The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #339 - Jacob Ward

00:00:03.000 Hey everybody, we're doing a podcast again.

00:00:07.000 Can you believe it?

00:00:08.000 Can you believe we're even still alive after that Shane Smith podcast?

00:00:12.000 Best podcast ever.

00:00:14.000 For everyone who thought it was the best podcast ever, thank you.

00:00:16.000 For everyone who tweeted me and said it sucked, I'm sorry. 0.68

00:00:19.000 Who are these people that think that sucked? 0.99

00:00:20.000 That was fucking funny. 0.99

00:00:22.000 Everybody has the right to their own opinion, sir. 0.99

00:00:25.000 Okay?

00:00:26.000 And my apologies to anybody who did. 0.96

00:00:28.000 We didn't mean to get that fucked up. 0.91

00:00:30.000 That's just what happens when you drink with ShaneSmithOfVice.com. 0.98

00:00:33.000 I think that was the second most drunk I've ever seen you.

00:00:36.000 Yeah, it was pretty hammered.

00:00:38.000 This episode of the joke, some guy sent me a message that he went to the comedy show and he was mad at me because I made a cancer joke.

00:00:45.000 I'm like, I don't have a cancer joke in my act, man.

00:00:47.000 I don't know where it came from.

00:00:50.000 I don't know.

00:00:51.000 He said the cancer joke was not cool.

00:00:53.000 I was like, I don't think I have one, man.

00:00:55.000 Maybe it was a drunken joke?

00:00:59.000 I'm pretty sure at the end of that show that I know when I'm trying new stuff out or when I'm venturing off into strange territory.

00:01:07.000 I don't think there was any of that.

00:01:08.000 This episode of the Joe Rogan Experience Podcast is brought to you by Ting.

00:01:14.000 Ting is, first of all, they are a supporter of this podcast because we believe in companies that are not trying to rip people off.

00:01:27.000 There's reasonable rules.

00:01:28.000 I don't like contracts with cell phone companies.

00:01:31.000 I think it's gross.

00:01:32.000 I understand it.

00:01:34.000 When 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.

00:01:43.000 The reason why they hit you with that big fee is because you didn't really pay for the whole price of that cell phone.

00:01:49.000 They sort of factor it in over the course of three years and then...

00:01:54.000 When you want to cancel, they want that money back. 0.90

00:01:57.000 I think that's silly.

00:01:59.000 It's not necessary.

00:02:02.000 It's also not necessary to have it set up where you can't have two people in the same plan.

00:02:11.000 Ting has that.

00:02:12.000 They have it set up so that You can, first of all, no contracts.

00:02:16.000 You 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.

00:02:25.000 And the Samsung Galaxy Note 2, really cool cell phones.

00:02:30.000 So you don't have to deal with crappy phones.

00:02:31.000 You're also dealing with the Sprint network.

00:02:34.000 So it's not like they have their own network.

00:02:36.000 They have a major network.

00:02:37.000 It's excellent service.

00:02:38.000 I'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.

00:02:48.000 Now, one of the things that I really love about Ting is credits on unused service.

00:02:53.000 I just think this is such a great idea.

00:02:55.000 There'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.

00:03:03.000 You can't ask for anything cooler than that.

00:03:05.000 It's good service, it's a good company, and it's all reasonable.

00:03:09.000 And if you go to rogan.ting.com, you can save yourself $25 either off service or off one of their groovy cell phones.

00:03:17.000 And 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.

00:03:26.000 And they're a lot cheaper.

00:03:27.000 So if you're looking for a phone on the cheap, you could even get the Samsung Galaxy S2 Epic 4G Touch.

00:03:34.000 And that's a lot cheaper than buying it new.

00:03:37.000 So if you even need a cheaper phone, you have the used marketplace also at Ting.

00:03:42.000 Yeah, 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.

00:03:51.000 It barely makes a difference. 0.98

00:03:52.000 It does pretty much the same shit. 0.96

00:03:54.000 And I love that Samsung Galaxy S3 and I love the screen. 0.98

00:03:57.000 It's amazing.

00:03:58.000 Once you go to that screen for looking at webpages or the Note, which is even more insane, you'll love it.

00:04:03.000 Alright, so go there.

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00:04:46.000 Brian's actually coded websites on Notepad with HTML and all that jazz.

00:04:50.000 But for a person like me, I'm not going to learn how to do this.

00:04:54.000 It's not happening.

00:04:55.000 But I've gone to Squarespace.

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00:05:18.000 You don't have to pay anything.

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00:05:23.000 That's Joe and the number 3, 3 because of March.

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00:05:47.000 Yeah, that's awesome. 0.97

00:05:48.000 That's ridiculous. 0.66

00:05:48.000 We live in strange times, folks. 0.66

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00:06:15.000 I can only do this commercial so many times before it becomes ridiculously redundant. 0.93

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00:07:08.000 Alright, folks.

00:07:09.000 Jacob Ward is here from Popular Science Magazine.

00:07:11.000 We're going to get freaky. 0.99

00:07:12.000 We're going to learn some shit. 0.99

00:07:14.000 We're going to educate the masses. 0.99

00:07:15.000 We're going to up his Twitter account.

00:07:18.000 The Joe Rogan Experience.

00:07:22.000 All day!

00:07:28.000 Powerful Jacob Ward, but you prefer Jake, right?

00:07:30.000 I do, yeah.

00:07:31.000 Call me Jake.

00:07:31.000 Jacob is very biblical.

00:07:33.000 Dude, I gotta tell you, I'm sold on all of your sponsors.

00:07:35.000 Really?

00:07:36.000 I don't know if it's them or you or what.

00:07:37.000 Man, I'm in.

00:07:38.000 I see a lot of pitches during my day, you know, I spend my professional day, like, look at, people are pitching me all the time.

00:07:44.000 Stuff's cool.

00:07:44.000 And you actually made the sound of the, of the, the name of the Galaxy, uh, sound cool, which is impossible.

00:07:50.000 That's the worst, that's the longest name for a phone.

00:07:53.000 It's a great piece of technology with a terrible name.

00:07:56.000 Yeah, Galaxy X3, Galaxy Note 4. It's just too long.

00:07:59.000 I know they've got a lot of phones, but man.

00:08:01.000 I was just thinking that the other day.

00:08:02.000 Why don't they just call it something different?

00:08:04.000 There's a lot of names in this world, I'm here to tell you.

00:08:07.000 Yeah, there's no need for that, right?

00:08:09.000 Why does everything have to be Note This and 3 and 4 and X and 5?

00:08:13.000 I don't know.

00:08:13.000 But the tech, I mean, the stuff itself is amazing.

00:08:15.000 And you're absolutely right that, like, a couple years old phone is a great deal.

00:08:19.000 Like, they change so fast.

00:08:21.000 Yeah, especially the Samsung phones.

00:08:23.000 With Apple, you have to wait a couple years for a new iPhone.

00:08:25.000 Right, because each one has to knock it out of the park.

00:08:27.000 You've got to go all the way with Apple.

00:08:29.000 Yeah, but I don't have the confidence in them without Steve Jobs at the helm.

00:08:34.000 I need a crazy person, completely obsessed with success.

00:08:36.000 Totally.

00:08:37.000 This regular Tim Cook fella, he seems like a regular dude.

00:08:40.000 Yeah, I don't know enough about him.

00:08:41.000 He's supposedly a very orderly person, which you would need.

00:08:44.000 Like, at the very least, you've got to run the hell out of that place.

00:08:47.000 I think when he gets home, he probably relaxes, and I don't need that.

00:08:51.000 I don't need that in my CEO. Yeah, yeah, you need a guy writhing around, angry.

00:08:55.000 Yeah, pissed off at coders because they got something wrong in Google Maps with Tacoma.

00:09:00.000 That's right.

00:09:01.000 That's right. 0.99

00:09:01.000 Fucking Tacoma, Washington is in the wrong place or whatever it is. 0.99

00:09:04.000 Whatever it is that Steve Jobs has to go bananas for. 0.99

00:09:07.000 That's right.

00:09:08.000 How long have you been the editor of Popular Science?

00:09:10.000 So I had a crazy experience.

00:09:11.000 I was the second in command of Popular Science for five years.

00:09:15.000 I was like the doer.

00:09:17.000 And then my boss decided to leave, and I got promoted about seven months ago.

00:09:22.000 And suddenly, like, I'm running a 140-year-old magazine.

00:09:26.000 I'll tell you right now, it's a big responsibility.

00:09:28.000 And I feel, you know, I freak out each morning for five minutes.

00:09:32.000 I'm like, I can't believe I'm about to go make these decisions.

00:09:34.000 And then, boom, I go off and do it.

00:09:36.000 It's a great thing.

00:09:37.000 It's been an honor.

00:09:39.000 The popular science episode or issue that I quote to people all the time is the one way back in the 1930s.

00:09:48.000 Love it, yeah.

00:09:48.000 Hemp the new billion dollar crop.

00:09:50.000 Oh yeah, totally.

00:09:51.000 We were way out in advance of that.

00:09:52.000 That's what's cool about popular science.

00:09:54.000 We're at least five or ten years ahead of, you know, we put our flag into each issue if you look through history.

00:09:59.000 I can't take credit for that personally, but it's really cool that it happens, you know.

00:10:03.000 Yeah, that was on the cover of Popular Mechanics.

00:10:07.000 Yeah, that's cool.

00:10:08.000 Here I'll clear up a confusion for a lot of people.

00:10:10.000 People are like, why is there Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, all this stuff, and why aren't we the same magazine?

00:10:15.000 We'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.

00:10:22.000 Popular portraiture, popular whatever.

00:10:24.000 It was basically saying like, hey, normal person, come read this thing.

00:10:27.000 You don't have to be an expert.

00:10:29.000 Unfortunately, I was incorrect.

00:10:31.000 Popular science actually demonized marijuana. 0.99

00:10:34.000 That's probably true.

00:10:35.000 We probably did.

00:10:36.000 Way back in 1936, it was when the government had gotten their greedy little paws.

00:10:42.000 I mean, let's be fair.

00:10:44.000 That's the depths of the depression.

00:10:46.000 That is not you.

00:10:46.000 Everyone's freaking out.

00:10:47.000 That is not you. 0.82

00:10:48.000 And that is not the popular science And blaming popular science for that would be like blaming me for killing Indians.

00:10:54.000 And to be truthful, there's worse stuff than that.

00:10:56.000 In 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.

00:11:04.000 And 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.

00:11:20.000 To look at the archives of Pompouson is to look at, like, an art project that is the history of America.

00:11:26.000 And what we were thinking about at the time, but written in these, you know, really cool covers.

00:11:30.000 So it's pretty sick.

00:11:31.000 Back in the day, there was so much more responsibility, too, to kind of deliver this kind of information.

00:11:37.000 Joe, with all respect, you would not be on the air in 19, you know, whatever, 36. Of course not.

00:11:42.000 The 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.

00:11:50.000 I wouldn't have been on the air in 96. No options.

00:11:53.000 That's interesting.

00:11:54.000 You've been in this game long enough to know, right?

00:11:56.000 That's right.

00:11:57.000 It's a whole new world.

00:12:01.000 Back then, you know, pre-Walter Cronkite, man, to get on the air, holy cow, was that hard.

00:12:05.000 You 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.

00:12:14.000 And the ability to control the public's perceptions of things back then was so complete.

00:12:20.000 Sure.

00:12:20.000 Like what Harry Anslinger and William Randolph Hearst did with controlling the public's perception.

00:12:26.000 You 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.

00:12:37.000 Like you got to be a carnivorous human being.

00:12:39.000 You know, you're a scary dude.

00:12:41.000 And then if you put something in your magazine or in your newspaper back then, that was doctrine.

00:12:47.000 Well, yeah, but here's the thing where I would say – I see where you're going with it and I'm with you halfway there.

00:12:52.000 I think the William Randolph Hearsts of the world were very crazy and very rich and it was powerful stuff.

00:12:56.000 But the people that you hire in to run your editorial product or the person you hire in to be your publicity guy.

00:13:02.000 Back then, think about the generation that generated Apollo and all that stuff.

00:13:07.000 Those guys were raised in the values of you do the best possible job you can.

00:13:12.000 You repay hard work with hard work.

00:13:14.000 It was an earnest group.

00:13:18.000 My dad is a writer.

00:13:21.000 My uncle is a writer.

00:13:22.000 Everybody in my family comes out of the sort of New York Magazine world in some way.

00:13:26.000 And it's a real meritocracy.

00:13:27.000 People are really trying.

00:13:28.000 Now, that said, there was a lot of other stuff.

00:13:30.000 Everybody's white. 0.95

00:13:31.000 Everybody's a man. 0.98

00:13:32.000 Like, there's a lot of other limitations to the- Trevor Burrus, Jr.: The good old days.

00:13:35.000 Yeah, the good old days.

00:13:35.000 I mean, it's what it was.

00:13:36.000 It's what it was, you know?

00:13:38.000 But now, you know, it's a, you know, but to now be able to be on the air, you know, with you like this, it's just cool.

00:13:45.000 It's fun.

00:13:46.000 And more people can listen to it than ever before.

00:13:48.000 Everybody can listen to this.

00:13:49.000 It's so cool.

00:13:50.000 Trevor Burrus, Jr.: I've heard people say that they believe that in today's era, the Watergate would have never happened.

00:13:55.000 That sort of sting operation against the present.

00:14:00.000 Oh my god.

00:14:00.000 Not only would it not have happened, it would be on 5000 Galaxy S35, whatever the name of the phones are.

00:14:08.000 Everybody would have filmed it.

00:14:10.000 You're not going to be able to get away with anything in the future, people.

00:14:12.000 I'd like everyone to know, this is an important message from Popular Science Magazine, behave yourself.

00:14:18.000 Law enforcement is about to get serious.

00:14:20.000 They're going to know exactly what's going on.

00:14:22.000 Here's a crazy thing.

00:14:23.000 I did a story a little while ago about this.

00:14:26.000 There'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.

00:14:33.000 But anyway, IARPA is an advanced research project agency for the intelligence community, right?

00:14:40.000 There's DARPA, which does it for the Defense Department.

00:14:43.000 IARPA does it for a coalition.

00:14:45.000 Each 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?

00:14:53.000 And 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.

00:15:01.000 And 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.

00:15:10.000 But 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.

00:15:23.000 The challenge is, can you identify visual information in video?

00:15:31.000 Basically, such that if I am looking for...

00:15:37.000 Well, so here's the first challenge.

00:15:38.000 The first challenge is from the visual information in the photograph, right?

00:15:41.000 You'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.

00:15:49.000 Whoa.

00:15:50.000 Does that make sense?

00:15:52.000 Triangulate from the visual location information.

00:15:55.000 And you know, right?

00:15:56.000 You've got to be a hardcore New Yorker.

00:15:57.000 To be able to spot a photograph of any corner in New York City and know exactly where you are, right?

00:16:01.000 That's a hard thing.

00:16:03.000 Imagine a computer designed just to do that thing, you know, a piece of software that can do exactly that thing.

00:16:07.000 Would it be able to triangulate anywhere in the world based on where the light source is coming from?

00:16:12.000 I don't know, yeah.

00:16:13.000 I don't know.

00:16:13.000 I don't know if it would know, like, time of year, right?

00:16:16.000 It might be able to, someday that'll be possible.

00:16:18.000 I think someone was busted recently with something.

00:16:21.000 I don't remember the specifics of what it was.

00:16:24.000 Someone was claiming to be somewhere when they took a photo.

00:16:27.000 And 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.

00:16:38.000 Totally.

00:16:38.000 It's all data, right?

00:16:39.000 That data is out there.

00:16:40.000 It's just, can you parse that data fast enough?

00:16:42.000 And in this case, these computer programs are saying, okay, can you triangulate where everybody is?

00:16:46.000 Then another one they're working on is, can you feed a query into the database and have it return...

00:16:58.000 You know how like on YouTube you'll see tags at the bottom, right?

00:17:03.000 I mean I'm sure under our pocket tags, Joe Rogan, whatever.

00:17:07.000 Those keywords help everyone search and organize it themselves, right?

00:17:10.000 But 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.

00:17:42.000 It'll say, who's this?

00:17:43.000 Or whatever, there's a little question mark over her face.

00:17:45.000 Like, who's this little cutie?

00:17:46.000 And I'm like, I'm not telling you, Google.

00:17:48.000 I don't want you to know that.

00:17:50.000 On the other hand, Google, there are some good-hearted engineers there who probably have a really good, useful thing for us.

00:17:56.000 For being able to find pictures of your daughter wherever they are, I mean, that might be useful.

00:18:00.000 It 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.

00:18:08.000 But the fight should go on, maybe.

00:18:10.000 Yes, I think it should.

00:18:11.000 I think it should, first of all, because one of the real issues is that along the way on this fight...

00:18:16.000 The issue is being decided by people.

00:18:18.000 People are deciding whether or not they can read your email.

00:18:21.000 People in the government are deciding whether or not they can listen to your cell phone.

00:18:24.000 How are they qualified?

00:18:25.000 And how are they moral?

00:18:26.000 And how are they better than you?

00:18:27.000 Or how are they as good as you? 1.00

00:18:28.000 We don't know anything about them, but yet they can look at your dick pics. 1.00

00:18:32.000 You're totally right. 0.99

00:18:32.000 You know what I'm saying? 0.99

00:18:33.000 I mean, that's wrong.

00:18:34.000 And how did they get to be a government person?

00:18:37.000 I mean, are they really ambitious?

00:18:38.000 And are they really ethical?

00:18:40.000 Or are they someone who really seeks to change the world?

00:18:42.000 Or are they just some schlub Who backhanded his way up to the top and now he's reading your email.

00:18:48.000 I like to believe that the people – I believe in civic institutions.

00:18:52.000 I 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.

00:19:03.000 I'm very cynical about that stuff too.

00:19:05.000 But I'm surprised how often – like I was just doing a thing the other day at the US Air Force Academy in Colorado.

00:19:12.000 It 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.

00:19:24.000 And this little panel of generals was saying this one, that one.

00:19:26.000 It was very cool.

00:19:27.000 But 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.

00:19:44.000 Over to your left, and then there's one in the back, and then there's one over here.

00:19:48.000 And 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.

00:19:55.000 You know, they're totally...

00:19:57.000 It turns out when you go with the program, sometimes good things result.

00:20:00.000 It's cool to be in a place where when things catch fire, everyone runs for the exit in the way that you're supposed to.

00:20:06.000 Not like a rap concert.

00:20:07.000 Yeah, right.

00:20:08.000 Sure, right.

00:20:09.000 But it's just cool.

00:20:10.000 I find some of that order.

00:20:11.000 If you meet a test pilot, those guys are just money.

00:20:15.000 That's the world's most reliable person.

00:20:17.000 I definitely believe in...

00:20:18.000 Maybe not with a bottle of whiskey in them, but...

00:20:21.000 I believe in order and I believe in discipline, but I don't believe in other people controlling people.

00:20:26.000 Well, that's right.

00:20:26.000 That's the real issue.

00:20:27.000 That's exactly right.

00:20:28.000 That's exactly right.

00:20:29.000 You imposing your values on me is not okay.

00:20:31.000 Right.

00:20:32.000 And imposing the ability to control people by having their information.

00:20:37.000 It gets into weird areas when you don't know the motives of the people looking for the search.

00:20:42.000 It's just so gray.

00:20:43.000 It's just like, who's allowed that?

00:20:45.000 Now 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.

00:20:58.000 You don't have to have a lawyer anymore.

00:21:00.000 All the checks and balances that were in place.

00:21:03.000 A lot of people unfairly think that if you criticize the way things are, it's like, oh, he's an anarchist.

00:21:10.000 Absolutely not.

00:21:11.000 I believe there should be a system of checks and balances, but I also believe there should be cops.

00:21:16.000 I believe there should be lawyers, there should be judges, there should be jails. 0.99

00:21:19.000 Because people – human nature is that in the real world, people fuck up. 0.99

00:21:24.000 Totally. 0.97

00:21:25.000 I'm quite excited by the amount of – like you were saying, Watergate could never have happened, right?

00:21:29.000 We've been caught so quickly, right?

00:21:31.000 The 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.

00:21:44.000 And 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.

00:21:55.000 The cheapening and democratizing of stuff like your sponsors represent that kind of thing.

00:22:01.000 But in order for that to happen, you have to have the threat of law.

00:22:04.000 You have to have that.

00:22:05.000 Or the threat of anonymous.

00:22:08.000 I 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.

00:22:21.000 If 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. 0.99

00:22:33.000 Yeah, this is fucked up. 0.99

00:22:34.000 Let's expose this. 0.99

00:22:35.000 Let's go after this.

00:22:36.000 I 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.

00:22:46.000 It's the most evolved form of democracy.

00:22:49.000 It is so granular.

00:22:51.000 You'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.

00:23:03.000 I mean it turns out when you take away the worry about being shamed in public, people really do bold things.

00:23:10.000 They go out there and they write manifestos.

00:23:13.000 There's so many – I'm supposed to go off and do this speech to my college, a writer's conference.

