2024-11-11 The Saad Truth Physicist Dr. David Deutsch Returns - Science, Mathematics, and Jew Hatred
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Duration: 01:23:55
Transcript
Gad Saad
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David Deutsch
Nice to be back. Thanks very much.
Gad Saad
Oh, I wish that millions of people would have watched our chat, although it is starting to grow in numbers. I did write on social media and I wasn’t trying to frivolously compliment you, but it was one of the most delightful conversations I had, if only because you allowed me to go back into my computer science and Turing days and so on. So I thought we’d start off kind of wrapping up our technical conversation and then we’d go into what we didn’t get a chance to do last time, which is talk about some political issues, Jew hatred and so on. As we start, the first thing I want to do is point to some people that we mentioned last time. Look at this beauty. Here’s Kurt Gödel, which we had mentioned linking him to Turing and how they approach roughly the same problem from different perspectives. I thought that was a brilliant insight on your part. So there’s that one. Stop me any time you want to make comments about any of these guys. Maybe it’s just me flexing my obsessive tsundoku, which is a Japanese term that means someone who is obsessively a book collector, which I definitely suffer from that psychiatric condition. This is an unbelievable book by Jim Holt discussing the walks that Gödel and Einstein would go on. If you have any stories to tell, interject because I’m just going to go through these books and then we could start. Anything so far comes to mind?
David Deutsch
Well, Wheeler used to tell the story and I’m sure this is well known to everybody about Princeton, that they all got increasingly worried about Gödel because he got increasingly kind of paranoid and crazy and so on. That included Einstein getting worried. So they would go to his house and he started refusing food because he feared it might be poisoned and so on. So I mean, of course, I didn’t know any of these people personally. It was before my time. So I only know stories that people have told me.
Gad Saad
Right. Well, actually I’m glad you mentioned the point about Gödel’s paranoia because I thought about doing an episode where I specifically talk about that within the same mind that can create the profundity that we talked about last time, Gödel’s incompleteness theorem and so on. That same mind is able to completely misfire into thinking that now that my wife is dead, there is no food taster around and they’re after me. And that juxtaposition of the most brilliant of mind and the most paranoid of mind residing in the same cranium is a truly incredible thing.
David Deutsch
And even more so because to do the work that he did on logic, he needed to have a much firmer grip on the notion of truth than most people do because he had to realize that things can be true but not provable, things can be true but not knowable. And all that had to be clear in his mind. Otherwise his work wouldn’t have made sense.
Gad Saad
So has anybody, I mean I’m sure someone has, but has anybody precisely done the analysis on exactly what you just said in a psychiatric perspective or psychoanalytic perspective? Do you know of any such works?
David Deutsch
I wouldn’t know. I mean, I’m not a historian. You’d think somebody should have, right? Yeah. Therefore you probably also think they probably haven’t.
Gad Saad
Fair enough. Now this other gentleman, we also talked about one of my other heroes because he is the ultimate polymath. This guy, this gorgeous guy, John von Neumann obtained his PhD at 23. So for you guys who are lagging, get off your couch. 23 years old. Now I’m going to do four guys that are specifically physicists. We’re going to start with the granddaddy of them. Oh, I’m very proud of this book. 1968. Oh boy, look at this. Now let’s start with Isaac Newton. I just saw a little clip by Brian Greene, the string theory guy, where he was doing a comparison between Einstein and Newton, as you might typically expect. And he was actually arguing that, in a sense, notwithstanding that Einstein is no dummy, that Newton was more impressive because while he said he’s standing on the shoulders of giants, he really was much earlier where there wasn’t as much stuff. I mean, he’s coming up with the stuff to solve the problems. So what’s your view as a professional physicist? I know maybe you don’t like to play those games, but if you had to compare those two guys, do you put one as a bit ahead of the other or you can?
David Deutsch
I think it would be generally conceded that Newton had the sort of, what would you call it, the more powerful mind of the two. In fact, I don’t know that one should describe Einstein as having a powerful mind. I mean, he was bold and able to challenge I think he was able to challenge much more in the pre-existing theory that existed before him than Newton was. Newton was in a way, he really was building on Galileo and he was saying, yes, Descartes is wrong, but the kind of explanation that he gave for physics was the same kind as Descartes. He was just saying Descartes is wrong, it’s not vortices, it’s forces. Whereas Einstein and Newton of course was also a significant figure in the history of mathematics. He was an amazing mathematician. Well, Einstein was not an amazing mathematician. He had to ask the advice of mathematicians to formulate his theory properly. So I think they were different. I would say Einstein was the greatest physicist of all time. Newton may well have been the greatest, what would you call it, thinker or at least a stem thinker.
Gad Saad
Before that acronym existed. All right, fair enough. Let’s move on. Now these are not, well, I guess maybe not quite at the same level. I just recently got this one. I don’t know if you can read it. Edward Teller, I think a Nobel Prize winner. Now would he, forgive my ignorance, would he have been someone that you could have met or this was before?
David Deutsch
I did meet him once at a conference, but not enough to have a conversation. I was at a conference where I was speaking and Wheeler was there, Wheeler had organized it. Teller was there and was sitting at the back booming out criticisms.
Gad Saad
Ah, one of those guys.
David Deutsch
Yeah, and I think I met him to the extent of shaking hands, but no more than that.
Gad Saad
Well, it’s interesting that you say about the guy sitting in the back, levying all sorts of criticism because this guy, although it wasn’t in this book, we did mention him briefly last time and you said that you met him. Richard Feynman tells a story in, not in this book, this is a biography, but in his, surely you must be joking Mr. Feynman. He tells a story where he went, he was a doctoral student, I think, was he at Princeton? Yes, I think so. And so he’s giving the departmental talk, which I certainly had to do before I go out onto the academic market, which is a very ominous thing because all of the big brains are there to tear you to pieces. Now, in his case, all the people who are there in the audience happen to be some of the biggest physicists of the 20th century. And so as he’s presenting his stuff, there were some guys that were very much a la Teller that you were saying, just kind of hammering him and so on. And this gentleman from the back row or something, turns out to be Einstein, says something to the effect of, don’t you think we owe the young man the courtesy to allow him to finish his thoughts? And then we could start asking him. And then apparently after that, not a single peep out of anyone. So you don’t have to shout loudly for people to respect you. Had you heard that story?
David Deutsch
No, no. Yes, sounds good.
