Episode 183: Accept the Mystery (with Paul Bloom)

[00:00:00] Very Bad Wizards is a podcast with a philosopher, my dad, and psychologist David Pizarro having an informal discussion about issues and science and ethics. Please note that the discussion contains bad words that I'm not allowed to say, and knowing my dad, some very inappropriate jokes.

[00:00:17] I don't follow your math, but I'm moved by your passion. Go on. Welcome to Very Bad Wizards. I'm Tamler Sommers from the University of Houston. Dave and Paul, we're going to talk about a serious man today. Is that the most Jew movie you've ever seen?

[00:01:23] All right, let's have Paul answer that first. It is the juvious movie in the world. It is not a movie about Jews. It's not a movie told from the perspective of Jews. It is above and beyond. It is filled with Jewishness. It is pure Jew.

[00:01:45] And we'll get to talk about this, but I was reading what people had to say about the movie, and some people were not pleased. It is not a flattering picture of our people. I saw that in your detailed secondary literature bibliography.

[00:02:01] I read the abstract of one of them. Yeah, point complaining about the depiction of Jews. I used to hold Fiddler on the roof in the highest regard in terms of my anthropological knowledge of your people. And this, you know, when you ask, is it the Jewish?

[00:02:24] I don't know because what is my standard? This is certainly a depiction of Jews, so I don't know what it means to be a very, very Jewish except for that everybody who plays somebody on this movie has been a guest star

[00:02:42] on either Kirby enthusiasm or the Larry Sanders show. So by the process of induction, I have concluded that this must be truly. I don't want to throw Sephardic under the bus. You know, I mean, I don't think any. Yeah, it's Ashkenazi.

[00:03:01] I did not read your secondary literature or even the abstract, Paul, but I don't think it's an I disagree that it's an unflattering portrayal of Jewishness. The sebaceous cysts. We will. Well, we will talk about that in the second segment.

[00:03:24] I find it very offensive that you don't think that of that unflattering depiction of Jewish. Well, again, it's not the people in it necessarily. Like when I suggested that it was the most Jew movie, it is like you said, Paul, it

[00:03:39] is like it's not just that the people and the creators, the Cohn brothers are Jewish. The movie is like undiluted just in terms of its themes and in terms of its yeah, just the way the movie carries itself is there's just there's something about it

[00:04:00] that it just exudes Jew. Yes. But not in a bad way as I as I see it, but we can that can be discussed. All right. For opening segment, though, what are we going to talk about?

[00:04:13] Paul, you fired off to us an email that might be described as a ramp. Oh, no, it was like an essay. It's an essay. It's a it's a polished essay, a polemic but written like, you know, Jack Kerouac wrote on the road just without stopping.

[00:04:33] I may have not been entirely sober as I wrote it. Possibly. Yes. Same with Jack Kerouac. So and a lot of it was about our episode that we just had with YOL on the Yarkoni paper, but seemed like a lot of it was also focused on the two

[00:04:49] episodes that YOL and Mickey did recently, one on the Yarkoni paper and one on against experiments that that episode. So I'll just turn it over to you. What did you think of all of this? So I got to say I loved your episode.

[00:05:06] I listened to a close to your episode with YOL. It is a sophisticated, really interesting discussion of some important issues in our field. And just it was it was rich. I went back. I read the original Yarkoni article. I read Daniel Lackin's, I think very trenchant response.

[00:05:22] And it was just it's just really important and interesting and deep. And this continues the theme that you guys have been doing as well as the two psychologist four beers crew. And I have thoughts on this.

[00:05:34] I have a lot of sympathy for the claim that we overblow our findings, not just in our titles, but everywhere and we should be better behaved. But I also think and Daniel Lackins puts it very nicely that a lot of our very narrow specific studies when done right,

[00:05:48] zoom in on specific hypotheses and they're like science at their best and we could pursue that. But what I really wanted to take off on what I really got into was you two to various proportions as well as Mickey, Mickey Inslet

[00:06:03] and YOLIN bar have been really on about the idea that psychologists should maybe tone down on the experiments and start doing descriptions of the world, start looking at the world just describing things. And this idea seems to me to be utterly insane.

[00:06:19] It is so insane that I have to figure out people are saying something different. So on the one hand, you can't be saying that psychologists should stand in street corners and write little descriptions as people walk by. You can't be saying that.

[00:06:36] You can't be saying to go to playgrounds and and tell stories about the kids that they see for one thing, who would read that crap? For another journalist and novelist do it so much better. You can be saying, OK, journalists and novels, but we'll use numbers.

[00:06:51] So we'll count how many red haired kids run by and we'll count how many people have hats come by and so on because who cares about that either? Now, what you might be saying is that you'll do observational studies as a way to test focus, complicated,

[00:07:06] unintuitive hypotheses like to speak to some research that's been done. I think you all has been involved in. You might look at a relationship between Twitter, what people say in Twitter about disgust, disgusting terms and whether that correlates with flu season and physical illness.

[00:07:25] That to me is terrific. That's great science. But that's the sort of cool stuff which doesn't seem so different from a cool specific experiment. You know, Tamla was on about this before, you know, you have a theory. Your theory predicts something which nobody else would have predicted.

[00:07:41] And you go look for it. I'm happy with that. But now you're very far away from the hippie, dippy, Paul Ross and sort of thing. Let's look at the world. So I can see no case at all that psychology should move to any form

[00:07:54] of unbiased description because who cares? OK, before Tamla jumps in with what is certainly a more extreme defense than mine, because I feel like I'm somewhere in the middle. Will you allow me, Tamla, to first give the my position? OK, so I find myself

[00:08:14] both agreeing with what you're saying, Paul, but thinking that you at least have misunderstood what I meant by descriptive research, which by analogy, I've always in an attempt to be intellectual have pointed to the work that what's his name, the amateur astronomer collected

[00:08:32] with the guy with the gold nose, Taika Brahe, systematic, detailed observation that doesn't need to be guided by a prior hypothesis about the world. Now, you might say, well, that's, you know, the what's what's constrained nicely there is what he's looking at.

[00:08:48] Like when you're looking at just the motion of stars, you are essentially testing, you know, doing an experiment. But but I say to you as a proud you as a proud cognitive developmentalist, this is the kind of observation that I mean isn't like, you know, I observed my

[00:09:10] clothes that were spinning in the dish in the lawn in the dryer. And I realize life is is nothing but, you know, a dream like that you get in these postmodern journals. What I mean is actual systematic observation. So you do go to a playground.

[00:09:27] You do have trained observers who are writing down things like how many times kids engage in play with two or more, how many times they're playing by themselves and how old they are. And there I think the most charitable view of what we were saying is that

[00:09:48] this is a way to derive hypotheses that that would at least be in tune with how the real world works. And so the part that surprises me is that as a proud cognitive developmentalist, you would think that all of Piaget's work was shit

[00:10:05] because what he was doing was systematically observing, you know, his kids and developing theories from that. Well, I make a distinction. Sometimes you teach you when teaches one teaches developmental psychology course as an assignment, you send the students off to do exactly what you're saying,

[00:10:22] which is go to a playground, observe kids and write things down and everything. And then they bring back their papers, but no one's ever going to read their papers. Because there's going to be nothing of value in them.

[00:10:33] So you look to make sure for the formatting and everything. So because who cares? I mean, you put that in a journal. No, no, no. But to be fair, you could also send a kid to do a seventh grade chemistry experiment

[00:10:43] and write it up and no one's going to read that. But that doesn't mean the chemical experiment thing is wrong. All right. You know, like, I guess what I'm saying is I don't. If somebody comes to a playground and watches the kids,

[00:10:52] I don't care what they have to say. I mean, unless they're a novelist or a journalist with incredibly clever insight, but here's the distinction. And here's maybe where we agree. I think sometimes observation of the world, careful, intelligent, open-minded, observational can lead to great hypotheses.

[00:11:08] You might notice something really cool, but that's where the work starts to get done. I mean, I wouldn't object to a psychologist who is totally stuck on a research program, spends time in a prison to start saying, I wonder what I could think of,

[00:11:23] what I could apply psychology, some cool ideas. But I wouldn't want to read what that person wrote about being in a prison just because there's such already such a wealth of great prison literature done by people. Oh, the prison literature, far more done by people

[00:11:36] who are far more astute observers, far better writers and psychologists. So before Tamler jumps in, I think that Tamler. No, I'm sorry, Tamler, but I to be fair, I think that Tamler wasn't saying and this is why I want you to jump in.

