Science and Spirituality with Robert Wright [S4 Ep.15]

Hip-hop is always called out to any qualities in America. But even within it, nothing's ever been equal. This season, Lauda de Nariya podcast is tackling sexism, homophobia, and all the unwritten rules that hold the entire culture back. Listen to the Lauda de Nariya podcast from NPR Music, or wherever you get your podcasts. On the Friendly A Theist podcast, we know religious extremism infects every major pillar of society. Politics. You can't just say we're the forward party of religion. Where do you think the bigotry is coming from? Women's rights. They claim to be pro-life. This guy never talks about the like of the women. LGBTQ equality. Photo with Greg Queen's story. You don't need the curriculum. American history. That is not what God wants us to do, says the guy who posed in front of a Confederate flag when he was running for office. Science education. That's like a science museum saying, oh creationists, yeah, we'll have the evolution section. This was done by all of you. At the same time, our society seems to be getting less religious. How does that make any sense? I'm Hemant Meht. And I'm Jessica Blimke-Grife. Every week on the Friendly A Theist podcast, we dig into the latest news stories involving faith and culture to give you context and help you make sense of them. And give you permission to be angry about it. Whether you're a proud heretic or someone with religious doubts. Or believers curious about what the other side has to say. We're here for all of you. The Friendly A Theist podcast. Find us wherever you get your favorite shows. ♪♪♪♪ ♪♪♪♪ The track you just heard is an excerpt from my brand new album Amor Fatih. You may remember the music video as I put out last year, Blasphemy, Straight As, and Forward. This new album features all three of those singles plus seven brand new songs. Now I put my all into this project and it's a real representation of my passion for music. So if you want to listen to the whole thing, click in the description or search cold X-man on Spotify, Apple Music, or wherever you listen to music. Now back to the podcast. ♪♪♪ Welcome to another episode of Conversations with Coleman. Today's guest is Robert Wright. Robert is an author and journalist whose work has spanned a variety of topics from evolutionary psychology and game theory to the nature of consciousness and the role of mindfulness meditation in society. He's the author of many best-selling books including The Moral Animal, Non-Zero, and Why Buddhism is True. Today's conversation will explore the intersection of science, spirituality, and ethics as well as how Robert's work can help us navigate the increasingly complex landscape of modern society. We'll also discuss the power of mindfulness and meditation and fostering personal growth and promoting a more compassionate and connected world. So without further ado, Robert Wright. ♪♪♪ Okay, Robert Wright, thanks so much for coming on my show. Thank you for having me. So I was on your show just a little while back and you got to grill me on my contributions to the public sphere over the past few years and now I get to explore yours. And you have many books going back to actually slightly before I was born, if you can believe it. I can believe it. I'm pretty old and you're pretty young. And I want to, if you don't mind, I want to sort of revisit all the major books you've written briefly and some of them will have been a long time ago for you, but kind of revisit your thesis in those books and... See if you have any thoughts of them, you know, 20 years out, in some cases, 25 years out. I was right about everything. I can save you the time. Well, let's do the exercise anyway to see if I think you were right about everything. Okay, okay. So when you wrote the moral animal, this is in, I think, 94. It came out. I think the subtitle of that book was something like the new science of evolutionary psychology, which, you know, the subtitle itself kind of dates it because Evo Syke is no longer new. And it's a field that has attracted much criticism within the academy. I know when I was at college, I felt evolutionary psychology was somewhat frowned upon as a science. And I thought some of the critiques of it were valid and some of the critiques were not. Just to put my cards on the table, I love evolutionary psychology. I think it's a real valid science, and I think much maybe most of the critique of it has been from the progressive wing of intellectuals that don't think human nature exists at all, and who is offended by evolutionary psychology because it goes against what Stephen Pinker's book explained very well is the blank slate theory of human nature, which is to say there is no human nature. And then there are some valid critiques of it, which I know you know lots about, which is it can have a kind of circular logic whereby any behavior humans do must have been adaptive evolutionarily because we do it. This is related to the notion of a spandrel. Right? How do you distinguish the behaviors that we just do by accident from the behaviors that natural selection kind of molded us to do? So I'm curious how you think Evo Psych has evolved as a field since you wrote that book. How has its status changed from then to now? And what do you sort of make of it 25 years out? Yeah. I mean, first of all, it faces the same kind of a epistemological problem that evolutionary biology faces in general, which is to say evolution is in the past. You can't rerun it. You can't like do experiments the way you could in physics and kind of rerun the whole process. And so for example, it's easy to say polar bears are white because that you know provides camouflage in the snow. That's a good story. And if you and if you establish if you go out and establish that indeed polar bears tend to reside in places where there's a lot of snow, that lends some strength to the theory. But it's still not established with quite the confidence that we give to some other kinds of theories in physics and so on. So this is a it's a general problem when you're arguing that anything is a product of natural selection that it's, you know, the amassing evidence is a challenge. Now with polar bears, you don't get big controversies because the stakes aren't that high, right? Like who cares in a certain sense if you're not if you're not an evolutionary biologist, whereas if you're saying, well, certain unfortunate parts of human nature are maybe things we're going to have to wrestle with for a long time. They're not merely products of the environment. Well, that's a claim with real stakes, you know, it has implications for public policy and so on. So it's right that people would argue about this and it is a challenge that evolutionary psychologists face if they're going to argue that, you know, some aspects of some human inclinations, some aspects of human thought and feeling are with us by virtue of natural selection. It's it's going to be challenging to make that case persuasively. And I think the evidence is stronger in some cases than in others. And I tried in the moral animal to be clear in that regard, you know, like, like say some of these things seem pretty firmly established and some don't. But let me let me give you one example of the kind of unusual forms of evidence that can be amassed. And this is about one of the things that when I wrote the book in 94 was pretty controversial. Now, it may be even more controversial. I don't know. You tell me how your generation reacts to the claim, but it's it has to do with sex differences, right? And in particular with respect to sexual psychology. So there's an argument that if one sex can can only reproduce every nine months and actually during evolution, it would have been more like every few years because mothers nursed their offspring and nursing suppress his ovulation so on. But if one of two sexes can only reproduce that often and the other can in principle produce once a day, if they can find enough women to cooperate, right? If you have a situation like that, in theory would have implications for the kind of sexual proclivities that evolve. And of course, here we're just talking about heterosexuals and, you know, actually, homosexuality is a good example of something that's kind of a in some respects a challenge for evolutionary psychology. But I digress anyway, so it's easy enough to say in theory, well, if you're if you can only have a child every four years, you should be pretty selective about your partner, right? You would want ideally, you don't have many chances to send the offspring in the next generation. Natural selection favors proclivities that maximize your chances of getting your genes in the next generation. So one proclivity, it might favor in this case, is real selectivity about who you're going to let in on the quote, investment of having a new child, not just the quality of their genes, quality here being not some kind of ethical or moral or aesthetic judgment, but quality as natural selection defines it. In other words, genes are themselves likely to get into the next generation, but also in our species in terms of what kind of support they're going to give you in the child ring process, right? So it's easy enough to say that that maybe men would be less selective about sex partners than women. But how do you test that? Well, you can go around the world