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Speaker 1

00:00

The following is a conversation with Rabbi David Wolpe, someone who I have been a fan of for many years, for the kindness in his heart, the strength of his character, and the kind of friends he keeps and talks with, many of whom disagree with him but love him nevertheless, including the late Christopher Hitchens. I will have many conversations like these in the future about religion, about Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and others, looking to understand and celebrate the culture, the tradition, and the beauty of the people who practice these religions. I will of course not shy away from the difficult topics. I will talk both about hate and love, about war and peace.

Speaker 1

00:46

This conversation was recorded more than 3 weeks ago. Please allow me this time to speak on what has been on my mind. If this is not interesting to you, please skip. I totally understand.

Speaker 1

01:00

Some people asked me to say a few words on the war in Ukraine. I think my words are worth little, but perhaps let me try. I considered doing a long solo episode on this war. I tried several times, but it is too personal for now.

Speaker 1

01:17

To give you context, I've been talking to refugees, friends, loved ones in Ukraine, in Russia, in Poland, Slovakia, Moldova, Romania, even UK, Germany, Canada, India, China, and of course the United States. Some of them crying or angry or confused or scared. I'm helping as best as I can privately and I'm hoping to help in the future by traveling to Ukraine and Russia and celebrating the humanity and the beauty of the people in this region. This was all set up both for Ukraine and Russia trips before 2022, including conversations with scientists, artists, athletes, leaders, and just, quote, regular folks who are equally, if not more, fascinating to me.

Speaker 1

02:10

For now, it has become much more difficult, but I'll keep trying to find a way. I was born in the Soviet Union. My roots are both Ukrainian and Russian. And today, and until the day I die, I am an American.

Speaker 1

02:26

I'm proud of all of this. I hope to keep celebrating the culture and the incredible human beings that make up these nations and humanity as a whole. We're all 1 people. We're in this together.

Speaker 1

02:39

That's how I feel about the people of these nations. Now, let me speak about those in the seats of power. I condemn all actions of leaders who play geopolitical games on the world stage disregarding the costs paid in human suffering on the scale of millions. For this reason, I condemn Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine.

Speaker 1

03:05

And I condemn many of the military interventions by the superpowers of the world, including by my country, the country I love, the United States, that after World War II has intervened in over 40 nations, with many studies finding that the United States is culpable for an unfathomable number of civilian deaths. I condemn all heads of state who needlessly wage wars, watching young men and women burn in the fires they started. I don't understand how humans can be so cruel to each other. Or rather, I understand, but I believe in a future world where this is no longer true.

Speaker 1

03:48

Let me also say a few words of what I hope to do with this podcast. I want to explore the full complexity and beauty of human nature. I believe each of us are capable of good and evil, and I want to understand how the mind and the circumstance lead 1 to choose the former path or the latter. And I believe conversation is 1 of the best ways to work toward this understanding.

Speaker 1

04:13

For that, I think I have to not only talk to the most inspiring humans in the world, but also to the most controversial. I will speak with many people who I disagree with. Politicians, activists, CEOs, heads of state, with very different opinions on the world. I will try hard to challenge their ideas without Closing my mind to the depth and complexity of their perspective and their humanity My presence in the same room with Wildly different people will make it easy for the media and the internet to pick and choose clips and snapshots attacking me for being a shill for 1 side or the other.

Speaker 1

04:54

I can't defend this point, except to say that I'm a shill for no 1, and that I hope you see the strength of my integrity, that I won't be influenced by any of them, no matter how rich, powerful, or charismatic they are. Like the poem, If, by Roger Kipling says, if you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue, or walk with kings, or lose the common touch, If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you, if all men count with you, but none too much." This is a really, really important thing to me that I try to live by, that all human beings count with me the same. People have criticized me for wanting to have some of these conversations, like with Vladimir Putin and Vladimir Zelensky, and for times in the past speaking about them without the seriousness the topic deserves. For this, I would sincerely like to apologize.

Speaker 1

05:49

I'm disappointed, even ashamed, of my frequent ineloquence on these topics. I will work hard to do better. When I'm joking, it should be clear that it's a joke, and hopefully actually funny. When I'm being serious, I should speak with care and rigor.