00:23:23.000 And I was asked in advance, what's it like to be a writer now?

00:23:28.000 What is the state of writing now or whatever?

00:23:31.000 And my feeling is like it's so nice to be – it's such a good time.

00:23:36.000 I didn't say this.

00:23:37.000 Somebody else originated this.

00:23:38.000 But to be – it's so much of a better time to be a reader now than it ever has been before.

00:23:43.000 So much cool stuff to read because everyone can write.

00:23:46.000 Everyone can get into print.

00:23:47.000 I read this the other day that 90% of the world's data was generated in the last two years.

00:23:54.000 Sure.

00:23:54.000 It's unbelievable how much data there is.

00:23:57.000 And it's a firehose.

00:23:59.000 We don't really know how to parse it yet.

00:24:00.000 Twitter is so primitive compared to what we're going to have in 10 years.

00:24:04.000 Yeah, what is going to be the next one?

00:24:06.000 I never saw Twitter coming. 0.98

00:24:07.000 I never thought, even when it came out, I was like, okay, what the fuck is that? 0.98

00:24:11.000 140 characters? 0.94

00:24:12.000 It's all code.

00:24:12.000 It's text messaging to anonymous people.

00:24:14.000 That doesn't make any sense.

00:24:15.000 Right.

00:24:16.000 And the guy, Jack Dorsey, who founded Twitter, has this brilliant thing where basically he was geeking out on the patterns of cities.

00:24:23.000 He was way into police scanners and stuff and was tracking the signals that like limo services ping back and forth.

00:24:33.000 He was just interested in the flow of information that is generated by cities.

00:24:37.000 And he saw that ambulances and limo services and delivery trucks have a system for saying, where are you?

00:24:44.000 And then the truck says back, here I am.

00:24:47.000 You know, there needs to be a system like that everywhere.

00:24:50.000 And his thing was, let's give it to people.

00:24:52.000 People don't have a system for reporting in their location and their status.

00:24:56.000 And that's where status updates came from.

00:24:58.000 It's interesting because that's what it used to be, but it's not really that anymore.

00:25:01.000 What 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.

00:25:09.000 Your neighborhood of Twitter is different than mine.

00:25:11.000 It's really interesting. 0.99

00:25:12.000 I've already acquainted with your followers and I'm like, oh, damn. 0.99

00:25:16.000 You get slaughtered up in here if you do something wrong. 1.00

00:25:19.000 Well, yeah.

00:25:20.000 I'm used to polite, popular science readers.

00:25:23.000 Yeah.

00:25:23.000 These are freaks.

00:25:24.000 These are people out there on the fringes with shotguns in their underwear.

00:25:28.000 Great.

00:25:29.000 When the zombies attack, I want your guys.

00:25:31.000 That's right.

00:25:31.000 My guys can't help me.

00:25:32.000 That's right.

00:25:33.000 They know how to root solar power.

00:25:34.000 My guys probably can't.

00:25:34.000 They know how to hunt.

00:25:35.000 Yeah.

00:25:36.000 My guys would actually...

00:25:37.000 Devise something, some piece of software that would control the Gatling gun and we'd all be safe.

00:25:40.000 Well, your guys would devise a new method of power that didn't rely on oil.

00:25:44.000 No, right.

00:25:44.000 Get together and, you know, my guys would be burning wood.

00:25:47.000 We'll have zombies like walking on treadmills forever, generating power.

00:25:51.000 Yes.

00:25:51.000 Yeah, put a zombie in a dog collar and we can go to work for you like a gerbil.

00:25:55.000 Popular Science was the only magazine my dad subscribed to as a kid growing up, like since the 70s.

00:26:00.000 He still does today.

00:26:01.000 What'd your dad do for a living?

00:26:02.000 He's an engineer.

00:26:03.000 Oh, cool.

00:26:03.000 Yeah.

00:26:03.000 What kind of engineer?

00:26:04.000 He builds huge batteries and backups and stuff like that and huge things for huge companies.

00:26:10.000 That's great.

00:26:11.000 Yeah, he's tried to retire several times.

00:26:12.000 He's like a master electrical engineer.

00:26:14.000 Yeah, I bet he's part of the old breed. 1.00

00:26:16.000 That's right.

00:26:16.000 He knows what he's doing.

00:26:18.000 Yeah.

00:26:18.000 That's so cool.

00:26:18.000 Now, you guys have transferred onto the iPad.

00:26:21.000 Yeah.

00:26:22.000 Have you noticed the subscription, the paper-based, is dying for sure?

00:26:27.000 Here'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.

00:26:35.000 Popular Science is just like, it's a universally beloved brand.

00:26:38.000 Like, even people who don't read it actively know, or have never even read it, know what it's about.

00:26:43.000 And 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.

00:26:52.000 And there's a cool sort of a hipster subset of like guys like me, I think.

00:26:56.000 That's what I imagine.

00:26:58.000 You 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.

00:27:05.000 But it's got a really loyal following in every medium basically.

00:27:09.000 There'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.

00:27:19.000 They're great.

00:27:19.000 I mean they're exactly the kind of engaged audience you want.

00:27:22.000 And in print, we have people who, you know, we pour a lot of effort into the print magazine.

00:27:27.000 We really try and uphold, you know, you're paying money for it.

00:27:29.000 So man, I'm working to make it as good as I can.

00:27:32.000 I'm glad it still exists too in print form.

00:27:34.000 It's great to take in an airplane.

00:27:35.000 You know, it's great to, it's beautiful visually.

00:27:40.000 You know, and you can find out so much about various things.

00:27:43.000 Now, this episode that you're, or issue, rather, that you're promoting is the brain issue.

00:27:48.000 Yeah, the brain issue.

00:27:48.000 So, you know, it's an amazing, what's so cool about working in public science is that we get to touch on everything, right?

00:27:55.000 We can do robots.

00:27:56.000 I mean, literally, I would come here anytime you want, Joe, because we can talk forever, dog.

00:28:01.000 Yeah, for sure.

00:28:02.000 It's really fun.

00:28:02.000 I like how you call me dog.

00:28:05.000 So, you know, the brain is one of many What's amazing about it is how little we actually know.

00:28:15.000 We are just starting to noodle around the basic functions of the brain.

00:28:21.000 We don't really have any idea how Personality is built.

00:28:27.000 I 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.

00:28:36.000 But 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.

00:28:49.000 Hey, 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.

00:29:00.000 Just think about the subtleties of personality and the brain in general.

00:29:04.000 I'm really interested by how...

00:29:07.000 How different a person I am from the people that can handle fear in any real way.

00:29:12.000 And you, I know, you had to watch people be really, really afraid for a living, you know, and… I still do, really, even more so.

00:29:20.000 And even more so now.

00:29:21.000 I 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,

00:29:40.000 by a big dude, is an amazing thing to me. 0.72

00:29:42.000 And 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. 0.99

00:29:51.000 Don't beat me up. 0.99

00:29:52.000 I'm not a fighter.

00:29:55.000 The difference between our brains.

00:29:57.000 Who knows what that is?

00:29:58.000 That stuff is so subtle.

00:29:59.000 You don't need to have the ability to perform under pressure like that.

00:30:05.000 You don't think?

00:30:05.000 No, but if you did, you would.

00:30:07.000 If your life depended on it, if you were in some sort of a walking dead situation and you had to deal with fear, you would deal with it.

00:30:13.000 You think there's two kinds of people, basically.

00:30:16.000 I don't even think there's two kinds of people.

00:30:18.000 No, I'm saying two kinds of people.

00:30:19.000 You're thinking just one kind of person and it's just the choices you make.

00:30:24.000 Yeah, they're survivors or people who die.

00:30:27.000 Literally, during most exchanges in civilized society, there's no need to be afraid of other people.

00:30:35.000 There's no need to be afraid of violent altercations.

00:30:37.000 It's very rare.

00:30:38.000 Unless 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.

00:30:48.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:30:49.000 But when you're forced to, in a day-to-day basis, overcome stress and fear and it becomes a part of your reality.

00:30:57.000 And once it becomes a part of your reality, in terms of performance, it almost becomes...

00:31:03.000 Something that you kind of have to be inoculated to.

00:31:05.000 You start off slowly.

00:31:08.000 Even stand-up comedy.

00:31:09.000 The first time I tried stand-up comedy, I was terrified.

00:31:11.000 But now I'm not scared at all.

00:31:13.000 Now it's fun.

00:31:14.000 And that is part of...

00:31:16.000 You've got to be competent.

00:31:18.000 You've got to have your bases covered.

00:31:20.000 And I remember competing as a martial artist.

00:31:22.000 There 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.

00:31:31.000 When you have doubts, that's when you're in a really bad place.

00:31:35.000 I would say, though, that the raw materials are distinct.

00:31:38.000 We can agree that the raw physical materials of people are distinct.

00:31:43.000 My wife was an Olympic hopeful.

00:31:46.000 She was a track and field runner.

00:31:50.000 You know, her body and its strength.

00:31:54.000 I mean, she had a 30-inch vertical. 1.00

00:31:55.000 She's 5'8", you know, like, or 5'9", you know, could hang from the rim, like, has hang time, all this stuff. 1.00

00:32:01.000 I used to play Ultimate Frisbee in college, you know, whatever.

00:32:04.000 I took her out a few times to play it with us, and, like, we'd never had a real athlete play before. 0.66

00:32:09.000 Like, she was out running all the dudes, you know, all that stuff.

00:32:11.000 There's just, there's distinctions between people that I think You know, are just part of the thing.

00:32:16.000 And I think there is an expression of that in the brain, that the brain is built differently for different things.

00:32:20.000 Which is not to say that you're wrong about that.

00:32:23.000 No, no, no.

00:32:23.000 But the question is, are those physical distinctions from her gifts from the womb or is it from constant focus on athletic activity?

00:32:31.000 I think it's a little of both.

00:32:31.000 I mean, you know, fast twitch and slow twitch muscles.

00:32:33.000 I mean, we know that, the difference between that.

00:32:35.000 Long calves versus the ones that are high and tight.

00:32:38.000 There's jumping ability, there's sprinting ability versus being able to run long distances.

00:32:43.000 There's just distinctions between people physically.

00:32:46.000 It doesn't mean anything other than just genes are out there.

00:32:49.000 That's what's amazing.

00:32:50.000 So 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,

00:33:06.000 right?

00:33:06.000 Yeah, triggering memories.

00:33:10.000 There'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.

00:33:23.000 And turn that into, combine them with, you know, a little bit of medical training or maybe pair them up with a medical student.

00:33:29.000 There's programs that do that.

00:33:30.000 And being a biomechanical engineer, they're literally creating little devices that will do stuff.

00:33:33.000 And 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.

00:33:47.000 But first you have to pick out the pattern.

00:33:50.000 So in this case, it was monkeys that had...

00:33:54.000 I've been taught a cartoon game, basically like a turn over and match the cards kind of game.

00:33:59.000 And when they got it right, that signal, the computer picked that up, right?

00:34:05.000 Software recorded that pattern.

00:34:07.000 Then 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.

00:34:22.000 And 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.

00:34:35.000 And 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.

00:34:46.000 Then they started doing this zapping again and could restore them to normal ability again.

00:34:53.000 The 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.

00:35:03.000 You don't know what the signals are that you're going to want to prompt ahead of time or whatever.

00:35:07.000 But they think that there's some memory stuff that might be, you know, that we could in future sort of improve our memory, right?

00:35:14.000 You 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,

00:35:37.000 which is something that scientists are really actively focusing on right now.

00:35:40.000 I found an article in your magazine I thought it was really amazing.

00:35:45.000 Nice.

00:35:45.000 Where scientists had created a tiny artificial brain that exhibits 12 seconds of short-term memory.

00:35:52.000 Yeah.

00:35:52.000 How nuts is that?

00:35:53.000 Yeah, I know.

00:35:54.000 Exactly.

00:35:56.000 How long before one of those is in your pocket?

00:35:58.000 I know, I know, I know.

00:35:59.000 You know, and it has all the information of the entire universe until now.

00:36:03.000 You know what's a...

00:36:03.000 Totally.

00:36:04.000 I was just hanging out with one of these total boy genius kids, this guy...

00:36:11.000 Brilliant 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,

00:36:34.000 you're always going to outperform even the best software.

00:36:38.000 Really good software given a small dataset is not as good as mediocre software given a huge dataset.

00:36:46.000 Data is what gives you your correct answers every time.

00:36:50.000 You don't, in fact, need the little brain.

00:36:52.000 What you need is a little device that connects to the whole big brain, to the world of data around it.

00:36:58.000 That's sort of analogous to an educated person.

00:37:00.000 Right.

00:37:01.000 You 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.

00:37:12.000 Yeah, the intellectually curious, right?

00:37:14.000 The guy who, like, wants to find out the answer.

00:37:16.000 Or has access.

00:37:17.000 Yeah, or has access. 0.95

00:37:18.000 There's a lot of really smart people that probably live in Siberia and they're forced to work a trap line catching minks and shit. 0.69

00:37:27.000 If you don't have data and you don't have access to more data, that's who you are. 0.88

00:37:32.000 That's what you do.

00:37:33.000 You will excel in your field, but your ability to actually do things will be completely limited by the data that you have access to.

00:37:41.000 Right, right, right.

00:37:41.000 It's cool just to see how people are being given So much more data than they used to, right?

00:37:48.000 It's really hard to be sort of an ignorant person these days just because there's so much information coming at us now.

00:37:54.000 It's also hard to pay attention to everything. 0.91

00:37:56.000 Oh yeah, totally. 0.99

00:37:57.000 I 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. 0.99

00:38:11.000 Jesus. 0.99

00:38:12.000 That's right. 1.00

00:38:13.000 Shut up, hive mind. 1.00

00:38:14.000 Yeah, but I can't help it. 0.99

00:38:15.000 And I really find myself struggling with disconnecting from Twitter.

00:38:23.000 I have not mastered it, but I know a guy who turns it off for – he goes to places without internet connection.

00:38:29.000 He takes his laptop to places that don't have internet connection.

00:38:32.000 Maybe that'll be a new hip thing. 1.00

00:38:35.000 It'll be places that don't have Wi-Fi.

00:38:37.000 But you can go there with a computer and sit without Wi-Fi.

00:38:40.000 And that's where he does writing.

00:38:42.000 Any actual thinking he has to do.

00:38:44.000 I'm like you, man.

00:38:45.000 I get distracted.

00:38:46.000 I'm addictive.

00:38:47.000 I do my writing that way where I don't go online.

00:38:49.000 I have this program called Write Room.

00:38:52.000 And what it does is it allows you to see only the text on the screen.

00:38:57.000 The screen goes black and it's green text on the screen.

00:39:00.000 And I just...

00:39:01.000 The most limited word processor.

00:39:03.000 It shows you when you're spelling things wrong, and that's it.

00:39:06.000 Perfect.

00:39:06.000 And 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.

00:39:17.000 I find it's too easy to look at porn.

00:39:19.000 It's just too easy.

00:39:20.000 It's just way too easy.

00:39:21.000 The stuff is perfectly designed to get your attention.

00:39:23.000 Oh, it's so quick.

00:39:25.000 By the way, with Google Chrome, all you have to do is press Y and it goes to Ujiz.

00:39:31.000 You know what I mean?

00:39:32.000 You don't even have to do much more than that.

00:39:34.000 That's because you go to Ujiz. 0.99

00:39:35.000 I know what it is.

00:39:37.000 I know.

00:39:37.000 If I'm looking at something or I want to show my wife something, I got to...

00:39:42.000 Press Y-O-U-T so fast.

00:39:45.000 I know.

00:39:46.000 I gotta go through Y-O-U and then T. I can't because she's a clever one. 0.91

00:39:52.000 She's over my shoulder and she sees me hit that Y. I'm thinking about just putting it in the fucking bookmark bar right there. 0.67

00:40:00.000 A little YouTube link. 0.77

00:40:01.000 Just click the private browsing thing on Safari which makes it so it has no cookies or anything.

00:40:08.000 I don't use Safari.

00:40:09.000 I find Safari to be whack.

00:40:10.000 They have it in Chrome too, I think.

00:40:11.000 Is it?

00:40:12.000 Yeah.

00:40:12.000 I really enjoy Chrome.

00:40:14.000 I love the fact that in Chrome I can go to the HTML, to the address bar rather, and just type a question.

00:40:21.000 And it'll take me to a Google search.

00:40:24.000 It's beautiful.

00:40:25.000 We live in awesome times.

00:40:28.000 It really is awesome.

00:40:30.000 I've described this time we live in now as the roaring 20s of the digital era.

00:40:35.000 Where you could still go like this.

00:40:38.000 We don't have to have a license.

00:40:39.000 We don't have to talk to a government official and get a license.

00:40:43.000 And it's still rare enough that we're popular.

00:40:47.000 We're like 7.5% more famous than other people.

00:40:53.000 Someday that percentage is going to drop down because Everyone's gonna have access.

00:40:58.000 Sure, 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.

00:41:06.000 Amazing.

00:41:07.000 Comedians, I know comedians like our friend Russell, Russell Peters.

00:41:09.000 Russell Peters became famous because of YouTube.

00:41:11.000 Is that right?

00:41:12.000 Yeah, people found his clips on YouTube and now he sells out the O2 Arena in London two nights in a row.

00:41:18.000 Wow.

00:41:18.000 That's like 18,000 people.

00:41:21.000 The whole generation of those out-of-nowhere, literally out-of-nowhere success stories is so cool, and it's so modern.

00:41:30.000 This era made that possible.

00:41:32.000 Yeah, I love the ability to distribute content, the ability to distribute artwork and podcasts and comedy shows on YouTube or what have you.

00:41:42.000 I think this is the most amazing time ever for...

00:41:45.000 Self-promotion, self-publishing.

00:41:47.000 We live in really cool times.

00:41:49.000 Like you say, like we were saying earlier, it's a great time to be a reader.

00:41:52.000 Anybody can write.

00:41:54.000 There's people tapping out whole novels on their phones.

00:41:56.000 There's cool stuff out there.

00:41:57.000 Didn't Stephen Wright write a whole novel on Twitter?

00:42:00.000 Oh, is that true?

00:42:01.000 Yeah, he wrote a whole novel, 140 characters at a time.

00:42:03.000 Is that right?

00:42:03.000 That's funny.

00:42:04.000 I hadn't heard that. 0.99

00:42:04.000 This guy is crazy. 0.99

00:42:05.000 Yeah, fascinating.

00:42:08.000 Is there anything in this episode or this issue that deals with a very controversial issue of antidepressants and their effect on the human mind?

00:42:16.000 Yeah, I saw people asking about that.

00:42:19.000 You know, antipsychotics, here's one thing that I'll say about… Or SSRIs or not antipsychotics.

00:42:24.000 Yeah, sorry, not SSRIs.

00:42:25.000 I don't have a good informed opinion on antidepressants.

00:42:31.000 I just don't know enough about it.

00:42:32.000 I wouldn't know how to comment on that intelligently.

00:42:35.000 I will say that… You know, antipsychotics, which are sort of an extreme thing, right?

00:42:41.000 There's all kinds of incredible research being done.

00:42:47.000 But 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.

00:42:53.000 And 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,

00:43:09.000 and 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.

00:43:22.000 It's not a lot of people.

00:43:23.000 I don't want to misrepresent the number.

00:43:25.000 But 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,

00:43:40.000 you know, and was living in stark terror in this kind of Cold War nightmare every waking moment.

00:43:47.000 And he was homeless and so forth, but just a ruined guy.

00:43:52.000 He 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.

00:44:03.000 It can be very helpful sometimes.

00:44:06.000 If it works.

00:44:07.000 And I'd like to point out that's not always true.

00:44:10.000 But he was so destabilized by discovering that nobody wanted him.

00:44:15.000 The Russians didn't want him.

00:44:16.000 Nobody wanted him.

00:44:17.000 He's just a homeless guy. 0.98

00:44:19.000 He's just a bum dude. 1.00

00:44:20.000 But he was bummed out?

00:44:21.000 Yeah, because he wasn't special anymore.

00:44:23.000 He was the star of his own action movie for so long.

00:44:27.000 And poor guy.

00:44:28.000 And he voluntarily went back to living that life.

00:44:33.000 He took the blue pill and then whatever it was and then wished he hadn't...

00:44:37.000 Well, I would like to see what he saw before I made any sort of a judgment on him because who knows?

00:44:42.000 He might have been living in an awesome world like a Winnie the Pooh ride at Disneyland.

00:44:46.000 Totally. 0.99

00:44:46.000 You know, just neon colors everywhere and fucking Russian agents hiding behind two-dimensional trees. 0.99

00:44:51.000 Driving a convertible. 0.98

00:44:53.000 Yeah, I mean, who knows what he actually saw.

00:44:57.000 Antipsychotics, although a fascinating subject, is quite different from the SSRI. Yeah, absolutely.

00:45:04.000 Which I think the SSRI subject is a really, really interesting one.

00:45:09.000 Yeah, what's your feeling about it?

00:45:10.000 I don't need them, so I feel like it would be really silly of me to make a judgment in one way or another.