Gad Saad
Those sociology of science stories, I mean, we’re a storytelling animal. So hearing those stories is really an orgasm to the ear. And I guess the last guy I’m going to bring up, and then one other quick book, Heisenberg, how do we, what do we, what do we feel about him?
David Deutsch
Oh, well, so he’s a very controversial figure, both in physics and outside physics. So now I could tell a story about Wheeler and him, but I’m afraid I have forgotten the punchline of the story. All I remember is that after the war, Heisenberg was kind of shunned by the other physicists who were either Western or had fled to the West. And Wheeler and his wife were once at a conference in, I forget where, Copenhagen, something. And they went into a cafe and there was Heisenberg. And so the question was, should we go and sit with him? You know, because they knew him very well and fellow physicists and so on or not. And I don’t know the punchline.
Gad Saad
Oh, come on. All right. I have to track it down to see if I could find it. And maybe I’ll post it in the description. Last book, and then we get on to other things. Now, this one is not exactly in your area, but Fermat’s last theorem. Now, the reason I just got this book, by the way, so I haven’t read it yet. I have a personal story linking to the solving of Fermat’s last theorem. So when I was an undergraduate student in mathematics, you know, obviously all the students are, you know, pretty brainy, but even within that ecosystem, there’s always someone, you know, that becomes sort of legendary that’s above everybody else. And this gentleman, I don’t think he’d mind if I mentioned his name, because it’s a compliment. His name is Henri Darmon, D-A-R-M-O-N, who’s now a full professor at McGill University where I had studied. Actually, I had his father as my professor when I was doing an MBA at McGill. Anyways, when Henri Darmon finished his PhD, and I think was doing a postdoc maybe at either Harvard or Princeton, Andrew Wiles, who ended up solving Fermat’s last theorem, had sent out the proof to some people to go through it. And as the story goes, as I heard, Henri Darmon was one of those young postdocs who had actually, you know, his eyes had gone over the proof before others had. So that’s my claim to fame in terms of being linked to Fermat’s last theorem. The other thing I was going to say about it, and then I’ll cede the floor to you, what amazes me about Fermat’s last theorem is that I could literally explain the structure of the problem to my now 12-year-old son. And the difference between simply being able to pose the problem and then solving the problem is arguably the biggest distance possible, right? Because there are a lot of problems in math that might be very difficult to solve, but the lay person can’t understand even what the problem is. Here you’ve got the extreme. It’s very easy to state and almost impossible to solve. Any other similar problems that you think fit that model?
David Deutsch
Well, in mathematics, there are plenty like the four color problem, for instance.
Gad Saad
That’s true.
David Deutsch
Um, in physics, it’s kind of, it’s more the other way around. There are problems that are very easy to state, like is space finite or infinite? Right. And it sounds as though, you know, it should be straightforward to either work that out or look through a telescope or whatever, but it’s not. It’s the more you look at it, the more complicated it gets. And physicists have kept changing their minds on this issue, you know, on a time scale of a couple of decades. So that’s why I always, I’m always reluctant to give an opinion on things like, is it really true that knowledge can continue forever, literally into infinity? And I try to explain that, it’s not really a meaningful question because it depends on which cosmological model you believe, or you favor, I shouldn’t say believe. And cosmological models are being overturned on a time scale of, you know, less than a generation. Right. So one would look very silly pontificating on the basis of the current theory. Right. So that’s, I think it’s, that’s different from mathematics. For a start when, in mathematics, when something is proved, there’s after a while, I mean, even Andrew Wiles’ proof was first criticized and then he had to fix the mistakes. But, you know, after a while, after the consensus has settled down, the mathematical proofs are very rarely overturned. What often happens though, is that they become uninteresting. So, you know, people realize that there are wider ways of looking at these mathematical objects and, you know, there’s a Pythagoras’s theorem and there’s better versions of Pythagoras’s theorem and so on. But what’s interesting, I mean, you said that sometimes we solve something and then it becomes uninteresting.
Gad Saad
There’s a similar point to be made as relating specifically to Fermat. When people ask me, well, you know, should we judge the value of research by its applicability potential? And then I usually bring up the example of many of Fermat’s solutions sat for hundreds of years collecting dust until you then had cryptography where suddenly you have an application to these otherwise completely esoteric problems that nobody cared about for hundreds of years. So what are your thoughts on that? Do you think, are you an epistemological purist in the sense of there is knowledge to be discovered, all I care about is discovering it, I leave it for someone else to care about how I apply it? Or are you of the slightly less purist version?
David Deutsch
No, no, there needs to be applications to what I’m thinking about. I think there’s a danger to researching into something that one isn’t interested in. So this question of is this of fundamental importance or will it be of fundamental importance 200 years hence or forever or whatever, those are dangerous questions. Because if the answer is different from whatever you’re burning to know, whatever you’re burning to find out, then well, that’s obviously a dangerous way to live one’s life. Because even if you’re right, you will have sacrificed your life and not find out until after you’re dead that you were right.
Gad Saad
Well, what amazes me about your point about sacrificing one’s life is that, you know, Andrew Wiles took a problem that he knew for hundreds of years, the top minds had failed at it. And had really the chutzpah, right? To say, well, you know what, I’m going to take a really huge gamble here. I’m going to go up into the attic where my wife is going to feed me the food underneath the crack of the door. And I think that I’m probably not going to solve it, but I’m going to gamble. I mean, that seems like an extra, I mean, it’s either a delusional or a supreme sense of confidence that I’m going to succeed where everybody else had failed. Do you have a sense of which one it was?
David Deutsch
I think, I don’t know, I haven’t read about his life in that way. But I think that solving a problem is not, how can I put this? It’s not the reason for working on it. That is, if one works on a problem with great joy and discovery, because, you know, if one works on a problem for a long time, even if one never solves it, one realizes, approaches that looked right and one then understands why they were wrong. And Popper says, you know, the, I can never say this in the beautiful way that he said it, but something like that philosophy consists of finding a problem, falling in love with it, living with it for the rest of your life. Whether you solve it or not is neither here nor there, but you live with it. And if you should solve it, it kind of has the tone of, if you should be unfortunate enough to solve it, then it will have a number of enchanting problem children. And I would add usually more than one, right? Whether you succeed or fail, you will have created problems and you will have created joy for yourself and for anyone else who happens to think the same way. Of which, you know, there is usually one or more, like Van Gogh at least had his brother who believed in him. But I think he didn’t care. He didn’t care who believed in him. He wanted to do his thing.