Speaker 1

06:07

I've now done many hundreds of hours of podcast conversation. Despite my frequent failures in speaking, I hope you know where my heart is. Unfortunately, I think people will take clips of me and use them to attack me. This will happen more and more.

Speaker 1

06:21

I guess there's nothing I can do but send them my love. In the meantime, try to be a better person and a better interviewer. Let me also say that I like humor, especially dark humor. I like being silly and not taking myself seriously.

Speaker 1

06:38

I will keep taking risks with that, all with the goal of having fun and celebrating humanity at its most absurd and most beautiful. I will occasionally dress up in strange and weird outfits to celebrate the absurdity of life. I will hang out, bake bread and joke with all kinds of people. I don't have to agree with them to laugh with them, in order to escape for a brief moment the tension, the conflict, the hatred in the world.

Speaker 1

07:05

Humor just might save this little chaotic little civilization of ours. I love the Ukrainian people. I love the Russian people. And of course, I love my fellow Americans, Californians and Midwesterners, New Yorkers and Texans.

Speaker 1

07:22

I love humans, I love life, and I want to share that love with others, with you. If I messed it up, I'm really, really sorry. I'm trying my best. I have no agenda and no 1 telling me what to do.

Speaker 1

07:36

I feel like the luckiest guy in the world to have all these opportunities. And I'm deeply grateful to be alive and to share that joy with other amazing people around me. Thank you for your support. For all the love you've sent my way, I will work my ass off to not disappoint you.

Speaker 1

07:53

I love you all. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, here's my conversation with David Welpy.

Speaker 2

08:05

Let's start with a big question. According to Judaism, who is God?

Speaker 3

08:10

It's difficult because Judaism, like any tradition that is thousands of years old and encompasses so many different lands and languages and thinkers, it doesn't give a single answer to even simple questions and to large questions, it certainly doesn't give a single answer. Although Judaism was responsible for introducing the monotheistic idea to the world, it doesn't mean that it's 1 idea. So if you take Maimonides, the greatest sage in the Jewish tradition, medieval philosopher, he would say that God is an omnipotent, benevolent, intangible, unimaginable God.

Speaker 3

08:49

In fact, he said you can't say what God is, only what God is not, because you have to emphasize, could talk more about that, but basically you have to emphasize the unknowability of God. You have a modern philosopher like Heschel, who says that God is a God of pathos, a God of deep feeling, which probably would make Maimonides shiver if he heard such a description. And if you look in the Bible, God is always regretting or having human emotions. So there are so many different kinds of depictions and ideas, and there is this tremendous tension between transcendence and imminence.

Speaker 3

09:27

That is, in the Jewish tradition, God is exquisitely close, God is imminent. In the Talmud's words, God is as close as your mouth is to your ear. In other words, whatever you say, God hears it. And yet at the same time, God is unfathomably distant.

Speaker 3

09:45

Sometimes when I speak to high schoolers, I will say, in the Jewish tradition, think of it this way, when you were 2 years old, you had no idea what it was to be a 15-year-old. Not only did you not know, but you didn't know what you didn't know. We conceive of God as being more, the distance between God and human beings is far greater than the distance between a two-year-old and a 15-year-old. So when we speak about God, we have to acknowledge how limited we really are.

Speaker 2

10:15

So, okay, you laid out a lot of fascinating things on the table. So 1, the knowability of God. Then this idea of deep feeling, which again, can God be operating the space of feelings too?

Speaker 2

10:29

So not just the mouth and the ear of the senses. Can God be known? Can God be felt by this 3 year old, in the analogy, versus the teenager?

Speaker 3

10:44

So I will take refuge in a beautiful phrase from Martin Buber, another Jewish theologian. He said, God cannot be expressed, God can only be addressed. In other words, you can speak to God, you can feel a sense of God, but can you begin to comprehend or know God?

Speaker 3

11:01

No. Yosef Caspi, I'm pulling in a couple of early Jewish philosophers, he said, to know God, I would have to be God.

Speaker 2

11:10

But can we get close, is it useful or is it a distraction to visualize things, to embody, to create, to attach to the stories some kind of visualizations in our mind. For example, gender, he versus she, things like this, or old man in the sky kind of feeling.

