Eric Weinstein clarifies his unrelatedness to Harvey Weinstein before diving into evolutionary biology, citing the giant cuttlefish’s "sneaker males" and female preference for traits like strength or deception. Joe Rogan contrasts this with human aggression, CRISPR’s ethical dilemmas, and debates over AI creativity versus organic artistry. They critique media’s radiation myths, Putin’s state-sponsored doping program, and Google’s suppression of James Damore’s gender-diversity research, warning that ignoring biology risks undermining Western progress. Weinstein argues religions adapt through survival-based archetypes—like dietary laws or contract marriages—while Rogan questions genetic versus cultural inheritance, ultimately stressing how ideologies shape civilization’s trajectory. [Automatically generated summary]
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.
I mean, all of these are just incredible hot-button topics.
But we were talking before about your conversation on male and female programming in the mind on male and female biological frames.
And what I was...
What I was going to talk about there was that you can actually have, in other species which aren't nearly as controversial as humans, a rational basis for something like transphobia in an evolutionary context.
So the giant cuttlefish, which I think is called sepia poma, 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.
And when the females are impressed, they accept shelter underneath one of these giant males.
But then you have these other males who aren't nearly as big, which might be called sneaker males.
And the sneaker males start retracting the tentacles that identify them as male and changing through their chromatophores, their sort of their presentation to look female.
male and then the giant males invite these males disguised as females through behavioral change underneath and we've now proven I believe that these sneaker males inseminate the females while the larger males are getting duped now are the larger males larger because they just have better genetics or are they larger because they're older
Well, you know the question about better genetics Key question is who leaves the lineages that matter over time?
So if you're wasting all of your Energy on a strategy and in fact what you're doing is you're providing protection for sneaker males to get busy with the females who seem to be equally happy to reward a devious male as a strong one.
You know, I'm put in mind of the old Willie Dixon blues song, I'm a backdoor man.
The men don't know, but the little girls understand.
You know, definitely females favor a variety of strategies, whether communicating strength and dominance, cleverness, or anything that females are likely to decide will benefit their offspring.
I've seen it in lizards, and I don't know the sepia pama giant cuttlefish system, but I'm obsessed with cephalopods, so I should probably go back and do some homework on them.
Yeah, the cognitive capabilities, their camouflage capabilities, the strategies that they use for attacking bait fish.
And there's a video that I put up on my Twitter really recently of a cuttlefish that opens up like a flower and shoots its tongue out and gets this fish and then just sucks it into its body.
And it's like you're looking at some kind of an alien.
You know, it's really on a different branch of the phylogenetic tree.
And I think that, 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, then the cuttlefish has to figure out, okay, how do I blend in with that?
I've heard a real legitimate argument for people that are opposed to eating animal protein that mollusks, especially like clams and mussels and things along those lines, are more primitive in terms of their ability to recognize or have any sense of what pain is, any sort of communication, any sort of...
Interpretation of danger that all they do is just close right and that in closing We've interpreted that to mean it's an animal and that this animal life form is like it's like eating a living thing versus like eating plants But I've heard it argued actually Sam Harris is the first one to bring it up.
This is actually a moral argument that They sense less than plants do.
And that they are more primitive than plants are.
But yet, from the mollusk family, you have octopus.
And there's a good argument that you probably shouldn't be eating octopus like you shouldn't be eating monkeys.
Sometimes they, I forget, they call them red devils, like the coast of Baja, California, and they're just social and they're terrifying because they attack in groups.
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.
Because, you know, obviously, if you're at war and you think highly of your enemy, you have to guard against your own empathy so that you can be an effective warrior.
You have to ask the question, you know, if monkeys and apes are among the most intelligent beings, do I actually feel some revulsion for just how savage chimpanzees are as compared to, say, bonobos or gibbons?
It's very hard to be sympathetic with the chimps after Jane Goodall showed us what they're capable of.
But in part, the cold logic of the natural world...
In general, it's usually some reason that makes complete sense.
It can't be sentimental.
Anytime you bring sentimentality in, you usually screw up a good theory.
And so, you know, I worry that our comparisons are driven by our needs to locate ourselves farther away from chimpanzees and closer to something that we feel comfortable with.
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 figure out the puzzle first.
And so I think that You know, there's this concept of the naturalistic fallacy of viewing that which, you know, if you assume that we carry some sort of Judeo-Christian baggage and all of this was thought to come from a creator who was thought to have positive characteristics, then, well, obviously the natural world is God's work.
But, I mean, if you actually look at the systems that fascinate me, The creator would have to be about the most twisted consciousness you could possibly imagine.
Well, it seems like it's the long game the creator's playing.
The creator's not playing the game that favors the health and the welfare of the individual in the current day.
It's the matter of 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.
You know this is the most complex and evolved this us you and me humans Most complex and evolved system in terms of its ability to change its environment that we've ever come across and we're not too happy with ourselves Yeah, although, I mean, I do think that despite our barbarism, we are that which can contemplate the game.
So for him, it was almost like a sort of a proof that if you really get, you know, another one of his good quotes is that life when properly understood is a spelling bee that ends in genocide, that we're also focused on our nucleotide sequences to Do you really care about the particular way in which you digest lactose,
different from how I do it, that you want to go to war with me so we can spell the future using your version rather than mine?
Maybe you'd feel this way about your ideas, about your songs, your stories, but really, you really want to fight over things that neither of us care about.
It would be interesting if you had a checklist of like what things that you would agree upon, like you and the wife get together and say, okay, so athletic ability, what do you think?
