Join us for a mini decoding to get us back into the swing of things as we examine a viral clip that had religious reactionaries, sensemakers, and academic philosophers in a bit of a tizzy. Specifically, we are covering reactions to a clip from a 2014 TEDx talk by Yuval Noah Harari, the well-known author and academic, in which he discussed how human rights (and really all of human culture) are a kind of 'fiction'.Get ready for a thrilling ride as your intrepid duo plunges into a beguiling world of symbolism, cultural evolution, and outraged philosophers. By the end of the episode, we have resolved many intractable philosophical problems including whether monkeys are bastards, if first-class seating is immoral, and where exactly human rights come from. Philosophers might get mad but that will just prove how right we are.LinksThe original tweet that set everyone offBananas in heaven | Yuval Noah Harari | TEDxJaffaPaul Vander Klay's tweet on the kerfuffleAn example of a rather mad philosopherSpeak Life: Can We Have Human Rights Without God? With Paul Blackham (The longer video that PVK clipped from)Standard InfoWars article on Harari
Welcome to Decoding the Gurus, a podcast where an anthropologist and a psychologist listen to the greatest minds the world has to offer and we try to work out what they're talking about.
I'm Matthew Brown.
Australian, extraordinary, high-level skier, all of that.
The guy over there is Christopher Kavanagh, dashingly handsome, Northern Irish, very young, smart brain on him.
No, no, it's me.
I had you all fooled, but it's me, Chris, doing the intro because Matthew is back from his world travels, back from the DTG company retreat in Japan where we met up, as people heard, and he's managed to survive the trip.
But not entirely.
You're not operating at 100%.
Is that fair to say, Professor Brown?
That is fair to say.
G'day, Chris.
Not a bad intro.
I have some notes I'll share with you later.
Yeah, no, it was a great holiday.
Great to see you.
Great to go skiing.
Great to show off skiing.
Be a big hit with your son, teaching him how to ski.
Become an idol for my son.
Yeah.
That poor kid, not having someone to look up to on the slopes.
No one to mentor him.
No father figure.
Hey, I went down to...
A red thing at the end, Matt.
A red thing, a red slope, you know?
Good job.
My wife wouldn't do that.
But no, as so many people do, I picked up a little bit of a sickness, a bit of the plague, the COVID plague on the way home.
And it's not too bad.
Bit of coughing, all that stuff.
But I'm on the mend.
Point of order.
Point of order.
It's probably COVID.
We don't have a diagnostic test to prove that.
You know, I'm rigorous, Matt.
I'm here fact-checking.
But the symptomology...
The epidemiology from cases that we've studied.
I've located case zero there.
I know a guy, the child of my friends, who did get diagnosed with it, and he was the one.
He infected us all.
That's here, Sandra.
Fortunately, you're vaccinated.
Many times.
We're not anti-vaccine here.
Famously, a non-anti-vaccine podcast.
Yeah, so it was all right.
The only bit that I really didn't like was getting on the plane as I was inching my way back towards economy through the first-class cabin, which is always a...
Humiliating experience at the best of times.
And there was a young guy sitting there in first class, like 25 years old.
That was his first crime, being much younger than me and enjoying his first class seat.
But the second thing that really got me down was that he had a great big fat copy of Jordan Peterson's 12 Rules for Life sitting there on his thing, which I noticed.
Yeah, that would grind the gears.
I hope at the least that you audibly tutted it on the way back.
Shake your hand and say, mate, you should check out here.
I wanted to budge him, but I couldn't.
That stands the reason.
One of my more communist-y opinions, Chris, is I think we should ban first class and business class or any classes on aeroplanes.
We should just have the one class.
Because those different classes just make the other people feel bad.
And I think we should give everyone a little bit more room.
Yes, plane flaps would be a little bit more expensive.
We'll all travel a little bit less.
They should make it so you just can't buy a more expensive seat.
Everyone gets the same.
And that way there's no envy.
There's no injustice.
And no one has to get punched in first class.
Yeah, that's a socialist take to start the podcast.
But maybe I can sign off on this until I'm wealthy enough to travel in first class.
And then I'll rescind my endorsement of that.
But I will say, whenever anybody is traveling first class and complaining about service in any way...
