In this episode of the podcast, we talk about disagreeable people and how to deal with them. We also talk about the power of virtue signaling and how it affects our ability to make sense of the world around us. This episode was produced and edited by Alex Blumberg and Sarah Abdurrahmanova. Our theme song is Come Alone by Suneaters, courtesy of Lotuspool Records. Music by PSOVOD and tyops. Art: Mackenzie Moore Music: Hayden Coplen Editor: Will Witwer Editing: Ben Kuklinski Theme Song: Ian Dorsch Our ad music is by Haley Shaw Logo by Kaitlyn Ward We are part of the Robots Radio Podcast Network. See all the great network shows at RobotsRadio.net. Episode Music: "Space Travel" by Borrtex "Goodbye Outer Space" by Cairo Braga "Outer Space Warning" by Fountains of Wayne "Good Morning America" by The Weatherfords (feat. Jeff Perla) Thank you for listening to Robots Radio and Good Morning America. We look forward to seeing you in the next episode of Robots Radio, coming soon. - The Good Morning Radio Network, Good Morning Nation, Bad Morning Nation. May 29th, 2019. July 28th, 2020. Thanks for listening and Good Luck, Good Luck! - Good Luck Out There! - Cheers, Cheers! - The Best Fiends by The Good Life, Cheers and Cheers. -- Cheers from the Good Luck and Good Blessings -- Don't Tell Us About Something Good Morning, by , Cheers & Good Luck & Good Life! -- Yours Truly, "Bye, Timestaff, -- The GoodLife, - . by P. ( ) Tom Bells, Thank You, Sarah, Sarah, , Sarah & Dan, Jack, ? Michael, Jr., @ ~ & Love, & Joe, . . Thanks, Joe, Sriram, etc., , & , etc. ( ) . & John, Sr. & Mike, Sr., etc.
00:00:14.000We were just talking about how weird it is out there before the podcast about how it just seems like it's very difficult to keep together during these times and to keep a reasonable position and to handle all of the pressure of all the people that get upset at anything you do,
00:00:32.000left or right, in the middle, centrist, you're too centrist, you're too left, you're too right, you're unreasonable, you're too reasonable, you're too nice, you're not nice enough.
00:00:47.000I think that this is the era for disagreeability.
00:00:51.000If you're not easily swayed because you're somehow insensitive enough that you just want to keep to first principles, whatever it is that you believe, that seems to be the best hedge against getting swept up in the madness of others.
00:01:09.000I guess when I go metacognitive, I look at my yearning for group belonging.
00:01:15.000And then I also watch my inability to belong to groups that say crazy things.
00:01:19.000And so those are two conflicting feelings.
00:01:22.000I think sometimes when people look at me, they say, wow, you're really contrarian and you have an easy time standing up to the conventional wisdom.
00:01:47.000I would say it's much harder to sway me because the number of things I would have to move cognitively to accommodate a wrong idea is quite large.
00:01:57.000It seems unnecessary, but it also seems like we should be able to disagree on things and you should be able to point out with reasonable courtesy that there's something wrong with someone's idea and it not become a big personal thing.
00:03:22.000Well, it also tries to explain your feelings, too.
00:03:41.000Yeah, I have a very minimal understanding of biology, but in that understanding, I've come to accept some things just about being a person that I never considered before.
00:03:52.000All the different things that are running your decision-making.
00:03:56.000Just what we're talking about, the need to be in a group, and all these are probably evolutionary advantages to fostering tribal behavior so you can all work together and feed each other.
00:04:44.000Or the part of them that's speaking is the part that's above that behavior, but that's not the part that's going to be operative after 11 on a weekend at a bar.
00:04:52.000Yeah, three shots in, all bets are off, the wheels are off the wagon.
00:04:58.000We are permanently in our own blind spot because the part of us that is just and righteous and good seems to know very little about the other part.
00:05:08.000It's also this thing, this need to belong and need to be accepted.
00:05:12.000Like, we work to be accepted instead of work to be someone that you would want to be a part of the group.
00:05:20.000Instead of being, like, really honest about who you are and how you think and how you behave and how you operate in the world, instead of doing that and trying to prove upon that, you try to project an image of this.
00:06:14.000No, I mean, he had this post, which was, he was, I think, offering a hand to a woman up a stair, and it said, come with me, I'll ruin your life, but it'll be fun.
00:06:22.000You know, it was just like, it's so disarming.
00:06:26.000And I think that this is also partially, you know, a secret to your success, which is that you're a nice guy.
00:07:03.000I think I brought this up recently on Twitter about meta-honesty where there was – in the Castro in San Francisco, there was a bar, a restaurant that was advertising – I think that in this world
00:07:33.000of virtue signaling, vice signaling is really the growth industry.
00:07:37.000And that's what's working for good people because they are more in touch and You know, they are going to lie to you, and they're going to do all the self-interested things, but they're not going to surprise you quite as much.
00:07:50.000Well, in the case of Dan Bilzerian, I really don't think he's going to lie to you.
00:07:54.000I think what he's doing is living like a guy who's got $100 million and happens to be 35 years old and likes to bang hot chicks and fly around in private jets and live in some...
00:08:05.000Have you seen that fucking house that he's got?
00:08:07.000He just bought some crazy house in, like, Bel Air, I guess with that weed money.
00:09:32.000And jujitsu life is that when you have a relationship with the unforgiving, you can say, you know, that guy doesn't really know what he's doing, but then you're in the ring.
00:09:40.000You know, you're the man in the arena.
00:09:41.000And you find out very quickly whether or not the trash talking, you know, paid off or it didn't.
00:09:47.000And I think that many people have no relationship with the unforgiving.
00:09:51.000Like, you'll take them out on a hike into, you know, let's say, the Trinity Wilderness, and then two hours in, they'll just sit down and say, I want to go home.
00:10:02.000You're signaling something, but there's no car service, and we're not calling a helicopter.
00:10:08.000If you live in the social layer, you're surprised by the existence of the unforgiving.
00:10:15.000Well, on one hand, I want to support people's ability to do whatever the fuck they want.
00:10:23.000On one hand, I want to support someone's ability to sit in front of a computer and...
00:10:28.000Whether you're working, or you're writing code, or you're writing a script, or you're just fucking playing video games.
00:10:34.000I want to support your ability to do whatever you want to do.
00:10:37.000If you have the means, if your family's not starving, this is what you enjoy doing, why do I care?
00:10:44.000But as a person who's experienced a fair amount of adversity, especially self-imposed adversity, I would tell you that you would benefit from it.
00:10:55.000I've benefited from it, and I think you'd benefit from it too.
00:10:58.000You don't want to be that guy that two hours into the hike says, I want to go home.
00:11:02.000You want to be that person who just says, well, this is what we're doing.
00:11:06.000And I'm going to figure out how to do this, and I'm going to show character, and I'm going to be proud of myself at the end of this.
00:11:12.000I mean, I might have to walk for six hours, and when it's all over, my legs might be shaky, and I might have to sit down, but that Gatorade's going to taste so good.
00:11:20.000It's going to be like the greatest Gatorade of all time, because you're going to drink it, and you'll be like, I'll earn the shit out of this.
00:11:44.000Got my dog to the to the podcast studio and everybody's all right, you know But for those firefighters, I mean 12-hour shifts battling the blaze for people who lost their homes some of them tried to save it There was a story about a guy in Malibu that climbed on top of his roof with a hose and tried to fight off the fire and he got severe burns and he's in the hospital and I mean it's raining ash and and and and these chunks of No
00:12:20.000We've been in something of a reality drought.
00:12:22.000The number of people who have Very little relationship to reality.
00:12:28.000I mean, you know, I used to live in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and you'd come in from Boston and there would be the signs that fresh-killed chicken.
00:13:30.000And when you see that fire raging over those hills and helicopters are dropping water on it and then another house explodes because the gas line gets hit.
00:14:09.000Let's imagine you go for a wedding and they house you with your third cousins, people you barely know.
00:14:15.000If you're lucky enough that the sewage system breaks and stuff is leaking out of the ceiling and you guys all have to do heroic crazy stuff to save the house, you're going to be closer to your third cousin than you are to your uncle.
00:14:27.000And this is this very strange feature of the world that kind of a random arrival of diversity is very often what bonds you to some particular human being.
00:14:39.000And if you avoid adversity in groups your whole life, You probably don't realize that you're never fully activated as a human being.
00:14:51.000Particularly if men, I think, don't form groups that in some sense fight or battle or contest together.
00:15:00.000So there's this very weird fact that apparently humans are the only species that organize contests in teams.
00:15:09.000This is an intrinsic feature of being human.
00:15:16.000Well, chimps will have these incredible raiding parties.
00:15:22.000They're very methodical and they'll attack somebody else.
00:15:25.000But I don't think that they practice it.
00:15:27.000It's like, okay, you're red team chimp and you're blue team chimp.
00:15:30.000Well, we're the only ones that do stuff like that that can communicate, right?
00:15:34.000Like dolphins can communicate, but they don't do stuff like that.
00:15:37.000Right, or you have individual sparring, like you'll have two bears learning to play with each other because it's safer to play with your brother in childhood than it is to just suddenly show up against some big-ass bear and have to compete for females.
00:15:51.000I had William von Hippel on a couple days ago, and he's the author of The Social Leap.
00:15:56.000And we were actually talking about this, about one of the things that made human beings successful as we came down from the trees and started walking around the grasslands is our ability to organize and to work and coordinate together.
00:16:11.000Well, you know, but like African wild dogs are fairly good at this.
00:16:18.000And you watch what they do in their spare time.
00:16:19.000Very often, they just take the piss out of each other.
00:16:21.000So they actually come to each other's aid at a very high level in times of need.
00:16:28.000But like, you know, when you're just hanging out around the firehouse, you're really just giving each other shit all the time.
00:16:33.000And so there's something about the way in which we play being kind of divergent from the way in which we behave when we actually just need each other.
00:16:43.000And it's like you need to be on that line, you know, let's say, you know, throwing burlap bags and I just need you to do that thing and we're both facing something together.
00:16:54.000It doesn't have to be fighting in a militaristic situation, but I do think that – This is one of the weird things that's going on with all of this emphasis on care and feelings, is that often men need to give each other shit in order to form very deep bonds.
00:17:12.000If I can't tease you, and if I don't know where the line is, like there is this line, which is like, dude, that was way too far.
00:17:20.000We all know that those lines exist, and we sometimes have to go up to them, and sometimes we have to experiment by going over them.
00:17:26.000But if somebody says, I don't like the way you're talking, that seems very insensitive.
00:17:30.000My response is, well, you're going to keep me from forming a deep bond with that person.
00:17:34.000You just don't know that that's how we do it.
00:18:41.000You know, the fear of the hazing ritual gone wrong may actually stop people from ever actually making the really deep bonds to last a lifetime.
00:19:26.000Yeah, it's like they're just not good at it.
00:19:29.000And oftentimes that's some sort of a sign of social intelligence, a lack of social intelligence, a lack of, I mean, who knows what's going on in their home.
00:19:38.000It might just be bad information from parents and they're growing up in this environment of just very low-level social skills.