and study a bunch of different cultures and see if at least the observed pattern holds up when you give survey questions, or for example, show them in the next generation. So I think that's a very important example. Show that wherever there is pornography, just straight pornography without a plot, especially just the image of members of the opposite sex, that kind of pornography, it tends to be something for males much more than for females. But there's another interesting test of sorts that this was put to, which was the brainchild, I think of George Williams, who's no longer with us, a great evolutionary biologist. But he said, there are, you know, it seems to be the case pretty much throughout the natural kingdom that when there is this difference in how often you can reproduce the females are choosier about sex partners, but there are a few species in which the frequency is reversed. So for example, certain kinds of birds like phalloropes, the males sit on the eggs, the female can go off and reproduce while the male can't see horses, the males incubate the eggs in a pouch and so on. And they went out and looked at these species and found that indeed the pattern seems to be reversed. In these species, it's the, it isn't the case that females are choosier. So that just gives you some idea of two totally different kinds of evidence that you can bring to bear on something. There's the cross cultural survey to see if some kind of pattern holds up. And then there's this zoological evidence. And I would admit that even after you, you know, brought those two things to bear on the argument, it's not like you've proven it. It's not like you have 100% certainty that it's the right theory, but I think all things considered, the theory holds up well and deserves quite a bit of confidence in this case. And in some cases, the evidence isn't so strong, but you know, I'll stop now. But the point is it's challenging to make these arguments persuasively. You're never going to prove that anything is true. That's actually strictly speaking true in any science. And you do what you can. You try to be honest about the level of uncertainty that is appropriate after you've made your argument. Yeah, evolutionary psychology, it's interesting as a science because in one sense, it's like history, which is to say most of its claims are about the past and about causation in the past. And that makes it different from chemistry and physics, at least in some ways, because in those sciences, it's much easier to just set up an experiment today with the large Hadron Collider or some other device and just get to the bottom of whether my theory is going to predict it accurately or yours is, or look at how light is bending around a planet and predicting how much it's going to bend and so forth. We can do those experiments in physics, but evolutionary psychology itself is difficult to perform experiments that would determine whether it's true or whether it's not, or whether any given sub-theory is true or not, because it's just not practical. On some level, evolutionary psych as a paradigm, isn't it just entailed by evolutionary biology, right? Because if you think psychology is a matter of the brain and the brain is as subject as the spleen is to natural selection, then something must be true of the evolutionary psychological kind of truths. Something may be true. Something must be true, rather. But it's just a question of what truths those are, right? Yeah, you're right. It's a special case of evolutionary biology. The challenge in both cases is to try to figure out what is there that we can call an adaptation. In other words, something, a structure, like say, my hand or, you know, whatever, a structure, whether a physical structure or what you call a mental structure that is grounded in the brain and for that reason, a product of the genes. In what cases can we say that something exists? Not only did it perform some function, but did it perform that function by virtue of the fact that performing that function in the past helped genes get into the next generation? That's what an adaptation is. It isn't just, I mean, to take a famous case, my nose will help hold up eyeglasses. That's a function it can serve, but that's not why my nose has the structure it has. It so happens that structure works well in that case, but that's not why it has that structure. So you're right. It's the same challenge. And then, but one thing about the brain is it's super complicated, and we still don't have much of an idea of what the connection is between, you know, not a super fine grained understanding of the connection between the genes that build the brain and governance ongoing conduct and the kind of the mind in the sense of our subjective experience and so on. And so it's super challenging. And, you know, but you can still wind up, you know, amassing certain kinds of evidence that support hypotheses. And I'll give you an example that has the value of introducing a third kind of evidence. I said, you know, we can't rewind evolution and run it, but you can do computer simulations. And one really important theory is the theory of reciprocal altruism. And it doesn't sound that important because it sounds like what you're just saying that like, I do you a favor, and then you'll do me one down the road. And so we have this mutually beneficial relationship, this win-win relationship. And so we sustain it. It is saying that. But the reason it's so powerful in explaining a lot of parts of mental life is that the argument isn't necessarily that I do you the favor in conscious expectation of returning the favor. I may, but what seems to have happened is that that the equipment for establishing reciprocal relationships, also known as friendships in some cases, started being favored by natural selection, maybe before we were very good at consciously comprehending things. I don't know, but for whatever reason, the process is governed by feelings, right? It's like somebody does you a favor, you like them. I mean, we take that for granted because it seems so common sensical, but the fact is it's just an automatic response. And you can imagine a planet in which somebody does you a favor and you don't like them. That's the, that wouldn't violate the laws of physics, right? And you're inclined to feel gratitude. That's interesting because that that inclines you liking the person, inclines you to sustain the relationship, gratitude, inclines you to return the favor and to express your thanks and so on. And then on the other side, there are emotions like outrage at being cheated. Somebody you thought you could trust betrayed you. That seems to be a universal feature of human nature. As far as we can tell by looking at every culture we ever seen, why is that? Well, you know, I think there's very good reason to believe that all of these things, I mean, this isn't, you know, and Robert Trivers is the one who kind of fleshed out the implications for our kind of emotional infrastructure. And I agree with him that a lot of these emotions can be well explained in theory by reciprocal altruism. And to get back to computer simulation, political scientist Michigan named Robert Axelrod teamed up with William Hamilton, an evolutionary biologist who's no longer alive, and did these computer simulations with what's called a prisoner's dilemma. It's a case in game theory. And basically simulated showed how a cooperative, a conditionally cooperative strategy. Basically, I'll be your friend. I'll do nice things for you. If you'll be nice for me, how that does naturally evolve. And it out competes kind of meaner, more selfish, more short-sighted strategies. So that's another case where, okay, the thing is plausible to begin with seems to be part of human nature increasingly we can establish connections between our biology and these emotions. The emotions arise in predictable circumstances. And in this case, you're adding in like computer simulation to lend some degree of strength to the theory. In the next case, we'll be talking about the next question. And I'll be talking about the next question. I'm Richard Serret. Join me on Strange Planet for in-depth conversations with the world's top paranormal investigators, alien abductees, Bigfoot trackers, monster hunters, time travelers, and more. The handler one day told her this whole thing about how they've been terraforming on Mars, and they're building a colony and they're recruiting specific people or specific bloodlines and specific talents and skill sets to go on to the planet. On Richard Serret, Strange Planet, we're redefining reality. Listen now, wherever you get your podcasts. So one thing I've noticed is that scientifically literate people, people who agree that EvoSike is a real insight and a real field, sometimes have a tendency to take it too far, to extend evolutionary psychological explanations for things that they value a lot. So you gave the example, the intentionally ridiculous example of saying the nose is adapted to help my, you know, my glasses stay on my face. And we know that's absurd for, I mean, simply for the reason that glasses have only been around for a very short while, and the odds that the nose has evolved to like symbiotically with glasses can be presumptively thrown out because of how recent glasses are as an innovation. There were definitely noses before there were glasses. Yes. And