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, it has no idea that CRISPR even exists, and it's potentially world-changing.
I mean, you are literally looking at the tools that will eventually lead, much like You know, Alexander Graham Bell's invention led to you having the internet in your pocket, right?
Slowly but surely.
I mean, you're looking at the tools that will one day lead to us engineering some completely new organism that you're going to call human beings.
I'm optimistic about certain things that turned out to be a lot easier than we expected.
I think that a lot of things that we thought were going to require artificial general intelligence are going to succumb to much simpler systems.
And so, you know, you might have thought that, for example, if you played through the great chess games of the 1800s, like Morphy and Anderson and things, you might say, well, that's just a uniquely human activity.
And then you find out, no, no.
Computers can trounce humans at chess because it wasn't what you thought it was.
Maybe music will be the next thing to succumb because that's really highly regular.
Well, music is also intensely creative and emotive, right?
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 Led Zeppelin the Immigrant Song.
You know, there's just like a bizarre feeling to someone's art that comes through when you listen to it and you're like, oh, this is fucking great.
You know, like where I don't I don't necessarily know you could do that.
With something that doesn't understand emotions or is using a replica of emotions.
Whereas chess, you know, a rook can move this way.
A pawn can move that way.
Here's the rules.
This is how it starts.
Once you get here, you're in check.
Those things seem pretty straightforward.
You're dealing with squares.
It's very mathematic.
One person moves, then another one moves.
Whereas there's this fluid nature to art, literature, and music, and comedy.
So if you take a guitar string and you split it into four equal parts, you put your finger over one quarter of the string, and then you start just plucking the string and hovering above...
The string, so you don't actually push it to the fretboard.
Those notes occur naturally as the harmonics in the expansion of the vibrating string.
So those notes were not really chosen by Roy Orbison or whoever wrote the song.
They were really chosen by 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.
So, you know, there are these people who are just in some multidimensional 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 a song called Roy's Blues and watch him just go into the multiverse and start playing pull a song called Roy's Blues and watch him just go into the multiverse and start playing with things So I do think that there's a very close relationship between algorithms and emotion.
And I just did this one for an old tweet of mine where I wrote a Python program that actually runs from the tweet.
So the entire program is in the tweet.
And its purpose is to generate the chord progression for Pachelbel's Canon, which is If you want people to cry at a wedding, that's the chord progression to play.
And so the idea that it's actually an algorithm that breaks your heart is very frightening.
We're dealing with some insane noise in the background here, folks.
They're doing some shit to our roof.
These are the last days that we're in the studio, by the way, which is hilarious, that it's sort of highlighting why we need to get the fuck out of here.
But I don't know what they're doing.
I mean, does it even rain anymore?
What are they doing, fixing the roof?
Put a fucking tarp up there, assholes.
The guy even asked me right before the show, he's like, what time do you tape?
I told him.
He's like, oh, well, that's right about the time we're lighting explosions right above your head.
Sorry.
For people listening to this, like, what the fuck is that noise?
Me, as a human, I probably have some bias, some stupid idea that creativity is impossible to recreate.
You know, that whatever leads to a person being able to make some beautiful song or create some amazing book is impossible for some sort of a computer to figure that out on its own.
So you can have nasalization on and off, vocalization.
So vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv Then your tongue can be in one of five positions and it can be fully elevated, half elevated or not elevated at all.
So there's like five parameter family that generates what's called the international phonemic alphabet.
And, you know, one of the cool things to think about is how could you create an instrument Right.
Often just called tabla, but tabla is the sort of soprano drum, and then the bayon, I guess you play with sort of the heel of your hand, so you strike it and you go...
A book by a guy named Neil Sorrell that I picked up in college, and I just opened it up, and it went through an entire performance of North Indian classical music.
And I was just, you know, my jaw was on the floor.
How is this entire form of classical music, much closer to our jazz, so much more impressive?
I mean, visually, to watch one of these drummers and one of these soloists Like, the soloist will try to lose the drummer, and the drummer's got these mirror neurons that can't be beat, and they'll just, like, follow him everywhere.
And so you're just, you know, you're some poor white kid in America saying, nobody told me this existed.
Isn't it weird how we just choose like a certain series of instruments that represent rock and roll, certain series of instruments that represent jazz, you know?
It's really, it's strange when you think of the wide range of musical instruments that exist all over the world that are just never utilized in modern music.
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 was, was they had introduced cattle at some point in the history of Hawaii.
And when they introduced cattle, they're like, hey, how do you keep these fucking things from wandering all over the place?
Man, we've got to find some cowboys to teach us how to do this shit.
And they got some, it was either Mexican or South American cowboys, to come over and Show them how to wrangle these cows, how to corral them, 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 America when we think about it.
You know, you hear like a sound of like the ukulele.
We sort of...
Think about it as, like, my daughter's a musician, and when we were in Hawaii, I got her a ukulele.
Like, she, you know, and she plays it.
We think about it.
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 a ukulele.
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.
And if you really pay attention, and I think there's been some sort of a study done on what percentage of the frog is actually used for Donald Trump or racism or alt-right, and what percentage of the frog is used just for a goof.
It's the vast majority is like feels good man type things.
Have you seen that the gay folks, for a very short period of time, were trying to co-op the swastika and turn it into a rainbow swastika to take it back?
Anyway, you know, so we become aware of words that open up new territories, like the concept of Sanuk in Thai.
Lots of people go through Thailand, come back, and they need the word Sanuk, which is the quality of fun that something has to have in order for it to be worth doing.
Like, did you pay your electrical bill?
No.