00:19:47.000And now what we're doing is, I mean, I think that you're spot on.
00:19:52.000We're now going to try to readjust everyone around our weakest players.
00:19:58.000So now the idea is that because that can be said in a horrible way, we're not going to let anyone say anything remotely adjacent to it.
00:20:06.000You can't do anything that would be a precursor to it.
00:20:09.000So you're just going to say, well, you see that little patch of bad cells over there?
00:20:12.000We're going to cut off your leg in order to stop that cancer.
00:20:16.000It's just like, couldn't we do something a little bit more surgical?
00:20:19.000Well, and also, there's some things that you're...
00:20:22.000There's a reason why we have this instinct to mock things.
00:20:32.000I believe this goes back to hunting parties and hunter-gatherers, where the one person who just wanted too much attention, like, you're fucking it up for this group effort.
00:20:40.000And that's kind of what happens socially when people claim these very ridiculous victim statuses.
00:20:47.000You know, and there's a picture that I put up on my Instagram a couple weeks ago of this guy.
00:20:51.000He had this crazy makeup on, and he had this ridiculous description of himself, like, non-binary queer that also identifies as a Muslim, and he was talking about quantum physics, and quantum physics helped him appreciate his queerness.
00:21:08.000And I looked at that, I said, okay, maybe.
00:21:10.000Or maybe you're just fucking crying out for attention.
00:21:13.000And all I wrote was, makes sense, definitely doesn't seem crazy.
00:21:17.000And people got mad at me for that, for something so obvious.
00:21:21.000I looked, I just peered into the fucking deep dungeon that is the comment section for a moment.
00:21:25.000And I saw people like, you would think that the people that are most susceptible to suicide, you would leave them alone.
00:21:31.000But your cruelty is, you know, you're exposing your cruelty.
00:23:16.000Sometimes it looks somewhat normal, and then suddenly it doesn't integrate, and the person just looks like they've got crazy stuff stuck to their head.
00:23:24.000And you're like, you've got crazy stuff stuck to your head!
00:24:10.000Now, what if somebody looks normal and then you turn around and suddenly they're Tammy Faye Baker and you never can predict when that's going to happen.
00:24:19.000An interesting question about, do we accept the person who...
00:24:23.000I don't know why I have this, it's just that's something in my mind.
00:24:26.000Well, because you're a logical person, and you're looking at this war paint that people are putting on, and you don't understand the desire to do this.
00:25:41.000Because you can't run away in those things.
00:25:42.000If you're in like stilettos, like these little things that you walk around in, and your feet are all smushed in, and you're basically doing tiptoes everywhere you go, and your feet have to be killing you by the end of the night, right?
00:26:24.000For a lot of people who don't know, cowboy boots, the reason why they slip on like that is when the horse bucks and takes off, your boots fall off.
00:27:08.000People die all the time that are wearing regular shoes that shove their feet into stirrups and then you're stuck.
00:27:14.000That's why cowboy boots come off like that.
00:27:17.000Yeah, I remember when I used to ride horses, we'd have the guy leading the trail would take us up to a gallop and suddenly say, emergency dismount!
00:27:25.000Yeah, and you'd have to do it at speed very, very quickly.
00:27:29.000But I think that high heels got taken over by women.
00:27:34.000Because a lot of the things that we claim that we like about heels, that is, I do it for height, I like the way it makes the leg look, probably secondary to the curvature of the back and the way in which that is typically associated with sexual receptivity.
00:27:58.000And so the way I read it is that the cost of the heel is part of the communication.
00:28:03.000In other words, I'm willing to do something that is clearly not comfortable or for my benefit in any other way, so much so that you can tell that I must be interested in sending a signal.
00:30:39.000He's going to grab that leather jacket and he basically has handles and he's going to throw you up in the air and he's going to hit you with the world.
00:31:44.000So there's a question as to whether you're safer if you spend all of your time in this kind of, well, what if something happens, I want to be prepared, but the preparation for it is itself potentially fairly hazardous.
00:31:57.000That's unquestionable, but isn't that just like the guy who sits on the couch and never goes into the woods because he doesn't want to get tired?
00:32:28.000So I think you hit the sweet spot where you got the skills, you've been in a training idiom, you really know what you're talking about, and you're getting front row seats but not actually having to have your brain particularly take the pounding.
00:32:46.000There's an absolute possibility, and it's not just your head, it's also your joints.
00:32:53.000The big part is your back and your neck.
00:32:55.000I know many guys that have neck impingements and disc herniations and fused neck discs and then nerve pinchs.
00:33:03.000Where their nerves are impinged to the point where they have atrophy in their arms.
00:33:08.000I know several guys who have that, where they have one arm that's smaller than the other arm, and it severely impedes their ability to move, and they used to be world champions.
00:33:17.000Two guys that have been on the show, Bas Root and Pat Miletic, two of the greatest of all time.
00:33:21.000Both guys have one small arm and one regular-size arm because of neck impingements.
00:33:27.000Their nerves are literally pinched down by all the swelling and scar tissue and damaged discs.
00:34:19.000But when you watch two really high-level guys trying to set each other up, it's this crazy rolling exercise in leverage and position and the knowledge of moves.
00:34:31.000That Eddie Bravo versus Hoyler Gracie.
00:34:35.000It's hard to even know what's going on.
00:34:39.000It's one of my more difficult challenges of being a commentator, is when the fight goes to the ground, explaining to people watching at home, what he wants to do right now is get his right leg over his arm, and as soon as he does that, now that arm is stuck.
00:36:16.000Okay, say if you were going to compete in the 170-pound division, but you actually weighed 190, what you would do is you would follow a pretty strict diet, keep your body weight and your fat at a certain level, and then when it comes down to a few days before, you would dehydrate yourself pretty radically.
00:36:32.000And then rehydrate yourself scientifically.
00:36:35.000There's a bunch of guys like George Lockhart, guys who are experts in this, and they'll give you the exact right amount of nutrients, the right amount of potassium and zinc, and they want to replenish all of your electrolytes and get you in a perfect balance, but you're still compromised.
00:36:48.000And if you don't have a guy like a George Lockhart or someone who's a real expert in nutrition and understands biology and can get you back into that position, you're most likely going to compete compromised, but you're going to accept that significant compromising because you're going to be a bigger person than the person you're fighting.
00:37:04.000But in boxing in particular, the vast majority of deaths have occurred in the lighter weight divisions, and a lot of it is not just because of the head trauma, but because it's head trauma to someone who's dehydrated.
00:37:40.000How frustrating if I want to meet you in a different class.
00:37:42.000Like, I wanted to fight you my whole life, but we're really separated.
00:37:45.000Well, you can lose weight the right way.
00:37:47.000Look, if somebody wants to compete at 170 pounds, in my humble opinion, they should actually weigh 170 pounds.
00:37:53.000My friend Cam Haynes is an ultramarathon runner, and one of the things that he does when he gets ready for ultramarathons is he loses body weight, but he doesn't have any body weight to lose.
00:38:03.000So he'll burn 3,000 calories and eat 2,000 calories, and that's how he loses weight.
00:39:38.000So you're dealing with, you know, it could be 25, 30 pounds difference between you two guys if you actually weigh what the weight class is when you get into the octagon.
00:40:02.000All the athletic commissions could step in and say, enough is enough.
00:40:05.000You're going to fight at what you weigh, and we're going to give you more weight classes so you can figure out what's the weight for you to be best at.
00:40:11.000And I hope it doesn't take someone dying before they figure this out.
00:40:16.000Because it's one of those things that people have done like...
00:40:38.000It's practiced across the board under the guise of being sanitary, prevention of AIDS. There's all these stupid reasons to cut dicks.
00:40:48.000Really, it's just a tradition that doesn't make any goddamn sense.
00:40:51.000Now, it's not the best analogy to weight cutting.
00:40:53.000Before we get into cutting dicks, I do want to...
00:40:57.000Pick up on an analogy, which I'm curious about.
00:40:59.000So when you're trying to describe the ground game, it's super tough for a lay audience because the picture doesn't necessarily match what you're seeing because the layer of expertise makes a bunch of random arm movements and head movements and hip movements into something else.
00:41:17.000We have the same problem in like math and physics where everybody wants to know what's going on with that thing.
00:41:24.000I've been listening to the physicists on your program.
00:41:27.000I don't think you have many mathematicians, but it's so confusing to figure out how to talk to the world about things that everybody wants to know about.
00:41:38.000And I was just curious if you saw a parallel in those two things.
00:43:31.000What they really mean is something like the space-time metric on space-like cross-sections has its volume form when integrated is higher, something like that.
00:44:16.000And when we try to solve his equations, We get these black hole singularities, which are called Schwarzschild singularities, and then we get this initial singularity, which we associate back to the Big Bang with the Friedman, Walker, Robertson model.
00:44:30.000In some sense, those singularities are indications to us that we're not at the end of physics and that Einstein's equations aren't the real story.
00:44:39.000And so rather than sort of saying, they're a pretty good model up until this point, and then we kind of really don't know what happened then.
00:44:46.000We have the observational thing that we would map to the Big Bang, and then we have the model thing that we would map to the Big Bang.
00:44:51.000And to be honest with you, we're pretty sure that our models don't make sense past a point, and now we're having this conversation past the point where we're pretty sure they don't make sense.
00:46:05.000So as a classical physicist, you say, that's not a good question, Eric.
00:46:10.000And when I ask you a good question, like how fast is the wavefront moving along this trajectory or something, you can give me an answer and it's definite.
00:46:20.000So as long as you ask a good question in classical mechanics, you get definite answers.
00:46:25.000When you go to quantum mechanics and you ask a good question, Technically, that means that the state vector is an observable of the Hermitian operator representing the question.
00:47:07.000I'll give you maybe this answer and maybe that answer, and here's the probability distribution that I'll actually give you either of those two answers.
00:47:13.000And what's more, I'll even kick it into the state that you asked about.
00:47:18.000So for example, if you ask, where is that wave concentrated?
00:47:22.000So like, let's say this is my coffee cup, and I drop a little drop in the center of it.
00:47:27.000That creates a circular wave that radiates out.
00:47:29.000And I say, where is the wave concentrated?
00:47:31.000Well, at one second it hits the coffee mug, let's say it's a big coffee cup, and at one second after that it's concentrated again in the center.
00:47:39.000So that becomes a good question only when the wave becomes re-concentrated in the center of the cup, right?
00:47:46.000But if that wave were a quantum wave, I could ask, where is the wave concentrated?
00:47:51.000And with equal probability, suddenly the wave will concentrate at some point along the circle that represents the wave.
00:48:03.000Well, the point would be it'll concentrate at one of these points around the circle at random with equal probability and suddenly the wave will concentrate randomly when it's a quantum question.
00:48:14.000So this is why quantum mechanics is so confusing.
00:48:17.000Quantum physics is so confusing to people.
00:48:18.000Because they hear that and they go, okay, this is...
00:48:30.000And I can see that if I ask where is the wave concentrated, you would say it's concentrated at like half an inch out from the center of the cup.
00:48:38.000Say, no, no, not what ring is it concentrated or what exact point?
