YouSaid · the spoken record

David Wolpe

lines on the record: 141
first: 2022-03-16
most recent: 2022-03-16
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“And he had, by the way, and he had asked that I give a lecture, which I did later. To his monks about how Jews survived in the diaspora. So it's not like he doesn't know about Judah. He knows a lot about it. But he says to me right away with, so I said, yes, Jews believe that they were chosen for a certain mission in this world. But that doesn't mean other people weren't chosen for other sorts of things. They certainly, I mean, seems to me that other people believe they're chosen for things too. burst out laughing and said, yeah, we also think we're chosen. So”
2022-03-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #270 – David Wolpe: Judaism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so is the Dalai Lama actually teaches at Emory, although he no longer does because he's too old to go to Emory. But for many years taught at Emory. And so my brother, he's the head of the Ethics Center at Emory. He's a bioethicist. So he brought a bunch of students to Dharm Sala to meet with the Dalai Lama. So I went to India. I was on sabbatical. Then anyway, I met my brother there and we had a chance to meet with the Dalai Lama. Okay, that was the name drop. So we're sitting in the off, before he speaks to the students, he was speaking to us. But not because I just wanted to make it clear, not because he said, oh, I got to talk to that rabbi. We just happened to be, I happened to glom along with my brother. We sit down. The first thing he says is he points at me and says, What's this about the chosen people anyway”
2022-03-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #270 – David Wolpe: Judaism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that the idea of Judaism was to try to exemplify a certain way of making that statement over and over again. And I want to say one other thing about chosenness that's very name droppy, but when I tell you how I got there, it won't be his name droppy. So my brother is a professor at Emery.”
2022-03-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #270 – David Wolpe: Judaism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it's both. I mean, the turret does not start with Jews. It starts with Adam and Eve. That's a way of saying, yeah, this is going to be a story about a people, but understand that prior to a kind of people, there are people. Like I'm a human being before I'm a Jew. And in fact, the Jewish New Year, you know, the Muslim New Year starts with Muhammad's journey and the Christian New Year starts with Jesus' birth. The Jewish New Year starts with the creation of the world because the idea is, yes, this is a particularist tradition, but it makes a universal statement, which is all of humanity is a child are in the image of God, are children of God.”
2022-03-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #270 – David Wolpe: Judaism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think it has to do with a religion that doesn't make ethical demands. That is. For Stalin and for Hitler, they both had religions, but they were in a sense, but they were religions that didn't make ethical demands for the other. I mean, 36 times the Torah talks about the stranger. The point is, it's trying to educate people away from their natural inclination towards distrusting and disliking the other. And it's a lot of work that's really difficult to do. But if you have the tribal passion and not a universal ethic, then you're in trouble.”
2022-03-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #270 – David Wolpe: Judaism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. Because I really think I know this sounds absurdly anthropomorphic, but I really think God is cheering us on. I feel like this is why we're here. We're here to grow in soul and to grow each other in soul.”
2022-03-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #270 – David Wolpe: Judaism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I really do believe that. I mean, it was religion that the Greeks looked back at the golden age of the past. It was the Jews who said, no, the golden age is in the future, right? It's the Messiah. And I think that that idea that we're moving towards something better, which I really believe humanity can do and absent destroying ourselves will do. I mean, I'm very excited about the technology that I won't live to see. I think it's fantastic.”
2022-03-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #270 – David Wolpe: Judaism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I think Nietzsche was largely right. It wasn't a statement about God, it was a statement about God's presence in the world. And I think that that's largely true, that God is not a force in... Lot of Western society, and I believe that if the force of nihilism has no clear counter without An idea that we're all here for a purpose and that our lives are inherently meaningful and that there's a God who wishes us to be better. So I worry a lot about it. And I don't think that the sort of optimism that things are just going to get better and better is what one philosopher called cut flower ethics. That is, we're still living off the morals that religion gave us, but now that they're separate from the soil that gave birth to them, I see them wilting.”
2022-03-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #270 – David Wolpe: Judaism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because the first debate I ever had on religion and science was with Stephen Jay Gould. And it was wonderful because he had a deep interest in religion. And his interest was actually not to say religion is terrible. But I started with this joke. And I think it made the Debaco a little bit easier. So the time has come when human beings can do everything that God can do. And a scientist looks up at heaven and says, God, look, you are great in your day. And we thank you for everything you did. But now we don't need you. And God says, really, you don't need me? He says, no, we can do everything you did. God says, everything. And human beings says, yeah, we can do everything. God says, okay, can you create a human being? And the scientist goes, yeah. God says, from dirt. The scientist goes, yeah. He says, okay, let me see. The scientist reaches down, scoops up some dirt, and God says, uh-uh, get your own dirt.”
