Joe Rogan Experience _1904 - Neil deGrasse Tyson

0:00Joe Rogan wants to check it out. The Joe Rogan experience. Trim by day Joe Rogan podcast by night all day. I don't want every one of my senses to sound like Barry Wayne. Is that what it sounds like in your ear? And her phones they do. It's like, oh, hey, baby. I just can't. Whereas without the headphones, I'm just regular. All right. Ready? Oh, ready. Good to see you. Hey. I'm excited to talk to you about a bunch of things, but I've been paying attention to all the web telescope stuff. Oh my gosh. Fascinating. It's all that. Could you please explain the difference in the ability of the capabilities of this telescope versus what we've had previously? Yeah. So first of all, it's all that. And the excitement was in part because so much could have gone wrong with this thing. And the fact that nothing went wrong. We were ecstatic. Could you explain how complicated it is to get something like that?

1:02Yeah, here's so one of the great challenges that we face is how do you put a telescope in orbit that's bigger than the rocket that's going to launch it? Is that even possible? And the Hubble telescope, do you know what set the size of that? 94 inch diameter mirror? That's the biggest mirror you could fit in the payload of the space shuttle. That's what set the size of that telescope. The big as it was, we would have made it bigger if the space shuttle were bigger. Now, I don't know if you've seen the Hubble telescope. There's a replica of it at the Aaron Space Museum. Let's take a photo of it. And it'll just, it's there hanging from the ceiling. But if you want to know how, it's about the size of a Greyhound bus. So the space shuttle deployed a Greyhound bus into orbit, which is the Hubble Space Telescope. And the value of the Hubble was that you could update it with servicing missions. And it was serviced many times. And as a result, it lived within our culture for three decades.

2:05There are people who came of age, only ever knowing the majesty of the universe as delivered to you by the Hubble telescope. Thirty years worth of this. Think about it. Most other telescopes they put into orbit and they have a five year mission and then they come down. So they don't have a chance to get to get inside you to become something that you, that you, oh, you got a nice visual there. So the Hubble telescope on the left, which every year, every year I post a tweet at the end of the Stanley Cup. And I say, the Stanley Cup and the Hubble telescope had the same designer. Really? No, I'm just kidding. No, just look at the thing. It looks like the Stanley Cup. A little bit. I wouldn't confuse it too if they were in a room together. So here's the thing. So notice the Hubble telescope. Its diameter is the spherical shape that fits in the spherical payload of the space shuttle. So now we want to put a bigger telescope into orbit.

3:07How do you do that? And so this is where you need engineers, clever engineers. We say here's a rocket, one of the most powerful rockets we can use. But the faring, that's the place where you hold the payload, can only be so big. And they say, all right, why don't we fold the telescope? Now how are you going to fold the mirror? Oh, you turn the mirror into segments. Hexagons. Hexagons, one of only three shapes that can tile a surface, a square, a triangle, and a hexagon. No other shape can do this. So well, you can have other irregular shapes that can match up. You can testulate what it's called. If you have a rate, what's called a regular polygon? So here in the image there, what you can see, it's all of the mirror segments. Those fold into a narrow structure along with the unfurling solar panels, as well as the heat shields.

4:09Notice how it's made in Northrop Grumman. By the way, Grumman has a long history in helping NASA put stuff in space. The LAM, Lunar Excursion Module. Remember that? The thing that landed on the moon? That was designed and built in Beth Page's Long Island at Grumman Aerospace. And so you go to Beth Page today, people still stand tall, because they had ants and uncles who worked on that project. Space is a force of nature unto itself. In our sense of pride, in our sense of achievement, in our sense of what operates on civilization to take us into the future, lest we continue to regress and move back into the cave, which we came. There it is, all folded up in the image we now see for those who are watching this. And you slip that into a fairing. And then you launch it a million miles from Earth.

5:09This is the Sun from Earth. And it unfurls like petals of a flower. Is there an animation of how they're doing? Oh yeah, yeah, slow-mo animation. Sure he can find it. And it's the deployment, how it deployed as it was on its way to its location, which is one of the Lagrangian points in orbit. For every two objects that orbit each other, there are five Lagrangian points. So here we are unfolding. So there we have solar panels coming out the side. And there's the communication antenna. And it has a unique set of baffles that shield it from sunlight so that the mirror and the detector can be very, very cold. Because it's specially tuned to observe infrared that comes to us from space. And infrared, as you may know, we normally associate it with heat.