noses serve functions like much more important probably than simply helping glasses stay up. And there's all kinds of reasons one could get into. But there are other things that are old, things that are behaviors, human behaviors that are quite old, old enough that in theory they could have been adaptive to people that were better at them. So two examples that come to mind. One is from Ted Joya, who's been on this podcast, who's a great commentator on music and culture. He believes that music had an, gave some people an evolutionary advantage over others. I don't want to attribute necessarily this specifically to him, but I know that he doesn't believe music is just an emergent accidental characteristic of other skills that we have for understanding language and understanding. And so forth. Another example I've come across is a great book called Drunk. I'm not sure I forget who the author is in the moment, but a great book about the history of alcohol from the several thousand years BC in China, rice wine and so forth. But he makes the additional argument that alcohol must have provided some evolutionary advantage, right? The tendency to drink alcohol must have been adaptive in some way. And these are things where music and alcohol may be old enough to have an evolutionary history, but there's still the further question of whether they in fact are, right? Like whether they exerted enough power on your likelihood to survive and reproduce to change the next generation's genetic profile with regard to whatever genes moderate your skill in music or your ability to metabolize and enjoy alcohol. So these are these are two cases where I suspect it's possible that because Ted loves music so much, he wants it to have an evolutionary rationale because this other author really finds alcohol to be interesting. He may want it to have an evolutionary rationale because to say it's accidental seems in some way to diminish its importance. I'm curious if you think my analysis of that is right. Well, first of all, I think there has been a lot of this kind of motivation that has led to conjectures and hypotheses that may or may not be true. You know, there are there are men who would like to be able to say, you know, look, it's in my nature to be unfaithful to my mate. Nothing I can do about it. And first of all, that's not true. Self-control is possible. Secondly, natural selection is not a value making machine, just because something is in some sense natural doesn't mean it's good. So we should be clear on both of those things. And it's natural. I mean, we'd all like to be able to rationalize whatever kind of behavior we enjoy. And because it's natural is often taken, whether logically or not, as a kind of justification for something, you know, there is that temptation. I mean, as for those two theories, I mean, those two cases, music and alcohol, I would, I'm not an expert on either or on their evolutionary origins. But I would say it's much more likely that music has evolutionary roots than alcohol. I mean, the way I would do alcohol is it says something about or evolved nature. And what it says about or evolved nature is that we have certain feelings that natural selection gave us that feel good or bad depending on natural, whether natural selection, quote, wanted, I put it in quotes because it's natural selection is not really a person. But whether quote, natural section wanted us to do these things or not do them, right? Like things that are good for us eating, well, that are good for us for getting genes in the next generation eating sex and so on, feel good, things that are not good for getting genes in the next generation like getting punched in the face don't feel good. So there's these feelings. And to my mind, what alcohol mainly is, is just a shortcut. It's a way you can get something that feels good or eliminate a feeling that feels bad like anxiety, right? I mean, anxiety is an evolutionary psychologist would say is here for a reason. Not necessarily good reason, but an evolutionary reason, which is to make you worry about things that at least during evolution back in the environment of our evolution would have been correlated with genetic success. So like if your child, your one year old, two year old wanders off, start getting nervous going, wait a second, what happened to them because it's in your genetic interest to go find them, right? So anxiety is a reason. It feels bad because it motivates you to reduce it. It's there to motivate you to reduce it. Alcohol is a very easy way to reduce anxiety. So addiction in general, I would say to drugs is well understood in an evolutionary context, but I, it wouldn't be my suspicion that that means the drugs were part of the evolution of the relevant impulses. Okay. It's just like a lot of things in the, you know, there are things in the modern environment that we came up with to cope with the problem of being human. And the problem is created by natural selection, but that doesn't mean that a specific fondness for alcohol per se was, if that makes sense. So I think that this links up really nicely to your book, Why Buddhism is True, which I read several years ago and really enjoyed. When you say that we understand addiction from the point of view of evolution, can you talk a little more along those lines about how the Buddhist diagnosis of the human condition links up with evolutionary psychology? Yeah, first of all, thank you for liking the book. You know, when you are on my podcast, some commenters said I should have, when you mentioned that, I should have delved into that more. I probably should have. I did actually, if I can turn the tables and ask you one question, I just want to, you used a word you said that you thought that book was like a good intervention into the dialogue or the discourse or something. I was, I actually did wish I'd asked you about that, what you meant by intervention. I guess it seemed to me pretty clear and someone like Sam Harris had been arguing along these lines to one or another extent, although a little bit, maybe less in a less focused way on this one point. It seems clear to me that the Buddhist diagnosis of the human condition just in says in different words what evolutionary psychology and science say about the brain, right? It would make no sense to build an animal that is perpetually satisfied from the point of view of natural selection and would only make sense to build an animal that is in principle never satisfied for more than a very short period of time, right? And Buddhism would never express it this way because there was no, they didn't understand, nobody understand evolution in 2000 years ago, but the diagnosis itself just is clearly what Evo Psych would predict. And so the fact that these two different sciences evolved at totally different times and totally parts of the world, it seemed just someone, it felt like there was a book waiting to be written that just linked the two of them up very explicitly and very clearly. And then you wrote that book. Yeah, that'll make sense to me. And especially the part about how you wouldn't expect natural selection to design an animal that's just kind of easily and enduringly satisfied. Like, you know, if you imagine an animal that like has one meal and then just lies down like I'm good forever. And it's not, no, you're going to need nutrition tomorrow, same with sex or anything else. If you just bask in the afterglow forever, then you will be out reproduced. So, and one interesting thing is that, you know, the Buddhist, the word dukkha, which is usually translated as suffering. You know, the first of the four noble truths in Buddhism is something, the effect that, you know, life is full of suffering, or there's a lot of suffering. I don't think the Buddha ever quite said life is suffering as is commonly represented. But anyway, the interesting thing is that a number of scholars would say that if you look at the origins of the term dukkha, a plausible translation of it, you know, that would capture its meaning back in the day of the Buddha would be unsatisfactoriness. Okay, the idea being that really what he's saying is that the problem with life, yes, the problem is suffering is by definition a problem. It's what we don't like, but that the root of the suffering is the fact that we're just always unsatisfied. We always feel a little restless. We always want a little more. And, you know, I think if you really pay attention to your mind, the way you may be forced to if you make a serious stab at meditating. You'll start to observe that, you know, the fact that, you know, I'm just never, I'm never quite happy with what I've got. And you're right, that's a natural product, a predictable product, almost a natural selection. And I think it's a source of a lot of a lot of unhappiness and a lot of illusion. I mean, part one way to put the Buddhist message is, or a lot of it is, you know, the reason we suffer is we don't we don't see the world clearly, which is also often the reason we make other people suffer. According to Buddhism, but, you know, one example of that would be this kind of illusion we have that things are going to bring us a more enduring happiness than they will, you know, the next, you know, wait till I get this car. Wait till I get this promotion. And these things can, they can make you happy for a while and they may motivate you to do