00:48:42.000It's not concentrated at an exact point.
00:48:45.000But that wave in quantum mechanics, which is not concentrated at an exact point, behaves differently when I ask a bad question.
00:48:53.000So the point that I'm trying to get across is, Good questions have exactly the same properties in classical mechanics and quantum mechanics.
00:49:00.000There's no introduction to probability theory.
00:49:02.000The weird question is why is quantum mechanics answering bad questions?
00:49:08.000Well, maybe even weirder question is Not just why.
00:49:15.000Is quantum mechanics in an adolescent state of understanding?
00:49:18.000I mean, is it part of the problem that they don't know enough yet?
00:49:21.000And they're trying to, like, explain what they do know, what they can prove on paper.
00:49:26.000And for a person like me, like, well, what do you know?
00:49:29.000And they're like, well, we know probabilities.
00:49:39.000So let's say we were having a conversation about genetics and we were looking only at the DNA and we didn't see epigenetics in terms of methylation patterns.
00:49:48.000Then you'd shove everything onto DNA and maybe you had no concept of development.
00:49:55.000And the model would work up to a point.
00:49:57.000It would explain why you have blue eyes or brown eyes, but it wouldn't explain all sorts of other things.
00:50:01.000And so now – then you overdevelop that model.
00:50:05.000So I think that what you're saying is really Einstein's intuition, which is – I'm not saying – Einstein, I'm not saying that this is wrong.
00:51:10.000Those are the continents I'm looking at.
00:51:12.000That's the cool part about it, which is This is very confusing to figure out what you're looking at, but it's finite.
00:51:19.000In other words, if we stay for an hour or two on this and we actually answer all your questions, you will actually know what a principal bundle is and you will know the arena in which gauge theory exists.
00:51:30.000For folks at home that are just listening and they go, what the fuck are these guys talking about?
00:51:35.000What is the name of this video, Jamie?
00:52:11.000What you're looking at is a two-dimensional sphere that is the surface of the Earth where an extra circle is included at every point on the surface of that sphere,
00:52:29.000And that extra circle, which would be called the fiber, When you take the totality of all of those circles together, one for each point on the surface of the sphere, they create something called a three-sphere.
00:52:46.000That is all the points that are one unit of distance away from the origin in four-dimensional space.
00:52:52.000So that three-dimensional sphere is the analog of a two-dimensional sphere sitting in three-dimensional space.
00:53:36.000So the first thing is, you are finding out that one of your friends thinks this is the most important object in the universe, and you've never even heard of it.
00:53:54.000Well, okay, this is what was discovered in the mid-1970s as the connection between mathematics and what we call differential geometry and the discipline of particle theory.
00:54:10.000So two guys, Jim Simons, now the world's most successful hedge fund manager, and C.N. Yang, a person who might arguably be the world's first or second greatest living theoretical physicist, had a lunch seminar.
00:54:24.000And they said, why don't we figure out how do we talk to each other?
00:54:27.000And what they found out is they both had developed a version of this picture.
00:54:38.000So when Lawrence Krauss was talking to you about gauge theory, he was saying things about chess boards and you color it white and you color it black.
00:57:29.000Now you have to come back at me in calculus and you say, no, I don't like your notion of the derivative because what you're doing is you're measuring the absolute number of dinars that you're paying me.
00:57:41.000But what I want to do is I want to measure it in purchasing power because I'm losing money every month that you don't increase my salary.
00:57:47.000So I now come up with a version of the calculus in which my salary is not constant because it's being measured relative to purchasing power rather than absolute units.
00:57:59.000That's gauge theory, is that you're bringing in a reference level That does the differentiation.
00:58:07.000So you're measuring rise over run by customizing the problem.
00:58:12.000So these were two different applications of the calculus.
00:58:15.000The cheating employer says, I want to go with constant dinars.
00:58:19.000The gifted employee says, not so fast.
00:59:05.000In reference to quantum physics, like how you would use gauge symmetry.
00:59:10.000Let's look at some more cool stuff with the visual cortex, because everything that we can do visually should inform what we can do linguistically.
00:59:17.000So you should push everything into the visual realm that you can.
00:59:47.000It would be better that we spent a day or two on this most important object which we think reality is based around and that you visually got comfortable with it.
00:59:59.000And then you said, okay, now tell me again what gauge symmetry is.
01:00:03.000And then instead of Lawrence talking about this chessboard and the colors and all this stuff by analogy, you'd actually be seeing gauge theory visually.
01:00:11.000Like I could program a computer and have done so.
01:00:14.000To show you visually what a gauge theory is.
01:00:17.000And it takes some time to sort of understand what the trippy pictures are.
01:00:20.000But let's bring up the Escher staircase.
01:00:24.000And Jamie has a nice wrinkle on this that instead of using MC Escher's staircase, he's got this animated guy who just keeps going down.
01:01:25.000Or if you're changing currencies and you don't spend any of it because you keep using your credit card, by the time you come home you have more money than when you left because the exchange rates did something so that when you changed into each currency you somehow got richer.
01:01:43.000But by saying rock is better than rock, you're denying the fact they're exactly the same.
01:02:08.000And so, by virtue of that, we would say that the system has curvature.
01:02:13.000Curvature is the Escherness of these better than transitive statements.
01:02:19.000Darrell Bock What we're looking at, folks, for people who are just listening, we're looking at, if you've never seen those Escher etches, those sketches, they're very strange because what there are is a bunch of staircases that appear to always be going downhill, even if one of them is above the other one.
01:02:36.000And this one, we're watching an animated guy roll down this staircase constantly, even though it really looks like somehow or another it must go up somewhere, but you don't ever see it going up.
01:02:46.000But it's also a factor of the illusion of perspective and how it's drawn and playing games with lines.
01:02:56.000If you do this very weird experiment, which we didn't know about until the late 50s, called the Aronoff-Bohm experiment, if you run an electric current through a wire that's insulated,
01:03:13.000it appears not to have any electromagnetic field outside of the insulation.
01:03:41.000is what determines the shift in the electron.
01:03:44.000But it's insulated, so there is no electromagnetic field to worry about.
01:03:46.000It turned out that it wasn't the electromagnetic field alone.
01:03:49.000It was some previous geometric concept, which was called the electromagnetic potential, that determined something about the phase shift.
01:03:57.000So this Escher staircase, in the case of electromagnetism, it's like the photons are the analog of those steps.
01:04:05.000They're partially what determine the derivative operators, these reference levels, and again, in our discussion of the, am I paying you the right amount in a hyperinflationary economy?
01:04:16.000So all of these things, you're trying to figure out, well, that's an optical illusion, but that effect actually occurs in some systems not as an optical illusion.
01:04:26.000So this weirdness It requires a fair amount in terms of either study of math or learning visualizations.
01:04:37.000But there's no way to achieve it in my experience with linguistic communications.
01:04:43.000Like, all the stuff that gets said about, you know, the universe is expanding or let me tell you what a gauge theory is and why, there's a reason it's confusing.
01:04:53.000It's because it doesn't make any effing sense.
01:06:43.000Now, the idea that there are objects that don't come back to themselves under 360 degrees of rotation but require 720 is probably something you've never thought about before in your life.
01:07:19.000So this spinner is one of the coolest, most important objects anywhere, and it was discovered to be important in physics by a guy named Paul Dirac.
01:07:46.000Like, unless you're hanging out with physicists...
01:07:49.000They don't tell you that electromagnetism has to do with the fact that there's a secret circle at every point in space and time that's invisible to you.
01:07:56.000They don't tell you that there's stuff that requires 720 degrees of rotation.
01:08:00.000They just say mind-blowing stuff about...
01:08:44.000Well, we know it's there because when Dirac – so there was this problem with like the Schrodinger equation.
01:08:53.000The Schrodinger equation takes one derivative in terms of the direction of time and takes two derivatives in the direction of all the spatial directions.
01:09:02.000But because Einstein told us that space and time are woven together, For the theory to be relativistic, you need the same number of derivatives of time as of space, because space-time is sort of one kind of semi-unified object.
01:09:15.000All right, that means you either have to boost the number of derivatives of time up to two to match the two derivatives in the directions of space, or you have to knock the two derivatives in the spatial directions down to one derivative to get it to be equal.
01:09:31.000Now, one direction gets you to something called the Klein-Gordon equation.
01:09:34.000What Dirac did is he took a square root of the Klein-Gordon equation to get these spinners.
01:09:42.000He didn't understand at first that he was going to get kicked into this world of spinners.
01:09:47.000He came up with a square root equation in which A times B, thought to be numbers, was not equal to B times A. It was like equal to the negative of B times A. So it was like what two numbers, when you multiply them, matter in which order?
01:11:16.000They come back to themselves after 360 degrees.
01:11:20.000They don't require 720. So this is sort of the, you know, if you were going to go to a play, you'd have the dramatic personnel of the play given to you at the beginning.
01:11:33.000It's a story about space and time, where and when, about what is in that, you know, like who are the players and what equipment are they using?
01:11:44.000And then there's the how and the why, which is the equations and the Lagrangians that govern the rules of play.
01:11:50.000So, for example, if you and I go to the beach and we've got a ball and a net and you think we're going to play volleyball and we actually – somebody says, no, no, we're going to play CPAC tukro, which is like volleyball played with the feet in a martial arts style, which is awesome.
01:12:06.000Yeah, we showed a video on that recently.
01:12:08.000I believe it was from Thailand or Bali or something.
01:12:19.000That's a different set of rules for a ball and a net and two teams that you could have done it one way as volleyball and you could have done it another way as CPAC tuck row where you're using your feet and not your hands.
01:12:33.000So that's sort of the breakdown of what a physics theory is.
01:13:41.000We've got three or four different kinds of objects in the system.
01:13:45.000We seem to be, and people are going to not like what I'm about to say, but screw them, we seem to be almost at the end.
01:13:53.000Like, these equations are so beautiful, they're so tight, that it's almost most mysterious because it feels like this thing, like a movie that ended prematurely.
01:14:08.000Well, when we found the Higgs particle at the LHC, there wasn't anything left that needed to close to explain the system.
01:14:20.000We know that there's dark matter out there that we don't understand.
01:14:22.000We know that there's dark energy out there that we don't understand because of astronomical observations.
01:14:27.000But all the stuff that we know about, when you look at it and collide it at high energies and figure out what mutates into what, there's nothing missing anymore.
01:14:35.000So it's like you've got this odd thing where everything got very, very simple, very unified.
01:14:45.000And it felt like we were going to get one or two more giant unifications and the whole thing would be tied up with a bow.
01:14:51.000And right now, we just don't have anything that is needed to close the system.
01:14:57.000So, for example, when you have radioactive carbon decay...
01:15:02.000What you see is that one of the neutrons flips into being a proton, and it spits out an electron when it does that, right?
01:15:23.000So this guy Wolfgang Pauli said, I bet there's a particle that's neutral so we can't see it, that we won't leave a track in a cloud chamber.
01:15:31.000It won't have any effect that we can see electromagnetically.
01:15:34.000But it's carrying away some of the energy because I'm not going to give up on conservation of energy just because this particular process doesn't seem to conserve it.
