The Joe Rogan Experience - #1022 - Eric Weinstein

Episode Date: October 10, 2017

Eric Weinstein is a mathematician and economist, and he is also the managing director at Thiel Capital.

do do do do do do do boom yes we're live hello Eric hello Joe thanks for doing this man Jamie had a question you're you're not related to that other fellow the other Weinstein fellow that's in trouble right now Brett Weinstein no that's your brother the other guy Oh Weinstein fellow that's in trouble right now? Brett Weinstein? No, that's your brother. The other guy. Oh, Weinstein? The other guy, yeah. Yeah, I don't know him. Okay. That other guy's in trouble. Like two more women,

Angelina Jolie and they both came out today. Yeah, I don't think it's going to stop there. Seems like you might have had a little bit of an issue. Isn't it amazing that someone can get away with something like that for so long, and then one or two people come clean and the walls come down? The oppressive fist of just his fucking tyranny, whatever that guy did.

Yeah, I mean, I think it does speak to the idea that power really exists in an industry in a town like this. Well, it's always been the, that's been the cliche, right? The casting couch, right? Yes, but I didn't know in the modern era how much power anyone still had. Yeah, I wonder, you know? It's just, and it's also like super left wing guy, you know, like really politically connected to social justice ideologies, fighting gun control. I mean, you know, promoting gun control and stumping for Hillary and all this.

Yeah. It seems like overcompensation. I didn't want to bring this up right up front. We were going to talk about cuttlefish. Overcompensation. I didn't want to bring this up right off the bat. We were going to talk about cuttlefish. I asked you to save the cuttlefish.

Ah, the cuttlefish. This conversation about a giant cuttlefish. Well, we were talking about, I mean, all of these are just like incredible hot button topics. But we were talking before about your conversation on male and female programming in the mind on male and female biological frames. And what I was going to talk about there was that you can actually have in other species, which aren't nearly as controversial as humans, a rational basis for something like transphobia in an evolutionary context. So the giant cuttlefish, which I think is called Sepia palma, I'm not a biologist, the males are incredibly large. They're very sexually dimorphic.

And you've got these tiny or smaller males who don't have a good strategy for keeping a lot of females underneath them. So the males are incredibly large or the females? The males are incredibly large. The females tend to be much smaller. Okay. And when the females are impressed, they accept shelter underneath one of these giant males. Huh. But then you have these other males who aren't nearly as big,

which might be called sneaker males. And the sneaker males start retracting the tentacles that identify them as male and changing through their chromatophores, their sort of their presentation, to look female. And then the giant males invite these males disguised as females through behavioral change underneath.

And we've now proven, I believe, that these sneaker males inseminate the females while the larger males are getting duped. Now, are the larger males larger because they just have better genetics or are they larger because they're older? Well, you know, the question about better genetics, key question is who leaves the lineages that matter over time. So if you're wasting all of your energy on a strategy and in fact what you're doing is you're providing protection for sneaker males to get busy with the females who seem to be equally happy to reward a devious male as a strong one. You know, I'm put in mind of the old Willie Dixon blues song. I'm a backdoor man. The men don't know, but the little girls understand. but the little girls understand.

You know, definitely females favor a variety of strategies, whether communicating strength and dominance, cleverness, or anything that females are likely to decide will benefit their offspring. Yeah, that's a great name for them, too. Sneaker males? Is that like the technical male? The technical term for those small males? I've seen it in lizards and I don't know the Sepia palma giant cuttlefish system, but I'm obsessed with cephalopods. So I should probably go back and do some homework on them.

I didn't know we would be starting out with Harvey Weinstein and giant cuttlefish. Weinstein versus Weinstein. That's the difference. I'm definitely keeping that distinction. Yeah. It's a good distinction now. Right now. Yeah. It's good to make a separation.

So cephalopods, including cuttlefish, octopods, squids. Nautilus. And then they all sort of came from mollusks, right? This is the craziest thing in the world, right? I mean, we're not guaranteed to meet an alien intelligence during our lifetimes, but the idea that such genius exists in mollusks where you least expect it, um, is probably the closest we're ever going to get to aliens. So, I mean, I think that, uh, it's sort of, there's a secret international conspiracy. People who have realized this and, you know, just freak out on cephalopods.

And they know every crazy thing that cephalopods have been proven to understand. And, you know, where their cognitive capabilities just sort of wow us yeah the cognitive capabilities their camouflage capabilities the strategies that they use for attacking bait fish and there's a video that i put up on my twitter really recently of a cuttlefish that opens up like a flower and shoots its tongue out and gets this fish and then just sucks it into its body and it's like you're looking at some kind of an alien it's totally and i I mean, I forget, is it like sevenfold symmetry? It's really on a different branch of the phylogenetic tree. And I think that the dazzle patterns, where you just start seeing these neon signs

that are effectively made out of the chromatophores. And if you've seen the videos where people put them on against really artificial patterns, like chess boards or chintz or things, and the cuttlefish has to figure out, okay, how do I blend in with that? Yeah. Yeah. And they do their best to mock it, but the natural world, they mimic perfectly.

Well, not really. I think. Was it octopus can do it? Some octopus can do it. I think what, what happens is that pie yeah that's i don't know that one um i guess it's octopi yeah i think what they do is they actually sort of do much less than we are imagining and they use the fact that we our brains are interpolating so they're in part not matching the background as well as we think but they're doing it well enough that our brains sort of make up the difference.

Huh. That's weird. I mean, but what would be the difference between the way we interpret their visual, whatever camouflage they're giving off? Because it's a visual camouflage right yeah, if you look at some of the Some of the camouflage videos like the first seven times you see it you can't imagine yeah but then after after a while you say oh wow there really is a difference and somehow I Just I did the interpolation To help out that which is trying to escape my detection.

Well, I mean, there's definitely a distinction. You can kind of tell once you look at it, but it's so insanely impressive in comparison to pretty much almost every other life form. You know, what they can do in terms of like they could change their texture. That's one of the like when they when they sit on a coral reef and they start looking like a coral reef, like, whoa. Have you have you checked out the mimic octopus yes right so like that one five or six different disguises yeah i i can't even imagine that usually when you have mimicry it's dedicated or obligate like a you know a stick bug or a leaf insect it's only going to do that one trick you know what's interesting too is like i've heard a real legitimate argument

for people that are opposed to eating animal protein that mollusks, especially like clams and mussels and things along those lines, are more primitive in terms of their ability to recognize or have any sense of what pain is, any sort of communication, any sort of interpretation of danger, that all they do is just close, right? And that in closing, we've interpreted that to mean it's an animal, and that this animal life form is like eating a living thing versus eating plants.

But I've heard it argued, and actually Sam Harris is the first one to bring it up, this is actually a moral argument that they sense less than plants do. And that they are more primitive than plants are. But yet, from the mollusk family, you have octopus. And there's a good argument that you probably shouldn't be eating octopus like you shouldn't be eating monkeys. You know? Like, an octopus is fucking smart. Like, crazy sneaky smart. It's them or us, us joe oh that's a good way i mean in that case they are delicious yeah i

think if you ever look at humboldt squid um you know schooling and descending as one of the great nightmares of all time i don't think i've seen a humboldt squid what's a humboldt squid sometimes they forget they call them red devils or off like the coast of baja california and they're just social and they're terrifying because they attack in groups so they plan it or they coordinate in some way in some way i mean obviously the chromatophores must have some ability to do signaling and i I think that, you know, with respect to, we have to figure out whether it's really intelligence that causes us to become empathic. Because, you know, obviously, if you're at war, and you think highly of your enemy, you have to guard against your own empathy so that you can be an effective warrior. You have to ask the question, you know, if monkeys and apes are among the most intelligent beings, do I actually feel some revulsion for just

how savage chimpanzees are as compared to, say, bonobos or gibbons? Yeah, isn't that the real argument or the real fascinating conversation is what happened in the evolutionary chain. Like, why did bonobos become these peaceful, sexual creatures and chimps become these warring, savage psychos? Like, what? They look so similar. Like, what happened? Well, that one I don't know.

But there's an interesting system in dung beetles where if you look at the armaments that they have on their head for warring between males, there's a conserved quantity between the length of the copulatory apparatus and the size of the weaponry. So the more weapons, the smaller the penis is. And so, you know, there are all these crazy trade-offs in apes between relative testicular size and penile size. For gorillas, right? For gorillas have tiny little penises,

but enormous bodies and giant fangs and little tiny one-inch penis. Yeah, I guess. But chimpanzees have big penises and big testicles. Both? Yeah. They say But chimpanzees have big penises and big testicles. Both? Yeah. They say that chimpanzees, there's a direct correlation between promiscuous females and the size of their testicles. Hmm. I don't remember that one.

But the question about, I also worry that we've idealized the bonobos too much. we've idealized the Bonobos too much. And, you know, we were sort of, it's very hard to be sympathetic with the chimps after Jane Goodall showed us what they're capable of. But in part, you know, the cold logic of the natural world in general, you know, it's usually some reason that, uh, makes complete sense. It's, it can't be sentimental.

Anytime you bring sentimentality, uh, and you usually screw up a good theory. Um, and so, you know, I, I, I worry that our comparisons are driven by our needs to locate ourselves farther away from chimpanzees and closer to something that we feel comfortable. So are idealizing the bonobos is not necessarily based on what they actually are, but based on like our little sort of hippie version of life, like, look, we could be like the bonobos, loving and sexual and affectionate, or we can be like the warring, horrible, horrible chimpanzees. Well, you know, it's also the case that how great does it feel to be sexual if you're being sexually out-competed by others?

It's always unfun to be, you know, low status. And nature has different ways of punishing and rewarding status and achievement in various different species. So my guess is that there is a kind of conserved unpleasantness in losing each particular game and a pleasure in winning each particular game. Right, and that's essentially how nature keeps moving forward, right? Right. And that's that's essentially how nature keeps moving forward, right? Yeah. You know, to the extent that you're wasting energy warring when you could be being constructive or being more strategic, you're going to get out competed by whichever members of your species, you know, figure out the puzzle first. And so I think that, you know, there's this concept of the naturalistic fallacy of viewing that which,

you know, if you assume that we carry some sort of Judeo-Christian baggage, and all of this was thought to come from a creator who was thought to have positive characteristics, then, well, obviously the natural world is God's work. But, I mean, if you actually look at the systems that fascinate me, the creator would have to be about the most twisted consciousness you could possibly imagine. Well, it seems like it's the long game the creator's playing. The creator's not playing the game that favors the the health and the welfare of the individual in the current day it's the matter of like figuring out how to get

through this brutal game and advancing and evolving along the way to the point where someday in the future you find a more complex and evolved system but you know this is the most complex and evolved system. But, you know, this is the most complex and evolved, this us, you and me, humans, most complex and evolved system in terms of its ability to change its environment that we've ever come across. And we're not too happy with ourselves. Yeah, although, I mean,

I do think that despite our barbarism, we are that which can contemplate the game. And, you know, at some point, you've obviously had my brother on the show. I asked him as an evolutionary theorist, Brett, what are you doing? You're married to one woman and you've had two kids. As an evolutionary theorist, don't you think you're throwing the game?

And his response was, I think, brilliant. It was, and tell me, Eric, if you understood the game, why would you want to continue to play it? Hmm. Right. So for him, it was almost like a sort of a proof that if you really get, you know, another one of his good quotes is that life when properly understood is a spelling bee that ends in genocide, that we're also focused on our nucleotide sequences. Do you really care about the particular way in which you digest lactose? Different from how I do it, that you want to go to war with me so that we can spell the future using your version rather than mine. Like maybe you'd feel this way about your ideas, about, you know, your songs, your stories.

But really, you really want to fight over like things that neither of us care about. I don't follow. Like what are you saying? Well, if you're trying to think about like I want to leave seven children. Right. Okay. Why do you want to do that? Well, because I want to see more copies of myself. Okay, why do you want to do that?

Well, because I want to see more copies of myself. Well, you will see a certain number of copies of yourself, but that's going to get diluted very quickly. By the time we get to your great-great-grandchildren, it's going to be hard to see yourself in your offspring. So that's sort of an illusion of one generation, two generations. Most of the things that are going to determine your genes propagating have to do with the fact that you're on a team. There are a bunch of people who digest milk the way you do. And so the key question is, you know, team Rogan on the milk digestion is some huge

number of people you've never met. That's what I understand. Like why? I don't understand the connection to milk digestion. Well, it's just one thing that your body is doing in a particular way. Uh huh. So, you know, do you like, let's take eye color. Maybe that's more familiar.

So, you know, I know that I have a blue allele that is being, um, suppressed in terms of its expression. Do I really care that, um, you know,

if my wife has two Brown alleles, um, does it matter to me that my blue somehow survives right do i care that i want it to survive enough against some brown-eyed person it would be interesting if you had a checklist of like what things that you would agree upon like you and the wife get together and say okay so uh athletic ability what do you think you know who's whose side are we going with? Intelligence? You're a little smarter than me.

I'm going to give it to you. Let's go with your brains. Okay, I'm better at smelling things. You're like, how do you, you know? I'm just thankful. I'm not allergic to cats. Let's not have the kids fucking sneeze every time they go near a litter box. Well, this is the great thing.

Let's just flip a coin. Yeah. Let's do it a couple of times and whatever we get, we get. I worry about, you know, CRISPR, Cas9, people are going to be having these, like, I'll trade you this for that. We're going to have crazy. Yeah. I'm fascinated by CRISPR. I mean, I think most people aren't even aware of it.

People like you, of course, are. People who are paying attention are. But I think to the general public has no idea that CRISPR even exists. And it's potentially world changing. I mean, you are literally looking at the tools that will eventually lead much like, you know, Alexander Graham Bell's invention led to you having the internet in your pocket, right? Slowly but surely. I mean, you're looking at the tools that will one day lead to us engineering some completely

new organism that you're gonna call human beings yeah I think that's gonna be a long time off but Alexander Graham Bell was a long time off nothing I think well I bet it's less time than that okay when was that was that 1800 yeah think of that what are the odds 2017 to the late 1800s you don't think 2117 we're going to have fucking Incredible Hulks and Thors and women look like Wonder Woman? There's not going to be a single troll-like looking person left when the technology trickles down? Yeah, I think we're going to be able to do a lot more combinatorics of swapping something in that's known to work and swapping something out. But when we actually get to authorship, where we're like okay I got this great idea

for a human being right I'm gonna start from scratch there's there's a lot of optimism that for which I am the pessimist you know uploading the mind to a computer yeah you pass a lot of curse? Yeah, well, not in the sense that we're never going to get anywhere close, but just there's this sort of... You don't think it's 2045? That's what they're aiming for? I'm optimistic about certain things that turned out to be a lot easier than we expected.

