Uh, it was a actually a British psychiatrist who invited me on his show.

00:24:00.320 And at the end of the conversation, he said to me, you know, you've been a professor for 30 plus

00:24:06.200 years, you know, studying human behavior. What is the singular phenomenon that has most surprised you

00:24:12.900 about the human condition or I'm paraphrasing his words. And yeah, I'd never been asked that question

00:24:18.140 before. And so I, I paused for a moment and then I said, well, I would have to say that the inability

00:24:25.260 of people to change their positions once anchored in irrespective of the amount of evidence that you

00:24:32.220 might otherwise offer them. And so it, it's a bit disappointing to think that even a mind as great

00:24:39.800 at Karl Popper fits under the umbrella of what I just said. Yeah. Although again, rather like,

00:24:47.580 rather like the issue of whether it's over of overriding importance to solve the problem or for the

00:24:54.960 problem to be important, I think having a conversation, it's not of overriding importance

00:25:02.440 for either side to persuade the other. What's important is, is that you learn something and

00:25:09.680 the something that you learn may not be, oh, I was wrong about that, or I was slightly wrong about that,

00:25:16.440 or I was partly wrong. It may be something less tangible. It may be, it may be as little as

00:25:24.880 as, now I understand who the enemy is. It's, it's that, but it, it can be more, much more

00:25:37.140 complicated than that. And, and I think as Popper also says in his book, The Myth of the Framework,

00:25:49.460 that the clash of ideas is more important than anyone changing their mind to the right or wrong

00:26:00.240 idea. The, the, the clash is itself fruitful. Right. Yeah. Beautiful. Okay. So, so now I want to

00:26:08.860 slightly segue to more political issues, more stuff that's in line with some of the things that I

00:26:15.180 discuss in the parasitic mind, but I'm going to segue to that via physics. So I talk about in the

00:26:23.360 parasitic mind, a, the story that happened, the regrettable situation that happened with a physicist,

00:26:29.880 Italian physicist. I can't remember his first name. I think it's Daniele Strumia. Do you, do you know

00:26:35.760 what that is? Have you, are you familiar with that story? So this was it, this is it, well, not was,

00:26:39.700 this is a physicist who was working, I think with both at a university. I can't remember if it was

00:26:46.200 University of Pisa. I don't remember the university. And also at CERN. Oh, I think I have heard the

00:26:53.000 story. Yes. Go on. Oh, okay. So I, maybe you heard it. He said something politically incorrect and

00:26:58.440 they thought, yeah, he, he was at a conference. It was a gender and physics conference. So, I mean,

00:27:07.700 it's literally on gender and physics. And so he goes up and provides a bibliometric analysis.

00:27:15.340 So for those of you who don't know what bibliometrics is, it's the quantification of

00:27:20.340 science, right? So, you know, for example, who cites whom? And so you can, with the, with the data

00:27:26.080 that we have today, we could ask some really tight hypotheses about the, the sociology of science,

00:27:32.460 the psychology of science and so on. So that's called bibliometrics and scientometrics. So it's very

00:27:36.860 objective. You're using real objective data to measure whatever you want to measure. And so he

00:27:42.600 basically presents bibliometric data that is, that is countering the narrative that, you know,

00:27:49.380 it's the, the patriarchy that's keeping the women down and blah, blah, blah. And he gets completely

00:27:55.800 trashed. You know, he's fired here. He's fired there. Of course, I invite him on my show because it

00:28:01.460 turns out that I'm the repository of all free thinking rebels. And now here's the part that

00:28:09.140 really pissed me off, David. Physicists got together under the Orwellian name, particles for justice,

00:28:19.520 where they put out this open letter, you know, chastising this Nazi strumia for saying, and you know,

00:28:29.060 guys like Sean Carroll and so on. The reason why I'm setting up this whole problem is because you'd

00:28:35.780 like to think that physicists by virtue of what they study would be less likely to succumb to

00:28:44.640 parasitic ideas. But it turns out that that's not true. Any human mind, including that of physicists

00:28:51.260 could be completely ravaged by parasitic ideas. What are your thoughts, Dr. Deutsch?

00:28:58.120 Well, I'm not sure. All I know about this is, is what I've seen on the internet. And I've seen these,

00:29:04.540 these bar charts, where physicists and engineers are usually at the bottom of the scale of susceptibility

00:29:11.840 to woke. So, you know, they are susceptible, but they're not just as susceptible. Another thing

00:29:22.480 that occurred to me, I didn't know this part, as you just said, I didn't know that this was at a

00:29:27.100 conference on gender. And did you say gender and physics? Gender and physics, yes. I can't imagine

00:29:34.120 circumstances under which I would be interested in the topic gender and physics. It's, it's like,

00:29:42.020 it's like washing machines and physics, you know, or actually, that's, that's more connected.

00:29:49.160 Right. Gender and physics. 0.99

00:29:50.800 Because washing machines have some physical reality. Okay, right. Yeah. So I wouldn't have gone. And I,

00:29:57.760 I, I, it makes me suspicious of the story that he went to this conference sort of all innocently.

00:30:05.220 Well, I can't, why, why, why did he go to such a thing?

00:30:09.800 What if he's trying to argue precisely to your point, that those two words should not be linked

00:30:16.020 together, right? I mean, science frees us, as I explained in parasitic mind, it frees us from the

00:30:21.500 shackles of our personal identities. That's why science is beautiful. So he went there,

00:30:26.220 maybe naively thinking, well, wait a second, I will present objective, quantifiable bibliometrics

00:30:33.360 that shows that your narrative is nonsense. Isn't that worthwhile?

00:30:39.020 Well, you know, it's up to him what, what he, you know, what he devotes his creativity to,

00:30:45.400 but I agree with what you just said, and you didn't have to do a study. And I, I also, you know,

00:30:50.860 I didn't have to do a study to agree with you. And I'm not moved by the study, in other words.

00:30:57.560 Right.