01:15:43.000There was this sneaky particle that was spiriting away some of the energy of the system that couldn't be seen because it didn't interact electromagnetically, and it didn't interact according to the strong force.
01:15:56.000The only thing you could use to trap it would be the weak force, and the weak force was so weak that it was very hard to see it.
01:16:01.000Okay, well, there's no neutrino that I know of left to find.
01:16:38.000I wasn't going to go there, but I was going to say that they found alternate generations of matter.
01:16:44.000So you and I are made out of the first generation of matter, but there could be alternate Joe Rogan made out of second generation matter or third generation.
01:16:51.000We don't know of any generations beyond these two.
01:18:18.000And we don't know it because nobody will show you a picture of the Hoppe vibration.
01:18:22.000Or there's a concept called the group, which is how we think about symmetry, that no mathematician or physicist can go a day without talking about groups almost.
01:18:32.000And we act as if it doesn't need to be taught in high school.
01:18:38.000We're not going to teach you that groups even exist.
01:18:40.000So we've built the professional version of the subject around objects that we don't even tell you exist when you're studying in school.
01:18:50.000So if you think about the portal story...
01:18:55.000In childhood, there's this story about either it's a rabbit hole or a looking glass or a wardrobe or platform nine and a half or whatever these things are.
01:19:04.000I don't know what the Harry Potter version of it is, but how do I get from the world that I'm in To this new amazing world and even find out that it's there.
01:19:13.000And that's what I think theoretical physics has failed to do.
01:19:16.000It hasn't built a portal for most people to even understand what the issues are, what are the objects, what is the game, how close are we to understanding what existence itself is, which I think we're very, very close.
01:19:29.000And the square root, this was what I was going to say before about Dirac, is like the most profound object in mathematics to me.
01:19:38.000And the reason is, is that when I ask you what is the square root of negative 1, that is a question that can be posed entirely within the familiar.
01:19:46.000So the real numbers, you're comfortable, you know, you owe money, you have money, so I need plus 1 and minus 1. Square root, understand what times itself equals my number.
01:19:59.000And when you say what's the square root of negative 1, there's no answer inside of the real line.
01:20:04.000But there is inside of this extension called the complex numbers.
01:20:08.000And so it's like you're in flatland and you're trying to figure out, is there anything beyond flatland?
01:20:13.000So the great thing about the square root is it's a question you can ask in flatland that gets you out of flatland.
01:20:21.000Jesus, you confused the shit out of me.
01:20:40.000Alright, well now I put my arm into the system and my arm plus coffee cup gives you spinners.
01:20:46.000Like, oh dude, I did not even know that spinners were here.
01:20:50.000I did not know that any object required 720 degrees of rotation.
01:20:56.000So the cup arm system, we just exhibited it.
01:20:59.000You don't need to learn Clifford algebras or all of this extra jazz that would get you to spinners mathematically.
01:21:05.000But you need to figure out, how do I discover the hidden world?
01:21:10.000And think about this from the perspective of ayahuasca.
01:21:14.000Somebody takes ayahuasca And they have no idea that their brain is capable of this alternate state or LSD or 5-MeO DMT. All of these things are like panic rooms in the mind.
01:21:27.000Where if you lived in a house for 20 years, you think you know your house.
01:21:31.000And then one day you pull an old musty book off the shelf and suddenly the bookshelf swings open.
01:21:37.000And it's like, holy crap, there's like a second home inside of my home.
01:21:40.000Well, that's a lot of what psychedelics are like.
01:21:43.000Psychedelics are like square roots in that they're portals.
01:21:47.000They can get you from the place that you know into a place that you never imagined could exist.
01:21:54.000Do you think that the teaching of groups and a lot of these concepts in high school would Facilitate a better understanding of it from the general public in adulthood?
01:22:18.000It's not something that you use in everyday life so that it's just too weird to think about the fact that there's cousins to the electron that are fat?
01:23:07.000You're going to lose some people because of the level of abstraction, but you're going to get other people who have never been able to buy a base hit in mathematics suddenly start overperforming.
01:23:17.000So the problem is that when you teach this stuff, It's very disruptive to notions of the hierarchy.
01:23:24.000Have you thought about what are the causes of these different levels of perception?
01:23:45.000So the thing I just showed you with the planet Earth in a way that you've never seen it before, I know of only two people who've ever created that image.
01:23:58.000Maybe there are many more, but I've never heard or met them.
01:24:01.000The number of people who first of all know what the hop vibration is, I would guess is if you really deeply know what it is, a few thousand people in the world.
01:24:10.000So if none of those people are gifted at trying to visualize or none of them care, none of them program computers, the number of people who could present that to the world is so small.
01:24:21.000It's such a tiny priestly class that your odds of getting anyone figuring out how to make this understandable are very small.
01:24:32.000So we're talking about a very small priesthood, most of whom are too busy trying to do new research to want to care to communicate, many of whom are not gifted communicators.
01:25:06.000Look at a tiny number, tiny collection of these objects, principal vibrations, spinners, exceptional lead groups, this E8 248 dimensional monster.
01:25:20.000There's a 248-dimensional set of symmetries which seems to live only to be the symmetries of itself, where everything else seems to live to symmetrize something else.
01:28:40.000I don't want to interrupt your story again, but I have an idea.
01:28:43.000So what I'm trying to get at is this is the majesty and mystery of being a mathematician or a physicist, these findings.
01:28:51.000So what I was going to say about Dungeons& Dragons, you're given these dice where the normal die is always a cube, but the platonic solids, you can have an octahedron, tetrahedron, dodecahedron, icosahedron, all these things.
01:29:03.000There's an analog of those five platonic solids in the next dimension up, which I think are called convex polytopes.
01:29:11.000So each one of those objects has an analog one dimension up.
01:29:14.000But it was found out in the late 1800s that there's a new platonic solid in dimension four called the 24-cell.
01:29:59.000And some of them touch everything and some of them have yet to touch almost anything.
01:30:04.000And it's like a communication from pure design that there is so much beautiful structure and so much grace in the universe that we're just...
01:30:39.000Why is there something that's the analog of a circle, where a circle I would call one-dimensional because it's got one degree of freedom, this thing is 248 dimensions.
01:30:48.000And it doesn't seem to live to symmetrize, in the jargon we would say it doesn't have a defining representation of lower dimension.
01:30:58.000So normally you have something of low dimension.
01:31:32.000But, like, if we're saying the Big Bang existed – And that means some point in the history of the universe it was this really tiny thing and it decided for whatever reason something happened and it became this enormous thing.
01:32:14.000I'm always uncomfortable saying something to settle, but you can say a lot of stuff about very early, very small, and that could turn out to be wrong.
01:32:26.000Impossibly long ago, 14 billion years ago, in our minds, for a guy like you, mathematics, you see it in numbers on paper, it all computes, you see the numbers, 14 billion is a number that makes sense.
01:32:40.000But conceptually, for a dummy like me, 14 billion is like, if I'm being honest, do you think I really have an accurate understanding of what 14 billion is?
01:32:49.000No, but Steven Weinberg doesn't feel 14 billion either.
01:32:53.000Right, but you know where 100 yards is.
01:33:36.000But then there's the concept of infinite, right?
01:33:39.000Like, this is one of the things that Krauss said, or maybe it was Sean Carroll, that said, it's really not that we know that we can see 14 billion years ago.
01:34:19.000Right, so a space-time metric is a collection of rulers and protractors, so I can do length and angle, including length and the time direction.
01:34:27.000And that generates a derivative operator, which we talked about before, which is rise-over-run relative to a custom reference level.
01:34:36.000The custom reference levels generate the Escher staircase that we did, and that generates the curvature tensor, which generates gravity.
01:34:44.000So, strangely, with all this kind of, like, Woo woo stuff that we've been doing.
01:34:50.000We just came to a much better description I really appreciate that you're explaining this in a way that you hope that someone can understand.
01:37:44.000When I say legitimate, I mean someone who can craft a new hour every two years, who does Netflix specials, who headlines all over the country, travel all over the world and do stand-up.
01:37:54.000It's an insanely small number of humans.
01:37:56.000And not only that, my guess is that the number of people that you think are at the very top of that craft, like when I really think about who really knows theoretical physics, It's tiny as fuck.
01:38:28.000Theoretical physics has been faking that it's in a healthy state for a long time.
01:38:33.000We are so vulnerable on the doorstep of actually cracking this puzzle, in my opinion.
01:38:40.000Well, that's where our comparisons end, because pretty much anybody can do stand-up if you put enough time to it, if you're silly, if you figure out the craft.
01:38:47.000But what you guys are doing is not just really rare, but also the barrier for entry, like the cost of entry, is exceptionally high.
01:38:58.000Like, you have to spend an inordinate amount of time studying and understanding this stuff just to get to a base level of what you've been able to explain.
01:39:08.000You've been able to explain, like, some really difficult concepts to the layperson that must have taken you fucking eons to learn and understand all your study of mathematics and of geometry and of all the...
01:39:28.000Maybe you don't practice physics, but you understand it.
01:39:31.000Well, no, it's something more audacious than that, which is that when you see a 10,000 hours only sign, only those who've done their 10,000 hours can come in.
01:40:21.000Take something very simple, like the harmonica.
01:40:25.000Most people don't know that that sweet blues sound on a harmonica comes from not using it the way the manufacturer said, which is called straight harp, and using it instead the way African Americans figured it out, which is it's much cooler to base it around a hole that nobody was expecting to draw rather than for blow.
01:40:44.000And that gives you a seventh chord that sounds like sweet blues music.
01:41:31.000Who knew when you get one of these things as a party favor as a kid...
01:41:35.000There's not somebody who says, hey, don't do that thing where you put your mouth over it, I'll say, you know?
01:41:41.000But who knew that that's the cooler sound?
01:41:43.000Well, yeah, but the idea is that there's something called tongue blocking, there's something called cross harp, and there's something called the 1-4-5 progression with a scale that no music teacher ever taught you in grade school in piano.
01:42:02.000When I opened for Jordan Peterson, Dave Rubin invited me and he said, you know, why don't you play a minute worth of harmonica at the Masonic Theater?
01:42:09.000So for 2,500 people, I became Dave Rubin's talking harmonica monkey.
01:42:14.000So I opened for Jordan Peterson and I said, you know, rule number zero, life is too short not to play the harmonica.
01:42:18.000Everyone should learn to play the harmonica or know why they're not doing it.
01:42:22.000There's this great thing in the Cal Berkeley fight song, we'll win the game or know the reason why.
01:42:27.000If you don't play the harmonica, it's so nice.
01:46:06.000Well, there's also, I don't know if it's that one or something de vegetale, there's one of those similar Christian-based dimethyltryptamine, ayahuasca-type churches that they sing songs about Jesus.
01:46:19.000They trip balls and sing songs about Jesus.
01:46:22.000And what's really weird about DMT in particular, and I guess you could say the same of mushrooms, but mushrooms apparently when it synthesizes, it's real similar in chemical content to what dimethyltryptamine is.
