In this episode of the Joe Rogan Experience Podcast, we talk about our trip to Austin, TX to visit Onnit and the amazing people they have at the company. We also talk about the new game company Kerosene Games and how they are changing the way we play video games. Finally, we discuss how Nintendo is ruining the gaming industry and why we don t want them to go the way Nintendo does. This episode is sponsored by Onnit. Use the code "ROGAN" at checkout to get 10% off any Onnit product, including Hemp Force, the delicious hemp protein supplement that we actually have to get from Canada. Hemp is legal to own in this country, it's legal to sell, but you can't grow it in Canada. It's one of the dumbest things about agriculture in the country, and it's so ridiculous because it's a very good source of protein. And it's not even psychoactive! And it doesn't make you feel like you're getting high. We also discuss the new Game Boy Advance, the new Nintendo Game Boy Pro, and how we think it's going to be the best gaming console of the 21st century. And we discuss our thoughts on the new iPad/iOS/Android tablet/smartphone hybrid we've been playing around with and why it's better than the old Game Boy. Also, we play a new game called Blade Runner, and we're in love with it. This is a game that's coming out on the Nintendo GameBoy Pro! and we play it on the way it's made us feel like we've never played it before. Joe and Brian play it before we've ever played it. We play it and talk about how it's just like that. It's pretty cool. Just pay the . Joe Rogans and Brian Rogan talk about video games, and they play it like it's cool as shit. -Joe Rogan and Brian talk about it's awesome. Thank you for listening to this episode, and I hope you enjoy this episode! -Jon and Brian are having a nice day, and you enjoy it, and have a nice rest of the podcast. You can't get any better than that! -Jon & Brian - -Josie and Brian :) Thanks, Jon & Brett (Joe Rogans and the crew at Onnit, and the Crew
00:01:15.000And we combine it with raw cocoa and maca, and it's fucking delicious.
00:01:20.000It is seriously one of the best tasting protein powders you can ever get, because it's sweetened also with stevia, so it only has one gram of sugar.
00:01:27.000So it's not poisoning you, it doesn't make you feel sick, and it's really easily digestible.
00:02:06.000We met all those Onnit guys, by the way, in Austin, and it was the full time that we got to meet the whole entire staff, and what an amazing group of fucking employees, man!
00:02:50.000Anyway, Jesus Christ, this is going to be a long day.
00:02:54.000We're also brought to you by Kerosene Games.
00:02:57.000This is the newest sponsor, and we're very excited about this because it's a game company that is making games directly for iPads and iPhones.
00:03:12.000So it's not like they're porting other games over to these platforms.
00:03:17.000To these platforms, they're making them for tablets and smartphones.
00:03:21.000And the visuals are fucking fantastic.
00:03:24.000Their first game is called Blade Runner.
00:04:53.000to go on any of these androids and release like their old classics and stuff like that in the iPad because they know once they start doing that they're killing themselves or shooting themselves in the foot you know right and their latest Nintendo Wii has the controller that has a tablet on it you know so it's like a tablet so they're trying to slowly like hey no we got tablet type stuff yeah they're fucked but yeah really fun this game is a perfect example why man this company I'm not sure how many people are in this company,
00:07:09.000Yeah, so, it's one of those games where, like, when somebody attacks, you use your finger to swipe them and to attack them and stuff like that.
00:07:18.000I've been playing with it for a while.
00:08:32.000They have a company that uses a Sprint backbone, and so you're getting a major internet cellular provider, but you don't have The same sort of contracts.
00:14:43.000Like if you look at the actual facts of it, you go, come on, you guys are, this is archaic.
00:14:48.000And then you realize that it's not really about that as much as it, the legality of these things and the moving them into position for legality, it's That eliminates a huge business.
00:16:55.000And Obama doesn't have another term in front of him.
00:17:00.000Hopefully he won't do what Clinton did, which was after he got voted out of office, oh, you know, I've I probably think maybe it should be legal.
00:17:06.000It's like, oh, maybe if you had a position of power where you could do something about that.
00:17:11.000I think that position is extremely costly.
00:17:14.000I think to take that position as a politician, the only thing it gets for you is the love of your constituents because you're being honest.
00:17:23.000That's the only thing it gets for you.
00:17:25.000But what if Obama decides to never go back to the Senate?
00:17:28.000What if he decides to go back to working as a public servant, as a community organizer?
00:17:34.000Yeah, he doesn't have anything to lose.
00:17:36.000Yeah, so I want to see him affect some real change here in the second term.
00:17:40.000I would love to see that too, but I just...
00:17:42.000I know, I'm a bit disillusioned about it too, but...
00:17:44.000They don't ever seem to be able to do that.
00:17:47.000Even a guy like Obama, who just was the perfect guy for...
00:17:51.000If you wanted to have a guy move into a position of power like that, that you thought would be like a completely new face, a guy who was born biracial, of a single mother, the whole deal, came up poor, worked hard, was very articulate,
00:18:07.000didn't really have anything wrong with him.
00:18:09.000He's like a really bright guy, a lawyer, brilliant, great speaker, perfect.
00:18:21.000But then it gets in and it's like, it's almost like it's a job where you don't get a chance to say what really happens.
00:18:31.000Yeah, I mean, it's probably really hard for us kind of on the outside to know how much, how little power somebody actually gets once they're elected in.
00:18:39.000And I mean, obviously, I think that we need to be putting the pressure on Obama hardcore at this point because I think that he's made a lot of fucking mistakes and I think that he needs to clean up a lot of messes, especially with like civil rights abuses, especially with a lot of the I mean, well, I won't say what I'm thinking.
00:20:51.000Put that shit all over their legs and then wrap it up with saran wrap, and you overdose on this lidocaine shit, and you can actually die from it.
00:22:36.000I would think that if you were fucked up to begin with and you got into that line of work, the combination of the two...
00:22:42.000I had a friend who's an ophthalmologist and he did his residency in Miami and it was during the cocaine war days and he would just come to me and just tell me the shit that he saw And you just have to shake your head like just people just torn to bits,
00:23:08.000And you want to have some power or some excitement in your life so you're doing something that you know is wrong, but you can't help yourself because it's a thrill to see if you can pull it off.
00:23:20.000And they wind up doing it with like 20, 30 people until they get busted.
00:23:54.000He is, like, best friends with somebody who's really important in my life, so I've gotten to be close to him over about the last year.
00:24:00.000And his last fight in China, obviously, I couldn't watch it live anyway, but I kind of waited until I knew what happened and then was really excited to watch it.
00:25:43.000I mean, he's the most ridiculous example of a guy who wins in spectacular fashion and doesn't even get hit.
00:25:50.000I just, you know, I think part of it for me is that, you know, when it's somebody you know, it's hard to see somebody take a punch.
00:25:56.000It's hard to see somebody break a bone or whatever.
00:25:58.000But also, I think because of my background in the field that I come from and studying neurobiology and working with people with brain injury, when I watch these fights, that's all I can think about the whole time.
00:26:52.000And one of the pieces really, really early on that I did was about kind of this concussive injury, more in like football players and boxers, and how it mimics ALS symptoms, you know, how it starts to look like Lou Gehrig's disease after a while.
00:27:07.000And even though they think it's kind of a separate disorder, it has the same outcome, which is so scary.
00:27:18.000You've got to know when to get out and you have to get medical examinations and stay up to date on all your checkups and neurological checkups and stuff like that because it's It's a big gamble, and that's why it's so exciting.
00:27:33.000It's so exciting because everybody knows how much is on the line.
00:27:36.000And that's why nobody wants to see huge changes, like in the NFL, for example.
00:27:40.000I actually got to be kind of internet friends with Steve Gleason after I did that piece, who's an ex-NFL player who actually suffers from these injuries now, and he's got a foundation where he really tries to educate people about it, so we kind of tweet a lot.
