Joe Rogan and Shane Smith are back at it again, and this time, they're talking about a cancer joke. Also, Ting is a great way to save money on cell phones, and you can get a new one on the cheap if you don't have a fancy new one. Logo by Courtney DeKorte. Theme by Mavus White. Music by PSOVOD and tyops. This episode was edited by Alex Blumberg and Annie-Rose Strasser. Our theme song is by Suneaters, and our ad music is by Build Buildings. The show was mixed by Mark Phillips and edited by Ian Dorsch. It was mixed and produced by Joe Rogan. Additional engineering and mixing by Matthew Boll. Special thanks to our sponsor Ting, which is a supporter of the pod and a great place to save some cash on cell phone service. If you like the pod, please consider becoming a patron patron and leaving us a five star rating and review the pod on Apple Podcasts. Have a question or suggestion for next week's pod? hl=en We'll see you next Tuesday, when we'll have a live show on the road trip! Thanks again for listening to the pod! The pod is brought to you by Anchor.fm/TheJoeRogan Experience. Subscribe, review, and subscribe to The Joe Rogans Experience Podcast. Thank you for listening and reviewing the pod. Cheers, and share the pod with your friends and family! Subscribe on iTunes and share it with your fellow podrates! Timestamps: 5 stars, rating, review on iTunes, and review on Podcharts, and a review on Insta, and much more! You'll be helping us spread the word about the podrates everywhere else on the pod is listening to this podcast! -- Thank you, and we'll be hearing about this podcast on social media and more. -- The Best Podrates and more on this podcast next week, and more in the next episode of this week's episode goes out on Tuesday, coming soon, coming out on Monday, Wednesday, July 17th, July 21st, July 25th and July 27th, so don't forget to check it out! and so on and so forth, so be sure to subscribe to the Podchips and other things like that and so we can be sure that we'll hear about it!
00:01:34.000When you buy a phone, say if you buy a phone from Verizon and you get it for X amount of dollars if you sign up for three-year service, when you try to cancel, they hit you with a big fee.
00:01:43.000The reason why they hit you with that big fee is because you didn't really pay for the whole price of that cell phone.
00:01:49.000They sort of factor it in over the course of three years and then...
00:01:54.000When you want to cancel, they want that money back.
00:02:12.000They have it set up so that You can, first of all, no contracts.
00:02:16.000You can buy, they have high-level Android phones, the best Android phones available, including the Samsung Galaxy S3, soon to be S4. I think it's coming out really soon.
00:02:25.000And the Samsung Galaxy Note 2, really cool cell phones.
00:02:30.000So you don't have to deal with crappy phones.
00:02:31.000You're also dealing with the Sprint network.
00:02:34.000So it's not like they have their own network.
00:02:38.000I've got nothing but people saying good things about it on Twitter ever since we started having them as a sponsor, including people saying how much they've been saving.
00:02:48.000Now, one of the things that I really love about Ting is credits on unused service.
00:02:53.000I just think this is such a great idea.
00:02:55.000There's plans, but if you use less than you thought you would, Ting drops you down to the level that you hit, and they credit you the difference on your next bill.
00:03:03.000You can't ask for anything cooler than that.
00:03:05.000It's good service, it's a good company, and it's all reasonable.
00:03:09.000And if you go to rogan.ting.com, you can save yourself $25 either off service or off one of their groovy cell phones.
00:03:17.000And by the way, they have used ones also, and they're just refurbished ones, and I've I haven't bought refurbished ones through Ting, but I've bought refurbished phones before.
00:03:27.000So if you're looking for a phone on the cheap, you could even get the Samsung Galaxy S2 Epic 4G Touch.
00:03:34.000And that's a lot cheaper than buying it new.
00:03:37.000So if you even need a cheaper phone, you have the used marketplace also at Ting.
00:03:42.000Yeah, and the reality is, unless you're like some crazy power user, you know, if you're on a budget, you can get by with a phone that was really cool a couple of years ago and you don't even notice it.
00:04:07.000We're also brought to you by Squarespace.
00:04:09.000Squarespace, if you've never used them before, is a really cool new service that is an all-in-one website development service where you can do it all yourself.
00:04:19.000You go to squarespace.com forward slash Joe and you can try it out.
00:04:24.000If you go to squarespace.com forward slash Joe, you don't even have to enter in your credit card.
00:06:02.000If you've never seen any of the fitness equipment that we have now, we have pull-up bars, jump ropes, steel maces, steel clubs, kettle bells, battle ropes, all kinds of stuff for functional fitness.
00:06:15.000I can only do this commercial so many times before it becomes ridiculously redundant.
00:06:19.000So if you've heard this podcast a few times, you probably fucking hate me already.
00:10:08.000Here I'll clear up a confusion for a lot of people.
00:10:10.000People are like, why is there Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, all this stuff, and why aren't we the same magazine?
00:10:15.000We're actually competitors, which is a weird thing, but it's because we date from the era when everything had the word popular at the front of it.
00:10:22.000Popular portraiture, popular whatever.
00:10:24.000It was basically saying like, hey, normal person, come read this thing.
00:10:48.000And that is not the popular science And blaming popular science for that would be like blaming me for killing Indians.
00:10:54.000And to be truthful, there's worse stuff than that.
00:10:56.000In the history of popular science, we have a cover in the middle of World War II that has this cartoonish, racist caricature of a Japanese guy.
00:11:04.000And if you look at the Google archive that we have, bracketed on either side of that man's face, Is, you know, how we're going to drop missiles from, you know, tanks, fighter jets, you know, like, everything is military hardware on either side.
00:11:20.000To look at the archives of Pompouson is to look at, like, an art project that is the history of America.
00:11:26.000And what we were thinking about at the time, but written in these, you know, really cool covers.
00:11:31.000Back in the day, there was so much more responsibility, too, to kind of deliver this kind of information.
00:11:37.000Joe, with all respect, you would not be on the air in 19, you know, whatever, 36. Of course not.
00:11:42.000The access to technology, the fact that you and I get to have this conversation and people are listening, which is such an amazing and wonderful thing, is so new.
00:11:50.000I wouldn't have been on the air in 96. No options.
00:12:01.000Back then, you know, pre-Walter Cronkite, man, to get on the air, holy cow, was that hard.
00:12:05.000You know, the amount of work, the amount of letter writing on letters to negotiate, you know, whether that guy's going to be a guest on Cronkite, you know, oh my god.
00:12:14.000And the ability to control the public's perceptions of things back then was so complete.
00:12:20.000Like what Harry Anslinger and William Randolph Hearst did with controlling the public's perception.
00:12:26.000You had to be so, you know, brilliant and kind of scary to rise to the top of the money heap and, you know, especially in the end to have enough of a fortune that you lasted through the 30s.
00:12:37.000Like you got to be a carnivorous human being.
00:14:23.000I did a story a little while ago about this.
00:14:26.000There's a thing called IARPA, which is a – and I have to choose my words carefully because this is sort of a complicated thing, but like – or a sensitive thing.
00:14:33.000But anyway, IARPA is an advanced research project agency for the intelligence community, right?
00:14:40.000There's DARPA, which does it for the Defense Department.
00:14:45.000Each of like the NSF, CIA, whoever will kick in dough and everybody – Funds little incubator projects of research to see, you know, can you do stuff?
00:14:53.000And you basically, the way you, what you do is you issue a challenge to the public and you say, anybody who can do this gets a million dollars, you know, or whatever the prize is.
00:15:01.000And that's how Robot Cars first started out, you know, those guys and the DARPA Urban Challenge is how these Google self-driving cars are coming about.
00:15:10.000But this one, there were these two projects that I bumped into Mind you, I can't tell you for sure that the implications of this are what I think they are, but here's what the programs themselves do, the challenge is.
00:15:23.000The challenge is, can you identify visual information in video?
00:15:31.000Basically, such that if I am looking for...
00:15:38.000The first challenge is from the visual information in the photograph, right?
00:15:41.000You're looking at a computer, looks at a photograph, and from the visual information inside of it, it knows exactly where the photo was taken.
00:16:13.000I don't know if it would know, like, time of year, right?
00:16:16.000It might be able to, someday that'll be possible.
00:16:18.000I think someone was busted recently with something.
00:16:21.000I don't remember the specifics of what it was.
00:16:24.000Someone was claiming to be somewhere when they took a photo.
00:16:27.000And then some analyst looked at the photo and said, that's not possible because this photo was taken and this hemisphere and the light source is from here, so it had to be taken in the afternoon.