I find it infuriating.
Yes, there's little things that annoy you when traveling, but you know, you should have compassion for the rest of us who suffer those indignities alongside the broader indignity of economy class in general.
So just be careful what you're completing the point.
Have you ever flown first class or business class?
No, I don't think so.
I have been in slightly better seats in like a domestic flight that you had to pay slightly extra for, but it wasn't like...
Like an extra location or anything.
So I don't think that counts.
No, that doesn't.
It's like the upgraded seats on Ryan Harris.
Like Economy Plus or something.
That does not count.
No, I've never flown anything other than Economy either.
That's what you get for having a family in this day and age, Chris.
And being an academic.
Being an academic.
If I was swanning around three men about town without responsibilities, maybe things would be different.
Would you fly first class?
No, I don't think I would.
I think I'd...
I prefer to suffer and then stay.
You could take that money and stay in a first-class hotel, like a much nicer hotel when you get there for a week.
I know senior academics that only fly business class and stuff.
I remember because people were talking to me about being able to get all this work done, which I sometimes endeavour to do on planes and it sort of works a bit.
But it's always the issue of the space, right?
And they're like, no, but you can just put it.
And I'm like...
No, no, no.
That doesn't work.
Then I realized, oh, you're always traveling in a different world than me.
Hey, is that getting paid by the university or do they pay for it themselves?
I guess so, but these are like PI.
I'm a PI.
Hey, I've been a PI on some stuff.
Well, no, maybe they're at your level, but you're basically not.
I'm at the highest level.
There is no level above mine, Chris.
Well, the reason I ask is because it's not possible as far as I know in Australia.
Like, it's not allowed.
No way.
Yeah, yeah.
But, man, academics have their ways.
Because that's the thing, like, on most grants it says you can't reimburse tickets that are, you know, above a certain class or whatever.
That's normal.
No, no, Chris, I'm not talking about the grants.
I'm talking about the university.
The university will not let you.
Wow.
Like, it doesn't matter.
In fact, even at CSIRO, the Australian Government Research Organisation, where I also worked, and I think most...
Government places are the same.
I remember my mentor and supervisor, Bill Venables, who was like a world-renowned statistician, also happened to be really very large.
He had health problems, right?
He had health problems which actually led to him being an extremely large, heavy guy, not very healthy.
He's the kind of person that would die from deep vein thrombosis and stuff on a plane, right?
Is he still alive?
I hope so.
I haven't checked in on him recently.
Okay.
Well, if you're listening, Bill, do that.
I hope you're alive.
But anyway, but they wanted him.
He was invited to go on this world tour giving lectures, right, to people about statistics and R and stuff because they really wanted him.
You know, he's smart guy.
Yeah, and he had to jump through all of these hoops because, like, he just physically couldn't do it unless he went.
First class, right?
He would probably die.
But that was like a big deal for that exception to be made.
I don't know.
Anyway, it's different if you're in the C-suite.
If you're up there with associate vice chancellors and those people, they fly first class.
I'd say the majority of academics don't, but I just know a lot who seem to be very comfortable in business and maybe higher.
And that might be the kind of academics I'm dealing with, Matt.
The fat cats are the academic words.
But yeah, I mean...
So I don't see those spoils.
So that's it.
But yeah, so this has been your advertisement for, why don't we lift everyone's boat?
Why don't we make all the seats a little bit nicer for everyone?
We can take some of the niceness out of the first car.
Spread it around economy.
It would be like spreading a little bit of butter over a lot of bread, but even so, it would all be, you know, incrementally better off.
We'd all have to pay a bit more.
Well, a millionaires just don't need a bit more.
We shouldn't do that.
We're going to do the online leftist thing.
If we just take Bill Gates' money, we'll be able to pay for first class seats for everybody for a hundred years.
I don't get why it doesn't work, Matt.
You know, this is why people come to this podcast for economic analysis.
So apart from setting the economic system and plane travel systems to right, we are here for a purpose.
Oh, and by the way, should you want more of our unstructured waffling and particular discussions...
About the experience in Japan at the Ryokan, more so than you got, there is a bunch of videos and audio stuff on the Patreon.