00:30:58.940 And, and, and I don't think I've ever persuaded an audience of something. So I think usually

00:31:11.340 when I persuade someone of something, it's, it's having a one-to-one quiet conversation

00:31:16.960 without millions of people looking on the, the, because then you can, you can both be pursuing

00:31:26.960 the truth and you can admit that you, that you made a mistake just now, you should have

00:31:31.740 said so-and-so without, without, you know, the whole world jumping on you. And, and similarly,

00:31:37.700 I wouldn't go and, if I lay down the law to an audience of physicists who I know will disagree

00:31:47.880 with me, it is by way of revealing that there's an alternative view out there, not of persuading

00:32:02.560 them. That's, that's not what I would want to do. So, yeah, I, I don't know. I, the, the,

00:32:10.940 the situation is bad. I agree with you.

00:32:13.240 Well, I was going to say one more example of a, of a physicist gone, you're too British 1.00

00:32:19.780 and polite to say it, but I'll say it for you. That's gone completely insane and wacko. 1.00

00:32:23.720 I don't know how much we would call him a physicist. Neil deGrasse Tyson recently explained to all

00:32:30.160 of us plebs, all of us who are part of the great unwashed, all of us dummies, that it's 0.96

00:32:35.700 ridiculous to think that, you know, gender or, or sex, most people use them interchangeably

00:32:42.540 is binary. It's, it's completely on a spectrum. And then there's a clip where you can see him 0.91

00:32:47.720 doing that. Sean Carroll's also said that now, the reason why I, it's not because I, you know,

00:32:52.240 I, I have physics envy and I want to pick on otherwise super smart physicists, but it speaks

00:32:57.660 to my point, notwithstanding the comment that you made that maybe the scale is such that

00:33:01.600 physicists are less likely to be parasitized. Once you are a scientist and you're willing to

00:33:09.240 argue that biological sex is on a spectrum, then we better really contact Charles Darwin

00:33:15.240 and explain to him that a sexual selection theory using two phenotypes called male and

00:33:19.280 female is wrong. So that someone could espouse such nonsense upsets me. And maybe we have 1.00

00:33:26.400 different temperaments. If, if you upset me by attacking and raping the truth, I'm not going 0.81

00:33:32.280 to do the one-on-one quiet conversation that you do. I'm going on social media to a million

00:33:36.920 people and telling the world that you're a schmuck. Am I wrong for doing that? 1.00

00:33:42.160 Well, as I said, everyone should do what, what gives them joy. I think I, I've been following

00:33:51.700 you for a while on, on X and, uh, I think you do sterling work and, uh, you, uh, it involves

00:34:01.840 sometimes insulting people because they are very wrong. Right. And, um, and I think, I think

00:34:11.820 this, the way you do it, uh, helps countless other people realize that they shouldn't go

00:34:20.760 down that avenue because they will end up being very wrong. Um, I, I don't think I could do

00:34:29.500 that. It's like, it's not in my temperament. Yes, exactly. Uh, it, even though, you know,

00:34:36.600 each, each, each person can do what they're good at. But the fact that you're able to say,

00:34:44.260 look, different people have different dispositions and they're going to come at the same problem in

00:34:52.240 different ways is a lot more charitable because, so let me give you the non-Deutsch response to some

00:35:01.100 of my interjections. Professor Saad, yours, and here comes a bunch of compliments, but why is it

00:35:09.620 that you go with such spice after someone? And I usually will have to explain to them contrary to

00:35:15.520 David Deutsch getting it is that look at, I will use a wide range of weaponry from my arsenal of

00:35:23.020 persuasion strategies to achieve a goal. The ultimate goal is always to assiduously defend truth.

00:35:31.100 I don't wake up and say, today I'd like to be frivolously mean against Neil deGrasse Tyson. If

00:35:38.920 anything, I would be upset if he sent me an email and said, you know, you really hurt my feelings

00:35:43.460 because I, it's never the goal to do that, but it's saying, look, if you espouse certain positions

00:35:50.820 publicly, and if I think that in the deep recesses of your mind, you know that you're spreading

00:35:57.840 nonsense, all bets are off. Yeah. Um, and as I said, in your case, you, you, I'm sure you achieve

00:36:11.520 your goal, not, not to the people you're attacking, but to everyone else. Right. The audience effect.

00:36:17.660 Exactly. Yes. Uh, okay. Uh, one more topic that's sciency, and then let's get into some politics,

00:36:27.340 Jew hatred, and so on, which may not be the right way to end the conversation, but maybe we'll end

00:36:31.760 it on a positive note. Uh, so Auguste Comte, are you, do you know who Auguste Comte is? He-

00:36:37.500 Yes, but I've never read any. Okay. So, but the general idea for, for the listeners and viewers who

00:36:42.280 don't know about him, he is, some argue the, the, the father of sociology, he created something that

00:36:48.760 he called the hierarchy of the sciences. And in a sense, it was inverted to what we typically say.

00:36:55.260 He, he said, look, it's, it's a lot more difficult to study sociology because it has these very

00:37:02.140 complicated beings called human beings with their brains and so on. I'm paraphrasing. Uh, whereas,

00:37:07.120 you know, physics, yes, it's, it's very hard, but there's greater predictability in studying the

00:37:13.580 things that a physicist would study than trying to understand the most complex machine that we

00:37:18.720 know of. It's called the human brain. What are your thoughts on, on that argument? Do you, do you

00:37:24.260 think, and it's not just to engage in a frivolous who is smarter, but I actually, you know, contrary to

00:37:31.100 what Feynman would, would say where, you know, he says, oh, but the social sciences, that's, that's not real

00:37:36.320 science. Well, what do you mean? You think the study of human beings is not within the purview of

00:37:42.360 science? That's a silly statement to make. So what are your thoughts on all that? Well, um, 0.94

00:37:48.020 um, the study of human beings is only a partly a science because of the inherent limitations of

00:37:58.760 science. The most important one of which is that it's impossible for anyone to predict the growth

00:38:09.660 of knowledge, to predict the course that knowledge will take in the future. And that is because if

00:38:15.780 they could predict it today, then it wouldn't be in the future and the, the, they, they would know it

00:38:20.300 today. So that's an argument due to Popper. And, uh, it means that there's a fundamental limitation on

00:38:28.420 predictability in any of the human, human philosophies. Oh, you, you, you don't use the

00:38:38.280 word sciences. I noticed you didn't say you can be precise. If I'm trying to be precise. Yes. I mean,

00:38:44.820 there, there are scientific aspects to the human sciences, such as say, um, psychology also deals

00:38:54.860 with, um, things like optical illusions and, and why an optical illusion happens in some situations

00:39:03.260 and not in others and, and so on. But once, once we get to, uh, issues where human creativity is

00:39:11.060 involved, human free will and so on, then I, I don't, I think it's fundamentally impossible

00:39:16.880 to predict, uh, the outcome of a, uh, of a, um, human thought process or of the thought process of

00:39:28.180 lots of humans. Um, uh, and, um, it is possible though to explain it retrospectively.

