Join us this spring for the sixth annual nexxus, the northeast largest conference dedicated to critical thinking and science education. It's all going down in New York City the weekend of April 11th through 13th 2014. We're excited to feature a keynote by physicist Lawrence Krauss, who's authored bestsellers like The Physics of Star Trek and who just started with Richard Dawkins in a new film last year called The Unbelievers. This is in addition to a great lineup of other speakers like Paul Offit, expert on vaccines and infectious disease, and Cady Coleman, veteran astronaut for NASA.

Of course, Masimo and I will be there taping a live episode of the nationally speaking podcast, and so will the cast of the Skeptics Guide to the Universe. Get your tickets now at NextG. That's an easy Sorg. Registration prices go up after March 20th. So don't wait. Get your tickets today.

Rationally speaking, is a presentation of New York City skeptics dedicated to promoting critical thinking, skeptical inquiry and science education. For more information, please visit us at NYC Skeptic's Doug. Welcome to Rationalise Big in the podcast, where we explore the borderlands between reason and nonsense. I'm your host Marsupial YouTube. And with me, as always, is my co-host, Julia Gillard. Julia, what are we going to talk about today?

What I'm personally very excited about today's guest. We are pleased to welcome Zach Smith, who is the author of the very popular webcomic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, which I have plugged on this podcast before.

Yes, it's a twisted and hilarious and highly nerdy Web comic, which covers topics very near and dear to the rapidly speaking heart, like time travel paradoxes and utilitarian ethics, but without ever being stuffy. So, Zach, welcome to the show.

Yeah, thanks. Things I feel like I am stuffy sometimes. Maybe I'm just so stuffy that I don't recognize. Welcome, Zach.

So my first question for you, Zach, is something I've always wondered reading your comic over the years, and it has been years that I've been following you, you you cover so much ground.

And I've always been curious how you know so much about these various fields like or do you know the philosophy that you touch on often without the actual sort of buzzwords from philosophy jargon.

But clearly you're familiar with a lot of philosophy that is not covered in philosophy, one on one classes about like thought experiments and utilitarian ethics and the simulation arguments and stuff like that. So I and just with the general culture of philosophy, like you had this one comic, it was kind of like a table and it was called Communicating with Academics, a guide. And it was the various Rosevear were like how to make someone from this field angry, how to make them happy.

And the philosopher column for how to make a philosopher angry was to say, how is unfriend always right about everything and how to make a philosopher happy was your slight elaboration on a single paragraph of Wittgenstein was revolutionary.

And like I read that I was like, this guy knows a lot of philosophers. I was just wondering. Yeah, how did you I follow what's going on in philosophy.

I thought he was getting all of this from the from the podcast. What were you. Not so.

Oh, no. Oh, well, I actually I have a degree in literature which kind of intersects with philosophy, of course. But I I'm in terms of the more technical stuff, it's mostly just from from reading. I have a pretty active reading schedule, mostly because I feel like I need to have some bona fides in these things because people get upset.

If you don't get it just right, you don't say, yeah, right. You understand. In fact, even if you do get it right, you still get people mad at you and then you need to defend yourself. But but but eventually I've had a couple times where I had an idea that I thought was original. And then it turns out someone beat me to it like I had this one about this guy. Maybe you remember this was about a guy who's just the happiest person ever.

And so the government employees are this universe simply as a utilitarian happiness system. And but it gets ruined because this one guy is the happiest about everything. So the way to maximize Felicity is to give everything to him. And because it's my sister. And so I had never heard of the utility monster. That's a nose ring.

You just independently invented it. So, yeah, that's so funny. I read that and I thought, wow, he's clearly familiar with the utility monster and he's just trying to not be stuffy by not naming it as it's weird.

And so then I went out and I had I a it on my stack. I've actually not I shouldn't admit this, but I've not read a word of Nosik. But I went out and bought some books by him and on my stack to read. No, but I haven't gotten to them. But it was funny because I did that comic that immediately there were these people who are like there's a comic about the utility monster. That's like, what the hell is it?

Yeah. Yeah.

But actually some of the some of the more existential stuff I, I had some knowledge of from, from reading Cameo in Star Trek, but more, more of the literary stuff and, but even some of that, most of it's just sort of motivated by just what I'm personally interested in. I mean I feel like maybe unfortunately our people use philosophy sort of as a cudgel to express their own intelligence rather than something that they are dealing with. And so I feel like for me, a lot of the interesting comics come out of me being interested in the topic.