00:16:40.000It's just, can you parse that data fast enough?
00:16:42.000And in this case, these computer programs are saying, okay, can you triangulate where everybody is?
00:16:46.000Then another one they're working on is, can you feed a query into the database and have it return...
00:16:58.000You know how like on YouTube you'll see tags at the bottom, right?
00:17:03.000I mean I'm sure under our pocket tags, Joe Rogan, whatever.
00:17:07.000Those keywords help everyone search and organize it themselves, right?
00:17:10.000But this is a program that can go in, look at the visual information of what's being shown in front of it and be able to come back with a correct set of photographs or videos that We're good to go.
00:17:50.000On the other hand, Google, there are some good-hearted engineers there who probably have a really good, useful thing for us.
00:17:56.000For being able to find pictures of your daughter wherever they are, I mean, that might be useful.
00:18:00.000It would definitely be useful, but it seems like we're resisting the inevitable with a lot of this retaining privacy rights and things like that.
00:18:40.000Or are they someone who really seeks to change the world?
00:18:42.000Or are they just some schlub Who backhanded his way up to the top and now he's reading your email.
00:18:48.000I like to believe that the people – I believe in civic institutions.
00:18:52.000I believe they really can function, especially when they come out of the generation – two generations ago, there's some nice – there's some good, dutiful people still in this world.
00:19:03.000I'm very cynical about that stuff too.
00:19:05.000But I'm surprised how often – like I was just doing a thing the other day at the US Air Force Academy in Colorado.
00:19:12.000It was one of these challenge programs, and these various students, young, undergraduate age, Air Force cadets, Marines, whoever they were, were coming forward with their cool science fair project, basically.
00:19:24.000And this little panel of generals was saying this one, that one.
00:19:27.000But at the beginning of it, the guy who is running the show, the MC or whatever, in military style, I don't know what an MC is, but stands up He says hello, you know, describes the artillery and said, but before I begin, I'd like everyone in the room to take a look at the emergency exits.
00:19:44.000Over to your left, and then there's one in the back, and then there's one over here.
00:19:48.000And as he pointed at each place, everyone in the room, military cadets, look to the one on the right, and the one behind them, and the one on the left.
00:20:45.000Now this government, this administration has made it so that there's all sorts of warrantless Wiretapping, warrantless arrests and the ability to detain citizens without any due process.
00:20:58.000You don't have to have a lawyer anymore.
00:21:00.000All the checks and balances that were in place.
00:21:03.000A lot of people unfairly think that if you criticize the way things are, it's like, oh, he's an anarchist.
00:21:31.000The amount of sort of – just the number of eyes on us right now mean that people are going to behave themselves more and more, but only if there is the threat of punishment for messing around with that.
00:21:44.000And so I think that as much as I want – These incredible services, the kinds of things that you – cheap software, cheap website hosting is a great idea.
00:21:55.000The cheapening and democratizing of stuff like your sponsors represent that kind of thing.
00:22:01.000But in order for that to happen, you have to have the threat of law.
00:22:08.000I think, you know, one of the things that I love about the internet is the rise of citizen activism and people who have – look, the morality of the anonymous internet is pretty outstanding.
00:22:21.000If you stop and think about the people that anonymous have gone after, you know, they've gone after some really fucked up people and they've kind of decided as a group Sort of just through the internet without even meeting in person.
00:22:36.000I think that's really encouraging because when people are anonymous and they just have the choice to do whatever they want online and yet they decide to try to right wrongs.
00:22:46.000It's the most evolved form of democracy.
00:22:51.000You've got a reliable way of measuring public approval or disapproval on Almost any subject you can think of by virtue of comments and the forums, the participation that we're all suddenly having.
00:23:03.000I mean it turns out when you take away the worry about being shamed in public, people really do bold things.
00:23:10.000They go out there and they write manifestos.
00:23:13.000There's so many – I'm supposed to go off and do this speech to my college, a writer's conference.
00:23:23.000And I was asked in advance, what's it like to be a writer now?
00:23:28.000What is the state of writing now or whatever?
00:23:31.000And my feeling is like it's so nice to be – it's such a good time.
00:24:16.000And the guy, Jack Dorsey, who founded Twitter, has this brilliant thing where basically he was geeking out on the patterns of cities.
00:24:23.000He was way into police scanners and stuff and was tracking the signals that like limo services ping back and forth.
00:24:33.000He was just interested in the flow of information that is generated by cities.
00:24:37.000And he saw that ambulances and limo services and delivery trucks have a system for saying, where are you?
00:24:44.000And then the truck says back, here I am.
00:24:47.000You know, there needs to be a system like that everywhere.
00:24:50.000And his thing was, let's give it to people.
00:24:52.000People don't have a system for reporting in their location and their status.
00:24:56.000And that's where status updates came from.
00:24:58.000It's interesting because that's what it used to be, but it's not really that anymore.
00:25:01.000What it's evolved to now, at least on my Twitter, my Twitter is all fascinating articles that people send me that I retweet or weird pictures that I take.
00:25:09.000Your neighborhood of Twitter is different than mine.
00:26:22.000Have you noticed the subscription, the paper-based, is dying for sure?
00:26:27.000Here's what's so great about working for Popular Science, and this is why I'm so lucky that it's this magazine I've inherited, because there's a lot of magazines with a lot of problems.
00:26:35.000Popular Science is just like, it's a universally beloved brand.
00:26:38.000Like, even people who don't read it actively know, or have never even read it, know what it's about.
00:26:43.000And so it's such a cool, universal thing to just walk in anywhere and be like, Popular Science, and it's like, oh, my dad reads that, you know, whatever it is.
00:26:52.000And there's a cool sort of a hipster subset of like guys like me, I think.
00:26:58.000You know, who are starting to pick it up in their 20s, you know, dig it as like just a thing to sort of geek out on.
00:27:05.000But it's got a really loyal following in every medium basically.
00:27:09.000There's this – there's the voracious internet hordes, the seizing mass of internet guys come to our site and are really brutal if we get it wrong.
00:28:05.000So, you know, the brain is one of many What's amazing about it is how little we actually know.
00:28:15.000We are just starting to noodle around the basic functions of the brain.
00:28:21.000We don't really have any idea how Personality is built.
00:28:27.000I mean, we have some idea, but the subtleties, like why we get along, whatever, all that stuff is totally unknown in terms of how the brain functions.
00:28:36.000But already, just by literally poking at the brain and zapping it and stuff, we can do amazing things already, like ease the symptoms of terrible diseases and do all kinds of crazy stuff.
00:28:49.000Hey, before we get into the details of that, can we talk about something I actually wanted to ask you about, which is sort of fear in general, the psychology.
00:29:00.000Just think about the subtleties of personality and the brain in general.
00:29:21.000I was going to say now as a matter of now that you're really doing, you know, observing a sport that you love, you see like how… The people for me who can train themselves to be unafraid or can channel their fear in the face of getting pummeled by a big person,
00:29:40.000by a big dude, is an amazing thing to me.
00:29:42.000And how that trait is expressed physically in the brain versus how a guy like me who's like, fuck dude, I'll give you any money I've got.
00:30:38.000Unless you're in terrible environments, unless you're in war, unless you're in really, really bad neighborhoods, Most likely you're going to be safe in San Francisco just going to your job and interacting with human beings.
00:31:18.000You've got to have your bases covered.
00:31:20.000And I remember competing as a martial artist.
00:31:22.000There was a big difference between how I felt when I was really prepared and how I felt if I was injured or if I was sick or if there was something wrong or if I didn't train hard enough.
00:31:31.000When you have doubts, that's when you're in a really bad place.
00:31:35.000I would say, though, that the raw materials are distinct.
00:31:38.000We can agree that the raw physical materials of people are distinct.
00:32:50.000So with the brain, with the way that it is distinct, you know, can do amazing things like we're literally putting pins into brains now, delivering a little signal and turning off, you know, seizures and turning off Triggering memories,
00:33:10.000There's basically a new category of a thing called biomechanical engineering where they've taken guys like your dad who like to tinker and are good at that.
00:33:23.000And turn that into, combine them with, you know, a little bit of medical training or maybe pair them up with a medical student.
00:33:30.000And being a biomechanical engineer, they're literally creating little devices that will do stuff.
00:33:33.000And so in one case, in the case of dementia, it's basically putting a pin, essentially, imagine a pin, into the brain and delivering a little jolt.
