Physicist Dr. David Deutsch Returns - Science, Mathematics & Jew-Hatred (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_749)
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 23 minutes
Words per Minute
148.3893
Summary
In this episode of The Sad Truth, Gatsad talks with Professor David Deutsch, a pioneer of quantum computing and author of The Fabric of Reality. They discuss the similarities between the minds of Albert Einstein and Kurt Goodell, and how they were both prone to paranoia.
Transcript
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Hi everybody, this is Gatsad for The Sad Truth. It was only about two weeks ago that I had this
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unbelievable gentleman on the show, Professor David Deutsch, who is a pioneer of quantum computing and
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many other things and many other awards. I won't repeat them, but he was kind enough to send me this
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little beauty, which I haven't read yet, and his other book, The Fabric of Reality, you should also
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Oh, you know, I wish that millions of people would have watched our chat, although it is starting to
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grow in numbers. I did write on social media, and I wasn't trying to frivolously compliment you,
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but it was one of the most delightful conversations I had, if only because you allowed me to go back into
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my computer science and touring days and so on. So I thought we'd start off kind of wrapping up our
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technical conversation, and then we'd go into what we didn't get a chance to do last time,
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which is talk about some political issues, Jew hatred, and so on. As we start, the first thing
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I want to do is point to some people that we mentioned last time. Look at this beauty. Here's
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Kurt Goodell, Kurt Goodell, which we had mentioned linking him to Turing and how they approach roughly
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the same problem from different perspectives. I thought that was a brilliant insight on your part,
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so that there's that one. Stop me anytime you want to make comments about any of these guys.
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Maybe it's just me flexing my obsessive tsonduku, which is a Japanese term that means someone who is
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obsessively a book collector, which I definitely suffer from that psychiatric condition. This is an
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unbelievable book by Jim Holt discussing the walks that Goodell and Einstein would go on. If you have
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any stories to tell, interject, because I'm just going to go through these books and then we could
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start. Anything so far comes to mind? Well, Wheeler used to tell the story, and I'm sure this is
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well-known to everybody about Princeton. They all got increasingly worried about Goodell because he got
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increasingly kind of paranoid and crazy and so on. And that included Einstein getting worried. And so,
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they would go to his house and he started refusing food because he feared it might be poisoned and so on.
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And so, I mean, of course, I didn't know any of these people personally. It was before my time.
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So, I only know stories that people have told me.
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Right. Well, actually, I'm glad you mentioned the point about Goodell's paranoia, because I thought
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about doing an episode where I specifically talk about that within the same mind that can create
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the profundity that we talked about last time, Goodell's incompleteness theorem and so on,
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that same mind is able to completely misfire into thinking that, you know, now that my wife is dead,
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there is no food taster around and they're after me. And that juxtaposition of the most brilliant of
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mind and the most paranoid of mind residing in the same cranium is a truly incredible thing.
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And even more so, because to do the work that he did on logic, he needed to have a much firmer grip
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on the notion of truth than most people do, because he had to realize that things can be true,
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but not provable. Things can be true, but not knowable. And all that had to be clear in his mind,
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otherwise his work wouldn't have made sense. So has any, I mean, I'm sure that someone has,
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but has anybody precisely did the analysis on exactly what you just said? You know,
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in a psychiatric perspective or psychoanalytic perspective, do you know?
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I wouldn't know. I mean, I'm not, I'm not a historian. So you'd think somebody should have,
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right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And therefore you probably also think they probably haven't.