00:45:19.000 I don't have any personal experience with them, but I do have friends who have had personal experience with them, and including...

00:45:25.000 People that I really respect that they change their life for the better.

00:45:30.000 That's right.

00:45:30.000 So I definitely think there's certainly a benefit to them.

00:45:36.000 The other thing is which one.

00:45:38.000 I 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.

00:45:46.000 How do you feel on this? 0.99

00:45:47.000 And then they doubled his dose and I'm like, what the fuck are they doing? 0.98

00:45:50.000 They don't do a blood test and give you a very specific, this is what you weigh. 0.97

00:45:55.000 This is exactly the thing.

00:45:56.000 We don't know how it works in the brain.

00:45:58.000 The 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.

00:46:11.000 Like, no one gets in, right?

00:46:12.000 VIP. Except weed and booze.

00:46:14.000 Get right in.

00:46:15.000 They do get right in.

00:46:16.000 They get in front of the line.

00:46:17.000 So, 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.

00:46:30.000 Wow.

00:46:32.000 Yeah, 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.

00:46:43.000 Sure.

00:46:43.000 For some folks, it's mild.

00:46:45.000 For other folks, they have horrible side effects.

00:46:47.000 Yeah.

00:46:48.000 And they can't tell until they put you on it.

00:46:50.000 Right.

00:46:50.000 It 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.

00:47:03.000 Like, it's pretty well known that certain people...

00:47:07.000 Certain nationalities have a difficult time with alcohol because they don't have a cultural history of it.

00:47:11.000 They don't have a genetic history of it.

00:47:12.000 Well, the truth is human beings don't have a history of alcohol.

00:47:16.000 We're not evolutionarily supposed to be drinking booze.

00:47:20.000 Stuff is poison in terms of just the toxicology of it.

00:47:23.000 But we evolved literally.

00:47:25.000 I 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.

00:47:44.000 But the idea was that, or one theory is that you would drink it in order to survive eating rotten meat.

00:47:50.000 Yeah.

00:47:51.000 Traveler's poisoning, they would call it.

00:47:53.000 Oh, is that true?

00:47:54.000 Traveler's sickness, yeah.

00:47:55.000 They would drink wine with all of their food because the alcohol in the wine they thought would kill rotten meat.

00:48:00.000 Totally.

00:48:00.000 They hadn't really figured out how to refrigerate things.

00:48:02.000 Look at you, Joe Rogan.

00:48:03.000 You want a job?

00:48:04.000 No, thanks.

00:48:05.000 I also read a fascinating thing about the origins of alcohol being that it was with honey.

00:48:11.000 That 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.

00:48:22.000 And one of the things that happens with honey is that it ferments and it becomes mead.

00:48:27.000 Delicious.

00:48:28.000 Yeah, 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.

00:48:44.000 That's so great.

00:48:45.000 Is that true?

00:48:46.000 That's so funny.

00:48:47.000 I don't know.

00:48:47.000 I mean, I don't think there's...

00:48:48.000 I think any history older than 6000 BC is like...

00:48:53.000 Who knows?

00:48:54.000 Good luck.

00:48:55.000 Good luck.

00:48:56.000 That's right.

00:48:56.000 Try to figure that out.

00:48:57.000 But they know that many, many cultures were preserving mushrooms in various ways.

00:49:03.000 Some of them were drying them out over the fireplace.

00:49:06.000 They were doing all these different things with mushrooms, and they know for sure they started storing them in honey.

00:49:12.000 And they also know that there was climatological changes where mushrooms weren't growing in areas anymore and they had to switch to different intoxicants. 0.98

00:49:19.000 And then the raping and the pillaging started, and shit got crazy. 0.99

00:49:24.000 According to McKenna, at least. 1.00

00:49:25.000 That's great.

00:49:26.000 I hadn't heard that.

00:49:26.000 Yeah, but mead, that's a lot of people don't know that alcohol made with honey is an early intoxicant.

00:49:32.000 I 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.

00:49:43.000 And everybody had only mead.

00:49:46.000 It's not like I hold it against people.

00:49:48.000 I would have happily paid cash for a whiskey cocktail, you know, like, oh my god.

00:49:52.000 What does it taste like?

00:49:53.000 It was like, oh man, I don't know, it's like a cross between wine and beer almost, but sort of a sour, sweet.

00:50:04.000 You know what I mean?

00:50:05.000 It's a weird drink.

00:50:06.000 I didn't like it.

00:50:07.000 Did anybody like it?

00:50:07.000 No, I would say...

00:50:08.000 Like, the whole wedding was people dumping the stuff into plants.

00:50:11.000 Dead plants everywhere.

00:50:13.000 And over and over again, somebody would stand up and be like, and raise your meads! 1.00

00:50:16.000 God, you fucking dork. 1.00

00:50:18.000 Exactly. 1.00

00:50:19.000 Are they Dungeons and Dragons players?

00:50:20.000 Probably, probably. 1.00

00:50:21.000 Oh, people are so silly. 1.00

00:50:22.000 That's right. 1.00

00:50:23.000 Careful, those are my people.

00:50:24.000 Only me.

00:50:25.000 They're probably my people, too.

00:50:26.000 That's right. 1.00

00:50:26.000 But they're still fucking silly. 1.00

00:50:28.000 Not that it's bad to be silly. 1.00

00:50:29.000 I'm pretty silly. 0.96

00:50:29.000 I was a big D&D guy. 0.96

00:50:31.000 Were you?

00:50:31.000 That was my thing.

00:50:32.000 Yeah.

00:50:33.000 Roll the dice.

00:50:34.000 I'm 6'7".

00:50:35.000 I should have been playing basketball, but I was inside casting spells.

00:50:38.000 Really?

00:50:38.000 Rolling D20. The world draws you, or the universe draws you to...

00:50:43.000 Yeah, where you'll be safest.

00:50:44.000 Yeah, maybe.

00:50:45.000 Maybe you're safer rolling dice and tricking mead.

00:50:48.000 Mead is a weird choice.

00:50:50.000 The guy makes it himself?

00:50:52.000 Is that what it is?

00:50:53.000 I guess so, yeah.

00:50:53.000 He was making it himself.

00:50:55.000 I've never heard of that.

00:50:56.000 I've heard of people making wine.

00:50:57.000 I've never heard of anybody making their own mead.

00:50:59.000 Yeah, I don't know.

00:51:00.000 It was definitely a...

00:51:01.000 When I went to college, there was a house of Renaissance guys.

00:51:06.000 And at one point, they would practice basically in the courtyard of the dorm.

00:51:13.000 And when one of my friends figured out that if you yelled, hold, it was the super secret signal for them to all...

00:51:23.000 That somebody had been hurt.

00:51:23.000 You know, somebody had been like, you know, poked in the eye with a Nerf sword or whatever.

00:51:27.000 And...

00:51:28.000 They would all go down on one knee and it was like their practice thing for taking a timeout.

00:51:33.000 It was like, stop hurting each other.

00:51:35.000 And so for about a week, you could trick them every time.

00:51:40.000 You could just yell, hold across the courtyard and make all of them kneel.

00:51:44.000 But it only lasted for a second.

00:51:45.000 Those are my people, man.

00:51:46.000 I love it.

00:51:47.000 The best kind.

00:51:49.000 Have 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?

00:52:01.000 I'm sure.

00:52:01.000 I don't know what it is, but yeah.

00:52:03.000 I mean, you know, it makes sense, right?

00:52:04.000 It would be like how long did people have the gene that allows them to, you know, turn the liquor into sugar, you know, or whatever.

00:52:14.000 Like, I don't know what the...

00:52:17.000 What the distinction is or if they've discovered that.

00:52:19.000 But I'm sure someone's studying it.

00:52:21.000 What's the mechanism for blackout drunk?

00:52:23.000 Right?

00:52:23.000 What is that?

00:52:24.000 Isn't it just tolerance though?

00:52:25.000 Your brain just says enough.

00:52:26.000 When you're young, one beer got you drunk.

00:52:28.000 The more you drink it now, like I could drink a million beers and not get blacked out.

00:52:33.000 That's not true.

00:52:34.000 You can't even drink one without slurring. 1.00

00:52:35.000 What the fuck are you talking about? 0.99

00:52:36.000 Well, slurring's different than blacked out. 0.99

00:52:38.000 It's true, yeah.

00:52:38.000 I black out.

00:52:39.000 If I drink Jack, I'll black out.

00:52:41.000 If I drink, I mean, literally, if I get past five or six beers, I start to be on the verge.

00:52:46.000 Yeah, I'm a mess.

00:52:48.000 I'm a mess.

00:52:48.000 The blackout thing is fascinating to me because some folks, I've seen people who are quote-unquote addicts, and they can't do anything.

00:52:57.000 They can't drink.

00:52:58.000 They can't smoke.

00:52:59.000 They can't do anything.

00:52:59.000 They'll drink coffee.

00:53:00.000 You know, coffee apparently is okay.

00:53:02.000 But if they have one drink...

00:53:05.000 They're gone.

00:53:05.000 They're off to the races.

00:53:06.000 They're doing heroin and sucking dicks for cash money to get home, whatever. 1.00

00:53:10.000 They don't know what happened. 0.99

00:53:12.000 They don't know what it is. 0.99

00:53:13.000 But for me, I can get fucked up. 0.99

00:53:16.000 And I still remember pieces and chunks. 0.99

00:53:19.000 And I get home.

00:53:19.000 And I don't really black out.

00:53:22.000 So I have a good friend that fucking blacks out. 1.00

00:53:25.000 I mean, completely blacks out. 1.00

00:53:26.000 You give them two drinks.

00:53:28.000 Our 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.

00:53:36.000 He just vanishes.

00:53:37.000 He's no longer there.

00:53:38.000 You look in his eyes, looks like a gerbil.

00:53:40.000 He's got gerbil eyes. 1.00

00:53:41.000 You know, you look at a gerbil, that motherfucker doesn't know what's going on. 0.99

00:53:45.000 That's what he, I don't, what is, I mean, do you know what that mechanism is? 0.99

00:53:49.000 I don't know.

00:53:50.000 No, I don't know enough about it.

00:53:51.000 But I, I mean, you know, like I say, though, the stuff is poison.

00:53:54.000 Eventually your brain, your body is going to say, okay, enough.

00:53:56.000 Good night.

00:53:57.000 It's going to paralyze your arms so they can't lift any more of it to your mouth or whatever.

00:54:01.000 There's a lot of new research being done on substances that act as a vaccine for addicts.

00:54:09.000 Are you aware of any of that?

00:54:11.000 Yeah, sure.

00:54:12.000 One of the pieces that we are looking at here is a thing about exactly that.

00:54:17.000 Basically, 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.

00:54:37.000 So your ability to not just...

00:54:41.000 It affects not just the function of the brain at the time, but can also guide it a little bit, basically.

00:54:50.000 So 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.

00:55:02.000 And when you hit it with a negative charge, the film releases a medication deep inside your brain.

00:55:08.000 And 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.

00:55:15.000 Basically, seizures happen, you know, everybody.

00:55:19.000 So many kinds of ailments can cause seizures, right?

00:55:22.000 It's super useful.

00:55:23.000 And 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,

00:55:39.000 you know, he's alone.

00:55:40.000 He's been alone for the past two days.

00:55:41.000 Who knows how it could be triggered?

00:55:43.000 And then, boom, it hits you with this thing that, you know, jolts you up a little bit, wakes you up again.

00:55:48.000 Do we know the difference between a physical addiction in the mind and these strange addictions like gambling?

00:55:56.000 Sure.

00:55:56.000 I mean, you know, it's the reward mechanism in your brain.

00:55:59.000 Your brain is a...

00:56:03.000 Basically is rewarding you at all times for whatever you're doing, you know, with a nice feeling.

00:56:08.000 You get a little jolt of serotonin for having done the right thing, you know, a lot of the time.

00:56:14.000 That's sort of a guiding principle of your body, basically.

00:56:17.000 And so you get a little thrill from things like Twitter, checking Twitter, right?

00:56:21.000 Or, 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.

00:56:31.000 Sometimes there's no reward and you still do it.

00:56:34.000 Yeah.

00:56:34.000 Well, it's right.

00:56:35.000 It's compulsion.

00:56:36.000 That's the thing.

00:56:36.000 It becomes a tick, right?

00:56:37.000 It's a compulsion.

00:56:38.000 Your brain forms pathways.

00:56:40.000 Literally, you physically rearrange the architecture of your brain to reward yourself more and more deeply for that addiction over time.

00:56:49.000 So gambling is exactly that kind of thing.

00:56:52.000 It's, you know, what will I get?

00:56:53.000 You know, what's the little reward I'll get?

00:56:55.000 You know, and there's the expectation of it, the temptation of it, all of those things.

00:56:59.000 Plus then it does pay off sometimes, you know.

00:57:02.000 It's a crazy, it's just your brain is an elastic thing.

00:57:06.000 It's changing and adapting to keep you alive and, you know, doing the best you can.

00:57:13.000 No matter the circumstances.

00:57:14.000 So if you're exposed to an addictive thing enough, it's just going to adapt to that thing.

00:57:20.000 Are you aware of the correlation that studies have done, the correlation between brain damage and addictive behavior to gambling?

00:57:26.000 No.

00:57:26.000 Uh-uh.

00:57:27.000 Uh-uh.

00:57:28.000 Yeah, we had a friend in here who used to be a boxer. 0.99

00:57:30.000 The president of the UFC, Dana White, who has been hitting the head a bunch and he gambles like ridiculous. 0.97

00:57:37.000 No kidding. 0.88

00:57:37.000 He's lost a million dollars in a night and won six million in a night. 0.88

00:57:42.000 Has he ever sought a professional opinion as to why that is?

00:57:45.000 Nope.

00:57:45.000 He's rich.

00:57:46.000 He just keeps gambling.

00:57:46.000 Cool.

00:57:47.000 He just keeps party rolling.

00:57:49.000 If you can, man, go.

00:57:50.000 But he also has had a brain scan because he was going to enter into a boxing match about six years ago.

00:57:58.000 And when that happened, they found spots on his brain.

00:58:01.000 They're like, yeah, you've been hit a lot, dude.

00:58:03.000 And the fact that he's addicted to gambling. 0.90

00:58:06.000 Crazy. 0.85

00:58:07.000 Fascinating.

00:58:08.000 The correlation between the two of them.

00:58:10.000 It's like there's damage, so your brain's just constantly urging this impulse to seek these rewards.

00:58:17.000 So 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?

00:58:28.000 The idea of being a savant, right?

00:58:30.000 For 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.

00:58:44.000 Basically, 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.

00:58:59.000 Somebody 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.

00:59:07.000 He's clutching his head really in agony.

00:59:10.000 He goes to the hospital.

00:59:11.000 He's got a very serious concussion.

00:59:13.000 But they send him home.

00:59:14.000 There's nothing really to be done.

00:59:16.000 And so they send him home and he sleeps for like four days basically.

00:59:19.000 He wakes up.

00:59:19.000 He 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.

00:59:31.000 And begins to just – can do the triads.

00:59:34.000 He's doing all the fancy stuff.

00:59:39.000 And he then immediately, of course, goes on the internet and is like, Jesus Christ, what's going on?

00:59:43.000 And he said it was like an itch that he needed to scratch.

00:59:46.000 It was satisfying to play in a way that he couldn't, you know, had never experienced before.

00:59:50.000 So 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.

01:00:06.000 And so he was led to a researcher who diagnosed him as having this thing.

01:00:11.000 There's like fewer than 30 documented cases in the world.

01:00:15.000 But it happens.

01:00:16.000 And I'll just tell your listeners right now, don't go whacking your head on stuff.

01:00:19.000 It really doesn't work out most of the time.

01:00:21.000 How's that possible?

01:00:21.000 Is that from memory?

01:00:22.000 Well, this is what they're trying to figure out.

01:00:24.000 And so there's two competing theories about it.

01:00:27.000 One is, and it may be that one of them is wrong, so let's all keep that in mind.

01:00:31.000 But 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.

01:00:48.000 And by damaging the right side, the left brain becomes disinhibited.

01:00:52.000 And 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?

01:01:03.000 You don't pick out the details anymore.

01:01:05.000 You're picking out the very general landscape.

01:01:08.000 I was just thinking about this on the drive here, right?

01:01:09.000 We'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?

01:01:19.000 Every rivet, right?

01:01:20.000 Every little reflector and the panels inside the reflector, like just tripping on the details.

01:01:25.000 And instead, my brain can go truck.

01:01:28.000 And boom, I'm on to the next thing.

01:01:30.000 And so that kind of shorthand, they think, gets maybe scrambled, disrupted in some way when you damage a part of the brain.

01:01:37.000 And suddenly you're seeing everything fresh again.

01:01:39.000 And so there's a whole world of guys who can do amazing new things.

01:01:44.000 And there's a whole new world of people who do artistry.

01:01:47.000 People who are old and have dementia develop an artistic flair all of a sudden.

01:01:52.000 With the savant syndrome, is there...

01:01:57.000 Like a loss correlation?

01:01:59.000 Like they lost this and so now all of a sudden that?

01:02:02.000 It almost always comes at a terrible cost, yes.

01:02:05.000 Reasoning, something will come out.

01:02:07.000 And you'll have people who are severely – some of the most amazing savant stories are people who are very developmentally disabled in other ways.

01:02:16.000 Some 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.

01:02:28.000 And he'd sit down with the piano and play.

01:02:31.000 But he's severely developmentally disabled.

01:02:33.000 This is somebody else who's not an acquired savant.

01:02:35.000 That's just a famous savant case.

01:02:37.000 So in some of these cases, yeah, it comes with these terrible things.

01:02:39.000 And this guy has pain, has all kinds of terrible debilitating things from his head injury, but can suddenly play this stuff.

01:02:47.000 And so...

01:02:49.000 The 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.

01:03:04.000 We barely understand concussions.

01:03:06.000 You 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.

01:03:16.000 What is the thought on people that have autism and can do amazing things?

01:03:21.000 Like, have you seen the young man that can look out a window from a plane and draw a picture?

01:03:26.000 The British gentleman, yep. 1.00

01:03:27.000 He's unbelievable, right?

01:03:29.000 Unbelievable.

01:03:29.000 It's insane.

01:03:30.000 If you've never seen the video, folks, just Google it.

01:03:33.000 I believe his name, someone on the board posted it, Stephen Wilshire.

01:03:37.000 DJ Crackpots.

01:03:38.000 Thanks for putting that up there, buddy.

01:03:40.000 Yeah, that's his name.

01:03:42.000 The ability to do things that a normal person would literally never be able to do, ever.

01:03:50.000 And this guy can do it every single time.

01:03:53.000 Right, right.

01:03:53.000 Is the thought that the mind is still evolving and advancing and one day we're all going to possess those sort of abilities?

01:04:02.000 I haven't seen anybody do any research that would suggest that.

01:04:06.000 But I do think that there's a lot of just – and I just have to say that as the editor of the science magazine.

01:04:11.000 I can't – I don't know.

01:04:12.000 Just speculate.

01:04:14.000 Yeah, sure.

01:04:14.000 I like that.

01:04:14.000 It sounds cool.

01:04:15.000 But I don't know that that's – Anyway, the feeling, though, is that autism is a vast spectrum of symptoms.

01:04:27.000 It's not at all common for someone who's autistic to also have these savant-like abilities.

01:04:32.000 Those are really unusual things.

01:04:34.000 What'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.

01:04:46.000 There's an amazing sense.

01:04:48.000 I 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.

01:04:59.000 Like, it's pretty cool.

01:05:00.000 I don't know.

01:05:00.000 I find that story pretty neat.

01:05:03.000 Like Louis Wayne, you know who he is?

01:05:05.000 No, no, who's that?

01:05:06.000 He's the famous artist that used to, I think, draw for the New York Times or something like that.

01:05:10.000 And then he started getting schizophrenic or started going crazy at his older age.

01:05:14.000 And like just his normal drawings of cats, like here's an example.

01:05:18.000 His 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.

01:05:26.000 It was straight up.

01:05:27.000 Like a Grateful Dead tattoo.

01:05:29.000 I've never seen that.

01:05:30.000 That's really cool.

01:05:31.000 The one on the right there is so complicated.

01:05:34.000 That looks like psychedelics.

01:05:36.000 That looks like something you would see if you were on Mushrooms or on DMT or something like that.

01:05:40.000 It looks like math.

01:05:40.000 That's right.

01:05:41.000 It's very fractal.

01:05:43.000 Yeah, fractal.

01:05:43.000 That's right.

01:05:44.000 Which is what you see when you take hardcore psychedelics.

01:05:47.000 Who knows?

01:05:47.000 His mind might just be slowly flooding itself.

01:05:50.000 The other one is Henry Darger.

01:05:51.000 Do you know about Henry Darger?

01:05:52.000 He's fascinating.

01:05:53.000 Same kind of guy.

01:05:56.000 And 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.

01:06:07.000 Nobody knew that he was doing this stuff.

01:06:08.000 And it's incredible.

01:06:10.000 He illustrates whole novels Of this stuff.