Why?
There was no Sanuk in it, you know?
So that was like...
That's a concept or chutzpah, you know, coming from Yiddish or, you know, Turkish has yakimos, which is the trail of light left on the water by the moon.
Right.
And so once you have a word for yakimos, It's very hard not to use it, even though nobody in 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 ladies in restrooms taking pictures of themselves in the mirror.
Yeah, you flush the birds out with dogs, the birds go up in the air, they shoot them out with a shotgun, the birds hit the ground, the dog gets it and brings it back to you.
Like everybody kind of knows that's what a lot of male feminists are.
They're like sneaker males.
They're like sliding in closer to proximity to the 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, but it is really amazing how we're conscious and we're aware of all these issues that we deal with, but yet we're still, to a certain extent, At the whim of these genes, of these poles that we have inside of us.
That's like the argument that people always make for why some people find subsistence living, like those shows in Alaska, so oddly comforting.
Anyway, we go out on this trail, and we're visiting this PhD mathematician in the jungles, and it is, without question, the most mosquito-ridden place I've ever been in my life.
We sprayed ourselves up with fucking horrible chemicals.
It probably took a year off my life.
But when you step out of the car, I mean, when we opened up, look at that.
That's legitimately what it's like.
We opened up the door to the car and within three to five seconds there was a hundred mosquitoes inside the car.
It's fucking insane because they're only alive for like a month, right?
It's only warm enough for them to exist for a short period of time.
So they're insanely aggressive.
So anyway, there's this product called Thermacell 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 immensely small.
You have to look in to see if it's lit, right?
It's probably not even a fire.
It's like somehow or another this element is heating up this fuel, and it takes a long time to go through a small canister.
But it emits this very fine mist, and this mist will keep an 18 square foot window of protection from mosquitoes.
Dude, it is impossible to be in the outdoors with it, without it rather, once you've had it.
I found out about it from my friends in Alberta.
They were the first to turn me on about it.
They live in Alberta, and it's 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.
How come nothing, you know, I've asked this before, but when we were kids and you'd read comic books about, like, radiation, they always helped people, turned people into fucking superheroes.
They had a state-sponsored doping program that was kind of overseed by Putin, like down the line.
There's a direct chain of command.
And the whole entire Russian team, Sochi, was on drugs.
All of them.
The guy who engineered the whole thing, like the main scientist, is in the United States now under protective custody in hiding.
And Putin is trying to drag him back to Russia by stealing the homes from his family, stealing his wives home, turning him into homeless people in some sort of a lure to get him to sacrifice himself to come back for the health and safety of his family.
You ever seen Christopher Hitchens, um, narrating the original bath party, um, I don't even know what to call it.
Theatrical video where, like, half the bath party was called out as being revealed traitors, and then the other half of the bath party was given sidearms with which to execute them, making them complicit in the founding murder.
Or, for example, forcing families to pay for the ammunition with which their family members were executed to make them complicit and emphasize their weakness.
Hmm.
All of the stuff that the mind goes to horror movies to explore is often used structurally, particularly in the Middle East.
So, you know, ISIS, for example, the Jordanian pilot video, which I find that many people haven't seen.
The whole point of it was...
That the pilots were raining down death in two particular forms, rubble and fire on people in the ground.
And Isis captured one of the Jordanian pilots and decided that they would theatrically execute him with a version of exactly these two things that he was meeting out from the air.
And so the whole point of it was to create the cinematic imagery to sear into people's mind what it meant to oppose ISIS, that ISIS was in fact just in a sort of eye for an eye kind of way.
And...
You know, my belief is that we don't understand the role that message violence plays, in part because we are now denying it.
If you think about Vietnam, we have all of these images that were burned into all of our minds with Pulitzer Prize winning photographs.
But in the modern era, you don't have images like that from Iraq.
Because 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 an issue that has always puzzled me, and this issue is people that lean left, people that consider themselves progressives, have a very distinct, very obvious bias against criticizing Islam, criticizing Islamic terrorism, criticizing Islamic suppression of women, criticizing these cultures.
wanting to promote islamophobia and things 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 community 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 muslim cultures right
And I've always wondered if that's what that is.
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.
The whole idea of spreading Islam is that you should be proselytizing.
You should be getting people to join because it is the only truth, it's the only way to go.
Yeah, if you go to Deuteronomy, I think it says something to the effect of if someone comes to you and says, hey, let's worship gods not known to the fathers, set upon them with a stone before anyone else gets there.
If I could stop you there for a second, one of the unique things about Jews is that there are so many Jewish people that I know that still consider themselves Jewish, but are almost totally atheists.
Like my friend Ari, he was doing this video recently, or this podcast recently, we were doing this challenge where we can't drink.
Smoke pot or do anything for a month and we have to do 15 hot yoga classes and he's going crazy and screaming during his podcast I am a Jewish performer and I live in New York City.
I'm supposed to be doing drugs.
I'm supposed to be drinking.
I like drinking But he's he's the biggest atheist I've ever met in my life right or if not an atheist he's certainly At the very least agnostic at the very least he's definitely not a someone who considers 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 religion like if you sit down and corner most Jews that I know about like Look, if you met anybody following the Old Testament, you wouldn't recognize them as a Jew.
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.
Well, that's the whole point, is that, 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 mean, there's a grown-up way of loving your country, and there's a childish way of loving your country, and there's a grown-up way of believing in your religion, and a childish one.
And the childish one is like, yeah, it's all literally.
So when you have the top marriage prospects, do you marry them off to the richest or the smartest?
