In this episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, the comedian and podcaster talks about the early days of compact cameras and how they changed the way we look at photography. He also talks about stereo photography and why it's a good thing it's not about color or depth. And, of course, there's a little bit of Star Trek in there too. If you haven't checked out the show yet, you should definitely do so. It's worth the listen. It's a great listen, and I think you'll agree that it's one of the most fun episodes I've done in a while. Enjoy, and tweet me if you like it! Timestamps: 4:00 - What was the first camera you owned? 6:30 - How many megapixels did I have? 7:40 - When did I get my first digital camera? 8:20 - What's the best camera I've ever had? 9:15 - What are some of the biggest mistakes I've made with a camera 10:00 What was my favorite camera 11:30 Camera 12:40 What's next? 13:20 14:00 What s the best thing I used to do with my camera 15:15 16:10 17:00 My favorite stereo camera 18:00 Camera 19:00 How did I feel about it? 21:00 Can I take better pictures? 22:00 Do you have a better one? 23:00 Is there a better camera than mine? 26: What kind of camera I'd you'd like to see me take a picture with a stereo? 27:00 Would you like to take a better picture? 28:30 What do you want me to take better? 29:00 Should I get a stereo camera with a bigger lens? 35:30 Can I have a bigger camera with more? 36:00 Could I get more of a bigger or smaller? 31:00 More? 32:30 How much money I'd like a bigger cupboard? 37: What's your favorite thing I could I get? 39:30 Do you need a bigger piece of film? 40:00 Are you ready for something bigger? 45:00 Who do you like me to make a better lens or less? Theme song by Ian Dorsch?
00:02:22.000But anyone doesn't have the sight of...
00:02:26.000The ability to, like, frame it properly and figure out what angle to take and how to focus things and how to...
00:02:35.000Well, yeah, because you're taking a three-dimensional scene, and a three-dimensional scene that changes as you move around, even as you shift your head from side to side, as you look at the scene through two eyes, so you get depth information from stereoscopic vision.
00:02:50.000You've got 180 degrees of visual angle, so you're always looking at a panorama.
00:02:56.000Then you're converting that into a two-dimensional rectangle.
00:02:59.000It's a restricted frame of what the world is.
00:03:04.000It's flat, unless you're into stereo photography, which I sometimes do as well.
00:03:16.000And so I think the art of photography is combining an appreciation of that part of the world that you are capturing with an aesthetically pleasing rectangle that has colors and shapes that would have to work.
00:03:31.000Even if it was just like an abstract rectangle of blobs of color, it's got to work at that level.
00:03:37.000At the same time, it's a picture of something in the world.
00:03:40.000And combining those two different mindsets, like it's reality, but it's a flat rectangle.
00:03:46.000That's what the art of photography is.
00:03:50.000That's when you have two lenses, like we have two eyes.
00:03:54.000And so you take two photographs from slightly different vantage points.
00:04:01.000And then you view the pair of images through a viewer that allows your eyes to focus on the two – each eye to focus on its own image.
00:04:11.000Oh, so it's like a 3D movie type deal?
00:04:13.000Well, 3D movies, which were a fad – they were fad first in the 50s when Hollywood had to compete with TV. And, of course, now they've been revived with IMAX and – I think?
00:04:52.000Is this supposed to be a visual, like a video representation of what that would look like, Jamie?
00:04:56.000Yeah, it's like taking a GIF and bouncing back and forth between the left and right photos so you can sort of see it without the viewer.
00:05:03.000They used to sell stereo cameras, and I think there's still one or two that you can get.
00:05:08.000You can get the equivalent by doing what they call the astronaut two-step because the astronauts who walked on the moon would take stereo photos with a regular camera.
00:05:18.000Put your weight on your left leg, take a picture.
00:05:20.000Put your weight on your right leg, take a picture.
00:05:23.000Naturally, it's going to shift the camera over by a couple of inches.
00:05:26.000So you have two images that were taken kind of like from the perspective of your left eye and your right eye.
00:05:32.000The trick then is you can't just take a pair of pictures, put them side by side, and have your left eye look at the left picture and the right eye look at the right picture.
00:05:41.000I mean, you can if you really train yourself.
00:05:42.000And I've trained myself to do this, and a lot of perceptions psychologists have.
00:05:49.000Both kind of converge and diverge in and out.
00:06:10.000Then when you try to get it into focus, now your brain's thinking, well, it's...
00:06:14.000Something is nearby, I've got to make my eyes a little more cross-eyed so I don't get a double image, and you lose each image going to a separate eye.
00:06:22.000So that's why you have these viewers, kind of like the Viewmasters that sold at tourist traps, those plastic contraptions with a ring of photos, where they just have two lenses, one for each eye, and that spares your eye from having to focus.
00:06:35.000You can just focus at infinity, and the lens makes the picture sharp.
00:06:40.000When you focus at infinity, your eyes are parallel.
00:06:43.000They're both looking out If I remember correctly, a few years ago there was a camera on a phone that was taking three-dimensional images.
00:07:04.000Android, because it's such an open source thing, they kind of have the freedom to do wacky things to try to attract attention and try to get people to buy them.
00:07:13.000And so they had developed this camera.
00:07:17.000It was like an enormous camera apparatus on the back of a phone that took three-dimensional images.
00:09:23.000Again, always taken one where the left eye is, one where the right eye is.
00:09:27.000Then the trick is how do you get each photo to the appropriate eye?
00:09:31.000And with lenticular photos, it's as if each photo is cut into teensy-weensy little vertical strips and they're kind of interdigitated.
00:09:39.000Then on top of it, you have a bunch of tiny little kind of half cylinders aligned with the images so that The left eye and the right eye, which are a couple of inches apart, are looking at the picture through slightly different angles, and these cylindrical lenses just make sure that each eye can only see the half image at the appropriate angle.
00:10:04.000It's gotten much better, and now there are artists who actually use it as an art form, where as you move, the image moves like it's a real scene in the world.
00:10:17.000But I remember them when I was a kid, often with cheesy cartoons or Jesus or Santa Claus, yet another way of just basically getting two images taken from different vantage points,
00:12:20.000No, and that was a spectacularly bad design.
00:12:23.000People don't know that there was another nuclear power plant in Japan, that during that same tsunami, people actually went into that nuclear power plant for safety because it was so well-built.
00:12:34.000It was so removed from the reach of the ocean, even during the worst conceivable tsunami.
00:12:40.000It was better designed, better situated.
00:12:44.000I know it sounds like an episode out of The Simpsons.
00:12:48.000Let's get into the nuclear power plant to be safe.
00:12:53.000I wrote an op-ed in The New York Times called Nuclear Power Can Save the World.
00:12:57.000And indeed, one of the big impediments is...
00:13:00.000A feature of psychology that I also write about in my book, Rationality, namely the availability bias.
00:13:06.000Namely, when people assess risk, they don't look up data, they don't count up the number of accidents compared to the number of years that nuclear power plants have been in operation and how many there are.
00:13:19.000And we estimate risk, we meaning the human race, by how easily we can dredge up examples from memory.
00:13:26.000We use our brain's search engine as a We're good to go.
00:13:52.000In terms of number of deaths per amount of energy made available, it's probably the safest form of energy ever developed.
00:13:59.000But our sense of danger comes from remembering these examples.
00:14:05.000I know someone who blames the climate crisis on the Doobie Brothers and Bonnie Raitt and Bruce Springsteen because their 1979 film, No Nukes, the benefit concert.
00:14:16.000Coming around the time of Three Mile Island, kind of poisoned an entire generation, maybe two generations against nuclear power.
00:14:24.000And, you know, the world needs energy.
00:14:27.000We saw that at the Glasgow meeting where, you know, India and China and Indonesia, they're saying, sorry, we're not going to do without the energy that lifted you guys out of poverty.
00:14:37.000So we're going to get it one way or another.
00:14:41.000You're not going to get it completely from sun and wind because that depends on the weather and the sun doesn't shine at night or when it's cloudy and the wind doesn't blow 24-7.
00:18:56.000Well, I remember as a child when nuclear – everything was good.
00:19:01.000You'd see these pictures of super zucchinis and massive turnips from seeds that had been irradiated and the mutants that would produce supercharged vegetables would be featured at county fairs, I don't think.
00:19:16.000But that was – Just after the era where people thought that nuclear bombs could excavate harbors and dig canals.
00:19:24.000I mean there was a period of let's say irrational exuberance about nuclear power in this country.
00:19:30.000Are you familiar, I'm sure you are, with the issues that they had with that radioactive paint and women who had...
00:19:39.000Oh yeah, the glow-in-the-dark watch dials, which had radium in them, yeah.
00:19:45.000Yeah, and these poor women that worked in these factories painting these things, they would touch the brush on their tongue.
00:21:05.000I mean, there's even a theory that a small amount of radiation might even be healthful, but whether or not it is, it's not necessarily harmful.
00:21:14.000But going back to what I write about, namely psychology, Together with the availability bias, namely people base their sense of risk on how easily they can think of examples, especially catastrophic examples.
00:21:29.000There's also a psychology of contamination where there is no safe dose that one drop can contaminate a substance of any size.
00:21:42.000I mean, just think of, say, a big container of water if someone spits in it or pees in it.
00:21:49.000You wouldn't be reassured by someone saying, oh, it's just one part in a million.
00:22:10.000It's one of those ones that carried over from the 1940s after the drop of the atomic bombs and all those Godzilla movies and all these different...
00:22:18.000There was so much talk about radiation that was in popular fiction and films and it became like a thing where people associate it immediately with danger.
00:22:31.000Also, there is a confusion in people's minds sometimes between nuclear power and nuclear weapons.
00:22:37.000People imagine that if a plant melts down, it could blow up like an atom bomb or a hydrogen bomb, which is physically impossible.
00:22:46.000Or they imagine that any country that has nuclear power will have an easy pathway to nuclear weapons.
00:22:54.000But there are lots of countries with nuclear power plants without nuclear weapons, and there are countries with nuclear weapons without much nuclear power.
00:23:01.000So they really are separate technologies.
00:23:05.000Your book, the new book, is Rationality.
