Episode 208: Dream Theater

[00:00:00] Very Bad Wizards is a podcast with a philosopher, my dad and psychologist Dave Pizarro having an informal discussion about issues in 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 am a god. Everybody says who does he think he is. I just told you who I thought I was. A god! The Queen in Oz has spoken! Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain. Are you? Who are you?

[00:01:01] I'm a very good man with no more brains than you have. Anybody can have a brain? You're a very bad man. I'm a very good man with just a very bad wizard. Welcome to Very Bad Wizards. I'm Tamler Sommers from the University of Houston.

[00:01:16] Dave, today we're going to talk about some culture-ward bullshit for the first segment. Are you excited for all those one-star reviews on iTunes? Those bring me down. I try really not to be bothered but it's so reliable that whenever we talk about

[00:01:31] something that our centrist listeners don't like. Our Eric Weinstein stans. Yeah. But we love you people too. Even if you don't listen to us. You can't just love everybody indiscriminately. Then we got a really nice Twitter thread about our episode with James Lindsay.

[00:01:58] So at least I think we make up for some of our lost listeners with some of your new extreme leftist war. We start with Mr. Potato Head. Yeah, I was going to say in order of importance with the top, the most pressing issue of the

[00:02:16] day being the gender of Mr. Potato Head. So I just heard people like all of a sudden one day a few days ago Mr. Potato Head was dropping the Mr. It was clearly something like that was supposed to appeal to the

[00:02:33] trans community making them feel more welcome and everyone was freaking out about it on Twitter. Right. This was another, you know, incursion by the social justice warriors. Keep your politics out of my childhood toys. So what do you give a fuck about your childhood toys first of all?

[00:02:52] But yeah, the first week that I saw was some like congressman saying he wanted to secede. So you know, this stuff is so it's such performance and it's so tiring. But I think it's to the extent that I take any of this stuff seriously, it really exhausts me.

[00:03:15] And when I step back and just laugh at stuff like that, then it's not so bad. But I feel like this week in particular, like starting with Mr. Potato Head, then Dr. Seuss, then like all this stuff, it just drains me. Like why do people care this much?

[00:03:30] I don't. I have some thoughts on that. But we should say that our main episode, our main segment today is going to be on a really interesting article that you can't, that you found on Dreams. We wanted to do like a comprehensive just solving dreams.

[00:03:45] That turned out to be something that we were not going to be able to do in one episode. So we're going to end up talking about a really good paper on Dreams that it

[00:03:52] does offer a theory of Dreams and then also connects it to art and the importance of art. So that's what we'll talk about in the second segment. Yeah. So why do people care so much? I don't know.

[00:04:05] Like I think it's just something that's been this like avalanche, a snowball effect where people take the progress that's good and extend it to places where it becomes trivial, sanctimonious. And then those incidents get inflated by the Christina Hoff Summers of the world.

[00:04:30] But it's not obviously not just her now. It's now just a large contingent of the center right, some on the center left and then of course further right. Like they really think this is like an existential threat to the nation. And so everything gets inflated right now.

[00:04:48] And the Mr. Potato Head thing was not even real. Right. I mean, all they did was rebrand. But, you know, it's just the super set of Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head is just now branded Potato Head.

[00:04:59] And then you can buy Mr. Potato, you can buy Mrs. Potato Head. And, you know, it's extra silly given that like you can obviously change the gender of the Potato Head very easily with the accessories that are provided.

[00:05:10] So they were always a little gender fluid to begin with. That seems what do you mean? Like just if you put a mustache on Mr. Potato Head, then that automatically makes it a man. Yeah, absolutely.

[00:05:22] In fact, every once in a while I put on powder to stop the shine on my face when I have to do like a video conference. And I am a woman in that moment. I have just become a woman. You should not have otherwise.

[00:05:35] Can I read you the tweet that the Potato Head company Hasbro, I guess, did when I assume they got just a huge amount of backlash for this fairly innocuous thing that they were doing. So this was the tweet.

[00:05:50] While it was announced today that the Potato Head brand name and logo are dropping the Mr. I am proud to confirm that Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head aren't going anywhere and will remain Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head. I love such fence writers. I am proud.

[00:06:10] YAM. I love that. That redeems the whole controversy to me. I like even though they're responding to something they probably just took like a huge amount of shit. Like they kind of came up with the right response to it.

[00:06:24] We'll kind of take it seriously, but we'll also make fun of it and show that we don't take it seriously. And all of you can fuck off. All right. I mean, I'm idealizing probably. Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head are probably going to enjoy a surge in sales. Yes.

[00:06:45] That's see that that that's the you know, like the conspiracy will on this was all just a way for them because who the hell like who buys Mr. Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head anymore anyway? I know it also it's such a weird toy to begin with.

[00:07:00] It is a very how did it not make you uncomfortable in the first place? And I'm assuming I don't remember because I don't think I ever have one, but they don't have like penises or vaginas. Mr. Mr. They have strap ons and penises. They have strap.

[00:07:17] No, they don't have any genitalia. You have to go to third party vendors to get those aftermarket aftermarket adjustments to your potato head. The dark web used to even be just a potato. It used to be just yeah, it used to be just the lips

[00:07:30] and whatever mustache that you would put on. You had to bring your own potato. That's how the toy started. That seems like but they would send you and then you would just play with them with that. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[00:07:45] It was just accessories that you would put on a regular potato to like put make your potato into a toy. It's like some great depression era shit, man. That sounds like depressing, but it also sounds a lot more environmentally friendly. Let's go back to that.

[00:07:59] And then, you know, and then compost the potato after we're done playing with it. You know what I just realized is so I've had in my head this week three or four like culture war kinds of topic things that happened

[00:08:13] that I don't even really I don't even I haven't even categorized them as whether it was the right or the left that was annoying me. And one of them, I don't know if you heard about this,

[00:08:21] that I just was reminded was that like on TikTok, like at least these were the claims of the tweets that Gen Z was trying to cancel Eminem because they heard his lyrics, you know, to this one song and they were

[00:08:34] abhorred and then all these millennials took to Twitter to defend Eminem and say that he can't be canceled. I don't even know what side of the political spectrum that's on. That's just some crazy, like, sanctum on your shit right there, though. Like, yeah.

[00:08:48] And also, like he's not getting canceled. That's the thing. Now he probably paid people to try to cancel it. Right. Again, he's like it's like when Seinfeld and Chris Rock said that they won't play college campuses anymore. They're not getting invited to or no, Seinfeld and some

[00:09:04] of another like old guy and maybe it was Chris Rock. It's like, well, no, you're just not getting invited to college campus. Sixty years old. They're playing it off like when you stumble and you try to make it look like a dance step.

[00:09:16] Like, no, I meant to not get invited to college. Exactly. So let's look at a good microcosm of these, which I would not have known. And this is one way in which it is a microcosm.

[00:09:28] Like I would not have known about this if you and YOL, I forget which one of you first texted. We have a little thread that we saw that we have sometimes go. And some you were I think it was you that said like they're trying to cancel Daniel

[00:09:43] Lankens or they're piling on Daniel Lankens because of a tweet. Right. Right. Right. So so I've learned that I'm pronouncing it wrong. It's Lackens. Sorry. Dan Lackens tweeted, the arc of the scientific universe is long, but it bends toward transparency, which whatever, you know, like Lackens

[00:10:05] is a champion of science. I get, you know, I understood what he was trying to say. I didn't even think that this might be an outrageous thing. The replies to that one of the big criticisms is, you know,

[00:10:17] he's equating the scientific open science practices to the civil rights movement because this is a riff on the Martin Luther King quote. Right. Right. Or appropriating an Martin Luther King quote is maybe not the open science open science community's best look.

[00:10:38] I think anytime somebody says it's not a good look, like that's that's already going to start. You're going into annoying territory. But but but so like, what do you think of that? Like just on its face before we talk about like whether it's a.

[00:10:54] Yeah, I'm a problem at all. Decontextualized like like manipulating quotes for stuff. I think it's. No, I mean like like do you have a problem with doing it for the Martin Luther King quote? Oh, no, no, no. No, I mean, I don't like I don't.

[00:11:13] Maybe I'm maybe I'm wrong here, but my sensibility is like whatever we say shit like this day shall live in infamy about like going to the bathroom and having like a big bowel movement. Like we say that all it's it's like I don't.

[00:11:24] I mean, are you disrespecting like what I tweeted? I guess now I would think about it because I you know, I care about what people you're chilled. But yeah, I mean, I'm a little chilled.

[00:11:33] I would you know, I joked that the title of this episode should be I have a dream. But now like for sure it's not going to. No, I think we should. You got to stand up to the woke mob. It seems like such a waste of energy.

[00:11:48] Well, so yeah, I don't have a problem with it either. And it's I feel like a lot of the time people do this. It's almost disingenuous. Like I don't I don't I'm not saying any of these people that replied to Lackens as being disingenuous.

[00:12:02] But it sounds disingenuous to me because it's like, you know that he's not really equating right the open site. You know that that's absolutely not what he's doing, what he means to do or. And so then you're just saying that something about that just objectively

[00:12:18] or automatically, you know, whether his intentions are that or not. That's I think just like clearly not true given how often we do these things. And this is something that always bugs me because people do it about, you know, the Holocaust anytime somebody mentions Hitler or the Holocaust,

[00:12:35] people will get all worked up and say, you know, don't trivialize the Holocaust or they're not you can't they're not fucking trivializing the Holocaust. You can't trivialize the Holocaust. That's not possible to do. And if they're drawing an analogy that they think is useful,

[00:12:49] like that's all that they're doing, you know. And so the like this whole you're equating thing. I just find to be and a little bit disingenuous, I think. I don't know. I think it's an unfair reading of what's going on.

