Eric Weinstein

00:00doo-doo-doo doo-doo-doo-doo boom yes alive hello Eric hello Joe thanks for doing this man Jamie had a question you're you're not related to that other fellow the other Weinstein fella that's in trouble right now Brett Weinstein no that's your brother the other guy Oh Weinstein the other guy yeah I don't know him okay that other guy's in trouble he's like two more women Angelina Jolie and they both came out today yeah I don't think it's gonna stop there uh seems like you might have had a little bit of an issue it's amazing that someone can get away with something like that for so long and then one or two people come clean and the walls come down the oppressive fist of just his tyranny whatever that guy did yeah I mean I think it does speak to the idea that power really exists in an industry in a town like this well it's always been the that's been the cliche right the casting couch

01:10right yes but I didn't know in the modern era how much how much power anyone still had yeah I wonder you know it's just and it's also like super left-wing guy you know like really politically connected to social justice ideologies fighting gun control I mean you know promoting gun control and stumping for Hillary and all this yeah that seems like overcompensation I don't want to bring this up right off yeah we were gonna talk about cuddlefish I asked you to save the cuttlefish and peddle comic conversation about how it was just little fish while we were talking about I mean all of these are just like incredible hot-button topics but we're talking before about your conversation on male and female programming in the mind on male and female biological right frames and what I was what I was going to to talk about there was that you can actually have in other species which aren't nearly as

02:19commercial as humans a rational basis for something like transphobia in an evolutionary context so the giant cuttlefish which I think is called sepia Palma I'm not a biologist the males are incredibly large they're very sexually dimorphic and you've got these tiny or smaller males who don't have a good strategy for keeping a lot of females underneath them where so the males are incredibly large or the fields are incredibly large okay females tend to be much smaller okay when the females are impressed they accept shelter underneath one of these giant males Wow but then you have these other males who aren't nearly as big which might be called sneaker males and the sneaker males start retracting the tentacles that identify them as male and changing through their chromatophores they're sort of their presentation to look female and then the giant males invite

03:22these males disguised as females through behavioural change underneath and we've now proven I believe that these sneaker males inseminate the females well the large males are getting duped now are the larger males larger because they just have better genetics or are they larger because they're older well you know the question about better genetics key question is who leaves the lineages that matter over time so if you're wasting all of your energy on a strategy and in fact what you're doing is you're providing protection for sneaker males to get busy with the females who seem to be equally happy to reward a devious male as a strong one you know I'm put in mind of the old Willie Dixon blues song I'm a backdoor man don't know but the little girls understand you know definitely females favor a variety of strategies whether communicating strength and dominance

04:31cleverness or anything that females are likely to decide will benefit their offspring yeah that's a that's a great name for them to sneaker males is that like the tactical male added technical term for those small meals I've seen it in the lizards and I don't know the sepia palma giant cuttlefish system but I'm obsessed with cephalopod so I should probably go back and do some homework on them I didn't know we would be starting out with we can talk about a Harvey Weinstein giant yeah giant cuttlefish Weinstein versus Weinstein that's the difference I'm definitely keeping that yeah yeah it's a good distinction now right now yeah it's good yeah make a separation so cephalopods including coddled fish octopus squids novelists and then they all sort of came from molix right this is the craziest thing in the world right I mean we're not we're not guaranteed to

05:23meet an alien intelligence during our lifetimes but the idea that such genius exists in mollusks where you least expect it yeah is probably the closest we're ever going to get to aliens so I mean I think that it's sort of there's a secret international conspiracy people who have realized this and you know just freaked out on cephalopods and they know they know every crazy thing that cephalopods have been proven to understand and you know where their cognitive capabilities just sort of wow us you have the cognitive capabilities their camouflage capabilities the strategies that they use for attacking baitfish and there's a video that I put up on my Twitter really recently of a cuttlefish that opens up like a flower and shoots its tongue out and gets this fish and then just sucks it into its body it's like you're looking at some kind of an alien it's totally an Emmy I

06:25forget is that like 7 fold symmetry or you know it's really on a different branch of the phylogenetic tree and I think you know the dazzle patterns where you just start seeing these neon signs that are effectively made out of the chromatophores and if you've seen the videos where people put them on against like really artificial patterns like chess boards or chintz or things and the cuttlefish has to figure out okay how do i blend in with that yeah yeah and they do their best to mock it but the natural world they mimic perfectly well not really I think the octopus can do it some octopus can do it I think what happens is the hi-yah I guess it's octopi yeah I think what they do is they actually sort of do much less than we are imagining and they use the fact that we our brains are interpolating so they're in part not matching the background as well as we

07:23think but they're doing it well enough that our brains sort of make up the difference wow that's weird I mean but what would be the difference between the way we interpret their their visual but what what whatever camouflage they're giving off because it's a visual camouflage right yeah if you look at some of the some of the camouflage videos like the first seven times you see it you can't imagine yeah but then after after a while you say oh wow there really is a difference and somehow I just I did the interpolation to help out that which is trying to escape my detection well I mean there's definitely a distinction you can kind of tell once you look at it but it's so insanely impressive in comparison to pretty much almost every other life-form you know what they can do in terms of like they could change their texture that's one of the like when they when

08:19they sit on a coral reef and they start looking like a coral reef like whoa have you uh have you checked at the mimic octopus yes right so yeah that one five or six different disguises yeah I can't even imagine that usually when you have mimicry it's dedicated or obligate like a you know a stick bug or a leaf insect it's only gonna do that one trick you know what's interesting too is like I've heard a real legitimate argument for people that are opposed to eating animal protein that mollusks especially like clams and mussels and things along those lines are more primitive in terms of their ability to recognize or have any any sense of what pain is any sort of communication any sort of interpretation of danger that all they do is just close right and that in closing we've interpreted that to be it's an animal and that this animal life form is like it's like eating a living thing versus

09:18like eating plants but I've heard it argued actually Sam Harris is the first one to bring it up is actually a moral argument that they sense less than plants do and that they are more they're more primitive than plants are but yet from the molix family you have octopus and there's a good argument that you probably shouldn't be eating octopus like you shouldn't be eating monkeys you know like an octopus is smart like crazy sneaky smart it's them or us Joe I mean that case they are delicious yeah I think if you ever look at Humboldt squid you know schooling and descending as one of the great nightmares of all time don't you think I've seen a Humboldt squid Humboldt squid sometimes they if we get they called them Red Devils like the coast of Baja California and they're just social and they're terrifying because they attack in groups so they plan it or they

10:15coordinate in some way in some way I mean obviously the chromatophores must have some ability to do signaling and I think that you know with respect to we have to figure out whether it's really intelligence that causes us to become empathic hmm because you know obviously if you're war and you think highly of your enemy you have to guard against your own empathy so that you can be an effective warrior you have to ask the question you know if monkeys and apes are among the most intelligent beings do I actually feel some revulsion for just how savage chimpanzees are as compared to say bonobos or Gibbons yeah isn't that the real argument or the real fascinating conversation is what happened on the in the evolutionary chain like why did bonobos become these peaceful sexual creatures and chimps become these warring savage psychos like what they look so similar like what happened

11:16well that that one I don't know but there's an interesting system in dung beetles where if you look at the armaments that they have on their head for warring between males there's a conserved quantity between the length of the copulatory apparatus and the size of the weaponry so the more weapons the smaller the penises mm-hmm and so you know there are all these crazy trade-offs in Apes between relative testicular size and penal size for gorillas right right as the rulers have tiny little penises but enormous bodies giant fangs and tiny wench penis yeah I guess yeah and but Ramses have big penises and big testicles both yeah see the chimpanzees there's a direct correlation between promiscuous females and the size of their testicles hmm I don't I don't remember that one but yeah the question about I also worry that we've we've idealized the bonobos too much and you know we were sort of

12:26it's very hard to be sympathetic with the chimps after Jane Goodall showed us what they're capable of right but in part you know that they called logic of the natural world in general you know it's usually some reason that makes complete sense it's it can't be sentimental anytime you bring sentimentality and you usually screw up a good theory and so you know I I worry that our comparisons are driven by our needs to locate ourselves farther away from chimpanzees and closer to something that we we feel comfortable so are idealizing the bonobos necessarily based on what they actually are but based on like our little sort of hippie version of life like look we could be like the bonobos loving and sexual and affectionate or we can be like the warring horrible horrible chimpanzees well you know it's also the case that how great does it feel to be sexual if you're being sexually out

13:32competed by others it's always unfun to be you know low status and Nature has different ways of punishing and rewarding status and achievement in in various different in various different species so my guess is is that there is a kind of conserved you know unpleasantness and losing each particular game and a pleasure in winning each particular game right and that's that's essentially how nature keeps moving forward right yeah you know to the extent that you're wasting energy warring when you could be being constructive or being more strategic you're going to get out competed by whichever members of your species you know figure out the puzzle first and so I think that you know there's this concept of the naturalistic fallacy of viewing that which you know if you assume that we carry some sort of judeo-christian baggage and all of this was thought to come from a creator who

14:40was thought to have positive characteristics then well obviously the natural world is is God's work but I mean if you actually look at the systems that fascinate me the creator would have to be about the most twisted conscious consciousness you could possibly imagine well it seems like it's it's the long game the creator's playing the creator's not playing the game that favors the the health and the welfare of the individual in the current day it's the matter of like figuring out how to get through this brutal game and advancing and evolving along the way to the point where someday in the future you find a more complex and evolved system but you know this is the most complex and evolved this us you humans most complex and involved system in terms of its ability to change its environment that we've ever come across and we're not too happy with ourselves

15:34yeah although I mean I do think that despite our barbarism we are that which can contemplate the game and you know at some point you've obviously had my brother on the street on the show I asked him as an evolutionary theorist Brett what are you doing you know you're married to one woman you've had two kids as an evolutionary theorist don't you think you're throwing the game and his response was I think brilliant it was and tell me Eric if you understood the game why would you want to continue to play it hmm right so for him it was almost like a sort of a proof that if you really get you know another one of his good quotes is that life when properly understood is a spelling bee that ends in genocide that we're all so focused on our nucleotide sequences do you really care about the particular way in which you digest lactose different from how I do it that

16:37you want to go to war with me so we can spell the future using your version rather than mine like maybe you'd feel this way about your ideas about you know your songs your your stories but really you really want to fight over like things that neither of us care I don't like what what are you saying well if you're trying to think about like I want to leave seven children right okay why do you want to do that well because I want to see more copies of myself well you will see a certain number of copies of yourself but that's gonna get diluted very quickly by the time we get to your great-great-grandchildren it's gonna be hard to see yourself in your offspring so that's sort of an illusion of one generation to generations most of the things that are going to determine your genes propagating have to do with the fact that you're on a team there are a bunch of people who digest milk the way

17:32you do and so the key question is you know team Rogan on the milk though Jess tchen is some huge number of people you've never met that's what I understand like why I don't understand the connection to milk digestion well it's just one thing that your body is doing in a particular way uh-huh so you know you like let's take eye color maybe that's more okay so you know I know that I have a blue allele that is being suppressed in terms of its expression do I really care that you know my wife has two brown alleles does it matter to me that my blue somehow survives bruh do I care that I wanted to survive enough against some brown-eyed person might be interesting if you had a checklist of like what things that you would agree upon like you and the wife get together they'd say okay so what do you think you know whose side we going with intelligence you're a little

18:27smarter than me I'm gonna give it to you let's go with you let's go with your brain yeah okay I'm better at smelling things like how do you know I'm just a bit allergic to cats let's have none of the kids sneeze every time they go near a litter box was the great thing let's just flip a coin yeah let's do it a couple of times and whatever we get we get I worry about you know crisper cast nine people are gonna be having these like I'll trade you this for that we're gonna have crazy yeah I'm fascinated by CRISPR I mean I think most people aren't even aware of it people like you of course are people who are paying attention are but I think to the general public has no idea that CRISPR even exists and it's potentially world-changing I mean you are literally looking at the tools that will eventually lead much like you know Alexander Graham Bell's invention led to

19:13you having the internet in your pocket right slowly but surely I mean you you're looking at the tools that will one day lead to us engineering some completely new organism that you're gonna call human beings yeah I think that's gonna be a long time off the Alexander Graham Bell was a long time off and I think well I bet it's less time than that okay when was that was that 1800s yeah look at that what are the odds 2017 to the late 1800s you don't think 2117 we're gonna behave incredible hulks and Thor's and women look like Wonder Woman there's not gonna be a single troll like looking person left I think we would be able to do a lot yeah I think we're gonna be able to do a lot more combinatorics of swapping something in that's known to work and swapping something out but when we actually get to like authorship where we're like okay I got this great idea

20:07for a human being right I'm gonna start from scratch there's there's a lot of optimism that for which I am the pessimist you know uploading the mind to a computer yeah you put a lot of curse Wiles ideas yeah well not in the sense that we're never gonna get anywhere close but just there was 2045 that's what they're well I mean for I mean I'm optimistic about certain things that turned out to be a lot easier than we expected I think that a lot of things that are we thought we're gonna require artificial general intelligence are gonna succumb to much simpler systems and so you know you might have thought that for example if you played through the great chess games of you know the 1800s like morphine yeah Anderson and things you might say well that's just a uniquely human activity and then you find out no no computers can trounce humans at chess because it's not it