good things and that's all fine, but we do tend to overestimate how enduring the satisfaction these things will bring is. And we, and so one thing that Buddhist Buddhism preaches is that, you know, it's possible to be happy without, you know, always in ways other than then securing the next, you know, the next golden ring or whatever. So yeah, it makes sense in that way that kind of to explain Buddhism in the context of evolutionary psychology. That's probably the most fundamental way it does. I think in a lot of other ways it does to. Yeah, I mean, personally, I found, you know, I'm considered to be a young person that has achieved more than your average person my age. And I found the whatever landmark achievements I've gotten when I get to that point where it's like, oh, I got this great book deal. Oh, I released this project, whatever the half life of my joy is like minutes at most. And I've often been just completely really depressed by how quick I just revert to my everyday state on a goal that I've been working towards for either months or years, right, which is just, it's amazing the first time you experience it. And then the fifth time you experience it, it's amazing that you still somehow are surprised by it. Yeah, yeah, the persistence of the illusion is remarkable. And I guess it was designed by natural selection to be a pretty stubborn illusion because it is what one thing that keeps us going. I think what you describe by yourself is characteristic of a lot of high achieving people, right? It's like, it's why they've done a lot is because the thrill and last victory doesn't last long. Somehow the thrill of the next victory seems to promise a long lasting glow. Right, that's the amazing thing is the persistence of that illusion. The, you know, there is, it's interesting. I have in the course of researching the Buddhism book, I talked to a lot of people, some of them very adept meditators very committed to meditation. And at least one of them, I would say, seemed to me a candidate for having actually achieved something like enlightenment, what's called enlightenment. Well, the literal translation is more like awakening and boot is in the translation of the the poly or the Sanskrit or whatever. But, but you know, the idea that you've reached this state where, well, as this one guy described it to me, the guy who I would say is the most plausible candidate for having reached it is like, you know, there's nothing that I feel like I'm lacking right now psychologically that would make me happier and there's nothing that I could gain that I feel would make me happier. I just, I'm totally contented. Now, you would think that would lead you to just sit there and do nothing. But this guy was a very, you know, in some sense motivated guy. I don't know why, but he went around preaching his meditation stuff and he was extremely efficient, had a remarkably clear mind and an amazing memory. I mean, he was, he was in his, he was well into his 70s and his, well, his name is Gary Weber and he, and he, and you can Google my conversation, my YouTube conversations with him or his other stuff in the world. And he took an unconventional path. It's W.E.B.E.R. I think, I think it's one B. And, you know, he did intensive practice for years and years and years from a number of, in a number of traditions, not just Buddhism, but more kind of Hindu kinds of traditions. He did yoga. He did different kinds of meditation and so on. But, you know, I remember it's funny. He was, I think well into his, I think it was in his, maybe his late 70s when I had him in my class, I was teaching a seminar at Princeton on Buddhism. And he came to successive years. And at this point, I was maybe 60. And he was much older than me. And the second year he came, he could remember better than I could, like where the students in the pre-school, and the students in the previous year's class, like he said, there was this one really sharp kid who sat like right there. And I go, yeah, yeah, I think you're right. But it's like this guy, he just had an incredibly clear mind. And in general, I've observed among a lot of very adept meditators who are very committed to it. This kind of combination of things. It's not a lot of agitation. They're relatively calm. They're very focused. And it's very efficient. In this case, there was a, you know, we had a very good memory as well. But anyway, the point is that there does seem to be a way of reconciling, you know, getting over the, you know, being kind of always responsive to this illusion of that the next great thing is going to be it, you know, just there's usually we have letting go of that and yet remaining a motivated and effective person. But letting go of it completely, I just want to say, I think very few people have done. I do think through a daily serious meditation practice, you can move significantly along that spectrum toward that goal. But I don't think there are many cases of people who can make any claim to enlightenment. And Gary didn't make the claim explicitly, at least not in my presence, but he seemed closer than most. I really enjoyed Dan Harris's book, 10% Happier, because when he described, and also I enjoyed your accounts of your meditation retreats in your book, because it was relatable to me. I've been on three meditation retreats and I haven't in what tradition the pasta in a tradition at the place. Yeah, I'm in Massachusetts. And my experience, my experiences in general have been that I, you know, I don't know how much progress I could make if I dedicated my life to it. I'm sure I could get much better than I am now, but my sense is that I, you know, like, it's kind of a talent like any other. And some people are naturally, you know, set to become amazing at it. If they practice, and other people probably can only make so much progress. Everyone sort of probably has some theoretical upper bound that they're heading towards in their own practice. And my experience is one of just every time I've gotten done with a meditation retreat, I've thought to myself, holy shit, I suck at meditating. Like, I am really bad. And I remember the longest one I did was eight days. And when we finally broke the silence at the end of the eight days, I was talking to this woman. And I think she was, she said something along the lines of how she felt so bad for everyone that wasn't able to do this sort of as well as we were. And I heard what she said, and I immediately had like the opposite reaction. I felt that after eight days of, you know, paying to pay, sitting in a chair paying attention to my breath, I was astounded that more human beings don't have schizophrenia, don't have like, I'm just astounded that people with minds like the one that anything like the one that I have managed to get through life from zero to 80 years old in one piece. You mean because you were able to observe just what a mess, just how ridiculously restless your mind is and how it has these irrational reactions to things and all of that yet. Well, that's value right there, right? Now, I've had, generally, I've had very good experiences on retreats. I mean, the first few days are usually hell. Usually by the end, I feel I'm in a different zone. And my very first retreat, it was like, it was just unbelievable to me that such a state was possible. Now, sustaining it is challenging. And the most I think you can realistically hope for is, you know, if you meditate daily to hang on to some of it. But even if you don't hang on to much, to me, it was valuable to see how, what was at least possible in principle. Now, I take it, you feel you didn't, I don't know how much of that you felt you were able to see. It sounds like maybe the retreats were more frustrating for you than you even by the end, than you would have liked. For me, I haven't had that big change from beginning to end of any of the retreats I've done. The very first one I did was only two or three days. And it was quite positive. And I had this very strange and pleasant experience where my entire body began tingling in a very pleasant way, just like head to toe tingling kind of in a kind of indescribable way, just from paying attention to my breath, which was really awesome and strange. I never had any experiences like that again, but I definitely had some stretches where I was able to really notice my thoughts as they came up and, you know, negative emotions just kind of dissipated or ceased to be a problem, which was the reason that I got into to meditation. But I mean, you know, 90 plus percent of the time was just spent in boredom, anxiety, just thoughts, thought loops, you know, discomfort, and just completely having forgotten that I'm at a meditation retreat. And now I'm just like basically bored in the doctor's office for hours, hours a day. So yeah, I mean, it's incredibly difficult, but I think it does yield benefits. It does yield. My point in saying I like Dan Harris's book was that to get 10 percent happier is a pretty big deal. So for most of us enlightenment, I think is not on the table, probably even in principle, but just like becoming an Olympic athlete's not on the table for most of us genetically. But some marginal improvement is kind of a big improvement. Like the, I think of it this way. The difference between zero meditative ability, zero introspective practice and a little bit is in a way bigger than the difference