The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss - Tim Minchin Discussing Science, Culture, & Comedy

Episode Date: January 18, 2022

Tune in for an excellent conversation between Tim Minchin and Lawrence Krauss. They dive into a variety of interesting subjects, such as Tim Minchin's upbringing, his scientific interests, comedy, culture, the state of the world, and even a few of Tim Minchin's current projects that is he working on now. Get full access to Critical Mass at lawrencekrauss.substack.com/subscribe

Hi, I'm Lawrence Krause and welcome to the Origins Podcast. This episode is with the amazing Tim Minchin. The first time I heard him sing a single song, I became a fan. And ever since then, I try and follow everything he does. His musical, Matilda, is simply brilliant. And I have enjoyed every interaction I've had with Tim. In fact, we interviewed him for our movie The Unbelievers. I was so happy after a bunch of years to find him.

finally catch up with him remotely when he was in Australia. And we talked about everything from his early childhood to why he understands science so well, what might make him upset, and then discuss social issues, the state of the world, his current projects. And I think you'll find it fascinating as well as incredibly entertaining. Tim is a remarkable human being and I'm privileged to know him and I'm so happy he agreed to be on the podcast to spend time with us here. So I hope you enjoy Tim Minchin. If you're watching this podcast on YouTube, I hope you'll consider subscribing to our YouTube channel because only a small fraction of the many, many people who watch the show actually subscribe.

And if you do, you'll get notices of upcoming episodes and other things we try and produce for our YouTube subscribers. Also, the program is produced by the Origins Project, trying to bring science and culture more broadly to humanity. And I hope some of you will either consider supporting that foundation or supporting us through subscribing to this podcast through Patreon. Either way, enjoy the podcast and enjoy Tim Minchin. Well, Tim, I'm so happy to have a chance to talk to again. It's been quite a while, but it's, you know, I, as you probably know, I've been a fan of yours since we first met. And we first met in, you know, when we remember when we first met? I do. No, I was trying to figure it out. No, my memory is, uh, is absolutely hopeless.

It's always, well, it was the reason rally, I think is the first time. Oh, that's right. 2011. Is that the first time we met? I think it is. And right around then, right around the same time, my guys had you, recorded you for the unbelievers because we're making that movie then as and yeah that's right and uh and and and you're great and we and actually we filmed that we filmed that little bit from the unbelievers in you were in in in costume people may not realize it yeah it's back stage at an arena in england somewhere playing jesus yeah in wales right there you go we we drove all the way to wales to see you and

and uh and yeah you were all made up as judas and it was It was a wonderful way to record that. I was amazed that you agreed to even do that right before you went on stage. But anyway. And I have to say that, and this is true. I always thought I was pretty clever. And then the first time I listened to you, I thought, you know, it's like that crocodile Dundee thing.

That's not clever. This is clever. And I'm good at faking clever. Well, you know, We'll get there. But I want to, anyway, I've always, we'll get to my unveiling.

Yeah, that's right. We'll slowly tear apart the layers. Yeah. But in fact, I want to begin, though. I mean, we have very similar sensibilities

about a lot of things. And in fact, also comedy is some, humor is something that's very important to me in my, my lecture and my science. And I want to talk

about that combination. But I wanted, this is an origins podcast, and I want to begin with your beginnings. And I don't want to, I want to try and do an like a different way. I know he'd been interviewed a million times about some of the stuff,

but you were born in the United Kingdom. Now, your father and grandfather were surgeons, is that right? That's right, yeah. What were they doing in England? What was your father doing in England? In the 70s, when dad was decided to specialize, he wanted to become what was then called a general surgeon, Australia being, you know, still a colony officially of the United Kingdom. We've always had this sort of sense of the motherland, you know, European Australians have, and a cultural, a bit of a cultural cringe. I think it's getting better with every decade that passes. But certainly in those days, for very good reasons, if you were ambitious Medico,

it was you had you got better credibility if you went and did your fellowship at the at fracks not at the fellowship of the royal yeah it's fricks and fracks fellowship of the royal college of surgeons in the UK or fellowship of the royal australian college of surgeons and the latter was not as credible and it was just something that people did like a gap year you go and do your fellowship in in the UK so dad got posted to northampton and was there for three years working in northampton general hospital to become a surgeon. And that's when you were born. Yeah, my brother was already alive when they went, and they came back with a second child.

Okay, so your brother's, how much older than you? No, three years? Three years. Give a take, roughly. And then you have sisters that are younger. Yeah, that's exactly right. Okay. I've been interacting with one of them in the last few weeks, Katie.

Yeah, one of them works for me now, post-COVID. Yeah, excellent. Now, what I want to do is I've been amazed at your scientific sensibility. So clearly, you know, when I realized your father and grandfather were surgeons, that's part of it. Although I have to say that, you know, my mother wanted me to become a doctor and my brother to lawyer. I was a Jewish boy, you know, and my brother became a lawyer, which is worse. But I wanted to be a doctor until I was probably in high school. But my mother made the mistake of telling me that doctors were scientists.

And so I got fascinated by science. And it was only in middle of high school that I kind of realized that, I mean, practicing, I'm not putting down doctors because you're using empirical evidence and all the rest. But that to be a scientist was different than to be a doctor. And it really killed my mother when I decided not to be a doctor. It took her many, many years to. Yeah, well, my dad would say that he's just a plumber, you know. there are obviously all different sorts of doctors

and a lot of doctors and surgeons do research as part of their stuff. But my dad was just a very, very good surgeon and very, very good man. He is still a good man and a kind, you know, his patients loved his bedside manner and stuff. And he was a very, very good surgeon, but he wasn't looking to push the boundaries of what was known.

He just loved doing his job. Yeah, no, well, and at least, you know, like me, he did something useful every day. And yeah, but I want to know what gave you your scientific sensibilities. Your fascination with process, rationality, empiricism, you know, was it watching them? What I was really kind of want to ask you was almost the same question, by the way, I asked Ricky Jervais for the mention. Why aren't you a scientist?

I can tell you why Ricky's not a scientist. Oh, I'd be happy to hear that. I don't think I am a good science brain. I think I'm a good philosophy of science brain. So my dad, you know, as I was, when I was a teenager and friends of mine were sort of getting into alternative medicine or reading the Celestine prophecy. And every now and then I'd have a chat with my dad and I'd say, you know, oh, my friend's cured is asthma with the Batako method or, you know, I'm not even sure if that

particular thing I mentioned is, has data or not. But anyway, and my dad would just be so boring about it. He'd be, well, I mean, either there's evidence or there's not. And at that age, I was like, that's just boring way to look at things. I had an adolescent sort of relativism, which, by the way, being an arts type, was promoted all through my university degree. this idea that knowledge is a relativistic construct and that science is a patriarchal, you know, not always, but it was always there shimmering. And in order to be a good 90s West Australian chilled guy, you know, long-haired, barefoot guy, it required you to be more open-minded than just, you know, data. And so I guess I was in that headspace, although never, never fully down

the rabbit hole. And then I did, you know, in first year, uni, among the many wonderful things I learned in the English department and the visual arts department and having sex with my girlfriend, I also did philosophy 100 and psychology 100 and then more philosophy and psych units through second year as well. And I think that really appealed to me, the clear pathway. And it still does. It excites me that there are, there have been developed over thousands of years of humanity, fantastic heuristics about how best to solve problems, how best to get the most possible answer, the most realistic answer. And that's so exciting to have those tools and to try and hone them and develop them. And my brother was, as a

honours in philosophy, it was very good at philosophy. So I guess, and I'm a very good friend of my brother, so I was always sort of slightly wanting to follow him. Did he influence you as a kid? Did he? Oh, everything. My brother played guitar and he's like, Tim, play this on the piano and he played hockey. So he played hockey together. All four of us are really just kind of acolytes of one another.

We're very close and we all kind of, we all do an arts degree. We all played hockey. We all played music. You know, we just got along. But it didn't really kick until my mid-20s, I think, when I started really looking into you know, erroneous belief, basically. There was this book of all the books you could read. I went on to read Ma Sagan and, you know, eventually that all those Dawkins and all

that lot. But I started with Francis Wien's How Mumbo Jumbo has conquered the world. And I don't know if you've even, and it was just a bit of a, probably what would now be called a bit of a right wing, you know, like grumpy old white guy going, oh, you know, this is bollocks. And I was like, hmm, he had a funny tone. And I'm sure, I haven't read it for years. I'm sure he wasn't particularly right or left.

He was just annoyed at misinformation and erroneous thinking. And then I actually found Randy in this kind of skeptical movement. And Randy wrote to me. And then, and that intercepted with my comedy career starting to take off. And so suddenly I was the guy doing that stuff on stage. I see. Okay. So I was wondering where it came.

in. Well, we'll get more because I, yeah, we'll get more because musical comedy doesn't quite, in my opinion, doesn't come near capturing you. And, and, and, and, and, I know, but, but what did, what did your mother, I'm trying, so it was, did, you, did, you know, did, you know, it was, did, you, said you knew you were in arts. I'm always amazed how people know that. I mean, so did that mean, so did that mean, you weren't good in math or, or, or did it mean? Oh, yeah, no, I wasn't great at math. I don't think I didn't, I wasn't burning any bridges, but I guess I knew, you know, I was good at writing poems and stuff in primary school. And, and I taught myself, you know, I played a little, I did a few lessons, but mostly through high school, I was just playing piano all the time just by myself,

with, just mucking around. And so I guess by the time I finished high school, I knew I was going to do an arts degree. When I got my what was called the TEE, my leavers exams for school, my year 12 levers exams, I didn't even look at the result because I knew I was going to get in to do a Bachelor of Arts at the University of West Australia, which is what I knew I wanted to do because my brother had done it and my mother had done it and my grandmother and both my uncles and, you know, but I didn't care about my overall score. I just wanted to know what I got in English literature because I had this sneaking suspicion

that all the guys getting A's in high school, when I was getting bees were just regurgitating crap. And when I did the exams, which are marked by university lecturers, I had this suspicion that I might jump. And I did. And I was thrilled because it just confirmed a little thing. I'm like, I think my sideways thinking is going to be valuable in this next phase of my life

in a way that it is not in high school. It was a big moment for me. I got a really good score in that paper. And that sort of helps define myself. myself as someone who's who's a better lateral thinker. Well, it also got you. It's interesting to hear because I remember it, I had a kind of epiphany in high school too.

You know, I always did very well in a lot of different subjects as it turned out. But, but, and I, you know, and I was sort of obsessed for a while with, with having the highest grades, which I did. And then suddenly, I guess sometime in the middle of high school, maybe it was because I got into Sartre or maybe or Camus or whatever, but I began to think of the, of, it just, it didn't make any sense to be worried about those numbers. And it was really a, and I realized that, of course, you know, grades, you know, and since after that being a professor, grades are an interesting thing.