00:23:26.000Not only do we have this mind-boggling technology...
00:23:30.000In terms of mRNA vaccines and smartphones and 3D printing and artificial intelligence.
00:23:39.000But we have rationality applied to areas of life that formerly were just a matter of seat-of-the-pants guesswork and hunches and you rely on experts.
00:23:49.000So we have things like Moneyball where...
00:23:53.000Some genius thought, well, if you make decisions in sports like drafting and strategy based on data instead of the hunches of some old general manager, you could actually have an advantage.
00:24:05.000And so the Oakland A's went all the way with a fairly small budget for players because they applied data.
00:24:16.000One of the reasons that the crime rate in the US fell by more than half in the 1990s wasn't that all of a sudden guns were taken off the street.
00:24:26.000It wasn't that racism vanished or inequality vanished.
00:24:30.000Part of it was that police got smarter.
00:24:32.000Since a lot of violence happens in a few small areas of a city, often by a few hotheads, a few perpetrators, if you concentrate police on where the crime hotspots are, you can control a lot of crime without that much manpower.
00:25:41.000What's interesting to me is that there's a thing that goes along with irrational thought where you have irrational thought that is confined to your party lines, right?
00:26:07.000It has nothing to do with scientific literacy.
00:26:10.000A lot of my fellow scientists say, oh, the fact that there's so much denial of man-made climate change means we need better science education in the schools.
00:26:18.000We need scientists becoming more popular.
00:26:22.000It's making the climate science more accessible.
00:26:26.000It turns out that whether you accept human-made climate change or not has nothing to do with how much science you know.
00:26:31.000And a lot of the people who do accept it know diddly about the science.
00:26:35.000They often will think, well, yeah, climate change, isn't that because of the hole in the ozone layer and toxic waste dumps and plastic straws in the oceans?
00:26:56.000A good lawyer can argue against anything.
00:26:59.000What does predict your acceptance of climate change is just where you are in the political spectrum.
00:27:03.000The farther to the right, the more denial.
00:27:05.000So, what you said is absolutely right.
00:27:07.000It's not just more denial, but this willingness to instantaneously argue it.
00:27:12.000Like, the subject came up, oddly enough, in jujitsu.
00:27:16.000We're after class, we're just getting dressed and putting stuff away, and someone said, man, it's just a fact of life that is getting hotter every year.
00:27:27.000And this guy jumped in immediately with this defense of this idea that climate change is nonsense.
00:27:43.000If you go back and look at core samples, and you look at the ice ages, and you look at all the various times in the history of the Earth, the climate has moved.
00:27:50.000We were actually just talking about this yesterday.
00:27:52.000I had someone on who was an expert in ancient science.
00:27:56.000Civilizations and all these archaeological mysteries that they've found and one of the things we were talking about was the Sahara Desert.
00:28:02.000That the Sahara Desert goes through this period of every like 20,000 years or so where it's green and then it becomes a desert again and then it becomes green again.
00:30:01.000But going back to what we were talking about, one of the big conclusions of rationality is that a lot of what we...
00:30:08.000Deplore now as, you know, just crazy stuff.
00:30:12.000Conspiracy theories and the fake news.
00:30:14.000A lot of it comes from one bias, the my side bias, which you kind of already alluded to.
00:30:20.000Namely, you believe in the sacred beliefs of your own clique, your own political party, your own coalition, your own tribe, your own sect, and you You paint the other side as stupid and evil for having different beliefs.
00:30:40.000There's a perverse kind of rationality in being a champion for your cause because you get brownie points from all your friends.
00:30:48.000If you were to accept climate change in a hardcore right-wing circle, you'd be a pariah.
00:30:57.000So there's a perverse kind of rationality in championing the beliefs of your side.
00:31:02.000It isn't so good for whole democracy when everyone is just promoting the beliefs that get them prestige within their own coalition rather than the beliefs that are actually true.
00:31:17.000Like, it's so common that people have this ideology, they subscribe to the belief system that is attached to that ideology, and whether it's left-wing or right-wing, and they just adopt a conglomeration of ideas.
00:31:30.000Instead of having these things where they've thought them through rationally and really, like, looked at it, instead they have an ideology, whether it's left or right-wing.
00:32:11.000There has been a rise in negative polarization that is in the sense that the people you disagree with aren't just mistaken, they don't just have a different opinion, but they are evil and stupid.
00:32:22.000So that has risen, especially at the extremes.
00:32:25.000It's still true that a majority of Americans call themselves moderate, but the extremes hate each other more.
00:32:33.000The common explanation is you blame it on social media and people being in filter bubbles.
00:32:38.000That might be part of it, but part of it may also be people segregate themselves in terms of where they live more so that you get educated hipsters and knowledge workers in cities.
00:32:53.000And you get less educated people moving out to the outer suburbs and staying in rural areas.
00:33:00.000So people just don't meet people who disagree with them anymore, who have come from different backgrounds or less than they used to.
00:33:07.000And then some of the organizations and institutions that used to bring people from different walks of life together, churches, service organizations like the Elks and the Rotary Club and so on are declining.
00:33:21.000So we tend to hang out more with people like ourselves.
00:33:25.000Well, even in universities, which used to be a place where people on the left and people on the right could debate.
00:33:32.000I remember when I was in high school, Barney Frank debated someone from the moral majority.
00:33:39.000And I remember watching it, I think I was 16, and we went and sat and watched this debate and watched Barney Frank trounce this guy and mock him, and it was pretty fun.
00:33:52.000But it was interesting, because we got to hear two very different perspectives, but one, at the time, Barty Frank, who's just better at it and had better points, was more articulate and had a better argument, and we walked away from that,
00:34:08.000having heard both sides, but having heard one side argued more effectively.
00:34:15.000Instead, now you get one side, and when someone tries to bring someone in that is of a differing opinion to debate this person, that person gets silenced, they try pulling alarms in buildings, and they shout and blow horns and call everyone a Nazi.
00:34:30.000And it's unfortunate because you miss the opportunity like I got to see when I was 16, where I got to see a more Articulate person with better points of view, better perspectives, argue more effectively that their perspective was more rational.
00:35:02.000So, you know, people ask me, there's a question I get asked a lot in...
00:35:06.000When I talk about rationality, I say, well, how do you convince a real QAnon believer that there isn't a cabal of Satan-worshipping cannibalistic pedophiles in the Democratic Party and Hollywood?
00:35:52.000And of course, new babies are being born all the time and they aren't born believing in QAnon or chemtrails or 9-11 truther theories.
00:36:01.000And some of them can be peeled off by rational arguments.
00:36:05.000I think it's not tried enough, including in issues that I strongly believe in, like We're good to go.
00:36:43.000What kind of increased my confidence, say, in human-made climate change, 25 years ago, I was a little bit open to it.
00:36:51.000But then seeing the objections, like it's all just cycles or it's just because the temperature measurements were – the cities grew and so the weather monitoring stations used to be out in the country.
00:37:04.000Now they're in the city and cities are hotter.
00:37:06.000I actually heard this from a Nobel Prize winner.
00:37:09.000But seeing the counterarguments where there's a site called Skeptical Science where they take on every one of the objections to human-made climate change and they explain why it's unlikely to be true.
00:37:22.000I find that fantastically convincing and I think that we should not give up on people's ability to take evidence seriously.
00:37:33.000Granted, there are some people who won't.
00:38:58.000Yeah, they've developed this sort of tribal climate where they really believed that they were going to stop this evil takeover of the government and supplanting the Constitution and killing our freedoms, and they thought they were going to do it through this one person who was a leaker.
00:39:20.000Well, this documentary shows that most likely, again, most likely, I don't know, Most likely Q was this guy who was running 4chan who was fucking with people.
00:39:32.000And then he actually took it over from another guy who was on 4chan who started fucking with people.
00:39:40.000And then the style of the drops changed.
00:39:44.000And then there's like real evidence that this one guy would be the only person that would have access to be able to post things at certain times.
00:39:52.000And during these certain times, Q got to post when other people couldn't post.
00:39:56.000It seems pretty clear that there's some fuckery afoot, right?
00:40:02.000But the people that were all in on the QAnon theory, these people had, they had President Trump photographs on the walls of their houses, and they believed in things so wholeheartedly.
00:40:18.000The way they communicated online, it was a part of their tribal identity.
00:40:22.000And it was also a tremendously entertaining, you know, multi-actor online game.
00:40:40.000A problem that I had to think about a lot when I wrote Rationality because I'm a cognitive psychologist and like everyone in my profession, I teach students about the gambler's fallacy.
00:40:51.000Like if there's a run of reds on a roulette wheel, people mistakenly think that a black is more likely whereas of course the roulette wheel has no memory and each spin is independent.
00:41:03.000So anyway, I have a list of those fallacies.
00:41:05.000Then someone says, okay, well, now explain QAnon.
00:41:08.000And, you know, the standard cognitive psychology textbook is not much use in explaining such a, you know, well-developed but bizarre set of beliefs.
00:41:20.000So part of what I came to in trying to make sense of this is...
00:41:25.000As you said, part of it is just building up a tribal identity, a set of sacred beliefs that just define your tribe.
00:41:33.000If you believe it, you're a member in good standing.
00:41:35.000If you doubt it, then you're some sort of traitor or heretic.
00:41:39.000But another part of it is it kind of depends what you mean by believe.
00:41:46.000I think there are two kinds of belief.
00:41:48.000There's the kind of belief about the physical environment that you – the world that we live in that where you've got to be in touch with reality because reality gets the last word.
00:41:59.000Reality is what doesn't go away when you stop believing in it.
00:42:02.000That's a quote from Philip K. Dick, the science fiction writer.
00:42:05.000Even the people who believe in the weirdest conspiracy theories – They hold a job, a lot of them, and they pay their taxes and they get the kids clothed and fed and off to school on time.
00:42:31.000And wishful thinking is not going to make your car go if there's no gas in the tank.
00:42:35.000And, you know, the vast majority of people know that.
00:42:37.000They're not going to say, well, I'd be really upset if the car didn't go when there's no gas in the tank, so therefore I'm going to believe that it will go.