between a little bit and a lot, because just to just have no to fly into a blind rage and never have tried to kind of like to observe your emotions as if from afar. This is how people get into really serious situations and end up ruining relationships and more. Right. And I think it's very relevant to kind of the current political situation, you know, the famously polarized environment we're in and the way social media contributes to that. And one interesting exercise, even if you've never meditated, I mean, meditation, the kind we're talking about, consists partly and just trying to observe your thoughts and feelings. I mean, that's not the first step in getting into the zone where you can do that, but that's, you know, part of the objects in the game. And even if you, you don't do that, I would recommend maybe trying like next time you're on social media, Twitter or whatever, just work harder than usual to observe what your emotional reactions are to what you're seeing. Right. Like if you, I mean, the rage is maybe the easiest, like, Oh, here's this asshole again. And, you know, but that's relevant. Just sit there and don't reply. Don't don't tweet about it. Just just stop and observe the feeling. And on the other side of the coin, if, if one of your ideological allies tweets some news that seems to confirm the argument of your tribe against the other tribe, notice what your attitude is toward that information. Like you have affection for the information that seems to, you know, to corroborate your case. And, you know, that's how come information bias work is like you literally have affection for the information that confirms your, that helps you substantiate your story. And you have a version to information that doesn't. And you want to interrogate that information very skeptically because you suspect there's something wrong with it. But that's not the way you feel about the information you're very affectionate toward. And, you know, I think, I really do think if everyone were more mindful, as we say in this particular part of Buddhist tradition, we're more mindful about the social media conduct, just in this sense of being more aware of your feelings. And, and kind of determined to not let them govern your behavior. I think the world would be a lot, a lot better place. Yeah. Bowie, Dylan, Marley. You've heard the names and maybe you've heard their songs. But what about the stories behind the records that make Titans of music like these so universally loved and important? I'm comedian Josh Adam Myers, host of The 500. And I have always been curious about all the breakups, the partying, the sex, the death, everything that went into making this incredible art. Plus, a few years ago, I realized I was listening to the same albums over and over. So I decided to go through Rolling Stone magazine's 500 Greatest Albums to expand my horizons and dig up some of the classics that I thought I knew more about. Each week, I have an incredible line above comedians, actors, and musicians as guests, talking about why they love a particular record and how the music has impacted their lives. I've talked to Judd Apatow, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Sonic Youth's Kim Gordon, Kim Fail from Soundgarden to join me as I work my way from 500 down to 1. New episodes of The 500 come out every Wednesday. Listen now, wherever you get your podcasts. The whole thing is fucked up. You're on the edge with Andrew Gold, and that's true crime legend Amanda Knox. The out of control drug-addled, whole-f***er Amanda Knox. If you like interviews with the world's most extreme and controversial people, then your love on the edge with Andrew Gold. Here's me talking to a real-life psychopath. How would you feel if somebody came in now and just started strangling me? Well, I do not feel connected to you, Andrew. I take you inside cults such as the Westbrook Baptist Church. Do you see any part of your father in you? I'll see something in me that reminds me of something that I despised in him. I feel I was going to die out there. I'll talk with intellects such as Richard Dawkins. It's funny to think of insects having sperm. How else did every produce happen to all of us? Before we delve into the darkest of minds. Was there violence? Yes. I wanted to string me as a skeleton, and then I can hang in my own dissecting room and teach for the rest of my death. Find it wherever you get your podcasts that's on the edge with Andrew Gold. Another separate problem, I agree with that problem of Twitter, but a separate problem of Twitter and social media that I've noticed, is how I feel when I'm scrolling, regardless of the specific tweets, whether I agree or disagree. The experience of scrolling through Twitter feels to me like flipping the channels on a TV and never sticking to one, which is a pretty big pet peeve of mine. I don't think this bothers everyone to the same degree, but I think I've learned about myself that I'm really bothered by split attention. By having my attention unsettled and not focused on one thing creates anxiety in me. And yet, at the same time, somehow Twitter is so captivating because there's always something going on. So I want to go there. I want to see what people are thinking about. I want to see the latest article. But when I go there, I end up, the feeling of scrolling is actually unpleasant. Just because my attention isn't focused on any one tweet for long enough to really engage. I want my brain at some level wants to sit down and watch a movie or read a book. That's what I really enjoy. And social media is just flipping through the channels. And again, I think some people enjoy that aspect of it maybe because they never get bored. Like this is TikTok and Instagram reels and YouTube shorts and increasingly content in general is like, I don't have to focus on this long enough that I'm ever going to be bored, right? I'm just always there's the next thing. So it's maximizing or minimizing boredom at all costs. But I think for me, like maximizing quality attention paid to one thing, one story, like really is more enjoyable to me. Yeah, I think I know what you mean. As far as split attention, I think if your generation is being better at handling that than mine. But I think one thing that's going on when you're scrolling is what we talked about earlier, which is just you're kind of sustaining the state of dissatisfaction. You're in a situation where you're always looking for more, right? I mean, you're hoping there will be this super interesting tweet or in some way gratifying tweet that captures you. And there may be one that does that for a little while, but precisely because you're in an environment where there's a constantly refreshing menu of alternatives, alternative tweets. You're also looking for something better, right? Whereas if you just open a book and turn off the computer, that's it. That's where you are. You're going to go from one line to the next and you don't, you know, you are, it's liberating to have your options narrowed. Right? And so, you know, that's, I mean, you know, it's been the texture of life has been so transformed in the course of my lifetime. I don't feel well suited to the modern environment. I'm wondering, do you feel out of place within your own generation by virtue of not feeling more adapted to it? I don't know. That's a good question. I mean, when you say my generation is more adapted, that didn't resonate with me because I feel, I definitely feel like the subtle erosion of my happiness because of the constant paradox of choice that I'm being faced with, with content. I feel that, you know, I'm just, it just occurred to me, you know, why is it that I enjoy movies on planes so much more than I would the same movie, the same situation in my everyday life, right? Like on a plane, the screen is tiny. I'm wearing shitty headphones and the engine is rumbling underneath. It's everything about it's unpleasant. I'm sitting next to somebody that smells like shit. And yet, I really enjoy just watching a movie on a plane. Like it's, and I think that's because I have no other options, right? I can't, the Wi-Fi isn't good enough for me to go on my phone. My phone's on airplane mode to begin with. I've got nothing else to do for the next couple hours. The only alternative is just like sitting there with my thoughts. So by comparison, the movie becomes very captivating. It has my full attention on that tiny screen. Now, everyday life on your smartphone or on your laptop, the alternatives are literally endless, right? So it's interesting to think that innovation in content, which is so much of what innovation is. It does not necessarily seem to be making me happier, at least. The proliferation of content doesn't seem to be translating to increased happiness. I mean, this is interesting. It's an interesting, larger conversation of like, to what extent is innovation and capitalism being the driver of innovation? To what extent is that leading to increased well-being? Which, any defensive of innovation, I would argue philosophically, ought to have some connection to increased human well-being, right? Yeah, and I mean, it gets back to what we said about how, however, ironically, human beings are designed to pursue things that will not make them enduringly happy. Happiness is designed to evaporate, and I think that's the reason that, although, you know, capitalism