WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:02.200 I want you to picture two very different worlds 00:00:02.200 --> 00:00:04.960 for a second. First, I want you to transport 00:00:04.960 --> 00:00:08.359 yourself back to Brussels. The year is 1908. 00:00:09.580 --> 00:00:11.619 Close your eyes and really picture it. You know, 00:00:11.640 --> 00:00:14.400 it's the world of gas lamps casting these flickering 00:00:14.400 --> 00:00:17.019 shadows on cobblestone streets. Right. Horse 00:00:17.019 --> 00:00:20.079 -drawn carriage. Exactly. It's the era of emperors 00:00:20.079 --> 00:00:22.899 still sitting on thrones in Europe, of a world 00:00:22.899 --> 00:00:25.879 that feels, at least to us, completely sepia 00:00:25.879 --> 00:00:28.500 -toned. It is a different epoch entirely. It's 00:00:28.500 --> 00:00:31.160 a world before the world wars, before the atom 00:00:31.160 --> 00:00:34.280 bomb, before penicillin even. A completely different 00:00:34.280 --> 00:00:36.960 mental landscape. Right. Now snap your fingers 00:00:36.960 --> 00:00:39.969 and cut to the year 2009. A whole century later. 00:00:40.109 --> 00:00:42.310 A whole century. We have the iPhone in our pockets. 00:00:42.390 --> 00:00:44.130 We have the Internet connecting every corner 00:00:44.130 --> 00:00:45.990 of the globe. We've mapped the human genome. 00:00:46.030 --> 00:00:48.750 We are living in a hyper -accelerated, digital, 00:00:48.890 --> 00:00:51.609 globalized future. And the gap between those 00:00:51.609 --> 00:00:55.570 two dates, 1908 to 2009, is the lifespan of exactly 00:00:55.570 --> 00:00:59.270 one man, Claude Levi Strauss. And that is a 100 00:00:59.270 --> 00:01:02.229 -year span. It just blows my mind. Precisely. 00:01:02.490 --> 00:01:05.790 He lived from the era of the carriage well into 00:01:05.790 --> 00:01:08.420 the age of the algorithm. He witnessed the entire 00:01:08.420 --> 00:01:11.359 trajectory in the 20th century, all of its horrors 00:01:11.359 --> 00:01:13.280 and all of its marvels. And here's the thing 00:01:13.280 --> 00:01:15.799 that really gets me. And this is, I think, the 00:01:15.799 --> 00:01:18.079 core of why we are doing this deep dive today. 00:01:18.579 --> 00:01:21.120 This man lived through the most radical technological 00:01:21.120 --> 00:01:24.540 and social changes in human history. But he spent 00:01:24.540 --> 00:01:27.780 that entire century arguing that human beings, 00:01:27.959 --> 00:01:30.079 well, that we haven't actually changed at all. 00:01:30.159 --> 00:01:32.439 It's a deeply disorienting thought, isn't it? 00:01:32.599 --> 00:01:34.519 But that's the provocation we're dealing with. 00:01:34.939 --> 00:01:37.640 Levi Strauss argued that if you strip away the 00:01:37.640 --> 00:01:39.540 iPhones and the carriages and you look at the 00:01:39.540 --> 00:01:42.180 raw operating system of the human mind. The software. 00:01:42.359 --> 00:01:44.900 The software, exactly. He's saying that a Wall 00:01:44.900 --> 00:01:47.099 Street banker creates meaning in the exact same 00:01:47.099 --> 00:01:49.319 way as a hunter -gatherer in the Amazon rainforest. 00:01:49.780 --> 00:01:53.400 So the hardware changes, the tools, the environment, 00:01:53.599 --> 00:01:56.700 but the code is the same. Exactly. He argued 00:01:56.700 --> 00:01:59.319 that the so -called savage mind and the civilized 00:01:59.319 --> 00:02:02.939 mind are structurally identical. He believed 00:02:02.939 --> 00:02:05.049 that there's a hidden grammar. a subconscious 00:02:05.049 --> 00:02:08.030 structural logic that dictates everything we 00:02:08.030 --> 00:02:11.289 do. Everything. From who we are allowed to marry, 00:02:11.430 --> 00:02:13.889 to the myths we tell our children, to what we 00:02:13.889 --> 00:02:16.009 eat for dinner. He believed these aren't just 00:02:16.009 --> 00:02:18.849 random cultural quirks or personal choices. They 00:02:18.849 --> 00:02:21.590 are governed by rules, just like grammar governs 00:02:21.590 --> 00:02:24.400 how you form a sentence. See, that is the hook 00:02:24.400 --> 00:02:26.699 for me. But it's also the scary part. The idea 00:02:26.699 --> 00:02:28.840 that we are following rules we don't even know 00:02:28.840 --> 00:02:31.360 exist. We think we're these free agents, you 00:02:31.360 --> 00:02:33.860 know, making choices. But Levi Strauss is saying, 00:02:33.939 --> 00:02:35.759 no, you're just speaking a language you didn't 00:02:35.759 --> 00:02:37.939 write. That is the essence of structuralism. 00:02:38.560 --> 00:02:41.280 And today. We're going to unpack exactly what 00:02:41.280 --> 00:02:44.840 that means. It's a huge, intimidating word, but 00:02:44.840 --> 00:02:47.919 the core idea is actually quite elegant. And 00:02:47.919 --> 00:02:49.620 we aren't just skimming the surface. We have 00:02:49.620 --> 00:02:52.099 a massive stack of sources today. We are diving 00:02:52.099 --> 00:02:54.680 into his biography, which honestly reads like 00:02:54.680 --> 00:02:56.680 an adventure novel. There's an escape from the 00:02:56.680 --> 00:03:00.159 Nazis, an FBI investigation, Amazonian expeditions. 00:03:00.199 --> 00:03:02.400 And we're tackling his major works, like the 00:03:02.400 --> 00:03:05.039 beautiful and melancholic Trista's Tropic, the 00:03:05.039 --> 00:03:07.560 bombshell that was The Savage Mind, and, of course, 00:03:07.580 --> 00:03:12.770 his four -volume magazine. And, crucially, we're 00:03:12.770 --> 00:03:15.210 not shying away from the controversy. Because 00:03:15.210 --> 00:03:17.810 for all his fame, for all the accolades of being 00:03:17.810 --> 00:03:20.590 the father of modern anthropology, he had some 00:03:20.590 --> 00:03:23.169 fierce critics who thought his theories were 00:03:23.169 --> 00:03:26.129 just a little too neat. A little too perfect, 00:03:26.270 --> 00:03:29.409 yes. They accused him of ignoring the messiness 00:03:29.409 --> 00:03:32.610 of real life to build these beautiful crystalline 00:03:32.610 --> 00:03:34.629 structures. So, are you ready to figure out if 00:03:34.629 --> 00:03:36.490 we're actually just puppets of a hidden grammar? 00:03:36.729 --> 00:03:38.780 I'm ready to connect the dots. Let's do it. All 00:03:38.780 --> 00:03:40.520 right. Let's jump into section one, the making 00:03:40.520 --> 00:03:44.080 of a reluctant explorer. Because for a guy who 00:03:44.080 --> 00:03:46.360 became the world's most famous anthropologist, 00:03:46.400 --> 00:03:48.259 the guy who put the Amazon on the intellectual 00:03:48.259 --> 00:03:52.199 map, his start was, well, it was completely unexpected. 00:03:52.219 --> 00:03:54.479 It was certainly unconventional. As we said, 00:03:54.560 --> 00:03:57.039 he was born in Brussels in 1908. His parents 00:03:57.039 --> 00:03:59.259 were French Jewish, though the household was 00:03:59.259 --> 00:04:02.159 artistic and secular. His father was a portrait 00:04:02.159 --> 00:04:04.419 painter. OK. But the detail that always stands 00:04:04.419 --> 00:04:06.509 out to me. the one that seems to set the stage 00:04:06.509 --> 00:04:09.189 for his entire way of thinking, comes from his 00:04:09.189 --> 00:04:11.409 childhood during World War I. This is when he 00:04:11.409 --> 00:04:13.490 goes to live with his grandfather, right? Yes. 00:04:14.069 --> 00:04:16.730 He's sent to live with his grandfather, who happened 00:04:16.730 --> 00:04:19.870 to be the rabbi of Versailles. The rabbi of Versailles. 00:04:19.949 --> 00:04:21.850 I mean, that sounds like a significant title. 00:04:21.949 --> 00:04:25.430 That's not a small -town rabbi. It was. But the 00:04:25.430 --> 00:04:28.209 way Levi Strauss describes the house itself is 00:04:28.209 --> 00:04:31.470 so telling. He lived there from age 6 to 10. 00:04:32.279 --> 00:04:34.339 and the house was physically attached to the 00:04:34.339 --> 00:04:36.500 synagogue. Right. But to get from the living 00:04:36.500 --> 00:04:38.399 quarters to the synagogue, you had to walk through 00:04:38.399 --> 00:04:42.180 this long, cold, dark inner passage. I remember 00:04:42.180 --> 00:04:43.939 reading this description in the notes. He called 00:04:43.939 --> 00:04:47.120 it an impassable frontier, which is, you know, 00:04:47.139 --> 00:04:49.319 a bit dramatic for a hallway. It is dramatic, 00:04:49.480 --> 00:04:50.959 but think about it from a six -year -old's perspective. 