So in Judaism, there is some weird way in which intellectual prestige proxies for material wealth.
So if you have somebody who's insanely smart and not very rich, it can be very prestigious to marry your daughter, let's say, to that student of the Torah.
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?
I don't know what the answer is, but I do know that, like in my case, getting a PhD in mathematics using an Ivy League education for that, or in my brother's case, giving up an Ivy League education to make a point standing up for social justice.
These are sort of self-destructive things in most cultures.
For people who don't know who your brother, Brett Weinstein, is...
Harvey Weinstein.
Brett Weinstein, right?
Brett was the guy that was the part of the whole Evergreen College fiasco.
He's been on this podcast twice.
I suggest if you're interested, you could either Google his name and get the story from a multitude of sources, or listen to the original podcast where he sort of laid it out.
It was before the settlement with the college, before he wound up leaving, and I really hope that he goes the Jordan Peterson route, meaning that he starts putting up these lectures and some of these ideas that he has, just putting them up online, just putting videos up.
I have a recommendation for him from his old advisor, who I think said he's the top student in 40 years of advising.
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.
They think that he's a guy from Evergreen State, so he's lower rank.
Let me use my tiny megaphone to say he's not lower rank.
He's unfucking believably smart.
Look at his work on elongation of telomeres in laboratory animals where he predicted what Nobel laureate Carol Greider found from first principles that the mice that are being used to test our drugs have wildly exaggerated telomere lengths, giving them amazing capacities for histological repair, but possibly putting drugs to market that shouldn't be there.
This is somebody you want to be taking intellectually serious and stop treating this like the clown act that they're running.
Well, Evergreen College is an amazing example of what can go wrong if you let these crazy children sort of dictate The way human beings are allowed to behave and the way discourse takes place on campus.
To the Cliff Notes, what I was going to say, they wanted to have a day of absence.
They traditionally had a day of absence where people of color would take the day off to school where people would miss them.
Sort of like, didn't they engineer that in LA, A Day Without Mexicans?
It was a movie, right?
It would shut down.
I'll just tell you right now, LA shuts down without Mexicans.
But instead of doing that, the social justice warrior mentality that thinks that every white man is some sort of an oppressor and you need to figure out a way to eradicate them from the world, they decided to go the opposite route and force white staff and white students to stay home.
Your brother rightly protested, saying that is inherently racist.
Like, what you're proposing is He's an anti-racist.
And the way you know that it's a cult is you ask for the definition of racism.
And if somebody tells you it's power Plus prejudice.
And therefore, certain groups can't be racist because they have no power.
That's how you know somebody's in the cult.
Because if you look it up in the dictionary, it doesn't say anything like that.
Another one would be, gender has nothing to do with sex.
Go to the Oxford English Dictionary, look at the difference between 3A versus 3B. Gender and sex have been closely tied.
And sometime in the 1940s, a couple of fields in the US started using gender to be behavior, sex to be that which is your dedicated genotype, phenotype.
What is going on is that these people are changing the definition of words.
In order to push a cult into the exact place where it must not go, it must not go in the diversity office, it must not go in HR. You cannot have this openly racist, openly sexist cult in the place which is the immune system.
And so that's the key thing, is that we're used to thinking of our immune system as being there to protect us.
But if you think about an autoimmune disease, It's when your immune system starts attacking the self that you're in real trouble.
So learn the signs and learn the tells.
You don't have to sign up for Jordan Peterson's postmodernism.
Just ask somebody whether black people can be racist against whites.
And as soon as you hear power plus prejudice, you know you're talking to a cult member.
As soon as you hear that gender and sex have nothing to do with each other.
And you have recourse to dictionaries, and you start talking about the history, and somebody starts saying, well, that's your white fragility, that's your white privilege, why are you in denial, why aren't you accepting allyship?
Okay, so suddenly it's like, okay, it's Xenu and the volcanoes and the clams again.
And, well, one great piece of evidence about that was this whole Google memo thing.
The Google Memo thing, the difference between what that guy actually wrote on the memo and what was published in so many different publications, so many different online websites, is just straight up libelous.
Like, that guy, I mean, I know he's going to sue Google, but he could probably sue a host of people once he's done with that.
Because they changed what he wrote and turned him into this horrible, evil, sexist person to the point where the CEO of YouTube was saying that she read it and it made her sad.
That the whole thing made her sound.
Well, he wrote a piece based on why people of different genders are more inclined to gravitate towards specific things.
The error that he made was that he used a reserved term, neuroticism, in the Big Five personality inventory, where it is a reserved term denoting a particular psychometric.
And so rather than saying men are less conscientious He said women are more neurotic.
But again, you know, I had not quite remembered that the big five personality inventory, you know, is openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.
But, you know, when you see something that careful, I mean, most people just didn't read it.
The thing about what he did was he was trying to write a pro-diversity memo.
If you lie about the differences between men and women, what are your odds that you will be able to hack a solution to getting all the brilliant women in our country who care about STEM into the workforce?
This is what we need to do.
There's no shortage of brilliant women.
I've collaborated with them.
I know they're there.
We need to figure out, as a society, do we need to pay women more so that we can get them out of working in the home and taking care of older parents and young children during their prime years?
We need to be very creative about the actual differences between men and women.
Should we have a rule, not equal pay for equal work, but equal pay for unequal salary negotiation?
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.
Look at Chekhov's short story called The Nincompoop, in which it's an employer and a domestic worker in his home.
And he talks to her about all of her wages, and then he starts taking away little bit by little bit for, you know, you broke a cup and you were a little bit late, and he whittles her compensation down to nothing, and she accepts it.