And you're right. People can do well, but not think necessarily. Yeah. And I don't. Go on. I don't have, I have this conversation with my kids because my, you know, I've got a kid starting high school next year and one halfway through. And there's so many ways in which it is a different time. Obviously, they're doing school down a computer screen here in Australia.

And my kids are very different from me. and they're not, they're neurodivergent. So my daughter's ASD and, you know, and of course that's, that is a function of both some changing genetic things, some neurological happenstance and a massive increase in our diagnostic capabilities. So that's different. And so I as a parent am armed with a lot more knowledge about the sort of thinkers my kids are because they've all done cognitive testing to figure out why they're so weird.

And but also I just, I keep saying to, especially in COVID, I just go, just don't just part. I sit my daughter down and go, why don't you not study for this one to see what scraping by feels like? Because you need to stop being so anxious about this stuff. I spent my whole childhood being shouted out by my parents to study harder because I was so chilled. Not chilled, but I just didn't like doing work. My kids are so, the culture has just taught them that. this anxiety. I don't understand where it comes from. But I also say to them when they say, I'm never going to use this math, I'm never going to use this. I say, what you're doing is

learning how to learn. You're literally wiring your brain to have pathways that allow you to problem solve. It doesn't matter whether you're never going to use it. And it doesn't even matter whether it's reductive and just regurgitative because you're training your brain. When you get to uni, you can start using that tool to go sideways, but don't second guess yourself. Well, I hope we'll get to that later on. I want to talk about this because I'm not, unfortunately, I'm not at least in the US and some extent of Canada, and I'm not sure whether it's hit Australia yet. I'm not sure where you're allowed to go sideways anymore at universities. Oh, yeah, well, that's a chat. Yeah, we'll have that chat in a while, but let's,

let's go back to you. And, uh, yeah, me, I'm awesome. Yeah, and, but so, but, but, but, so, but, but, You mentioned your mom went to University of Western Australia, did an arts degree. So what does she do? Well, they got married. I mean, her, she would say she was a mum. And that was her main thing. She was a carer and very much of that era.

Although I can fiercely defend the right of men and women to be carers. I think it's, be family managers. I think it's a fantastic thing. Weirdly, in 20, 2021. My wife does that as a full-time job. And it's incredibly full on, not just because we have interesting kids, but because we have a very complicated life. And I don't, I've never bought or sold one of our homes or I've never, I don't organize the travel or the various migrations. We've done. It's all Sarah's job, you know, but my mom was like that. So she had four kids. She got married at

22. Um, she gave up her, um, I don't know what she was, she was a librarian, actually a trained librarian for a bit, but had kids. Dad was a surgeon and was worked 14 hours a day. And then eventually she went and worked in his rooms a bit and did some bookkeeping. And then she went and did half a diploma of education and then felt guilty because she wasn't giving her fourth child the same attention. And she gave her first child and all this stuff that women of that generation and still have to deal with that men seem to shrug off. Well, yeah, okay, interesting. But do you know what she did? What did she, what did she, what did she, what did she study in school? Oh, she, uh, like, she, um, like, she,

she did English same as me I think yeah yeah yeah I know it's interesting I was gonna say that so she was I guess your primary care yeah and and you know and so you're sort of your appreciation of empiricism in some senses I don't want to psychoanalysis but see you know from you clearly appreciated that for your father but your mom seems to have had rubbed off more on you in in terms of in terms of sort of I don't know if it's that you well you know very well it's not that simple but i understand the question um i suspect i i tend to my reading of of the information we have is that we're probably more wired than we like to think um and i think the brain i have is is a is a genetic function of my parents you know my parents were not very

We're close, but dad never sat me down and gave me big lectures, nor did my mom say, you must read this, you know, they were busy. We played mostly played sport. I mean, I played hockey five times away. Real hockey. I didn't know. Oh, field hockey. I was going to say, yeah, I grew up in Canada. I didn't, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's not hockey. This is hockey. That's exactly. Americans and Canadians go, that's not hockey. And I'm like, you know those little countries, India, Pakistan, China, Holland, Germany, Australia. That's hockey. That's one of the most popular games on the planet.

Anyway, so we were not, it was not what I would think of as what the experience in my cliches, I think of a Jewish family where, you know, intellectualism and achievement is very on the table and disgust at night. And, you know, we just, my parents. had sort of strong let us know that taking what a British person would say taking the piss is not

acceptable. You don't rest on your laurels, you don't cruise, you do your best and they used to get very cross with me because I would say Tim, you can get A's easily and you're getting B's. Your sister can get B's when she works hard so we're not

on her back, you know, like so I think I don't know how it's hard to track the influence and my intellectualism which I like to put the word pseudo in front of but that's probably false modesty branding or something. I think so. My type of intellectualism is a thing that I discovered. I am autodidactic in nearly everything I do and I have a brain that wants to problem solve.

And I really, it is, yes, a lot my granddad's brain. fixing things with wire and inventing solutions to logistical problems and being quite didactic in his thinking. And it is quite my mum's side of the family who are publicans and musos and laugh like drains and drink too much. And it's the tool I was, you know, either blessed with or cursed with my filter. Yeah, yeah. And it's interesting because, yeah, it's funny. I, as I said, I came from a Jewish family. And I wouldn't have considered it until, intellectual in any way. Either my parents finished high school, but which is why that was so important to them that I think we became professional. So I be a doctor, my brother, lawyer. My brother actually

became a professor of laws. It's worse because he creates lawyers. But anyway, I want to psychoanalyze that because I, I think, and maybe this is a conversation for a bit later on, but I wouldn't mind talking about how sort of defensiveness or, um, insecurity breeds achievement. And I am interested to hear that your parents didn't finish high school, but you and your brother obviously had incredible intellectual capacity combined with a like, I'll fucking show them sort of attitude. And I think I've got for some reason, some a bit of a I'll show them attitude. So it breeds ambition in a way that's sometimes not very attractive. Yeah, no, it isn't. And we'll talk about. I love what you're

wife said about you, one of the things I actually want to quote. But anyway, because, you know, I feel like, and again, since I mean, Prince Edward Island, I feel like a kindred spirit to you with so many ways. For that, I'll show them attitude. But, you know, that, so that, you know, that professionalism was important. But the science is hard to know. I think it was neighbors and it was reading about scientists for me. But did you, I don't want to leave this science thing for long because I've been so impressed with. with your take on a number of aspects of science over the years. And you're right.

In some sense, it's philosophy of science. But did you read any science? Did you, when you were a kid, did you, did you ever have any teachers that turned you on to that? Or who are your favorite teachers? No, I really wasn't, I really wasn't a science head in school. I quite like biology, but I was really just getting through it. There was a point where chemistry clicked for me in like year 11,

where I came bottom of the year in semester one and top of the year in semester two, which says something about the sort of, I'm like, okay, fine, I get it now. But also I was incredibly, and this says something about my personality, something probably quite boring, I was incredibly influenced by whether or not I liked the teacher. I was not one of these people that just got on with it. I'm like, if I don't like this teacher, they can suck my, you know, I just, no, wasn't even that. It wasn't even that chippy. It was just like, I'm not interested in that. That person's boring. Well, I think, you know, but that's not so unusual, Tim. I think,

no, I've been a teacher. And I, I was a teacher ostensibly for 40 years, but I never really felt like I was teaching in a sense. I mean, in this, you learn yourself. You talk about being audited, but everyone is in a sense. You only learn what you teach yourself at some level. And what a teacher does, it seems to me, and my, I thought, of my role as a teacher, someone as a guide, but a motivator, really more than anything, a motivator because that motivates someone to go home and learn, but really not the actual classroom time. And that's hard, because that is a talent.

You know, I have publicly stated so many times how much I admire teachers and how I think they're undervalued in commercially and just philosophically in our society. And I really think, and if I hadn't have ended up doing what I was doing, I hope I would have been a teacher and I hope I would have been good because I do think my brain is good at passing information and putting it in packages that fun. Well, exactly. Packaging. I mean, that's partly what your career is.

It's packaging information in an entertaining way that gets people to, I mean, actually gets people to think. You know, also gets people to have fun and be happy and all the rest or maybe be sad at times. But that's, yeah, that's a different kind of teaching. and that's what I mean by what you do is more than musical comedy. In fact, I have to, one of the, you know, I've read, I have a lot of notes here, by the way,

but I do my homework. It's very kind of you to do the homework. I feel bad that you've wasted time looking into my... It's fun. No, it's fun. It's fun. It's like when I write books, I get to... You know, I wouldn't have done it otherwise,

so this gives me the opportunity to learn, you know, anyway. But one of these quotes, was, look, a reviewer once wrote that you were to musical comedy, what Darwin was to evolution and Einstein was to physics. And I thought, that's got to be the quote that makes Tim more happy than anything else. Because if I think of the kind of things you talk about, Darwin and Einstein, my God, you know, anyway. Well, sure, except that's, I mean, there's hyperbole and then there's absurdity. And that's absolutely ridiculous. But I suppose the reason it's ridiculous is because I might be musical comedy,

Einstein, but musical comedy and physics are very different magistrate. One is slightly more impactful on the world. You mean, well, yeah, but I hope that one day physics will become just as impactful. Anyway. Okay. I didn't really answer your question.

I'm not, I never had a science nerd thing. It really did come late, like my dormant dad brain, which as you say to come to your your little bit of Freud, my mum and that energy was more of an influence and my siblings and our love of sport and the beach and just being busy and going to my dad's farm all the time. My granddad, my granddad had a farm and we were there and doing all this just physical stuff.

The logically, nerdy brain that was good for a, comprehending some parts of science, but mostly the philosophy of science, was just sitting there waiting for me to find that interest. And my way into science was the philosophy of science and the more psychology or the intersection of neurology and psychology that makes us believe what we believe and perceive what we perceive. That's my interest level. And I've tried to get good at listening to science podcasts and reading science and you know like i've got all your books and i struggle you know sure and i should struggle it's a universe from nothing should make you struggle it makes you struggle it makes me struggle too but i also as i often say really

the buying the books is so much more important than reading them yeah yeah yeah it's my smoses i gather a certain type of intellectual dust you touch them and it's kind of osmosis you get That's what I always kind of. I have a lot of books in my shelf that I kind of touched, and I wish I read more. But by the way, well, first of all, I appreciate it. But, you know, it is interesting that, you know, it's the right, it's something there and it hits you at the right time. And, you know, I wanted to, actually, neurology when I was, because I didn't really know what physics was or anything, it was actually a book about Galileo that got me, but I wanted to be a neurosurgeon. Because for me, I was interested in the brain and being a doctor. And so I didn't know any other kind. I never heard in neurology or even to some extent psychology.

But the brain is certainly fascinating. And I like to tell people that I became a physicist because it's just so much easier, really, I think. Because the brain is the universe we have in our skulls. Yeah. And it's but it's so much more. It's the whole thing. Exactly. And it's also much less well understood than to say the universe.