Gad Saad
It’s the second time, I mean, the first time we chatted, you mentioned Popper with a lot of admiration. Now you mentioned him again. So should I presume that if we played the game, who would you like to, which historical figure would you like to invite over for dinner? Popper would be on top of that list?
David Deutsch
He would. Again, I did meet him once, but it wasn’t a very productive meeting, although it was quite long.
Gad Saad
Yes. Just one on one or amongst other people?
David Deutsch
No, I was really the, I was a graduate student at the time. It was Bryce DeWitt who went to see Popper and I drove him there in my car. And so I went in and I was sort of, participated in the conversation because it was, it was much of it was about the many worlds interpretation or the Everett interpretation. Popper had trashed several times and DeWitt wanted to explain to him why he was wrong, why he had been wrong to trash it. And again, I’ve told this story many times again, like Feynman meeting Popper was one of the highlights of my life. Really amazing. And yes, I would have dinner with him today if he could be brought back to life. He seemed to accept DeWitt’s points and asked the right questions. And at the end he said, well, because of what you say, I’m going to have to change a whole chapter in my book, which is now with the publisher. And I will, so then the book came out, I forget which one it was. And we looked eagerly in the book and it was the same old.
Gad Saad
Ah, he didn’t make the changes.
David Deutsch
He didn’t know. And I think he must have backslid as soon as we went out the door, he must have backslid.
Gad Saad
Well, that speaks to actually something that I’ve recently mentioned on several occasions, because the question that was posed to me speaks exactly to this point about the inability of most people to change their positions once anchored very solidly somewhere. The question that I was posed was about a year ago, it was actually a British psychiatrist who invited me on his show. And at the end of the conversation, he said to me, you’ve been a professor for 30 plus years, studying human behavior. What is the singular phenomenon that has most surprised you about the human condition? Or I’m paraphrasing his words. And yeah, I’ve never been asked that question before. And so I paused for a moment and then I said, well, I would have to say that the inability of people to change their positions once anchored, irrespective of the amount of evidence that you might otherwise offer them. And so it’s a bit disappointing to think that even a mind as great as Karl Popper fits under the umbrella of what I just said.
David Deutsch
Yeah. Well, again, rather like the issue of whether it’s of overriding importance to solve the problem or for the problem to be important. I think having a conversation, it’s not of overriding importance for either side to persuade the other. What’s important is that you learn something and the something that you learn may not be, oh, I was wrong about that, or I was slightly wrong about that, or I was partly wrong. It may be something less tangible. It may be as little as, now I understand who the enemy is. But it can be much more complicated than that. And I think, as Popper also says in his book, The Myth of the Framework, that the clash of ideas is more important than anyone changing their mind to the right or wrong idea. The clash is itself fruitful.
Gad Saad
Right. Yeah. Beautiful. Okay. So now I want to slightly segue to more political issues, more stuff that’s in line with some of the things that I discussed in The Parasitic Mind, but I’m going to segue to that via physics. So I talk about in The Parasitic Mind the story that happened, the regrettable situation that happened with a physicist, Italian physicist. I can’t remember his first name. I think it’s Daniele Strumia. Do you know who that is? Are you familiar with that story? So this is a physicist who was working, I think, with both at a university, I can’t remember if it was the University of Pisa. I don’t remember the university. And also at CERN.
David Deutsch
I think I have heard the story. Yes, go on. Oh, okay. So maybe you heard- He said something politically incorrect and they threw him out or something like that.
Gad Saad
Yeah, he was at a conference. It was a gender and physics conference. So, I mean, it’s literally on gender and physics. And so he goes up and provides a bibliometric analysis. So for those of you who don’t know what bibliometrics is, it’s the quantification of science. Right. So, you know, for example, who cites whom. And so you can, with the data that we have today, we could ask some really tight hypotheses about the sociology of science, the psychology of science, and so on. So that’s called bibliometrics and scientometrics. So it’s very objective. You’re using real objective data to measure whatever you want to measure. And so he basically presents bibliometric data that is countering the narrative that, you know, it’s the patriarchy that’s keeping the women down and blah, blah, blah. And he gets completely trashed. You know, he’s fired here. He’s fired there. Of course, I invite him on my show because it turns out that I’m the repository of all free-thinking rebels. And now here’s the part that really pissed me off, David. Physicists got together under the Orwellian name Particles for Justice, where they put out this open letter, you know, chastising this Nazi Strumia for saying, and, you know, guys like Sean Carroll and so on. The reason why I’m setting up this whole problem is because you’d like to think that physicists, by virtue of what they study, would be less likely to succumb to parasitic ideas. But it turns out that that’s not true. Any human mind, including that of physicists, could be completely ravaged by parasitic ideas. What are your thoughts, Dr. Deutsch?
David Deutsch
Well, I’m not sure. All I know about this is what I’ve seen on the internet. And I’ve seen these bar charts where physicists and engineers are usually at the bottom of the scale of susceptibility to woke. So, you know, they are susceptible, but they’re not just as susceptible. Another thing that occurred to me, I didn’t know this part, as you just said, I didn’t know that this was at a conference on gender. And did you say gender and physics?
Gad Saad
Gender and physics, yes.
David Deutsch
Um, I can’t imagine circumstances under which I would be interested in the topic gender and physics. Um, it’s, it’s like, uh, it’s like washing machines and physics, you know, or actually that’s, that’s more connected. Right. Gender and physics.
Gad Saad
Because washing machines have some physical reality. Okay, right.
David Deutsch
Yeah. Um, so I wouldn’t have gone and I, it makes me suspicious of the story. That he went to this conference sort of all instantly. Well, I can’t, why did he go to such a thing?
Gad Saad
What if he’s trying to argue precisely to your point that those two words should not be linked together, right? I mean, science frees us, as I explained in parasitic mind, it frees us from the shackles of our personal identities. That’s why science is beautiful. So he went there, maybe naively thinking, well, wait a second. I will present objective, quantifiable bibliometrics that shows that your narrative is nonsense. Isn’t that worthwhile?
David Deutsch
Um. Well, you know, it’s up to him what he, you know, what he devotes his creativity to, but I agree with what you just said and you didn’t have to do a study. And I also, you know, I didn’t have to do a study to agree with you. And I’m not moved by the study in other words. And, um, I don’t think I’ve ever persuaded an audience of something. So I think usually when I persuade someone of something, it’s, it’s having a one-to-one, uh, quiet conversation without millions of people looking on, uh, the, because then you can, you can both be pursuing the truth and you can admit that you made a mistake just now. You should have said so and so without, without, you know, the whole world jumping on you. And similarly, I wouldn’t go and if I lay down the law to an audience of physicists who I know will disagree with me, uh, it is by way of, um, uh, revealing that there’s an alternative view out there, not of persuading them. That’s, that’s not what I would want to do. Um, so yeah, I don’t know. I, the situation is bad. I agree with you.