00:42:47.000Reality really is a pretty good check.
00:42:50.000In the world of day-to-day cause and effect, But then there's this whole other realm of things that, you know, you will never get to know, like what goes on in the White House and in corporate boardrooms and what happened at the origin of the universe and what happens,
00:43:06.000you know, and why do good things happen, bad things happen to good people and vice versa, these kind of cosmic questions, where I think the sense of most people is that's a different kind of belief.
00:43:19.000So I'm going to believe things that are interesting, that are morally uplifting, that convey the right message.
00:43:27.000Whether they're true or false, you can't find out.
00:43:31.000No one knows what difference does it make.
00:43:33.000And there's a whole set of beliefs that fall into that category of more mythology than reality.
00:43:40.000Religious beliefs, that's why we say people hold things on faith because you don't demand evidence that Jesus was the Son of God or that God created heaven and earth.
00:43:53.000Sometimes some of our national founding myths, you know, every country believes that it was founded by a generation of heroes, of martyrs, of great men.
00:44:05.000And then, you know, the annoying historians come along and they say, well, yeah, but, you know, Jefferson kept slaves and, you know, the greatest generation in World War II, they were kind of, you know, racist and they, you know, killed civilians and, you know, bombed innocent people too.
00:44:19.000And, you know, we don't want to hear that.
00:44:25.000And when it comes to some of these conspiracy theories, I suspect that a lot of them fall into this category of mythological beliefs rather than reality-based beliefs.
00:44:35.000So if someone says, I believe that Hillary Clinton ran a child sex ring out of the basement of a pizzeria, what they're really saying is, I believe that Hillary Clinton is so depraved that that's the kind of thing she could have done.
00:44:55.000That's kind of what the belief amounts to.
00:44:57.000And it's not clear how factually committed most of them are.
00:45:01.000I took an example from another cognitive psychologist, Hugo Mercier, who noted that one reaction of a Pizzagate believer was to leave a one-star Google review to the Comet Ping Pong Pizzeria.
00:45:15.000He said the pizza was incredibly underbaked and there were some men looking suspiciously at my son.
00:45:22.000Now, that's not the kind of thing you'd do if you literally thought that children were being raped in the basement.
00:45:44.000But the most people who say they believe it, they believe it in a kind of different sense than we believe that there's coffee in that cup or that it's going to rain today.
00:45:53.000It's a whole different mindset of belief.
00:45:56.000It's belief for the purpose of Expressing the right moral values.
00:48:10.000I mean, some of them do say when they got caught, I was wondering what took you so long.
00:48:14.000Well, they do take bigger and bigger chances to see what they can get away with.
00:48:17.000Well, the Unabomber's a great example of that, right?
00:48:19.000The Unabomber, he left very odd clues to what he did and even wrote this very bizarre manifesto that eventually was his downfall because his brother recognized the ranting.
00:50:06.000There's a great documentary about Ted Kaczynski that's on Netflix, and it goes into detail.
00:50:12.000His brother goes into detail about his childhood, and one of the aspects besides the Harvard LSD study that he was involved in He had a disease when he was young, and they separated him from his family as an infant for long periods of time,
00:50:27.000where they put him in this infirmary, and in this hospital setup, no one touched him, no one held him, and he cried and screamed, and it went on for months.
00:50:38.000And they think that it really negatively affected his psychological development.
00:50:43.000And that it's part of this lack of empathy and this lack of connection that he had to other people was a direct result of his experiences as an infant hospitalized.
00:50:55.000Because it was like for months and months at a time, his family didn't get to see him.
00:51:14.000And his brother, who turned him in, was detailing all the instances in Ted Kaczynski's life where he realized he's really a problem.
00:51:23.000Like, if a woman rejected his advances, He would write horrible, evil letters to her and do things to sabotage her and just go out of his way to try to attack her.
00:51:35.000And he realized, like, Jesus Christ, my brother is a real fucking psycho.
00:51:55.000Psychology is so fascinating because the way the mind works and the way the mind can be manipulated with cults and with religions and with ideologies and beliefs.
00:52:06.000My friend Bridget Phetasy, who has a great podcast, she's got a few great podcasts, but she was interviewing this guy who became a jihadist, this blonde-haired, I think?
00:52:41.000It's almost like a disease of the mind where people get trapped into this certain very rigid way of thinking and they refuse to believe that what they're thinking is incorrect.
00:52:54.000Or it's kind of like a matrix where they often, cults and terrorist cells will befriend a lonely person.
00:53:02.000They'll simulate all the experiences of a family and often say, we're your family now.
00:53:08.000We're a A band of brothers, use kinship metaphors, and religious cults do this too.
00:53:15.000There are a lot of lonely, alienated people out there, and then you suddenly provide them with a warm, loving family and a sense of purpose.
00:53:22.000Then you combine that with the fact that our own...
00:53:27.000Rationalization powers, and I distinguish rationalization from rationality, but we're all to some extent intuitive lawyers.
00:53:35.000That is, we can use our brain power to find the best possible argument for some position that we're committed to.
00:53:41.000It's called motivated reasoning, and it's another big source of irrationality, even among smart people, sometimes especially among smart people.
00:53:50.000Yeah, it's very disturbing when smart people get locked into these rigid ideologies where they won't examine new evidence.
00:54:00.000It drives me crazy because I have very intelligent friends that hit these sort of roadblocks.
00:54:06.000And you want to say, hey, man, this is not – you're looking at it the wrong way.
00:54:11.000So that's another frequently asked question that I get is, is rationality the same thing as intelligence?
00:54:16.000And to the extent we can measure them separately – They correlate.
00:54:21.000On average, smarter people are more rational.
00:54:24.000When I say more rational, I mean less vulnerable to standard cognitive fallacies like the gambler's fallacy, like the sunk cost fallacy, better able to estimate risk and Probability and chance and logical fallacies.
00:54:41.000So they kind of correlate, but not perfectly.
00:54:43.000There's an awful lot of smart, irrational people out there.
00:54:47.000And especially when you have a smart person who gets locked on to a belief that's close to his or her identity, then of course you can muster the best lawyerly skills to defend it.
00:54:59.000So it shows that what makes us rational as a species and as a country isn't so much that we've got some...
00:55:10.000So we form these communities where different people can check each other's irrationality in the same way that the whole basis of democratic government is, this goes back to the founding, the framers and the founding fathers, Yeah,
00:55:26.000everyone wants power and everyone has too much ambition and if you let someone get too much power, for sure they'll abuse it.
00:55:33.000So the trick is you have one person's power that checks another person's power.
00:55:38.000You have checks and balances and branches of government.
00:55:43.000So likewise, when it comes to ideas, What's to prevent someone with their brilliant theory of the whole explains everything, but they're really out to lunch, but they're very capable of defending it.
00:55:58.000Well, you throw them in a community where they've got to defend it to other people and other people get to pick holes in it.
00:56:59.000It was a ham-fisted move, but it wasn't the kind of diabolical conspiracy involving hundreds or thousands of people keeping an amazing secret, like, for example, if the Twin Towers were demolished by implosion.
00:57:14.000I mean, it's a different order of conspiracy.
00:57:19.000There's clearly a bunch of people that conspired to keep evidence from the general public.
00:57:24.000They wanted to make sure that evidence wasn't easily distributed because this idea that you could put something up on Facebook or on Twitter and then it catches fire and then it gets shared by millions of people.
00:57:35.000And we know that some of the information that gets shared like that is incorrect and is done by foreign entities.
00:57:41.000In order to sow distrust into our political system, and that's what the whole internet research agency is in Russia that Rene Diresta has written about, and that was one of the things that they encountered recently is that 19 of the top 20 Christian sites on Facebook were run by a troll farm in Macedonia.
00:58:12.000And in fact, there's a sense in which going back in our evolutionary history, the biggest threat of aggression was in the form of conspiracies rather than full frontal attacks.
00:58:26.000Because if you look at tribal warfare, It's not two sides like on a football field chucking spears at each other.
00:58:33.000I mean, they do that, but not that many people get killed.
00:58:37.000But where the body counts really get racked up are in pre-dawn raids and in stealthy ambushes.
00:58:45.000So I give an example from the Yanamama, one of the indigenous peoples of the Amazon rainforest, Where the villages are often at war with each other and one village invited another one over for a feast and at the end of the feast everyone was kind of full and kind of drunk.
00:59:07.000Then on cue the hosts kind of pulled out their bows and arrows and battle axes and killed all the guests on cue.
00:59:17.000It's like the Red Wedding in Game of Thrones.
00:59:21.000So that exists and that's what people were vulnerable to.
00:59:24.000So I suspect you're right in that a certain openness to the possibility of conspiracies came about because there really were conspiracies in our history.
00:59:36.000Don't you think they're happening right now?
00:59:37.000Not on the scale of chemtrails or QAnon.
00:59:41.000I mean, if you think of the number of people that would have to successfully cooperate...
00:59:45.000Well, the chemtrail one is just a total misunderstanding, like a lack of understanding of what happens when a jet engine encounters condensation.
01:00:00.000The number of people that would have to maintain the equivalent of a non-disclosure agreement for decades with no one leaking it and everyone being perfectly silent, perfectly coordinated, that kind of defies common sense.
01:00:16.000Well, there's also a lack of understanding of eyewitness accounts of things too.
01:00:20.000Like people say, eyewitness people said that they saw this and heard that.
01:00:23.000The problem with any traumatic experience is eyewitness accounts are often highly inaccurate.
01:00:53.000A lot of innocent people have been convicted based on eyewitness testimony, especially Not only when they're coached, but especially after the fact, the more often they're asked to affirm what they saw, the more confident they get whether it was true or not.
01:01:07.000And the fact that we distinctly remember this, I saw it with my own eyes, means nothing in terms of whether it really happened because we can confidently remember things that never took place.
01:02:21.000And there are certain tricks that we know our memory plays on us, such as we tend to kind of retrospectively edit our memories to make a good story, often that puts us at the center of historic events.
01:02:33.000So, you know, a lot of people remember, people in my generation, remember seeing John F. Kennedy assassinated on live TV. Now, there wasn't live TV. Right, ever.