2022-03-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #270 – David Wolpe: Judaism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The way I'm not at all insensible to how remarkable it must feel to create that. I'm actually worried in part about how remarkable it feels to create that because to maintain humility and perspective, when it's such a fantastic thing is what's difficult. And I think also because Creativity is both part of what it is to be human and it's very much part of the legacy of Western civilization and the legacy of having a creator god. If you have a tradition where God is known primarily through what God creates, so the first debate I ever had since we talked about humor and God and creating, let me give you my one God-creating joke.”
2022-03-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #270 – David Wolpe: Judaism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I have a question about that myself. Not about Stalin. I'm sure that Stalin thought so. Stalin does not strike me from what I know of him as somebody given to a lot of self-doubt. But the question with AI to me is actually, it goes back to the God question, which is if we have an appreciation of the limitations of our own intelligence, That we know that just like we can only hear certain things and see certain colors, how much of the world is inaccessible to us because of the way our brains are constructed? How can we possibly have any confidence that we can create things that in certain ways are far more intelligent than we are and control them the way we think is best seems to me a hubris that might end up being destructive?”
2022-03-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #270 – David Wolpe: Judaism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“100% runs through every human heart. I have no doubt about it. And I know, as you probably do, but I probably know more both because of what I do and because I have lived a lot longer than you. I know a lot of religious leaders who people thought or think are above the human. And they are emphatically not. They're not. Some of them have done horrible things and they've used their position to do horrible things. And it's because there is no perfect saint. There's no, you know, I mean, all through history, you discover all these saintly characters that we worship, the people who actually knew them around them, some like them and some didn't. People are complicated, all of us.”
2022-03-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #270 – David Wolpe: Judaism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And there was an English scholar named Hyman Maccabee who said the reason that that's so is the myth that Jews killed God. They killed Jesus. And to kill a God, you have to be superhumanly evil. You can't just be bad. Otherwise, you can't kill a god. So there is some supercharged evil sense that people got from that about Jews that still inheres.”
2022-03-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #270 – David Wolpe: Judaism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Skating, you know, when you're on thin ice, your safety is in your speed. So I was trying to move fast. For most of history in Eastern Western Europe, not obviously in Asia, but in Eastern Western Europe, Jews were the ones who, like they're not like us. They're clearly not like us. And so, and in addition, there's a peculiar quality, and I don't know, I wonder what you'll think of this explanation, there's a peculiar quality to anti-Semitism that is unlike any other hatred that I know of, which is Jews are both superhuman and subhuman They're vermin. Nazis thought of them as vermin, and yet they control”
2022-03-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #270 – David Wolpe: Judaism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're absolutely right. And I was moving fast because I didn't want to get bogged down in all the very difficult. It's true. I tried.”
2022-03-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #270 – David Wolpe: Judaism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I asked you before if you were a chess player. And when I was a kid and playing in tournaments, and I didn't do it for that long and I didn't do it that well, but when I was, it was like the whole world was divided into people who could play chess and people who couldn't play chess, which is ridiculous if you think about it, as though that's the way you divide the world. But we tend to do that. And the Jews were always the identifiable other. There were Frenchmen and Jews. There were Russians and Jews. There were Germans and Jews. The great blessing of America is that there's no identifiable other quite that way is that there's all these minorities and there's not an American and a something. But once you have that identifiable other and you have a long history of blaming that identifiable other for all the ills that befall you,”
2022-03-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #270 – David Wolpe: Judaism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, for me, it's multicausal. I don't think there's one reason. One of the things especially there has to do with the special nature of anti-Semitism, which is let's put that to one side for the moment. The second is, I think human beings are fundamentally split. They are mostly good except when put under certain pressures. My first explanation for hatred is as follows. To a play What happens when a new kid comes on the playground? Do the other kids say, Oh, let's go share our toys with the new kid? No. They say, oh, who's that stranger? And let's go get him. Because otherness is built into our genetic. I mean, we're tribal by nature. And we see people form tribes all the time of different kinds.”
2022-03-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #270 – David Wolpe: Judaism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've seen it. And you see, you can see his face, but at the same time, you see that this is an amazing. And I think what's so disturbing about it is exactly what you were saying, is I've seen a thousand people like this. And I know this one, and I know what he became. So what about all those other people who look exactly like him, who didn't make it out of the camp?”
2022-03-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #270 – David Wolpe: Judaism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a first of all, I'm a vegetarian, so I'm tough to have it at Thanksgiving dinner, but there's a comedian and Kathy Lansman, who one year I heard this on the radio and it stuck with me. She said that holidays are a chance to renew your resentments afresh. And that's basically what people do with their families. It's like, I'm going to go home and fight with the uncle again this year.”