I've been trying to see if anyone else has thought about it either.

But now a lot of your comics are also about science and you're pursuing a degree in physics, I think is I was OK.

I had to I had to drop out because comics I couldn't do both at the same time. Yeah, but but actually as as I'm sure you both know. Being outside of academia, I've had more time to read and and so I still self teach physics, but but I'm not I'm not in any formal system anymore.

Kind of an interesting transition from literature to physics. Yeah. How did this happen? It's a very long story short. I got a degree in literature and I actually got accepted into literature grad school in the program I wanted. And then I just sort of I don't know. I thought to myself, I'm not going to actually be happy doing this. And I happened to live near Los Angeles. So I moved to L.A. and I my first gig was a, you know, that studio that made the movie Sharknado.

No. Is this so they made this movie Sharknado, which they're famous for now, because if this horrible movie but it's bad horror movie studio. And I worked for them and I sort of from there I got into the entertainment business. I promise this ends of physics. Yeah. Yeah. So I sort of worked my way up through the Hollywood ladder, which is just an evil enterprise. And it's actually it's kind of ruined movies and TV for me.

I can't really watch them and feel objectively happy about it because you've seen how the sausage is made or. Yeah, the sausage factory owner is a sausage maker. The sausage might be perfectly good, but the people who are making it are, I should say, I have people who work in film and they're very nice, but they're OK.

So anyway, so after working in entertainment for a while, it got the coveted entertainment gig, which is assistant and I was assisting talent agents and talent agents are sort of the worst of the worst in terms of Hollywood people.

And you're missing a lot of you're making a lot of friends right now. You realize that. So I'm just I'm just burning every bridge. Yeah. Yeah, OK. I feel great about it. I'll never be tempted to cross those bridges, but I, I just hated this job tremendously. And and comics sort of became the way out in that, you know, slowly growing an audience which held out the prospect that maybe I could make a living at it.

And so I at some point I had enough savings that I quit my job and I just did comics for a while. I found that I was not stressed out enough to do good work. The comics were sort of overly overwrought and too polished or something. They just weren't very good. Maybe I just didn't know what I was doing. But so I had this idea, which was that, well, if I went back to college, I could feel good about myself for filling in a lot of the gaps in my knowledge.

But also just there would be this sort of profound stress. And I think looking back, I just had a point in my life where I wanted some change. So I went back to college. And long story short, I ended up liking physics a lot.

And when I went for a degree in physics and sure enough, some of your comics do deal with physics or mathematics and maybe we'll get some of those. But but there's a number of them that I've seen the deal actually with neurobiology. I have one in front of me that that starts out with Hi, kids, I'm the clown.

And the kids look like a clown and then goes from there into basically making fun of some so some kind of excesses of neurobiology. Can you speak to that? How does that fit in your general view of things? What do you think of neurobiology and neural babble? We had actually a guest recently, a social scientist and psychologist who actually was pretty, pretty sort of critical of certain excesses of, you know, the ladies. This is your brain on X thing.

What's your thinking?

Actually, before I got a physics degree I was intending to get was was neurobiology. And I just for some reason I thought it was. But yeah, I find it really interesting. I, I, I think in terms of excesses of neurobiology, I, I in general very dubious of a lot of psych lab studies or in terms of their ability to apply to reality and and I think yeah. Even comics like that, I suppose in some sense making fun of it, reductionist view of what we can glean from these tests that are done on the brain.

But I would be curious to know what excesses you were talking about particular.

Well, you know, some of the the problems with the sort of the neuro your brain is on things is that there seems to be sometimes be some trauma trivial, like, you know, oh, gee, I'm taking an MRI scan of somebody while he's reading. And guess what? The brain is active.

Well, yes, no kidding. Now, of course, it's interesting to see which areas of the brain active and all that, but there is a lot of tendency to sort of. To simplify things, many people, especially if they're reading the DVD accounts in the public, in the sort of popular literature, they don't seem to realize, for instance, that that these are not really live neuro scans of a single brain. They're there, you know, and there are very artificial conditions.

There are statistical aggregates of a bunch of different scans and that sort of stuff.

But also one actually, where a couple of guests who were both in the sort of weird background in neuroscience and yet skeptical of some of these claims, one of them could find worth pointing out that a lot of what you hear about brain based differences between genders needs to be taken with a very, very large grain of salt, because, first of all, again, the conditions are artificial, that they are usually small sample sizes under very difficult conditions. But also the basic idea is that, you know, of course, you will observe differences between men and women, between, you know, whatever in between me and you, for instance, when it was the brain doing certain things.