01:06:14.000 And it's all fantastical.

01:06:15.000 It's quite creepy, too.

01:06:16.000 I'll tell you right now.

01:06:17.000 I mean, you know, a lot of stuff about little girls and stuff.

01:06:20.000 Yeah, he's just absolutely obsessed with little girls.

01:06:23.000 But it also...

01:06:24.000 The body of work got more and more intense and more and more prolific at a certain stage in his life.

01:06:30.000 And then at the end of his life, it had tapered off and he wasn't doing it anymore.

01:06:34.000 And they think that his schizophrenia had sort of flamed out at a certain point.

01:06:38.000 Wow!

01:06:40.000 Schizophrenia wears off?

01:06:41.000 Well, they don't know, but as you get old, the brain changes and somehow it changes.

01:06:51.000 Yeah, it's crazy, too, because if you get...

01:06:54.000 Yeah, some of the stuff is very disturbing.

01:06:56.000 And when you get in there, the note there in the bottom, I'm sure, like, he has all this mythology.

01:07:03.000 He wrote all this stuff, you know.

01:07:05.000 He had two races, the Tatalingans versus the such-and-such. 0.98

01:07:12.000 I can't remember what it is, but it's, you know, two armies going up against each other.

01:07:18.000 Wow.

01:07:19.000 Yeah, crazy stuff.

01:07:20.000 It'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.

01:07:34.000 Totally.

01:07:34.000 It's manifest.

01:07:35.000 That's right. 0.66

01:07:35.000 The 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. 0.66

01:07:49.000 We 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,

01:08:05.000 a million years.

01:08:06.000 I 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.

01:08:17.000 That's right.

01:08:18.000 I'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.

01:08:28.000 It literally maps the details of your face.

01:08:31.000 If everyone wants to check it out, it's Evolver is the name of it.

01:08:35.000 Check it out if you want to.

01:08:36.000 And what's amazing about it is Absolutely, would you say?

01:08:40.000 Like, so much stronger.

01:08:42.000 Yeah.

01:08:42.000 Like, Neanderthal man, you know, so much stronger than we are right now.

01:08:46.000 Would totally tear apart the greatest UFC fighter, just because they were just so much, you know, heavier.

01:08:52.000 They were really short.

01:08:53.000 Built for battle.

01:08:53.000 Yeah, the short...

01:08:54.000 Five feet tall, 200 pounds.

01:08:55.000 Totally.

01:08:56.000 Built completely different. 0.99

01:08:57.000 But would get in there and, like, stab a rhino in the heart with a spear, a sleeping rhino. 0.84

01:09:01.000 That's how they would hunt. 0.60

01:09:03.000 Do that and then run is, like, their job.

01:09:05.000 And so they would find...

01:09:07.000 This is one of the theories about why they would find the vertebrae of buried Neanderthals would be all messed up.

01:09:13.000 Because from terrible falls, you know, and being like trampled and rolled by some rhino, they just stabbed, you know, the bravest people. 0.99

01:09:23.000 Or just dumb as fuck and really strong. 1.00

01:09:25.000 But they're why we're here, right? 1.00

01:09:26.000 They had to do it.

01:09:28.000 Well, they're totally separate from us, Neanderthal. 0.98

01:09:30.000 We 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.

01:09:38.000 They think that because they were around at the same time, it may have happened at some point.

01:09:42.000 They had larger minds too, which is even crazier.

01:09:44.000 Yeah, yeah. 0.81

01:09:45.000 They had larger brains than people.

01:09:46.000 What probably means, or I don't know, probably is not the right word, but may mean that they had different senses, right?

01:09:53.000 Different other capabilities.

01:09:54.000 Larger eyes too.

01:09:55.000 Yeah, maybe time slows down.

01:09:57.000 Anderson Silva time is a certain slowness when the punch is coming or whatever.

01:10:01.000 And these guys probably could see it from a mile away.

01:10:05.000 They could see that rhino tusk coming around.

01:10:07.000 Yeah, you probably had to.

01:10:09.000 We know by their bone structure and what we know about their tendon structure.

01:10:13.000 They were ridiculously physically strong.

01:10:16.000 Two, three times stronger than a normal human. 0.76

01:10:18.000 Oh, yeah.

01:10:18.000 Like, literally, you know, could tear your arms off if they got a good purchase on you.

01:10:22.000 You know, like, really strong people.

01:10:24.000 Have you seen this thing recently where these Harvard scientists are trying to talk a woman into giving birth to a Neanderthal?

01:10:31.000 Oh, my God, no.

01:10:32.000 You haven't heard of it?

01:10:32.000 I mean, I've heard of it, but I don't know anything directly about it.

01:10:35.000 Yeah, I've heard of it.

01:10:35.000 Yeah, they're trying to find a brave woman.

01:10:40.000 Oh, I thought you meant that they had found one and were trying to talk her into it.

01:10:42.000 I'd heard about the thing, but...

01:10:44.000 They're trying to find one.

01:10:45.000 Yeah, I was trying to find one.

01:10:45.000 They're willing to implant the embryo of a Neanderthal.

01:10:49.000 I was imagining the actual negotiations with the specific woman and found myself to be like, oh, that'd be a tough, tough day.

01:10:55.000 It would be tough because there's plenty of crazy people out there, I'm sure, that would do it just to become famous.

01:11:00.000 Sure. 1.00

01:11:00.000 If they thought they could be the next Kim Kardashian if you threw a fucking caveman in their pussy. 1.00

01:11:04.000 The reality show of that? 1.00

01:11:05.000 Like going around to the Shishi Mall or whatever.

01:11:08.000 Yeah, with a Neanderthal baby. 0.76

01:11:10.000 That's hilarious.

01:11:11.000 Well, they're really trying to do this.

01:11:14.000 It would be amazing.

01:11:15.000 It would be amazing.

01:11:16.000 I don't know that it's – I think it's a great idea to actually bring one back.

01:11:19.000 Terrible idea.

01:11:20.000 But that's amazing science I'm sure. 0.99

01:11:23.000 I 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? 0.98

01:11:33.000 I think it's already been written probably. 0.99

01:11:35.000 I think there's probably some – Because it sounds good.

01:11:37.000 I would see that.

01:11:38.000 Well, I mean, we really are entering into very unexplored territory.

01:11:42.000 There's a new frog that has been extinct for over 30 years that they just have created in a lab.

01:11:48.000 The one that births its young through its mouth.

01:11:50.000 That was its trait, I guess.

01:11:53.000 Wow.

01:11:53.000 Yeah, through its mouth is where it gives birth.

01:11:55.000 Crazy.

01:11:56.000 And they've created the first embryo of this now extinct frog.

01:11:59.000 The de-extinction movement is a whole thing.

01:12:02.000 I'm really not down with that.

01:12:03.000 Yeah.

01:12:04.000 You know, some of it, though, is...

01:12:06.000 I mean, I'm with you, yeah.

01:12:07.000 I don't want them, like, you know, letting loose herds of 25-foot sheep, you know, just because that's a better meat source.

01:12:12.000 Mammoth.

01:12:13.000 Yeah, you don't want the...

01:12:14.000 You know, you want a little government regulation on this one, I think.

01:12:17.000 But...

01:12:18.000 I'm not sure if the government's wise enough for that.

01:12:19.000 Yeah, maybe not.

01:12:20.000 Maybe not.

01:12:21.000 Regulation of some sort.

01:12:22.000 Yeah, whatever it is.

01:12:22.000 Something.

01:12:23.000 Some scientific consensus.

01:12:24.000 Somebody needs to hold that back somehow.

01:12:25.000 But 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.

01:12:37.000 I 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.

01:12:50.000 People love reading about that stuff.

01:12:52.000 That's a really interesting trope for a lot of people.

01:12:54.000 But to know this Neanderthal was this way in comparison to the way that an animal Correlates to its modern-day incarnation, right? 0.81

01:13:07.000 And what that connection is.

01:13:09.000 What they have in common, what they don't, would be an incredibly valuable science.

01:13:15.000 But I'm not qualified to speak to whether or not that's a really good idea.

01:13:18.000 I don't think anybody is.

01:13:18.000 I think it probably is.

01:13:19.000 I really don't think that anybody can extrapolate what happens when you start making a neighborhood of Neanderthals. 0.93

01:13:25.000 You know?

01:13:26.000 No one knows.

01:13:26.000 No one knows a Neanderthal.

01:13:28.000 No one knows...

01:13:28.000 And I think there's this issue with...

01:13:32.000 We'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.

01:13:40.000 But like the creation of the atomic bomb, it's almost like once you start that process, you kind of have to see it.

01:13:46.000 You kind of have to see, can we make this?

01:13:48.000 Can we do this?

01:13:49.000 There 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.

01:14:01.000 Somebody help me.

01:14:03.000 Oppenheimer?

01:14:03.000 Yes, thank you, Oppenheimer.

01:14:05.000 Oh, my God.

01:14:06.000 Robert Oppenheimer's famous phrase, I have become death, destroyer of worlds, and is racked by guilt.

01:14:12.000 The Bhagavad Gita.

01:14:13.000 Right, the Bhagavad Gita.

01:14:13.000 Quoting the Bhagavad Gita.

01:14:15.000 Richard 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.

01:14:23.000 He remembers that he thought to himself, oh, that's how clouds are made.

01:14:27.000 He was already on to the next thing.

01:14:30.000 He wasn't thinking at all about the moral implications of what had happened below him.

01:14:34.000 He was like, that's how a cloud's made.

01:14:35.000 That's so cool.

01:14:36.000 He's a scientist.

01:14:37.000 He's a nerd.

01:14:38.000 He's thinking it.

01:14:39.000 He's the best kind of geek, and you need those guys who just want to find out how stuff works.

01:14:44.000 That Oppenheimer quote is the creepiest thing ever.

01:14:47.000 Also because the translation is so odd, I am become death.

01:14:50.000 I am become death, destroyer of worlds.

01:14:52.000 Yeah, I know. 0.99

01:14:53.000 Can 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? 0.99

01:15:05.000 This is impossible power. 0.98

01:15:07.000 Can you imagine the feeling of the shockwave going by when they're all in that bunker?

01:15:11.000 Yeah.

01:15:11.000 One 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.

01:15:21.000 Right, right.

01:15:21.000 Everyone get under your desks.

01:15:22.000 Or no, when they would blow the atomic bombs up and then have the military run towards the blast.

01:15:29.000 Oh, man. 1.00

01:15:29.000 Those guys are dead as fuck. 1.00

01:15:31.000 All those guys that did that. 1.00

01:15:33.000 They died horrible deaths.

01:15:35.000 And they didn't know.

01:15:36.000 They just like, let's see what happens when they make the soldiers run towards the blast.

01:15:40.000 I mean, the videos are really, really creepy.

01:15:44.000 These poor guys, they're in a ditch.

01:15:47.000 They blow up the bomb. 1.00

01:15:48.000 Shit's Flying overhead. 1.00

01:15:50.000 I mean, the whiplash from that fucking explosion must have been insane. 1.00

01:15:55.000 Yeah, sure. 0.98

01:15:55.000 I mean, the electromagnetic pulse that goes through, all of this, just the concussive force of that is so unbelievable. 0.98

01:16:03.000 And all kinds of, you know, You were talking about your friend had white spots on his brain.

01:16:09.000 There'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.

01:16:16.000 It's a terrible injury.

01:16:17.000 Yeah, that's a lot of things.

01:16:19.000 One 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.

01:16:36.000 Who don't show any other physical signs of injury.

01:16:38.000 That's the other crazy thing.

01:16:39.000 They're not, you know, they walked away, you know, and are lucky to have done so.

01:16:44.000 You know, that's the sort of medical evaluation it used to be.

01:16:46.000 And now they know that there's an invisible, you know, effect in the brain.

01:16:51.000 There's a shearing force that passes through the brain that, you know, can mess things up.

01:16:56.000 And 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.

01:17:04.000 And 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. 0.97

01:17:14.000 Yeah, we're just not that fucking durable. 0.92

01:17:16.000 It seems like we're not really designed. 0.96

01:17:18.000 Look at these guys watching this blast, just staring at it, and then they climb out of this ditch and they run towards the explosion.

01:17:26.000 Jesus.

01:17:27.000 Wow, I've never seen that footage.

01:17:28.000 Oh, it's so gross.

01:17:30.000 I wonder what the purpose was of taking, I guess just...

01:17:34.000 Seeing what happens.

01:17:35.000 Wow.

01:17:35.000 That's what it is.

01:17:36.000 I mean, they just, look at that.

01:17:37.000 Oops, I got hit in the face with nuclear waste.

01:17:40.000 Boom! 0.99

01:17:41.000 I mean, look at the...

01:17:42.000 I mean, these guys are a couple miles from...

01:17:44.000 Yeah, that's the thing.

01:17:44.000 It's probably hitting them just after.

01:17:46.000 Yeah.

01:17:46.000 And then they jump up and they...

01:17:48.000 Let's run towards the blast.

01:17:49.000 Like, we're going to go get the reds. 1.00

01:17:51.000 I wonder...

01:17:51.000 Yeah, I wonder if it was at a time when they actually thought they would follow up the blast with...

01:17:56.000 You know, invading, I guess.

01:17:58.000 Yes, that's exactly what it was. 0.99

01:17:59.000 Look, these guys are walking towards a goddamn mushroom cloud. 0.98

01:18:03.000 Wow, I've never seen that footage. 0.99

01:18:05.000 Yeah, it's insane.

01:18:06.000 It's completely insane.

01:18:07.000 And this was just a couple of decades ago.

01:18:10.000 One 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.

01:18:22.000 Wow, that's crazy.

01:18:25.000 You know, there's a...

01:18:26.000 This long history of when the military funds a technology and goes after it, they master it quickly.

01:18:38.000 They bring a lot of resources to it and they get it done.

01:18:41.000 They have unlimited budgets.

01:18:42.000 Yeah, unlimited budgets.

01:18:43.000 That's right.

01:18:43.000 Especially when it's classified.

01:18:44.000 It'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,

01:19:00.000 I 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,

01:19:22.000 like a Boeing and a Lockheed, both building the same thing, not knowing that the other is also building it.

01:19:27.000 And it's the military funding two competing prototypes and then melding them or whatever.

01:19:33.000 See who makes the best product.

01:19:34.000 See who makes the best product, right?

01:19:35.000 And they both will throw all the money at it, that kind of stuff.

01:19:38.000 It's crazy.

01:19:39.000 But when the military throws money at a problem, they tend to...

01:19:43.000 I've seen a stealth fighter fly overhead.

01:19:46.000 We 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.

01:19:56.000 Especially because when we first started Fear Factor, it was right after September 11th.

01:20:00.000 Fear Factor went on air, I think, in 2002. So we would watch these things fly overhead.

01:20:06.000 It would be like, whoa. 0.99

01:20:07.000 That is a goddamn spaceship. 0.99

01:20:09.000 Look at that thing. 1.00

01:20:09.000 Yeah, totally. 1.00

01:20:10.000 With all the angles on it, it only has like two or three angles built into the whole thing to minimize its radar signature.

01:20:17.000 How does that work?

01:20:18.000 Do you know?

01:20:19.000 It's literally that if radar hits a thing A certain amount of the radar has to bounce back, basically.

01:20:28.000 And 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?

01:20:41.000 Serrated edges.

01:20:42.000 It's to make those angles line up.

01:20:45.000 And it's because that's a lower radar signature.

01:20:48.000 There's less for radar to pick up a disturbance, basically. 0.99

01:20:52.000 Radar sucks. 0.98

01:20:53.000 Yeah, well... 1.00

01:20:54.000 It's not really good.

01:20:55.000 I mean, it's awesome for 1945 when you...

01:20:58.000 That's a subject I don't know enough about.

01:21:00.000 You're making me realize that's totally a thing I need to look into.

01:21:03.000 What is the state of radar right now?

01:21:05.000 Is there a new upgrade?

01:21:07.000 I don't know enough about that. 0.99

01:21:09.000 You can get a fucking gigantic spaceship with weapons. 0.99

01:21:13.000 Well, it makes me wonder, right? 0.99

01:21:14.000 And you don't even see it coming?

01:21:16.000 Or, you know, enough cameras?

01:21:18.000 With enough cameras, do you even need radar?

01:21:20.000 Right.

01:21:20.000 It's like all those radar signatures of UFO sightings.

01:21:25.000 Like, that's one of the things they always point to for evidence, you know.

01:21:27.000 These radar, they showed up on radar. 0.98

01:21:29.000 You're telling me that we can make a ship that doesn't show up on radar and the fucking aliens haven't figured that out yet? 0.98

01:21:34.000 Right, right, right, right. 0.99

01:21:35.000 That seems so preposterous.

01:21:37.000 It doesn't make any sense at all.

01:21:38.000 Right, right.

01:21:38.000 It's like the same as their butt tests.

01:21:40.000 It was the last time you went to a doctor and you stuck something up your ass. 0.99

01:21:43.000 It's pretty rare. 1.00

01:21:44.000 You have to have an ass problem. 1.00

01:21:45.000 But almost every alien abduction leads to an anal test. 1.00

01:21:50.000 Right, right, right. 0.99

01:21:51.000 Yeah.

01:21:51.000 Did you know Radar from M.A.S.H. lost all his fingers on his left side of his hand?

01:21:56.000 I don't think that's related.

01:21:57.000 But no, I did not know that.

01:22:00.000 How did he do that?

01:22:02.000 Actually, they were just born smaller.

01:22:03.000 Half small.

01:22:04.000 Huh.

01:22:05.000 Oh, so we didn't lose them.

01:22:06.000 No, I'm sorry.

01:22:07.000 Thanks internet.

01:22:09.000 Yeah, powerful internet.

01:22:12.000 Yeah, so just to get away from that sort of technology.

01:22:15.000 The state of understanding of the human mind today, what is like one of the most bizarre things that they've discovered recently?

01:22:25.000 About human beings?

01:22:26.000 About the human mind.

01:22:28.000 Well, 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,

01:22:45.000 a federally funded brain map project.

01:22:48.000 It's like going to Mars.

01:22:49.000 It's a great national ambition.

01:22:53.000 I am as frugal as the next person.

01:22:56.000 I 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.

01:23:08.000 And it would be really nice to understand the brain better than we do.

01:23:12.000 Well, it's ridiculous to think that a few billion dollars is a lot when you consider the military budget.

01:23:17.000 Well, right.

01:23:17.000 There seem to be a lot of people complaining about that.

01:23:19.000 Totally.

01:23:20.000 Some folks are, but it's not – like no one is saying, listen, we have to stop spending money on the military.

01:23:25.000 Right, right.

01:23:25.000 If 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.

01:23:38.000 That technology is working pretty good I would say right now.

01:23:43.000 LCDs were created under a government program.

01:23:46.000 There's all kinds of things that make our lives possible that get off the ground that way.

01:23:54.000 And the brain is such an unknown.

01:23:56.000 You need that bridge of money to get from here to then when the private sector will take over, when we know some stuff.

01:24:04.000 There's going to be a lot of economic activity that comes out of this.

01:24:07.000 So to me, I would love to know better.

01:24:10.000 Basically what they want to do is, we don't know right now what neurons in the brain correspond to what behavior in the body.

01:24:16.000 We don't know what the thing is, what the connection is yet.

01:24:19.000 And they want to try to map that out, I mean, as best they can.

01:24:22.000 What's the general consensus as far as what created the doubling of the human brain size?

01:24:27.000 One 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.

01:24:39.000 Right, right, yep.

01:24:40.000 So the sense that I have of it, and I don't know that area too well, but the...

01:24:48.000 The eating of meat set off the explosion of the brain, supposedly.

01:24:53.000 Like eating animal proteins, suddenly, boom, we were able to grow our huge brains bigger, you know.

01:24:59.000 The process is so slow.

01:25:02.000 Evolution 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.

01:25:13.000 Eating meat makes sense if cougars are super smart. 0.98

01:25:17.000 Why did people get really smart?

01:25:19.000 Unless, I guess, they had to figure out how to get that meat and since we're kind of physically weak.

01:25:24.000 Scavenging and trying to stay alive.

01:25:26.000 That's right.

01:25:27.000 It's all we had.

01:25:28.000 I mean, it was so important, right, that We're one of the few mammals that has babies that are born defenseless, utterly defenseless.

01:25:35.000 And 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.

01:25:45.000 Well, it's just ridiculous that people have sex in the same place where the baby comes out. 1.00

01:25:49.000 This little tiny penis and a fucking baby's supposed to come out of a hole that keeps that thing tight enough to create friction. 1.00

01:25:54.000 The human body should be like a clam. 1.00

01:25:56.000 It should be like you cook that baby inside you and then boom, you hatch it out.

01:26:00.000 You know, a nice hard clam to protect the baby. 0.96

01:26:02.000 That's funny.

01:26:03.000 Air things out a little.

01:26:04.000 Yeah, just open it up and then that's how the baby comes out. 1.00

01:26:07.000 It's like your sexual organs, I mean, this dual purpose thing is just so nutty. 0.83

01:26:12.000 And if pee comes out of there too, Right. 0.96

01:26:14.000 On the other hand, you know, an engineer would say, you know, that's sufficient.

