Can one person truly encompass the extremes of good and evil, brilliance, and folly? That's the conundrum we unravel as we delve into the lives of Fritz Haber and Alfred Nobel, whose legacies are as much about their contributions to humanity as they are about the destruction they inadvertently enabled. We navigate the murky waters of morality, the ethical dilemmas of wartime science, and the paradoxical nature of technological progress that can simultaneously advance and hinder human capability.
Our lively discussion takes unexpected turns, from the haunting psychological aftermath of chemical warfare to the whimsical musings on the Nobel Prize's explosive origins and design. We probe the concept of 'Type 2 ADHD,' a modern affliction born from our digital excesses, and the anthropological roots of our deepest fears. The banter is educational yet humorous, as we also tease a future deep-dive into the world of deconstruction with French philosopher Jacques Derrida.
In the final act, we ponder the balance between nationalism and global citizenship, questioning how free our life choices truly are. Are we simply living out a predetermined script? It's a contemplative end to a spirited debate, where we've laughed, learned, and left our listeners with more questions than answers. So, join us for a journey through the duality of man and the endless shades of gray that define our existence. The show may be over, but the dialogue within your mind is just beginning.
Can one person truly encompass the extremes of good and evil, brilliance, and folly? That's the conundrum we unravel as we delve into the lives of Fritz Haber and Alfred Nobel, whose legacies are as much about their contributions to humanity as they are about the destruction they inadvertently enabled. We navigate the murky waters of morality, the ethical dilemmas of wartime science, and the paradoxical nature of technological progress that can simultaneously advance and hinder human capability.
Our lively discussion takes unexpected turns, from the haunting psychological aftermath of chemical warfare to the whimsical musings on the Nobel Prize's explosive origins and design. We probe the concept of 'Type 2 ADHD,' a modern affliction born from our digital excesses, and the anthropological roots of our deepest fears. The banter is educational yet humorous, as we also tease a future deep-dive into the world of deconstruction with French philosopher Jacques Derrida.
In the final act, we ponder the balance between nationalism and global citizenship, questioning how free our life choices truly are. Are we simply living out a predetermined script? It's a contemplative end to a spirited debate, where we've laughed, learned, and left our listeners with more questions than answers. So, join us for a journey through the duality of man and the endless shades of gray that define our existence. The show may be over, but the dialogue within your mind is just beginning.
Hello and welcome to another episode of Terribly Unoblivious. On this episode we explore the duality of man.
Brad:We explore some real-life. Dr Jekyll and Mr Hydes, like German chemist Fritz Haber, can you be responsible for maintaining a food source for over half of the current world population, while also masterminding some of the world's most horrific acts of war? Or what about Alfred Nobel, who is known equally for his invention of dynamite and the creation of the Nobel Peace Prize as a response to it? We are indeed complex beings that are not easily put into neat, tidy boxes, such as smart, dumb, good and evil, or accomplished or worthless. So come along as we explore the gray muck between black and white, in this episode, the duality of man.
Dylan:Yep, I said it before and I'll say it again Life moves pretty fast.
Brad:You don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it. You know what would be a cool nickname.
Dylan:That was our intro. So what would be a cool nickname? Merchant of Death. Merchant of Death would be a cool nickname.
Brad:Do you know who had that nickname? Just start naming people.
Dylan:I do know this actually. Why can't it? Why is it coming to me right now? I don't know.
Brad:I feel like it's in a movie, actually the Merchant of Death.
Dylan:It is in a.
Brad:It would be a Jason Statham movie.
Dylan:What.
Brad:Please don't say Alfred Nobel.
Dylan:A Legend of Russian Arms. Oh it was. Victor Bout Also knows the Merchant of Death. Oh it was yes.
Brad:That's right, he was not the original though.
Dylan:No, they've had.
Brad:And why was he in? Who was the Merchant of Death and why was he in Illinois?
Dylan:They've used this in movies all the time though. I feel like the Merchant of.
Brad:Death is one.
Dylan:They recycle every two or three years. So I Intro song Slipknot. I'm not going to say the name of the song because it kind of gives away the hint, but if there's some attuned listeners they should know the theme of today's episode.
Brad:Oh, I don't know if I know the title of that track right off the bat.
Dylan:That's right, they're on the TV screen, I know.
Brad:You can't play that.
Dylan:No, I can't play anymore. I think we've already hit our limit on copyright infringement.
Brad:Good for you.
Dylan:But it's educational and it adds more value, so we can't get hit.
Brad:Whatever you say.
Dylan:Whatever I say goes.
Brad:I believe you.
Dylan:Thank you.
Brad:It's kind of a bad title for this episode really. Yeah, we're it could have been titled a lot of things.
Dylan:We're not titling at this episode. I know I haven't even gotten to the writing station yet.
Brad:But I mean it is a general overall theme. I had an idea. I think it'll take us places. It's gonna. Yeah, this is the beginning of my yarn map. I believe you know yarn map.
Dylan:Yeah, are you talking about like Charlie from Always Sunny in Philadelphia just going off into?
Brad:Pepe Silva, pepe Silva, everywhere Pepe Silva. And guess what? I go up to the middle room and I go hey, where's Pepe Silva? Guess what? There was. No, pepe Silva Doesn't exist.
Dylan:Doesn't exist.
Brad:Yeah.
Dylan:I want to. I want to porn of your imagination. I think we should. I think we should Along with the don't do cocaine in the bathroom. We should have a yarn map in our new studio.
Brad:Love it. I'll write all the stuff for it. But yeah, today was it was something about duality, the duality of man, which sounds kind of deep, but it's really not. It's really not, it's really not at all.
Dylan:I've kind of actually been thinking about this as well and it's very I don't know. I fall on one side. I very clearly fall on one side of a train of thought on this. I don't really think there's too much more that's necessary beyond that.
Brad:No.
Dylan:I'm very close-minded when it comes to it. What is it? I think I've probably fallen to the. It's better to be a warrior in the garden than a gardener in the war.
Brad:Yeah, but what about, like, I like to eat pancakes but I want to be skinny? That's duality.
Dylan:It is duality. I think that's also just what. I wish I was thinking yeah, I don't know if I have the brain cells for this right now.
Brad:But there it sounds deep and it can be complex, but it can also just be. It is what it is. No, I mean, it applies to a lot of different things. There are contradictions that man holds. So I was kind of trying to think about this in different ways, to explain it and examples to use things like that. Then the other day I texted you. I just happened to be on I don't know some streaming service and came across a movie and it was the Grey, which I've seen a couple of times.
Dylan:Was the Villain, the Merchant of Death.
Brad:No, I feel like Liam Neeson could play the Merchant of Death at some point. Maybe he has. There's a lot of movies of his I haven't seen, so the Grey. And then, of course, because this was in my head, I started thinking about it this way, which I think it's also portrayed in the movie this way. I don't think I'm just making it up.
Dylan:I think, it's.
Brad:There was actually a book, so it was originally written about this way. But the Grey is about a guy that you get a really short intro before the movie kicks off and it's a guy that's in maybe Alaska, maybe Canada, definitely in the North country, and working around oil rigs and such. But he is tasked to basically keep wildlife at bay of the oil workers, because the especially wolf packs will randomly stock some of these workers if they're far enough out.
Dylan:Sound tasty. And they're hungry to that kind of thing.