01:02:44.000People remember the Arthur Zapruder 8mm home movie, which was only made public weeks later.
01:03:10.000He's the reason why the whole back and to the left thing came about, and people started questioning the official story of Lee Harvey Oswald acting alone.
01:03:19.000They released it on Geraldo Rivera's television show in 75, so it was 13 years.
01:03:27.000Well, since then, people who've seen the film merge it with their memory of that day and they think that they actually saw it in real time, which was absolutely impossible.
01:04:43.000It's unfortunate that people don't have good memories and that their memories can be manipulated.
01:04:46.000And I was reading an article that someone sent to me today of a terrible case where a woman who's the author of that book, I believe it's called Lovely Bones...
01:04:57.000She was raped when she was 18 and a man was convicted who was innocent and he was just released after many many years of being incarcerated and she detailed how she was kind of coached into believing that he was the one and she actually picked the wrong person out of a lineup and and she was told by the prosecutor that that
01:05:27.000wrong person that she picked out was there as a trick to throw her off because he looked like the other guy and they they were friends they did it on purpose they kind of lied to her and coached her and she was 18 and traumatized she had just been raped and she was convinced by these people that she had got the right guy they used the junk science of Microscopic hair samples,
01:06:11.000When you're 18, you know, I mean, we were talking about someone planting memories in your head, especially when you've had this horrific, traumatic event happen to you.
01:06:21.000You've been raped, and you think they got the guy, and they're convincing, these are adults, they're convincing you that this is the guy.
01:06:29.000Yeah, no, and it's bad if you've been traumatized.
01:06:34.000It's bad if you're 18, but it happens even when you're not traumatized and even when you're, you know, 35, 45, 55. You know, it's another issue that I talk about in Rationality where I have a chapter on what psychologists call signal detection theory,
01:06:50.000also called statistical decision theory, which is if you, you know, none of us is...
01:06:57.000We all have to rely on noisy signals from the world, and we're never completely sure whether they indicate reality or whether they're, as we say, in the noise.
01:08:05.000The way to deal with terrorism is we've got to monitor social media and arrest people before they can commit rampage shootings or acts of terrorism.
01:08:19.000The thing is if all you're doing is you're changing your cutoff, saying I'm going to be satisfied with less evidence before I pull the trigger and say guilty, yeah, you're going to convict more guilty people and you're also going to convict more innocent people.
01:08:34.000The way to satisfy the ideal of convicting more guilty people but not falsely convicting innocent people is your forensics have to get better.
01:08:44.000And our forensics, a lot of our forensics, you mentioned hair analysis, which are contrary to what you see on CSI. A lot of the forensic techniques are close to worthless, and people get falsely convicted.
01:08:58.000I mean, DNA is the most reliable, and that's shown that a lot of people are in jail for crimes they didn't convict.
01:09:03.000Yeah, my friend Josh Dubin, a good friend of mine who works for the Innocence Project, I've had him on a few times and recently had him on with a gentleman who was falsely accused and spent a long time in jail for that.
01:09:16.000And he has a podcast that he runs on junk science.
01:09:32.000What bolt cutters actually went through this chain?
01:09:36.000The thing is that I kind of rediscovered this myself when I went to a talk at Harvard by the FBI's expert in linguistic analysis because I study language.
01:09:47.000How do you tell who wrote the ransom note based on choice of words?
01:11:09.000But signal detection theory is combining that kind of thinking, like how bad is the error of a false acquittal or a false conviction, which is a moral question, combine that with how good are we at telling them apart,
01:11:25.000which is a question of how good our forensics are.
01:11:28.000My concern when it comes to this sort of inevitable connection of human beings to technology, I think it's just a matter of time before we become symbiotic.
01:11:44.000We're kind of already connected at the hip to our cell phones.
01:11:50.000But I think it's a matter of time before we get something that is more reliable than the human memory.
01:11:57.000And my real concern is that one day we're gonna all be required to be chipped because this is the only way to get a full HD version of what you did during the day.
01:12:10.000And it shouldn't bother you if you're innocent.
01:12:14.000It's the same idea of like the NSA spying, like what Edward Snowden revealed, and so many people were horrified by it, and some of the other people were like, what difference does it make if you're not doing anything wrong?
01:12:23.000Like, well, you're missing the point, because human beings having that kind of power to look into other human beings' lives are almost always going to abuse it.
01:12:31.000And if we do come to a point in time someday where we say, listen, there are thousands of innocent people convicted every year and sent to – probably more than that – sent to jails for crimes they didn't commit, we can stop all of that.
01:12:46.000We can stop all of that through these chips.
01:12:49.000By chips, do you mean like everyone wears Google Glass?
01:14:24.000And at the end of it, one of the weirder parts about it is that what he is trying to do is to get to a point where he can have a conversation with his father.
01:14:39.000He thinks that he, through memories and through whatever recordings he has and photographs he has, will be able to replicate his father's personality to a significant or sufficient extent where he can actually have a conversation with him.
01:15:04.000If the father wrote a lot, like wrote a lot of correspondence, we already have AI that can kind of fake new text in the style of existing text.
01:15:31.000I have very good friends that have died, and if I had the ability to email a fake version of my very good friend that died and get a response that's very similar to what they would say, that would mean nothing to me.
01:15:45.000It's another interesting part of our psychology.
01:15:48.000We have this sense of, you know, is something real or not?
01:15:52.000That sometimes, is it really connected to the person that we know and love?
01:15:58.000And it makes a big psychological difference, even if you can't tell the difference.
01:16:03.000It's like, there are lots of examples, and this is from my former collaborator, Paul Bloom.
01:16:09.000You know, someone paid a lot of money for John F. Kennedy's golf clubs.
01:16:13.000Now, if it turned out that they weren't John F. Kennedy's golf clubs, if they were just some other guy's golf clubs from the late 50s and early 60s, it would be worth a fraction of the amount and it would be emotionally much less satisfying, even if they're the same golf clubs.
01:16:27.000But just knowing that there is that personal connection makes a big psychological difference.
01:16:34.000If you could get some sort of an artifact from a historic figure.
01:16:39.000You know, I've got a letter from Hunter S. Thompson that he wrote to someone that I have framed in my office in L.A. And it's just like, I look at it every now and then, I'm like, huh, he really wrote that.
01:17:13.000The real paintings versus forgeries things has always freaked me out.
01:17:16.000There was a documentary about this one gentleman who was a master at recreating the style of the masters.
01:17:26.000Like, he was really good at, like, he could make a fake Picasso, he could make a fake Rembrandt, and he was making these paintings and selling them for spectacular amounts of money.
01:17:36.000And they were really good paintings, but they were bullshit.
01:22:47.000Very few people even know how vulnerable people's memories are to being manipulated that way, that someone can easily introduce a false memory into your mind.
01:22:59.000And they often increase coherence because a lot of our lives are more random than we like to think.
01:23:07.000They're not like scripted plots where we actually pursue a goal.
01:23:11.000If you actually had a record of what you did in any given day, A lot of things, you forgot what you were doing, you went here, and it wasn't really a very smart thing to do.
01:23:19.000But then you like to present yourself to the world as someone who lives his life with a plan, who can be trusted, whose word is good.
01:23:29.000And so we retrospectively edit our lives to make ourselves more comfortable.
01:23:33.000Our lives more coherent, to make them seem more like a scripted story with a protagonist and a goal and a climax and a denouement.
01:23:42.000And so our memories are always much more satisfying as stories than the reality.
01:23:48.000That's why, by the way, I once read an interview with Susan Estrich, who was a political consultant, but before that she was a criminal defense lawyer.
01:23:57.000She said the reason that we all are familiar with those The courtroom shows where the defense lawyer, the first thing they tell their client is, you know, shut up.
01:24:08.000Don't say anything to the police until you're under oath or I'll answer for you.
01:24:18.000The reason is that people will retrospectively make their Memories more coherent than they really were.
01:24:26.000And then that means that they'll talk themselves into a lie, which then the prosecutor can use to impugn their credibility.
01:24:33.000Well, you said the following seven things under oath, and we can show that number two and number five never happened.
01:24:41.000So anything you say, we're going to treat now as a lie.
01:24:44.000And it wasn't that they were trying to fool anyone.
01:24:47.000They were just trying to make themselves seem like sensible humans who did things for a good reason.
01:24:51.000Well, there's also situations where you have a prosecutor that's unscrupulous and all they want to do is catch you lying, and then they could prosecute you for perjury.
01:25:01.000That's happened to many people that were actually innocent of the initial crime they were trying to be convicted of, but then they made false statements to the FBI. Oh, absolutely.
01:25:10.000We're sitting ducks for that because we all lie.
01:25:12.000I mean, I think the estimate is every person tells two lies a day on average.
01:25:44.000Yeah, the thing about the idea of a digital memory is that it's something that they're working on.
01:25:55.000It's something that they do believe that within our lifetimes they're going to be able to achieve some way of a visual interpretation of what you're experiencing that can be either downloaded or shared or at least examined for veracity.
01:26:12.000Like say if you have an idea We're good to go.
01:26:34.000Unfortunately, it hasn't led to 1984 in England.
01:26:57.000You have a lack of privacy and an erosion of your privacy, but you also have this possibility that someone who could be convicted – and that has happened, right?
01:27:08.000Look, this Kyle Rittenhouse verdict that came down, there's many people that had a very distorted idea of what actually took place that day.
01:27:17.000And then through the trial, we got to see what had actually happened.
01:27:21.000Many people did not know that someone had actually pulled a gun on him and that they had attacked him and knocked him to the ground.
01:27:27.000When you get to see it and see when he actually shot them, it changes the whole narrative.
01:27:32.000Yeah, in other cases, like the, well, some of the police shootings we never would have known about if there weren't cell phone cameras.
01:27:38.000The Boston Marathon bombers that Sir Mayer brothers caught on camera.
01:27:46.000You know, I tend to think that the fears that people have after reading 1984, that if you have better technology, that is the slippery slope towards totalitarianism.