And then he says...
The employer says, you stupid fool.
I've just cheated you out of your entire wages.
I'm going to give them to you, but understand that this is how an employer cheats an employee.
And you're just like, whoa.
So this is an old Russian speaking a truth, which is don't allow yourself to get taken advantage of.
Now, you could say that's really horrible because it's called the nincompoop.
Right?
Or you could say, actually, that was an attempt to talk about a problem about needing to be more aggressive and more assertive.
So, you know, getting back to the Damore issue, Damore needed to set this thing up at Google differently.
So I took my son to the local pinball arcade.
And just think of it as a bunch of workstations where nobody's getting paid.
Instead, you're paying for the privilege of staring at this thing for hours with the bells and lights doing something with balls and mechanical systems.
There are not a lot of women trying to integrate the pinball arcade because it's a loser activity.
What Damore said was, it's not cognitive ability, you idiots, it's interest and temperament, which is hugely liberating.
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 Not necessarily a great thing.
Assume that you lose out 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.
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 So there's, you know, dumb enough to get in, smart enough to get out is kind of the magic formula.
Bite off more than you can chew.
But if you actually, you know, feel called, you can summon the will, you can summon the intellect, you can summon your friends, your resources to somehow get across the adaptive valley.
Whereas with someone who is an expert in the field and who's worked very hard through apprenticeship, through schooling, whatever it is, to get to become an expert in this field can tell you definitively, yes, Eric, I can fix your computer.
Jim Watson said this thing, which I think is just brilliant, which is, if you're going to do something amazing, you are by definition unqualified to do it.
In other words, when you start hearing people say, why aren't there more female founders of billion-dollar-plus tech companies, my feeling is that a lot of those people who do found such companies are in this kind of fast-and-loose outlier idiom.
And very often females, specifically because of the crazy demands of child rearing, which is like something you cannot screw up.
You have to be on all the time.
You have to be incredibly regular.
Have a very strong ethic of not screwing up, which is positive.
I don't want to say that it's negative.
And I'm not saying that it's negative.
What I am saying is that...
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.
Yeah, I mean, I would like to tell a lot more men, hey, you can't keep promising and failing to come through.
So, you know, it would be better if we had higher regularity from some men who chronically over-promise and chronically under-deliver, and we had more women who were trying to swing for the fences if the feeling is, why are we not represented at the highest level of certain kinds of activities?
So what I'm trying to get at is that we are not currently feeling safe enough to have these style of conversations where we're saying, look, to what extent are we holding ourselves back?
Are we holding you back?
What is it that we need to be doing?
Are we talking about the glass floor as well as the glass ceiling?
So, you know, the 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 arcades, you don't find them in bricklayers unions, and you find fewer of them founding, you know, multi-billion dollar tech companies.
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 Damore tried to do was to decouple intelligence from this problem and say, it's much more temperament and interest.
And the person who made that point on Dave Rubin's show a month before the Google memo leaked was my wife.
And she didn't get attacked because she said, look, you know, I was in an incredibly, 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 and my time fighting.
You know, she has like a Nobel quality result in economics.
And her feeling was, it's just not worth it to get into some multi-decade pissing match with incredibly powerful people.
Now, my feeling about this is those guys are going down.
We're going to fight them.
You know, a book came out called The Physics of Wall Street that I encourage women to read.
The chapter called A New Manhattan Project.
And the epilogue discusses her contribution.
And, you know, in fact, we sort of walked away from it in part because she didn't want to go to war.
And there's nothing wrong with not wanting to go to war.
But that is a very big temperamental difference that is not a cognitive difference.
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 a quality of opportunity, right?
I mean, if you think about how many women are offline and you think of it as like, just stop thinking about it in terms of like social good and think about it as- Offline?
One quarter of 1% of the world's population won 25% of the Nobel Prizes in physics.
Very few Asian females have Nobel Prizes.
If I were trying to figure out, like with oil fields, I wouldn't go to Texas to try to find more oil because I'd figured it'd be pretty well picked over.
I'd try to find some other place.
It's like, I'm going to find great waves, not in Hawaii, but I'm going to go to the Arctic.
Right?
Let's say Asian females have a huge percentage of the world's neurons basically untapped.
If you want to make tons of money, if you want to cure cancer, if you want to do all these things, figure out how to bring those neurons fully online.
So it's not just a question of nobody wants to keep them out.
Right, but has it not been proved that gender and sex have a role in what people are attracted to or interested in?
So why should we assume that just because we have these systems, whether they're economic systems, whether it's starting a business or whether it's working in tech, Why should we assume that women would want to do that?
Why should we encourage them to do that if they're not interested in it?
And why do we put so much value in it just because it generates an incredible amount of money?
Do you think that maybe what we're looking at is natural patterns?
There's natural patterns where, I mean, this is what Damore 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.
The other thing that they didn't do is no one, I mean, not no one, but many of the people that republished his work and took snippets of it, they didn't publish the citations.
But look, let's look at it from the felt experience.
And the felt experience is, 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.
So you have to appreciate that the lived experience of the women inside of Google is that they know that some percentage of those guys who are saying, hey, I just want to talk about studies, are actually pissed off.
But the issue is, what if I need to do some amount, some relatively minimal amount of kind of intellectual terraforming to get all of these female neurons to work on all of these amazing problems?
So what if the people who have the answer for, let's say, cancer or AGI or who knows, happen to be female?
What if I needed to do some things in order to make the environment more attractive?