And that's fascinating. And someone once pointed out to me that you can tell how well something is understood by the number of books that are written about it. And so the things that aren't understood have lots of books written about them. And you know, there's all these books on consciousness because I don't think anyone really understands the consciousness. If there's one good book on something, then, you know, like how to make a shovel. Yeah. And that book's being written. Yeah.

You can make their shovels. Yeah, Dirac wrote a book on quantum mechanics. you don't need that and we'll get back to quantum. The other way you can tell whether something's understood is how many pseudo understanders exploit the gaps in our knowledge

for profit. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And yeah, and source, there aren't as many people who exploit physics except I always got mad. I've gotten mad a long time for the people who exploit quantum mechanics for that because all the words sound so neat, the secret and all this garbage.

and it's really... Oh, my God. Well, you know, the other... Sorry, go on. I'll say we could do two hours, just getting angry about the secret. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, exactly.

You know, Australia really exports, so anyway, it doesn't matter. Yeah, some... There's a lot of... Yeah, yeah, exactly. But some other good things. It promotes the naturalism fallacy. A culture like ours is very ripe for the naturalism fallacy. Like, oh, we just love the ocean, and nature and the bush, and it's like, that's all good.

and therefore, I'm David Avocado Wolf, and I'm going to send you a bunch of bullshit. Exactly. But, you know, part of what is interesting, too, that I can relate to when you talk about your childhood, and, you know, I say this, I'm older than you, and I still demown it, but I knew when my daughter was growing up,

because we, you know, we went out and played. You know, that's, we wouldn't, we weren't. And now these kids are programmed. And, you know, and I noticed this, like, just programmed from, if they're not doing something productive all the time, it's like, and it's just not, I can't help but think it's sad. And it's part of this coddling that, that kids have. But I remember, you know, going, I hated going into these school meetings. My daughter was young. And I, you know, I taught at the time I taught Yale.

And now these people were talking about how. Oh, their kid in grade three wasn't writing well enough and how are they going to get into a good college? And I thought, you know, first of all, I've seen the writing and it's better than a lot of the students. Yeah, totally. There's such a big conversation here and it's not something I've spent enough time talking about to even claim a sort of personal opinion on it, except this coddling idea, which I'm very, very interested in. And I know it's been written about very brilliantly. sometimes if your hypothesis is coddling, it can blind you to other things.

For example, there's another whole really interesting conversation about risk and how we manage risk and how we seem to have become a society that is uncomfortable with risk. However, there's another conversation in that Venn diagram, which is about information overload, right? And I think all these things intercept because the internet and just, media and communication and travel and everything has meant we know too much. And that makes us anxious about risk. So there are, you know, this this coddling, which sounds like a flaw in how we parent is actually a result of putting through a normal parent filter, all this information about the local paedophile, which you used to not have. And not having it was fine because the

odds on something happening are so near zero that you would discard it off any graph. But, But now we know, and not only do we have the information, but that information is promoted by algorithms and promoted by the way of 24-hour news. So this is a big conversation, but I think we are our natural paucity of a natural inability to really contextualize risk, which we're seeing when we get to the vaccine conversation, which is really well, that people can't understand risk benefit. Yeah, sure. And big numbers.

And then we have all this information and, you know, and the outcome. come is coddling. Coddling is not the input. Yeah, I think that's, yeah, well, partly. Yeah, I guess it's that. I just totally wanked on for five minutes, so I need that deconstructed. Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, no, I think that, well, I think that, yeah, at the same time, I, I tend to think it's, it's a product of the kids who've come up and, and, you know, as you say, you have access to a lot of information. The problem is you also have access to a lot of misinformation, and we'll talk about that, because you've talked about the sort of democratization of information for the internet and how problematic it is because you can and so and I have this is new I've said it a lot as a teacher I think all that school

the prime thing that schools should do now is train kids how to tell the difference to the information and misinformation this is yeah this is the thing if I could preach one more thing for the rest of my life it would be the job of school is to teach how to learn and how to think critically and how to pass information parse not pass out of parse information, how to spot good from bad information. And it does come back to the basic tenets of critical thinking, to philosophy 100. Philosophy, or I would say being liking science more than philosophy, the scientific method. Yeah, yeah, that's right.

Yeah, which is philosophy of logic 100. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, we'll come back to that. Anyway, I don't know where we're going to go, which is really good. but I do want to go back to early times still. I haven't gotten to the present to him yet. Let's go back to Little Timmy. Let's go back to Little Timmy.

Who claimed he didn't have much aptitude for piano. But you played at the piano, but you said you didn't read music. But obviously at some point you got an advanced degree in contemporary music. So I assume you have to know. I still can't read music. Oh, come on. It's not an advanced degree. It was an advanced certificate.

And it was more like a what we call a TAFE course, like a, it wasn't a community college course, but it was a two-year course in that was, at the time, it was called an advanced certificate in commercial music. Because it's basically starting down at, you know, sort of Delta Blues and working your way through all the sort of styles that you could play in contemporary music and then just putting the toe in the water of jazz. And that was the end of the course. A little bit of theory, a little bit of history, and a lot of practical.

stuff. But yeah, I went to do that course hoping I would be able to reverse time and learn how to read and site read and stuff. And yeah, it didn't work. I was too far gone. But I did learn a lot of stuff. And I have a pretty good understanding of how music works. I just, if you put a sheet music in front of me, unless it's got just chords, that chords I can do. But yeah, dots I can't do. Oh, really still. Oh, wow. That's fascinating. I can't read them. Can't write them. Wow. And so hold on, can't write them. So when you when you compose, How do you compose? I've got Logic Audio Pro open here.

I open it in case you want to me to record a backup. And, you know, I sit down and I play that piano and it feeds MIDI, musical instrument digital interface information into that. And I play in the flute line and I play in the bass line. I play in the drum line. I do eight vocal lines. And then I send it all to my genius orchestrator. And they use their ears.

And sometimes I send stems. so they can hear all the different tracks. And they do it for me. And often, in the case of Matilda and Groundhog Day, my orchestrator, Chris Nightingale, he's not just transcribing. He also has a huge creative input in how it comes out. Do you, wow.

Now, hold on a second. So if you'd been composing 50 years ago before this technology. Well, even when I started, the reason I went to do that course is I was writing music for, like, you theater and stuff. Yeah. and just kind of teaching people the bits and going, it goes like this.

And if they're a violinist, they'd write down their bit. Or I was using very early, um, logic, very early midi, midi only, not yeah, audio stuff. And I would get the computer to churn out a chart that was terrible, but it would at least be enough for us to talk about. Um, but yeah, as I, I went to that course and went, I need to learn to score. I'm going to hit the ceiling here. Um, and then just during that time,

the tech started getting better. And that was part of why I just went, oh, screw it, I don't need this. And in fact, what's weird is, although I don't miss it at all. And if anything, I think it makes you write a certain way when you're scoring,

there's advantages and disadvantages to not being, not having that visual code as your language. Yeah. I think. Yeah, I can understand. I guess, you know, I can understand, but in an envious way, because I love music and I'm miserable at it. It's the only, I mean, I'm going to sound pompous, but everything else I've ever tried to do I can do.

And I've tried to do me. I was just telling some of the other day, so I learned the piano, and I, I, the mandolin, and then for a while, my daughter was very musical and started the violin at age two and a half and was really good. when she was a kid I secreted away a cello in my office at that time of Yale and I took a cello lesson so I could accompany her

and twinkle twinkle when she was a Christmas and a Christmas present and she was so thrilled for about two days and then I couldn't keep up with her and she had no interest in me anymore but all the time I've had teachers who said well I think you've gotten

to the maximum of your potential and it's and so I'm so envious but you obviously why you say didn't have musical aptitude you obviously had musical aptitude right i mean i'm near well i didn't have recognizable what what i guess what's interesting if it's interesting at all um and i i say this without any because i i find my musicality annoying and i don't think i'm there's lots and lots of ways in which i wish i was

better and more soulful and more intuitive or something it's it's a bit of a weird combination of things that I am. But what was interesting is I went through my entire school career without anyone particularly recognizing any particular aptitude in any of the things I've ended up doing, with the exception, I guess, of writing essays and some creative writing. I had a couple of teachers who were fans. But I didn't get the parts in the school. plays and I didn't, you know, I didn't get, I was quite good in the primary school choir before my

voice broke, but no one went, you should, you know, be the captain of the choir or, you know, and when I wanted to quit piano halfway through grade three, my teacher went, okay, and just, you know, and I've seen her recently. She's 90 something now. And she's like, oh, I didn't see it. I just, I'll never forgive myself for not spotting it. And I said to her, there's nothing to spot. It wasn't there. It just came. Everything came later for me. Everything came late. Except you were, except,

just being a sibling and playing hockey. Well, that's all right. But the foundations there, I mean, but it didn't quite come later. You said you used to tinker at the piano a lot anyway, whether you didn't take lessons or not. Oh, yeah.

So clearly you liked hitting it. Yeah, yeah. Okay, but there was something enjoyable about hitting those keys. Obviously. Oh, yeah. I was compelled to play. And my, my mom,

you know, the main memory of my child, my teenage years for my mom was this infernal racket, you know. and mostly the piano. Shut the door! Shut the other door! Well, at least it was a piano. I remember when my daughter, you know,

it was taken to the violin, boy, it takes a long time before they're going on. Oh, yeah, to even make a bearable noise. Yeah, yeah, and then it's very good. But, okay, so if that wasn't recognizable necessarily, but I suspect the other aptitude was, and maybe it was equally annoying to your mom, and that's the comedy part. I suspect that was quite evident early on.

Am I wrong? Well, I think the impact. was probably evident. I think I was cheeky and inclined to answer back. I don't, I don't think I was particularly funny, but yeah, I was compelled to, mum said, you don't have to be funny all the time, you know, when I was young. We were all a bit like that. We, we, we, that's why we get along as siblings, we're, we're silly. Um, but I'm now dealing with it with my son, who's a totally curious little monster who at 12 just, just, just, doesn't matter whether we're having a really serious talk or whether he's in trouble or whether he's

upset if he sees an opportunity to make some stupid pun or quote some goddamn meme or just be a dick he does it's 12 oh you're so annoying it's supposed to be even like i must have been yeah it comes back to haunt you but you were that way younger i guess you're your your wife and you knew each other when you were quite young, right? I mean, you were, you're Yeah, 17, yeah. So, at least when you're 17, I was really amused reading what your wife had to say about you, but, you know, everyone

points out you're so clever, and she's, I can't resist because it hits home with my wife as well, but he likes impressing people and being clever, she said, and she said, you know, so it's not new to me. Everything else everyone else thought he was different, but it was really

just, his trousers got tighter and his hair got straighter. I love that. Where was that from? I had some article I read and I'll find you. I'll send you the link. But, but. New York Times.