Brad:So that's his occupation. The first five minutes very kind of ominous music, a couple of inner dialogue moments him slamming shots at a shitty oil rig, makeshift bar on.
Dylan:Let me guess it's very like gray and like blur, like this scene. I mean it's snow, so it's mostly white, yeah, maybe shades of gray, I'm assuming in the videography that nothing was very crystal clear and sharp. It was probably everything, a little bit of bokeh in the background. It's not Just kind of creating a haze of creating a visual effect of confusion.
Brad:Yeah, you get the sense, not necessarily confusion ominous. You get the sense very quickly that he's not a happy person.
Dylan:I get that every time you walk through my door. Great.
Brad:Okay, that's awesome.
Dylan:Martin's live in here.
Brad:And then it becomes very clear, because he puts a gun in his mouth.
Dylan:We're like hey, is it a six shooter? We are. No, it's a rifle, okay.
Brad:Yeah, because that's what he carries the rifle around every time because that's his occupation. So, he's ready to pull the trigger Again. You have these dialogue moments where he's reciting something. Every once in a while they'll catch a little glimpse of him with a woman. That is like a daydream in his mind, really, and he has the rifle on his mouth, he's ready to pull the trigger and the wolf howls in, and then he takes his mouth off the barrel and the story continues.
Dylan:Okay.
Brad:So the remainder of the hour and a half movie is they're getting on a plane and they're traveling, probably to a different base location or maybe back somewhere else to the States or something, and the plane crashes in the middle of nowhere tundra. Some survivors so say I don't know what camera we're at. It has 10, 15 survivors right and immediately start getting picked off one by one by this wolf back and the whole scene is them basically running away from the wolves right.
Brad:And how do we defend ourselves? How do we survive in the cold? What do we eat? How do we cross this train, which is super gnarly? All the while, these things are apparently chasing them and the idea is, if we get far enough away from their homeland, they'll leave us alone. We just we landed in the wrong spot, right? And I'm going to just spoil this because it's not just territorial. It's yeah, they're actually just doing it for fun.
Dylan:It's not like that. It's not like that.
Brad:What is that? One movie the Lion Lion in the Darkness. The Val Kilmer, michael Douglas you ever seen that one? Two Lion Hunters in Africa in late 1800s, early 1900s, while they're building a railroad there and there, there actually are lions that kill for fun. Oh, yeah, yeah. So, and this particular one or two. They racked up a lot of numbers. Yeah, they were busy.
Dylan:Most dangerous game.
Brad:Sort of like that.
Brad:Yes, Except the lions didn't have to pay. So so they're they. It's just, it's an escape, they're trying to escape right and again you get these inner, inner monologues and these, this glimpse that you find out later as his wife, and so it's her laying in a bed and it's always him in, like the gear that he's in right, His parka and his rifle and everything like that. And then, very late in the movie, you find out that she is dead. That's why he is so unhappy and so clearly from the, the, the gun scene, in the very beginning he doesn't want to live and in the end it ends up being just him left, and of course the wolves are around him again and he finds himself surrounded by carcasses in this place that he is basically meandered into on accident.
Brad:So he walked into the wolves den, essentially all the while trying to get away From them. He went straight to the, the front door, right. So the the ending scene is him realizing I'm fucked, the alpha male coming out. He knows he's going to fight him, right, cause that's his alpha's job. I'm going to take this one. And in that scene he you think, okay, this is it, you're good, just let him, let him kill you, problem solved, right. But no, he takes a fixed blade knife and he electrical tapes it to his hand. And then he's got a couple little little bottles of alcohol that they had stored, puts those between his knuckles, breaks them off, tapes them all to the hand. And the the last scene is just him ready to go, fists up, and then there's like a growl and then it cuts right. I'm like what, how, how better to describe duality than the guy that wants to fucking die? But when he's ready to fight, when I'm presented with the opportunity.
Brad:Yeah.
Dylan:Because but this is, this is a thing. People want to make decisions when it's on their terms. But then, when somebody makes the decision, how many times have you been in a situation where it's like I, I want to do this, and then somebody else suggested or something else? You're like you know what I'm out, you know what I lied? I don't want to do this. Actually, I don't want it suggested to me. This needs to be mine.
Brad:There is a. There is an underlying theme, though, because it's that, that quote. So he grows it, it cuts back to his dad and he had this little type written post it type thing that he framed and put on his wall and he would always read it or look at it or whatever, and the, the quote was once more into the fray, into the last good fight I'll ever know to live and die on this day. And so it's. It's that man, this, all this really sucks and I don't want to do it. But also there was something in him that sensed like this is it?
Brad:I got this day and my terms, my terms, my terms, yeah, so that was a kind of an interesting that's on. I mean, that's on the severe end of the day, obviously, life and death is the ultimate duality.
Dylan:Your wife just must love movie night with you. She didn't fucking watch movies with me.
Brad:I wonder why I always pick the good ones.
Dylan:Yeah, it's. I can see you collecting little alcohol bottles now like little airport bottles. You're like, yeah, just in case.
Brad:Just in case. Little EDC kit here. You know what is funny? I bought a new roll of electrical tape today. Yeah, Coincidence. I'm sure, purely I'm sure you weren't. I had to fix some Christmas lights. You don't even know what wiring is. I had to fix some Christmas lights, which I did, so incandescent or LED LED. Yeah, Nice, but that was the. That was kind of a an intro to that. So, yeah, there's. There's these contradictions that we, that we face.
Dylan:We struggle with, I wouldn't say we face. I think struggle is probably a better term.
Brad:Some, some more than others. Yeah, um, some people. I think I think some people live with them and never realize that that they are living with them. I mean, you can see it in the way that some people reason in the same sentence. You're like that those two things don't work together and they're like, yeah, yeah, they do, cause I believe them.
Dylan:I had this, I and I've. This is something that's been on my mind my entire life and I've been very fortunate with um. I've been able to do jobs my entire life that I enjoy and, uh, work, I should say just I've. I've had jobs that I've enjoyed, um. And then you hear about people that absolutely hate what they do but they go there every day because they're like, well, I have to do it to live. And then there's that contradiction of are you actually living if you're just kind of in the zombie state for five days a week and then you get to just kind of come out of it for two days, or you know I just there's, there's just contradictions there that I and I've been fortunate enough that I've never really had to struggle with that. I've definitely been through periods in my life where it's harder to go to work than other days, but I've never been in the for 15 years. I've just been mindlessly going in every morning and just hating my life.
Brad:Yeah, and ultimately, what the duality and the contradictions led me to is kind of the, I think, the overarching theme of things that we like to talk about, which is it's not black and white. So you talk about duality is these two totally opposite things that you're struggling with, and there's a lot of shit in between those two things Absolutely, and you're constantly sliding that scale right From one thing to the other thing. So, uh, in that sense, yeah, some people have to go to work. They have to do whatever they hate, maybe maybe to in order to do what they love. Maybe they do it a little bit, maybe they just have to provide, maybe they just have to survive. I mean, there's, there's all of those things, and it's an easier thing to say especially when you love what you do, or love the place you're in, or love yourself, whatever the case is to say like yeah, why don't you just do this?
Brad:no-transcript. And to some extent there's, yeah, there's something there, but the obstacles for certain people are much other than other people. But then on the on the flip side of that, I think there's people that literally don't give a shit. It's just autopilot. You know, we've talked about that.
Dylan:Yeah, they just don't not present. I'm just moving.