Speaker 3

11:31

So it's almost inevitable, but I think ultimately you try to transcend it. This was the great, you know, we just read this actually in synagogue, the story of the golden calf. And The story is that human beings found it impossible to not have a visualization because they had just come from Egypt and in the world of pagan worship, everything is, it's not that pagans thought that idol was actually God, but it represented visually what God was.

Speaker 3

12:04

And along comes this idea that God is actually not capable of being visualized, which is very difficult and it stretches the bounds of human comprehension, maybe even breaks them.

Speaker 2

12:18

So would you say the proper way to operate as a human in relation to God is humility in that you're screwed, you're not able to basically know anything, almost anything?

Speaker 3

12:32

Well, the reason that you're the salvation of this is that you can't, that you can't, I was going to say the reason you're not screwed, but then I thought somebody might be upset at a rabbi saying that, so I didn't say it and have not said

Speaker 2

12:45

it.

Speaker 3

12:46

Yes. But the reason you're not is that you don't have to have a comprehension of God. You have to have a relationship to God. And those are not the same.

Speaker 3

12:59

I mean, To draw an analogy that is not far from perfect as most analogies are, but this 1 especially, you have relationships with people who are mysteries to you. You're a mystery to yourself. You can live and love somebody for 50 years and they can say something that surprises you because ultimately we are trapped in here. And when a child first says I, we call that individuation.

Speaker 3

13:25

But what that really means is I now know that I am cut off from the minds of all other children and all other people. And so you have with God a more intimate relationship because you can believe that God is, you are known by God and you have a relationship to God despite the fact that you can't know God just as you can't know others.

Speaker 2

13:52

And some would say to have a good relationship, you wanna be constantly surprised.

Speaker 3

13:57

Right, yes. You

Speaker 2

13:57

don't want to know the thing.

Speaker 3

13:58

Well, the world, yes, The world that God created is constantly surprising. But, and by the way, the caveat to this, you know, when I had all these debates with Christopher Hitchens, and he would always say that God is a greater tyrant than North Korea because it continues after your death. And the idea of being known by God is, after all, frightening if you think God knows what I think and so on, if your image of God is unloving.

Speaker 2

14:22

Can we jump to this, you had friendships and conversations with a lot of the fascinating figures of the past 20, 30 years of the great intellectuals, 1 of which, perhaps 1 of the greats, is Christopher Hitchens. What have you learned from your conversation, your friendship?

Speaker 3

14:42

So there are a lot of views he held that I really did not agree with, but he was a remarkable person.

Speaker 2

14:47

That was a good line about North Korea. He was full

Speaker 3

14:49

of incredibly good lines. Well, 1 of the things I learned was you can't win a debate with Christopher Hitchens. 1 of the reasons you can't win is because he has this British baritone and this ready wit that, you can't triumph over laughter.

Speaker 3

15:06

It doesn't matter if your argument is better. If your quip is better, you win. And so I remember once we were arguing about free will and he said, well, I choose to believe in it. And everybody laughed and that was, despite the fact that that's not really an argument.

Speaker 2

15:19

Or like, I have free will because I don't have a choice.

Speaker 3

15:23

Right, exactly.

Speaker 2

15:24

And people should watch your conversation with him, it's great. I mean, it's a kind of David versus Goliath situation, and you're quite masterful at using charisma and sweet-talking Christopher Hitchens.

Speaker 3

15:38

I also genuinely liked him. I mean, I spent a three-hour limousine ride with him from 1 debate to another, from LA to San Diego, and the entire time he said, we just can't talk about religion. So we talked about literature and he gave me a long lecture about Scotch.

Speaker 3

15:59

He was inexhaustible. I mean, not only did he, I began, I wrote a couple of obituaries about him. And when I began with the, the, historian Keith Thomas said there are 2 ways of achieving immortality by doing things worth remembering or saying things worth remembering. And by that standard, he did both.

Speaker 3

16:18

I mean, he went all around the world to all sorts of danger zones. He knew like the best bars everywhere from Kuala Lumpur, you know, to Beirut, to LA. And he could drink all night and write a 2000 word essay on the poetry of Yeats and go to sleep. I remember before 1 of our debates in Boston, he was at the bar and he said, come have a drink.