00:27:51.000But that's why I don't think you'll ever see football players going back to wearing leather helmets, for example, which would Completely cut down on concussive head injuries because people wouldn't be charging with their heads anymore.
00:28:01.000It's just so hard for people to wrap their heads around that.
00:29:06.000You know that when you see someone do something that's really spectacular in an MMA fight, the difficulty of doing that and pulling that off on another trained killer When you watch an Anderson Silva fight, the spectacular nature that he goes about doing that,
00:29:24.000to me, it's like the most exciting artwork.
00:29:28.000Because I know how much is on the line in order to create this performance.
00:29:33.000But when he does it, it's literally like a work of art.
00:29:37.000I look at it the same way someone would look at an incredible sculpture.
00:29:41.000Unfortunately, I don't think that everybody looks at it that way, and I think that it does just kind of have this Roman Colosseum draw to it, which is just, I want to see two people fuck each other up.
00:29:51.000I want to get my aggressions out by watching somebody else do that.
00:29:54.000I blame that on a lack of understanding of martial arts, and I think that the way to fix that would be to teach it to everybody from the time they're little kids.
00:30:04.000And I think that should be a curriculum in school for boys.
00:32:31.000I mean, I don't know if that kind of survival instinct kicks in.
00:32:35.000I think as humans, we've kind of evolved.
00:32:38.000We've bred out a lot of the survival instincts that our ancestors had.
00:32:43.000We do fight to stay alive, but for example, if you look at the way little kids grow up, little kids need their parents for years and years and years and years.
00:33:03.000But definitely a four-year-old, a five-year-old could never figure out how to feed themselves to take care of themselves.
00:33:08.000Whereas if you look in the animal kingdom, it's within months that most animals are weaned.
00:33:14.000In order to, I think, have these more complex thoughts and these more complex abilities, as humans we have language and we have art and we have music and we have philosophy.
00:33:22.000We're not so good at the survival stuff anymore.
00:36:46.000So that's, I think that that's the draw for some people when they do psychedelics, but I would say specifically LSD as compared to other psychedelics, because one of the central features that I always found, and I haven't, you know, done anything like that since late high school, early college,
00:37:01.000but one of the central features that I always found was that you...
00:37:57.000The worst trip that I had was a really long trip, and it was just, I was grimy, and I was just over it, and I was trying to sober up because I had to work the next day and I hadn't slept.
00:38:08.000And when I was younger, I used to dye my hair a lot of crazy colors.
00:38:11.000I kept it really short and dyed it a lot.
00:38:13.000It's a little punk rocker, raver chick.
00:38:15.000And I remember taking a shower because I thought it would sober me up and my hair was like blood red.
00:38:20.000And so I took this shower and washed my hair and just all this red shit was going down the drain and it really flipped me out.
00:38:26.000But it was so late in the trip that I worked my way through it.
00:38:30.000I've never had a scary shitting myself trip.
00:38:46.000I had a friend who was in my neighborhood who sold coke, and I watched him go from this carefree, fun-loving guy, it's always fun to be around, To being this withered away weirdo.
00:39:00.000Well, yeah, those are two very different drugs.
00:39:02.000He was just hiding in his attic and doing coke all the time with his girlfriend.
00:43:02.000I was lying on my bed with a friend of mine, and we were just like, we were touching kind of, but it would be like, if you move, I'm going to throw up, and if I move, you're going to throw up.
00:43:12.000And you just sit there, and I remember floating around my apartment, kind of listening to other people's conversations.
00:44:43.000He stabs him in the leg with it, hits the plunger, and sends him to the fucking darkest regions of the universe, floating in an isolation tank the first time ever doing ketamine.
00:46:32.000But they're also doing echolocation, which is really cool.
00:46:35.000I think it's so cool when you see a dolphin or a bat doing echolocation so that they can get around.
00:46:40.000It's really interesting to think about the fact that some humans who have been blind, typically congenitally blind, blind from birth, can actually do that echolocation.
00:46:50.000There are some great YouTube videos of one kid who could skateboard.
00:47:18.000You know, perceptual things that we probably completely take for granted because we have eyes or because we have ears that organisms that are much kind of behind us on the evolutionary timescale can utilize that are just probably, you know, kind of latent in us.
00:47:35.000And if for some reason we lose some sort of ability, we could, you know, develop something like echolocation and use it to our advantage.
00:47:44.000Most people would never think to do it because we can see, so we don't need to.
00:47:47.000And seeing is a much more advanced way to navigate your surroundings.
00:47:51.000We should tape a bunch of bats to some dolphins, guys, and get in an isolation tank.
00:49:06.000But it was the weirdest experience of my...
00:49:12.000If you've never listened to Mr. Bungle, imagine listening to Mr. Bungle on heavy, heavy doses of Ecstasy and GHP. I've never done GHP, nor have I listened to Mr. Bungle.
00:50:55.000My views about some of these things, like animal research or like genetically modified organisms, they are informed by my studies of the scientific literature.
00:51:04.000They're not informed by my party affiliation or, you know, by my political views.
00:51:10.000So that's where sometimes, you know, generally I think scientific thinkers and left-wingers are in the same camps.
00:51:16.000But once in a while, I think you have these left-wing anti-science views or pseudoscience views that come up against each other.
00:52:10.000Because my conception of it has always been, my perception of it rather, of reading articles that a lot of people are concerned with the long-term consequences of eating certain Foods that have been significantly changed to the point where they can resist pesticides,
00:52:26.000they have all these strange antibiotic properties, and they worry about the long-term consequences of consuming these unnatural foods.
00:52:36.000Okay, so I think two points that I can make in direct response to that.
00:52:40.000I think it's fair to say that they're worried about long-term consequences because they haven't been around long enough to see those consequences.
00:52:47.000But so far, every legitimate lab experiment that has been done has shown no deleterious effects.
00:52:53.000The big rat study with the tumors has been, you know, completely debunked.
00:53:35.000This kind of like, Whole Foods is better because it's all natural.
00:53:39.000And just the word natural is hilarious to me because Organisms, especially plants, mostly what we're talking about here are plants, like fruits and vegetables, they have been genetically modifying themselves for hundreds of thousands of years.
00:53:58.000And then once agriculture began, we started genetically modifying all of these organisms by doing crossbreeding.
00:54:04.000We would take, you know, the healthiest looking tomatoes and breed it only with the other really healthy looking tomatoes.
00:54:09.000And what we were really doing is solidifying that certain genes were going to be passed down and other genes were going to be weeded out.
00:54:15.000Now what we do is we put individual genes into the plants.
00:54:19.000So whereas we used to swap something like 50,000 genes without even knowing the specifics of what we were changing, now that we can do it with biotechnology in the lab, we can swap out one or two genes.
00:54:30.000And somehow that's more frightening to the general public than 50,000 genes being swapped.
00:54:36.000And so that's the part that I don't really understand people's arguments.
00:54:39.000So when you're coming at it, you're coming at it, you think from a position of science where you say the evidence against it is really most of it's just confused people?
00:54:48.000I think that there's a lot of fear-mongering, first of all.
00:54:51.000And the truth is, if you don't want to eat GMOs because you're not sure, you don't have to.
00:54:55.000Trust me, the companies that don't use genetically modified organisms in their food already label their packages as such because they use it as a marketing ploy.
00:55:03.000They're not going to miss out on that chance.
00:55:05.000So for us to have to mandate a label, That says, this is genetically modified food, is really going to come across to the regular consumer as, warning!
00:55:13.000This is genetically modified food, when there's no reason to warn people.
00:55:17.000The FDA's job is to warn people if there's a potential risk.
00:55:22.000And all the evidence so far says that they're perfectly healthy.
00:55:25.000What about the Chinese studies that showed that it's not just vitamins and protein that some GMOs are providing to the body, but your body is absorbing microRNA?