Brad:They don't have to think about it, they just and and for some people I think they they might like that I don't want to think about it. I want to show up at eight o'clock and I want to leave at five o'clock, absolutely, and I'm gonna do what I have to do while I'm there and then I'm fucking gone. See you tomorrow. So there's a sliding scale of those kind of things. Another I. So ultimately, what we'll get into today is a little bit of good and evil and how. That isn't Super easy to define when it comes to people necessarily. So think like Think good people with bad ideas, or smart people with evil intentions or bad people with Maybe some good morality. No, there's.
Dylan:Thanos.
Brad:Thanos is actually a really fucking good example. You know, is his good? Is his ultimate end goal for the good, yeah yeah it is is the actions he takes to get there Great for everybody? Not everybody. Only half, and the half that remain lost. The other half. So his, his Methods are questionable, we'll say, and that is a little bit of what we'll run into today. I think another way is an easier, less Diabolical way of thinking about this, and this is a, this is a Martin term that he likes to to do all the time when it comes to sports, and it applies definitely to kids. But if you ask some adults, I I don't know, I don't know what everybody's response would be, but it has to do with the ideas of of winning poorly or Losing well.
Dylan:Yeah, so we've discussed, this.
Brad:Yeah, so they're. They're kind of contradictory because you want to win, like everybody, everybody's kind of on the winning side of things. That's that's where we're, we're leaning towards. But life's not fair, competition is not fair and and you know, sometimes you get your asses kicked. So, can you? Can you do what you are able to, to the best of your ability, even if you come out on the losing end of things, versus Can you do what you do, come out on the winning end of things and do it in a maybe shitty manner sort of thing? Mm-hmm, I.
Dylan:Think we talk about, I think we give, we give a lot of credit to what I would talk about good losers. I think there's a lot of highlight on that, which is okay. When they lost the game, they held their heads high, you know they didn't, you know, throw temper tantrums, etc. But I don't necessarily know if there's enough.
Brad:I Think it's important to talk about good winners as well, winners that don't just yeah, and I guess I look at it more so, like there's definitely the sportsmanship aspect of that, but I look at it more of you, the, the level that you are able to do something at. If you are at, or exceeding that level, mm-hmm, but you lose because you are competing against a person or a team. That is edit on a whole another level. Yes, you lost, but the advances that you made in what you're doing we're really good. Versus if you are, say, a good team and you're playing a not even a mediocre team, just a poor team, right, and you play the worst game you've ever played in your life and you win like, yeah, you win, you just you got more skills, you're more athletic, but it was awful. In any sense that you can think of it, that's not Prideful no but you see that happen.
Dylan:I have two specific instances and basketball, where we played teams that were had no business being in Whatever tournament we were in at our division level and I remember playing and it was so uncomfortable for me, I mean, we were up by 15, 20 points and that was us being very casual, like it could have been even more of a blowout, and it never felt good to me and it wasn't even a Try new things, let's do the it. Just they were never there and I mean it was.
Dylan:It wasn't even an opportunity for us to try new things because there was nothing to. There was no, no barrier for us to grow over. Right, if that makes sense. There was no level of Hardship there. So it's like, yeah, I mean we can, we can line up and do this thing, but it's really not real-world applicable because people were gonna play against, aren't gonna do what they're doing. Yeah, it was, it was just please get me off the court.
Brad:I don't really want to be here right now so you kind of, in a sense, you kind of prepare For a situation that you you think you're gonna feel pride in, and then the situation presents itself and it didn't quite go the way you so. You had, you had these good ideas and Even though you won, like the outcome was not positive, yeah, for you that's. That's the kind of shit that that interests me. Yeah, you know, it was like how do you get, how do you get these, these seemingly good people that end up doing atrocious things, or vice versa, or just this amalgamation of all of these things together? Right, and One of my favorite stories and this came from, I think, initially when I heard of this was Dan Carlin, and he did I think he did a whole little piece on this during the blueprint for Armageddon. He didn't in World.
Brad:War one and talk about our boy fritzy yeah. Yeah, and that that one bit in particular like really Just kind of stuck with me. I don't know, I find it super fascinating.
Dylan:There's a lot of irony here. When, though, when the audience finds out?
Brad:there irony is. Irony is an understatement.
Dylan:Yeah.
Brad:But there's all for me. There's a lot of different subjects that get brought up and that some of the nuances and some of the uh-oh's I might have Might have fucked that up.
Brad:Maybe you know me to make a little boo boo, right? So Just I'm gonna read through, give you guys a little bit of background on what we're talking about. You can just stop me, jump in Whatever you want, but the the character we're talking about, for this is Name is Fritz Haber, lived in 1868 to 1934. He was a German nationalist, which means that he Loved Germany. He was down for the Deutsch. He was also Jewish and good hamburgers at that time?
Dylan:what? No, yeah, good hamburgers at that time. Really, hamburg, that's not, that's what then?
Brad:don't do that to me.
Dylan:Is that real Hamburg hamburger was invented in the World's Fair when at Hamburg.
Brad:Oh, look it up, I will. So if you're wondering if, if his Jewish descent had anything to conflict with his German nationalist, yeah, maybe some foreshadowing.
Brad:There he is considered to be the father of chemical warfare, which is Kind of a big deal it's kind of big deal, kind of I don't know like, would you want to be known for that? Like, when it comes, we will get it. We'll get to that part, all right. So considered to be a father of chemical warfare for developing and weaponizing chlorine as well as several other poison gases, and that was proposed to break the trench warfare stalemate during the World War one Well campaign. We'll call it a campaign, world War one, that's what. That's what Calla duty calls it. Okay, I think, a campaign.
Brad:Okay, yeah yeah, he's a super smart dude, right, he comes from a very intelligent background and always into, obviously, chemistry. One of the early things that they improved upon was a powerful cyanide gas formulation, and the earliest that I've seen this used is late 1800s, actually in California, and they'd used it to fumigate some sort of trees over here and they had modified it in Hobbers lab and they used it for grain stores and things like that to keep insects pests, away from that. So it was a very strong pesticide and it had odors.
Brad:Yeah, I was known as Zyclon a, and like a lot of Poisons that you don't want to use for Values. You know they include something that to warn people if you get close enough to you know, like, say, a field that's been sprayed or yes, so they're green.
Dylan:They added a smell in an eye, irritant. Yeah, so actually the cause of the dangerous stuff. It's just there to irritate you, to keep you away, correct?
Brad:Yes. So if you were Overly exposed to this, yes, you would die. So they added a couple of little warning signs, chemically, so that you wouldn't just wander into a bean field and just play for the whole day.
Brad:Whoops and and end up dead. So His other Big claim to fame and this is really big between 1894 and 1911 was the inventor of what is known as the Haber Bosch process, and this is a process that Is the catalytic formation of ammonia from hydrogen and atmospheric nitrogen, and the way they do this is they put them under extreme temperature and pressure constraints and basically it takes the nitrogen and the air and causes a chemical reaction and Basically processes liquid ammonia, mm-hmm which does what for the world now?
Brad:Well, ammonia is a good fertilizer and prior to that I think they would. They would gather like bird shit Mm-hmm and ship it somewhere obviously not a very proficient Way to fertilize the world. And there was also some stuff where they could get from mines which was very laborious and also not very productive. So this literally changed the landscape for agriculture.