[00:13:04] And I think, you know, what what's at the heart of it, I think is people wanting to condemn somebody who they probably already don't like or think already they already have reason to believe that they are sort of not not the good person that they ought to be.

[00:13:18] I think that's what a bit of what's happening here. Laggons has enemies on Twitter for his, you know, shit that he says about bad science and people he thinks are dumb. So, you know, I don't he has a thick skin.

[00:13:32] He says shit about people, people saying shit about him. But here I think is just particularly unfair, like criticize him for like mean shit that he's done in the past. Like go ahead, fine. Well, that's the disingenuous part of it.

[00:13:44] Yeah, that criticize him for what you want to criticize him, not for this. But I I don't know. Like I think that well, I don't know. So I don't know the people who are doing it and I don't know what they think of

[00:13:54] Laggons, but this is a kind of complaint that you see a lot. And it's always struck me as just nonsensical and also almost never coming from the people who are supposed to be aggrieved by it or trivialized.

[00:14:09] Like if you look at so I guess we're the Will Gervais. Yeah, so will Gervais like, you know, like posted an image of the tweet so it's not to amplify. I guess the tweet. Yeah. OK, OK, I know I know Lacons.

[00:14:26] I know Will a little bit like we've met. I don't, you know, I'm not going to make this personal, except for the whole amplifying because you find that somebody did something that you're offended on behalf of other people by an amplifying.

[00:14:40] Yeah, I don't think to paraphrase that's not a good look. Like I don't think that that that seems to me like you are now just trying to get credit for finding something wrong on Twitter. Like, right.

[00:14:51] If you are so worried about amplifying it, then it seems like you just wouldn't do it at all. Like I can't go to at Lacons and find that tweet, which is what I did immediately. I didn't I only saw it because Will tweeted.

[00:15:05] I would not I would not have seen it otherwise. And so then, you know, then you had you you question whether it was a pile on and it's probably not a pile. It's just like a few a handful of people complaining.

[00:15:15] Yeah, he's like this, you know, the Dutch built slave ships. So I'm not surprised. Yeah, no, they're a total way. It's not that they that they're not white supremacists. They are it's just that this doesn't prove right. This quote did not come from Lacons as white supremacy.

[00:15:31] Like other stuff came from. It's a premise. Yeah. But one thing that's notable when you look through the replies and again, I don't think it's a pile on it. I think the U.L. said that they're they're they're making them out to be a white supremacist.

[00:15:47] I don't think they're doing that either. It's that that would almost be more interesting than what they're actually doing. They're just bitching about it. But it seems like virtually everyone is white. That is complaining about it. Yeah, wait, I saw one that that he tweeted this on February 27.

[00:16:04] And apparently it was an extra sinful, egregious error because it was in Black History Month. So Lacons had you only waited till March 1. It wouldn't have been as bad. And that is characteristic of some of these kind of pseudo

[00:16:16] controversies is that it's the white people that are complaining about it the most. This the privileged people now, whether that's I mean, I wouldn't be surprised if there were people of color complaining about it, but that I think the point still stands.

[00:16:31] I think it's often that there is a type of person who is quick to to to be offended at this. And I would venture to say that like base rates are that that these are people who have the luxury of being offended

[00:16:43] by open science tweets that use MLK. It really made me think about stuff that I really did make me think about stuff that I would say that I would normally easily say. But isn't it an instructive that Lacons just totally stood his ground

[00:16:56] and like didn't apologize, didn't like and just told people who objected like why he disagreed with them and it was fine. Like, you know, like nothing happened to him. He's still there. He's still tweeting. He's still and people move on and nobody would even be talking about it

[00:17:14] except that, you know, we brought it up on this right, explosively popular podcast. Let's let's just be clear. The irony of this conversation does not escape me. But no, I thought that was actually something that I wish people would take a lesson from.

[00:17:30] I don't think the lesson here is don't is be more careful about what you say. I think the lesson is if you do get these people who are unfairly criticizing you, don't back down to them. Don't apologize. Don't pretend you're sorry.

[00:17:45] Just like either ignore them or just like respond to them with what you think and it's going to be fine. People's attention spans aren't long enough for for these kinds of things to last. And really, like often, like in this case, the people who are

[00:18:04] you know, the whole reason anybody even knows about them at all is because people are looking from the side that you and you know, El were on in this case to complain about the complainers, right, which is often, you know, like and said, something

[00:18:15] that I think is underappreciated by Americans. And I think anybody who has sufficient international experience would know this, which I think is true, which is the racial sensibilities and the political sensibilities of Americans are a really they're like a very unique way

[00:18:31] of thinking and it requires you to have been, I think, socialized heavily in this country to even think that that some of these things would be missteps and to even if you think that what he did was insensitive to hold somebody

[00:18:46] from another country to the standard of like what somebody here would know about, like some leftist American elite person would know about is I think a kind of misstep in and of itself that you just can't get out of your head here that somebody might not even be

[00:19:03] thinking that right. So you're trying to like one up the like the same. Yeah, I'm going to take a picture of Will Gervais tweet. The sanctimonious small minded and sensitive will Gervais. So my last thing that I wanted to say about this thing

[00:19:24] that we've already talked about too long, but is it's interesting also that this was done to objecting to somebody who is saying something on behalf of open science, which is trying to make significant radical changes to the way science is conducted and that often these kinds

[00:19:42] of controversies tend to be ones that end up somehow making it harder to change the status quo. And like this is something that you see a lot like you we talked about at some earlier episode, the people who say broken science, you know, like bro and science.

[00:20:01] And yeah, and this was obviously something with Bernie and people accusing them of being Bernie bros and racist. And like these are tactics or tactics makes it sound like it's conscious. And I think a lot of times maybe this is unconscious,

[00:20:15] but these are ways for what's in power to stay in power. And even though they're billed as like exactly the opposite of that. Right. So you have so there is this whole, you know, something we just avoided talking about too much

[00:20:29] was the whole context of critics of open science and the way that certain people who are proponents of open science have acted, you know, perhaps perhaps in misogynistic or racist ways like that's possible. But the truth of the matter is that the people

[00:20:44] who have the power to institute these large scale reforms in science are going to be people who have power. And so it's an easy way to take down these people by accusing them of being part of a culture that is toxic.

[00:21:00] Yeah. And that's not to say that their people shouldn't be really careful looking at what they're doing and what kind of culture they're creating around open science. But I think that's the context is that there's this fear that open science is somehow anti, you know,

[00:21:13] anti woman, anti people of color. And when in reality, I think everybody who who is a true proponent of open science doesn't feel that way. Maybe there have been some bad actors that give it a bad name. But you're but I think you're right.

[00:21:25] This is a way this is an easy way of taking down the message that that I think is a good one of open science of reform. Yeah, yeah. And it's weird because the critics have largely come from you have like very established high power older professors

[00:21:39] at elite universities who shit on open science. Yeah. And then you have like the broken science, the you know, the grass roots. And even like I remember we talked about that Tej Rai thing. Yeah. And he's somebody that it's raised these concerns

[00:21:54] and he's the editor of Science Magazine. And like a lot of these things are, you know, whether it's consciously or unconsciously, they send a message about like making it harder to make real significant reforms. And I think again, this is this is a pattern that you see

[00:22:11] throughout the domains of culture and politics. And that sucks. Like that's the worst thing about it. Otherwise, it would just be really annoying. But the fact that it also ends up doing that, it's a way of dividing people who should be on the same team.

[00:22:29] I can see why people who are powerless in many ways because of their background might say, well, do I have to accept this bullshit in order to endorse open science? Like why do I have to put up with some guy

[00:22:39] being like an open misogynist in order to put up with open science? And and it's not that I don't see that that problem. I just think, well, you just are going to have to put up with it almost with whatever you do.

[00:22:50] Like that's just a feature of most institutions. And most like I mean, most groups will have an element of it, but often also the it's like this, the accusations are completely unfair. Again, I don't know if it's conscious or unconscious.

[00:23:03] It's like the invisible forces of like power stability or something like that. But the but yeah, a lot of the time the charges are total bullshit like this time. Yeah. And and this gets us to a conversation that we had when we were talking about the English department

[00:23:18] at Cornell changing their name. You know, my like the concern of mine is always that like rather than fight the real fight, it suffices to call out, you know, to go on some some calling out of whoever for whatever misstep and and then you've done your job.

[00:23:34] Yeah. And purely cosmetic change. Yeah. Yeah. But I also have just in general, I don't like the whole take to Twitter to shit talk. I think it would be funny if like will text at his friends and said, look at this fucking guy

[00:23:47] and like made fun of lack of just behind closed doors. Fine. Like you guys did to me. But we have to now amplify it. And now we're at. We shouldn't put a link. We won't put a link to Wilger Ves' is that's right.

[00:24:03] You have to Google it yourself. You have to find it organically. We don't want to amplify that kind of divisiveness and anti reform. That's right. All right. Well, let's save Dr. Seuss for some other time. I'm sure that's. Yeah. Are you even allowed to say Dr. Seuss now?

[00:24:25] It's not racist to say Dr. Seuss just to even like know that you. That there's a whole yeah, there's yeah, we should talk. We'll save it for later, but there is something I have. I want to get off my chest eventually about Dr. Seuss.

[00:24:40] What? No, you got to say it now. Part of what tires me about culture wars is the treatment of things as equivalent that ought not be equivalent. And so it gets to the calibration thing that we've talked about before. Like there's some racist shit in Dr.