00:33:47.000But first you have to pick out the pattern.
00:33:50.000So in this case, it was monkeys that had...
00:33:54.000I've been taught a cartoon game, basically like a turn over and match the cards kind of game.
00:33:59.000And when they got it right, that signal, the computer picked that up, right?
00:34:07.000Then later, when, I don't know if it was the same monkeys or new monkeys, forgive me, but when they played again, they would use the signal to To stimulate the part of the brain that had lit up when the monkey got it right last time.
00:34:22.000And they found that they could increase the accuracy of the monkey by 10% on a consistent basis by jolting them right before they were about to make a decision, like hitting them with whatever the signal was at that time.
00:34:35.000And then, this is the other crazy part of it, they then hit those monkeys, each with a hit of cocaine, and watched their They fell off by 20% basically from their normal abilities in that game.
00:34:46.000Then they started doing this zapping again and could restore them to normal ability again.
00:34:53.000The trouble in this case though, or the reason that this is still a decade or more from being possible in humans, is life is not like a game of flashcards.
00:35:03.000You don't know what the signals are that you're going to want to prompt ahead of time or whatever.
00:35:07.000But they think that there's some memory stuff that might be, you know, that we could in future sort of improve our memory, right?
00:35:14.000You have a little signal processor and a thing that would zap the right spots of the brain or whatever, you know, could someday It really is such a fascinating time in regards to what we were saying earlier about data and information, but also in the fact that we still have so much to learn when it comes to the human mind and the ability to recreate it,
00:35:37.000which is something that scientists are really actively focusing on right now.
00:35:40.000I found an article in your magazine I thought it was really amazing.
00:36:04.000I was just hanging out with one of these total boy genius kids, this guy...
00:36:11.000Brilliant guy named Azar Raskin, a very smart dude, and he was pointing out a thing to me about Google where one of the chief sort of, you know, math officers essentially of Google basically released this paper in 2000, 2001 that said that it doesn't matter how good the software is The more data you give,
00:36:34.000you're always going to outperform even the best software.
00:36:38.000Really good software given a small dataset is not as good as mediocre software given a huge dataset.
00:36:46.000Data is what gives you your correct answers every time.
00:36:50.000You don't, in fact, need the little brain.
00:36:52.000What you need is a little device that connects to the whole big brain, to the world of data around it.
00:36:58.000That's sort of analogous to an educated person.
00:37:01.000You know, I mean, if a person is a clever, street-smart person or a person is just of average intelligence but very well-educated, you would, you know, much rather go to that person.
00:37:12.000Yeah, the intellectually curious, right?
00:37:14.000The guy who, like, wants to find out the answer.
00:37:57.000I literally find myself sometimes, I come home and my kids are all asleep and I just get on the internet at 10 and before I know it, it's 3.30 and I'm still reading things and watching videos and I'm like, shut this fucking thing.
00:39:06.000And then when I want to go back and Google certain things, I'll have little highlights in certain areas, and I'll go back to those, and then I can get online and do the rest of my research.
00:40:39.000We don't have to talk to a government official and get a license.
00:40:43.000And it's still rare enough that we're popular.
00:40:47.000We're like 7.5% more famous than other people.
00:40:53.000Someday that percentage is going to drop down because Everyone's gonna have access.
00:40:58.000Sure, and there's also a lot of people online that were never famous before and got famous because of their online content, which is really amazing.
00:41:32.000Yeah, I love the ability to distribute content, the ability to distribute artwork and podcasts and comedy shows on YouTube or what have you.
00:41:42.000I think this is the most amazing time ever for...
00:42:08.000Is there anything in this episode or this issue that deals with a very controversial issue of antidepressants and their effect on the human mind?
00:42:32.000I wouldn't know how to comment on that intelligently.
00:42:35.000I will say that… You know, antipsychotics, which are sort of an extreme thing, right?
00:42:41.000There's all kinds of incredible research being done.
00:42:47.000But we're still – it's still very early days in our understanding of what drugs do to the brain and what happens here and there.
00:42:53.000And so antipsychotics, there was a statistically significant group of people in a – I think God, I'm going to misrepresent this, but basically I was talking to a university professor who had done this study about, she was a clinical psychologist who had done a study about people taking antipsychotics,
00:43:09.000and a certain number of the patients were so transformed by this new generation of antipsychotics that they voluntarily went off them to go back to the hallucinations that they'd had before.
00:43:23.000I don't want to misrepresent the number.
00:43:25.000But it was a statistically significant group of people, which means that there are people whose – for whatever reason, their reaction is I would rather – so in one of the cases that she described, Was a man, a homeless man, who believed that he was being pursued by the Russians,
00:43:40.000you know, and was living in stark terror in this kind of Cold War nightmare every waking moment.
00:43:47.000And he was homeless and so forth, but just a ruined guy.
00:43:52.000He goes and he gets, begins to get this antipsychotic medication and these And it turns off not just your hallucinations, but it also maintains your ability to reason and function.
00:45:38.000I have a friend and he got on some antidepressants and they started him off on one and it sucked and they switched that and got him to another one.
00:45:56.000We don't know how it works in the brain.
00:45:58.000The blood-brain barrier is basically the body's system for keeping things Only the tiniest molecules from passing into your brain, because it's such an important organ.
00:46:17.000So, you know, the ability of, you know, medications coming through that barrier to, you know, change your mood or your outlook on life, it's such a difficult thing to predict.
00:46:32.000Yeah, and not only that, it's so variable between human beings that one person would describe You'd almost think you're dealing with a completely different substance, one person's reaction to another.
00:46:50.000It seems like there's so many variables when it comes to any sort of a medication that affects the mind because you're dealing with who knows how many thousands of generations of genetics, where your origin was.
00:47:03.000Like, it's pretty well known that certain people...
00:47:07.000Certain nationalities have a difficult time with alcohol because they don't have a cultural history of it.
00:47:11.000They don't have a genetic history of it.
00:47:12.000Well, the truth is human beings don't have a history of alcohol.
00:47:16.000We're not evolutionarily supposed to be drinking booze.
00:47:20.000Stuff is poison in terms of just the toxicology of it.
00:47:25.000I mean, there's a whole field of evolutionary biology that studies The moment that we began to drink alcohol, and it was, you know, I couldn't even guess when, you know, 5th century B.C. or something, something, you know, way long time ago.
00:47:44.000But the idea was that, or one theory is that you would drink it in order to survive eating rotten meat.
00:48:05.000I also read a fascinating thing about the origins of alcohol being that it was with honey.
00:48:11.000That they had figured out a long time ago that honey was a preferred method of storing things in because it prevented deterioration, prevented things spoiling.
00:48:22.000And one of the things that happens with honey is that it ferments and it becomes mead.
00:48:28.000Yeah, this is one of the theories of Terence McKenna on the changing of cultures from earlier psychedelic-based mushroom cultures to cultures that were more alcohol-based was that they started storing their mushrooms in honey.
00:48:57.000But they know that many, many cultures were preserving mushrooms in various ways.
00:49:03.000Some of them were drying them out over the fireplace.
00:49:06.000They were doing all these different things with mushrooms, and they know for sure they started storing them in honey.
00:49:12.000And they also know that there was climatological changes where mushrooms weren't growing in areas anymore and they had to switch to different intoxicants.
00:49:19.000And then the raping and the pillaging started, and shit got crazy.
00:49:26.000Yeah, but mead, that's a lot of people don't know that alcohol made with honey is an early intoxicant.
00:49:32.000I have to tell you, though, I once went to a wedding where the only drink that was announced to us when we arrived would be honey mead that the groom's brother or something had made.
00:51:49.000Have there ever been any studies on figuring out what it is, what the process is with people that can't handle alcohol versus the people who have a history?
00:53:28.000Our friend Joey Diaz says it's the Indian in him, because he's Mexican, and Mexicans were part Indian, part Spaniards, that the Indian in him kicks in, and he's gone.
00:54:12.000One of the pieces that we are looking at here is a thing about exactly that.
00:54:17.000Basically, it's a piece of technology that allows you to Head off seizures and lets you basically not only deliver an electrical signal into the brain, but also a very precisely timed jolt of medication.
00:54:41.000It affects not just the function of the brain at the time, but can also guide it a little bit, basically.
00:54:50.000So the way it's designed is like this tiny little, you basically end up with a film, a molecule thick basically film of, basically film on top of this electrode.