6:12Well, how am I going to detect something that's very, very cold in space? If my detector is hotter than what I'm trying to detect, there's no way to see something that is warmer than the temperature of your detector. Your detector has to be very cold, extremely cold. So these are the baffles and there are many, many layers. So that when sunlight hits one layer, that layer absorbs it and re-radiates it in both directions, forward and back. So there's less that goes to the next layer. So then the next layer re-radiates it. And by the time it gets the fourth layer, hardly anything goes towards the telescope. And so it is insulated and it drops to deep space cold temperatures. And it's literally where the sun don't shine right now. So the solar panels are getting the solar energy from the bottom? Yeah, because that's the direction the sun is. It radiates off the bottom and those are the things that protect it. And we see how all the layers, yeah, it's amazing.

7:14And it's specifically tuned for the infrared part of the spectrum. You remember the spectrum. So you have like visible light, right? The Roy G bib, right? If you want to remember it red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. Those are the parts of the spectrum we can see. But there's light outside of this. There's like beyond the violet, there's ultraviolet. That's how you get that. And below the red is infrared, not visible to the human eye. By the way, insects can see ultraviolet. We can't. That's why bug zappers work. You put a UV light in a bug zapper? The bug say, oh my gosh, I love ultraviolet. And then they get zapped. And we're old enough to remember before the bug zappers, you'd had a picnic bulb for a twilight picnics. And it's like a yellow bulb, kind of yellow amber bulb. It was a bug bulb. It was sold as bug bulbs. It's not that they repelled bugs. It's that the bugs couldn't even see it.

8:14Because their whole vision is shifted towards the ultraviolet. And it leaves out the deep red. So that's evidence we're smarter than bugs. There's one piece. Luckily. One piece of evidence that we're smarter than bugs. So just to bring that to a closure, the earliest forming galaxies in the universe radiated a lot of ultraviolet. So you might say, well, let's get an ultraviolet telescope. No. Because 14 billion years later, the expansion of the universe has red shifted the ultraviolet into the infrared. So if you want to see the birth of galaxies, you've got to know what they look like in the here and the now. And in the here and the now, it's in the infrared. So this is a telescope specifically tuned to see galaxies born at the edge of the universe. And infrared also allows you to see deep into gas clouds. Now, when they're showing you an image like this,

9:15the pillars of creation, which were so named at the time Hubble first attempted this, we were gagged out over the Hubble image of this. And now like the JWST, oh my gosh. For those who are more prone to religion, some have called this the hand of God. Because if you look at the pillars, you can kind of picture like a thumb and fingers. So but regardless, this is nearby. This is the telescope peering deep into gas clouds that otherwise would enshroud what's going on. And you get to see stars being born, planets being born. And so what's remarkable about JWST is that to be tuned for the edge of the universe and the birth of galaxies is the same properties you would want to see the birth of stars. A star is born right in front of your nose

10:16that would otherwise be cloaked by gas. And infrared penetrates those clouds and enables you to see it as though the cloud isn't even there. And you already know this because when if you're driving through fog, okay, you put on your fog lights. The fog lights are not blue. They're like reddish amber, okay? That improves your ability to see through the fog. If we could see infrared, that's the kind of light you'd use then you wouldn't even know the fog was there. That's why self-driving cars will be amazing. It won't matter if it's foggy. They'll be able to see everything. Just give them infrared sensors. The fog is irrelevant. They can drive a hundred miles an hour in dense fog and all the cars will see each other. And they want to change lines. They tell all the cars I'm going to change lines, they'll part for them, open up. And we won't get 40,000 deaths a year as we currently do from automobile accidents. Now, how much bigger is this telescope? So you wanted to think about collecting area.

11:17I forgot the exact number. Something like eight times around there. More powerful in the sense of it can see things eight times dimmer. There you go. So that's two and a half squared. It's about eight times the area. And the technology obviously is improved as well. So like the ability that... Well, our detectors are better. And let me remind you that when the Hubble was designed, it was designed in like the 1980s. It was scheduled to go up and then we had the challenger accident. And that delayed the shuttle program. So there's Hubble sitting there in woth balls with an old Microsoft chip. And by the time it launched, it was already not as fast as it could have been. And so the very first servicing mission swapped all that out and put in better methods and tools for measuring what it is we always needed it to do. So this is... So one sad part about this is that it's not serviceable.