Dylan:This same process supports over half the world's food supply. Yes, so.
Brad:We are aware of this. Anyone that's in in big cities that's not around agricultural farming may not know it, but around here you see the big white tanks being pulled behind trucks or trailers all the time. That is green labels all over them, some form of Liquid ammonia and that's what goes in the sprayers, or a really big can of smelling salts. Or or it could be that I guess didn't think about that a football team got to go but it's yeah With.
Brad:Without that, we would have a starvation problem that could easily eradicate Close to half the population of the world right now. We just wouldn't.
Dylan:So the way there's, so there's still an opportunity for us to be Thanos. If if you're listening to this podcast, it wasn't us.
Brad:So here, this is okay. It's a little sidetrack here because I like to go back in time, mm-hmm. So Okay, asteroid hits, we wipe out some. Let's just go with a large number of population. Well, let's just go with scientists. Let's just say we wipe out scientists, right?
Dylan:And catalogs of information does that include the kids they get like the little Christmas chemistry sets or just like real scientists?
Brad:If they're into chemistry, they're gone. Yeah, okay, for sure, okay, they don't get to. So we killed the kids.
Dylan:No, yeah, there's no jump. All right, All right, okay, no head starts. So if we ask for a red rider, we're good start.
Brad:Yeah, okay, yep, starting from scratch. How long Might it take for us to figure out the Haber-Bosch?
Dylan:Method. Is there still evidence around?
Brad:yeah, but like what? What would you do with it? Like if you went into a lab, you're like, oh, here's a big Huff it.
Dylan:See what I have a steel container, container and some fire, and then when weeds started growing on my ass, it'd be great.
Brad:Like you do. You're not just gonna walk in there and be like I bet I could make liquid ammonia out of this, yeah. So it's a big, it's a big deal. And there the actual thought for this process came earlier than him Not by very many years, but it was already an idea when he kind of took it on.
Brad:Yeah and it just failed because it was. You got to remember like you're working in labs in the 1800s, in the late 1800s that's when you're doing. You're not doing it in a top-notch science facility of today, and so the temperatures and pressures needed to do that were Less than dangerous and they had way less obviously safety standards or Quality of materials or whatever.
Brad:So the scientists that had actually theorized this process was trying to do it and someone had died in that process, Probably from an explosion of the extreme Pressure. So that was thank you for your sacrifice. So that was a banded. And then hopper picked that up and thought you know what I can do this?
Dylan:because sweet corn in the summer is so good.
Brad:So he actually won the Nobel Prize for this and I think it was in In his speech for this that he noted it may be that this solution is not the final one. Nitrogen bacteria teaches us that nature, with her sophisticated forms of the chemistry of living matter, still understands and utilizes methods which we do not as yet know how to imitate. So that doesn't really have anything to do with duality, but I find it very interesting that certain people kind of go about I mean, science really is just like what's the natural world do? How do we do it? To scale or quicker, or For our specific purpose and benefit, you know?
Brad:So that was kind of interesting, but duality will hit when you, when you do the punchline.
Dylan:This is the punchline. What's the punchline? Oh, you know what the punchline is the oh, the chemical weapons.
Brad:Well, oh yeah, so that 1911, that was kind of the end of that process. They had, they had a established that. I think he won the Nobel Prize in 1918, I believe, and there was a little asterisk to that. Because of this next part, which is a little, we're gonna go with a little, it's a little asterisk. Yeah, so when World War one started and I don't have I have his history up somewhere I think he served early on, early on in the in the German army, like when he was much younger back when they had like horses and more spiky hats.
Dylan:Yeah, yeah and.
Brad:I kind of get the feeling like he didn't feel like he did enough for his country because he was a chemist. He was kind of you know, well, yeah, I mean he was a nerd.
Dylan:It was a big deal.
Brad:You know he was kind of nerdy so when World War one came around, and now he is a very established scientist. Not only an established scientist, but he is Is the head of the German chemical warfare unit. He's the top dog. They have a science research facility and he runs it.
Dylan:Do you think he gets like a his own mahogany room or he gets like hang out and like rich leather chairs and just drink Sherry and think about?
Brad:it Interesting because, going back to his Jewish heritage, Mm-hmm. They I believe they might have more clay pots. I think they changed. They either changed their name early on and they were associated with other families that were like very well-to-do and powerful, okay, and so their family kind of got to Ride the higher horse in society, right?
Brad:So even a lot of me and leather even way back then, the, the Jewish descent, whether it was cultural or religious it was was still already looked down upon in the 1800s. Yeah, it just hadn't come to its its full fruition.
Dylan:I mean, let's be honest, they've been looked down upon since Egypt, pre-egypt. It's had a storied history in terms of being looked upon favorably right.
Brad:They've always been the scapegoat so he, he was kind of able to do this through some powerful family, friends and things like that, but I mean dating back to like his father papers.
Dylan:We can get your papers, man, what you got.
Brad:Yeah, and he was clearly like a brilliant scientist right, so that was kind of a win-win for everybody at the time. So World War one starts up. He is deeply devoted to Germany and sees that the trench warfare is Just stagnant, right. They get into these, these spots, and just nothing happens. You know, people just die in the trenches. Sometimes you try to get out of them, then you definitely die. The whole thing is terrible and, and Essentially, what was it?
Dylan:It was how many years, for it never moved more than a mile. It was just absolutely ridiculous.
Brad:I don't know, but you, if you look at it from his terms, this is where those contradictions kind of start. Right, you're like why invent something to be used that is just awful on human beings? And, and I was like so.
Dylan:So my guys don't die.
Brad:Essentially, we want to win. Yeah, I want my guys to live.
Dylan:I want to save my life.
Brad:I like our guys so the the first one that he made was the chlorine gas so they weaponized it. It was in, I think, 1915 in the Battle of a Pre, and they they buried something like 5000 canisters of this stuff, and chlorine gas is A lot. Of the gases they used in general were not overly deadly.
Dylan:They're more irritants than.
Brad:I think the they estimated about 1% of all deaths from Moldova one were from gases, which is still a. It's still a lot of people. A lot of people died in Moldova one, but in terms of, I think sometimes how we see it portrayed it is, has that not? I don't obviously know, but if you've ever been tear gassed, imagine it multiple times worse than that. I try to avoid those situations. Yeah, uh, sometimes you got to take one for the team, though.
Brad:Yeah, yeah and so chlorine was the first one that they, they, they let loose, and they actually didn't take advantage of it, because the Germans were unprepared for how well it was going to work, because when it was let loose, obviously everybody scatters Like if the trenches were going sideways. They were going sideways, this, they were just running as far as they could go and literally the, the german army could have just walked Straight through that afterwards, uh, but they weren't ready for that, so it didn't actually happen.
Dylan:Yeah, so Russia 56 000, with the most gas casualties, germany 9 000, france, 8 000. British empire, including canada, 8 000, austria, hungary 3 000, united states 1400, italy 4600 and others 1 000. They and this actually is pretty staggering little stat I read up here, which was the contribution of gas webs to the total casualty figures were relatively minor. British figures, which were Accurately maintained from 1916, recorded that three percent of all gas casualties were fatal, two percent were permanently invalid and 70 percent were fit for duty again Within six weeks. Yeah, so at that point what they found with gas was Incapacitation. Really it was trying to move the needle, in a sense of we can incapacitate these people and we can try, by their lack of Fit for duty soldiers, to try to move the needle.