There's a long extended discussion on plagiarism, academic plagiarism, if you want to hear us discuss that with a glass of whiskey or two.
So just mentioning, should that be something people are interested in.
But that's all.
Patreon, waffle, what we're here for today, Matt.
We're not doing the Sean Carroll.
Decoding, which is the next decoding we have planned, a treat for you, a reward for all the terrible people that we cover.
Instead, you know, to gently bring you back into the fold and give you a chance to build up your decoding muscles, you know, to let your lungs recover.
We're doing one of those short, focused decodings on a specific...
Really a tweet, actually, that went viral.
So a little bit different, but it touches on a bunch of topics that we're interested in.
The clip, Matt, why don't I play it for you and then I'll explain the context.
Is that the right way to do it?
Okay, I'll play it first so that I don't give you any preconceptions.
Many, maybe most legal systems are based on this idea, this belief in human rights.
But human rights...
Just like heaven and like God, it's just a fictional story that we've invented and spread around.
It may be a very nice story, it may be a very attractive story, we want to believe it, but it's just a story.
It's not a reality.
It is not a biological reality.
Just as jellyfish and woodpeckers and ostriches have no rights, homo sapiens have no rights also.
Take a human, cut him open, look inside, you find their blood, and you find the heart and lungs and kidneys, but you don't find there any rights.
The only place you find rights is in the fictional stories that humans have invented and spread around.
And the same thing is also true in the political field.
States and nations are also, like human rights and like God and like heaven, they too are just stories.
A mountain is a reality.
You can see it.
You can touch it.
You can even smell it.
But Israel or the United States...
They are just stories, very powerful stories, stories we might want to believe very much.
But still, they are just stories.
You can't really see the United States.
You cannot touch it.
You cannot smell it.
So that was Yuval Noah Harari, somebody that actually...
Planning to cover in the future.
A Israeli historian, philosopher, author, wrote a book, Sapiens and Homo Deus.
And there he is giving a TEDx talk, I believe, in 2014, TEDxJafa.
It's an...
Old video, and the specific clip that I played to you went viral on Twitter.
Various people shared it around.
One of them, someone called Scarlett Johnson, a political scientist, grassroots activist, daughter of a Marine Corps vet, and blah blah blah blah, right, said in response to this video, in a tweet that has 3.1 million views, if you believe this, what we just heard,
is there any horror you cannot justify?
And this was retweeted wildly with a lot of people outraged.
Yes.
So what did you think about...
Were you similarly outraged?
Well, that's how it came across my desk, shall we say, as well, which was that, yeah, it was getting retweeted.
There was an outrage farming going on initially.
Pretty much the religious right, I think, in the United States, who'd like to find things to be outraged about, even if it's a relatively tepid 10-year-old TEDx snippet.
Because, you know, this goes to their idea of atheistic socialists who believe in nothing, nihilistic point of view, where, you know, unless you actually have faith in the reality of the eternal nature of God,
the United States and the flag and all that stuff, then, you know, you'll just be, you know, sniffing your own farts.
And wallowing in your own crapulence as socialists I want to do.
So that was the original outrage thing.
But it was interesting to see academic philosophers get in on the act as well, hey?
Oh, we'll get to them.
We'll get to them.
But before we get off the religious right, I do want to say that I think part of the reason that...
Harari triggered them is that at the start, he says, human rights are just like heaven and like God.
It's just a fictional story that we've invented and spread around.
It may be a nice story, maybe a very attractive story.
We want to believe it, but it's just a story.
So I think that is the bit that set him up.
For angering religious people because they don't like it when you present their stories as, you know, comparative to fiction, right?
That is not good.
Now, I would say when I heard this, the general takeaway I got from it is he's wanting to emphasize that humans have the capacity for symbolic culture and that we invent ideas like nations and democracy and human rights and languages and so on.
And that these are very important.
And that this distinguishes humans from other animals in very important respects.
So if we care about those things, we have to take consideration that they aren't like the others.
They're reliant on humans coming up to some sort of shared agreement about their importance.
Now that felt obvious to me, especially because so many cultural evolution theorists have emphasized this point about the ultra-sociality of humans, right?
Like, why are humans able to...
To cooperate in such large numbers beyond genetic kin.