And in that sense, yes, there are, quote unquote, biological differences between different brains. But biology is a general term, which includes, of course, not just genetics, but also developmental biology, responses to environmental conditions, basically everything. And so just the fact that you showed that there are differences between brains, that doesn't really tell you anything about the causality and nothing about how these differences actually came about, how important they are. They tend to be actually fairly different for one reason or one recent story in the papers was about how the worst is statistically significant difference in the brains brain scans of men and women when it came to certain kinds of tasks.

And, you know, it was a significant difference of about three to four percent. And somebody pointed out that perhaps the story could have been, look, men's and women's brains are 96 percent identical.

As you know, three or four percent difference is like the differences are interesting, but that small, do we really want to pay that much attention to it? That's that was the idea.

Masimo, did you almost say humans and women? Well, actually, I almost did, but I wasn't going in that direction.

Did you see, the thing is, I was thinking before coming to the podcast about a question that I was asked to be asked by David Silverman, the president of American Atheist, about the most recent genetic studies on hybridization between Neanderthals and humans.

And so I was that's that's where my brain was born. But unfortunately, we don't have brain scans of Neanderthals.

So there is actually it's funny because I got I got kind of into the disconnect between lab studies and I guess what you might call sociological effects. When I was I was doing research for this talk I did about the history of comics. And I don't know if you know that comics have this really horrible history of censorship that happened in the 1950s.

Oh, under McCarthy. That doesn't surprise me. Yeah. I mean, it was it McCarthy wasn't the one who did it, but it was it was during that period. And the comics and I think the nineteen fifty four adopted this policy called the Comics Code Authority, which restricted all this stuff you could do in comics. And it's insane, wacky stuff like one of the rules literally says no salacious posture. Wow. You're not allowed. They're vampires.

This is actually true. There was a debate in the 60s as to whether a guy whose name is a famous person, comics, a guy named Mark Wolfman, could put his name on a comic because you're not allowed to talk about men. And under this code that's so draconian, it was sort of killed the comics industry for it really hasn't even recovered since the 50s in terms of absolute numbers of readership.

But it was interesting to me is wolfmen because it will be. But at some point in the past, Wolken men had had sex. I think I think it's actually it's really interesting, too, that what happened was in the 40s and 50s, the popular genre was what we call today, true crime fiction. It was not superheroes and it was CSI, you know, and and it was much more adult than you might think of 1950s comics. And then because of this code, one of the rules was good has to always triumph over evil.

And so when you think about it, you have this universe where you can't have real monsters, you can't have any sex, you can't have any like, scary violence. And good has to always win over evil. This is the era when superhero comics become big. And it's no surprise this is also the area when there's like a proliferation of titles under the same name Batman.

But there's also Bat Dog and Batgirl and Batwoman and Bat Boy, because all that's left from the devastation is these superhero titles and what started out as a crime fighter of the kind of going beyond.

Yeah. He started out as a crime fighter of sort of the regular type meaning meaning I think I've seen some early comics featuring Batman. I'm pretty sure it was, you know, with a revolver and going after or Superman, for instance, throwing people out, throwing criminals out of the window so, you know, killing people, which is not exactly what you expect from the modern version of those superhero.

Well, the only way I think Batman was originally based on Sherlock Holmes and so still kind of bears that. But but the 50s kind of ruined everything by turning superheroes into these like absurd manoukian sexless heroes and. But anyway, the point I wanted to make, the reason all this happened was because of a guy named Frederick, where the doctor, Frederick Wortham, who is a psychologist who studied what he would have called, I think, mental hygiene, and he proposed that there was this rise in juvenile delinquency.

Forget the exact term used, but that's what we might call it now. And he tied it to comics and he wrote this book called Seduction of the Innocent, which which is basically great if you ever want to teach a class on, like abuse of analysis and statistics. It's a great book because the argument he makes, in essence, is, well, every time we have a boy who does something violent, we can find that he saw it first comic book, which is which is true, probably.

I'm willing to believe it. But of course, this is the time when every single boy reads comic books. So it's sort of absurd to suggest that those few boys who are, you know, being criminal are going to copy what they see in comic books. But so what was interesting is you have the situation where not not what the media seems to actually be doing, because, as you may know, nineteen fifty four is actually pretty much the nature of violent crime in the United States.