01:46:38.000I'm going to fuck this up, but I think it's NN-dimethyltryptamine is dimethyltryptamine, and then when it's synthesized, when the body processes Psilocybin, I think it produces something called 4-Fox-4-Aloxy-NN-dimethyltryptamine.
01:47:10.000You can sing your way out of a bad trip.
01:47:12.000You can actually control the trip with good music.
01:47:15.000And one of the things that's really constant with DMT is these Icaros that these shaman will sing.
01:47:23.000And these Icaros with the thimbles and a little bit of drum and these really rhythmic singing, it makes the hallucination dance in a really obvious, tangible way.
01:47:38.000It moves around itself and it changes and guides the trip.
01:48:07.000They actually blow tobacco on you while you do that.
01:48:16.000So this guy with just this little rattle and singing, and sometimes there's actual singing, not just whistling, but in their language, this beautiful, soft, rhythmic sort of song, and the hallucinations dance to the sound,
01:48:33.000Like they're supposed to dance to it, like they're a part of it.
01:48:36.000It's not just that you're having music on top of the psychedelic experience, but that they merge.
01:48:42.000They merge, and the psychedelic experience is 100% affected by this.
01:48:48.000So it's not just that there's chemicals that are interacting with your brain.
01:48:52.000You're doing something, too, by responding to that music, and then the music is doing something by enhancing the way your perception of this experience is, and all of it is dancing together like they belong together.
01:49:42.000You will think for a good solid five seconds before any hasty moves.
01:49:47.000Let's understand that we're going to get great benefit from this in terms of our ability to be loose and to be silly and to enjoy each other's company.
01:49:56.000But if a demon comes out during this time, you must address this demon personally, on your own.
01:50:03.000Don't pull the demon out and throw it at the party.
01:50:34.000Yeah, and what if the worm actually was psychedelic?
01:50:38.000Like, what if there was a way we could genetically engineer a worm to be intensely psychedelic?
01:50:43.000Like, the worm literally is made out of ayahuasca.
01:50:47.000Why don't we put a toad in the mezcal?
01:50:49.000Well, don't they do weird shit like that, where they'll take tomatoes and they'll use fucking frog DNA in the tomato to make it live longer?
01:50:57.000Isn't there some weird shit they're already doing with...
01:51:00.000Oh, the cool stuff is the green fluorescent protein stuff.
01:51:02.000You can have glow-in-the-dark rabbits.
01:54:18.000One's always trying to eat and the other one will jump on them and start biting them and kicking them and the other one will do the same and they'll rotate.
01:55:48.000Yeah, well, the Taliban actually really needed the Jewish community, because they wanted to be able to say, hey, we've got great relations with Afghanistan's Jewish community.
01:57:03.000Hyenas, there's been evidence of hyenas attacking their sibling while it's in the ambionic sac.
01:57:13.000And when they come out, the bigger one or the stronger one or whatever one's healthy will almost immediately start attacking its sibling and try to kill it.
01:59:32.000So when the new male takes over the pride, his first order of business may be, let's stop wasting resources on the previous daddy's offspring.
02:00:55.000Yeah, Google that because I might be wrong about the numbers, but it's some exorbitant number of babies die and a huge number of women die.
02:03:48.000I mean, if we were all shaped like stingrays and we saw a person, we'd be like, what in the holy fuck is that thing?
02:03:54.000Whether it's articulating fingers and moving its eyeballs around, sniffing things with its nostrils.
02:04:00.000We just accept the fact that this shape is normal, that it makes sense.
02:04:05.000Well, this is why cephalopods, from last time when we were talking about the cuttlefish, I just learned something new, which is that cephalopods are under consideration to be the next great model organism for biology.
02:04:18.000So if you think about how weird it is that some branch of the phylogenetic tree is so far distant from us, that these mollusks have such advanced minds and their skin...
02:04:35.000Not only do they have these chromatophores to get the camouflage right, but they also change the texture of their skin to mimic things like coral and all this stuff.
02:04:44.000Wouldn't it be cool if we made cephalopods the next great model organism and then we started doing comparative, like, not only neuroanatomy, but connectomics, where we're trying to study how their brains are organized?
02:04:56.000Because they're so far away, they are probably...
02:04:59.000The closest we will ever get to meeting aliens.
02:05:02.000I think I said that the last time I was here.
02:05:03.000And I'm really excited if that goes forward.
02:05:06.000Well, it really doesn't seem like anything else.
02:05:33.000Well, it would be fun to do I mean, I would imagine that newts and salamanders in the tetrapod category would be the best for us to study for regeneration.
02:05:41.000I like how they regenerate up to a point.
02:05:43.000Like, nature will say, yeah, you can grow an arm back, can't grow a head back.
02:07:17.000The guy who did it, I think, was, maybe his name was Robert White, and he was a devout Christian, so it was really, it was good, because, you know, there was a lot of this reverence for the human form, and if a religious person is doing it, we feel better than if somebody is, like,
02:07:33.000Right, right, some atheist asshole scientist who doesn't, there is no God.
02:07:38.000I bet he's cutting heads off of dogs and reattaching them to monkeys.
02:07:42.000Yeah, that's also like we think of it as like, okay, it's one thing if you're trying out medicine on a monkey that might save babies, but it's another thing if you just say, hey, what happens if I cut this monkey's head off?
02:07:55.000Well, there's all this crazy, I don't know if you've ever seen this, the Russians had this film introduced by J.B.S. Haldane, a great English biologist who was also a communist and therefore very pro-Soviet.
02:08:06.000And there's this experiment, experiments in continuation of the brain after death.
02:08:15.000And they hook up the head to an artificial circulatory system.
02:08:20.000And they sort of continue to have interactions where they swab the head and they get the eyelash movement and the tongue comes out to lick and eat things.
02:08:45.000The Archbishop of Canterbury found himself, I think, seated across from Haldane and wanted to needle him because he was a communist atheist.
02:08:55.000And he said, you know, tell me, what does your study of the biological world inform us about our great creator?
02:09:13.000It's like, smoked, burned, but to our way of thinking, it's not that hard of a burn.
02:09:19.000Well, we're really committed to the idea that all the stuff that we can do, manipulating the planet, sending rockets into space, that that's more important than what an ant does.
02:09:29.000We're really committed to this, that our significance, although it's clearly, if we're working together, we believe in a sense of community, it's more important to each other, to us, it is, but to the whole thing, is it really more important?
02:10:03.000This has been widely decided that if we lost all insects, especially all ants, it probably would collapse all the ecosystems that we need to sustain human life.
02:10:14.000I have the feeling that those water bear tardigrades would be like...
02:10:42.000I think I read a paper proposing that, and they were explaining the critical role that ants play in all these different ecosystems and how the biomass of ants worldwide is equal to or greater than the biomass of human beings.
02:11:48.000But the really interesting thing about humans is that we're the only species that understands what game we're in, and we can reject the game.
02:11:56.000Every other species is playing the game.
02:12:02.000Very surprising to me that my brother only wanted to have two kids and didn't want to spend all his time down at the sperm bank making donations.
02:12:09.000I said, you're an evolutionary theorist.
02:12:11.000Do you ever think it's kind of weird that you're not playing this game very effectively?
02:14:22.000So, they had to sleep in these elevated tents, and they had to paint some sort of turpentine-type chemical all over the posts, because if they didn't, the ants would crawl up the posts and eat you in your sleep.
02:14:38.000Like, literally climb in your ear and start eating you, and tell everybody, and you would die that way.
02:14:44.000Like, people have died from elephants.
02:15:16.000Hymenoptera has this weird property of this haplodiploid structure so that the females are highly related to each other.
02:15:22.000And so in the same way that your cells aren't individual animals, they all conspire to create you, there is a sense in which in this world of bees and ants and wasps and things, Hymenoptera, The real entity is the colony.
02:15:43.000So, you know, if I took a cytological approach to you, and I just went cell by cell, you know, you're this collection of, you know, 10 or 50 trillion separate entities.
02:15:55.000And that's what makes ants so terrifying, is that, you know, Kropakian, the great anarchist...
02:16:17.000When those leafcutter ants design those intricate cities, they have places where things ferment and where gases are released through holes in the ground.
02:16:28.000And it doesn't make any sense that this little tiny brain could figure out this enormous structure.
02:16:34.000But somehow or another, when combined...
02:18:14.000Looks like tunnel systems, and then they lead to these big circular areas where they're really almost uniform in size.
02:18:22.000It's a really strange way, or similar in size.
02:18:26.000So they have these pathways that go to these like rooms, these circular rooms, and there's just This incredible network of these tubes and circular rooms that they uncover.
02:18:52.000They're not even done in this video here, but you see all the pipes that extend to the left and to the right.
02:18:57.000So they've developed some sort of complex civilization, some weird, bizarre network of these passageways and rooms, and they do it just like this everywhere.
02:19:11.000So some pattern has emerged in their species that has set them up to act as this collective group and then operate in this similar fashion all over the world, wherever they exist, with that kind of dirt they can manipulate like that.
02:19:50.000Okay, so if you look at, for example, C. elegans, the nematode with 1,000 cells for the entire body plan, 300 of which are neurons, we have a complete map not only of the cell lineage diagram, which is how this thing unfolds from a single fertilized egg,
02:20:07.000But we also have a complete wiring diagram of its nervous system.
02:20:11.000So this is something that locomotes, it moves around, it eats, has sex, and it's only got 300 neurons.
02:20:19.000Each of those is an extremely primitive machine, and they send signals to each other.
02:20:23.000And we still don't know how the thing really works, even though we've got the entire thing mapped.
02:20:29.000This was the great insight of Sidney Brenner that we would make the worm the great model organism because we could actually map everything about it, right?
02:20:42.000And it is astounding to me how little we've learned.
02:20:47.000But I had thought that we would have gotten much farther in understanding the brain Did you see this recent discovery of a 25-foot-long sea worm that apparently is not just one organism?
02:21:02.000It's like many organisms together combined?
02:21:23.000It looks like they landed on another planet, and they're experiencing this thing.
02:21:29.000Like, this thing, whatever this is, I'm pretty sure that what I read, I read it really quickly as I was running out the door, that it exists.
02:21:38.000Large, 8-meter worm-like sea creature stuns New Zealand divers.
02:22:27.000Well, it moves and changes, but sometimes it's larger than a human waist or a human chest, and other times it gets real skinny, but it's fucking huge.
02:24:37.000Dude, how bizarre is it that there's a civilization of these things all combined, but what they are is individuals that operate as a giant tube?
02:29:26.000That there is something weird about the affect of attracting some beautiful bear to a kind of easy place to kill it and then just getting super excited about it.
02:29:38.000Well, your natural instincts, there's a reason for them, and you're most certainly correct.
02:29:43.000It's a weird feeling, the idea that you're going to trick this bear into thinking he's going there to eat, and then you kill him.
02:29:50.000Bear hunting is different than any other kind of hunting.
02:29:53.000And first of all, there's a lot of emotional attachment to it because people love teddy bears and things along those lines.
02:31:06.000You can still hunt bears, but it's extremely difficult.
02:31:08.000Almost impossible with a bow or very, very unlikely.
02:31:11.000Your rate of success would be extremely low.