Brad:Yeah, essentially you're just looking to scatter it's and and in some sense it was not greatly Effective it wasn't good. There was not especially for the british when they would set them off, and the wind was coming back at them, mm-hmm, it didn't work very well when you end up gassing your own troops, so so that's got to be well.
Dylan:We talked about this on previous podcast the Hitler was when he fought in world war one for germany. He had had a. The same thing happened. They had set something off and it backfired back to them and he had been mustard-guessed. And that's why he never used chemical warfare in world war two, was he did not.
Brad:Yeah, he didn't like it Also there's your, there's your duality there.
Dylan:He was moral no chemicals there. But, not for the, not not for the soldiers, maybe some others which we'll get to here in a second.
Brad:So that's, that was his big contribution to world war one, and, yeah, it wasn't great, it wasn't wasn't great. Um, also, they lost, you know, but it didn't, didn't help, didn't end up, really, uh, solving the problem. Um, what he did do is start an entire new sector of arms, which is Any kind of chemical warfare you want to think of now really kind of um, really kind of.
Brad:Uh accelerated that a little catalyst effect there and it's, I think, still to this day, the the thing with chemical warfare. Is there some sort of fear, like I think the most effective part of it is the fear base of it. Um, because you either Aren't able to handle it like you can't do anything. If you're surrounded by three miles of gas, you can't go anywhere, and at that time, obviously they didn't have gas masks that were effective. Uh, chlorine became actually really ineffective because it is uh soluble by water, I think. So if you soaked a rag and put it over your mouth, uh, it would highly mitigate the effects of the chlorine. But even today, if you look at, uh, what's the, what's the powder, what's the powdery stuff that uh, what's his name? We'll send in to everybody.
Dylan:Oh, what is that? Anthrax, anthrax yeah.
Brad:Yeah, yeah, like if you open up A letter and all this white powder falls out. That's a that does something to your psyche.
Dylan:I didn't, um, I didn't go to my mailbox After, like 2001, for a long, long time. You were like eight, yeah, 10. My parents always sent me to go get mail and then I had a lot of anxiety when I was a little and I remember seeing that anthrax. I was like I'm not going to the yeah and then actually at this end.
Dylan:So it wasn't just anthrax at the time either. Um, there was the mailbox bomber at the same time, don't you remember that guy? Yeah, it was a weird time for to be a postal worker.
Brad:One of many.
Dylan:Yeah, that's true probably so.
Brad:That's, uh. That was his legacy in terms of his Contributions to the the war effort. This this also brings up.
Dylan:Hit the punchline because I gotta talk about duality a little bit, a little bit of it going on a history tangent.
Brad:So he at some point Comments. During peacetime, a scientist belongs to the world, but during wartime he belongs to his country. Unless you're the united states and you perform operation paperclip, then he belongs to us.
Dylan:Okay.
Brad:Okay, so that's when we stole all the good ones. So so it's, it's, this is his duality. When we're not fighting, I'm trying to do things to better the whole of humanity. Um, hence the hobber method, and saving agriculture and lives, and winning the Nobel prize for it, right. But during wartime, I'm gonna kill you. Yeah, what?
Dylan:was the quote when in peace.
Brad:Yeah, I'm a scientist for the world and in wartime.
Dylan:I'm a scientist for my country, yeah so the irony In this statement?
Brad:he, he loved his country.
Dylan:Mm-hmm didn't work out well for him, uh because it's back by a little bit his, uh, his cultural heritage to a little hit for it.
Brad:Yeah by 1931, the the rise of the national socialist party in germany, which, uh, hitler later became the leader of, they brought about the law for the restoration of the professional civil service, which basically meant they were going to establish a national civil service, which was a very polite way of saying that anyone that worked in civil positions teachers, professors, judges, all government officials, doctors, lawyers, anyone that could benefit society at large essentially, yeah, you couldn't be part of certain groups if you were going to be in those jobs. So that was, that was their top down approach to to getting rid of groups of people. And the Jewish population happened to be in that group right at the top. And so he kind of, because of his familial ties and and and patriotism and all that kind of stuff, he kind of was able to hang out for a little bit. He lasted about two years.
Brad:Uh, most of the scientists in his institute that were doing all the work A lot of them were of Jewish heritage had to fire all of them and then eventually he left when he realized like Things are probably gonna get out of hand. You know, you could see the writing on the wall. So he left germany 1933, um, in route to wherever he was gonna live out his life, he died. He didn't make it. He died in january 1934.
Dylan:Do we know why was it? Was where there's suspicious circumstances. I think there was a hit job.
Brad:No, I think he'd been working with chemical gases his entire life. He had, he had. It was like a cardiac response.
Dylan:That was the. What was the couple that, uh, that discovered radiation that had been working with? What was that couple?
Brad:I can't remember. So here's the real kicker. So remember zyclone a, back in the back, in the early days. It was a very powerful pesticide. So after this was, I believe, after he had left the country, of course the science didn't stop and New people took over and they found this pesticide that was pretty potent and they took out the, the little uh you know smells and irritants, and just kind of left the deadly part of it and the. So he he's attached to this, but he didn't have direct knowledge of it. They took his work. They took his work, modified it and became zyclone b, and zyclone b is the most famous gas known, uh, that was in use by the nazis in the gas chambers and it killed over 1 million Jews, including some of hobbers extended family that was left in germany.
Dylan:So his, that's um.
Brad:His early work killed a lot of bugs, his late work killed a lot of people, and his middle work sustains over half of the world's population to this day.
Dylan:So that's a walking contradiction, right there.
Brad:It is, and there is that asterisk by his Nobel Prize.
Dylan:Wasn't a peace prize though.
Brad:No, because Nobel was chemistry, math, physics.
Dylan:There's literature there too Peace literature. And then they added economics. Missed that.
Brad:Like 69 or something.
Dylan:It was Marie and Pierre. Curie were the radiology or the radioactive couple. By the way, what was the last name?
Brad:Curie, C-U-R-I-E, Curie I don't even pretend to try to have a French accent. They used to use radiation and watches to make them glow. And yeah, people that made watches didn't fare so well, turns out, you don't want to touch radiation.
Dylan:Well for their sacrifice. We now know True. Thank you for your sacrifice. Thank you for your sacrifice Now we can see in the dark what time it is.
Brad:But the original contradiction of all of this was actually Alfred Nobel, who created the Nobel Prize, and the contradiction coming from, again, his long line of work where he had like 350 or so patents. He was very rich, turns out, his brothers were big into the oil business and he profiteered from that quite a bit Skimming off the side.
Brad:But he created Dynamite, which was his most famous invention, as well as other powerful explosives and while used to mine and make tunnels, rail systems, I mean all kinds of things that benefited society through that use. It was also extremely deadly and used in wartime situations. And the way that the Nobel Prize came about allegedly unconfirmed. One of Alfred Nobel's brothers had died and I think it was a French newspaper wrote an article about him and so the newspaper thought it was Alfred that had died. And that's where that merchant of death and like what a terrible person and this legacy that he left behind and all this kind of stuff. And he allegedly read this newspaper and was like, oh yeah, this isn't how I want to be remembered. So late in life he rewrote his will and left something like 90% of his fortune to create the Nobel Prize system. And again, an asterisk, because some people are like, well, he only did that so that he would be remembered favorably. It's like, yeah, well, I mean yeah, it's kind of like why was that.
