Why Smart People Believe Stupid Things About Jews?

Lio · 00:24 Okay — trying to find out what the secret of our immortality is. I have some ideas. I'm Lio, this is Seth. Hi everyone, we're very happy to have you on another live episode of TheJewFunction. 4:30 Eastern — and, I'm sorry, 9:30 Eastern; it's 4:30 PM here in Israel. This has been a very— well, I want to say it has been a very challenging time for Jews, but it seems like every week is a challenging time for Jews. So I think that's old news. But we are making some progress, I feel, in revealing more and more of the thing that's preventing us from reaching our goal of solving the problem of Jew hatred. I think there's a bit more internal scrutiny happening. And today's guest is going to help us look at it from an even more scientific perspective than we claim to have on the topic, because our guest today is a neuroscientist. His work explores human beings — how they construct moral beliefs, social identities, collective narratives — all the things we talk about here on TheJewFunction. And while most of the discussion here focuses on history, some politics, religion, spirituality— you know, oh, he popped in! Didn't even wait for me to finish the introduction. But no, no, you can stay, you can stay — the cat is out of the bag. I think our guest today, because of his background, is going to help us explore what's happening inside the human mind itself, and help us understand why the hostility we talk about appears across different cultures and different ideologies. Why do intelligent people become so easily convinced of ideas that often collapse under scrutiny? And what can neuroscience teach us about humanity's oldest hatred? Zack Dulberg — Dr. Zack Dulberg — welcome to TheJewFunction. Lio · 02:48 Hi, Zack. Good morning. Zack Hi, thank you for having me. That's a really interesting podcast, and I think we're aligned on trying to get to the root cause of these things. Lio · 02:54 Great — it takes a neuroscientist to get to the root cause of things. Zack So, I don't know if I can answer all the questions just posed, but— Lio Well, let's start with something easy. If I gave you scans of two brains, could you spot the Jew hater? Zack Absolutely. Lio Really? Is this it? Now we're getting somewhere. Okay, this is— Zack · 03:17 Rookie stuff. Lio · 03:20 So tell us — is there an area in the brain in charge of hating Jews, or just irrational hatred? Give us a little... get us into the science a bit. Zack · 03:30 No. So, I did a PhD in neuroscience, but of course I wasn't studying hatred or Judaism. I was studying basic psychological phenomena like internal conflict, grief, pain, and pleasure — very basic things. But there are ways to think about what's going on, not in terms of the brain per se, or brain images, but just, you know, what algorithms are people running? What kind of processes are at play? So my background is a little more psychological. We can get into some research I did after the PhD, which is about people's moral intuitions — we can get into that at some point. But overall, no, there's... Seth · 04:17 Zack, if you wanted to take the entire species and categorize them into very rough categories, what are the algorithms that are running — starting with the most base ones that everybody shares, and then a little more...? Zack That's a big question. Lio · 04:35 We've got an hour. Zack · 04:38 Part of my work was about homeostasis, and it was really a way to explain conflict in the brain. Because I come from a medical background — I'm also a family doctor, I treat patients for mental health issues — and patients very strangely have a lot of internal conflict, like they're at odds with themselves. And that's a bit confusing. Why would an organism that has goals be at odds with itself? It seems like it should be on the same team as itself. But when it comes to homeostasis — my first paper showed that when you have many different things you have to accomplish, it's good to split yourself into sub-agents and have those sub-agents working for their goals. And then, of course, for example— Lio Like what? Zack I don't know — maybe you're hungry, and you're tired and want to sleep, and you want to go to McDonald's. The fact that you have separate subsystems working on each of those, instead of one global system that has to deal with everything... A global system wouldn't have conflict — it would just be able to arbitrate. But when you have sub-agents, you do get conflict. Seth · 05:50 So do animals have kind of one system that just kind of...? Zack · 05:55 I don't know. So, my work was computational modeling — basically creating artificial reinforcement-learning agents. This is a kind of AI, to show that when you build them as a single agent, they do worse than if you build them as having multiple sub-agents. And this idea in psychology of multiple selves goes back very far. We're a bit in the weeds, but it makes the story really complicated: can somebody have Jew hatred, but also know it's wrong, and not have it, all at the same time? Can people have multiplicity when it comes to that? Lio · 06:30 We met someone who has Jew hatred, and he also loves Jews. Zack · 06:35 I think it's very possible to have a lot of heterogeneity in all this stuff. Lio · 06:40 Well, what we see — like I said, we study not just history, but also how Jew hatred and Jewish behavior, and the Jew hatred around them, gets patterned over time throughout history. We've studied that, and also the words of Jewish sages, who speak about the structure of nature. They certainly see human beings as the odd one out — not just another animal. The ability to hold these conflicting ideas, thoughts, and feelings is distinctly human, and humans are left to constantly juggle all those different desires. Whereas with animals it's usually very simple — the strongest desire at every moment wins. Even with us it wins, but we're still given the chance to manage it. You can't ask an animal to hunt now and eat next week. But with a human, you can say, "Work now, you get paid next week." You can manage a little bit how you interact with your desires, and how you pursue the fulfillment of those desires. Zack · 07:57 Yeah, that's right. To Seth's point, those competing homeostatic drives are fairly low-level. And then humans do have this ability to abstract. I have one paper on abstraction, and the interesting thing is the etymology tells you what's going on. "Abstract," in Latin, means "to tear away." What that means is: we evolved to perceive — the more we could perceive, the more sense data we could take in, the better, because we could sense what was going on. But abstraction means getting rid of some of that data. And when we start getting rid of data, we start being able to see bigger pictures — to see things that apply not only to the specific situation but to the global situation. Our ability to abstract, to get rid of data, was also the thing that allowed us to start modeling ourselves, because we could get rid of specifics and say, "I'm this kind of person, and I'm going to do this; I'll