[00:24:53] Seuss books and if they decide to not publish it, yeah, you know, like maybe you wish that they didn't. But like that's very different from like appropriating an MLK tweet. And that's very different from being accused of rape. Like they're all the like some of these things

[00:25:06] ought to be complained about and they're and we should talk about them. Some of these things are a complete waste of time and their performative. And the problem with the whole thing together, these like what we're calling these culture wars

[00:25:18] is that it stops people from looking specifically at these things and saying, is this a justified complaint or is this one? Like we just all complain about it all. Like the woke laughter, the white supremacist right. And we lump all those things together when I actually think

[00:25:32] that you should not publish things with like China man rice bowl chopstick heads like, you know, right. And it's worth having like a real discussion about that, rather than just bitching about it on Twitter. Like, but like, you know, if you could actually have that conversation,

[00:25:48] that would be good, but that's not what sells. And if you look at like one of the things like if you go to the Atlantic or you go to like, you know, these politics kind of politics slash culture

[00:25:57] journals that give like a ranking of what are the most popular articles. It's all like if one of these comes out, it's always going to be up in the most popular, most clicked on articles.

[00:26:09] And they're not measured sort of, all right, let's weigh this case on its merits. Because that's interesting. I didn't think of like Dr. Seuss and that book that nobody's ever heard of, but that probably contains like, you know, ridiculously racist from today's standards images.

[00:26:25] Like it is, you know, this is the apocalypse. And we it's terrible. It's so draining. It's so depressing to me. This is that this is what this is what the Internet economy has become. But it's so energizing to my stepmother. I don't think I'm bothered.

[00:26:44] Like I get annoyed by people who make too much of it, you know, and even that I'm kind of over because like I don't even know anymore. You know, it's my fault for being on Twitter. Like Twitter is such a small, small, small percentage of all people

[00:26:57] and you know, the people who complain the most get on there. And and I like there is enough good about Twitter that keeps me on. But like I have no filter for culture wars. I don't know how to get rid of them.

[00:27:08] But like, I have the magic button mute James Lindsay. Mute like just mute all of those people. You would be so sad to hear you say that. You would be devastated. I know, but he's just going to have to find some way to come to terms with it.

[00:27:24] Right. All right. We'll be back to talk about dreams. How are dreams for a better future? We have a. I'm trying so hard not to say I have a dream. Just say it. This episode of Very Bad Wizards is brought to you by our continuing sponsor, BetterHelp.

[00:27:44] Look, every probably every one of us is could use some therapy. You might be in a particular part of your life where you could really talk to somebody, but it's always difficult, you know, find a therapist in your town. You need word of mouth.

[00:28:01] You need to be able to schedule and visit that therapist. BetterHelp is there for exactly this kind of situation. They're there across all 50 states, across the world. Chances are you can reach out to BetterHelp. So if you're feeling particularly depressed or anxious or stressed or angry,

[00:28:18] or you just want to make your life more about flourishing, you want to increase your happiness. All you have to do is go to betterhelp.com, sign up, fill out some forms, letting them know what your issues are. They'll assign you a licensed professional therapist

[00:28:33] that is used to dealing in those particular issues. You can always change if you don't like them, but in 24 hours, you'll be talking to somebody. You can talk to them over the phone. You can talk to them via text or video chat. Again, this is secure and convenient.

[00:28:50] These are licensed professionals. It's affordable compared to many options. And if you can't afford it, financial aid is available. So if you're feeling like therapy might be something you're looking for now and you're listening to this, you should really feel encouraged

[00:29:05] and feel free to go to betterhelp.com. Slash VBW, if you're a very bad wizards listener and you use that code, you'll get 10% off of your first month with the discount code BBW. Again, that's B-E-T-T-E-R-H-E-L-P.com. Slash VBW are thanks to Better Help

[00:29:25] for once again sponsoring this episode of Very Bad Wizards.

[00:30:20] Welcome back to Very Bad Wizards. This is the time in the podcast where we like to take a moment to thank everybody who has just been involved with our podcast in emailing us, in tweeting us, in getting into discussions. We really appreciate all of that.

[00:30:36] It's as we often say, it's what keeps us going. We would like to hear from you if you want to get in touch with us. You can email us verybadwizards at gmail.com. We say this a lot, but I'm just especially feeling guilty

[00:30:48] because I've gotten some really nice emails lately. And we read them all. We just... We really do. It feeds us. We had the time to, yeah, it really does, to respond to them all. But especially in the thick of the semester, it's tough. But we appreciate it.

[00:31:02] You can also tweet to us at verybadwizards or at tamler and at peas. If you want to engage in deep discussions or light or heavy mockery of us, you can go to reddit.com slash r slash verybadwizards and engage with the community there.

[00:31:19] You can check out our Instagram page, just verybadwizards. You can listen and rate us on Apple Music. We appreciate that, especially the ones that keep our average up from people. Yeah, if you're one of those people who's going to complain

[00:31:33] about us being too woke like get a girlfriend. I wasn't a very woke thing. And listen and subscribe on Spotify and maybe the word for our podcast can get out and we can grow. And we really appreciate all of that.

[00:31:52] Thank you so much for all of the time and effort you put into engaging with us and with the community. And if you would like to support us in more tangible ways, you can give us one time or recurring donation on PayPal.

[00:32:03] You can buy some of our merch, which is available. I actually got an email from a listener, Dave, that was just directly to my email asking if there were any coffee cups that are going to be available. You know, Cotton Bureau doesn't do coffee cups,

[00:32:17] but I would really love a coffee cup. So so I'm going to look and see if there's a good company that makes quality coffee. But all of our t-shirts now, the ones that we love and that our listeners seems to love are at Cotton Bureau.

[00:32:32] And you can find all of this on the support page of our website. Finally, our favorite thing that you can do is to become one of our Patreon supporters. At any tier of support, you will get ad free episodes. You will also get Dave's Beats.

[00:32:49] Four soon five volumes of Dave's Beats. You will get if you are a two dollar and up subscriber, you will get bonus episodes. We I think we've pretty much settled on our next one, right? Sopranos College. Oh yeah. Yeah. Sopranos College.

[00:33:05] Look for some Sopranos related bonus content very soon on Patreon. And if you're a five dollar and up listener, you'll get all of our Brothers Karamazov episodes delivered straight to your feed. And you'll also get to select our listener selected episode. And so help me God.

[00:33:27] I'm going to put out the call for nominations. We need it. We are, you know, we struggle for episode topics. We always find one we tip that we like, but it's hard. And this is one great way for us to supercharge that

[00:33:41] and reward our five dollar and up listeners by allowing them to select what we do. And that's always a really popular episode. So we should just have we should just crowdsource our like the producing job for this podcast. Yeah, we should.

[00:33:56] I mean, look at what your dream tweet did actually. That's what I was going to say. Yeah, that's I should have said thank you to everybody on that if anybody's listening because I tweeted out ideas for articles about dreams and we got so many suggestions

[00:34:08] that it was a little overwhelming, but good shit. Just good shit. Really good. So yeah, so thank you, everybody. All right, so let's go to our main topic. We wanted to do an episode about dreams. You tweeted out a request and we got a ton of unbelievable stuff.

[00:34:25] As you mentioned, and we settled on this article called Enter the Supercensorium and it's on the website and the magazine, The Baffler, which is a yeah, which is a really good magazine. I wasn't familiar with it at all, but that's because I'm unlearned.

[00:34:45] Or just kind of like it's a little too left for you. It's a little too threatening to your position of power and your privilege. Well, as you point out, it's it's not it's the kind of left

[00:34:55] that is super elite and entitled is not the kind that I am, you know, coming from my background. We don't we don't know that The Baffler is. One of the things we're supposed to read. But yeah, absolutely.

[00:35:06] So one of the things, you know, when we were looking through all those articles on dreams, it's a it's a little hard to choose something that because there's a lot of scientific work on dreams. And in this article, Eric Hol, hell, I don't know how to pronounce the

[00:35:21] the German is a German word that I'm. Is he German? It's H O E L. Seems like yeah. Oh, H O E L. Yeah. Hole. Hole, hell, hell. He takes the science of dreams and builds an argument and that argument goes through a whole bunch of different discussions

[00:35:42] about art and what it is. But I'm going to just summarize that and in the process, I think we'll talk a lot about what dreams are and the science behind dreams. So hole builds this argument based on a particular theory of why we dream

[00:35:57] and the argument that he's proposing is that we should distinguish between art and entertainment and we should ensure that good art, which will get into the differences between good and art and entertainment should be produced and maintained and really distinguished from mere entertainment.

[00:36:11] His argument rests on a few assumption. And I think the most interesting one is this theory that he's proposing for why we dream and he's a neuroscientist. Neuroscientism has actually written articles on this theory of dreams. We have nothing but praise for neuroscience. This podcast.

[00:36:30] You know, this is a case where somebody has taken the neuroscience and I think done something interesting with it. So maybe we should champion this. Yes, absolutely. Yeah. So so the argument is that dreams might serve a necessary biological function and that current theories of dreams

[00:36:47] that just focus on like the the neurological functioning of like REM sleep and its role in memory seem to be ignoring some the really important aspect of dreams, which which he thinks is the phenomenology of these dreams. Like those theories just don't unlike, say, Freud's theories.

[00:37:04] These neuroscientific theories don't usually have much to say about the actual content of dreams. So he argues that maybe the function that dream serves is to present the mind with a set of experiences that are sufficiently different from the ones we have in our everyday lives.

[00:37:20] And he says this is in order to avoid a problem called overfitting, which is a statistical problem where a predictive model becomes too dependent on the data it's been given, the data it's been trained on. So it does actually a poor job of predicting novel data

[00:37:35] when it encounters it. Can you give me a because this part I wanted to understand this better. Yeah. Is there another example of overfitting that would help illustrate this problem? Yeah, I by myself was looking a little bit more into the problem of overfitting

[00:37:51] because apparently it happens a lot with neural nets that are trained up on a data set. So the the idea is that if you train up a model or if you use as the data that you're building a model or an algorithm to

[00:38:05] if you're using it to predict something new, what can happen is you can focus too much on the details of that data and that will end up getting in the way of the future predictions. So so I think one example that I was reading was

[00:38:20] imagine if you want, if I want to build an algorithm that predicts what movies and TV shows you buy on Amazon or books. And so I input whatever I know about you, like your geographical location, your education.