00:39:41.060 And that, that, that is not, uh, that's not ruled out by the, by this, um, Popperian view

00:39:47.780 of what science is. You can, my favorite example is you, you can explain, um, the Napoleonic wars

00:39:57.840 and what happened. You can form a view about who the better general was, Napoleon or Wellington.

00:40:06.280 You can form a view about who won, why Napoleon won the battle of Austerlitz and so on, why Napoleon

00:40:14.340 fell and so on. But you could not have done that in 1800. No matter how much knowledge you had

00:40:23.320 about, about the human condition and no matter how much data you had about previous battles

00:40:28.600 and because Napoleon was a phenomenon that either, depending on how you look at it, either

00:40:35.540 it had never happened before or it had only happened a handful of times and, and they're

00:40:39.720 sufficiently different in other ways to be able to draw a conclusion. And if there had

00:40:45.900 been a way of drawing a conclusion, then, you know, Napoleon was very, very scientifically

00:40:52.960 minded. You could have gone to him with, with your bit of paper and, and showed him the

00:40:57.420 equations and said, look, if you continue like this, you'll lose. And he would have said,

00:41:03.220 are we? And then he would have changed what he did. And that, that's really the same thing

00:41:08.740 as Popper's argument. So you still couldn't have predicted it because you couldn't have predicted

00:41:13.620 the effect of the thing that he did that was different from all those previous dictators

00:41:19.820 or whatever you call Napoleon. So, and what's true of dictators, I think is true of every

00:41:28.540 human being. I think that there, there are no, there are no two humans alike. I think the

00:41:40.200 difference between two humans is much greater than the difference between say two biological

00:41:45.760 species. Um, they, uh, they, you know, like, just like a species can go extinct through not

00:41:55.560 creating the knowledge that would be necessary to survive. So a human can make arbitrarily large

00:42:02.260 errors. That's precisely because of free will. If, if, if there was a limit on the size of error

00:42:10.000 you could make, then you could avoid errors just by seeing that you're coming up to the limit.

00:42:15.060 Right. And then, you know, that your, your next idea is bound to be true because otherwise you'd

00:42:20.100 pass the limit of size of error. So, um, uh, if I can say one more thing, please say as many

00:42:28.600 things as you want. Well, um, it's about evolution. Um, one way in which, um, people purport to

00:42:39.500 explain human behavior, um, is that they, uh, draw an analogy with animal behavior and, and

00:42:49.780 evolution. So now I think that such explanations are never true for various, for various reasons,

00:42:58.620 but they may look true because of the existence of memes. So if you say, you know, the reason that,

00:43:08.580 um, that, um, men sometimes go mad with rage, if they suspect that, uh, their, their, uh, mate

00:43:18.660 is unfaithful, then you could say, well, that's because genes for doing that would survive better

00:43:26.780 than genes for not doing that. But that's also true of memes. Uh, and the thing is that meme

00:43:34.580 evolution is much more sensitive to selection pressures and much more, um, sophisticated.

00:43:45.400 So animals who try to keep their mates from, from, um, having sex with other people, they

00:43:54.940 can only use very crude methods. I mean, they don't know what a mate is. They don't know what

00:44:00.380 an offspring is. They don't know that, that something in them wants to, you know, all they

00:44:05.000 know is that if, if, uh, if, uh, if a young animal of that species smells wrong, they will

00:44:13.600 kill it. You know, they, they don't know why they're doing that. Whereas a human can conjecture,

00:44:21.240 um, what they want to have a bloodline, uh, a pure bloodline for what, what, what they

00:44:30.620 want it for. And it might have started with some, some ruler, some, uh, ancient, uh, prehistoric

00:44:37.920 king or ruler, uh, you know, saying to his son, you know, one day all this will be yours.

00:44:44.460 And, and, uh, so why does he say that to his son and not to his daughter or to his adopted

00:44:53.120 son or to his stepson? Or I think, suppose that originally it was because he had a greater

00:45:02.320 influence over his son. He, he had, he thinks that his son, when he takes over, will continue

00:45:07.580 to run all this wonderful thing that they have in the same way that he would. Whereas with

00:45:12.340 his other, um, possible heirs, he's not so sure. And so he, he made sure that his wife

00:45:22.280 was never out of his sight. And so his son also did because he was taking his father's

00:45:29.660 advice. And so a meme was born and the meme I'm oversimplifying here, but the meme could

00:45:37.540 have had the same underlying logic as the gene that you're imagining, but I don't think that

00:45:43.180 gene exists or could exist. But the, the argument for why people behave like that might still

00:45:49.780 be largely true.

00:45:51.140 So, all right. So a lot to unpack there. You're ready. You're ready. You're passing your seat.

00:45:56.820 Okay. So I, I think I actually, I agree with a lot of what you're saying, but they're covered

00:46:01.560 in evolutionary theory. So number one, that your distinction of genes and memes is in a

00:46:07.200 sense, I can read, well, first of all, you're exactly right. We're both a biological and cultural

00:46:11.360 animal. Hence, that's why Richard Dawkins was right. When he said, you know, genes, you know,

00:46:16.900 genes, uh, genetic evolution is the propagation of genes. Mimetic evolution is the propagation

00:46:22.180 of our memes. You and I are having a conversation right now. People are going to consume that.