21:05wasn't what you thought it was and maybe music will be the next thing to succumb because that's really highly regular right well music is also intensely creative and emotive right it it sparks feeling in humans and I don't think you could really I don't know I mean maybe you could but I don't think you really could figure out a way to engineer or have a computer engineer something that makes you feel like leads up on the immigrant song you know there's just like a bizarre feeling - someone's art that comes through when you listen to it and you're like oh this is great you know like we're I don't I don't necessarily know you could do that with something that doesn't understand emotions or is using a replica of emotions whereas chess you know you know a rook move this way one can move that way here's the rules this is how it starts this is what once you get here

22:00you're in check like those things seem pretty straightforward you're dealing with squares it's very mathematic you know one person moves and another one moves whereas like there's like this fluid nature to art literature and music and how many other half of that III think I disagree really yeah I mean so I don't know why you chose the immigrant that that's like you know why because I'm gonna go to cryotherapy after this that's the Salmonella so do just good song so if we - if you'd taken if you'd if you take in Roy Orbison's pretty woman okay right so you have the main riff from that song yeah head like I am walking down the street like do to calm down working afternoon right with the riff is like doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo did it right so if you start if you take a guitar string and you split it into four equal parts you put your finger over one quarter of the string

23:06and then you start just plucking the string and hovering above the string so you don't actually push it to the fretboard those notes occur naturally as the harmonics in the expansion of the vibrating string so that those notes were not really chosen by Roy Orbison or whoever wrote the song they were really chosen by like a Fourier series and it feels like it's a riff but I discovered this when I was in Indonesia as I would start playing that and people would react I thought like why that song what about more complex creative and sort of improvisational song like voodoo child from Hendrix so I don't know about voodoo child I mean well you take taking out and it changes up so I if you look at the first couple of chords of red house there's like some seventh or diminished chord mm-hmm like he's arpeggiating no no and then he moves it down a half step which has to do with

24:09this tritone substitution and the symmetry inside of the seventh chord so if I recall correctly you have a like ceg b-flat would be a c7 chord and the e and they b-flat would form this thing called a tritone and now if you went in the Blues either three elements of the chord progression the dominant sub-dominant and the tonic if you go down a half step you effectively invert the third and the flat seven so if you go one half step below that it's the flat seventh of the third I think of the subdominant chord so hendrix is actually playing with math mm-hmm in something as basic as do you think he's aware of it or do you think he's doing it sort of just instinctual well first of all when you're visited by an alien intelligence we went through cuttlefish and we now we've got Jimi Hendrix so it you know that's like these are the these are the best alien sightings we have right it's very hard

25:12to speculate but I I just look at everything I've been able to understand about what he did and you you know you're dealing with a super mind as well as an intuitive right mastery master of the instrument complete understanding of the chords and progressions and just the ability to improvise and to make it sound different adding the wah wah pedal and all that distortion and all the and the fact that he imparts more into one note like I wouldn't even know how to notate I mean what is even the instrument he didn't play the guitar he played the guitar amplification you know signal processing system as a whole yeah so you know there are these people who are just in some multi dimensional space another one of my favorites is a guy named Roy Buchanan who somehow these guys who understand harmonics gravitate to Telecasters and you know pull up song called Roy's blues and watch him just go

26:13into the multiverse and start playing with things that you can't even imagine are possible so I do think that that there's a very close relationship between algorithms and emotion and I just did this one for an old tweet of mine where I wrote a Python program that actually runs from the tweet so the entire program is in the tweet and its purpose is to generate the chord progression for Pachelbel's Canon which is if you want people to cry at a wedding that's the chord progression to play and so the idea that it's actually an algorithm that breaks your heart it is very frightening just dealing with some insane noise in the background here folks they're doing some to our roof these are the last days that we're in the studio by the way which is hilarious that it's sort of highlighting why we need to get the out of here I don't know what they're doing this dude I mean does even rain anymore

27:11while they doing fixing the roof put a tarp up their think I even asked me right before the show he's like what time do you tape I told them he's like oh well that's right about the time we're lighting explosions right above your head sorry for people listening to this like what the is that noise that's the noises they're banging around the roof pinned down by enemy fire yeah well I mean I think it's also me as a as a human I probably have some bias some stupid idea that creativity is impossible to recreate you know that whatever it leads to a person being able to make some beautiful song or create some amazing book is impossible for some sort of a computer to figure that out on its own well if you I would go and hang out in a modern recording studio and watch them move the beat around mm-hmm and mutated and change it or if you think about like that moment where cher

28:11said hey I don't think auto-tune should be used to correct my voice in a sly way I'm going to use this as the instrument itself right and suddenly this metallic voice actually isn't it becomes an anthem and you start you know Robo cher is incredibly inspiring do you remember Peter Frampton he was like one of the first guys use it in a song do you feel like I do well so use that that thing with his mouth yeah Cuban isthmus so he's really act using his body to shape he's using the there's like this five dimensional lattice in your in your mouth to produce the International phonemic alphabet so your your nose could be on or off that's one degree of freedom you can have vocalization on or off vocalization meaning you can have your vote like F f as in Frank versus V is and victory they're the same mouth right but right so you're just vibrating your throat so you can analyze a Chinon off

29:15vocalization so who is in the throat smart Frank you boomer like as best versus Z would be another pair ah ok so the sound that you're making with with your throat right and you have like your lips in one of three positions so that's a third degree of freedom then your tongue can be in one of five positions and it can be fully elevated half elevated or not elevated at all hmm so there's like five parameter family that generates what's called the International phonemic alphabet and you know one of the cool things to think about is how could you create an instrument that naturally allowed you phonemic productions that you're not just doing these you know rightful ringing tones well there's got to be a way to just recreate it physically right they just make an artificial head and maybe just made an artificial head with I mean it's not like we do something that's impossible

30:19to recreate with a robot okay but like in terms of if you take the collection of all major instruments what comes closest to the human voice a lot of people think it's the Indian violin called the sarong II really yeah if you've never checked that out do you know what's a sarangi a sarangi is like we use it to drown out the pounding on the roof we'd win I've never even heard of a sarong II sounds badass it's it's oh it's a strange violin it's a strange violence got a lot of sympathetic strings and you know because of you can power into a note you if you if I have a guitar and I pluck a string I'm just gonna get decay unless I Drive the sound mm-hmm right but you know if I do with my voice look how cool that thing looks yeah Wow louder Wow I just try to imagine like a lot of those are sympathetic strings so they ring when you hit the tone perfectly whoa now

31:30so if you've never gotten into North Indian classical music this is what hasn't today's your lucky day this is really cool wild looking thing man it has three strings yeah my guess is I mean I don't recall but very often you will need to know one that one looks kind of older you know beat-up amazing she got like romney-ryan on this thing he was like the ultimate bet oh there's a ultimate badass and the sarong gee I'm learning almost I almost died out it almost died I think it was like it was used for guzzle singing and courtesans used to play it what's up guzzle singing ghazals like this type of song that would be popular and what would now be Pakistan in northern pissed dude out do you remember Zamfir master the pan-flute they'd have those late night ads yeah that died off quick huh I am that old that pan flute thing really never caught on this is way better than

32:43the pan flute though do you think this guy has groupies I know he does does he teach yoga too seems like he would well so you see the drums on the left yeah so that's that the table and the Bayan and that is the you know I think many people would consider North Indian drumming to be the world's most advanced rhythmic system really yeah I mean even even more than Africa the speed of articulation it goes at the speed of speech and if you take the Hindi verb to speak bolna they have the system that they call the bowls and to speak the bowls is to say what you would instruct your hands to do if you were playing the drums oh wow look at him I've heard sounds like this before for sure like I'm a fan of dollar mehndi I like dollar Mindy's music okay I've got some cool music and he has this kind of in the background a lot do you know he is right I do not you don't know

33:50who dollar mehndi is what is this song the big famous song things called tunak tunak tun it's really a badass song it's uh I love music where I don't know what they're saying you know I enjoy that because it just like you just kind of get a feel for the song and you have no idea what the actual words where they could be totally corny yeah you know see if you can find something like speaking the bowls for table and you'll see these guys doing this thing where they did you dougie deducted it didn't it that they could do an attack to detect that you know and what they do presents that they create with their mouths everything their fingers would do with their hands so that song that song that we just plan totally cut off this is it this is him he's got a badass have no idea what he's saying you got he's hilarious music video - the music is like as any badass it's him

34:57against him in this video but he got arrested for like white slavery well they're like good yeah he got arrested Jesus what it was like sex trafficking or something like that some kind of sleeve trap it's sex slave trafficking or something like that he was a part of some I don't know maybe he just pissed off the wrong guy in India and I guess they hit him with some charge you never know you know weird countries like that they can get away with a lot of what is it brother just died I guess Oh anyway sorry so um what does that those drums called again often just called table but table is the sort of soprano drum and then the the Bayan I guess you played with sort of the heel of your hands so you strike it and go huh and I think the you know the world's best practitioner this guy lives in Marin County now really Zakhar Hussein who's the child of a LaRocca who was like the badass of his

36:06time and it's one of these things where I think you sort of have to be born almost into the family to have this passed down how do you know all this stuff this is something you've studied for a long time there is an amazing book by guy named Neil Sorel that I picked up in college and I just opened it up and it went through an entire performance of Indian North Indian classical music and I was just you know my my jaw was on the floor how is the this entire form of classical music much closer to our jazz so much more impressive I mean visually to watch one of these drummers and one of these soloists like the soloist will try to lose the drummer and the drummer's got these mirror neurons that can't be beat and they'll just like follow him everywhere and so you just you know you're some-some poor white kid in America saying nobody told me this existed yeah it's isn't it weird how we just

37:04choose like a certain series of instruments that represent rock and roll certain series of instruments that represent jazz you know it's really it's strange when you think of the the wide range of musical instruments that exist all over the world that are just never utilized in modern music yeah and I do think that we've become too complacent we should be you know like Ian Anderson with Jethro Tull yeah why you know if you listen to the flute solo and locomotive breath that'll get me going every guy why didn't I think I didn't take it off yeah you know the clarinet was lost to jazz used to be this incredibly dominant instrument and coming out of like the klezmer tradition you know it rocked and then it sort of became this non thing and at some point I saw a guy named Tony Scott who was like the last great clarinetist in jazz who went off to Japan to study Zen for

38:02years and he came back for a birthday concert and he blew Dizzy Gillespie and Benny Carter off the stage I was just thinking like oh I forgot clarinet can be the kick-ass instrument yeah most people think of it as something you're forced to take in high school yeah but fundamentally that's that's where like the uke the ukulele has come back like crazy the ukulele was a Mexican instrument that was introduced to Hawaii right it's not our keys I think yes was it yeah but it got it is it's a big thing in in Hawaii right are they into the ukulele yeah I think it came over with cattle ranchers I think it was introduced to Hawaii by people who brought over like Cowboys like if I remember I might be butchering the story forgive me my Hawaiian friends but I think what it what it was was they had introduced cattle at some point in the history of Hawaii and when they introduced cattle

39:01how do you keep these things from wandering all over the place oh man we gotta find some cowboys to teach us how to do this and they got someone who's either Mexican or South American Cowboys to come over and show them how to wrangle these cows how to how to corral them how to how to take care of them and then when they did these Cowboys came over and introduced the ukulele which is really kind of uniquely Hawaiian in art in America when we think about it you know you hear like a sound of like the ukulele we we sort of think about it as whole like my daughter's musician and when we're in Hawaii I got our ukulele like she you know and she plays it we think about it's like in a lot of people's eyes like a lot of like what we think of as classic Hawaiian music is played with the ukulele yeah so I I think I'm I thought that his thought it was I thought it was like a porch I

39:53think it's cool a lei and it's like jumping flea Sun why a name on a Portuguese instrument what's that that's a wikipedia says they attributed to three Portuguese immigrants in the 1880s that developed it from three other guitar-like instruments from Portugal that's the origin of the ukulele but how did it get to Hawaii as they were in Hawaii oh they were in Hawaii those guys were in Hawaii also they brought it to him why the very guys who made it so I wake up edia says there's nothing Wikipedia said Brian challenged my brother and I have some weird diseases that I don't really have what Kapiti is often I just love the fact that you let people just edit it like anytime there's a podcast and something up happens you go to the person's Wikipedia page and they'll totally butcher it well the amazing thing is is that it works at all yes that's it that is amazing right

40:45it is amazing I never would have guessed that yeah right like some user edited thing that's sort of well what's amazing also is there's only one Snopes you know like there's only one like real well-regarded fact-checking website like it was someone else a like hey I want you Snopes that right I wouldn't yeah I wouldn't anymore yeah I'm distressful you're distressed about distrustful distrustful of Snopes why do you feel like there cleaning or do you feel like they're just not necessarily 100% honest or what do you think well or you think the guy gets a lot of hookers and blow guys the history of it is hilarious the guy he just shacks up with some escort and she becomes the main editor I'm gonna have some more DMT before I think that one I think that the IQ not needed to sort fact from fiction at the moment is enormous the amount of money he'd made would be oh yeah right