act like this in the future." It's the ability to have a self — an abstract self-model — that, I think, is the high-level thing that allows you to monitor your own drives, so you can start deciding when you want to follow them and when you don't. And it also gives you the ability to have agency for the first time. I'm not sure animals have the kind of agency we have. There's an idea from cybernetics that says— Lio · 09:32 Oh, the screen just changed — you're just being spotlit. Okay, okay. Zack · 09:37 Yes. So there's this idea from cybernetics that says: if you want to control a system, you have to have a model of that system inside of you. So if we want to control ourselves — to have agency — then we have to have this abstract model of ourselves inside us. And I think Jewish people are high-agency people, and our ability to look at ourselves and model ourselves — there's something about that going on at the highest level. Lio · 10:07 All those things you say are fascinating to us, because you're using terms that coincide with a lot of the ways we've been talking about this problem — not just us, but people in general. You talk about homeostasis. You talk about the need to model something inside of you in order to control it. And I'd add: in order to interact with it, or even to perceive it in the first place. You need to have what you might call equivalence of form, or some level of resonance, in order to perceive any phenomenon. If you're not able to produce the same frequency within you, you can't — that's how transmitters and receivers work, right? And everything in nature works on this assumption. So we understand there's a unique, complex relationship between the world we perceive — what's happening outside of us, seemingly outside of us — and what we think and feel, seemingly inside of us. I use the word "seemingly" because, again, if you ask Jewish sages, they'll say it's all one big imaginary reality; it's all being produced for you, so to speak. You can't even— Zack · 11:27 And Anil Seth — he runs a neuroscience lab in the UK — he says consciousness is a controlled hallucination. Lio · 11:36 A hundred percent. If you think about it, you're seemingly stuck inside this black box with five holes, and each hole seemingly brings in data. Again, that's a big "if," because there's a lot of downstream data as well. But let's say that's the average person's perception of the world. You have these five holes, each bringing in some sensory data, as you say. And then it's not reality itself — it's a version of what reality does to those senses. It sends some light signals, some waves— Zack · 12:14 I see it as an anchor that keeps your generated— just like generative AI produces videos— Lio Exactly. Zack · 12:22 Your brain is producing those, and reality, through the senses, is anchoring it. And then when you sleep, the anchor goes away, and you generate. Lio · 12:31 Yeah. You could almost say we're being trained — your consciousness is being trained on this information — and in return it produces these, as you said, hallucinations, which we're somehow able to navigate through with each other: our perception of each other. But I don't really know what's actually outside of me. I have no way of getting my brain to taste something; I have to rely on some interpretation of that reality, in every way possible. Zack · 13:02 This is like the noumena and the phenomena — I think Kant came up with that — that you can never truly access reality. I'm not sure about it. I mean, like you said, reality is out there, and it penetrates into your brain. Lio · 13:17 Something penetrates. It gets in there. Zack Yeah, something does. Lio I mean, you're clearly sitting here, you're clearly hearing voices and seeing sights, but you have no way of knowing this whole thing. When I'm in a very vivid dream, it can feel super real. I'm experienced enough by now to say, "Oh—" Seth · 13:36 You can make it even simpler. If my ears were not good, I might not hear all the things you say correctly. Or if my eyes are not good, I might think you're looking at me with a scowl, and I'd perceive what's happening differently. So even just sitting here, our senses could totally change what reality we think we're perceiving. Zack · 13:56 Yeah. So that's the key to the scientific revolution, though: you can never be sure that you're right, but you can always become less wrong by doing error correction. Lio · 14:06 Exactly. So that's one thing you said. The other thing is, you talked about homeostasis, and I want to call those things out, because they're super important. You talk about homeostasis in the human body, which is a definition of well-being versus disease. But in human society, there's the same sort of dynamic, pushing and pulling to bring human society to homeostasis. And right now I want to ask you: when you look at the world, when you look at people and how they interact with each other, do you think we're in a state of homeostasis, or far from it? Zack · 14:52 Well, I think civilization doesn't only do homeostasis. It also does a kind of progress and perpetual growth, and that's not really homeostasis — that's a continual moving of the set point. Homeostasis is when you have a set point and you just want to stay stable. I think it's the balance between staying stable and developing a new set point — a new goal, like "go to the moon" or "go to Mars" — that's the best balance you can have: some kind of infinite growth mixed with stability. And the Jews have been doing that. They've stabilized their— almost like the algorithm they're running, the rituals they do, the book they have. But at the same time, that stable point promotes continual growth. It's kind of like in evolution: we started with a single cell, and that single cell never really went away — it just kept growing more elaborate bodies. And eventually that body ends up producing that same single cell again, to grow another body. So it's like that one cell stays exactly the same for billions of years, but it's also producing more and more elaborate bodies to shuttle it to the next generation. Lio · 16:19 So the system always aspires to reach homeostasis, but there are constant impulses that come in and disturb it — force it to grow, change conditions — and then it has to find the new level, the new degree of homeostasis, right? Zack · 16:38 This is called the paradox of change, because the only way to stay the same — to survive — is to adapt, which means to change. So how can you change and stay the same at the same time? That's the thing. Lio · 16:49 Exactly. So, to all our viewers — by the way, this is all going in a direction. It seems a little heady, but there's a point to this. We're trying to find some common ground with Zack. The reason we're bringing up all these things — and you'll tell us more about how you tie your work to your attitudes toward Jew hatred — but the reason I'm bringing them up is that when we look at humanity, and when we look at what Jewish sages wrote about humanity, that changing impulse — the thing that changes things — is what they call the