02:31:13.000If you want to control populations, if you like to eat moose and deer or you want to have them keep healthy populations and you don't want the bear encroaching on these rural homes and these areas, you have to control their populations.
02:31:27.000And there's very few other ways to control their populations other than baiting them.
02:31:33.000So assume that I was positively predisposed to hunting.
02:31:35.000I do think that they're beautiful creatures.
02:32:37.000One of the problems with respect is that it's assumed that you only have that respect if you don't have happiness that goes along with that respect.
02:32:44.000So I understand that there is some amount of sadness, some amount of happiness.
02:33:16.000It's hard if you're not there experiencing it.
02:33:18.000It's hard if you're not involved in this hunt for many, many days and it gets very difficult and you don't know if it's ever going to happen.
02:33:24.000But the bear hunting in particular, especially over bait, is way more problematic psychologically.
02:33:32.000I think there's a really good argument, and I support this argument, that you must keep bear populations in control if you want people and all those other animals to live in harmony.
02:33:54.000A real giant problem in terms of our...
02:33:58.000Our anthropomorphization of these animals, attaching these human attributes and these human thoughts, and thinking of them as our friends in the forest, and then what they actually are to people that live out there.
02:34:10.000My guess is that if I went hunting with you...
02:34:29.000I don't have any of those issues, I think.
02:34:32.000I think that where the issue is is that I wouldn't expect an unbalanced elation.
02:34:37.000Yeah, I understand what you're saying.
02:34:39.000And especially an unbalanced elation when you're hunting over bait for an animal that is not necessarily thought of in our culture as being an animal that you eat, which is bear.
02:34:51.000And a lot of times people think that you don't eat them.
02:34:54.000Black bears in particular, actually, they taste very good and people do eat them.
02:34:58.000When you deal with people, like I have friends, my friend John and Jen Rivett, who live in Alberta and they are hunting guides.
02:35:06.000It's a real necessity up there to hunt bears.
02:38:47.000And what I wanted to do is I wanted to reacquaint myself with – now that I can watch somebody actually in that moment, try to figure out what my ethics around hunting were.
02:39:00.000And I thought that I had prepared myself.
02:39:02.000And I thought when I saw you, find out where Joe is.
02:39:08.000Because I have no question, knowing your ethics and how you think, that you would have a very subtle perspective on all these different kinds of kills, which sorts of animals.
02:39:19.000Yeah, if you get to Spears, you're in a weird place.
02:39:24.000Like you say, oh, I only spear wild pigs.
02:39:27.000We're trying to get rid of them anyway.
02:39:59.000Out to 100 yards, you're fucking deadly if you have a really good control of squeezing the trigger, you're not jerking everything, you're not panicking.
02:40:10.000You know, bow, it requires way more practice, way more fine-tuning of your motor skills, but it's still possible.
02:40:18.000Then you have crossbow, which is even more effective than a bow.
02:40:22.000Faster feet per second so that it travels at a flat line because it's going quicker before it drops.
02:40:29.000They all drop at the same speed, right?
02:40:31.000Bullets and arrows all drop at the same speed.
02:40:34.000They just don't get there at the same speed.
02:40:36.000So in the same amount of time, like if I'm shooting something at 100 yards with a bow, I am aiming with a sight that is calculating for the fact that the arrow is going to drop significantly in the time that it takes, if it's going 280 feet per second is like a normal speed for a good bow with a good heavy arrow,
02:40:58.000that's 280 feet per second that goes 100 yards, okay?
02:41:01.000A bullet is going to go 100 yards far quicker.
02:41:05.000But in the same amount of time it takes that arrow to get to that target, the bullet is going to drop the same amount as the arrow.
02:41:11.000And that's what most people don't understand.
02:41:13.000So a crossbow is more ethical because it's more accurate.
02:42:27.000I mean, they used to be allowed to hunt black bears with a spear in Alberta until a big scandal a couple years ago.
02:42:39.000Where a guy filmed himself doing that.
02:42:42.000He shot a bear, or he killed a bear, rather, with a spear, and was hooting and hollering, and people got a hold of the video and thought it was disgusting and protested it, and people from Under Armour dropped his wife from their,
02:42:57.000you know, they had this sort of sponsorship deal with them.
02:43:02.000And it caused a rift in the hunting community.
02:43:06.000Some people think you should be able to hunt with a rock.
02:43:16.000Or are we putting on a macho performance of our ability?
02:43:20.000Okay, this is exactly what I wanted to get at, which is, if you know that a population has to be controlled, and you want the meat, Then it makes sense to me that you have to open yourself up to some of the pleasure of the kill.
02:43:59.000I think if you were there, you'd probably be even more conflicted because you actually were there in the presence of the thing dying.
02:44:09.000Watching a bear die on a video is one thing, but being there alive when they die is a completely different thing.
02:44:18.000It's a very complicated thing because we have these deep-set Yeah.
02:44:40.000But if you use the animal respectfully and you kill it ethically, I don't have any problem with hunting bears.
02:44:48.000In fact, I think it really is a necessary task.
02:44:52.000It's something that even if you don't like to hunt bears, if you're living in a place like Alberta, you probably should hunt bears because you should do your part.
02:45:03.000One of the things that becomes an interesting relationship is the relationship between the moose hunters and the deer hunters and the bear hunters.
02:45:13.000Those smart ones have come to an understanding that even if I don't hunt bear, I need those people out there doing it.
02:45:20.000But it's how do you do it and why are you doing it?
02:45:24.000I've seen animals die very quickly with a bow and arrow.
02:45:31.000But I don't want to be the person that tells you you can't do it.
02:45:34.000If you have an ethical range of five yards and you only hunt bear with a spear at five yards and you kill it immediately, you hit it and kill it, you're right.
02:45:51.000And also, I would kind of be a hypocrite.
02:45:53.000Because even though I can ethically kill something at 40 yards or just figure out what the number is depending on the size of the animal...
02:46:01.000Even though I can do that, I could do it way easier with a rifle.
02:46:52.000I don't want to focus more on it necessarily, but it's just a question I had to ask you because I was very surprised by my own reaction.
02:46:59.000Well, a lot of people are taking issue.
02:47:02.000My good friend Ben O'Brien, who's a brilliant writer who's actually also a hunter, Is advocating that people stop taking what he calls grip and grins.
02:47:12.000What a grip and grin is, like say if you shot a beautiful deer, you're holding the deer up by the antlers and you're smiling.
02:47:18.000And he's advocating that those photos are problematic because people who don't hunt look at it like you're some bloodthirsty asshole that's super happy that something died.
02:47:27.000And that's not, even though that's not how the people feel when they're taking those photos, what they are is happy.
02:47:34.000That's something which is very difficult, which, you know, especially using a bow, most people go home empty-handed.
02:47:40.000It requires too much fitness, physical fitness, because you're going up and down these mountains.
02:47:45.000It requires too much accuracy and training and technique and archery.
02:48:01.000Because it was probably not going to come together and people get happy.
02:48:04.000These are people, again, that already accept hunting.
02:48:07.000Now, if you take someone who is an animal rights activist or someone who deeply appreciates animals and then you show them that photo, they have a completely different association with what that photo means.
02:48:16.000What that photo means is here's an asshole who's a trophy hunter who shot this thing.
02:49:06.000Do you see a way in which this political epic comes to an end?
02:49:10.000The only hope that I have is through reasonable dialogue becoming an accepted and appreciated thing, a celebrated thing.
02:49:22.000And that this is possible that people can realize there's some stupidity To this team mentality that we have, is right versus left, which is almost all, a good percentage of it, is these assumed identities.
02:49:36.000These predetermined patterns that get adopted in order to, as we first started talking about this, in order to establish yourself as someone who's in a group.
02:49:56.000And you see them switch teams, and I don't buy their rationalizations when it comes to ideology, but I think what they're doing is they're switching teams because they realize there's an in on this team.
02:50:12.000They probably have as much of an affinity to the ideas of one side as they do the other side.
02:50:19.000They just go all in on one side to get acceptance from the group.
02:50:23.000There's no way people change their opinion that much over two years or something like that.
02:50:27.000It's like they just decide this group makes more sense now, and I've been attacked by people on the left, so I'm going to go to the right, or vice-a-verse.
02:50:34.000And usually what it is, even when they say they've been attacked, like, oh, you fucking baby.
02:50:40.000300 million people just in this country alone.
02:50:42.000If you put something out there publicly and a thousand people attack you, don't act like you're being persecuted, okay?
02:50:48.000You have an idea, you've launched that idea out into the zeitgeist, and people took a big shit on it.
02:50:55.000Whether it's people on the right or people on the left, you've got to be able to argue your point one way or the other and not just immediately jump ship when someone who shares ideas with you decides that your idea sucks.
02:51:30.000And this idea that this group is trying to fuck it up and they're trying to turn us all Muslims and this one wants everybody to be gay and this one wants everybody to fucking have free food and this is nonsense.
02:51:42.000We need better understanding and, you know, the word better education gets tossed around a lot, but it also means better social understanding.
02:51:52.000An appreciation of who we are and why we think the way we think.
02:51:56.000And calling out weasels on both sides of the pattern.
02:52:00.000Calling out weasels on the right that are pandering, that are just repeating a lot of these accepted beliefs because they know that they can hit this frequency and a lot of people sing along.
02:52:11.000Or the same thing that people are doing on the left.
02:52:33.000Ethics, but an appreciation for each other, for all of us as a group.
02:52:38.000And that, I think, if we can celebrate reasonable conversations and celebrate an understanding of other people's perspectives, be able to just look at how you're looking at things and have empathy.
02:52:52.000Okay, let me see where you're coming from with this.
02:52:54.000Okay, let me put myself in your shoes.
02:52:56.000Okay, instead of just immediately, like, fuck you, you cuck, and fuck you, you this, and...
02:53:01.000Instead of thinking about it that way, if we just tried to just...
02:53:06.000Everybody exercise a little bit more, so we're a little bit more calm, and come at this from a rational place, and try to, like, realize, like...
02:53:16.000I've been experimenting with a very dangerous idea, which is I keep hearing about chief inclusion officers.
02:53:21.000And, you know, I thought about, you know, I think from Ecclesiastes, you know, to every season there's a purpose under heaven.
02:53:30.000So if there's inclusion, there also has to be exclusion.
02:53:33.000And, like, deplatforming or unplatforming somebody is an act of exclusion.
02:53:38.000And very often it's very interesting that the people who are for inclusion are very focused on the need for deplatforming, which is an act of exclusion.
02:54:32.000And keeps pushing us into this very divided landscape.
02:54:36.000I was just curious, you know, in terms of our group of people that we talk and hang out with in common, Where you see the high leverage is.
02:55:08.000And I just – have you thought about how this ends?
02:55:14.000Well, I would never be so presumptuous to think that I have any idea how this ends.
02:55:20.000I've proposed various scenarios to myself, and I don't like any of them.
02:55:26.000I don't like where it's going, because what I worry about, and this is also, again, hypocritical, that Because I think it probably should burn down and be rebuilt from the ruins.
02:55:38.000We're not going to get such a clean thing again.