We're only just now getting toward the level it was then. So what was actually happening wasn't what caused the big change in the law or a big change in behavior based on threat of a change in the law. What caused the change was perception of what the media might be doing, not not the media itself, which to me is interesting because I think this is a parallel phenomenon now with video games and video games. Similarly, you can look up now.

You can look up psych studies, which will show, and I believe it, that if you have a kid play a violent video game, he will immediately be more aggressive, more insolent, more you probably I bet you could take an MRI and show that certain areas in the brain associated with aggression light up. And yet if you look at the societal level, violence has been going down almost uniformly during the era of video games. I don't think those are correlated.

But but that sort of point is they don't appear to be correlated unless there's some countervailing trend that just obscures everything there is to say. You can show in lab psychology and perhaps even neurology that there is a link between video games and violence, but it does not show up in society. And I feel like that should have some bearing on what we think about the psychology studies.

Well, yeah, in fact, that actually is a very interesting point because it does go to the to the core of a lot of the problems, not just with the sort of neural you're your brain on this thing, but also actually, as you were saying a minute ago, with psychological studies in general, which is very often, you know, they're done by by necessity, under very controlled conditions. In fact, that's the same in some in some sense, that's what you want to do, what you want to control the conditions and, you know, have a repeatable experiment that results and so on and so forth.

But the problem is that a lot of these effects, such as priming, you know, the fact that things like, oh, well, if you're holding a cold glass of something, you're going to have cold their feelings toward your interlocutor and so on and so forth. Most of these effects actually have very, very temporary. They're very, very temporary. They last only a few minutes or a few hours. And so then to use those kinds of studies to say, well, in general, you know, exposure to video games increases a person's life, long likelihood of more long term likelihood of committing crimes.

That's where the thing completely falls apart.

And yeah, I think it's all predicated on an assumption of a lack of sophistication among media consumers. You know, I mean, I believe that kids act more aggressively after video games because I know I remember playing Grand Theft Auto and then getting into a car and being like, I got to remember not to kill everybody, but like I mean, how many people I don't know if it's ever happened that someone actually then got in the car and forgot themselves for a second and went and ran over to somebody.

You know, you're sophisticated enough to know the difference between game and reality. I'd love to get both of your perspective, because I've been I've been wrestling with this. So, like, it's very easy for me to say. I don't believe there's a correlation between. On some video against balance at large, and I can back that up with numbers, crime statistics and rising prevalence of video gaming, I would bet if I looked into it I could even see a rise in violence in video games does not correlate with rising violence in the real world.

That's easy for me to say because that's popular with my side. But at the same time, I'm inclined to say, like I don't like, as you say, certain certain priming, things like portrayal of sex in media. There are some versions of it that I dislike. And if I if I believe what I'm saying about the video game, I'm bound to say that people are also sophisticated about portrayal of of, you know, sex and and or women and minorities in media.

And so I'm in this corner because I would like to have it both ways.

If you say I'm saying yeah, I yeah, I very much respect your the sort of thought experiment that you're engaging in here of like, well, if this thing that I believe were true, what else would that imply and might there be any any conclusions about that. But I find unsavory or maybe kind of dubious.

I do suggest a way you might have it both ways. I mean, as you were saying, this is one of the things that one needs really to be constantly on guard against. Right. So using well known logical fallacies, when you apply to somebody else's reasoning and then committing the same exact fallacy when when it when it comes to your favorite pet theory. But in the two cases that you're talking about, for instance, you know, the correlation between videogames and violence, on the one hand, let's say, and the treatment of, let's say, women in the media and societal attitudes toward women.

First of all, if I if I remember correctly the times that I occasionally read studies in both those areas, in the first case, as you were saying a minute ago, there is in fact the lack of overall correlation, although there is a there are significant effects on individuals, but there are there's a lack of overall societal correlation. The second one, on the other hand, the correlation is actually pretty strong.

And not only that, but one has to remember that the second case that the stereotype that, let's say, the advertising industry plays on, those are already present demonstrably so and well, you know, well embedded into society.

And so the reason the data and the voting industry, let's say, in fact, plays on those is because they're already there. And so it gets into a cycle of reinforcement. So we a we can blame the media or the advertisers for turning our society into a bunch of sexist or misogynist. It is that our society already has a pretty good degree of that.

And these people simply play on it and keep going the cycle so they can be criticized on that basis alone, because people do look at at media and they do absorb or reinforce their stereotypes.