01:28:00.000Feeling tends to be overblown that you can have some technologically pretty crude countries that are just horrible places to live because the government can always tap into ordinary conversations, gossip networks.
01:28:16.000If people really are planning something, they talk to other people.
01:28:21.000They can use friends and relatives against each other.
01:28:29.000Tin pot third world dictatorships that are pretty terrifying places with really crude technology.
01:28:35.000And then there are places like Scandinavia and England where the technology is pretty advanced, but they haven't turned into 1984. But then you have places like China.
01:28:46.000Where the technology is very advanced and they've done some very disturbing things like this social credit score system that people in America that are staunch advocates for personal liberty are very concerned that something like that is going to make its way in some sort of an innocuous form.
01:29:03.000Here, that some social credit score thing will be something that we implement and then before you know it, like there was an article really recently where they were saying that your actual credit score, your credit score in terms of ability to borrow money,
01:29:19.000could be affected by your browser history.
01:29:29.000And the way they were framing it was so insidious, because they were framing it essentially like, you could be able to borrow more money if we can look at your browser history.
01:29:40.000So they were saying that essentially, if you're a good guy, we could check your browser history, and maybe you'd be eligible for more money.
01:29:49.000Or maybe if you're some guy who wants to Google some naughty things about Joe Biden or some naughty things about Kamala Harris or how did Nancy Pelosi get all that money?
01:30:04.000Well, and it wouldn't take much artificial intelligence to find patterns in people's browsing history that would predict all kinds of stuff.
01:30:20.000And, you know, they got radicalized, and they start—I mean, that happens all the time to people, right?
01:30:24.000Like, people that were hardcore left-wing people switch over to the right, or hardcore right-wing people switch over to the left.
01:30:31.000And then they find this new ideology, and it's kind of exciting.
01:30:34.000It's like breaking up with your wife, and you get this new wife, and all of a sudden, you know, you got new problems and everything, but yay!
01:30:46.000Got a new wife, new life, everything's great!
01:30:49.000And that's kind of what they're doing.
01:30:50.000They switch ideologies, and this new ideology becomes exciting.
01:30:54.000Well, and it is true that there are certain patterns of thinking, like conspiratorial thinking, that you can find on the left and on the right.
01:31:29.000But in terms of ones that kind of defy conventional understanding and involve considerable amounts of Cooperation and conspiracy across a wide range in opposition to constituencies that have an interest in maintaining the truth.
01:31:49.000Which is what we tend to call conspiracy theories.
01:31:53.000When I took the Washington Post survey, I didn't believe any of them.
01:31:58.000People that have an interest in maintaining the truth?
01:32:16.000Kind of checks and balances where there are people who have a vested interest in It's advancing some goal and there are also people who have a vested interest in stopping them where they don't have completely free reign,
01:32:32.000where there are journalists, where there are members of the other political party, where there are people just doing their jobs, where just so many people would have to be acting together who ordinarily would have conflicting interests.
01:32:46.000Trevor Burrus Give me an example of one of those kind of theories.
01:32:49.000Well, let's say, did the CIA deliberately release the HIV virus in order to sterilize African-Americans?
01:33:52.000I think it's much easier to believe that a bunch of prison staff were incompetent than that they actually were willing to risk imprisonment for a goal that they probably couldn't have meant a whole lot to them.
01:34:04.000But not just incompetent, but the cameras were shut off?
01:34:09.000The cameras that were supposed to be monitoring his area were shut off?
01:34:13.000I mean, you know, low paid civil servants can do all kinds of incompetent things.
01:34:19.000Low paid civil servants can also be bribed.
01:34:22.000They can, but it would have to be an awful lot of people who are bribed.
01:34:28.000And could that secret really have been kept by so many people?
01:34:33.000But you know that forensic scientists have studied his autopsy and concluded that the ligature marks around his neck and the placement of them and the wound...
01:34:44.000The way the damage to his vertebrae, the bones that are in his neck, is not consistent with hanging, but is consistent with being strangled because of the positioning of where the choke marks were.
01:34:56.000When you hang, usually it's higher up because the force of gravity, when you have something tighter on your neck, the force of gravity raises it up to where your neck is, meeting your chin.
01:35:08.000He was strangled down low, which is usually what happens if someone gets behind you and chokes you to death.
01:35:16.000There's a fracture of the bones in his neck that's consistent with strangulation.
01:35:21.000Dr. Michael Badden, who's a leading forensic scientist, who's the guy who used to be on that HBO show, Autopsy, who's worked on thousands of criminal cases, his conclusion was it was a homicide.
01:35:33.000The last one I read seemed to suggest it was perfectly compatible.
01:36:27.000I want to see if someone had a legitimate criticism of Dr. Michael Baden's view of the autopsy.
01:36:37.000That's an interesting conspiracy, the Jeffrey Epstein one.
01:36:40.000Because, you know, I was told about that by Alex Jones, of all people, more than a decade ago.
01:36:46.000He told me there was a group of people that would compromise very wealthy and powerful folks by bringing them to this place and introducing them to underage girls and filming them.
01:38:33.000And Bill Clinton in that dress, the way it looks to me, I mean, when you find out later that Bill Clinton had been invited to Jeffrey Epstein's plane and flew with him more than 26 times, Over a period of just a couple of years,
01:38:51.000And we know that Bill Clinton's kind of a pig, right?
01:38:55.000That guy having that painting of Bill Clinton in a dress pointing at the viewer, that to me, if I was going to put that in my house, that's a way to say, I own you, bitch.
01:39:09.000That's what I would be saying to Bill Clinton.
01:39:59.000I mean, I had the tremendous misfortune of knowing Jeffrey Epstein because I knew so many people at Harvard, at MIT, at Arizona State who were in tight with him.
01:40:10.000He got really in tight with scientists, right?
01:40:12.000He got really in tight with scientists.
01:40:56.000Oh, I wouldn't have set foot on this island in a million years.
01:40:59.000But before any of this stuff came out, I did fly on his plane once to Ted in Monterey with my literary agent, John Brockman and Dan Dennett.
01:41:07.000You just thought you were hanging out with a rich guy.
01:41:31.000He had ADD. He couldn't keep on track with the conversation.
01:41:34.000And I think because he sloshed money around so freely that a lot of people, including good friends of mine, thought, oh, he's as smart as my academic and scientific colleagues, which he was not.
01:42:54.000Like that guy, him, what is said about him is true.
01:43:00.000That he was compromising all these very rich and powerful people by introducing them to underage girls.
01:43:06.000If it was an attempt to compromise them as opposed to just kind of sharing the favors and befriending people by offering them what he thought was a perk that he got to enjoy.
01:43:18.000But then the other conspiracy is, where's this guy getting this money?
01:43:21.000Well, yeah, that is something that we don't know.
01:43:43.000Well, there was an era in which if you had something on the ball, if you had a little bit of math and if you were lucky, you could make a lot of money on Wall Street.
01:43:57.000And I think he was in that generation of capitalizing on some opportunities to multiply money because of When I've talked to people that understand money that way, though, specifically Eric Weinstein,
01:44:12.000he doesn't think he's nearly sophisticated enough to do that.
01:44:15.000He didn't think he had an understanding of—he thought he was full of shit.
01:44:20.000He's like, I think this guy's playing a role.
01:44:22.000He goes, I don't think he's a financial expert at all.
01:44:24.000And the idea of all these people giving him money to invest, he's like, this is nonsense.
01:44:30.000Eric is one of the smartest people I know.
01:44:32.000When he was talking about his particular field of interest, he runs Teal Capital.
01:44:40.000He understands what the fuck he's talking about.
01:44:45.000So when he's talking to someone, it's like, if I'm talking to someone who pretends that they're a stand-up comedian, and I'm like, where do you play?
01:45:47.000What's interesting is it's so easy to dismiss the idea of a conspiracy theory because if you believe in them, you're a silly person and you can't be taken seriously.
01:45:56.000Like if you say … The reason I think that you've got to start off with an attitude of skepticism toward conspiracy theories Is that they are so resistant to falsification.
01:46:09.000Namely, the fact that there is no evidence for the conspiracy is proof of what a diabolical conspiracy it is.
01:46:16.000And so whenever you have an idea that kind of resists falsification by its very nature, it's not that it's necessarily false, but still there should be a really high burden of proof.
01:46:29.000I got this from my philosophy professor a long time ago.
01:46:31.000Let's say you ask, why does a watch go tick, [...
01:46:35.000And the guy says, well, I have a theory.
01:46:37.000There's a little man inside the watch with a hammer, and he's going wap, [...
01:46:43.000And you say, okay, well, let's test the theory.
01:46:45.000I'll take a screwdriver, pull off the back of the watch, and you say, hey, there's no little man inside, just a bunch of gears and springs.
01:46:51.000And the guy says, no, no, there really is a little man, but he turns into gears and springs whenever you look at him.
01:46:56.000Now, you know, that could be true, but the fact that the theory is so Crafted so that it resists being falsified just should make you very suspicious.
01:47:06.000You need an awful lot of evidence to be convinced of that kind of thing.
01:47:10.000And that's why conspiracy theories are so easy to spin out and often so hard to definitively refute.
01:47:16.000You can't prove that they're not true, but you should greet them with a lot of skepticism.
01:47:23.000Yeah, I've ramped up my skepticism lately.
01:47:26.000On one of the subjects, it's the UFO subject.
01:47:29.000And the reason why I've ramped my skepticism is because of the transparency of the federal government.
01:47:35.000When they started talking about how UFOs are real, and they started talking about how these things are unexplainable, we don't know what they are, we're trying to monitor them.
01:47:45.000And someone who worked for the Pentagon said that there's the reality of off-world vehicles not made on this earth.
01:47:53.000And then I'm like, why are they telling us that?
01:48:40.000There was a recent press release that just came out, and Jeremy Corbell was talking about it, and Jeremy Corbell said that he believed...
01:48:48.000Jeremy Corbell is the guy who produced this documentary about Bob Lazar, who's the most controversial of all characters when it comes to the UFO world, because...
01:48:56.000He is a propulsions expert that claimed to have worked at Area 51 Site 4, which is a place where they say they have these engineered or back-engineered UFOs they're working on.