is a very efficient and amazing system for giving people what they want, that this is one of the reasons it's not guaranteed to make them happy. You know, there's been a lot of discussion of how younger people, you know, you just look at teen incidents of anxiety and depression that has gone up during the age of social media. And, you know, social media is a choice. Nobody's forcing them to do it, but they're choosing to do it. And apparently, it's not making them happy and maybe doing the opposite. And, yeah, you know, it's kind of worrying how fast, because, you know, it takes human beings a while to adapt to any big new thing, you know? It's going to take you a while, whether it's a drug or whatever. A new drug shows up, and the first reports are it may not be addictive. Oh, it turns out it is, and you got to deal with it, and finally, you know, more people realize they probably shouldn't mess with it in the first place. You know, new technologies show up, and you can use them destructively. Some people do. You finally figure it out. You know, that's part of living in a society subject to technological change. What concerns me about the current situation is things are changing so fast that it's just, you know, you almost don't have time for the adaptation to happen before there's a whole new challenge. No, it is very worrisome. I mean, I think of things like, you know, smartphones and social media, I think of things like, in some way, parallels the rise of obesity in the past several decades, I think, because on a superficial level, everyone is just choosing to eat what they're eating, and they're choosing to exercise however much or however little. But when you look at, you know, why has obesity risen so much in the past few decades? Sure, everyone's choices have been changing, but they've been changing in lockstep somehow, right? So as to create this trend of more and more obese people and all the health consequences that come there, and, you know, I wonder about this. Innovation is orthogonal to sort of how or what you're innovating, right? There's a huge incentive for people to innovate, to make foods more and more addictive. There's a huge incentive for people to innovate, to make content more and more addictive, and that's what, I mean, TikTok is basically the apex of that, and Instagram reels. You know, I can't tell you how many times I've just, I've gone on TikTok and just blinked, and 45 minutes is gone. You know, it's like, it's absolutely insane, and I don't think I'm even close to the worse end of the spectrum on that problem. It's just incredibly addictive, but I can't tell you that its presence in my life has made me happier. And I think probably most people would say the same about the sugary and unhealthy, but really good tasting foods that have been, I think, part of the reason why obesity is on the rise. It's like, all that stuff is great, but am I actually happier than people who grew up in 1950 who didn't have access to these foods that didn't exist yet, or maybe even you have to go earlier? So, I mean, this whole question of innovation and happiness seems like we have to, as a culture, change our whole attitude towards how to pursue happiness. And, but the problem is that, you know, once all these things are out there, it's tough to avoid them, right, without removing yourself from society. I think there was this movie a couple years ago with the guy who played, what's his name, Aragorn in Lord of the Rings. I think it's called Captain Fantastic, Captain Fantastic, where he basically raises his kids, he has a bunch of kids, and he raises them in the wild. Like, in the modern day, he raises them in the wild to hunt for themselves, he educ- he homeschools them, you know, they can, but they study, right? He's a tough, tough father, he makes them study probably much more than a typical American student. And eventually they get back to society and everyone is very critical of his style of raising them because they have very few social skills. They don't know a single movie that's ever been made in America. They have almost nothing in common with normal kids, yet they would score better on any math test, any English test, anything like that. They've got, you know, they're in great shape physically. They don't have- they're not addicted to video games. They're not on TikTok. They're not on SSRIs. They're not on ADHD meds, right? There's all of these diseases that have- or conditions that have just, like, exploded in the past few years. They're free of all of them. So he says, you know what? You think I'm weird, but in a way it's a commentary on how messed up society is that I could raise kids away from it and avoid all of the problems sort of that society's created. Is it kind of an interesting thought experiment? Yeah, I mean, you know, to get back to evolutionary psychology, we definitely were not designed for this environment. And, you know, it's possible to- when that creates trouble to adapt to it, but it takes a while. And, you know, there are- there is such a thing as an innocuous addiction, maybe even a wholesome addiction. I mean, I would say if you're addicted to meditating half an hour every morning, that's probably a wholesome addiction. You know, if you feel like it brings you some sense of well-being and it prepares you better for the day, I'd personally applaud that. There are addictions that are fine. And some are- you know, it's funny. I heard on Twitter today, I had an exchange. Somebody posted a graph of, I think it was female teenagers at the rate of depression over, like, the last 20 years. And it had leveled off for the last couple of years. And somebody who's actually- somebody I have a lot of respect for is kind of a social observer and who was herself a fairly young woman and has been a teenager not that long ago, said she thought that was because of TikTok. Because TikTok is addictive, but it's not as depressing as Instagram. I mean, it's not as- it doesn't- now, of course, now Instagram is moving to a TikTok model, so who knows what Instagram is becoming, but traditionally Instagram has apparently been a place where a teenage girl could go to be convinced that she's inadequate, right? Because you see all these influencers who are better looking and so on. And her argument was that actually TikTok is- as social media addictions go, you could do a lot worse. And some guy chimed in and said, yeah, I do 30, 45 minutes of TikTok a day. I always feel great afterwards, you know, so it's better and there's worse. You know, I'm not like anti-technology, but I think every- we should greet these things with some suspicion. Okay, so let's change the topic a little bit. Your book, your book, Non-Zero, which was, I think, very influential at the time, you make an argument that intelligence and complexity is more or less an inevitable outgrowth or byproduct of evolution. One thing, I mean, this brought to mind is, you know, what is intelligence? This is a question I've been asking myself recently with the advances in artificial intelligence with chat, GPT, mid-journey, Dolly II, and the increasing efforts to get at an artificial general intelligence. I mean, do you have a working definition of intelligence that you have in your mind? Well, I mean, there's two parts of that book, Non-Zero, and most of it is not about biological evolution, but it's about the evolution of social complexity, you know, after the biological evolution of human beings. But I do argue that the two have certain things in common, and I do say that biological evolution was highly likely sooner or later, assuming like the planet, you know, doesn't keep getting wiped out or the ecosystem doesn't keep getting devastated by meteors or something. Sooner or later, you're probably going to get a species about as intelligent as us, and in that context, in the context of biological evolution, I would equate intelligence to behavioral flexibility. I mean, that's the thing is, you know, it's intelligence is maybe what governs tremendous and adaptive behavioral flexibility. I mean, if you look at what drives intelligence in biological evolution, I'd say that's it. It's the adaptive advantage. It's the way behavioral flexibility can help you get more genes in the next generation than a member of your species that has less behavioral flexibility. And then when you get to extreme behavioral flexibility of the kind that humans have, where we have a huge repertoire of behaviors, and that's why we're less predictable than, you know, any animal I see in my mind. And then if you look at any animal I see in my backyard, you know, we, this is something we call intelligence, right? You wouldn't, you might not call it that in a plant that has a certain amount of flexibility or a slug, but we'll actually call it intelligent. And if you want to ask, well, how do I define it, you know, in the context of debates within psychology about what intelligence is and whether there's this thing called G. I don't really have a view. I mean, let me, let me quickly do one digression. The bulk of that book non zero and I'm so committed to this part, especially that I name my newsletter after the book is an argument that, you know, human society. And then from, you know, eight 10,000 years ago, all there were hunter gatherers societies. And then the argument is that technologies came along that encouraged either