Gad Saad
Well, I was going to say one more example of a, of a physicist gone, uh, you’re too British and polite to say it, but I’ll say it for you. That’s gone completely insane and wacko. I don’t know how much we would call him a physicist. Uh, Neil deGrasse Tyson recently explained to all of us plebs, all of us who are part of the great unwashed, all of us dummies, that it’s ridiculous to think that, you know, gender or sex, most people use them interchangeably is binary. It’s, it’s completely on a spectrum. And then there’s a clip where you can see him doing that. Sean Carroll has also said that now the reason why I, it’s not because I, you know, I have physics envy and I want to pick on otherwise super smart physicists, but it speaks to my point, notwithstanding the comment that you made that maybe the scale is such that physicists are less likely to be parasitized. Once you are a scientist and you’re willing to argue that biological sex is on a spectrum, then we better really contact Charles Darwin and explain to him that a sexual selection theory using two phenotypes called male and female is wrong so that someone could espouse such nonsense upsets me. And maybe we have different temperaments. If you upset me by attacking and raping the truth, I’m not going to do the one-on-one quiet conversation that you do. I’m going on social media to a million people and telling the world that you’re a schmuck. Am I wrong for doing that?
David Deutsch
Well, as I said, everyone should do what gives them joy. I think I, I’ve been following you for a while on X and I think you do sterling work and you, it involves sometimes insulting people because they are very wrong. Right. And exactly. And I think, I think this, the way you do it helps countless other people realize that they shouldn’t go down that avenue because they will end up being very wrong. I don’t think I could do that. It’s like, it’s not in my temperament. Yes, exactly. Uh, it, even though, you know, each, each, each person can do what they’re good at.
Gad Saad
But the fact that you’re able to say, look, different people have different dispositions and they’re going to come at the same problem in different ways is a lot more charitable because, so let me give you the non-Deutsch response to some of my interjections. Professor Saad, yours, and here comes a bunch of compliments, but why is it that you go with such spice after someone? And I usually will have to explain to them contrary to David Deutsch getting it is that look at, I will use a wide range of weaponry from my arsenal of persuasion strategies to achieve a goal. The ultimate goal is always to assiduously defend truth. I don’t wake up and say today, I’d like to be frivolously mean against Neil deGrasse Tyson. If anything, I would be upset if he sent me an email and said, you know, you really hurt my feelings because I, it’s never the goal to do that, but it’s saying, look, if you espouse certain positions publicly, and if I think that in the deep recesses of your mind, you know that you’re spreading nonsense, all bets are off.
David Deutsch
Yeah. And as I said, in your case, I’m sure you achieve your goal, not to the people you’re attacking, but to everyone else.
Gad Saad
Right. The audience effect. Exactly. Yes. Okay. One more topic that’s sciencey, and then let’s get into some politics, Jew hatred, and so on, which may not be the right way to end the conversation, but maybe we’ll end it on a positive note. So Auguste Comte, do you know who Auguste Comte is?
David Deutsch
Yes, but I’ve never read any.
Gad Saad
Okay. But the general idea for the listeners and viewers who don’t know about him, he is some argue the father of sociology. He created something that he called the hierarchy of the sciences. And in a sense, it was inverted to what we typically say. He said, look, it’s a lot more difficult to study sociology because it has these very complicated beings called human beings with their brains and so on. I’m paraphrasing. Whereas, you know, physics, yes, it’s very hard, but there’s greater predictability in studying the things that a physicist would study than trying to understand the most complex machine that we know of. It’s called the human brain. What are your thoughts on that argument? Do you think, and it’s not just to engage in a frivolous who is smarter, but I actually, you know, contrary to what Feynman would say where, you know, he says, oh, but the social sciences, that’s not real science. What do you mean? You think the study of human beings is not within the purview of science? That’s a silly statement to make. So what are your thoughts on all that?
David Deutsch
The study of human beings is only partly a science because of the inherent limitations of science. The most important one of which is that it’s impossible for anyone to predict the growth of knowledge, to predict the course that knowledge will take in the future. And that is because if they could predict it today, then it wouldn’t be in the future and they would know it today. So that’s an argument due to Popper. And it means that there’s a fundamental limitation on predictability in any of the human philosophies. Oh, you don’t use the word sciences. I noticed you didn’t say you’re trying to be precise. If I’m trying to be precise. Yes. I mean, there are scientific aspects to the human sciences, such as say, psychology also deals with things like optical illusions and why an optical illusion happens in some situations and not in others and so on. But once we get to issues where human creativity is involved, human free will, and so on, then I think it’s fundamentally impossible to predict the outcome of a of a human thought process or of the thought process of lots of humans. It is possible though to explain it retrospectively. And that’s not ruled out by this Popper view of what sciences you can. My favorite example is you can explain the Napoleonic Wars and what happened. You can form a view about who the better general was, Napoleon or Wellington. You can form a view about who won, why Napoleon won the battle of Austerlitz and so on, why Napoleon fell and so on. But you could not have done that in 1800, no matter how much knowledge you had about the human condition and no matter how much data you had about previous battles. Because Napoleon was a phenomenon that either, depending on how you look at it, either it had never happened before or it had only happened a handful of times and they’re sufficiently different in other ways to be able to draw a conclusion. And if there had been a way of drawing a conclusion, then Napoleon was very scientifically minded. You could have gone to him with your bit of paper and showed him the equations and said, look, if you continue like this, you’ll lose. And he would have said, are we? And then he would have changed what he did. And that’s really the same thing as Popper’s argument. So you still couldn’t have predicted it because you couldn’t have predicted the effect of the thing that he did that was different from all those previous dictators or whatever you call Napoleon. So, and what’s true of dictators, I think is true of every human being. I think there are no two humans alike. I think the difference between two humans is much greater than the difference between say two biological species. They, you know, like just like a species can go extinct through not creating the knowledge that would be necessary to survive. So a human can make arbitrarily large errors.