Speaker 3

16:41

And I said, I'm not gonna have a drink before I go to debate with you. What are you crazy? And he said, just have a beer, it's water. So he was, he really was a constant, inexhaustible fountain of intrigue and interest.

Speaker 3

16:58

What kind

Speaker 2

16:59

of things, if you can remember, if you can mention, if you can admit, to have him enlightening you or helping you change your mind about something in this world?

Speaker 3

17:09

So I think... Unrelated to Scotch. Yeah, unrelated to Scotch.

Speaker 3

17:15

He convinced me that the idea, I mean, I had my doubts about it and have my doubts about it, but he convinced me through many debates, and not only he, that the idea that religion makes people better is not, it's not ipso facto wrong, but it's a much, much more complicated argument than I wished it to be. So he is, however you conceive of the term,

Speaker 2

17:43

beauty. He's 1 of the more beautiful humans, this weird little earth produced. So how do you explain the atheism combined with such a beautiful mind? So from your perspective of a man of faith, how do you think about that?

Speaker 3

18:07

So of the atheists that I have debated, I think about all of them somewhat differently. So I think that in some deep way, for example, Sam Harris is a religious personality. I don't even think that he would, he wouldn't like the word religious, but I don't even think that he would take issue with that.

Speaker 3

18:29

I think that he would say his is a purely material based spirituality, but I mean, his orientation towards meditation and appreciation of Buddhism, there's something deeply seeking spiritual about him. With Hitchens, I honestly, and I know that some of his fans will really not like this. It's not that he was any kind of closet believer, certainly not at all. But I almost feel as though he was less a passionate arguer against religion than he was, first of all, extremely upset by the forms that religion took in this world.

Speaker 3

19:08

And then once he trained his intellectual howitzers on a target, he had so much fun inventing new arguments and attacking it that I really believe he gets carried away sometimes by his own eloquence and intellectual range. So for example, the idea that you would call a book that religion poisons everything. I think he did that deliberately, provocatively, so that he could defend a proposition that obviously is indefensible, that it poisons everything. So I don't know, I think he had tremendous joie de vivre.

Speaker 3

19:47

That's really what, that's what sums him up. This guy loved life in all of its manifestations and arguing against something that someone else believed was 1 of his greatest joys.

Speaker 2

19:59

Yeah, and of course the practical aspect of that, he just saw the powerful and he challenged them with humor

Speaker 3

20:04

and so on. Absolutely.

Speaker 2

20:05

And you could argue, perhaps, that humor is the highest form of what humanity can achieve. Like sometimes maybe us little humans take things a little too seriously, then sometimes we need to just laugh at it all, laugh at ourselves, and that's probably the purest form of wisdom.

Speaker 3

20:21

You know, Auden, the poet, said, "'Among the people that I like or admire, "'I can find no common quality, "'but among those I love, I can. "'All of them make me laugh.'" There you have it.

Speaker 2

20:32

Speaking of people that make you laugh, Sam Harris. Because he actually has a really great sense of humor.

Speaker 3

20:39

He does. With a very cold

Speaker 2

20:41

and monotone delivery. He's another 1 that you had, you're friends with, you have good conversations with. Where's your fundamental disagreements and agreements with Sam?

Speaker 3

20:53

Sam believes that religion is intellectually indefensible. He really believes it, like deep in his soul. And he gets angry at the idea that a proposition should be unchallenged if it offends his sense of logic.

Speaker 2

21:13

Yeah, so he cannot move on until this is dealt with.

Speaker 3

21:16

Nope, In fact, I mean, I did a podcast with Eric Weinstein. And then Sam did 1. And Sam said, when I heard your podcast with David Wolpe, I learned stuff about what he thinks that I never learned in my conversations with him because I can never let him make those unfounded assertions without challenging them, and you just let them go.

Speaker 3

21:36

And I think that there was something too that was like, he finds it hard to have a conversation about religion that doesn't arouse his real ire about the harm that he thinks religion does in the world.

Speaker 2

21:52

So it's more about the implementation of religion in the world as it is versus the really fundamental.

Speaker 3

21:58

I think he also thinks it's fundamentally, intellectually shoddy and disreputable. Faith. Yeah, faith.