00:55:55.000But isn't the real issue that if there is something wrong, especially in the future, if it shortens people's lifespans in some ways, causes some problem, it's going to be really hard to stop once it's already in place.
00:56:23.000The truth is, in essence, it helps people.
00:56:25.000And sometimes I worry if these kinds of conversations that I would be having, like when I would do appearances on The Young Turks, for example, which I think is a really great network, and I'll sit on with them a lot just to kind of talk science with them.
00:56:36.000But there's a very strong liberal view on the shows, and so a lot of the people will write in and they'll ask about these things.
00:56:43.000And I think that sometimes, I know it might sound a little bit offensive, but it's kind of like a first-world problem.
00:56:48.000Like, it's kind of like a one-percenter problem to be worrying about eating these genetically modified organisms.
00:56:56.000Farmers, the reason that biotechnologists in these university laboratories are doing genetic modification is so that we could feed more people safely and healthily.
00:57:06.000So that people who don't have access to a lot of nutritious food can eat, for example, golden rice that gives them certain vitamins that they wouldn't have been able to get if they were just eating white rice.
00:57:16.000It's so that these foods can have a longer shelf life so that they last longer so that more people can consume them.
00:57:21.000But we're looking at it through American eyes, from an American perspective, where we constantly waste food, where we have so much money that we can eat, you know, we try to make our food as clean as possible.
00:57:33.000And I'm not shitting on people who want to eat pure, organic food, but I don't like the holier-than-thou attitude that somehow they're healthier because they do it, because there's no evidence to support that.
00:58:18.000We need to separate in our minds the difference between bad business practices and greedy capitalistic practices and the basic science that goes into it.
00:59:22.000Indian suicide is due to Monsanto because it's fucking bizarre.
00:59:25.000And it's so sad because I feel like so many hardworking, you know, university scientists who don't get a dime from companies like Monsanto are working really hard to manipulate these organisms for the reason of helping people, you know, in order to feed more people that are going hungry.
00:59:41.000For some of that research to become bastardized once this huge company can kind of put restrictions on people's ability to get food or grow food in their own indigenous farms in their backyards, it's disgusting.
00:59:56.000Instead of doing this, if they just provided them at a more reasonable rate in a more reasonable way and worked with these farmers, they would continue to get a certain amount of money from them instead of raping them and taking it all.
01:00:11.000They could have a nice business with these people and continue to profit and everybody do well.
01:00:17.000But they have connected 200,000 suicides in India throughout the past decade to Monsanto.
01:00:28.000And it's also 200,000 people, if you think about it, who are no longer working and making money.
01:00:33.000And these are 200,000 people who are probably very poor and probably could never raise enough money to levy a legitimate lawsuit against this company.
01:00:40.000And I mean, it's just, it's mortifying.
01:00:41.000And it's the same thing that we see, I feel like, with big pharma.
01:00:45.000And this is another big problem, where people will lump in biomedical research.
01:00:51.000They'll lump in research on drug efficacy with big pharma.
01:00:56.000And there are, don't get me wrong, there are a lot of connections there.
01:00:58.000But what's wrong, I think, with the way that drugs are prescribed in this country, what's wrong with the amount of kind of danger linked to drugs in this country has little to do with the fact that drugs are being developed that can help people.
01:01:10.000And it has everything to do with how these drugs are being marketed.
01:01:13.000We're the only developed country in the world where we can have commercials for pharmaceuticals on television because we shouldn't be asking our doctor if so-and-so is right for Our doctor should be telling us what we should be taking.
01:01:26.000We should have the ability to take generics of things if we want to.
01:01:32.000Drugs should be affordable for people.
01:01:36.000I definitely think that that would change a lot of these problems.
01:01:38.000But again, I think that a lot of liberal thinkers They end up throwing the baby out with the bathwater and they throw the science out with the terrible company practices.
01:01:47.000And that is kind of sad to me because I think the fundamental science that's being done to develop drugs that actually help people is amazing.
01:01:55.000It's crazy that they tell you what would be wrong with you if you need this stuff.
01:02:00.000Then you go to your doctor and you're like, dude, I got that same problem.
01:03:19.000With the access to information that we have, the culture hasn't really caught up to what everyone knows.
01:03:25.000So the reality of what everyone knows about the insanity of the economy and how it's all structured, the reality of drug laws, the reality of law enforcement, and the reality of ever-increasing civil liberties violations where people have to fight for what used to be what we considered a part of being an American.
01:03:47.000Proud to be an American because at least I know I'm free.
01:03:58.000And even outside of America, I mean, that's, I think, a really sad part of the civil liberties violations is like looking at just the sheer amount of like bombings and drone strikes.
01:04:07.000You know, innocent deaths just across the board.
01:04:09.000And to see us do the same type of tactics, even in a lesser form, that we're seeing dictators do in other countries like Egypt, where people are riding in the streets because this guy's turned himself into a dictator.
01:04:28.000Yeah, like on New Year's Eve, they'll do certain bills, they'll release them on New Year's Eve, so everybody has to go back and look at it.
01:05:42.000But you know, I'd rather, I mean, sometimes I would rather watch a bad lip reading than an actual, you know, presidential debate or something on YouTube.
01:05:50.000You get offended as an intelligent person when you hear politicians talk in that political bullshit way.
01:05:57.000I just want to tell everybody, please log on on Monday to HuffPost Science because I'm releasing a new video where I just, like, rail into Marco Rubio.
01:06:08.000Marco Rubio is the senator from Florida who was interviewed by GQ recently and just kind of hemmed and hawed when they asked him, how old is the earth?
01:06:17.000And instead of saying up front, 4.5 billion years, he said, whoa, yeah, yeah, yeah.
01:06:21.000I'm not a scientist, and I can't really say, and there's a lot of debate with theologians and scientists.
01:06:28.000Well, there is a lot of debate between theologians and scientists.
01:06:57.000Especially when science comes into play.
01:06:59.000This guy, Brown, who sits on the fucking House Science Committee.
01:07:04.000And he thinks that evolution, embryology, and all this nonsense about the Big Bang Theory are lies from the pit of hell, is what he said publicly in front of a wall of deer heads, by the way.
01:07:17.000I mean, it's mortifying that these people...
01:08:40.000And it's so funny how many of these...
01:08:42.000You start to see these people flip-flopping lately because they can't hold on to this kind of archaic, you know, just embedded, seeped in such intense religion.
01:08:52.000They can't hold on to these views anymore.
01:08:54.000We saw Pat Robertson the other day on the 700 Club.
01:08:57.000Like, Pat Robertson, the televangelist, the old guy going on about, like...
01:09:32.000Are you just thanking God for Pat Robertson?
01:09:34.000I just thank God for Pat, the God in which I do not believe, for Pat Robertson because he's, I mean, granted, he's still a total piece of work, and he said earlier this year that atheists are trying to steal Christmas.
01:11:42.000There's this guilt that's built into their faith that says, I don't know, if I don't believe this, I might not end up in heaven and God is going to punish me.
01:11:49.000And I know it's difficult, but he's just testing my faith.
01:11:52.000And it's so sad that they're locked into that.
01:11:54.000It's so sad that these religions can't be more flexible and more progressive.
01:11:57.000I wouldn't be so anti-religion if I saw more progressive religion out there.
01:12:01.000I have friends that are in progressive...
01:12:04.000Christian denominations, and I respect that.
01:12:06.000I mean, I think it's bullshit, and I can't believe they believe what they believe, but I'm not gonna, you know, say that they shouldn't.
01:12:11.000I think religions are a type of operating system for a human being, and I think that a lot of people need some set of rules and regulations and something to look forward to when it all ends and something, you know, the idea of the vast Just expanse of the universe and the insignificant aspect of your life in relationship to everything you see in relation to everything you see in the cosmos.