00:55:02.000And when you hit it with a negative charge, the film releases a medication deep inside your brain.
00:55:08.000And it'll turn off seizures, and they think that it can also do stuff with, that it might be able to help ward off the effects of Parkinson's.
00:55:15.000Basically, seizures happen, you know, everybody.
00:55:19.000So many kinds of ailments can cause seizures, right?
00:55:23.000And they also think they could use it to turn off some of the addictive impulse, that it could detect, you know, I don't know how they would do this, but somehow they would detect the signal in your brain ahead of time that signals, or maybe it's, you know, the environmental, Thing of like,
00:56:03.000Basically is rewarding you at all times for whatever you're doing, you know, with a nice feeling.
00:56:08.000You get a little jolt of serotonin for having done the right thing, you know, a lot of the time.
00:56:14.000That's sort of a guiding principle of your body, basically.
00:56:17.000And so you get a little thrill from things like Twitter, checking Twitter, right?
00:56:21.000Or, you know, there's a whole body of writing that's been done about this, like the addictive nature of picking up new information all the time and how that's why we can't get away from the Internet.
00:56:31.000Sometimes there's no reward and you still do it.
00:58:08.000The correlation between the two of them.
00:58:10.000It's like there's damage, so your brain's just constantly urging this impulse to seek these rewards.
00:58:17.000So not to selfishly steer this to my magazine, but in this issue of the magazine, we have a thing about basically You know, savants, right?
00:58:30.000For anyone who doesn't know, it's the idea that you're just this perfect, incredibly skillful, just master of a thing, whatever that thing is.
00:58:44.000Basically, it's the story of this guy, Derek Amato, who was a pushing 40, normal guy, playing football in a pool with his friends in Sioux City, South Dakota, where he's from.
00:58:59.000Somebody throws a pass to him from the jacuzzi, he leaps into the pool for it, and he whacks his head really hard on the bottom of the pool, and comes up and thinks that he's broken his skull.
00:59:07.000He's clutching his head really in agony.
00:59:19.000He goes over to his friend's house, one of the friends that was with him when he was playing football, and sits down at the guy's piano or keyboard or whatever and just begins to play the piano and has never really played the piano before.
00:59:31.000And begins to just – can do the triads.
00:59:39.000And he then immediately, of course, goes on the internet and is like, Jesus Christ, what's going on?
00:59:43.000And he said it was like an itch that he needed to scratch.
00:59:46.000It was satisfying to play in a way that he couldn't, you know, had never experienced before.
00:59:50.000So he looks online and discovers that there's a whole field of study into what's called acquired savant syndrome, where you pick up a miraculous skill like this from some sort of debilitating brain damage or whatever the thing ends up being.
01:00:06.000And so he was led to a researcher who diagnosed him as having this thing.
01:00:11.000There's like fewer than 30 documented cases in the world.
01:00:22.000Well, this is what they're trying to figure out.
01:00:24.000And so there's two competing theories about it.
01:00:27.000One is, and it may be that one of them is wrong, so let's all keep that in mind.
01:00:31.000But one of the theories is that when you damage a part of the brain, you can sometimes damage a part of the brain that had been inhibiting The other half of your brain, basically, the right brain, you know, it was inhibiting the left side.
01:00:48.000And by damaging the right side, the left brain becomes disinhibited.
01:00:52.000And so one of the things that they, one of the examples that they use is, you know, as we get used to stuff over the course of our lives, we begin to develop a shorthand for it in our brain, right?
01:01:03.000You don't pick out the details anymore.
01:01:05.000You're picking out the very general landscape.
01:01:08.000I was just thinking about this on the drive here, right?
01:01:09.000We're driving through Burbank and, you know, I was looking at a truck and thinking to myself, how would I see that truck if I was seeing it for the very first time with, you know, with that side of my brain disinhibited?
01:02:07.000And you'll have people who are severely – some of the most amazing savant stories are people who are very developmentally disabled in other ways.
01:02:16.000Some of them have an IQ of 54, a verbal IQ of 54. This one kid could listen to a piano on TV once and play it perfectly, whatever it was, Tchaikovsky, in a movie.
01:02:28.000And he'd sit down with the piano and play.
01:02:49.000The other theory about it is maybe in the dying of a part of the brain, there's weird electrical activity that, you know, supercharges either the area in some way or, you know, this again, they don't know enough about the brain to really have any idea.
01:03:06.000You know, I mean, actually we have a pretty good grasp on concussions, but we, you know, have no experience protecting people from them, you know, and all of this because the brain, just our understanding of it is so new.
01:03:16.000What is the thought on people that have autism and can do amazing things?
01:03:21.000Like, have you seen the young man that can look out a window from a plane and draw a picture?
01:04:34.000What's crazy about the The thing that I find so interesting is these people who are aging and developing, you know, being able to paint, being able to do all this stuff.
01:04:48.000I like the theory just because it's kind of nice to think about that there's, you know, as people's minds are decaying, certain artistic abilities or whatever suddenly begin to flourish.
01:05:06.000He's the famous artist that used to, I think, draw for the New York Times or something like that.
01:05:10.000And then he started getting schizophrenic or started going crazy at his older age.
01:05:14.000And like just his normal drawings of cats, like here's an example.
01:05:18.000His normal drawings of cats, which were like really normal looking, started to get more and more psychedelic almost looking until near the end of his life.
01:05:56.000And his art, he did so much art that he, from the history of how it was stacked up in his apartment, he died and his landlord found all his work.
01:06:07.000Nobody knew that he was doing this stuff.
01:07:20.000It's so fascinating how someone can lose their mind and in their artwork you could sort of see the window into their craziness, you know, like through their offerings, through their creativity.
01:07:35.000The human mind is such a strange thing in that We're the only animal that we know of that's truly aware of what the fuck is going on and that is also truly aware of its origins and development.
01:07:49.000We have some sort of sketchy information about dolphin intelligence and there's a lot of speculation when it comes to what they can and can't do, but the reality of what humans can do as opposed to what they used to be able to do You know, 50,000, 100,000,
01:08:06.000I mean, when we go to Australopithecus and we see the little pieces of stone that they used to chip into a slight edge to cut meat, and then you look at a cell phone.
01:08:18.000I'll tell you right now, there's an app we made where you can take a photo of yourself As an Australopithecus or as Neanderthal and see what you would have looked like.
01:08:28.000It literally maps the details of your face.
01:08:31.000If everyone wants to check it out, it's Evolver is the name of it.
01:09:28.000Well, they're totally separate from us, Neanderthal.
01:09:30.000We carry around some of their genetics, but there's a lot of speculation as to whether or not we interbred with them or whether or not we just have similar origins.
01:09:38.000They think that because they were around at the same time, it may have happened at some point.
01:09:42.000They had larger minds too, which is even crazier.
01:11:23.000I mean what if we find out that we had to fucking kill them off because they were killing people and they were our mortal enemy and that they were trying to – Can we split the proceeds on this movie that you're writing right here?
01:11:33.000I think it's already been written probably.
01:11:35.000I think there's probably some – Because it sounds good.
01:12:24.000Somebody needs to hold that back somehow.
01:12:25.000But anyway, but yeah, it's a, you know, there are some things where you could, you know, where we could learn all kinds, you know, it'd be amazing to know exactly what we had in common with XYZ, you know, person.
01:12:37.000I mean, you know, the amount of mileage that people get out of even the most, you know, loose stories about like We may have inherited this trait for aggression.
01:13:28.000And I think there's this issue with...
01:13:32.000We're always going to be curious and we're always going to want to come up with the newest, latest, greatest thing and figure out the newest, latest, greatest thing.
01:13:40.000But like the creation of the atomic bomb, it's almost like once you start that process, you kind of have to see it.
01:13:46.000You kind of have to see, can we make this?
01:13:49.000There was the famous thing from the Manhattan Project is definitely at Los Alamos when the explosion was happening, when the cumulus cloud was going up is when, holy cow, wow, I can't believe I'm going to blank his name, Robert.
01:14:15.000Richard Feynman, who's like 22 or something at the time, is up in an airplane watching from above taking notes and he remembers and he wrote this in a book.
01:14:23.000He remembers that he thought to himself, oh, that's how clouds are made.
01:14:53.000Can you imagine just not knowing, not having any idea how this is going to be used, seeing it explode and going, oh, fuck, what have we done?
01:15:11.000One of the clearest examples of us really not knowing the implications of these things is watching those early government tapes where they would send the military towards the blasts.