Dylan:It's kind of why, like Martin, Luther left the church was because you could buy the. You could basically buy the, the, the the past to heaven with the Catholic church, what they call that money, they call it money. Well, I mean maybe coins back then.
Brad:So it's like, yeah, maybe he did that, but does it matter? If he did a good thing, was he a bad person? Did he create a bad thing? So there's, this is where the, the nuance comes into, all of these different ideas.
Dylan:Is it indulgence? What was it called? I always forget.
Brad:Inheritance.
Dylan:No, it was indulgence. It was, yeah, buying indulgences.
Brad:Yeah, cause you would indulge. The Pope, yeah, or the whoever, whomever.
Dylan:Bishop.
Brad:I don't know, it's been a while.
Dylan:So that's, that's kind of where it ends.
Brad:I mean, was Hobber a good guy?
Dylan:I think, sorry, everyone, the cat has been cut loose and Annie is the, the official mascot of the podcast and she apparently is star crazy.
Brad:Yeah, and speaking of binaries, there's nothing more terrifying than petting a soft cat that is on your lap and waiting for claws.
Dylan:She doesn't have fronts, she has backs.
Brad:Animal.
Dylan:We've talked about that before. That's, my that's my, that's my immorality. Right there, annie, you go and you can't touch the microphone stand.
Brad:So rude. So yeah it's. There's this thing where you're a good person and somehow you get a little curious and then things get out of hand and all of a sudden you had dynamite or you gas a million Jewish people you know bad people that have consequences. So, it's.
Dylan:I mean, the guy that invented the segue died on the segue.
Brad:But that's irony yeah.
Dylan:Right, I mean the, the chemical. That guy invented Xylem B.
Brad:Segway is the two wheel thing that you stand on yeah. Yeah, he should have died. Wow, yeah, I said it Okay.
Dylan:Yeah, hope their family doesn't listen to our podcast.
Brad:They're the first lawsuit. Give me a skateboard any day.
Dylan:Okay.
Brad:But you, you, you have to admit that that gives off a real vibe when you see somebody riding around on a segue.
Dylan:I when I see those in cities and tours and the big helmets, it's uh yeah it's not my favorite.
Brad:Give me a Vespa any day.
Dylan:You'd be a Vespa guy.
Brad:Thanks, and it's.
Dylan:it's not a negative, Thanks a lot Vespa's fun man. Vespa's fun.
Brad:So that's a yeah.
Dylan:So I think what we're really trying to say is that you can make duality as deep as you want to, but at the end of the day, it's really kind of we exist and we say things, we do things, we struggle with things, and there's I nuances, there's nuances.
Brad:There's nuances to it.
Dylan:So I had this conversation last night in my industry. Ai is what they're calling AI, and I think the debate over what is artificial intelligence and machine learning is going to rear its rear its head here sooner doesn't matter, because there's I, there is divergence Maybe, yeah, because you are really going to have to start class.
Dylan:Ai is a very sexy term right now, but how do we classify intelligence versus a machine that can learn something and then also continue to learn? So there's, there's going to have to be some parameters and distinctions put around that. But isn't that what we do sort of Well, and I had this conversation last night with a, with a friend, and he was AI will never be as smart as us. He goes, they can compute faster than us, but there's always something innate in the human brain that allows us to get to this higher level, and I kind of I I haven't thought. I shouldn't say I haven't thought about it, I've thought about it, but I haven't really come to my own conclusion in my head.
Dylan:So I was just playing the opposite side right now, which was what we call gray area and nuance. I think is just the amalgamation of all the ones and zeros which are the yes no answers we have in our head, and it's how we blend those yes no's that creates what our gray nuanced area is. And then my supporting fact because he goes well, there's always gray area with humans and I go well, and it kind of goes back to Sam Harris, which is has everything that has happened before you led you to make he goes well? No, I have the choice at every point. I go well, you think you do, but if you think you're making the desert divergent choice right now is because of something else previous in your life and so but he goes well and I was talking about in our industry, our big thing is going to be what data do we feed to these engines in these tools so that they can give you the best results in terms of what they're interpreting you?
Dylan:know, whether it be analyzing sales data, analyzing documentation and giving you answers to very verbose you know books of knowledge. How do you get it in the fastest way possible? And I said, well, it's going to be. Data ingestion is going to be a very critical engineering rule at some point. And he goes that's exactly it. You can feed it whatever you want and it's it'll never be us. And I said Lou, I can take sorry, I just named him out loud, friend, friend, I'll bleep that part out.
Dylan:I could take a school of children at one years old right now and I could put them on an island and I could teach them that two plus two equals seven, and I could. You know all these random things and you know what. By the time they're 35, they're going to believe what I taught them because they ingested what they thought was fact and truth. I was like, how does that make it different than the machine? I go, if you, if I release them back into the world, they'll probably be able to start to figure out things on their own. Yes, but it's going to be a very slow curve to get back to what, what we consider truth actually is, but that's also what AI is doing, right now.
Brad:Right, yes, in certain terms you are feeding it.
Dylan:They're finding things that we that are wrong, that we thought were correct in a confined system, you're feeding it what you want.
Brad:Yes, in a confined system, such as like chat, gpt, where it has more ability to scan more things, that's what it's doing, so that's that's what it. You take a cult gathering of kids that grew up in this specific way and then you release them into the general public. It's the same thing that AI is doing when it's scanning all available documents to it. Now are those kids going to learn everything? Absolutely true, no, neither is AI.
Dylan:No.
Brad:They're not all there, but is the scope going to broaden? Yes, and I know, like Sam Harris has talked about this in terms of why he fears AI and in the way that that we write code now for that to scan and compute and get better. At the point that AI becomes independent, which is getting to the scary point with things like, like the chat, gpt, oh, but you still have to input, you know things to it. It's like, but why? Like, that thing exists and it's at some point it's going to figure out how to get to the information At some point, it will just decide.
Brad:I can write code.
Dylan:It can.
Brad:It's going to write more code.
Dylan:Oh 100%.
Brad:And at the processing. So what I would tell your friend is that you're hitting on the point of the processing speed. Once it reaches that point of no return, the processing speed is the problem, because now it can do whatever it wants to and it can do it in humanly fast. It can make a million years of progress in months, yeah.
Dylan:I mean, you see that in the technology curve though, you go back to the advancements we have every day.
Brad:Yes, it is.
Dylan:You go from what we'll consider the Big Bang, the origin of man, whatever you want to call it, and then you have you know. So that's that's your X axis is time, and then Y is technological advancement, and for 99.9% of that graph, that X axis barely gets up into the Y axis. And then you hit industrial revolution and we're making quantum leaps in years. It's like we had more technological revolution in 50 year period than we did in the billion of years before.
Dylan:Yeah, and it's. And guess what? It's not linear, it's, it's just, it's um sorry, it's exponential, it's exponential. Thank you.
Brad:God that's. I do enjoy that. You just added a yarn string to something that is super interesting to me, and it is this, this idea of like, uh, what is it? Psychological anthropology, so kind of. You've seen documentaries about this, about how our bodies process food and how the food that is available to us today is not like the food of the past, and and why that could cause so many problems. Well, it's because our gut system has developed over millions of years to process things that were available for millions of years, and now, within the past 80 years, we're introduced to an abundance of all types of either excessive things that we didn't naturally find or now manmade things that were never available before.