Whether that happens with violence in video games, I think the evidence actually pretty clear that at this point that video games in general don't do anything, you know, sort of threatening long term to people. But of course, if you have somebody who is already predisposed to violent behavior, that behavior can be, in fact, triggered or augmented by exposure to scenes of violence. But that's a whole different story there, because that person probably would commit by winning by a doctor.

Regardless, it's just becomes a trigger as opposed to a cause.

Right. So. Yeah, yeah. Go ahead. Sorry. Go ahead.

I was going to derail a little, so I'd like to hear what your opinion is. So as I. You do. Well, OK guys. What was I going to say. Oh yeah. So I mean how does it. Because I'm just trying to get this from, you know, making sure I'm not defending what you might call my side of the argument. Like, how would how how would you treat stuff like portrayal of gun violence in media and gun culture?

Do you want to say?

Yeah, that's a question.

My take. So I think that's Massimo makes a good point, but something that I actually changed my mind about I know a couple of years ago, people this is kind of a minefield. But just to touch on it very briefly and hopefully not set off any minds, there's often a firestorm set off in the general public discourse when a comedian or someone makes a joke about sexism or rape or misogyny in general. And one of the counterarguments like to the effect that there shouldn't be a firestorm that had originally seemed pretty convincing to me was, well, we don't object when comedians make jokes about murder or violence or, you know, Nazis.

So why are we objecting when? They make jokes about rape, isn't that a double standard and the counter counter argument, which ended up convincing me the other way, was that, you know, it's much more plausible to think that there are very real, pretty common attitudes in our society that are misogynistic and that do think that, you know, rape is maybe more OK than is commonly spoken aloud or is, you know, maybe more the woman's fault than is commonly spoken aloud, etc.

. And so those jokes have more sting to them than the jokes about murder, because it's generally accepted as a culture that murder is not OK. And I couldn't really tell whether Masimo was arguing that portrayal of of, uh, misogyny or or racism was just a symptom, you know, in the media. It was just a symptom of underlying cultural attitudes or whether it was actually reinforcing cultural attitudes.

But it's pretty plausible to me at least, that there would be some reinforcement happening, because my impression is that most of that causal effect, the hypothesized causal effect of violence or misogyny or racism in the media on people's actual behavior or thoughts is via giving them the impression that this is something socially acceptable or socially applauded, even correct. So there's already some underlying sense that this is true. Then the like implicit admiration towards those things in the media could have much more power than if it's about something that's just clearly, you know, looked down upon.

Yeah, not correct.

I was actually arguing both both both points. That is, that it may be that certain portrayals in the media or certain jokes on certain topics are more acceptable and more frequent because they play already an existing sort of somewhat acceptable stereotypes. But at the same time, they also reinforce them. And yes, I think it's more dangerous or more problematic at the very least, to joke about rape than about the Nazi, because probably a lot more people, as you were saying, think sort of borderline about rape than about genocide.

Right. That's interesting, though, because the logical conclusion of that would be then that we live it. Maybe this is true. This is an interesting idea. If we lived in a more ideal society than would rape jokes be.

OK, that's a good question. That is the implication. Yeah, but I mean, yeah, I mean, I think that it kind of makes sense. It's like if that joke didn't carry any fear with it.

Right? I mean, yes. Because if you can if you're if you can actually have a joke about genocide, which clearly I would I would think nobody, even if you're not a utilitarian, would you would agree that a genocide has is actually more morally problematic even than rape.

If you can joke about that, then yes, ideally, quote unquote, you could joke rape if the society were so condemning of rape as it is of genocide. Yeah, I think that's that's a that's an interesting point.

Now, all our podcast that I don't want to be carelessly summarized somewhere, but not so since we're talking about, you know, this kind of very interesting topics. How about Autofill?

So so I got this very interesting cartoon transition. I know, right?

So I got these really interesting Segre points. Barentu.

I got this cartoon from your collection that starts out. It's a two panel and it starts out with a an academic, a very stuffy and self-assured academic who is looking is showing a slide of of an ancient symbol with a snake basically biting his own tail. And the guy says it is an ancient symbol showing the cyclical and recursive nature of being. And then the second panel shifts 2000 years earlier to the guy that actually drew the symbol. And the guy says, I need a picture that conveys Autofill out to you had shown here to tourists.