01:15:55.000I mean, the electromagnetic pulse that goes through, all of this, just the concussive force of that is so unbelievable.
01:16:03.000And all kinds of, you know, You were talking about your friend had white spots on his brain.
01:16:09.000There's so much of that kind of brain damage out there in the world, especially people who've had their bell rung by a big concussion like that.
01:16:19.000One of the things that people are finding out about folks that are recovering from traumatic brain injury in the military now is that they can save Many more people than ever before, but you're getting many more people that have these brain injuries just from the concussive effect.
01:16:36.000Who don't show any other physical signs of injury.
01:16:39.000They're not, you know, they walked away, you know, and are lucky to have done so.
01:16:44.000You know, that's the sort of medical evaluation it used to be.
01:16:46.000And now they know that there's an invisible, you know, effect in the brain.
01:16:51.000There's a shearing force that passes through the brain that, you know, can mess things up.
01:16:56.000And that's, you know, a lot of the, both football concussions and these kinds of things like this, just a, you know, the brain is fragile, we're learning.
01:17:04.000And that kind of concussive blast, you know, an IED going off by the roadside is really a terrible, you know, can ring your bell and really damage your brain.
01:17:14.000Yeah, we're just not that fucking durable.
01:17:16.000It seems like we're not really designed.
01:17:18.000Look at these guys watching this blast, just staring at it, and then they climb out of this ditch and they run towards the explosion.
01:18:07.000And this was just a couple of decades ago.
01:18:10.000One of the things that I brought up on this podcast before that is one of the wildest statistics is that from the invention of the airplane to the time someone dropped an atomic bomb from an airplane was less than 50 years.
01:18:44.000It's like you can have line items that are $600 million, boom, and it will say just like, Project Roundup, you know, and you're like what you know, and then that's six hundred million dollars of just line item whatever they they're spending and and you know,
01:19:00.000I did a TV show For Discovery a little while ago that was about this and like they've got You know these whole hangers set up for private contractors out near Edwards Air Force Base at area Plan 42 and They just build Sometimes you'll have two private contractors,
01:19:22.000like a Boeing and a Lockheed, both building the same thing, not knowing that the other is also building it.
01:19:27.000And it's the military funding two competing prototypes and then melding them or whatever.
01:19:39.000But when the military throws money at a problem, they tend to...
01:19:43.000I've seen a stealth fighter fly overhead.
01:19:46.000We were in Palmdale, out near the Edwards Air Force Base, and we were out there filming Fear Factor several times and watched these things fly over.
01:19:56.000Especially because when we first started Fear Factor, it was right after September 11th.
01:20:00.000Fear Factor went on air, I think, in 2002. So we would watch these things fly overhead.
01:20:19.000It's literally that if radar hits a thing A certain amount of the radar has to bounce back, basically.
01:20:28.000And the more that you can make the angles of the body of the plane match, So that's why you get those sort of like Batman kind of, you know, crackler kind of, what am I trying to say?
01:22:28.000Well, I mean, to me, the money that is about to be proposed, or the rumor is that President Obama is going to put up a $3 billion proposal for a brain map project,
01:22:56.000I understand that we're in a time of austerity, but I also think that these kinds of projects can really pay off and that you can get incredible amounts of research done at a great value these days.
01:23:08.000And it would be really nice to understand the brain better than we do.
01:23:12.000Well, it's ridiculous to think that a few billion dollars is a lot when you consider the military budget.
01:23:25.000If you also – if you look at the social and economic payoff of a lot of the military-funded or government-funded research projects, the internet has – I think we can all agree has paid off pretty well.
01:23:38.000That technology is working pretty good I would say right now.
01:23:43.000LCDs were created under a government program.
01:23:46.000There's all kinds of things that make our lives possible that get off the ground that way.
01:23:56.000You need that bridge of money to get from here to then when the private sector will take over, when we know some stuff.
01:24:04.000There's going to be a lot of economic activity that comes out of this.
01:24:07.000So to me, I would love to know better.
01:24:10.000Basically what they want to do is, we don't know right now what neurons in the brain correspond to what behavior in the body.
01:24:16.000We don't know what the thing is, what the connection is yet.
01:24:19.000And they want to try to map that out, I mean, as best they can.
01:24:22.000What's the general consensus as far as what created the doubling of the human brain size?
01:24:27.000One of the things that I read about the human brain's development was that one of the biggest mysteries in the entire fossil record is the doubling of the human brain over a period of two million years.
01:25:02.000Evolution moves so slowly that, like, That process, that time, for it to show up in the fossil record means it happens so quickly in evolutionary terms.
01:25:13.000Eating meat makes sense if cougars are super smart.
01:25:28.000I mean, it was so important, right, that We're one of the few mammals that has babies that are born defenseless, utterly defenseless.
01:25:35.000And it's because the brain is so large that the body has to give birth to the baby before the baby is truly qualified to be outside of the body.
01:25:45.000Well, it's just ridiculous that people have sex in the same place where the baby comes out.
01:25:49.000This little tiny penis and a fucking baby's supposed to come out of a hole that keeps that thing tight enough to create friction.
01:26:19.000You want as few openings in the body as possible.
01:26:21.000That's what they said of the Model T when it came out as well.
01:26:24.000I think, you know, one of the issues with human beings, obviously, is that we are pretty much the same as we were 50,000 years ago biologically, but the world has changed dramatically.
01:27:48.000It seems that we should, I mean, everyone says you should source things locally, it's good for your environment, good for your community.
01:27:55.000That's all well and good, but it also, for survival's sake, When you see what happened with Hurricane Sandy, where New York City was just shut down.
01:28:03.000New York City, the most advanced city in the world, shut down, no one can get gasoline.
01:28:09.000Like, wow, you gotta rethink this whole thing, because that fucker was designed when people were on horses.
01:28:15.000I highly recommend a book, The World Without Us, by Alan Weissman.
01:28:21.000Who writes about, like, what would happen if human beings vaporized from our places now?
01:28:25.000Like, what would happen on the next day, basically?
01:28:28.000And it was, it's stuff about, like, you know, everything from, like, feral cats, right, would, would, those that weren't locked in, you know, the ones that were locked in would die and then This number of them would be out there and they would decimate the rodent population.
01:28:41.000He basically takes that fantastical moment when everyone is vaporized and then is like, how long will the nuclear power plants last?
01:28:49.000How long before the houses break down?
01:28:52.000It'll be a hundred years and they all fall apart.
01:28:55.000This office plaza would just come apart in a hundred years.
01:29:01.000And it's because it requires so much little gritty, granular maintenance to keep something like New York City going.
01:29:08.000Well, not only that, the world, the erosion, just the changing of the seasons, the moving of the dirt on the ground due to seismic activity.
01:29:18.000We don't think about it in our time because we only live to be 100 years, and in 100 years, not a whole lot of things happen.
01:29:24.000But over the course of a billion years plus, there's nothing left.
01:29:32.000I was in Montana recently, and one of the coolest things about, I was in the Badlands, and when we're hiking through these hills, you find seashells all over the place.
01:29:44.000Because Montana, that area of Montana, used to be something called the Great Western Inland Sea.
01:29:49.000Millions of years ago, there used to be fucking dinosaurs in Montana, in an ocean, an inland ocean.
01:29:55.000And you're like, wow, this ain't permanent.
01:29:58.000This whole thing just keeps changing and shifting.
01:30:01.000I mean, California, where we live, right, all these dramatic seascapes and so forth, all the waves crashing on the beaches and all that stuff, all that imagery.
01:30:08.000Man, we are utterly living in a place that's crumbling into the ocean.
01:31:04.000His job is, he owns a contractor, a construction company or a deconstruction company, really, that pulls oil rigs out of the ocean, wrecked oil rigs.
01:31:13.000And he, in his 20s, was designing oil rigs.
01:31:17.000And was describing what it was like to design them back then.
01:31:19.000And he said that the instructions from the instructor back then was build it to this 60-year storm standard.
01:31:31.000And he was like, but we've only been designing oil rigs for 35 years.
01:31:34.000How do we know what a 60-year storm looks like?
01:32:01.000And this guy now runs Versabar, this company that builds this thing that can pull a whole oil rig out of the ocean and carry it into land, because there's so many that got wrecked by Katrina.
01:32:25.000That's one of the creepiest ideas about what's going to happen because of the warming of the planet is that these storms are going to happen more and more often.