01:49:12.000They're trying to figure out how to...
01:49:21.000And we're trying to go to other planets.
01:49:23.000So why is it so crazy to think that some person or some thing, some creature from another planet that also has a spaceship would come here?
01:49:30.000Well, because there's a simpler explanation, namely that they are unidentified flying objects.
01:50:28.000Yeah, but he's not correct in a lot of his assumptions as well.
01:50:34.000And one of the things, the problem with what he's saying is he disregards one of the most credible of all of the sightings by this guy named Commander David Fravor.
01:50:46.000And Commander David Fravor was a fighter jet pilot.
01:50:49.000And off the coast of San Diego in 2004, they tracked some object on radar that went from 50,000 feet above sea level to 50 feet in less than a second.
01:51:00.000They got visual confirmation of this thing.
01:51:15.000It was also actively jamming their radar.
01:51:17.000So as they were trying to track it, like when the jets pulled up to try to track it, it was actively blocking their radar, which is technically an act of war.
01:51:25.000But this thing was super sophisticated and moved at insane rates of speed that if you put a human being inside of it, he said, you would literally be turned into jello from the G-force.
01:51:35.000There's no way you would be able to tolerate it.
01:51:37.000And this thing went from where they had found it and it went to their cat point, which means their predetermined point of destination, where the fighter jets were supposed to go to.
01:51:48.000This thing went there and appeared there on radar again.
01:51:51.000So they have visual confirmation from more than two jets, they have video evidence of this thing, and then they have radar tracking that shows extraordinary speeds that defy our understanding of physics and propulsion.
01:52:06.000So whatever this thing is, it's not operating the way a jet would work, where you push things out the back to make something go fast forward the way a rocket works.
01:52:16.000It's operating on some completely different way.
01:52:19.000My suspicion Especially because of all this government release of this UFO stuff is that they've figured out how to use some sort of gravity propulsion system on a drone and that that's what that thing is.
01:52:35.000And I think it's probably because it's off the coast of San Diego, which is...
01:52:42.000There's all these military bases, and there's so much military activity going there.
01:52:47.000It just makes sense that that would be a place where they would practice using some sort of drone.
01:52:53.000I'm highly skeptical, and the thing is that it would be pretty straightforward if these things did exist, that we would have high-quality photography.
01:53:02.000We'd actually find the thing, find traces of them.
01:53:05.000I suspect that there are complicated, boring explanations for them such as the fact that the speed of a flying object, of course, depends on the distance that you think that it's at.
01:53:16.000If it's much closer than you think it is, you could attribute fantastic speeds to it simply because the visual angle that it covers Sure, but we're talking about highly sophisticated United States military tracking systems that are designed to protect the United States from being attacked by other countries and their sophisticated weapons.
01:53:40.000So these are the most accurate weapons detection systems that we have.
01:53:47.000So when they detect something and they see it at 60,000 feet, and then they see it again at 50 feet above sea level, and it happens in less than a second, it gives one pause.
01:53:59.000I don't know what it is, but whatever it is, Commander David Fravor was absolutely convinced that he had never seen anything like this before.
01:54:07.000He knows that it had been aware of him because it changed its plane and it moved towards them.
01:54:56.000But he doesn't have any understanding of these tracking systems.
01:55:01.000And that's where he made the critical errors.
01:55:03.000And there's been more than one fighter pilot, more than one expert in these tracking systems that's debunked Mick West's debunking.
01:55:14.000Commander David Fravor being one of them.
01:55:16.000There's another guy that's on YouTube that has a very long and detailed analysis of why Mick West is incorrect.
01:55:22.000I don't know who's right or wrong because I don't know jack shit about these military systems.
01:55:27.000But I find it fascinating that there's this guy who's an incredibly credible human being who is a fighter pilot, who's a guy who's the best and the brightest amongst our...
01:55:40.000I mean, fighter pilots aren't the people who would be best equipped to answer these questions.
01:55:47.000I mean, that's not what they're selected for.
01:56:07.000When you say an artifact, they saw it visually, they had visual confirmation, and then they have it on video, and they watched it jet off.
01:56:15.000We're susceptible to visual illusions, the foremost being that The speed of something depends critically on the distance, which can be fooled.
01:56:25.000But if anybody is going to understand these things, it's someone who operates these jets in water.
01:56:32.000You don't think that someone who's accustomed to tracking, flying, moving objects with a jet plane in the heat of combat?
01:56:39.000And understands how all these tracking systems on these jets work, that that person wouldn't be very highly qualified when it comes to registering what a flying object is and how fast it's moving and how big it is?
01:56:54.000I suspect not, for the same reason that a pilot is not the kind of engineer that you'd bring in to, say, analyze the wreckage from a plane crash to figure out what caused it.
01:57:09.000This is someone recognizing something, taking off at the same rates of speed.
01:57:13.000The thing is that the possible causes of highly unusual observations is not the kind of thing that a habitual pilot would be equipped to do.
01:57:24.000In the same way that when there were claims of telekinesis and psychics in the 70s and they brought in physicists to, say, examine Uri Geller, it turned out that they were fooled and the people they should have brought in were stage magicians who are experts in how our appearances can be It can deceive us in terms of the underlying reality.
01:57:49.000But this is a very different type of situation.
01:57:51.000You're talking about more than one jet, more than one person in each jet, visual confirmation of this thing by these people.
01:58:00.000And this thing, lifting off the water, recognizing them, jamming their radar, and then moving off at insane rates of speed, and then flying and being recognized at their cat point.
01:58:10.000Which shows some sort of intelligent control of it.
01:58:13.000Well, if the rates of speed really are insane.
01:58:17.000It may be that the perception of insane rates of speed is mistaken.
01:58:22.000If you're tracking something with the most sophisticated radar that we have and it goes from 50,000 feet above sea level to 50 feet above sea level in less than a second, that's pretty fucking insane.
01:58:34.000If you know for sure that it's done that.
01:58:46.000It's to demand a high burden of proof, such as actually having an irrefutable, high-quality photograph of it.
01:58:54.000And it's been observed by Elon Musk and others that the quality of photographic evidence for UFOs over the last 50 years has been pretty much constant, even though the technology of photography and sensing has increased by orders of magnitude.
01:59:11.000So shouldn't we have much more convincing evidence now that we're so much better able to take high-quality photographs of everything, that we still have these Okay, we're talking about a different thing then.
01:59:29.000And also, if you're talking about something that can literally move at the rate of speed that we can't perceive with our human eyes, like this thing, how are you going to take a picture of that?
01:59:40.000So, we're talking about anomalies, things that rarely occur, if they occur at all.
01:59:45.000And I'm skeptical that they're from another world.
01:59:47.000The more time goes on, the more I'm skeptical of it.
01:59:51.000And I tend to think, because I know that there's been some work in magnetic propulsion systems And some sort of a gravity-defying propulsion system.
01:59:59.000There's been all sorts of work in these things.
02:00:01.000Maybe there's some breakthrough that we're not being led on about and that this has military applications and that this is what all this work with these drones is.
02:00:11.000So when these fighter pilots, and there's been multiple fighter pilots that have seen these anomalous objects moving at insane rates of speed, maybe that's what we're seeing.
02:00:19.000Maybe we're seeing some kind of drone system.
02:00:21.000Maybe I have reached the limits of my expertise, but I do have some skepticism, and perhaps if we could decide what would be convincing evidence one way or another.
02:00:32.000You're also a public intellectual, so you have to maintain a level of credibility that I don't...
02:00:39.000You can't entertain some dumb shit ideas that I can, like, go all the way into.
02:00:49.000I've watched many documentaries and I've read analysis of these things by experts and I actually had Commander Fravor in here and I spoke to him in person for a long period of time and he's very convincing.
02:01:02.000That what he saw was extraordinary and it doesn't make any sense.
02:01:05.000He's never seen anything like it since.
02:01:07.000And he also said that the folks that were communicating with him from whatever ship, I think they were on the Nimitz, he was saying that they had seen multiple ones of those and that they had happened multiple times over the past few months while he was there.
02:01:23.000So again, not being an expert in UFOs, let me bring it back to reasoning and rationality and why I'm skeptical.
02:01:32.000You can have a kind of a Bayesian analysis of how we should adjust our belief.
02:01:41.000So Bayesian refers to the formula from the Reverend Thomas Bayes from the 18th century On the optimal way to calibrate your belief to evidence.
02:01:51.000And so you've heard the expression priors, depends what your priors are.
02:01:56.000Namely, you start off with a, based on everything you know so far, everything you've already observed, What credence would you give to an idea?
02:02:34.000It picks up 90% of the cancers that are there, but it also has a false alarm rate, so that, say, 9% of the time, it picks up a signal that is not really cancer, a false positive rate, like a lot of medical tests.
02:02:48.000If you have a positive test result, How do you interpret it in terms of the probability that a person really has cancer?
02:02:55.000And the famous finding from psychology is that we tend to...
02:03:00.000First of all, people are often not very good at it, including doctors.
02:03:04.000So in the numbers that I just gave you, most people and most doctors would say, oh, positive test result, 90% chance you have cancer.
02:03:12.000The correct answer, according to the formula of Thomas Bayes, is 9%.
02:03:26.000If it's only 1% of the population that even has the cancer, most of the positives are going to be false positives.
02:03:33.000So what does this have to do with UFOs?
02:03:35.000Well, before you even look at this particular evidence, given how many claims of UFOs there have been which turned out to be bogus, namely pretty much all of them so far, that sets a pretty low prior so that even if you can't be certain that this is a False observation.
02:04:05.000But still, your priors, before you even look at the quality of that evidence, would be, chances are it's going to be like all the other UFO reports.
02:04:14.000Namely, we may not even be able to explain it just because we can't track down every Last minute fact of that situation that took place three years ago.
02:04:24.000You know, we didn't have cameras from every angle.
02:04:28.000But chances are that something that's unexplained for something that's unlikely, based on all observations so far, is unlikely to be true, is even if the evidence was pretty good, you'd be rational not to believe it.