2022-03-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #270 – David Wolpe: Judaism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say traditions that are demanding fall apart to traditions that require Turkey might not fall apart, but traditions that make demands of you that are countercultural or are hard, they fall apart.”
2022-03-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #270 – David Wolpe: Judaism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's very hard to sustain over generations without some belief that the source of it is beyond ourselves. And in that sense, as in many others, Eric is unique.”
2022-03-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #270 – David Wolpe: Judaism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Rodinger's God So, I think that he would probably agree with what Ellie Weizel said, that a Jew can be angry at God or be disbelieving of God, but is not allowed to be indifferent to God. And I think Eric's not indifferent to God. And it's different than Christianity. I've had this conversation many times because you can be very Jewish and have deep doubts about theological questions because Judaism isn't a religion. It's a religious family. And so you're born Jewish. Like if I said to you tomorrow, if I was Christian and I said, oh, I believe in Jesus today. And then tomorrow I didn't. I'm not Christian anymore. But if tomorrow I said, oh, I don't believe all this stuff, I'm still Jewish. So it's a more complicated system. Having said that though,”
2022-03-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #270 – David Wolpe: Judaism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think that's exactly right. I think, first of all, Eric has a really deep appreciation of the Jewish tradition. I don't know, Peterson. I've read his stuff and I've reviewed his stuff and so on. But I think that Jungians are in their very approach. They believe that myth is the way the world works. And so it's not that big a leap to God, but it's still there's still a distance there.”
2022-03-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #270 – David Wolpe: Judaism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think he also thinks it's fundamentally intellectually shoddy and disreputable. Yeah, faith. I don't know how to put this. I mean, they're both capable of separating their contempt for religion from the people that they have sitting in front of them.”
2022-03-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #270 – David Wolpe: Judaism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In fact, I mean, he, you know, I did a podcast with Eric Weinstein. And then Sam did one. And Sam said, when I heard your podcast with David Wolpey, I learned stuff about what he thinks that I never learned in my conversations with him because I can never let him make those unfounded assertions without challenging them and you just let them go. And I think that there was something to that was like he finds it hard to have a conversation about religion that doesn't arouse his real ire about the harm that he thinks religion does in the world.”
2022-03-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #270 – David Wolpe: Judaism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sam believes that religion is intellectually indefensible. He really believes it, like deep in his soul. And he gets angry at the idea that a proposition should be unchallenged if it offends his sense of logic.”
2022-03-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #270 – David Wolpe: Judaism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know Auden, the poet, said among the people that I like or admire, I can find no common quality. But among those I love, I can. All of them make me laugh.”
2022-03-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #270 – David Wolpe: Judaism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Once he trained his intellectual howitzers on a target, he had so much fun inventing new arguments and attacking it, that I really believe he gets carried away sometimes by his own eloquence and intellectual range. So, for example, the idea that you would call a book that religion poisons everything, I think he did that deliberately, provocatively so that he could defend a proposition that obviously is indefensible, that it poisons everything. So I don't know. I think he had tremendous joys dev. That's really what sums him up. This guy loved life in all of its manifestations and arguing against something that someone else believed was one of his greatest joys.”
2022-03-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #270 – David Wolpe: Judaism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So of the atheists that I have debated, I think about all of them somewhat differently. So I think that in some deep way, for example, Sam Harris is a religious personality. I don't even think that he wouldn't like the word religious, but I don't even think that he would take issue with that. I think that he would say his is a purely material-based spirituality. But, I mean, his orientation towards meditation and appreciation of Buddhism, there's something deeply seeking spiritual about him. With Hitchens, I honestly, and I know that some of his fans will really not like this. It's not that he was any kind of closet believer, certainly not at all. But I almost feel as though he was less a passionate arguer against religion than he was, first of all, extremely upset by the forms that religion took in this world.”
2022-03-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #270 – David Wolpe: Judaism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, unrelated to Scotch. He convinced me that the idea of I mean, I had my doubts about it and have my doubts about it, but he convinced me through many debates, and not only he, that the idea that religion makes people better. It's not ipso facto wrong, but it's a much, much more complicated argument than I wished it to be.”
2022-03-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #270 – David Wolpe: Judaism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I spent a three hour limousine ride with him from one debate to another, from LA de Sint to San Diego. And the entire time he said, we just can't talk about religion. So we talked about literature and he gave me a long lecture about Scotch. He was inexhaustible. I mean, not only did he, I began, I wrote a couple of obituaries about him, and when I began with the historian Keith Thomas, said there are two ways of achieving immortality by doing things worth remembering or saying things worth remembering. And by that standard, he did both. I mean, he went all around the world to all sorts of danger zones. He knew the best bars everywhere from Kuala Lumpur, you know, to Beirut to LA. And he could drink all night and write a 2,000 word essay on the poetry of Yates and go to sleep. I remember before one of our debates in Boston, he was at the bar. And he said, come have a drink. And I said, I'm going to have a drink before I go to debate with you. What are you crazy? And he said, just have a beer. It's water.”