[00:11:49] It wasn't saying anything other than maybe they should read some more of those novels before they start going out into the world. I think that's I then I would agree. Well, I'm goodness. I say something a little more than that.

[00:12:02] So a couple of things, Paul, about what you said and you said it maybe with even more verb in the in the email. But this idea that if we go out into the world and study it and take careful observations, nobody's going to want to read that crap.

[00:12:22] I don't know. It sounds to me now and it sounded to me even more in the email, like somebody if like Fox News is being accused of doing irresponsible research or just any media outlet is doing like just to get clicks or just to get viewers sensationalist stuff.

[00:12:40] And then and the critic, the media critic says, you know, we should be doing. We shouldn't just be trying to appeal to like base instincts on the part of the viewer. We should be trying to inform them and we should be trying to do careful

[00:12:53] journalism and long reads and stuff like that. And then the reply would be, but nobody's going to read that. Nobody's going to watch that. Nobody's going to click on that. OK, so OK, maybe that's true, but that doesn't justify doing flashy, irresponsible, outrage inducing media stuff

[00:13:17] just to get people to watch and just to get people to click on it. Right. And I know that that's a little bit of an unfair way of putting your point, but like in terms of the scientific value of what is done,

[00:13:32] the fact that nobody would read it from a wider perspective doesn't diminish the value of it. And also the fact that people will want to read something. I mean, people want to learn about the Stanford Prison Experiment and that doesn't make it a responsible piece of research

[00:13:54] that is actually informing us about something real. So that's my that's my first point. And then my second point is something a little different about maybe the value of the more qualitative or descriptive stuff. But I just want you to. So let me clarify. Yeah.

[00:14:12] When I say no one's going to care, I don't mean that in a sense of, you know, click bait and what are you going to get published in the top journals? I mean, nobody should care. It's it's I think people are correct not to want to care.

[00:14:24] I think that if psych science had an article in the first article, well, it's one of our big journals in our field, first article was, you know, was a bunch of psychologists go into a DMV department motor vehicles and they observe what's happening there.

[00:14:38] I'm going to skip that because, you know, I don't think it doesn't seem interesting in any significant way. And to the extent there are observations to be had, again, there are people who are so better equipped to write about it.

[00:14:53] I mean, I there's a lot of journalists and novelists and essayist I read. I read what Roxane Gay has to say about a DMV. I read Ian McEwen about a prison. I'd read, you know, I'd read some some long form journalists.

[00:15:08] But psychologists, they just they would just describe it. But the alternative isn't, you know, flashy bogus made up experiments. The alternative is, you know, really clever, theoretically where you have a clever theoretical idea. And then either in real world circumstances or incredibly artificial circumstances, you you test it.

[00:15:27] So in some way, I'm speaking out. It's about time the establishment came and met with you guys and said enough enough, you know, there's a lot to be said for the standard experimental method for getting real insights. We've learned all sorts of great stuff that way.

[00:15:44] And I don't think we've learned anything from this neutral observation of what you're describing. So you're acting like there are no sciences that use observation. And you talk about the hippie-dippy Paul Rosin thing. But he and I love Paul Rosin, right?

[00:16:01] But in that in that paper, he documents pretty rigorously how biologists went about their business before jumping into experiments. And they didn't worry about the fact that, well, you know, careful notes about what's going on in the Galapagos is not going to be

[00:16:20] interesting to me or it's not going to be interesting to people who read about it. They thought that that was a necessary step before jumping into the experimental method. And I don't know, like the way you're talking about it, it's like you gather

[00:16:36] information and you build a theory and you generate a counterintuitive hypothesis. And if you can demonstrate it, if that hypothesis is confirmed, we've really learned something. How how often does that does that happen where you really do build a theory in social psychology?

[00:16:57] I mean, where you really do build a theory that generates a hypothesis that out of that will come a really surprising prediction that turns out to be true or turns out to be confirmed, which will provide some evidence

[00:17:12] for the theory. I mean, do you really think there's a lot of that going on in social psychology? Because I take Mickey and Yoel's point in their episode. That's actually not usually what goes on in these experiments. No, I agree with you. It's I'm not described.

[00:17:30] There's a lot of stuff. Which is neither open minded description, which at least is harmless and might generate good ideas, nor is it robust, careful experiments or sort of like it's the mush in between. But let me give you an example.

[00:17:44] This is what I sent in my email screen because somebody told me that I always found this fascinating. And it seems like an example we should always go back to. In 1981, this guy does kind of fairly obscure Australian internship, had a new theory of ulcers.

[00:17:58] Everybody thought ulcers caused by stress. He thought ulcers were caused by bacteria, some sort of bacterial strain. Nobody believed him. He couldn't test it on monkeys because the whole thing I'm sorry on mice because only works on primates. He couldn't get permission to test it on primates.

[00:18:16] He couldn't use humans because of obvious ethical reasons. So what he did was he put together a stew of bacteria, really made it kind of in the soup, drank it all up. And two days later he was vomiting.

[00:18:28] He had gastritis and a couple of days later he had a full blown ulcer. Now you hear this story and say, wow, this guy had a theory. He did something which makes no sense outside of the theory

[00:18:39] and had a prediction that no one else would make and confirmed it. And that's science at its best. And by the way, he didn't have to test 10,000 people from different ethnicities and different genders in different parts of the world.

[00:18:52] He had an N of one, a single trial, no statistics because he had an idea and tested it. And I don't think this sort of thing is beyond the capacity of social psychology. It shows up in other forms of psychology. There are many demonstrations in cognitive psychology,

[00:19:11] perceptual psychology, where somebody says, if my theory, say, Antriesman's theory of visual pop out is correct, these letters should pop out at you and these should not. And you could show it to me and say, I got it. And so I think maybe social psychologists

[00:19:26] should be gearing their efforts to getting sophisticated enough theories where they could do stuff like that. So can I jump in with a couple of thoughts? I think that there are some distinctions that need to be made that I feel like you guys are conflating a few things.

[00:19:46] One is the method of observation, right? The systematic field observation or getting data from Twitter or whatever. Like there is that method. And so long as that method is careful and systematic, then that method ought to be a solid way of acquiring empirical information about the world.

[00:20:08] So if you have a theory that you want to test through observational methods, going to the DMV or to the grocery store isn't that crazy a way to test it. So I want to bring Tom Gilovich's work into here because these are great examples of observational studies

[00:20:25] built within a package of studies that include experiments. But that arose from observations. So a lot of what he does is observing, like he watches sports. So he has a feeling, some intuition forms about what's going on in sports.

[00:20:42] So he has a well-known paper about the amount of time that hockey players or other team sport players who are wearing black uniforms get called for penalties in a disproportionate amount than those who aren't wearing black uniforms. He has a great study on people missing free throws

[00:21:00] when their foul has been called clearly in their favor as a mistake. So they're discombobulated because they know that they shouldn't have been getting a free throw and they're more likely to miss. These are just looking at the data and the numbers,

[00:21:14] but he's testing at least a hypothesis. And Tamly was saying like we don't ever do that. Well, he doesn't have a full blown theory of the human mind, but he definitely has a local theory, which takes the form of a specific hypothesis in here.

[00:21:29] And he's doing observational work to test it out in a systematic way. And I think he's generating reliable information about the world. He usually combines it with experimental studies. So I think that... What is the theory? This is a sincere question. Like what's the theory that...

[00:21:45] No, it's just a hypothesis. It's just that in this, I think that you keep thinking that what is required for falsification to work as science is like a broad theory. His theory is just like, oh, there is something going on in the mind of NBA players

[00:21:58] that when they get a foul unfairly called in their favor, they will be discombobulated and this will cause them to miss. That's all I mean by a theoretical claim. Like it's... And it takes the specific form of the hypothesis that let's count the like the proportion

[00:22:13] of free throws made after they get a foul in this way called in their favor, they'll miss more. So that's all. It's not a grand theory of anything. Well, I'm not asking if what the theory of the human mind is just

[00:22:26] like is the theory that people who feel like they were granted something unjustly will subconsciously act in a way to return something like that? Something like that, yeah. Yeah. And so he then takes that idea and does it in the lab

[00:22:43] by having people play a beanbag toss game when they've totally been unfairly awarded an extra toss and he shows evidence for that. Now I think that's confirmatory. Like you could spin it as falsifying but it's probably just confirmatory. He's just looking to prove something.

[00:23:02] But it's a good, I've always liked his work because it does he is looking at the real world and documenting phenomena out there in the real world with real behavior. And sometimes the only way you can get that is through observational work.