Speaker 3

22:06

I don't know how to put this. I mean, they're both capable of separating their contempt for religion from the people that they have sitting in front of them.

Speaker 2

22:16

You mean Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris?

Speaker 3

22:17

Yes, both of them.

Speaker 2

22:19

Okay, so let me, you mentioned Eric Weinstein, people should listen to your conversation with Eric, as it's a fascinating 1, it's great. It's non-standard, it just goes all over the place in this humor and wit, it's great. So 1 interesting aspect that I also learned, perhaps not about you, but about Eric, well about both, but Eric has a similar thing as with Jordan Peterson, which is if you ask them, do they believe in God, I think the answer, they're not comfortable answering that question, or they might say no, but they're usually just not comfortable answering that question, but there's a kind of sense that they would like to live life, a religious life, as if God exists.

Speaker 3

23:02

I think that's exactly right. I think, first of all, Eric has a really deep appreciation of the Jewish tradition. I don't know, Peterson, I've read his stuff and I've reviewed his stuff and so on, but I think that Jungians are in their very approach.

Speaker 3

23:20

They believe that myth is the way the world works, and so it's not that big a leap to God, but it's still, there's still a distance there.

Speaker 2

23:29

Is it possible to have your cake and eat it too? Is it possible to have the depth of a religious life without believing in God? Like how do you make sense of Eric Weinstein's devout life within the tradition?

Speaker 2

23:45

I mean, I honestly think he believes in God, but doesn't believe in God. And it's oscillating like it's a quantum mechanical system of some sort.

Speaker 3

23:54

Schrodinger's God. So I think that he would probably agree with what Elie Wiesel said, that a Jew can be angry at God or be disbelieving of God, but is not allowed to be indifferent to God. And I think Eric's not indifferent to God.

Speaker 3

24:11

And it's different than Christianity. I've had this conversation many times because you can be very Jewish and have deep doubts about theological questions because Judaism isn't a religion, it's a religious family, and so you're born Jewish. Like if I said to you tomorrow, if I was Christian and I said, oh, I believe in Jesus today and then tomorrow I didn't, I'm not Christian anymore. But if tomorrow I said, oh, I don't believe all this stuff, I'm still Jewish.

Speaker 3

24:42

So it's a more complicated system. Having said that though, I think it's very hard to sustain over generations without some belief that the source of it is beyond ourselves. And in that sense, as in many others, Eric is unique.

Speaker 2

25:01

Well, he was actually making that claim that we need faith to propagate this tradition through the generations. So without that, the traditions crumble. It's a very interesting idea and a very interesting argument for devout faith, which is it's a glue that holds a tradition together, otherwise, like, traditions fall apart.

Speaker 2

25:27

So you can't have the intensity of that tradition. I mean, on the other hand, you do see tradition, I mean, Thanksgiving, 1 of my favorite holidays.

Speaker 3

25:36

So I would say traditions that are demanding fall apart. Traditions that require turkey might not fall apart, but traditions that make demands of you that are counter-cultural or are hard, they fall apart.

Speaker 2

25:50

I think I need to introduce you to some Thanksgiving dinners that are quite demanding. Getting the family together.

Speaker 3

25:57

First of all, I'm a vegetarian, so I'm tough to have at Thanksgiving dinner. But there's a comedian named Kathy Lansman, who 1 year I heard this on the radio and it stuck with me. She said that holidays are a chance to renew your resentments afresh.

Speaker 3

26:13

You know, and that's basically what people do with their families. It's like, I'm gonna go home and fight with the uncle again this year.

Speaker 2

26:20

I apologize to take a dark turn, but you mentioned Elie Wiesel. I recently saw a picture of Elie Wiesel when he was in the camp, when he was liberated. For some reason that hit hard.

Speaker 2

26:35

Like, you know, I've seen pictures in concentration camps of people I don't know, or whose words I haven't really felt and gone through. But for some reason, like here's just a normal person, like

Speaker 3

26:48

a normal body laying there. That just, that was him. I've seen it.