00:46:27.100 And those memes are going to live on in other people's brains. Okay. That's fine. I can repackage

00:46:32.000 that distinction that you made as the distinction between nature versus nurture, uh, nurture being

00:46:39.180 that it's, it's culture that is impacting your behavior, socialization, your parents, your rabbi,

00:46:45.140 whomever. And then nature is that which is inscribed in your genes. And of course, the,

00:46:50.940 the evolutionary perspective, or certainly the evolutionary psychology perspective is that it's an

00:46:56.100 interactionist framework, meaning for most meaningful things, our genes and our, uh,

00:47:02.280 environments interact with each other, but the socialization element exists in its form because

00:47:10.000 of nature. So it's not an either or it's not, it's due to nature or it's due to nurture. No one contests

00:47:18.700 the fact that maybe the ruler had spread that meme to his son, but he spread that meme to his son

00:47:25.440 precisely because it is bound to certain biological imperatives. This is what EO Wilson talked about.

00:47:32.620 The genes hold culture on a leash. It may be a long leash, but it's still held. So it is perfectly

00:47:39.460 reasonable to incorporate everything that you said with what I just added to it. So far, so good. Are we

00:47:45.740 together? Except that you're omitting creativity, but I think it won't matter in what you're about to say,

00:47:54.400 I guess. No. Okay. So let me just, I'll finish off. Now, the other thing that I think you might find

00:47:59.880 fascinating, David, if, if only because you don't deal with biological agents. So I'm, I'm hoping

00:48:05.440 that maybe I'm, I might be introducing you to a new concept here. Boy, I could put that on my CV. I

00:48:11.140 taught something. I taught David Deutsch something. I can retire now. So in, in, whenever you are studying

00:48:17.720 biological beings, there is an epistemological distinction between what's called proximate

00:48:24.440 explanations and ultimate explanations. Much of science operates at the proximate level.

00:48:32.400 Almost all Nobel prizes that have been won other than the one for say Conrad Lawrence, human ethology

00:48:38.700 would have been, would have been done on the proximate level. You're studying the how and the what

00:48:44.760 of a mechanism. The ultimate explanation, not ultimate in the superior sense, ultimate in that

00:48:52.220 you ask the Darwinian why, not the how and the what of the phenomenon, but why would it have evolved

00:48:59.660 to be of that form? So for example, if you indulge me for a few more, am I, am I, are we okay still?

00:49:05.840 Yeah, yeah, of course. Okay. So take for example, pregnancy sickness, right? If you're a gynecologist

00:49:14.980 you've studied and you went to medical school, you did a specialization in gynecology. You only studied

00:49:20.080 the proximate explanations of pregnancy sickness. How does fluctuations in a woman's symptoms or hormones 0.66

00:49:30.400 affect the severity of her pregnancy sickness symptoms? Okay. That's a how and what. The ultimate

00:49:36.020 Darwinian why would be why have women evolved the mechanism, the universal mechanism of pregnancy 0.99

00:49:43.200 sickness? Well, and the answer turns out to be mind blowing. Well, you can literally set your, your

00:49:48.760 clock, your watch to the timing of pregnancy sickness. It happens during the first trimester.

00:49:55.080 It happens during a period called organogenesis, where the organs are forming in utero inside a

00:50:01.720 woman. During that period, it is uniquely important that the woman does not ingest any

00:50:07.140 teratogens, because if she does, foodborne pathogens, because if she does, that could wreak havoc to 1.00

00:50:13.100 organogenesis. Therefore, she evolves a multitude of mechanisms that serve as insurance policies 1.00

00:50:20.620 against that. Now, why is all that important? Because it turns out that if you go see your

00:50:25.880 physician, your gynecologist, and you're a woman, and you say, I can't, I'm running every five seconds to 0.99

00:50:32.560 throw up, what will he or she do? They will prescribe you a medicine that attenuates the symptoms of

00:50:40.420 pregnancy sickness from an evolutionary perspective that is the perfectly incorrect thing to do. The more 1.00

00:50:45.980 pregnancy sickness you experience, the more likely you are to have a successful trajectory for your 0.96

00:50:53.560 pregnancy, precisely because of the things that I just mentioned. So, so now to wrap all this up,

00:51:01.460 the specific memes that evolve might be at the proximate level, how does socialization impart those

00:51:10.580 biological things, but the ultimate explanation always add an extra layer of epistemological

00:51:17.620 complexity to the human phenomenon that you're studying? I've said a lot. What are your thoughts

00:51:22.140 on all this? Well, you're right that that's, that's an interesting biological explanation of a common

00:51:32.580 human behavior. Um, uh, and I have no reason to think that that's false. Uh, I, I, I, uh, I would say

00:51:43.300 that, that it's, it's only going to be as true as, um, as a, uh, it's going to be true modulo how much of

00:51:55.700 this is under the person's control. Right. So for example, if a woman decides after the, her first 0.96

00:52:05.080 pregnancy that she won't have another because, um, uh, because she can't stand the, the, the vomiting,

00:52:13.860 um, then she won't. And it could be that the doctor giving her an antiemetic will actually

00:52:20.240 increase the number of those genes rather than decrease. Right. So this is an example. I mean,

00:52:27.440 you would call that gene environment interaction, but I think that there's, there's a more fundamental,

00:52:35.660 um, uh, thing to take into account, which is that whether, whether, what the woman thinks about her

00:52:47.980 feeling ill and having babies and, and, or, and going to doctors and obeying doctors and, and all

00:52:55.540 that stuff will depend in part on memes because, you know, she'll have been instructed. She'll have

00:53:03.220 got ideas from the, but it, it'll depend in a very large part. And this part is unlimited in its effect

00:53:10.520 on her ideas on the, on, for example, the new ideas that she might have. She might be the first person

00:53:17.740 ever to have a new idea about how to cope with this situation. And then, uh, it may enable her to

00:53:25.120 have more children or it may cause her not to have any, or, you know, whatever it could be either.

00:53:30.600 She could write a book about it. She, she could make a millions of pounds, um, from this book that

00:53:37.000 all this is, is stems from her creativity and isn't explained by either genes or means that the fact

00:53:46.420 that she has this ability is explained by genes, of course, but what conclusion she comes to and

00:53:54.780 therefore what the outcome is for her, for her offspring, that is determined by her creativity

00:54:00.940 and her creativity isn't determined by anything. It, it is, it comes out of nothing. It's free will.