[00:23:13] He had a postdoc sit there and code MBA games hours upon hours of MBA games. So I tend to agree with Paul about like the uselessness. So I agree with all of that. I leave the idea that the real work could give you cool ideas

[00:23:27] for theories of different levels. And also once you have a hypothesis you might test it using real world data. Totally agree. Right, so hypothesis driven real world observation might be good. I still think that systematic observation I think usually what psychologists social psychologists say is

[00:23:43] their descriptive work is just like capturing intuitions through living in the world. I'm certain that Tom would say it's just hours and hours of watching basketball games. And maybe that's why you do systematic. But I still think that if you were just like

[00:24:00] I wonder when fairness emerges in kids and you go to a playground and you systematically observe them I think that you might actually save yourself the pain of having done a bunch of lab experiments without any good theory of what's going on.

[00:24:14] You might get real use out of them. But you have to reward. It's not just personally because as an institution then you would want to reward people who are doing that work too. And not just the work of people who run the flashy experiment afterwards.

[00:24:35] Yeah, and it's true. Paul, you tell me like at least in social psychology if you just go in with a descriptive field study even if you're testing a hypothesis chances are, I mean it's getting better now but chances are they're gonna tell you

[00:24:47] to beef up that paper with some experiments. Before you actually submit it. And if I was a reviewer, I would say that too. You're an example of fairness emerging gets a little bit complicated because what counts as the merchants of fairness is extremely theoretically laden.

[00:25:03] So it may be in some way very theoretically informed work. Booger picking. But you know, right, but if you go to a playground and count booger picking and then you send it into a child to the general child development damn right the reviewers are gonna say

[00:25:15] why did you do this? Well there goes my full professor packet. That's right. There. So take booger picking and is it booger or booger? Well anyway, well that's a different that's a whole different paper. I don't think it's booger. Booger? Booger. I don't think, yeah.

[00:25:31] Yeah, it's spelled that way though. Okay, well huh. You see it's through everyday observation we learn things. But I find that that is honest to God description and so on and I don't think I don't think people care because. That's not a fair example of descriptive research.

[00:25:51] But suppose you looked at hitting or stealing or acts of kindness. Still absent some organizing principles, some ideas. I mean one way to put it is sort of more economic terms. Whoever does this is extremely replaceable. Anybody could do this. You don't need any idea.

[00:26:10] You need no special skills. So even if such an article should be published in a Tom Journal, then you just move it to the web and you have thousands and thousands of these things coming in. Everybody who has a kid,

[00:26:22] just every psychologist has a diary entries and so on. And maybe to be fair to the Galapagos examples, maybe the first people who did systematic, sophisticated recordings of their kids speech really did have making contribution. At the very least they're making data available for future researchers.

[00:26:41] My dissertation work was largely based on data that was collected by other people making recordings of their kids early language. But now that well has been tapped. And nobody cares anymore about the stories of you and your kids. It's not to say that you can't get really cool

[00:26:56] ideas for experiments by hanging out with your kids, but your observations of the adorable things your kids do or what they do today are very little interest. I mean again when you talk like that it sounds like responsible political journalism, nobody cares. Rush Limbaugh is not replaceable.

[00:27:19] I'm attacking C-span. I'm attacking somebody putting up a camera and pointing it at some rally that's about to begin and leaving the camera running for three hours. Right. And you're defending Hannity. Oh no. I'm defending frontline. I don't know, I'm defending sharp and decisive investigative journalism.

[00:27:43] When you say interest, when Paul says interest he means scientific value. I think that and he's assuming that scientists will be interested in things of scientific value. We can agree on that. Yeah. I was gonna say the ulcer guy I love. Like this is wonderful.

[00:27:56] I think that the problem is we have, we're very far from tight theories in social psychology. And to be honest, as I grow older I don't know that we'll ever get to tight theories in social psychology. But the ulcer guy is a nice illustration

[00:28:12] of Daniel Lackin's point as to why we do studies, which is he didn't do this study to say, and I wanna conclude that everybody around the world if they swallowed this bacteria would get an ulcer. He may not have any thought about that.

[00:28:25] Maybe they wouldn't for all sorts of reasons. He doesn't care. He did that thing because he has a tight hypothesis. And if he wasn't right, there's no reason to expect this to happen. And the fact that it happened supports that he's right. It's very deductive.

[00:28:42] And then it leads to a discovery where nobody in their right mind would dismiss. And yeah, I think we are very far away from it. We aren't so far away from it in other fields of psychology. Yeah, visual perception is a good example.

[00:28:54] I mean, Brian Scholl says this, he says sometimes he thinks it's a waste of time and money to go and run the experiments in the proper stats because when he creates a visual illusion based on his theory of how vision works specifically predicting this,

[00:29:09] it pops out so well that you can bring in your colleagues and everybody's gonna see it. And then you have to go because you wanna submit it to a journal. Okay, let's get 50 kids per condition and tweak it.

[00:29:20] But he has zeroed out that they're gonna find it, right? Yeah. And I share your skepticism. And I could say a good experiment an exciting psychological experiment goes like that and you really don't need statistics. But it might well be true

[00:29:34] that it's very hard to create such experiments in our field because we don't know enough. Should we take a break and talk about something with far more resolution? Judaism. Yeah. All right, we'll be right back. Let's take a moment to thank one of our sponsors for today, HelloFresh.

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[00:32:58] during HelloFresh's New Year's sale for 10 free meals including free shipping. Thanks to HelloFresh for sponsoring this episode. Welcome back to VerybadWizards. At this point in the episode we'd like to take a moment to thank all of our listeners who support us in the various ways that you do

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[00:37:04] Thank you so much. It keeps the lights on. It keeps us doing this, what would otherwise feel sometimes like a tiring, thankless job. I'm sorry. You sweet dealing with each other. That's right. You're paying us to be friends is essentially what you do. So thank you.

[00:37:26] All right now that we're done with our support segment I just wanted to take a moment because we didn't actually properly introduce Paul in the magnanimous way that we usually do with his Brooks and Ronald Reagan that I always put, Brooks and Reagan professor of psychology at university.

[00:37:44] Such a fluent and beautiful introduction. I can't believe you missed it the first time. I am the Brooks and Suzanne Reagan professor of psychology. And I'll say that because I have actually met Brooks and Suzanne Reagan. Brooks Reagan passed away a few years ago.

[00:37:59] I met Suzanne Reagan regularly. And they're tremendously nice, sweet people and great supporters of science. I like them a lot. That's wonderful. And what I really wanted to say was a few nice things about you Paul, believe it or not.

[00:38:14] Whenever we get like we just got on Reddit somebody saying like, I'm new to the podcast can anybody tell me what some good episodes are to jump into invariably? Like the predict that I can predict this through just my descriptive observation of the world before now.

[00:38:30] It's the Paul Bloom episodes are the best. Paul Bloom episodes are the best. Paul Bloom episodes are the best. Start with the Paul Bloom episodes. They say yeah. That's very nice to say thank you. I mean, I gotta say on the flip side

[00:38:40] I do a lot of podcasts sometimes but really when I'm promoting something but also just to talk to people but you guys have a special place in my heart. Thank you. And he says that as a Sam Harris co-host nowadays which we'll put a link to that actually.

[00:38:54] Thank you. You're doing a series with Sam Harris now that I'm sure people will love. You're like the Mike and Mad Dog of the intellectual dark web. I don't get to just don't, I just don't get the reference. I'm sorry. Sports something alt-right something.

[00:39:09] Oh some sports alt-right reference. Yeah, yeah. I'm all about the alt-right but the sports I just don't get it. Yeah, that's a reference that may not overlap with many people in our audience. They're New York like old time radio hosts

[00:39:25] that we used to be on together for a long time. I'm talking New York sports. All right, should we talk about a serious man? Just start with some general thoughts. What did you guys think of the movie? What did, yeah, what did you think?

[00:39:39] How did you watch it? What's your impression of it? Well can we first say for people who haven't seen it this is a Coen Brothers movie that's really just about a family in this, a Jewish family in the 50s, right? It's 50s in Minnesota. 60s I think.

[00:39:53] 60s in Minnesota. Yeah, summer of 67. Okay and a lot of crazy shit happens to this poor guy. He's like God's punching bag I think. So I love the movie. I loved it more the second time than the first time. It is hard to watch man.

[00:40:10] I think that's all I really have to say is it's funny but also sad in a way that the Coen Brothers just I think do a really nice job of making me not sure whether this is deep, hilarious or just awful. Yeah I have all the same impression.