01:32:32.000And we had a guy on here that was talking about The possibility of Hurricane Sandy being something that happens every year.
01:32:39.000You're going to have one of those a year.
01:34:29.000That's why I made it this wide, because at the Ice House, we have another place at the Ice House, and I was always touching toes with people under the desk.
01:34:42.000When I want to talk, I'll touch your foot.
01:34:45.000But what is that about humans, where we need this sort of, we need a closeness?
01:34:50.000Yeah, I mean, I think there's a, I don't know, but it's definitely hardwired.
01:34:53.000There's the uncanny valley is this whole thing that they determined where...
01:34:58.000Basically, if you show somebody a fake human face, right, the brain immediately is like, oh, this is fake.
01:35:06.000And if you make it more and more lifelike, basically roboticists study this and try to create a robot that could fool a human, right, or make a human comfortable.
01:35:17.000And so like when you take a kid, well, so when it gets more and more uncanny, right, more and more like a person, there's a point at which Just before real acceptance, where you've really fooled the person, where the acceptance rate drops off,
01:35:34.000the closer you get to actual reality, the more it freaks people out to be talking to a fake person.
01:35:39.000A really lifelike fake person is way scarier than a not at all lifelike person.
01:36:50.000But at the Stanford Research Institute in the 1970s and 80s, Targ and his colleague, a guy named Harold Putloff, Co-founded a 23-year, $25 million program of research into the psychic abilities and their operational use for the U.S. Intelligence Community.
01:37:06.000Time travel chair, like I said a couple months ago.
01:37:10.000Including the CIA, Defense Intelligence Agency, and the Army Intelligence.
01:37:14.000And these abilities are referred to collectively as remote viewing.
01:37:17.000And they both express the belief that...
01:37:20.000It's possible and that they believe that there is actual physical evidence that proves that people can accurately describe and depict things that exist somewhere where they're nowhere near.
01:37:31.000It would be fascinating to know whether they can prove it.
01:37:35.000Yeah, you guys haven't looked into any of that yet?
01:37:36.000I mean, I know about it and, you know, in the spirit of not saying anything negative about something I don't know a lot about, you know, I don't want to like shoot it down right off the bat, you know, but It doesn't sound likely to me.
01:37:53.000But we've had a friend, Tim Ferriss, in here who described studies that are done where people accurately describe things through remote viewing.
01:38:07.000I should say this is controversial, but it's been written at least that it's been proven statistically that people can tell when people are looking at you.
01:38:16.000That someone can more often than not be accurate about whether or not someone is looking at you, like you could feel someone's eyes on you.
01:38:23.000I don't know whether that's true or not, but I do know that there is a...
01:38:28.000If you talk to a police detective, they'll tell you that when you interview witnesses, You know, to an auto accident, let's say.
01:38:39.000They typically say that they saw the cars collide, when in fact they typically heard the sound, whirled around, and then saw the aftermath of the actual collision.
01:38:48.000But their memory tells them, this was me seeing the cars collide.
01:39:28.000Is it zeros and ones or is it like a We know that if you stimulate certain parts of the brain, you can rekindle memories, right?
01:39:39.000Or at least rekindle the way, the ability you have to retain memory.
01:39:43.000I don't know that you can bring them back, but you can certainly, you know, you can stimulate the part of the brain that can Help foster that for some reason.
01:39:51.000But again, this is us like poking on the outside and seeing like, oh, sorry.
01:39:56.000There's a Far Side cartoon from years ago where the group of doctors is around the table and one of the legs is going out one side and the nurse says, careful doctor, don't touch that part or leave that part or whatever it is.
01:40:09.000And that's totally, that's sort of where we're at in terms of brain research.
01:40:15.000I read this speculation once where they were thinking that it was possible that memories were in fact stored in the neurons and the the idea behind it was that human cells regenerate every seven years like pretty much every cell in your body It's completely regenerated every seven years,
01:40:42.000So that might be the only place for memories.
01:40:43.000But I've thought about it and I said, well, maybe that's why your memories suck when they're older than seven years old, because they're like copies of copies, like an old VHS tape.
01:41:08.000But if I allowed you into my mind to look at what data I have, I mean, you basically have me regurgitating some shit that I might have said when I was 10, and then I'm saying it over again when I'm 13, then again when I'm 16, and again...
01:41:24.000And it's like I've kept repeating this and referencing it or considering it, so I have...
01:41:32.000This image of it, but if you looked into my head, some of the things that I've done in my life, you know, and some of the things that, you know, really big moments in my life, all you'd find is like a few fucking blurry images and maybe some reference points.
01:42:10.000You're going to need some serious drugs.
01:42:14.000So they turn off your memory, basically.
01:42:18.000And it's not so much that they're turning off the body's sensation of the pain as much as they're turning off your memory of it so that you're not really experiencing it consciously.
01:42:28.000But you still, in that state, your blood pressure goes up, like your body is feeling pain.
01:42:33.000And an anesthesiologist is managing that pain for you.
01:42:36.000But the idea is to turn off your memory more than your nerve receptors, which is amazing.
01:42:41.000So when you're unconscious in an anesthesia state or an anesthetized state, your body still is sending the signals, but not like a sleeping person who would wake up.
01:43:09.000But as a result, yeah, your body still is free to respond.
01:43:15.000I think that an anesthesiologist would say, A, It really depends.
01:43:18.000There's some procedures where that's not the case.
01:43:21.000But it also is healthier not to turn off too much.
01:43:26.000You don't want to turn off a lot of the body.
01:43:28.000They have to sometimes, depending on the procedure, but you want to, I think, keep a lot of it as going of its own accord as much as possible.
01:43:36.000Well, then there's brain surgery, which is even fucking crazier, and the fact that there was A general consensus amongst doctors and scientists just, I mean, how many decades ago where they were doing lobotomies?
01:43:50.000Where they were going, this dude's fucked up, let's drill a hole in his brain and scramble that frontal lobe and see if we can get a nicer person out of it.
01:43:58.000The idea that anybody would sort of really mess around with the brain back then, considering how little we know now, You know, the fact that we need $3 billion worth of research to get oriented is basically what that would do.
01:44:11.000Man, you know, like, yeah, nobody should be scrambling anybody.
01:44:13.000Yeah, what is that, what was it called?
01:44:15.000Trepanning, I think, where they would drill holes in the skull to release pressure?
01:44:41.000Was this desire to sort of, you could calm the brain in a way by jolting it.
01:44:48.000And it comes, it was discovered basically by, or the original sort of discovery that led to that was in slaughterhouses.
01:44:58.000They would stun the cattle ahead of time with like a shot to the brow basically with one of those, not nail guns, but a rivet gun.
01:45:09.000And as a result, the cow would go incredibly calm and then a whole body of research sort of grew out of that dynamic trying to figure out like what is the shot to the system that calms the body, calms the mind for a second.
01:45:21.000And for the longest time, they weren't doing electroshock therapy on humans.
01:46:04.000And the negative is a lack of emotional connection, lack of reasoning.
01:46:08.000Your cognitive ability starts to go away, and those were a whole separate category of symptoms.
01:46:14.000And back then, in the early days of something like electroshock therapy, they typically only had something like Thorzine, Lithium, All it would turn off was your positive symptoms, but it didn't affect any of your negative symptoms.
01:46:31.000You're still lethargic, you still can't make connections to people, you're still not thinking well, plus you're sort of sedated.
01:46:37.000So they talked about the Thorazine Shuffle.
01:46:40.000I'm just making this up, but I wonder if some of it is people would get jolted And then after that, be on this medication, typically, and be shuffling around.
01:46:52.000And people would all be like, oh, that guy was never the same since he had his electroshock therapy.
01:46:55.000But maybe he was also on the drug that was turning him off.
01:47:17.000What is your thoughts on Ray Kurzweil's idea of humanism that we are eventually going to be symbiotic with some sort of a machine counterpart?
01:47:50.000Like, if you've got the new galaxy, blah, blah, blah, blah, with Google, when you turn on that first little screen that tells you, like, here's the time, here's the weather near you, it'll also follow, you know, it'll track your time, like, where you are and begin to pick up the history over time of where you are.
01:48:09.000And it'll start to suggest, like, here's a better route to take to work.
01:48:16.000And it's telling you information before you're even asking for it, which for me is a totally new, you know, crossing this line where it's no longer like, oh, I'm hungry.