Brad:Cows milk and and how we're incapable of dealing with that. The same thing works for your brain, and there's just going to be continuous data and studies on this over who knows how long, because of the technology that has been introduced that we're not used to Uh things that can cause anxiety or depression, or how we think about ourselves or how we deal with other human beings. It's, it's not been a thing. Even even how we live in big cities in close proximity is size wise, new within the last 150, 170 years, and so the way we live, not even the things that we're introduced to, just how many people were around and how that fucks with your, your societal relationships with people.
Dylan:Right, yeah, so they touched on that and that ADHD 2.0 book that we've talked offline about and there is actually they're, they're, they're defining it almost like type one, type two diabetes, type one diabetes, being born with type two you develop Right, and they're saying, I think I don't know if they call it VST. So there's ADHD, and then there's another one. It starts with a V and I can't remember the exact acronym, but they're essentially there's so much technology and there's so much stimulation in our world now which is visual.
Dylan:And it is. It needs to be constant that we've created essentially a type two ADHD, which is it has the exact same symptoms, it has the exact same effects psychologically, emotionally, physically, all those things and it's really hard to be able to differentiate between the two because they're so similar. But one is you're born with it and one is it has been created through these systems that you're talking about.
Brad:I was just thinking about that last night Actually like it's almost like we talk, man what?
Brad:what is happening in my world? Is my brain deficient, or is the world so coked up and going so fast that my brain actually needs additives to keep up? Now, like you, as a regular functioning human doesn't perform in the world that surrounds you anymore. So you're fine, you, just you. You are a four hour marathoner that has just gotten thrown into the Olympics. I got oh, I got to fucking step this up. I was fine, but, but everything that surrounds me now makes me feel like I am not with it.
Dylan:Yeah.
Brad:And then I again, it's not black and white. I think there's a whole bunch of different levels to it, so one the best thing that I got out of doing some of this research is a whole lot of new episodes that I want to do, One being the the, that anthropological look at psychology and how we it's. What was it something like why we don't fear like dying in a car crash, but we're acutely aware of a snake in the grass or heights or things like that?
Dylan:Needles.
Brad:Needles are new. That's just you, I know.
Dylan:Still did it, though, but some but some of those visceral thing.
Brad:When you see a spider, you know, drop from. There's these things that you have no reason. Like I was terrified of snakes, I have no reason to be terrified of snakes. I've hardly seen snakes. I don't like them, I don't know. But when I see one in the wild, nothing to do with it.
Dylan:I'd leave it alone.
Brad:It's not supposed to be a pet, it's just this, like somebody punches you in the chest. I don't get like hey, wake up, there's a snake here. Obviously you get used to that, but it does make me feel like there's some sort of innate sense that there has to be, it was it has been passed down for so long because so many people got fucked by snakes. Not literally they got, they got merked. Maybe Eve they got merked. Maybe, Add a yarn Interesting Add a yarn. Yarn Eve Snake Question work.
Dylan:Got it there goes the Christian base. Well, so so that look at it but I mean that is, there are innate fears because, like you're saying, that has been passed down. That is, you're going to have to help me out here. Why am I? Why am I struggling right now? It's probably that red breast. It's rude.
Brad:Just, I don't know, he's talking about whiskey, Mm, hmm, 12. So, yeah, that's. That's one of them. Another one is the the idea of binaries, and like how we we like to think of binaries and you know black and white good and evil yeah.
Dylan:I've been thinking a lot about that and that's what I was getting back to is, I think, what we call great. I think everything is binary. I think you can, I think it can be broken down to ones and zeros at the end of the day, but I think it's there's so many millions of ones and zeros that turn into those gray areas.
Brad:So a future episode, we'll do an introduction of Jacques Derrida, who's a French philosopher.
Dylan:Okay.
Brad:Postmodernist and croissants.
Dylan:Do we need croissants for the episode? Maybe?
Brad:Oh, we could do a wine, I could do a wine at Croissants. Okay, okay, his. Have you heard of the word deconstruction?
Dylan:I understand the term deconstruction. I've not, I've not, I've not.
Brad:Okay, so in the classical philosophy sense deconstruction, no, give me your sense, don't look anything up, just give me like your sense, because it's a very commonly used word now and you got to remember that he came up with this in like the seventies. So it's 1970s.
Dylan:Yes, okay, so he it's. He didn't invent the word deconstructed.
Brad:Philosophically, yeah, I mean, yeah, deconstructed, yeah, there wasn't a thing really before him, and I think that's the idea of that. From that we have pulled.
Dylan:And people use it. So yeah, like what we would use in today's vernacular would be there, how we would understand it would be to take items apart piece by piece till you get to the very, you know, most simplistic items of it. You know you take, you take something apart, okay.
Brad:Yeah, totally wrong. Yeah, all right, I can't wait to hear it. So, and part of it is just the word. He could have used a different word. It's not great, because if you say I'm going to deconstruct this, what would I? I'm going to unbuild it. That's basically what he, what he. That's what that word sounds like, but that's not what he means Exactly. So I hate him already.
Dylan:We're going to drink Italian wine, just to fucking spite him.
Brad:I don't know what that is.
Dylan:A Barolo, I don't know. Okay, I trust you so that's that's another one. The relationship between text and meaning.
Brad:Oh bro, Wow. You want to get into semantics, oh no, how many of you want to be bored out of your fucking?
Dylan:mind.
Brad:Oh no.
Dylan:We're going to.
Brad:But also it's one of the most interesting things I've ever read about.
Dylan:We're not going to have a viewer base after this at all. No, but they're not even the Christians.
Brad:There are some, some really interesting topics that he dives into and and some fun ways to lay them out. So we'll get to that. We'll get to some of that psychology. To end on this, I had some notes and I think this deserves maybe a full episode. One that loves Jordan Peterson, Take note.
Dylan:I don't have any comment.
Brad:Okay, I, I texted you the other day that I kind of went down a rabbit hole on him and you said you weren't a fan. I I've never been a fan, I would say, but I've heard it. I mean, he's on fucking everything. He is on everything. He is the fucking Dr Phil of podcasts right now, where he just blew up and and now he's everywhere. Partly he's everywhere because people want to try to catch him or they want to try to get them, you know in these, in these debates, which is such a terrible way to go into a debate.
Dylan:You should never, you should never go with the intention of catching or getting if you're going, you should hold.
Brad:you should hold someone to a standard If you're going into a debate wanting to get someone, you're probably going to get fucked. Yeah, Because chances are that person knows how to debate, which is why you hate them in the first place. And if there's one thing I will say about Jordan Peterson is his rhetoric is pretty top notch like a toy guy. But the more and more I listen to him, I wonder, I think you, I wonder you about the information.
Dylan:I think you and him fall apart, probably at the same place, and I don't even want to say fall apart, and with Sam Harris, I think is Jordan goes down the morality through, well, what he calls religion or virtuous stories, and you know yeah, there's a part of that, but also it's just a part of it almost feels like he's always telling a story without but that's but that. That was Sam Harris's point. Is Jordan Harris believes in the power of.
Dylan:Peterson, jordan, sorry. Jordan Peterson believes in the power of storing, telling, but then those stories go back to biblical literature.
Brad:It's archetypal.
Dylan:It is archetypal Whereas, but that's his basis for everything and that's and that's where Sam differs and he's like there's some good in there to take notes on, but I don't think we should base everything on those, because there's stories in the present that we should also be telling and trying to understand as well.