02:04:46.000But isn't it better when you're dealing with extraordinary and unique circumstances to look at it entirely based on the facts that are at hand?
02:04:57.000But what about things like what we were talking about before the podcast started, when we were doing our little COVID tests?
02:05:02.000We were talking about the Hobbit Man from the island of Flores.
02:05:06.000They were very skeptical that there was a complete new branch of the human species that we weren't aware of that coexisted with human beings as recently as 10,000 years ago.
02:05:19.000I mean, if you told that to people 20 years ago, they would have laughed in your face.
02:05:23.000I don't know if they would have laughed in your face, but they would have demanded a high quality of evidence, and there was a high quality of evidence.
02:05:32.000There's just no reason to be skeptical whatsoever.
02:05:34.000Initially, there was a lot of skepticism.
02:05:35.000Yeah, but now that it has been, there was a theory that these were actually stunted from disease, from malnutrition, but those have been ruled out pretty well.
02:05:49.000If this evidence of this tic-tac, if there's more concrete, conclusive evidence that shows that something can defy our understanding of physics and use some sort of propulsion system that's not indicative of something pushing something out the back like fire and shooting forward like most rockets do,
02:06:08.000would you be willing to entertain the idea that something's going on?
02:06:25.000So I'm willing to credit the physicists who have measured the acceleration of the expansion of the universe that there is something going on there that we don't understand.
02:06:38.000But the evidence is pretty good, and there's no way to dismiss it.
02:06:41.000It's not a one-off, unique event that happened somewhere a few years ago that we'll never be able to recreate.
02:06:49.000It's just much better evidence than that.
02:06:51.000And so, yeah, you've got to be prepared to be surprised.
02:06:54.000You've got to revise your Posterior, as they say, that is, how much you believe something after you've looked at the evidence from your priors, namely how much credence did you give to it before looking at the evidence, if the evidence is really, really strong.
02:07:12.000It's trading off, based on everything you know so far, how credible is it with how strong is the evidence and how common is the evidence across the board, those three things.
02:07:23.000What's the difference between dark energy and dark matter?
02:07:25.000So dark energy is the hypothetical, as yet poorly understood source of the fact that the Big Bang seems to be getting faster and faster, which no one had predicted.
02:07:41.000And dark matter My understanding is that it's meant to explain a different phenomenon, namely why there's a kind of clumping among galaxies more than we would expect based on the mass of the stars making up those galaxies,
02:07:57.000suggesting that there is some source of gravitational attraction that we can't see that's forming those clumps.
02:08:04.000What gets confusing to me is when I read this article that was talking about a galaxy that they've discovered that is made entirely of black matter, or dark matter, rather.
02:08:12.000And they're like, well, what are you talking about?
02:08:15.000Yeah, well, I think that they don't know, but I suppose you're sort of guessing that they detect its presence from its gravitational effect on other celestial bodies.
02:08:28.000Yeah, so most of the universe, like, it's a large percentage, is dark matter, correct?
02:09:35.000Yeah, because a lot of them are through hypnotic regression.
02:09:38.000And John Mack, who was from your university, from Harvard, who was a famous proponent of Of UFOs and wrote books, two, I believe, about this sort of phenomenon,
02:09:58.000this hypnotic regression where people would have these stories of being abducted by UFOs, but very highly criticized, like his methods in particular.
02:10:15.000So I think he—and by the way, I think this is a great example of the distinction that we were talking about earlier between beliefs that you really hold because they affect your life and you have to act on them.
02:10:27.000Like, you know, is there food in the fridge?
02:11:04.000You're a doctor at one of these hospitals, in his case the Cambridge Hospital, the Mass General Hospital, the Beth Israel Hospital, where a lot of the doctors could put after their name a Harvard professor, but they're not really hired on the basis of their research expertise.
02:11:24.000So he wasn't lying when he said that he had a Harvard affiliation, but didn't mean all that much.
02:11:29.000In his case, so he had these patients who were convinced that they had been abducted by aliens, their genitals had been examined, they were part of experiments.
02:11:41.000So his, and I think what was going on there is that he was...
02:11:45.000A kind of psychiatrist who believes that we should take our patient's testimony seriously.
02:11:50.000That if it was their reality, we should treat it as reality.
02:11:56.000Now, that's kind of different from, say, calling up the Harvard astronomy department and say, hey, you're going to get a Nobel Prize based on something that I'm going to tip you off to, like we've been visited by aliens.
02:12:08.000You know, just like if you really believed in Pizzagate, you'd probably call the police if you really thought that there were children being raped in the basement.
02:12:16.000If you really, really thought that he had evidence of alien visitation, You'd think he'd call some astronomers, some astrophysicists.
02:12:27.000He didn't because that wasn't the way he believed it.
02:12:30.000He believed it in the sense that, well, it's important to take my patient's testimony seriously.
02:12:40.000If you were dealing with someone that had some sort of abduction experience where they had been visited by beings That have technology and a capability beyond our understanding and that these beings can appear and disappear at will,
02:12:57.000can paralyze people, they can do things to people and perform medical exams and then return them and reduce their memory to like mere splinters where they have to be hypnotized in order to have this hypnotic regression to get this memory back.
02:13:14.000What is calling an astronomer going to do to you?
02:13:16.000Why would you think about an astrophysicist?
02:13:46.000The main criticism is that he was introducing ideas into these people's heads and confirming ideas.
02:13:52.000And actually, we do know the neurological phenomenon that can lead to some of these memories.
02:14:00.000There's a phenomenon of partial awakening, partial sleep, where your body is still paralyzed, as it is during deep sleep or during REM sleep.
02:14:12.000But you're conscious and you're experiencing your surroundings, but your body is paralyzed.
02:14:18.000And there are states like that where you can misinterpret that That constellation of experience as being passively carried, as seeing bulbous-headed apparitions.
02:14:32.000And also believing that you are being manipulated into that state by some nefarious creatures who want to examine you.
02:14:39.000So now we're kind of doing Bayesian reasoning again, saying...
02:14:42.000Given that our memories are really not always that accurate, given that when we're in various states of exhaustion and delirium and half sleep, half wake, we can hallucinate all kinds of weird stuff, what's more likely?
02:14:57.000That some psychiatrist at Cambridge Hospital has made the most important discovery in thousands of years?
02:15:05.000Or That he's taking some patients' hallucinations a little bit too seriously.
02:15:09.000Well, all in all, we'd say, chances are the memories were not veridical, just based on everything else we understand.
02:15:19.000Now, he did not engage in that kind of Bayesian reasoning.
02:15:47.000No, I think you put your finger on it.
02:15:49.000The question is, how committed are you to a narrative being true in the same sense that there's gas in the car is true or false?
02:15:57.000And I think that people, when it comes to stirring interesting, meaning-giving narratives, they don't insist on that kind of proof.
02:16:08.000I think there is an attitude that some people have, probably a tiny minority of humanity, that you should only believe things for which there's good evidence.
02:16:27.000You might think, oh, isn't that obvious?
02:16:30.000I mean, couldn't your grandmother have told you that?
02:16:32.000But now, the thing is, it's a revolutionary manifesto.
02:16:36.000That's not the way people believe things.
02:16:38.000They believe things for all kinds of reasons.
02:16:41.000And I consider it kind of a gift of the enlightenment where we have this strange new mindset, only believe things that someone can show to be true.
02:16:57.000And I think it's a fundamental flaw in maybe it's our education system or maybe it's just the collective way that people look at things that they attach themselves to an idea and then defend it as if it's a part of them.
02:17:13.000Yeah, and even if they don't defend it, they can sometimes even just believe it.
02:17:18.000Rationalize it, find a way, and then find like-minded people that support that idea, get themselves in an echo chamber, and bounce around QAnon theories.
02:17:26.000I mean, that's really kind of the same thing, right?
02:17:28.000So is that a failure of our education system?
02:17:32.000Is that a failure of the way we're raising our children?
02:17:35.000Like, what is it that's causing This lack of understanding of how the mind works and how we form ideas and opinions and how not to cling to ones that might not be true at all or might be highly suspect.
02:17:52.000Well, it is, although I would kind of turn the question upside down.
02:17:56.000It's not that it's this strange, inexplicable anomaly that people believe weird stuff.
02:18:03.000That's the natural state of humanity is to believe weird stuff.
02:18:18.000Until we had modern science and record keeping and archives and presidents having tape recorders going in the Oval Office, You just can't know.
02:19:37.000Led people to do heroic, moral things and inhibited them from doing evil, bad things.
02:19:43.000Those are all reasons to believe something, separate from, is it actually true?
02:19:48.000Or can you actually show that it's true?
02:19:49.000And the idea that you should only believe things that are factually true, that's weird in human history.
02:19:56.000I think it's good, and I think our educational system should get kids to think that way, but it's not the natural way for anyone to think.
02:20:04.000So we're always pushing against the part of human nature that is happy to believe things because it's, you know, uplifting, edifying a good story, a satisfying myth.
02:20:16.000And for those of us who say, no, that's really not a good reason to believe something.
02:20:20.000You should only believe it if it's true.
02:20:24.000It's a battle worth fighting, but our schools and our journalistic practices and our everyday conversation should be steered toward the kind of skeptical attitude of, I'm not going to believe it until there's good evidence for it.
02:20:42.000You have faced, in my opinion, some of the most irrational criticism that I think is based on ideological narratives that people want to follow when it comes to the progression of safety.
02:20:58.000You've said that if you follow history, this is one of the safest times to be alive.
02:21:03.000There's less murder, there's less rape, there's less racism, there's less violence.
02:21:11.000All these things that factor into that this is a really amazing time to be alive.
02:21:15.000And because of people's, I believe, because of their ideological biases or these narratives that they'd want to stick to, like things are terrible today.
02:21:25.000When you say things are actually less terrible than ever before, people get angry at you.
02:21:30.000Like, what is that like to face that kind of criticism when you are talking about some hard statistics in science that's very easily trackable?
02:22:29.000There's kind of the reactionary resistance, the people who want to look backward to a golden age.