01:49:11.000This girl I know is working on a movie, and I guess there's a couple people that are so hipster that they don't have phones, and so she has to email them.
01:51:03.000And that's totally how I feel about everything.
01:51:06.000Like, when I look at, you know, airbags, you know, safety restraint systems, like pressurization on planes, all that stuff is unbelievable.
01:51:56.000I mean, even having this conversation, there's no distractions, but every now and then you hear that truck that goes by next door, or you feel you have to shift your butt because it gets uncomfortable.
01:53:30.000I didn't invent this fucking thing and I can't believe that I tell so many people about it and they're like, wow, I need to do that.
01:53:38.000I'm like, Jesus, it's 2013. Why the fuck are these things not everywhere?
01:53:42.000They're so incredibly beneficial and they give you a lot of the benefits of psychedelic drugs without any of the worries about tripping out and losing your mind and You know, a lot of people know someone that's lost their marbles on LSD or something or had a bad emotional experience on mushrooms.
01:53:57.000And so when they think about the idea of taking a drug to detach from the reality to gain a fresh perspective, it's terrifying.
01:54:06.000But you can achieve psychedelic states in a sensory deprivation tank with no worries at all.
01:55:17.000I know several people that have come up to me and talked to me about isolation tanks because they've heard it on this podcast and they were like, I've done it three times.
01:56:14.000One, most people who do it, they don't do it enough to get truly relaxed in that environment because a lot of the sensory deprivation tank experience is about letting go.
01:56:24.000It's about learning how to relax and learning how to let go and not concentrating on the fact that you're in a tank and not bumping up against the walls.
01:56:32.000You got to get good at it and you got to get good at the whole letting go thing.
01:56:41.000But you can achieve some pretty powerful states in meditation.
01:56:45.000You can achieve much more powerful states if you're meditating inside an isolation tank.
01:56:50.000I just wanted to know if you knew anything about the actual effects of the mind.
01:56:54.000Do you remember that movie Altered States when the dude was wired up with all these electrodes and they were monitoring his mind while he was in there?
01:59:26.000I think the idea of taking a super intelligent animal like a dolphin and putting it in a swimming pool and having a bunch of people touch it is just like taking a person and putting them in a fucking box and having a bunch of fish come and stare at you.
02:01:16.000He's a good writer and did a story for us about Basically going and tagging along with this kind of, not quite ragtag crew, but like, you know, crew scientists.
02:01:27.000But they're, by their nature, a little crazy in that they're out hand-tagging sharks.
02:01:34.000They get them up on the boat, you know, like being dangerous, you know, hammerheads, you know, the whole deal.
02:01:40.000And they tag them with these very improved tags that are far more technologically sophisticated than what we have now and as a result of giving us all this new data about sharks and what they do.
02:01:49.000Where they live, how deep they go, all this stuff.
02:01:52.000But he was describing what it's like, in the story he describes what it's like to be in the water with a shark.
02:02:01.000Those things are just built for death.
02:02:03.000They are, you know, nature's perfect weapon, those things.
02:02:06.000Yeah, that must be absolutely horrifying.
02:02:08.000One of the things, one of the reasons why I'm so adamant about the dolphin thing is that I had a psychedelic experience with dolphins, too, from eating pot and being on a boat.
02:02:19.000And that's that bit that I do, the story that I wrote.
02:04:18.000What seemed like that to me was the shemuz, the killer whales.
02:04:21.000That, to me, I thought the dolphins looked like they were all having a great time, but the killer whales looked That was kind of fucked up, because it was just a huge tank, and they just were swimming in circles non-stop.
02:05:09.000If they really want to have a relationship with dolphins, they should give them food and put up a center and a place where the dolphins live naturally and put people in submarines.
02:05:17.000But the idea that you should put them in a fucking fish tank, and by the way, that water is probably chlorinated.
02:06:03.000It's funny when you go, the American Museum of Natural History in New York has this whole wing of its stuff that it inherited of stuffed animals.
02:06:13.000And I love the American Museum of Natural History.
02:06:17.000But it's just funny to go and stand in front of what was the zoo back in the 19th century, 18th century, the desire to To shoot and stuff an animal.
02:06:32.000There's been exhibits at zoos before where they had black men.
02:06:37.000I think they had pygmies at zoos before.
02:06:40.000The ability to justify the imprisonment of an intelligent animal It's really weird when we start and think about what an intelligent species from another planet would do to us.
02:06:54.000If they came here and found out that Kim Kardashian was the most famous woman on the planet, what is to say that they want, these dumb motherfuckers, let's just lock them up in a cage and give them food.
02:07:03.000As long as they have food, they'll be happy.
02:07:05.000There are, I mean, on the other hand, though, I would point out that there's like, you know, There is some, at least some understanding of what animals need to thrive in an environment, and zoologists do do a great job, or try to do a great job anyway, of creating environments where the animal is,
02:07:20.000you know, maybe tricked is one way to put it, but like, you know, is...
02:07:24.000It feels comfortable in the environment.
02:07:26.000And there's all kinds of crazy optical illusions.
02:07:29.000At the Seattle Zoo, there's the savannah kind of curves.
02:07:32.000It's almost like you're on the top of a dome, sort of, but it's a very gradual dome.
02:07:36.000But it's enough that for a long time, it looks as if there's a long horizon out in front of you.
02:07:44.000You're not seeing any trees in the background or whatever because it's sloped up just slightly.
02:07:47.000And, you know, I wonder if that's, I don't know, but I imagine that's like designed to make, you know, to keep a lion's eyes sharp or whatever the thing is that they're trying to do.
02:07:57.000Well, if they really wanted to be nice to the lion, they would let goats loose.
02:08:01.000They would also let goats loose in there like they do in Asia.
02:08:04.000You know, in Asia, the way they treat tigers, it's really not sporting whatsoever because they back a truck up and they lift up the forklift in the back of the truck or whatever the cab in the back of the truck is.
02:08:16.000And the goat falls out, the tigers just tear it apart.
02:08:24.000There's also a zoo in Iraq, and that's one of the first videos I ever saw about it online, where they released a goat, and these lions came running out and ripped the goat apart in front of all these GIs that were there with cell phones.
02:08:43.000The idea of sliding a tray under the cage with some cold meat.
02:08:49.000The whole reward system that an animal has, especially these predators, their entire reward system is based on chasing and catching things.
02:08:58.000I mean, if you roll a ball in front of a cat, it's going to go after it.
02:09:04.000I mean, they say one of the big things about mountain lion attacks is they attack joggers a lot because they think you're trying to get away.
02:10:01.000Yeah, the lions take a little more time than the tigers.
02:10:04.000The tigers grab ahold of it and it's almost instantly a wrap.
02:10:07.000They just yank them and rip them apart.
02:10:09.000But I mean, if you're going to have animals like that, it seems kind of fucked up to have them in a place where they can't run around and they don't have anything to chase.
02:10:53.000And we're willing to imprison all of them.
02:10:55.000What's really also amazing is seeing the stingrays.
02:10:57.000They have this whole thing where it's just this pool where you can touch and feed stingrays.
02:11:01.000And these stingrays would just come up out of the pool and they look like little dogs that instead of having feet have like, you know, like...
02:13:47.000Their method of locomotion is one thing, but if you met a dolphin in space...
02:13:52.000If it was, like, something like that, where it had that sort of intelligence and it was communicating and moving around more like a human, if it was bipedal, but you looked at it and made noise and it interacted with you, you would freak the fuck out.
02:14:15.000Dolphins exist in this world where they can move through three-dimensional space, so they don't need to be able to touch things with fingers and manipulate the world.
02:14:23.000There's all kinds of studies about the inner life, the emotional life of animals.
02:14:29.000Elephants that bury their dead, grieve for their dead.
02:14:32.000Elephants can recognize themselves in the mirror, know who they are.
02:14:46.000Like when we look back at the evolution of people, one of the great turning points in evolution is when we began burying our dead and the idea that we began having these sort of, you know, A scientist would say, inner lives,
02:15:08.000That's when our mediating brains begin to really do it.
02:15:11.000That's one of the things that trips me out the most about Ray Kurzweil is that he believes we'll be able to transcend death and we'll be able to download consciousness into a computer and He takes 100,000 pills a day and watches his diet in order to extend his life to that point where he gets to do that.
02:15:39.000You want all the medical research working to make you think you are playing in Well, it's a real wrestling match between our instincts and the reality that we're a finite being and the reality that we are also a part of a process.