growing desire. It's a growing desire for, always, maximum pleasure, minimum pain — or minimum payment, if you will. That's the algorithm that runs everything. And as long as interests meet, then fine — everybody can benefit. When interests stop coinciding, there will be some sort of imbalance, and one side will devour the other, or push the other, whatever it takes. It starts from the lowest desires — for food and shelter, then sex and procreation, then protecting the family and the next generation. Then it goes into more complex desires — desires for accumulation of wealth, money, which also translates to control, power, fame — and then acquisition of knowledge, which is considered the highest desire. And so as humans advance with this, at some point we start to see some sort of — I don't want to say a dead end, but you can see we're hitting a certain ceiling. The amount of pleasure we're able to derive from these desires is reaching some sort of — what do you call it — an asymptote. It can't advance any further, basically. And what we're saying is that the system is not able to— you're not able to stay at the level of pleasure we arrived at. Seemingly, on the surface, we have better living conditions than any generation before us — you live better than most kings — and yet people are not happy. There are still wars. There's imbalance, religious friction, economic friction. You have— Zack · 19:37 Yeah. Right. So there was a paper published a couple of years ago, in 2023, that describes something called proxy failure — which I think is what you're talking about. Proxy failure is when the signal — the reward signal — becomes the target. The money becomes the end goal, rather than the means; the pleasure of food becomes the end goal, rather than the means for connection, or whatever it is. And I think it's a deep idea — this paper was computational, but I think the idea of idolatry is the exact same idea. If you ever have some signal that you're trying to maximize, and you forget that it's just a signal of something that has underlying value — rather than the thing of value itself — and, again, because you can't see the underlying value, you can only see the signal, when you do that, you've elevated that signal to the highest value. And that's idolatry. And that's proxy failure. It's like a failure mode of computational systems. Lio · 20:39 I think that's exactly what you're talking about. So, do you see where this is going? You put the paper you wrote on pleasure and pain in the chat. Something is not working. Humanity is not able to break through that ceiling. Seemingly we've reached— we'll see some more developments here and there, but we're kind of stuck. Even with the great advancements we can foresee for AI, we're still not solving the basic problems we're feeling. It's just going to accelerate us having to deal with these issues. Zack · 21:22 So it could. And yeah, the stuckness is that we've forgotten what the value underneath the signal of value is. And I think that relates to identity. You can never elevate something finite — like a signal — to the highest value. You have to have some sense of a transcendent thing, such that no matter what you want to worship, it's higher than that. And I'm not even really a theist, but that idea — that you can't worship anything finite — I think that's the problem. Once we solve that, we're going to keep going for the infinite growth. Lio · 22:05 Okay — infinite growth. See, Seth? Great correlations. I'm hearing all these terms from someone who studies the brain. So bring us back — let's put a little pin in this, and bring us back to the kind of work you do right now and how it relates to the problem of hatred, and Jew hatred in particular. Zack · 22:33 Yeah. I'll give you a slight personal backstory of how I diverted into this. Lio Yes. Zack · 22:40 I was at Princeton doing my PhD in computational neuroscience, and for four years it was just uneventful. And then October 7th happened. And then two very strange things happened after that. One: all the grad students got into fights on social media. But the result of that was that Princeton punished me — put me on three months of disciplinary probation — for trying to push back on the anti-Zionism and antisemitism. There's a whole administrative process that's going to take too long to explain. I fought that, and I won the appeal. But on top of that, I went to the campus protests, and at one point I took a video of a student who was standing up on the podium and praising North Korea as a great liberator. I posted this video, and it got almost a million views. Everyone was shocked that a student could be praising North Korea. So this was the inversion I noticed: students punished for standing up against antisemitism, and at the same time, students praising one of the worst dictatorships in the world. Lio · 23:47 And that's at an Ivy League school, right? At an Ivy League school — or what we now call a Poison Ivy League school. Zack · 23:54 Not to hurt their reputation too much, but they were the best of all of them. Columbia was way worse. Harvard was way worse. Lio Yeah. We had a talk with Shai Davidai from Columbia — you probably heard. So we got a sense of what was going on there. Go on. Zack · 24:11 Anyway. So I'm like, "Okay, something's upside down." I also met this guy who runs something called the Network Contagion Research Institute, which studies social psychology, extremism online, online dynamics. It's an interesting nonprofit group. So I thought we should study this. The simplest way to study this kind of inversion — I thought, you know, if they're praising North Korea, they must... And the pro-Palestine protests were also appealing to human rights for their legitimacy. They were saying, "We care about the human rights of the Palestinian people; this makes us good people." And I said, okay, let's see if maybe they're right — let's see if they care about human rights, or what they know about it. We did a very simple study: we asked a set of, you know, 1,200 or 1,300 people online to rate the human rights records of a list of ten countries that ranged from liberal democracies — like the USA, Switzerland, Australia — all the way to North Korea, China, Sudan, Iran. And we also asked about Israel, of course. Then we measured a bunch of other attitudes, including anti-Zionism, antisemitism, and other things like left-wing authoritarianism — how they responded to Soviet anti-Israel propaganda, how they responded to Hitler quotes with "the Jew" replaced by "Israel," all these things. And we found that they all clustered together, all those attitudes. In fact, as you got higher on any one of those attitudes, you started rating the worst human rights violators in the world higher, and rating the liberal democracies lower. So, to sum that up: the more anti-Zionist people were, the higher they rated countries like North Korea, Iran, China, Sudan, Cuba. And the anti-Zionist attitude was also correlated — it kept very poor company with all these other attitudes, like authoritarianism, and endorsements of Soviet