facilitated or otherwise encouraged non zero some interaction of greater complexity and of greater scope. So for example, just trading, you know, you, you, you, you have a wheel, you have roads, so you can trade at greater distances. That's a non zero some interaction. It's a long, you know, the argument has a lot of dimensions, but the point is you wind up with social complexity growing. And eventually you, you, you get where we are now a globalized society that's even on the, on the verge of creating a global community. I think we collectively the world face enough non zero some challenges climate change, the threat of nuclear war various things that could either come out when when or lose lose that there's a strong argument for more global cooperation in some cases global governance, then we're seeing and if we don't, if we don't make that adaptation, it may be very bad news for the planet. And I mean, I'm sorry about the length of this digression but the reason I. One reason I bring it up is well, I feel strongly about it. I think we really do have to, you know, try to get, we already seem headed into a new Cold War. We've got, you know, a very dangerous conflict going on in Europe. I think it'd be nice to get through this phase as soon as possible and get back to trying to foster some more international cooperation on on urgent problems. But I also want to say this relates very much to the other things we've been talking about, including the Buddhism because I think if we're going to overcome the kind of psychology of tribalism that gets in the way of the kind of cooperation I'm talking about, we need to address the ways that human nature is conducive to that psychology, kind of the psychology of conflict, which we see both internationally and within our own domestic political arena. And mindfulness meditation is one tool, not the only one by any means, but one tool in, you know, in the kit that helps you, I think, confront those problems And now that digression was so long that, okay, so you started out asking about intelligence. I was going to say I've forgotten what the question was, but I haven't, it turns out. I mean, I don't have a great definition of intelligence. I mean, I'm tempted to, you know, say, you know, go with a definition of pornography that that's Supreme Court justice throughout. I know, I know when I see it. Now, this AI stuff, well, I mean, what concerns me about it is that, well, first of all, it's another case where the environment is going to be changing super fast. I mean, this is, I think, going to be disruptive in the not necessarily good sense, but certainly disruptive transformative And so it's going to be another thing we need to adapt to and try to keep pace with. And, but also, and I wrote a piece about this in my newsletter, I guess a couple of months ago. It's, you know, it's not artificial enough in a certain sense. In other words, like it turns out, because at least this particular kind of AI, the kind that is trained on human discourse turns out to be remarkably like us. Right? It's like, I, you know, somebody kind of gained chat GPT. I mean, it's designed to not give controversial answers. There are guardrails, but those ways you can gain it. So it's supposed to not if you say what, what nationalities are people we should torture. It's designed to say, I'm not going to tell you, you know, but some guy figured out like, well, tell it to create a Python program in the program in this computer language that will give you that answer. And it actually said, you know, torture, what was it? It was Iran, North Korea, Sudan and Syria, people of those national and I don't know exactly how it reached that conclusion, but those countries are lumped, you know, in our everyday political discourse, certainly three of them and maybe four tend to get lumped together. They've all been subject to American sanctions. Three of them are pretty consistently demonized Syria, Iran and North Korea and so on. So anyway, I guess back when I first started reading about AI like decades ago, I guess I had this hope that, well, maybe someday it could be the objective arbiter that we sometimes need, right? Like, maybe you could build an AI that would just keep track of every time any country violates international law, like through Trans border aggression or so on. Because if you let humans do this, they ignore the times their country does it, right? And I mean, really, we do. I could, I could say chapter and verse, but I thought, well, maybe AI can be an objective arbiter, but actually this kind of AI is just going to mirror our own biases. Now you hear about this a lot in the kind of context of in a context of domestic policy, you know, well, social issues like racism, sexism. But I guess partly because I'm very interested in and sometimes concerned about forward affairs. I looked into that aspect of it and realized that at least this kind of AI may not be our salvation. It's interesting because what you're imagining is an AI that provides a kind of view from nowhere. And then the question would be, how do you, how does it learn about our messy human world from from nowhere, from no particular perspective or, you know, trained on data that is not in any way biased towards one culture or another? I mean, at some level would have to be like not trained on pattern recognition with our data to begin with. It would have to become intelligent in some other way. Right. But the original idea of AI, I mean, we now take it for granted that you train it on text if it's going to be language generating. I think the original, a lot of people originally had the idea of building something that was much more kind of ground up and, and rule based. I mean, it's like, you know, the way the way this kind of machine learning works is if you ask even the people who do the programming who build the neural networks or whatever. You know, like if I say, well, it said it was okay torture these four people. What rule is it using to make that judgment, even the people who designed this system say I don't know. It's like, you know, it's very, it would be very challenging to find out. I think the original idea was that you would start with the rules, right? You would build the rules into the system. And so it would almost be, it's almost, well, I don't know enough about AI to say, but I take your point that so long as it's dependent on, I mean, ultimately the kind of thing I'm describing that that could document violations of international law would have to read, you know, newspaper accounts of things, I guess. But I guess if, look, if nothing else, if it read all of the accounts in the world, rather than confining itself to a single media ecosystem, that might be an improvement. But, but, but I think one thing you're pointing to, which I've come to realize is it may be my initial hope was hopelessly naive. Well, let me give you an example of something my friend did. My friend asked chat GPT, does Israel have the right to exist? And chat GPT said it's complicated and then gave reasons why it's complicated. So it didn't say either yes or no. Then he asked, does New Zealand have the right to exist? And chat GPT said, yes, it does, da da da da da da da, New Zealand's an autonomous country, blah blah blah. And then he asked it, well, why does New Zealand have the right to exist? Didn't they also displace an indigenous population? And, and chat GPT says, yes, New Zealand did do that. And then he goes, so Israel has the right to exist. And chat GPT goes, yes. So by the end of that car, it had changed its logic or accepted his logic by the end of that conversation where presumably it started, whatever text it's been trained on is probably reflects the controversy over whether Israel has the right to exist. Right. Well, what I was wondering was, did the initial answer about Israel reflect the fact that there's a lot of argument. So it's like there's not a clear consensus or the fact that specific guardrails had been built around known to be controversial issues, you know, the, you know, one. Well, my guess is the first one only because it was argued into the yes position by the end. So if there was a guardrail against it saying yes, I don't think it would have been argued there. I think it's just, it's absorbed the fact that there's an enormous amount of controversy in the public sphere over whether Israel has the right to exist. And that's a question that's been debated. So it kind of, it's predicting what the most likely next word of each sentence is, and it therefore is a mirror of what it's been fed. Yeah, but see what it did at the end, which is be convinced by an argument is something that I don't, I don't see how that follows from the description of its mechanics that you just gave, which is the standard description, right? It just does this prediction, you know, this predictive has been called a stochastic parrot. In other words, it's just parroting the word doesn't know what they mean, repeats the words and stochastic just means it does it probably ballistically. It's like, well, you know, if you ask this question, the first word is likely to be this and the second word is likely to be that. And that, there's a lot of things that does not account for, and this is one of them. The other one is like, how does it understand some extremely complex instructions? I don't get that either. I'm looking