David Deutsch
That’s precisely because of free will. If there was a limit on the size of error you could make, then you could avoid errors just by seeing that you’re coming up to the limit. And then you know that you’re going to the limit. Right. And then you know that your next idea is bound to be true because otherwise you’d pass the limit of size of error. So if I can say one more thing.
Gad Saad
Please say as many things as you want.
David Deutsch
Well, it’s about evolution. One way in which people purport to explain human behavior is that they draw an analogy with animal behavior and evolution. So now I think that such explanations are never true for various reasons, but they may look true because of the existence of memes. So if you say, you know, the reason that that men sometimes go mad with rage if they suspect that their mate is unfaithful, then you could say, well, that’s because genes for doing that would survive better than genes for not doing that. But that’s also true of memes. And the thing is that meme evolution is much more sensitive to selection pressures and much more sophisticated. So animals who try to keep their mates from having sex with other people, they can only use very crude methods. I mean, they don’t know what a mate is. They don’t know what an offspring is. They don’t know that something in them wants to, you know, all they know is that if a young animal of that species smells wrong, they will kill it. You know, they don’t know why they’re doing that. Whereas a human can conjecture what they want to have a pure bloodline for, what they want it for. And it might have started with some ruler, some ancient prehistoric king or ruler, you know, saying to his son, you know, one day all this will be yours. And so why does he say that to his son and not to his daughter or to his adopted son or to his stepson? I think suppose that originally it was because he had a greater influence over his son. He thinks that his son, when he takes over, will continue to run all this wonderful thing that they have in the same way that he would, whereas with his other possible heirs, he’s not so sure. And so he made sure that his wife was never out of his sight. And so his son also did because he was taking his father’s advice. And so a meme was born. And the meme, I’m oversimplifying here, but the meme could have had the same underlying logic as the gene that you’re imagining, but I don’t think that gene exists or could exist. But the argument for why people behave like that might still be largely true. So, all right, so a lot to unpack there.
Gad Saad
You’re ready? You’re passing your seat belt. Okay. So I think actually I agree with a lot of what you’re saying, but they’re covered in evolutionary theory. So number one, your distinction of genes and memes is in a sense I can read. Well, first of all, you’re exactly right. We’re both a biological and cultural animal. Hence that’s why Richard Dawkins was right when he said, genetic evolution is the propagation of genes, memetic evolution is the propagation of our memes. You and I are having a conversation right now. People are going to consume that and those memes are going to live on in other people’s brains.
David Deutsch
Okay. That’s fine.
Gad Saad
I can repackage that distinction that you made as the distinction between nature versus nurture. Nurture being that it’s culture that is impacting your behavior, socialization, your parents, your rabbi, whomever. And then nature is that which is inscribed in your genes. And of course the evolutionary perspective or certainly the evolutionary psychology perspective is that it’s an interactionist framework, meaning for most meaningful things our genes and our environments interact with each other, but the socialization element exists in its form because of nature. So it’s not an either or. It’s not it’s due to nature or it’s due to nurture. No one contests the fact that maybe the ruler had spread that meme to his son, but he spread that meme to his son precisely because it is bound to certain biological imperatives. This is what E.O. Wilson talked about. The genes hold culture on a leash. It may be a long leash, but it’s still held. So it is perfectly reasonable to incorporate everything that you said with what I just added to it. So far so good. Are we together?
David Deutsch
Except that you’re omitting creativity, but I think it won’t matter in what you’re about to say. I guess.
Gad Saad
Okay, so let me just I’ll finish off. Now the other thing that I think you might find fascinating, David, if only because you don’t deal with biological agents. So I’m hoping that maybe I might be introducing you to a new concept here. Boy, I could put that on my CV. I taught David Deutsch something. I can retire now. So whenever you are studying biological beings, there is an epistemological distinction between what’s called proximate explanations and ultimate explanations. Much of science operates at the proximate level. Almost all Nobel prizes that have been won other than the one for, say, Konrad Lorenz, human ethology, would have been done on the proximate level. You’re studying the how and the what of a mechanism. The ultimate explanation, not ultimate in the superior sense, ultimate in that you ask the Darwinian why, not the how and the what of the phenomenon, but why would it have evolved to be of that form? So for example, if you indulge me for a few more, am I, are we okay still?
David Deutsch
Yeah, yeah, of course.
Gad Saad
Okay. So take, for example, pregnancy sickness, right? If you’re a gynecologist, you’ve studied and you went to medical school, you did a specialization in gynecology, you only studied the proximate explanations of pregnancy sickness. How does fluctuations in a woman’s symptoms or hormones affect the severity of her pregnancy sickness symptoms? That’s a how and what. The ultimate Darwinian why would be why have women evolved the mechanism, the universal mechanism of pregnancy sickness? Well, and the answer turns out to be mind blowing. Well, you can literally set your clock, your watch to the timing of pregnancy sickness. It happens during the first trimester. It happens during a period called organogenesis, where the organs are forming in utero inside a woman. During that period, it is uniquely important that the woman does not ingest any teratogens, because if she does, foodborne pathogens, because if she does, that could wreak havoc to organogenesis. Therefore, she evolves a multitude of mechanisms that serve as insurance policies against that. Now, why is all that important? Because it turns out that if you go see your physician, your gynecologist, and you’re a woman, and you say, I can’t, I’m running every five seconds to throw up, what will he or she do? They will prescribe you a medicine that attenuates the symptoms of pregnancy sickness from an evolutionary perspective, that is the perfectly incorrect thing to do. The more pregnancy sickness you experience, the more likely you are to have a successful trajectory for your pregnancy, precisely because of the things that I just mentioned. So now to wrap all this up, the specific means that evolve might be at the proximate level, how does socialization impart those biological things? But the ultimate explanation always adds an extra layer of epistemological complexity to the human phenomenon that you’re studying. I’ve said a lot, what are your thoughts on all this?