Speaker 3

26:55

It's, and you see, you can see his face, but at the same time, you see that this is an amazing, and I think what's so disturbing about it is exactly what you were saying, is I've seen a thousand people like this, and I know this 1, and I know what he became, so what about all those other people who look exactly like him, who didn't make it out of the camp. You know, maybe it's projection, but it seemed like, this perhaps is also just combining with Mance's search for meaning, is it seemed like it was a regular day for them, in

Speaker 2

27:32

the picture. It didn't seem like, I mean, I'm not sure what I expect to see, what suffering looks like, but it's almost like there's no celebration.

Speaker 3

27:41

I've never seen a picture of actually liberation be celebratory, It's true, it's really true. So what do

Speaker 2

27:48

you make sense, and I apologize to take a step into that moment in history. How does, how do you make sense of the Holocaust, that of Nazi Germany, that such things could be committed by human beings to each other. Is it religion?

Speaker 2

28:09

Is it the thirst for power? Is it the madness of crowds somehow carrying us forward?

Speaker 3

28:18

I mean, for me, it's multi-causal. I don't think there's 1 reason. So 1 of the things, especially there, has to do with the special nature of antisemitism, which is, let's put that to 1 side for the moment.

Speaker 3

28:30

The second is, I think human beings are fundamentally split. They are mostly good except when put under certain pressures. My first explanation for hatreds is as follows. Go to a playground.

Speaker 3

28:43

What happens when a new kid comes on the playground? Do the other kids say, Oh, let's go share our toys with the new kid. No. They say, Oh, who's that stranger.

Speaker 3

28:51

And let's go get them because otherness is built into our genetic. I mean, we're tribal by nature. And we see people form tribes all the time of different kinds. I asked you before if you were a chess player.

Speaker 3

29:10

And when I was a kid and playing in tournaments and I didn't do it for that long and I didn't do it that well, but when I was, it was like the whole world was divided into people who could play chess and people who couldn't play chess, which is ridiculous if you think about it, as though that's the way you divide the world. But we tend to do that. And the Jews were always the identifiable other. There were Frenchmen and Jews, there were Russians and Jews, there were Germans and Jews.

Speaker 3

29:36

And the great blessing of America is that there's no identifiable other quite that way, is that there's all these minorities and no, there's not an American and a something. But once you have that identifiable other, and you have a long history of blaming that identifiable other for all the ills that befall you.

Speaker 2

29:58

Of course, people still do try to form, you said America, they still try to form other, I mean, immigrant versus been here for a generation. There's so many ways to slice it. We still try to find ways.

Speaker 2

30:10

It's just more difficult in America because there's so many sub-tribes, hierarchies of tribes upon tribes.

Speaker 3

30:16

You're absolutely right. And I was moving fast because I didn't want to get bogged down in all the very difficult. It's true, I tried.

Speaker 2

30:24

You're hoping I wouldn't mention that tribalism happens in America too.

Speaker 3

30:27

I was skating, you know, when you're on thin ice, your safety is in your speed. So I was trying to move fast. But for most of history in Eastern Western Europe, not obviously in Asia, but in Eastern Western Europe, Jews were the ones who like, They're not like us.

Speaker 3

30:46

They're clearly not like us. And so, and in addition, there's a peculiar quality, and I don't know, I wonder what you'll think of this explanation. There's a peculiar quality to antisemitism that is unlike any other hatred that I know of, which is Jews are both superhuman and subhuman. They're vermin, the Nazis thought of them as vermin, and yet they control the world.

Speaker 3

31:10

And there was an English scholar named Hyman Maccabee who said the reason that that's so is the myth that Jews killed God. They killed Jesus. And to kill a God, you have to be superhumanly evil. You can't just be bad, otherwise you can't kill a God.

Speaker 3

31:27

So there is some like supercharged evil sense that people got from that about Jews that still inheres.

Speaker 2

31:37

Yeah, that's true. A lot of the way we formulate the other in terms of tribes is often they're subhuman and they're here to steal our resources, like on the playground. But to be both is a fascinating construction.

Speaker 2

31:53

Do you agree with Solzhenitsyn that all of us have the capacity for evil?

Speaker 1

31:58

100%,

Speaker 3

31:59

runs through every human heart. I have no doubt about it. And I know, as you probably do, but I probably know more both because of what I do and because I have lived a lot longer than you, I know a lot of religious leaders who people thought or think are above the human, and they are emphatically not, they're not.