12:19We have no access to that point in space a million miles from the moon. We haven't left low earth orbit since 1972. When I go in out a million miles from earth to fix a telescope. So that's unfortunate. Maybe a robotic fix? I don't know. Do refill some of the fuel it needs fuel to station keep. Didn't it get hit by a micrometeon? Yeah, well that's the brakes. When you're in space. Yeah. Yeah, but it doesn't affect the overall performance. That's amazing. Yeah, well it's huge. And micrometeons will do small damage. But you don't want it in the middle of a meteor storm. That would be totally bad. And do they... Well they obviously know where some of the asteroid belts are and where some of the near-by-earth objects are. Yeah, so in this context... So first most asteroids are in the asteroid belt. So that's between Mars and Jupiter. So I have an asteroid named after me.

13:19Congratulations. I'll meet the brag or anything. Can you get a star named after you online? Not leaked. Not authentically. You just get robbed. The schedule is... With your name drawn in the map. CK for a piece of paper. Yeah, they claim that it gets registered with the astrophysicist, but it doesn't. No, there's only one way we name stars. And that's by committee and by traditions and this sort of thing. It's their fascinating traditions. So planets are named after Roman gods and planet moons are named after Greek characters in the life of the Greek god, who's the counterpart to that Roman god. So Jupiter for example, one of its moons is Ganymede. Ganymede was the man-servant of Zeus and Zeus and Jupiter were corresponding gods in Greek and Roman. And not only that, what's the number? Is it about half? Somewhere around there of all the stars and the night sky that have names, have Arabic

14:21names. So in my field, we have deep respect for people who made great inroads into understanding the natural universe and the golden age of Islam from a thousand years ago made material contributions in this regard. And of course, Greek and Roman legends and this sort of thing. So there they are in its influence on Western culture. So yeah, no, the universe is a fun place. Pretty fun place. Yeah, yeah. So this James Webb telescope in terms of its ability to recognize things. Like what magnitude of improvement are we talking about from the Hubble? Yeah, fact of ten. Yeah, easily. That's right. Well, the fact of ten for the things Hubble could see, but it's incalculable when it sees things that Hubble could have never seen because Hubble was not tuned for the infrared. So then you can't even compare it. It's a complete other window opened up to the universe for you. So what has changed in terms of our understanding? The Webb has been in the million mile orbit or how far away it is for how long now?

15:29Well, it got there and then we did some engineering. So I guess a year, a year and a half. And what has changed in our understanding? So that's been people's first question. And what I want to do is temper that to say something a little different. So yes, we expect James Webb to make great discoveries. We expect that. But the first order of business is hardly ever, let's discover something new today. It's, here's something that we have limited understanding of. Let's improve on that. And in so doing, we deepen our understanding of how things work in the universe. That doesn't always involve overturning a previous idea or discovering something that nobody ordered. All right? That will happen. We fully expect that to happen. But we targeted parts of the sky initially because we know other telescopes have gone there before. And we're going to say, how can we further advance and deepen our understanding? One thing it's going to be able to do and it has already done.

16:31We have, you know, many exoplanets there are. I don't know how many of your audience was born after 1995. How many 27 year olds and younger? Probably quite a few. OK, so I will take this opportunity to knight them. Generation X, so planet. I see. 1995 was the first exoplanet discovered, planet orbiting another star. And I'll never forget that because it was my first time on national television. I was freshly minted as director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York City. And NBC sent the New York City, this is the media news headquarters, right, of all the networks. So NBC sent an action cam. They interviewed me because of my title, not because they knew that it will give a crap who I was. My title was director of the planetarium. And so I gave my best professional reply. I saw what was the Doppler shift. This is how it's discovered and what we do and how we measure it.