[00:38:34] I also input dates and time and whatever color of your house. Those things in in the original data set, it might turn out that those things are correlated with your movie and TV purchases. But that will just be a weird quirk of that particular data set

[00:38:50] because it's not really a causal. It's not playing a causal role. It's just, you know, it's one of those quirks in a limited data set. You might find a correlation between the time of day

[00:38:59] that you order in your particular time zone and and what the content of what you buy. So now if I try, if I say, oh, I have a model that predicts really well and one of the big predictors is time of day that you ordered.

[00:39:11] But now I'm trying to predict on a completely novel data set someone in a different time zone in a different country. Those things will end up not being predictive at all. So the model has been overfit by using the details of the original data set

[00:39:25] at the expense of good generalization. Right. So so it results in some weird quirky errors that are a result of the limited set that you train a model on. Kind of idiosyncratic like aspects of the data that isn't relevant. That's right. That's right.

[00:39:43] And you know, when you're doing these learning, these deep learning things, you often don't know what they're using to predict. Like it's kind of like a black box. You're just training it up on this data set. So you have no idea what it's using.

[00:39:54] Right. You can't just look at it on its face and say, well, of course, date and time wouldn't, you know, you don't know what it's using. And so so what he argues is that what dreams are doing

[00:40:05] is that they're expanding the set that our brains are training up on because essentially life is boring and predictable. And for all sorts of reasons, we don't experience that much diversity. Right. But in order to have a good adaptive brain

[00:40:20] that can tell, you know, that can that can do a good job of navigating the environment and predicting novel things that it hasn't encountered. It's good for the brain to have some experiences, quote, unquote, that that are that give our brains flexibility.

[00:40:35] And so he argues that this is a need that dreams are serving and points to to some research on dreams that show that, you know, when when you don't dream, you fail, you start failing at various kinds of cognitive tasks like generalization tasks.

[00:40:50] And he thinks that that need to have that novel experience set like that that escape that what does he call it? The the experiential world line or something like that. Like the the the whole mind space like a state space space of possible experiences. Right.

[00:41:09] And so he says that's just a need that our brain has and dreams seem to fulfill that need. But like many other things, there are other ways to feed the brain in this way. And he thinks that fiction, right, telling stories about things

[00:41:25] that we haven't experienced in reading stories and seeing movies and all that stuff is doing the job that dreams would do and therefore sort of providing us our brains with even more data to to avoid this problem of overfitting.

[00:41:40] In the end, he thinks, though, that that role, that function that art is supposed to serve might have been thwarted by the fact that much of our entertainment has become predictable and is sort of lowest common denominator and it's predictable in its trite, you know, tropey bad fiction.

[00:41:58] He thinks they're blurred copies of the original form of what art was supposed to do. And even though they might give us the satisfaction that comes from satisfying this biological craving, much like porn or fast food, it's faking. It's not really giving you what you need.

[00:42:13] And so, you know, we have a biological drive to fuck because it helps us reproduce, but we can spend all our time looking at porn and satisfying that particular need at the expense of the function. And he thinks that this is what just the term he uses

[00:42:26] entertainment versus art. He thinks that's what entertainment might be. So while it might sound hoity-toity to try to distinguish between art and entertainment, he says maybe it's actually a really important thing to distinguish because art is in this like,

[00:42:40] it's in this particular kind of space that gives us that novel experience that at the end of the day might be really good for our brains and for our existence in this world. So fuck you, MCU. Martin Scorsese was right. Fuck all of you.

[00:43:00] I was about, you know, I made that connection when I was reading this. So I was like, this is just going to be a way that he argues against Marvel. It is exactly the way that people argue against Marvel as being just homogenized, like, you know, feeding people

[00:43:15] what they want, like not terrible, like really competent at doing that. But in the same way that like McDonald's French fries are really actually good to, you know, they're tasty to eat, but like, yeah, that's the criticism. Right. And it's separate from art.

[00:43:31] A mild defense, which is that the difference between Marvel Universe and McDonald's is that it's more like a McDonald's that every once in a while has really healthy food. And you might miss out on the good parts of the Marvel Universe if you just don't enter,

[00:43:46] you know, the Marvel Universe. But I but. So you think like Marvel, they're like to make a rib? Is that what you're saying? They're like that, you know, when they every once in a while have an attempt at offering a healthy menu, but nobody buys it. The salad.

[00:44:00] Yeah. Yeah. But I'm not going to defend it too much. Yeah, so this is it's a very wide ranging, really cool article. I think you summed up the argument really well. There is a couple of different parts of it. There's just the way he understands dreams,

[00:44:16] which maybe we can start out talking about and then see to what extent I think, you know, like that same argument applies to art. And then. Yeah. So here's one question I had about the way he understands the purpose of dreams.

[00:44:33] So he talks about the phantasmogorical aspects of dreams. And as he says, many dreams could be short stories by Kafka, Borges, Marquez or some other fabulous. And I guess when it's when dreams are like that, I'm wondering how it actually fulfills the function

[00:44:53] that he says our brains crave because if things that are impossible are happening in our dreams, it doesn't seem like that's something that will help us. We don't have to deal with impossible situations in real life. You know, so he gives the example of somebody who's falling

[00:45:13] like and you often have dreams that you're falling and it would be good to like, given that we don't often fall from really high places, it would just be good to have an like for our brains or, you know,

[00:45:25] to have at least that experience so we know how to behave if that happens to us in the future. But then there's these other parts of dreams that there's no way it could happen because they're impossible. Like people are just changing from one person to another.

[00:45:38] And so so so why does the fast like, why are they so fabulous? Why are they so much like Borges if this is what their function is? Right. I think that the argument has to be something like this. And I think he alludes to something like this,

[00:45:55] which is that that for instance, that like rapid changing of location or person is is a kind of a category violation that while that thing might not happen, what it might be encouraging is a flexible use of boundaries and categories.

[00:46:11] And that flexibility is what those complete phantasmagoric elements are doing. They are it's like, you know, it's like working out really hard with with like a weight machine that only exercises your triceps or something.

[00:46:26] Like in real world, it would never you would never need just that one muscle. But but it might just serve. That's not a great metaphor. But no, I think it is actually, I think it's a really good metaphor.

[00:46:38] It's like you don't need to do push ups in everyday life. Like you're not going to come across a situation unless you join the Marines or something where like it's going to be really important that you perform push ups.

[00:46:49] But you might be in situations where like you need the strength that comes from doing push ups. We evolved push ups for 11th grade gym class. Exactly. To pass. So to get that, remember the president's thing? Yeah, the presidential physical fitness that I never got.

[00:47:05] I was like, fuck the president. Yeah, I actually got mine. So I should have had my I could do one pull the one pull up that was required. I couldn't do a pull up until I was like 22.

[00:47:16] So I think that that combined with kind of like what you might see as the natural, you know, he says a lot of these theories of dreams are just about like the brain shitting out like information that it's acquired throughout the day or like a cleanup process.

[00:47:32] Like there are reasons to think that it might the phenomenology might pose some like weird, weird experiences that just end up helping for this other reason. They might be weird for other reasons, though. I you know, who knows?

[00:47:48] Like if it's if your brain is just kind of shitting out stuff, then the content might be as crazy as it wants, as long as it's serving this overfitting protection. Right, I see. Like as long as it's serving that purpose, then it can also go into these

[00:48:01] wacky places because of like you were attracted to your mother or whatever. So so one of the theories he considers is this idea that we process the information from that day. Like that's what our dreams are for is like we have we have these new

[00:48:18] experiences that we need like some time to just kind of assimilate and integrate with our past experiences. And that's what dreams do. And he says he's never found that very compelling because like that's so not what dreams typically are there.

[00:48:33] They have nothing to do with what you just did that day, typically unless you know, unless it's a very strange connection. But like that seems like it doesn't fit the phenomenology at all. Yeah, and that's a point it's a point that I hadn't considered,

[00:48:48] you know, having read about like this theory of dreams. So this is the theory that dreams are for memory consolidation. And what what it ought to predict is that you're getting this sort of replay of daily events. And it's true that my dreams aren't always like stuff

[00:49:05] that happened to me during the day. But sometimes they are like sometimes shit works its way into my dreams. Like, but sometimes it's like something I've watched. Right. So like if I'm watching The Sopranos or like I might dream that I was

[00:49:18] in a forest and I murdered somebody and do they ran away? You know, or whatever like it does work its way into it. But but I sort of agree that this is not a very if if that's the case,

[00:49:30] then there doesn't seem to be very good evidence for it from our dreams. And yeah. And then our dreams will be boring. And right, they would be like repetitions of things we have experienced. So like I had a dream like, you know, now I've been sort of paying

[00:49:44] attention to my dreams a little bit since we had the idea of doing this. And there was a dream I had like four days ago or five days ago where I was living in like a dorm room and Scotty Pippin came to the dorm

[00:49:58] room and was being really nice. You know, like he wanted to sign some things. Now, to be clear, I'm not a Scotty Pippin fan, really. That's not a post fan. And I'm like, there's no reason for Scotty Pippin to be in my dreams that I'm aware of.

[00:50:14] He was really nice. Then my dogs got out of the dorm room and I was worried that they would go like attack, you know, or bark at children. But then they turned into children. And so like, so none of that is stuff that I'm worried about or

[00:50:32] that happened to me that day. I haven't thought about Scotty Pippin in my consciousness, like since we watched the Jordan dog. Yeah. Yeah. And, and you know, obviously dogs don't change into children, although I do sometimes worry that like Charlie loves to bark at like two

[00:50:49] year olds that walk by our house. So probably that part is. I don't know. So it's like that doesn't seem like memory. That doesn't seem like memory consolidation. No, in fact, like even though you have a memory of Scotty Pippin,

[00:51:02] that wouldn't be the memory that he's consolidating because you didn't just acquire it. You weren't just having thoughts about Scotty Pippin, right? Consolidation ought to be what's going on with new information that needs to be sort of organized and stored, you know, in your long term memory.