Yeah. Yeah, it might have been. Oh, it might have been New York Times article. Yeah. And in fact, I think it might have been the article after the awful experience in L.A. Oh, yeah, yeah. And maybe, yeah, yeah. And, but so she does she, I assume she grounds you in that sense.

Oh, yeah. I mean, grinds me. Yeah, yeah. Okay, good. Good. Now, more kindred spirits. She's just, I mean, we've been together for a long time. And I think she definitely loves me.

But not, she doesn't value, she values almost the opposite of what people who like my work value. This chat is not of interest to her. self-analysis or even analysis of other stuff particularly in a sort of she's incredibly sensitive to pomposity and and also it's not her bag she doesn't walk she's not wired like me we're not the same yeah yeah and so the things that this version of myself that I am which is a very true version of myself when I'm trying to intelligently comment on stuff or think clearly or articulate ideas, she's very passionate about. That's not what I'm doing on the odd occasion. I'm allowed to sleep in her bed because one of my kids is in there. You know, like, she likes old me, you know,

and she's had a great time, but my career competes. Sure. Oh, yes. Oh, my God. It's the enemy of Sarah, as well as the thing that allows her to, you know, have a nice house. Yeah, no, I, it's so fine, really resonate with that. I mean, when I, I, I come up here to my study and I, and I sort of feel, yeah, it's competing. And a funny thing is, boy, we're really self-analysing here for the public. I don't know whether, I want my wife to hear this, but, but, you know, I think those aspects of us that now that have helped with our careers or whatever else we do, were attracted to our spouses early on, but after a while, they kind of become annoying, or at least, yeah, and yeah, and my wife said to me the She used to read what I'm in fact, actually, it was actually some things I wrote.

When I first met her, she thought, she didn't, I didn't make a good impression. Let me put it that way. And it was only accidentally that she started reading things I wrote. And so that's not the person I knew. And she used to like that. But nowadays, I said, why don't you read this? She said, well, that's your stuff. I'm not interested in that stuff.

Yeah. Yeah. And it's interesting to see that. And it's also you just become, I mean, and obviously, if we were talking to Sarah, she would have a totally different. view and she would be able to reflect on what I like about her that is distinct from her. Yeah. You know, there's stuff that she cares about in relationships she has has in her life that are not

what I see. And it's really healthy and it's why we've lasted is we are comfortable with the fact that we're very distinct entities and don't need each other to be all of each other all the time. are we are for each other what we need to be for each other as co-parents and as co-parents and you don't need each other to you don't need the being risen and you don't need to be risen up or praised by your you know you have enough of that internally. Yeah yeah exactly yeah yeah yeah I know that feeling okay but okay so comedy well I mean you're obviously clever and witty even though it was mostly smart elokey maybe in your kid

but what, so I want to hit, and I hate some of these questions I'm going to ask because they sound like the, I don't like you ever ask the kind of normal questions, but the comedy is for, I'm asking this because I know what is for me, I guess. So why comedy? I mean, what is common? Is there a purpose to what you do? And I've read many of your discussions about it, but let me hear it from you. It's a two-part answer. And the first one is the sort of interesting one about how I'm seen because I have, I guess,

the last time I had a job that wasn't musical performance or writing was I was 22 or something. So it's almost 25 years now. And I was a comedian for six. So I did, the last time I wrote a comedy song was for my orchestra show, which I wrote early 2010. So 11 years ago. apart from my little activism spasms with Cardinal Pell and which were political and money raising acts. And that's a really good tool.

And we can talk about the role of satire and activism and the limitations of that and the cost of it in terms of hate and all that stuff. That's interesting, sort of. But I fell into comedy because I was trying to be a museo and trying to be an actor. and I put this cabaret show together and people laughed and I went, oh, people find me funny on stage. And from that moment to O2 Arena with a 55 piece orchestra, it was six and a half years. And then I stopped.

So that's one thing to note and we can talk about why and how I've just written a big article about that actually. But in terms of why, when I say I stopped, of course, I've been writing TV and doing musicals and acting in things and comedy and satire and my worldview, my humanist, you know, empirical worldview, are all through all of it. So the conversation about why is comedy

an effective tool communication and why one would do it could, you know, fill some of those dusty books. Yeah, it can be boring. But for me, it just turned out it was something I could do and I was compelled to do. I wanted to make people laugh. I always have liked making people laugh. Me too. And upon analysis, I can reflect on why it's an effective way to share ideas. I mean, storytelling, narrative, the arts, you know, film, telly, paintings,

poetry, music, comedy are all about narrativeizing the human experience in a way that hits us in the heart or a part of the brain we call the heart in a way that the data, sadly, doesn't. And laughter and tears, especially at either end of that sort of bell curve of emotions, render you vulnerable to taking on board ideas. And that's bad and good because we are so emotional. And half the time I'm trying to fight that part of human nature, ironically, with the tool that exploits that part of human nature. Sure. Oh, that's a really interesting way to put it.

Yeah, well, as humans said, the reason is a slave of fashion. And it is. And it is, well, no, the reason I ask because, you know, one sense is that comedy allowed you to do what you wanted to do, which is in some ways touch people in other ways. And it was, and it opened up just. And again, I hate to keep making, I don't want to make this about me, but I, I, I, I resonate with that.

I resonate with that because that's what I want to reach people about science and the world and get them thinking. And my medium for that also when I lecture it, right, is comedic in a sense because it disarms people. First of all, because people are so damn afraid of physics. That humor is a really important part to, as you say, to disarm people to get them to open up in a way that makes them more amenable to letting other things come in without. immediately putting up a wall that says, no, this is just too hard or this is too boring. It shortcuts fear in a way it shortcuts anxiety. Because if you're laughing, you're less anxious and a huge barrier to knowledge is anxiety. Maybe anxiety about the subject, but the sort of meta-anxiety about whether, am I getting

this? Am I getting this? And if you're laughing, damn right, you're getting it. Yeah, yeah, exactly. You can tell. In fact, it's always, it's always interesting to me when I've given lectures in countries where they have to have a simultaneous translator. And it's always, but it's, and you know, I'm telling jokes and it's always interesting to me to see

if anyone laughs five or ten seconds later. Because then I get a sense. Yeah, well, I'm trying to see if I, because if they haven't, then I'm not reaching you at all, you know, it's really, yeah, it's really a, a, uh, a nerving way of doing things. But, um, but that it, as you say, it gets, it, it short-circuits those things and gives you a chance to talk about what you really want to talk about or what you really want to want to talk about. And I think if I look at your songs and I look at writing, at least I'm not, I've tried to, I've already been familiar with a lot of it, but I've become more

familiar in preparation for this too. I mean, obviously religion, empiricism, philosophy, politics, and more recently it seems to me love, which I hadn't seen so much before, but maybe, well, except in maybe the wine song, which I, which is always a true. Oh, and you grew on me like a tumor. Hi, this is Lawrence Krause, and I'm really happy to talk to you today on behalf of Audible. Audible is a leading provider of spoken word entertainment all in one place. I'm an Audible user, and I also am an Audible producer. I've read a variety of my books on audiobooks that you can get through the Audible catalog.

I find in my current position with the podcast that Audible has become even more important for me because I have discussions with many different authors and I have to read a lot of books and I find through Audible I can listen to a number than when I'm otherwise doing other things like driving the car or working out. Almost any book I want to read electronically or in a hard copy version I can find spoken on Audible. It's really worthwhile considering becoming a member. If you're a member, you get one credit every month good for any title in their entire premium collection. And you also get full access to their Plus catalog, which has thousands of different books.

And new members can actually get Audible free for one month. And if you're a listener to our program, you can do it by going to audible.com slash Origins Podcast. Or you can text Origins Podcast at 500.500. So that's visit audible.com slash origins podcast or text origins podcast to 500-500. I think that's right. And Ricky speaks to this and I love Ricky and I love his comedy and I am so close to agreeing with him on everything all the time.

But sometimes when he talks about comedy and humor and offense and all that stuff, which I actually am not that interested in that conversation, That's Ricky's conversation. And he has to have it because of his style. Yeah. And I totally respect it. And, you know, Jim Jeffries, the Australian comedian, has to have that. Yeah, boys.

And Frankie Boyle and, you know, Jimmy Carr. That's a very important conversation. And there's valid stuff to say. The thing I would say, keeping in mind that I'm not a stand-up comic and I haven't really, well, I'm back touring now. So I'm back. Yeah. But I was sort of semi-retired or focusing on other things for seven years.

Yeah. But I, what is true to come back to sort of what you were just talking about a minute ago, is that comedy gives you license to break down formal barriers, right? So when you're in a meeting of professors at a university or surgeons at a hospital or, you know, business people in a meeting in a tall building in Japan, there are conventions that are important to adhere to quite strict rules of language, of dress, of, you know, and comedy by its nature, art by its nature, and perhaps especially comedy, demands that you don't adhere to them. The laughter is often about non-adherence to convention, whether it's your ideas about the

world or your take on something, your use of language. Obviously, comedy is a place where The language is not like in a primary school a lot of the time. Your dress, your attitude, you're allowed to be really aggressive as a tool, as a rhetorical tool. It's not real anger, it's performative. And you're allowed to be flippant and arrogant and then really self-deprecating. And you use all these tools to undermine social convention to shortcut through people's front brains into their back brains, into their stuff that's impulsive. Now, that is a huge responsibility if you get good

because you are sharing ideas that shortcut through convention, which means you can get ideas through that might not be great. And then in the world of, you know, just implacable flooding of self-righteous outrage that we have on the internet because it's it's endless and outraged and self-indulgent and virtue signaling and stuff it's tempting to ignore it all so you so then you're in a bind right you're a person with a microphone and a powerful weapon and you can say anything you fucking want now what should you say and when people say you shouldn't have said that when should you say fuck off it's comedy which is 95% of the time

probably because people are generally, you know, performatively hypersensitive. And I get it. I am too about things. I get it. But sometimes always, always you should be on a journey with all your knowledge, all your beliefs, a journey not influenced by brain crowds or the threat of shame or whatever, but influenced by your own moral code and your own belief that what you're doing actually matters if you've got a big audience and you need to be checking your phone.

fucking privilege. Unfortunately, that's the phrase. It's been overused, but you need to be working. You need to be holding yourself to account. So that's my little reflection on how comedians are a little bit sometimes I understandably belligerent. But that what I just pitched then is a fair thing to say as well. And maybe we should all to say that. We, you know, I understand it's a powerful weapon. And I'm not going to take all your notes, but I'll take some of them. Thanks. Yeah, well, okay. I was quite eloquent.