00:04:51.550 --> 00:04:54.089 On one side, you have the house. It's warm. It's 00:04:54.089 --> 00:04:56.569 familiar, domestic, profane. On the other side, 00:04:56.629 --> 00:04:58.790 you have the synagogue. It's sacred, mysterious, 00:04:59.149 --> 00:05:01.689 full of strange rituals and sounds. And connecting 00:05:01.689 --> 00:05:05.029 them is this cold, terrifying void. Exactly. 00:05:05.189 --> 00:05:07.550 He described venturing into that passage with 00:05:07.550 --> 00:05:09.870 a feeling of genuine anguish. It was a place 00:05:09.870 --> 00:05:12.610 of transition between two opposite worlds. It's 00:05:12.610 --> 00:05:14.449 almost like he was living in a binary opposition 00:05:14.449 --> 00:05:17.860 before he even knew what that term meant. the 00:05:17.860 --> 00:05:21.560 sacred and the profane, separated by a cold hallway. 00:05:21.879 --> 00:05:24.420 That's a brilliant observation. He was living 00:05:24.420 --> 00:05:26.899 the theory before he wrote it. The structure 00:05:26.899 --> 00:05:29.639 was imprinted on him. And despite this intense 00:05:29.639 --> 00:05:32.519 religious proximity, or maybe because of the 00:05:32.519 --> 00:05:35.360 terror of that hallway, he became a staunch atheist 00:05:35.360 --> 00:05:38.459 as an adult. He rejected the content of the religion 00:05:38.459 --> 00:05:40.600 entirely. Though, and here's where it gets really 00:05:40.600 --> 00:05:43.279 interesting, he never quite shook that prophet 00:05:43.279 --> 00:05:46.360 vibe, did he? He later wrote about the role of 00:05:46.360 --> 00:05:49.259 the thinker as being a prophet and martyr. He 00:05:49.259 --> 00:05:51.399 kept the structure of the religion. He loved 00:05:51.399 --> 00:05:54.060 the idea of a lone figure interpreting the hidden 00:05:54.060 --> 00:05:56.480 laws of the universe for everyone else. He just 00:05:56.480 --> 00:05:59.500 replaced the content god with science and structure. 00:05:59.660 --> 00:06:01.860 That's a very structuralist thing to do, actually. 00:06:01.860 --> 00:06:03.740 You keep the frame, you just change the picture. 00:06:03.899 --> 00:06:06.399 So he's smart, clearly. He breezes through school. 00:06:06.680 --> 00:06:08.920 Breezes is the right word. He went to the best 00:06:08.920 --> 00:06:11.759 schools, the Lycaeans and Desailly, and later 00:06:11.759 --> 00:06:14.550 the Sorbonne. He starts by studying law. Which 00:06:14.550 --> 00:06:17.430 he hated. He found it excruciatingly boring. 00:06:17.930 --> 00:06:20.550 He said it was just mental gymnastics without 00:06:20.550 --> 00:06:24.209 any grounding in reality. It had no soul, so 00:06:24.209 --> 00:06:26.589 he switched to philosophy. Okay, that feels like 00:06:26.589 --> 00:06:29.589 a better fit. It was. And just to contextualize 00:06:29.589 --> 00:06:32.490 his intellect for you, in France, there's this 00:06:32.490 --> 00:06:35.490 exam called the aggregation. It's an incredibly 00:06:35.490 --> 00:06:38.930 difficult, brutally competitive exam you have 00:06:38.930 --> 00:06:41.470 to pass to become a professor. The kind of exam 00:06:41.470 --> 00:06:43.689 where people study for years and still fail? 00:06:44.029 --> 00:06:47.149 Exactly. People's careers are made or broken 00:06:47.149 --> 00:06:50.290 by it. Lévi -Strauss passed it at age 22. He 00:06:50.290 --> 00:06:52.129 was the youngest person in his class. And who 00:06:52.129 --> 00:06:54.290 was in his class? Well, just people like Simone 00:06:54.290 --> 00:06:56.990 de Beauvoir and Maurice Merleau -Ponty. You know, 00:06:57.009 --> 00:06:59.589 no big deal. This is a golden generation French 00:06:59.589 --> 00:07:01.149 intellect. And he was the kid at the front of 00:07:01.149 --> 00:07:04.350 the class. But then reality hits. The Great Depression 00:07:04.350 --> 00:07:06.709 is in full swing. He's teaching secondary school, 00:07:06.870 --> 00:07:09.089 probably bored out of his mind again, lecturing 00:07:09.089 --> 00:07:12.930 teenagers on Kant. And then in 1935, the phone 00:07:12.930 --> 00:07:15.029 rings. A literal call to adventure. It was the 00:07:15.029 --> 00:07:17.790 director of the École Normale Supérieure. And 00:07:17.790 --> 00:07:19.689 he says, are you still interested in ethnography? 00:07:19.889 --> 00:07:21.870 And Levi Strauss basically said yes without knowing 00:07:21.870 --> 00:07:24.550 what it was. So he gets offered a job. He's offered 00:07:24.550 --> 00:07:26.490 a visiting professorship at the University of 00:07:26.490 --> 00:07:29.610 Sao Paulo in Brazil. It was part of a French 00:07:29.610 --> 00:07:32.709 cultural mission to bring European intellect 00:07:32.709 --> 00:07:35.829 to South America. And he accepts. But he doesn't 00:07:35.829 --> 00:07:38.009 accept because he has this burning passion for 00:07:38.009 --> 00:07:41.009 Brazil. No, he accepts to escape boredom. That's 00:07:41.009 --> 00:07:42.990 what he said. He wanted to get out of the classroom. 00:07:43.129 --> 00:07:45.350 He wanted to see something other, something completely 00:07:45.350 --> 00:07:47.569 different from the intellectual hothouse of Paris. 00:07:47.970 --> 00:07:51.970 This kicks off the Brazil expedition. 1935 to 00:07:51.970 --> 00:07:54.889 1939. And this is really the foundational myth 00:07:54.889 --> 00:07:57.490 of Levi Strauss, right? He goes into the Mato 00:07:57.490 --> 00:08:00.829 Grosso, into the deep Amazon rainforest. And 00:08:00.829 --> 00:08:04.470 he didn't go alone. His first wife, Dina Dreyfus, 00:08:04.569 --> 00:08:06.949 was with him. And it's important to note, she 00:08:06.949 --> 00:08:09.970 was actually a trained ethnographer, unlike Claude 00:08:09.970 --> 00:08:11.970 at the time, who was a philosopher dabbling in 00:08:11.970 --> 00:08:13.709 a new field. So she knew what she was doing. 00:08:14.139 --> 00:08:16.639 She did. They ventured into the interior to study 00:08:16.639 --> 00:08:19.680 tribes like the Guaycuru, the Boro, the Nambiquara, 00:08:19.779 --> 00:08:21.879 and the Tupicauhi. These were groups that had 00:08:21.879 --> 00:08:23.779 had very little contact with the outside world. 00:08:24.000 --> 00:08:26.879 Now, hold on. When we picture an anthropologist 00:08:26.879 --> 00:08:30.019 in the Amazon, we have a specific image in our 00:08:30.019 --> 00:08:32.879 heads, right? We picture someone living in a 00:08:32.879 --> 00:08:35.559 hut for two years, learning the language, eating 00:08:35.559 --> 00:08:38.460 the food, becoming one of the tribe, you know, 00:08:38.460 --> 00:08:41.940 going native, basically. That's the... Ideal. 00:08:41.940 --> 00:08:44.899 Yes. That's the participatory observation method 00:08:44.899 --> 00:08:47.779 established by the greats like Branisagat -Melanowski. 00:08:48.039 --> 00:08:50.500 You immerse yourself until you understand the 00:08:50.500 --> 00:08:52.480 culture from the inside out. But this is where 00:08:52.480 --> 00:08:54.179 we have to pump the brakes a bit because there 00:08:54.179 --> 00:08:56.960 is a lot of critique about how Levi Strauss actually 00:08:56.960 --> 00:08:59.539 did his fieldwork. There is. And it's a valid 00:08:59.539 --> 00:09:02.580 critique. Edmund Leach, who was a very prominent 00:09:02.580 --> 00:09:05.379 British anthropologist, later went through Levi 00:09:05.379 --> 00:09:08.100 Strauss' own accounts with a fine -tooth comb. 00:09:08.419 --> 00:09:10.340 And what did he find? He pointed out that if 00:09:10.340 --> 00:09:13.100 you actually look at the timeline, he spent weeks, 00:09:13.220 --> 00:09:16.740 sometimes only days, in any one place. Weeks? 00:09:16.960 --> 00:09:19.200 That's barely a vacation. That's not deep immersion. 00:09:19.620 --> 00:09:21.419 It was an expedition. They were constantly moving. 00:09:21.539 --> 00:09:24.220 And critically, Leach pointed out that Levi Strauss 00:09:24.220 --> 00:09:26.580 couldn't speak the languages fluently. He was 00:09:26.580 --> 00:09:28.820 working through translators or just through observation. 00:09:29.259 --> 00:09:31.519 So he's basically a tourist with a notebook. 00:09:31.940 --> 00:09:34.860 I mean, that sounds harsh, but if you can't talk 00:09:34.860 --> 00:09:36.980 to the people, how are you understanding their 00:09:36.980 --> 00:09:39.820 deepest cultural secrets, their myths, their 00:09:39.820 --> 00:09:43.179 kinship rules? It is harsh, but not entirely 00:09:43.179 --> 00:09:46.419 unfair regarding his fieldwork methods. Leach 00:09:46.419 --> 00:09:48.879 suggested he was never able to converse easily 00:09:48.879 --> 00:09:51.580 with any of his native informants. He was collecting 00:09:51.580 --> 00:09:54.980 fragments, sketches, data points. Which brings 00:09:54.980 --> 00:09:57.120 us to my favorite irony of this whole story. 