I think that a lot of things that we thought were going to require artificial general intelligence are going to succumb to much simpler systems. And so, you know, you might have thought that, for example, if you played through the great chess games of, you know, the 1800s, like Morphy and Anderson and things, you might say, well, that's just a uniquely human activity. And then you find out, no, no, computers can trounce humans at chess because it's not it it wasn't what you thought it was maybe music will be the next thing to succumb because that's really highly regular right well

music is also intensely creative and emotive right it it it sparks feeling in humans and i don't think you could really i don't know i mean maybe you could but i don't think you could really, I don't know. I mean, maybe you could, but I don't think you really could figure out a way to engineer or have a computer engineer something that makes you feel like Led Zeppelin, the immigrant song, you know, there's just like a bizarre feeling to someone's art that comes through when you listen to it and you're like, Oh, this is fucking great. You know, like where I don't, I don't necessarily know you could do that with something that doesn't understand emotions or is using a replica of emotions. Whereas chess, you know, you know, a rook move this way. A pawn can move that way.

Here's the rules. This is how it starts. This is what, once you get here, you're in check. Like those things seem pretty straightforward. You're dealing with squares. It's very mathematic. You know, one person moves and another one moves. Whereas like there's like this fluid nature to art, literature and music and comedy.

I'll take the other half of that. I think I disagree. Really? Yeah. I mean, so I don't know why you chose the immigrant. That's like. I love that song. You know why?

Because I'm going to go to cryotherapy after this. That's the song that I listen to yeah come from the land the ice and snow hammer of the gods it's just a good song so if we if you'd taken if you'd if you'd taken roy orbison's pretty woman okay right so do you have the main riff from that song in your head? Yeah. Pretty woman walking down the street. Pretty woman, the kind I'd like to meet. Or now I'm going to have to. Right. The riff is like do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do.

Right. So if you take a guitar string and you split it into four equal parts, you put your finger over one quarter of the string. And then you start just plucking the string and hovering above the string so you don't actually push it to the fretboard. Those notes occur naturally as the harmonics in the expansion of the vibrating string. So those notes were not really chosen by Roy Orbison or whoever wrote the song they were really chosen by like a Fourier series and it feels like it's a riff but I discovered this when I was in Indonesia as I would start playing that and people would react and I thought like why that

song what about more complex creative and sort of improvisational song like Voodoo Child from Hendrix. So I don't know about Voodoo Child from Hendrix. You know that... You know what I mean? I mean... And it changes up. So if you look at the first couple of chords of Red House, there's like some seventh or diminished chord. Like he's arpeggiating and then he moves

it down a half step which has to do with this tritone substitution and the symmetry inside of the seventh chord so if I recall correctly you have a chord like C E G B flat would be a C7 chord. And the E and the B flat would form this thing called a tritone. And now if you went in the blues, there are three elements of the chord progression, the dominant, subdominant, and the tonic. If you go down a half step, you effectively invert the third and the flat seventh. So if you go one half step below that, it's the flat seventh and the third and the flat seventh so if you go one half step below that it's the flat seventh and the third i think of the subdominant chord so hendrix is actually playing with math in something as basic as do you think he's aware of it or do you think he's doing it

sort of just instinctual well first of all when you're visited by an alien intelligence we went through cuttlefish and now we've got the jimmy hendrix so you know that's like these are the these are the best alien sightings we have right it's very hard to speculate but i i i just look at everything i've been able to understand about what he did and you know you're dealing with a super mind as well as an intuitive right mastery mastery of the instrument complete understanding of the chords and you know, you're dealing with a super mind as well as an intuitive. Right. Mastery, mastery of the instrument, complete understanding of the chords and progressions and just the ability to improvise and to make it sound different. Adding the wah-wah pedal and all that distortion and all the shit that he used to do.

And the fact that he imparts more into one note. Like I wouldn't even know how to notate. I mean, what is even the instrument? He didn't play the guitar. One note. Like I wouldn't even know how to notate. I mean, what is even the instrument? He didn't play the guitar. He played the guitar amplification, you know, signal processing system as a whole. Yeah. a guy named Roy Buchanan, who somehow these guys who understand harmonics gravitate to telecasters and, you know, pull a song called Roy's Blues and watch him just go into the multiverse and start playing with things that you can't even imagine are possible. So I do think that there's a very close relationship between algorithms and emotion.

And I just did this one for an old tweet of mine where I wrote a Python program that actually runs from the tweet. So the entire program is in the tweet. And its purpose is to generate the chord progression for Pachelbel's Canon, which is if you want people to cry at a wedding, that's the chord progression to play. And so the idea that it's actually an algorithm that breaks your heart is very frightening. We're dealing with some insane noise in the background here, folks. They're doing some shit to our roof. These are the last days that we're in the studio, by the way, which is hilarious, that it's sort of highlighting why we need to get the fuck out of here. But I don't know what they're doing to the studio. I mean, does it even rain anymore? What are

they doing? Fixing the roof? Put a fucking tarp up there, assholes. The guy even asked me right before the show, he's like, what time do you tape? I told him. He's like, oh, well, that's right about the time we're lighting explosions right above your head sorry for people listening to this like what the fuck is that noise that's the noises they're banging around the roof pinned down by enemy fire yeah well i mean i think it's also me as a as a human i probably have uh some bias some stupid idea that creativity is impossible to recreate. You know, that whatever leads to a person being able to make some beautiful song or create some amazing book is impossible for some sort of a computer

to figure that out on its own. Well, I would go out and hang out in a modern recording studio and watch them move the beat around and mutate it and change it. Or if you think about that moment where Cher said, hey, I don't think auto-tune should be used to correct my voice in a sly way. I'm going to use this as the instrument itself. Right. And suddenly this metallic voice actually becomes an anthem. And you start, you know, RoboShare is incredibly inspiring.

Do you remember Peter Frampton? He was like one of the first guys to use it in a song. Do you feel like I do? Well, so he used that thing with his mouth. Yeah. He had a tube in his mouth. So he's really actually using his body to shape. so he's really actually using his body to shape he's using the there's like this five-dimensional lattice in your in your mouth to produce the international phonemic alphabet so your your

nose could be on or off that's one degree of freedom you can have vocalization on or off vocalization meaning you can have your like f F as in Frank versus V as in victory. F, V. They're the same mouth. Right. But, right, so you're just vibrating your throat. So you can have nasalization on, off, vocalization. So V is in the throat somewhere?

V. Frank, you fucking voomer. Like S versus Z would be another pair. Ah, okay. So the sound that you're making with your throat. Right. And you have like your lips in one of three positions. So that's a third degree of freedom.

Then your tongue can be in one of five positions and it can be fully elevated, half elevated or not elevated at all. positions and it can be fully elevated, half elevated or not elevated at all. So there's like five parameter family that generates what's called the international phonemic alphabet. And, um, you know, one of the cool things to think about is how could you create an instrument that naturally allowed you phonemic productions that you're not just doing these, you know, simple ringing tones. Well, there's got to be a way to just recreate it physically, right? Just make an artificial head. I mean, if you just made an artificial head with, I mean, it's not like we do something that's impossible to recreate with a robot.

Okay, but like in terms of if you take the collection of all major instruments what comes closest to the human voice a lot of people think it's the indian violin called the sarangi really yeah if you've never checked that out no what's a sarangi a sarangi is like a can we use it to drown out the pounding on the roof we'd win a sarangi yeah i've never even heard of a sarangi. It sounds badass. So it's a strange violin? It's a strange violin.

It's got a lot of sympathetic strings. And because you can power into a note, if I have a guitar and I pluck a string, I'm just going to get decay unless I drive the sound. Right? But if I do with my voice. Oh, wow. Look how cool that thing looks. Yeah.

Wow. Louder. Wow. I'm just trying to imagine. A lot of those are sympathetic strings, so they ring when you hit the tone perfectly. Whoa. Now, so if you've never gotten into North Indian classical music, this is potentially...

Who hasn't? Today's your lucky day. This is a really cool show. It's a wild-looking thing, man. It only has three strings? Yeah, my guess is, I mean, I don't recall recall but very often you only it's an old one that one looks kind of old yeah it looks a little beat up those fucking amazing check out like ram narayan on this thing he was like the ultimate oh there's a ultimate badass and the sarangi i'm learning things, man.

It almost died out. It almost died out. Yeah, I think it was used for guzzle singing and courtesans used to play it. What's a guzzle singing? Guzzle is like this type of song that would be popular in what would now be Pakistan and northern India. In the early 50s, Pandit Ram Narayan decided to... Check this dude out. Do you remember Zamfear, Master of the Pan Flute? They'd have those late night ads.

Remember that? That shit died off quick, huh? I am that old. That pan flute thing really never caught on. This is way better than the pan flute, though. do you think this guy has groupies i know he does does he teach yoga too it seems like he would um well so you see the drums on the left yeah so that's that's the tabla and the bayan. And that is the, you know, I think many people would consider North Indian drumming to be the world's most advanced rhythmic system. Really?

Yeah. I mean, even more than Africa. The speed of articulation, it goes at the speed of speech. And if you take the Hindi verb to speak, bolna, they have this system that they call the bowls. And to speak the bowls is to say what you would instruct your hands to do if you were playing the drums. Oh, wow, look at him. I've heard sounds like this before for sure.

Like, I'm a fan of Dollar Mendy. I like Dollar Mendy's music. He's got some cool music. And he has this kind of shit in the background a lot. Do you know who he is, right? I do not. You don't know who Dollar Mendy is? I should. What is this song, the big famous song, I think it's called Tunic Tune. It's really a badass song. I really love music where I don't know what they're saying. I enjoy that because you just kind of get a feel for the song and you have no idea what the actual words are.

They could be totally corny. See if you can find something like speaking the bowls for tabla. And you'll see these guys doing this thing where they do... What they do is that they create with their mouths everything that their fingers would do with their hands. Now play that song, that song that we were just playing. What? Totally cut off. This is it. This is him.

He's got a badass... I have no idea what he's saying. He's got a hilarious music video, too. The music is like... Isn't he badass? It's him against him in this video. But he got arrested for white slavery. Well, that's not good.

Yeah, he got arrested. like white slavery. Well, that's not good. Yeah, he got arrested. Jesus, what it was like sex trafficking or something like that. Some kind of sex slave trafficking or something like that. He was a part of some, I don't know. Maybe he just pissed off the wrong guy in India. I guess. They fucking hit him with some bullshit charge. You never know.

You know, weird countries like that, they can get away with a lot of shit. What is it? His brother just died, I guess. He's taking over the new son of his name. Anyway. Sorry. So, um, what is that, those drums called again? Often just called tabla,

but tabla is the sort of soprano drum, and then the bayan, I guess you play with sort of the heel of your hand, so you strike it and you go... Huh. And I think the world's best practitioner is this guy who lives in Marin County now. Really? Zakir Hussain, who's the child of Al-Araqa, who was like the badass of his time. And it's one of these things where I think you sort of have to be born almost into the family to have this passed down.

How do you know all this stuff? Is this something you've studied for a long time? There is an amazing book by a guy named Neil Sorrell that I picked up in college. And I just opened it up and it went through an entire performance of Indian North Indian classical music and I was just you know my my jaw was on the floor how is the this entire form of classical music much closer to our jazz so much more impressive I mean visually to watch one of these drummers and one of these soloists, like the soloist will try to lose the drummer and the drummer's got these mirror neurons that can't be beat and they'll just like follow him everywhere.

And so you're just, you know, you're some, some, uh, poor white kid in America saying nobody told me this existed. Yeah. It's,

isn't it weird how we just choose like a certain series of instruments that represent rock and roll, certain series of instruments that represent jazz? It's strange when you think of the wide range of musical instruments that exist all over the world that are just never utilized in modern music. Yeah. And I do think that we've become too complacent we should be you know like ian anderson with jethro tull why you know if you listen to the flute solo and locomotive breath that'll get me going every goddamn time and why didn't that take why didn't take it off yeah

um you know the clarinet was lost to jazz It used to be this incredibly dominant instrument. And coming out of the klezmer tradition, it rocked. And then it sort of became this non-thing. And at some point, I saw a guy named Tony Scott, who was the last great clarinetist in jazz, who went off to Japan to study Zen for years. And he came back for a birthday concert. And he blew Dizzy Gillespie and Benny Carter off the stage. I was just thinking like, oh, I forgot clarinet can be

the kick-ass instrument. Yeah. Most people think of it as something you're forced to take in high school. Yeah. But fundamentally that's where, like the ukulele has come back like crazy. The ukulele has come back like crazy. The ukulele was a Mexican instrument that was introduced to Hawaii, right? Isn't that how it worked? Portuguese, I think, yeah. Was it? Yeah. But it's a big thing in Hawaii, right?

Aren't they into the ukulele? Yeah. I think it came over with cattle ranchers. I think it was introduced to Hawaii by people who brought over cowboys. If I remember, I might be butchering this story. Forgive me, my Hawaiian friends. But I think what it was was they had introduced cattle at some point in the history of Hawaii. And when they introduced cattle, they're like,

hey, how do you keep these fucking things from wandering all over the place? So, man, we've got to find some these fucking things from wandering all over the place? So man, we got to find some cowboys to teach us how to do this shit. And they got some, it was either Mexican or South American cowboys to come over and show them how to wrangle these cows, how to, how to corral them,

how to, how to take care of them. And then when they did, these cowboys came over and introduced the ukulele, which is really kind of uniquely hawaiian in art in america when we think about it you know you hear like a sound of like the ukulele we we sort of think about it as like my daughter's musician and when we're in hawaii i got her ukulele like she you know and she plays it we think about it's like in a lot of people's eyes like a lot of

like what we think of as classic hawai Hawaiian music is played with a ukulele. Yeah. So I think I thought it was, I thought it was like a Portuguese. I think it's ukulele. It means like jumping flea. So it's a Hawaiian name on a Portuguese instrument. What's that?

That's what Wikipedia says. They attribute it to three Portuguese immigrants in the 1880s that developed it from three other guitar-like instruments from Portugal, called the machete, called vaquino. That's the origin of the ukulele, but how did it get to Hawaii? It says they were in Hawaii. Oh, they were in Hawaii. Those guys were in Hawaii.

Oh, so they brought it to Hawaii, the very guys who made it? That's what Wikipedia says. Wikipedia also said Brian Callen's my brother. And I have some weird diseases that I don't really have. Wikipedia is awesome. I just love the fact that a lot of people just edit it. Like anytime there's a podcast and something

fucked up happens, you go to the person's Wikipedia page and they'll totally butcher it. Well, the amazing thing is that it works at all. Yes, that is amazing, right? It is amazing. I never would have guessed that. Yeah, right? Like some user-edited thing that sort of works.

What's amazing also is there's only one Snopes. You know? There's only one real, well-regarded, fact-checking website. Someone will say, hey, why don't you Snopes that? Right? I wouldn't. Yeah, I wouldn't anymore. Yeah, I'm distrustful.

You're distressed about... I'm distrustful. Distrustful of Snopes? Do you feel like they're left-leaning, or do you feel like they're just not necessarily 100% honest, or what do you think? Well... Or do you think the guy gets a lot of hookers and does a lot of blow

and does not really pay attention sometimes. The guy's history of it is fucking hilarious. The guy, he just shacks up with some escort and she becomes the main editor. I'm going to have some more DMT before I answer it. I think that, one, I think that the IQ needed to sort fact from fiction at the moment is enormous. The amount of money you'd need would be fantastic. Especially today with hashtag fake news. Yeah.