01:12:40.000And I think that the real problem with religions, especially like real fundamentalist religions that are like really strict, is that they stop your thinking and corner it in this trap.
01:12:53.000And this operating system that you're operating under has this very limited range.
01:12:58.000And if it doesn't fall in this very limited range, you really can't rationalize, you can't accept it, so you don't grow.
01:13:06.000You can't see outside of those boundaries at all.
01:13:07.000And everybody else is outside looking in going like, come out here with us!
01:13:51.000It's almost like it has all this love to it.
01:13:54.000Treat your brother as if it's you and live your life in harmony and do good unto others and use these laws because they're designed to make harmony amongst men.
01:14:57.000I personally chose to kind of throw the baby out with the bathwater on that because I don't see anything redeeming in religion that I can't find outside of religion.
01:15:04.000So I don't believe in anything supernatural.
01:15:36.000And he has a gift for that kind of spiritual, almost worship-like wonder of the natural world, of the cosmos, that is not a religious thing at all, but it gives you that feeling that you get from religion.
01:15:48.000I actually have a quote tattooed on my ribs down my left side.
01:15:52.000That's a quote from Carl Sagan that says, we are a way for the cosmos to know itself.
01:15:56.000And it's really powerful to me because it almost gives me that feedback that a lot of people get from religion, but I don't need to get it from religion.
01:16:04.000I get it from kind of the wonder of the universe.
01:16:06.000So if you really think about what he's saying is that the universe is not conscious and there is no great conscious organizer out there.
01:16:13.000So the universe can't really reflect on itself because it can't think, but we as human beings are made of the stuff of stars.
01:16:20.000All of the molecules in our bodies are traceable to molecular phenomena that was exploded in the furnace of a star.
01:16:27.000So, because we are made of the stuff of stars and because our molecules organized in such a way to make us higher thinking, cognitive beings, and we can contemplate our place In the vast expanses of the universe, we are a way for the universe to know itself, for the cosmos to know itself.
01:16:44.000And I bet you Carl Sagan was high as fuck.
01:16:56.000And that's the thing, he was a working scientist who made so many discoveries and who contributed so much to man's understanding of science, he was using a drug that wasn't, it wasn't like he was on acid and claiming to have all of these huge expanded consciousness experiences.
01:17:12.000He was using a drug that hardly fucks you up, to be honest.
01:17:16.000It alters your consciousness so slightly that he could still work and he could still make these incredible discoveries, but he could also find the emotional valence and the poetry in the cosmos and then tell it to us in such a way that I think that he inspired an entire generation of thinkers to grow up,
01:17:34.000to become scientists, or at least to be scientifically literate and appreciate what nature can tell us.
01:17:40.000And he was very open about his appreciation for cannabis and that whole quest for information.
01:17:51.000I love the fact that he was a pothead.
01:17:53.000Yeah, you were just talking about getting high and watching Cosmos, right, before we started recording.
01:17:57.000And are you excited about the new Cosmos that Seth MacFarlane is producing with Carl Sagan's widow, Ann Druyan, and they are going to be producing a new version for Fox hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson?
01:18:37.000And for fucking days, I never left that room.
01:18:40.000I was just watching these fucking terrifying documentaries on supernovas and the possibility of a hypernova exploding near us would just eliminate life on Earth instantaneously.
01:18:54.000And the fact that they found out they're going on every day all over the universe.
01:19:16.000Like just yesterday, I did a Skype interview with a scientist in Washington who wrote this paper basically that shows some evidence They're not claiming that we are, but they're saying it's not completely crazy to assume that we might be a simulation.
01:19:52.000But if we can simulate that, and eventually we get to a point where we can simulate more and more and more of kind of living, breathing quantum space, who's to say that we ourselves aren't a simulation?
01:20:03.000I just told Jill the other day how I've been living my life as if we are a simulation.
01:20:08.000And if you look at it that way, it really freaks you out.
01:20:11.000And I have this new thing where every time I talk about the simulation, I see an Asian coming around the corner.
01:20:16.000So they're the bodyguards of the simulation.
01:22:32.000Your simulation is way different than ours.
01:22:35.000But what's fascinating about the simulation theory is these guys that are talking about that self-correcting computer code that they found in the computations of string theory.
01:22:47.000It's discovered in 1940 by this guy named Claude Shannon, and they've discovered these exact same self-correcting computer codes embedded in the equations of string theory.
01:23:03.000I just interviewed a string theorist who was in town from the University of Paris.
01:23:06.000I interviewed him on Monday and just kind of tried to get a good primer on what string theory is, what it sets out to do, and I'm going to be writing a video on that soon.
01:23:16.000So hopefully I'll be able to kind of offer a good fundamental primer on string theory to my viewers.
01:23:22.000But I don't really understand this thing with the code because the string theorists write their own mathematics.
01:23:30.000That's what a lot of this kind of theoretical cosmology, this quantum level cosmology is about.
01:23:36.000A lot of times these aren't things that are really experimentally testable.
01:23:39.000They're things where these physicists are trying to map out or trying to understand the basic particles, the basic waves that make up the universe and how do they interact with each other using the strong force, the weak force.
01:23:53.000How does gravity come into play with this, which is a huge problem for them right now, so that they can get this unified theory?
01:24:06.000They're trying to learn about these things and they're trying to document them and then figure out how to make the math work.
01:24:11.000Once they do that, the difficulty comes in experimenting with them because these are such small particles.
01:24:16.000That occur at such high energies that you can only get them in a particle accelerator, like at CERN. Or you could find them in a black hole, for example, but we can't study a black hole directly.
01:24:27.000So in string theory, this shit is so small that you can't even get these things out of a particle accelerator.
01:24:32.000So at this point, the only way that they can study string theory is by looking at the cosmic microwave background radiation, which is the radiation that was put off from the Big Bang.
01:24:42.000And it's always around us in the background.
01:24:44.000And they've been able to kind of map its signature.
01:24:46.000And they can look for basically evidence, much later evidence, you know, 13 billion years later, almost 14 billion years later, evidence of what happened in the Big Bang, where these tiny particles would have come from.
01:25:31.000When these scientists write the code, when you see those documentaries or those shows, whenever they have guys talking about string theory and they're sitting there with a yellow legal pad, scribbling furiously, what the fuck are they doing?
01:25:48.000So they're looking basically at the math of the...
01:25:52.000They're trying to look at the universe and they're trying to describe it in the only language that we can describe those very, very small things in, which is math.
01:26:04.000That help particle A interact with particle B. Maybe there's a gluon in between.
01:26:10.000They're trying to look at the electromagnetic forces between them.
01:26:13.000They're trying to see basically all of the quantum fluctuations of this soup of particles that make up all the things that you see right now.
01:26:26.000It's very difficult to know exactly how fast they're moving or where they are, so they have to kind of look at a range of states.
01:26:33.000Of these particles, and they're trying to work out all of the math to be able to get a whole spectrum of how these particles interact with each other.
01:26:41.000And once they have a really solid understanding of how these particles interact with each other, then we can start to really understand why an atom looks like an atom, and how that atom combines with that atom to make a molecule of something, and then how all those molecules come.
01:26:53.000We're good at knowing from the top down, you know?
01:26:56.000We can look at very big things like universes and subdivide into galaxies and subdivide into solar systems and then we can even look at Earth and look at all of the life that's on Earth within our own bodies.
01:27:08.000We can look at us at the cellular level.
01:27:10.000We can even break down a cell and look at it at the molecular level.
01:27:12.000But once you get smaller than an atom, things start acting fucking weird and there's a whole new set of laws that governs the quantum world.
01:27:23.000Yeah, it's like anything about, you know, because it's so hard to measure these things.
01:27:27.000It's really difficult to measure their speed and their position at the same time because they're moving, and they're moving really fucking fast, and their properties change depending on what position they're in.