00:09:57.259 --> 00:10:00.669 In his most famous book, Trister Tropic, which 00:10:00.669 --> 00:10:03.429 is basically his travel memoir, the very first 00:10:03.429 --> 00:10:05.809 sentence is him admitting he hates traveling. 00:10:06.049 --> 00:10:08.830 I hate traveling and explorers. It's a shocking 00:10:08.830 --> 00:10:10.629 way to start a book about travel and exploration. 00:10:11.110 --> 00:10:13.610 A complete provocation. It's like a chef opening 00:10:13.610 --> 00:10:16.049 a cookbook by saying, you know what, I hate food, 00:10:16.190 --> 00:10:19.470 and cooking is a chore. Exactly. But it reveals 00:10:19.470 --> 00:10:22.720 his philosophy. For Levi Strauss, the truth wasn't 00:10:22.720 --> 00:10:24.820 in the experience of the jungle. He didn't think 00:10:24.820 --> 00:10:26.440 you learned the truth by getting bug bites and 00:10:26.440 --> 00:10:28.399 sweating in a hammock for a year. So where was 00:10:28.399 --> 00:10:31.000 the truth? He believed the truth was found in 00:10:31.000 --> 00:10:34.120 the analysis of the data afterwards, in the quiet 00:10:34.120 --> 00:10:36.179 of the library where his mind could actually 00:10:36.179 --> 00:10:39.240 work on it. He viewed the travel as a necessary 00:10:39.240 --> 00:10:43.340 evil way to go out, grab the raw material, and 00:10:43.340 --> 00:10:45.279 then bring it back to the laboratory. He wanted 00:10:45.279 --> 00:10:48.950 the data, not the dirt. Precisely. He was an 00:10:48.950 --> 00:10:50.850 armchair anthropologist who was forced to get 00:10:50.850 --> 00:10:52.909 up out of the armchair for a few years, and he 00:10:52.909 --> 00:10:54.389 couldn't wait to sit back down and think about 00:10:54.389 --> 00:10:56.909 what he'd seen. So he wraps up in Brazil in 1939. 00:10:57.409 --> 00:11:00.610 He heads back to France. And talk about bad timing. 00:11:01.169 --> 00:11:03.889 Terrible timing. The worst possible. Yeah. He 00:11:03.889 --> 00:11:06.590 returns just as World War II is starting. He's 00:11:06.590 --> 00:11:09.009 mobilized for the war effort, serving as a liaison 00:11:09.009 --> 00:11:11.230 on the Maginot Line. Which didn't go so well 00:11:11.230 --> 00:11:14.110 for France. Not at all. As we know, the German 00:11:14.110 --> 00:11:16.909 Blitzkrieg happens. France capitulates in 1940. 00:11:17.409 --> 00:11:19.610 The Vichy government takes over, collaborating 00:11:19.610 --> 00:11:21.830 with the Nazis. And Lévi -Strauss is Jewish? 00:11:22.210 --> 00:11:25.210 He is the grandson of a rabbi. Under the Vichy 00:11:25.210 --> 00:11:27.669 racial laws, he is stripped of his French citizenship. 00:11:27.830 --> 00:11:30.149 He's fired from his teaching job. Overnight, 00:11:30.169 --> 00:11:32.350 he becomes a non -person in his own country. 00:11:32.450 --> 00:11:34.490 So he has to run. He has to run for his life. 00:11:34.690 --> 00:11:37.269 And this escape story is absolutely cinematic. 00:11:37.610 --> 00:11:40.549 He manages to get on a boat to Martinique. And 00:11:40.549 --> 00:11:43.700 this boat... It was just a passenger liner. It 00:11:43.700 --> 00:11:46.980 was packed with refugees. And on this boat, he's 00:11:46.980 --> 00:11:48.840 having these deep philosophical conversations 00:11:48.840 --> 00:11:51.700 with the revolutionary Victor Serge, with Andre 00:11:51.700 --> 00:11:54.200 Britton, the surrealist. It's this floating container 00:11:54.200 --> 00:11:57.340 of exiled European intellect just bobbing across 00:11:57.340 --> 00:11:59.600 the Atlantic. Exactly. I kind of know his arc 00:11:59.600 --> 00:12:01.759 of the European mind. He gets to Martinique, 00:12:01.820 --> 00:12:04.860 then Puerto Rico, and then the FBI gets involved. 00:12:05.039 --> 00:12:07.419 What's that about? Yes. He arrives in Puerto 00:12:07.419 --> 00:12:10.179 Rico, which is U .S. territory, and the FBI goes 00:12:10.179 --> 00:12:12.840 through his luggage. They find all these papers 00:12:12.840 --> 00:12:15.539 covered in what to them are just strange scribbles 00:12:15.539 --> 00:12:18.240 and diagrams. His anthropology notes, his kinship 00:12:18.240 --> 00:12:21.440 charts. Right. But to an FBI agent in 1941, they 00:12:21.440 --> 00:12:24.299 look like codes. They see German letters or what 00:12:24.299 --> 00:12:25.879 they think are German letters because of some 00:12:25.879 --> 00:12:28.159 of the linguistic symbols he used. They suspected 00:12:28.159 --> 00:12:31.519 he might be a spy. Spy for who? The Nazis. He's 00:12:31.519 --> 00:12:34.460 a Jewish man fleeing the Nazis. Paranoia was 00:12:34.460 --> 00:12:38.259 at an all -time high. It was wartime. They eventually 00:12:38.259 --> 00:12:40.320 realize their mistake, that they were just academic 00:12:40.320 --> 00:12:43.659 papers, and let him through. He finally arrives 00:12:43.659 --> 00:12:46.519 in New York City. And this is where the story 00:12:46.519 --> 00:12:50.139 shifts gears. This is Section 2, New York, linguistics, 00:12:50.139 --> 00:12:53.019 and the birth of structuralism. Because it turns 00:12:53.019 --> 00:12:55.759 out, getting kicked out of France was the best 00:12:55.759 --> 00:12:57.700 thing that could have possibly happened to his 00:12:57.700 --> 00:13:00.389 career. It was the crucible. It was the moment 00:13:00.389 --> 00:13:02.409 everything came together for him. You have to 00:13:02.409 --> 00:13:05.269 imagine New York in the 1940s. It was, as you 00:13:05.269 --> 00:13:08.049 said, a university in exile. All these brilliant 00:13:08.049 --> 00:13:10.629 European minds had fled there. So he wasn't alone. 00:13:10.870 --> 00:13:14.129 Far from it. He helped found the École Libra 00:13:14.129 --> 00:13:16.759 d 'Haute Étude. He's hanging out with surrealists 00:13:16.759 --> 00:13:19.279 like Max Ernst, wandering through antique shops 00:13:19.279 --> 00:13:21.740 on 3rd Avenue, looking at totem poles in the 00:13:21.740 --> 00:13:24.159 Museum of Natural History. He was soaking it 00:13:24.159 --> 00:13:26.259 all in. But the most important meeting, the one 00:13:26.259 --> 00:13:28.200 that changes the history of anthropology forever, 00:13:28.360 --> 00:13:31.679 is with a Russian guy. Roman Jacobson. Okay, 00:13:31.700 --> 00:13:33.200 let's slow down here because this is the pivot 00:13:33.200 --> 00:13:35.740 point. Roman Jacobson. Why is this linguist so 00:13:35.740 --> 00:13:38.340 important? Because Jacobson gave Levi Strauss 00:13:38.340 --> 00:13:40.820 the key to the code he had been looking for his 00:13:40.820 --> 00:13:44.159 whole life. Jacobson was a pioneer in what's 00:13:44.159 --> 00:13:47.029 called structural linguistics. And what is that? 00:13:47.370 --> 00:13:50.850 Well, he taught Levi Strauss that language isn't 00:13:50.850 --> 00:13:53.529 just a big pile of words. It's a system. It's 00:13:53.529 --> 00:13:56.129 built of foams, the smallest units of sound. 00:13:56.610 --> 00:14:01.090 And here is the absolute key concept. A sound 00:14:01.090 --> 00:14:04.830 like B or P has no meaning on its own. Right. 00:14:04.990 --> 00:14:07.269 But doesn't mean anything. But doesn't mean anything. 00:14:07.450 --> 00:14:10.470 Exactly. A phoneme only has meaning in relation 00:14:10.470 --> 00:14:13.110 to other sounds. We can distinguish the word 00:14:13.110 --> 00:14:16.029 bat. from the word pat, because our brain can 00:14:16.029 --> 00:14:19.490 distinguish the sound B from the sound P. The 00:14:19.490 --> 00:14:21.370 meaning comes from the difference, from the contrast. 00:14:21.590 --> 00:14:22.850 Okay, I want to make sure I really get this, 00:14:22.929 --> 00:14:24.330 and I want to make sure everyone listening gets 00:14:24.330 --> 00:14:25.830 this, because everything else depends on it. 00:14:25.929 --> 00:14:28.450 You're saying meaning doesn't live inside the 00:14:28.450 --> 00:14:31.929 thing. Meaning lives in the space between things. 00:14:32.190 --> 00:14:34.090 That is a beautiful way to put it, yes. Let's 00:14:34.090 --> 00:14:36.070 use an analogy. Think of a traffic light. Okay. 00:14:36.149 --> 00:14:38.809 Red, yellow, green. You're driving, and you see 00:14:38.809 --> 00:14:41.570 a red light. What does red mean? It means... 