01:26:18.000 That's really efficient.

01:26:19.000 You want as few openings in the body as possible.

01:26:21.000 That's what they said of the Model T when it came out as well.

01:26:24.000 I 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.

01:26:35.000 Yeah, sure.

01:26:35.000 There's so many more of us.

01:26:37.000 That's right.

01:26:37.000 Yeah.

01:26:38.000 That's right.

01:26:38.000 So many more.

01:26:39.000 What's the future going to hold for overpopulation?

01:26:42.000 It's crazy, man.

01:26:42.000 There's a whole category of sort of architecture that thinks about the density of stuff, you know, how we'll all live.

01:26:55.000 Amazing things that, you know, these sort of things are the megalopolis, these huge cities of greater than 30 million people.

01:27:03.000 And they think that in the next like 15 to 20 years, we're going to have several of them.

01:27:08.000 You know, Lagos, Nigeria is on course to be a 30 million person city by whatever that year is.

01:27:15.000 Unbelievable.

01:27:16.000 And so the patterns of life, you know, for when we're living in cities that huge.

01:27:21.000 It's also really ridiculous that we still have cities like New York City, as a perfect example, where there's not a single farm. 0.99

01:27:30.000 No one's growing shit. 0.99

01:27:31.000 You have eight million plus people living in this one tiny little island, and you've got to get all your food from somewhere else. 0.99

01:27:38.000 Yeah, that's right.

01:27:38.000 You don't get your gas there.

01:27:40.000 You don't get your food there.

01:27:42.000 Right.

01:27:42.000 I mean, I think that's one of the most ridiculous things about human beings, that we still rely on shipping and transportation.

01:27:48.000 Right.

01:27:48.000 It seems that we should, I mean, everyone says you should source things locally, it's good for your environment, good for your community.

01:27:55.000 That'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.

01:28:03.000 New York City, the most advanced city in the world, shut down, no one can get gasoline. 0.99

01:28:09.000 Like, wow, you gotta rethink this whole thing, because that fucker was designed when people were on horses. 0.99

01:28:13.000 Yeah, that's right, that's right. 0.99

01:28:15.000 I highly recommend a book, The World Without Us, by Alan Weissman.

01:28:21.000 Who writes about, like, what would happen if human beings vaporized from our places now?

01:28:25.000 Like, what would happen on the next day, basically?

01:28:28.000 And 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.

01:28:41.000 He basically takes that fantastical moment when everyone is vaporized and then is like, how long will the nuclear power plants last?

01:28:49.000 How long before the houses break down?

01:28:52.000 It'll be a hundred years and they all fall apart.

01:28:55.000 This office plaza would just come apart in a hundred years.

01:28:58.000 That kind of stuff is...

01:29:00.000 Fascinating.

01:29:01.000 And it's because it requires so much little gritty, granular maintenance to keep something like New York City going.

01:29:08.000 Well, 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.

01:29:18.000 We 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.

01:29:24.000 But over the course of a billion years plus, there's nothing left.

01:29:29.000 Nature will have its way with you.

01:29:30.000 With everything.

01:29:32.000 I 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.

01:29:44.000 Because Montana, that area of Montana, used to be something called the Great Western Inland Sea.

01:29:49.000 Millions of years ago, there used to be fucking dinosaurs in Montana, in an ocean, an inland ocean. 0.93

01:29:55.000 And you're like, wow, this ain't permanent. 0.88

01:29:58.000 This whole thing just keeps changing and shifting.

01:30:01.000 I 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.

01:30:08.000 Man, we are utterly living in a place that's crumbling into the ocean.

01:30:13.000 It's just being eaten away. 1.00

01:30:15.000 And the people who have a house on the beach, you silly asshole. 1.00

01:30:19.000 Are you crazy? 1.00

01:30:21.000 I knew a guy who was building this, I think it was like several million dollar house. 0.93

01:30:26.000 He's super rich.

01:30:27.000 His whole family's rich.

01:30:28.000 He's like one of those old money dudes, just seems to always have cash.

01:30:33.000 We were talking about this place.

01:30:35.000 It shows me these architectural designs.

01:30:36.000 I'm like, that's on the water.

01:30:37.000 What makes you think the water is going to stay there?

01:30:40.000 What if it goes back?

01:30:41.000 Do you have a contingency plan?

01:30:43.000 No, no. 0.99

01:30:44.000 You're just going to spend fucking $8 million on this crazy-ass house that's on the water, right there. 1.00

01:30:49.000 Go to a lake, dude. 1.00

01:30:50.000 So beautiful.

01:30:51.000 Lakes are so much more stable.

01:30:52.000 For a few years, man, that'd be a nice place to live, but you're right.

01:30:55.000 Can you even get insurance that the ocean will eat your house?

01:30:59.000 Yeah, they know better now, right?

01:31:00.000 I talked to a guy.

01:31:01.000 I interviewed a guy recently who...

01:31:04.000 His 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.

01:31:13.000 And he, in his 20s, was designing oil rigs.

01:31:17.000 And was describing what it was like to design them back then.

01:31:19.000 And he said that the instructions from the instructor back then was build it to this 60-year storm standard.

01:31:31.000 And he was like, but we've only been designing oil rigs for 35 years.

01:31:34.000 How do we know what a 60-year storm looks like?

01:31:36.000 And they're like, never mind, kid.

01:31:38.000 Keep drawing.

01:31:39.000 So he's making these things.

01:31:40.000 And he was explaining this by way of his then experience.

01:31:44.000 When Katrina hit, the...

01:31:47.000 The waves were so massive.

01:31:49.000 It was like a greater than a 100-year storm, where these decks that were designed for 60 feet got hit with 100-foot waves.

01:31:58.000 It's unbelievable.

01:31:59.000 And everything got torn down.

01:32:01.000 And 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.

01:32:13.000 It's like its own industry.

01:32:15.000 Yeah, and by 100-year storm you mean once every 100 years something this crazy happens.

01:32:19.000 Right.

01:32:19.000 Every year there's a one in 100 chance or whatever.

01:32:21.000 Yeah, exactly.

01:32:23.000 It's the 100-year storm.

01:32:24.000 That's right.

01:32:25.000 That'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.

01:32:32.000 And we had a guy on here that was talking about The possibility of Hurricane Sandy being something that happens every year.

01:32:39.000 You're going to have one of those a year.

01:32:41.000 That could change to two a year.

01:32:43.000 That could change to three.

01:32:44.000 The planet is built for equilibrium.

01:32:47.000 It's always trying to get to equilibrium.

01:32:50.000 It just keeps changing.

01:32:52.000 That's right.

01:32:52.000 You're a Northern California guy, right?

01:32:55.000 You live up there?

01:32:55.000 I live a weird life, actually.

01:32:56.000 I go back and forth between New York and California every month.

01:33:00.000 I'm in New York for one week a month, and then my wife and daughter are in Oakland because we love California.

01:33:06.000 And I happened to be living here when the job came up.

01:33:09.000 Oh, wow.

01:33:09.000 So, you know, in today's day and age, how much do you physically have to be in a location anymore?

01:33:15.000 Yeah, I live in a—I am sort of testing out that theory that you don't have to be right with the people you work with.

01:33:21.000 So my staff is all in New York.

01:33:24.000 And I communicate with them largely through the phone, I would say, most of the time now.

01:33:28.000 But I went hard at the video telepresence thing.

01:33:31.000 And I found that it's really useful for a few kinds of conversations.

01:33:34.000 I can make an announcement or I can settle a debate.

01:33:37.000 I hear two signs and I make a decision or something like that.

01:33:40.000 But it's not good for, like, catching up with someone.

01:33:43.000 It's not good for, you know, sort of a confession, right?

01:33:47.000 Or, you know...

01:33:48.000 Interpersonal stuff.

01:33:49.000 Interpersonal stuff.

01:33:50.000 Anything where you want to win trust or influence someone.

01:33:53.000 You know, I don't want to meet somebody that I'm trying to impress that way.

01:33:55.000 Yeah.

01:33:56.000 And instead of trying...

01:33:57.000 You've got to be face-to-face to really connect with somebody.

01:33:59.000 Isn't that a fascinating aspect of the human being and the human mind is the need for, like...

01:34:05.000 Like, if we were having this conversation, there was six more feet of desk between us.

01:34:09.000 That would change the nature of the conversation, right?

01:34:12.000 It's good that we're not sitting at this table the other way.

01:34:14.000 That's funny.

01:34:14.000 Yeah, it's weird, right?

01:34:15.000 That's funny, yeah.

01:34:16.000 That'd be like a banquet.

01:34:17.000 I mean, we have headphones on.

01:34:18.000 I could see you if you were over there, but it would feel weird.

01:34:21.000 Right, it would.

01:34:22.000 This is like a good amount of distance where we're like four feet from each other.

01:34:25.000 That's right, that's right.

01:34:26.000 We don't touch toes under the desk too many times.

01:34:27.000 Totally.

01:34:28.000 You know that theory?

01:34:29.000 That'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.

01:34:35.000 That changes the conversation. 0.98

01:34:36.000 Yeah, it's fucking footsie. 0.98

01:34:37.000 I don't mean to do that. 0.98

01:34:38.000 People wonder, is he trying to say something?

01:34:40.000 No, he's trying to talk.

01:34:42.000 When I want to talk, I'll touch your foot.

01:34:45.000 But what is that about humans, where we need this sort of, we need a closeness?

01:34:50.000 Yeah, I mean, I think there's a, I don't know, but it's definitely hardwired.

01:34:53.000 There's the uncanny valley is this whole thing that they determined where...

01:34:58.000 Basically, if you show somebody a fake human face, right, the brain immediately is like, oh, this is fake.

01:35:06.000 And 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.

01:35:17.000 And 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,

01:35:34.000 the closer you get to actual reality, the more it freaks people out to be talking to a fake person.

01:35:39.000 A really lifelike fake person is way scarier than a not at all lifelike person.

01:35:43.000 I'm sure! 1.00

01:35:44.000 You know, like a really lifelike fake person that wants to fuck you. 1.00

01:35:49.000 How creepy would that be like, listen man, you don't know what it feels like to be a person. 1.00

01:35:54.000 You're just imitating it. 0.99

01:35:55.000 If I say no, what the fuck are you gonna do? 0.99

01:35:58.000 No means yes. 0.99

01:35:59.000 No means yes. 1.00

01:36:00.000 Yeah, like a fake crazy robot girl that wants your dick and you gotta go, listen, this is not gonna work. 1.00

01:36:06.000 That is funny, man. 1.00

01:36:07.000 What is your thoughts, if any, on remote viewing?

01:36:11.000 Are you aware of the phenomenon?

01:36:13.000 Is that real?

01:36:15.000 Yeah, I don't think it's real, or at least it's never been real enough that we wanted to do a story on it.

01:36:18.000 So I don't think of it as a real thing, but I'm interested to hear any thoughts anyone has about it.

01:36:23.000 Yeah, I don't know if it's real, but we're having this guy, his name is Russell Targ, and he's a physicist, and he's...

01:36:30.000 He's also a pioneer in the earliest development of the laser, and he's a future upcoming guest.

01:36:36.000 And he's written quite a few books on it.

01:36:39.000 One on remote viewing and one on the reality of ESP. It's called A Physicist's Proof of Psychic Abilities.

01:36:47.000 I just got it in the mail today.

01:36:48.000 I haven't gotten into it.

01:36:50.000 But 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.

01:37:06.000 Time travel chair, like I said a couple months ago.

01:37:09.000 I don't know what that means.

01:37:10.000 Including the CIA, Defense Intelligence Agency, and the Army Intelligence.

01:37:14.000 And these abilities are referred to collectively as remote viewing.

01:37:17.000 And they both express the belief that...

01:37:20.000 It'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.

01:37:31.000 It would be fascinating to know whether they can prove it.

01:37:34.000 I would love to see it.

01:37:35.000 Yeah, you guys haven't looked into any of that yet?

01:37:36.000 I 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. 0.75

01:37:50.000 It sounds like fuckery, right? 0.66

01:37:51.000 It does. 0.98

01:37:52.000 It sounds like it to me.

01:37:53.000 But we've had a friend, Tim Ferriss, in here who described studies that are done where people accurately describe things through remote viewing.

01:38:04.000 So I'm really interested in that.

01:38:06.000 It also has been...

01:38:07.000 I 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.

01:38:16.000 That 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.

01:38:23.000 I don't know whether that's true or not, but I do know that there is a...

01:38:28.000 If you talk to a police detective, they'll tell you that when you interview witnesses, You know, to an auto accident, let's say.

01:38:39.000 They 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.

01:38:48.000 But their memory tells them, this was me seeing the cars collide.

01:38:53.000 And so I wonder how much...

01:38:58.000 Where's the memory stored?

01:39:00.000 Yeah, good question.

01:39:01.000 Good question, right?

01:39:02.000 I mean the ability to really know where Stuff is happening.

01:39:12.000 It's totally unbelievable.

01:39:13.000 You've got the prefrontal cortex that controls how you move your arms.

01:39:18.000 We know some things about where stuff is kept, but how it is affected, how it truly is stored.

01:39:26.000 Is it binary or is it analog?

01:39:28.000 Is 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?

01:39:39.000 Or at least rekindle the way, the ability you have to retain memory.

01:39:43.000 I 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.

01:39:51.000 But again, this is us like poking on the outside and seeing like, oh, sorry.

01:39:56.000 There'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.

01:40:09.000 And that's totally, that's sort of where we're at in terms of brain research.

01:40:15.000 I 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,

01:40:36.000 except the neurons.

01:40:37.000 The neurons tend to stay with you for the rest of your life.

01:40:41.000 Yeah, that's interesting.

01:40:42.000 So that might be the only place for memories.

01:40:43.000 But 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.

01:40:51.000 Right, right, right.

01:40:52.000 Remember when things would just get real fuzzy.

01:40:53.000 Gets grainy.

01:40:54.000 Gets a little grainy.

01:40:55.000 In fact, you were the hero of that story.

01:40:57.000 Yeah.

01:40:57.000 Right, right, right.

01:40:58.000 Because I've gone back over things.

01:40:59.000 I mean, I have some really definitive, life-changing moments in my life that I'm pretty sure I have the events...

01:41:06.000 Locked in clearly, right.

01:41:08.000 But 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... 0.86

01:41:23.000 You know what I mean?

01:41:24.000 And it's like I've kept repeating this and referencing it or considering it, so I have... 0.60

01:41:32.000 This 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. 0.60

01:41:45.000 That's right.

01:41:46.000 I mean, and if you look at the way that...

01:41:49.000 One place that we have learned the brain pretty well is anesthesia because we know now how to turn off things like short-term memory.

01:42:00.000 So the latest forms of anesthesia is that.

01:42:03.000 That's the way to do it.

01:42:05.000 But if you're going to crack open the chest to get the baby out or whatever the thing is...

01:42:09.000 The clam.

01:42:10.000 You're going to need some serious drugs.

01:42:14.000 So they turn off your memory, basically.

01:42:18.000 And 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.

01:42:28.000 But you still, in that state, your blood pressure goes up, like your body is feeling pain.

01:42:33.000 And an anesthesiologist is managing that pain for you.

01:42:36.000 But the idea is to turn off your memory more than your nerve receptors, which is amazing.

01:42:41.000 So 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.

01:42:54.000 The memory shut off.

01:42:55.000 Yeah.

01:42:55.000 You're not having the experience consciously.

01:42:58.000 So your body is not jolting you awake.

01:43:01.000 It's just turning that off.

01:43:02.000 So you're not absorbing it at all.

01:43:04.000 The hippocampus is not translating that into long-term memories for whatever reason.

01:43:08.000 I'm not sure quite how it works.

01:43:09.000 But as a result, yeah, your body still is free to respond.

01:43:15.000 I think that an anesthesiologist would say, A, It really depends.

01:43:18.000 There's some procedures where that's not the case.

01:43:21.000 But it also is healthier not to turn off too much.

01:43:26.000 You don't want to turn off a lot of the body.

01:43:28.000 They 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.

01:43:36.000 Well, 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? 0.95

01:43:50.000 Where 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. 0.98

01:43:57.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah. 1.00

01:43:57.000 No, I know. 1.00

01:43:58.000 The 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.

01:44:11.000 Man, you know, like, yeah, nobody should be scrambling anybody.

01:44:13.000 Yeah, what is that, what was it called?

01:44:15.000 Trepanning, I think, where they would drill holes in the skull to release pressure?

01:44:20.000 Man, man.

01:44:21.000 And sometimes they have to do that, you know, like emergency surgery, you have to, you know, somebody will whack their head.

01:44:26.000 Right.

01:44:26.000 I mean, you know, and then they have to do that sometimes.

01:44:28.000 But yeah, the idea that you would do that to try and sort of like affect behavior is nuts.

01:44:33.000 You know, on the other hand, they have discovered things like You know, what's it called?

01:44:39.000 Shock treatment, right?

01:44:41.000 Was this desire to sort of, you could calm the brain in a way by jolting it.

01:44:48.000 And it comes, it was discovered basically by, or the original sort of discovery that led to that was in slaughterhouses.

01:44:58.000 They 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.

01:45:09.000 And 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.

01:45:21.000 And for the longest time, they weren't doing electroshock therapy on humans.

01:45:26.000 They stopped doing it.

01:45:27.000 There was the sort of one flew over the cuckoo's nest way of looking at it.

01:45:32.000 Like, oh, you just ruined that guy. 0.72

01:45:33.000 You calmed him down, but you shut...

01:45:35.000 You know, the Jack Nicholson drooling at the end of the movie where it's, oh, he's gone. 1.00

01:45:39.000 He's fucked. 1.00

01:45:40.000 He cooked his brain. 1.00

01:45:41.000 Whereas now, it's commonly done to people that are fucked up. 0.99

01:45:44.000 Well, I think they also know now... 0.96

01:45:46.000 So back then, you had what were called...

01:45:48.000 We're back on antipsychotics here, but you had positive and negative symptoms, and that's a technical term.

01:45:53.000 It doesn't mean good or bad.

01:45:54.000 It means positive symptoms were the symptoms where you have an outburst.

01:45:57.000 It's either outwardly noticeable, yelling, hallucinations.

01:46:03.000 Those are positive.

01:46:04.000 And the negative is a lack of emotional connection, lack of reasoning.

01:46:08.000 Your cognitive ability starts to go away, and those were a whole separate category of symptoms.

01:46:14.000 And 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.

01:46:31.000 You're still lethargic, you still can't make connections to people, you're still not thinking well, plus you're sort of sedated.

01:46:37.000 So they talked about the Thorazine Shuffle.

01:46:40.000 I'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.

01:46:52.000 And people would all be like, oh, that guy was never the same since he had his electroshock therapy.

01:46:55.000 But maybe he was also on the drug that was turning him off.

01:46:57.000 I don't know.

01:46:58.000 I'm just making that up.

01:46:59.000 Yeah, it certainly could have been both. 1.00

01:47:01.000 It's so funny how we look back at those days and go, oh, those fucking dummies. 1.00

01:47:04.000 They didn't even know what they were doing. 1.00

01:47:05.000 But guaranteed, people a thousand years from now are going to be looking at us like, we're so silly. 0.77

01:47:11.000 We didn't know anything. 0.94

01:47:12.000 We didn't even have artificial brains yet.

01:47:14.000 Exactly.

01:47:14.000 We're still driving ourselves.

01:47:16.000 Yeah, that's right.

01:47:17.000 What 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?

01:47:26.000 I love it.

01:47:27.000 I mean, I think it's a really interesting, you know, it's a great time reference.

01:47:31.000 That's basically what he's trying to do.

01:47:32.000 It's like, here's the next great milestone in innovation and development.

01:47:36.000 You know, and I think it's a nice, a really good organizing principle.

01:47:41.000 It's inspired a lot of great thinking.

01:47:42.000 You know, whether it's going to turn out that we really do create, like, A symbiotic, you know, relationship.

01:47:48.000 I don't know.

01:47:48.000 But in a way, we already have, right?

01:47:50.000 Like, 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.

01:48:09.000 And it'll start to suggest, like, here's a better route to take to work.

01:48:13.000 Or, you know, here's food near you.

01:48:16.000 And 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.

01:48:25.000 I want to go eat something.

01:48:26.000 And then you pull out your phone to ask it how to do that.

01:48:29.000 Instead, the phone is telling you, hey, I've got an idea.

01:48:32.000 Why don't you get a burger?

01:48:33.000 And you're like, thanks, phone.

01:48:36.000 And so in a way, we've almost already gotten there, you know.

01:48:39.000 And the biggest giveaway is how weird you feel when you leave it at home.

01:48:42.000 You forgot your phone.

01:48:44.000 I didn't use my phone for almost two days this weekend.

01:48:47.000 It was the best feeling ever.

01:48:48.000 And I've noticed that one of the biggest things with hipsters nowadays is that they don't have cell phones anymore.

01:48:53.000 And I could kind of see myself even going back there.