02:56:51.000We see that this is incorrect, and we see these people that think the world is flat are idiots, and we think that these people that think this and think that, we think they're all wrong, and so we want to stop them from talking.
02:59:38.000Is it the people who were selling, you know, weapons of mass destruction in Iraq as a response to 9-11?
02:59:43.000Or, you know, the people, let's assume that you're a reasonable person on immigration.
02:59:50.000You neither think that borders should be open nor closed.
02:59:54.000Then you start hearing professors say, you know, the great thing about immigration is that it has absolutely no costs and all of them are better than all of our people because they're highly trained, they're highly motivated, they're young.
03:00:06.000You're thinking like, okay, what kind of thing has all benefits and no costs?
03:00:11.000You're not even entering into a rational description.
03:00:14.000And now we're hearing like all these trade deals that got negotiated and Yeah, that kind of wasn't true.
03:00:19.000All those things that we were telling you that if you question these things, you were a backward protectionist and you were just stuck in the old world and you couldn't embrace the new.
03:01:01.000And so I don't actually want to de-platform these people, but I do have the very strong sense.
03:01:06.000When Elon came on your show and Peter Thiel, my friend and boss, came on Dave Rubin's show, I thought that was quite a moment where this alternate network of distribution...
03:01:19.000which is not under centralized control started to be seen as comparably powerful and important and I think some of the noises that Tucker Carlson just made To Dave Rubin about, well, hey, you're doing this out of your garage and you have the freedom to do anything.
03:01:35.000I'm beholden to the structure in which I live.
03:01:39.000We're at a very interesting place with respect to what is this thing, this alternate distribution network for ideas that's unpoliced by the institutions.
03:01:52.000And I think I've been convinced in the last two days that I need This is advice that I got from you at the beginning.
03:01:59.000You said, you need to start a podcast.
03:02:10.000But we have to return to some kind of stable sanity that I'm positive that the institutions can't return us to because the institutional interests I think?
03:02:40.000Is that high-agency individuals are out-competing traditional institutional structures in terms of mindshare.
03:02:48.000And some of those high-agency individuals are irresponsible.
03:02:51.000They're like Milo types that are kind of trying to light things up.
03:02:55.000And some of them are extremely responsible.
03:02:58.000And some of them, you know, will do a few irresponsible things, but will self-correct.
03:03:02.000And this new world that is being born is a huge check on the institutions.
03:03:27.000This is the only place you could do this.
03:03:29.000But isn't it interesting to you that we still have not – like, Jordan had to be dealt with by the mainstream because the book was too big.
03:03:42.000I think his effect on the internet is bigger than the book.
03:03:46.000I think the YouTube videos and the debates that he has, the one that I was telling you, the recent one, the interview with GQ... So interesting.
03:04:50.000And whenever Jordan goes on one of these conversations, these video interviews, and there's a feminist and Jordan Peterson, like, there's a fucking game going on.
03:05:18.000And this is what's happening over and over and over again because whether you appreciate what he's saying or not, he has some facts that are undeniable.
03:05:28.000He has some positions that are based on a rich understanding of history and of Marxism and of communism and of a lot of the problems with people With compelled thoughts.
03:05:40.000If you're compelling people to behave a certain way, compelling people to talk a certain way, and we're not talking about compelling people to not commit crimes or violence.
03:05:50.000We're talking about weird things, like compelled pronouns.
03:05:54.000So if I take your analogy, because you brought it up, that he's like doing jujitsu.
03:06:01.000So in some previous era, and I thought your description of the early days of MMA was fascinating, that we just didn't know what fighting was.
03:06:10.000So we didn't know who would win or what systems worked.
03:06:13.000And if you think about the mainstream media is like...
03:06:19.000It's some system that maybe has some validity in some very rarefied context, and it comes into general purpose fighting systems, and it's dismantled very quickly.
03:06:32.000So now we have this weird situation that we've got this new world of kind of rule-laden, anything-goes discussions, more or less, And the mainstream world doesn't want, like, the Aikido world doesn't want to acknowledge that this weird UFC-type thing is happening.
03:07:50.000We don't give them access to the media, etc., etc.
03:07:53.000Or we can shame them, or we can kind of take them aside.
03:07:57.000At what layer of this sort of communication stack do we should – because I think one of the things that we haven't done is to positively say, We agree with you that the speech is offensive and it is potentially dangerous, but we think it should be downregulated differently than the deplatforming option.
03:08:17.000Well, the deplatforming option, the real issue is there's only a few different avenues for these people to express themselves publicly.
03:08:26.000And the argument that's really strange is, should these be regulated like a utility?
03:08:32.000Or should they be thought of as private businesses get to decide what's on their channel, essentially?
03:08:37.000It's almost like a private NBC that everyone can broadcast on.
03:08:51.000I think these ideas, what I was discussing, that there's a reason why good ideas and bad ideas should go to war.
03:09:00.000It's the same reason why, even though I kind of knew that most kung fu was bullshit before the UFC, I want those guys to get in there and try.
03:10:18.000The way they were going at him was so much more unreasonable.
03:10:21.000They were saying right away that what he has to do is leave work because he's white.
03:10:29.000They were basically saying a racist thing and everyone universally acknowledges as racist except for these super lefties.
03:10:37.000Who thought that it made sense because in their mind every white person is somehow or another guilty of at least, at the very least, using your privilege to advance in the world to the negative impact of people of color and people of other ethnicities.
03:10:56.000So they decided that they are going to have a day of exclusion and instead of this day of absence having Right.
03:11:21.000You would see that fucking stupid president of the university standing in front of those kids and they told him to put his hands down because he was threatening.
03:13:29.000Similar enough that any deviation from 50-50 shows you the amount of sexism in a workforce.
03:13:35.000And we are all so different that once you include women in previously male occupations, you will see a great benefit because of the diversity of opinion.
03:13:44.000So there are all these self-contradictory couplets.
03:14:09.000You can't do that because they don't make sense.
03:14:11.000You can't say, oh, yeah, they make sense.
03:14:13.000Well, then how do I know when you're serious?
03:14:15.000If you just let those through and those things fail...
03:14:17.000But that's my point, is that by showing the internal...
03:14:21.000In mathematics, we call this reductio ad absurdum, that once you take on too many different points, you show the conflicts, showing that those things can't all be true.
03:15:03.000You have a company that is dedicated to the commercial exploitation of humans as sexual objects for the privilege of the male gaze, and now you're angry that it doesn't include trans into that exploited class.
03:15:18.000So just without getting into whether this makes good economic sense or anything, there's just the issue of self-contradiction.
03:15:25.000But isn't that a reductionist view of what Victoria's Secrets is?
03:15:28.000Isn't it possible that a woman can feel empowered and sexy if she's wearing lingerie and it's not just to the exploiting of the male gaze that she appreciates looking attractive?
03:15:41.000So the idea is that you're both going to say...
03:15:47.000That's a positive female empowerment issue, and it's a terrible male exploitation issue at the same time.
03:15:53.000But is it a terrible male exploitation issue?
03:15:55.000What if women decide universally they like guys who wear leopard skin underwear, and guys start wearing leopard skin, tighty-whitey underwear?
03:16:05.000But yes, but what's the difference between that and women wearing lingerie?
03:16:08.000If women wear lingerie and they do it because they like to be gazed at and they like to be more attractive or to accentuate their attractiveness.
03:16:16.000So then the sexual self-objectification is an interesting issue.
03:16:19.000Is that an issue of empowerment or is it an issue of oppression?
03:17:06.000And these ideas are clearly incompatible.
03:17:08.000So, for example, one of the tricks that I use is to look at advertising for women, to women, and what phrases get used.
03:17:19.000So if you use the phrase, turn heads this summer, in quotes, and put it into a search engine, you'll find all sorts of revealing outfits that are intended to court the male gaze.
03:17:30.000You say, well, maybe that's not really the male gaze.
03:17:32.000So then you put in a phrase like, make him drool.
03:17:35.000And that will be used to market to women.
03:17:38.000And so this issue about, can we at least get to a point where we're talking about the internal contradictions of your position?
03:17:46.000Like, I don't even want to get into what my position is.
03:17:49.000The first thing that's scaring me is that you've said so many things so strongly and so dogmatically.
03:17:54.000And this doesn't have to be about gender, it could be about race, it could be about class.
03:17:59.000But once you've said too many things, Then I can say, look, I don't see any way of squaring all of your positions.
03:18:07.000And it doesn't even have to do with me.
03:18:10.000I think that's where we haven't gone to yet.
03:18:13.000So you think letting them come up with as many preposterous things as possible, and then once it gets to a position where the ideas contradict each other, expose that...
03:18:23.000Well, that's my point, which is once you've told me all of your principles...
03:18:28.000Then I'm going to say, great, I'm confused.
03:18:31.000Do you feel that I have to understand you or that I can't understand you?
03:18:36.000Because I don't know which is operative in this situation.
03:18:39.000Tell me the rule how I decide which principle that you've stated governs this situation.
03:18:49.000I don't want to have to refer to you where you say, well, you bring me each individual situation and I... Will tell you which principle is operative and which principle is inoperative.
03:19:01.000I want you to list your principles and list your mechanisms for resolving the conflicts within your principles.
03:19:08.000And then, once you've done that, we can actually evaluate what you're saying.
03:19:13.000But at the moment, it requires you as an oracle to tell me which of your seemingly contradictory positions is operative in every particular case.
03:19:23.000So, for example, We did that one with the person who was the quantum ex-Muslim, trans-trans, you know, everything going on.
03:19:34.000The person with machilophobia, which is an extremely rare psychological condition, or the person who appears to be deep into some radical self-actualization principle?
03:21:41.000I've never watched one of these in my life.
03:21:43.000But it's not the case that I believe that the male gaze is nowhere to be found here because...
03:21:49.000It's a very weird thing that the female is largely buying an amplifier for something that is supposed to excite a male, but it's a little bit to me like the female is the magician buying magic supplies at a store for the audience.
03:22:46.000And are they transphobic if they don't want to see that?
03:22:48.000If women go to one of those all-male review shows and it's all trans men, but they're heterosexual and they're not really into trans men, are they all transphobic?
03:22:59.000Yeah, so what I'm trying to get at is there's a hierarchy, like I'm not that interested in this, in the particulars of Victoria's Secret's profitability and what their statements are.
03:23:10.000What I'm more interested in is you've enunciated so many, there's so many different principles at work here as to what should govern in a conflict that you won't tell me Well, okay, when these two beautiful things that you've said actually lie in conflict,
03:23:48.000But as long as I have to keep going to you and your crazy definitions and your, well, this is operative on alternate Tuesdays, then it doesn't work.
03:24:05.000If you allow them to establish certain ridiculous principles and rules that are contradictory to each other, they'll come up with a reason why they make sense.
03:25:02.000These, I think, honestly, and I'm not trying to blow Jordan's horn any more than I already have, but I think what he does is very important because he is one of the few that engages in these people in these very public forums, in these long-form debates where they go to war with ideas.
03:25:20.000And these are way better conversations.
03:25:37.000I don't have the credentials that he has.