00:14:41.570 --> 00:14:43.919 But why does it mean stop? Is there something 00:14:43.919 --> 00:14:46.340 inherently stopping about the wavelength of red 00:14:46.340 --> 00:14:48.580 light? I mean, if you showed a red light to an 00:14:48.580 --> 00:14:51.100 alien who'd never seen a car, would they instinctively 00:14:51.100 --> 00:14:54.559 slam on the brakes? Of course not. We just decided 00:14:54.559 --> 00:14:56.620 it means stop. It could have been blue. It could 00:14:56.620 --> 00:14:59.659 have been purple. Exactly. Red only means stop 00:14:59.659 --> 00:15:02.580 because it is positioned in a system of opposition 00:15:02.580 --> 00:15:06.659 to green, which means go. The meaning isn't in 00:15:06.659 --> 00:15:08.919 the color itself. The meaning is in the difference 00:15:08.919 --> 00:15:10.960 between the two colors. It's the relationship. 00:15:11.460 --> 00:15:15.039 Red is simply not green. Green is not red. Okay, 00:15:15.080 --> 00:15:17.340 so meaning is a system of contrasts, a system 00:15:17.340 --> 00:15:19.960 of opposites. Precisely. This is what we call 00:15:19.960 --> 00:15:22.139 a binary opposition. And sitting there in New 00:15:22.139 --> 00:15:24.539 York listening to Jacobson talk about sounds, 00:15:24.879 --> 00:15:27.200 Lovie Strauss had this massive world -changing 00:15:27.200 --> 00:15:29.259 realization. He thought, wait a minute, if language 00:15:29.259 --> 00:15:31.779 works like this based on hidden rules of opposition, 00:15:32.429 --> 00:15:34.309 Maybe culture works like this, too. That is a 00:15:34.309 --> 00:15:38.210 huge leap to go from Beavis SP to how an entire 00:15:38.210 --> 00:15:41.590 society functions. It's the birth of structuralism. 00:15:41.789 --> 00:15:44.269 He made the leap. He realized that culture is 00:15:44.269 --> 00:15:46.970 like a language. We follow its rules without 00:15:46.970 --> 00:15:49.210 being consciously aware of them. I mean, you 00:15:49.210 --> 00:15:51.470 don't wake up and say, today I'm going to perform 00:15:51.470 --> 00:15:53.970 the binary opposition of raw versus cooked by 00:15:53.970 --> 00:15:56.250 making a salad for lunch. You just make a salad. 00:15:56.529 --> 00:15:58.950 But Levi Strauss believed that underneath that 00:15:58.950 --> 00:16:02.330 action is a mental grammar at play. So if we 00:16:02.330 --> 00:16:04.149 stick with the traffic light, he's saying that 00:16:04.149 --> 00:16:07.190 our marriage customs, our art, our table manners, 00:16:07.490 --> 00:16:10.090 they're all just traffic lights. They're signals 00:16:10.090 --> 00:16:11.889 that only have meaning because they're different 00:16:11.889 --> 00:16:15.009 from other signals. Yes. Take food again. The 00:16:15.009 --> 00:16:18.570 opposition between raw and cooked. Levi Strauss 00:16:18.570 --> 00:16:20.830 would say we don't just cook food to kill bacteria 00:16:20.830 --> 00:16:22.750 or make it digestible. That's the functional 00:16:22.750 --> 00:16:24.870 reason. Right. The structural reason is that 00:16:24.870 --> 00:16:27.889 we cook food to mark a symbolic transition. Raw 00:16:27.889 --> 00:16:31.230 is nature. Coke is culture. By cooking the meat, 00:16:31.309 --> 00:16:34.090 we are turning a biological object from the natural 00:16:34.090 --> 00:16:36.830 world into a social object from the cultural 00:16:36.830 --> 00:16:39.690 world. We're symbolically saying, I am a human, 00:16:39.750 --> 00:16:42.289 not an animal. So the act of barbecuing a steak 00:16:42.289 --> 00:16:44.950 is actually a linguistic statement. You're speaking 00:16:44.950 --> 00:16:48.389 culture. In the structuralist view, yes. It's 00:16:48.389 --> 00:16:50.769 a sentence in the language of food. You're communicating 00:16:50.769 --> 00:16:53.470 your humanity. That is wild. It makes everything 00:16:53.470 --> 00:16:55.649 feel so deliberate, even if we aren't doing it 00:16:55.649 --> 00:16:57.629 on purpose. And that's why he felt connected 00:16:57.629 --> 00:17:00.070 to American anthropology, too. He actually met 00:17:00.070 --> 00:17:02.649 the great Franz Boas in New York. The father 00:17:02.649 --> 00:17:05.130 of American anthropology. The big one. The giant 00:17:05.130 --> 00:17:07.869 of the field. And talk about a dramatic passing 00:17:07.869 --> 00:17:11.069 of the torch. In 1942, they were having dinner 00:17:11.069 --> 00:17:12.950 at the faculty house at Columbia University. 00:17:13.230 --> 00:17:17.759 A nice, quiet, scholarly dinner. And Franz Boas 00:17:17.759 --> 00:17:21.500 literally died in Lévi -Strauss' arms. He had 00:17:21.500 --> 00:17:24.839 a heart attack at the table. Wow. That's cinematic. 00:17:24.960 --> 00:17:27.180 That's mythic in its own right. It sounds like 00:17:27.180 --> 00:17:29.559 a myth, doesn't it? The old king dying in the 00:17:29.559 --> 00:17:31.740 arms of the young prince who will take his place. 00:17:32.099 --> 00:17:35.279 It gave Lévi -Strauss this direct, almost physical 00:17:35.279 --> 00:17:38.099 lineage to American anthropology, which helped 00:17:38.099 --> 00:17:40.180 his work get accepted in the U .S. later on. 00:17:40.460 --> 00:17:42.700 But the shift he was proposing was radical. He 00:17:42.700 --> 00:17:44.880 was moving the entire field from functionalism 00:17:44.880 --> 00:17:48.240 to structuralism. Yes. Let's clarify that shift, 00:17:48.380 --> 00:17:50.460 because before Levi Strauss, pretty much everyone 00:17:50.460 --> 00:17:53.259 was a functionalist. Right. Functionalism asks, 00:17:53.500 --> 00:17:55.740 what is the purpose of this custom? What does 00:17:55.740 --> 00:17:59.700 it do? If a tribe does a rain dance, a functionalist 00:17:59.700 --> 00:18:02.079 asks, does this bring the group together? Does 00:18:02.079 --> 00:18:04.900 it relieve anxiety about the harvest? They look 00:18:04.900 --> 00:18:07.190 for the function. They assume the custom exists 00:18:07.190 --> 00:18:09.289 because it does something useful for society. 00:18:09.589 --> 00:18:12.410 Like a tool. A hammer exists to hit nails. That's 00:18:12.410 --> 00:18:14.950 its function. Exactly. But structuralism asks 00:18:14.950 --> 00:18:17.789 a completely different question. It asks, what 00:18:17.789 --> 00:18:20.809 is the underlying logic? What is the grammar 00:18:20.809 --> 00:18:23.569 of this dance? It doesn't care if the dance works 00:18:23.569 --> 00:18:25.990 to make rain. It cares about how the symbols 00:18:25.990 --> 00:18:27.910 in the dance, the colors, the movements, the 00:18:27.910 --> 00:18:30.349 sounds, relate to each other to create meaning. 00:18:30.670 --> 00:18:32.829 It's a fundamental shift from what does it do 00:18:32.829 --> 00:18:35.410 to how was it built. So let's see this in action. 00:18:35.819 --> 00:18:37.940 Because abstract theory is fine, but I want to 00:18:37.940 --> 00:18:39.920 see how he actually applied this. Let's move 00:18:39.920 --> 00:18:42.220 to section three, decoding the family. Because 00:18:42.220 --> 00:18:43.920 if there's anything that seems personal, emotional, 00:18:43.980 --> 00:18:46.740 and biological, it's family. Who we love, who 00:18:46.740 --> 00:18:48.740 we marry. But Levi -Strauss comes along and says, 00:18:48.839 --> 00:18:52.319 nope, it's math. It is algebra to him. He started 00:18:52.319 --> 00:18:54.579 with his book, The Elementary Structures of Kinship, 00:18:54.579 --> 00:18:58.539 in 1949. And he looked at kinship systems all 00:18:58.539 --> 00:19:01.759 over the world. Now... The British anthropologists, 00:19:01.900 --> 00:19:04.480 like Radcliffe Brown, thought kinship was all 00:19:04.480 --> 00:19:07.720 about descent. Meaning bloodlines. Yes. Passing 00:19:07.720 --> 00:19:10.339 things down from father to son. Property, names, 00:19:10.480 --> 00:19:13.160 titles. That's how we usually think of it. My 00:19:13.160 --> 00:19:14.819 name comes from my father, who got it from his 00:19:14.819 --> 00:19:16.900 father. It's a vertical line through time. Makes 00:19:16.900 --> 00:19:19.339 sense. Levi Strauss said that's important, but 00:19:19.339 --> 00:19:21.440 it's not the most important thing. He said kinship 00:19:21.440 --> 00:19:24.000 is really about alliance. It's horizontal, not 00:19:24.000 --> 00:19:27.299 vertical. It's about marriage. Specifically, 00:19:27.460 --> 00:19:29.940 he argued that the incest taboo, which is nearly 00:19:29.940 --> 00:19:33.059 universal across all human cultures, wasn't just 00:19:33.059 --> 00:19:35.039 a moral rule. It wasn't just don't do that, it's 00:19:35.039 --> 00:19:38.000 gross. Or about avoiding genetic defects. Okay, 00:19:38.079 --> 00:19:40.529 so what was it about? He saw it as a structural 00:19:40.529 --> 00:19:42.950 necessity, the foundational rule of culture. 