and Nazi propaganda, and that kind of stuff. So we need to understand: what the hell is going on? Well, first of all, the hypothesis that they are a human rights movement, I think, was fairly falsified. At the extremes of all these attitudes, Israel was ranked far below North Korea. And that's the biggest inversion of all. The other countries — I don't have the graphs to show you, but the bad guys went up and the good guys went down. Seth · 27:00 Is it just ignorance? Is it absolute ignorance? You have the whole "Queers for Palestine" thing as well — these very strange things. Is it just because people don't know the facts? Or, even when presented with the facts, is there another mechanism operating inside? Zack · 27:15 I think— so this is the hardest question: getting to the underlying mechanism, because there are lots of different possible mechanisms. I've been thinking about this a lot. There's a tension between something like Occam's razor — where you want to find the simplest underlying cause that explains the whole thing — but people use that in medicine and have gotten in trouble for it. There's a counterpoint called Hickam's dictum, which says a man can have as many diseases as he damn well pleases. So these two things are in tension: there could be many causes, and if that's the truth, that's the truth — and if we search for this one underlying cause, we may be missing something. So I don't know. Is there an underlying cause where there's this kind of moral inversion — where people start projecting what's bad in them onto, you know, the Jews, or the West — and it just flips the scale upside down? If you have trouble looking in the mirror, the easiest thing to do is to flip the moral compass upside down, because then you become good with no work. So that's one kind of thing. There's this— Seth · 28:33 Hold on, wait, wait — that's huge. That's really, really huge, right? What that means is, I can— let's just use Trump as an example, because it seems like an easy one — I can put all the bad onto that one guy, and absolve myself of any scrutiny or self-reflection. It doesn't have to be Trump, right? That's what you're saying. It sounds very childish — like, there's Superman and Lex Luthor: let's put all our good emotions on one side. Is that what we're saying? Zack · 29:08 I think the libels are very valuable to people in that exact way. If you do have trouble looking in the mirror for some reason, and someone offers you this libel that says, "Look, all the evil is over there" — and in fact, by accepting this libel, you become righteous— Seth · 29:26 It is — it's the easiest way. So hold on, let's not gloss over that. This could account for a lot of what we see going on in the world right now, right? And we also probably can't say that— you know, if you have trouble looking in the mirror... I don't think people are trained to look in the mirror. Remember, we were like cavemen — we're just a self-preservation species; we were a savage group of people. So this requires a high level of training. Zack · 30:03 Yeah, I agree. And if we're going the Occam's razor route, this, I think, is the one I'd land on — the fact that, you know, Jewish people, for example, have ritualized, through teshuva, this looking in the mirror, and making it okay to error-correct. As we talked about before, the only way you can become less wrong is to error-correct. But some dimensions are too painful for people to error-correct if they're not trained in that process. And because we've ritualized it, I think there's something going on. Seth · 30:31 So— Shpik, I feel you want to go somewhere, but just give me a minute. Lio · 30:35 No, no — just on this. The whole "looking in the mirror" thing reminds me of what Professor David Patterson says — you're familiar with his work? He comes from religious studies and spiritual studies. He didn't call it "looking in the mirror." He said the presence of a Jew among other people forces everyone to be self-aware — it forces the others to look in the mirror as well. And that's what they don't like about it. Seth · 31:11 Unconsciously. Lio · 31:13 Unconsciously — either way, they just want to get rid of him, so they can continue being who they are. Zack Yeah, exactly. Lio · 31:20 I.e., remain on the level of simple animals: "I want this pleasure, that pleasure; I don't care about that." This person — if I don't see them, it doesn't hurt me. That sort of thing. This very basic level of existence. Zack · 31:33 It might be the problem with the Enlightenment. We came out of the dark, but we never dealt with what you do when you see something in the light — when light is shone on something you don't like. If we're a light unto the nations, then people are going to— if that's how it works, people are going to see things they don't like. And it's not because anyone's better than anyone else; it's because it's really hard, and a burden, to actually see it. You have to practice it. Lio · 32:03 Yeah. Someone said — I don't know who — the problem is that we have prehistoric feelings, medieval institutions, and godlike technology. So that's where we are. We have not evolved. Most people are not evolved beyond the level of a five-year-old. And you see it — I'm sorry to say, no offense, Seth — you see it in America a lot. There are no life circumstances that force people to mature and grow up, and the reactions are very immature, all the way up to Mr. President, for example. Again, not being political — I'm just observing. Now, as we're talking, that same president is threatening the president of Iran, because he says he got everything he wanted from him. So that's the level we're dealing with — of emotional management — for most people. Seth · 33:07 But hold on a sec — go back to your thing. Now you've diverted me. I wanted to get into the Jew situation and split the Jews into two groups. Okay, I have at least three directions to go in right now. Zack, what's on your mind? Lio · 33:29 Where does that take us? Maybe tell us where it leads you — from this realization about the Jew, the mirror, the reflection, all of that. Zack · 33:38 I always come back to error correction. You know, David Deutsch — he invented quantum computing, he's a brilliant guy — this goes all the way back to what you said about humans having something special. He says we're "universal understanders," because we can do this error-correction process of conjecture and criticism. We can criticize ourselves, our own self-models, and then we can change and adapt and become better. And he says, if it's physically possible in the universe, humans can do it, based on this universalism property. So it's a very optimistic idea of humanity. But it requires that we can do this error correction, which is often very painful. And, like you said, it requires training — to accurately model yourself, see where you fall short, and error-correct that. And because of the proxy-failure thing I talked about, if you elevate any dimension to the highest level, then if you fall short along that dimension, it's just intolerable. You can't do the error