01:48:57.000 Isn't that really the big thing with hipsters?

01:48:59.000 Is that a hip thing?

01:49:00.000 I hadn't heard of that.

01:49:01.000 Yeah, the new thing is hipsters don't have cell phones anymore.

01:49:03.000 Dude, that's great.

01:49:03.000 I hadn't heard of that.

01:49:04.000 And that they just write letters.

01:49:07.000 I'm being 100% serious.

01:49:09.000 I just found out about it this week.

01:49:10.000 Where did you hear this from?

01:49:11.000 This 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. 0.62

01:49:21.000 That's great.

01:49:22.000 Wow.

01:49:23.000 I'm into it.

01:49:23.000 It's like the steampunk thing, like looking back, nostalgic at that time.

01:49:27.000 Try to find out if a movie's good if you don't have a phone. 0.93

01:49:30.000 That's ridiculous. 1.00

01:49:31.000 That's so stupid. 1.00

01:49:33.000 Well, you don't have to use it, dummy. 1.00

01:49:35.000 But the fact that you don't have one... 0.97

01:49:36.000 Yeah, but I'm an addict, man. 1.00

01:49:36.000 Get the fuck out of here. 1.00

01:49:37.000 Fuck, not using your phone for two days? 1.00

01:49:40.000 Yeah, what did you do? 1.00

01:49:41.000 What did you do to yourself?

01:49:42.000 I ate mushrooms and swam with dolphins.

01:49:46.000 Well, I did it when I went to Montana for six days.

01:49:49.000 Wow.

01:49:49.000 For six days, no cell phone.

01:49:51.000 It felt great, right?

01:49:51.000 Yeah.

01:49:52.000 Well, it's also good to get the fuck away from the hive. 0.99

01:49:56.000 Because we were camping for those days that we were out there. 0.99

01:49:59.000 So it wasn't just no cell phone.

01:50:01.000 It was no contact with the civilized world.

01:50:03.000 It was just the natural world of walking around and hiking.

01:50:07.000 It's a completely different feeling than when you're constantly checking your email and constantly watching the CNN screen at the airport.

01:50:14.000 Yeah.

01:50:15.000 And all that, the constant input of information.

01:50:19.000 Right.

01:50:19.000 Do you have any experience at all in sensory deprivation tanks?

01:50:23.000 No, not me personally.

01:50:24.000 I am really interested in, you had said earlier when we were looking at that footage of the...

01:50:29.000 The cumulus cloud and the soldiers running toward it.

01:50:31.000 Like, how fragile the body is.

01:50:33.000 That's my, like, that's the subject I geek out on hardest.

01:50:36.000 I really am fascinated by exactly that.

01:50:40.000 And like, you know, sensory deprivation texts.

01:50:42.000 It's just funny, like, we're so vulnerable.

01:50:44.000 We're such vulnerable little creatures.

01:50:47.000 And it's so unbelievable that we move around the world and live around the world where we do, how we do.

01:50:55.000 You know, Louis C.K. has that great thing about, you know, people complaining about the Wi-Fi not working on the flight.

01:51:00.000 He's like, you're being thrown through the sky in a chair.

01:51:02.000 You know, come on.

01:51:03.000 And that's totally how I feel about everything.

01:51:06.000 Like, when I look at, you know, airbags, you know, safety restraint systems, like pressurization on planes, all that stuff is unbelievable.

01:51:16.000 So, yeah.

01:51:16.000 Yeah.

01:51:16.000 Yeah, what I meant, though, is the actual effects on the mind of sensory deprivation.

01:51:22.000 You've never experienced that at all?

01:51:23.000 I haven't.

01:51:24.000 I haven't gone in and done a tank.

01:51:25.000 No, I've never done it.

01:51:27.000 I don't know.

01:51:27.000 I just haven't had the opportunity.

01:51:28.000 I'd love to.

01:51:28.000 It sounds great.

01:51:30.000 You're leaving soon.

01:51:31.000 Otherwise, I would suggest a place here.

01:51:32.000 But in Northern California, there's a gang of places you can go to.

01:51:35.000 And I'm sure Twitter people attack.

01:51:37.000 Go send them some links.

01:51:39.000 You've got to try it.

01:51:40.000 If you're fascinated by the human mind, you really need to try that state.

01:51:43.000 Cool.

01:51:43.000 Because it's not available anywhere else in the world.

01:51:45.000 How would you describe it?

01:51:46.000 Have you done it?

01:51:46.000 Oh yeah, I have one in my house.

01:51:48.000 No kidding?

01:51:48.000 Yeah, I do it almost every week, many times a week.

01:51:52.000 So what's it like?

01:51:52.000 What's the effect?

01:51:53.000 Well, there's no senses coming in.

01:51:56.000 I 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.

01:52:06.000 All that's input.

01:52:07.000 All that's input.

01:52:08.000 When you're in the tank, there's nothing.

01:52:10.000 There's no input.

01:52:11.000 And much like we're having this conversation, if a truck goes by, it's a slight distraction.

01:52:15.000 If you were trying to formulate words and that truck was really loud, it would be annoying because you have to deal with that input.

01:52:20.000 You have to deal with that information that's coming towards you.

01:52:23.000 When you're inside the tank, it really is the only environment in the world where you don't have your body talking to you.

01:52:29.000 You're floating in water that's the same temperature as your skin. 0.53

01:52:32.000 There's a thousand pounds of salt in that water, Epsom salt, so you float like you're completely buoyant.

01:52:38.000 And because your temperature of the water is the same as your skin, you don't feel it after a while.

01:52:43.000 You literally feel like you're flying through space.

01:52:45.000 What does it do to your mind?

01:52:46.000 Total darkness, total silence.

01:52:48.000 Well, your mind has no sensory input, so there's no distraction.

01:52:51.000 So it's super-powered.

01:52:54.000 Just as your brain is compromised when there's a jackhammer next to you, Your brain becomes equally magnified when there's nothing.

01:53:02.000 If I have any problems whatsoever, if there's things that are bothering me, I go in the tank and it's like having a seminar on my life.

01:53:08.000 It's like all of a sudden I can see things so much more clearly.

01:53:12.000 And you're completely outside of the world.

01:53:16.000 I mean, you're not lying on a bed.

01:53:17.000 You're not in an ashram.

01:53:18.000 You're not even in a human body anymore.

01:53:21.000 It's your consciousness...

01:53:24.000 Literally untethered from the human body.

01:53:26.000 That's awesome.

01:53:27.000 Yeah, you need to do it.

01:53:28.000 Yeah, I will.

01:53:28.000 I will.

01:53:29.000 I'm in.

01:53:30.000 That sounds great. 0.98

01:53:30.000 I 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. 0.98

01:53:38.000 I'm like, Jesus, it's 2013. Why the fuck are these things not everywhere? 0.99

01:53:42.000 They'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. 0.98

01:53:57.000 And so when they think about the idea of taking a drug to detach from the reality to gain a fresh perspective, it's terrifying.

01:54:06.000 But you can achieve psychedelic states in a sensory deprivation tank with no worries at all.

01:54:11.000 Totally.

01:54:11.000 I will try it out.

01:54:12.000 I've never done it.

01:54:13.000 Get on it, son.

01:54:14.000 We're just eating mushrooms.

01:54:15.000 It's better.

01:54:16.000 It's not better.

01:54:16.000 You don't even know.

01:54:17.000 You don't even try an isolation tank.

01:54:19.000 How do you talk on that?

01:54:20.000 It doesn't beat mushrooms.

01:54:22.000 You don't know that.

01:54:23.000 You don't know anything.

01:54:24.000 So you're saying isolation tank beats mushrooms?

01:54:27.000 I'm saying it's the same sort of experience.

01:54:28.000 You can have the same experience that you can have on a heavy-duty mushroom trip in an isolation tank.

01:54:33.000 And, by the way, a mushroom trip in an isolation tank is a thousand times more intense.

01:54:40.000 Weed is more, for you, self-examatory.

01:54:42.000 That's the last thing you want.

01:54:46.000 It's just an incredibly unique environment that I'm shocked isn't available at major universities, I think it should be everywhere.

01:54:54.000 I think people should have that.

01:54:56.000 I mean it should be – you can go anywhere and you find a yoga studio.

01:54:59.000 Try finding a sentry deprivation type place.

01:55:01.000 I think the reason, Joe, is that a lot of people it doesn't work on.

01:55:04.000 That's not the reason, Brian.

01:55:06.000 The reason why it's not available is not because a lot of people it doesn't work on.

01:55:09.000 No, I mean that's why it's not as popular because a lot of people do the isolation tank and it does nothing for them.

01:55:14.000 So why would they go back to doing it?

01:55:16.000 What are you basing this on?

01:55:17.000 I 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.

01:55:24.000 It's nothing to me.

01:55:26.000 It's just kind of boring.

01:55:27.000 I just sit there and that's happened to me at least three times.

01:55:30.000 Those are the people that are desperate to talk to you.

01:55:33.000 They have limited resources. 0.99

01:55:36.000 I'm telling you because I fucking have one in my basement. 0.99

01:55:38.000 I use it all the time. 0.99

01:55:41.000 You just need to learn how to let go and concentrate.

01:55:43.000 It's not like it's an immediate jolt into hyperspace.

01:55:47.000 But what it is is an environment where you can truly be away from the influence of the body.

01:55:57.000 If you're on any sort of substance, any psychedelic or anything, it's magically enhanced inside the tank. 0.99

01:56:03.000 You eat a pot cookie and get it in an isolation tank and tell me that's not a trippy experience, I'll tell you, you're crazy. 0.96

01:56:10.000 It's so beneficial.

01:56:13.000 There's a couple issues.

01:56:14.000 One, 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.

01:56:24.000 It'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.

01:56:32.000 You got to get good at it and you got to get good at the whole letting go thing.

01:56:37.000 It's not easy.

01:56:38.000 It's just like meditation.

01:56:39.000 It's a difficult thing to do.

01:56:41.000 But you can achieve some pretty powerful states in meditation.

01:56:45.000 You can achieve much more powerful states if you're meditating inside an isolation tank.

01:56:50.000 I just wanted to know if you knew anything about the actual effects of the mind.

01:56:54.000 Do 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?

01:57:00.000 I haven't seen it.

01:57:01.000 You haven't seen Alter States?

01:57:02.000 I'm sorry, I haven't.

01:57:03.000 Well, it was all based on John Lilly, who was, by the way, used to take acid and talk to dolphins.

01:57:09.000 That was his thing.

01:57:09.000 That's what I did.

01:57:10.000 He was a pioneer in interspecies communication.

01:57:12.000 And Lilly would get an isolation tank and set it up right next to a tank filled with dolphins. 1.00

01:57:18.000 Right.

01:57:18.000 And hop in the isolation tank and trip his balls off and have this experience.

01:57:23.000 He created the sensory deprivation tank. 0.50

01:57:25.000 There was a couple different versions of it.

01:57:27.000 The first one, he was vertical with sort of like a space helmet on for his air.

01:57:30.000 And he would like float based on this tank.

01:57:34.000 Like he would kind of be floating from his head.

01:57:36.000 Wow.

01:57:37.000 Yeah.

01:57:37.000 And then the second one, he figured out, okay...

01:57:40.000 If you lie vertically and fill the tank with salt, you'll float.

01:57:44.000 So he even rigged it up so that he could – he had like a tube that was collecting waste and sucking waste out of it.

01:57:52.000 So he was spending a long time there.

01:57:54.000 Well, Lily was also famous for his love of ketamine.

01:57:58.000 So he would take ketamine and go on these six-hour K-hole trips inside this tank.

01:58:04.000 If you've got to take a leak, it just pulls it out of you.

01:58:09.000 Joe, I was peaking hard during this mushroom trip though.

01:58:13.000 I ate a cap.

01:58:15.000 I just went into a little and I started to the point where my hands were melting and I had to go into this water.

01:58:21.000 And it was intense.

01:58:24.000 I was trying to talk to the dolphin with my mind, staring at it in its eyes and stuff.

01:58:29.000 How'd that go?

01:58:30.000 It went pretty good. 0.98

01:58:31.000 It was pretty ridiculous. 0.60

01:58:33.000 But the crazy thing is that the dolphin racked me twice. 0.67

01:58:36.000 Didn't hit anybody else.

01:58:37.000 And then at the end, busted me on the lip with its tail. 0.88

01:58:40.000 You got lucky too.

01:58:41.000 Dolphins are strong.

01:58:42.000 Yeah.

01:58:43.000 So what are you thinking? 0.99

01:58:44.000 That the dolphin was hearing your cries and wanted to beat the shit out of you because you were annoying? 0.99

01:58:48.000 I have no idea. 0.99

01:58:49.000 And the only other thing I can think of is I was at the end of the line.

01:58:52.000 So when they were like, all right, we're going to flip the dolphin over.

01:58:55.000 Everyone pet its stomach. 0.99

01:58:56.000 Well, I was petting the vagina the whole time. 1.00

01:58:58.000 Didn't even know it. 0.99

01:58:59.000 And then she's like, see, this is the vagina and there's a slit on each side of the vagina that the dolphin feeds out of it. 1.00

01:59:04.000 I'm like, whoa, I'm touching it? 0.98

01:59:07.000 What do you mean you didn't know?

01:59:08.000 You've told me about that many times.

01:59:09.000 I was shrooming, dude.

01:59:11.000 I was like, touch item that's in front of me.

01:59:15.000 So you didn't even know what it looked like?

01:59:16.000 I mean, at the time, I was just like, wow, it's soft.

01:59:18.000 It's awesome.

01:59:19.000 But then, did you get to ride?

01:59:20.000 You did this before, right?

01:59:21.000 No, I did not.

01:59:23.000 I'm really against dolphin captivity. 0.99

01:59:25.000 I think it's really fucked up. 0.99

01:59:26.000 I 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. 1.00

01:59:38.000 I think it's ridiculous. 0.99

01:59:39.000 They do eat like crazy and they seem all very happy.

01:59:42.000 And dolphins are the only ones that, you know, if they don't like life, they just stop breathing.

01:59:47.000 Like they're voluntarily breathing.

01:59:49.000 They're the only species that voluntarily breathes. 0.51

01:59:51.000 And so like that's why a lot of times when dolphins will just commit suicide if they're unhappy.

01:59:55.000 And they would all commit suicide if they were unhappy, wouldn't they? 0.96

01:59:58.000 That's silly. 1.00

01:59:59.000 That's instincts. 1.00

02:00:00.000 You're saying that their life has to be so horrible that they commit suicide.

02:00:03.000 There's a lot of people that are ridiculously unhappy in prison that aren't committing suicide.

02:00:07.000 It doesn't mean that prison is awesome.

02:00:08.000 By that logic, that doesn't make any sense at all.

02:00:10.000 Wouldn't there be some dolphins that killed themselves then if they were unhappy?

02:00:14.000 How do you know that they don't?

02:00:14.000 They pretty much just got fed the whole time I was watching them.

02:00:17.000 But they have no freedom, man.

02:00:19.000 They have no freedom.

02:00:19.000 Not only that, they steal them from their mothers.

02:00:21.000 Killer whales are very famous for that.

02:00:24.000 And killer whales, by the way, the only incidents of killer whales ever murdering people has been in captivity.

02:00:30.000 They hate it.

02:00:30.000 They don't want that.

02:00:32.000 Those are dolphins.

02:00:34.000 Dolphins are just cousins of killer whales.

02:00:36.000 I just think it's a remnant of the past where we didn't understand these animals.

02:00:41.000 These are super, super intelligent animals. 1.00

02:00:43.000 And just like the cove is fucked up because it's fucked up to murder them, it's fucked up to imprison them, too. 1.00

02:00:48.000 It's not like these were bad dolphins and we had to remove them from the dolphin population Which, dolphins, by the way, are fucking bad. 1.00

02:00:56.000 They do a lot of crazy shit. 1.00

02:00:57.000 They rape, they kill babies. 1.00

02:01:00.000 Just because they're intelligent, they don't follow by the morals and the ethics that human beings would like to think of Flipper having. 1.00

02:01:07.000 Dolphins do some dirty shit. 1.00

02:01:08.000 We have a story coming up in a couple of issues by this guy, Brian Lamb, who runs the thing called The Wirecutter. 1.00

02:01:15.000 He's a cool guy.

02:01:16.000 He'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.

02:01:27.000 But they're, by their nature, a little crazy in that they're out hand-tagging sharks.

02:01:34.000 They get them up on the boat, you know, like being dangerous, you know, hammerheads, you know, the whole deal. 0.90

02:01:40.000 And 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.

02:01:49.000 Where they live, how deep they go, all this stuff.

02:01:52.000 But he was describing what it's like, in the story he describes what it's like to be in the water with a shark.

02:01:58.000 And how incredibly scary that is.

02:02:01.000 Those things are just built for death.

02:02:03.000 They are, you know, nature's perfect weapon, those things.

02:02:06.000 Yeah, that must be absolutely horrifying.

02:02:08.000 One 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.

02:02:19.000 And that's that bit that I do, the story that I wrote.

02:02:22.000 These dolphins were playing with us.

02:02:24.000 Yeah.

02:02:25.000 They were jumping next to us by the boat, and they're really playful, and they're really obviously intelligent.

02:02:30.000 They don't fall for the hooks.

02:02:32.000 They're not biting our bait.

02:02:34.000 We're fishing, and they don't worry about it at all.

02:02:38.000 No one catches a dolphin on a hook.

02:02:40.000 It just doesn't happen. 1.00

02:02:41.000 The only way you catch them is by netting them, by corralling them in when they're fucked. 0.99

02:02:45.000 But you don't hear about dolphins falling for a fake worm. 0.99

02:02:47.000 It doesn't happen.

02:02:49.000 I've always liked the people who've spent time with them sometimes say, man, it seems almost as if they've evolved past where we are.

02:02:56.000 They shed their possessions.

02:02:58.000 Well, they don't have the ability to change their environment, but Other than that, they have an amazing ability to communicate.

02:03:04.000 And they have a nice environment.

02:03:05.000 Have you seen their ears, Joe?

02:03:07.000 This is like a higher technology than us.

02:03:09.000 It's a pinhole.

02:03:10.000 It's just a little dot.

02:03:11.000 And they're also born with mustaches when they're young.

02:03:15.000 And you can see the holes when they're older where the mustache used to be on their lip.

02:03:19.000 They're so badass they're born with mustaches.

02:03:21.000 I wonder what purpose that serves.

02:03:24.000 Evolutionarily.

02:03:25.000 Looking fresh.

02:03:26.000 Looking fresh.

02:03:27.000 A nice little pimp, thin stash.

02:03:30.000 I think it is too.

02:03:30.000 I think it is a thin stripe.

02:03:32.000 Like one of those Eddie Murphy ones where it's just a tiny line of hair above the lip.

02:03:37.000 Yeah.

02:03:38.000 I don't know.

02:03:39.000 I think it's cool that you did that.

02:03:43.000 They're going to be in that SeaWorld place whether you go there or not, but I don't want to go there.

02:03:48.000 I've been to the zoo high and I don't like it.

02:03:51.000 I wrote this whole thing when I went to the zoo about this animal prison.

02:03:55.000 You see these primates screaming in their cage.

02:03:58.000 I was at a zoo once, and there's this one monkey.

02:04:01.000 I don't remember what monkey it was, but it was by itself in this little cage. 0.99

02:04:03.000 It was smaller than this room, and this fucking thing was screaming. 0.99

02:04:07.000 And I was like, that is madness. 1.00

02:04:09.000 That's an intelligent animal that someone has decided to make it stay in this one spot, and it's going insane.

02:04:17.000 Screaming.

02:04:18.000 What seemed like that to me was the shemuz, the killer whales. 0.78

02:04:21.000 That, 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.

02:04:35.000 That's all they did. 0.98

02:04:36.000 God, that drives me nuts.

02:04:37.000 Yeah, that was awful.

02:04:39.000 But I thought the chameleos were pretty cool.

02:04:42.000 I mean, you thought the dolphins were cool.

02:04:44.000 You know what?

02:04:44.000 I think it's called a Balboa.

02:04:46.000 Is that what it's called?

02:04:46.000 Where it's like a dolphin, but it's white, and it's got a huge...

02:04:51.000 I know what you're talking about.

02:04:53.000 It's a type of dolphin.

02:04:55.000 I think it's actually a type of whale.

02:04:59.000 I know what you're talking about.

02:05:00.000 I don't know the name of it. 0.97

02:05:01.000 They're opening up next month where you can hang out with those guys and that shit looks badass because it looks like Star Wars. 0.94

02:05:07.000 You know what, man? 0.97

02:05:08.000 This is how they should do it.

02:05:09.000 If 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. 0.97

02:05:17.000 But the idea that you should put them in a fucking fish tank, and by the way, that water is probably chlorinated. 0.97

02:05:23.000 How else are they going to have it? 0.99

02:05:24.000 It was salt water.

02:05:25.000 It was salty. 1.00

02:05:25.000 It tastes like salt water and shit. 1.00

02:05:27.000 Oh, okay. 1.00

02:05:28.000 It was great.