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Fair enough. Now this other gentleman, we also talked about one of my other heroes,
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because he is the ultimate polymath. This guy, this gorgeous guy, John von Neumann obtained his PhD
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at 23. So for you guys who are lagging, get off, get off your couch, 23 years old. Now I'm going to,
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I'm going to do four guys that are specifically physicists. We're going to start with the granddaddy
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of them all. I'm very proud of this book, 1968. Oh boy, look at this. Now let's start with Isaac
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Newton. I just saw a little clip by Brian Green, you know, the, the string theory guy where he was
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doing a comparison between Einstein and Newton, as you might typically expect. And he was actually
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arguing that in a sense, notwithstanding that Einstein is no dummy, that it, Newton was more
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impressive because he, while he said, you know, he's standing on, on the, on the shoulders of giants,
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he really was much earlier where there wasn't as much stuff. I mean, he's coming up with the stuff
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to solve the problems. So what's your view as a professional physicist? If you had to, I know maybe
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you don't like to play those games, but if you had to compare those two guys, do you put one as
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a bit ahead of the other or, or you can't? I think it's, I think it would be generally conceded
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that Newton had the sort of, what would you call it, the more powerful mind of the two. In fact,
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I don't know that one should describe Einstein as having a powerful mind. I mean, he, he, he was
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bold and able to challenge, I think he was able to challenge much more in the pre-existing theory that
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existed before him than Newton was. Newton was in a way, he really was building on Galileo and, and,
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um, and he was saying, yes, Descartes is wrong. Uh, but the kind of explanation that he gave
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for physics was the same kind as, as Descartes. He was just saying Descartes is wrong. It's not
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vortices, it's forces, you know, whereas, whereas, uh, Einstein, uh, and, and Newton of course was,
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was also a significant figure in the history of mathematics. He was an amazing mathematician. Well,
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um, Einstein was not an amazing mathematician. He, he, uh, had to ask the advice of mathematicians,
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um, to formulate, to, to formulate his theory properly. Um, uh, so I think they were different. I,
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I think, um, um, I would say Einstein was the greatest physicist of all time. Newton may well
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have been the greatest, um, what would you call it? Uh, thinker or, or at least, uh, STEM thinker.
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STEM thinker, yeah, before that acronym existed. All right. Fair enough. Uh, let's move on. Now,
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these, these are not, well, I guess maybe not quite at the same level. I just recently got this
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one. What do we, Oh, I don't know if you can read it. Edward Teller, I think a Nobel prize winner.
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Now, would he forgive my ignorance? Would he have been someone that you could have met or this was
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I did meet him once, uh, at a conference, but not enough to have a conversation. He, he would, uh,
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I was at a conference where, uh, um, I was speaking and, uh, Wheeler was there. Wheeler had organized it.
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Teller was there and was sitting at the back, booming out criticisms.
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Yeah. And, uh, I think I met him to the extent of shaking hands, but no more than that.
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Well, it's interesting that you say, uh, uh, you know, about the guy sitting in the back, uh, you know,
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levying all sorts of criticism because this guy, although it wasn't in this book, we did mention
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him briefly last time. And you said that you met him, Richard Feynman tells a story and not in this
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book, this is a biography, but in his, surely you must be joking. Mr. Feynman. He tells a story where
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he went, he was, you know, uh, a doctoral student, I think, was it at, was he at Princeton or yes?
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Yeah. I think so. Uh, and so he's, he's giving the departmental talk, which, you know, I certainly
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had to do when I, before I go out onto the academic market, which is a very sort of ominous thing.
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Cause all, all of the big brains are there to tear you to pieces. Now, in his case, all the people
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who are there in the audience happen to be some of the biggest physicists of the 20th century.
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And so as he's presenting his stuff, there were some guys that were very much a lot, uh, teller
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that you were saying, just kind of hammering him and so on. And this gentleman from, you know,
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the back row or something turns out to be Einstein says something to the effect of, don't you think
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we owe the young man the courtesy to allow him to, you know, finish his thoughts. And then we could
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start asking him. And then apparently after that, not a single peep out of anyone. So you don't have
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to shout loudly for people to respect you. Had you heard that story? No, no. It's a, yes.
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Sounds good. Those, those sociology of science stories. I mean, we're a storytelling animal.
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So hearing those stories is, is, is really a, an orgasm to the ear. And I guess the last
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guy I'm going to bring up, and then one other quick book, uh, Heisenberg, how do we, what
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do we, what do we feel about him? Oh, well, so he's a very controversial figure, both in physics
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and, uh, outside physics. So, uh, now I could tell a story about Wheeler and him, but I'm afraid
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I have forgotten the punchline of the story. All I remember is that after the war, Heisenberg
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was kind of shunned by the other physicists who, who had either, were either Western or had
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fled to the West. Um, and, um, Wheeler and his wife were once at a conference in, I forget
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where, Copenhagen, something. Uh, and, um, they went into a cafe and there was Heisenberg.