41:51fantastically today with a hashtag fake news it yeah so I am I'm sort of feeling like I'm witnessing the battle for whether any authority exists at all and the claim that you fact check has been synonymous dwith the fact that you're truthful mmm which is total nonsense in other words if I accurately represent three people who were in a in a scene and I and I leave out to others and somebody says that fact you know that that picture is fake i I said no no these three people really were there yes but you filtered out those other things you know you think we didn't tell wise by leaving things out by insinuation I had this whole riff on what I frequently referred to as Russell conjugation that other people call emotive conjugation so you know the difference between Fink versus whistleblower is how I usually introduce this hmm you have these are technically synonyms in English but you cannot

43:03substitute one for the other yeah rat and whistleblower don't ya know whistleblower is the only is usually one of the only positive ones Chelsea Manning is a highly regarded rat the emotional shading yeah and so you know the like another thing is to get somebody proximate to something very disturbing so Ben Shapiro and I were in this article about how the all right was outraged and we were that like the two people cited neither's must be alright you right Jesus Christ all right things a weird thing to no no no it's it's a great game you have to appreciate what it is okay so if you're trying to silence the very small number of people who are probably your guests mm-hmm the right thing to do is to make sure that they're proximate to lots of terrible stuff right so that people who are too busy to sort things out so well you know I neither condemn nor condone

44:03because all you're trying to do is to muddle everything right I need enough fear uncertainty and doubt in order to get the job done and so it doesn't matter that the article says you know in the banner headline alright enraged and then the two people you know listed or like Jews who opposed Trump because when those articles are parsed it shows up as well you were in a bunch of articles about the all right yeah okay so I get it you're really not paying attention and the the point isn't to inform the reader the point is to tag that which you wish to news neutralize right and so it's working very well to people in the alt-right consider themselves alright or did they use to well it's become sort of a pejorative so let's go through the craziness here okay assume that you are not a Democrat right not a Democrat might translate to libertarian a more Republican right Republican translates

45:07to right of center right of transit center translates to right-wing translates to far-right translates to all right translates to white supremacist translates to neo-nazi translates to Nazi right and so you have these very strange chains on the Left where Republican keeps bleeding into Nazi right because of this very weird thing it's like what you said you said you didn't vote Democrat so I can I say that your right-wing I mean your far-right right you're basically all right Jesus Christ holy crap you just you know moved somebody who's a country club Republican into being a Gestapo agent you know yeah and does alright necessarily mean white supremacists or they conveniently glued those two things together I think Richard Spencer considers himself alright well I think he coined all right oh he did yeah so you know the idea is white supremacy with a human

46:04face and a human face is opposed to wild look a goat no he's trying he was trying to change the he was trying to come up with a friendlier version of Nazi or Oh white supremacist Solaris right and so it's at some level that was a disgusting intellectual masterstroke but then all right became the plaything you know a lot of people who are tired of being told what to think and who to be started blurring these distinctions you know now you've got this frog and sometimes you put a hat on the Frog sometimes it's the Nazi hat sometimes the Trump hat right and so the whole idea is like okay for those of us who got used to those lines that we do not cross those were major transgressions to other people they're like well why should there be a rule about a frog right and so you have this crazy discussion where you have people with terrible insidious intent people who are just clowning around and

47:07everybody is mixed in in a way that nobody can sort out right like the Frog that's qeq all right yeah and I can if you really pay attention and I think there's been some sort of a study done and what percentage of the Frog is actually used for you know Donald Trump or racism or all right and what percentage of the Frog is used just for a goof it's the vast majority is like feels good man type thing maybe but like me I've seen I got sent to many Nazi frogs during election I've been sent a few yeah right you know it's like anybody could make one make a Nazi and people have maybe that's - Mickey Mouse but you know we didn't use to like there's still a lot of stigma around reproducing swastikas with the color scheme and the orientation of the Third Reich if you've seen that the gay folks for what for a very short period of time we're trying to co-opt the swastika and turn into a rainbow

48:05swastika to take it back oh my gosh well to work when you go to India right you have swastikas you know pointing the other direction with dots in them and so if you come from an America yes context you're just trigger at all there's a place up here there's a place in Chatsworth I believe that is in a very very old Indian temple that that's swastikas on it and there's a large sign but it's not a swastika it's a reverse swastika there's a large sign explaining you know hey this is an ancient Hindu symbol and we've had it for a long time and longer yeah I mean I guess I haven't looked at the at the etymology but I would guess that sois comes from beautiful in in Sanskrit or something and so you know the question about who does a symbol belong to right and when is an inexorable and when is it inexorable when is it like you know that symmetry pattern I have no question that

49:01you might find that symmetry pattern in nature or you know in in like you know ninth century Islamic art architecture or something well you know the hexagon they found on top of Jupiter you know remember that the storm yeah you know what if it was a swastika could you imagine instead of a hexagon there's a swastika on top of Jupiter Jesus Christ you think that Jupiter was it Saturn and Jupiter may have been Saturn but there was some very bizarre pattern pattern that's a very strange yeah but it's uniform I mean it's like pretty close to an actual hexagon right Eve so yeah but it is very weird that we get so wrapped up in symbols and symbols are so huge for us yeah but they are efficient compressions and information you know you know and then you lose you know a symbol like you can lose the name you know like dick no I call it our kids dick and you're gay right yeah yeah

50:04used to be gay old time The Flintstones they had a gay old time that was one of the last uses of gay in that my grandfather claimed that the emotion of gaiety was lost with the work he claimed that there was actually an emotion that went with it no one actually experiences anymore Wow but how does he describe it that it was a sort of careless frivolity that it had a certain sort of combination of like innocence tinged with a little bit of mischief mm like sexual messages oh really anyway you know so we become aware of words that open up new territories so like the concept of Sanuk in Thai lots of people go through Thailand come back and they need the word Sanuk which is the quality of fun that something has to have in order for it to be worth doing like did you pay your electrical bill no why there was no cynic in it you know so that that was like that's a concept or

51:06hutzpah you know coming from kiddush or you know Turkish has Yakima's which is the trail of light left on the water by the moon right and so once you have a word for yakumo's it's very hard not to use it even though nobody in an english-speaking context knows about it just the way the word selfie if you recall when that came in we'd seen all these weird pictures of like ladies and you know restrooms taking pictures of themselves in the mirror and you're like yeah somebody says oh that's a selfie it's like got it yeah right and then suddenly that word was everywhere so once we get the the symbolic compression that goes with a concept we become pretty dangerous my wife as a friend is so stupid she's known a selfie means so she takes she put uses hashtag selfie and somebody else takes the picture yeah sure of her she does know a camera in her hand and she's standing

52:06there with her hands on her hips I would love to joke with you but I have definitely used that hashtag selfie I've thought selfie when it's not a selfie at all well I mean it is just her picture of herself maybe she set up the camera maybe I'm the right isn't it is it a selfie if you put a timer on a camera and you step back see this will me I'm an he's a diabetic questions of her she's right I'm wrong maybe she's got a maybe if you just have a husband that's so dominant just sit around take pictures of you so you could put them on Instagram I mean you you basically programs that dissolve you have a program monkey that'll take pictures six-ten itself exactly yeah yeah if you if you shoot a pheasant and you have a dog that will fetch that bird and bring it back to you still shot the bird a pheasant yeah yeah you know how will they do that yeah yeah you you flush the

52:59birds out with dogs the birds go up in the air they shoot them out with a shotgun the birds hit the ground the dog gets it and brings it back to you but you shot it yeah yeah that's why they only call them retrievers yes exactly exactly but we're learning a lot of let's just go over all we covered no no quiz but they were covered why we're moving because there's a earthquake going on on the roof Indian music cephalopods sneaker males sneaker sneaker males yeah I didn't know so many things I didn't know about is that like a common thing though like everybody kind of knows that's what a lot of male feminists are they're like like sneaker males they're like sliding in closer to proximity to the females by you know by trying to sort of espouse some ideals that they think would be more attractive to the females because they don't find them in nature yeah and

53:56then the problem is that the ovulatory would comes along and suddenly there's a desire for something completely different right immediately and it's like what happened with that it's like I don't know it was strangely appealing yeah it's that gene pool man those goddamn genetics they've got us yeah but it's not it is really amazing how we're conscious and we're we're aware of all these issues that we deal with but yet we're still we're still at the first a certain extent at the whim of these genes of these these poles that we have inside of us that's like the argument that people always make for why some people find like subsistence living like those shows in Alaska so oddly comforting you ever see those shows where you're really close to with the environment that brought you here yeah like Alaska the final frontier you see that show yes folks just live up in

54:51there they're actually related to that woman jewel do you know that beautiful singer jewel remember this amazing voice and she is related to those folks that live in Alaska and they have this show where they let me live way to up there with nobody around them yeah they are literally and just nowhere I last got to do that but it's oddly comforting I love those shows I don't know why I love those shows what I really do I think you might I could see you doing that des living like that no no I like to do in little bursts yeah I enjoy a movie theater sir I like a highway I like to drive cars I enjoy television I like cooking in a home okay I like doing that I like sitting down with electricity I like all the trappings of civilization but I do enjoy going to nature I have no desire to be a trapper and you know flying around in a bush plane landing places and checking my steel traps for minks

55:54and stuff yeah those are the folks huh is that her in there super old picture of it is she one of them is she the girl with the red sweater yeah I forget the name of the family killed killed sure yeah I think that is it yeah but they mean these people they make their own houses up there I like that and somehow or another she escaped no she's probably was in Venice now some so my arch nemesis is this guy Garrett Lisi who lives in Maui oh yeah why you guys arch nemesis you don't have one I don't think so you should totally get one what are they good for you well first of all lots of billionaires forgotten to have an arch nemesis you go to movies about arch nemesis very plural is but it's like it's definitely one of these things almost nobody has and your arch nemesis has to be somewhat like you so right you know like there is tension that there should only be one mmm oh yeah see I'm not

56:47there should only be one guy I'm a tribal guy yeah I think you should gather up as many people that are like you and support each other well you do end up supporting your economists each other going right oh right in some sort of a way right some yeah I mean definitely we definitely need some sort of competition I definitely believe that so my arch-nemesis took me out into the jungles of northern Maui to kill you I thought so really we will yeah you have an enemy and he says hey man you wanna go hiking yeah bro why was I was down for it because I just thought look I'm not sure that he's the one who's coming back right right yeah anyway we could go out on this trail and we're visiting this PhD mathematician in the jungles yeah it is without question the most mosquito ridden place I've ever been Maui yeah it's just it's unlivable Maui has some incredible rain forests incredible and

57:44we get out along this trail and we hike like a mile or two in and this guy has built shangri-la he's taken this river and he's Scott you know he's been there for like 25 30 40 years he's a mathematician is like a PhD in differential geometry Wow he lives under this amazing durian tree nastiest fruit durian is that yeah that's that stinky fruit right why would he do that because if you've ever had great durian it's one of the great pleasures of life really it's so it stinks but it tastes good yeah it's like Limburger cheese okay that's a good analysis so anyway this guy has built this like solitary world that nobody is watching it's right it's a performance for one and it's it's like this naturally sculpted Wonderland that he lives in with all these mosquitoes that he doesn't notice under his durian trees where he can do mathematics why does he not notice

58:40something because you're in there for eternity yeah Wow we can't focus on it for 30 years he needs to get one of those Therma cells you ever seen those things no oh they're amazing yeah if you go to anywhere where the mosquitoes are particularly aggressive because like if you go to Alaska have you been to Alaska before sir one thing about Alaska that's fantastic is the mosquitoes are rabid they're like pit bulls me and my friend Ari went fishing in Alaska and I am not exaggerating here no we didn't we sprayed ourselves up with horrible chemicals if you only took a year off my life but when you step out of the car I mean when we opened up look at that that's that's like legitimately what it's like we opened up the door to the car and within three to five seconds there was a hundred mosquitoes inside the car it's insane because they're only alive for like a month

59:39right it's only warm enough for them to exist a short period of time so they're insanely aggressive so anyway there's this product called thermos L that outdoors people use and what it is is it's like a small pad that looks like a large square like piece of gum or something like that and you slide this blue pad under this screen and then you ignite it by pressing a button this little heating element goes off and it has like a little fuel canister that keeps this very tiny fire it's it immensely small like like you have to look in to see if it's lit right it's probably not even a fire it's somehow this element is heating up this fuel it takes a long time to go through a small canister but it emits this very fine mist and this mist will keep a like an 18 square foot get out window of protection dude it is impossible to be in the outdoors with it without it

60:33rather once you've had it so III I found out about it from my friends in Alberta they they were the first to turn me on about it they live in Alberta and the same thing in Alberta the mosquitoes are super super aggressive because it's only warm enough for them to exist for a short period of time I'm so glad I did the show dude a thermos L is amazing and you can strap them to your hip you just put one on right there you don't even smell it and but the mosquitos don't want to have nothing to do with it they just keep they try some like really what I'm doing they give up I mean it's amazing it makes be in the woods incredibly bearable like meet my daughters want to go camping in the backyard one night there was bugs out there and I said I got the solution when I got my thermos I'll let that sucker put it there everybody's about alcohol sleeping just no problems at all bugs and civilians