Like, for example, programming in teams has, to some extent, replaced cowboy programming, where it's just some guy with his code and a set of headphones, and he goes to it.
Okay, so that's what he was talking about.
To what extent can you actually change the nature of work to bring these extra neurons online?
Now, that's the right reason to do this.
I don't think we should value...
Like, what is coding?
It's some sort of highly logical...
Very technical persnickety activity.
If it's highly compensated, everybody wants in.
If it's poorly compensated, only people who are sort of addicted to it would want it.
And it happens to be sort of high status at the moment, and so there's this feeling of, okay, this must be an all-boys club.
And maybe it grew up as an all-boys club, and maybe it has particular attributes.
But the thing that I'm looking at that may be different from what you're looking at Is that I'm thinking about particular high ability females who have left the game or who have sort of gone into a lower intensity mode because they're just sick of being in an all-male environment.
So four and a half years ago, I gave some talks on physics, which were terrifying to me because I wasn't trained as a physicist, and they got a lot of attention and publicity at Oxford.
I don't like the unpleasantness of intellectual one-upsmanship and negging, if you will, that takes place in particle theory.
It's a turnoff to me.
And so I've sort of stayed away For four and a half years because I didn't like how unpleasant and hyper, like, exaggeratedly masculine it was.
I'm just trying to say that part of the problem is, is that every time you have an extremely kind of overly, like an exaggeratedly toxic culture, You get attrition from people who are really good at it or just don't like to go into work.
Probably because he said something uncharitable about Islam, which we have to get back to.
But the key point was that I had three biologists, Damore, Dawkins, and Weinstein, who had all been de-platformed.
So I let off a tweet about You know, for God's sake, stop teaching people that they should run to HR rather than code, which had nothing to do with harassment at all.
It was really just about seeing a woman who deleted her tweet, and I haven't talked about this until now because I felt that I... I reacted to her deleted tweet, and then I still have it on my computer, but I didn't want to bring it up, and then I was left sort of holding the bag.
It was something like, 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.
Do not suck it up if you are 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 there are these psychometrics, and 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.
Well, I think discourse and free speech is incredibly important.
When you distort what that guy was saying and you turn into this hateful attack on women, you've shut down discourse and you've discouraged anybody else that has any sort of unusual opinion or unusual observation from coming forth because you're essentially limiting free speech to free speech that you agree with.
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 this shit.
It's very important that these people not be made unwelcome, because fundamentally we're going to leaven this untried social justice stuff in absolutely everything.
Well, not only that, he was labeled as a misogynist over and over and over again, and you're not even giving the guy a chance to have open communication.
Like, if you sit down with him, instead of firing him...
The big problem is that if you say, come to the seminar, we're going to teach you things, the things are wrong, and now we want your feedback, you're just setting certain minds up for this thing.
No, because I'm part of this constellation of people.
But we keep doing this, we keep making a mistake in my opinion, which is we keep seeing these wrong things that happen in this space, and we lose the empathy in some sense because people are not representing themselves well.
So I believe, having watched my wife in economics, That it is really corrosive to go in every day to work in an environment which does not feel welcoming to you.
They're saying they're giving people time off because this diversity memo that he put out is very- So this is the thing about the soft targets versus hard targets, right?
Even while I am outspoken on Demore's behalf, I believe that fundamentally we are in danger of breaking empathy with people who do not express themselves in our idiom.
And I don't like the fragility.
I don't like the...
You know, there is this confusion between strong people versus very aggressive people.
And in general, stronger people are much less aggressive.
So part of the problem is, is that we are waiting for the strongest voices To rise above the din and say, look, we can't be this aggressive about everything all the time.
And to say, look, we need to be able to talk about this without silencing each other, without terrifying each other, without assuming that we've heard the other's argument.
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 to turn this into an educational experience.
But what I'm trying to get at is that 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.
And so, you know, can we pop all the way back up to your original point about Islam?
You asked the question, why is the left seemingly weirdly supportive of practices that include female genital mutilation, honor killing, terror, etc., 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 Abrahmic faith similar to Christianity and Judaism.
On the other hand, there is a much bigger issue, which is that Islam has a totality to it that Judaism no longer has and that Christianity perhaps never had.
As Sam Harris points out, the line, render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, cleaves off the potential for political Christianity at the same level as political Islam.
So you're dealing with this different object that doesn't quite seem to have the same characteristics as the others, and you haven't been given any tools to sort of pull it apart.
You've also been taught that if you're proud of European civilization, That you are 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 gonna give up on European civilization.
So, in part, what you have is you have people who are making the vanilla confusion, where they imagine that vanilla, we use it to mean the absence of anything interesting.
But in fact, it's like the most interesting spice.
It's this particular orchid that's incredibly flavorful.
So it's like a linguistic mistake.
Well, white is that to European civilization.
I have no attachment to my whiteness.
I could care less.
I couldn't care less.
On the other hand, I have a huge attachment to Newton, to Mozart.
To the terrible things that happened, you know, in the killing lands in the mid-20th century.
So the evil, the good, the imperialism, the guilt, like that tradition, I'm very resonant with.
The good, the bad, and the ugly.
And it is my tradition.
So when I meet somebody coming from China, I expect them to be an exponent of Chinese culture.
Well, I don't wish to say, well, I don't have the right to have my own culture because I have to erase myself Based on this confusion between this canon that is incredibly valuable and the skin color that is completely irrelevant to me.
I would much rather have Western civilization running between the ears of people who don't look anything like me and be proud of what the software has produced than have a bunch of people who look like me who don't think in any way that I recognize.