01:27:38.000And so once you get down to these really, really small, small, small, but very high energy levels of the world, Then you start to see different theories that try to describe them.
01:27:47.000And string theory is only one of those theories.
01:27:48.000It's actually one of the more kind of bizarre theories.
01:27:51.000A lot of people aren't string theorists in theoretical cosmology.
01:27:55.000But string theory is one of the most promising theories that tries to combine this kind of Newtonian and Einsteinian view together.
01:28:02.000So this quantum molecular view and also having a quantum theory of gravity, which gravity still doesn't really operate the same way that most people think that quantum mechanics operates.
01:28:13.000So a big problem that quantum physicists have is trying to figure out how to fit Newtonian gravity into the equation so that they can get a grand unified theory of everything.
01:28:23.000And right now, gravity doesn't really seem to fit.
01:28:25.000Now when they measure particles that are in superposition, meaning they're in motion and still at the same time, what the fuck is that?
01:28:35.000I don't think it necessarily means that they're in motion and still at the same time.
01:28:38.000I think what it means is that they can only measure them A lot of times it becomes one of these questions where if a tree falls in the forest, does it still make a sound?
01:28:48.000If we as an observer are trying to understand the molecular world, just by observing it, because we can't just look at it.
01:29:15.000Because that's the other thing about the idea of the observer in quantum mechanics.
01:29:23.000My friend JD, shout out to JD. He's a physicist.
01:29:29.000He related to me that the real issue is in measuring it and that when you measure it, that's the observer.
01:29:38.000It's not necessarily that you are looking at something or that human intention or visual, you know, your visual cortex is tuned in on something.
01:30:33.000Because there's been so much malarkey that I've read and seen online about the idea of the observer changing the results that I felt like, why did everybody have to turn into voodoo?
01:30:46.000I did an interview with Brian Green, who's a pretty renowned physicist.
01:30:50.000And I ended up splitting it into two parts.
01:30:53.000One was about black holes and one was about the multiverse theory.
01:30:55.000But one segment that we talked about in between that I couldn't really work into a story, it bums me out because it's such great footage because I asked him, how do you feel about movies like What the Bleep Do We Know?
01:31:05.000How do you feel about it when people try to take what you understand about the quantum world and what you understand about the cosmos and apply it to like woo-woo pseudoscience and say, oh, but our thoughts are quantum and now all of a sudden we can use quantum mechanics to describe How we think and how our thoughts live outside of our bodies and all this bullshit.
01:31:24.000And I mean, he was very explicit that no person who studies this stuff, who's dedicated their lives to understanding this, would ever try to apply it to a region of understanding where the math doesn't make sense.
01:31:39.000And so all of the people who are trying to shill quantum mechanics as an explanation for thought or behavior or love or any of these woo-woo things, none of them are fucking physicists.
01:31:50.000That should probably tell us something.
01:31:52.000The whole thing was that Ramthalady, she channels.
01:32:05.000And so many of the people in that movie were misrepresented.
01:32:08.000I mean, so many people, they would take like three hours of footage from an interview and then cut it up in such a way that it kind of sort of sounds like They're making their point.
01:32:18.000It was one of the first things I ever did when I started doing science communication and being more on air when I was getting out of the university system and doing what I do now.
01:32:26.000And the episode was all about neuroscience.
01:32:28.000And one of the things that I said on it was some people would say that the mind is an entity outside of the brain that can, you know, put forces on the brain.
01:32:38.000But we know as modern neuroscientists that mind and brain are the same thing.
01:32:41.000They're just two sides of the same coin.
01:32:43.000And how did they run the promo for that?
01:32:46.000The mind is an entity outside of the brain that can affect...
01:32:50.000You know, they just completely took it out of context.
01:33:11.000The idea of consciousness or thought being outside of the brain is a very fascinating idea.
01:33:16.000The idea that the brain is actually just an antenna that tunes it all in.
01:33:20.000And that's why when different areas of it get damaged, that's areas that are designed to tune in to whatever is out there.
01:33:27.000The idea of the Akashic records, the idea that knowledge and so much of what makes us human beings is actually virtually retrievable from the air.
01:33:38.000Well, I think that there's a way to look at that without being woo-woo.
01:33:41.000Like, I don't think it's physically in the air.
01:33:42.000But there is obviously this idea that thoughts and ideas, once we put them into language, once we write them down on paper, they do exist outside of us at this point.
01:33:53.000Somebody else can appreciate them and they can live well past us.
01:33:56.000But I still think that all of that knowledge...
01:33:58.000Was conceptualized, synthesized, remembered, retrieved, whatever, by a physical organ, which is our brain, and that thought is fundamentally a function of brain activity.
01:34:11.000Like, I'm a really hardcore materialist when it comes to that kind of stuff.
01:34:18.000It's like, what the fuck is that beautiful organ tuning in?
01:34:21.000When you're at your hype level, when you're locked on to some crazy explanation and you're very passionate, what is that that's coming through that brain?
01:34:34.000It's not coming through the brain, it's being created by the brain.
01:34:37.000To me, it's the same thing as saying, what is it when an athlete is at peak performance and their heart is working?
01:34:43.000The best way that it can possibly work.
01:34:45.000The problem is the brain is so much more complicated.
01:34:48.000There's so much more metabolism happening in the brain.
01:34:51.000And there's so many individual neurons that have so many connections between them.
01:34:57.000And there's so many different kind of options, kind of permutations and combinations of ways that these neurons can communicate with one another that thought, that consciousness, It somehow arises from all of those connections.
01:35:10.000But that's the holy grail of neuroscience.
01:35:14.000This is my background is neuroscience.
01:35:16.000And so when I do all of my science reporting and all of my science commenting, all the space stuff and all of the physics stuff, I'm not as good at.
01:35:24.000You know, I have to learn it as I go, which kind of, I think, helps me when I communicate it because I get where people are coming from when they're like, I don't fucking understand this at all.
01:35:32.000The neuroscience stuff is like my bread and butter.
01:36:04.000Eckhart Tolle is probably the least huckstery of all of them, but he's still...
01:36:08.000What do you think is Huckstery about providing motivation to people and giving people sort of a framework to work on as far as living in the now and taking charge of their life, especially if it's something that someone like Eckhart Tolle had personal success with?
01:36:25.000Yeah, so compare somebody like Eckhart Tolle to...
01:36:36.000I was able to interview this really interesting guy who has a PhD in molecular genetics and then moved to the Himalayas to become a Buddhist monk.
01:36:46.000His name is Mathieu Ricard and he's a French Buddhist monk and he talks about mindfulness meditation and he talks about the neuroscience of the things that the Tibetans are doing right now.
01:37:01.000But he's not trying to make money off of it.
01:37:03.000And I think that is a fundamental kind of red flag for me.
01:37:06.000I'm not saying just because somebody's trying to make money they are selling snake oil.
01:37:10.000But first of all, what's the motivation?
01:37:43.000That's like culty behavior, but that's fine.
01:37:45.000But when people pick and choose how they want to use science and how they want to bastardize science to meet their needs, it makes me nervous.
01:37:53.000I did a piece recently about the power of positive thinking.
01:37:56.000I've also done a piece about the power of And I went through the literature and I tried to find examples where positive thinking actually helped people.
01:38:04.000And there's just no good evidence that thinking positively is going to actually bring goodwill to your life, like the secret, you know, that's like, well, if I just want it bad enough, I'm going to make a bunch of money.
01:38:14.000It's like, no, if you want it bad enough, you're going to have to fucking work for it.
01:39:42.000In some sense, karma is totally real because if you're a fucking nice person and you do goodwill all of the time, sometimes shitty things are going to happen to you, but most people are going to be nice to you too.
01:39:53.000If you put bad karma out there, to me what that really means is if you're just a fucking asshole all the time, people are going to be an asshole back to you.