And I thought it was obviously it's just the only funny in and of itself. But it's this is a recurring theme, I think, in some of your cartoons. And they make fun of sort of a little too overconfident sort of academic conclusions about something that, frankly, we don't know as much about because we don't have access to all the relevant data that I read it correctly.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And may I say, too, with your accent, you say, I don't really feel much more it sounds more like the Latin. Right. And that's the big auto show.

Some class thing.

Yeah. It's so much better than when I said yeah. Yeah I know. I really do like making fun of academic pretensions. I mean I said I come from a literature background. So, you know, I'm familiar with the level of just outright nonsense that goes on in literary theory. And I don't mind saying it's there. There are people who walk the earth who. Do nothing for a living and get a lot of respect for it. Well, go ahead and try to turn the lens a little bit closer to home.

You have. My impression was that you have an approach of kind of equal opportunity mockery, MSNBC of theoretical science, experimental science, philosophy for sure, economics, journalism, all of these fields get the same B.S. treatment. So I've kind of been playing this game with myself for the last few years of figuring out like where your true sympathies lie, like which of the mockery is mockery with affection, like coming from a place of affection and which of the mockery is coming from a place of genuine disdain.

And so, for example, on this podcast, we frequently return to the tensions between philosophy and science or philosophy and engineering or technology. And the common refrain from a lot of scientists or science enthusiasts is that a lot of philosophy topics could or should just be tackled by science. Or relatedly, philosophy doesn't have the power to actually answer questions, or philosophers are just arguing about silly things. And this does also seem to be a recurring theme in S.A.C..

So, for example, I have one of my favorite Zambesi comics pulled up right here. There's a philosopher who's talking to someone and he's saying, so if a perfect duplicate of you is made, can you ever define in a meaningful sentence, which is the clonan, which is the original? And the guy says, yup, clones, the second one. And the philosopher says, right. But they're the same atom for atom. And the guy says, yeah, because the second one is the clone.

And the philosopher says, Well, but who's to say which came first? And the guy says, the guy who came first there sort of a long, angry pause. And the guy continues and says, man, that was easy.

You guys have any harder ones? And the final panel is someone standing up at a podium and saying, and engineers are now officially banned from all future philosophy conferences. And this is like one representative example.

So I was wondering if you like where you stand in sort of this general battleground, if you have if you come from a place of affection or disdain for God.

Now, be careful before you respond because you're already burned several bridges. So different disciplines, let's say you can do.

Now, I'll tell you what I think. And we should we should start with the caveat that, of course, in every field there are people who are worthless and full of it. Yes. Yes, we can. That's that's obvious.

And because of that saying, yeah, I think if you don't name names, you're not burning bridges. You go, yeah, they're out there. You know who you are or I wish you did. But I'll tell you what I think this is this is too sweeping to to be likely to be true. But my impression from reading in the history of science is for whatever reason, at least in the US, as the heroic generation of physicists give rise to, say, Feynman's generation, there seem to be this attitude.

That philosophy was inherently sort of stupid. And which is really interesting because it's like you can look at someone like Feynman and compare it to someone like Schrodinger and both make big fundamental contributions. Both are fascinating characters. But Schrodinger, someone who reads philosophy in the original Greek and Latin, that's how much he likes it and how important it is to him finding someone who openly disdains the idea of philosophy, per say. Right. And I you can speculate on why that is.

I try to give a little hand to the physics crowd in the era of Feynman is dealing with in philosophy. It's perhaps a bit more post-modernist, a little more anti science in a certain sense. You know, I mean, I imagine what Feynman would say if you read Paul Feyerabend, you know. Right. And I don't know that I don't know that necessarily Schrodinger would have been dealing as directly with that sort of thing. So that might be part of it.

It might be, in a sense, sort of backlash. But for whatever reason, my my general impression of that generation of physicists is one that's a little more against maybe the more whimsy, whimsical parts of of of philosophy, of science. And so I don't know why that should be, but it does seem to be the case. And the sense I get I hope this is true. Maybe it's just my bias is that maybe that swing a little back the other way now.

And I think that's good. Because my general view is that if there are questions that can be answered with the science of experiments, they probably are better left in science. But you still need philosophy to tell you why that experiment was decisive. And to my mind, more importantly, you need for speed to deal with questions of ethics and metaphysics, which to my mind are obviously you can say they're almost mathematical questions. And I don't know who you pissed off if you say this, but you can either say, you know, philosophy is a branch of math or math is a branch of philosophy, depending on who you're catering to.