Lots of explanations, but a lot of them revolve around having symbolic culture and cumulative cultural capacities.
So to me, this is nothing new.
And it was very clear that he is not...
Saying that these things are not important.
And the fact that they are symbolic means that we shouldn't invest our passions in defending them or that kind of thing.
Well, you would say that because you're a godless materialist reductionist, Chris.
And I would too.
You know, the other thing too is, I mean, I'm not a big fan of Yuval Harari and I'm not a fan of TEDx Talkie.
And this was a perfect example of that where you want to make a point.
His point is...
Hey, ideas are important, man.
Let's talk about the importance of ideas, but they're not tangibly real.
It's a pretty basic, trite point.
He was dressing it up.
In some flowery language, rather than describing it in terms of social constructivism or in terms of symbolic ideas or transmissible culture and stuff like that, he was talking about stories, fictional stories that we made up and told ourselves, you know, to sex up his talk a little bit.
And then, of course, that sexing up, ironically, is the thing that triggers the little outrage cycle we saw.
Yeah, although also part of the outrage cycle here is that Harari is in the pantheon.
Of right-wing villains, right?
Infowars often references him.
He's like, if Klaus Schwab is the evil deity at the top, Harari is somewhere down in the demigod status.
He's a neoliberal Jewish person.
So already he's not doing well.
And he's a futurist in certain respects, right?
So his villain status.
Already makes him like a suitable, you know, it's very easy to whip up anger at a man.
The fact that he appeared to be disparaging religion helps.
And just to highlight, Matt, Paul van der Klee, a religious person on Twitter who I've interacted with before, he was pointing out this.
video and promoting a response to it from some religious talk show kind of thing, looks like a religious talk show, some guy called Glenn Scrivener.
And he was saying that their response is pure Jonathan Pejot and Jordan Peterson.
So let me play the response that they Head to this clip.
Why do you think this went viral on Twitter?
I've never seen that clip, and it's extraordinary to me that when he says, like, I can see a mountain.
And I'm like, well, you don't actually.
What you see is a conglomeration of rocks and things like that.
But he, like, will adopt a standpoint and see these things and go...
That's a mountain.
How do you know it's not a hill?
That's right.
How do you know it's not a hill?
And why is it?
Because if he just sees a few rocks, would he go, it's a mountain?
Yes.
No, he wouldn't.
He has to be...
And he arbitrarily selects a certain point at which...
Or he might say, social convention does that and says, this is a mountain.
And he goes, now that's a mountain!
That's...
But then if he sees a conglomeration of human beings, and either, and so there's a point at which people go, oh no, that's the United States.
And he goes, oh no, you see, I can't buy into that.
I'm having a conglomeration of rocks, but not a conglomeration of human beings.
You're like, dude, your metaphysical trousers are down.
We can see how you're being thick.
I sort of feel embarrassed for him, really.
This kind of pseudo-philosophical wordplay is so annoying, isn't it?
Because it sounds smart, superficial.
The sense makers love it.
I love this.
This is what they love to do.
Anytime that somebody suggests that something is objectively exists or whatever, they're like, ah, you know.
How can you say that egregores are any less real than a sun, say?
Because a sun is just a concept.
It's just an idea that we've applied to a bunch of hydrogen and helium that happens to be in the same place.
You know, these are just concepts, Chris.
You know, egregores are just as real as...
Stars.
There's plenty of legitimate arguments that you could make to somebody being too glib about the way concepts work or whatever, but like...
The central thing he's saying, he would agree if they wanted to emphasize this point that, you know, what we deem mountains and what is a hill, it's actually like a social convention, which, you know, they're fuzzy buying.
Like Harari would be down with all that.
Yeah, of course.
He's not talking about that.
He's not making that distinction.
That's right.
That's right.
That's not his point.
As we've said before, it's not a very interesting point.
It's probably a boring TEDx talk that he gave, right?
I don't know.
But he's just saying that there There are tangible material things and there are things that are sort of cultural ideas and things like that that sort of live in our heads and that you cannot point to any place in the physical world where they actually exist.
Yeah, and just to make this point clear, he wasn't in the larger talk arguing that because human rights derive from like symbolic culture or whatever, that they're not important or that all these concepts, they're just, you know, compared to the objective reality, they're so fluffy and nonsense.