02:15:54.000We are one piece of a superorganism, which is the human race.
02:15:58.000But our ego tells us, no, I must survive.
02:17:35.000You know, I was once interviewing a fighter, a test pilot who went on to become an astronaut.
02:17:41.000And I was asking him, how do you not freak out when you are sitting atop this bomb on the launch pad?
02:17:49.000Like, how do you not just, like you were saying, you know, about getting out of the sensory deprivation tank, like, you know, leap to your feet, scramble at the door.
02:17:55.000Like, how do you resist the impulse to do that?
02:17:57.000And he said, well, you know, we're trained, you know, we're recruited and trained for a specific...
02:18:02.000Ability, you know, and situational awareness is what he described it.
02:18:05.000And he said that one of the examples of it is what he called winding the clock.
02:18:11.000And I was like, what's winding the clock?
02:18:13.000He had been a test pilot out of Edwards over here and was one day assigned to shoot down a drone to test a new air-to-air missile.
02:18:22.000And so he comes out of this, you know, steep turn, fires the rocket, and it doesn't leave his wing.
02:18:29.000He hears it go, but it doesn't actually leave the jet.
02:18:33.000He looks over and it's armed on his wing.
02:18:37.000Ready to blow up, it's armed, it's ready to make him back, and you're done.
02:18:40.000And so the moment, the reaction you're having, even to hear this story, is the same reaction I had and the same reaction so many people would have.
02:18:48.000Eject immediately or panic, you know, whatever.
02:18:51.000And he said that in that moment, they're trained to wind the clock.
02:18:54.000They literally would reach up to a cheap clock that they had duct taped to the dash of this fighter and wind it to keep it going.
02:19:02.000And you're trained to do that in order to have a little downtime to think through what you're going to do next.
02:19:08.000And in the amount of time it takes him to reach up and crank that dial, He is hearing, you know, thinking through, okay, well, it's kind of a nice day.
02:19:18.000Should I go out across Los Angeles and over the ocean and ditch there?
02:19:57.000They get every general with a mile radius.
02:20:00.000You know, but I said to him, like, I don't understand how you're able to do that.
02:20:02.000And he's like, yeah, we're just trained to, you know, we have that ability.
02:20:05.000You know, and that's true when you look across all, you know, there's another astronaut story.
02:20:10.000This guy, Franklin Chang Diaz, was a Costa Rican national who was an astronaut on the shuttle.
02:20:18.000And he narrowly avoided being killed in both the Columbia and the Challenger disasters.
02:20:22.000He was training for both, and through a fluke of scheduling, did not go on either, and saw all of his friends and colleagues killed in these two disasters.
02:20:28.000I mean, an unbelievable tragedy for this guy, twice.
02:20:32.000And he still shares the record for the most times in space.
02:20:37.000And, you know, has done more, I think, more spacewalks than anybody else, or something like that.
02:20:43.000He's just an absolutely superlative human being.
02:20:45.000And he had this story of Floating out there with this, you know, $60 million piece of equipment that he's got to move from this place to this place or whatever.
02:20:54.000And as he's doing it, he looks down and the clouds are parted beneath him and there's Costa Rica.
02:20:59.000And he realizes, I'm the only person of my nation who will ever have this view, you know, in all likelihood.
02:21:06.000And he's got his camera attached to his belt, and he said he was thinking to himself, I can just reach down and grab the camera and take the photo that all Costa Ricans will have on their wall, basically.
02:21:18.000I'm sure he didn't have that thought, but to me, that's what it is.
02:21:21.000And he doesn't do it because he would have had to let go of this piece of equipment and go for the camera.
02:21:29.000He's like, they brought me here to do this job, I'm going to do this job, and he scoots it over.
02:21:33.000But again, that's a piece of programming That he's resisting, you know, like by his training and his steadfastness and whatever it is in his brain, like, man, the guy doesn't just do what I would have done, just throw the piece of equipment out into space and take, you know...
02:21:47.000Yeah, training is a fascinating thing.
02:21:49.000The idea of developing your skills and your mindset to the point where you can do extremely dangerous things and keep your composure...
02:22:05.000Even when it doesn't mean anything like this, I think that's part of the reason why I think X Games and stuff along those lines, it's part of the evolutionary process to compete against each other to see who can do the more and more fucked up things.
02:23:15.000I mean, that's why a guy like you can, you know, you're obviously a successful, intelligent guy, but you're like joking around about, oh, I can't handle fear.
02:23:35.000You know, the consistent ability to resist fear and do, you know, the needful in the face of terrible odds, that is a crazy thing.
02:23:46.000You know, at the same time, though, we're also, you know, we just did a story recently about how there's a whole DARPA challenge around creating rescue robots that would replace firefighters, would replace people, not in all circumstances, but in circumstances like Fukushima, where there's radiation,
02:24:02.000you can't send people right into the middle of it.
02:24:03.000But you want to be able to send in a robot that can cut its way through a door, look around, maybe bring somebody back.
02:24:10.000And so the challenges that DARPA are putting out there include literally being able to cut through a door with a Sawzall, drive a car.
02:24:19.000The thing has to be able to get into a car and drive away with it.
02:24:22.000It's literally like the rules have been written by an eight-year-old.
02:24:25.000Incredible, the challenge that they're putting out in front of these people.
02:25:07.000But when we first put the cover together, it was reaching for you, trying to save you through a broken window, basically, in this sort of ruined environment, which is the environment that the thing is going to have to compete in.
02:25:20.000But it looked like it was reaching for you to kill you.
02:25:24.000The robot looked frightening, and we decided in the end, like, wait, we've got to make this thing not look like it caused all this damage, because we as people are terrified of Robots.
02:27:33.000I think the proponents of epigenetics...
02:27:36.000I would say that it's probably somewhere in your evolutionary past or somewhere in your genetic past rather that someone got fucked up by a snake and either one of your ancestors saw it or one of your ancestors was wounded.
02:27:48.000We did a story about, we have a section of the magazine where we basically ask incredibly dumb questions of incredibly smart people and it's great because they play along in this wonderful way.
02:27:58.000So one of them was, what's the world's grossest sound?
02:28:02.000And literally there was a guy who had You know, done a study to determine it.
02:28:06.000And he determined that the sound was the sound of vomiting.
02:28:09.000And they simulated it by pouring a bucket of baked beans into another bucket while somebody else was making yakking noises.
02:28:18.000And they played all these different noises for people.
02:28:20.000And that was the one that was grossest.
02:28:22.000And the reason they think, the evolutionary purpose of that in theory is that when you as a group, you know, were eating diseased, you know, elk or whatever around a fire, you know, 20,000 years ago, and someone started to get sick, everyone would know it and would also throw up so that no one in the tribe ate the diseased stuff.
02:28:45.000Well, that also, by the way, can be bypassed.
02:28:49.000And I can tell you that from personal experience, because when I was a kid in high school, if someone threw up in the hallway, which always happened in school, I would start throwing up.
02:28:58.000And a lot of other people would start throwing up, too.
02:31:38.000And, you know, the feeling of there being, you know, a purpose to staying away from, you know, you know that like dysentery results from, you know, if you don't have adequate waste systems and people are around, you know, if it infects the drinking water.
02:31:51.000Like there's so many reasons to stay away from, yeah, the dirtiest parts of people.
02:32:38.000If you want to take mushrooms and hang out with Brian in a dolphin tank, I'm sure we can accommodate you.
02:32:43.000See, I wonder if there's experiments going on like that.
02:32:46.000Because if I had a dolphin, I would be doing weird things like that.
02:32:49.000There's definitely two researchers who could compare notes and come up with something like that.
02:32:53.000Well, that's why you should read Lilly, bro.
02:32:55.000You should read some of John Lilly stuff.
02:32:56.000He was a pioneer in interspecies communication.
02:32:58.000He actually, like, you know, peer-reviewed stuff on dolphin intelligence because of psychedelics and getting in dolphin tanks or getting in isolation tanks.
02:33:06.000You need to take an isolation tank trip, too, man.
02:33:08.000All this crazy poo-pooing of it without any personal experience.
02:33:41.000The amount of emails that I get every week, the amount of Twitter messages and Facebook messages by people that have positive experiences and isolation attacks and how much it helps them and changes them.
02:37:06.000It came from a UFC fight where a bag of ice spilled in the octagon and I gave a whole commentary for like three minutes on these guys cleaning up the ice because it was so ridiculous.