Speaker 3

32:22

Some of them have done horrible things and they've used their position to do horrible things. And it's because nobody, There is no perfect saint. There's no, you know, I mean, all through history, you discover all these saintly characters that we worship, the people who actually knew them around them, some liked them and some didn't. People are complicated, all of us.

Speaker 3

32:45

And the tough thing is, the thing that's the toughest for me is it's not very always clear what is good

Speaker 2

32:52

and what is evil. Because certainly if you just look at history, and it's not always propaganda, I really believe that some part of Stalin thought he was doing good, legitimately. And it makes you ask a question of yourself, for those of us who want to do good in the world, am I actually doing good?

Speaker 2

33:20

And that's a really difficult question, so like in the technology sphere, for example, in this dream of creating technology that will do some good, am I actually doing good?

Speaker 3

33:30

So I have a question about that myself, not about Stalin. I'm sure that Stalin thought so. Stalin does not strike me from what I know of him as somebody given to a lot of self-doubt.

Speaker 3

33:40

But the question with AI to me is actually it goes back to the God question, which is if we have an appreciation of the limitations of our own intelligence, that we know that just like we can only hear certain things and see certain colors, how much of the world is inaccessible to us because of the way our brains are constructed. How can we possibly have any confidence that we can create things that in certain ways are far more intelligent than we are and control them the way we think is best? Seems to me a hubris that might end up being destructive.

Speaker 2

34:22

Definitely, well, any sentence with the word hubris in it is going to end badly when implemented at scale. But there is also beauty. So if you approach it with humility, there is a sense, I don't want to over-romanticize it, but there is a legged robot right behind you,

Speaker 3

34:39

which

Speaker 2

34:39

is hilarious. So there's a magic, I don't have kids, I would love to have kids, but there's a magic to bringing robots to life that it feels like you are a mini god because you just breathe life into an entity that operates in this world, especially when they have legs and they move in this way that's in the case of the four-legged robots, like a dog. That, I think, I don't think I'm over-romanticizing it.

Speaker 2

35:15

The feeling is like you would with a child. You just gave birth, like, holy crap, this is a living thing. I wonder what he or she are thinking about.

Speaker 3

35:24

By the way, I'm not at all insensible to how remarkable it must feel to create that. I'm actually worried in part about how remarkable it feels to create that, because to maintain humility and perspective when it's such a fantastic thing is what's difficult. And I think also because creativity is both part of what it is to be human and it's very much part of the legacy of Western civilization and the legacy of having a creator God.

Speaker 3

35:56

If you have a tradition where God is known primarily through what God creates, so the first debate I ever had, since we talked about humor and God and creating, let me give you my 1 God creating joke. Because the first debate I ever had on religion and science was with Stephen Jay Gould. And it was wonderful, because he had a deep interest in religion. And his interest was actually not to say religion is terrible.

Speaker 3

36:22

But I started with this joke and I think it made the debate go a little bit easier. So the time has come when human beings can do everything that God can do. And a scientist looks up at heaven and says, God, look, you were great in your day, and we thank you for everything you did, but now we don't need you. And God says, really, you don't need me?

Speaker 3

36:40

He says, no, we can do everything you did. God says, everything? And the human being says, Yeah, we can do everything. God says, okay, can you create a human being?

Speaker 3

36:49

And the scientist goes, yeah. God says, from dirt? Scientist goes, yeah. He says, okay, let me see.

Speaker 3

36:54

Scientist reaches down, scoops up some dirt, and God says, uh-uh-uh, get your own dirt. Yeah. But the idea is that a creator God impels us to create too.

Speaker 2

37:05

But let me bring up Nietzsche, who proclaimed that God is dead. Is belief in God slowly disappearing from our world, do you think? And what kind of impact does that have on society?

Speaker 2

37:18

You wrote that religion is not our enemy. Before the Western faiths captured the heart of our world, there was cruelty, carnage, and destruction. In the 20th century, when religion ceased to be a force of international politics, the scale of human slaughter was far beyond anything human beings have ever known. What is the world like when we take religion out of it?

Speaker 3

37:39

I mean, I think Nietzsche was largely right. It wasn't a statement about God, it was a statement about God's presence in the world. And I think that that's largely true, that God is not a force in a lot of Western society.