00:54:08.680 Um, and, uh, again, the example I've imagined, which by the way, I've just imagined that example and it

00:54:18.900 didn't come from my genes or, or from the, from the culture. The example of that that I've just

00:54:25.420 imagined may seem forced, but that is because, uh, human creativity can't be second

00:54:38.600 guessed like that. And I, so, so the, the example I gave is necessarily oversimplified and a real

00:54:46.320 situation, um, will involve much more complex, uh, ideas than the ones I've said. In fact,

00:54:53.540 you know, the ones she writes in this book I've imagined are going to take a whole book to explain

00:54:59.260 and I've just explained it in a couple of minutes. So, you know, forgive me for interrupting. I actually,

00:55:05.220 I'm, I don't think it was us having our first conversation where I mentioned this, but even if

00:55:10.720 I did, it's worth repeating. Cause you're talking about human creativity. There is a psychologist at,

00:55:16.740 I think UC Davis, his name, he must be at the stage of maybe professor emeritus. Now his name is Dean

00:55:24.080 Simonton. And he wrote a book on a Darwinian perspective on human creativity, which I think you'd find,

00:55:32.960 uh, fascinating. And I, I, I, I'm trying to remember his argument. I think he basically argues

00:55:38.100 exactly to your point, how you just said, oh, well, the thought that I just had didn't come from

00:55:42.640 my genes and didn't come from me. So I think he analogizes, but I think in a, in a rather convincing

00:55:48.500 way that the, the, the, the, the impetus of a creative thought is akin to the random mutation

00:55:58.860 that arises in biological evolution, right? Right. An animal is born to a male and a female get 0.87

00:56:05.940 together. And just through the random reshuffling of genes, that animal has a blue dot. If that blue

00:56:12.260 dot, uh, confers a either reproductive or, or survival advantage, boom, now there's going to be 0.98

00:56:19.220 selection pressures for all future descendants to have that blue dots and those, those that don't,

00:56:23.400 but what started the process was a random mutation. And so he analogizes some of that creative

00:56:29.260 processes that you're talking about akin to the random mutations in genes. What are your thoughts

00:56:34.840 about that argument? Well, I think I say true novel things more often than I would if I just spoke

00:56:43.900 randomly. So there's, there's something at work. There's this creativity, you know, in some ways it's

00:56:50.740 analogous to mutations. And I, I think that, um, in the brain, something analogous to mutations and

00:56:59.040 selection, uh, are happening on many levels before an idea comes to be enacted or spoken or whatever it

00:57:07.220 is. So at, at the lowest level, creativity must be made of non-creative steps. Right. Um, because,

00:57:19.600 you know, unless, you know, unless you believe that God does it or something, it's, it's, it's,

00:57:23.880 it's impossible that, that creativity could be made by creative steps all the way down. But

00:57:29.560 nevertheless, an, an act of creativity brings something irreducibly new into the world. Um,

00:57:40.160 and therefore trying to explain it via non-creative things like genes or, or memes, um,

00:57:49.200 is going to miss the most important thing about humans. You might say there are humans who are

00:57:54.800 absolutely dominated by memes, you know, by, by the woke virus. And I could agree with that. Uh, I,

00:58:01.480 I mean, I'm not sure, but, but, uh, I, I, I think it's, it's, it's plausible that many people and,

00:58:11.400 and, and too many people, um, are, have, um, their, their, their actions and, uh, their, uh, behavior and

00:58:22.600 even their, their thoughts, um, are generated by non-creative memes, means and memes. Um, and, um, uh,

00:58:36.520 and therefore in my terms, they are less human. They are, they are less human than they, than they,

00:58:42.600 uh, uh, uh, have the ability to be. Uh, but even those people would not be able to, for example,

00:58:54.160 make up, uh, ridiculous excuses for why they do what they do or say what they say if they weren't

00:59:00.360 creative, right? Making up ridiculous excuses is as purely human thing and chat GPT can't do it. 0.91

00:59:08.040 And chimpanzees can't do it. It's only humans that can be that stupid. Right. Well, you know, it's, 1.00

00:59:15.120 it's, I'm glad we're talking about creativity because in my latest book, the one subsequent to

00:59:21.480 Persidic Mind, uh, it's a book on happiness. Uh, when I, I argue that too, and I'm gonna, I'm gonna link

00:59:28.500 it to creativity in a second, but let me set it up. So I argue that two of the most fundamental

00:59:32.700 decisions that you could make that can either impart great happiness or great misery upon you

00:59:39.100 is choosing the right spouse and choosing the right job. And it's not difficult to understand why,

00:59:46.380 if I wake up in the morning and the person next to me is someone that I can't stand, I'm not off to a

00:59:50.720 good start. If I then go to a place away from my home and I can't stand what I'm doing, and then I come

00:59:56.060 back to the person that I can't stand, I'm, I'm not really doing too well. And if it's the opposite,

00:59:59.940 then things are good. Now I argue that, uh, one of the key metrics, when you are trying to look for

01:00:07.640 a job that gives you as much purpose and meaning as possible and happiness. So now I'm going to link

01:00:13.260 it to creativity. I argue that anything that by definition allows you to instantiate your creative

01:00:19.920 impulse is by definition going to lead to more purpose and meaning. Now that doesn't mean that we

01:00:25.900 don't need insurance adjusters and it doesn't mean that we don't need, uh, you know, bus drivers

01:00:30.500 and it's not a derogatory thing against it, but all other things equal. If I'm a chef or an architect

01:00:37.500 or an author or a standup comic, look, those are all very different things, but what they share in

01:00:42.220 common is that that person created something from nothing until I came along and created my standup

01:00:48.660 comedy routine that then made people laugh. That routine didn't exist. That plate didn't exist. That

01:00:55.800 bridge didn't exist. That book didn't exist. So do you, do you subscribe to the idea that I, I not only

01:01:02.680 do I subscribe, I feel like clapping, but I, I, I, I made damage to the microphone. Oh, that's great.