Like, this is from later in the talk, Matt.
I went and...
You will never catch a chimpanzee standing in front of an audience of 200 other chimps and giving a talk about bananas or about humans or something.
Only humans do such things.
It should also be said, however, that chimps not only don't give talks to strangers, they also don't have prisons.
They don't have concentration camps.
They don't have slaughterhouses.
They don't have arms factories.
Cooperation is not always nice.
Often when we think about cooperation, we think about Sesame Street and teaching children to cooperate together.
But all the terrible things that humans have been doing, still are doing in the world, they too are the outcome of this ability to cooperate flexibly in very, very large numbers.
Now suppose I've managed to convince you that the secret of success of our species is this ability to cooperate flexibly in large numbers.
The next question that immediately arises in the mind of an inquisitive person is how exactly humans do it.
What gives us this ability to do something no other animal can do?
And the answer is our imagination.
Humans cooperate flexibly in large numbers because humans can create imagined realities together.
Yeah, he's saying this intangible stuff, this conceptual stuff, this cultural stuff is terribly, terribly important.
Two-edged sword can be used for great things or terrible things.
Even if you're religious, Matt.
Harari is atheist or whatever, right?
But you can actually take from this that he's saying human cultural products or human imagined realities that we share, which maybe, you know, you can say, you know, God helped to create those in man through the kind of instincts that he developed.
This should be freaking gravy for the sense makers.
This is what they love, right?
Talking about symbolism and the importance of imagined realities.
So he actually was making a point where Which they would be on board with, but because they were so triggered by the reference to fiction in regards to religion, it's taken one that he's arguing human rights.
It's not saying human rights are not important.
Or too, that religion is a terrible thing that we should transcend.
And he, again, isn't saying that either.
He might think that, but that's not what he's arguing at all.
He's arguing that all these imagined realities, like states, like democracy, like religion, are hugely important for human societies, which obviously they are.
So it should be.
A mundane point, right?
The kind of point which is like, what is money?
You know, the money that you have in your pocket, it's just paper and metal.
And the only thing that gives it value is people are willing to trade it.
And treat it like it has inherent value.
And that's just a shared convention.
What if society broke down?
And you're like, yes, that actually is an interesting thing to realize.
But most people realize that in their teens.
And you're right, though, that there's something special and triggering about him saying that natural or human rights are imaginary, right?
Or are invented.
But people wouldn't have a problem if you said that people invented democracy, right?
Or money.
Or money.
Or freaking anything, right?
But we went down a little bit of a rabbit hole, didn't we?
And in finding out that there is a stream of respectable thought, not amongst the religious right, but amongst a much broader stream of philosophers and other people, that human rights and natural rights are not a human invention, like democracy or money, but actually exist independently of humans.
Their mind independent, I think, is the jargon that they use for it.
But like, so, yeah, so you mentioned academic philosophers, Matt.
And in a rare...
Clasping across the boundaries, right?
That meme.
You had the religious, right?
And the sense speakers and the philosophers, I actually think they're fairly, they're not a huge distance apart.
I described them a little bit like Pokemon, you know, the biggest Pokemon and the evolved version.
Philosophers being the evolved version of sense speakers.
I don't know who that's worth something for, but I do think there's at least connections there.
But the bit that is not always so in step was that...
Academic philosophers were likewise very annoyed by this clip from Harari.
And what triggered them was not the reference to religion as being a fiction.
They didn't really care about that point.
What they got triggered by, and I will say it's triggered, is because he referenced human rights.
And apparently there is a developed debate within philosophical circles about the nature of rights and whether...
What I would say a kind of naturalistic science-based perspective would be is that human symbolic culture relies on humans existing.
So the concept of rights has to develop from human symbolic culture.
So you go back to the dinosaurs, you don't have any concept of rights.
But there are a class of philosophers, including ones that classify themselves as naturalists, who think that those concepts existed without humans.
And that there's very complications about it.
But that's why.
So had he used the other example, he wouldn't have triggered the reaction, but they were very annoyed because they said, what a simplistic way to treat a very complex topic about rights.