So I'm sort of feeling like I'm witnessing the battle for whether any authority exists at all. And the claim that you fact check has been synonymized with the fact that you're truthful, which is total nonsense. In other words, if I accurately represent three people who were in a scene and I leave out two others and somebody says, that fact, you know, that picture is fake. I say, no, no, no. These three people really were there. Yes. But you filtered out those other things. You know, you can tell lies by leaving things out by insinuation. is by leaving things out by insinuation. I have this whole riff on what I frequently refer to as Russell conjugation that other people call emotive conjugation.

So, you know, the difference between think versus whistleblower is how I usually introduce this. These are technically synonyms in English, but you cannot substitute one for the other. Yeah, rat and whistleblower don't, yeah. Well, whistleblower is the only, is usually one of the only positive ones. Chelsea Manning is a highly regarded rat. Exactly.

It doesn't work because of the emotional shading. Yeah. And so, you know, like another thing is to get somebody proximate to something very disturbing. thing is to get somebody proximate to something very disturbing so ben shapiro and i were in this article um about how the alt-right was outraged and we were the like the two people cited you were supposed to be alt-right you right jesus christ this alt-right thing is a weird thing to define no no no it's it's a great. You have to appreciate what it is. Okay. So if you're trying to silence the very small number of people who are probably your guests, the right thing to do is to make sure that they're proximate to lots of terrible stuff. Right.

So that people who are too busy to sort things out say, well, you know, I neither condemn nor condone. Because all you're trying to do is to muddle everything. You need enough fear, uncertainty, and doubt in order to get the job done. And so it doesn't matter that the article says, you know, in the banner headline, alt-right enraged. And then the two people, you know, listed are like Jews who opposed Trump. But because when those articles are parsed, it shows up as well. You were in a bunch of articles about the alt-right. Yeah. Okay. So I get it.

You're really not paying attention. And the point isn't to inform the reader. The point is to tag that which you wish to neutralize. Right. And so it's working very well. Do people in the alt-right consider themselves alt-right? Or did they used to? And now it's become sort of a pejorative, right?

So let's go through the craziness here. Okay. Assume that you are not a Democrat. Right. Not a Democrat might translate to libertarian or Republican right Republican translates to right of center right of trance center translates to right-wing translates to far-right translates to alt-right translates to white supremacist translates to neo-nazi

translates to Nazi right and so you have these very strange chains on the left where Republican keeps bleeding into Nazi right because of this very weird thing it's like well you said you said you didn't vote Democrat so I can I say that your right-wing I mean you're far right right you're basically all right Jesus Christ holy crap you just you know move somebody who's a country club Republican into being a Gestapo agent. Yeah, and does alt-right necessarily mean white supremacist? Or have they conveniently glued those two things together? I think Richard Spencer. Considers himself alt-right?

Well, I think he coined alt-right. Oh, he did? Yeah, so the idea is white supremacy with a human face. A human face is supposed to what like a goat no he's trying he was trying to change the he was trying to come up with a friendlier version of nazi or white supremacist hilarious right and so at some level that was a disgusting intellectual masterstroke but then alt-right became the play thing. Um, you know,

a lot of people who are tired of being told what to think and who to be started blurring these distinctions. So, you know, now you've got this frog and sometimes you put a hat on the frog. Sometimes it's the Nazi hat. Sometimes the Trump hat. Right.

And so the whole idea is like, okay, okay, for those of us who got used to those lines that we do not cross, those were major transgressions. To other people, they're like, well, why should there be a rule about a frog? Right. And so you have this crazy discussion where you have people with terrible insidious intent people who are just clowning around and everybody is mixed in in a way that nobody can sort out right that's the frog that's keck right yeah i mean if you really pay attention and i think there's been some sort of a study done and what percentage of the frog is actually used for you know donald trump or racism or alt-right and what percentage of the

frog is used just for a goof it's the vast majority is like feels good man type things maybe but like i've seen i got sent too many nazi frogs during the election i've been sent a few yeah right you know it's like anybody could make one you can make a Nazi, and people have made Nazi Mickey Mouse. But we didn't used to. There's still a lot of stigma around reproducing swastikas with the color scheme and the orientation of the third rank. Have you seen that the gay folks, for a very short period of time, were trying to co-op the swastika and turn it into a rainbow swastika to take it back. Oh my gosh. It didn't work. When you go to India, right,

you have the swastikas, you know, pointing the other direction with dots in them. And so if you come from an American context, you're just fucking triggered all the time. There's a place up here. There's a place in Chatsworth, I believe, that is in a very, very old Indian temple that has swastikas on it. And there's a large sign, but it's not swastika.

It's a reverse swastika. There's a large sign explaining, you know, hey, this is an ancient Hindu symbol and we've had it for a long time. Longer, right? I mean, my guess, I haven't looked at the etymology, but I would guess that swa comes from beautiful in Sanskrit or something. And so, you know, the question about who does a symbol belong to? Right. And when is it inexorable? And when is it inexorable?

When is it like, you know, that symmetry pattern? I have no question that you might find that symmetry pattern in nature. Right. Or, you know, in like, you know, ninth century Islamic architecture or something. Well, you know, the hexagon they found on top of Jupiter. You remember that? The storm. Yeah.

You know, what if it was a swastika? Could you imagine instead of a hexagon, there's a swastika on top of Jupiter? Jesus Christ. You think it's really a takeout Jupiter? Was it Saturn? Yeah was it saturn or jupiter it might have been saturn but there was some very bizarre pattern pattern that's very strange yeah but and it's uniform i mean it's like pretty close to an actual hexagon i believe so yeah but isn't it is very weird that we get so wrapped up in symbols.

And symbols are so huge for us. Yeah, but they are efficient compressions of information. So, you know, and then you lose, you know, a symbol. Like you can lose a name. You know. Like Dick. No one's calling their kids Dick anymore. Or Gay, right? Gay, yeah.

It used to be Gay Old Time. The Flintstones, they had a gay old time. That was one of the last uses of gay in that my grandfather claimed that the emotion of gaiety was lost with the word. He claimed that there was actually an emotion that went with it that no one actually experiences anymore. Wow. But how does he describe it? experiences anymore. Wow. But how does he describe it? That it was a sort of careless frivolity, that it had a certain sort of combination of like innocence tinged with a little bit of...

Mischief? Like sexual mischief. Ah, really? Anyway, you know, so we become aware of words that open up new territories. So like the concept of Sanuk in Thai, lots of people go through Thailand, come back and they need the word Sanuk, which is the quality of fun that something has to have in order for it to be worth doing. Like, did you pay your electrical bill? No. Why?

There was no Sanuk in it, you know? Did you pay your electrical bill? No. Why? There was no Sanuk in it, you know, so that that was like That's a concept or chutzpah, you know coming from Yiddish or you know Turkish has Yakima's Which is the trail of light left on the water by the moon Right. And so once you have a word for Yakima's It's very hard not to use it even though nobody in English speaking context knows about it. Just the way the word selfie, uh, if you recall when that came in,

we'd seen all these weird pictures of like ladies in, you know, uh, restrooms taking pictures of themselves in the mirror. And you're like, what the hell is that? Yeah. Somebody says,

Oh, that's a selfie. And it's like, got it. Yeah. Right. And then suddenly that word was everywhere so once we get the the symbolic compression that goes with a concept we become pretty dangerous my wife has a friend who's so stupid she doesn't know what a selfie

means so she takes she uses hashtag selfie and somebody else takes the picture yeah it's a picture of her she doesn't have a fucking camera in her hand and she's standing there with her hands on her hips. I would love to joke with you, but I have definitely used that. Hashtag selfie. I've thought selfie

when it's not a selfie at all. Well, I mean, it's just her. It's a picture of herself. Maybe she set up the camera. Maybe I'm the asshole. Right? Is it a selfie if you put a timer on a camera and you step back?

Well, fuck me. I'm an asshole. These are the Talmudic questions of our time. She's right. I'm wrong. Maybe she's got a... If you just have a husband that's so dumb, he'll just sit around and take pictures of you so you can put them on Instagram. I mean, you basically programmed a monkey. It's the extended self. You have a programmed monkey that'll take pictures. It's the extended self.

Exactly. Right. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, if you shoot a pheasant and you have a dog that will fetch that bird and bring it back to you, you still shot the bird. A pheasant? Yeah. Yeah. Do you know how they do that? Yeah.

Yeah, you flush the birds out with dogs. The birds go up in the air. They shoot them out with a shotgun. The birds hit the ground. The dog gets it and brings it back to you. But you shot it. Yeah. That's why they only call them retrievers. Yes. Exactly.

Exactly. But we're learning a lot of shit. Let's just go over all we covered. Is that going to be a quiz? No, no quiz. But we covered why we're moving because there's a fucking earthquake going on on the roof. Indian music.

Cephalopods. Sneaker males. Sneaker males. Yeah. I didn't know. So many things I didn't know about. It's not like a common thing, though. Like, everybody kind of knows that's what a lot of male feminists are.

They're like sneaker males they're like sliding in closer to proximity to the to the females by you know by trying to sort of uh espouse some ideals that they think would be more attractive to the females because they don't find them in nature yeah and then the problem is that the ovulatory window comes along and suddenly there's a desire for something completely different yeah they go out with some biker right immediately and Immediately. And it's like, what happened with that? It's like, I don't know. It was strangely appealing. Yeah.

It's that fucking gene pull, man. Those goddamn genetics. They've got us. Yeah. But it is really amazing how we're conscious and we're aware of all these issues that we deal with, but yet we're still we're still at the first to a certain extent at the whim of these genes of these these poles that we have inside of us you know that's like

the argument that people always make for why um some people find like subsistence living like those shows in alaska so oddly comforting you ever see those shows where you're really close to what the environment that brought you here yeah like alaska the final frontier You ever see those shows? Where you're really close to the environment that brought you here. Yeah, like Alaska, The Final Frontier. You ever see that show? No. Those folks just live up in,

they're actually related to that woman, Jewel. Do you know that beautiful singer, Jewel? I remember. She has an amazing voice. And she is related to those folks that live in Alaska. And they have this show where they live, I mean, they live way the fuck up there with nobody around them. They are literally in just bumfuck nowhere Alaska. I don't want to do that.

But it's oddly comforting. I love those shows. I don't know why I love those shows. I really do. I think you might. I could see you doing that. Living like that? Nah.

No, I like to do it in little bursts. I enjoy a movie theater, sir. I like a highway. I like to drive cars. I enjoy television. I like cooking in a home. Okay. I like doing that.

I like sitting down with electricity. I like all the trappings of civilization, but I do enjoy going to nature. I have no desire to be a trapper and fucking, you know, flying around in a bush plane, landing places and checking my steel traps for minks and stuff. Yeah, those are the folks. Huh. Is that her in there?

I think it's a super old picture of it. Is she one of them? Is she the girl with the red sweater? Yeah. I forget the name of the family. Kilcher, I think. Yeah, I think that is it. Yeah, but they, I mean, these fucking people, they make their own houses up there. I like that.

And somehow or another, she escaped. No, she probably lives in Venice now or some shit. My arch nemesis is this guy, Garrett Lisi, who lives in Maui. Oh, yeah? Why are you guys arch nemesises? You don't have one? I don't think so. You should totally get one.

Are they good for you? Well, first of all, lots of billionaires have forgotten to have an arch nemesis. You go to movies about arch nemeses. I don't know what the plural is, but it's definitely one of these things almost nobody has. And your arch nemesis has to be somewhat like you so that there is tension that there should only be one. Oh, you know, like there is tension that there should only be one.

Oh yeah. See, I'm not a, there should only be one guy. I'm a tribal guy. Yeah. I think you should gather up as many people that are like you and support each other. Well, you do end up supporting your arch nemesis. You keep each other going, right? Oh, right.

In some sort of a way, right? Some, yeah. I mean, definitely, we definitely need some sort of competition. I definitely believe that. Yeah. I mean, definitely, we definitely need some sort of competition. I definitely believe that. So my arch nemesis took me out into the jungles of northern Maui. To kill you? I thought so.

Really? Were you wondering? Yeah. Like, if you have an anime and he says, hey, man, you want to go hiking? Yeah. You're like, oh, fuck, bro. Well, I was down for it because I just thought, look, I'm not sure that he's the one who's coming back, right? Right. Anyway, we go out on this trail and we're visiting this PhD mathematician in the jungles.

And it is without question the most mosquito ridden place I've ever been in my life. In Maui? Yeah. It's just, it's unlivable. Maui has some incredible rainforests. Incredible. And we get out along this trail And we went hike like a mile or two in and this guy has built Shangri-La He's taken this river, and he's sculpted. He's been there for like 25 30 40 years. He's a mathematician

Yeah, he's like a PhD in differential geometry Wow He like lives under this amazing durian tree. If you, you know. Yeah. Yeah. Like, the nastiest fruit in the world. Durian is that, yeah, that's that stinky fruit, right? Why would he do that? Because if you've ever had great durian, it's one of the great pleasures of life.

Really? Oh, man. So it stinks, but it tastes good. Yeah, it's like Limburger cheese. Oh, okay. That's a good analysis. So, anyway, this guy has built this, like, solitary world that nobody is watching like it's just it's a performance for one and it's it's like this naturally sculpted um wonderland that he lives in with all these mosquitoes that he doesn't notice under his durian trees where

he can do mathematics why does he not notice them because you've been there for 30 yeah wow i mean you can't focus on mosquitoes every day for 30 years. He needs to get one of those thermocels. You ever seen those things? Oh, they're amazing. Yeah, if you go to anywhere where the mosquitoes are particularly aggressive, because if you go to Alaska, have you been to Alaska before? Yes, sir.

One thing about Alaska that's fantastic is the mosquitoes are fucking rabid. They're like pit bulls. Me and my friend Ari went fishing in Alaska, and I am not exaggerating in that. Full gear. No, we didn't. We sprayed ourselves up with fucking horrible chemicals. It probably took a year off my life. But when you step out of the car, I mean, when we opened up, look at that.

That's legitimately what it's like we opened up the door yeah to the car and within three to five seconds there was a hundred mosquitoes inside the car it's fucking insane because they're only alive for like a month right it's only warm enough for them to exist for a short period of time so they're insanely aggressive so anyway there's this product called Thermocell that outdoors people use. And what it is is it's like a small pad that looks like a large square-like piece of gum or something like that.

Okay. And you slide this blue pad under this screen and then you ignite it by pressing a button. This little heating element goes off and it has like a little fuel canister that keeps this very tiny fire. It's immensely small.

You have to look in to see if it's lit, right? It's probably not even a fire. It's like somehow or another this element is heating up this fuel and it takes a long time to go through a small canister. But it emits this very fine mist. And this mist will keep a, like an 18 square foot.

Get out. Window of protection for mosquitoes. How have I never heard of this? Dude, it is impossible to be in the outdoors with it, without it rather, once you've had it. I,

I, I found out about it from my friends in Alberta. They, they were the first to turn me on about it. They live in Alberta and the same thing in Alberta. The mosquitoes are super, super aggressive because it's only warm enough for them to exist for a short period of time.