[00:51:16] So yeah, I think that's, that seems right, that it can't, at least it can't be just for that, right? There is, if it's for anything at all, it doesn't seem like it could be just for that.

[00:51:28] There are a couple other theories and I don't know if he discussed, I don't think he discusses these in the article, but I'll put a link to another review article that he wrote called The Overfitted Brain Dreams Evolved to Assist Generalization, where he kind of goes through

[00:51:43] a theories of dreams like modern theories of dreams with a little discussion of the Freudian view. And he talks about another kind of popular view, which is that dreams are for preparing yourself for real world problems.

[00:52:00] So there's like a sort of a simulation for what you do in the real world or what you might do, which sounds like it might be kind of similar to this overfitting theory that he's proposing, but it's not as broad. So it's more constrained.

[00:52:17] It's like you're actually simulating things that you might actually do. And it wouldn't fit the bill for the overfitting hypothesis because it's crucial for the overfitting hypothesis that you have these weird category violating phantasmagoric experiences. And this would be more like just like you're going through shit that

[00:52:36] you might actually do in the real world. And so he doesn't think that that's the best theory. Oh, so I must have misinterpreted that. I thought he was sort of saying this is an example like falling or being hunted or something like that is an example of dealing

[00:52:50] with the overfitting because, number one, it's not something that you've experienced. And number two, it actually, unlike dogs turning into children, is something that you might like that might be relevant. So you would want that piece of data in the data set that would be relevant.

[00:53:08] So I think what he's saying is that while those things like while there might be actions that you would that you would really perform in like a straightforward fashion, that the cognitive role of like making your your mind more flexible is served more by the

[00:53:27] fantastic elements of the dreams than like that. So I think he has, let me see. He said you're right. Indeed, the phenomenology of dreams as sparse and who's sanitary and fabulous to make it unlikely that strategies or abilities or preparations that originate in dreams would work

[00:53:42] at all in the real world. But he's OK with the simulation part. Like I think maybe he thinks of it as a subset, like in some cases it does prepare you for real world action. Yeah, yeah.

[00:53:54] He says it might even be that our experiential state spaces are used or lose at just like muscle mass and dreams are like a frenetic gas that counteracts the monotony of the brain's experience. Like he's a really this is very well written. It's well written.

[00:54:10] I want to I meant to say that at the beginning and ask you what you thought in general of it. But I found it to be like one of the. I wasn't expecting to be glued to the to the article in the way

[00:54:20] that I was when I was reading it. Totally. Yeah, you know, there is there is a little bit of an aspect of I think real world. I don't know if you've ever had this experience, but I'll use an embarrassing life experience of mine.

[00:54:31] I remember dreaming that I kissed people like kissed girls before I ever got to kiss a girl in real life. And what I feel like it was not off. Like, I mean, I know what skin to my lips feels like.

[00:54:47] And and I think that it was like when I finally did kiss someone in whatever, you know, 2012, I it didn't feel so foreign. It didn't feel so weird. Right. So it actually can do. I agree with that. There's a lot of times I've been dreaming of things

[00:55:04] that then ended up happening. And yeah, and it's hard to know. Can you give like a briefest summary of Freud's theory of dreams, since that's not for now what we're going to talk about? Right. Right. So somebody on the Twitter thread said like, oh, we can't

[00:55:21] just discard Freud. And I was like, the point is that there's plenty about Freud that I've read and I know. So I was looking for stuff other than Freud. But Freud has dominated the, you know, like theories of dreams.

[00:55:34] And what he says basically is that dreams are a what he called a royal road to the unconscious. And he believed, as we've talked about, I think before, he had this theory that the human mind is segmented and you have the id, which is all unconscious content

[00:55:53] and stuff that's not available to your conscious mind at all, but is the source of energy, psychic energy. And the id is built on the pleasure principle. It just wants what it wants. Your ego has to filter out all that stuff and convert

[00:56:10] it through defense mechanisms in other ways to actually act in the world. The ego is driven by the reality principle, but the huge, you know, Hines-Eisberg metaphor, most of the mind he thinks is in this unconscious land. And that is just built on desire and the desire

[00:56:29] for pleasure. And so he thought that when you're dreaming, your conscious defenses like the ego defenses are not active. They're so they can't convert the content of the id into the stuff that you would think about in everyday life.

[00:56:48] And so he thought that these words like, like you got a window into your unconscious mind. And this is why many people refer to it as wishes as dream, dreams as wish fulfillment because he thought since the id is driven by desire, what you

[00:57:03] dream is somehow a representation of your desire. Now he thought it wasn't it wasn't entirely pure because you have what he called the manifest content, which is the on the face of it content of the dream like I was scotty pippin and then

[00:57:18] there were dogs and there were kids. But he thought that via interpretation, like if I talked to you and I said, well, tell me what you think about scotty pippin. And then we got to talking about like how scotty pippin is somehow related to your disdain for

[00:57:34] teams that defeated the Celtics and your relationship with your father when you would like watch Celtics games together. And then in the nineties, the bulls took over and that sucked. Then you could get to like, oh, you wanted to talk to your dad. Right.

[00:57:48] You and and so he thought that through this process of interpretation, in fact, he explicitly compared himself to the Joseph of the Bible who interpreted the dreams of his brother and the king. He compared himself to Joseph because he was also a Jew. Yeah, right.

[00:58:04] So dreams for him were wishful fulfillment. They're the it's the Royal Roads of the Unconscious in if you do the right kind of work in talking about your dreams, you can figure out what it is that your unconscious mind is desiring and that can strike me therapeutically.

[00:58:19] It can help you in a lot of ways for thought, right? Because making the unconscious conscious, he thought would make lives more happy. It would just be it would just be a better life. Right. So yeah, the view is shit on like it's

[00:58:33] shit on by most people who study dreams. But I think as as is our attitude toward Freud, you can throw out the baby with the bathwater because like the thing that I like about the Freudian view of dreams is that sometimes there is emotional

[00:58:48] content to dreams that really does say something about what's going on in my life and it's often not at all obvious to me what that is. Yeah, no, totally. Right? It's the common thing with Freud. He's getting at something true. It's just that like with the Scotty

[00:59:03] Pippin, like it's given that he's not saying that I have this unconscious desire to have Scotty Pippin be a nice guy and sign a jersey or something. Like given that he's not saying that and there's all these other connections that have to be made, it seems

[00:59:17] unfossifiable, like, you know, to say like, like how are we supposed to know that that that that the interpretation is the right one? And probably he has, I'm assuming, some sort of answer to that. But I think his answer is and it's worth just briefly mentioning.

[00:59:30] I think that the error is in thinking that there would be sort of universal symbols and like universal ways of interpreting dreams and that really what you if you have any shot at all at capturing any meaning if there is at all meaning

[00:59:44] in your dreams, it would have to be like through its idiosyncratic, right? It's what Scotty Pippin and dogs and kids mean to you. There's not, you know, you might actually believe that there were universal symbols that would work their way into everyone's dreams.

[00:59:57] But but I think Freud would be like, don't you know, he'd be like, oh, classic hero narrative. Exactly. Right. No, I guess that's right. And it's the process of interpretation that brings that out. And, you know, like it's going to be different for me than it is

[01:00:12] for you. And and it's actually think that there is something that's that's very interesting about that. It's just not in the realm of, I guess, empirical verifiability. It's in the realm of something else. But that doesn't mean that it's not actually onto something and

[01:00:29] and enriching. I actually think, you know, this is why a lot of Freudians are heavily into art interpretation too. And like hermeneutics and that whole field, like it it's it's it's relevant, right? It's through the process of interpretation that you get a lot

[01:00:44] of the value of the thing itself. And like just like just think about if what I said about Scotty Pippin and your dad, which was just off the top of my head, if that had all resonated with you and made you think about that connection,

[01:00:56] then it might serve a purpose to talk about your dreams in this way with somebody. And even, you know, even that alone, like just because you can't just because I can't verify that this is actually what Scotty Pippin meant in your dream.

[01:01:09] If it resonated with you and you had an emotional reaction to it and you talk about it, then then why would that be a bad thing to do? Right. If I told you and you were like, whoa, Pizarra was way off on that one, then maybe not.

[01:01:21] Right. But like maybe in the hands of a good therapist where you're talking and digging deep into your life, it might actually be a great way to start talking about things that are going on. Yeah. That's exactly like how Tony Soprano stopped having panic attacks. Oh, man.

[01:01:37] I want to watch that so badly. OK. So what you said just then about dreams telling you something about where you're emotionally at like something about your emotional life at that time, I think is totally right. Or it's true for me. And in fact, I ignore.

[01:01:57] I ignore a lot of my dreams because they probably have emotional content that I don't want to deal with. How like how where are you with dreams? Like how do you we have? How do you respond? I'm like, I'm what kind of dreams do you remember them really

[01:02:09] well? I'm a super vivid dreamer. I love dreams. I used to as a kid just look forward to going to sleep just so I could dream. And I remember a lot of my dreams less so if I'm if I drink, obviously, or if I take Benadryl or

[01:02:23] some sleeping medication, which actually is like a big bummer for me because I ended up forgetting my dreams more. But I often wake up with such vivid, vivid like I laugh a lot in my dreams. Like I'll wake up my partner sometimes like from laughing. And I just

[01:02:40] it's always been like a big part of my life. Like I was telling you before no one gives a shit about like the idiosyncrasies of each other's dreams. But like for me, it's a huge part of my experience in this world. Like I love them.