03:25:38.000Like, when he's the University of Toronto professor, he's a PhD, when he's going to war with these people, they're throwing out valiant warriors to die at his sword.
03:25:48.000Well, did you hear what just happened with Brett and Richard Dawkins?
03:26:18.000He believes that religion is actually an adaptation.
03:26:21.000And the weird thing was He said, look, there's young Dawkins and there's old Dawkins.
03:26:27.000And young Dawkins came up with these two powerful ideas, the idea that the meme, the unit of ideation, is a gene-like object.
03:26:38.000He also came up with the idea of the extended phenotype.
03:26:42.000So when you talked about that ant mound that you were excavating, that ant mound is in some sense part Of the ant strategy, it's so deeply tied in that you have to consider the ant mound as part of the ant system because it can't exist without that complicated underground city.
03:27:01.000And so what he said was, okay, if I use these two concepts, that memes are like genes and that genes can throw off a bad meme instantly, so memes have to ride on a gene, And they can't parasitize it too much.
03:27:18.000And you also have this inclusive fitness, which is that maybe religions co-travel with us and allow us to outcompete those who don't have them, because they seem to be found everywhere.
03:27:50.000And I think Dawkins had this kind of reaction like, oh, crap.
03:27:55.000I'm meeting an ultra-Darwinist who's read my work, taken it seriously, and is feeding it back in and saying, you, Richard Dawkins, in your younger years, established ideas who, when those ideas' logical consequences are explored,
03:28:12.000it completely negates your late-life hatred for religion.
03:28:17.000Because it reveals it to be an adaptation rather than a parasitization of the human species.
03:28:22.000You know the real problem that I've always had with Dawkins and his take on religion is not that he's wrong or they're right.
03:28:30.000It's his anger that he has when he's talking to people that believe.
03:28:34.000He sets up the kind of like heavy conflict That, you know, the way people interact with each other, the reactions are very dependent upon the attitude that a person has when they go into this interaction.
03:28:51.000You know, two people meet on the street, one person meets that person, says the same words, and they wind up hugging.
03:28:58.000Another person meets that person and has a fist fight.
03:29:03.000Well, there's a lot of it is the way you approach people.
03:29:05.000A lot of it is the way you accept people's ideas, the way you communicate with them, the way you allow them to fully express themselves without judgment, and he doesn't buy any of that.
03:29:15.000He feels like there's a war going on, and he's got to shut down religion as quickly as possible.
03:29:33.000And what Brett did is to say, actually, your scientific work goes in the exact opposite direction.
03:29:39.000The reason I brought it up was it was one of these unexpected occurrences that when you have a meeting of these things, and this is your point about the UFC, is that the mixed martial arts thing is, hey, we don't know what's going to work.
03:29:54.000And gradually, we came to understand that there were certain systems that were hyper-effective and that even those could get – you were making the point earlier about Brazilian jiu-jitsu didn't keep advancing at the same level once we understood the role of all of these different systems in advancing fighting.
03:30:12.000So the question that I'm having repeatedly is, what kept Brett and Dawkins, for example, from having that meeting?
03:30:22.000Where I think Dawkins probably didn't fully understand what he was getting into when he agreed to appear with an evolutionary theorist on stage.
03:30:30.000But don't you think that he's just very confident in his ideas?
03:30:32.000He's very confident in his intellectual capabilities?
03:30:35.000He's been doing these type of debates and shutting down these secular people or these people that are, I mean, from various religions, right?
03:30:42.000I mean, he's had these debates with people from Judaism, from Christianity.
03:31:32.000Well, this is what I'm trying to get at.
03:31:34.000Isn't it interesting that, in general, the people who say immigration is a pure good, there is no connection between Islam and terror, The only people who oppose free trade or protection is these people know enough not to want to trounce us.
03:31:53.000Because what they're saying is wrong, right?
03:31:56.000And they're expert enough to know that they've got a secret five-point exploding heart technique or something.
03:32:12.000I don't think they necessarily do actually believe that they're wrong.
03:32:18.000I do think that some of these people that are like super progressive and very committed to some of these maybe illogical positions on some of these ideas are afraid of conflict though.
03:32:30.000And I think that's one of the reasons why they shy towards progressivism, towards socialism.
03:32:50.000This is the type of person that would think it's a good idea to show up and bang on someone's door and scare them in their home.
03:32:58.000That type of person is not the type of person that looks forward to on an even battlefield engaging someone one-on-one and just Just open communication.
03:34:09.000They all know that climate science is settled science.
03:34:13.000I mean, there's some that they have these pretty much open borders are a great thing, and that everybody who doesn't believe in that is only not believing it because of xenophobia.
03:34:27.000Whatever these set of beliefs are, I don't see these guys in open discussion, particularly, you know, two hours long.
03:35:01.000They make a tremendous amount of money.
03:35:03.000If they came and said anything that could be misconstrued or misinterpreted even, not even actually being something that's actually transphobic or actually homophobic or actually xenophobic, if they said anything that could be taken out of context and put in a small clip and then sent out and it goes virally,
03:37:16.000But is the idea that this is such a – like your point about Aikido was if you happen to be unarmed and attacked by a man with a sword, this might have some value.
03:37:26.000It would have some value if someone attacked you in a very specific way and didn't understand Aikido.
03:37:31.000So the idea is that that's a very restricted rule set on which to fight, right?
03:37:35.000So now maybe what you just said to me, which could open this whole thing up, is that all of these people can only apply their ability to have a back and forth of ideas If the rules are heavily restricted?
03:37:50.000I don't necessarily think that's the case.
03:37:52.000I think they could do it in other ways.
03:37:54.000I think all of them are operating under this rule system because this rule system is how they get paid.
03:38:00.000But I think Seth Meyers is a very smart guy.
03:38:56.000And then when Ben sat down with Bill, we saw this thing that was very – we were sort of hoping because Bill is kind of the most towards us of anybody in that kind of mainstream environment.
03:39:33.000When I saw Ben in that context, there were only a few hours separating the two appearances, and that the characteristics of that environment, and where Bill's show is the most like this show, that it's just too different.
03:39:48.000It's not really the same ecosystem, and you couldn't have an open debate.
03:39:53.000Unless it cuts off after seven minutes and the host is in control.
03:40:03.000He was doing a conversation with Steve Bannon, and he was on Sam Harris' podcast, and he was talking about it, and he said that one of the problems was he got to this point where he was like, I wanted to ask him more stuff, but I ran out of time.
03:40:15.000And I heard that, and I was like, what the fuck kind of ancient system are you operating under that you run out of time?
03:40:23.000Well, he definitely did run out of time.
03:40:58.000You know, Tucker, you know, I'm having my own weird issues where I used to, you know, my previous position was that Fox News is just propaganda and that Tucker was in that old crossfire situation way back when.
03:41:13.000Tucker was opening up as a different person, saying, you have the freedom, you're the new, I'm still stuck in the old.
03:42:30.000I mean, it's a big thing in terms of, first of all, the actual reality of the organization and what they've done to protect people that have molested children.
03:42:44.000I don't think that he wants to do that sort of wild country, open-type internet show.
03:42:53.000I think he enjoys wearing a tie and doing a straight-up talk show like the Johnny Carson show or the Jay Leno show, and I think he's very, very good at it.
03:43:02.000And I don't think there's anything wrong with that.
03:43:03.000I think a lot of people like that format.
03:43:04.000Okay, that's on preference, and I understand that.
03:43:30.000I think if you had two people having these conversations in long form instead of those CNN three windows where they're just battling it out for six minutes and then everybody's yelling over everybody, that is the single worst way to argue ideas.
03:44:30.000I think what you're saying is true for everybody except Bill Maher.
03:44:34.000I think Bill Maher would hold his positions in podcast form, and I think he would just have more time to expand on them, and I base this on him being on Sam Harris' show, and I find it to be very good.
03:44:47.000It was the 10th anniversary of Religious, and he was excellent on there.
03:45:00.000The whole thing is very different with him.
03:45:02.000He's on HBO. But when Ice Cube came to him and said, you can't do that, it was painful to me because I was positive that he had a Carlin-style attitude about that word.
03:45:13.000Because in this environment, again, that's where he makes his living.
03:45:17.000He butters his bread over at HBO. And if you wanted to have a long-form conversation with that guy, even on a podcast, and he didn't have an HBO show, that's one thing.
03:45:25.000But if you do have an HBO show, you have to have a totally different attitude because you're walking a goddamn tightrope.
03:45:32.000But this is what I'm trying to get at, is that we are too dangerous, in some sense, to play with.
03:45:40.000He's asked, I've talked, Bill and I actually went back and forth on an email about something.
03:45:45.000I think I dropped the ball, but no, he would do anybody's podcast.
03:46:05.000I mean, the only thing that's holding him back, he's a man of his ideas.
03:46:10.000He's probably the least likely to alter or manipulate his ideas of anybody that's ever done one of those late night talk show hosts.
03:46:18.000He's just operating inside a format where you don't swear, and you have a certain amount of time, and you try to be funny, and you say insightful stuff.
03:46:25.000But he's a very ethical guy, and he's also a very, very smart guy, and he's also very rich.
03:46:30.000He's got a shitload of fuck you money.
03:46:32.000And I think Jimmy Kimmel could do it easily.
03:46:34.000I think a lot of people could do it easily, and I think they're going to have to.
03:46:37.000I think some point along the line, they're going to realize that the restrictions that they're operating under, unless they really enjoy that format...
03:46:45.000I don't think those formats are going to be there that long.
03:46:47.000I think those formats are a lot like sitcoms.
03:46:51.000For every one Roseanne show that comes up, which is kind of nostalgic and that runs into its own disaster, how many new sitcoms are there that everybody's aware of?
03:47:00.000Shit, it used to be every time there was a new sitcom, whether it was Friends or Fill in the Blank, whatever the show, Seinfeld, everybody was talking about these new sitcoms.
03:47:09.000Nobody fucking talks about sitcoms anymore.
03:47:13.000This is the thing I took on this morning on Twitter, which was Dave Rubin and Brett Weinstein and myself were talking about this phenomena of very high follower counts with psycho low engagement.
03:47:42.000Apparently there's discussion about Jack may have floated some trial balloons that Twitter is going to try to improve the level of conversation.
03:47:49.000And by getting rid of follower counts.
03:47:53.000Can you imagine thinking that you're going to improve the level of conversation by getting rid of a heart that you can put on someone's idea?
03:48:45.000We've been saying for a while, we are rethinking everything about the service to ensure we are incentivizing healthy conversation that includes the like button.
03:48:54.000We are in the early stages of the work and have no plans to share right now.
03:49:01.000And this is in response to the Telegraph saying, Twitter to remove the like tool and the bid to improve the quality of debate.
03:49:07.000Yeah, I think something really weird is going on.
03:49:09.000Well, I mean, what is the quality of debate and by whose definition?
03:49:12.000I mean, you're definitely not going to change the way people interact with each other.
03:49:23.000Okay, so the one thing I could ask as we close this thing out is if we could plug not only my Twitter, which is my main thing, but I'm trying to diversify into Instagram and YouTube should I get shut off Twitter.