So the interesting thing about this, Chris, is it puts you and me, reductionist materialists, that we are in the same camp as Michel Foucault and other people because...
They would describe this kind of rights as being totally socially constructed, right?
Which is saying the same thing.
Just trust me on that one.
At least I think you're probably right.
Whereas it's more the liberal, I guess.
Philosophers who would talk about natural rights and inalienable sorts of things.
And they sometimes would say that they derive from the divine, right?
God or a godlike essence in people or something.
Or if you get a bit more sophisticated and less religious, you might say that they arise.
Kind of by our inherent human qualities, right?
Like humans, from that argument, you'd say that natural rights or human rights arise because humans as being conscious, intelligent creatures or whatever, just naturally want to be free, that kind of thing, right?
Not be oppressed.
Yes.
And I was helpfully sent a link to, you know, the Stanford philosophy page, which has...
A long entry about these kind of debates, but I couldn't help but notice that whenever it's referencing a lot of the points of the people who want to argue that they're not mind-dependent or whatever, it will reference the source.
Can be supernatural?
Or an unspecified, but kind of mystic-y...
I'm sorry, it is.
It's kind of like a realm of concepts or something.
The ether or whatever.
Yeah, like platonic eternal forms.
Yeah, we'll be triggering the philosophers, but I don't mind.
I'm sorry.
Because the point I want to emphasize with this was, you know, take whatever philosophy you want, like theistic philosopher, if you so believe that's your bag.
But the point for me is that both of those groups, the academic philosophers and the religious reactionaries on Twitter, they both were just focusing on this little thing, you know, this part of the speech.
That's right.
We have to remind people, these were just examples, right?
He was not making a point about human rights or natural rights or about religion.
He was making a point about transmissible.
Culture and the importance of cooperation and ideas in fueling organised endeavours.
Yes, and almost universally, I will say, from interacting with some philosophers, I cannot speak for all of them, and just looking to the religious right, they seem to get that wrong.
Like, they didn't infer that the broader point of the talk is actually a promotion of the importance of imagined realities, right, for humans.
So, like, they kind of assumed that he was...
He was sort of dissing.
Yeah.
He was implying that either God or human rights are important.
Yeah, which he wasn't.
It was very obvious to me.
So, you know...
You know, work on your theory of mind, guys.
Work on your theory of mind.
Figure out what the person's trying to communicate, what their motivations are, rather than zeroing in on the syntax.
Yeah, and I do think it's occasionally worth looking into the context of why Harari is a particularly triggering individual for the reactionary, right?
Or that kind of thing, like, just the...
A five-minute Google search will reveal to you his position in, you know, conspiracy theorist lore and whatnot, which seems like you might consider it when addressing this kind of topic.
But I don't know.
Philosophers are very good at focusing on individual words or in this way they share a lot with sense makers.
That's what they like to do.
Making simple things extremely complicated, you mean?
But don't say that.
I will say another, like an external example is a guy, Alex O 'Connor.
Who's doing a bunch of interviews recently with various figures, Peter Hitchens.
Stormed out of an interview with him, and he's kind of like an atheist philosopher.
He recently did an episode with Peugeot, and they enjoyed a productive, symbolic-laden philosopher-slash-sensemaker crossover with nary a word about, you know, the lurid conspiracism and religious apologetic-style reasoning that Peugeot applies.
And both seemed very happy that they were able to, you know, achieve such an important reaching-across dialogue.
And I thought...
Really, this is something to be impressed by because the fact that philosophers and sensemakers can talk together and enjoy this kind of thing, I could have told you that from my experience with both of them.
So I'm sorry.
I'm not besmirching all philosophers.
I know there are plenty of philosophers who are, you know, they also...
Find issue with conspiracy theorists and sense makers and this kind of thing.
So I'm not casting aspersions at the entire philosophy field.
And I know that very many smart people have spent many decades talking about Rights and how they can be independent from mind.
Yep.
And a lot of religious scholars have spent a long time arguing how many angels dance on the head of a pin.
I don't know why you would use that analogy.
That's not fair.
We're coming back with a bang.
Maybe the normal people won't understand.
When I say normal, I mean like reasonable people won't understand why philosophers are going to be slightly mad at us.