[00:40:29] I'll add it was nominated for Best Picture. The same year I think that Avatar was and it's hard to imagine two more different movies. They don't make it easy for you. I found this funny. I loved watching it. It difficult to watch and it just isn't easy

[00:40:46] and you don't get the feeling oh this is a puzzle I'm gonna work it through. I'm gonna figure out what it's all about because I think a lot of it is just for laughs and a lot of it is clever and a lot of it is misdirection.

[00:40:56] But if there's a category of great film, this is in it. Yeah so I saw it the first time on DVD when I had like 103 fever and I was by myself in New Orleans and it was like all I could watch because I just had a few DVDs.

[00:41:17] I remember liking it but I remembered also nothing about it and then I watched it last night and then this morning like back to back. And so when I watched it last night I remember saying to my wife and daughter people think that this is their masterpiece

[00:41:36] and I kind of feel like I can see why but I didn't but I can't really put my finger on it exactly. So then I watched it again today this morning as soon as I got up, I got up very early.

[00:41:51] Watched it again and it just clicked for me. Like I feel like I understood better the movie, the themes of it and I also understood why people think it's a masterpiece. It's funny Paul you said it's not this puzzle that fits together. I think it kind of is.

[00:42:12] There are these intricate elements of both the plot and the themes that it doesn't fit together perfectly but it almost fits together in ways that are tantalizing and in ways that reflect like what the movie is about tantalizing questions with no answers.

[00:42:35] So you think you could explain some of it? Well I feel like I have a better, no I like do I think I've undecoded it? No but to the extent that it's possible. But you think it's decodable? It's not decodable in the sense that there

[00:42:51] is this solution that is then a resolution that's satisfying but I think there's a lot that's put together thematically and plot wise. Like so I'll give you an example. Like this is something I noticed on the second rewatch. So very early on in the movie

[00:43:09] a Korean student comes to complain about his grade. He had failed a physics midterm. Clive with a stereotypical Korean name Clive. Clive Park yes. Another unflattering designation of a stereotype by the way. That's right. So as he's walking in and we can talk about that scene

[00:43:31] it's hilarious one of the funniest scenes in the movie but as he's walking in he gets a little memo as to who is waiting for him and like people who have called and the reason for their call and the reason for Clive's visit.

[00:43:45] And on the reason for Clive's visit it says unjust test result. And he says like that the test result was unjust on the physics test. So then at the end of the movie he decides to keep Clive Park's bribe money

[00:44:05] and change his grade from an F to a C and then he switches it to a C minus. Right? And then right as that happens he gets a phone call from his doctor that heavily suggests that an x-ray that they just took revealed that he has cancer.

[00:44:25] And so that in another sense is an unjust test result. He got a result from the test that is unjust. He gives Clive Park an unjust test result because he really failed it and he's now giving him a C minus. And then right after that

[00:44:43] there's an unjust test result of a different kind. And I think there's just tons of that. Now what does it mean? I don't know. Does that mean like justice was served here? Like that's the kind of question that the movie doesn't answer.

[00:44:58] But it packs in all these things to make the questions more tantalizing. As something that is clearly richly thematic, like to me it's clear like all those connections that Tamler's talking about are what makes the movie great for me. And I think that if we're saying like

[00:45:17] what is their solution to the mystery in any straightforward sense I think then that's kind of not what the theme is. As Clive Park's father says, kind of cryptically but just very thematically, accept the mystery. I think this is just a series of questions

[00:45:34] and it's not at all a coincidence that people think this is a modern Job story. Well, so this is the funny thing. I know that people think it's a Job story and I get why. And there's a lot of stuff like the three rabbis are in some sense

[00:45:50] could be like the three friends. God coming in a whirlwind at the end. But thematically this struck me as closer to Ecclesiastes, raising questions that there are no answers to and the only thing we can do is live your life and stop obsessing about the questions

[00:46:13] because we will never get an answer to them. I mean, I think the themes of Job and Ecclesiastes are both so kind of old timey existential that for sure the question of the meaning of life is kind of at the center and what should a good person do?

[00:46:31] And there's so many instances where every time, the part that I think is very Job-like is whenever there's a question asked, there is like explicitly a non-answer given. Let's talk about the opening which it is. Right, so somebody should summarize it

[00:46:49] but I wonder whether either you have a theory of how that connects with the broader movie as a whole. I do, okay. Even though the movie takes place in Minneapolis suburb, where the Coen brothers grew up or at least modeled after where the Coen brothers grew up

[00:47:05] and at the time that they grew up and the neighborhood that they grew up, the movie begins in like a 19th century shtetl and it is a very small story of a man who comes back to his house and he has met somebody on the way

[00:47:27] who saved, who helped him when he needed help and it turns out to be this rabbi and he comes and he tells his wife, look I ran into this rabbi, it was so lucky and then he tells his wife the rabbi's name

[00:47:42] and the wife says he died three years ago. What you saw was a dibbak. A dibbak is like kind of a demonic Jewish spirit that can take the form of people who have died. Then the husband says, what are you talking about? That's impossible, I'm a rational man

[00:48:01] and he says and I invited him over to eat. He's coming over right now and the wife is very angry about this. You don't let a dibbak into your house and he comes in and he seems very joyful and he's laughing and the wife just to his face

[00:48:18] calls him a dibbak and offers him food and he turns it down and she says, I told you, a dibbaks don't eat. And then he just laughs about it and he says yes, I was sick but I didn't end up dying obviously here I am

[00:48:32] and then she stabs him in the heart and he laughs and at first you think, oh it's definitely a dibbak because there's no blood, he seems not to be hurt. He was clearly wearing layers. Yeah and then he, but then a little time passes

[00:48:46] he gets weak and then blood starts to appear and he leaves and the husband says, oh my God, they're gonna find his body, we're in so much trouble now and she says, nope, good riddance to evil. She slams the door on it and that's it

[00:49:01] and we never hear about that again. And it was in Yiddish the whole thing to which my daughter who is taking German, she's like they're speaking German dad and I was like daughter. That's a shock that your daughter is taking German, by the way.

[00:49:16] I know, I was believing. So the dibbak story, it was completely confusing to me the first time I watched it, the second time I watched it, it would have been as confusing if I hadn't read someone say that this is supposed to be

[00:49:30] one of his ancestors who is then cursed because of what they did to that whatever it was. Well, that's their interpretation. The Coen brothers specifically deny any connection like that. Do the Coen brothers, is there a place where the Coen brothers talk about this?

[00:49:48] Do they offer us anything? Only to say that it is disconnected from the rest of the story. That's helpful. Then I'm not sure what the connection is because you're right. I mean, if it were just an ancestor, that would be boring. Like the whole point is that everything

[00:50:05] that's happening to him is sort of mysterious and so I don't know. I don't have any interesting theory of what this is supposed to represent. Well, this is something I heard from somebody on Slade, I forget who it was as I was scrambling to find out

[00:50:18] but drew a connection between the boldness of the woman in the shadow, her aggression, her clear confidence and the boldness of Larry's wife who very assertively takes up with another man and the meekness of Larry himself.

[00:50:36] And so it just occurs to me, one way to take this was that Larry is in some sense being punished for being a nebish, for being a nobody, for being a nothing to be contrasted with how that woman in the past fought off evil.

[00:50:50] Yeah, so that's sort of similar to my take of the thematic connection is this is a movie about somebody who just life happens to and he never takes action. I've done nothing. Yeah, I've done nothing is the refrain from the movie. I didn't do anything.

[00:51:09] I didn't do anything. And the wife just with no doubt in her mind stabs this dibeck and she acts and then when the blood appears and he leaves and she slams the door, she still doesn't have any doubt. And meanwhile, the man is racked with doubt

[00:51:32] about what just happened. And we'll never know whether it's a dibeck or not, whether she stabbed an innocent man, an innocent old man, or if it was really a demon. And even in the credits, it is listed as dibeck question mark. They also say no Jews were harmed

[00:51:54] in the making of this film. So thematically, it's like we are posed with these questions, which we're not gonna get answers to and here are two ways of dealing with it. Not acting because you don't know or acting and it's two extremes of the spectrum,

[00:52:12] at least her is just I am, I know, even though it's uncertain, I know, move forward without any doubt. And that is exactly what the main character can't do. He's too obsessed with the question and the lack of answers to take any action at all.