I'm so glad I did this show. Dude, a thermosel is amazing. And you can strap them to your hip. You just put one on right there and you don't even smell it. But the mosquitoes don't want to have nothing to do with it. They just keep, they try. Some really aggressive ones go, you motherfucker, I'm getting, and they give up.

I mean, it's amazing. It makes, uh, being in the woods incredibly bearable. Like, uh, me, my daughters wanted to go camping in the backyard one night and there was bugs out there. And I said, Oh, I got the solution. I went out and got my thermosel, lit that sucker, put it there. Everybody's out cold sleeping. Just no problems at all. Bugs and civilians can purchase this. Yeah. Well,, it's not it's not toxic. I think but it's um super easy to use That's it right there. Yeah, so that thanks to that blue thing in the top. That's a piece of The thermosel the chewing gum looking stuff these slide under that screen and when it gets used up that blue thing becomes all white It's so easy to use man

It's like they go to like come check it just to try it out. They have a large one there that looks like a lamp. See that one that looks like a lamp up there? Fucking dude. Those things are the shit. Because I hate mosquitoes. Oh, thermosel. It's the way to go. I mean, I don't, Google the negative consequences. See that, see that one?

He's got like pouches on the side of the container. In one pouch you would have like your little extra fuel canisters the container and one pouch you'd have like your little extra fuel canisters and the other side you'd probably have some of those little extra thermosel pads but one little thing one of those little blue things lasts for like eight hours so i mean one of the great questions is some of the most beautiful land uh in a place like maui is mosquito ridden yeah and so if some if that could you change the land value? You'd have to burn them all the time.

And I don't know if it's something you want to breathe in all the time. Okay. I just don't know enough about negative consequences. But I've used them a bunch of times, and they've never even given me a headache or anything. Find out if whatever's in Thermocell is safe for long-term exposure. It says you're not supposed to use in a confined space. Okay.

Because there is some sort of stuff you're obviously breathing in. Yeah, for sure. Permanone? Permethin? Paramethin? I don't know. How come nothing, you know, I've asked this before, but when we were kids and you read comic books about like radiation,

they always helped people, turn people into fucking superheroes yeah you never hear that shit in real life yeah you have to get lucky and get like some homeotic mutations so you've got like yeah extra arms coming out of your head it never does anything good no no mutation well homeotic mutations and bugs are really cool yeah and bugs but i mean in in human beings like i mean, I guess random mutations. Are the Chinese experimenting with this? Probably. That was the thing about CRISPR that I was going to bring up earlier. For sure they're doing that, right? They're making humans.

Yeah, I mean, that's the thing about having this ethical, moral stance on the use of something like CRISPR to genetically alter fetuses. Yeah. use of something like CRISPR to genetically alter fetuses. Yeah. That if you do that, you really, if, if you have an opposition to altering embryos, you're like, that's immoral. It's not something we want to be a part of. No, we're going to get past that.

Yeah, but that's the problem. They already passed that. The Russians don't give a fuck about that. Did you see that movie, um, uh, Icarus? No. God damn, you have to see that movie. All right, sir. Um, I had Brian Fogle on last week, who is the director and producer of this documentary on the doping, the Russian state-sponsored doping program.

Right. Russians don't play, dude. They don't play. They had a state-sponsored doping program that was kind of overseen by Putin, like down the line. There's a direct chain of command. And the whole entire Russian team in Sochi was on drugs, all of them. The guy who engineered the whole thing, like the main scientist, is in the United States now under protective custody, in hiding.

And Putin is trying to drag him back to Russia by stealing the homes from his family, stealing his wife's home, turning him into homeless people in some sort of a lure to get him to sacrifice himself to come back for the health and safety of his family. You remember what happened when Saddam did that? It didn't work out so good. Yeah. The cell phone video.

That's when you know you fucked up the cell phone video footage of your execution. Oh, that's Saddam's execution. But I think he lured his son-in-laws back. Like, don't worry, it's all forgiven. And the son-in-laws came back. Oh, really? Yeah, Saddam was pretty skilled. Oh, this was a different situation then.

No, no, no. The cell phone. I mean, that was a very strange situation because he actually was the only guy who was like, he had his shit together when he was being executed. Yeah. He understood the game. He accepted the game. He's like, all right. But also, he's probably like, Jesus Christ, how many people did I kill?

I think after you've killed like a few hundred thousand people, you're probably like, I probably deserve it. Yeah. arm it yeah i mean well i don't know you ever seen christopher hitchens um narrating the original bath party um i don't know i don't know what to call it theatrical video where like half the bath party was called out as being revealed traitors and then the other half of the bath party was giving given sidearms with which to execute them making them complicit in the founding murder and it was all filmed oh i'm aware of this but i didn't know that christopher hitchens narrated it well he did something where he he brought it to prominence i mean i think i was aware of it with just arabic i couldn't tell what was going on oh okay and okay. And then he actually said,

okay, look, you have to appreciate, well, this is a topic that I think, you know, it'd be good to talk about. I don't know that I've ever talked about it, but message violence is the glue that keeps a lot of societies together.

And we don't study it or talk about violence that is specifically constructed to be theatrical. Um, like public beheadings? Is that what you mean? Yeah. That would be a kind of message violence. Or, for example, forcing families to pay for the ammunition with which their family members were executed to make them complicit and emphasize their weakness. All of the stuff that the mind goes to horror movies to explore is often used structurally, particularly in the Middle East. So, you know, ISIS, for example, the Jordanian pilot video,

which I find that many people haven't seen. The whole point of it was that the pilots were raining down death in two particular forms, rubble and fire on people in the ground. And ISIS captured one of the Jordanian pilots and decided that they would theatrically execute him with a version of exactly these two things that he was meeting out from the air. And so the whole point of it was to create the cinematic imagery to sear into people's mind what it meant to oppose ISIS, that ISIS was in fact just in a sort of eye for an eye kind of way. And my belief is that we don't understand the role that message violence plays, in part because we are now denying it.

If you think about Vietnam, we have all of these images that were burned into all of our minds, um, with Pulitzer prize winning photographs. But in the modern era, you don't have images like that from Iraq. Um, because there was a, there was a decision that we could not afford in some sense to have the kind of opposition that we had to Vietnam when people suddenly said, wait a minute, you're that we had to Vietnam when people suddenly said, wait a minute, you're doing what in my name? There's an issue that has always puzzled me. And this issue is people that lean left, people that consider themselves progressives,

have a very distinct, very obvious bias against criticizing Islam, criticizing Islamic terrorism, criticizing Islamic suppression of women, you know, criticizing these cultures under the guise of not wanting to promote Islamophobia and things on those lines and I've always wondered how much of what that is is a fear of Reprisal of speaking out against them is terrifying So what they do instead is embrace the the cultural differences that these people exhibit concentrate instead on the positive aspects of their community and the good things about Muslim culture and Islamic culture and really does not bring it up at all. You very rarely hear people on the left talk about how oppressive and horrific

some of the conditions that women and homosexuals are forced to live in in Muslim cultures. Right. And I've always wondered if that's what that is. in in in muslim cultures right and i've always wondered if that's what that is like there's a feat because no one in modern day no no one ideology is more brutal in their reprisal i mean they kill apostates right they kill people who leave if you join you can join no one's stopping them they're the whole idea of spreading islam is that you should be proselytizing. You should be getting people to join because it is the only truth. It's the only way to go.

But once you do join, you're in. Like, you're not allowed to leave. First of all, I mean, let's actually do this one. I think it's important. Okay. But they didn't start that. We Jews started this, so far as I know. Proselytizing?

No, no, no, no. We don't proselytize. But the once you're in, you're in. Oh, really? Yeah. If you go to Deuteronomy, I think it says something to the effect of if someone comes to you and says, hey, let's worship gods not known to the fathers, set upon them with a stone before anyone else gets there. But are you supposed to do that to someone who is already converted to? If you're in.

Right. If you're in. If you're in and somebody says, and somebody says hey let's go worship other gods you're supposed to kill them what if that oh that's interesting right so like so it's an old idea it's an old idea and it's not an islamic idea right it's a jewish idea in my opinion okay okay but it does exist today primarily so i asked my rabbi about this and she's and she said you have a female rabbi oh yeah you progressive motherfucker you look at you no i have actually i like it i'm proud of this i have a rabbi who happens to be female okay like i don't get it was she born female or is it one of them she's all woman all rabbi allegedly they're all all women caitlin jenner's all how many incendiary topics

do you want all of them no no let's just turn everything up to 11 i do okay come on man i'm a comedian all right i don't have a boss well in three minutes i'm about to be a target oh you're no target okay you're a female rabbi yeah point was, yeah, and we don't execute anybody because in effect that portion of the code never runs. So the Jews have figured out how to have bad code that is almost permanently inoperative. If I could stop you there for a second. One of the unique things about Jews is that there are so many Jewish people that I know that still consider themselves Jewish but are almost totally atheists.

Yeah. Like my friend Ari. He was doing this video recently or this podcast recently. We were doing this challenge where we can't drink or smoke pot or do anything for a month and we have to do 15 hot yoga classes. And he's going crazy and screaming during his podcast. I am a Jewish performer, and I live in New York City. I'm supposed to be doing drugs.

I'm supposed to be drinking. I like drinking. But he's the biggest atheist I've ever met in my life. Right. Or if not an atheist, he's certainly, at the very least, agnostic. He's definitely not someone who considers himself a religious person. But he was. He was and he escaped the claws of it when he was young.

But Jews many times think of themselves, it's almost a tribe as much as it is a religion. If you sit down and corner most Jews that I know about, like, how much of the Talmud do you follow? How much of the Old Testament do you think is legit? How much of these teachings do you think are imperative for everyday living? The vast majority don't want to have, they're not connected to any of it. Look, if you met anybody following the Old Testament, you wouldn't recognize them as a Jew. Right. Right? Like, we have to them as a Jew. Right. Right?

Like, we have to kill the apostates? Right. I used to live in an ultra-Orthodox neighborhood in Jerusalem. And at some point I was writing on the Sabbath, my final list for leaving. And the kids in the building next door started shouting in Hebrew, it is forbidden to write on the Sabbath. Kill him. Whoa.

And the parents had to come out and say, knock it off. Like, the ultra Whoa, and the parents had to come and say knock it off like the ultra Orthodox parents So they wanted to kill you because you were writing because it was literally that's that was you know I was violent a bunch of little monsters. No Momsers is the word you're looking for bastards. Oh anyway Yeah, so Jews are big into observance Mom's ers is the word you're looking for. Bastards. Oh. Anyway. Yeah. So Jews are big into observance. But part of the relationship is you get to question things at a much deeper level than in most religions. Right.

And, you know, I would say I know six or seven rabbis well enough to ask the question about their belief structure. None of them believe in the character of God from the Old Testament. So how do they sort of rationalize the whole thing? Well, that's the whole point is that you have layers of abstraction. And if you're really stupid, for example, do you believe that the Supreme Court is nine black-robed super geniuses who can channel the original intent of the founding fathers. I think they're wizards. Yeah.

OK. They dress like wizards. Well, then that's it. I mean, you there's a grown up way of loving your country and there's a childish way of loving your country. And there's a grown up way of believing in your religion and a childish one. And the childish one is like, yeah, it's all literally. But what is the grown up way of believing in a religion well i mean in part and it's got a lot of hidden instructions it's it's not resolved so that you have these sort of dialectical tensions that uh so you have

like ethical guidelines as opposed to like yeah brought down from on high in giant stone tablets. Well, you know, thou shalt not kill. But thou shalt not kill has to go up against an admonition to kill. Right. Right. And so these things are not resolved and they're. Well, I'm trying to swim back upstream to your original point about Islam. We're going to get original point about Islam. Right.

We're going to get waylaid here. Before we leave Israel or Jews in particular, there's an answer to this and I used to know it but I forgot it. What is the reason why so many European Jews have won Nobel prizes? So many European Jews are insanely intelligent. Like what is it? Do you want the modern social justice answer? No.

It's because we cheated physics. I don't want that answer. That's? No. It's because we cheated physics. I don't want that answer. That's a joke. That's a silly answer. No, no, no. No, they're fucking smart. Like, why?

Why are so many insanely intelligent people European Jews? So. Is this hard for you to answer, being a Jew? Yeah, a little bit. Like, if you asked me about about, uh, well, let's do a different one. Okay. Okay. So from 1897 to 1987, you had all of these different countries winning the Boston marathon. And then from 1987 to the present, it's basically two.

It's right. Kenya and Ethiopia. Maybe a Korean guy wins it or something. Um, why is that? 1987 to the present, it's basically two. It's Kenya and Ethiopia. Maybe a Korean guy wins it or something. Why is that? Well, now you have this really uncomfortable thing, which is, is it culture? Is it that those guys in East Africa just have heart? Is it because they really run to school every day, 26 miles?

People said that, and it turns out they take the bus like everybody else. So there can be a genetic predisposition in trade-off space. There can be a cultural premium. So when you have the top marriage prospects, do you marry them off to the richest or the smartest. So in Judaism, there is some weird way in which intellectual prestige proxies for material wealth. So if you have somebody who's insanely smart and not very rich, it can be very prestigious to marry your daughter, let's say, to that student of the Torah. your, uh, your daughter, let's say to that, uh, student of the Torah. So there are all sorts of cultural strange aspects of this. Is it because money lending was prescribed and forbidden to Christians that this particular facility with mathematics was highly selected for when nobody else was selecting for it? You know, I don't know what the answer is, but I do know that, like in my case,

getting a PhD in mathematics, using an Ivy League education for that, or in my brother's case, giving up an Ivy League education to make a point standing up for social justice. These are sort of self-destructive things in most cultures. Standing up for social justice against social justice warriors. Well, no, no, no, no, no.

In his case, in 1987, he stood up because a Jewish fraternity was using black strippers for sexual entertainment to lure in incoming freshmen. And he said, okay, this is, you know know this is some sort of class-oriented thing where we're exploiting one group so this is a different situation no no yeah so he had to leave penn university of pennsylvania under death threats um wow so you know this is like the great irony of my brother's situation is that for people who don't know who your brother Brett Weinstein is Weinstein. Harvey Weinstein. Brett Weinstein, right?