Speaker 3

37:56

And I believe that if the force of nihilism has no clear counter without an idea that we're all here for a purpose and that our lives are inherently meaningful and that there's a God who wishes us to be better. So I worry a lot about it. And I don't think, I think that the sort of optimism that things are just gonna get better and better is what 1 philosopher called cut flower ethics. That is, we're still living off the morals that religion gave us, but now that they're separate from the soil that gave birth to them, I see them wilting.

Speaker 2

38:37

So this kind of optimism for the future of human civilization, you think, is in part grounded in a religious society?

Speaker 3

38:45

I really do believe that. I mean, it was religion that, the Greeks looked back at the golden age of the past. It was the Jews who said, no, the golden age is in the future, right?

Speaker 3

38:53

It's the Messiah. And I think that that idea that we're moving towards something better, which I really believe humanity can do, and absent destroying ourselves will do, You know, I mean, I'm very excited about the technology that I won't live to see. I think it's fantastic.

Speaker 2

39:11

And that excitement is a kind of religious excitement because there's a reason to preserve this whole thing.

Speaker 3

39:16

Absolutely, because I really think, I know this sounds absurdly anthropomorphic, but I really think God is cheering us on. I feel like this is why we're here. We're here to grow in soul and to grow each other in soul.

Speaker 2

39:36

Yeah, so what do you think the world, so if we just think of this force of nihilism that's contending with the force of faith-based optimism. Right. What do you make of the atrocities in the 20th century?

Speaker 2

39:54

Do you think at its core it's part of human nature and has nothing to do with religion or not religion, or do you think you can assign this kind of nihilistic view of the world?

Speaker 3

40:07

I think it has to do with a religion that doesn't make ethical demands. That is, For Stalin and for Hitler, they both had religions, but they were, in a sense, but they were religions that didn't make ethical demands for the other. I mean, 36 times the Torah talks about the stranger.

Speaker 3

40:27

The point is, it's trying to educate people away from their natural inclination towards distrusting and disliking the other. And it's a lot of work. That's really difficult to do. But if you have a tribal passion and not a universal ethic, then you're in trouble.

Speaker 3

40:50

Well, the Jewish tribe

Speaker 2

40:52

is a very strong tribe, so how do you make sense of this mention of the stranger versus the power of the tribe, which is the whole point, not the point, but the mechanism of tradition propagates the tribe.

Speaker 3

41:05

So it's both. I mean, the Torah does not start with Jews. It starts with Adam and Eve.

Speaker 3

41:11

That's a way of saying, yeah, this is gonna be a story about a people, but understand that prior to a kind of people, there are people. I'm a human being before I'm a Jew. And in fact, the Jewish new year, the Muslim new year starts with Muhammad's journey and the Christian New Year starts with Jesus' birth. The Jewish New Year starts with the creation of the world.

Speaker 3

41:35

Because the idea is, yes, this is a particularist tradition, but it makes a universal statement, which is all of humanity is a child, are in the image of God, are children of God. I think that the idea of Judaism was to try to exemplify a certain way of making that statement over and over again. And I want to say 1 other thing about chosenness that's very name-droppy, but when I tell you how I got there, it won't be as name droppy. So my brother is a professor at Emory and so is the Dalai Lama actually teaches at Emory, although he no longer does because he's too old to go to Emory, but for many years taught at Emory.

Speaker 3

42:18

And so my brother brought us, he's the head of the ethics center at Emory, he's a bioethicist. So he brought a bunch of students to Dharamsala to meet with the Dalai Lama. So I went to India, I was on sabbatical then anyway, I met my brother there and we had a chance to meet with the Dalai Lama. Okay, that was the name drop.

Speaker 3

42:36

So we're sitting in the yard, before he speaks to the students, he was speaking to us, but not because I just wanted to make it clear, not because he said, oh, I got to talk to that rabbi, we just happened to be, I happened to glom along with my brother. We sit down, the first thing he says, he points at me and says, what's this about the chosen people anyway? So, and he had, by the way, and he had asked that I give a lecture, which I did later to his monks about how Jews survived in the diaspora. So it's not like he doesn't know about Judah, he knows a lot about it.