00:19:43.230 --> 00:19:45.170 Because if you are forbidden from marrying your 00:19:45.170 --> 00:19:47.430 own sister or daughter, you must give her to 00:19:47.430 --> 00:19:50.130 someone else. And in return, you expect that 00:19:50.130 --> 00:19:52.349 someone else will give you a wife. So it forces 00:19:52.349 --> 00:19:54.970 groups to interact. It's an anti -isolation device. 00:19:55.470 --> 00:19:59.150 Exactly. It forces men to obtain wives from outside 00:19:59.150 --> 00:20:02.630 their immediate family group. He saw it as a 00:20:02.630 --> 00:20:05.930 system for circulating women. And he was very 00:20:05.930 --> 00:20:08.690 explicit about this language. He said women were 00:20:08.690 --> 00:20:11.569 being exchanged like meaningful signs in a language 00:20:11.569 --> 00:20:14.130 or like currency in an economy. To build alliances. 00:20:14.490 --> 00:20:16.529 To build alliances. It keeps clans from killing 00:20:16.529 --> 00:20:19.089 each other because now my brother -in -law is 00:20:19.089 --> 00:20:21.089 in that other clan. My nephew's in that clan. 00:20:21.269 --> 00:20:23.950 We can't go to war. We're family now. It's the 00:20:23.950 --> 00:20:26.250 glue that holds society together. This brings 00:20:26.250 --> 00:20:29.029 us to what he called the atom of kinship. And 00:20:29.029 --> 00:20:30.809 this is the part where he really tries to turn 00:20:30.809 --> 00:20:34.779 family drama into an algebra equation. It literally 00:20:34.779 --> 00:20:37.000 is an equation. He said the basic elementary 00:20:37.000 --> 00:20:39.660 unit of family isn't just husband, wife, and 00:20:39.660 --> 00:20:41.700 child. And the nuclear family. Right. He says 00:20:41.700 --> 00:20:43.420 that's too simple. That's a biological unit, 00:20:43.460 --> 00:20:46.019 not a cultural one. The basic cultural unit requires 00:20:46.019 --> 00:20:48.759 four roles to make sense. Brother, sister, father, 00:20:48.880 --> 00:20:51.140 and son. You have to include the uncle. The mother's 00:20:51.140 --> 00:20:54.640 brother. You have to. Because the uncle represents 00:20:54.640 --> 00:20:58.099 the group that gave the wife. He is the link 00:20:58.099 --> 00:21:00.619 to the outside world, to the alliance. And Levi 00:21:00.619 --> 00:21:03.200 Strauss found this incredible pattern, this formula. 00:21:03.539 --> 00:21:05.640 He said the relationship between the uncle and 00:21:05.640 --> 00:21:08.079 the nephew is to the brother and sister as the 00:21:08.079 --> 00:21:10.519 father and son is to the husband and wife. Okay, 00:21:10.599 --> 00:21:13.720 my brain just cramped. A is to B as C is to D. 00:21:14.059 --> 00:21:16.279 What does that actually mean in real life? Give 00:21:16.279 --> 00:21:19.099 me a concrete scenario. It's a system of balances. 00:21:19.759 --> 00:21:22.420 It's about positive and negative emotional charges. 00:21:23.039 --> 00:21:25.059 He argued that you can predict the emotional 00:21:25.059 --> 00:21:27.539 tone of these relationships based on the others. 00:21:27.900 --> 00:21:29.940 Let's say you're in a society where the father 00:21:29.940 --> 00:21:32.359 is very stern. He is the authoritarian figure. 00:21:32.440 --> 00:21:34.680 He disciplines the son. Their relationship is 00:21:34.680 --> 00:21:36.640 formal, respectful, maybe a little tense. Okay, 00:21:36.680 --> 00:21:38.779 stern dad. I got it. Common enough. In those 00:21:38.779 --> 00:21:41.240 societies, Levi Strauss predicted that the maternal 00:21:41.240 --> 00:21:43.279 uncle will almost always be familiar, playful, 00:21:43.359 --> 00:21:46.519 and kind. He's the cool uncle. The one the nephew 00:21:46.519 --> 00:21:49.039 can joke with, confide in. He's the emotional 00:21:49.039 --> 00:21:51.819 release valve. But, and here's the structure 00:21:51.819 --> 00:21:54.420 kicking in. In societies where the relationship 00:21:54.420 --> 00:21:57.180 between father and son is warm and casual, where 00:21:57.180 --> 00:21:59.920 the dad is the buddy. Let me guess. The uncle 00:21:59.920 --> 00:22:02.440 becomes the mean one, the authority figure. Exactly. 00:22:02.500 --> 00:22:04.619 The uncle becomes the representative of authority. 00:22:04.900 --> 00:22:07.599 The structure demands balance. You can't have 00:22:07.599 --> 00:22:09.480 authority everywhere and you can't have familiarity 00:22:09.480 --> 00:22:11.640 everywhere. It has to be distributed logically. 00:22:12.200 --> 00:22:14.519 If the father is a plus charge, the uncle has 00:22:14.519 --> 00:22:17.529 to be a minus charge and vice versa. That is 00:22:17.529 --> 00:22:20.390 wild. So he could walk into a village, watch 00:22:20.390 --> 00:22:23.089 a father scold his son, and immediately predict 00:22:23.089 --> 00:22:25.190 how the uncle acts without ever meeting him. 00:22:25.309 --> 00:22:28.029 That was the claim. That was the predictive power 00:22:28.029 --> 00:22:30.990 of structural analysis. And it worked a surprising 00:22:30.990 --> 00:22:34.130 number of cases. But, and I have to pause here, 00:22:34.230 --> 00:22:35.950 we need to address the elephant in the room. 00:22:36.130 --> 00:22:38.410 Yeah, I was waiting for this. This entire theory 00:22:38.410 --> 00:22:41.089 rests on the idea that men are exchanging women 00:22:41.089 --> 00:22:43.009 like they're trading cards to build alliances. 00:22:43.109 --> 00:22:46.309 That feels pretty dehumanizing to modern ears. 00:22:46.809 --> 00:22:49.450 You are hitting on one of the major modern critiques 00:22:49.450 --> 00:22:52.109 of Levi Strauss. Feminist scholars have pointed 00:22:52.109 --> 00:22:55.390 this out for decades. His model, as groundbreaking 00:22:55.390 --> 00:22:58.990 as it was, views women essentially as signs or 00:22:58.990 --> 00:23:01.730 messages being sent between groups of men to 00:23:01.730 --> 00:23:04.049 facilitate communication. I give you my sister 00:23:04.049 --> 00:23:06.309 so you don't kill me and my clan. Basically. 00:23:06.690 --> 00:23:09.559 Now... In his defense, Levi -Strauss would say 00:23:09.559 --> 00:23:12.339 he isn't endorsing this system. He's just describing 00:23:12.339 --> 00:23:14.720 the underlying machinery of how many patriarchal 00:23:14.720 --> 00:23:17.480 societies have functioned for millennia. He's 00:23:17.480 --> 00:23:19.920 analyzing the code, not writing it or approving 00:23:19.920 --> 00:23:22.160 of it. But you're absolutely right. It reduces 00:23:22.160 --> 00:23:24.900 women to objects of exchange within the theoretical 00:23:24.900 --> 00:23:27.559 model itself. And beyond the, let's call it, 00:23:27.559 --> 00:23:29.940 problematic framing, there's also a data problem, 00:23:30.200 --> 00:23:33.140 right? Augustus Elkin, the expert on Australian 00:23:33.140 --> 00:23:35.740 Aboriginals, he had a bone to pick with this 00:23:35.740 --> 00:23:38.640 neat little atom. He did. This is the classificatory 00:23:38.640 --> 00:23:40.779 kin problem. That's a huge issue for the theory. 00:23:40.960 --> 00:23:42.980 Break that down for me. What's classificatory 00:23:42.980 --> 00:23:45.579 kin? In many tribal societies, you don't just 00:23:45.579 --> 00:23:48.839 have one father. You call all men of your father's 00:23:48.839 --> 00:23:51.980 generation and lineage father. You call all of 00:23:51.980 --> 00:23:54.380 your female cousins from a certain side sister. 00:23:55.190 --> 00:23:57.670 It's a way of knitting the whole tribe together 00:23:57.670 --> 00:24:00.390 into one big family. So if I have 20 fathers, 00:24:00.509 --> 00:24:03.049 which one is the stern one that the formula requires? 00:24:03.450 --> 00:24:06.410 Exactly. Levi Strauss' neat little Adam assumes 00:24:06.410 --> 00:24:10.269 a one -to -one biological relationship. My specific 00:24:10.269 --> 00:24:13.759 dad, my specific mother's brother. But if the 00:24:13.759 --> 00:24:16.299 mother's brother is just a distant relative you 00:24:16.299 --> 00:24:18.799 happen to call uncle, the psychological formula 00:24:18.799 --> 00:24:21.819 of the stern father versus nice uncle completely 00:24:21.819 --> 00:24:24.059 fall apart. The emotional charges get all mixed 00:24:24.059 --> 00:24:26.759 up. It's like trying to apply a strict chemical 00:24:26.759 --> 00:24:29.059 formula to a soup where the ingredients keep 00:24:29.059 --> 00:24:30.839 changing names and you're not even sure which 00:24:30.839 --> 00:24:33.059 one is which. That's a great way to put it. He 00:24:33.059 --> 00:24:36.190 was accused. often of forcing the messy reality 00:24:36.190 --> 00:24:39.009 of human life into these beautiful, rigid mathematical 00:24:39.009 --> 00:24:41.730 boxes. He wanted the world to be cleaner and 00:24:41.730 --> 00:24:44.630 more logical than it actually was. But man, even 00:24:44.630 --> 00:24:47.109 if they are flawed, those boxes are fascinating. 