I would have said what Spider-Man said, with great power, power comes a very responsibility. When you say eloquent, you mean verbose? I don't think it's distinct with comedy. No, no, it is powerful. But it's, you know, I kept thinking as you were saying it. But that's why it's amazing that you can get away with things in comedy. Or, by the way, with science fiction sometimes, another place where the first interracial. Well, you could do things.

for interracial kiss on Star Trek and all these things because it's not our world and you allowing people to suspend disbelief and all the rest. But that's why comedy is so, but it saddens me because that's why comedy is now so dangerous in academia. It's, you know, it used to begin. It was for me as a teacher, it's a good way to disarm students. But now because it's so effective and powerful, it's suspect. And we'll get, you know, it's really, it's discouraging. Yeah, it is hugely problematic. And just to do the short little addendum to what I just said about trying to, trying to follow your own moral conscious towards, towards an understanding that with great power comes great responsibility, it is hard to do that job when the, you

opinions of people who are who do not have actually anything in any interest at heart except you know de-platforming or or um or a power shift when they actually have no genuine interest in developing complex ideas or in comedy or in anything when those people's voices are by algorithmic necessity elevated all the time then we can't actually do that work at all. We can't see the wood for the trees. We can't, we can't, we can't, we can't have, um, shame based moral policing as the way, as the mechanism by which we become more moral species that just will not work and is not working. It's never work. It's, I mean, it's not new. It's, it's been many examples. Yeah. And it's, it doesn't work. In fact, it, and it, it, you know,

it, you know, it backfires in so many ways. I, I, I actually, I did a debate at Oxford online a while ago, and I was surprised I did. But anyway, I was on our people, is religion, you know, is everyone religious? And I decided to take, I took the side, which was the opposite of the side that my atheist colleagues were on the other side. I took the side and said, yeah. And my argument was, if people weren't naturally religious, we wouldn't need science. You know, we wouldn't need these to have developed these tools that overcome what is natural. And where do our biases lie, I guess is the question.

Because science is the pursuit of knowledge taking into account our neurological and psychological biases. Yeah. Now, are our neuropsychological biases generally towards magic? Well, probably in an evolutionary psychology kind of way, yeah. Well, and if you look at the, you know, I don't want this to become too heavy, but if you look at all of the secular religiosity of the sort of heretical words, the fact that something can be said, something can't even be questioned, it is really, it seems to me, that's what caused me to rethink this,

because watching the community of people who I used to think were sort of anti-religious, adopting the same kind of things which makes me think, well, maybe there's some naturalness to be, to wanting to, to not want, not need to question, to wanting to, you know, her mentalities as well. And it's, it's interesting to me. Yeah. And I think, but there's other hypotheses like maybe it's not, maybe religion is a distract, you know, all those words, God, religion. They're all distracting words with too much baggage. to get any clarity on because we can argue forever about the semantics of the word. Yeah, sure. Yeah, yeah. But maybe magical thinking is a compulsion that we have to work on,

specifically sort of post hoc magical thinking and confirmation bias. These big, big flaws we have that we only notice what we want to notice and we think things are causally connected when they're not. But there's another thing which is moral righteousness and, group membership, tribal membership. I think we're definitely tribal and we love being right. We get huge amounts of dopamine serotonin and shit from from feeling right and feeling outraged. And actually I think, and when I talk about this stuff, it matters to me that listeners understand that I am part of it. I am, I have been worse. I'm trying to get better, but we are all subject to this is not them. It's all of us. We all want to be right. I mean, I've built my whole career on

being clever and right. That's what I do. I try because I get a kick out of it, right? Yeah. And I like being part of a tribe, although interestingly, not interestingly, for me, I'm very suspicious of tribes. That's part of my personality. Sure. I don't want to be in a club that'll have a lot of you remember as Scroo. I was going to say it if you hadn't. Okay. Yeah, it's it's the chorus of one of my new songs. Okay. But stolen, acknowledged stolen from gravy.

If you're going to steal, steal from Groucho. I mean, I'm going to steal from the Jews. That's what I say. Yeah, exactly. So fundamentalism, fundamental tribalism and fundamental,

you know, and language policing and all these things, they are shared by religion and this new moral puritanism. Sorry, that I hate making these things easily reduced. Yeah. But you know what I'm talking about.

Sure. Yeah. So, so how do we fight it, though? Because one thing I've noticed about the far left, and I'm, I suppose in an Australian way, you'd call me a lefty. I believe in science, in climate science. And I believe in, you know, redistribution of wealth and, you know, in my tax and I care about education. and, you know, so I'm a lefty or whatever. But there's, I haven't seen, I never see on either end of the political spectrum, which is a false spectrum and a false binary and all that,

anyone coming back onto social media and going, you know what, I was wrong about that. Fucking ever. Ever. I never see it. I've seen people shame a young right-wing gay kid. being an asshole, being a total asshole in Australia. He was like shaming these fantastic drag queens who do stories for kids and took a video.

And they piled on and piled on him. And he suicided, right, this kid. And that no one came back and went, you know what, he was an asshole, but maybe we didn't, he didn't, maybe we should have thought that he's a person with his own problems. No one.

I didn't see, I looked, I searched. Please someone acknowledged that they were part of mob that drove someone to suicide. Not one. And on the other side, these horrible people in the right of the United States who just spread lies. I never see them. I never see any of those guys come back and go, you know, like Trump's kid or, you know, any of those right wing guys who just make ridiculous. No one apologises. My goal is to always be able to acknowledge when I'm wrong and bat away people who want me to acknowledge when I'm wrong when I don't fucking think. I am.

Both of those, and I go beyond that, not just being wrong, but also being able to say, which is really, really hard, I don't know. Yeah. I mean, no parents don't do enough, teachers don't do enough, because part of acknowledging you might be wrong is first recognizing that you may not actually know. And, you know, it's interesting when you talk about this, I just wrote a piece on a fence, believe you or not, which I think, God willing, may come

out on the economist. But I was reading for this, and I was reading, I was listening to a, to a, I guess a monologue is the best way to put it by Christopher Hitchens, of course. And what he pointed out, which is fascinating to me, he was talking about freedom of speech, but in a different way,

and creating offense, and why you should have the freedom to create a fence. But his point was, you should have the freedom to create a fence, But in fact, if you take away that freedom from someone, you're not just taking away freedom from someone to be able to speak. You are taking away your own freedom to the possibility that that person creating offense might cause you to rethink some of the things you're thinking about.

So you're taking away your own right to suddenly confront your ideas and learn. And I never thought of it that way. So it's not just the person that you're censoring or whatever that you're removing the rights of. You're actually affecting your own rights because the only way. way you'll come up and say you're wrong, as if someone suddenly provokes you to think you're wrong. Being offended is sometimes a feeling that you get when your feet are in concrete. And someone's pushing, trying to push you over, you know.

However, a hell of a lot of the time is just edge lord assholes being offensive. And most offence online is caused by people. who think they're talking about what you're talking about, who think they're being hitchian, or they think they're engaged in this conversation. I don't even want to say the words free speech because it's always reductive and becomes a semantic argument. But they think they're engaged in pushing buttons and expanding minds,

but they're not, they're just offensive dickheads being like children throwing mud in the eyes of someone, you know, knocking the glasses off someone's face in the playground. Yeah. And the people having this conversation about defending the right to offend are mostly 35 plus white guys. So that and the trouble is that doesn't mean it's wrong. Yeah, exactly.

Because we live in an identity politics world where being white and male is reducible to evil or unchecked footage. Yeah. And so this is a problem, not something I'm going to have a rant about, a genuine, ponderous thing. It is possible that the reason most people having the conversation about free speech and offence are over 35-year-old white guys. It's possible that I've got that wrong and that's just what's promoted by the algorithms. It's possible that they're having that conversation because they're trying to hold on to their power.

It's possible that they're trying to stop themselves from being edited. in a good way. That's all possible, right? Maybe. It's also very, very possible that it's a really interesting and important conversation that happens to not be something

that women or people of colour feel very comfortable having because they are members of movements, arguably, if they want to be, that are trying to push against straight white guys being allowed to say things offensive. So they don't... So there's lots of...

of reasons. There's a lot of a, yeah. And it's really, I would like to, I'm not equipped, but I'd like to hear that conversation more. And they're out there. If people are interested in this, there are amazing black intellectuals and women and people from all stripes, even if you are into this reductive racial, essentialist bullshit division that I don't believe in. There are people of all different stripes having this conversation. And I really encourage you to seek them out because it is, Absolutely. It needs to be nuanced and you need to ignore the edge lords

on the internet going, oh, free speech, I'm going to use whatever language I want because they're just knobs. But you have to also ignore the people who then get offended because you talk about free speech. But I mean, and you know,

if you're actually interested, you've got to ignore nearly everyone. If you're actually interested in any of these questions. If you're, and only, but I wish you could in the modern world ignore everyone.

It's really, it's really, I mean, it's nice to have a megaphone and it's a privilege in general to have that and it's also, as you say, power. And I know I felt the same way as you. I mean, if you're really on with your comedy, you capture the audience, you could say anything.

And I kind of feel that way of in a lecture, if I really got them, I could say, and you know what, quarks have little pink elephants in them and they really, you know, and then be, okay, fine. And I realize that's why I've had an obligation when I think to not knowingly mislead as an educator. Because you can. So it's so tempting to give people what they want.

When journalists ask something, it's so tempting to give them an answer they want. But to get back to what you were getting at there, this notion of being wrong is so important because it's probably the only time you learn. Again, pedagogically, and I know listeners who listen to me have heard me say this a lot, but having thought about teaching physics a lot,

there's a lot of evidence that the only way you learn is to confront your own misconceptions. And I've done examples. Once I was giving a talk for leaders of the world, where I did something that Galeo showed. And they all learned it in school, but they all got it wrong because it was written on a board

and they memorized it and I'm sure they did well. But then they saw that experiment that I did. And suddenly, then they'll remember it for the rest of their lives. They'll remember that things that, you know, fall the same way. But yeah, but, you know, and so that's very, very important. But I have to, I've been smiling

because when you talk about this offensiveness being, yeah, a lot of jerks. and there are a lot of jerks. Interesting enough, the conversation we just had would now be censored by the Journal of Hospital Medicine. So there was an article that just came out, and I wrote about this in my thing. I mean, this is what drives me nuts.

So there was an article by some doctor, and this should come back to your upbringing doctors saying, it was called tribalism in medicine, and saying we shouldn't form tribes, we should be, listen to other people, listen to other people, blah, blah, blah. And then the journal was confronted by people who said, that's an offensive word, tribal.

You should not be allowed to use that. So the journal retracted the article, rewrote it, even though, by the way, tribalism was defined at the beginning of the article, took the article out, rewrote it, got rid of the word tribalism, and then wrote an editorial apologizing for offending people by using the word from. tribes are usually used for like African tribes. Yeah, of course. Yeah, for someone, it offended someone.