But to my mind, something like ethics is something that you just can't solve with science. You inform with science. But but it requires you to state axioms and find conclusions and then decide whether you like that. And that's that's the whole deal. And to my mind, that is philosophy. That's not science. So the idea that you can dispense with plus philosophy perspectives is silly. Mind you, there are philosophers I think are just crazy. I someday when I'm old and rich, I want to write a book called Nietzsche and Common.

Just Bad You Go and but every time I make fun of Nietzsche, someone gets mad at me. But I'm sorry. But that's how you read Nietzsche and you're like it's like he's just a little wrong about Darwin and it's leading to all these weird conclusions.

I try to sympathize with a lot of what you said about philosophy and science. So, OK, we can stay friends.

No, you're allowed to finish this interview well before I think Julia's about to wrap it up and ask you one last question. But yes. So actually, I think your analysis is interesting and I agree with it that that is the modern age and that the more recent generation of physicists, the fine, the Vineberg, Stephen Vineberg, who famously wrote this essay against philosophy and even more recently, Stephen Hawking, Lawrence Krauss, all of these people actually are.

In fact, if you read what they write about philosophy, they are pretty much reacting against postmodernist postmodernism. And which is kind of too bad because first of all, postmodernism has been dead for a while. And second of all, the best responses to postmodernism actually have come from analytical philosophy. So it's like they're shooting in the wrong at the wrong target. And and they're overreacting in the sense that, you know, that's definitely not a representation of what philosophy is in general, whether things, as you say, are changing or not.

That's that's an interesting question. I'm not as optimistic as opposed as you are. But but very quickly, I can point out that there are at least three books biophysicist that I read recently.

The trouble with physics, not even wrong, and one, I'm currently farewell to reality.

These are written by physicists and they're all very critical of certain areas of fundamental physics, which ironically they accuse of going into metaphysical speculation. So it's going to be interesting where that that internal debate is going. It's going to go.

Yeah, no, that I think what gives me hope is largely anecdotal. It's just from doing my talks and such. I meet a lot of young engineer physics types and the sense I get, which surprised me, is that I could compare notes with them about literature and that sort of thing, which might my stereotype is that that maybe I couldn't do that with my my dad's generation of science people.

So that's speaking of bad sake from Nietzsche or elsewhere. In addition to writing and drawing MSNBC, you are also the co-founder of the Festival of Bad Ad Hoc Hypothesis, which debuted at Amitay this past fall to a crowd of, I think, over a thousand people. So I was hoping you could tell us a little bit about what that was all about, in addition to any other projects you have going on now.

Yeah, so we call it barfs buzz for that ad hoc hypothesis. And it's because I did this comic that was making fun of bed adaptation, adaptational theories, I think in the comic. The festival was called the Festival of Bed ADHOC Evolution Adaptation of Subparts. I don't remember anyway, the theory presented, which is I presented a version of in my talk that I gave, was this idea that it's clear from evolution that babies are adapted to be, I think in the comic it's dropkicks in order to reach a genetically distinct population.

And I can Overkill's to.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly, exactly. And you've actually seen the video, right.

Yes. Of the of your presentation of the very illustrious respectable theory.

Yes. They called it the fanciful theory and but. To give your listeners some flavor of it, it's it's it's I think it's like a seven minute talk on all the various strands of evidence that babies are, in fact, adapted for aerodynamics. And and so anyway, so what we did is we thought this was funny and we decided to put together an event and somehow we ended up with a venue for a thousand people. And really amazingly, we actually sold out our tickets and and we got six speakers who gave these wonderful fake evolutionary theories.

And and I think by the time this goes up, we'll have them listed on our website. But just to give you a sense of them, our winner was a guy named Telma Ollman. I think it's Dr. Tomaro one, actually. But he he gave this theory that and this first part is true, that if you hear a baby crying, you have higher adrenaline. So and so he posed it as an evolutionary question, why should babies cry?

Because it would attract predators. It doesn't seem like a good way to to do your business. But if they if they provide. Yeah, yeah. And but if they provide an adrenaline boost, you can use them for combat and by by holding them near your ear with traditional baby holding gear and then you run into combat with the screaming baby and then you perform better. What was really impressive is he had an agent based model for the whole thing.

It was very involved and well, anyway, I don't want to give away too much, but the theories like that and it's good.

I just I love how seriously with how much seriousness everyone threw themselves into their task of explaining these physical facts.