61:21can purchase this yeah well it's not it's not toxic okay I think but it's super easy to use that's it right there yeah so that thinks that blue thing in the top that's a piece of the thermos sell the chewing gum looking stuff these slide under that screen and when it gets used up that blue thing becomes all white it's so easy to use Matt it's like a go like come Chuck I just it's right out they have a large one there that looks like a lamp see that one that looks like a lamp up there dude those things are this I hate mosquitoes Oh thermos el it's a way to go I mean I don't look cool the negative consequences you see that see that one he's got like pouches on the side of the container and one pouch II would have like you're a little extra fuel canisters on the other side you'd probably have some of those little extra thermos L pads but one little thing one

62:12of those little blue things lasts for like eight hours so I mean one of the great questions is some of the most beautiful land in a place like Maui mmm is mosquito ridden yeah and so if something that worked could you change lien value you'd have to burn them all the time and I don't know if it's something you want to breathe in all the time I just don't I don't know enough about negative consequences but I've used them a bunch of times and they've never even given me a headache or anything find out if whatever is in thermos L is like safe for long term exposure says you're not supposed to use in a confined space okay there's some sort of stuff you're obviously breathing it yeah for sure but Herman owned permison para Mithen I don't know how come nothing you know I've asked this before but when we were kids and you read comic books about like radiation they always helped people turn

63:03people into superheroes yeah you never hear that in real life yeah you have to get lucky and get like some homey a documentation so you've got like straight arms out of your head never does anything good no no me well mutations and bugs are really cool we add bugs that I mean in in human beings like I mean I guess that probably that was the thing about CRISPR that I was gonna bring up earlier for sure they're doing that right they're making humans yeah I mean that's the thing about like having this ethical moral stance on the use of something like CRISPR to genetically alter fetuses yeah that if you do that you really if if you have an opposition to altering embryos like that's immoral it's not something we want to be murderous that yeah but that's the problem they're already past that the Russians don't give a about that did you see that movie Icarus no god damn you have to see that

64:03movie answer I had Brian Fogle on last week who is the director and producer of this documentary on the doping the Russian state-sponsored doping program the Russians don't play dude they don't play they had a state-sponsored doping program that was kind of over seed bye-bye Putin like down the Lyla there's a direct chain of command and the whole entire Russian team is Sochi was on drugs all of them the guy who engineered the whole thing like the main scientist is in the United States now in a protective custody yeah in hiding and Putin is trying to drag him back to Russia by stealing the the homes from his family stealing his wives home turned him into homeless people and some sort of a lure to get him to sacrifice himself to come back for the health and safety of his family you remember what happened when Saddam did that it didn't work out so good yeah a cell phone video it's when you

65:00know you up the cell phone video footage of your execution oh that's that Saddam's execution but I think you learned his son and his son in laws back like don't worry it's all forgiven the sudden loss came back and they owe me I was the it yes Saddam was pretty skilled and and oh this was a difference in them no no the self I mean that was a very strange situation because he actually was the only guy was like he had his together when he was being executed yeah he understood the game he accepted the girl like alright but also he's probably like Jesus Christ how many people that I kill like ft I think after you've killed like a few hundred thousand people you probably like a probably deserve it yeah I'm I'm well yeah I know you ever seen Christopher Hitchens narrating the original bath party I don't know what to call it theatrical video where like half the

65:57bath party was called out as being revealed traitors and then the other half of the bath party was giving given sidearms with which to execute them making them complicit in the founding murder and it was all filmed oh I'm aware of this but I didn't know the Christians narrated it well he did something where he he brought it to prominence I think I was aware of it with just Arabic I couldn't tell what was going on okay and then he actually said okay look you have to appreciate well this is a topic that I think you know be good to talk about I don't know that I've ever talked about it but message violence is the glue that keeps a lot of societies together and we don't study it or talk about violence that is specifically constructed to be theatrical like public beheadings I mean yeah that would be a kind of message violence or for example forcing families

66:59to pay for the ammunition with which their family members were executed to make them complicit and emphasize their weakness mmm all of the stuff that the mind goes to horror movies to explore is often used structurally particularly in the Middle East so you know Isis for example the Jordanian pilot video which I find that many people haven't seen the whole point of it was that the pilots were raining down death in two particular forms rubble and fire when people in the ground and Isis captured one of the Jordanian pilots and decided that they would theatrically execute him with a version of exactly these two things that he was meeting out from the air and so the whole point of it was to create the cinematic imagery to see her into people's mind what it meant to oppose Isis that Isis was in fact just in that sort of AI for an eye kind of way and you know my belief is that we

68:13don't understand the role that message violence plays in part because we are now denying it if you think about Vietnam we have all of these images that were burned into all of our minds with pulitzer prize-winning photographs but in the modern era you don't have images like that from iraq because there was a there was a decision that we could not afford in some sense to have the kind of opposition that we had to vietnam when people suddenly said wait a minute you're doing what in my name there's a there's an issue that is always puzzled me and this issue is people that lean left people that consider themselves progressives have a very distinct very obvious bias against criticizing Islam criticizing Islamic terrorism criticizing Islamic suppression of women you know these criticizing these cultures right under the guise of not wanting to promote Islamophobia and

69:20things along those lines and I've always wondered how much of what that is is a fear of reprisal of speaking out against them is terrifying so what they do instead is embrace the the cultural differences that these people exhibit concentrate instead on the positive aspects of their kin unity and the good things about Muslim culture and Islamic culture and not really does not bring it up at all like you very rarely hear people on the left talk about how oppressive and horrific some of the conditions that women and homosexuals are forced to live in in in in Muslim cultures right and I've always wondered if that's what that is like there's a feat because no one in modern day no one ideology is more brutal in their reprisal I mean they kill apostates right they kill people who leave if you join you can join no one's stopping them there the whole idea of spreading Islam is that you should be

70:24proselytizing you should be getting people to join because it is the only truth is the only way to go but once you do join you're in like you're not allowed to leave first of all let's actually do this one I think it's important okay they didn't start that we Jews started this so far as I know so if you go no no no we don't we don't proselytize but the once you're in you're in really yeah if you go to Deuteronomy I think it says something to the effect of if someone comes to you and says hey let's worship God's not known to the fathers set upon them with a stone before anyone else gets there but you were supposed to do that to someone who is already converted to if you're in right if you're in if you're in and somebody says hey let's go worship other gods you're supposed to kill them what if that oh so like so it's an old idea it's an old idea and it's not an Islamic

71:16idea that's a Jewish idea in my opinion okay okay but it does exist today primarily so I asked my rabbi about this and she's and she said yeah me Oh rabbi oh yeah you progressive you look at you know I have actually like I'm proud of this I have a rabbi who happens to be female okay I don't say that she born female how does it want him she's all woman all rabbi allegedly they're all women caitlyn jenner's all how many incendiary topics do you want no no no let's just turn everything up to 11 in three minutes I'm about to be a target okay you're no time female rabbit yet so her point was yeah and we don't execute anybody because in in effect that portion of the code never runs hmm so the Jews have figured out how to have bad code that is almost permanently inoperative mmm if I could stop you there for a second one of the unique things about Jews is that there are so

72:25many Jewish people that I know they'd still considered themselves Jewish but are almost totally atheists yeah like my friend Ari like he was doing this video recently where this podcast recently was we were doing this challenge what we can't drink or smoke pot or do anything for a month and we have to do 15 hot yoga classes and he's going crazy and screaming during his podcast I am a Jewish performer and I live in New York City I'm supposed to be doing drugs I was supposed to be drinking I like drinking but he's he's the biggest atheist I've ever met in my life right or if not an atheist he's certainly it's a very least agnostic at the very least he's definitely not a so I think it letters himself a religious person yeah but he was you know he was and he escaped the the claws of it when he was young but it's Jews many times think of himself it's almost a tribe as much as it is a

73:19religion like if you you sit down and and corner most Jews that I know about like how much of the Talmud do you follow how much how much of the Old Testament do you think is legit how much of the these teachings do you think are imperative for everyday living there's a vast majority don't want to have they did not connect it to any of it if you've met anybody following the Old Testament you wouldn't recognize him as a Jew right right like we have to kill the apostates right I used to live in an ultra-orthodox neighborhood in Jerusalem and at some point I was writing on the Sabbath my final list for leaving and the kids in the building next door started shouting in Hebrew it is forbidden to write on the Sabbath kill him whoa and the parent said to cleanse a knock it off like the ultra-orthodox parents so they wanted to kill you because you were writing because it was literally

74:12that's that was you know I was violent when a bunch of little monsters no moms errs is the word your bastards Oh anyway yeah so Jews are big into observance um but part of the relationship is you get to question things at a much deeper level than in most religions right and you know I would say you know six or seven rabbis well enough to ask the question about their belief structure none of them believe in the character of God from the Old Testament hmm so how do they sort of rationalize the whole thing well that's the whole point is you know you have layers of abstraction and you know if you're really stupid for example do you believe that the Supreme Court is nine black-robed super geniuses who can channel the original intent of the founding fathers I think the Wizards yeah okay just like wizards well then and that's it I mean you there's a grown-up way of

75:15loving your country and there's a childish way of loving your country there's a grown-up way of believing in your religion and a childish one right and the childish one is like yeah that's all literally but what is the grown-up way of believing in a religion well I mean in part and it's got a lot of hidden instructions it's it's not resolved so that you have these sort of dialectical tensions that so you have like ethical guidelines as opposed to like yeah it's not telling you exactly what down from on high and giant stone tablets well you know thou shalt not kill but thou shalt not kill has to go up against an admonition to kill right right and so these things are not resolved and they're well yeah I'm trying to swim back upstream to your original point about Islam right we're gonna get waylaid here before we leave Israel or Jews sure there's an answer to

76:09this and I used to know it but I forgot it what is the reason why so many European Jews of won Nobel Prizes so many European Jews are insanely intelligent what is is there's what the modern social justice answer it's because we cheated physics answer it's a joke that's a silly answer no nobody no they're smart like why why are so many insanely intelligent people European Jews um so you is this hard for you to answer being a Jew yeah a little like like if you asked me about well let's do a different one okay okay so from 1897 to 1987 you've got all of these different countries winning the Boston Marathon and then from 1987 to the president basically - it's right Kenyan Ethiopia maybe a Korean guy wins it our son mm-hmm why is that well now you have this really uncomfortable thing which is is it culture is it that those guys in East Africa just have heart is it because

77:18they really run just to school every day 26 miles people said that and it turns out they take the bus like everybody else so there can be a genetic predisposition in tradeoff space mm-hmm if there can be a cultural premium so when you have the top marriage prospects do you marry them off to the to the richest or the smartest so in Judaism there is some weird way in which intellectual prestige proxies for material wealth so if you have somebody is insanely smart and not very rich it can be very prestigious to marry your your daughter let's say to that student of the Torah hmm so there are all sorts of cultural strange aspects of this is it because money-lending was prescribed and forbidden to Christians that this particular facility with mathematics was highly selected for when nobody else was selecting for it you know I I don't know what the answer is but I do know that

78:27like in my case getting a PhD in mathematics using an Ivy League education for that my brother's case giving up an Ivy League education to make a point standing up for social justice these are sort of self-destructive things in most cultures standing up for social justice against social justice warriors well no no no in his in his case 1987 he stood up because a Jewish fraternity was using black strippers for sexual entertainment to lure in incoming freshmen and he said okay this is you know this is some sort of class oriented thing where we're exploiting wow this is a different situation no no yes so yeah he had to leave Penn the University of Pennsylvania under death threats Wow so you know this is like the great irony of my brother's situation is that four people don't know who you brother Bret Weinstein is a Weinstein Harvey Weinstein Brett Weinstein right

79:29Brett was the guy that was a part of the whole ever game College Fiasco he's been on this podcast twice I suggest if you're interested you could either google his name and get the story from multitude of sources or listen to the original podcast where he'd sort of laid it out it was before the settlement with the college before he wound up leaving and you know I really hope that he goes the Jordan Peterson route meaning that he starts putting up these lectures and some of these ideas that he has just putting them up on online I mean just putting videos up and you know Patriot I know he's got a patreon page now correct yeah and that which is a great way to do it too but Jordan is making more money from doing that than he ever did from college yeah I change I want to support you know the other thing is is that we have to make the case because he can't

80:18because it'll look wrong right hire this yeah all right that yeah I mean he's made he's a straight-up genius I have a recommendation for him from his old adviser who I think you know said he's the top student in 40 years of advising and just we have to recognize that if you want this stuff to stop you have to make it not pay to drive super smart people who are courageous enough to be open in their thinking and his shirt Dickey I'm sorry yeah and to share and you know to share their thoughts and fundamentally if we drive these people to extinction it's on us yeah and so my question is hey University of Chicago Harvard Princeton Stanford where are you yeah I means people are terrified of repercussions right of the do they think that he's a he's a guy from Evergreen State so he's lower rank I was like you know let me let me use my tiny megaphone to say he's not lower rank he's

81:20un-fuckin'-believable smart look at his work on elongation of telomeres and laboratory animals where he predicted what Nobel laureate Carol Greider found from first principles that the mice that are being used to test our drugs have wildly exaggerated telomere lengths giving them amazing capacities for histological repair but and possibly putting drugs to market that shouldn't be there this is somebody you want to be taking intellectually serious and stop treating this like the clown act that they're running and this just happens to be a victim well evergreen college is an amazing example of what can go wrong if you let these crazy children sort of dictate the the way human beings are allowed to behave and and the way discourse takes place on campus it's at the cliffnotes what I was gonna say they wanted to have a day of absence they've traditionally had day of absence where