David Deutsch
Well, you’re right that that’s an interesting biological explanation of a common human behavior. And I have no reason to think that that’s false. I would say that it’s only going to be as true as a, it’s going to be true modulo, how much of this is under the person’s control. So for example, if a woman decides after her first pregnancy, that she won’t have another because she can’t stand the vomiting, then she won’t. And it could be that the doctor giving her an anti-emetic will actually increase the number of those genes, rather than decreasing. Right. So this is an example. I mean, you would call that gene environment interaction, but I think that there’s a more fundamental thing to take into account, which is that whether, whether what the woman thinks about her feeling ill and having babies and going to doctors and obeying doctors and all that stuff will depend in part on memes, because, you know, she’ll have been instructed, she’ll have got ideas from the culture, but it’ll depend in a very large part. And this part is unlimited in its effect on her ideas, on the, on, for example, the new ideas that she might have, she might be the first person ever to have a new idea about how to cope with this situation. And then it may enable her to have more children or it may cause her not to have any, or, you know, whatever it could be either. She could write a book about it. She could make millions of pounds from this book. All this stems from her creativity and isn’t explained by either genes or memes. The fact that she has this ability is explained by genes, of course, but what conclusion she comes to, and therefore what the outcome is for her, for her offspring, that is determined by her creativity and her creativity isn’t determined by anything. It is, it comes out of nothing. It’s free will. And again, the example I’ve imagined, which by the way, I’ve just imagined that example and it didn’t come from my genes or from the culture. The example of that I’ve just imagined may seem forced, but that is because human creativity can’t be second guessed like that. And so the example I gave is necessarily oversimplified and a real situation will involve much more complex ideas than the ones I’ve said. In fact, you know, the ones she writes in this book I’ve imagined are going to take a whole book to explain and I’ve just explained it in a couple of minutes. So, you know, that.
Gad Saad
Forgive me for interrupting. I actually, I don’t think it was us having our first conversation where I mentioned this, but even if I did, it’s worth repeating because you’re talking about human creativity. There is a psychologist at, I think UC Davis, his name, he must be at the stage of maybe professor emeritus now. His name is Dean Simonton and he wrote a book on a Darwinian perspective on human creativity, which I think you’d find fascinating. And I, I’m trying to remember his argument. I think he basically argues exactly to your point how you just said, oh, well, the thought that I just had didn’t come from my genes and it didn’t come from memes. So I think he analogizes, but I think in a, in a rather convincing way that the impetus of a creative thought is akin to the random mutation that arises in biological evolution, right? Right. An animal is born a male and a female get together and just through the random reshuffling of genes, that animal has a blue dot. If that blue dot confers either reproductive or survival advantage, boom, now there’s going to be selection pressures for all future descendants to have that blue dot and those that don’t. But what started the process was a random mutation. And so he analogizes some of that creative processes that you’re talking about akin to the random mutations in genes. What are your thoughts about that argument?
David Deutsch
Well, I think I say true novel things more often than I would if I just spoke randomly. So there’s, there’s something at work. There’s this creativity, you know, in some ways it’s analogous to mutations. And I think that in the brain, something analogous to mutations and selection are happening on many levels before an idea comes to be enacted or spoken or whatever it is. So at the lowest level, creativity must be made of non-creative steps. Right. Because, you know, unless you believe that God does it or something, it’s impossible that creativity could be made by creative steps all the way down. But nevertheless, an act of creativity brings something irreducibly new into the world. And therefore trying to explain it via non-creative things like genes or memes is going to miss the most important thing about humans. You might say there are humans who are absolutely dominated by memes, you know, by the woke virus. And I could agree with that. I mean, I’m not sure, but I think it’s, it’s, it’s plausible that many people and too many people have their actions and their behavior and even their thoughts generated by non-creative memes, genes and memes. And therefore in my terms, they are less human. They are, they are less human than they, than they have the ability to be. Uh, but even those people would not be able to, for example, make up ridiculous excuses for why they do what they do or say what they say if they weren’t creative. Making up ridiculous excuses is a purely human thing and ChatGPT can’t do it and chimpanzees can’t do it. It’s only humans that can be that stupid.
Gad Saad
Well, you know, it’s, it’s, I’m glad we’re talking about creativity because in my latest book, the one subsequent to Parasitic Mind, uh, it’s a book on happiness. Uh, when I argue that too, and I’m gonna, I’m gonna link it to creativity in a second, but let me set it up. So I argue that two of the most fundamental decisions that you could make that can either impart great happiness or great misery upon you is choosing the right spouse and choosing the right job. And it’s not difficult to understand why if I wake up in the morning and the person next to me is someone that I can’t stand, I’m not off to a good start. If I then go to a place away from my home and I can’t stand what I’m doing, and then I come back to the person that I can’t stand, I’m not really doing too well. And if it’s the opposite, then things are good. Now I argue that one of the key metrics when you are trying to look for a job that gives you as much purpose and meaning as possible and happiness. So now I’m going to link it to creativity. I argue that anything that by definition allows you to instantiate your creative impulse is by definition going to lead to more purpose and meaning. Now that doesn’t mean that we don’t need insurance adjusters and it doesn’t mean that we don’t need, uh, you know, bus drivers and it’s not a derogatory thing against it, but all other things equal. If I’m a chef or an architect or an author or a stand-up comic, look, those are all very different things, but what they share in common is that that person created something from nothing until I came along and created my stand-up comedy routine that then made people laugh. That routine didn’t exist. That plate didn’t exist. That bridge didn’t exist. That book didn’t exist. So do you, do you subscribe to the idea that creativity is essential?
David Deutsch
Not only do I subscribe, I feel like clapping, but I may damage the microphone. Oh, that’s great. I want to burst into applause. Oh, that’s wonderful.
Gad Saad
Okay. Well, so that’s what I always tell people because I receive countless messages from people, you know, asking me what’s the secret to life. And I say, well, you know, there are many, many elements, but just do something that instantiates your creative impulse. I mean, it’s easier said than done, but …
David Deutsch
That’s the whole enchilada. I, you mentioned bus drivers. I think that there’s a really nice article and I’ll send you a link if I can find it written on the internet by somebody who had been an art history professor in Moscow. And then when it became possible for Jews to leave the country, he went to Israel and in Israel, he couldn’t get a job as an art history professor. So he got a job as a street sweeper. Wow. And the article explains how he was happy as a street sweeper. And a few years later, I wrote, I read an article about him saying that after that he did get a job. His next job was an attendant at a multi-story car park. And after that, he wrote a book with all this stuff. And now, now he, he, he’s an author. Oh, amazing. He, he, it’s really beautiful the way he linked, not only could he be happy as a street sweeper, but it, it was integrally linked to his previous life as an art history professor. That’s gorgeous. I’ll try and, I’ll try. Yeah, please do. And then I’ll share it on, …
Gad Saad
On my social media. That’s amazing. All right. Let’s, we, we promised the people that we’re going to do at least a short, uh, foray into some of the stuff that keeps us both up at night. I mean, frankly, you are one of the few, uh, academics that I know that, you know, weighs in on some of these issues. I don’t know why more people don’t do them. They probably don’t have the courage, but what are your thoughts about what’s going on with the orgiastic global Jew hatred that we’re seeing? By the way, for people who don’t know, you are Jewish. You were born in Haifa. Um, I knew it, take it away.