Brett was the guy that was the part of the whole Evergreen College fiasco. He's been on this podcast twice. I suggest if you're interested, you could either Google his name and get the story from a multitude of sources. Or listen to the original podcast where he sort of laid it out. It was before the settlement with the college, before he wound up leaving. And, you know, I really hope that he goes the Jordan Peterson route, meaning that he starts putting up these lectures

and some of these ideas that he has, just putting them up online, just putting videos up. And, you know, I know he's got a patreon page now correct yeah and that which is a great way to do it too but jordan is making more money from doing that than he ever did from college yeah from teaching a university i want to support you know the other thing is is that we have to make the case because he can't because it'll look wrong right hire this motherfucker yeah hire that motherfucker yeah i mean he amazing. He's a straight up genius. I have a recommendation for him from his old advisor who I think,

um, you know, said he's the top student in 40 years of advising. And it just, we have to recognize that if you want this stuff to stop, you have to make it not pay to drive super smart people who are courageous enough to be open in their thinking and to share i'm sorry keep going yeah um and to share and you know to share their thoughts

and fundamentally if we drive these people to extinction it's on us yeah and so my question is hey university of chicago harvard princeton Stanford. Where are you? Yeah. I mean, people are terrified of repercussions, right? They're terrified of... But they think that he's a guy from Evergreen State, so he's lower rank. Oh, I see. Let me use my tiny megaphone to say he's not lower rank. He's un-fucking-believably smart. Look at his work on elongation of telomeres

in laboratory animals, where he predicted what Nobel laureate Carol Greider found from first principles that the mice that are being used to test our drugs have wildly exaggerated telomere lengths, giving them amazing capacities for histological repair, but possibly putting drugs to market that shouldn't be there. This is somebody you want to be taking intellectually serious and stop

treating this like the clown act that they're running and this just happens to be a victim well Evergreen College is an amazing example what can go wrong if you let these crazy children sort of dictate the the way human beings are allowed to behave and and the way discourse takes place on campus to the cliff notes what i was going to say they wanted to have a day of absence they've traditionally had a day of absence where people of color would take the day off to school for where people would miss them sort of like didn't they engineer that in la a day without mexicans it was a movie right it shut down. I'll just tell you right now, LA shuts down without Mexicans. But instead of doing that, the social justice warrior

mentality that thinks that every white man is some sort of an oppressor and you need to figure out a way to eradicate them from the world, they decided to go the opposite route and force white staff and white students to stay home. Your brother rightly protested saying that is inherently racist. Like what you're proposing is racist. He's an anti-racist. Yes, he's anti-racist. And the problem is, is that the diversity movement, which has now become the equity

movement, is actually racist. It's racist against white people. It's, I mean, I don't even want to say it's reverse racism or racism against white. It's openly racist. There's no such thing as reverse racism. There is either racism or no racism. That whole proposal that racism against white people is reverse racism. This is a cult.

And the way you know that it's a cult is you ask for the definition of racism. And if somebody tells you it's power plus prejudice, and therefore certain groups can't be racist because they have no power, that's how you know somebody's in the cult. Because if you look it up in the dictionary, it doesn't say anything like that. Another one would be gender has nothing to do with sex. Go to the Oxford English Dictionary, look at the difference between 3A versus 3B. Gender and sex have been closely tied. And sometime in, like, I think the 1940s, a couple of fields in the U.S. started using gender to be behavior, sex to be, you know, that which is your dedicated genotype, phenotype. What is going on is that these people are changing the definition of words in order to push a cult into the exact place where it must not go. It must not go in the diversity office. It must not go in HR. You cannot have this openly racist, openly sexist cult in the place which is the immune system.

And so that's the key thing is that we're used to thinking of our immune system as being there to protect us. But if you think about an autoimmune disease, it's when your immune system starts attacking the self that you're in real trouble. So learn the signs and learn the tells. You don't have to sign up for Jordan Peterson's postmodernism. Just ask somebody whether black people can be racist against whites. And as soon as you hear power plus prejudice, you know, you're talking to a cult member. As soon as you hear the gender and sex have nothing to do with each other.

And you have recourse to dictionaries and you start talking about the history and somebody starts to say, well, that's your white fragility.'s your white privilege mm-hmm why are you in denial why aren't you accepting ally ship okay so suddenly it's like okay it's it's Xenu and the volcanoes and the clams again yeah it is yeah it is and well one one great piece of evidence about that was this whole Google memo thing the Google memo thing the difference between what that guy actually wrote on the memo and what was published in so many different publications, so many different online websites, it's just straight up libelous.

Like that guy, I mean, I know he's going to sue Google, but he could probably sue a host of people once he's done with that. Because they changed what he wrote and turned him into this horrible, evil, sexist person. To the point where the CEO of YouTube was saying that she read it and it made her sad. That the whole thing made her sad. Well, he wrote a piece based on why people of different genders are more inclined to gravitate towards specific things. But he made an error. What was the error? The error that he made was that he used a reserved term, neuroticism, in the Big Five personality inventory, where it is a reserved term denoting a particular psychometric.

And so rather than saying men are less conscientious than women. He said women are more neurotic. He said women are more neurotic. I actually brought that up with him, and he regretted it. He regretted bringing that, because I told him, I said, that's my only criticism. It's like, that's a derogatory term. But again, you know, I had not quite remembered that the big five personality inventory, you know, is openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. But, you know, when you see something that careful, I mean, most people just didn't read it.

They went with like the headline. Right. So that's the first thing. You should guess. Somebody that smart is probably using a term. If I say moral hazard to you and you don't know economics, you're going to think, oh, wow, what is the moral hazard? Is that like reefer? It has nothing to do with that.

It's a reserve term. Right. So if I keep talking about rent seeking or moral hazard and I'm talking about landlords, you know, or somebody offering your kid a doobie after school. Right. Right. Right. So so that was like the first intellectual failure. And I just have been dealing with this where I talk about power laws and statistics, which is a particular type of probability distribution. Somebody says, geez, the power, the powerful people in our country are so protected and privileged. Why do we why do we need laws to protect them? Like what?

Oh, you said power law. It's like that has nothing to do with there used to be this character on Saturday Night Live whose name was Emily Littella, played by Gilda Radner. And they bring her in and she was hard of hearing. She'd say, what's all this? I hear about a death penalty. The deaf have problems enough as it is. And then she'd riff for two minutes and it's a death penalty. Oh, that's entirely different.

Never mind. So she was like trying. I remember that. Remember? Like violins on television. We need classical music for kids. Kilda Radner was awesome. She was awesome.

Rosanna, Rosanna Dana. Remember that? Oh my God. You couldn't do any of this stuff anymore. You couldn't. You really couldn't. Yeah. But getting back

to the DeMore thing, I'm checking our tree and it's exploding here. You know, the thing about what he did was he was trying to write a pro-diversity memo.

If you lie about the differences between men and women, what are your odds that you will be able to hack a solution to getting all the brilliant women in our country who care about STEM into the workforce? This is what we need to do.

There's no shortage of brilliant women. You know, I've collaborated with them. I know they're there. We need to figure out as a society, do we need to pay women more so that we can get them out of working in the home and taking care of older parents and young children during their prime years? We need to be very creative about the actual differences between men and women. Should we have a rule, not equal pay for equal work, but equal pay for unequal salary negotiation? If we don't allow ourselves-

That's a good point. Please elaborate on that because that is an issue with why women sometimes make less than men is that they don't have the same sort of aggressive salary negotiating tendencies that a lot of men do aggressive testosterone driven sort of i mean there's all sorts of things you know again i don't want to mansplain any but that's isn't that a big issue too i mean look at checkoffs a short story called The Nincompoop, in which it's an employer and a domestic worker in his home. And he talks to her about all of her wages. And then he starts taking away little bit by little bit for, you know, you broke a cup and you were a little bit late. And he whittles her compensation down to nothing.

And she accepts it. And then he says, the employer says you you stupid fool i've just cheated you out of your entire wages i'm going to give them to you but understand that this is how an employer cheats an employee and you're just like whoa so this is an old russian speaking a truth which is don't allow yourself to get taken advantage of. Now, you could say that's really horrible because it's called the nincompoop. Right. Or you could say, actually, that was an attempt to talk about a problem, about needing to be more aggressive and more assertive.

So, you know, getting back to the Damore issue, Damore needed to set this thing up at Google differently. So I took my son to the local pinball arcade. And just think of it as a bunch of workstations where nobody's getting paid. Instead, you're paying for the privilege of staring at this thing for hours with the bells and lights doing something with balls and mechanical systems. There are not a lot of women trying to integrate the pinball arcade because it's a loser activity right that's how they see balls for losers yeah i play pinball i'm a loser i know these things okay my friend owns a pinball arcade yeah it's got a restaurant with pinball in the back is he gonna hurt me no

pinball arcade yeah it's got a restaurant pinball in the back gonna hurt me no no no i'm just joking the point is this is something which is low prestige it's anti-compensated yeah and anti-compensated it's a good way of pointing right it's just like you're just plugging money into the machines so my point is is that what demore said was it's not cognitive ability, you idiots. It's interest in temperament, which is hugely liberating. in a kind of robotic monomaniacal tunnel focus kind of a way. Is that necessarily a great thing? What happens to be compensated now? Well, it's only a great thing if that's what you choose to go into for a career. I program and I hate it. You hate programming? Yeah.

What do you want to do? Play that funky Indian violin thing? Exactly. But I'll spend hours doing something like that. Right. But the point is that coding turns me into this autistic, spectrumy guy. I get speech apnea. Again, I don't want to say anything against...

So the more you get into coding, you sort of adopt a code mindset? So you start talking to me while I'm coding, right? You say, hey, Eric, do you want to go out for a beer? I'll start to say, maybe later. Really? Yeah. Well, that's probably because I'm being annoying and I'm distracting you from your work. Exactly.

Right? Right. I see you as annoying. Yes. I'm trying to follow. I see me as annoying, too, if that helps. Well, if you're doing Brazilian juj jiu-jitsu and i come in and say hey joe you want to go out for a beer like i got my hands choked bro yeah yeah so you know the

the issue is that a lot of us you know who have male hardware male software recognize that we get obsessive compulsive we're not always thinking about reward right um it's not necessarily the most attractive set of characteristics when i do math i'm definitely wildly on the spectrum and i'm proud by the way i'm proud of it it's not like right you know it's not a derogatory term and you're actually talking about yourself well when i'm socializing yes i'd like to think that i'm fairly normal you You're fairly normal. Fairly normal. But when I'm doing math, I don't want to be. I want to kill that problem.

I want to think through that thing. I want to have that theorem. Well, I'm that way. I'm not on the spectrum in any way, but I'm that way with writing for sure. If I'm writing and someone came over to talk to me, I'd be like, uh, I can't talk. You know, I'm in that zone. My wife will come over and she'll say, wow, you're really sharp with me. Huh?

What? I barely even noticed that you were. Oh, she's needy. No. Well, the thing is, is that we've collaborated on, you know, she brought geometry from quantum field theory into economics and so at the level of you know she's really she occupies brain space with me but she will kick out of that space if the kids need something whereas i'll just say i'm sure the kids will be fine it's just like you know they're two years old eric you know they're yeah they're not going to be able to take care of themselves right you

know and so she'll have a much more, she always has her compassion running, whereas I can turn it off, turn it on for periods of time when I'm focused. There are these differences. And, you know, I think we need, we need in part to teach women how to under deliver. Under deliver?

Yeah. How so? Well, if you can't risk under delivering, then you can't shoot for the, you know, you can't swing for the fences as often you want to make sure that you're going to be able to not disappoint. So men very often like, hey, I thought I could do it. Didn't quite work out. It's going to take another couple of weeks. That's a weird way of putting it, though, because that's a results oriented way of putting it instead of an ambition oriented. putting it though because that's a results oriented way of putting it instead of an ambition or anything to say you're like if the real secret of life is over promise over deliver I don't think it is though assume that it

is assume that you lose out when in a bid if somebody else is gonna promise more than you and then if you can't over deliver given that you've already over promised then you can't actually delight people so that they're going to want to do multiple go-rounds with you. That's like an economy of bullshit, though. Like, do we really want to even promote that? Like, why not just be... Why? Why not just be honest about what you can do?

Because you don't know what you can do. You know, this is the thing that I opened up... Well, be honest about what you think you can do. No. No? Okay. Well, let's use it in I opened up. Well, be honest about what you think you can do. No. No? Okay. But let's use it in a practical sense. Okay.

Like, say if I bring you a car. Yeah. And I say, hey, man, I think the transmission's gone on this fucking thing. Do you know how to fix one of those things? And you're like, definitely. I know how to do it. I can do it. But meanwhile, you don't.

Right. Well, I don't want to go to you, man. Well, okay. I don't want to go to the guy down the street where he's been there for 25 years. But you've stupidly given me the car, right? No, I've asked you to go to you, man. I want to go to the guy down the street who's been there for 25 years. But you've stupidly given me the car, right? No, I've asked you a question and you lied to me. Now I go home and I say, honey, I don't know what I'm doing. I'm trying to open this thing.

I don't know, right? I better learn transmissions fast. Right. So now I go into crazy mode because now I'm terrified. This is called crossing the adaptive valley. What if it's something you can't learn fast, like Brazilian jiu-jitsu? What if I come to you and I say, hey, are you a jiu-jitsu expert, Eric? And you're like, yes, I am.

I'm like, okay, cool. Why don't you meet me in two weeks and we're going to do jiu-jitsu? And you have two weeks to go fucking crazy and learn all you know about jiu-jitsu. Okay, so what we're talking about now is this is not a trivial skill fixing transmissions is no let's slow it down okay you have to be able to have a feel for what adaptive valleys you can cross okay i see what you're saying right so so in other words if you just say like hey i could run this country uh i run businesses i run hotels yeah yeah yeah Right. So if you're a carpenter. thing like hypothetically yeah like this hypothetically the situation hypothetically okay now but my point is that there are lots of things that don't have those characteristics where

something is really hard but you may have to invent something in order to get out of it so there's you know dumb enough to get in smart enough to get out is kind of the magic formula. Bite off more than you can chew. But if you actually, you know, feel called, you can summon the will. You can summon the intellect. You can summon your friends, your resources to somehow get across the adaptive valley. But isn't the problem that it leaves open the possibility that you won't be able to get across that valley? We feel. Whereas with someone who is an expert in the field and who's worked very hard through apprenticeship, through schooling, whatever it is, to get to become an expert in this field can tell you definitively, yes, Eric, I can fix your computer.

I fix computers for a living. I know exactly how to attach a motherboard to. Let's at least agree that you're making the point that, you know't over promise yes don't under deliver yes okay but we all know that we all know that we all know that that's the general good advice so but you're advising women to do something that they shouldn't but here's the problem i'm trying to give contrarian advice the more women that over promise and under deliver the more where people are going to go, you know what? You can't fucking hire these chicks because they don't deliver. Joe, I don't think that that's right.

I think that what's happening is that there are certain characteristics that are very valuable in low variance processes. There are certain things that you want every time to work out. Okay. Like? Well. Doctors. Child rearing. Yes. Or particular to work out. Okay. Right. Well, child, child rearing or, or particular kinds of surgery. Yes. Right. It's a simple append, uh, appendectomy. I, I don't want to get fancy. Just do the append, appendectomy and don't screw it up. Right. Okay. Okay. So those are low variance processes. Now you've got some sort of crazy conjoined twins

that nobody's ever seen before right and the question is what are we going to do right well do you think that that is potentially within your ability even though nobody's ever successfully pulled it off before you have to over promise to some extent like there's a guy who's going to try to do a head transplant you know we we had a somebody who head transplant with monkeys in the early 70s Robert White or something Yeah, so you know this came out of Jim Watson said this thing which I think is just brilliant, which is if you're going to do something amazing You are by definition unqualified to do it. That's Watson from quick and Watson. That's right

Now the point was is that those guys did not know enough biochemistry to do the double helix But why do you think that that's good advice to give to women to over pro over promise I still understand it, okay If you cannot over promise you may not be able to win a bidding war for the right to do a project You may not be able to win a bidding war for the right to do a project. If you're playing it very, very safe. And other people are saying, I can get that done faster and cheaper. See, the cynic in me says you're telling people to bullshit. I like to know. I like to know whether or not someone can actually deliver on what we're talking about.