The original point was, why does the left, why do progressives fail to criticize the homophobia, the sexism, the honor killings, all the horrific acts?
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.
So do you think that we associate Islam with maybe even a smaller faction of it than we really understand, like the ISIS faction, the Taliban, things that we're terrified of, the people that are throwing gay folks off buildings?
We somehow weirdly view them as more authentic in some sense.
And so you don't want to go against the authentic versions.
But like, for example, the Wahhabist sort of Saudi Arabian variant, I never thought was going to be influential over Pakistan because South Asians tended to look down.
But with all of this money that's been spent exporting the sort of particularly text oriented, very literal interpretations.
I think we've gone down a terrible path where we've sort of weirdly not understood that there is a conflict and that we actually have a dog in this fight, and the dog in this fight is those who are trying to create cultural Islam and cleaving off political Islam.
I don't want to live under Sharia law.
And I don't want to feel bad about this.
I don't want to live under anybody's religious law.
I don't want anyone to live under Halakhic Jewish law.
And this is a mainstay of Western civilization.
And when we can't feel comfortable about that, which is like, well, who are you to say whether we should live under Sharia law?
The answer is, I come from a culture myself.
It's not like I have no culture.
This is my culture.
We do not live under religious law, period, the end.
It's fascinating to me how many different ideologies exist, and how much they vary, and how people can just slot right into those and accept them as the end-all, be-all period.
And to me, just from...
Evolutionary psychology standpoint, just looking at the broad spectrum of different ideologies that people slot into, it's so fascinating.
It's so fascinating how many different mindsets that people adhere to that are unwavering and rigid.
And how common it is.
It's so uncommon to not have an ideology.
I mean, it seems like this idea of, well, the numbers that we have of atheists and agnostics in America today, I mean, is this unprecedented?
Is this the most, the largest group of human beings ever that are looking at things and going, maybe nobody has the answer.
Why is it that so many people who are atheists and agnostics adopt religious tendencies in terms of cultural behavior and what they're willing to accept and not willing to accept?
A lot of the stuff that you see that you're calling earlier when you were saying people that describe racism and you know, do you describe it as power and influence?
These cult member ideas You're a lot of times getting these cult member ideas from people that will tell you that they're not a part of an ideology.
They're not religious, but they're exhibiting dogmatic religious ideology.
So that was my question is, is it just a thing that we are inherently programmed to slot into?
Well, it was confusing, and Sam would have appeared to have won that one pretty decisively because Jordan tried to fold in fitness to the definition of truth, which does not work.
But what I was going to say is that Jordan Peterson's really deep point, if I understand it, so Jordan, if you're out there, please correct me, is only archetype.
of the kind found in religion is sufficiently rich and deep to explain why humans behave the way they do.
There's no scientific theory that's good enough.
There's no purely logical.
There's no purely philosophical tradition.
So as of the moment, we are stuck with deep cultural archetype.
Maybe Shakespeare would be the only thing comparable to the religious canons.
And the claim that you're making implicitly, and that 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.
And you go to some, you know, you're going to a place, whether it's a temple or a chapel or, you know, you're going to this place, this uniquely ornate environment.
You know, we have particular words, for example, the rabbis tell us, you know, we usually don't say this because this is what we have stolen from the angels.
But this is the one time in the year when we can actually shout it.
To your original point, so you have some weird tradition that makes no sense, that produces a ridiculously disproportionate number of the Nobel Prizes, let's say, in science.
So if you were a good scientist, you'd say, I don't know what's going on with these weird rituals.
It could be the funky chicken or the hokey pokey, but if most of the people who win Nobel Prizes were found to do the hokey pokey, I'd probably put more effort into it.
Maybe it's not attached to the ideas that spawn from these religions at all.
Maybe it's that these people have the freedom to think about these other things because they have intense confidence in their future and their destiny and their God and their traditions and their ethics and they're all so carved out that this...
I've always thought of religion in some ways as almost being like a moral scaffolding.
Like, okay, well you got like a real clear structure to operate under and that...
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, and you've got to go look at a list.
If we conjure Sam, and we try to steal man Sam, Sam will say...
Okay, but there's all these explicit ways that you're supposed to worship God, and they can't all be right because they're mutual incompatibilities, and so how do you choose one among many, and if n is allowed to get...
Okay, blah, blah, blah.
None of this is the point.
The point is deep archetype is its own thing, and the mind seeks deep archetype.
It's why it cares about the godfather pictures differently than home alone.
But 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 stuff even
genetically like whatever memories and 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 and Why are children afraid of spiders 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 are the reasons why?
And Rupert Sheldrake had a great point about that.
If you talk to children in New York City, they're not afraid of child molesters or murderers or things that they might encounter, car accidents.
They're afraid of monsters.
Like, why?
What is a monster?
And that a monster may very well be the memory or the ancient genetic memory of predators.
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, here's the emergency break glass in case of emergency plan, right?
And so the idea is that all of these rules, you know, dietary restrictions, Rules for who gets to marry?
At what level in the culture?
Where do you put your resources?
Are you proselytizing or do you try to live at steady state?
Do you discourage people converting in?
All of these things are some sort of toolkit for living and it has produced more physicists than, you know, outfielders.
Right?
So it's not good at everything.
It's good at some things at the exclusion of others.
And so the question about how does this stuff co-travel?
It co-travels in some way that's very mysterious.
Do we pass on trauma?
I can say in my family for sure that my family stopped being religious when my great-uncle Sasha died.
I was killed right at the end of World War II and my great-grandmother said no compassionate God would kill somebody so stupidly who had so much to give to their family and change the family from some kind of orthodoxy to orthodox atheism.