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And, um, so the question was, should we go and sit with him, you know, cause they knew
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him very well and, and, uh, fellow physicist and, uh, and so on or not. And I don't know
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Oh, come on. All right. I'll have to track it down to see if I could find it and I'll,
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maybe I'll post it in the description last book. And then we, we get onto other things
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that this one is not exactly in your area, but, uh, Fermat's last theorem. Now the reason
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I just got this book, by the way, uh, so I haven't read it yet. I have a personal story
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linking, uh, to, to the solving of Fermat's last theorem. So when I was an undergraduate, uh,
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student in mathematics, you know, obviously all the students are, you know, pretty brainy,
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but even within that ecosystem, there's always someone, you know, that becomes sort of legendary
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that's above everybody else. And this, uh, gentleman, I don't think he'd mind if I mentioned
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his name because it's a compliment. His name is, uh, Henri Darmont, D-A-R-M-O-N, who's now
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a, a, a full professor at McGill university where, where I had studied. Actually, I had his father
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as my professor when I was doing an MBA at McGill. Uh, anyways, uh, when he, when Henri Darmont
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finished his PhD and I think was doing a postdoc, maybe at either Harvard or Princeton, Andrew Wiles,
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who ended up solving Fermat's last theorem had, uh, sent out the proof to some people to go through it.
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And as the story goes, as I heard, Henri Darmont was one of those young postdocs who had actually,
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you know, his eyes had gone over the proof before others had. So that's my claim to fame in terms of
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being linked to Fermat's last theorem. The other thing I was going to say about it, and then I'll
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cede the floor to you. What amazes me about Fermat's last theorem is that I could literally explain
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the structure of the problem to my now 12 year old son and the difference between simply being able
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to pose the problem and then solving the problem is arguably the biggest distance possible, right?
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Because there are a lot of problems in math that might be very difficult to solve, but the lay person
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can't understand even what the problem is here. You've got the extreme. It's very easy to state
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if almost impossible to solve. Any other similar problems that you think fit that model?
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Well, in mathematics, uh, there are plenty like the, the four color problem, for instance.
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That's true. That's true. Um, the, uh, in physics, um, it's kind of, uh, it's more the other way
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around that there are problems that are very easy to state like is space finite or infinite, right?
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And it sounds as though, you know, it should be straightforward to either work that out or
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look through a telescope or, or whatever, but it's not, it's the, the more you look at
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it, the more complicated it gets. And physicists have kept changing their minds on this, on this
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issue, uh, you know, uh, on a timescale of a couple of decades. So that's why I always, um,
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I'm, I'm always reluctant to give an opinion on things like, is it really true that knowledge
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can continue forever, literally into infinity? And I, I try to explain that, that, um, it's not
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really a meaningful question because it depends on which cosmological model you believe or you,
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you favor, I shouldn't say believe, um, uh, and, and cosmological models are being overturned on a
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timescale of, you know, less than a generation. Right. So, uh, uh, one would look very silly
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pontificating on the basis of the current theory. Right. So, uh, that, that's, I, I think it's,
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that that's, that's different from mathematics. Um, for a start when, when in mathematics, when
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something is proved, um, there's after a while, I mean, even Andrew Wiles, his proof was, was
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first criticized and then he had to fix the mistakes. Uh, uh, but you know, after a while,
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after, after the consensus has settled down, um, the mathematical, uh, proofs are very rarely,
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um, overturned. What often happens though, is that they become uninteresting. So, you know,
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people, people, uh, realize that there are wider ways of looking at these mathematical objects and,
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and, um, you know, there's, there's a Pythagoras's theorem and, uh, there's better versions of
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Pythagoras's theorem and, and, and so on. But what's interesting, I mean, you said that sometimes
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we solve something and then it becomes uninteresting. And there's a similar point to be
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made as relating specifically to Fermat. When people ask me, well, you know, should we judge
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the value of research by its, uh, applicability potential? And then I usually bring up the example
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of many of Fermat's, uh, solutions, uh, sat for hundreds of years collecting dust until you then
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had cryptography where suddenly you have an application to these otherwise completely esoteric
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problems that nobody cared about for hundreds of years. So what are your thoughts on that? Do you
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think, are you a, an epistemological purist in the sense of there is knowledge to be discovered.