[00:52:31] I like that because it gets at the feeling that Larry has of dissatisfaction without getting any answers, right? Every answer is bullshit or a non-answer. And at some point he tells you, one of the rabbis, I forget says, I wrote it down somewhere, but where he says,

[00:52:55] God's not gonna give you any answers. And he says, why did he make me wanna ask the questions then? Why does he make us feel the questions? Why does he make us, yeah, he says, why does he make us feel the questions

[00:53:05] if he isn't gonna give the answers? And then the rabbi says he hasn't told me. And the difference between somebody who is comfortable with uncertainty or is very certain themselves, like the wife being, there's no doubt that I look at that and I say,

[00:53:20] what must it be like to have that certainty that what you're doing is the right thing and not be wracked with a deep, profound failure to know why any of this is going on. I would be more the Larry than I would be the wife.

[00:53:36] And it goes right into the Schrodinger's cat, him at the chalkboard talking about Schrodinger's cat and which is all about the uncertainty of whether the cat is alive or dead. And what the wife does is just open the box. You know, whereas Larry just has to live

[00:53:55] with the uncertainty. The wife in the Dibbock scene just opens the box. This is what it is. What do you guys make of the sexy neighbor who surprisingly turns out to be Jewish? Why do you say that because you don't find your own people attracted?

[00:54:10] Because faking us out once again. But yeah, so she turns out to be Jewish. The non-Jewish figure I guess is the guy who goes to the dentist, the Goy of the teeth. And also the next door neighbor. Oh, that's right. And that is played for the stereotype.

[00:54:28] That is the know nothing beefy hunting thug. They are Goy's as like Jews imagine Goy's in their nightmares. That scene where they bring home some sort of huge deer or... Yeah, it's a Dibbock, yeah. Scrub off, Mitch. Scrub off. And then to make it a bit heavy handed,

[00:54:52] Larry has a dream where he's being hunted by this guy who's allowed to hunt Jews. There's another Jew. So I don't... This is maybe a loose connection but all I could think of was when David spied Bathsheba bathing and lost it after her.

[00:55:09] It seemed like a clear connection although David then has the husband killed. Something this guy would never be able to do, right? She also kind of represents something that's otherwise absent in the movie which is the time period. Like this is the late 60s. This is summer of 67.

[00:55:30] Like this is the drugs, free love but otherwise I know the kids are smoking pot in school but not in the way that you imagine the 60s. And so she is some part of that too that has been up till the point where he goes into her house

[00:55:51] very closed off from Larry Gopnik. I guess one obvious attempt at a parallel with the book of Job and with a Dibbock story is that the wives do represent actually the bad person. So Job's wife is constantly saying, in no uncertain terms curse God and die.

[00:56:11] Like just this guy's fucking with you. I saw some people write that the Dibbock might represent the presence of God himself and that the wife stabbing the Dibbock was essentially either killing God or killing the messenger of God. So because we don't know whether that guy

[00:56:28] was really a Dibbock or not, I suspect not. We don't know whether what she did with her certainty was a good thing or whether it was a bad thing and it's not like his Larry's wife, what's Judith? My ex-wife's name as well so this was nice.

[00:56:43] It seems to be a terrible person but also I can see why somebody would get frustrated living with the indecisiveness of Larry. It's not like it's obvious that I could see Larry not even knowing that for years things have been going poorly and not doing anything about it.

[00:57:01] He says, I've done nothing. The lack of doing anything is why I'm leaving. And the lack of doing anything is an action. So I think this is represented by the Columbia Records Company. Oh, very nice. I'm not a member of Colombian Records, he says.

[00:57:17] So he says, I haven't done anything. And the Columbia Record guy says, you not doing anything is requesting the selection of the month. And so the inaction, no, that is requesting by doing nothing you have requested the main selection of the month, Santana's.

[00:57:38] For those who are too young, this was a thing, even when we were kids the Columbia Record pool where you would get, they would sneakily get you because you would get like 12 CDs for free. But then you would just default to get into this

[00:57:51] like every month you had to pay 20 bucks for a CD or something. And people would just forget and it was coming into mail every month and I got caught up in that. They had it for books, they had it for CDs, they had it for everything.

[00:58:03] But it's great, it's a lesson to the sin of inaction. And the whole movie he is saying, I didn't do anything. He says that right when his wife says, she wants a divorce. And he says, I didn't do anything. And I think part of the point is

[00:58:18] by not doing anything, which he never does, that's a kind of response to the world. That's a kind of action. There was a part that struck me when we were talking earlier about the test that the Asian kid failed, I'm the Korean kid.

[00:58:36] He expresses a few times that he tells the kid, the kid says, no, I knew the concepts. I didn't know there was gonna be math. Like no one told me there would be math. And he's like, what are you talking about? You can't do physics without the math.

[00:58:50] And he says, the math is the real thing. I think that he finds comfort in the certainty of mathematics, right? The only time you see him expressing joy is when he's writing those equations on the board. And I think that that is one aspect of life

[00:59:08] or of existence where he knows he can be sure. The answer is right or wrong. Everything else around him is just causing all this confusion, right? He's very bad at judgment under uncertainty, but with math he doesn't. Even when you express the uncertainty principle

[00:59:23] in mathematic terms, he can deal with it. Yeah, and he says something about stories at that scene, which could be sort of a reflection on the movie itself. These stories we tell, they're just for illustration. They're not a real thing. They're fables. They're fables.

[00:59:39] And I took that to represent also like the fables and the stories in the Bible and the Jewish tradition, right? These are fables. We don't understand Abraham and Isaac. Like what is that supposed to mean? That God asks him to sacrifice his kid. He almost does.

[00:59:55] And how are we supposed to interpret that? We don't know. But yeah, I think the math is supposed to be, like you said, Dave, the truth. But then as Sai says, dead Sai in the dream, mathematics is the art of the possible.

[01:00:13] Before we forget to talk about Sai when he comes over, I remember the first time I saw this, the way that they can build, the Coen brothers build the frustration by Sai. So Sai is his friend who turns out is either cheating

[01:00:30] or about to be, the wife is gonna leave Larry for this guy. Sai is an actor who's, he's been in a bunch and I really like the guy, but he plays this role so well where he's essentially going to sidestep any conflict.

[01:00:48] He's not gonna let, he knows Larry. He knows Larry's not gonna confront. So the way that he gets around this is he's just like, he's patronizing, so patronized says, you know, I'm glad we could take care of this as an adult and he's smarmy and weird

[01:01:03] and he hugs. He keeps touching him. He keeps touching him. There's no personal space. There's nothing. And it's almost like he's trying to be like a bad therapist for him when the guy has just realized that his wife is leaving him for this guy

[01:01:19] and he's still in shock and the guy is like holding his hand and telling him thank you for being such an adult about it. He's like, I don't know what you're talking about. Like he's the polar opposite of Larry, right? He is all smarmy certainty

[01:01:31] whereas Larry is, you know, in passive uncertainty. Like he is just... He's a serious man. Yes, he's a serious man sure of what has to happen at every step that Larry has to move out of the house and live with the Jolly Rogers

[01:01:50] so that they can have their affair. Yeah, he basically decides that for him. There's a scene where Larry says to his wife, why don't you move over to his house? And they both look at him shocked and disgusted

[01:02:01] and so I says, you know, Larry, Larry, what are you saying? We can't do that. He says, Larry, you're joking. You're just. Yeah, you're just, you're just, yeah. Well, Ethel did die a mere three years ago, so. Yeah, yeah, her body is still warm.

[01:02:20] This episode of Very Bad Wizards is also brought to us by actually a new sponsor. I think it's the first time we've had just a standalone app as a sponsor, but it is a sponsor, Tamler, that I think we needed if not the sponsor we deserve

[01:02:37] and that's Daily Budget App. It is a simple iOS app that makes budgeting easy. Tamler, I've been trying to get you to do it. I need to do it. I mean, your wife has been texting me. I wanna do it, I'm scared to do it

[01:02:59] because I know that once I get like financial affairs in order, it will become clear to me that I have flushed. It sounds like you're gonna die. So much money down the toilet that it will, like I'd rather not know,

[01:03:13] but my daughter does also have to go to college. So I think I will. This is why we get this sweet podcast money. I don't need to save, but we do and I will say that this Daily Budget App is a budgeting app.

[01:03:25] It's unlike any I've seen or tried before because it does one job, it does it simply and it does it with a beautiful interface. It actually makes it kind of fun to start tracking your daily budget. When you download the app, which by the way is 100% free.