So when Bill Gates talked to IBM, he didn't have an operating system. He said that he did. That created a panic situation. How often do you have a product and you announce the date for the product before the engineering is done? But are you talking about outliers? Are you talking about people that pulled things off that, you know, the average person probably doesn't? I mean, how many people fall by the wayside?

How many people do over-promise? This is what I'm trying to get at. Yeah. Which is, if you value regularity, then under-promise, over-deliver. Right. If you value Shackleton like outliers You may have to over promise and over deliver so that wait wait wait. Okay, and you may have to risk overpromising and under deliver

And I think women are averse to that oh absolutely so women are averse to bullshitting people absolutely they are much good I like them. I know hiring chicks I'm gonna start hiring chicks for the reason you're telling them to not be the way they are, but we're failing to communicate. No, no, no, no. I'm just, I'm just playing devil's advocate and picking you apart a little bit. That's okay. But I think in other words, when, when you start hearing people say, why aren't there more female founders of, um, billion dollar plus,-plus tech companies. My feeling is that a lot of those people who do found such companies are in this kind of

fast and loose outlier idiom. And very often females, specifically because of the crazy demands of child rearing, which is like something you cannot screw up. You have to be on all the time. You have to be incredibly regular, have a very strong ethic of not screwing up, which is positive. I don't want to say that it's negative and I'm not saying that it's negative. What I am saying is that, um, if you are not happy because you are not represented in the outlier category, understand that not screwing up is not a behavior pattern that leads to outlier level results. I see what you're saying. I see what you're saying.

So they almost have to go away from their natural instincts and adopt a different pattern of behavior to achieve extraordinary success. Yeah. I mean, I would like to tell a lot more men, Hey, you can't keep promising and failing to come through. So, you know, it would be better if we had higher regularity from some men who chronically over promise and chronically under deliver. And we had more women who were trying to swing for the fences.

If the feeling is, why are we not represented at the highest level of certain kinds of activities? So what I'm trying to get at is that we are not currently feeling safe enough to have these style of conversations where we're saying, look, to what extent are we holding ourselves back? Are we holding you back? What is it that we need to be doing? Are we talking about the glass floor as well as the glass ceiling? So, you know, the brick layer unions is a famous example where if you look for pictures of brick layers, you'll generally see a bunch of guys, very few women, and there's no complaint that these have not been integrated.

So there are ways in which you don't find women in the pinball arcades, you don't find them in bricklayers unions, and you find fewer of them founding, you know, multi-billion dollar tech companies. So how do we feel about that? I don't know. I mean, the key question is, if you want to see change, you have to be risking having a real conversation about these things. And what DeMoore tried to do was to decouple intelligence from this problem and say, it's much more temperament and interest. And the person who made that point on Dave Rubin's show a month before the Google memo leaked was my wife. And she didn't get attacked because she said, look, you know, I was in an incredibly all, you know, basically an all male environment. I wasn't happy because of the temperament and interest when it got highly competitive. Uh, I didn't want to spend my energy

and my time fighting. You know, she, she has like a Nobel quality result in economics. And her feeling was it's just not worth it to get into some multi-decade pissing match with incredibly powerful people. Now, my feeling about this is those guys are going down. We're going to fight them. You know, a book came out called The Physics of Wall Street that I encourage women to read, the chapter called A New Manhattan Project. And the epilogue discusses her contribution. And, you know, in fact, we sort of walked away from it in part because she didn't want to go to war. And there's nothing wrong with not wanting to go to war. But that is a very big temperamental difference that is not a cognitive difference.

And that's what I think Damore was saying. Now, I think you and I would both agree that we would never want anyone to discriminate against women for a job that they're qualified for and that they're looking to get into. If they're good at it, we would like to see people, we would to see in a quality of opportunity right more than that more than that yeah i mean if you think about how many women are offline and you think of it as like just stop thinking about in terms of like social good and think about it as yeah like an oil field that hasn't been tapped just their neural fields i see what you're saying. Huge numbers of potential. Yeah. Right.

Like, you know, you were just talking about Jews and physics. So one quarter of 1% of the world's population have won 25% of the Nobel Prizes in physics or thereabout. Right. Very few Asian females have Nobel Prizes. If I were trying to figure out, like with oil fields, I wouldn't go to Texas to try to find more oil because I'd figured it'd be pretty well picked over. I'd try to find some other place. It's like, I'm going to find great waves, not in Hawaii, but I'm going to go to the Arctic. So let's say Asian females have a huge percentage of the world's neurons basically

untapped. If you want to make tons of money, if you want to cure cancer, if you want to do all these things, figure out how to bring those neurons fully online. So it's not just a question of nobody wants to keep them out. There's a huge prize to be won for figuring out the puzzle. Right. But has it not been proved that gender and sex have a role in what people are attracted to or interested in. So why should we assume that just because we have these systems, like whether they're economic systems, whether it's starting a business or whether it's working in tech, why should we assume that women would want to do that? Why should we encourage them to do that if they're not interested in it? And why do we put so much value in it just because it generates an incredible amount of money?

Do you think that maybe what we're looking at is natural patterns? There's natural patterns where, I mean, this is what DeMoor argued, that men gravitate towards certain things more often than women, and that was one of the things that was so disturbing to me that was overlooked about his memo. He had a full page and a half dedicated to trying to encourage in various ways to try to encourage women to get into tech. Right. Nobody talked about that. The other thing that they didn't do is no one, I mean, not no one, but many of the people that republished his work and took snippets of it, they didn't publish the

citations. Right. Or the bibliography. Yeah. Which is like, no, it's, it's immoral. Yeah. It's immoral. It's, but it's, what it is, is back to your cult analogy. Yeah.

These people are in a cult and this was a challenge to, to the ideology of the cult. No, but, but look, let's look at it from the felt experience. And the felt experience is if you're, if you've already struggled as a woman against incredible odds to be in tech to begin with,

you know that there's somebody whispering, yeah, she's not very good. They only hired her because she was female. And you're sick of this shit. So you have to appreciate that the lived experience of the women inside of Google is that they know that some percentage of those guys who are saying, hey, I just want to talk about studies are actually pissed off. Right.

So their bullshit detectors are set very, very high. They think they're hearing dog whistles everywhere. Right. And so I don't think we should be blaming women who have been subjected to this as if this is not a real thing. There really are dog whistles. There really are people who don't want women in tech and want to go back to an all boys club, blah, blah, blah. For sure. But that's not really what we're saying, are we?

No, we aren't. I don't think. Okay. No. But the issue is what if I need to do some amount, some relatively minimal amount of kind of intellectual terraforming to get all of these female neurons to work on all of these amazing problems? So what if the people who have the answer for, let's say, cancer or AGI or who knows, happen to be female? What if I needed to do some things in order to make the environment more attractive?

Like for example, programming in teams has to some extent replaced cowboy programming where just some guy with his code and you know, right. A set of headphones and he, he goes to it. Okay. So that's what he was talking about.

Like what are the, to what extent can you actually change the nature of work to bring these extra neurons online? Now that's the right reason to do this. I don't think we should value, like, what is coding? It's some sort of highly logical, very technical persnickety activity. If it's highly compensated, everybody wants in. If it's poorly compensated, only people who are sort of addicted to it would want it. Right. And it happens to be sort of high status at the moment. And so there's this feeling of, okay, this must be an all boys club. And maybe it grew up as an all boys club and maybe it has particular attributes. But the thing that I'm looking at that may be different from what you're looking at is that I'm thinking about particular high

ability females who have left the game or who have sort of gone into a lower intensity mode because there's just sick of being in an all male environment. So if I can interject, you're trying to discourage attrition. I'm trying to discourage attrition i'm trying to discourage attrition of the amazing people who have something deep and powerful and important to say so the environment of these places is contrary to them establishing whatever strengths that they have so let me give i would rather not talk about women and i'd rather talk about something i know very very well which is myself okay so four and a half years ago I gave some talks on physics which were terrifying to me because I wasn't trained as

a physicist and they got a lot of attention and publicity at Oxford I don't like the unpleasantness of intellectual one-upsmanship and negging if you you will, that takes place in particle theory. It's a turnoff to me. And so I've sort of stayed away for four and a half years because I didn't like how unpleasant and hyper, like exaggeratedly masculine it was. Why do you think that exists? Well, because it's a huge prize, right? I mean, if you're trying to gain Einstein's mantle, it's still a game worth winning because, you know, Einstein was times man of the century. So because of this huge prize, there's also a lot of critical thinking and a lot of criticizing. Yeah, but there's a lot of just wasted.

Bravado? Yeah, there's like a dick measuring contest that does nothing for me. Okay. bravado yeah there's like a dick measuring contest that does nothing for me okay right and so so my point is is that as a guy who's been in mathematics physics economics finance and tech that's five hyper male fields there are some of them that i just can't stand because they're too exaggeratedly male and you you feel like criticism is exaggeratedly male. It's not just criticism. It's just like snarky, stupid, mean-spirited, non-constructive, take-down stuff. Sounds like that Mean Girls show. It's a female show.

Maybe Housewives of Beverly Hills. That's pretty take-downy. Yeah, that's a different version. So this has made you avoid these particular pursuits. It makes lots of us men. And you think women, they would be more so likely to avoid and you would lose the contributions of a lot of these brilliant minds. kind of overly like an exaggeratedly toxic culture you get attrition from people who are really good at it or just don't like to go into work makes sense and putting that on women is not fair right i don't want to do labor economics at harvard for the same reason it's right it's a

really unpleasant i understand that once they've actually gotten to the game. Yeah. Right. But is that what keeps them from pursuing the game or is it natural inclinations towards other pursuits? And that it's a mixture. It's a mixture. Right. Like most things. Right. Well,

this is, this is really what, what DeMora was saying is he was saying there's a 50, 50 default baseline that you've adopted. I don't think I, I, James DeMora don't think that we should accept 5050 we should figure out what percentage of this has to do with

interest and inclination and that should be an adjustment and then we should test you with prejudice and right so break it into two components we're off of 50 it's a plus B where a is the natural amount that it should favor one gender or sex over the other. And then B is the extent of systematic bias. That's a very analytical and I think a very objective. I think it's exactly what he was saying. I think it is exactly. Right. You're one of the very few people that has broken it down like that. It became this weird ideological struggle. But I got into tremendous trouble because I let off a tweet that was about biologists.

Yeah. Right. Because Richard Dawkins had just been deplatformed at Berkeley where he was going to speak as a biologist. My brother. Yeah. What was that about? Why did they deplatform Dawkins? Probably because, you know, he said something uncharitable about Islam, which we have to get back to. Yeah. Right. But the key point was, is that I had three biologists Damore Dawkins and Weinstein who had all

been deep platform so I let off a tweet about you know for God's sake stop teaching people that they should run to HR rather than code which had nothing to do with harassment at all it was really just about seeing a woman, uh, who deleted her tweet. And I haven't talked about this until now because I felt that I, I reacted to her deleted tweet. And then I still, I still have it on my computer, but I didn't want to bring it up. And then I, I was left sort of holding the bag. Um, what was the tweet? It was something like, dear Google, um, don't teach my daughter, uh, to run to HR for financial freedom rather than code.

Thanks a dad. And that was interpreted as like, Oh, suck it up. If you're being harassed in the workplace, you know, do not suck it up. If you were being harassed in the workplace, I don't know how to make that clearer, but it's about if somebody's talking like a biologist and they're saying, oh, well, there's pre prenatal testosterone and, um, you know, there are these psychometrics and there, these are the conserved differences across cultures. That's not a reason to go to HR. That's a reason to figure out whether the person

is making sense, not making sense to take them on, on the arguments. figure out whether the person is making sense not making sense to take them on on the arguments that's I feel very passionately yes well I think discourse and free speech is incredibly important when you you distort what that guy was saying and you turn into this hateful attack on women you've shut down discourse and you've discouraged anybody else that has any sort of unusual opinion or unusual observation from coming forth because you're, you're essentially, you're limiting free speech to free speech that you agree with. And this is what happened. Well, I agree with this,

but think about how difficult it has been. You know, as soon as I say, learn how to over promise and then over deliver or risk under delivering that, that, that can take up 10 minutes. Like, are you telling me to bullshit and not, not come through? No, I'm not saying that,

but all of these higher level points all have lower level misinterpretations. Right. And so, you know, in this circumstance, it's also important to realize that after so many years of putting up with sort of whisper campaigns it is understandable that women are sick of the shit right so that's true to that too right yeah

so the key question is are we going to just de-platform all the biologists are we going to pretend that there are no differences are we going to pretend that gender and sex have absolutely nothing to do with each other like this sort of fantasy life that you can try to lead in a progressive context is going to destroy the underpinnings of Western civilization. Right. And I have nothing against Eastern civilization, but I'm an exponent of Western civilization. Yeah. And, you know, this gets back to the issue of will we be able to talk anywhere in a safe enough fashion that we can have really meaningful conversations so that we can actually fix these fucking problems? Right. And the only way you're going to fix these problems is if you cut out all this. The the ideological biases on the right and the left the male and the female just look at the problem for what it really is

Well, and it's tough and you know, we're challenged because we also don't see Ourselves but just firing that guy for that memo. Yeah, and then here's the my favorite part my all-time favorite part They invited women to take time off because it was so stressful. I mean, you are reinforcing the worst stereotypes that someone couldn't, if you've actually read the memo and it was so disturbing to you that you had to take time off, you are insanely fragile. Or you're looking for time off. You're looking to take time off.

Either one of those things reinforces the worst stereotypes that people have against women. Yeah, but what if the idea is different? What if the idea is that they've actually been experiencing trauma at somebody else's hands that wasn't James Damore? Okay, but that's not about the James Damore memo, though. Why have it then? Right?

Why have it directly in response have it because that's not how trauma works but you're having it directly in response to that guy's memo which wasn't in any way derogatory conversation i go to india and i see a bunch of backward swastikas with dots in them that have nothing to do with nazis right i'm fucking triggered we're going far though we're pretty far away from that let's just talk about the actual memo in the google sense like why why give women off if you first of all don't fire that fucking guy have a conversation with him and have open discourse the biggest problem was firing him because that establishes the precedent that look i called him up specifically to ask what the hell happened right and you know you've

talked to him yes he's soft-sp Soft spoken, very kind, very nice guy. James is pretty open. So I'm going to say he's wildly introverted, almost certainly on the spectrum. For sure. And his reaction was that I went to a meeting where they tried to teach diversity. The biology was wrong. They asked if I had any feedback. I told them.