82:15people of color would take the day off to school for where people would miss them sort of like didn't they engineer that in LA a day without Mexicans was a movie right it would shut down I'll just tell you right now le shuts down without Mexicans but - but instead of doing that there's social justice warrior mentality that thinks that every white man is some sort of an oppressor and you need to figure out a way to eradicate them from the world they decided to go the opposite route and force white staff and white students to stay home your brother rightly protested saying that is inherently racist like what you're proposing is is really anti-racist yes the problem is is that the diversity movement which has now become the equity movement you is actually racist racist against white people it's a man I only want to say it's reverse racism a racism against

83:05white its openly racist versus actual there is either racism or no racism that whole proposal that racism against white people is reverse racism this is a cult and the way you know that it's a cult is you asked for the definition of racism and if somebody tells you it's power plus prejudice and therefore certain groups can't be racist because they have no power that's how you know somebody's in the cult because if you look it up in the dictionary it doesn't say anything like that another one would be gender has nothing to do with sex go to the Oxford English Dictionary look at the difference between 3a versus 3b gender and sex have been closely tied and sometime like the 1940s a couple of fields in the u.s. started using gender to be behavior sex to be you know that which is your dedicated genotype phenotype what what is going on is is that these people are

84:02changing the definition of words in order to push a cult into the exact place where it must not go it must not go in the diversity office it must not go in HR you cannot have this openly racist openly sexist cult in the place where the which is the immune system yeah and so that's that's that's the key thing is is that we're used to thinking of our immune system as being there to protect us but if you think about an autoimmune disease it's when your immune system starts attacking the self that you're in real trouble so learn the signs and learn the tells you don't have to sign up for jordan Peterson's post-modernism just ask somebody whether black people can be racist against whites and as soon as you hear power plus prejudice you know you're talking to a cult member as soon as you hear the gender and sex have nothing to do with each other right and you have recourse

84:56to dictionaries and you start talking about the history and somebody starts to well that's your white fragility it's your white privilege evening why are you in denial why aren't you accepting a lie ship okay so suddenly it's like okay it's it's xeno and the volcanoes and the clams again yeah it is yeah it is and well one one great piece of evidence about that was this whole Google memo thing the Google memo thing the the difference between what that guy actually wrote on the memo and what was published in so many different publications so many different online websites it's just straight up libelous like that guy if I mean I know he's gonna sue Google but he could probably sue a host of people once he's done with that because they changed what he wrote and turned him into this horrible evil sexist person to the point where the CEO of goo of you a YouTube

85:46brother was saying that she read it and it made her sad that the whole thing made her sad well he wrote a piece based on why people of different genders are more inclined to gravitate there were specific things he made an error how what was the error the error that he made was is that he used a reserved term neuroticism yeah Big Five personality inventory where it is a reserved term denoting a particular psychometric and so rather than saying men are less conscientious then he said women are more intrusive women are more neurotic I actually brought that up with them and he regretted it he regretted bringing that because I told him I said that's my only criticism it's like that's a derogatory term but again you know I not quite remembered mm-hmm that the big five personality inventory you know is what openness conscientiousness extraversion agreeableness and

86:38neuroticism but you know when you see something that careful I mean most people just didn't read it they went with like the headline right so that's the first thing you should guess somebody that's smart is probably using a term if I say moral hazard to you and you don't know economics you're gonna think oh wow what is the moral hazard is that like reefer right so if I keep talking about rent-seeking or moral hazard and I'm talking about landlords you know or somebody offering your kid a doobie after school right right so so that was like the first intellectual failure and I just have been dealing with this with where I talk about power laws and statistics which is a particular type of probability distribution and somebody says geez the power powerful people in our country are so protected and privileged why should we why do we need laws to protect them

87:25like what oh you said power law it's like that has nothing to do with there used to be this character on a Saturday Night Live and his name was Emily Litella played by Gilda Radner and they bring her in and she was hard of hearing what's all this I hear about a death penalty they deaf have problems enough as it is and then she drift for two minutes and the death penalty oh that's entirely different never mind so she was like trained for that remember the violins on television we need classical music you know random was awesome she was awesome Hosanna Roseannadanna oh my god we couldn't do idea this stuff anymore you couldn't you really couldn't yeah but so going back to the domore theking our tree and it's exploding here you know the thing about what he did was he was trying to write a pro diversity memo if you lie about the differences between men and women what are your odds that

88:22you will be able to hack a solution to get getting all the brilliant women in our country who care about stem into the workforce this is what we need to do right there's no shortage of brilliant women you know I've collaborated with them I know they're there we need to figure out as a society do we need to pay women more so that we can get them out of working in the home and taking care of older you know parents and young children during their prime years we need to be very creative about the actual differences between men and women should we have a rule not equal pay for equal work but equal pay for unequal salary negotiation if we don't please please elaborate on that because that is an issue with why women sometimes make less than men is that they don't have the same sort of aggressive salary negotiating tendencies that a lot of men do yes have testosterone-driven sort of

89:15I mean there's all sorts of things that you know again I don't want to mansplain any is not a big issue to I mean look at checkers a short story called the nincompoop in which it's a an employer and a domestic worker in his home and he talks to her about all of her wages and then he starts taking away a little bit by a little bit for you know she you broke a cup and you were a little bit late and he whittles her compensation down to nothing and she accepts it and then he says the employer says you you stupid fool I've just cheated you out of your entire wages I'm gonna give them to you but understand that this is how an employer cheats an employee hmm and you're just like whoa so this is an old Russian speaking a truth which is don't allow yourself to get taken advantage of now you could say that's really horrible because it's called the nincompoop right

90:10or you could say actually that was an attempt to talk about a problem about needing to be more aggressive and more assertive so you know getting back to the d'amour issue d'amour needed to set this thing up at Google differently so I took my son to the local pinball arcade and just think of it as a bunch of workstations where nobody's getting paid instead you're paying for the privilege of staring at this thing for hours with the bells and lights doing something with balls and mechanical systems there are no they're not a lot of women trying to integrate the pinball arcade because it's a looser activity all right that's how these deals for losers yeah I play pinball I'm a loser I know this okay I might have no one's a pinball arcade it's got a restaurant pinball designer hurt me no no the point is this is something which isn't low prestige its antique compensated yeah

91:12and as compensated we're pointing it right it's just like a but you just plug the money into the machines so my point is is that what d'amore said was it's not cognitive ability you idiots its interest in temperament which is hugely liberating right if it's not basically cognitive ability if men are as smart as women but men can do something for hours and hours often uncompensated in a kind of robotic monomaniacal tunnel focused kind of a way is that necessarily a great thing what happens to be compensated now it's only a great thing if that's what you choose to go into career I don't I program and I hate it I'm not you know programming yeah what do you want to do well play that funky Indian violin thing exactly I'll spend hours doing something like that right but the point is that that coding turns me into like this autistic spectrum II guy I get speech apt apnea again I don't

92:14want to say anything against do you guys know like the more you get into coding you just sort of adopt a code mind so you started talking to me while I'm coding alright you say hey or if you want to go out for beer I'll start see you later really yeah I'm being annoying and I'm distracting you from you exactly right right I see you is annoying yes I'm trying to follow see me is annoying two of them help but if you're doing Brazilian Jujitsu and I come in and say hey Joey I got free beer like yeah so you know the issue is that a lot of us you know who have male hardware male software recognize that we get obsessive-compulsive we're not always thinking about reward right it's not necessarily the most attractive set of characteristics when I do math I'm definitely wildly on the spectrum and I'm proud by the way I'm proud of it it's not like right you know it's not a

93:17derogatory term and you're actually talking about yourself when I'm socializing yes I'd like to think that I'm fairly normal you're fairly normal fairly normal but when I'm doing math yeah I don't want to be right I want what it killed that problem I want to think through that thing I want to have that right here oh well I'm that way I'm not on the spectrum in any way but I'm that way with writing for sure if I'm writing and someone came over to talk to me yeah I can't talk you know I mean my wife will come over and she'll say wow you're really sharp with me huh what I barely even noticed that you were she's needy no well the thing is is that we've collaborated on you know she brought geometry from quantum field theory into economics and so at the level of you know she's really she occupies brain space with me but she will kick out of that space if the kids

94:13need something whereas I'll just say I'm sure the kids will be fine it's just like you know they're two years old Eric you know there's yeah they're not gonna be able to take care of themselves right you know and so she'll have it much more she always has her compassion running whereas I can turn it off turn it on for periods of time when I'm focused there are these differences and you know I think we need we need in part to teach women how to under deliver deliver yeah how so well if you can't risk under delivery then you can't shoot for the you know you can't swing for the fences as often you want to make sure that you're going to be able to not disappoint some men very often like hey I thought I could do it didn't quite work out it's gonna take another couple of weeks that's a weird way of putting it though because that's a results-oriented way of putting it

95:02instead of an ambition oriented what I'm trying to say like if the real secret of life is over promise over deliver all right it is though assume that it is assumed that you abused out when in a bid if somebody else is going to promise more than you and then if you can't over deliver given that you've already over promised then you can't actually delight people so that they're going to want to do multiple go rounds but that's like a economy of though like do we really want to even promote that like why why not just be honest about what you can do because you don't know what you can do you know this is the thing that I'll be honest about what you think you can do no no okay but let's use it in a practical sense okay like so this was the whole bring you a car yeah and I say hey man I think the transmissions gone on this thing do you not have fixed my yes definitely I'm gonna

95:58do it I can do it but meanwhile you don't alright well I don't want to go to you man well I want to go to the guy down the street no but you've given in there for 25 years he was definitely giving me the car you know I to me now I go home I don't know what I'm doing I'm trying to open this thing I don't know right I better learn transmissions fast right so now I go into crazy mode because now I'm terrified this is called crossing the adaptive Valley what if it's something you can't learn fast like Brazilian Jujitsu yeah look what if I come to you and I say hey are you a jujitsu expert and you're like yes I am like okay cool why don't you meet me in two weeks and we're gonna do jujitsu and you have two weeks to go crazy and learn all you know about you just K so what we're talking about now is this is not a trivial skill fixing transmissions is know let's slow

96:52it down okay you have to be able to have a feel for what adaptive valley's you can cross okay I see what you're saying right so so in other words if you just say like hey I could run this country country run business yeah then you're gonna have a problem because you really have to learn Washington in order to run it right if you have no plan to do that then you're just bullshitting your way through everything like hypothetically yeah like this hypothetically this situation hypothetically okay now but my point is that there are lots of things that don't have those characteristics where something is really hard but you may have to invent something in order to get out of it so there's you know dumb enough to get in smart enough to get out is kind of the magic formula hmm bite off more than you can chew but if you actually you know feel called you can summon the will you can summon the

97:55intellect you can summon your friends your resources to somehow get across the adaptive Ally but isn't the problem that it leaves open the possibility won't be able to get across that Valley before has put someone who is an expert in the field and who's worked very hard through apprenticeship through schooling whatever it is to get to become an x-ray this field can tell you definitively yes Eric I can fix your computer I've fixed computers for a living I know exactly how to attach a motherboard to you let's at least agree that you're making the point that you know don't over promise yes don't under deliver yes okay but we all know that we all know we all know that that's the general good advice so but you're advising women to do something that they shouldn't but here's the problem I'm trying to give Comorian advice the more women that over promise and under deliver the more where people

98:45are gonna go you guys know what I'm sure these chicks yeah they don't deliver I don't think that that's right I don't think I think that what's happening is is that there are certain characteristics that are very valuable in low variance processes there are certain things that you want every time to work out okay like well child or child rearing or particular kinds of surgery yes right it's a simple app and a pin deck to me I don't want to get fancy just do the app and appendectomy and don't screw it up right okay okay so those are low variance processes now you've got some sort of crazy conjoined twins that nobody's ever seen before right and the question is what are we going to do right well do you think that that is potentially within your ability even though nobody's ever successfully pulled it off before you have to over-promised to some extent like there's a guy who's

99:42gonna try to do a head transplant you know we we had it some of you a head transplant with monkeys in the early seventies Robert White or something yeah so you know this came out of Jim Watson said this thing which I think is just brilliant which is if you're going to do something amazing you were by definition unqualified to do it that's Watson from Crick and Watson that's right now the point was is that those guys did not know enough biochemistry to do the double helix but why do you think that that's good advice to give to women to over prot over promise us do you understand that okay if you cannot over promise you may not be able to win a bidding war for the right to do a project if you're playing it very very safe and other people are saying I can get that done faster and cheaper see the cynic in me says you're telling people to I like tille dates I'd like

100:44to know whether or not someone deliver on what we're talking when Bill Gates talked to IBM he didn't have an operating system he said that he did that created a panic situation how often do you have a product and you announce the date for the product before the engineering is done but are you talking about outliers and you're talking about people that pulled things off that you know the average person probably doesn't mean how many people by the wayside how many people do over-promised and this is what I'm trying to get ya which is if you value regularity then under-promise over-deliver right if you value Shackleton like outliers you may have to over promise and over deliver us a net weight lately okay and you may have to risk over-promising and under-delivering I don't think women are averse to that oh absolutely so women are averse to bullshitting people absolutely they are I like them