01:40:00.000That's obvious, but I don't believe that karma is some sort of cosmic force that says you store up goodwill with the universe and then the universe pays you back in some way.
01:40:10.000We feel that it is because that's how it applies to us socially.
01:40:15.000I've always felt that the idea of the birth and the death of the universe was a weird concept and that maybe we're wrapped around that because of the idea of our own biological limitations.
01:40:30.000It's flexible, yes, but it is also a real thing, but we perceive it to be something that's...
01:40:35.000In some ways quite different than what time actually is.
01:40:37.000Well, when you start getting into crazy shit like a spaceship that goes faster than the speed of light and then comes back to Earth in 20 years and 500 years have passed or whatever the fuck the math is.
01:40:55.000They say that if you are many, like if you're a million light years away from Earth and you could look back and You'd see yourself coming there.
01:41:05.000Yeah, like if you left on a spaceship and you were going faster to the speed of light and you landed on Mars and then you turned your telescope towards Earth, you would see yourself landing.
01:41:23.000I mean, that's the fascinating thing about thinking about it.
01:41:25.000Do you ever wonder, like, when you see things like Fukushima and you see, you know, nuclear disasters and all the potential nuclear disasters, different places that we have all over just California that are on fault lines or near fault lines, does that freak you out?
01:41:41.000Do you wonder about, like, the idea behind nuclear power?
01:41:45.000I mean, sure, it's been very beneficial to societies, but if you have to look at Whatever it's been, how many 60 years of implementation and there's three parts of the world that are broken now?
01:41:56.000You know what's funny is I think that there's this huge disconnect in public opinion between, again, science and implementation.
01:42:06.000And I always, I shouldn't say always, but I'm often an advocate of doing science for the sake of science.
01:42:11.000I'm often an advocate of just trying to learn as much as we can.
01:42:14.000I think that once these things get implemented as technologies and as Sources of engineering.
01:42:22.000And government is supposed to be better at making sure that all of these things are checked and balanced, you know, and that we should have good protocols.
01:42:32.000When the earthquake struck in Italy and all of those seismologists who basically said, I'm not sure that this is going to happen, I wouldn't worry about it too much, and then so many people died, everybody blamed the scientists.
01:42:50.000Nobody blamed any of the civil engineers, any of the people overseeing whether or not the buildings were up to code, whether or not the city was built in such a way that it could withstand an earthquake.
01:43:01.000And it's absolutely insane to me that the people who were tasked with just trying to understand whether or not...
01:43:08.000And we can't predict earthquakes, by the way.
01:43:38.000And the pencil pushers with their glasses sitting behind their desk were an easy target.
01:43:42.000And it's really fucking sad because it sets a terrible precedent.
01:43:46.000And it makes it so that seismologists the world over are going to be nervous to have any sort of rapport.
01:43:50.000If a government official comes and says, look at all of this data.
01:43:53.000Do you think that there's a risk that something like this could happen to us soon?
01:43:56.000They're going to go, I don't want to fucking say anything.
01:43:58.000I'm just going to keep my mouth shut because I don't want to get in trouble.
01:44:00.000Well, not only that, but how could they, the people that are in charge of the legal system, how could they prosecute him when everyone knows that it's impossible to predict earthquakes?
01:45:44.000We've never been in an intellectual climate that's so detrimental to scientific thinking, but we've also never been in a technological climate that's so permissive of scientific progress.
01:45:56.000I think there's always going to be loud people.
01:45:58.000But I think generally across the board, people are much more open-minded to science and understanding of the reality of the universe than they ever have been before.
01:46:06.000I guess I should say, I feel like within this century, within the last century, I should say, we're in a very anti-science era.
01:46:13.000They figured out in the Reagan administration era, they figured out how to make a lot of noise.
01:47:30.000And the idea of God immediately draws up a Christian ideal of a white-bearded guy living on a cloud or some shit that's going to cast judgment on you.
01:47:41.000So when people talk about, yeah, but I see God more as a...
01:47:44.000I'm like, call it fucking something different because it confuses me every time you use the word God.
01:48:00.000It's incredible, and it's awe-inspiring, and learning about our own existence is why we are.
01:48:06.000So you feel like consciousness is really just a byproduct of all these different synapses firing and all these different cells charging and igniting and filling with thought and tension and instincts and genes?
01:49:18.000You don't think that there's some sort of a pattern, a very clear pattern of constant...
01:49:24.000If you look at from the Big Bang to now, especially if you look at just our culture, the constant innovation and progress and moving forward, just from looking at planets that go from single-celled organisms like we did to what we have now with the internet and having the ability to broadcast something like this on a podcast.
01:49:45.000Isn't that showing that there's some sort of a pattern, that it's moving in a very specific direction?
01:49:52.000Unless there's some horrible disaster that stops this course, we're going to continue to move in a more and more advanced direction.
01:49:59.000Yeah, I definitely think that we're seeing exponential growth in technological advances, but I don't think that that means that there's somebody driving that pattern.
01:50:07.000No, not that someone's driving it, but that there is absolutely a pattern, and it almost seems insurmountable.
01:50:21.000I mean, I personally think that, you know, people talk about the kind of Kurzweilian singularity and when man and machine combine and then we can live forever because we can download our consciousness or whatever.
01:50:32.000I personally don't think that Ray Kurzweil has the best grasp of how the human brain works.
01:50:37.000And so I'm not sure that I really buy into what he's selling.
01:50:42.000But eventually, if we got to a point where AI was kind of sophisticated enough, I think that...
01:50:48.000I worry, you know, when we talk about what is going to be the end for humans, I personally think that we're going to fuck ourselves up.
01:51:21.000I mean, I just did a chat yesterday with two guys from Mars One, which is this Dutch company that plans to colonize Mars in 2023. I mean, that's in 11 years.
01:52:55.000I mean, they didn't actually show him dying, but he died while they were filming the show.
01:52:59.000I mean, they have had deaths on reality shows before.
01:53:03.000All they would have to do is just figure out a way to not tune the camera in and tell them that there was some sort of a chemical asphyxiation issue or whatever the fuck it is that kills you.
01:53:13.000When you're on a planet that doesn't have air on it.
01:53:18.000And so their idea is that every ten years, they want to send four more people.
01:53:22.000So it's like four people, then four people, four people.
01:53:24.000And they're going to have to be, you know, a doctor, an engineer, whatever, because they're going to have to be able to grow the colony out there and eventually start terraforming.
01:53:33.000I mean, hopefully we'll get to a point where we could blast something off of Mars eventually to come back to Earth.
01:53:39.000But until then, they're going to have to just make supply runs.
01:54:01.000I don't know if they'll be successful, but the whole time I was doing this segment on HuffPost Live yesterday, I just kept stopping and being like, Are you fucking seriously talking about this right now?
01:55:16.000I kept wanting to say to them, like, you're so fucking crazy, but then I wanted to be like, it's because of crazy motherfuckers like you that stuff happens.
01:55:24.000It's because somebody was like, let's go to the fucking moon, and probably somebody was like, don't fucking go to the moon, you're gonna die, you idiot!
01:56:07.000And so I stopped him and said, you know, eventually, because you talk about this at scientific conferences, and you also talk about it to the media, and eventually you use the word they enough times, or maybe they are right.
01:56:31.000He said, if we are finally at a point in our evolution that we are sophisticated enough to write these fundamental bits of code, because that's the whole point of this.
01:56:43.000Who's to say that we aren't a simulation if we can write our own simulation of a very small portion of the universe?
01:56:49.000Well, if we're sophisticated enough to write our own, a very small simulation, who's to say that hundreds of thousand years in the future, we couldn't simulate the whole universe?
01:58:11.000We've been talking about this for so long, although I am joking around when I say that, I don't really believe that we are the aliens because I don't really believe anything.
01:58:20.000I mean, it's hard to believe something without good evidence, but it's interesting to philosophize on it.