[01:03:40] So there are features that you can unlock that I'll tell you about in a second, but why not give it a try? This is 100% free. It's a beautiful app. It just on boards you, it prompts you to enter your income, then you enter your recurring expenses

[01:03:58] and then you enter a saving goal and it basically breaks it down for you in one simple screen, how much money you can spend on any given day. This is what prompted me to start writing down all of the various services that I'm subscribed to.

[01:04:11] That was feeling quite shitty. By the way, the app developers are also avid listeners of Very Bad Wizards, which means that they are quality, high character individuals. The highest character. What struck me when I went to look at the page

[01:04:25] is this has as close to a perfect set of ratings that apps have. It has 4,000 ratings and it's averaging about 4.7. So it's practically five star. Here's one review. Beyond spectacular, the app is fantastic. I've tried other budgeting apps like Mint

[01:04:42] but this is the only app that actually works. The other thing that I'll say about this that I really like is all of your information is on your device. You don't have to enter any passwords for any of your services. This is just you, you enter your information,

[01:04:55] it stays on your phone. You don't have to worry about any security risks which you should worry about if you're not. So give it a try. Daily budget app on the iOS app store will put a link. And thank you Daily Budget App

[01:05:10] for sponsoring this episode of Very Bad Wizards. Thank you, I'm convinced. Sorry, apologies to our audience because we've been talking a lot about the themes with an eye toward getting to the specific characters and the plot. So why don't we focus a little bit on the characters

[01:05:24] and the plot and what's going on? And one of the things that is happening as we're learning that this family is, you know, that Larry is about to get left and divorced, one of the sources of tension in the household is that his uncle Arthur,

[01:05:40] played by Richard Kyned who's amazing. Is living there. Clearly he's just, you know, whatever has happened to his life, he doesn't have a place to live. He's supposed to be looking for an apartment but he's clearly not doing that. We see him, all we see him doing

[01:05:54] is draining his sebaceous cyst which is the grossest part of this movie. I didn't even know that was a thing. And what we see that he's doing is he's constantly writing in this notebook. And we do get a glimpse and this might tie to the theme

[01:06:11] that I was bringing up about mathematics. He finally looks, Larry finally looks in Arthur's notebook and it appears to be, you know, he says he's working on the mentaculus. That's what he labels his oof, right? Like his notebook. And it looks just like mathematical gibberish.

[01:06:32] It looks like the notebook of somebody who's gone off the deep end, like a schizophrenic. And it turns out that he's been using math because he's very gifted with numbers. We hear Larry say, he's been using math to gamble and he's been making money on sports bets.

[01:06:47] Because it's a probability map. It's probability math. And there is something about the way that Arthur uses math that is uncomfortable for Larry that all I have is like this vague sense that there is something there. I don't know, but I wanna ask you guys

[01:07:05] what you think about the brother in that plot line. So I can't go deep on that and the mentaculus connects to the whole thing about mathematics and the possibilities and Schrodinger's cat and all of that stuff. But the brother more than anybody else is the most

[01:07:20] is played to be grotesque and played to be almost comically disgusting. And as if the Coen brothers went out of their way in the characters, in the people they cast but also in how they're depicted in the camera work, close ups of ears

[01:07:38] and bellies and hair to make it a kind of grotesque uncomfortably grotesque depiction of these people. Absolutely, absolutely. And why? And that scene in the hotel room where he's woken up and he's kind of crying and you just see his silhouette towards the end of the movie

[01:07:59] and it is grotesque to the point of like stylized in a way that he almost doesn't look human at that point. And yet he's such a poignant character because he's so disappointed with his life and he actually sees Larry Gopnik who supposedly the Job figure as lucky

[01:08:23] because he has all these things that he doesn't have. When you said, Dave, that his math makes Larry feel uncomfortable, it occurred to me that what his math is is all about probability and Larry doesn't like probability, he wants certainty. He wants certainty in order.

[01:08:44] And in that, you know, one of the best shots in any film I think is Larry in his dream sequence with the huge chalkboard, blackboard with equations that is Larry having been able to figure out existence with some satisfaction and it is illusory. It's, it's right.

[01:09:04] It's a dream. He wants order, he wants rules, right? That's why when the neighbor is encroaching on his lawn, he finds that to be unacceptable because like that's breaking a rule and like rules are the things that give our lives order. And so he goes to- That's right.

[01:09:24] I hadn't made that connection between the discomfort with disorder from the, and he's like, why would anybody mow? He's literally mowing like maybe two feet into his property and it's like, why would he do that? He doesn't understand why anybody would do it

[01:09:39] when I don't, and I don't either. Since we're going through characters, what do you make of the son? You know, they would have been young in this community. Is the son and his circle of friends representing, you know, he's definitely,

[01:09:55] we see him departing from the traditions of Judaism. The first scene is him trying to listen to rock and roll on his pocket radio, which is a pretty cool radio. And he gets, while he's supposed to be learning Hebrew, and so he gets in trouble.

[01:10:11] We see him smoking weed. He's learning to be Bar Mitzvah because he has to learn the Hebrew. And I couldn't help but think that maybe they are inserting themselves as rebellious teens, but I don't know. Yeah, it could have been a stand-in for the brothers.

[01:10:27] And you know, his circle of friends, he has his comic friend who says fuckers all the time. And they're trying to be tough, and it's just that- That fucker. That part of it was actually kind of sweet. You're right. He's rebelling against the tradition in one sense

[01:10:42] because he's listening in Hebrew school. It's sort of like the most boring, possible Hebrew school class that is conceivable by the human mind. Oh, that brought back to memories. I really did. Did you guys both, I assume both of you were Bar Mitzvah? Yes.

[01:11:00] In fact, that was what he was doing. So on the one hand, he's rebelling against the tradition. On the other hand, he is learning his Bar Mitzvah by listening to a recording, which I still remember me doing too. I had a cassette recording to have I made it.

[01:11:16] And then I meet with him once a week and we play chess. I try it out on him, the recording, he makes some corrections on how I was doing it and we play chess. And that Bar Mitzvah, of course,

[01:11:27] is a fairly significant scene at the end of the movie. What's interesting about Bar Mitzvahs is that it is this kind of ritual. You do read the Haftora and there's something very momentous about it, despite the fact that you have no idea

[01:11:47] what exactly it is that you're saying. You are repeating syllables essentially. A string of nonsense words. Yeah, and I was not stoned during it, but that is, that's one of the most hilarious things of the movie. The idea of doing that stoned?

[01:12:07] I was gonna ask, I can't imagine. It made me so uncomfortable. And I thought he was definitely gonna fuck it up, but somehow he pulls it through. And I can't help but think that they're showing him kind of rebel, but he's not completely, he's not completely rebelling.

[01:12:26] He still does it and he actually gets it done in a way that he gets congratulated. And he did well. Yeah, and the shot of his friend being super high I rewound that a couple times. Yeah, the friend just looks so stoned

[01:12:44] and also just kind of appalled for him. He freaks me out. Just the thought of being up there freaks me out. All right, let's go to the rabbis. Okay, so the first rabbi goes to is Rabbi Scott. He's trying to get in the whole time

[01:12:57] to see this guy named Rabbi Marshak, who's supposed, he's like the super rabbi. He looks like Jewish Dumbledore. He can't get in, so he sees Rabbi Scott to get the first lesson. This is actually one of the funniest scenes to me. When Rabbi Scott is a junior rabbi,

[01:13:15] so we can accept that he's not fully, he's not fully done learning the ways of wisdom. So he's trying really hard to tell, to give Larry advice. And he says, you can't see Hashem. Hashem is the word they use for God.

[01:13:33] You're looking at the world through tired eyes and he says, I mean, look at the parking lot. There's also this great scene where Larry says, so she wants to get, and at first the Rabbi goes, what? Wait a minute. Oh, oh yeah.

[01:13:50] And he's trying really hard to use the parking lot of a metaphor. Imagine that you couldn't see the parking lot well as a metaphor for not seeing the world well. And it fails miserably, but I actually look at the parking lot Larry, I think is my favorite.

[01:14:06] Because at first he says that and he thinks it's going somewhere because it leads to you're looking at your wife with tired eyes. And then he reminds him that his wife has left him for a Psi Edelman. And he says, oh right, yeah, they get.

[01:14:25] But look at the parking lot. And now it's just a total empty thing to say. So not much wisdom there. Then he actually goes to his lawyer, I think right after that, right? And I think there he still, he maintains that you know, I haven't done anything

[01:14:42] when he's talking to his lawyer. We find out that Sill has died, I mean, Psi has died. And Larry might actually have to pay for the funeral and then ultimate fuck you. He might be responsible for paying the funeral of the guy who stole his wife.