[01:02:53] Yeah, I'm not like I wouldn't say that that I'm there just because probably I do drink like a lot. Also take like a lot of sleeping medication sometimes. But but I you know, like I'll remember I'm also a fairly light sleeper, which is good for

[01:03:07] remembering your dreams, I think because yeah, because if you wake up doing REM, I don't know, like I used to have recurring dreams, like when I was in college and a little bit after college that were clearly just reflecting a lot of guilt that I

[01:03:21] had about the way I acted in the last year of my mom's life or the last couple years of my mom's life. And like I would have dreams that were you didn't need a Freudian psychoanalyst to say like you really you feel bad about that. And and

[01:03:37] like, you know, a lot of times if somebody has died, at least for me, the dream is about them coming back to life and you like dealing with that and like how you're responding to it. And then I remember after my dad died, my dreams about

[01:03:50] him were so much more like peaceful and friendly. And and it was just a total I think I think product of the fact that I was more at peace with the way like I interacted with him in the last few years of his life

[01:04:03] than I was with my mom. And so I was able to and also it wasn't you know, he was 91, my mom was 41. So it's like not as as terrible a thing objectively. And and like so I would have like friendly dreams, like he

[01:04:17] would be back and like we would hang out and it would be nice, you know. Right. And then I think like when I'm in a really good space emotionally and mentally, like my dreams are just fun. Like they're just yeah. And yeah, there might be

[01:04:30] like a women or there might be, you know, various things. But like and then when things are stressed and when things, you know, then I'll have those anxiety dreams. And so I think it is a pretty well correlated, I think, with where I'm at. That's interesting. Yeah.

[01:04:46] Anxiety dreams. I have like these recurring dreams that often involve my teeth falling out that are just pure anxiety dreams or you know, or like to still have standard one. Yeah, it is. And I've had it once recently because I like only once I

[01:05:00] learned that that was a thing. It's so weird. It's so weird that would that would be the thing. Or like, you know, everybody I know who's ever had to lecture has dreams like you completely forgot that you had the lecture. It's so funny.

[01:05:16] It's like, I have that so often that it's not even like I don't even get that stressed about it because like I think my brain like he says, like my brain is just used to it now. Right. I figured out in the dream,

[01:05:28] you know, like I don't even get that anxious about it. You know, there is one part that I about dreams that I want to talk about that I think is consistent with this overfitting hypothesis, at least so. So like hear me out and tell me

[01:05:41] if you think that I'm right. So lucid dreams there was some recent articles on lucid dreams that were kind of interesting to about communicating with lucid dreamers. But I remember when I was in high school, I read or early college, late high school or the college,

[01:05:57] I read a book on lucid dreaming and it had happened to me before. Usually like if I notice that I'm doing something impossible, like I'll become aware of the dream. But in reading this book, I became much more likely to lucid dream. Like while I was

[01:06:12] reading and think about it, I would I would have lots of lucid dreams. And once I would notice that I'm in the dream, sometimes it was so clear to me that I was in a dream that I could say like my name is David

[01:06:23] Bizarro. I'm in bed in whatever riverside like I, you know, that degree of lucidity would happen. And then I would just try to fuck around in my dreams. I would be like, let me see if I can fly. Let me see if I can have sex with somebody.

[01:06:35] Let me see. And in my life, I've had like some amazing lucid dreams. One time I remember I had a night full of lucid dreams where I was I was like doing experiments in my dreams. I was looking at details like I remember walking down a shop and

[01:06:48] looking at someone selling watches and I was looking to see the details of the watch and I was thinking, holy shit, my brain is is like creating this like it's amazing. But I'm a genius. Yeah, I'm a genius. Mom was right. And what I what I

[01:07:02] remember during the time that I was lucid dreaming a lot was that I became fatigued with it. Like it didn't seem to be doing whatever dreams are supposed to be doing. And as I was thinking about it in the context of this article, I was thinking what I'm

[01:07:19] doing in the lucid dreams is thwarting like the loose connections and the weird fantastic elements and imposing my conscious mind on my environment. I was trying to control it and create order and that seemed to have had some effect on like even how

[01:07:38] restful I felt like it felt like I hadn't really rested well if I had lucid dreamed a lot and maybe as you were taking too much control. Yeah, maybe I was defeating this this purpose of dreams which is to just let it go, let it loose.

[01:07:54] Yeah, I was turning my dreams into like shitty Netflix dramas. Right. That's interesting. And then you weren't as rested as a result of that. So there's a thing in meditation where you're really not supposed to interfere with like whatever the is going on the sensations in your body,

[01:08:16] you're not supposed to try to resist it or try to control it or trying to wish it wasn't there or and and like the goal is to just have it happen to you. And when you can do that and obviously you can be more or

[01:08:30] less successful on a degree, it is a more relaxing much more relaxing activity. So it would make sense. You know, similar kind of thing is your if you're not if you're just letting your body do its thing and the environment do its thing, then that's like

[01:08:46] a very restful state to be in. But if if you're trying to take charge, then then then you're interfering with that. So that fits with whatever you know like the meditation totally. That's a that's a connection I hadn't thought of it totally is right. That's exactly it's resisting.

[01:09:04] Yeah, like and and resisting his work and it's trying to impose all of your experience and and desire on to what what's going on. And you need to let go. I mean, I have experienced in the little meditation I've done I've experienced how difficult that is.

[01:09:18] Like yeah, you're just working against it. You're just so used to working against you want to control the content. But then sometimes you do get into a state where you're just like for whatever reason. I think you also get into the state like right before you're falling asleep

[01:09:32] where you're just letting it all happen. And it's like that's such a beautiful feeling and especially like like a relaxing energizing kind of feeling. I will say like lucid dreaming is funny because I've had a lot of dreams where I was like I'm dreaming

[01:09:48] right, you know, and that's but then I've had a couple and this was only after I started reading about lucid dreaming. So I think it is. Let's like you say like, you know, you have to become familiar with it. We'll make it more possible.

[01:10:00] But I remember like the one or two times that I've had one where I can like be in the driver's seat a little bit, I remember thinking it was pretty fun. Like you could fry like I could fly like I'm like, OK, I can fly. All right.

[01:10:13] And and the best thing is like I can just go wherever I want. Yeah. Go this way. And I'm going that way. I'm like it was it was great. Like I just but I, you know, it's only happened to me a handful of times and

[01:10:26] I always enjoy it. It is. It is fun. It's amazing. It's like it's like VR, but your brain is creating it all. Right. And you're just and you kind of know that this is happening and it's better take advantage of it. You know, I remember telling

[01:10:38] I remember in one of my dreams being in a classroom and telling everybody that it sucks for them is that they're all just products of my dream right now. Right. All right. Let's show we. Yeah. Let's talk like should we dive into the whole?

[01:10:53] I mean the the main thesis of this is that this is says something about art. And I found myself as I was reading it being like, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then later on I was like, well, does it really follow? Like, does anything that what he's

[01:11:06] saying like is the defense of the hoity toy do you follow from from the neuroscience? So he says like he has a section outsourcing dreams and like, you know, like dreams can only do so much. So we've turned to art to like our brain also craves art

[01:11:21] because that's another way to like stop overfitting. Yeah. He says somewhere, you know, an interesting thought experiment like why do we care so much about fiction? You know, we could be creatures who only concern themselves with with things that were true and we could you can imagine

[01:11:36] a world of creatures where if you said like, you know, there once was a guy who lived a long time ago in a galaxy far far away, they'd be like, what the fuck are you talking about? Just get back to like whatever talking about what's here.

[01:11:48] But we're not. We love we love this shit. Right. And I think that alone is something is super interesting like and the explanation. We crave it and and then his point is now the world is offering like a lot of it that it's never experienced.

[01:12:05] It used to be you had to like sit around the fire and listen to some guy like, you know, telling a story or something like that. And that happened like once a day at best. But now it's like at any point you care. And so that's where it

[01:12:19] leads to this question of well, then how do we decide what's what's good and what's bad? What's good, what's fast food and what's healthy? So but just about this idea that they're proxy dreams or like another way for us to dream. I wonder how this fits with the

[01:12:38] phantasmagorical element of dreams because a lot of the art now it's true that a lot of the art that has lasted or that we consider cannon has a slightly phantasmagorical element to it. You know, Shakespeare has a lot of that Homer has a lot of that.

[01:12:56] The Greek tragedies have a lot of that. And I think in eastern traditions they have a ton of that like they're very dreamlike. But you know, it seems like people are hungry for friends and the office and stuff that really isn't, you know, lynch in obvious ways.

[01:13:16] Right. So why how like why is that the one that we find so delicious that we're so, you know, like McDonald's French fries like the that's that's what I didn't fully get from this. Yeah, you know, it's it rests on like I think this assumption

[01:13:36] that that we can be tricked into thinking that something like Friends in the Office is providing us because it matches some features of fiction, which is yeah, I am not Michael Scott. I do not have a job in that office. And so and that is what

[01:13:52] we end up responding to and liking. That's, you know, the what he calls super stimuli and that that those things are like that dung beetle that just fucks bottle caps all day because the bottle caps look like a mate that that at least with bad art

[01:14:12] like where our brains aren't sophisticated enough to be able to say no, this is what would be the best for your mind to like read things that are kind of like real life, but but just different enough that you can both follow the story

[01:14:26] and have like your mind expanded. So but I mean, I guess like it seems like we could have gravitated towards more dream like trashy fiction, you know, like then we have we seem that the stuff that seems like it's the stuff that he wants

[01:14:45] to separate from art, the stuff that's entertainment is I guess I mean, I guess Marvel has, you know, they there's plenty of phantasmagorical elements to that. But there's a lot that's just you know, Bob's burgers or something is great, right? You know, but it's like it's pretty ordinary.