01:58:24.000And it's also interesting that that sort of archetype, that alien, that sort of really stereotypical alien, it repeats itself over and over and over again with the big head, the little skinny body.
01:58:36.000If you look at all of the lore built into religion across so many cultures, the virgin birth story, the resurrection story, so many religions use that.
01:58:45.000Yeah, but as far as like the way a human looks and the way a gorilla looks, you know, you look at other primates and, you know, the way monkeys look, the way, you know, we have to figure we all came from some very similar source at one long, long distant part in the past.
01:58:58.000If you look at a gorilla and then you look at a person and then you look at an alien, it's like, yeah, that's how it goes.
01:59:03.000Yeah, I mean it doesn't seem that far-fetched.
01:59:05.000Like why would we develop like scales or like have a shark fin or some shit?
01:59:08.000That's like not our evolutionary lineage.
01:59:10.000And by the way, they're developing all these artificial skins.
01:59:13.000Some of them with spider silk that they believe is going to be bulletproof.
01:59:17.000They're talking about engineering human skin with fucking spider silk.
01:59:22.000So you become like some bulletproof person.
01:59:25.000Do you know how fucking nuts that's going to be when people don't tear open anymore?
02:01:23.000But the guy who's getting fucked by the horse has all these piercings all over his balls.
02:01:29.000And I was talking to a doctor about it, and he's like, there's very often those really self-destructive people have an issue, like feeling pain.
02:02:04.000The alien abduction experience and the near-death experience, all of them, they believe may be influenced by DMT. We know our brain makes it.
02:04:45.000And it may have came down the Bering Straits along with people.
02:04:48.000And the idea is that if they were intelligent, and they probably are, just like, you know, if they're bipedal, they might be the only other...
02:05:26.000Not genotyping, but this genographic project where you can do a cheek swab, send them your DNA, and they will give you the background of your ancestry.
02:06:54.000Or maybe we did fuck them, but maybe it is a trace from a common ancestor and we just fucked them for fun and that's not how we got their DNA. Well, what fascinates me is, first of all, how few fossils there really are as opposed to how many things that ever lived.
02:07:06.000And when they find something new like that Homo florensis, the hobbit man from the Isle of Flores, that makes you really geek out.
02:07:14.000Like, holy shit, 10,000, 13,000 years ago there was this little monkey man.
02:07:18.000Yeah, and they just found the biggest dinosaur.
02:07:55.000If you watch those dudes that are on the late night TV shows screaming and hollering and hooting about Jesus, there is an art form to that.
02:11:10.000And I interviewed this guy who does crow research.
02:11:13.000They did this study where they wore masks.
02:11:15.000And like just neutral masks, but they would do a helpful condition and then kind of like a harsh condition.
02:11:22.000So the helpful condition, they would feed the crows and then in the harsh position, they would capture them and tag them.
02:11:27.000And so then when they went outside wearing the masks, I think for up to seven years, maybe 10 years later, when they saw somebody in a mask that was in the helpful condition, the crows would come up and ask for food.
02:11:38.000When they saw them in the harmful position, they would squawk at them and like try to attack them.
02:12:06.000There's a video on YouTube of a snowboarding crow, which is like the best thing ever.
02:12:10.000It's like it finds a little roof tile or something, carries it to the top of a roof in Russia, slides down it, doesn't fly away, decides it was fun, and does it again.
02:12:20.000Like, it does it four times in a row, so it's obviously using this as a tool to ski or to snowboard.
02:13:55.000She was like, so many people take Ambien, and they sleepwalk, and they sleep drive, and they sleep eat, and they sleep fuck, and they wake up, and they don't remember any of it.
02:14:21.000He gets you off and he goes, listen, as long as you don't take it every day, you can try again and we'll get you off again.
02:14:26.000That's the really crazy thing about Ambien.
02:14:28.000It's supposed to be a short-term prescription.
02:14:29.000You're not supposed to take Ambien for longer than 10 days.
02:14:32.000So a lot of people who have chronic sleep problems...
02:14:35.000They'll take it once a week or something.
02:14:37.000Well, it's just amazing that we live in this culture of addiction where it's so many people are addicted to cigarettes and coffee and things that don't fuck up your everyday life as far as you're functioning too much.
02:14:48.000But we're completely triggered into them and addicted to them.
02:16:18.000Everybody thinks that you have an agenda when you write science, but really I'm just trying to look at the available evidence and write about it.
02:16:24.000A lot of the available evidence, when I looked into Ambien, showed that it's risky.
02:16:28.000It's really risky, a drug, but it does help people.
02:16:34.000There's always two sides of that coin.
02:16:54.000And ecstasy and acid and GHB and all these things that I've done, I had so much control back when I was doing drugs because I'm a pretty kind of paranoid person and I don't drink because I never like feeling drunk.
02:17:20.000But definitely when I look back at my drug history, I experimented with drugs.
02:17:24.000I never became addicted to any drug I ever did.
02:17:27.000Yeah, I've never fucked with anything that's completely addictive.
02:17:30.000I've never tried heroin or meth or coke or any of those things.
02:17:34.000I just saw too many people just lose everything.
02:17:37.000And still to this day, I've seen more people over the last decade or so fall apart because of pills than anything.
02:17:45.000Yeah, and I played with pills for a little bit because I liked downers.
02:17:48.000I liked drugs that I could have fun on and then go to sleep on.
02:17:51.000And the problem with things like Xanax, for example, which I really liked back in the day, is that for somebody who actually does have a little bit of anxiety, you take a dose of Xanax that's maybe a little higher than you're supposed to, and you feel so good, but you also feel so sober.
02:18:06.000Like, you're fucked up in that you feel more sober than you've ever felt in your life.
02:18:10.000And so you're talkative, you're warm, you're emotional.
02:18:14.000But then you can go to sleep at night because it's a downer.
02:18:17.000I mean, it's very easy to sleep on these drugs.
02:18:50.000I know what I'm like when I'm off of it.
02:18:51.000I know that my brain chemistry is such that a mild selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor It helps me prevent having major depressive episodes.
02:19:02.000And so now I am taking something that's a daily maintenance kind of thing.
02:19:07.000But back in the day, I think that a lot of my experiments with drugs were attempts to self-medicate.
02:19:12.000And when I would take something like Xanax or Valium, I felt sober.
02:19:17.000Have you tried anything like 5-HTP? Have you tried any natural ways?
02:19:22.000Yeah, I mean, and I think that for some people it's a difference between talking about just kind of elevating your mood when you're having a tough day and treating clinical depression.
02:19:31.000Is this something that you feel runs in your family's genetic history?
02:20:27.000And I think that I just convinced myself that I would be okay.
02:20:30.000But after enough bad behavior and after hurting myself and enough people in my life, I finally decided this is something that's important for me to do.
02:20:37.000And now I really advocate for trying to erase the stigma.
02:20:40.000With mental illness, trying to be as open.
02:20:42.000It's not easy, but trying to be as open about it as I can.
02:20:46.000And it's one of those things, almost like obesity, that we see in this country where there is a fair amount of people, for example, who eat like shit and they're fat.
02:20:54.000And then there's some people who are morbidly clinically obese that have something wrong with them.
02:21:01.000Nobody gets to be 600 pounds without some sort of mental illness or without some sort of A biochemical problem.
02:21:08.000And I think for mental illness, it's the same kind of thing.
02:21:11.000There are people who can kind of work through it with a lot of talk therapy, and there are people who have such a difficulty, such a kind of biochemical difficulty, where they need medical intervention.
02:21:21.000And I would love to see it if we could start changing public perception about mental illness to look at it just like, you know, somebody has diabetes, they have to fucking take insulin.
02:21:30.000And nobody goes, oh, you're just not thinking positively enough.
02:21:32.000If you just think more positively, your cells can take in sugar.