And he wrote an 18 page memo. Right. But this is like, this is how his brain thinks. Exactly. Which is why he's a coder. Which is why he was a bi thinks exactly which is why he's a coder which is why he was a biologist which is why he's a champion right exactly this is how yeah and it's very important that these people not be made unwelcome because fundamentally we're going to leaven this untried social justice stuff in absolutely everything well not only that he was labeled as a misogynist over and over and over again and you're not even giving the

guy a chance to have a communicate have open communication like if you sit down with him instead of firing the big problem is is that if if you say come to the seminar we're going to teach you things the things are wrong and now we want your feedback you're just setting certain minds up for this thing for sure yeah that said and this is something I, this is like much harder to bring to this room. This room? Yeah, this room. What's wrong with this room? No, because I'm part of this constellation of people.

But we keep doing this. We keep making a mistake in my opinion, which is we keep seeing these wrong things that happen in this space. We keep seeing these wrong things that happen in this space and we lose the empathy in some sense because people are not representing themselves well. So I believe, having watched my wife in economics, that it is really corrosive to go in every day to work in an environment which does not feel welcoming. Right. For sure. Very toxic. Okay. feel welcoming to you. Right. For sure. Very toxic.

Okay. Very bad for you. So now the idea is that something breaks the camel's back and it's a proximate cause. It's not the actual problem. Right? But that's not how they framed it. They're saying they're giving people time off because this diversity memo that he put out is very-

So this is the thing about the soft targets versus hard targets, right? So the idea is that he was a soft target. But they may have, you know, many of these women may have had a manager who passed them over for promotions three times when they'd been the major contributors. Right, but it sort of reinforces irrational ideas about his memo without actually reading the core components of it and looking at it objectively. Joe, that's why I was outspoken on his behalf. I know you were. I know you were. So the point is, even while I am outspoken on Damore's behalf.

You still think there's issues that need to be addressed. I believe that fundamentally we are in danger of breaking empathy with people who do not express themselves in our idiom. And I don't like the fragility. I don't like the, you know, there is this confusion between strong people versus very aggressive people. And in general, stronger people are much less aggressive. Right. Isn't that, that's like loud yelling people think that they're winning an argument because they're loud and yelling. Well, if you watch like the Jungle Book, Shere Khan, the tiger is portrayed as unfailingly polite.

Right. Right. Because he's just, he doesn't need toingly polite. Right. Right. Because he's just, he doesn't need to prove himself. Right. So part of the problem is, is that we are waiting for the strongest voices to rise above the din and say, look,

we can't be this aggressive about everything all the time. Right. We have to actually think what's a misdemeanor, what's a felony, what's a foot fault, you know? So just to boil it all down, you don't think there's any issue with inviting women to take time off from a memo that you didn't even disagree with? I absolutely think that there's a problem there, but I don't think that that's the right place. Google's sitting on a pile of cash. It doesn't need all these people to show up. They botched this thing as far as I can tell.

Right. But why, why tell women take some time off? You just got assaulted. You were just attacked by some horrible thing that doesn't discourage or that discourages diversity. The discourage is The right thing to do would be to retain demur, right? Yes. And to say, look, we need to be able to talk about this without silencing each other, without terrifying each other, without assuming that we've heard the other's argument.

Have some public speeches where you have people oppose his ideas and have him discuss them. Right. And make it public so that maybe people can learn from it. Instead of making it this gigantic campaign against one guy's idea and just destroying his credibility in a very sort of perverse way how about just google has youtube they have all the resources in the world i understand to turn this into an educational experience exactly yeah but the big problem was firing Damore.

Yes. Because what that did was it put, it said, here's how this game should go. When you hear somebody say genotype versus phenotype, complain. When you, when something makes you uncomfortable about psychometrics,

complain. If somebody starts to disagree with the implicit association tests and they won't own their own bigotry and bias complain right well that's terrifying well it's sort of the same type of thinking that got your brother in hot water right in evergreen but what i'm trying to get at is that we are we who understand this problem, I think, better than others and are willing to talk about it in public are losing empathy because we're so sick of being worn down by these terrible arguments. Right. And so, you know, can we can we pop all the way back up to your original point about Islam? Sure. OK. to your original point about Islam?

Sure. Okay. You asked the question, why is the left seemingly weirdly supportive of practices that include female genital mutilation, honor killing, terror, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And I think it has to do with the fact that there is a fundamental inability to discuss these issues because nobody has given us the right tools and language. So the issue of political Judaism, political Christianity, and political Islam is one category. And then there's just sort of cultural Judaism, cultural Islam,

cultural Christianity. Now, quite honestly, you can easily be embedded in a Muslim community that is not devoted to political Islam and feel that you're very much in another Abrahamic faith similar to Christianity and Judaism. On the other hand, there is a much bigger issue, which is that Islam has a totality to it that Judaism no longer has. And that Christianity perhaps never had. As Sam Harris points out the line, render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, cleaves off the potential for political Christianity at the same level as political Islam. So you're dealing with this different object that doesn't quite seem to have the same

characteristics as the others. And you haven't been given any tools to sort of pull it apart. You've also been taught that if you are proud of European civilization, that you are like pro-white. Well, white is irrelevant to me. I care about European civilization just as I care about European barbarity. Having sat through European barbarity, I'm not going to give up on European civilization.

So in part, what you have is you have people who are making the vanilla confusion, where they imagine that vanilla, you know, we use it to mean the absence of anything interesting. But in fact, it's like the most interesting spice. It's this particular orchid that's incredibly flavorful. So it's like a linguistic mistake. Well, white is that to European civilization. I have no attachment to my whiteness.

I could care less. I couldn't care less. On the other hand, I have a huge attachment to Newton, to Mozart, to the terrible things that happened, you know, in the in the killing lands in the mid 20th century. So the evil, the good, the imperialism, the guilt, like that tradition, I'm very resonant with the good, the bad, and the ugly. And it is my tradition. So when I meet somebody coming from China,

I expect them to be an exponent of Chinese culture. Well, I don't wish to say, well, I don't have the right to have my own culture because I have to erase myself based on this confusion between this canon that is incredibly valuable and the skin color that is completely irrelevant to me. between the ears of people who don't look anything like me and be proud of what the software has produced than have a bunch of people who look like me who don't think in any way that I recognize. The original point was why does the left, why do progressives fail to criticize the homophobia, the sexism, the honor killings, all the horrific acts.

So let's talk about a particular example. Okay. RAWA. Have you ever heard of them? Yes. Revolutionary Afghan Women's Association. Yeah. These are the most badass chicks on the planet. They are the ones who taught little girls under the Taliban.

They are Muslim. They are proud Afghan women. They have Afghan men who risk their lives. These are people who take their lives in their own hands to educate women in one of the most repressive places on earth. That is Islam. Those are Muslims. Right. Right. Now, my point is I try to get people interested in won't you take the side of the Muslims who hold your values or the values closest to yours. And this is where we get into real trouble because for some reason we don't perceive that there is almost an intellectual civil war within Islam with forces for modernity and forces that are trying to reboot, you

know, from the original texts. Right. So do you think that we associate Islam with maybe even a smaller faction of it than we really understand? Like the ISIS faction, the Taliban, like things, things that we're terrified of. Well, people that are throwing gay folks off buildings. We somehow weirdly view them as more authentic in some sense.

And so you don't want to go against the authentic, you know, versions, but like, for example, the Wahhabist sort of Saudi Arabian variant, I never thought was going to be influential over Pakistan because South Asians tended to look down. But with all of this money that's been spent exporting the sort of particularly text oriented, very literal interpretations, I think we've gone down a terrible path where we've sort of weirdly not understood that there

is a conflict and that we actually have a dog in this fight and the dog in this fight is those who are trying to create cultural Islam and cleaving off political Islam. I don't want to live under Sharia law and I don't want to feel bad about this. I don't want to live under anybody's religious law. I don't want to feel bad about this. I don't want to live under anybody's religious law. I don't want anyone to live under halakhic Jewish law. And this is a mainstay of Western civilization. And when we can't feel comfortable about that, which is like, well, who are you to say whether we should live in under Sharia law? The answer is I come from a culture myself. It's not like I have no culture. This is my culture. We do not live under religious law,

period, the end. It's fascinating to me how many different ideologies exist and how much they vary and how people can just slot right into those and accept them as the end-all be-all period. And to me, just from an evolutionary psychology standpoint, just looking at the broad spectrum of different ideologies that people slot into, it's so fascinating. It's so fascinating how many different mindsets that people adhere to that are unwavering and rigid and how common it is. It's so uncommon to not have an ideology. I mean, it seems like this idea of, well, the numbers that we have of atheists and agnostics in America today. I mean, is this unprecedented? Is this the most, the largest group of human beings ever that are looking at things and going, maybe nobody has the answer.

Maybe this isn't the right way. Yeah. maybe this isn't the right way. Well, but I also think that a lot of those agnostics and atheists have more religious leanings than they open up to. And a lot more of the religious folks are able to run the atheist agnostic program almost perfectly between their ears as well. I don't think it's as clean as, let's say, Sam Harris might make it. That's what I was going to get to next. let's say, you know, Sam Harris might make it happen. That's what I was going to get to next.

Why is it that so many people who are atheists and agnostics adopt religious tendencies in terms of cultural behavior and what they're willing to accept and not willing to accept? A lot of the stuff that you see that you're calling earlier, when you were saying people that describe racism and, you know, do you describe it as power and influence? These cult member ideas. You're a lot of times getting these cult member ideas from people that will tell you that they're not a part of an ideology. They're not religious, but they're exhibiting dogmatic religious ideology. dogmatic religious ideology so but that was my question is is it just a a thing that we are inherently programmed to slot into yeah yeah yeah yeah this is this is the big point where

when jordan peterson and sam harris got into it the first time on sam's show that was so confusing it was well it was confusing and sam would have would have appeared to have won that one pretty decisively because Jordan tried to fold in Fitness to the definition of truth. Yeah, which does not work right Jordan's point however was really deep and I don't think he did it The service it needed to be to have done. I think they would have been better off in person I don't like conversations where people are talking on Skype. I've refused so far to do any podcast where I'm not looking at the person because I believe

that the eye contact. Yeah, it's huge. I've done one so far that was with John Anthony West, the brilliant Egyptologist. And just because he's ill and he lives in New York and it's just hard to get. And it was awkward. Yeah, I do it if I had to. But in general, it's like how many fights have happened over Unicode and ASCII? Yeah.

Exactly. It's just bad. Message board fights. How many of them would even take place if you were looking at each other, talking to each other? Right, right. Tone. Yeah, tone, social cues. It's completely ineffective form.

Video conferencing is that you find that you're staring right above the person's eyes. Yeah, because you're looking at the- So there's no trust. Yes. Yeah, it's completely you know this is like with video conferencing is is that you find that you're staring right? Above the person's eyes. There's no trust. Yes, so yeah, it's weird But what I was gonna say is that Jordan Peterson's really deep point is if I understand it So Jordan if you're out there, please correct me is only archetype Of the kind found in religion is sufficiently rich and deep to explain why humans behave the way they do there's no scientific theory that's good enough there's no purely logical there's no clearly philosophical tradition so as of the moment we are stuck with deep cultural archetype

maybe Shakespeare would be the only thing comparable to the religious canons. And the claim that you're making implicitly and the Jordan is making perhaps more explicitly is that there's something about our brains, maybe that we were parented. And so we need to give the parenting apparatus over to something else. I don't know that fundamentally finds its way to religion. that fundamentally finds its way to religion. Even if the computer that is our brain knows that it's making leaps that don't make sense. How old are your kids? Mine are 12 and 15.

Do you, when you see them, do you see things that are you and your wife and wonder like, is this, how much of this is genetics? How much of this is them mimicking their environment? How much of it is both? And then there's the sui generis stuff that comes from God knows where that I have no idea got into their head at all. Yeah. Well, culture, media, books. I mean, don't don't discount individual invention.

Sure. You know, for sure. That, too. don't discount individual invention sure you know for sure that too so i believe that my son who's 12 um has gravitated very strongly towards judaism um so we go to services i don't think he believes in a technical sense but he enjoys the service yeah but you know again so many of us just don't well the music is beautiful, the sentiments, the richness. I mean, coming back to Jordan's point. It's epic, too, right?

Isn't that part of it? You have a chance to be part of it. You're in like a Star Wars drama or you're in Kung Fu Panda. Don't you laugh at the panda. You go to some, you know, you're going to a place, whether it's a temple or a chapel or, you know, you're going to this place is uniquely ornate environment. You know, we have particular words, for example, the rabbis tell us, you know, we usually don't say this because this is what we have stolen from the angels. Well, this was the one time in the year when we can actually shout it.

And, you know, it's potent stuff. Yeah, that's potent. And, you know, you're stuff that's potent and you know you're gonna to your original point so you have some weird tradition that makes no sense that produces it a ridiculously disproportionate number of the nobel prizes let's say in science and would it be scientific to throw that away i don't think so no right so if you were a good scientist you'd say i don't know what's going on with these weird rituals it's like you know it could be the funky chicken you know or the hokey

pokey but something is mean you know if if most of the people who win nobel prizes were found to do the hokey pokey i'd probably put more effort into right and maybe it's not maybe that it's not attached to the ideas that spawn from these religions at all. Maybe it's that these people have the freedom to think about these other things because they have intense confidence in their future and their destiny and their God and their traditions and their ethics. And they're all so carved out that this, I've always thought of religion in some ways as almost being like a moral scaffolding. Like you've, okay,, you got like a real clear structure to operate under and that gives you resources. It gives you freeze up resources to do other things.

I mean, the problem is that the atheist critique, which is like there is no bearded dude in a cloud granting your wishes or listening to what you say. How do you know, bitch? That's my answer. to what you know bitch that's my answer how do you know everybody who says there's no god and nothing happens when you die like you don't know that to say that is no different than someone saying they know for sure there's a god in the cloud with a harp and saint peter and you gotta go look at a list but if we conjure our if we conjure sam and we try to steal man sam sam will say okay okay but there's all these explicit ways that you're supposed to worship god right and they can't all be right because they're mutual

incompatibilities and so how do you choose one among many and if n is right okay blah blah blah none of this is the point the point is deep archetype is its own thing and the mind seeks deep archetype it's why it cares about the Godfather pictures differently than Home Alone. Home Alone is not deep archetype. Godfather pictures are deep archetype. Right? Okay. This is why I'm on Kung Fu Panda like white on rice. That is deep archetype.

Those are actually pretty goddamn good movies. No, just the first one. The second one's not bad. My kids liked it. They're younger than yours. I don't hide behind my kids i liked it i enjoy it i enjoyed them i look i enjoy the lego movies man i said i've never seen a lego movie not bad this last ninjago one it's not bad i enjoy it so i i think that you're just messing me no i do i do enjoy it i don't even know what a lego movie would be there's a lot of fucking

dumb shit that i like though that said really yeah There's a lot of fucking dumb shit that I like, though. That said. Really? Yeah, I like a lot of dumb shit. Okay, musically, what's some dumb shit that you like? Kiss. That is dumb shit. Every now and then, man, I'm on my way to the comedy store.