00:24:48.349 --> 00:24:50.430 Let's move to section four, because this is the 00:24:50.430 --> 00:24:52.309 book that really put him on the map for the general 00:24:52.309 --> 00:24:54.950 public, not just for anthropologists. The Savage 00:24:54.950 --> 00:24:58.930 Mind. La Pensée Sauvage, published in 1962. A 00:24:58.930 --> 00:25:02.450 cultural bombshell. It was a sensation. And we 00:25:02.450 --> 00:25:04.390 have to talk about the title. Because the savage 00:25:04.390 --> 00:25:08.769 mind sounds a bit colonial. It sounds dismissive, 00:25:08.769 --> 00:25:10.369 like, oh, look at those savages and how they 00:25:10.369 --> 00:25:13.109 think. It does in English, and it's a terrible 00:25:13.109 --> 00:25:15.730 translation, really. In French, it's a beautiful, 00:25:15.869 --> 00:25:19.089 untranslatable pun. Pensee means thought, but 00:25:19.089 --> 00:25:21.930 it also means pansy, the flower. And sauvage 00:25:21.930 --> 00:25:24.089 means wild. So the title means the savage mind, 00:25:24.230 --> 00:25:27.539 but it also means wild pansies. That is so much 00:25:27.539 --> 00:25:30.019 more poetic. It is. He even suggested the English 00:25:30.019 --> 00:25:32.240 title should be Pansies for Thought, which is 00:25:32.240 --> 00:25:34.420 a reference to Ophelia in Shakespeare's Hamlet. 00:25:34.680 --> 00:25:36.880 But the publishers went with the more aggressive, 00:25:37.019 --> 00:25:39.920 more provocative The Savage Mind. The main argument 00:25:39.920 --> 00:25:41.900 here is that primitive people aren't stupid, 00:25:42.079 --> 00:25:45.799 which sounds blindingly obvious to us now, but 00:25:45.799 --> 00:25:48.680 it wasn't the consensus back then. Correct. For 00:25:48.680 --> 00:25:51.019 a long time, the Western view, inherited from 00:25:51.019 --> 00:25:53.500 thinkers like Lucien Lévi -Bruhl, was that indigenous 00:25:53.500 --> 00:25:55.980 people thought like children. that their minds 00:25:55.980 --> 00:25:59.519 were pre -logical, mystical, irrational. Levi 00:25:59.519 --> 00:26:02.859 Strauss said, absolutely not. He argued that 00:26:02.859 --> 00:26:06.319 the savage mind is just as complex, just as logical, 00:26:06.480 --> 00:26:08.859 and just as rigorous as modern scientific thought. 00:26:09.000 --> 00:26:11.319 It just uses different tools and applies itself 00:26:11.319 --> 00:26:13.559 to different problems. This is the famous distinction 00:26:13.559 --> 00:26:17.680 between the engineer and the bricoleur. I love 00:26:17.680 --> 00:26:19.579 this concept. I think about this constantly in 00:26:19.579 --> 00:26:21.740 my own life. It's one of his most powerful and 00:26:21.740 --> 00:26:24.039 enduring ideas. It's a lens you can apply to 00:26:24.039 --> 00:26:26.059 almost anything. So break it down for us. The 00:26:26.059 --> 00:26:28.980 engineer versus the brickler. Okay. The engineer 00:26:28.980 --> 00:26:31.119 represents modern scientific thought. The engineer 00:26:31.119 --> 00:26:33.900 has a specific project, say building a bridge. 00:26:34.380 --> 00:26:37.099 He designs the bridge first. Then he invents 00:26:37.099 --> 00:26:39.339 or manufactures the exact tools and materials 00:26:39.339 --> 00:26:42.299 he needs for that specific project. If he needs 00:26:42.299 --> 00:26:45.140 a drill bit of a very specific size, he makes 00:26:45.140 --> 00:26:48.619 it. His universe of tools is open. He can create 00:26:48.619 --> 00:26:50.940 new tools for the job. And the brickler. The 00:26:50.940 --> 00:26:55.700 brickler is more like a tinkerer or a DIY enthusiast, 00:26:55.700 --> 00:26:59.480 a handyman. He has a closed set of tools, just 00:26:59.480 --> 00:27:01.660 whatever happens to the lying around in his garage, 00:27:01.880 --> 00:27:04.460 a bent nail, a piece of string, an old tire. 00:27:05.000 --> 00:27:08.240 When he faces a problem, say a leaky pipe, he 00:27:08.240 --> 00:27:10.880 doesn't go buy a new tool. He looks at his pile 00:27:10.880 --> 00:27:13.460 of junk and asks, What can this object do? How 00:27:13.460 --> 00:27:15.960 can I repurpose this old tire to fix this pipe? 00:27:16.220 --> 00:27:19.000 The analogy I always use is cooking. The engineer 00:27:19.000 --> 00:27:21.339 is a professional chef who decides to make a 00:27:21.339 --> 00:27:23.880 souffle. He writes a detailed list, goes to a 00:27:23.880 --> 00:27:26.359 specialty grocery store, and buys the perfect 00:27:26.359 --> 00:27:28.779 eggs. The right Gruyere cheese, the right kind 00:27:28.779 --> 00:27:31.079 of cream. He gets exactly what he needs for the 00:27:31.079 --> 00:27:33.240 recipe. Right, a top -down approach. The bricoleur 00:27:33.240 --> 00:27:35.759 is the home cook who gets home at 7 p .m., totally 00:27:35.759 --> 00:27:38.240 exhausted and hungry. He opens the fridge. He 00:27:38.240 --> 00:27:40.079 sees half a roast chicken from two days ago, 00:27:40.220 --> 00:27:42.500 a jar of mustard, one sad -looking carrot, and 00:27:42.500 --> 00:27:44.599 some stale bread. He has to make dinner out of 00:27:44.599 --> 00:27:46.880 that. He can't go to the store. He has to improvise 00:27:46.880 --> 00:27:49.019 with what's at hand. That is a perfect analogy. 00:27:49.420 --> 00:27:52.599 And Levi Strauss said that myth -making is intellectual 00:27:52.599 --> 00:27:56.220 bricolage. indigenous cultures take the materials 00:27:56.220 --> 00:27:59.519 at hand the animals plants stars and geography 00:27:59.519 --> 00:28:02.079 around them the stuff in their fridge and they 00:28:02.079 --> 00:28:04.980 rearrange them into stories that solve deep abstract 00:28:04.980 --> 00:28:07.799 intellectual problems like the opposition between 00:28:07.799 --> 00:28:10.039 life and death and the key point is that both 00:28:10.039 --> 00:28:13.210 the chef and the home cook get you fed Both the 00:28:13.210 --> 00:28:15.650 engineer and the bricoleur solve the problem. 00:28:15.809 --> 00:28:18.829 Exactly. One isn't better or smarter than the 00:28:18.829 --> 00:28:20.750 other. They're just different modes of thought 00:28:20.750 --> 00:28:23.250 operating on different materials. The bricoleur 00:28:23.250 --> 00:28:25.430 speaks with things. The engineer speaks with 00:28:25.430 --> 00:28:27.730 concepts. Now, this book also got him into a 00:28:27.730 --> 00:28:30.660 huge public fight with Jean Pulsarch. And in 00:28:30.660 --> 00:28:33.960 1960s Paris, a fight with Sartre was like a heavyweight 00:28:33.960 --> 00:28:35.960 title bout. It was the Super Bowl of philosophy. 00:28:36.240 --> 00:28:38.579 It was the clash of the titans. Existentialism 00:28:38.579 --> 00:28:40.720 versus the brand new structuralism. Everyone 00:28:40.720 --> 00:28:42.720 in Paris was taking sides. Sartre was all about 00:28:42.720 --> 00:28:44.559 freedom, right? The individual makes himself. 00:28:44.940 --> 00:28:49.019 Yes. For Sartre, existence precedes essence. 00:28:49.680 --> 00:28:52.599 We are born as a blank slate and we define ourselves 00:28:52.599 --> 00:28:55.059 through our choices. History is made by human 00:28:55.059 --> 00:28:57.460 action, by conscious decisions. We are the authors 00:28:57.460 --> 00:28:59.549 of our own lives. We are radically free. And 00:28:59.549 --> 00:29:01.609 Levi Strauss comes along in The Savage Mind and 00:29:01.609 --> 00:29:04.789 says... He says, not so fast. He argued that 00:29:04.789 --> 00:29:07.730 we are profoundly constrained by these invisible 00:29:07.730 --> 00:29:10.089 structures, these grammars. We think we're making 00:29:10.089 --> 00:29:12.190 free choices, but we're actually just operating 00:29:12.190 --> 00:29:14.470 within the pre -existing grammar of our culture. 