correction. Seth · 34:45 But this thing doesn't work for the masses, either. When we look at how things— you have hubs and nodes, certain areas where information is understood and then disseminated out, and then the mass accepts it. Most of the population is still like a herd of sheep, or a flock of birds, or a school of fish. Some advertisement comes on, or the World Cup comes on, or it rains over here, and most people just move according to whatever's disseminated down to them. Zack · 35:18 That's right. And that hits a key variable that we also found in our studies, which is locus of control. I don't know if you've heard of it, but in psychiatry it's important. Internal locus of control means you believe you're responsible for the outcomes in your life. External locus of control means you believe some other force is responsible for the outcomes in your life — like you said, the World Cup comes on, or nefarious people do stuff, or rich, powerful people, or Jews, or whatever. But it's both — really, it's always both. But these anti-Zionist, antisemitic attitudes are all correlated with having a more external locus. So if we can make people have a more internal locus — which means enhancing agency, which means— Seth · 36:01 Hold on, let me give you maybe an easier one. Because what you're saying requires generations of quality education, in the home and in schools, so people can understand these tools — who they are, how they operate, how to self-reflect and self-correct. That takes quite a lot of time. You need immaculate institutions, you need great teachers — you also need good nutrition and exercise, because teaching something to someone who's strapped to a chair eight hours a day without going outside is also not good. It's a complicated process. But, you know, when Shpik brought up the news before — Trump, this, the deal — it's so simple. What people don't get is that anything we're getting in the news has already gone through a very intricate framing process, by the editors and publishers: "How do we want people to feel?" And Trump doesn't just say anything; none of these politicians just say what they feel. They're saying, "I'm going to say this, and when I do, a billion people are going to feel this, and then there's going to be a reaction." So what we're getting in the news — most of the world reacts to it as if it's the truth, when in fact what we're getting is just some pre-loaded emotion that we're meant to feel. Why am I saying that? Because maybe an easier solution to this whole thing is to just load the news— just tell people these stories in a more correct way, and let them absorb it. Because if the masses are into something, it's very easy to follow it and learn that way, instead of having to learn in the more school-like, education-and-upbringing way — which also has to happen, but is much more complex and takes much more time. So, what's the solution I'm proposing? Some news headline comes out, and everyone says, "Oh, the deal sucks," or "Oh, the deal's great." Just something simple — like good, well-reported news. Just coming out with great headlines every day — you can immediately start to change the whole vibe in the population. Zack · 38:28 I think I'm very optimistic about AI, actually, in that respect. Lio · 38:35 Really? But AI is trained on this. Hold on — what do you mean by that? No, no, I want to make it difficult, because I'm actually involved in this. Zack · 38:43 It's a heterodox view now — everyone's scared of it — but I think it's going to be a big part of the solution. But go on. Lio · 38:54 No, no. I was just saying that I'm actually working with a company that's concerned with that layer in the evolution of AI — the fact that it's trained on this toxic form of communication: biased, driven by interests and interest groups. And it's the opposite— humanity is not seeing AI as a fundamental piece in its own evolution, as a way to provide a mirror to humanity, to your point perhaps. It's not doing that right now. But in reality, it is a mirror to all of our bad behaviors. Zack · 39:33 So, I don't think it's— I think early on it was a bit of a mirror. People were calling it a "stochastic parrot" — like it just parrots. But I think that's wrong, actually. These things are trained in a way that— what I was saying in terms of error correction: it predicts the next word — that's a conjecture — and then it either gets it wrong or right, and that's the criticism. And if it does that for enough data, it has to develop some internal coherence. Which means, you know, I'm sure it's seen the line "the earth is flat" a million times in its training data. Do you think Claude or GPT believes the earth is flat just because it's seen that in the data? Lio · 40:12 No. But stating a wrong fact is one thing — I'm talking about attitudes. Zack · 40:18 But it sees all the attitudes. And at some point, it's possible that there's such an overwhelming amount of bias and lies in one area that it's going to take a lot more data to get it to have an accurate world model. Lio · 40:37 I'm going to that. Sorry to cut you off a sec, but I'm going back to that first algorithm we discussed — maximum pleasure, minimum pain. If people are going to continue to operate based only on this assumption, with no higher purpose, perhaps, or no better way of interacting with other people, relating to other people... Just like, for example, the way you relate to your family. You don't relate to your family with "maximum pleasure, minimum pain." I mean, you may come to the table like that, but ultimately a functioning family always corrects that. Whereas out in the world — no, everybody's just out to get what they can. We're not trained to approach people differently right now, at this point in time. Zack · 41:20 But how does that relate to the accuracy of AI? Lio · 41:22 That AI is trained on data produced from these kinds of toxic interactions. Zack · 41:27 But also data produced by really good interactions. And also— but where are those good interactions? Also video and images, not only text. These things are developing, over time, more and more accurate world models. And also, because of the alignment issue, companies are not going to want these AIs to produce biased or toxic content, even though it's in the training data. So the alignment technology — a company getting the AI to be the kind of AI it wants to be — that's available to everybody. So it doesn't matter that it was trained on these things; we can make these AIs act the way we want them to. And if we want them to be truth-seeking, like Elon wants for Grok, or if we want them to be a good reporter, like Seth wants — giving accurate headlines — we can do that. We have the technology to do that. Lio Yeah, but do you have the interest to do it? Lio · 42:18 Do the people have that desire? Most people, I believe, do not — and not even through their own fault. It's who they are, because they themselves were trained in an environment that rewards the bigger egos. And this is where it meets the Jews, by the way. This is exactly the place where we meet the