02:05:28.000 Well, that makes sense, actually, because I have a salt water pool.

02:05:31.000 You can get away with that without the same principle of the isolation tank not getting funky.

02:05:38.000 Nothing really can grow in the salt water.

02:05:39.000 Right.

02:05:40.000 But I just think that we don't need to do that anymore, man.

02:05:43.000 Even zoos.

02:05:44.000 I mean, I take my kids to the zoo because the zoo is there and for them it's fascinating and they go crazy.

02:05:49.000 But if it was up to me, we wouldn't have zoos.

02:05:52.000 It just seems crazy to have a prison for gorillas. 1.00

02:05:54.000 They're staring at you and they're fucked. 1.00

02:05:58.000 The whole thing is a relic, I think. 1.00

02:06:01.000 Yeah, no, it's true.

02:06:03.000 It'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.

02:06:13.000 And I love the American Museum of Natural History.

02:06:16.000 I think they do amazing work.

02:06:17.000 But 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.

02:06:30.000 How about African men?

02:06:32.000 There's been exhibits at zoos before where they had black men.

02:06:37.000 I think they had pygmies at zoos before.

02:06:40.000 The 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. 1.00

02:06:54.000 If 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. 1.00

02:07:03.000 As long as they have food, they'll be happy. 0.99

02:07:05.000 There 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,

02:07:20.000 you know, maybe tricked is one way to put it, but like, you know, is...

02:07:24.000 It feels comfortable in the environment.

02:07:26.000 And there's all kinds of crazy optical illusions.

02:07:29.000 At the Seattle Zoo, there's the savannah kind of curves.

02:07:32.000 It's almost like you're on the top of a dome, sort of, but it's a very gradual dome.

02:07:36.000 But it's enough that for a long time, it looks as if there's a long horizon out in front of you.

02:07:42.000 It blocks out the background.

02:07:44.000 You're not seeing any trees in the background or whatever because it's sloped up just slightly.

02:07:47.000 And, 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.

02:07:57.000 Well, if they really wanted to be nice to the lion, they would let goats loose.

02:08:00.000 That's a good point.

02:08:01.000 They would also let goats loose in there like they do in Asia. 1.00

02:08:04.000 You 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.

02:08:16.000 And the goat falls out, the tigers just tear it apart.

02:08:18.000 Have you ever seen that before?

02:08:20.000 No, I haven't.

02:08:20.000 Cue the video!

02:08:24.000 There'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.

02:08:37.000 Yeah.

02:08:38.000 At least that's normal.

02:08:41.000 I mean, that's what they do.

02:08:43.000 The idea of sliding a tray under the cage with some cold meat.

02:08:49.000 The whole reward system that an animal has, especially these predators, their entire reward system is based on chasing and catching things.

02:08:58.000 I mean, if you roll a ball in front of a cat, it's going to go after it.

02:09:02.000 And that's because it's got...

02:09:04.000 I 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.

02:09:10.000 Right, right.

02:09:11.000 There's that thing they tell you about pick up any small children.

02:09:17.000 Because a mountain lion's instinct is to go after the smallest one.

02:09:21.000 And little kids are prone to running away.

02:09:24.000 And that is what turns on the instinct, the prey drive.

02:09:28.000 So you have to pick up your kid if you see a mountain lion.

02:09:30.000 And coyotes as well.

02:09:32.000 There was a big bear last year.

02:09:35.000 There was an attack.

02:09:36.000 A five-year-old was attacked by a coyote right in front of his father. 0.99

02:09:39.000 The coyote tackled the kid and just tried to fucking eat him. 0.99

02:09:43.000 Man. 0.99

02:09:44.000 Yeah.

02:09:44.000 As a father, I would freak out.

02:09:46.000 Yeah, so here they drop this thing out and they just grab ahold of it and just start pulling it apart.

02:09:51.000 Wow.

02:09:51.000 What is that?

02:09:52.000 Is it beef?

02:09:54.000 Some sort of a sheep or a goat or something like that.

02:09:58.000 Yeah.

02:09:58.000 And this is lions here.

02:10:00.000 God, those things are strong.

02:10:01.000 Yeah, the lions take a little more time than the tigers.

02:10:04.000 The tigers grab ahold of it and it's almost instantly a wrap.

02:10:07.000 They just yank them and rip them apart. 0.81

02:10:09.000 But 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. 0.97

02:10:17.000 Right, right, right. 0.97

02:10:18.000 Their whole reason to live.

02:10:19.000 That's right.

02:10:20.000 They've evolved all these incredible abilities.

02:10:22.000 The teeth and the prey drive, the eyesight, all that stuff.

02:10:24.000 And you do need to keep it sharp.

02:10:27.000 It's like vegans who feed their dogs vegan dog food. 1.00

02:10:29.000 Like, oh, you fuck. 1.00

02:10:31.000 How dare you? 1.00

02:10:33.000 Like, you know that dog's barely surviving on that shit. 1.00

02:10:36.000 By the way, I was talking about a beluga whale earlier. 1.00

02:10:39.000 Oh, yeah, that's it.

02:10:39.000 Wait, are they as smart as a dolphin?

02:10:42.000 That's a good question.

02:10:43.000 I think it's the same family.

02:10:44.000 I mean, they're definitely the...

02:10:45.000 Yeah, it's that family, yeah.

02:10:47.000 Yeah, I think there's a whole gang of smart marine animals, you know?

02:10:52.000 Right.

02:10:53.000 And we're willing to imprison all of them.

02:10:55.000 What's really also amazing is seeing the stingrays.

02:10:57.000 They have this whole thing where it's just this pool where you can touch and feed stingrays.

02:11:01.000 And 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...

02:11:08.000 Wings almost.

02:11:09.000 It was really amazing.

02:11:11.000 Because they're so domesticated?

02:11:11.000 Yeah, yeah.

02:11:12.000 Yeah, I fed them in Hawaii.

02:11:13.000 There's a tank at the Big Island where you swim with them.

02:11:17.000 You put a snorkel on and you swim with stingrays and all these other fish.

02:11:21.000 And fish poop, by the way, everywhere you look.

02:11:23.000 It's not even a tank, actually.

02:11:25.000 It's like a big pond.

02:11:26.000 And they'll allow you to feed them.

02:11:28.000 Little kids feed them.

02:11:29.000 They hold food out, like scallops and stuff in their hands.

02:11:31.000 And the stingrays come up and they're crazy mouths and they just suck it right out of your hand.

02:11:38.000 Yeah, I agree.

02:11:41.000 I mean it is badass but I can't agree with it morally.

02:11:46.000 I just think – I think they're intelligent and I think we have to sort of draw some sort of a line.

02:11:52.000 As to how we deal with intelligent beings, our attitude is like, what are you saying?

02:11:57.000 I can't understand you.

02:11:58.000 Do you want to fish?

02:11:59.000 Then you have to do the trick. 0.99

02:12:02.000 It's kind of fucked up. 0.98

02:12:03.000 I had a friend who was a trainer. 0.99

02:12:05.000 I don't know where it was, but somewhere in Hawaii.

02:12:07.000 He was training dolphins, or he was a graduate student and was doing this work, and...

02:12:11.000 He said that by the end of it, the Dauphins had trained him.

02:12:14.000 That basically he was only getting into the pool when they would behave a certain way to get him to behave a certain way.

02:12:20.000 He just wound up one day realizing that.

02:12:22.000 Not disagreeing with you in any way, but it is nuts.

02:12:25.000 They are really, really intelligent.

02:12:27.000 Yeah, I'm sure.

02:12:28.000 They're trying to express something, and if he's paying attention, he's going to sort of catch on and move with them.

02:12:34.000 They would do the trick to get him to give them the treat, but then they would withhold the trick and then do it really well.

02:12:41.000 They'd mess with him and train him to just deliver the fish.

02:12:45.000 If I could live comfortably and not have to worry about money, I would just take care of dolphins for my job.

02:12:52.000 That's how attached to that experience to me was.

02:12:57.000 There's something with dolphins that haven't been found out yet.

02:13:00.000 They're amazing.

02:13:01.000 Well, it's not that it hasn't been found out.

02:13:02.000 It's just we can't understand them.

02:13:04.000 They're very intelligent.

02:13:05.000 Their cerebral cortex is 40% larger than a human being's.

02:13:10.000 That experience that I had when I was in the boat in Hawaii with those wild dolphins playing, it seemed very tangible to me.

02:13:19.000 And it changed the way I look at human beings.

02:13:21.000 It changed the way I look at consciousness in general.

02:13:23.000 I started thinking that their consciousness is probably quite a bit like a human's consciousness.

02:13:27.000 They just can't alter their environment.

02:13:30.000 We can't understand them and they can't alter their environment, but they seem like If you encountered...

02:13:36.000 I mean, we take for granted the fact that the way they move is very much like a fish, so we sort of categorize them.

02:13:42.000 Sort of how you were talking about trucks earlier, like, oh, that's a truck.

02:13:45.000 Oh, that's a dolphin.

02:13:47.000 Their method of locomotion is one thing, but if you met a dolphin in space...

02:13:52.000 If 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.

02:14:07.000 Yeah, you'd run.

02:14:08.000 Yeah, well, you would just freak out.

02:14:09.000 You'd be so flabbergasted that you're dealing with this alien intelligence that's just like you.

02:14:14.000 Yeah.

02:14:15.000 Dolphins 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.

02:14:23.000 There's all kinds of studies about the inner life, the emotional life of animals.

02:14:29.000 Elephants that bury their dead, grieve for their dead.

02:14:32.000 Elephants can recognize themselves in the mirror, know who they are.

02:14:35.000 All that stuff is amazing.

02:14:37.000 They can paint themselves.

02:14:37.000 Yeah, paint themselves.

02:14:39.000 Have you seen that?

02:14:39.000 That is a trip.

02:14:40.000 That's amazing.

02:14:41.000 When you see the elephant painting an elephant with his nose.

02:14:44.000 Yeah.

02:14:44.000 And grief is a big one.

02:14:46.000 Like 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,

02:15:02.000 an imaginary life almost.

02:15:04.000 We just develop an abstract sense of death.

02:15:06.000 That's when we become sophisticated.

02:15:08.000 That's when our mediating brains begin to really do it.

02:15:11.000 That'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.

02:15:28.000 I wonder if I would opt for that.

02:15:31.000 I find myself thinking about how I would want to go, given infinite technological stuff.

02:15:35.000 I would want to go out on top.

02:15:37.000 You don't want to fade anymore.

02:15:39.000 You 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.

02:15:54.000 We are one piece of a superorganism, which is the human race.

02:15:58.000 But our ego tells us, no, I must survive.

02:16:02.000 I must.

02:16:03.000 I am important.

02:16:04.000 It is I. It is me.

02:16:06.000 It's the thing that is always amazing to me about people who can be so brave and reckless with their bodies and so forth.

02:16:12.000 It's like they're taking what you're describing and sort of Somehow of resisting it in a weird way.

02:16:20.000 Like your brain has evolved to basically keep you alive, keep you out of danger.

02:16:24.000 And the idea that people can sort of voluntarily enter dangerous situations is to me amazing.

02:16:29.000 You mean like fighters or something like that?

02:16:31.000 Fighters or like...

02:16:32.000 Wingsuit people? 0.51

02:16:33.000 Yeah, exactly.

02:16:34.000 Exactly.

02:16:34.000 Extreme athlete stuff is unbelievable to me.

02:16:36.000 I just think that's so...

02:16:38.000 It's amazing and thrilling and wondrous and also scary as hell.

02:16:43.000 Sort of nonsensical from an evolutionary perspective, like the idea that you would voluntarily leap off a cliff.

02:16:49.000 You have to resist so many millennia of programming to do that.

02:16:55.000 It's nuts.

02:16:56.000 In a great way, I guess, we have the luxury of doing that. 0.99

02:17:01.000 Yeah, and it's also that weird thing that we do where we try to outdo each other and who can do the wackiest, craziest, scariest shit. 0.86

02:17:07.000 And that's how these X Games things, they've had to put limits on people.

02:17:11.000 Like say, okay, you can't do that anymore because someone just died trying.

02:17:15.000 Stop with a quadruple flip off of the top of this ramp. 0.75

02:17:20.000 It's not going to be done or it's going to be done and 20% of the people are going to die and that's not acceptable.

02:17:25.000 Yeah, yeah.

02:17:25.000 Right, right.

02:17:26.000 I mean you can't really regulate what people are going to do just to give them a suit.

02:17:30.000 Those guys are mostly doing it illegally.

02:17:32.000 But, man, just the ability to...

02:17:35.000 You know, I was once interviewing a fighter, a test pilot who went on to become an astronaut.

02:17:41.000 And I was asking him, how do you not freak out when you are sitting atop this bomb on the launch pad?

02:17:49.000 Like, 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.

02:17:55.000 Like, how do you resist the impulse to do that?

02:17:57.000 And he said, well, you know, we're trained, you know, we're recruited and trained for a specific...

02:18:02.000 Ability, you know, and situational awareness is what he described it.

02:18:05.000 And he said that one of the examples of it is what he called winding the clock.

02:18:11.000 And I was like, what's winding the clock?

02:18:13.000 He 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.

02:18:22.000 And so he comes out of this, you know, steep turn, fires the rocket, and it doesn't leave his wing.

02:18:29.000 He hears it go, but it doesn't actually leave the jet.

02:18:33.000 He looks over and it's armed on his wing.

02:18:35.000 So it's ready to blow up?

02:18:37.000 Ready to blow up, it's armed, it's ready to make him back, and you're done.

02:18:40.000 And 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.

02:18:48.000 Eject immediately or panic, you know, whatever.

02:18:50.000 It's just bad news.

02:18:51.000 And he said that in that moment, they're trained to wind the clock.

02:18:54.000 They 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.

02:19:02.000 And you're trained to do that in order to have a little downtime to think through what you're going to do next.

02:19:08.000 And 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.

02:19:18.000 Should I go out across Los Angeles and over the ocean and ditch there?

02:19:23.000 He's like, well, no.

02:19:24.000 First of all, you know, that's a lot of people.

02:19:26.000 I can't go over with an armed missile over a lot of people.

02:19:29.000 And then I don't want to be the guy who lost the $40 million airplane.

02:19:32.000 So he then thinks it through this morning.

02:19:33.000 He's like, the weather's pretty good today.

02:19:35.000 I think I can probably make it.

02:19:37.000 And by God, he lands it.

02:19:38.000 He totally does the corkscrew and comes in and lands a plane with live armament attached.

02:19:43.000 And makes it, right?

02:19:44.000 What are they telling him at the base when he's like, hey, guys, I'm flying in hot?

02:19:49.000 I wonder.

02:19:49.000 I bet there's a procedure, right?

02:19:51.000 Air Force people probably have a procedure for that. 0.99

02:19:53.000 Yeah, they get in their car and they fucking run. 0.99

02:19:56.000 That's right. 1.00

02:19:56.000 Out into the desert. 1.00

02:19:57.000 They get every general with a mile radius.

02:20:00.000 You know, but I said to him, like, I don't understand how you're able to do that.

02:20:02.000 And he's like, yeah, we're just trained to, you know, we have that ability.

02:20:05.000 You know, and that's true when you look across all, you know, there's another astronaut story.

02:20:10.000 This guy, Franklin Chang Diaz, was a Costa Rican national who was an astronaut on the shuttle.

02:20:18.000 And he narrowly avoided being killed in both the Columbia and the Challenger disasters.

02:20:22.000 He 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.

02:20:28.000 I mean, an unbelievable tragedy for this guy, twice.

02:20:32.000 And he still shares the record for the most times in space.

02:20:37.000 And, you know, has done more, I think, more spacewalks than anybody else, or something like that.

02:20:43.000 He's just an absolutely superlative human being.

02:20:45.000 And 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.

02:20:54.000 And as he's doing it, he looks down and the clouds are parted beneath him and there's Costa Rica.

02:20:59.000 And he realizes, I'm the only person of my nation who will ever have this view, you know, in all likelihood.

02:21:06.000 And 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.

02:21:18.000 I'm sure he didn't have that thought, but to me, that's what it is.

02:21:21.000 And he doesn't do it because he would have had to let go of this piece of equipment and go for the camera.

02:21:27.000 And he's got a duty to perform.

02:21:29.000 He's like, they brought me here to do this job, I'm going to do this job, and he scoots it over.

02:21:33.000 But 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...

02:21:47.000 Yeah, training is a fascinating thing.

02:21:49.000 The idea of developing your skills and your mindset to the point where you can do extremely dangerous things and keep your composure...

02:21:58.000 It's very attractive to us.

02:22:00.000 We're fascinated by heroes.

02:22:02.000 And we need them.

02:22:03.000 Yeah, we need them.

02:22:03.000 We need them.

02:22:04.000 They have to be able to do that. 0.82

02:22:05.000 Even 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. 0.82

02:22:17.000 Yeah, sure.

02:22:17.000 And that there's something that gets developed along the line.

02:22:21.000 Totally.

02:22:21.000 It's testing the limits of the human body.

02:22:23.000 I think everybody just really wants to be able to fly or do whatever.

02:22:27.000 There's this extreme – it's cliche to say it, but an extreme – you're trying to find the extremity of life.

02:22:34.000 You're trying to find how close to death can I get?

02:22:36.000 And in finding the limits of human performance, I think it's a part of the grand equation of the human race, period.

02:22:44.000 It is a part of the numbers.

02:22:47.000 Now we know that people can run a four-minute mile.

02:22:50.000 Now we know that people can do that.

02:22:51.000 It's all of these things that sort of aid in the progress of the race.

02:22:56.000 Yeah, that's right.

02:22:56.000 In some strange way.

02:22:57.000 Well, you need the person to go first.

02:22:59.000 You need the person to come pull people out of burning buildings.

02:23:02.000 You're absolutely right.

02:23:02.000 There's a...

02:23:04.000 You know a purpose to having that kind of But as we become a more and more advanced society, that need sort of...

02:23:13.000 Maybe it's going away.

02:23:14.000 That's interesting.

02:23:15.000 I think it is.

02:23:15.000 I 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.

02:23:22.000 Right.

02:23:22.000 It's because you don't have to.

02:23:23.000 Yeah, and I never will.

02:23:24.000 That's exactly right.

02:23:25.000 Well, I mean, that's not true.

02:23:26.000 You might?

02:23:26.000 That's not true.

02:23:26.000 I might, right?

02:23:27.000 And I have in my personal life experienced, you know, extreme situations.

02:23:31.000 I'm sure everybody has.

02:23:32.000 Everybody has tragedies in their lives, you know, stuff that's going on.

02:23:35.000 But...

02:23:35.000 You know, the consistent ability to resist fear and do, you know, the needful in the face of terrible odds, that is a crazy thing.

02:23:46.000 You 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,

02:24:02.000 you can't send people right into the middle of it.

02:24:03.000 But you want to be able to send in a robot that can cut its way through a door, look around, maybe bring somebody back.

02:24:10.000 And so the challenges that DARPA are putting out there include literally being able to cut through a door with a Sawzall, drive a car.

02:24:19.000 The thing has to be able to get into a car and drive away with it.

02:24:22.000 It's literally like the rules have been written by an eight-year-old.

02:24:25.000 Incredible, the challenge that they're putting out in front of these people.

02:24:27.000 And people are doing it.

02:24:28.000 The DARPA robots are some of the creepiest things that have ever been created by humans.

02:24:32.000 Those dogs and cheetahs.

02:24:35.000 Totally.

02:24:35.000 The one that looks like a pack mule.

02:24:38.000 They're disturbing to look at, right?

02:24:39.000 The latest model can throw things now.

02:24:42.000 I forget.

02:24:42.000 Like bricks, I think it is.

02:24:43.000 It can throw bricks.

02:24:44.000 Oh, it ejects.

02:24:45.000 Yeah, I've seen that.

02:24:46.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

02:24:47.000 Also, there's a whole field of study around trying to make robots.

02:24:51.000 We were messing with this on our cover when we were putting together the cover a couple issues ago.

02:24:54.000 We put one of these robots on the cover from Virginia Tech.

02:24:57.000 It's a real robot.

02:24:58.000 What we put in there is actually what it could someday look like.

02:25:01.000 It's definitely what it's headed for.

02:25:03.000 And they've built the legs and the whole thing.

02:25:06.000 It's just unbelievable.

02:25:07.000 But 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. 0.90

02:25:20.000 But it looked like it was reaching for you to kill you.

02:25:22.000 Like, it was a scary cover.

02:25:24.000 The 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.

02:25:35.000 They just look scary.

02:25:36.000 And if you make them all black and militaristic, you know, like, you know, the graphite look is scary. 0.94

02:25:40.000 And so you've got to paint them like ambulances.

02:25:42.000 That's what these guys are all learning.

02:25:43.000 Look at this robot throwing a cinder block.

02:25:46.000 It just whips a cinder block.

02:25:47.000 While bouncing itself.

02:25:48.000 Yeah, but look how it uses its legs, too. 1.00

02:25:50.000 I mean, it does like a shot putter.