02:22:35.000Then from the left, there's the idea that our current society is so corrupt, so rotten, so evil that we'd be better off just burning the whole thing down and anything that rises out of the rubble is going to be better than what we have now.
02:22:52.000And when you say, well, yeah, we've got an awful lot of problems now, but things could be worse.
02:22:59.000And so let's not tear it down because it's much easier to make things worse than to make things better.
02:23:05.000So that goes against that kind of radical left-wing ideology, kind of not exactly a mirror image of the reactionary right-wing ideology, but both sides are opposed to claims that there has been progress.
02:23:18.000But on top of that, so that's the ideological resistance, but I think there's also some cognitive resistance, and that comes from the...
02:23:27.000We talked before about the availability bias.
02:23:29.000Namely, you base your sense of probability on how easily you can remember examples.
02:23:35.000And the news is about stuff that happens, not stuff that doesn't happen.
02:23:40.000And it's usually about bad stuff that happens.
02:23:44.000Because bad things can happen quickly.
02:24:02.000Or things that happen gradually, like every year, several hundred thousand people escape from extreme poverty.
02:24:13.000Actually, every week, several hundred thousand people escape from extreme poverty.
02:24:17.000But it's not something that all of a sudden happened on a Thursday.
02:24:20.000It just happens in the background creeping up on us, so you never read about it.
02:24:26.000It's only when you look at the graphs and you see, oh my goodness, there's still wars, but now the rate of death from war is about 1 per 100,000 per year.
02:24:37.000Not long ago it was 10 per 100,000 per year, and before that it was 30 per 100,000 a year.
02:24:42.000It's when you actually plot the graphs that you see the progress, which you can never tell from headlines.
02:24:48.000So there's also a kind of an illusion from the experience of news as opposed to data.
02:24:57.000That's all well and good, but how do we fix this?
02:25:00.000How do we change the way people look at the reality of progress, and instead of just dismissing it because it doesn't fit their narrative, how do we convince people, like, yes, it doesn't mean that there aren't real problems in the world.
02:25:15.000There are real problems in the world, but we are collectively moving in the right general direction.
02:25:33.000But if there is a police shooting, a rampage shooting, a terrorist attack, it should be put in perspective of how many murders there are a year in all.
02:25:43.000So we'd realize that, say, for example, terrorist attacks...
02:25:47.000Of course, that's why we call it terrorism.
02:25:51.000But really, if you're going to get murdered, it's much more likely to be in an argument over a parking spot or a barroom brawl or a jealous spouse.
02:26:04.000So stories in the papers should put things into statistical context.
02:26:09.000We should have more of a dashboard of the world.
02:26:12.000The news should be a little bit more like the sports page and the business section, where you see constantly updated numbers and not just the eyeball-grabbing, sensational event.
02:26:27.000We should also have an understanding of what progress is, because it's easy to misunderstand it in the other direction and to think, oh, things just get better and better all by themselves.
02:26:37.000Progress is just part of the universe, and that's clearly wrong.
02:26:51.000They're constantly evolving to be more deadly, as we're seeing it this very week.
02:26:56.000So nothing by itself makes life better for us.
02:26:59.000It only comes from human ingenuity being applied to making people better off.
02:27:04.000That is, if we decide, well, what can we do to make people live longer or be less likely to be in a famine or less likely to go to war or less likely to commit crime and apply our brain power to try to reduce those problems?
02:27:20.000There's no guarantee that we'll succeed.
02:27:22.000Every once in a while, we'll come across something that works if we keep it, if we don't repeat our mistakes.
02:27:27.000That's what can lead to intermittent progress, and it can accumulate.
02:27:32.000That's all the progress is, but it means that there's always a chance that things can go backwards, and they do go backwards.
02:27:39.000You know, COVID meant that a lot of these data showing human improvement have gone into reverse, we hope temporarily.
02:27:58.000There's also the issue where some people want to move things collectively in a better place for the human race and other people want to profit wildly.
02:28:08.000Yeah, they want to take advantage of these situations where people are trying to move things in the right direction and they hijack these movements.
02:28:14.000And they instead attach themselves or their corporation or whatever their cause is to these movements in order for them to profit.
02:28:23.000This is the problem we have with politicians, right?
02:28:25.000This is the problem we have when politicians are corrupt and making a lot of money while also espousing woke ideals that seem great to young people and they hijack these ideas.
02:28:36.000And we have to figure out a way to stop that from happening.
02:28:40.000Collectively, to get people to move in the right direction, the general direction of progress, on paper, it seems like a great thing for almost everybody.
02:28:52.000Everybody's like, yeah, I want the world to be a better place.
02:28:54.000Everybody wants the world to be a better place.
02:28:58.000My family's in the coal business, so I don't know what to tell you.
02:29:02.000Yeah, it is a problem and we do need institutional changes that make that less likely to happen.
02:29:09.000And we don't have nearly enough guardrails in terms of just disclosure of campaign contributions, dependence of politicians on money to get re-elected.
02:29:20.000These are systematic things that get in the way, absolutely.
02:29:23.000When people get hijacked, like when pharmaceutical – have you seen Dope Sick?
02:29:34.000There's been many of those situations where pharmaceutical companies who have extraordinary power and influence have manipulated reality so that they can sell their drugs.
02:29:44.000And in this case, selling opioids, which are highly, highly, highly – We're good to go.
02:30:43.000It seems like we've almost come to this point of like a crossroads where the influence that a lot of these special interest groups have, like whether it's pharmaceutical companies or big oil or whatever it is, they have so much influence that to try to get that out of politics,
02:31:03.000to try to get that out of the way we govern, It seems like we'd almost have to revamp the entire system, and this is where all these crazy burn-it-all-to-the-ground kids come into play, right?
02:31:15.000This is where all the crazy communists and Marxists, and Marxism just hasn't been done right, and they just want to come in.
02:31:24.000It's like, these motherfuckers are just never going to let go of profit, and profit at the cost of destroying the Amazon, or at the cost of whatever it is.
02:31:36.000One could imagine boot stamping on a face forever, to use one of the last lines of 1984, where you can't reform the system because the system is unreformable precisely because the vested interest won't let it be reformed.
02:32:01.000Well, the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act in the 1970s, in the teeth of opposition from many corporations, and with, ironically, the support of Richard Nixon at the time,
02:32:16.000But there was a different level of influence that corporations had on campaign contributions, on the amount of money they could donate, the amount of influence they had.
02:32:29.000It seems like it was a different level back then.
02:32:31.000I mean, it could be, but there's lots of cases in which environmental regulations have gotten more stringent, where countries have introduced carbon taxes, which the fossil fuel companies don't like, safety standards, which the car companies don't like.
02:32:48.000And the overall tendency is that the In many regards, the environment has gotten cleaner because of these innovations.
02:33:19.000And so it'll be a leveler playing field.
02:33:21.000That's the argument that a lot of right-wing people use against doing things for the environment today because of the competition with China and the competition with other countries that are not doing things to regulate and so that they can't compete with these other countries because their governments don't give a shit.
02:33:40.000And, in fact, that is another theme that I explore in Rationality in a chapter on Game Theory.
02:33:47.000Where what's rational for an individual For every individual, it might be irrational for everyone put together.
02:33:57.000The classic case is the tragedy of the commons, the hypothetical scenario where each shepherd has an interest in grazing his sheep on the town commons because his sheep isn't going to make the difference between the grass being grazed faster that it can grow back.
02:34:15.000It's always to his advantage, and they all think that.
02:34:18.000Then you've got so many sheep that the grass can't grow back and all the sheep starve.
02:34:22.000So that's called the tragedy of the commons, also called negative externality, also called public goods problem.
02:34:29.000But it's a case in which everyone doing what's in their interests actually works against their interests in the long run, unless you change the rules of the game, such as you've got permits or you've got to pay for the privilege or some way of aligning individuals' incentives with everyone's incentives.
02:34:48.000And that's true of carbon, exactly as you said.
02:34:51.000If we forego burning coal and oil, but China and India keep doing it, then we're just going to suffer the economic costs without saving the planet.
02:35:02.000So you do need that kind of international pressure.
02:35:05.000You need an international community that...
02:35:09.000Makes it just deeply uncool to be the bad guy who's spoiling the planet.
02:35:13.000You've got to dangle other incentives so that if you want our cooperation on one thing, you've got to cooperate on this.
02:36:22.000And especially if their stuff is made by an enormous corporation.
02:36:25.000And the enormous corporation, if it's a very popular corporation like Apple, they don't suffer at all for the fact that their stuff is being made But the push
02:37:04.000Well, in each one of them, you do see companies changing their policies because they don't want to look like bad guys.
02:37:13.000So it's not totally ineffective, although not as effective as we would like it to be.
02:37:19.000And also, when it comes going back to, say, China and India burning coal, there's also a built-in incentive for them to not go all out on it, namely that their skies are so polluted with particulate matter and poison gases that people start to drop like flies from respiratory diseases.
02:37:46.000So for the same reason that when you have the choice of some source of energy other than coal, you go for it, that itself is also going to have a partial pushback against...
02:38:00.000A slowdown in the rate of building coal plants in both India and China, just because it's choking their own population.
02:38:09.000And there have been some work done in innovating some kind of a device to suck all the particulate matter out of the sky, like some sort of enormous air filter.
02:38:41.000Well, the thing about that is, and together with carbon capture, especially direct air carbon capture as opposed to, say, smokestack carbon capture...
02:38:50.000It's that those things are going to require an awful lot of energy.
02:38:53.000And if you get that energy by, you know, burning coal, then you're right back where you started.
02:39:17.000If we had scalable fourth generation nuclear, yeah.
02:39:20.000When you sit down to write something like Rationality, when you write your book and you've written many great books, do you have a goal in mind other than put together these ideas?
02:39:33.000Are you trying to get something out there?
02:39:40.000I sometimes quote Anton Chekhov, mankind will be better when you show him what he is like.
02:39:47.000So the idea is that if we understood what makes us tick better, then we'd be better equipped to solve a number of our problems, which after all are human problems.
02:40:06.000I really appreciate you very much and I really appreciate your work and I enjoy your books and I just started this one so I'm enjoying it very much as well.