But, well, you know, philosophers being mad at you, you have to be doing something right to get some set of philosophy.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That's what it is.
But that clip, just to be clear again, like, Harari is, I think both of us agree, it's a fairly mundane observation just about humans having symbolic culture and it being important, right, our cumulative culture.
In some respects, the thing which distinguishes us from...
Almost all other animals have the capacity to communicate, create cumulative culture and share intentionality in a kind of bonding and whatnot way.
But that, to me, seems unobjectionable, but not particularly mind-blowing.
No.
Well, anyway, I'll be keen to look at her.
Maybe it was a bit unfair to him.
Maybe I'll think he's all right when we cover him properly.
I started reading Sapiens and I got bored and stopped.
I can't really speak to it.
I believe part of the issue is, you know, he does long, big picture history.
And so if you know specifics of any of the topics he covers, it's really oversimplifying claims and complexities.
And, you know, if you do big history for all of human civilization and history, you're really going to annoy a large, diverse set of people.
Yeah, even bigger, for instance.
Yeah, he's in the same category.
But Chris, Speaking of culture and monkeys and people, when we were in Japan, my wife, I didn't actually go to see them, but she took photos for me.
She went to see the snow monkeys.
Nihonzaru.
Nihonzaru.
Macaques.
Macaques, are they?
Yeah, I think they're Japanese macaques.
Anyway.
Very famous people have probably seen the beautiful photos of the snow monkeys sitting in the steaming pond or hot spring bath.
I don't know what they're called.
Hot spring.
You know, but what is also pretty well known, but my wife saw it for herself, is that not all the monkeys...
Are allowed into the spring.
There's the alpha, high-status family, males and females, and their children, maybe cousins.
I don't know how far it extends.
But, you know, the in-group, the aristocrats.
They're in there having a lovely bath.
And meanwhile, all of the other members of the macaque troop are sitting there literally clutching their shoulders, like huddled together for warmth in the snow because they're not allowed to get into the spring, even though there's room for everyone.
There's room in the spring.
for everyone, but they're not allowed in because of...
Monkey society.
Does that remind you of another species that behaves like this, Chris?
I like how you've tied this into our opening segment with the discussion of first-class plane travel.
Oh, yeah.
Obviously, you meant it there.
This whole discussion leading to that.
That's right.
I'm the monkey shivering in the snow at the back of the plane.
They should let me in first class.
This is right.
Jordan Peterson, Hooperman, and Joe Rogan are the monkeys luxuriating in the hot spring.
And telling everybody else the benefits of cold water plunges while they retreat to their mansion.
So yes, I agree.
The proletariat macaques need to seize back the means of water heating production and enjoy this world.
But Matt, answer one question to me.
If you cut open the macaque, where do you...
See that status.
You cut open a macaque, there's no status there.
Wait a second, this is blowing my mind.
Like, are you telling me that monkeys have some kind of symbolic system of reasoning as well?
Have you thought this through?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, I mean, this would, I'm sure this is in your wheelhouse, right?
Because this is what, comparative anthropology?
And I love that stuff because, I mean, one, like monkeys are bastards, right?
They're bastards.
I've met monkeys all over the world and they've never been anything other than horrible.
But they're very clever.
They're a lot like us.
And in one spot, they figured out that they could steal tourist stuff and that they'd race up a tree, you know, the sunglasses.
This is pretty famous.
Most people know this, right?
And they'll hold on to your sunglasses until you chuck them a banana.
Then they'll drop the sunglasses.
So it's basically extortion, right?
They've invented extortion.
They've invented extortion.
That's a good example, Matt, because the limitation there for the monkeys and why we don't have the capitalist class developing amongst them is that typically, with some limited examples, they're not great.
At passing down that kind of knowledge across generations.
Now, there are a couple of notable exceptions, but it's the cumulative culture and the capacity for passing down information and cultural learning, which is the hallmark.
But actually, they do.
There's a good example.
You know, we're primates, we're cousins, we've got close common ancestors.
Like us, and like many other species too, they are concerned about prestige and hierarchy or status.
Yep, social status.
So they are modeling a component of relations in their mental wheel space.
But yet...
They didn't invent rights or democracy.