[01:15:00] That goes right into the second rabbi. Right, second rabbi and a story of the Goi's teeth. Tell that one, tell that one Paul. Yeah, tell it. So you know, the rabbi unfolds a story. It's a very good story. It's dentist and then he's cleaning this guy's,

[01:15:16] doing, trying to do a mold of this guy's teeth. And he sees in the mold Hebrew letters that say, save me, help me. And he brings the guy back and he looks at his teeth and they're in his teeth, embedded in his teeth are the Hebrew letters.

[01:15:33] And he becomes a- Complete Nanju. Complete Nanju. There's a scene at the end where Larry says, so what happened to the Goi? And the rabbi says, who cares? But more of the- That's what I knew how you guys really feel about me. Yeah, I know.

[01:15:50] And so the dentist is obsessed. He looks at his own teeth. He looks at his wife's teeth while she's sleeping, brings back patients, looks at other molds, doesn't find anything else. Then he looks and you know, in Hebrew, the letters correspond to numbers

[01:16:05] and it comes up to a phone number. So he calls the place, he goes and visits it. And nothing comes of any of this. And then he just goes and lives his life. And Larry is like, dumbstruck. So what's the point in the story?

[01:16:20] And the rabbi says, you know, you asked me to tell the story. First you asked me to tell it, now you're upset that I told it. And Larry is just so stunned that the story has no point at all.

[01:16:32] And to be honest, I was kind of stunned too. It's, and that's when he says, why does he make us- The rabbi says, we can't know everything. He doesn't owe us an answer. And that dismissal of uncertainty is so well represented in this moment, this scene.

[01:16:50] That's when Larry says, why does he make us feel the questions if he isn't gonna give us the answers? And the rabbi says, man, he hasn't told me. Like why? And that scene though, that short story of the guy with the dentist is Borgesian to me.

[01:17:07] Like it is, I love it. Very rarely will something stick that this long from a movie that you see once, years ago. That story always, there's something about it that encapsulates like the absurdity that this is communicating.

[01:17:22] It is the thesis of the movie I think in so many ways. So you have this mystery like on a goist teeth, just Hebrew letters that says help me, save me. Of course that's gonna be an all consuming question

[01:17:37] that he needs an answer to and he never gets it. And then eventually, like for a while he can't sleep. He can't eat, he can't do anything. And then eventually he returns to life. You see him playing golf and just laughing with his family.

[01:17:52] Yeah, and he says maybe some of these questions are like toothaches where you feel them and then they go away. And that's all we have. Again, very Ecclesiastes. Like in the end, you just gotta return to life. You just gotta, because this isn't getting resolved.

[01:18:12] Okay, so in thinking about this, I feel more like this is nihilistic in a way that not even Ecclesiastes is. There's not much of live life and be happy. He just says, just stop asking the questions in a way that is kind of like the dude's philosophy

[01:18:32] where just don't let anything bother you. The answer is don't let anything bother you. And it feels as if this is less about embrace the joys and the suffering of life and live your life, but more about there was nothing there. Why do you even care?

[01:18:49] There's no meaning in the teeth. The way that the second rabbi doesn't even, he's surprised that he would ask how the story ends. I don't know, he went back to his life. It feels pretty nihilistic to me. I mean, you see the big Lebowski

[01:19:03] as more nihilistic than I do. I think the difference between the dude and this character is the dude accepts the uncertainty. So he makes the choice to accept it and to just roll. Yeah, I think that's the ideal. That's what Larry is being told to do. Right, exactly.

[01:19:22] But what he is incapable of doing. But in that sense, I think it is very much in line with Ecclesiastes. This is the best you can do. And there's some good in that, you know? If you can just allow yourself,

[01:19:36] if you can allow yourself to appreciate the rewards that you are actually given. And that's Larry's sin is that he doesn't appreciate the rewards of a good family, a good career, a good job. Instead, he's just obsessed with the questions. But he's obsessed with the questions

[01:19:57] once everything starts crumbling. But there is another parallel, I think, with Ecclesiastes. Remember when we talked about the end part where it's like, you know, and the, and Koh-Haleth, whatever the wise man who's supposed to be the narrator.

[01:20:14] It seemed that we said that it seemed like an addendum that was added later. When the rabbi is being pressed by Larry, he says, well what did the teeth mean? And the rabbi says, a sign from God? I don't know. But helping others couldn't hurt.

[01:20:30] Like, so it seems as if there is a message there. You know, you can't go wrong if you just ignore all this shit and just try to do good in the world. But maybe that is more optimistic than I'm describing because that is something that Larry isn't acting.

[01:20:48] So he's not acting in any way, let alone acting to help others. He's very self-centered. And it occurs to me, the one time he does try to take that advice, he goes over to the woman's house and says, I just wanna help out a little bit.

[01:21:03] And that actually leads to the one moment of kind of happiness or at least, you know, just kind of escapism for him is just getting stoned with the woman. Okay, let's take one last break to talk about one of our favorite sponsors of all time. Givewell.

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[01:22:29] could really take the time to do in order to make sure that our philanthropic donations are doing what we want them to do. So it's a great organization. You know, Givewell, I've said this before in the sort of truest love for these people.

[01:22:47] They are my favorite spreadsheet nerds because the nerdry that they engage in actually saves lives. If you go to Givewell.org, you'll find all of their research for free. You can sign up, make a recurring donation. It doesn't matter if it's two bucks a month

[01:23:03] or way more like Tamler gives half of his income. Not quite. Yeah, you can donate directly through their website. They charge no fees and take no cut of it. It goes directly to the charities that you're supporting. Yeah, so thank you to Givewell.org

[01:23:21] for sponsoring very bad wizards. And thank you to all the listeners who have gone to Givewell.org to keep promoting the good that they're doing. Okay, so the third rabbi, the very, very famous rabbi Marshak who he's had so much trouble getting into see.

[01:23:38] He even goes to see him once and he's the secretary, just studio 54s him. He says, no, you can't get in. Even though he sees him doing absolutely nothing in the back of his office and she says, no, he's busy. He's thinking, he's just sitting there thinking.

[01:23:57] He finally does get to see him. No, he doesn't. No, his son sees him. The only Danny gets in to see him, that's right. After his bar mitzvah. And Danny goes to see him, yeah, Larry never gets to and the rabbi recites to him

[01:24:16] lyrics from a Jefferson airplane song and then gives him back his Walkman, which was confiscated at the beginning of the movie. Which contained the $20 that we didn't say, the $20 that he owed a bully from his neighborhood. This is what I mean where I was, the receive with simplicity.

[01:24:35] Like that's a crazy scene from Danny's perspective. He is stoned. He is going to see this rabbi who is reputed for his wisdom and life experience. And he's supposed to get these words that will affect him for the rest of his life.

[01:24:52] And instead he gets Jefferson airplane lyrics and his Walkman back. He doesn't ask any questions. He just takes it, you know, and kind of smiles. And all the rabbi tells him is be a good boy. There's some point where he's,

[01:25:06] when he's trying to get in to see Rabbi Marschuk where he says I've tried to be a serious man. Right, he can't actually say that he's a serious man. But what do you think that means a serious man in the context of this movie?

[01:25:21] Well, since Psy was the one who was saying at first, I don't think it's meant to be taken literally. Like I don't think we were supposed to see Psy as really a serious man. Right, he's called that at the funeral. By the rabbi.

[01:25:34] No, but Psy described himself as a serious man. He did in the dream. In the dream, that's right, in the dream. It could just be a decisive, not necessarily meant to be complimentary for sure. Because Psy is a repellent character. And one theme of this movie throughout is

[01:25:52] there's the unpredictable relationship in who you are and what happens to you. So Psy gets killed all of a sudden, and we should get to this, but at the very end of the movie, it's entirely unclear whether all of those things that happened at the very end,

[01:26:05] the phone call from his doctor, what's gonna happen with his son, is a sort of punishment for Larry taking the bribe? Or was it gonna happen anyway? And in fact, there's even a whimsical thing where the phone call from the doctor telling Larry he presumed he's gonna die

[01:26:24] isn't when he gets into C. It's when he adds to minus. And I was thinking, why is that, right? The bribe, he took the bribe with the C, nothing, and then he adds the minus. So one idea is it's just random. Like this is a coincidence,

[01:26:40] which the movie encourages you to think that that's eminently possible. But the other I thought was he almost took a stand there. I'm taking the bribe and use that money to get my brother help through this lawyer and I'm gonna give the kid the C,

[01:26:58] which is what he paid for. But then he can't get himself to fully dive in. And so he gives the minus as a kind of hedge. So he's being punished for not fully committing? Exactly, it's like for hedging. I like this interpretation that it was his indecisiveness

[01:27:15] that actually warranted the punishment. If he would have just done it, it would have been fine. And in his dream sequence, Larry dreams about using that money to help his brother escape to Canada. And there is what is actually a tender scene where he pulls out the money

[01:27:32] and he is on a little boat, I guess back in the day you could sneak into Canada if you knew the right route but his brother also has been accused of being a pedophile, right? That's what they implied. Solicitation and sodomy, but I don't,

[01:27:49] like it's not totally clear what he's meant to have done, but yes. I think that he's imagining using this money for good in a way that had he just been decisive, taken the bribe, given the grade, maybe he could have done that and actually, but in the dream,

[01:28:04] that's exactly when his brother gets shot. So I'm not quite sure what, whether there's anything there, whether it's just a string of, like he just doesn't believe that anything can go well. Well in his dream, he takes actions, but it doesn't work out.