01:01:07.380 I want to burst into applause. Oh, that's wonderful. Okay. Well, so that's what I always tell people because I

01:01:13.140 receive countless messages from people, you know, asking me what's the secret to life. And, and I

01:01:19.940 say, well, you know, there are many, many elements, but just do something that instantiates your creativity

01:01:24.960 impulse. I mean, it's easier said than done, but that's the whole enchilada. Uh, I, I, um, you mentioned

01:01:32.240 bus drivers. I, I, I think that, um, that there's a really nice article. Um, uh, and I'll send you a link

01:01:41.200 if I can find it, uh, written on the internet by somebody who, um, uh, had been an art history

01:01:49.360 professor in Moscow. And then when it became possible for Jews to leave the country, he went

01:01:56.000 to Israel and in Israel, he couldn't get a job as an art history professor. So he got a job as a

01:02:01.820 street sweeper. And, and the article explains how he was happy as a street sweeper. And a few years

01:02:13.140 later, I, I, I wrote, I read an article about him saying that after that, he did get a job. His next job

01:02:20.820 was a attendant at a multi-story car park. And after that, he wrote a book with all this stuff. And, and now,

01:02:30.040 now he, he, he's an author. Oh, amazing. Uh, he, he, uh, it's really beautiful the way he, he linked

01:02:37.160 not only could he be happy as a street sweeper, but it, it was integrally linked to his previous

01:02:45.360 life as, as an art history professor. That's gorgeous. I'll try and I'll try and please do.

01:02:51.360 And then I'll share it on, on my social media. That's amazing. All right. Let's, we, we promised

01:02:55.580 the people that we're going to do at least a short, uh, foray into some of the stuff that keeps us

01:03:02.300 both up at night. I mean, frankly, you are one of the few, uh, academics that I know that, you know,

01:03:08.220 weighs in on some of these issues. I don't know why more people don't do them. They probably don't

01:03:12.080 have the courage, but what are your thoughts about what's going on with the orgiastic global Jew 1.00

01:03:18.380 hatred that we're seeing, by the way, for people who don't know you are Jewish, you were born in

01:03:23.080 Haifa. Um, anyways, take it away. Yeah. So, um, I have a, an idiosyncratic theory of what this is

01:03:31.680 all about. Uh, unfortunately it doesn't explain why. So I, I, I won't be, I won't be arguing with

01:03:38.400 you about whether it's genes or memes or creativity. Um, I, it's only a theory about what it's the,

01:03:45.720 it's the proximate part of, of understanding. You've already internalized the vernacular. I love

01:03:52.360 it. What a student. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's, it's a good distinction. Um, uh, but I think that

01:04:00.740 everybody has got a terrible misconception about what is happening. And, um, um, so let me quickly say

01:04:12.260 what I think, what I think is happening. I think that there is a, um, a moral perversion or a meme

01:04:24.760 of morality or something or other, which is really ancient. It's, it's, um, at least 2,400 years old,

01:04:33.400 but, um, quite likely much older than that. And it is, uh, and that has, has, um, persisted

01:04:44.960 in, in Western society and Middle Eastern society. And as soon as it touched Far Eastern society,

01:04:52.160 it took hold there as well. So it's, it's a bit like a meme though. I have reason to believe

01:04:57.700 that it's, it's not entirely explained that way, but, um, it is, it's a moral, uh, perversion.

01:05:09.320 It's a, it's a moral propensity and it consists of a compulsion to legitimize hurting Jews. 0.87

01:05:19.340 So it's not a compulsion to hurt Jews. It's not a compulsion to legitimize killing Jews. Uh, 0.98

01:05:25.440 you know, it's specifically that, and it does, it, it doesn't fluctuate. It, it, it may be been

01:05:34.400 gradually diminishing over the millennia, but what it gives rise to is occasional pogroms.

01:05:43.280 So occasionally, usually it doesn't do anything. It just, it just kind of poisons people's thinking.

01:05:51.580 It makes it more difficult to think about anything because rather, as I always say,

01:05:57.060 if you have a jigsaw puzzle and you nail down one of the pieces onto the table and insist that that,

01:06:02.680 that piece has got to be just there for a while, it may not affect your jigsaw puzzle. It depends

01:06:08.880 on luck. I mean, if you're unlucky, you, you just won't be able to make anything that makes sense out

01:06:15.180 of the picture. If you're lucky, you'll be able to make a lot of picture, but in any case,

01:06:22.220 the picture will be wrong, will be very, very wrong because you've nailed down that one piece

01:06:27.400 and that one piece can exist in, in people in various strengths. So, uh, for, for most people,

01:06:35.660 it's, it's, it's down below things like their love of their children or their, their willingness to,

01:06:42.720 willingness to stay alive or that kind of thing. For some people, it, it exceeds that. And a few times

01:06:50.420 in history, like in Nazi Germany or in, in, uh, Palestinian, um, culture, it becomes the dominant, uh, 0.88

01:07:00.500 thing so that everything else has to give way to it. It's like shingles it's in you and then it could

01:07:06.360 suddenly flare up. Yes. And if you're lucky, it doesn't, if you're lucky, you, you know, you die

01:07:12.240 before, before you get shingles and, and, uh, and in the, in the Jewish, uh, Passover thing, the Haggadah,

01:07:22.060 uh, which only dates from the middle ages. So, you know, they were already very, very familiar with

01:07:29.720 this happening. They, they say in, in every generation, they rise up and try to kill us.

01:07:35.860 And it's, uh, it's usually a little bit less than a generation. I mean, sorry,

01:07:40.940 takes a bit longer than a generation usually, but, uh, that that's been true. And, and the 0.71

01:07:46.920 one surprising thing is why are there any Jews left? If there's, if there are pogroms every generation 0.99

01:07:54.020 and everybody thinks that they are right, everything, everybody thinks that those are legitimate,

01:07:58.900 whether or not they're happening, how come there are any Jews? Because many 1.00

01:08:03.820 subcultures or whatever you call Jews, um, uh, religions, subcultures, uh, um, have been wiped 0.98

01:08:14.520 out. And, um, you know, the Khazars were wiped out. The Carthaginians were wiped out. Um, I would 1.00

01:08:22.960 guess most cultures have been wiped out. Um, yes. I mean, the fact that I can't think of any is

01:08:29.280 probably because they've been wiped out and they, they no longer participated in history,

01:08:33.140 but the Jews haven't. And despite, um, being, being, uh, called, um, very often, uh, they're still