So what's the difference?
Or socialism.
That's right.
They need to invent socialism.
But, you know, but this is good.
I think it sort of speaks to the power of his point.
Because I generally, even though it's bland, I generally agree with it.
Like monkeys, societies suck.
And they're pretty similar to basic state of nature type human psychology.
Small scale human societies before we developed larger communities and shared cultures.
Yeah.
We were just another primary on the block.
Yeah.
For a long time.
Yeah.
It's basically a very hierarchical, totally status-driven, oppressive kind of society.
Oh, Matt, careful.
The anthropologists, I can feel them cringing within because...
What did I get wrong?
Just plenty of examples.
Are you going to mention bonobos or something?
No, no, no, I'm not.
Those little fruit cakes.
Those sexy little bastards.
We talked about it with Manvir.
Oh, you weren't here.
You were drunk at the time.
But there's plenty of societies.
You have small-scale societies or...
They're not always nasty.
No, no, no.
They don't always form in the hierarchies.
In fact, there's plenty of examples where there are anti-hierarchy social organizations.
So it isn't necessarily a fundamental feature for society to function that you would have to have this rigid social hierarchy system.
This is something that various anthropologists and other social science people want to emphasize.
Like Jordan Peterson looking at nature.
And say the status hierarchies of lobsters equate to that it's such a primal component that you simply can't understand human society without understanding that that is a core component that can never be removed.
And the notion...
That prestige biases and that there are status and stuff.
I think he's actually right there, but he's wrong on the notion that it has to form in the kind of...
A rigid hierarchy type thing.
Yeah, like status and social cachet.
Reputation is always important, but it doesn't necessarily ossify into a hierarchy type thing.
Exactly by the point that Harari is making.
We can create cultural systems that are much more egalitarian and whatnot.
That's the difference.
That's the point I was trying to make.
Just the relatively...
Weak version of that, which is that we can make things more sophisticated, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse, but it does at least expand the universe of possibilities, including this great state of Queensland, this great country of Australia, where we live in the best of all possible worlds.
Wow, that took a surprisingly parochial turn.
Look, I'm just demonstrating anthropologists getting triggered over the mention of natural hierarchies and whatnot.
So, yeah, it's all complicated, Matt.
We can all agree.
Natural doesn't mean good, and this is where Jordan Peterson's wrong, that natural doesn't mean inevitable either, right?
Natural is usually not very good and certainly not inevitable, and you know, you've got to be aware of it.
Common misreading of old Dawkins, right?
That because he said selfish genes, that he was saying we should be selfish and humans are selfish.
And no, that was actually the opposite.
We're not tailored to the gene drives because of our cultural values.
So a similar point, commonly misinterpreted, and equally somebody that annoys philosophers for some valid reasons.
So there we go, Matt.
Look, we tied it all up.
You see how many?
Little threads we wove and we pulled it all together.
We're getting back into the swing of this.
We'll be decoding gurus in a full-length episode in no time.
I'm feeling healthier just having spoken to you.
Off the air, you mentioned that, you know, it's difficult if you laugh because, you know, it can induce coughing, so you have to be careful.
And so for that reason, I was 20 to 30% less funny than usual.
But listeners might have noticed that.
So if there's any of that, it was purely to protect Matt's lungs.
That's why I was doing any jokes that didn't land, any, you know.
It was all in service of protecting the most important member of the Guru's pod team.
The most vulnerable, you could say.
Wow.
This gives us something to look forward to.
Excited to see how you're going to perform backwards.
That doesn't follow, but yeah.
So there we go, Matt.
A little, the daily delivery on Twitter and elsewhere of outrage from various different factions and stupid clips surfacing years and years after they were made.
This is what?
Social media was made for.
To make people outraged about out-of-context clips.
And lucky for us that they are, because it's grist to our mill, Chris, gives us a position to give a reasonable, considered, and fundamentally correct take on events.
But there's one message that I want to leave people with, which is monkeys are bastards.
Never trust a monkey.
Or a philosopher.
That's a good message to end on.
Some of my best friends are philosophers.
Some of them, I assume, are good people.
Now, we'll leave with that and we'll return soon enough with full-length decodings, other things that you can expect.