2022-03-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #270 – David Wolpe: Judaism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the things I learned was you can't win a debate with Christopher One of the reasons you can't win is because he has this British baritone and this ready wit that you can't triumph over laughter. It doesn't matter if your argument is better, if your quip is better, you win. And so I remember once we were arguing about free will, and he said, Well, I choose to believe in it. And everybody laughed, and that was. Despite the fact that that's not really an argument”
2022-03-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #270 – David Wolpe: Judaism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You don't want to know the thing. Well, the world, yes. The world that got created is constantly surprising. But, and by the way, the caveat to this, you know, when I had all these debates with Christopher Hitchens and he would always say that God is a greater tyrant than North Korea because he continues after your death. And the idea of being known by God is after all frightening if you think God knows what I think and so on if your image of God is unloving.”
2022-03-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #270 – David Wolpe: Judaism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, you have with God a more intimate relationship because you can believe that God is, you are known by God and you have a relationship to God despite the fact that you can't know God just as you can't know others”
2022-03-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #270 – David Wolpe: Judaism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But the reason you're not is that you don't have to have a comprehension of God. You have to have a relationship to God. And those are not the same. I mean, to draw an analogy that is not far from perfect, as most analogies are, but this one especially, you have relationships with people who are mysteries to you. Your mysteries to yourself. You can live and love somebody for 50 years and they can say something that surprises you because ultimately we are trapped in here. And when a child first says I, we call that individuation. But what that really means is I now know that I am cut off from the minds of all other children and all other people.”
2022-03-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #270 – David Wolpe: Judaism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the reason that the salvation of this is that you can't, I was going to say the reason you're not screwed, but then I thought somebody might be upset at a rabbi saying that. So I didn't say it and have not said it.”
2022-03-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #270 – David Wolpe: Judaism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it's almost inevitable, but I think ultimately you try to transcend it. This was the great, you know, we just read this actually in synagogue, the story of the Golden Calf. And the story is that human beings found it impossible to not have a visualization because they had just come from Egypt and in the world of pagan worship everything is not that pagans thought that idol was actually God, but it represented visually what God was. And along comes this idea that God is actually not capable of being visualized, which is very difficult and it stretches the bounds of human comprehension, maybe even breaks them.”
2022-03-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #270 – David Wolpe: Judaism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I will take refuge in a beautiful phrase from Martin Buber, another Jewish theologian. He said, God cannot be expressed, God can only be addressed. In other words, you can speak to God, you can feel a sense of God, but can you begin to comprehend or know God? No. Josef Cospi, I'm pulling in a couple of early Jewish philosophers. He said, to know God, I would have to be God”
2022-03-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #270 – David Wolpe: Judaism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not only did you not know, but you didn't know what you didn't know. Conceive of God as being the distance between God and human beings is far greater than the distance between the two year old and a 15-year-old. So when we speak about God, we have to acknowledge how limited we really are.”
2022-03-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #270 – David Wolpe: Judaism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You have a modern philosopher like Heschel who says that God is a god of pathos, a god of deep feeling, which probably would make Maimonides shiver if he heard such a description. And if you look in the Bible, God is always regretting or having human emotions. So there are so many different kinds of depictions and ideas. And there is this tremendous tension between transcendence and immanence. That is, In the Jewish tradition, God is exquisitely close. God is imminent. In the Talmud's words, God is as close as your mouth is to your ear. In other words, whatever you say, God hears it. And yet at the same time, God is unfathomably distant. Sometimes when I speak to high schoolers, I will say, in the Jewish tradition, think of it this way. When you were two years old, you had no idea what it was to be a 15-year-old.”
2022-03-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #270 – David Wolpe: Judaism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's difficult because Judaism, like any tradition that is thousands of years old and encompasses so many different lands and languages and thinkers, Don't give a single answer to even simple questions and to large questions, it certainly doesn't give a single answer. Although Judaism was responsible for introducing the monotheistic idea to the world, it doesn't mean that it's one idea. So if you take my Maimonides, the greatest sage in the Jewish tradition, medieval philosopher, he would say that God is an omnipotent, benevolent, intangible, unimaginable God. In fact, he said, you can't say what God is, only what God is not, because you have to emphasize, could talk more about that, but basically you have to emphasize the unknowability of God.”
2022-03-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #270 – David Wolpe: Judaism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source