Jews. Because that algorithm — maximum pleasure, minimum pain — that's how all of humanity has been thriving. That was the driving engine behind the evolution of humanity: "How can I become smarter, better at extracting this from that, finding solutions to this problem?" It was always trying to do that — sometimes at the expense of other people, of the environment, of whatever — but on the whole, we were striving toward better conditions. At some point we get to this — like I said — close to a dead end, because this relationship is not conducive to long-term thriving. It's egoistic. It's like cancer: if the cancer just takes and takes, eventually the body dies. Zack · 43:27 Yeah — if it's not serving... But I'd also push back a little on saying it's only maximum pleasure, minimum pain. It's a huge part of the brain — the reinforcement-learning system — and it does really drive most behavior. But it's not the only system that's learning and driving the brain. Lio Name another. Zack There are predictive systems in the brain. You want to predict, just for the sake of predicting. So you might explore and gather some new information to suit the prediction objective, rather than the pain–pleasure objective. Lio · 44:04 But why would you want to predict anything, if not to derive more future pleasure? I don't understand. Zack · 44:10 This is the back-and-forth. You could say, if the brain were built so that it only wanted to predict, you could ask, why would you try to get pleasure, if it doesn't— Seth · 44:20 But the brain is just serving the desire that arises. Zack Well, it's serving multiple things. Seth Yeah, it is. But the desire — whatever desire arises— Zack · 44:27 The prefrontal cortex is serving abstract thought. You could think this thing is important to do, regardless of whether it hurts or feels good. Abstract importance is also something that can drive neurons. Lio · 44:46 But I'd argue that you're only doing it because it gives you some form of pleasure. Even a theoretical physicist or mathematician, who deals with borderline imaginary ideas sometimes — why is he doing it? Because it gives him some form of pleasure. It serves some version of his desire for knowledge — for the control of knowledge, the manipulation of knowledge. It's on that level. Zack · 45:15 I think you can cover the majority of cases. I just don't think it's an absolute. Lio · 45:22 Okay, I'll go with you. Let's say it's not an absolute. Zack · 45:25 I think other systems can— I could prove it right now, just by saying, for the sake of this argument, I'm going to cause myself a lot of pain. Lio · 45:33 But you'd do it to win an argument. Zack No, no, it's the— Lio It's the right pleasure. Pleasure doesn't just mean physical pleasure. Zack · 45:40 Just the pure, raw rationality of the point I want to make — not because it makes me feel good. Lio · 45:47 Zack, come on. As a doctor and a scientist, you know very well that feeling of being justified in one's ideas — of proving a point, of winning an argument, getting to the final line and having everything check out. That's such raw pleasure. In fact, I'd argue against you: the people who developed the nuclear bombs — the physicists — knew the dangers, but the curiosity of solving these problems, of coming up with the equations that explain matter and energy, was too big, too good an opportunity, for them to say, "No, no, this can also create a lot of trouble — just put it in the box." Zack · 46:33 It's just a bit circular, because you're saying, "If you did it, it's because you wanted to do it." I say, no matter what you did, if you did it, it's because you wanted it. I'm saying that the— you don't— Lio · 46:49 We work on fuel, right? The body needs fuel. If I felt good right now, sitting like this, I wouldn't lift a finger. But if my body feels that, to reach homeostasis, I need to do this or that, then I'm going to invest the energy, because it'll get me to a better state of homeostasis. That's exactly the point. And that homeostasis equals pleasure, right? Zack · 47:11 But you must believe that there's this abstract way to — like you said at the beginning — overcome those drives, and to make decisions because of what's important, or because of something transcendent. Lio · 47:22 Okay, perfect. So this is where it gets to the Jews. What we're saying — what the people we've studied, and what Jewish sages, are saying — is, look: that algorithm, and this mode of existence, this egoistic way of existence, is not the be-all and end-all purpose. You certainly didn't need to evolve this complicated human creature just to say that this is life. You could have stopped at — supposedly — the inanimate degree, the vegetative, the animate, some really advanced primates. But the fact is, we get these very unique creatures, very advanced, but something doesn't work with the system. We're somehow at odds with the system around us. We're unlike the animals in their ability to reach homeostasis and actually maintain it. Lions won't suddenly start devouring more gazelles just because they feel like it, or because the gazelle market is doing great now. This is purely a human thing. So we have something going on. And what Jewish sages say is: look, humanity is also part of nature, and it's evolving along with nature, and it needs to exercise what people might call free will, or free agency — but through their own efforts reach the next degree of their evolution. It's no longer an involuntary evolution, because it's an evolution of your very own desires and consciousness. You cannot evolve unconsciously. By definition, you have to be part of— Zack · 49:09 Yeah, exactly. We're saying the same thing. Lio · 49:11 No, no, I know, I know — we're agreeing passionately. What I'm trying to say is that what they saw is that someone needs to serve as an example. So they took a group of people out of humanity — they took representatives from a lot of different nations, put them together, and said, "Okay, your group, we're going to call you Jews." Why? Because — from the word Yehudi, Yehud — you're going to be working on unity. That's your purpose, that's your directive in the system. And on top of conflicting views, and friction, and all those great things that characterize being human, you're going to find a way to care for each other, to love each other — even though you're not from the same family, you don't share the same mother, father, or tribe. Twelve different tribes. Even the final nation that came — twelve tribes. So you're going to go through this accelerated track of evolution, parallel to humanity, and you're going to get to a point where you can actually exercise that through your own free will: to love someone even though their views are the opposite of yours, even though you're in friction. Not to harm them is step one. And then also to love them — just as you love yourself, just as you take the time to know what's good for you, you're going to take the time to learn what's good for the other, and do it. That's what this group was told. Seth · 50:37 I just have a little Torah quote here: that "love your friend as yourself" is the final aim of the entire Torah — that everything else in it, the sages say, is detail. Zack · 50:57 I think that's the next level. If you self-model — there's even neuroscience research showing that the part of the brain you use for self-modeling overlaps with the part you use for theory of mind, for modeling others — so they're probably related. Lio Can you explain that simply? Zack Theory of mind is your ability to take the perspective of someone else. And self-modeling is metacognition — thinking about thinking — but also a self-model: "Who am I? What kind of person am I?" Those circuits seem to overlap: the one that lets you put yourself in the perspective of others, and the one that lets you put yourself in the perspective of yourself. Seth · 51:46 Yes. It turns out, from the model of the world that the sages give us, that I am not just myself. I feel like myself, but in fact I'm part of this one creature, which is all of humanity — even more than that, all of reality — but through this portal, this overlap, like you said, between me and the others. So "love your neighbor as yourself" is not a moral thing — it's actually unlocking what you're saying. Once I start to behave— Lio · 52:18 Go ahead, speak. Seth No, go on. Lio It's the essence of being human, because no animal can do it. Only humans can relate to another human in this way. And it's also just true. Listen — they've been saying it for two, three thousand years. The fact that we're just catching up to these truths is great. Well, our point — and this is where this talk really needs to bloom — is: how does all this relate to Jew hatred? Why specifically? Because that's why we're here — to celebrate today. I mean, not to celebrate; to solve. I don't know how to celebrate. Seth To appreciate it. Zack · 53:00 We do celebrate that every day. Lio · 53:02 We appreciate it, because Jew hatred has been pushing us to do it. We probably wouldn't be here talking about these things if it weren't for it. And the point is — I'd love to get your final thought on this — if what we're saying is really, at the heart of it, true: the problem is not hatred of Jews. What we're saying is that this is an almost natural reaction to the state that Jews are in. It's like— do you have kids, by the way? Zack · 53:52 No, I don't. Lio Not good for you. You should try it. Zack Well, maybe you should try it. Lio I'm a few steps before that — I have to... Zack Yeah. If you try it, you'll notice that— Lio · 54:04 Children — and again, a lot of studies say this, unequivocally — really respond to your state. You're the higher-functioning entity in the room. If you're stressed, if the example you give is wrong, they'll respond even worse. Whereas if you're the one who's regulated, who's able to think more clearly, who empathizes and all those things... So the argument Jewish sages make is that Jews, again, were selected — you can say by nature, or by a higher force; that's a separate argument — but nature needed, in the system of humanity, a group to become a representation of this higher state, this next level. Zack · 54:58 We inherited a responsibility. Lio · 55:02 You can say it's a responsibility. You can say it's a directive in the system, because the system needs such a function. That's what we call the Jew function. So we need to behave in this way — this higher functioning — which translates to "love your neighbor as yourself." Again, not as a moral directive, but as, you could say, a higher function. Zack · 55:24 As a truth — that our perspectives share something in common. Lio · 55:27 Exactly. And that requires effort. Seth · 55:30 And we'll actually perceive reality more correctly, the more these connections between people happen. Lio · 55:36 It opens up reality. You begin to perceive it as an interconnected system. And all Jews share a little bit of that — that's why they have this good ability to see systems. It's no accident that we're involved in systems: financial systems, communication systems, trade, commerce, the interchange of ideas. That's where Jews thrive, for a reason — because they have a memory of being on that level. They reached this highest level of existence during the First and Second Temple, and then fell from that consciousness level, if you will. But now we're asked to come back to it, and we're not doing it, and the world is pressuring us to do it — and that's Jew hatred. Zack · 56:21 The world is pressuring us because they're looking for something. Lio · 56:25 And they don't even know it. Subconsciously, they need that quality to be there. Zack Oh, I see what you're saying. Lio That's how nature is pushing us, through the world. Nature is not going to send you an email. It's going to apply pressure. Just like every evolutionary leap, nature simply applied pressure. You needed to come down from the trees, you needed to get into the savannah, you needed to get into the caves, then fire — again, all in the interest of evolving the way we derive things from the world and getting better at it. So pressure is the way nature gets us to move — unless you start to become conscious of it. And then, as they say in Hebrew, "a wise man has his eyes in his head," meaning he can see ahead. If a lower level of evolution was like fire — you put your hand in and you get burned — a higher level would say, "Oh, no, I can use it to cook food, to warm water." Same phenomenon, higher use, right? Zack · 57:26 Yeah. It's a very teleological, purpose-driven way to think about it, and I agree with it — that Jew hatred is a natural system response. I don't know if nature... it's hard for me to think nature has the agency to pressure things in a certain direction. But maybe that's beside the point. The fact that it's a natural response also means that, in order to do something about it, we have to diagnose that response and figure out the treatment. And what you said about— for me, it comes down to agency, and the balance between the individual and the collective. There are studies done in Israel — that country is one of the only ones that ranks at the highest level on both individualism and collectivism. Lio Which one? Zack Israel. So you have this systems-level modeling of each other, acting as a collective. But at the same time, it's all for one and one for all — the individual is also elevated to a certain primacy, because it's individual agency that lets people even be able to connect. Seth · 58:44 Well, let's look at the West and the East. We're kind of running out of time, but the West is very, very individualistic— Zack Yeah. Seth —and the East is very, very collective, right? Zack Yeah. Seth And the Jew has to be a balance of both of these things. Completely. Because collectivism is beautiful in the sense that everyone would be taken care of — everyone would have a home, everyone would have food. But how does the world, the natural system — how do humans enforce that? Through the KGB, through knives, through surveillance. So it's impossible to enforce collectivism through the gun. The only real way it can come— Zack · 