David Deutsch
Yeah. So, um, I have a, an idiosyncratic theory of what this is all about. Uh, unfortunately it doesn’t explain why. So I won’t be, I won’t be arguing with you about whether it’s genes or memes or creativity. Um, uh, I, it’s only a theory about what it’s the, it’s the proximate part of understanding.
Gad Saad
You’ve already internalized the vernacular. I love it. What a student.
David Deutsch
Yeah. Yeah. It’s, it’s, it’s a good distinction. Um, uh, but I think that everybody has got a terrible misconception about what is happening. And, um, so let me quickly say what I think, what I think is happening. I think that there is a, um, a moral perversion or a meme of morality or something or other, which is really ancient. It’s, it’s, um, at least 2,400 years old, but, um, quite likely much older than that. And it is, uh, and that has, has, um, persisted in Western society and the Middle Eastern society. And as soon as it touched Far Eastern society, it took hold there as well. So it’s, it’s a bit like a meme, though I have reason to believe that it’s not entirely explained that way, but, um, it is, it’s a moral, uh, perversion. It’s a, it’s a moral propensity and it consists of a compulsion to legitimize hurting Jews. So it’s not a compulsion to hurt Jews. It’s not a compulsion to legitimize killing Jews. Uh, you know, it’s specifically that, and it does it, um, so it doesn’t fluctuate. It, it, it may have been gradually diminishing over the millennia, but what it gives rise to is occasional pogroms. So occasionally, usually it doesn’t do anything. It just, it just kind of poisons people’s thinking. It makes it more difficult to think about anything because rather, as I always say, if you have a jigsaw puzzle and you nail down one of the pieces onto the table and insist that that, that piece has got to be just there for a while, it may not affect your jigsaw puzzle. It depends on luck. I mean, if you’re unlucky, you just won’t be able to make anything that makes sense out of the picture. If you’re lucky, you’ll be able to make a lot of picture, but in any case, the picture will be wrong, will be very, very wrong because you’ve nailed down that one piece and that one piece can exist in people in various strengths. So for most people, it’s, it’s down below things like their love of their children or their willingness to stay alive or that kind of thing. For some people, it, it exceeds that. And a few times in history, like in Nazi Germany or in Palestinian culture, it becomes the dominant thing. So that everything else has to give way to it.
Gad Saad
It’s like shingles. It’s in you and then it could suddenly flare up.
David Deutsch
Yes. And if you’re lucky, it doesn’t. If you’re lucky, you know, you die before, before you get shingles. And in the, in the Jewish Passover thing, the Haggadah, which only dates from the middle ages. So, you know, they were already very, very familiar with this happening. They say in every generation, they rise up and try to kill us. And it’s, it’s usually a little bit less than a generation. I mean, sorry, it takes a bit longer than a generation usually, but that that’s been true. And the one surprising thing is why are there any Jews left? If there’s, if there are pogroms every generation and everybody thinks that they are right, everything, everybody thinks that those are legitimate, whether or not they’re happening, how come there are any Jews? Because many subcultures or whatever you call Jews, religion subcultures have been wiped out. And, you know, the Khazars were wiped out. The Carthaginians were wiped out. I would guess most cultures have been wiped out. I mean, the fact that I can’t think of any is probably because they’ve been wiped out and they, they no longer participated in history, but the Jews haven’t. And despite being, being culled very often, they’re still going strong.
Gad Saad
And winning all the Nobel prizes.
David Deutsch
Yes. And some people say that those things are connected because, you know, the people who didn’t escape well enough were culled, but I don’t think it’s that. I think the, well, I shouldn’t say what I don’t think it is because I do not know what I do think it is, but it’s not, it’s not Christianity because it happened well before Christianity. Christianity took it up as a way of becoming popular. It’s not scapegoating. It’s not envy. You know, this, this pogrom thing happened to Jews who were dirt poor. It happened to Jews who were rich and it didn’t, it, it, it, people, people didn’t cite, well, sometimes they cited those as reasons. Sometimes they cited opposite reasons at the same time, like the Jews are communists and Jews are capitalists, you know, that, that’s, that’s quite common as well. But the idea that it’s legitimate to hurt Jews for being Jews was stated explicitly at least as far back as St. Augustine. Right. He, he, he actually, you know, that was his, and that was his, that was his humane theory. He was, he was advising the rulers not to exterminate the Jews, but only to make them suffer. How benevolent. Yeah. Well, it was comparatively benevolent, but more important, I think he put his finger on the, what the impulse is. He just then rationalized it. And same thing with Wagner. He also said in his, in his ridiculous diatribe against the Jews that we know that it’s, I forget what he, you know, we know that it’s right to persecute them, but we don’t know why that’s, that’s a remarkably perceptive remark.
Gad Saad
Can I offer some possible explanations?
David Deutsch
Yes.
Gad Saad
So, and the, they’re, these are not, they don’t fully cover all possible causes for Jew hatred, but I think there are two mechanisms that could hopefully shed some light.
David Deutsch
I don’t think it’s hatred usually, but carry on.
Gad Saad
Right. So Amy Chua, who is a professor of law at Yale university, who is the mentor of JD Vance, the guy who’s running with Donald Trump, she’s, she’s actually been on my show. She introduced the term, which is I think a very powerful one, although the concept has existed for millennia. She calls it market dominant minorities. So the Jews would be the epitome of that, but you could have the Chinese in Malaysia, or you could have, you know, I don’t know, the Lebanese and Liberia where it’s a very, very small group of people within a society that tend to be punching well above their weight class to speak colloquially. So notwithstanding the pogroms, as you said, your point is well taken where you could have dirt poor non-influential Jews that we still hate and want to exterminate. The general dynamic is you’ve got these people that definitely band together that have a very strong sense of self that are in a larger sea of other people where there’s a clear delineation between blue team and red team. And yet those asshole minorities seem to be the top physicians and the top lawyers and the top movie producers and the top bankers and the top scientists and on and on and on. So now let’s, so put that aside for a second. Now I’m going to introduce another concept from psychology, the self-serving bias. So the self-serving bias is where people attribute successes internally and failures externally. So I did really well on the exam, well, because I’m very smart. I did very poorly on the exam because Professor Deutsch is a Jewish asshole and he was so unfair on the exam. And that’s just a natural way by which people navigate their lives because it’s an ego protective mechanism. I did well because of me, I did poorly because of outside. Well, now imagine if I can be given a carte blanche for all my failures and it’s called the Jew precisely because of the earlier dynamic I said. So if my wife cheats on me, well, who put those lascivious thoughts in her head? It’s the pornographers who are led by Jews. So it’s not my wife’s fault that she cheated on me. It’s because the Jews put that idea in her head. And of course, growing up in the Middle East, I can assure you David, and I grew up in progressive, modern, tolerant Lebanon, it’s everywhere. If it rains today, it’s the Jew. If it didn’t rain today, it’s the Jew. So could it be as simple as these two mechanisms? You take market dominant minorities, you bring in the self-serving bias, and now you’ve got the perfect conditions to ensure that we always have a ready explanation for why we failed. It’s the Jew over there.