101:42I know hiring chicks I'm gonna start hiring tricks for the reason you're telling them to not be the way they are but we're failing to communicate you know another I'm just playing devil's advocate and picking you apart a little bit that's okay but I think in other words when you start hearing people say why aren't there aren't more female founders of billion dollar plus tech companies mm-hmm my feeling is is that a lot of those people who do found such companies are in this kind of fast and loose outlier idiom and very often females specifically because of the crazy demands of child-rearing which is like something you cannot screw up you have to be on all the time you have to be incredibly regular have a very strong ethic of not screwing up brauch is positive I don't want to say that it's negative right I'm not saying that it's negative what I am saying is

102:38that if you are not happy because you are not represented in the outlier category understand that not screwing up is not a behavior pattern that leads to outlier level results I see what you're saying I see what you're saying so they almost have to go away from their natural instincts and adopt a different pattern or behavior to achieve extraordinary success yeah I mean I would like to tell a lot more men hey you can't keep promising and failing to come through mm-hmm yeah so you know it would be better if we had higher regularity from some men who chronically over-promised and chronically under deliver and we had more women who were trying to swing for the fences if the feeling is why are we not represented at the highest level of certain kinds of activities so all right so what I'm trying to get at is is that we are not currently feeling safe enough to have

103:36these style of conversations where we're saying look to what extent are we holding ourselves back are we holding you back what is it that we need to be doing or are we talking about the glass floor as well as the glass ceiling so you know the bricklayer unions is a famous example where if you look for pictures of bricklayers you'll generally see a bunch of guys very few women and there's no complaint that these have not been integrated so there are ways in which you don't find women in the pinball arcade z-- you don't find them in bricklayers unions and you find fewer of them founding you know multibillion-dollar tech companies so how do we feel about that I don't know I mean the key question is if you want to see change you have to be risking having a real conversation about these things and what d'amore tried to do was to decouple intelligence from this problem

104:31and say it's much more temperament and interest and the person who made that point on Dave Rubens show a month before the Google memo leaked was my wife and she didn't get attacked because she said look you know I was in an incredibly vault you know basically an all-male environment I wasn't happy because of the temperament and interest when it got highly competitive I didn't want to spend my energy in my time fighting you know she has like a no-bail quality result in economics and her feeling was it's just not worth it to get into some multi-decade pissing match with incredibly powerful people now my feeling about this is those guys are going down we're gonna fight them you know I we my book came out called the physics of Wall Street that I encourage women to read the chapter called a new Manhattan Project and the epilogue discusses her contribution and

105:32you know in fact we sort of walked away from it in part because she didn't want to go to war and there's nothing wrong with not wanting to go to war but that is a very big temperamental difference that is not a cognitive difference and that's what I think d'amour was saying now I think you and I would both agree that we would never want anyone to discriminate against women for a job that they're qualified for and that they're looking to get into if they're good at it we would like to see people we would like to see in an equality of opportunity right more than that more than that yeah I mean if you think about how many women are off line and you think of it as like just stop thinking about in terms of like social good and talk about it yeah like putting like an oil field that hasn't been tapped just their neural or another essential yeah right like you

106:28know you're just talking about Jews in physics so one quarter of 1% of the world's population of 125 percent of the Nobel Prizes and physics are they're about right very few Asian females have Nobel Prizes if I were trying to figure out like with oil fields I wouldn't go to Texas to try to find more oil because I figured to be pretty well picked over I try to find some other place it's like I'm gonna find great waves not in Hawaii but I'm gonna go to the Arctic right so let's say agen females have a huge percentage of the world's neurons basically untapped if you want to make tons of money if you want to cure cancer if you want to do all these things figure out how to bring those neurons fully online so it's not just a question of nobody wants to keep them out there's a huge prize to be won for figuring out the puzzle right but is has it not been proved that gender and sex have a role

107:21in what people are attracted to are interested in so why should we assume that just because we have these systems right like the weather their economic systems whether it's you know starting a business or whether it's working in tech why should we assume that women would want to do that why should we encourage them to do that if they're not interested in it and why do we put so much value in it just because it generates an incredible amount of money do you think that maybe what we're looking at is natural patterns there's natural patterns where I mean this is what d'amore argued that men gravitate towards certain things more often than women and that was one of the things that was so disturbing to me that was overlooked about his memo he had a full page and a half dedicated to trying to encourage in various ways to try to encourage women to get into tech right

108:10nobody talked about that the other thing that they didn't do is no one I mean not no one but many of the people that republish his work and took snippets of it they didn't publish the citations right or the bibliography yeah which is like you know it's yeah it's but it's what it is is back to your cult analogy yeah these people are in a cult and this was a challenge to the ideology of the cult so but but look let's look at it from the felt experience and the felt experience is if you're if you've already struggled as a woman against incredible odds to be in tech to begin with you know that there's somebody whispering yeah she's not very good they only hired her because she was female you're sick of this right so you have to appreciate that the lived experience of the women inside of Google is that they know that some percentage of those guys were saying hey I just

109:06want to talk about studies are actually pissed off right so their detectors are set very very high they think they're hearing dog whistles everywhere right and sorry I don't think we should be blaming women who have been subjected to this as if this is not a real thing there really are dog whistles there really are people who don't want women in tech and want to go back to an all-boys Club blah blah blah for sure but that's not really what we're saying are we no we aren't I don't think ok no but the issue is what if I need to do some amount some relatively minimal amount of kind of intellectual terraforming to get all of these female neurons to work on all of these amazing problems so what if what if the people who have the answer for cancer or AGI or who knows happen to be female mm-hmm what if I needed to do some things in order to make the environment more

110:07attractive like for example programming in teams has to some extent replaced cowboy programming where's just some guy with his code and you know right beside a headphones and he he goes to it okay so that's what he was talking about like what are the to what extent can you actually change the nature of work to bring these extra neurons online mm-hmm now that's the right reason to do this I don't think we should value like what is coding it's some sort of highly logical very technical person tickity activity if it's highly compensated everybody wants in if it's poorly compensated only people who are sort of addicted to it would want it right and it happens to be sort of high status at the moment and so there's this feeling of like okay this must be an all-boys Club and maybe it grew up as an all-boys Club and maybe it has particular attributes but the thing that I'm looking at that may be

111:05different from what you're looking at is that I'm thinking about particular high ability females who have left the game or who have sort of gone into a lower intensity mode because there's just sick of being in an all-male environment so if I can interject you trying to discourage attrition I'm trying to discourage attrition of the amazing people who have something deep and powerful and important to say so the environment of these places is contrary to them establishing whatever strengths that they have so let me give I would let rather not talk about women and I'd rather talk about something I know very very well which is myself okay so four and a half years ago I gave some talks on physics which were terrifying to me because I wasn't trained as a physicist and they got a lot of attention and publicity at Oxford I don't like the unpleasantness of intellectual one-upsmanship and

112:03negging if you will that takes place in particle Theory it's a turn-off to me and so I sort of stayed away for four and a half years because I didn't like how unpleasant and hyper like exaggeratedly masculine it was why do you think that exists well because it's a huge prize right I mean if you're trying to get gained Einsteins mantle it's still a game worth winning because you know Einstein was times one of the century so it's so because of this huge prize there's also a lot of critical thinking and a lot of criticizing yeah but there's a lot of just wasted yeah there's like a dick measuring contest that does nothing for me okay right and so so my point is is that is a guy who's been in mathematics physics economics finance and tech that's five hyper male fields there are some of them that I just can't stand because they're too exaggeratedly male and you you feel like criticism is

113:03exaggeratedly male it's not just criticism it's just like snarky stupid mean-spirited non-constructive teen girl show it's a female show maybe Housewives of Beverly Hills that's pretty pretty takedown II yeah that's a different version so um this is made you avoid these particulars lots of us men and you think women they would be more so likely to avoid and you would lose the contribution trying to say a lot of these brilliant minds that part of the problem is is that every time you have an extremely kind of overly like an exaggerated Lee toxic culture you get attrition from people who are really good at it or just don't like going to work make sense and putting that on women is not fair right I don't want to do labor economics at Harvard for the same reason it right it's a really unpleasant I understand that once they've actually gotten to the game Yeah right but is that what keeps them

114:07from pursuing the game or is it natural inclinations towards other pursuits and it's a mixture it's a mixture right like most things right well this is this is really what what d'amour was saying he was saying that it's a 50-50 default baseline that you've adopted I don't think I'd do more don't think that we should accept 50/50 we should figure out what percentage of this has to do with interest and inclination and that should be an adjustment and then we just has to do with prejudice isn't right so break it into two components we're off of 50 it's a plus B where a is the natural amount that it should favor one gender or sex over the other and then B is the extent of systemic bias that's a very analytical and I think a very I think it is exactly right you're one of the very few people that has broken it down like that it became this weird ideological struggle like I got into tremendous

115:04trouble because I let off a tweet that was about biologists yeah right because Richard Dawkins had just been D platformed at Berkeley where he was going to speak as a biologist my brother yeah what was that about why did they do platformer Donald Lee because you know he said something unch eret about his song we have to get back to yeah right but the key point was is that I had three biologists two more Dawkins and Weinstein who had all bendy platforms so I let off a tweet about you know for God's sake stop teaching people that they should run to HR rather than code we had nothing to do with harassment at all it was really just about seeing a woman who deleted her tweet and I haven't talked about this I'd tell them because I felt that I I reacted to her deleted tweet and then I still I still have it on my computer but I didn't want to bring it up and then I I was left

115:58sort of holding the bag right what was the tweet it was something like dear Google don't teach my daughter to run to HR for financial freedom rather than code thanks to dad and that was interpreted as like Oh suck it up if you're being harassed in the workplace you know do not suck it up if you were being harassed in the workplace I don't know how to make that clearer but it's about if somebody's talking like a biologist and they're saying oh well there's prenatal testosterone and you know there are these psychometrics and they're these are the conserved differences across cultures that's not a reason to go to HR that's a reason to figure out whether the person is making sense not making sense to take them on on the arguments that's I feel very passionately yeah well I think discourse in free speech is incredibly important when you you distort what that guy was saying and you

116:56turn into this hateful attack on women you've shut down discourse and you've discourage anybody else that has any sort of unusual opinion or unusual observation from coming forth because you're essentially you're limiting free speech to free speech that you agree with and this is what happens well I agree with this but think about how difficult it has been you know as soon as I say learn how to over-promised mm-hmm and then over deliver or risk under delivering that that that can take up ten minutes like are you telling me to and not not come through no I'm not saying that I know it all but all of these higher level points all have lower level misinterpretations right and so you know in this circumstance it's also important to realize that after so many years of putting up with sort of whisper campaigns it is understandable that women are sick of the right so

117:50that's true to that too right yeah yeah yeah so the key question is are we going - just deep LAT form all the biologists are we going to pretend that there are no differences are we going to pretend the gender and sex have absolutely nothing to do with each other like this sort of fantasy life that you can try to lead in a progressive context is going to destroy the underpinnings of Western civilization right and I have nothing against Eastern civilization but I'm an exponent of Western civilization yeah and you know this gets back to the issue of will we be able to talk anywhere in a safe enough fashion that we can have really meaningful so that we can actually fix these problems right and the only way you're gonna fix these problems is if you cut out all this the the ideological biases on the right and the left the male and the female yeah just look at

118:46the problem for what it really is well and it's tough and you know we're challenged because we also don't see ourselves but just firing that guy for that memo yeah and then here's the my favorite part my all-time favorite part they invited women to take time off because it was so stressful I mean you're you are reinforcing the worst stereotypes that someone couldn't have you actually read the memo yeah and it was so disturbing to you that you had to take time off you're insanely fragile or you're looking for time off you're looking to take time off either one of those things reinforces the worst stereotypes that people have against women yeah but what if the idea is different what if the idea is that they've actually been experiencing trauma at somebody else's hands that wasn't James d'amour okay but that's not what about the James do more memory and why I have it done right why have it

119:45lots but you're having it directly in response to that guy's a memo which wasn't this conversation I go to India and I see a bunch of backward swastikas with dots in them that have nothing to do with Nazis right I'm a trigger what we're going far though we're pretty far away from that let's just talk about the intro but mo Mughal sense like why why give women off if you first of all don't fire that guy have a conversation with them and have open discourse the biggest problem was firing yeah that establishes the precedent that look I called him up specifically to ask what the hell happened right and you know you've talked to him yes he's soft-spoken very kind very nice guy James is pretty open so I'm gonna say he's wildly introverted almost certainly on the spectrum for sure and his reaction was that I went to a meeting where they tried to teach diversity the

120:36biology was wrong they asked if I had any feedback I told them and he wrote an 18-page well this is the right this is like brain things a crash is why he's a coder which is why he was a biologist which is why and is that's champion right exactly this is how yeah it's very important that these people not be made unwelcome because fundamentally we're gonna Levin this untried social justice stuff in absolutely everything well not only that he was labeled as a misogynist over and over and over again and you don't even giving the guy a chance to have a communicate have open communication like if you sit down with them instead of the problem is is that it if you say come to the seminar we're gonna teach you things the things are wrong and now we want your feedback I'm just setting certain minds up resting for sure right yeah that said and and this is something I