00:29:14.710 --> 00:29:17.450 He famously said that history is not as free 00:29:17.450 --> 00:29:19.970 as we think it is. That must have driven Sartre 00:29:19.970 --> 00:29:22.970 absolutely crazy. It did. Levi Strauss was essentially 00:29:22.970 --> 00:29:25.809 saying that the individual subject, the I, that 00:29:25.809 --> 00:29:27.970 Sartre and the existentialists loved so much, 00:29:28.009 --> 00:29:30.690 was an illusion. He argued that the I is just 00:29:30.690 --> 00:29:32.869 a focal point where these huge impersonal structures 00:29:32.869 --> 00:29:35.529 intersect. He was, in a sense, trying to dissolve 00:29:35.529 --> 00:29:38.009 the individual into the structure. It was a devastating 00:29:38.009 --> 00:29:40.430 critique of existentialism. It feels like he 00:29:40.430 --> 00:29:42.589 is saying, we are characters in a book that's 00:29:42.589 --> 00:29:44.390 already been written by a grammar we can't even 00:29:44.390 --> 00:29:47.009 read. Sartre is screaming, I am writing the book! 00:29:47.109 --> 00:29:48.960 And Levi Strauss... Strauss -Conley says, no, 00:29:49.039 --> 00:29:51.500 you're just descendants on page 42. That is a 00:29:51.500 --> 00:29:54.660 haunting and very accurate way to put it. And 00:29:54.660 --> 00:29:57.240 nowhere is that grammar more complex or more 00:29:57.240 --> 00:29:59.700 beautifully analyzed than in his masterwork, 00:29:59.799 --> 00:30:02.480 Mythologiques. This is section five. This is 00:30:02.480 --> 00:30:05.180 the four -volume monster, the raw and the cooked, 00:30:05.339 --> 00:30:08.440 from honey to ashes. It's monumental. It's over 00:30:08.440 --> 00:30:11.690 2 ,000 pages. He took a single myth. Literally 00:30:11.690 --> 00:30:14.029 starting with one story he heard in Brazil and 00:30:14.029 --> 00:30:16.430 followed its variations and transformations from 00:30:16.430 --> 00:30:18.710 the tip of South America all the way up to the 00:30:18.710 --> 00:30:21.250 Arctic Circle. He treated myths like a type of 00:30:21.250 --> 00:30:23.910 speech, like a language. Yes. He broke them down 00:30:23.910 --> 00:30:26.190 into their smallest component parts, which he 00:30:26.190 --> 00:30:29.630 called mythemes. Think of mythemes like the sentences 00:30:29.630 --> 00:30:32.049 or key ideas of a myth. And then he looked for 00:30:32.049 --> 00:30:34.789 those binary oppositions again. Raw versus cooked. 00:30:34.950 --> 00:30:38.250 Fresh versus rotten. Silence versus noise. Sky 00:30:38.250 --> 00:30:40.910 versus earth. Nature versus culture. Let's use 00:30:40.910 --> 00:30:42.650 a concrete example because this can get very 00:30:42.650 --> 00:30:44.650 abstract. Let's look at the trickster figure 00:30:44.650 --> 00:30:47.230 because this is where the theory actually makes 00:30:47.230 --> 00:30:49.950 a kind of beautiful weird sense to me. Why are 00:30:49.950 --> 00:30:52.250 tricksters in so much Native American mythology 00:30:52.250 --> 00:30:56.089 almost always coyotes or ravens? This is a classic 00:30:56.089 --> 00:30:59.869 example of his logic in action. The simple functionalist 00:30:59.869 --> 00:31:02.029 answer would be, oh, it's because coyotes are 00:31:02.029 --> 00:31:05.049 sneaky in real life or ravens are smart birds. 00:31:05.250 --> 00:31:07.130 Right. That's what I would assume. The animal 00:31:07.130 --> 00:31:09.809 has a personality that fits the story. Levi Strauss. 00:31:09.839 --> 00:31:11.819 says no. That's too simple. That's looking at 00:31:11.819 --> 00:31:13.839 the content, not the structure. It says you have 00:31:13.839 --> 00:31:15.519 to look at their place in the system. First, 00:31:15.640 --> 00:31:18.920 you establish a primary binary opposition, life 00:31:18.920 --> 00:31:22.079 and death. Okay. Life versus death. The big one. 00:31:22.220 --> 00:31:24.259 Now, how do human beings interact with that opposition? 00:31:25.000 --> 00:31:27.079 Well, one way is through food. So let's look 00:31:27.079 --> 00:31:30.720 at that. What represents life? Agriculture. Growing 00:31:30.720 --> 00:31:35.099 plants. What represents death? Hunting. The killing 00:31:35.099 --> 00:31:38.640 of animals. Okay. So plants, life. Hunting, death. 00:31:38.720 --> 00:31:40.630 I'm with you. Now look at the animal kingdom 00:31:40.630 --> 00:31:43.650 from that perspective. Herbivores eat plants. 00:31:44.130 --> 00:31:46.470 So they are structurally on the side of life. 00:31:47.130 --> 00:31:50.250 Predators eat meat. They kill. So they are structurally 00:31:50.250 --> 00:31:52.549 on the side of death. So you have these two opposite 00:31:52.549 --> 00:31:55.130 poles in the animal world. Where do the raven 00:31:55.130 --> 00:31:59.089 and coyote fit in? They are carrion eaters. Scavengers. 00:31:59.150 --> 00:32:02.009 This is the key. They eat meat. So they are like 00:32:02.009 --> 00:32:05.349 predators on the side of death. They don't necessarily 00:32:05.349 --> 00:32:07.910 kill to get it, so they are like herbivores on 00:32:07.910 --> 00:32:09.750 the side of life. They are in the middle. They 00:32:09.750 --> 00:32:12.329 break the rule. They are mediators. They bridge 00:32:12.329 --> 00:32:14.970 the conceptual gap between herbivore and predator. 00:32:15.329 --> 00:32:17.609 And because they bridge that gap in the natural 00:32:17.609 --> 00:32:20.369 world, they can be used symbolically in myths 00:32:20.369 --> 00:32:23.089 to bridge the ultimate gap between life and death. 00:32:23.329 --> 00:32:25.930 So because they are biological hybrids in their 00:32:25.930 --> 00:32:28.390 eating habits, they become spiritual hybrids 00:32:28.390 --> 00:32:30.450 in the myths. They can travel between worlds. 00:32:30.769 --> 00:32:33.250 Precisely. They are chosen as tricksters not 00:32:33.250 --> 00:32:35.809 because they are sneaky, but because their structural 00:32:35.809 --> 00:32:38.569 position makes them the perfect logical tool 00:32:38.569 --> 00:32:41.589 to think with about the biggest, most unsolvable 00:32:41.589 --> 00:32:44.549 contradiction of all. That is, it's just so elegantly 00:32:44.549 --> 00:32:48.990 complex, it's beautiful. But is it actually true? 00:32:49.269 --> 00:32:51.809 That is the million -dollar question that has 00:32:51.809 --> 00:32:54.680 followed his work for 60 years. Because when 00:32:54.680 --> 00:32:57.460 I hear this, my first thought is of Stanley Diamond's 00:32:57.460 --> 00:32:59.799 criticism. He basically wrote a response saying, 00:32:59.880 --> 00:33:02.519 hey, Claude, have you ever actually, you know, 00:33:02.519 --> 00:33:05.099 seen a coyote? Right. Stanley Diamond, another 00:33:05.099 --> 00:33:07.160 anthropologist, pointed out that the biological 00:33:07.160 --> 00:33:09.900 premise is flawed. Coyotes aren't just scavengers. 00:33:09.980 --> 00:33:11.900 They are very effective hunters. They kill rabbits, 00:33:12.059 --> 00:33:15.440 mice, fawns. They are predators and ravens. They're 00:33:15.440 --> 00:33:17.980 corvids. They'll absolutely kill small animals 00:33:17.980 --> 00:33:19.779 if they get the chance. And on the flip side, 00:33:20.059 --> 00:33:24.029 bears are massive scavengers. Bears eat everything. 00:33:24.390 --> 00:33:26.710 But bears aren't usually tricksters in the same 00:33:26.710 --> 00:33:28.789 way as coyote. They're more often symbols of 00:33:28.789 --> 00:33:31.950 power or nature. Exactly. Diamond argued that 00:33:31.950 --> 00:33:34.049 Levi Strauss was cherry picking the biological 00:33:34.049 --> 00:33:37.529 facts to fit his beautiful formula. He was accused 00:33:37.529 --> 00:33:39.990 of threatening people with mathematics. I love 00:33:39.990 --> 00:33:41.809 that phrase, threatening people with mathematics. 00:33:42.029 --> 00:33:44.410 It implies he was bullying the data until it 00:33:44.410 --> 00:33:47.230 confessed to fitting his theory. There is definitely 00:33:47.230 --> 00:33:49.730 a sense, especially in mythologics, that the 00:33:49.730 --> 00:33:52.670 theory was so beautiful. So crystalline that 00:33:52.670 --> 00:33:55.450 Levi Strauss didn't want messy reality to ruin 00:33:55.450 --> 00:33:58.509 it. He was building a cathedral of logic. And 00:33:58.509 --> 00:34:00.650 if a particular brick from the real world didn't 00:34:00.650 --> 00:34:03.430 fit, he would chisel it down until it did. So 00:34:03.430 --> 00:34:05.970 he was the engineer pretending to be the bricoleur. 00:34:06.130 --> 00:34:08.309 Or maybe the other way around. It gets confused. 00:34:08.570 --> 00:34:10.469 Perhaps he was a myth maker himself, creating 00:34:10.469 --> 00:34:14.469 a grand, overarching myth about myths. A metamyth. 00:34:14.489 --> 00:34:17.130 That is a head spinner. Let's move to our final 00:34:17.130 --> 00:34:19.789 section, section six. Because for all this high 00:34:19.789 --> 00:34:22.789 theory and complex logic, the man was also a 00:34:22.789 --> 00:34:25.650 beautiful writer. We mentioned Tris Tropic earlier. 