But, you know, that's, that's, that's, yeah, I know. So, I mean, that's the, that's the kind of, I just want to keep, I want to keep, I want to keep, it's so easy. I've got, I've got a friend who I love who's just addicted to listening to like, um, blocked and reported podcast and all these different podcasts that report all this crazy stuff. Yeah, yeah. You know, all these, like, things like that, like stories of the word tribal and this sort of political correctness gone mad, which I used to hate people who said that. And now I'm like, ah, yeah, that's got a good man.

But it's not political correctness that's gone mad. It's, it's misguided, righteous, desire. to make the world better without considering the law of unintended consequences anyway. Yeah. He's just incredibly, and I get it because he keeps going, read this, look at this, read this, you know. And it's so addictive. It is.

It's addictive to get angry all the time. You could spend all day long. And I go, we've got to be so careful. So every time I listen to something, you know, I think, oh, my God, this woke nonsense has gone mad. I try and go listen to someone that is talking intelligently about social justice and affirmative action and the financial discrepancies between black and white families in America. And I just, this is what we have to do if we're honestly on the mission. I do not want to be one side or other of this debate.

However, I want to be unafraid to call out bullshit when I see it, regardless of the color of a person's skin or the, you know, the genitals I have between their legs or anything because there's nothing more condescending than thinking your intellectual curiosity is okay in front of your Jewish physicist friend, but not okay in front of someone who has different skin and different experiences. It's just gross and racist. And I have got to say a lot of the so-called social justice people that I see, I just cringe. Some of the conversations I have in my industry that white people talking about

and stuff and affirmative action. And I'm like going, I'm sorry, this is racist. Not racist against white people, which it is, I suppose. But it's racist against black people. you're talking so reductively. Of course. You're saying, you're literally saying we need someone with darker skin in this role. You're not talking about their talent or whether they've, they come from a working class

background or their accent or their, all their insights, or their intellect. You're talking about the shade of the color of their skin. And you're the same person who will say sex is on a spectrum, which, you know, is a conversation I know nothing about it and I'm not interested in. I'm not making a claim on. But you'll say sex is. on a spectrum. There's no binary in biological sex, but there's a binary between black and white human beings. It's like, oh, my God, you're racist and you're being dumb. So obviously I can get

worked up about this stuff. I'm glad. If in five years or two years or after this podcast, there are people going, oh, Tim Minchin's like one of those, if you think I'm in a tribe, fuck you i'm fucking not i'm on a journey and i'm listening and learning probably more carefully than you are so anyway that's my defensiveness about that because i do get accused of shit that's bullshit yeah i'm a public figure and that's what happened it happened and me too obviously and it's and it's it's it's easy to be sensitive about that and it's and it's important not to be not not to let it stop you it's at least that's my feeling i mean it can't you have to do what you're going to do and i'm not can let it stop me. And, uh, and, and, uh, and, and what you want to be is someone that can,

I don't call out culture can suck my balls, but, um, but if, if I'm in a conversation where there's this sort of conversation, uh, what I really want, and this is really hard for all of us, is to not be seduced into being dragged. You know, you listen to, um, what's old mate's name? He's got a huge, Mark Maron, huge podcast. And he's so brilliant. But part of his brilliance is whatever the guest is saying, he sort of supports. Yeah. It's an empathy thing.

It's a mirroring thing. And he's very good at it. I don't want to be that guy. I want to try and look clearly at this stuff. Yeah, yeah. There are interviewers who are supposed to be great interviews that I can't stand for that reason. It's never a difficult question.

There's never a disagreement. And, well, let's not talk about it. It's too easy to talk about the people, you know, you're not impressed with. because you'd spend all your time doing that. It is. The, I was going to say, yeah,

you got me off. Yeah, you told me throwing me because I was going to say something so intelligent. Thank God I threw it. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Thank God you threw me.

I think that, oh, now I was going to, I wasn't intelligent, it was pandering. Same thing. No, no, it wasn't really pandering, but it's because it's true. When I have this discussion, you know what I use to disarm people and I've had I had it

in you know in environments where it's really touchy when I talk about language police and and then I talk about this song prejudice because it is so fucking brilliant and I mean and I mean and because because I just like you love to do

I'm sure when you're on the piano playing it I love when I'm in I'm having a discussion with an interviewer somewhere else or on a debate. And I start talking about this word that has an N and two G's and I and Enar, and I see their face, you know, beginning to get nervous and then and then ginger. And it is, it puts it in such perspective. It's a great example of what you were talking about before. I get is of humor of suddenly pointing out, allowing humor,

which really is some sort of points out your misconceptions often because it juxtaposes things that are part of, you know, I don't want to be an analysis of humor, but a lot of the times it juxtaposes things that aren't supposed to be juxtapose, and that's humorous. And prejudice really hits that, that song. Well, I, so I'm agnostic about that song, because I've recently been told that, um,

that, you know, that, that song, and look, this is tiny, tiny minorities, but,

you know, someone said to me in an interview, um, uh, you know, you're just getting a laugh out of that word, that very serious, horrible word that's hurt people. Why do you have a right to muck around with that word, right? And so I've thought, as you can imagine, I've thought about that a lot. And I think, I think there's something to be said for that, except I think it's a total misinterpretation of the intent, because I'm not, I'm not going, ooh, look at me, I'm playing with this word.

I'm actually doing the opposite. I'm making the point, in amongst just doing what you're saying is sort of reflecting on how small the gap is between horrible offence and total benignness. Yeah, exactly. And how we as humans have this massive gap in how we'd react to this different word

because of our cultural input. So I'm commenting on all of that. But I'm also making a very clear point that, firstly, the N word is a word that that is a word that you need to allow to be siloed and reclaimed by people who have suffered because of it. As in, I don't think it should be turned into a magical potion that has the power to destroy societies. I think we give it power. I think social justice has given the gives these words power. It's like it's it's like someone's found a sword and said, this sword is really dangerous.

Let's sharpen it. You know, so it doesn't hurt each other. Let's sharpen it and sharpen it and sharpen it. So it's the most dangerous sword in the world by what and then we'll put it in this case. And that way it won't hurt anyone. It's like, yeah. So that's an interesting discussion.

but it's not, I'm happy to accept. I don't want to have a discussion about it. It's not mine. It's not my culture. It's not my word. I'm not interested in it. The song makes the point that being ginger is humorously not being in a minority group

in the way that being black is. The comedy is in the funny joke that I as a ginger have no idea what it's like. That's the joke. And to not be able to see that very basically that's the joke as if it's as bad being, as if the G word is as bad as the N word. Yeah. But if you can't see that joke, then probably you've got to think, well,

shit, I'm really, really affected by this. But as I say, it's not, I don't care. I'm very happy if a black person doesn't like that song, that worries me a bit, but not too much because I know lots of black people who do like that song. Yeah, well, okay, and then you can't worry about it. Well, yeah, you can't worry about whether, and in the end, whether people are like, you know, sort of, you did it. And it's nice, it's always nice if people like it,

but if they don't, it's their problem and not yours to some extent. But in particular, it, you know, I wrote a piece for actually, for magazine out of Australia, which is, now I'm called the right wing funded, by the way, because I write for equivalent every now and then. And, and, and, and, but, you know, calling, yeah, yeah. And, and the article was called making the, the the profane sacred.

But that's exactly what you do by elevating words like Yahweh or, you know, there's a great scene from from Life of Brian. You know, and it's and you suddenly create Ahab by Jahara. Yeah, exactly. And it's like

you make something dangerous it isn't before. And I guess I see and maybe you don't, but I'm going to, I don't care whether you do or not. I, from that song I also see yes. the part of the humor is saying, oh,

Ginger is just like being, you know, the N word, but the other part of it is if you think about it right, if you took it right, for you, the N word could be like ginger.

I mean, if you just say, oh, fuck, it's, I mean, you choose, you choose how that affects you.

And if people, people can just get over, you know, and I guess, you know, when you talk about males over 35, I'm not sure,

it's just males over 35. I do think it's generated. It's not, it should, well, no, think it's generational because I grew up in the playground with and because you know I remember my my it was funny because my middle name is Maxwell and there's a coffee called Maxwell house coffee

and all the girls would say Maxwell Kraus good to the last drop I didn't realize of course they were complimenting you but anyway that's a different thing but um um and and then we'd always say you know six and stones will break my bones but names will never hurt me and and I and it's sort of a thing that in a way, I mean, you can choose how to interpret that song. And so as I say, I see a two-sodic coin to that. I see yes, obviously being a ginger is not the same problems as being black, but on the other hand, you can choose to not be devastated by a word. And it's your choice. That's true. And obviously in the current climate, rightly or wrongly, and I'm not sure, I am a bit the the the the no you know i think about one of my if i think about a black friend listening to this

podcast and i uh one of the my more black lives matter black friends i think they would say tim just don't fucking talk about it it's not your thing and i'd probably take that note so i think that's my resting position but i i don't think that's necessarily right because my whiteness doesn't preclude me from having a reasonable philosophical take on this thing. But in the current climate, I think that's where I'm comfortable just going, well, I'm going to go listen to a black thinker talk about this. And there are brilliant black thinkers who say exactly what you say, which of course brings up the question, why is it better coming out of that mouth than yours? And the answer is it's not. But, well, no, no, there's a conversation to have there. There's a conversation to have there.

It's an interesting conversation to have there. It's more disarming. I'd say, great, well, I'll get lots of hate mail for some things we're saying anyway, but I would say in some sense, what it is is the same thing comedy is. It's more disarming. Because if you have that conversation coming out of a blackmail, you're willing to listen and not have all these. It doesn't make it any more right or wrong.

Yeah, but you're more willing, you're not kind of all these barriers and all these things to tell you, but you put before it and you used to interpret all the words, it opens you up. And I guess that's the whole point of all of this, of communication, is just to get people to listen. And anyway, we are living in it. Yeah, we're living in a time where for good, I think, we are high, not infinitely for good, but there is good in a movement towards understanding of course that a discussion about a particular. experience in the world is very important to listen to the people who have had that experience, right? So I think that's really, really important.

That is distinct from the assertion that we can divide humans into easily, easily categorized groups based on, phenotype and that their opinions will correlate, their validity of their opinions will correlate with those groups. That is an absurd absurd. There's absolutely no doubt I could find a person of any colour and any gender of any cultural experience who has an absolute bat-shit nonsense opinion on any subject. Absolutely. And I could find another person of another group and color and blah blah, blah, that has an excellent opinion on subjects that they have no experience of. Exactly. That's your point.

These are just truths. Then the question is it's on a dial. So we're in a situation where it's on a dial on one side of politics of these fundamentalist moral police on the far, what we call the far left, which is nonsense, of course, social justice, who have got the dial cranked up so far that they've ended up back at racist, without a doubt in my mind. They've ended back at essentialist racial attributes. And then there's people on the right who have got the dial way too far where they're like, I'm allowed to say this. Who cares about my colour?