Brad:So the long and short of this part that got me thinking about the duality is is there's a very pretty kind of famous clips out there and if you want to check them out, go to YouTube Jordan Peterson, monster or anything like that and you'll pull up a whole bunch of different ones. And he, he bases this, I believe, on Carl Jung's shadow hypothesis, which has a lot more to do with, like the it and the ego. And then there's this unconscious part of you that young calls the shadow, and he kind of takes this and says he turns this into a monster. And he says you know, in order to be virtuous, you can't just be harmless, you have to be a monster and then not use it Right. So he, he kind of goes on this tangent and when you, when you break it down and you get these little sound bite clips, you're like that's right.
Brad:Like if a meek person doesn't kill anyone, like yeah, that's what is, that's, that's their nature, but if, if you're a truly dangerous person and you don't kill someone, clearly that's a lot of self restraint. I might have some problems with that. But it really hits on the duality of of like you, you have this thing in you. That could just be awful if you unleashed it. And also you're living this thing trying to be the best version of yourself, and both of those things are within you and that, to me, sums up the duality of man is that you, you are a Jekyll and Hyde. It's that sliding scale of where do you land on any given day, at any given time, as to which part is you?
Dylan:Yeah, and I think, jordan, like you're saying, there's sound bites there, there's the, there's the extremes, and we talk about that. You know, and you you made that in your notes which is you got the elite special forces, the guys that walk around every day, and they're, they're just, you know, providing better for the world. Now that they're out doing, you know they're not continuing on in that profession, they're, they're wholesome, and that's an easy way to, you know, draw a motion and attention. But really, and you know, to touch on the meek, anyone really has the opportunity and that really sure, and I think it's a little short side I think you make some great points. It's a little short side for Jordan to think that's the worst thing in life. Anyone, at any moment can really make anyone's life hell. You know whether that's a rumor, whether that's socially.
Dylan:You know, engineering some situation, fabricating, presenting information. You know we talk about Brené Brown espousing bullshit. That shouldn't be out there. So it really is.
Brad:This is his archetypal view of it.
Dylan:So it's like violence is the the easiest way to explain it, but it's like, at any given day, you have the opportunity to make somebody else's life. I don't want to necessarily say hell, you do, but you can make someone's life harder, and so for you to restrain yourself and not do that and take what is everyone says is the higher road out, I'm just you just rake the other decision Right, or do you make it? It's so hard sometimes, but I think, yeah, he oversimplifies. I think that's probably how he knows he's going to be able to grab the largest base of people, though.
Brad:It's easy, the oversimplification is what is super appealing, I think, to a wide.
Dylan:there is that day to day and I get into it with people on a professional and personal basis, it's like it's easier for me not to introduce myself into that situation. They're like, well, you should, you know you should man up and do something about it. You're like it doesn't matter, I just don't want to be a part of a situation because it's they'll be fine and I'll be fine and we can all move on. And that's the thing is, why would we introduce more chaos into the world than is necessary?
Brad:So that little paragraph that I have right there, I think, in the end, I think that that deserves a closer look and a part of that which will get its own look, which doesn't have to do with the anthropology part of it, but it does have to do with some of the new stuff that we're learning about and I saw and I will I'll find this out for when we do the episode but the way, the way the brain works or doesn't work, so when we're talking psychologically, philosophically, and why we might do this, or the id and the ego, and we have these urges within us, now there's a whole new scope of science that can do brain scans and figure out what parts of your brain are actually functioning or not and what that looks like. And there is a doctor that has done a scan and I think it was. It was someone that was convicted of murder and I can't remember if it was a mass shooting or something along those, or if it was a familial killing or something like that, and didn't die. That kid didn't die, which is part of the reason we probably don't have more stats like this, because everybody that commits these crimes dies. You can't obviously do a brain scan on somebody that's dead and he's like it was by far.
Brad:I mean, this kid was in his teens, I think, and he said it was the most like decrepit looking brain he'd ever seen in his life. So we can sit here and look at Jordan Peterson and his monster, and this kid was obviously not able to control it like you should be able to. Okay, true, but how much of that is out of somebody's grasp, or not? So that plays a whole new role into morality. Where, at what level, are you functioning and at what? Where's morality?
Dylan:start. Yeah, what's the? Where's the level?
Brad:Yeah, oh man.
Dylan:I mean it's, I'm not going to sleep tonight.
Brad:But you can look at it from from all tight, I mean, obviously we see a range of people like look at a at the spectrum of autism. You have a range there that is huge. Oh yeah, you've got the. So also, now we're finding out, we have a range of people that seem to be functioning quote unquote functioning in society that may not be at all on the same playing field in terms of brain function, and that's that's kind of like a new interesting thing to me. Um, because you can. You can theorize all you want to about human nature and things like that, but there is an actual physical element, just like you're talking about ADHD, right? So there is an actual physical part of that. And then there's also this other thing that is manifested, and they're two separate things. And I think morality and people might be a little bit like you look at true psychopaths. That's a. That's a physical, uh, manifestation of how their brain is working.
Dylan:You know, and then morality wins with the populace. So you know more people kind of act like um psychopaths. Morality shifts a little bit, I mean.
Brad:I don't, I don't like that. There's my head. I don't want to talk about that right now.
Dylan:I'm just saying the populace wins.
Brad:If it's, if it's enough, if it's enough.
Dylan:We go, we go to Mexico city and we're learning about all the history. The Aztecs, the Mayans, the Omex and the Aztecs were blood thirsty, like they just enjoyed it in that to them Like, yeah, ritual killings, all this stuff, it was fine, it was moral, the populace enjoyed it.
Brad:It's what the civilization was set up on.
Dylan:Yeah, so it's just the populace wins. So morality at some points, popularity contest. We're not going to make your head hurt anymore, though.
Brad:Yeah, so there there's a. This was a 15 minute way of saying that there's a lot more shit coming down the pipe.
Dylan:I feel like we're always just introducing more stuff. This is bad. We're sorry everyone. We're disappointing ourselves.
Brad:So don't play with dynamite, don't go around the fields that smell bad.
Dylan:You think that, like the Nobel, like the Nobel prize, like the medal they give you, they got a little like dynamite hidden somewhere in there?
Brad:No, it would be funny if it was just like a stack, just like you know, like you see those triangular stacks of dynamite. So that's what the medal was. So we get absolutely hammered.
Dylan:After winning it. I'm like I'm the bomb man. Okay, that was, that was down. That was bad, I know.
Brad:That was real bad. You know, just you can love your nation, but maybe just not that much. You know there's some issues there, I guess.
Dylan:I guess probably the thing to round out with this conversation is maybe be a person for the world all the time. That's not bad.
Brad:Yeah, it's not bad that that gets us going in the right path.
Dylan:That and I don't. Yeah your choices. They're not, they're not easy.
Brad:And it's only. They might not even be yours. They might already be in up for you, Based on your past life.
Dylan:We're going to have to get Sam Harris now. No Good luck, I know All right?
Brad:Well, anything to add? Yeah, more funnies coming next time. I thought this was pretty funny. I can't do this every time.
Dylan:Why? Because I like to laugh. We laughed, I laughed, that's good. It was fun when Martin was here last time. Great, okay, can't wait. Bye, everyone Are you still here.
Brad:It's over Go home. Go.