[01:28:20] Like in that case, they're shot. Maybe it represents his fear of taking action. And with the wife, he dreams having sex, not with the neighbor. And just as they're reaching completion, he's all of a sudden in a coffin and Sai is slamming it shut on him.

[01:28:38] So it's like, yeah, I think it's his fear of taking action. So there is as a general, I think that the general, like a person who's doing nothing, this is what Larry is. It is interesting that sometimes it's very clear when he says, I've done nothing.

[01:28:56] Sometimes that is exculpating, right? He's trying to get out of an accusation that he's done bad. But sometimes it's very clear that he should have done something. And so it seems as if, you know, what they're saying is he's like a chaotic neutral agent. Like doing nothing,

[01:29:14] in doing nothing, you will do good things sometimes, but by accident. You don't get credit for not having harmed somebody if this is just coming from your general inability to act. Sometimes the record of the month will be good, but sometimes it won't.

[01:29:38] The other thing I wanted to read to you guys is I looked up that song, that Yiddish song. You know the one that's playing in the background sometime? Yeah, that he would lie on the floor and listen to. And it's in Yiddish, but there was a translation.

[01:29:50] You can find this on YouTube. We'll put up a link to this. I'll just read the first two verses. Oh, how many years have passed since I've been a miller here? The wheels turn, the years pass. I'm old and gray. These are days I wanna remember.

[01:30:05] If I had a little happiness, the wheels turn, the years pass, and I don't get any answers. I heard it said they wanna drive me out, away from my village, away from the mill. The wheels turn, the years pass, without an end, without a goal.

[01:30:21] Where will I live? Who will care for me? I'm already old, I'm already tired. The wheels turn, the years pass, and with them also go the Jews. I felt this way of when we talked in depth about the Big Lebowski is that this is a string

[01:30:37] of events that happened, maybe at best you can just have this attitude of let things happen because shit's gonna happen anyway. But it does strike me as we could, in trying to interpret this, is this just the Coen Brothers being at their ultimate level,

[01:30:58] just absurdity, like existential absurdity? And we shouldn't take much from this? I think there's a lot of absurdity here. I don't think we're not gonna succeed if we wanna take us as sort of simple. So the moral of this is one should act,

[01:31:13] one should not be a doormat. Si acted. We're not gonna decode it. They make it absolutely clear that we're not getting any answers about their intentions or the movie is such a puzzle in itself with a lot of tantalizing possibilities. But again, we're not getting any answers.

[01:31:33] I do think if there is a positive message, it is like find a golden mean between Si and Larry. Like they are both cautionary tales of two ways not to handle life's unanswerable questions. But then how to handle it, we don't really get any real sense.

[01:31:58] I don't think from the movie. I agree. No life advice here. Unlike the Big Lebowski, which is literally a training manual. So I mean, I guess that as a goal, the arc can be to just get you to feel this absurdity about life.

[01:32:19] But the other goal is also, it seems an aesthetic communicating a certain aesthetic about the grotesque, I don't know. I can see why proud Jews, not like you guys, but proud Jews might think that this is an unflattering depiction that shouldn't be the way that they're portrayed.

[01:32:41] Can I give a, because I said I didn't feel that way. I thought at the scene, the Bar Mitzvah scene, and also the scene with the, who we haven't talked about, but the leader of the tenure committee who would come talk to Larry every so often.

[01:33:00] And those scenes are very funny. Nothing to worry about. We don't even consider these things. Just wanted to let you know. Just the Bar Mitzvah and the look on people's faces when the sun finally gets through and his parasha, and the conversation with his sister,

[01:33:20] if that is his sister about these Jewish fables and the tradition, and we don't have to do it alone. We can puzzle over these questions together. And the ritualistic aspect in this bleak universe, that is something that stands out as quite positive.

[01:33:41] And the problem is often when people just use the rituals without puzzling over the questions like Psy. He's getting the get without asking sort of why is this okay? But I think you do get the other side of it, which is we're bringing everybody together

[01:34:03] to honor this young boy through this ceremony. And that's a very positive experience, or at least it's potentially a positive experience in a world with no answers. It's not an organizing principle, but it's a way of moving forward. So I mean, and other than that,

[01:34:22] you could also say is that nobody looks good in that movie. The very few non-Jewish characters, there's the guy at the teeth who was not portrayed as an attractive man. Who cares about him? There's his insane hunter neighbor. Yes, it does have some features

[01:34:39] that you could find appealing. But at the physical level, how these people are filmed, how they were cast, it's no accident that they look so bad. It's no accident that Larry's brother has, David, what do you call it? Some sort of seditious. Sedaciousist. I mean, come on.

[01:34:58] That he drains with a machine and like a plastic tubing, medical tubing. He's constantly draining it. It's like, you don't know how much pus is in there. It's like, you know, mountains. The way that I saw this is, you know, not to speak to whether it's flattering

[01:35:12] or I'm flattering of Jews. It seems like this could be the eyes that you have when you're a kid and you see old people around you. There's a lot of grossness that you notice. You see their ears. You see their nose hairs.

[01:35:30] You know, the things that they do to care for their bodies that happen to us when we get old are foreign and gross and distressing. And it very much feels like this is from the eyes of the kids remembering this cast of characters. Yeah, it's interesting. You're right.

[01:35:51] It could be the way another would look at us is how an 11 year old or 12 year old would look at the adults around them. And even like the hot neighbor, you know, that she's the one exception.

[01:36:07] And you can see the kid spots her in the Bar Mitzvah scene and it's almost like that inspires him to... Yeah, that Joe, that Joe's a man of his high. Yeah, that's an interesting way of looking at the movie is it's kind of through the boy's perspective.

[01:36:23] I don't know like how far that could take you but it's really interesting. The sister who we've barely talked about, she mostly washes her hair. I love that line. There are apparently a number of steps involved in this. So I don't know, I think the last thing

[01:36:41] that I have to say about this movie is something that I alluded to at the beginning which is that I found it to be much more humorous. If you watch it, maybe you had a similar experience like maybe the first time I watched it

[01:36:53] I was actually sort of moping already or maybe in some sort of not happy state. And it seems like a depressing, like bleak view of human existence especially there's no answers that the film cuts off with this tornado that we mentioned at the beginning

[01:37:12] is the very last scene. And I don't know if there is any meaning to this last scene where the tornado is coming and we see the bullies face for the first time but it cuts off right there. And is that punishment for Danny for listening to his Walkman

[01:37:26] after the rabbi told them to be good? We don't know. Is he finally seeing the face of the demon or something? Or God. Or God, the face of God. I mean in Job, God is in the storm. So I thought that was sort of a clear illusion

[01:37:42] to when God finally gives his non-answers to Job he comes in a storm and he just tells Job like who are you to ask me questions? And that's that and maybe it ends there because why give the answers? The answers don't mean anything anyway.

[01:38:00] I think we could agree that this is a film that needs a sequel. A serious man too. Seriouser. Yeah, that's, this resolves all of these issues. You know, this is, I'm clarifying. Answer every question. I don't mean a lot. All right, well I'm out of analysis.

[01:38:23] On that note, thank you Paul for joining us. Thank you for having me on again. Always a pleasure. Yes, thank you Paul. Join us next time on Very Bad Wizard. The Queen in life has spoken. They know our tension. You're the Queen. I'm a very good man.

[01:38:53] Good, very good man. I think we've lost and with no more brains than you have. They know our tension to that man. Anybody can have a brain? You're a very bad man. I'm a very good man. Just a very bad wizard.