17:36And I was describing the fact that when you discover these planets, you don't actually see the planet. It's the effect of the planet's gravity on the host star. And so if you'd watch the host star, the host star like jiggles, OK, just a little bit in response to the planet going back and forth around it. So you're measuring the star. So I motioned that like with my hips and that evening on the evening news. That's all they showed was me jiggling my hips. I said, oh my gosh. OK, that's how you're going to do this. OK, you don't want me to be professor Neil. You want me to be sound bite Neil. All right. So from then on, I practiced my sound bites. And a sound bite is like three sentences. Oh, so you recognize that this is the format now. Correct. And I said, I can't just give them my stump speech as professor of astrophysics. It has to work in their medium. And so I went home and stood in front of the mirror and had people just shout out things

18:36to me. Anything in the universe, any idea, object, person, place or thing. And I would come up with like three sentences that are interesting, make a smile, and be tasty enough to want to tell someone off the anatomy of a sound bite. Try it. Say anything in the whole universe. How do we know how? No, just one word. Just say anything. The Big Bang. Big Bang. Ooh, the birth of space time, energy and everything we know and love about this universe. It occurred 14 billion years ago. And we have no idea what happened before it. And we're still expanding as we will forever. I read an article. That's my sound bite for the Big Bang. That's good. It's a good sound bite. Yeah. Don't go to the web, telescope and what they were taking in consideration is the possibility that the Big Bang may be incorrect, and that the universe might be larger and older than we think.

19:36So I hesitate to ask what pages on the internet you hang out on. It was a legend. It wasn't saying the universe is older, saying, as more data and new information comes in. There is a distinct possibility that the Big Bang might just be the, it just might explain the reach of the technology and not the actual scale of the universe itself. Okay, so the way to think about this is, and this is the way science has worked since basically the year 1600, where Galileo sort of starts codifying what people knew probably should be happening, but no one really did it in large scale. If you have an idea about something, then you test it multiple ways and get other people to test it. And if the tests give you consistent results, you have a new understanding of the universe. When that happens, that knowledge of the universe doesn't go away. It doesn't get undone.

20:39What happens typically is you have a deeper understanding of the universe in which that understanding gets embedded. And you realize that you only understood a small part of a larger whole, but the small parts you did understand, where you had multiple experiments that confirmed it, that doesn't change. So the cleanest example of this, and I'll get back to your question, is Newton's laws of motion and gravity. Did anyone see anything move faster than a galloping horse in his day? Probably not. And so the Newton's laws of motion and gravity worked. They worked not only for galloping horses, it worked for the moon and orbit around the earth, and the earth and orbit around the sun, and Jupiter's moons and orbit around Jupiter. And for the planets. So, okay, but wait a minute, it doesn't work for Mercury. Mercury's orbit is not following Newton's laws. Is it something wrong with the data?

21:41Let's check it. Data's correct. Oh my gosh, what's happening? Einstein comes along. It says, I have a new understanding of gravity and a new understanding of motion. And it accounts for this weirdness in Mercury's orbit. What was the weirdness? It does, it's shape was not exactly what Newton's laws of gravity would give you. It's shape could only be accounted for when you throw in Einstein's theory of general relativity. Why? Because the sun's gravity is so monstrous, and Mercury's orbiting close enough to it, that it's being influenced by extra-funominant going on in the universe. That's the product of very high and significant gravity. And so, so then do we throw Newton out the window? No, actually, you know what Newton's laws are? They're what Einstein's laws look like when you put in low speeds and low gravity. If you put in low speeds, they become Newton's laws. In that limit,

22:43Newton's laws don't stop working where they used to work. We'll follow to the moon used only Newton's laws. Because Einstein didn't matter at those scales. The moon and earth and rockets, when I go fast enough for any of that to matter. But when you start going fast enough, you cannot use Newton's laws. You have to use a deeper understanding. Now, where does Einstein take us? You go into the center of a black hole, you get black holes from Einstein. Center black hole is a singularity. All the theories say the matter occupies zero volume thereby having infinite density. And that's kind of weird. What? No, you can't have infinite. No, that's a limit of Einstein's theory. That's where it breaks down. It's some of joke that's where God divides by zero. Remember in math class, you can't divide by zero. It's not defined or not allowed. So, in Einstein's equations, we're dividing by zero at the singularity. So, we all know

23:45that is brilliant as Einstein was. And as successful as his general theory of relativity has been, it has limits. And one limit is the center of a black hole. And another limit is the very birth of the universe itself. Getting back to your question, the big bang. So, we have top people working on trying to resolve the singularity problem. And in so doing, you get to some ideas that will maybe our big bang, because the big bang is not going to go away. All the data support this. So, now I've got this big bang thing. Okay? And well, is this embedded in something bigger? So, when you put quantum physics and general relativity and you try to come up with some bigger understanding, deeper understanding, strength theorists have been all into this. You get a multiverse. We didn't pull that out of our ass that came out of the equations. So, how old is the multiverse?