02:25:52.000 Like, it kicks it.

02:25:53.000 Yeah, that's a cinder block, man.

02:25:55.000 I mean, could a human even do that?

02:25:56.000 And what if that's a grenade instead of a cinder block?

02:25:59.000 Yeah.

02:25:59.000 You showed this to little kids and it just scares the hell out of them.

02:26:02.000 Yeah, it's like Star Wars.

02:26:03.000 It's a creepy spider-looking thing.

02:26:05.000 It's like our natural instincts are being terrified of that.

02:26:07.000 Do you see that tarantula that has antlers?

02:26:10.000 It's got a defect that's growing antlers. 0.82

02:26:12.000 It's a real tarantula?

02:26:14.000 Yeah, it's crazy.

02:26:15.000 There's another robot that they've invented that drives up to a wall and then it can spring up through the air.

02:26:23.000 It can clear these big walls.

02:26:26.000 Totally.

02:26:26.000 We give that an award this year.

02:26:27.000 It's an amazing thing.

02:26:28.000 It can jump like 30 or 40 feet.

02:26:31.000 It can clear a single story building.

02:26:32.000 The idea being that it can get in wherever you need it to.

02:26:36.000 You're up on a ridge, you send it down, and it can leap You know, off a cliff.

02:26:40.000 That's the other thing is you can roll it off a cliff and it'll survive the fall.

02:26:43.000 It's incredibly hardy.

02:26:44.000 It's crazy.

02:26:44.000 Look at that.

02:26:45.000 This is that tarantula that has grown at birth defect that started growing antlers.

02:26:49.000 Whoa.

02:26:50.000 Wow.

02:26:51.000 And Jamban's scared of spiders, we just found out, because he can't even look at this photo.

02:26:55.000 Yeah, that's a weird-looking thing, those little antlers.

02:26:59.000 Well, that's like when a person's born with a tail.

02:27:01.000 You're like, what?

02:27:02.000 What is going on in the genome where that's representing itself?

02:27:05.000 That's the cats.

02:27:07.000 That's a strange little animal. 0.99

02:27:10.000 Well, spiders in general are creepy as fuck. 0.99

02:27:13.000 Yeah, no, I have trouble with those snakes. 0.99

02:27:14.000 I have the natural evolutionary response to snakes.

02:27:18.000 That's literally spineless quality.

02:27:21.000 What's that called?

02:27:21.000 Aphidiophobia?

02:27:23.000 Arachnophobia spiders, yeah.

02:27:25.000 I think it's called aphidiophobia.

02:27:26.000 It's very common, though.

02:27:27.000 Sure.

02:27:28.000 They just move in a way that my eye doesn't like to follow.

02:27:31.000 Well, people that...

02:27:33.000 I think the proponents of epigenetics... 0.73

02:27:36.000 I 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.

02:27:48.000 We 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. 0.95

02:27:58.000 So one of them was, what's the world's grossest sound?

02:28:02.000 And literally there was a guy who had You know, done a study to determine it.

02:28:06.000 And he determined that the sound was the sound of vomiting.

02:28:09.000 And they simulated it by pouring a bucket of baked beans into another bucket while somebody else was making yakking noises.

02:28:18.000 And they played all these different noises for people.

02:28:20.000 And that was the one that was grossest.

02:28:22.000 And 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.

02:28:42.000 That totally makes sense.

02:28:44.000 I've always wondered why.

02:28:45.000 Well, that also, by the way, can be bypassed.

02:28:49.000 And 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.

02:28:58.000 And a lot of other people would start throwing up, too.

02:29:00.000 You know?

02:29:00.000 No, it's just built in.

02:29:02.000 Like that scene in Stand By Me, where there's a pie-eating contest, and he's throwing up.

02:29:06.000 Well, that doesn't work on me anymore.

02:29:07.000 Because of all my years of Fear Factor, I've seen so many people throw up.

02:29:11.000 I've seen- Really?

02:29:12.000 Yeah.

02:29:13.000 That's really interesting.

02:29:14.000 I don't know how many people I've seen throw up.

02:29:16.000 We did 148 episodes and every episode somebody threw up.

02:29:20.000 You totally are a test case.

02:29:21.000 That's really interesting.

02:29:22.000 So nothing makes me throw up anymore.

02:29:25.000 I could be right next to someone throwing up on the ground and it doesn't bother me.

02:29:29.000 In fact, my wife threw up in her car once and she was all upset because she couldn't clean it because she would throw up again. 0.71

02:29:36.000 I was like, I'll clean it.

02:29:38.000 It didn't bother me at all.

02:29:39.000 I smell a puke in her car in August and it didn't bother me at all.

02:29:43.000 It totally goes away.

02:29:45.000 I can be at a bar and someone threw up in a urinal.

02:29:48.000 I'll pee on it.

02:29:49.000 It doesn't freak me out. 0.99

02:29:50.000 I think the grossest sound is two guys fucking anyway. 0.98

02:29:53.000 How do you know what that sounds like? 1.00

02:29:55.000 Busted! 1.00

02:29:56.000 Oh, shit! 1.00

02:29:57.000 I got you, son! 1.00

02:29:59.000 Well, unless you were gay, then that would be the most awesome sound ever. 1.00

02:30:02.000 Well, that was like the idea of like, do gay guys get accustomed to the smell of poop? 1.00

02:30:09.000 Is that like an okay smell to them because they're into anal sex? 1.00

02:30:14.000 I don't know. 1.00

02:30:15.000 I mean, what...

02:30:16.000 What causes certain connections, what causes you to be repulsed by certain things is always very fascinating.

02:30:23.000 Yeah, sure.

02:30:24.000 But that thing of the throw-up sound totally makes sense.

02:30:29.000 Yeah, it just makes perfect sense.

02:30:30.000 Yeah, I think that's right.

02:30:32.000 Anything liquid and squishy.

02:30:34.000 The smell of a dead death is, I think, also actually the worst.

02:30:36.000 The smell?

02:30:37.000 The smell of a dead person.

02:30:38.000 And that's also a useful instinct, I would say.

02:30:40.000 When you smell it, you want to go the other way.

02:30:42.000 That's a good idea.

02:30:43.000 Yeah, when I was a kid, someone died in our apartment building, and they didn't find the...

02:30:47.000 It was an old lady, and they didn't find her body for a while.

02:30:50.000 And it was the entire floor had this horrible, horrible odor to it.

02:30:56.000 We would walk in, you know, and then eventually they found out that this lady had died, and they went and cleaned it up.

02:31:02.000 But the smell lasted forever.

02:31:04.000 Sure, sure.

02:31:04.000 It took the longest time to clean that out.

02:31:07.000 It's not like any other dead smell.

02:31:09.000 Yeah, no.

02:31:09.000 I mean, it really is that thing of like...

02:31:12.000 We were talking many hours ago about trying to have as few openings as possible in the body.

02:31:17.000 That's the other reason you want as few as possible, because there's some stuff you've got to keep in there.

02:31:22.000 You don't want it out in the world.

02:31:23.000 And I think the fear of that smell is probably to discourage predation.

02:31:26.000 Yeah. 1.00

02:31:28.000 When we were really starving to death and people would find a dead person, they'd go, well, fuck it, man. 1.00

02:31:32.000 We might as well just eat them. 1.00

02:31:33.000 Yeah.

02:31:34.000 I bet that is part of it, or I'm sure...

02:31:37.000 One could make that argument.

02:31:38.000 And, 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.

02:31:51.000 Like there's so many reasons to stay away from, yeah, the dirtiest parts of people.

02:31:57.000 That's right. 0.85

02:31:57.000 Yeah, the evolutionary desire to escape stinky people. 0.85

02:32:01.000 That's right.

02:32:02.000 There's a whole thesis there, I'm sure.

02:32:04.000 Yeah, why is bad breath so horrible then?

02:32:06.000 I mean, that can't really affect you, for real.

02:32:08.000 I guess it can.

02:32:09.000 Maybe if the person's sick, though, right?

02:32:10.000 Sometimes it can be a symptom of disease.

02:32:12.000 That's interesting.

02:32:13.000 Yeah, maybe that's why.

02:32:15.000 That's right.

02:32:16.000 This guy's not well.

02:32:17.000 I gotta get out of here.

02:32:18.000 That's funny.

02:32:19.000 Listen, man, this has been a fascinating conversation.

02:32:21.000 Dude, this has been fascinating.

02:32:21.000 You guys are good company.

02:32:23.000 Thank you.

02:32:23.000 This is really a lovely place.

02:32:24.000 Anytime you'd like to do this again, we'd be more than happy to have you on.

02:32:26.000 Yeah, let's do it.

02:32:26.000 You're way, I'm just to say this right now, but you guys are like on it.

02:32:30.000 This is a much, like I was on my toes this whole time.

02:32:34.000 Like, you know, no dummy Joe Rogan.

02:32:36.000 Thank you.

02:32:37.000 I'm glad you had a good time.

02:32:38.000 If you want to take mushrooms and hang out with Brian in a dolphin tank, I'm sure we can accommodate you.

02:32:43.000 See, I wonder if there's experiments going on like that.

02:32:46.000 Because if I had a dolphin, I would be doing weird things like that.

02:32:49.000 There's definitely two researchers who could compare notes and come up with something like that.

02:32:53.000 Well, that's why you should read Lilly, bro.

02:32:55.000 You should read some of John Lilly stuff.

02:32:56.000 He was a pioneer in interspecies communication.

02:32:58.000 He actually, like, you know, peer-reviewed stuff on dolphin intelligence because of psychedelics and getting in dolphin tanks or getting in isolation tanks.

02:33:06.000 You need to take an isolation tank trip, too, man.

02:33:08.000 All this crazy poo-pooing of it without any personal experience.

02:33:11.000 No, I'm not poo-pooing it.

02:33:12.000 I'm just saying that I'm sure it doesn't work on some people because I've had it.

02:33:15.000 People tell me it didn't work on them.

02:33:16.000 That word doesn't work is like saying, you know, I have a computer and I don't know how to get on the internet.

02:33:23.000 Well, I think some people's minds are just too active to slow down to the point where that would be, you know, helpful for them.

02:33:29.000 Like they're, you know, almost ADD. I agree with what you said except the word to.

02:33:35.000 I don't believe that their minds are too active.

02:33:38.000 I believe their minds are active.

02:33:39.000 I believe they don't know how to manage that.

02:33:40.000 But that can be taught.

02:33:41.000 The 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.

02:33:52.000 Fighters.

02:33:53.000 A lot of fighters started using them to meditate and to practice relaxing.

02:33:57.000 Plus, it's an awesome source of magnesium.

02:33:59.000 You just need to do it, dude.

02:34:01.000 I mean, it's so crazy that you haven't done it.

02:34:02.000 It's not like you're busy all day.

02:34:03.000 No, no, I totally need to do it.

02:34:04.000 What is that?

02:34:04.000 Destroy hat.

02:34:05.000 What is that?

02:34:06.000 I don't know.

02:34:06.000 It's just a hat I got.

02:34:07.000 Yeah.

02:34:08.000 What is that on the hat?

02:34:09.000 A dude on a rocket?

02:34:10.000 I think it's the Red Skull or Satan.

02:34:12.000 Satan or Red Skull on a rocket. 0.99

02:34:13.000 Dude, that's fucking badass. 0.99

02:34:15.000 Where'd you get that? 0.99

02:34:16.000 San Diego.

02:34:17.000 Powerful San Diego.

02:34:18.000 San Diego's awesome, isn't it?

02:34:19.000 I would almost move there if it wasn't for the military presence.

02:34:24.000 Like the people are all ex-military, so everybody acts like crazy.

02:34:29.000 The bouncers of every bar are so much more strict and intense.

02:34:33.000 Like this woman came up to me and I was smoking a cigarette and she goes, are you smoking pot? 0.86

02:34:37.000 And I'm like, no, this is a cigarette.

02:34:39.000 She goes, let me see that. 0.99

02:34:40.000 Okay. 1.00

02:34:41.000 And she just walked away and I'm like, what the fuck? 0.99

02:34:43.000 No, I had no idea who she was. 1.00

02:34:44.000 A lady on the street? 1.00

02:34:45.000 Yeah, you could tell she was a military chick though. 0.99

02:34:47.000 And then it was just like that was everywhere I went.

02:34:50.000 It felt like that.

02:34:51.000 And then, I don't know, it just felt...

02:34:53.000 That is a side effect.

02:34:56.000 That's without a doubt a side effect of a military area.

02:34:58.000 If I could live near Mission Bay, I tell you, that is the most beautiful area.

02:35:02.000 And the sea...

02:35:03.000 What is that?

02:35:03.000 Sea lions?

02:35:04.000 Those retarded animals of the night that just go... 1.00

02:35:06.000 Like, listening to that is some of the funniest shit ever. 1.00

02:35:10.000 Because out of nowhere, one would just... 1.00

02:35:14.000 You're like, what the fuck is going on? 0.98

02:35:16.000 By the way, that's also what attracts sharks. 0.99

02:35:18.000 Oh, really? 0.80

02:35:18.000 Yeah, sharks love to eat the fuck out of those things. 0.80

02:35:20.000 I feel bad for those guys. 1.00

02:35:21.000 They're just like big fat retards that live in the city. 1.00

02:35:23.000 Big meat popsicles, right? 1.00

02:35:24.000 That's what they're there for, I think.

02:35:25.000 That's so delicious.

02:35:26.000 That's probably what they're there for.

02:35:28.000 I mean, what else are they doing?

02:35:29.000 They're providing food to sharks.

02:35:31.000 Looking up in the sky.

02:35:33.000 Running for it.

02:35:35.000 You ever see those poor walruses that polar bears run up to and they can't get away?

02:35:38.000 They're on the ground.

02:35:39.000 Why can't they get away? 0.98

02:35:41.000 Because nature doesn't want you to get away, dummy. 1.00

02:35:43.000 You're a big meat sickle. 0.99

02:35:44.000 Someone's got to feed this big guy. 0.96

02:35:46.000 That's right.

02:35:48.000 Listen, man, thank you very much.

02:35:49.000 Yeah, I appreciate it.

02:35:50.000 We really appreciate this.

02:35:51.000 I'm so glad we did this.

02:35:52.000 And let's do it again.

02:35:52.000 Yeah, sounds great.

02:35:53.000 And you can follow Jacob on Twitter.

02:35:56.000 What is your Twitter handle?

02:35:57.000 You've got a bunch of lines.

02:35:59.000 It's got an underscore.

02:35:59.000 I was late.

02:36:00.000 I'm sorry.

02:36:01.000 So anyway, it's underscore Jacob Ward underscore.

02:36:03.000 Can you get Jacob Ward?

02:36:04.000 Just search for my name.

02:36:05.000 Yeah, search for my name and you'll just find me.

02:36:06.000 Jacob Ward.

02:36:07.000 Jacob Ward.

02:36:08.000 It's underscore Jacob Ward underscore.

02:36:11.000 Yeah, I'm sorry.

02:36:12.000 Oh, what?

02:36:12.000 You need to change that.

02:36:13.000 I don't say it out loud ever.

02:36:14.000 I would say this is the only time I've ever had to say it out loud.

02:36:17.000 It's easy to find.

02:36:18.000 Ward science.

02:36:19.000 Just go Jacob Ward.

02:36:20.000 Just look for my name on Google.

02:36:21.000 You'll find it.

02:36:21.000 Do you have a little check next to your name so everybody knows it's the real you?

02:36:25.000 Are you verified?

02:36:25.000 No, you're not.

02:36:26.000 Oh, I don't even know.

02:36:27.000 You're right.

02:36:28.000 You don't even know about that?

02:36:28.000 I haven't even done that.

02:36:29.000 I'm sorry.

02:36:30.000 Yeah, once you get – you've got to get into that world of fake Jacob Wards.

02:36:33.000 I guess so. 0.99

02:36:34.000 God damn it. 0.99

02:36:34.000 I've got to get verified. 0.99

02:36:35.000 Because a bunch of people are going to have fake Jacob Ward accounts and post a bunch of non-scientific shit and attribute it to you. 0.97

02:36:42.000 That's funny. 0.98

02:36:42.000 That could happen. 0.98

02:36:43.000 You know what sucks, Joe, is that I don't have it and I have a bunch of fakes that are actually acting like me and stuff like that.

02:36:49.000 And I just found out there's this guy that's on Twitter that has like 2,000 Twitter followers and his name is like Spilled Bag of Ice. 0.84

02:36:58.000 And he's verified.

02:37:00.000 Huh.

02:37:00.000 He's verified.

02:37:01.000 A bag of ice.

02:37:02.000 Let me show you this.

02:37:03.000 I know that account because do you know what spilled bag of ice came from?

02:37:06.000 No.

02:37:06.000 It 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.

02:37:17.000 Yeah.

02:37:17.000 And I was like, get back in there!

02:37:18.000 And it was funny, and so this guy became Spilled Bag of Ice, and he's verified.

02:37:22.000 And he's verified. 1.00

02:37:23.000 That's the internet telling you to go fuck yourself, pal. 1.00

02:37:25.000 Yeah, I'm done. 1.00

02:37:26.000 Listen, and Wikipedia.

02:37:27.000 I bet he's got a Wikipedia page, too.

02:37:29.000 Oh, I'm sure.

02:37:29.000 I'm going to escape and live a dolphin.

02:37:31.000 Someone can tell you how to get verified.

02:37:33.000 I'm sure there's a convenient way to do it.

02:37:36.000 You just have to find it.

02:37:37.000 Yeah, it's supposed to be if there's enough people that are acting like you.

02:37:40.000 And there's so many people, like, I don't even say who, I know is acting like me online.

02:37:46.000 And people are actually asking him questions like, hey, Red Band, what's going on?

02:37:50.000 You're talking about that crazy dude that we both know?

02:37:52.000 Yeah.

02:37:53.000 Okay.

02:37:54.000 Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised.

02:37:55.000 Yeah.

02:37:56.000 But, you know, you have the most, right?

02:37:58.000 Huh?

02:37:58.000 Yeah, but it's just annoying that there's at least two people maybe that are thinking this is him.

02:38:03.000 You've made it.

02:38:04.000 That's what this is.

02:38:05.000 I think you've made it.

02:38:05.000 You've got people pretending to be you.

02:38:07.000 I just want a checkmark.

02:38:08.000 Yeah, he wants a Wikipedia page and a blue checkmark.

02:38:11.000 The kid's illegitimate.

02:38:12.000 He's hurting.

02:38:13.000 He's hurting on the inside.

02:38:14.000 Underscore Jacob Ward, underscore, or do a Twitter search for Jacob Ward on Popular Science Magazine.

02:38:21.000 Editor-in-Chief.

02:38:22.000 Thank you very much, man.

02:38:23.000 Really awesome time.

02:38:24.000 Thanks, guys.

02:38:25.000 It was awesome.

02:38:26.000 Thank you, everybody, for tuning into the podcast.

02:38:28.000 We apologize again one more time for that drunk podcast of last week.

02:38:32.000 But that's what happens, folks.

02:38:33.000 No, no.

02:38:33.000 That's the best one.

02:38:34.000 That's what happens when you go off the rails.

02:38:35.000 Let's submit that to the Podcast Awards.

02:38:37.000 Thank you to Ting for sponsoring our podcast.

02:38:39.000 Go to rogan.ting.com and save $25 off...

02:38:44.000 It's a service credit or device discount.

02:38:47.000 And it's an awesome cell phone company that supports our podcast.

02:38:52.000 Thanks also to Squarespace.

02:38:55.000 If you go to squarespace.com forward slash Joe and enter in the code Joe3, you can save yourself 10% off of any new product.

02:39:10.000 We're good to go.

02:39:13.000 We're good to go.

02:39:30.000 This is the month of March if you're listening to this.

02:39:33.000 If it's April, I'm sure it will be Squarespace 4. But right now it's Squarespace 3. You mean Joe 3?

02:39:38.000 Joe 3, yeah. 0.99

02:39:39.000 What the fuck am I even talking about? 0.95

02:39:41.000 Also, Onnit.com. 0.98

02:39:42.000 Go to O-N-N-I-T and use the code name ROGAN to save 10% off any of the supplements.

02:39:49.000 We will see you tomorrow with our buddy JD, who's a long-time member of the website.

02:39:56.000 And then we'll be here on Wednesday with Ben Hoffman from Comedy Central's new show.

02:40:01.000 What is this show called?

02:40:02.000 The Ben Hoffman Show or something like that?

02:40:04.000 But very cool guy and very funny guy and we'll see him on Wednesday.

02:40:08.000 Alright my friends, this weekend Nashville at Zany's.

02:40:12.000 Me and powerful Tom Segura.

02:40:15.000 Friday and Saturday night.

02:40:17.000 Tickets are going fast.

02:40:18.000 There's not much left.

02:40:18.000 So get in there son.

02:40:20.000 And we'll see you tomorrow. 0.99

02:40:21.000 We love the shit out of ya. 0.99

02:40:21.000 Bye. 0.99

The Joe Rogan Experience - March 18, 2013

Joe Rogan Experience #339 - Jacob Ward

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