02:21:35.000Well, it's always ignorant when anybody tries to explain to you what's going on with your consciousness or your body.
02:21:49.000And what I say, I actually did a piece a long time ago about depression where I talk about it.
02:21:53.000I was like, I have studied this from a neuroscientific perspective, but I also know what I'm talking about because I suffer from it myself, and this is what I've done, and I urge anybody who needs help to get help or whatever.
02:22:05.000But I talk about the biochemistry, and I talk about some of the kind of biological causes of depression.
02:22:10.000But one of the things that I say in the video is like, I'm so sick of people who will come into comment boards and be like, oh, you know, just fucking buck up or whatever.
02:22:57.000They want the option if there's a worst case scenario situation.
02:23:00.000So you feel like this is a universal situation that all people that suffer from clinical depression, that it's just some sort of imbalance in the chemicals that your brain, your body produces?
02:23:23.000If you have, let's say, lower than normal levels of serotonin or dopamine or norepinephrine or whatever the combination is that causes your specific depression, If you have lower than normal levels of that, it's going to contribute to a lot of depressive thoughts.
02:23:40.000Say that you have a lot of environmental things that happened in your life.
02:23:43.000You had a difficult childhood, or you experienced trauma, or whatever the case may be.
02:23:47.000Combined with this, the patterns in your brain, the actual networks in your brain, are going to be reinforced In these depressive ways.
02:23:57.000So you immediately have a thought, for example, and you might go dark on that thought.
02:24:01.000You might look at something as a glass half empty kind of way instead of a glass half full way.
02:24:05.000And then what you're doing is you're reinforcing these.
02:24:07.000So talk therapy can actually help you form new neural networks to come out of it.
02:24:11.000But sometimes that's not enough for some people because there's still a strong biochemical basis.
02:24:49.000Well, it seems like, though, that before you try any sort of chemical intervention into your consciousness, you should definitely try to get your health in order.
02:25:12.000That person needs medical intervention quickly.
02:25:14.000Sometimes the medical intervention has to come first so that all of the other stuff can take place because they're that ill.
02:25:20.000Other times, if we're talking about generalized anxiety, if we're talking about certain levels of depression, it may be the case that getting your diet in order Talking through some of your relationship issues, your work issues, all those things can exacerbate.
02:25:33.000Then you'll actually kind of be able to tell, you know, a lot of things are going well in my life.
02:25:38.000I'm feeling really good, but I still just have these days where I start fucking crying for no reason.
02:26:30.000But yeah, I mean, those people, they may need medical intervention.
02:26:33.000When you talked about doing Xanax and having that feeling that you were sober, wouldn't you think that would be like the ideal state of consciousness?
02:26:41.000Have you ever tried to re-engineer that and find what the right mixture is to hit that ideal state of consciousness all the time?
02:26:46.000I'm just so paranoid now about altering my consciousness through drugs.
02:26:53.000That it's like, I'm finally at a place in my life where I'm pretty, pretty stable, and I know that I take the Celexa every day, or the Citalopram, and I like the dose that I'm on.
02:27:06.000For example, and I know that I'm in a room full of men, and probably most of the people that are listening right now are dudes.
02:27:39.000So that I don't always just cry for no reason or so that I don't have a major depressive episode that I feel like I'm never going to get out of.
02:31:12.000No, I think the real issue is that soy has high levels of phytoestrogens, but there's absolutely no reason to believe that eating plant estrogens are going to affect your own human estrogens.
02:31:41.000Did you know that there's a tribe in New Guinea, not just one tribe, but many that force the boys at a very young age to ingest their sperm?
02:31:51.000And it's not just like one of them, it's really fucking crazy.
02:31:54.000There's like many, many islands where they practice this, where they take these boys away from their mother at a very early age and they live in these bachelor houses.
02:32:04.000They live with men and the men give them sperm to make them grow.
02:32:10.000Well, I mean, in Africa there are many, many, many areas in Africa where they still eat bushmeat, where they'll still kind of murder chimpanzees, gorillas, and they'll drink their blood because they think that it gives them life force.
02:32:20.000It thinks that it makes them stronger.
02:32:21.000There's a lot of lore connected to that.
02:32:23.000It's not true, the same way that drinking sperm would not make you grow faster.
02:32:27.000You say that, but meanwhile, these guys are the baddest motherfuckers on earth.
02:32:30.000You go there, they're flying through the air and climbing trees.
02:32:34.000All right, just so everybody knows, Joe Rogan is advocating drinking your own.
02:34:09.000But I do think that a lot of more progressive and liberal thinkers, maybe people who have more liberal parents, are probably people who are less likely to be circumcised.
02:34:17.000Is it hard to date you because you're so smart?
02:34:53.000It's one of the dumbest things that human beings still do.
02:34:56.000And do under the guise, really, at the lowest levels of it, when the Orthodox Jews do it, when the rabbi has to suck the baby's penis to stop the blood.
02:35:14.000How much shit do you take, like, if you do something like this, how much shit do you take on Twitter, like, from people that are Bible bangers?
02:35:20.000Oh, you know, I don't have that many Bible-beater followers, so I think they kind of know.
02:35:24.000People are going to find out, because they're either going to troll you and pretend they're Bible-beater followers.
02:35:28.000Because, you know, I am an atheist, and I say it a lot, you know?
02:35:32.000It kind of does, but I feel like I need...
02:35:34.000I did an episode of this internet show called The Point, which is a Young Turks spinoff show, and it's like an hour-long just talk, you know?
02:35:44.000Three people in a panel and a host, and I hosted an episode that was all about atheism, and I made sure that everybody on the panel was...
02:36:04.000We've got to start getting rid of the stigma.
02:36:07.000Because, honestly, atheists take more shit than a lot of minority groups.
02:36:11.000And it's one of the biggest minority groups out there.
02:36:13.000But if you look across the board in positions of political power, It's a fucking death wish if you tell your constituency that you don't believe in God.
02:36:42.000If there were never any Christianity, if there's never any Bible, or I should say Judaism, because it's in the first ten books, if that never existed, we just would all be fucking killing each other.
02:36:52.000Nobody would ever stop and go, probably we shouldn't kill each other.
02:36:57.000Well, it's just so weird, as we were saying before, that there are positive aspects to the idea of living your life in, I want to say a pious manner, or a spiritual manner, because that's really tainted too.
02:39:50.000I mean, if you're going to have an animal and lock them in an area, the least you could do is give them some fun.
02:39:55.000I mean, give them the genetic thrills that are put in place, the reward systems.
02:39:59.000At least I feel like there's a push with some new zoos, hopefully.
02:40:03.000I mean, you're starting to see zoos combining with universities where we're seeing kind of animal behavior as really being a big part of the design of the zoo and worrying more about an animal's well-being Not just whether it stays alive, but it's psychiatric health.
02:40:18.000Yeah, I think that's really important.
02:40:20.000I was in Denver at the zoo and we were walking past this one exhibit and there was this one monkey that was by himself and he was wailing in agony.
02:42:44.000It's nutty how many we've created, too.
02:42:47.000That's what's really scary, how many people have created these biological weapons that if they got out, wipe out giant cities, whoops, we just want to see if we can make it.
02:44:12.000Yeah, they found this guy named Carl Amon.
02:44:15.000He's a Swiss wildlife photographer, and he started studying them in 96. They have some camera trap photos, and then they started sending expeditions, and they found it's a completely different strain.
02:44:27.000If you, like, look Google Image, you can see how big they are.
02:45:18.000And they thought it could be some sort of a hybrid between chimps and gorillas.
02:45:21.000They're not completely sure that it's not, but most likely they think that it's just a subspecies that only exists in this one area called Bili.
02:45:46.000These are like, you know, if you think about a regular chimp being 150, 200 pounds and having the strength of whatever it is, a 500-pound man.