[01:15:05] It's not dreamlike. Right. So I, you know, it's an interesting it's an interesting switch from dreams to fiction because I don't think that he thinks that they have to be dreamlike in necessarily in right, like I think he even wants it to be that like, well, when we

[01:15:24] create these narratives, we're going to like be imposing order. We we just are to to degrees, we are going to include more of the like experiences that you've never had kind of art or less of that. And in that in that sense, like, you know, this

[01:15:49] this all will turn on what what you think is a good good way of fulfilling this function, because in some sense, like Marvel's complete phantasmagorical universe of like heroes and villains and intergalactic shit and superpower. And all this young and like yeah, up the ass like this.

[01:16:07] Yeah, that might actually be doing it serving that role and more like, you know, reading, you know, whatever, like Anna Karen and I is not. You know, and maybe it turns like if the neuroscience is supposed to guide us, maybe we should watch

[01:16:21] more crazy Tom and Jerry cartoons and read less of, you know, like Tolstoy. Well, so I think there is an answer to that question and it's actually one that I think involves interpretation, which we talked earlier about in reference to to Freud and and the value of dreams

[01:16:43] from his perspective. But before we get there, there is this other piece of this argument that I don't think we've mentioned, which is the and it's actually a little confusing. But the idea is that art as well as dreams, but especially art, this is what he

[01:17:02] he says it's in reference to is a way of kind of reinforcing our illusion of the self. So he says like he quotes Shakespeare, all the world's a stage and all the men and women are merely players. They have exits and entrances

[01:17:19] and one man in his time plays many parts. And he says these different parts must act coherently together. The temporal slices of a person's life must be coordinated as if each slice were a different individual because from the perspective of physics, they are to organize the

[01:17:34] temporarily disparate versions of us. We use a myth called the self. It creates a natural agreement among the different versions of us enabling contiguous behavior and solving coordination problems. You are a protagonist in a story told by a spatio-temporally disparate set of individuals. And what artificial

[01:17:56] fictions do, he says, it helps us coordinate the fragments of ourselves that have been scattered across time. It exercises the experiential space. And so what do you think of this? This is another kind of aspect dimension of this argument is that it's helping us have

[01:18:19] a more unified sense of self, these fictions. I mean, I really, as with this whole article, I really like these arguments. Like these are really, I think, interesting creative arguments. I don't know. Like that's it. It seems as if a lot of the work our minds do

[01:18:39] is to organize this continuous sense of self from essentially a set of disparate experiences. I don't know, though, that fiction is what's doing that or storytelling is what's doing that. And it's not the other way around is that our brains are so good at constructing a narrative about

[01:18:53] our existence that it then becomes good at creating narratives about other people's existence. You know, it's hard for me to be able to distinguish direction Yeah, of the causation. But I mean, I guess, right, the idea is, you know, if you think of a novel like

[01:19:08] Say in a Crone and Oh, which you just referred to and and you read about her and her journey throughout the text as well as these other characters, like that is a unified person and that helps us sort of consolidate our own selves. It is it's it's provocative.

[01:19:26] It's interesting. It's definitely picking up on something interesting. It's hard to know how plausible it is. I mean, on the one hand, storytelling has been with us, it seems like since the beginning. Like you don't have a real sense of any human civilization that didn't have stories.

[01:19:43] But on the other hand, we don't know exactly why. Yeah, we don't know. And I don't mind that, you know, I haven't read from a scientist in a long and a while. I haven't read such big thinking. Like, I don't know how to describe it.

[01:19:56] Like this is it's pretty bold. And it's not bold. It's not bold in a sloppy way. You know, like you can there are people who, you know, who love telling these nifty stories about how the mind works. But like this is this is creative

[01:20:09] and this is building on, I think his understanding of science. The ambition is refreshing and then like pull it off because most people would never like try to come up with a theory of dreams, a theory of the self and a theory of the role of fiction

[01:20:27] and then also all leading to a, you know, defending a distinction between art and art. Like that's that's a lot. Right. Like and it's not done in a grandiose way at all. It's not done. It's just exactly. Exactly. Let me read a little bit about the distinctions

[01:20:45] that he's trying to make between art and entertainment because I don't I feel like we've said it, but not done a good job of describing what he thinks the distinction is. So he says entertainment is lamarckian in its representation of the world that produces copies of copies

[01:21:01] until the image blurs. The artificial dreams we crave to prevent overfitting become themselves overfitted, self similar to stereotyped and wooden to accomplish their purpose. Schloch while unable to fulfill their function just like the empty calories of candy, they still satisfy the underlying drive on the opposite

[01:21:19] end of the spectrum. The works that we consider artful if successful contain a shocking realness, they return to the well of the world. Perhaps this is why in a recent interview in the New Yorker, Nasgar declared the duty of literature is to fight fiction. Artful narratives almost always

[01:21:34] have both a freshness and innate ambiguity. They represent while at the same time avoid overfitting via stereotype, a nudge in one direction and they can veer to catch another, a nudge in another and they become experimental and unduly alienating, which is like describes a lot of

[01:21:51] art. Inland Empire. Exactly. I was going to say Lynch at his worst. That's I love inland empire. And that's bad for me. They exist in an uncanny valley of familiarity. The world of art is like a dream that some higher being more aesthetically sensitive, more

[01:22:08] empathetic, more intelligent is having. And by extension we are having existing at such points of criticality it is these kinds of artificial dreams that are the most advanced, efficient and rewarding. So this is actually I think although he doesn't make it explicit one kind of

[01:22:22] promising way of making this distinction that he wants to make because you know he says on the one hand that these things become just so stereotype that they're just doing the same overfitting job as our ordinary lives. And then art has like a shocking

[01:22:39] realness. It's like well what is it that gives it the shocking realness or what is it and what does that even mean? Shocking realness since like we're trying to not mirror or reflect the everyday life. But I think it's when he talks about the innate ambiguity and

[01:22:55] that side of it that while still having like really important patterns here's where I would what I would just add to the argument not disagreeing with anything but what I would add to it is the importance of interpretation and like what good art does and maybe this

[01:23:09] is why Marvel fantasmagoric as it is it maybe doesn't have this element to the extent that like other art might which is this innate ambiguity about how to interpret the the work and that a lot of the richness of great art is in trying isn't just discussing.

[01:23:31] You know like this is the kind of art that we've discussed on this podcast all the time. Borges Kafka it's it's and a lot of the movies that we've talked about the best conversations are one where we're trying to like actively work out how you know what

[01:23:47] this meet what what's the meaning of it is and why you know and why it's causing us to have the emotional reactions that we're having and there's something about that that's healthy you know like that's good food that's not fast food that's not just watching

[01:24:02] Lawn Order or whatever where you've just given like all the beats that you want that you kind of crave so that you can turn your brain off it's like turning our brain on and like that seems to me like a solid basis for some sort of

[01:24:17] distinction between art and and and you know entertain entertainment that is entertaining but not art. I like that a lot like I love the way you said that because it is a both captures like like you said why we gain satisfaction from discussing the things that we do.

[01:24:37] I mean on the one hand we could just say well it's because there's not that much to say about some art that's straightforward you know there's we can fill an hour talking about a paragraph in Borges and we can't do that with a comic book

[01:24:49] or at least with a Marvel comic book. But it's true that like that feeling of satisfaction the feeling of having worked out your brain is really different and as much as I love comic books like comic book movies you have guys being like I'm evil you know

[01:25:06] and that guy's saying I'm good I'm going to destroy you know I'm going to destroy you. And like this is by far not what comic books are today but it is what a lot of like the lowest common denominator entertainment really really ends up being

[01:25:17] and I think it is feeding ourselves with stuff that is so easy to interpret a face value is much like the lucid dreams that I have which is just like I'm keeping shit really predictable. I'm working hard to keep it really predictable and then it ends up actually

[01:25:34] fatiguing me. And I think this is what he's trying to say is like you think that by watching Law and Order and Friends and Marvel movies that you're scratching that itch for for something but you haven't really. I mean I think like sometimes with something like

[01:25:50] Law and Order which I don't know if it still resonates with certain listeners but that is a role for some things is but I about OK I see what you're saying. It's not that you think it you think it's relaxing you but it's actually not because

[01:26:05] you're not getting that kind of stimulation that you need for. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe relaxing isn't the right word but like the work that that it's supposed to be doing or at least that our brains are craving is getting it's like it's getting a bit fooled. And you know

[01:26:20] I love putting stuff on that I can ignore. Like you know I often like if I'm cooking or even if I'm just like actually working I'll have something on the background that I can ignore and and that's you know it's relaxing in some way. It's just familiar.

[01:26:37] It's very familiar. I don't I don't need to pay attention. I kind of know what's going to happen in every episode of Law and Order. You know save spare the detail like except for the details. But soothing. Yeah. Right. There's something soothing about the familiar but

[01:26:51] it at least whatever the word is for what art is supposed to do here in this definition of art maybe that really is the case that it's not you know and it's it's not so surprising then that the kind of fiction that is consumed by younger minds tends

[01:27:09] to be the easy stuff and the stuff that you know that you like later on in life tends to be or toward the more complex I think. Yeah I think it depends. I mean sometimes kids are into pretty wacky shit. You know like that.

[01:27:21] It's it's they're not necessarily doing like hermeneutical analysis of it but they are kind of praising it. Yeah. So I don't know about the the younger stuff because I do think we're pretty hungry for. Well maybe what's going on is that since they haven't had as

[01:27:38] much experience that that something can actually like Superman you know Super Friends cartoons did fulfill that role for my younger mind. Right. Like it was like in a scaffolding kind of way it was just out of just out of reach from my experience

[01:27:51] in a way that it just isn't now. But as the tropes and the cliches become solidified and you know like it's no longer right. Right. The first time you learn about the first time you hear a trope it's not a trope right. Right. Exactly. Yeah. Of course.