And you go, well, no, it matters what colour you are because of the experiences you had growing up. It matters that you have no visceral sense of what that N word meant. And it is not like Maxwell House and it's not like kike and it's not like ginger. it is distinct and we need to know about that. But both those far positions are wrong. Like almost always in all areas of life, far positions on either end of a bell curve are nearly always wrong. They're sometimes helpful, but they're nearly always wrong.

Yeah, yeah, the extremes, and one might have said in a different time, the black and white is not this great. Yes, that's right. And, but, you know, and I think the other important point, I think of this this woman writer who was, you know, I guess wrote about being, I mean, the point is there are insights really, you and you're absolutely right. I haven't had experiences that other people had. But what I can try and do is imagine those experiences, and that's probably called literature and and slash empathy. Empathy. And that's, and so a, you know, a white writer

who writes with the voice of a black child in the South is not, that could be very interesting. And, and, um, and, uh, uh, it could be terrible and often has been. It often has been. But I think of, I actually think of that book, I've just read, which I made in a movie by Ethan Hawk. What's it's, um, we'd want to pull a surprise, but the, the protagonist is a young black boy, but their author certainly wasn't, but in the civil war.

And it's John, uh, John Brown is the, but anyway, and point is it open. And, and, and, and so, it's so, such a shame that, that, that, that, Anyway, I wasn't going to, you know, it's funny thing is, okay, we've gone an hour and a half and we're past my introduction now. Yeah, good. If I look at my literature, I know you do have a, yeah, and I'm going to take you right till your next podcast. So you're just too bad. Yeah, I'm afraid I've got a little bit of press. I'd like to just go and go.

Yeah, I know. I know. We're going to go just a few more minutes. But I want to, before we offend people, I want to talk about religion, politics and, and then science. Okay, great, great. Yeah. Yeah. And, and, and, and, um, so can we go another 15 or 20 minutes?

Is that okay? Yeah. Absolutely. We can go 24 minutes. Okay, as long as you, I didn't know if you needed a minute. We can go right up. We can go right up. Great. I will take every second I have. Let's talk religion because it's so much fun.

Yeah. And this is what first, I suppose, brought us together. Yeah. And, you know, I think, you know, I became known, you know, for a long time, well, Richard Dawkinson, I had a difference as of opinion because I used to I think you, you know, you don't, I still think you don't convince anyone of anything by saying, hey, guess what, you're stupid. Now listen to me. Yeah. But where I went myself, and I want to see if this is the same for you,

because I suspect based on some things you're written and said, that the real problem of religion, you know, there's fundamentalism and of course all of that nonsense. Yeah. But the real problem, which is something I was, I went back and listened to what you said at the beginning of the unbelievers again just a few minutes ago just because I try remember it is that it that religion has this monopoly on morality that that that that somehow says we define what's right and wrong and if you disagree you're a bad person and so I mean it really hit home with me with the unbelievers because it's the first time I and I'd spoken to big crowds but when I saw the

reaction to that movie I saw people writing into saying I you know I They love seeing these big crowds. And what they realized was, I met living a small town in the south, and I've been asking these questions. And I feel like I'm a bad person for asking these questions. And I realize I'm not the only one asking the questions. And I thought, wow, we did a service doing that. So what's the worst part about religion?

What do you think? Well, it's very different in America from in Australia and the UK, and it's different again in Saudi Arabia or Iran or. or Afghanistan, but I think in a country like America, the problem, religious, I can't remember who said it originally, I think it was a British philosopher that, but it's been coined by various people that, by Hitchens, I think, most famously, that which has been asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence. Yeah, Hitchens. So, so, and this is the trouble, religion is so culturally built in, and I totally understand that, and I don't disresist,

respect every religious person on the planet. And the vast majority of my material about religion has been about where religion intercepts with bigotry. And so sometimes it's just like prayer is dumb. Yeah. And the Bible is dumb. And I don't have any regrets about that, but it's probably less useful. Although it's educational.

My song, Thank you God, like literally people use to educate people about logical philosophy and critical. Which is, by the way, the song you sang at the reason, rally. I haven't remember. Good, good, good, in the rain. I'm trying to remember that. Yeah, yeah. And Hitchens was the reason we met, actually, because I said yes to the reason,

Rally, because Hitch was, Christopher was very sick, and he was booked, and I thought, if I'm going to meet him, it will be this. And the bastard died before he got there. You never got to meet him. Too sick. Never got to meet him, no. Oh, that's amazing. You know, it's, I think any time religion is brought up in any discussion about law, it should

just be summarily dismissed. Like if you're in Texas and, you know, America is legally secular, if you're in Texas and talking about abortion, you just, if anyone brings up their religion, it should just be like, yeah, don't care, mate. That is as valuable as me saying, I believe abortion should be legal because of the dragon in my roof. It is utterly pointless. And I am sort of constantly shocked that religion, one's personal, you know, superstitious mystical belief system, and mystical belief systems can be profound and deep rooted in generations. But when they're brought into secular law, it's insane. It's just, it should be completely unacceptable. So that's one thing that irritates me. It's like, why are we even talking about this?

That's your religious belief. It means nothing. Your moral code based on magical thinking means no more than the moral code that made those guys fly into the Twin Towers. That was magical thinking, giving them what they thought was a moral impetus to do something they thought was good. We have to talk in empirical terms or we can't agree on any moral norms. We just can't. So discard religion from the discussion. So that's my sort of fundamentalist thing.

The thing I've been thinking about more recently, Lawrence, I'd be interested in your opinion on this is does being brought up religion, religion, being brought up religion, does being brought up religious, I think it probably, given brain plasticity, wires your brain to be really good at resolving cognitive dissonance and therefore you are primed to believe other things that clearly ain't so, right? So is it possible that neurologically, if we studied this, and is this just a wanker thing to say, neurologically, really religious people, like literally religious people,

would be more inclined to be able to resolve the cognitive dissonance, for example, of Trump's apparent intelligence versus the apparent absence of intelligence. And they just believe them both at the same time because they can, because their brains have been really well built for that process. Well, you know, there wasn't. actually I'm going to give some argument in defense of that and I'm going to give you some arguments

opposed to it. My gut reaction is to say I think it's putting the carp before the horse that people all of us want to believe 10 impossible things before breakfast just to wake up that we love our jobs or our spouses or whatever. But in fact actually there was there especially with children a lot of work and there were some studies that showed that kids who were more religious were willing to believe other kind of fairy tales. And so whether, you know, I don't think it's in children, and the question is, was, does it survive later on? So I think there are arguments on both sides.

I think it's absolutely true. What amazes me, because I can see it in the extreme of religious scientists. And I know some excellent scientists who are not just religious in a vague sense, not in the Einstein-Spinosa sense of, you know, order in the universe and therefore. it's wonderful and blood and that's my God and all that bullshit. But devout Christians. Now, it's obvious why they are.

They are because their parents were and they were brought up as devout Christians. But my goodness, it's amazing to me that they can switch so effectively from that magical thinking to non-magical thinking. and you know and but I think but on the other hand I think people can do it do it well there were there was it takes a lot of it takes a lot of I don't know whether

courage is the way to put it but maybe discipline or willing or self analysis to say what I think it was Haldane the famous biologist who said hey you know when I go in the laboratory and I well yeah well he said more I don't think there's any

you know God twisting the dials and affecting my experiment so in the laboratory I'm an atheist. So I can't, how can I not be an atheist outside the laboratory? But, but on the other hand, there, you know, Richard has talked about, as you probably know, he's a geologist, he knows a geologist who goes into work, studies rocks that are hundreds of millions years old or tens of millions years old, and at the same time as a young earth creationist. I mean, it's like, it comes to Gould's non-overlapping magisteria, right?

And it always struck me that this non-overlapping magisteria thing was a bit of a hedge. Yeah, absolutely. But it's a useful phrase because what it is is there's people who won't, who stubbornly through cognitive dissonance resolution, refuse to let the magisteria overlap. It's not that they don't overlap. They bloody do. Yeah.

But there are doors you can close, just enough doors to make sure that your God thinking and your rock thinking, just leave each other alone. They're both in the room, but it's like separating your grumpy uncle from your gay cousin at a party. It's like, look, they're both here. They don't get along,

but we're just going to not let them meet at the punch, you know? So it's, I think it's actually, it is all about subdividing your hard drive. It's about saying, I'm going to run at different programs. Of course. And that's the point. That's one of the things that's really important.

That's why it's not just saying, not wanting to tell some of they're stupid. But being religious isn't a characteristic of intelligence. There's so many other things, and it's so pompous, and I had to get out of this. Because some of the stories are so stupid that it's easy to dismiss, but there's so many morally deeply ingrained cultural and historical and familial things that come into religiosity that while one can dismiss religiosity, it's incorrect to dismiss the religious

because as if they're cretons or something like that. And the thing that you mature into when you're an atheist is very exciting when you're in your 20s to realize that you're right. And then as you get older, two things have happened, not that I've had any Damascene moment. Yeah, yeah.

I have been outspoken about religion and I have stumbled over into just being straight up you know, condescending, many times. And I think sometimes that's okay because you are fighting a huge battle against a very old and strong set of ideas that are often really problematic. So sometimes you just have to go, that's fucked, you know, and people who think that are fucked, you know. Sometimes you have to.

That's the role of polemic, right? Which was better 15 years ago than it is now, because now everyone's a polemic. they're all just bad at it. But then you start to think about the difference between right and right. So there's right a synonym of correct and right a synonym of moral, right? So you can be wrong and right. You can be incorrect about the nature of the universe. Like you can believe there's a God who responds to prayer.

That is an incorrect. That's a non-true. That is a fact that there is no interventionalist God that responds to prayer. That is a very easily. established fact. Now, you could be wrong about that fact and much, much better kind of more moral person than someone who is right about that fact. In fact, there's probably no moral correlation between someone who knows that fact and someone who doesn't, except that, you know, religion can make you do bad things. Exactly. Except once you start basing your, your actions and thoughts on

something that's fundamentally fallacious. You're bound to have actions that are bad. That's the problem. That's why there has to be a non-religious moral conversation at all times. And it's what the Enlightenment did. And, you know, we're living in a time when enlightenment values are sneered at as white and male and all this sort of thing. And that is racist and bullshit.

Humanity, people of all colors and all genders, have for thousands of years, honed their thinking and it got really hot around the late 1700s and people got really good taking all the ideas from the Greeks and from the Middle East and from Asia. We have worked on a set of ideas that stop us being racist and stop us being magical thinky and thinking that it's moral to ride into buildings and that it's moral to stop people having abortions, right? We have worked on it and we must not let that... thousand, that that millennia long project of developing human thought get thrown away in a spasm of social justice because you're pointing at data saying most of the people who know critical

thinking have this genital distribution and this pigmentation. Fuck you. If you are telling me that my black friends are not a going to be able to learn or be benefit from the accumulated philosophical knowledge of millennia, then you have a real problem and you are being, I'm sorry, with all your beautiful heart, you're being racist and reductive. And denying the best part of, no, no, no, it's okay. Because I would have if you hadn't, so I'm really glad. But no, the point is that you're, what was denouying is the greatest, is celebrating the greatest part of being human, which is the intellectual experience.