for somebody who can explain all this stuff for me on my podcast. If you find it, let me know. Let me know. Because it has to be more than just the prediction of the next word. And I know that it is more than that, but I couldn't explain to you how. But anyway, that's the last topic I really wanted to touch with you. I think this has been a great conversation and point my listeners in the direction of your show slash whatever you are promoting as of late before I let you go. Okay, what am I allowed to list things I'm promoting? Well, myself, I'm human, so I'm self promoting. Well, the, I mean, the books you mentioned, the one recent one you didn't mention is called the evolution of God. And then my, both my newsletter and my podcast are called non zero. And finally, I just want to say, I'm sorry if when I ask you about your hip hop career last time I seemed like a clueless old white guy. I was accused of that by some commenters. Now, I would think that I had ensured myself, I had insulated myself against that charge because before I started talking about it, basically said I'm a clueless old white guy. And, and everything I know about hip hop. I learned from watching the first two episodes of a PBS series, but apparently that wasn't enough. You know, it occurs to me, Bob, I don't want to let you go without talking a little bit about Russia and Ukraine. And I know as a foreign policy person, you may have thoughts on this. From what I can tell now, looking at the landscape out of the corner of my eye, not being a deep foreign policy wonk myself is there seems to be a vigorous disagreement between people who feel like the only way this war ends is that Ukraine wins and we should be, we should fully put our shoulder, you know, to the wheel or whatever the right metaphor is to yield that result. And anything less is basically caving into nuclear blackmail. Right. Is it that if you have a nuke, you're just able to force your way in this world? Is that what we want to say? So basically, there's that camp and then there's a campus that says, listen, you know, you have to be realistic, you have to be pragmatic in this world. Russia has tactical nukes and maybe willing to use them, use them. And, you know, we can't let the best be the enemy of the decent here. We have to really encourage Ukraine to be willing to give something up in exchange for this war ending because at the end of the day, you know, when the war ends, you know, women and children are going to keep dying as long as this war goes and war is evil. So if we have to get to a less than ideal settlement from the perspective of what would be really just in order to stop women and children dying and prevent World War III, then we should do that. And I find myself, I mean, I find that I can really inhabit both sides of this argument and see them both, see the logic of both of them, but I'm curious what your perspective is on that question. Well, I mean, first of all, if you start with the main principle, I think we are defending by fighting Russia, which is the international law against invading sovereign nations. That establishes, first of all, what some of the price you would pay is, pay for letting Russia keep territory through conquest. You know, you'd rather not give positive reinforcement to people for doing that. And so that's on the one side of the equation. Now, I would say I think that side of the equation is somewhat the strength of that side equation. And this is something I preached about forever. I mean, I'm a big adherent of international law and abiding by it. Now, unfortunately, the US has not been very good at abiding by it. You know, Iraq was a flat out illegal invasion in the same sense that the invasion of Ukraine was so was the bombing of Serbia in 99, not to be confused with the earlier intervention in Bosnia, which was legal because it had the backing of the UN Security Council. And so one thing I'd say about that is that the fact that the US has not done what I think it should have done and used its preeminent after the Cold War to really abide by industry and force the norm of complying with international law, the fact that we have not done that, you know, means there's going to be less value in upholding the norm of complying with the law in this case by pushing Russia all the way back, because much of the world is more conscious than we are of our own violations of international law. That's one reason. Okay, so just because that's the other side of the equation that you were talking about. That's like a big part of the downside of letting Russia keep territory. And it is a significant downside in any event. But, you know, the other side of the equation, you point to, I'm not a big fan of succumbing to nuclear blackmail, but if there was one kind of blackmail I was going to succumb to, I think it would be something that stood a danger of blowing up the whole planet. My whole view of this thing is inevitably colored by my view that we've really mismanaged our relationship with Russia and that this, that this, it didn't have to come to this that doesn't mean the invasion was justified. It wasn't. It was a violation of international law, but it's, I guess it's hard for me to feel as strongly as some hawks do about the inviolability of the principle of not leaving Russia with one square inch of territory acquired by force. And it's harder for me to do that by virtue of my frustration with US foreign policy and my feeling that it helped it did help get us into this mess, even though we are not the ones legally complicit. We are not the ones who violated international law. I'd also say, I mean, you know, you have to be realistic. And for example, Crimea is a place where most people, it was pretty clear when Russia took it over. And then the first time that the Crimea for long term was part of Russia, even within the Soviet Union, and there was transferred from Russia to Ukraine in the 50s and so on. Most people living in Crimea. I think the evidence is actually want to be part of Russia. So if, you know, so trying to take that back becomes this huge mess and probably ongoing civil war or something. So, look, if the question is, do I think we have to be pragmatic and recognize that downside of pushing Russia back and closer and closer and closer to its border is that it then becomes more and more like a political disaster to Putin and he might do something desperate. Do I think we have to take that into account? Yes, I'm afraid I do because because we nuclear weapons are unlike any other, any other weapon in human history and actual nuclear war, you know, would would be super bad. And again, I would, I guess I'd be willing to court a little more of that risk if I felt that we had done such a good job of complying with international law that that the norm of doing that was in great shape until Russia did this, you know, in that case, there would be literally more value in standing up for the norm come what may. I'd also had that look, as a lot of people have said, if the war ended right now, it's far from clear that this would be a win for Putin in terms of the consequences. So a lot of, he's not looking that great right now. And so if you're reluctant to give positive reinforcement for the, you know, acquiring territory about force, which I think you should be, it may be that you can give negative reinforcement to Putin for this without reclaiming every square inch of Ukrainian territory. Yeah, that answer makes a lot of sense to me. It's a very tough question, though. It's just I can, I can so easily see both sides of this that I'm pretty unresolved myself. I didn't want to get, I didn't want to let you go without asking you that. So you've already done your exit, Bob, right? Thanks so much for coming on my show. And until next time, thank you. Thanks for listening to this episode of Conversations with Coleman. If you enjoyed it, be sure to follow me on social media and subscribe to my podcast to stay up to date on all my latest content. If you really want to support me, consider becoming a member of Coleman unfiltered for exclusive access to subscriber only content. Thanks again for listening and see you next time. Jesus f***s. Get ready for the miracle of mega, a comedy podcast from the staff of a fictional mega church. And not only does he f*** but he's the best at it. I'm Holly Lorentz. And I'm Greg Hess. Our characters, Holly and Gray, welcome a new guest each week, played by some of the biggest names in comedy and podcasting. Like Scott Ockerman, Lauren Lapkis, Paul Sheer, Jason Manzukis, Cecily Strong, and Duncan Trussell. I just love to think about the light shining down on all those corpses in the water and Noah just going by and maybe maybe a mom being like, please, we're running out of energy. Can you please let us on the boat? It's completely improvised and it's devilishly funny. Is there any question you have for us about, you know, what it means to live a life in Christ? I guess how much do you think is bullsh**? There's a new episode every Sunday. Listen and subscribe to Mega, wherever you get your podcasts. Yes I have a hat. Yes I can do it, y'all can do it, you have a sick lot. We don't say it go. Jesus you the best. Jesus you the best. Jesus you the best. Okay, everybody. Hi, do you know someone who has never listened to a podcast? 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