[01:28:05] And so that's why like it has its place for younger minds and maybe older minds are using it for our going to it for this other thing like maybe also distracting you from your own thoughts and your own problems and which is definitely a thing

[01:28:21] we turn to like to try to do. And that's harder and harder to like find space to not do that because it is such a craving. You know we were going to talk about this article or blog post about like mind wandering and how we don't do that.

[01:28:36] Like yeah. That's such a fraction of the time that we used to. It's a little bit of a different. But it's related point that that author was making which is it's really valuable to allow our brain to have some free reign and not just have it focused on

[01:28:53] something all the time. But but it's often uncomfortable. And so we have to like live with that discomfort. And so if you make an effort to you know go on a walk without listening to any you know feels weird. It feels weird. But like it's often rewarding

[01:29:10] and it's often when like good ideas happen and it's often when like I'm sorry you know but it's like reading art rather than reading like a fun mystery. It's something that you have to kind of force yourself to do and it's and the rewards come

[01:29:27] like when you're doing it. But the hard part is just getting yourself to actually do it. And I think it's the same kind of thing that our brain our brain needs that. But it's not but it's easier to not have it. And I guess it's actually

[01:29:39] exactly what we need and would end up being more restful. Yeah. If we did it. Which I think is also true of those things. Yeah. Now I will say like one if this is going to be taken as an argument for as he says

[01:29:55] that you know the necessity of an aesthetic an aesthetic spectrum and the distinction between good art and entertainment. What I do worry about is that the way in which we often decide what is good art has nothing to do with this. So there is like a

[01:30:13] sociological aspect to people defining what's good. And you know to go back to comic books right now like there are graphic novels that challenge me in ways that no other media has. But but you know the the literati might look down upon that because it has

[01:30:30] drawings and it's you know related to the history. I feel like graphic novels are accepted as art now. Maybe I like to keep believing though that I'm just a rogue in this. I've discovered them. To the barricades. As and as we like we probably have talked about at

[01:30:46] some point you know there is a lot of art that's just that's said to be great because somebody important said it was great and it's actually probably not. Right. I almost think that and I don't know if he's saying this but I would argue this pretentious fuck

[01:31:05] that I am. It's not as important to decide what art and and what isn't art like that's not as important as just having a line there in the first place where you're actually thinking about that. Right. And so like you like if some people don't want

[01:31:23] to put graphic novels on that list and you do that's fine as long as you both maintain that there is a distinction and are trying to sort of work out what that distinction is and why graphic novels either are or aren't on that one side or the other.

[01:31:40] You know because like I there's plenty of things that I thought weren't art. And then now I just because I didn't understand and now I do and I think that's that they are. So that's fine. That's natural. What's what would be bad is

[01:31:54] if you know and I don't even have I don't have any like sympathy for this view is just to say that it's all the same or that like there's no distinction. And I think you know you could read this article is just saying maintain the distinction.

[01:32:07] We don't all have to agree on on what the distinction is or where the line is and what belongs on one side or the other. Yeah, I really like that. It reminds me of Roger Ebert whom I loved as just a critic as a writer got in

[01:32:23] this argument with with a whole generation of people when he said that video games are not art and a lot of people were like have you like have you played some of these video games like these modern ones like that have these amazing like both stories

[01:32:39] and visual like the you know world shapes. And he I think came around to at least understanding why people do consider it art and appreciating some of the the complexity of that art. And I don't know if he was ever convinced that he that

[01:32:56] it was something that he ought to consume. But but that's a case where that conversation was had and and I think that that you're right that that's that's important and good and it can avoid some of the elitism if you mount a good argument and

[01:33:10] tell me why you know Warner Brothers cartoons from the 50s or 40s are great pieces of art. And I am too. All right man too is a great piece of art or the room. Then we can listen and you can tell me why and maybe

[01:33:27] I'll be convinced and maybe not. But right. But at least we're thinking about what makes for good art. Right. And we're not just saying it's all just you know fully in the eye of the beholder and there's no point in trying to even get to this. Right.

[01:33:41] I think my favorite part of his analysis is as this this idea that artful narratives have both a freshness and an eight ambiguity and they represent without overfitting via stereotype. And then when he says and you quoted this that the nudge in one direction

[01:34:03] can veer to catch a nudge in another is you know like I don't know some dissonant music that doesn't mean anything to me. Although I think it probably does to some people. But again it doesn't matter like that's going to depend on the person.

[01:34:16] But like this uncanny valley of familiarity thing is pretty interesting and seems right to me that that there is this sort of space where art thrives which is you know it's not obvious what's going on or how to interpret it or what the meaning is or

[01:34:34] where you should be on it. But it's also not just random. Right. You haven't just lost it. Right. And I was thinking about this in terms of like music appreciation. And I remember like a while ago thinking that it was always interesting to me

[01:34:50] that the music that I enjoyed the first time I heard it never really ended up being the music that I loved. Like there is something about like pop music that is really great when you hear you're like oh that's really clever tune or whatever. And then like the

[01:35:03] the more complex kind of uncomfortable music that you might not really like the first time you listen to it or that is kind of jarring or uncomfortable. That's the stuff that rewards repeated listening and that you want to talk about and that you want to think

[01:35:17] about and that ends up being you know like the kind of music that I like and I can see that that kind of discomfort that hasn't lost to you. Right. There's cacophonous music that like people might put out there is like great art

[01:35:30] but it's not I'm not there I'm not there yet. Right. Yeah. It needs to be just uncomfortable enough for me with a fat dose of familiarity. Yeah. No totally. And I think like when it hits you it can be unexpected. You know I'm doing this

[01:35:44] philosophy of film class and I was surprised that some people thought like Fight Club was like really like out there and disturbing and like well I love Fight Club like I don't think of it as something that like like it almost seems kind of fun and energetic

[01:36:03] but I think whoever was saying that is someone maybe doesn't have that kind of experience with this kind of movie that I do and did the first time I saw Fight Club but then like we all saw Persona the Ingmar Bergman film

[01:36:18] which we could do an episode on by the way which is just like it's just so hard to wrap your mind around what's going on and how to interpret it and at least for me that was in that perfect sweet spot right now.

[01:36:30] I hope it was for my students and not in the into the too experimental and like cacophonous and but like because I don't you know but you know like that's obviously going to depend on the person like it's expanding you like it's expanding you

[01:36:46] you are you have a set of experiences. Right. And I like that I like this way of thinking about it because it is neither there are objectively good things. It's not nobody's like like I believe that some people might not like the music I like at the films

[01:37:00] you like and but yet it's not just completely subjective. Like there is something there is something and that something does also depend on the context and the context includes the person's experiences and their expertise in a domain like right and their familiarity with the genre.

[01:37:19] Right. You can't just jump into Ingmar Bergman. You just don't go be the first movie that you see. I like and you know like yeah often great art also takes advantage of your familiarity with the medium or whatever it is in the form of it and subverts

[01:37:39] it. But if you don't have the familiarity with the form and the expectations absolutely not going to do it. I'm going to for like the nth time bring up J Dilla's Donuts album the instrumental hip hop album that he did right before he died which on

[01:37:55] the face of it uses a ton of tropes uses samples that have been used hundreds of times in a way that you're like wait I thought he was like super underground and shit like why is he using stuff that but he ends up using

[01:38:10] those in such an all the way that it's almost just him flexing like I could do this with this thing that you know but he's bringing you in with the thing that you know and then he's showing you what he can do with it.

[01:38:19] And that's the best kind of like place to sit and you can't start I can't start somebody on that album. I like I don't want that to be how they was. I want them to know these other things first and that ends up sounding pretentious when you're like

[01:38:34] hipster you're like oh you got to listen to this and this and this but the charitable way of understanding that is like look there is a context that I believe me you will appreciate this Lynch movie if you take the time to like spend

[01:38:48] some time with some other of his work or some other films. Yeah. Or like you were talking about with the shining right like Kubrick knows that you have certain expectations for a horror movie and certain like things that you expect to find and he's going to give

[01:39:00] you some of them. He's going to give you maybe overly kind of but he's also going to subvert a lot of them too. And that's just that's the landscape that he's working with is assuming that his audience has a kind of familiarity with the genre

[01:39:14] that he's working within. Right. That's why I think some cases of bad art are when somebody mistakes the subverting part and the like cacophonous part for like the important thing. And so they put out something that is actually just confusing. Like it's not actually doing

[01:39:30] the work they think it's doing but it has the surface structure of being like experimental and challenging. But there's no there there. Like it's it's just the opposite of like friends and and you know this is what I think Lynch is really we should we should wrap up

[01:39:45] but this is what I think Lynch is so good at. You know there's so many other surrealist filmmakers who don't have anywhere near the success of as Lynch does. And I think the thing that Lynch figured out was if you have a core mystery

[01:39:58] at the center of your movie then you can do all this other more surreal abstract stuff that makes the audience work because they're just you've got them with with the mystery. And yeah. Who killed Laura Palmer is not what that show is about. Right. Right.

[01:40:17] I mean you know or like you know fire walk with me it kind of is but but it's not about the mystery of it but the mystery is the thing that draws you in. Yeah. All right. We should wrap up this nice discussion. I think Eric. Well

[01:40:34] I hope he doesn't mind that a Jew talked about his his essay. And yeah. And there you go. Neuroscientists we took a neuroscientist seriously. And if this is what neuroscientists are doing like writing these kinds of articles then oh my god like it is

[01:40:52] a real like I urge our academic friends and also non academics like like look at this like the ambition that you pointed out and then but without the I don't know preciousness of yeah some people who try to come up with grander theories of of

[01:41:10] human human life or whatever the human situation. That's like a really good thing like I and we should too. Yes. Well we do it every every two weeks. All right. Join us next time on Very Bad.