And that's not just science, but music and art and literature, the things that make it best about being human. And if you deny that, all humans. And if you take that away, then, I mean, what's the point being human? I mean, that's why I spend so much time in science and I try and connect it to culture because they're all the best part of being human. And being, and that, as you say, that enlightenment, you're absolutely right. You could be moral and kind or whatever and have all your beliefs based on, nonsense, but still act that way. But wouldn't it be better if people could be moral and kind and nice and have their beliefs based on reality? Wouldn't that actually be a little bit better?

I think so, but I think the vast, vast majority of people, religious or not, their belief systems are secular, of course. Because most religious people, they're picking the bits from the Bible that match with modern, contemporary, secular morality. They're not taking it. They're actually do have secular moral beliefs. Of course. They all do. They're going to narrow it. So this is, if I might just sort of draw a bit of a ring around the sort of social justice

and religious question and what, you know, I think you, to come back to your disagreements with Dawkins and Richard's pugnacious personality, he's probably not neurotypical. he's brilliant and you know irascible and you know yeah but he's sweet i'm going i'm going to be talking to him a couple of weeks he's a lovely he's incredibly kind and a proper liberal like yeah yeah if you are a social if you are a a lefty uh liberal like like me and you hate richard dorkins you are hating such a tiny percent you would agree with him for a man his age and from where from whence he's come he is liberal and progressive and thoughtful, right?

And I get it, you might have been really angered. Yeah, he doesn't mean to. But he might have. And if you've been hurt by what he said, then I'm not telling you you shouldn't be. But it's crazy how we look, we only look to the things that have hurt us in people. So to bring that back to religion and religious people,

anything I do and have said even on this podcast that makes a religious listener, of which I assume there are very few, feel like shit and feel angry with me, I've blown it a bit. I should be at my age, and with my education and my experience in communication, I should be able to try not to hurt too many people. And as a lefty, as someone who puts my, you know, and this is gross, but, you know, I literally put a big percentage of my post-tax income into charities

that are mostly about elevating education and mostly it's you know there's indigenous Australians and homeless people in New York. My charity you can look it all up on the internet where my money goes it's not enough and I'll get better but you know I leverage my power to do re-try, try not enough nowhere near enough to try to do little bits to promote the things I believe in equality and mobility and education education education and the arts the arts and education how how However, and I, so I have a bit of a basis from which to say this, which is that we have to always work on understanding individual people, not races, not groups, not that that's good knowledge. But mostly we have to understand every human you have not walked through the flames they've walked through. You don't know whether that entitled white guy was abused by his uncle or whether that black guy in ripped jeans is a multimillionaire.

you just don't. You don't know whether they have nefarious ideas. You don't know whether they're trying to push their own barrow. You don't know whether they're nasty regardless of their color. You don't know whether they're nice regardless of their color. You don't know where their prejudices come from, but they come from somewhere. They've been taught them. You know, you don't know whether they've got a tumor.

You don't know whether their kids just died. You don't know whether that lady in the park with the phone is having a panic attack. You don't know whether that woman closing down the black kids lemonade stand. is mentally ill and has just buried her husband and all she wants is not to have kids on the street. You don't know. You don't know whether that guy filming the story time drag queens saying that we shouldn't have drag queens

telling kids to our stories is actually a self-hating, not out gay man with mental health issues who if you pile on and share that video will kill himself. You do not know about whether that religious person needs their religion to make sense of the world that has been hard for them. You don't know whether they used religion to get out of their addiction. You know, so I can stop grouping people by things you think you know and start understanding

that the liberal civil rights mission, which is still good, is to treat humans as humans. God's sake, kids. Now there you go. Now that you're preaching, we only have eight minutes or seven minutes. according to me. Was it too? Is it too much? Have you got out of me what you wanted?

No, no, no. I could go nowhere near. But this is great. I was going to ask you earlier because you talked about religion in terms of secular laws. And I want you to answer this in two minutes because I want to give you a chance to ask me a question in the last three minutes or five minutes. Politics, clearly, and if you're like me, again, I can't help think. I write when I get angry often. off and I'm getting angry and so and I

could sense there's that there's that compatibility but and politics makes you angry and by the way I was really happy I was really happy we had Pell on our and Believers movie because it was so much better in retrospective scene I was only upset he wanted originally both me and Richard were supposed to

debate him but he said so I was supposed to be on the program and then he said no I can't I don't be outnumbered so I've got to just have one on one but anyway it's thought of running for politics because your speech you just made it be great one, right? Have you, have you ever thought about that? I think about it in terms of, I don't know shit. And I'm, I'm just a guy who reads some books. But in Australia, the level of rhetoric,

the amount, the craft, it's just so absent. It's horrible. It's horrible, isn't it? Yeah, I've just, in the States too. People got suspicious of rhetoric, you know, and Obama made them suspicious of rhetoric on the right. Rhetoric is an incredibly important tool. Leadership is about helping your population be their best version of themselves, and it happens in words. As a leader, you're meant to be inspiring. Let your ministers do the politics and the economics.

Your job is to inspire your population to be cohesive and enthusiastic, and believe in themselves. It doesn't have to be nationalistic. It's just, anyway. So sometimes I think, geez, I would like to write some speeches for these idiots, but they'll blow it. You wrote, I noticed you said you wrote one for Turmblay.

This was a few years ago. You wrote one for the old, what's her name who was the head of the British Prime Minister. I can't remember. Remember anymore because she's out of my mind. But no, no, the woman. Oh, my God. Yeah, what's her name?

Isn't that terrible? Isn't that a name too? Yeah, anyway. that'll be held we'll be held to no no no no thatcher keeps doing it but it's um it's um anyway my god well this is really a shame yeah anyway i'm not going to take time yeah teresa may okay good okay good anyway that was terrible yeah anyway it's all right um it's best something anyway um so you're absolutely right but at the same time i also know that the other thing i want to say is that yeah it's nice it's tempting to think you could go in and do that but it's also happy to know that you're

You can leave that. And I have to say that I share with you, we both have left the United States. And it's a broken country. And I was resonating when I read it because I chose to leave more recently than you. And now, so I almost feel easier to, it saddens me, but less intensively depresses me, I guess, because I can look at it from the outside and say, it's sad that it's broken. And I feel really bad for all my friends there and all of that. But boy, it's just, it's broken.

And their leaders are not helping. And what worries me is that in Australia, we take our cue from America all the time. Australia is getting worse. I used to live, as you know, I think you know, I used to live in, my wife has lived in Australia, and I just commute back and forth. And it's gotten, in my mind, the Australia I see now is so different than the Australia I saw when Julia was, say, Prime Minister there. Yeah, and we inherit America's anxieties.

America exports. And we use it as a jumping off point. And it's just like, stop. stop worrying about what's happening in America. We have our own Black Lives Matter movement and a huge Black Lives Matter style problem, but it's not the same problem. No, yeah, Australia, don't be like the US. We don't need to march during the pandemic just because something happened in America.

Like, we are getting incredibly anxious because of America, and it's making us divided like them. So ironically, by watching them, what we should do is go, don't be like that. But it's, we're being more like them. You're not seeing what happens when you become binary in a country? I'm seeing it in Canada too. And the left, you go, we're all in this together. And the left go, no, we're not.

It's brilliant. And it's like, yeah, I know. Okay, good. Now, and I don't have enough time. I wanted you to ask me a science question about something that you didn't understand. I don't understand anything. I don't really give you a time. Just super positioning in two minutes.

No one understands your positioning, but it's really a fact that a particle or anything can be in two different states at once or many different states at the same time until you measure it to be in one. And it's crazy that electron can be in many different places at the same time until you measure it to be in one. And there's no logic, there's no understanding of it. It just is. And that's why Richard Feynman actually, by the way, wanted to create quantum computers a long time ago because he said maybe that will help me understand quantum. quantum mechanics because they'll think using quantum mechanics. Can I ask you a different question about it? Is the fact that subatomically matter behaves like this and in the macro world it behaves

like that and they and the insane behavior subatomically doesn't doesn't make the macro world unpredictable? In fact, the macro world's incredibly predictable. and if we had a big enough computer we could predict everything, I believe. Yeah, yeah, I'm a determinist. Me too, me too. And by the way, quantum mechanics is deterministic.

Don't let anyone tell you it isn't. It is. It's second order differential equation. You know the wave function now, you know the wave function at all times, but sorry, go on. Right, okay, shit, that's another hour. But the next time.

Does the fact that they don't, I mean, they never will. it there's no there's no there's no this is stupid question there's no way that sort of subatomic behavior could could in some future universe or future galaxy be that that that that the macro world could behave with such ghostly you know well well in general in general no in general the rules that tell you that in fact that what what causes this weird behavior is what called quantum mechanical correlations and they disappear very effectively except what is amazing and at the forefront of physics

is we are now learning how to design systems which may manifest macroscopically the weird properties of quantum mechanical systems. Now they're very special and you have to really work hard and elaborate to do it, but it's amazing and that's probably the forefront of a lot of experimental physics now is to create on a somewhat macroscopic scale

systems that behave the crazy way that quantum mechanics does which is normally hidden from view. So most of the world doesn't... I don't see how that could be possible. Well, then we'll have to... It feels physically impossible and a little bit scary to me. Well, I know, but you have to go to another podcast, and I'm...

I'm... I haven't been watching Jurassic Park. Don't make weird shit bigger. Don't make it bigger. Making it big as bad. Yeah, that's a good thing about... Stay small. Yeah, okay.

Well, the good thing for me is that I see, that's why I'm happy. I worry about the universe and, you know, nothing I have ever done. will ever have any practical value whatsoever and except for just making the world and it's not going to be over soon enough. Unfortunately, human anxiety is not is not ameliorated by understanding that it's meaningless for me anyway. Yeah. I would really like to do a podcast where we start with science and drift a little bit into politics rather than the other way around. If you want to do it again, I'd love to do it that way. All right. Let's give it a year. Okay. It was great. Thanks, Tim. Thank you. It's so great to buy. I wish I could be with me. Yeah, it really is. And when we do it again, let's

make sure we come to it with something we've changed our mind about in the last year. Okay, it's a deal. Okay, it's a deal. You stay safe and I hope to see you there sometime. Okay, bye-bye. It's really nice to talk. I hope you enjoyed today's conversation. You can continue the discussion with us on social media and gain access to exclusive bonus content by supporting us through Patreon. podcast is produced by the Origins Project Foundation, a non-profit organization whose goal is to enrich your perspective of your place in the cosmos by providing access to the people who are driving the future of society in the 21st century and to the ideas that are changing our understanding of ourselves and our world. To learn more, please visit Originsprojectfoundation.org