I'll throw in, I was made for loving you. I was made for loving you, baby. Yeah, that's not so bad. But I prefer Angus young in the school boy hey i don't mind it either i like him as well yeah look i like all kinds of music but um i i wonder when it comes to archetypes whether or not when i was getting to when i was talking about your sons and your children whether or not their behavior is genetic whether or not it's learned experience Whether it's a combination of all things how much of what we have is just and these this

Sort of inclination towards ideologies is because pretty much everybody had them For the thousands and thousands and thousands of years that we had civilization and we are in some way of years that we had civilization and we are in some way shape or form the product of all that stuff even genetically yeah like whatever memories i don't totally understand genetics but what i do understand is that there's a lot that we don't know about why ideas get transferred from father to son from children from parents to children and there's things that get transferred even to adopted kids that come directly from their parents in a very eerie way where you go, well, what are instincts?

Why are children afraid of spiders and monsters? What is that? Is it because at one point in time someone near them was killed by a big cat thousands of years ago, back when we were living in these environments where we were preyed upon by predators. I mean, what are the reasons why? And Rupert Sheldrake had a great point about that. If you talk to children in New York City, they're not afraid of child molesters or murderers or things that they might encounter, car accidents. they're afraid of monsters. Like, why? What is a monster?

And that a monster may very well be the memory or the ancient genetic memory of predators. Oh, I think it's worse than this. I mean, I think if you look at, for example, the evil stepmother. Oh, well, that's real too, right? Okay, yeah. But what was that about? Probably it had to do with the fact that the first thing that you want to teach your children probably it had to do with the fact that the first thing that you want to teach your children is, Hey, if I'm not around and daddy remarries somebody who has no interest in you genetically,

right? Here's the emergency break glass in case of emergency plan, right? There's a little of that, but it's also how many times does that play out where someone has to tell that story because it's so calm. We all know it. We all know the story. I have a good friend of mine who was essentially tortured by his stepfather all throughout growing up. I mean, he has a horrific life story. And it's just one of a million, one of millions. Right.

But sometimes what we do is we sort of go obliquely at these things. So, for example, in Little Red Riding Hood you know is the Fox a fox or there's a wolf sorry is the wolf a wolf or is the wolf actually a stand-in well I think it's a wolf because throughout Europe through fucking thousands of years wolves preyed on people but the wolf is pretty creepy in this kind right because wolves are You know, do you know that in Paris, in I think the early 1400s, wolves killed something like, what was the number? Some insane number of people.

In Paris, like 14 people were killed by wolves. No, I didn't know that. In Paris. They're starting to show up in Paris again. Okay. Wolves are fucking dangerous animals. Wolves, look, everybody- So I think the big i think everybody everybody respects the

wolf yeah but they're clever yeah this thing about wolves is they they have some sort of ever said the better to see you with my dear right because he was being clever i mean okay but you asked the question about predators well why the big bad wolf the three pigs it's all wolves there's a lot of wolves in ancient folklore. It's to stay the fuck out of the woods. It's always stay out of the woods. Right. Because there's wolves in the woods. Right.

So what's the woods? Is it Central Park? No, it's real woods. People lived near the fucking woods. There wasn't those kind of cities when they wrote these stories. When the Grimm brothers were around, there was no Central Park. Right? Yeah.

All I'm suggesting is that a lot of our information comes coded so that it doesn't point too directly. Maybe stepmothers are cunts and wolves are dangerous. Stepmothers, I take no responsibility for this, man. There's a lot of amazing stepmothers. Now, let's say 30 seconds worth of things about wonderful stepmothers. There's amazing stepmothers there's amazing stepmothers but there's obviously some monsters there's obviously some monsters no no but just to your point it's not always stepmother stepfather the question is right what happens

when mommy or daddy remarries yeah sometimes it's awesome right often it's not right and why because of this issue about genetic relatedness so you know sure to your earlier question i was stunned i didn't think about um 23 and me as a religious test but when i sent my saliva uh off to be uh analyzed it came back you're a jew like 98.6 percent coming well i didn't i didn't know my religion was in my saliva. It didn't even occur to me. Oh. Yeah, but that's the weird thing about Jews, right? Is that it's a religion, but it's also an ethnicity.

Right. Right. Right. And so the idea is that all of these rules, you know, dietary restrictions, rules for who gets to marry, at what level in the culture, where do you put your resources? Are you proselytizing or do you try to live at steady state? Do you discourage people converting in? All of these things are some sort of toolkit for living and it has produced more physicists than, you know, outfielders, right? So it's not good at everything. It's good at some things at the

exclusion of others. And so the question about how does the stuff co-travel, um, it co-travels in some way that's very mysterious where, you know, do we pass on trauma? Uh, I can say in my family for sure that my family stopped being religious when my great uncle Sasha was killed right at the end of World War II. And my great grandmother said no compassionate God would kill somebody so stupidly who had so much to give to their family and change the family from some kind of orthodoxy to orthodox atheism. And then, you know, for three generations, you have Jews marrying Jews with nobody believing in anything. Why are they continuing to marry Jews? Why are they celebrating these holidays? Well, it's because fundamentally a switch got

flipped. But my guess is that the orthodox were always questioning whether there was a God. The atheists are always questioning whether there's a God at some level because our brains are not just simple computers to be, you know, rid of bias. They have particular needs. So my four things that I care about are truth, fitness, meaning, and grace. All of those trade off amongst each other. And when I said there's something like this on Sam Harris's program, a lot of the people who wrote in said, Oh, you know, it shows that he doesn't care about truth. And, you know, I, I felt like, no, it just shows that you guys don't understand how important, what is the argument? I understand the argument. Sam would like to

make an argument that the better and more rational our thinking is, the more it can do everything that religion once did. So if you've had a DMT or an LSD experience that can give you meaning and transcendence, you know, if you can think your way more accurately through a problem that should increase your fitness, you know, maybe grace is something that's independent and you have to figure out whether that's important to you, but that's a choice and an, you know, an elected objective. And my belief is, is that a lot of these things are actually preset and that there's more antagonism between them. So I think of myself as an atheist, but it's only because there's a room in my mind that I try to keep very, very clean and analytical that I, I sort of make the first among equals, but I have needs for these other things.

I haven't, you know, there are times when the truth doesn't give me enough meaning and I'll start storytelling. Okay. You know, we're, we're surrounded, we've got to fight our way out, you know, like all that kind of narrative. So Joseph Campbell's type stuff. type stuff yeah sure don't you think that there's lessons to be learned in those right but it's and there's meaning in all those stories and there's there's a longing that we have for a lot of those heroes journey type narratives but um

but truth is significantly more important than just these lessons that we learn from heroes journeys like learning the lessons is important they're fascinating they're interesting the stories are amazing but what's really going on like what biological processes are responsible for certain types of behavior you know what what really is happening to human bodies under certain conditions what is really happening to the earth what is really happening as far as, you know, yeah. My friend,

Peter Thiel critiques me on this point, just as you have, where he says you, Eric under value and underweight the role of truth. But I worry that we're not even having a conversation. If I think about, um, my personal physics hero,

Dirac, uh, who's the guy who came up with the equation for the electron. Less well known than the Einstein equations, but arguably even more beautiful. In order to predict that, he needed a positively charged and a negatively charged particle. And the only two known at the time were the electron and the proton to make up, let's say, a hydrogen atom. Well, the proton is quite a bit heavier than the electron. And so he told a story that wasn't really true, where the proton was the antiparticle of the electron. And Heisenberg pointed out that

couldn't be because the masses are too far off and they'd have to be equal. Well, a short time later, the anti-electron, the positron that is, was found, I guess, by Anderson at Caltech in the early 30s. And then an anti-proton was created sometime later. So it turned out that the story had more meaning than the exact version of the story. So the story was sort of more true than the version of the story that was originally told. And I could tell you a similar story with Einstein. I could tell it to you with Darwin, who didn't fully understand the implications of his theory, as is evidenced by his screwing up a particular kind of orchid in his later work,

not understanding that his theory completely explained that orchid. So there's all sorts of ways in which we get the truth wrong the first several times we try it, but the meaning of the story that we tell somehow remains intact. And I think that that's a very difficult lesson for people who just want to say, look, I want to, you know, like Feynman would say, look, if experiment disagrees with you, then you're wrong. And it's a very appealing story to tell to people. But it's also worth noting that Feynman never got a physical law of nature.

And it may be that he was too wedded to this kind of rude judgment of the unforgiving. You know, you can imagine you were to innovate in Brazilian jiu-jitsu. The first few times might not actually work. But if you told yourself a story, no, no, no, this is actually genius and it's working. And you're like, no, you just lost three consecutive bouts. Well, that may give you the ability to eventually perfect the move, perfect the technique, even though you were lying to yourself during the period in which it was being set up. It's a little bit like the difference between scaffolding and a building. And too often,

people who are crazy about truth reject scaffolding, which is an intermediate stage in getting to the final truth. So. Well, the problem with that analogy is that some techniques work, but they just don't work for you. And the reason why they don't work for you is you don't know them good enough yet. Right. You're not. You're going to eat that? Yeah.

You have a problem with that? No, we can just wrap this up if you're that hungry. We're on the home stretch, buddy. We've got seven more minutes. You can't take it anymore? I'm sorry. Insulin lower issues? I've got issues.

Crushing? Mm-hmm. Listen, we can just wrap this up anyway. This was a really fun conversation. I feel like eating that bar has changed. You crashed it. I know. You were so hungry, you had to eat in the middle of talking.

I was told I could go to the bathroom here. You can. Do you need to go? Well, he said you could do it for like 60 to 90 seconds. People go fucking crazy when they hear people chewing on the microphone. It is the number one thing that people complain about on this podcast. May I apologize to America? No, no worries.

We've had these fight companion podcasts and people are fucking potato chips and they're eating potato chips on the podcast. And I just would get my Twitter would be filled with people fucking furious. So just letting you know. America. Just hang in there, dude. I'm sorry. You gotta be comfortable being uncomfortable.

Like, a couple minutes. I can do it. What I was gonna say is that analogy is not the best analogy because some things work, they just don't work for you. Like, one of the analogies that's used in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu

is like someone will try a technique and it doesn't work for them. And they're like, well, that technique's no good. And I'll say, okay, well, you know that head kicks work, right? You've seen people kick people in the head and knock them unconscious, right? Okay. Try to kick me in the head. Well, I don't know how to kick people in the head.

There you go. Even if I show you how, you're not going to be able to do it. If I show you how to kick people in the head, do you think you're going to be able to kick someone who actually knows how to fight in the head? No. They're going to see it coming. It's going to be too slow. You're not going to have your neural pathways carved to the point where that thing just slices right in there. You're not going to know how to set it up. You're not going to have the confidence and the experience to execute it. The difference between that and the truth is very different because it doesn't require some sort of physical process for you to master before you can execute it with sufficient prowess

to actually be successful. Well, I think, you know, this has to do with placeholder truth. You know, the famous example of trichinosis and pork, where if you believe that God hates those who eat the pig you think that's what that's about I think it's about tricking it most likely right or various other parasites right right so you know how long well malaria right bad air shellfish red tide right don't eat shellfish right so all of these things have to do with I'm not quite sure that I can explain to you why this is a bad thing. But let's have a placeholder and then we'll refine it over time as we come to understand what it is that we're doing. Unless we're rigid with our ideology and we go by some ancient scripture. And that ancient scripture says that anything with a cloven hoof that eats its own cud you know like they there's all these weird laws like this is

your what you're allowed to eat this is what you're not allowed to eat except that's very often not how things work right so my fear is is that it's a little bit the emily latela effect on religion where the atheist concept of a religious person is usually the sort of robot that just looks things up in the text. And in fact, what you often find is that you're rewarded for brilliance in a religion by not having to follow the rules nearly as closely if you become adept at argument. Sort of like really Christian people with a cross tattooed on them? That could be, right?

For example, in Islam contract marriage where you need to get married for a few hours so that you can sate your urges with your wife who then becomes not your wife a short time later. You're arbitraging the letter of the law against the need for some sort of human realism. So they have contract marriages where you like, let's get married for a day. Yeah. Really sweet.

Good move. I think everybody should do that just to find out what the hell that person's really like. You don't know anybody until you actually marry them. Once you're shacked up with them and you're living for a while and they have access to all your money, then you're like, then you get to find out what they're really like.

1.6 billion people are considering your words right now. I don't know if it's a good thing or a bad thing. I do think that. I don't think that many people listen to this podcast. I think we're okay. You know, we had a situation, I think, in Lake Kinneret in Israel where people were using breadcrumbs to fish as bait. And the question was, well, does that invalidate the entire water supply of Israel during Passover? And so rabbis had to be convened. And if, you know, paid a sufficient amount of money, genius level rabbis

could figure out why it was okay to drink the water during Passover. So the issue of getting around your own rules is a time-honored religious tradition where any book that is not a book for living and survival and thriving is consigned to the despot of history. And so the fact that these things have been around for so long in general means that they have their own means of evading these self-extinguishing programs that would seem to doom them. Well, some of them, those self-extinguishing programs, the way they evaded is through fear,

right? I mean, isn't that the fear of reprisal, cheating on them? Yeah. Right. And so the idea is of, you know, if you attack on Yom Kippur, does that mean you can't fight back because you're supposed to be atoning for your sins? No. If you want to survive, you're going to figure out a way to fight on Yom Kippur. What about Ramadan?

I guarantee you nobody, you know, if it were so easy to defeat people using their own religious traditions against them, we wouldn't know the name of these religions and we wouldn't know the genius of the books. How many did we lose? How many religions have we forgot what they were? You mean like Joe and Ted's Excellent Religion? Yeah. Yeah. How many of them just didn't make the cut? You know, I mean, how many from Epic of Gilgamesh from those days?

I would guess tons. What did they call it back then? What was the Heaven's Gate? Remember? Oh, yeah, the dudes who with the Nikes that killed themselves when the the comet or the self castrating Yeah, yeah, the one guy who let it was self castration Shakers right shaker furniture that they were down to like one or there were three shakers at some point Then there was like one and they were accepting. No, no, no new recruits. My favorite is the Amish

They have that uh what's that called romskeller what is that crazy thing nuts yeah they go nuts for like a year what's it rumspringa is that is that one one year where they just go fucking hog wild they don't have to follow the rules and then they usually feel so lost and disconnected that they they i think the majority of them return to being amish is that right yeah yeah i'm pretty sure they find their way to burning now? Nah. No, I don't think they go that kind of nuts.

I think it's more like booze and ACDC type nuts. I think they just fuck a lot and get crazy and throw rocks. You know? I'm going to look for the Amish camp next year. Eric, this is a really beautiful conversation. It exceeded my expectations. I really enjoyed it. And we should do this more often.

Joe, thanks for having me. Let's do it again. Terrific. Thanks man. Perfect. Alright folks, we'll be back tomorrow with the great and powerful Christina Pazitsky, whose Netflix special is out today!