01:08:42.760 going strong. Um, I, I, and winning all the Nobel prizes. Yes. Uh, and some people say that those

01:08:51.080 things are connected because, you know, the people who didn't escape well enough were, were culled,

01:08:55.920 but I don't think it's that. I don't think it's that. I think the, the, uh, well, I shouldn't say

01:09:01.360 what I don't think it is because I, I do not know what I do think it is, but it's not, it's not

01:09:06.440 Christianity because it, it happened well before Christianity. Christianity took it up as a way 0.89

01:09:12.220 of becoming popular. Uh, it's not scapegoating. It's not envy. You know, this, this pogrom thing 0.64

01:09:21.440 happened to Jews who were dirt poor. It happened to Jews who were rich. Uh, and it, it didn't, it, 0.93

01:09:28.560 it, it, people, people, um, didn't cite, well, sometimes they cited those as reasons. Sometimes

01:09:38.020 they cited opposite reasons at the same time, like the Jews are communists and Jews are capitalists,

01:09:43.700 you know, that, um, that's, that's quite common as well. Um, but the, the idea that it's legitimate

01:09:52.400 to hurt Jews for being Jews was stated explicitly at least as far back as St. Augustine. Right. He, 0.99

01:10:01.580 he, he, he actually, you know, that was his, and that was his, that was his humane theory. He was,

01:10:09.440 he was advising the rulers not to exterminate the Jews, but only to make them suffer.

01:10:17.080 How benevolent. Yeah. Well, it was comparatively benevolent, but more important, I think he

01:10:24.560 put his finger on, on the, what the impulse is. He just then rationalized it. And same thing with

01:10:32.700 Wagner. He also, uh, said in his, in his ridiculous, uh, diatribe against the Jews that we know that 0.96

01:10:42.020 it's, I forget what he, you know, we know that it's right to persecute them, but we don't know why 0.90

01:10:47.120 that that's, that's a remark, that's remarkably perceptive. Can I offer some possible explanations?

01:10:53.420 Yes. So, and the, they're, these are not, they don't fully cover all possible causes for Jew 0.98

01:11:01.880 hatred, but I think there are two mechanisms that could hopefully shed some light. So I don't think

01:11:07.820 it's hatred usually, but, but carry on. Right. So Amy Chua, who is a professor of law at Yale 0.96

01:11:14.140 university, uh, who is the mentor of JD Vance, the, the, the guy who's running with, uh, with Donald Trump.

01:11:21.400 Uh, she's, she's actually been on my show. She introduced the term, uh, which is, I think a

01:11:28.220 very powerful one, although the concept has existed for millennia, she calls it market dominant

01:11:34.260 minorities. So the Jews would be the epitome of that, but you could have the Chinese in Malaysia, 1.00

01:11:40.660 or you could have, uh, you know, I don't know, the Lebanese and Liberia, where it's a very,

01:11:45.060 very small group of people within a society that tend to be boxing well above their weight class

01:11:53.080 to speak colloquially. So notwithstanding the pogroms, as you said, uh, your point is well

01:11:58.440 taken where you could have dirt, poor, uh, non-influential Jews that we still hate and want 1.00

01:12:03.940 to exterminate. The general dynamic is you've got this people that definitely band around each other 0.97

01:12:11.560 that have a very strong sense of self that are in a larger sea of other people where there's a clear

01:12:19.060 delineation between blue team and red team. And yet those asshole minority seem to be the top 1.00

01:12:27.080 physicians and the top lawyers and the top movie producers and the top bankers and the top scientists 0.99

01:12:33.080 and on and on and on. So now let's, so put that aside for a second. Now I'm going to introduce

01:12:38.360 another concept from psychology, the self-serving bias. So the self-serving bias is where people

01:12:45.220 attribute successes internally and failures externally. Right? So I did really well on the

01:12:52.100 exam. Well, because I'm very smart. I did very poorly on the exam because professor Deutsch is a

01:12:58.560 Jewish asshole and he was so unfair on the exam. Right? And that's just a natural way by which people 1.00

01:13:04.900 navigate their lives because it's an ego protective mechanism. I did well because of me. I did poorly

01:13:11.040 because of outside. Well, now imagine if I can be given a carte blanche for all my failures and it's

01:13:19.640 called the Jew precisely because of the earlier dynamic I said. So if my wife cheats on me, well,

01:13:26.960 who put those lascivious thoughts in her head? It's the pornographers who are led by Jews. So it's not 1.00

01:13:34.380 my wife's fault that she cheated on me. It's because the Jews put that idea in her head. And of course, 1.00

01:13:40.980 growing up in the Middle East, I can assure you, David, and I grew up in progressive, modern, tolerant

01:13:46.240 Lebanon. It's everywhere. If it rains today, it's the Jew. If it didn't rain today, it's the Jew. So could 1.00

01:13:52.880 it be as simple as these two mechanisms? You take market dominant minorities, you bring in the self-serving

01:14:00.240 bias, and now you've got the perfect conditions to ensure that we always have a ready explanation

01:14:06.840 for why we failed. It's the Jew over there. 1.00

01:14:12.600 Yes. I mean, you don't need the beginning with the market dominant thing. The whole thing could work

01:14:18.580 just as well. Fair enough. A colleague of mine, Matthias Leonardis, proposed a similar theory

01:14:29.340 that you're trying to answer the question, why the Jews? Because the Jews are the traditional thing

01:14:42.000 to blame. And so he said, it's like gold. Why do people use gold as money? Well, it's because people 0.99

01:14:50.900 use gold as money. And it grew up sometime in prehistory, because yes, gold has some obvious properties

01:15:05.940 that make it suitable for being money. It's very dense. It can't be destroyed. But there are other

01:15:13.120 things. And some cultures have used silver, and some cultures have used large nuts, and so on. But gold is

01:15:22.500 amazingly prevalent in this role of being money, basically because it always has been.

01:15:29.740 It has some properties that might make it more suitable than many things. But the real reason

01:15:40.800 is because it's already used. So similarly, with Jews, if you want to have a universal explanation 0.93

01:15:50.860 for what ails you, then reaching for the Jews gives you a ready-made, I was going to say 1.00

01:16:01.380 infrastructure, but it's a framework of theories. Yes. Ready-made framework of theories, because

01:16:08.620 thousands of people have been there before you. Yeah. There are thousands of books about this.