And then, you know, for three generations you have Jews marrying Jews with nobody believing in anything.
Why are they continuing to marry Jews?
Why are they celebrating these holidays?
Well, it's because, fundamentally, a switch got flipped.
But my guess is that the Orthodox were always questioning whether there was a God.
The atheists are always questioning whether there's a God.
At some level, because our brains are not just simple computers to be, you know, rid of bias.
They have particular needs.
So my four things that I care about are truth, fitness, meaning, and grace.
All of those trade off amongst each other.
And when I said something like this on Sam Harris's program, a lot of the people who wrote in said, oh, you know, it shows that he doesn't care about truth.
And, you know, I felt like, no, it just shows that you guys don't understand how important...
Sam would like to make an argument that the better and more rational our thinking is, the more it can do everything that religion once did.
So, if you've had a DMT or an LSD experience, that can give you meaning and transcendence.
You know, if you can think your way more accurately through a problem that should increase your fitness, You know, maybe grace is something that's independent and you have to figure out whether that's important to you, but that's a choice and an elected objective.
And my belief 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 sort of make the first among equals.
But I have needs for these other things.
There are times when the truth doesn't give me enough meaning, and I'll start storytelling.
Okay, we're surrounded, we've got to fight our way out, all that kind of narrative.
Yeah, my friend Peter Thiel critiques me on this point, just as you have, where he says, you, Eric, undervalue and underweight the role of truth.
But I worry that we're not even having a conversation.
If I think about...
My personal physics hero, Dirac, 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 and a negatively charged particle, and the only two known at the time were the electron and the proton to make up, let's say, a hydrogen atom.
Well, the proton is quite a bit heavier than the electron.
And so he told a story that wasn't really true, where the proton was the antiparticle of the electron.
And Heisenberg pointed out that couldn't be because the masses are too far off and they'd have to be equal.
Well, a short time later, the antielectron, the positron that is, was found, I guess, by Anderson at 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 Einstein.
I could tell it to you with Darwin, who didn't fully understand the implications of his theory, as is evidenced by his screwing up particular kind of orchid in his later work.
Not understanding that his theory completely explained that orchid.
So there's all sorts of ways in which we get the truth wrong the first several times we try it, but the meaning of the story that we tell somehow remains intact.
And I think that that's a very difficult lesson for people who just want to say, look, I want to, you know, like Feynman would say, look, if experiment disagrees with you, then you're wrong.
And it's a very appealing story to tell to people, but it's also worth noting that Feynman never got a physical law of nature.
And it may be that he was too wedded to this kind of rude judgment of the unforgiving.
Imagine you were to innovate in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.
The first few times, it might not actually work.
But if you told yourself a story, no, no, no, this is actually genius and it's working, and you're like, no, you just lost three consecutive bouts.
Well, that may give you the ability to eventually perfect the move, perfect the technique, even though you were lying to yourself during the period in which it was being set up.
It's a little bit like the difference between scaffolding and a building.
And too often, people who are crazy about truth reject scaffolding, which is an intermediate stage in getting to the final truth.
We've had these fight companion podcasts and people have fucking potato chips and they're eating potato chips on the podcast and I just would get, my Twitter would be filled with people fucking furious.
What I was going to say is that analogy is not the best analogy because some things work, they just don't work for you.
Like one of the analogies that's used in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu is like someone will try a technique and it doesn't work for them.
And they're like, well, that technique's no good.
And I'll say, okay, well, you know that head kicks work, right?
You've seen people kick people in the head and knock them unconscious, right?
Okay, try to kick me in the head.
Well, I don't know how to kick people in the head.
There you go.
Even if I show you how, you're not going to be able to do it.
If I show you how to kick people in the head, do you think you're going to be able to kick someone who actually knows how to fight in the head?
No.
They're going to see it coming.
It's going to be too slow.
You're not going to have your neural pathways carved to the point where that thing just slices right in there.
You're not going to know how to set it up.
You're not going to have the confidence and the experience to execute it.
The difference between that and the truth is very different because it doesn't require some sort of physical process for you to master before you can execute it with sufficient prowess to actually be successful.
Unless we're rigid with our ideology and we go by some ancient scripture and that ancient scripture says that anything with a cloven hoof that eats its own cud, you know, like there's all these weird laws like this is what you're allowed to eat.
So my fear is, is that It's a little bit the Emily Littella effect on religion, where the atheist concept of a religious person is usually the sort of robot that just looks things up in the text.
And in fact, what you often find is that you're rewarded for brilliance in a religion by not having to follow the rules nearly as closely if you become adept at argument.
For example, in Islam contract marriage, where you need to get married for a few hours so that you can sate your urges with your wife, who then becomes not your wife a short time later.
You know, we had a situation, I think, in Lake Kinneret in Israel where people were using breadcrumbs to fish as bait.
And the question was, well, does that invalidate the entire water supply of Israel during Passover?
And so rabbis had to be convened.
And if paid a sufficient amount of money, genius-level rabbis could figure out why it was okay to drink the water during Passover.
So the issue of getting around your own rules...
Is a time-honored religious tradition where, you know, any book that is not a book for living and survival and thriving is consigned to the discipline 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.
I guarantee you, nobody, you know, if it were so easy to defeat people using their own religious traditions against them, we wouldn't know the name of these religions and we wouldn't know the genius of the books.
That one year where they just go fucking hog wild, they don't have to follow the rules, and then they usually feel so lost and disconnected that I think the majority of them return to being Amish.