Yeah, because I'm hopeful, actually. It'll be easier next time because we have a lot of people didn't get the idea. So they sent us these sort of jokey funny presentations. And like as you saw from mine, like I mean, it's got jokes clearly, but they're all in the deadpan jokes as if it's a real seminar. And so a lot of a lot of people didn't seem to understand that. So I'm glad this time we're going to have a bunch of videos to show people.

Tell me who actually won. I don't think he smiled once during his presentation. He really did for him. Yeah, it was amazing.

So anyway, we'll definitely link to the best homepage when this episode goes up. We are actually over time now. But very briefly, before we wrap up, do you want to mention any other projects you have on the horizon? Yeah, sure.

I have two two projects, one we just released and one that's coming out in a couple of months. We just released a video project called Star Pocalypse and we're especially marketing it a bit, I should say, at the sceptic atheist community. There's a lot of jokes for that community in it, but I think it's just it's generally enjoyable regardless. And the team with S.A.C. Theatre spent two years making this thing. And I hope it shows there's a lot of special effects, there's a lot of locations.

And it was done on a very small budget. And and you can you can find it by going to SABC Dash Theater dot com. I think we spell theatre E.R. because it's America. Damn right. And America rather a Murka. Yeah, no, Novell's. And the other project I'm working on is I have a kids book coming out in hopefully April, and it's about a scientifically literate, literate, not illiterate, similar girl who goes on a little adventure.

And it's sort of a new direction for me. But I'm going to have a kid, so I need to read it something.

And I don't like other people's writing to self writing. Yeah, I mean, maybe I don't know if you two know, because I've been I've been stressing about it like there aren't a lot of books with female protagonists who go on adventures to read to kids, or maybe there are and I just don't know about it. Not know what bugs me is. It's like you can get female protagonists who are smart, but you can't get female protagonists who are smart and obnoxious.

And and that's a disservice. We should we should teach girls to be obnoxious to. And so I sort of went for that in this book.

Wonderful. Well, we'll link to Star Pocalypse as well and let our listeners know about your kids book, which when it comes out as well as I encourage all of our listeners to create fiction with both smart and obnoxious young female heroines. And unfortunately, we are way over times too enjoyable of a conversation, so I'm going to be a hard ass and insist that we move on now to the rationally speaking PEX.

Welcome back. Every episode, we pick a suggestion for our listeners that has tickled our rational fancy. This time we ask our guests Zica winners Mith for his suggestions.

I want to suggest my very favorite science fiction author, maybe my favorite author, Stanton's Love, one who is best known for what is probably his best book called Solaris. I understand a lot of people are familiar with the movie or I think it's been a couple of it, but I've actually never seen it. But the book is it's up there with any other book. It's it's got everything in it.

And actually, you're right, there are two, two movies. One was the original was a Russian production and the more recent one was American. And I think the Russian production was actually much, much better. But that's what I hear.

Yeah. The American like you could actually make that book into a movie, but they did a good job.

They did a good job in avoiding watching either one, because you don't want to ruin your experience of the book a little bit.

I just I mean, I have a friend whose is a science fiction author, and I brought it hilarious with him. And he was like, yeah, but nothing happens in that book. And I was like, everything happens in that book, but nothing happens. I mean, it's just it's like Russian literature. It's just people sitting around and being sad and talking about things. Correct.

And that's then that's why the original movie is many people think it's boring. I think it's actually very interesting. And again, it reflects the book somewhat closely. The the American remake, guess what? They went for action. And so they ruined the whole damn thing.

I mean, it's gone. Yeah, that's right. I didn't sort of whole point of that book is there is no payoff. Right.

And actually, I don't know if I'm recommending them sort of like the calculus to the algebra that it's hilarious is a book called Fiasco. But Fiasco is really thick. It's worth getting through, but it's it's a lot more thick and kind of sad and nihilistic, but really good.

I think that phrase the calculus to the algebra that is Solares could only have been uttered by a former literature physicist cartoonist. Well, Zach, it was such a pleasure having you on the show. I'm so glad we were finally able to do this and I'm very excited for your upcoming projects, both personal and professional.

You. It was fun. We got a lot of good attendance. Was a very good, very pleasure. Well, this concludes another episode of Rationally Speaking. Join us next time for more explorations on the borderlands between reason and nonsense. The rationally speaking podcast is presented by New York City skeptics for program notes, links, and to get involved in an online conversation about this and other episodes, please visit rationally speaking podcast Dog. This podcast is produced by Benny Tollan and recorded in the heart of Greenwich Village, New York.

Our theme, Truth by Todd Rundgren, is used by permission. Thank you for listening.