121:26this is like much harder to bring to this room this room yeah this room what's wrong no because I'm I'm part of this constellation of people but we keep doing this we keep making a mistake in my opinion which is we keep seeing these wrong things that happen in this space and we lose the empathy in some sense because people are are not representing themselves well so I believe having watched my wife in economics that it is really corrosive to go in every day to work in an environment which does not feel welcoming right for sure very toxic okay very bad so now the idea is that something breaks the camel's back and it's a proximate cause it's not the actual problem right but it's on how they framed it they're saying they're giving people time off because this diversity memo that he's a soft targets versus hard targets right so the idea is is that he was a soft target but they

122:25may have you know many of these women may have had a manager who passed them over for you know promotions three times when they had been the major contributors but it sort of reinforces irrational ideas about his memo without actually reading the core components of it and look job that's why that's why I was outspoken on it I know I know you were right so you so the point is even while I am outspoken on d'amours you still think there's issues I believe that fundamentally we are in danger of breaking empathy with people who do not express themselves in our idiom I don't like the fragility I don't like the you know there's this confusion between strong people versus very aggressive people and in general stronger people are much less aggressive right isn't that that's like loud yelling people who think that they're winning an argument because they're loud and yelling well it's if you if you

123:16watch like The Jungle Book sheer Khan the tiger is portrayed as unfailingly polite mmm right right because he's just he doesn't need to prove himself right so part of the problem is is that we are waiting for the strongest voices to rise above the din hmm and say look we can't be this aggressive about everything all the time right we have to actually think what's a misdemeanor what's a felony what's a foot fault you know so just to boil it all down you don't think there's any issue with inviting women to take time off from a memo that you didn't even disagree with I absolutely think that there's a problem there but I don't think that that's the right place Google's sitting on a pile of cash it doesn't need all these people to show up they botched this thing as far as I can tell right but why why tell women take some time off you just got it assaulted

124:15you were just attacked by some horrible thing that doesn't discourage or that discourages diversity that discourage the right thing to do would be rich to retain more right yes and to say look we need to be able to talk about this right without silencing each other without terrifying each other without assuming that we've heard the others argument have some public speeches we have people opposes ideas and have them discuss right right and make it public so that maybe people can learn from it instead of making it this gigantic campaign against one guy's idea and just destroying his credibility in a very sort of perverse way how about just Google has YouTube they have all the resources in the world I understand to turn this into an educational experience exactly yeah but the big problem was firing d'amore yes Ari because what that did was it puts out of press it said

125:09here's how this game should go when you hear somebody say genotype versus phenotype complain yes when you but something makes you uncomfortable about psychometrics complain if somebody starts to disagree with the implicit association test s-- and they won't own their own bigotry and bias complain right well that's terrifying well it's sort of the same type of thinking that got your brother in hot water right inevitable what I'm trying to get at is that we are B we who understand this problem I think better than others and are willing to talk about it in public are losing empathy because we're so sick of being worn down by these terrible arguments right and so you know can we can we pop all the way back up to your original point about Islam sure okay you asked the question why is the Left seemingly weirdly supportive of practices that include female genital

126:13mutilation honor killing terror etcetera etc etc and I think it has to do with the fact that there is a fundamental inability to discuss these issues because nobody has given us the right tools and language so the issue of political Judaism political Christianity and political Islam is one category and then there's just sort of cultural Judaism cultural Islam cultural Christianity now quite honestly you can easily be embedded in a Muslim community that is not devoted to political Islam and feel that you're very much in another a brahmic faith similar to Christianity and Judaism on the other hand there is a much bigger issue which is that Islam has a totality to it the Judaism no longer has and the Christianity perhaps never had as Sam Harris points throughout the line render unto Caesar what is Caesar's Cleves off the potential for political Christianity at the same level as

127:27political Islam so you're dealing with this different object that doesn't quite seem to have the same characteristics as the others and you haven't been given any tools to sort of pull it apart you've also been taught that if you're proud of European civilization that you are like pro white well white is irrelevant to me I care about European civilization just as I care about European barbarity having sat through European barbarity I'm not going to give up hurt being civilization you know so in part what you have is you have people who are making the vanilla confusion where they they imagine that vanilla you know we use it to mean the absence of anything interesting but in fact it's like the most interesting spice you know this particular orchid that's incredibly flavorful so we it's like a linguistic mistake well white is that to European civilization I have no

128:25attachment to my whiteness I could care less I couldn't care less on the other hand I have a huge attachment to Newton to Mozart to the terrible things that happened you know in the in the killing lands in the mid 20th century so the evil the good the imperialism the guilt like that tradition I'm very resonant with the good the bad and the ugly and it is my tradition so when I you know meet somebody coming from China I expect them to be an exponent of Chinese culture well I don't wish to say well I don't have the right to have my own culture because I have to erase myself based on this confusion between this Canon that is incredibly valuable and the skin colour that is completely irrelevant to me I don't I would much rather have Western civilization running between the ears of people who don't look anything like me and you know be proud of what the software has produced

129:27hmm then have a bunch of people who look like me who don't think in any way that I recognize the original point was why does the left why do progressives fail to criticize the homophobia the sexism the the honor killings all the horrific acts so let's talk about let's talk about a particular example okay rawa you ever heard of them yes revolutionary Afghan women's Association these are the these are the most badass chicks on the planet they are the ones who taught little girls under the Taliban they are Muslim they are proud Afghan women they have Afghan men who risked their lives these are people who take their lives in their own hands to educate women in one of the most repressive places on earth that is Islam those are Muslims right right now my point is I try to get people interested in won't you take the side of the Muslims who hold your values right or

130:28the values closest to yours and this is where we get into real trouble because for some reason we don't perceive that there is almost an intellectual civil war within Islam with forces for modernity and forces that are trying to reboot you know from the original texts right so do you think that we associate Islam with maybe even a smaller faction of it than we really understand like the ISIS faction the the the Taliban like thing things that were terrified of well people that are throwing gay folks off buildings we saw how weirdly view them is more authentic hmm in some sense and so you don't want to go against the authentic you know versions but like for example the Wahhabi is sort of Saudi Arabian variant I never thought was going to be influential over Pakistan because South Asians tended to look down but with you know all of this money that's been spent exporting the

131:31sort of particularly text oriented very literal interpretations I think we've gone down a terrible path where we've sort of weirdly not understood that there is a conflict in that we actually have a dog in this fight and the dog in this fight is those who are trying to create cultural Islam and cleaving off political Islam I don't want to live under Sharia law and I don't want to feel bad about this I don't want to live under anybody's religious law I don't want anyone to live under halacha kuis law and this is a mainstay of Western civilization and when we can't feel comfortable about that which is like well who are you to say whether we should live in under Sharia law the answer is I come from a culture myself it's not like I have no culture this is my culture we do not live under religious law period the end it's fascinating to me how very how many

132:29different idea ideologies exist and how much they vary and how people can just slot right into those and accept them as the end-all be-all period and it's it to me just from evolutionary psychology standpoint just looking at the the broad spectrum of different ideologies that people slot into it's so fascinating it's so fasting how many different mindsets that people adhere to that are unwavering and rigid and how common it is it's so uncommon to not have an ideology I mean it seems like this idea of well the numbers that we have of atheists and agnostics in America today I mean is this unprecedented is this the most the largest group of human beings ever that are looking at things and going maybe nobody has the answer maybe this isn't the right way yeah well I think that a lot of those agnostics and atheists have more religious leanings than they open up to and a lot more of

133:30the religious folks are able to run the atheist agnostic program almost perfectly between their ears as well I don't think it's as clean as let's say you know Sam might say Harris might make it that's what I was going to get to next why is it that so many people who are atheists and agnostics adopt religious tendencies in terms of cultural behavior and what they're willing to accept and not willing to say except a lot of the stuff that you see that you're calling earlier when you were saying people that describe racism and you know describe it as power and influence these cult member ideas your a lot of times getting these cult member ideas from people that will tell you that they're not a part of an ideology they're not religious but they're exhibiting dogmatic religious ideology so that was my question is is it just a thing that we are inherently programmed

134:29to slot into yeah yeah yeah yeah this is this is the big point where when Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris got into it the first time on Sam's show that was so confused as well was confusing and Sam would have would have appeared to have won that one pretty decisively because Jordan tried to fold in fitness to the definition of truth yeah does not work right Jordans point however was really deep and I don't think he did it the service it needed to be to have done I think it would have been better off in person I don't like conversations where people are walking on skype and I've refused so far to do any podcast where I'm not looking at the person because I believe that the eye contact you would yeah it's huge I've done one so far that was with John Anthony West the brilliant Egyptologist and just cuz he's the ill and he lives in New York and it's just

135:22hard to get any was awkward yeah I do it if I had to but in general it's like how many fights have happened over Unicode and asked exactly just bad I'm a message board fight so come to them it would even take place are you looking at each other drivin each other tone tone social cues is it completely you know that's like with video conferencing is is that you find that you're staring right above the person yeah no trust yes so yeah it's weird but what I was gonna say is that Jordan Peterson's really deep point yes if I understand it so Jordan if you're out there please correct me is only archetype of the kind found in religion is sufficiently rich in deep to explain why humans behave the way they do there's no scientific theory that's there's no purely logical there's no clearly philosophical tradition so as of the moment we are stuck with deep cultural archetype maybe Shakespeare

136:21would be the only thing comparable to the religious canons and the claim that you're making implicitly and the Jordan is making perhaps more explicitly is that there's something about our brains maybe that we were parented and so we need to give the parenting apparatus over to something else I don't know that fundamentally finds its way to religion even if the computer that is our brain knows that it's making leaps that don't make sense how old your kids mine are 12 and 15 do you when you see them do you see things that are you and your wife and wonder like is this how much of this is genetics how much of this is them mimicking their environment how much of it is both and then there's the sue a generous stuff that comes from God knows where that I have no idea cut into their head at all yeah well culture the books invent I mean don't discount individual invention

137:21sure you know sure that too so I believe that my son who's 12 has gravitated very strongly towards Judaism so we go to services I don't think he believes in a technical sense but he enjoys the service yeah but you know again so many of us just don't well the music is beautiful and sentiments the richness I mean coming back to Jordan's point it's epic do no horrible right you're in like a Star Wars drama for warrior you're in Kung Fu Panda go to some you know you're going to a place whether it's a temple or a chapel or you know you're going to this place is uniquely ornate environment you know we have particular words for example the rabbi's tell us you know we usually don't say this because this is what we have stolen from the Angels well this was the one time in the year when we can actually shout it and you know it's potent that's potent and you know you're gonna to your original

138:27point so you have some weird tradition that makes no sense that produces it a ridiculously disproportionate number of the Nobel Prizes let's say in science hey would it be scientific to throw that away I don't think so no right so if you were a good scientist you'd say I don't know what's going on with these weird rituals it's like you know it could be the Funky Chicken you know or the hokey-pokey but something is mean you know if if most of the people who win Nobel prizes were found to do the hokey-pokey I'd probably put more effort into it right and maybe it's not maybe the it's not attached to the ideas that spawned from these religions at all maybe it's that these people have the freedom to think about these other things because they have intense confidence in the future and their destiny and their God and their traditions and their ethics and they're also carved out that this I've

139:18always thought of religion in some ways it's almost being like a moral scaffolding like you've okay well you got like a real clear structure to operate under and that that gives you resources it gives you frees up resources to do other things I mean I mean the problem is is that the Atheist critique which is like there is no beer to do it in a cloud granting your wishes are listening to whether you know that's my answer okay you know everybody who says there's no God and nothing happens when you die like you don't know that to say that is no different than someone saying they know for sure there's a god in the cloud with a harp and st. Peter you know but go but look at a list but if we conjure art if we conjure Sam and we try to steal man Sam right and we'll say okay okay but there's all these explicit ways that you're supposed to worship God right and

140:06we they can't all be right because there are mutual incompatibilities and so how do you choose one among many and if n is Larry okay blah blah none of this is the point the point is deep archetype is its own thing and the mind seeks deep archetype it's why it cares about the Godfather pictures differently than home alone home alone is not deep archetype Godfather pictures are deep archetype right okay there's a buyer I I'm on kung fu kung fu panda like white on rice that is deep archetype those are actually pretty goddamn good moon no just the first one the second one's not bad my kids liked it they're younger than yours I don't hide behind my kids generally I like I enjoy it I enjoyed him I'd look I enjoy the Lego movies man I said I've never seen a league of mind and I'm bad this last Ninjago one it's not bad I enjoy it so I think that just messing it no I like those they're good I be

141:03there's a lot of dumb that I like though that said really yeah okay musically what some dumb did you kiss that is dumb every now and then man I'm on my way to the comic store I'll throw in I was made for loving you yeah that's not so bad but I prefer Angus Young in school boy yeah I don't mind it either I like him as well yeah look I like all kinds of music but I I wonder when it comes to archetypes whether or not when I was getting to when I was talking about your sons and your children whether or not their behavior is genetic whether or not it's learned experience whether it's a combination of all things how much of what we have is just and these this sort of inclination towards ideologies is because pretty much everybody had them for the thousands and thousands and thousands of years that we had civilization and we are in some way shape or form the product of all that