00:34:26.130 --> 00:34:29.730 Yes, published in 1955. It's a masterpiece. It's 00:34:29.730 --> 00:34:31.949 a memoir of his time in Brazil, but it's also 00:34:31.949 --> 00:34:34.650 an elegy. A song of mourning for a world that 00:34:34.650 --> 00:34:37.230 was disappearing. The title translates to sad 00:34:37.230 --> 00:34:40.789 tropics or a world on the wane. It's so good 00:34:40.789 --> 00:34:42.809 that the organizers of the Prix Goncourt, which 00:34:42.809 --> 00:34:44.730 is the biggest literary prize in France, like 00:34:44.730 --> 00:34:46.949 the Pulitzer for fiction, they wanted to give 00:34:46.949 --> 00:34:49.349 it to him. But they couldn't, because the rules 00:34:49.349 --> 00:34:52.230 said it had to be a work of fiction. It's just 00:34:52.230 --> 00:34:54.610 unheard of for an anthropology book to be considered 00:34:54.610 --> 00:34:56.900 for a prize like that. It contains some of the 00:34:56.900 --> 00:34:59.079 most beautiful prose written in the French language 00:34:59.079 --> 00:35:01.300 in the 20th century. And in his later years, 00:35:01.420 --> 00:35:04.599 the sadness, this melancholy, it really deepened. 00:35:04.599 --> 00:35:07.239 He wasn't just analyzing myths anymore. He was 00:35:07.239 --> 00:35:09.860 looking at the modern world and recoiling in 00:35:09.860 --> 00:35:12.800 horror. He became a very pessimistic environmentalist. 00:35:13.190 --> 00:35:15.929 long before it was trendy. In his later works 00:35:15.929 --> 00:35:18.610 and in posthumously published essays like in 00:35:18.610 --> 00:35:21.090 the book We Are All Cannibals, he argued that 00:35:21.090 --> 00:35:23.590 humanity is poisoning itself. There's that quote 00:35:23.590 --> 00:35:25.949 about overpopulation that's so chilling. Yes. 00:35:26.230 --> 00:35:28.510 He said the density of human beings has become 00:35:28.510 --> 00:35:31.250 so great that they've begun to poison themselves. 00:35:31.949 --> 00:35:34.090 He saw the disappearance of species not just 00:35:34.090 --> 00:35:37.570 as a biological loss, but as a symbolic and intellectual 00:35:37.570 --> 00:35:41.130 loss. Remember, if we think with animals, if 00:35:41.130 --> 00:35:44.050 animals are the tools in our bricoleur kit, then 00:35:44.050 --> 00:35:46.190 when we drive them to extinction, we are losing 00:35:46.190 --> 00:35:48.469 our ability to think. We are emptying the fridge. 00:35:48.809 --> 00:35:51.050 Soon there will be nothing left to cook with. 00:35:51.289 --> 00:35:53.639 Exactly. We are left with nothing to think with. 00:35:53.719 --> 00:35:56.039 We're impoverishing our own minds. And he had 00:35:56.039 --> 00:35:58.699 a very strong take on vegetarianism, right? Which 00:35:58.699 --> 00:36:01.679 fits his whole raw versus cooked obsession. He 00:36:01.679 --> 00:36:04.559 did. It follows his logic perfectly. He wrote 00:36:04.559 --> 00:36:07.179 that one day he believed the idea of raising 00:36:07.179 --> 00:36:10.099 and massacring living beings for food will inspire 00:36:10.099 --> 00:36:12.780 the same repulsion in us that we currently feel 00:36:12.780 --> 00:36:15.320 towards cannibalism. That is a heavy prediction 00:36:15.320 --> 00:36:17.800 to put meat eating on the same level as cannibalism. 00:36:17.900 --> 00:36:19.880 It's consistent with his worldview. If we are 00:36:19.880 --> 00:36:22.440 all part of the same grand structure, if the 00:36:22.440 --> 00:36:25.099 savage and the civilized are identical in their 00:36:25.099 --> 00:36:28.059 mental software, then drawing a hard absolute 00:36:28.059 --> 00:36:30.619 line between human and animal is just another 00:36:30.619 --> 00:36:33.619 arbitrary binary opposition, one that we might 00:36:33.619 --> 00:36:36.400 one day deconstruct. He lived to be 100 years 00:36:36.400 --> 00:36:39.480 old. He died in 2009. And the irony of his long 00:36:39.480 --> 00:36:42.260 life is so poignant. He spent his career studying 00:36:42.260 --> 00:36:44.980 the incredible diversity of human cultures, the 00:36:44.980 --> 00:36:48.139 wild pansies of thought. But he died believing 00:36:48.139 --> 00:36:50.980 that the modern world, the monoculture, the globalized, 00:36:51.000 --> 00:36:53.679 homogenized world we live in now, was systematically 00:36:53.679 --> 00:36:56.280 destroying that very diversity. He felt he was 00:36:56.280 --> 00:36:58.619 watching the world he loved vanish before his 00:36:58.619 --> 00:37:01.469 eyes. So let's try to wrap this up. Let's recap. 00:37:01.730 --> 00:37:03.909 We've traveled from the rabbi's house in Versailles 00:37:03.909 --> 00:37:06.449 to the Brazilian rainforest, from the university 00:37:06.449 --> 00:37:09.150 in exile in New York to the prestigious College 00:37:09.150 --> 00:37:11.809 de France. We have gone from the atom of kinship 00:37:11.809 --> 00:37:14.250 to the trickster coyote. It's a massive intellectual 00:37:14.250 --> 00:37:16.929 journey. So what does this all mean? Why should 00:37:16.929 --> 00:37:19.769 a listener driving to work in 2026 care about 00:37:19.769 --> 00:37:22.469 structuralism? Why does it matter today if we 00:37:22.469 --> 00:37:25.030 are bricolers or engineers? I think it matters 00:37:25.030 --> 00:37:28.429 because it is a profound challenge to our modern 00:37:28.429 --> 00:37:31.619 arrogance. love to think we are the engineers 00:37:31.619 --> 00:37:34.360 of our own lives, that we are rational, independent, 00:37:34.739 --> 00:37:38.059 modern, that we have outgrown myths and superstition. 00:37:38.380 --> 00:37:40.400 Levi Strauss comes along and reminds us that 00:37:40.400 --> 00:37:43.280 we are also, and perhaps primarily, prequelers. 00:37:43.380 --> 00:37:46.039 We are working with the scraps of myths, symbols, 00:37:46.179 --> 00:37:48.519 and structures that we inherited from our ancestors, 00:37:48.820 --> 00:37:50.980 whether we know it or not. We aren't smarter 00:37:50.980 --> 00:37:53.440 than the people who painted caves 30 ,000 years 00:37:53.440 --> 00:37:55.480 ago. We just have different tools in the garage. 00:37:55.800 --> 00:37:57.920 Exactly. And the hidden grammar is still there. 00:37:58.039 --> 00:38:00.659 We still operate on binary oppositions. Red state, 00:38:00.719 --> 00:38:03.820 blue state, 1%, 99%, Beamer Gen Z, Android phone. 00:38:04.460 --> 00:38:07.019 We are constantly defining ourselves by what 00:38:07.019 --> 00:38:09.559 we are not. We are still telling myths to resolve 00:38:09.559 --> 00:38:11.739 our contradictions. We just don't call them myths. 00:38:12.019 --> 00:38:14.559 Which leads us to a final provocative thought 00:38:14.559 --> 00:38:17.300 to leave everyone with. Levi Strauss suggested 00:38:17.300 --> 00:38:20.679 that myths exist to solve problems that are in 00:38:20.679 --> 00:38:23.599 reality unsolvable. The biggest one being the 00:38:23.599 --> 00:38:26.909 conflict between life and death. Yes. The myth 00:38:26.909 --> 00:38:30.130 creates a symbolic, logical solution where reality 00:38:30.130 --> 00:38:32.610 cannot provide one. It papers over the cracks 00:38:32.610 --> 00:38:35.349 in our existence. So if our modern world has 00:38:35.349 --> 00:38:37.389 stopped believing in myths, if we think we're 00:38:37.389 --> 00:38:39.550 too smart for Zeus or the coyote or the story 00:38:39.550 --> 00:38:42.260 of Genesis. What mechanisms do we have left? 00:38:42.420 --> 00:38:44.679 That is the dangerous question, isn't it? If 00:38:44.679 --> 00:38:46.940 we don't have the myths to mediate our deepest 00:38:46.940 --> 00:38:49.139 contradictions, are we just left with the raw, 00:38:49.300 --> 00:38:51.179 unbearable contradictions themselves? Or have 00:38:51.179 --> 00:38:53.039 we just replaced the old myths with new ones 00:38:53.039 --> 00:38:55.119 that we don't even recognize as myths yet? Things 00:38:55.119 --> 00:38:58.699 like progress or the market or the algorithm. 00:38:59.289 --> 00:39:02.230 And if those are our new unrecognized myths, 00:39:02.570 --> 00:39:05.690 what hidden grammar are they imposing on us right 00:39:05.690 --> 00:39:08.150 now? What is the binary opposition of the algorithm? 00:39:08.329 --> 00:39:11.010 What unseen structures are we living inside today? 00:39:11.250 --> 00:39:12.849 That is something I'm going to be thinking about 00:39:12.849 --> 00:39:15.010 for a very long time. Thanks for diving deep 00:39:15.010 --> 00:39:16.829 with us. It was a pleasure. We'll see you next 00:39:16.829 --> 00:39:17.010 time.