59:27 —is through love. Like in a family. So the Jew is dignifying the individual. And that's how the body works: you have a bunch of specialized cells that are all serving a collective. Seth · 59:39 Exactly. So nice to talk to somebody who actually understands the natural world. We can really talk about all of these phenomena in a way that— you have a language. It's really helpful for us. Zack · 59:48 I'll say one more thing to tie it up. If we're coming down to this idea of agency, and we know that low agency is what's causing people to project, and to morally invert, and to become hateful, then giving them back that agency, I think, is really important. There's that line that Mordecai said to Esther: "Maybe you were put here just for this reason." In fact, the universe is such a high-dimensional space that every human is almost infinitely unique. There's something that only that person can do — just mathematically. Seth · 1:00:27 There's something so beautiful— Zack So if we can somehow tell people that — that you're important, that there's something only you, in the history of the universe, can do if you put your mind to it — that might give them a little bit of agency back. Seth · 1:00:41 And let's add— let's cover the whole thing with a blanket of love. By connecting us more together, it will become clearer what that purpose is. It's not just each one rolling out by themselves; it's that the individual is completely unique, like you just said, and has something in this holographic universe that can affect the whole system. And simultaneously, by coming together — maybe at first in small circles like this — and understanding ourselves better, that true purpose of each one becomes more and more crystallized. What a nice conversation. Lio · 1:01:22 And to what you said before, about whether or not nature has purpose: I think, just looking at the Jewish people— everyone works as if they're groping in the dark, trying to find the next step to land on. Whereas Jews were the ones who said, "Look, here's the purpose. You have to reach equivalence of form with this quality of love." Everything is laid out. Now you're just making your way back to that purpose. You can argue it, you can agree or disagree, but that has been the driving force behind Jewish perseverance — they were always going toward something. So it is always purpose-driven. And by extension, you could say nature has to have that as well, because you could argue that nature can't create something that's not already in it. You can't imagine something outside the realm of— "How will I build a table?" Oh, I'm looking at the cow that has four legs and a straight back: a table. Zack · 1:02:37 But is there emergence — where something can emerge at a higher level that isn't there at the lower level? Lio · 1:02:42 True, true. But even that emergence — I know we have a whole thing about emergence — even that exists on a higher level within the system. It just didn't exist for you, on your lower level. Zack · 1:02:54 Yeah, it's perspective. Perspectivism is also a base philosophy for me. Lio · 1:02:59 Man, we could have this going for hours, but unfortunately we have to bring it to a close. I feel like we talked about the direction for the solution to all the problems of the Jews, but I feel like we're just scraping the surface. Zack · 1:03:16 Yeah, I mean, it's been a four-thousand-year project. It's going to take a long time. Lio · 1:03:22 Another few weeks. Zack, before you leave us, if you can read us this quote — it's from the Degel Machaneh Ephraim. It's a little abstract, but I think it's good for this conversation. And then, if another Jew is listening to this, what should they do tomorrow to bring us closer to the end of Jew hatred? So here's the quote, it's in the chat. Zack · 1:03:52 "It is good for the children of Israel to always unite together in one bundle. Then even those who are of a lesser degree help their friends sanctify with more holiness, and attain more. The upper one needs the one below it, and the lower one needs the one above it. And then your roots will unite as well." So this is like a hierarchical collective that serves every level. It's the tide that raises all boats. So I think that's exactly what we've been talking about. And if there's something I could say to all Jews — I'm going to be unoriginal, because I just heard Bret Stephens say this at an event I was at. He basically said that Judaism is an inheritance. It's as if you've been given a ten-million-dollar check that's sitting in your drawer. Some people are going to wait twenty years and then take the check out and find out it's expired — and nobody would ever want to do that. You want to cash the check while you can still use it. And some people will say, "It's not fair that I have this burden; I didn't choose to be a Jew." Well, too bad — you have the ten-million-dollar check; you inherited a billion dollars. It's your responsibility now. What are you going to do about it? So: cash the check. That's the hashtag — #CashTheCheck. Lio · 1:05:21 Yeah, it's actually a Kabbalistic allegory, what you just said — about a guy who leaves his son a huge orchard, and the son is like, "Oh man, I got this orchard, but I'm going to—" No, dude, you got the orchard! You can get the oranges, you can get everything you want. Zack Even Bret was unoriginal. Lio · 1:05:41 Yes, yes. There's nothing— you know, it's Jews, what can you do? But it's how we bring it; that's what makes it unique. So, Zack, thank you for bringing your unique self to us. Like I said, I feel like this is just scratching the surface — we're just finding a common language — and we have to part. But this is good. Is there something people should read from you? Where can they follow you? Do you want to send people your way? Zack · 1:06:19 Do you post websites? Lio Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Zack You can find me on X, at @PianoZack. My Google Scholar has all my research papers. I can send you my website. Lio · 1:06:32 Great. And you also put your paper on pleasure and pain in the chat, so we'll include that. Zack · 1:06:36 Yeah, the pleasure and pain one — you mentioned it. Lio · 1:06:39 Great. All right, so thank you so much. This has been truly invigorating. We are TheJewFunction — please like, follow, subscribe. You can find everything on YouTube; all the episodes are on Spotify. Please check out the first season of TheJewFunction — the first 22 episodes. There's a dedicated playlist on Spotify for it. It lays out the entire chronology of the Jewish people, and what we believe is the direction for a Jewish nation that doesn't only survive but actually thrives, and really shows the world the next degree, where it needs to go. Thank you so much, and I'll see everyone on our next— You got the links? Zack I got the links in the chat. Lio Okay, I'm getting them right now. And we will— hold on, hold on — and we will say goodbye to everyone. Zack, you're off the hook, I got it all. Zack Okay, that was really fun. Thanks for having me. Lio Thanks, everyone. Seth Thank you, guys. Lio Bye-bye.