142:07stuff even genetically yeah like whatever memories I don't totally understand genetics but what I do understand is that there's a lot that we don't know about why ideas get transferred from father to son from children from parents to children and there's things that get transferred even to adopted kids right that come directly from their parents right in a very eerie way where you go well is there some like what our instincts why are children afraid of spiders and and monsters like what is that is it because at one point in time someone near them was killed by a big cat you know thousands of years ago you know back when you know we were living in these environments where we were preyed upon by predators I mean what it what are the reasons why and Rupert Sheldrake had a great point about that if you talk to children in New York City they're not afraid of

142:57child molesters or murderers or things that they might encounter car accidents they're afraid of monsters like why what is a monster and that a monster may very well be the memory or the ancient genetic memory I think of coarseness I mean I think if you look at for example the evil stepmother oh well that's real too right okay yeah but what was that about probably it had to do with the fact that the first thing that you want to teach your children is hey if I'm not around and daddy remarries somebody who has no interest in you genetically right here's the emergency break glass in case of emergency plan right there's a little of that but it's also how many times does that play out or someone has to tell that story yeah because it's so common it we all know the story I have a good friend of mine who was essentially tortured by a stepfather throughout

143:50growing up I mean it has a horrific life story and it's just one of a million one of millions right but sometimes what we do is we we sort of go obliquely at these things so for example in Little Red Riding Hood you know is the Fox of Fox or there's the wolf sorry is the wolf a wolf or the wolf actually wolf must stand in well I think it's a wolf because throughout Europe there were thousands of years wolves preyed on people the wolf is pretty creepy in this kind right because wolves are clever you know do you know that in Paris in I think the early 1400s wolves killed something like what was the number some insane number of people in Paris like 14 people were killed by wolves not in in Paris they're starting to show up in Paris again okay wolves are dangerous and wolves we'll look I think everybody everybody respects the wolf but yeah but they're clever

144:48yes but about wolves is they they have some sort of a temper said the better to see you with my dear right because he was being clever I mean ok but you asked the question about predators I have the big bad wolf the three pigs it's all wolves there's a lot of wolves in ancient folklore it stay the out of the woods it's always stay out of the woods whereas there's wolves in the woods right so what's the woods is it Central Park no it's real woods people live near the woods they weren't their doors in those kind of cities yeah when they wrote these stories when the Grimm brothers were around there was no Central Park right yeah all I'm suggesting is is that a lot of our information comes coded so that it doesn't point to directly maybe maybe stepmothers or and wolves are dangerous stepmothers I take my responsibility there's a lot of amazing stepmothers now let's say 30 seconds

145:41worth of things there's amazing stepmothers but there's obviously some monsters there's obviously some mom no no but just it to your point it's not always stepmother Stepfather the question is right what happens when mommy your daddy remarries yeah sometimes it's awesome right often it's not right and why because of this issue about genetic relatedness so you know sure into your earlier question I was stunned I didn't think about 23andme as a religious test but when I said my saliva off to be analyzed it came back you're a Jew like 98 crazy point six percent coming well I didn't I didn't know my religion was in my saliva it didn't even occur to me oh yeah but it's uh but that's the weird thing about Jews right is that it's a religion but it was also an ethnicity right right right and so the idea is that all of these rules you know dietary restrictions rules for who gets to marry

146:42at what level in the culture where do you put your resources are you proselytizing or do you try to live at steady-state do you discourage people converting in all of these things are some sort of toolkit for living and it has produced more physicists than you know outfielders hmm right so it's not good at everything it's mended some things at the exclusion of others and so the question about how does the stuff Co travel it Co travels in some way that's very mysterious yeah you know do we pass on trauma I can say in my family for sure that my family stopped being religious when my great uncle Sasha was killed right at the end of World War two and my great grandmother said no no compassionate God would kill somebody so stupidly who had so much to give to their family and changed the family from some kind of orthodoxy to Orthodox atheism and then you know for three generations you have

147:47Jews marrying Jews with nobody believing in anything hmm why are they continuing to marry Jews why are they celebrating these holidays well it's because fundamentally a switch got flipped but my guess is that the Orthodox were always questioning whether there was a God the atheists are always questioning whether there's a God at some level because our brains are not just simple computers to be you know rid of bias they have particular needs so my for things that I care about our truth Fitness meaning and grace all of those trade off amongst each other and when I said there's something like this on Sam's same Eris's program a lot of the people who wrote in said oh you know shows that he doesn't care about truth and you know I felt like now it just shows that you guys don't understand how important what is the argument understand the argument Sam would like

148:40to make an argument that the better and more rational our thinking is the more it can do everything that religion once did so if you've had a DMT or an LSD experience that can give you meaning and transcendence you know if you can think your way more accurately through a problem that should increase your fitness you know maybe grace is something that's independent and you have to figure out whether that's important to you but that's a choice that an you know an elected objective and my belief is is that a lot of these things are actually preset and that there's more antagonism between them so I think of myself as an atheist but it's only because there's a room in my mind that I try to keep very very clean and analytical that I I sort of make the first among equals but I have needs for these other things I haven't you know there are times when the truth doesn't

149:33give me enough meaning and I'll start storytelling okay you know we're surrounded we've got to fight our way out you know like all that kind of narrative so Joseph Campbell's type stuff yeah sure don't you think that there's lessons to be learned in those right but it's and there's meaning in all those stories and there's there's a longing that we have for a lot of those hero's journey type narratives but but truth is significantly more important than just these lessons that we learned from hero's journeys like Clara learning the lessons is important they're fascinating they're interesting the stories are amazing but what's really going on like what biological processes are responsible for certain types of behavior you know what what really is happening to human bodies under certain conditions what is really happening to the earth what is really happening as far as my own yeah my

150:26friend Peter Thiel critiques me on this point just as you have where he says you Eric under value and under weight the role of truth but I worried that we're not even having a conversation if I think about my personal physics hero Dirac I was the guy who came up with the equation for the electron less well known than the Einstein equations but arguably even more beautiful in order to predict that he needed a positively charged than a negatively charged particle and the only two known at the time with the electron and the proton to make up let's say a hydrogen atom well the proton is quite a bit heavier than the electron and so he told a story that wasn't really true where the proton was the antiparticle of the electron and Heisenberg pointed out that couldn't be because the masses are too far off and they'd have to be equal well a short time later the anti electron the

151:27positron that is was found I guess by Anderson and Caltech in the early 30s and then an antiproton was created sometime later so it turned out that the story had more meaning than the exact version of the story so the story was sort of more true than the version of the story that was originally told and I could tell you a similar story with with Einstein I could tell it to you with Darwin who you know didn't fully understand the implications of his theory as is evidenced by his screwing up a particular kind of orchid in his later work not understanding that his theory completely explained that orchid so there's all sorts of ways in which we get the the truth wrong the first several times we try it but the meaning of the story that we tell somehow remains intact and I think that that's a very difficult lesson for people who just want to say look I want

152:25to you know like Fineman would say look if experiment disagrees with you then you're wrong and it's a very appealing story to tell the people but it's also worth noting that Fineman never got a physical law of nature and it may be that he was too wedded to this kind of rude judgment of the unforgiving you know you can imagine you were to innovate in in Brazilian Jujitsu the first few times might not actually work but if you told yourself a story no no this is actually genius and it's working and you're like no you just lost three you know consecutive bouts well that may give you the ability to eventually perfect the move perfect the technique even though you were lying to yourself during the period in which it was being set up it's a little bit like the difference between scaffolding and a building and too often people who are crazy about truth reject scaffolding

153:17which is an intermediate stage in getting to the final truth so well the problem with that analogy is that some techniques work but they just don't work for you and the reason why they don't work for you is you don't know them good enough yet right or not you can eat that ya know we could just wrap this up hungry we're on the homestretch buddy we got seven more minutes don't take it anymore I'm sorry insulin lowered into issues - mm-hmm listen we could just wrap this up anyway this is uh this was a really fun conversation really I feel like that eating that bar he definitely did change the butter crash I know well you you were so hungry you had to eat in the middle of talking I was told I could go to the bathroom here's a good filling - garlic - well he said you could do it for like six right but denies that people go crazy when they hear people chewing on the

154:06microphone is the number one thing that people complain about on his podcast they apologize to him no no worries we've had these fight companion podcasts and people have potato chips and they're eating potato chips on the pocket and I just would get my Twitter would be filled with people furious so it's like you know America's hang in there dude sorry you got out you got to be comfortable being uncomfortable like a couple minutes I can do it what I was gonna say is that analogy is not the best analogy because some things work they just don't work for you like one of the analogies is used in Brazilian Jujitsu is like someone will try a technique and it doesn't work for them and they're like well that techniques no good let's say okay well you know that head kicks work right you've seen people kick people in the head and knock them unconscious right okay

154:55try to kick me in the head well I don't know how to kick people in the head there you go even if I show you how you're not gonna be able to do it if I show you how to kick people in the head you think gonna be able to kick someone it actually knows how to fight in a head no then they're gonna move that they're gonna see it coming you're gonna it's gonna be too slow you're not gonna have your neural pathways carve to the point where that thing just slices right in there we're not gonna know how to set it up you're not gonna have the confidence and the experience to execute it the difference between that and the truth is very different because it doesn't require some sort of physical process for you to master before you can execute it with sufficient prowess to actually be successful well I think you know this has to do with placeholder truth you know the famous example of trichinosis

155:40and pork where if you believe that God hates those who eat the pig you think that's what that's about I think it's about tricking it most likely right or various other parasites right right so you know how long while malaria right bad air shellfish red tide right don't eat shellfish right so all of these things have to do with I'm not quite sure that I can explain to you why this is a bad thing but let's have a placeholder and then we'll refine it over time right come to understand what it is that we're doing and alas we're rigid with our ideology and we go by some ancient Scripture that ancient scripture says that anything with a cloven hoof that eats its own cud you know like they there's all these weird laws like this is your what you're allowed to eat this is what you're not allowed to eat you accept it that's very often not how things work right so my fear is is that

156:38it's a little bit the Emily Litella effect on religion where the atheist concept of a religious person is usually the sort of robot that's right look sighs right right and in fact what you often find is is that you're rewarded for brilliance in a religion by not having to follow the rules nearly as closely if you become adept at argument it's sort of like really Christian people with a cross tattooed on them that could be right there you make some art well for example in Islam contract marriage where you need to get married for a few hours so that you can say your urges with your wife who then becomes not your wife a short time later you're arbitrage in the letter of the law against the need for some sort of human realism so they have contract marriages where you like woods get married for a day yeah really so we good move I think everybody should do that just to find out what the hell

157:35that person's really like you don't know anybody until you actually marry him when she's shacked up with them and you're living for a while and they have access to all your money then your life then you get to find out what they're really like 1.6 billion people are considering your words right now I don't know if it's a good thing or a bad thing I do think that I don't think that many people lives in this broadcast these are okay you know we had a situation I think in in the Lake Kinneret in Israel where people were using breadcrumbs to fish as bait and the question was well does that invalidate the entire water supply of Israel during Passover and so rabbis had to be convened and if you know paid a sufficient amount of money genius-level rabbis could figure out why it was okay to drink the water during Passover all right so the issue of getting around our own rules is a time-honored

158:27religious tradition where you know any book that is not a book for living and survival and thriving is consigned to the dustbin of history and so the fact that these things have been around for so long in general means that they have their own means of evading these self extinguishing programs that would seem to doom them well some of them those self extinguishing programs have the way they evade it is through fear right I mean isn't that right Raizel cheating on them yeah right and so the idea of you know if you attack on Yom Kippur does that mean you can't fight back because you should you're supposed to be atoning for your sins now if you want to survive you're gonna figure out a way to fight on Yom Kippur well what about Ramadan I guarantee you nobody you know if it were so easy to defeat people using their own religious traditions against them we wouldn't know

159:23the name of these religions and we wouldn't we wouldn't know the genius of the books how many did we lose how many religions have we forgot what they were like Joe and Ted's Excellent religion yeah yeah just didn't make the cut you know I mean how many from epic of gilgamesh from those days I would I would guess tons what did they call it but what was the Heaven's Gate remember oh yeah the nikes that killed themselves when the the comet or the sole castrating yeah yeah yeah the one guy who let it was self castration makers Shaker furniture then they were down to like one or there were three shakers at some point then there was like one and they were accepting no no no new recruits my favorite is the Amish they have that was that called roms Geller what is that crazy they go nuts yeah well they go nuts for like a year was it Ringo I'm Springer's Otis that what one

160:13year where they just go hog wild they don't have to follow the rules and then they usually feel so lost and disconnected that they they I think the majority of them returned to being Amish is that right yeah yeah find their way to Burning Man ah no I don't think they go that kind of now so I think it's more like booze and ac/dc type nuts I think they just a lot and get crazy and throw rocks you know so I'm gonna I'm gonna look for the Amish camp yes dear Eric this is a really beautiful conversation exceeded my expectations I really enjoyed it and we should do this more often Joe thanks to Dan terrific thanks perfect all right folks we'll be back tomorrow with the great and powerful christina pazsitzky who's Netflix special is out today