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All I care about is discovering it. I leave it for someone else to care about how I apply it.
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Or are you of the slightly less purist version? No, no, there's, there needs to be applications to
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what I'm thinking about. I think there's a danger to, uh, researching into something that one isn't
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interested in. So this question of, of, um, of, is this a fundamental importance or will it be of
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fundamental importance? 200 years hence or forever or whatever? Those are dangerous questions.
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Uh, because if the answer is different from whatever you're burning to know, whatever you're
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burning to find out, then, um, well, that's obviously, uh, a dangerous way to live one's life
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because, uh, even if you're right, you will have sacrificed your life and not find out
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until after you're dead, uh, that you were right. Well, what amazes me about your point about
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sacrificing one's life is that, you know, Andrew Wiles took a problem that he knew for hundreds of
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years, the top minds had failed at it and had really the, the chutzpah, right. To say, well,
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you know what? I'm going to take a really huge gamble here. I'm going to go up into the attic where my
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wife is going to feed me the food underneath the crack of the door. And I think that I'm probably
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not going to solve it, but I'm going to gamble. I mean, that seems like an extra, I mean, it's either,
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uh, delusional or a supreme sense of confidence that I'm going to succeed where everybody else
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had failed. Do you have a sense of which one it was? I think, um, I don't know. I haven't read
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about his, his, uh, his life in that way. But I think that, um, uh, solving a problem
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is not, how can I put this? It's not the reason for working on it. That is, if one works on a problem
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with great joy and discovery, because it, you know, if one works on a problem for a long time,
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even if, even if one never solves it, one, one realizes approaches that looked right and one
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then understands why they were wrong. And, uh, and Popper says, you know, the, the, the, um,
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I can never, I can never say this in the, in the, um, beautiful way that he said it, but something
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like, uh, that, um, philosophy consists of finding a problem, um, falling in love with it, living with it
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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
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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.
00:29:50.800
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.
00:30:58.940
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,
00:32:13.240
Well, I was going to say one more example of a, of a physicist gone, you're too British
00:32:19.780
and polite to say it, but I'll say it for you. That's gone completely insane and wacko.
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
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
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
00:33:26.400
different temperaments. If, if you upset me by attacking and raping the truth, I'm not going
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?
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,
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
00:45:51.140
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
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
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
00:50:13.100
organogenesis. Therefore, she evolves a multitude of mechanisms that serve as insurance policies
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
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
00:50:45.980
pregnancy sickness you experience, the more likely you are to have a successful trajectory for your
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
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
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
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.
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,
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
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.
01:05:19.340
So it's not a compulsion to hurt Jews. It's not a compulsion to legitimize killing Jews. Uh,
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,
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
01:07:46.920
one surprising thing is why are there any Jews left? If there's, if there are pogroms every generation
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
01:08:03.820
subcultures or whatever you call Jews, um, uh, religions, subcultures, uh, um, have been wiped
01:08:14.520
out. And, um, you know, the Khazars were wiped out. The Carthaginians were wiped out. Um, I would
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
01:09:12.220
of becoming popular. Uh, it's not scapegoating. It's not envy. You know, this, this pogrom thing
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,
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,
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
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
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
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
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,
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
01:12:03.940
to exterminate. The general dynamic is you've got this people that definitely band around each other
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
01:12:27.080
physicians and the top lawyers and the top movie producers and the top bankers and the top scientists
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
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
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,
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
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
01:14:12.600
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
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
01:15:50.860
for what ails you, then reaching for the Jews gives you a ready-made, I was going to say
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
01:18:28.440
caused by the Jews. And, but, he said, not in England. Now, that...
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
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
01:20:02.140
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
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,
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.