01:16:14.480 And nowadays, for thousands of books about what the origin of it is, all of which I disagree. But

01:16:25.700 well done. I mean, you've come up with something very close to what I think is the best explanation

01:16:34.180 so far. Are we able, so having hopefully explained it, can we hope to have a vaccine against it, or

01:16:42.140 we just know that the virus exists, and we're eternally damned to suffer from it?

01:16:48.200 Well, of course, I think problems are soluble, and this is a problem. And I think there is an

01:16:55.440 explanation, and I think it can be combated. One thing to note is that as, what's his first name,

01:17:06.480 Nordau, the early Zionist, he gave a magnificent speech at the First Zionist Congress in 1897,

01:17:17.660 in which he explained why the emancipation of the Jews did not improve the status of Jews,

01:17:24.580 but rather worsened it. And he foretold that things are going to get worse, and that the worst place is

01:17:32.340 going to be Western Europe, because everyone else would be saying, no, you know, we've got the

01:17:36.100 Enlightenment, you know, and he was saying, no. Well, one of the things that causes flare-ups

01:17:44.040 of persecution caused by this pattern, I call it the pattern with a capital P, because I think that

01:17:52.080 anti-Semitism has got such misleading connotations. The flare-ups occur when it appears that society is

01:18:03.800 neglecting the legitimacy of hurting Jews. And so the Enlightenment was a red rag to the bull.

01:18:12.420 You immediately had entire movements, entire political movements, that were, I don't mean

01:18:22.540 Nazism, I mean, you know, 19th century things, whose main premise was that everything bad is 0.82

01:18:28.440 caused by the Jews. And, but, he said, not in England. Now, that...

01:18:39.960 Or is he wrong now?

01:18:42.480 I think he's still right, to this day. And he could have said, or America. I mean, I think in

01:18:52.740 1897, he wasn't really thinking of America as a thing. But, you know, I would say today,

01:18:58.060 the Anglosphere. When this thing comes up against the Anglosphere, it spreads just as well as with

01:19:06.120 anyone else. By the way, it spreads among Jews exactly as well as among anyone else. But, it doesn't 0.93

01:19:13.300 give rise to pogroms, or at least it hasn't until now, because the pogrom just conflicts with the

01:19:22.960 fundamental memes of the Anglosphere. You know, you'd have to say that it's okay to think in terms of

01:19:32.160 groups rather than individuals, and that it's okay to deprive people of rights, and it's okay to not

01:19:39.220 have freedom of speech, and so on. Which, all of those things could be easily accepted in Germany

01:19:48.280 or France, but ran up against a brick wall in England. So, in England, you had only genteel

01:19:56.140 anti-Semitism, but not persecution.

01:20:01.180 Right.

01:20:02.140 And another thing Nordau says, very perceptibly, is that England was the last place in Western Europe

01:20:09.620 where Jews got the vote, but only in England was it genuine.

01:20:18.880 It's an amazingly perceptive speech. And, by the way, I wanted to look up other things he'd written

01:20:26.960 and found that he was just a bitter old right-winger. He was just a pessimistic,

01:20:33.100 you know, nothing I've seen of his is very interesting, except that, which is brilliant.

01:20:37.180 Well, okay. So, let's end. Again, I could keep you here for another five hours, but I want to be

01:20:41.300 mindful of your time. But I'm so glad we actually ended up splitting it, because I think the internet

01:20:45.760 would have exploded if we put all that in one conversation. What is it? So, earlier, we were

01:20:51.200 talking about purpose and meaning. What is it? So, if somebody is now a young person is watching this

01:20:57.640 chat, you know, two guys who, you know, have had a, you know, a good career so far, hopefully many more

01:21:04.080 years ahead. What would be the set of prescriptions you'd offer some young person listening to this

01:21:13.160 conversation in terms of how to seek happiness or purpose or meaning?

01:21:19.400 As I always say to this question, I don't want to give advice, because whenever you give advice,

01:21:24.920 it'll be your fault when something bad happens. So, I'm not going to tell anyone what to do.

01:21:33.100 But I just want to point out what we spoke about before as well, and I think you agreed, that

01:21:39.780 if you adopt a criterion in life for what to do, what to engage with, and so on, which

01:21:50.820 does not have the property that, in your view, you're going to enjoy it, then that is extremely

01:21:58.760 dangerous, because when you don't enjoy it, you won't know that you made a mistake, because that's

01:22:06.540 what you expected. And if you make decisions on the basis that you expect to enjoy the thing,

01:22:14.040 whatever it is, a course, a job, then if you don't, if you do, it's fine, but it's always fine

01:22:24.240 if you do enjoy it. But if you don't, you will have learned something. You will have learned that

01:22:29.580 you were wrong in the way you judged this thing before. And you were right, the way you described 1.00

01:22:36.660 it about, you know, marrying the wrong person or going to the wrong job or whatever. If you're

01:22:43.040 kind of philosophically okay with the job being hateful to you, then it's dangerous, because

01:22:55.160 you're deprived of the most important thing that would lead you out of it. So, that's what I would

01:23:06.020 say. And if it's a young person doing university course, I would say, choose the options that you

01:23:12.080 think you will enjoy while doing them. Exactly. Never mind afterwards, while doing.

01:23:18.440 Wonderfully said. Go get this book, people. Get the fabric of reality. David, in Arabic, we say,

01:23:25.860 I often tell this to people, whenever you leave someone, and, you know, Arabic is a very flowery, 1.00

01:23:31.200 poetic language. When you leave someone, a beautiful way to leave them, as you say, I mean,

01:23:37.060 I'm translating in English, it is impossible to be satiated of you. Well, this holds true for you,

01:23:43.100 sir. What a pleasure it is to talk to you. It's my distinct honor and privilege to have had this

01:23:47.840 much time with you. Stay on the line so we could say goodbye offline and come back anytime.

01:23:52.320 Thank you, sir. Thank you so much. Cheers.

The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - November 11, 2024

Physicist Dr. David Deutsch Returns - Science, Mathematics & Jew-Hatred (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_749)

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