David Deutsch
Yes. I mean, you don’t need the beginning with the market dominant thing. The whole thing could work just as well.
Gad Saad
Fair enough. A colleague of mine, Matjaž Leonardis, proposed a similar theory.
David Deutsch
You’re trying to answer the question, why the Jews? Because the Jews are the traditional thing to blame. So he said, it’s like gold. Why do people use gold as money? Well, it’s because people use gold as money. And it grew up sometime in prehistory, because yes, gold has some obvious properties that make it suitable for being money. It’s very dense. It can’t be destroyed. But there are other things. And some cultures have used silver, and some cultures have used large nuts and so on. But gold is amazingly prevalent in this role of being money, basically, because it always has been. It has some properties that might make it more suitable than many things. But the real reason is because it’s already used. So similarly, with Jews, if you want to have a universal explanation for what ails you, then reaching for the Jews gives you a ready-made, I was going to say infrastructure, but it’s a framework of theories. Yes. Ready-made framework of theories, because thousands of people have been there before you. There are thousands of books about this. And nowadays, thousands of books about what the origin of it is, all of which I disagree. But well done. I mean, you’ve come up with something very close to what I think is the best explanation so far.
Gad Saad
Are we able, so having hopefully explained it, can we hope to have a vaccine against it, or we just know that the virus exists and we’re eternally damned to suffer from it?
David Deutsch
Well, of course, I think problems are soluble. And this is a problem. And I think there is an explanation, and I think it can be combated. One thing to note is that as, what’s his first name, Nordau, the early Zionist, he gave a magnificent speech at the first Zionist Congress in 1897, in which he explained why the emancipation of the Jews did not improve the status of Jews, but rather worsened it. So, and he foretold that things are going to get worse and that the worst place is going to be Western Europe, because everyone else would be saying, no, we’ve got the enlightenment. And he was saying, no. Well, one of the things that causes flare-ups of persecution caused by this pattern, I call it the pattern with a capital P, because I think that anti-Semitism has got such misleading connotations. The flare-ups occur when it appears that society is neglecting the legitimacy of hurting Jews. And so the enlightenment was a red rag to the bull. You immediately had entire movements, entire political movements that were, I don’t mean Nazism, I mean, you know, 19th century things, whose main premise was that everything bad is caused by the Jews. But he said, not in England. Now that- …
Gad Saad
Boy, is he wrong now.
David Deutsch
I think he’s still right to this day. And he could have said, or America. I mean, I think in 1897, he wasn’t really thinking of America as a thing. But, you know, I would say today the Anglosphere, when this thing comes up against the Anglosphere, it spreads just as well as with anyone else. By the way, it spreads among Jews exactly as well as among anyone else. But it doesn’t give rise to pogroms, or at least it hasn’t until now. Because the pogrom just conflicts with the fundamental memes of the Anglosphere. You know, you’d have to say that it’s okay to think in terms of groups rather than individuals, and that it’s okay to deprive people of rights, and it’s okay to not have freedom of speech, and so on. Which all of those things could be easily accepted in Germany or France, but ran up against the brick wall in England. So in England, you had only genteel anti-Semitism, but not persecution. Right. And another thing Nordau says, very perceptibly, is that England was the last place in Western Europe where Jews got the vote. But only in England was it genuine. It’s an amazingly perceptive speech. And by the way, I wanted to look up other things he’d written and found that he was just a bitter old right-winger. He was just a pessimistic, nothing I’ve seen of his is very interesting, except that, which is brilliant.
Gad Saad
Well, okay. So let’s end. Again, I could keep you here for another five hours, but I want to be mindful of your time. But I’m so glad we actually ended up splitting it, because I think the internet would have exploded if we put all that in one conversation. What is it? So earlier we were talking about purpose and meaning. What is it? So if somebody is now a young person is watching this chat, two guys who have had a good career so far, hopefully many more years ahead. What would be the set of prescriptions you’d offer some young person listening to this conversation in terms of how to seek happiness or purpose or meaning?
David Deutsch
As I always say to this question, I don’t want to give advice because whenever you give advice, it’ll be your fault when something bad happens. So I’m not going to tell anyone what to do, but I just want to point out what we spoke about before as well. And I think you agreed that if you adopt a criterion in life for what to do, what to engage with and so on, which does not have the property that in your view, you’re going to enjoy it, then that is extremely dangerous because when you don’t enjoy it, you won’t know that you made a mistake because that’s what you expected. And if you make decisions on the basis that you expect to enjoy the thing, whatever it is, a course, a job, then if you don’t, if you do, it’s fine, but it’s always fine if you do enjoy it. But if you don’t, you will have learned something. You will have learned that you were wrong in the way you judged this thing before. And the way you described it about you know, marrying the wrong person or going to the wrong job or whatever. If you’re kind of philosophically okay with the job being hateful to you, then it’s dangerous because you’re deprived of the most important thing that would lead you out of it. So that’s what I would say. And if it’s a young person doing university course, I would say, choose the options that you think you will enjoy while doing them.
Gad Saad
Exactly. Never mind afterwards. Wonderfully said. Go get this book, people. Get The Fabric of Reality. David, in Arabic we say, I often tell this to people, whenever you leave someone and you know, Arabic is a very flowery poetic language, when you leave someone, a beautiful way to leave them is you say, I mean, I’m translating in English, it is impossible to be satiated of you. While this holds true for you, sir, what a pleasure it is to talk to you. It’s my distinct honor and privilege to have had this much time with you. Stay on the line so we could say goodbye offline and come back. And vice versa. Thank you, sir. Thank you so much.
David Deutsch
Cheers.
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