24:47I don't know. It's definitely older than our universe, because it birthed our universe, and it births other universes, and it births the way the equations drive it, and infinity of universes. This is the idea that maybe there's a version of us in another where I'm bald and you got the afro, but everything else is the same. And also a version where everything's the same. Where everything would be the same. Yes. Everything you've ever said has been said before exacting the same order. Correct. There's no reason to presume that everything in this universe isn't or hasn't already played out in the exact way in another one of these infinite universes. And in an infinite number of different ways. Correct. And so that is what comes out of the equations. So that makes the big bang a kind of a small part of a much larger hole. And so, yeah, we're ready for that. But the fact that the universe had a beginning 14 billion years ago, and there's the cosmic microwave background, all of these features are intact. They're not going to all of a sudden

25:53not apply. That's my point. That's my long answer to your question. So this thing that happened 14 billion years ago, what is the predominant theory of why? So this multiverse concept gives us a reason why. Okay. So it's like imagine you're rolling around in a basin. Okay. And you're stable there. You're just fine. But then something kicks you out of the basin. And you didn't know that there's a huge hill to roll down after you come out of that basin. But you didn't know that you thought everything was just fine. You roll down that hill. You're gaining energy. At the bottom of the hill, something stops you. And then we does all that energy go. One of the hypotheses and I'm highly simplifying here is that the energy gained by rolling down a hill.

26:53And these are energy hills that would exist in this sort of higher dimensional space that we're talking about. That energy has to manifest in that object somehow. And it becomes an explosion and gives birth with enough energy. It gives birth to matter. Everything that we know and love. And it expands because when you concentrate that much energy in a small spot, that's the only thing you can do. I understand you're simplifying it, but I don't understand it. Simplifying it in the sense that by using this basin analogy and rolling down a hill, there are equations of the energetics of a system. This is called a false vacuum. So you can be in a place that's not the true bottom energy state of the system. But you think everything is fine. But it's not. And so if you move around and among these hills and valleys, you end up birthing universes out the other side. And this

27:54multiverse concept actually delivers this for you basically for free. That thought would be that the big bang is just one of many events that happen in the multiverse. Correct. And not only that, it could be that other big bang events might have a different, slightly different laws of physics in it. So you want to watch out for that if you cross over from one universe to the other. And the charge on the electron is slightly different. You could like all your atoms could just scatter or compress into a pile of goo. Yeah, so take something to test first. Yeah, send a chicken out there. Chicken. Chicken's getting no respect. What happened to Guinea pigs? Well, Guinea pigs, they're cute and furry. Oh my gosh. Chickens are way easier to just spend a whole section in this in this book talking about people

28:58who love animals and want to care for them and don't want to eat them. But the only love ones that are cuddly. Oh yeah, for sure. The plush toy out of it. My agent said that she knows I hunt. She's like, you should hunt pigs because they're ugly. Oh, I'm like, how dare you? First of all, domesticated pigs are adorable. They are. Yeah, domesticated dogs are ugly too, because they're desperate. In fact, I have a, I have a voice cameo of a pig in a Disney XD cartoon called Gravity Falls. It's a farmhouse and there's a pig that lives with everybody. And the pig eats some slop that the kids are told makes you smarter. And so they bought it out of fair or something. So they went to sleep putting the slop on their forehead, thinking it would get into their head and make them smart. But the pig sees it on their forehead and licks it off of their forehead. And then overnight the pig becomes a supreme genius builds an Adam smasher, builds a voice translator.

29:58And while the pig is smart, I'm its voice. It's cute. It's cute. And so, but what was I talking about before? Big bang, multiverse is different laws of physics. Yeah, different slightly different laws of physics are a fascinating prospect. How that they might vary and how you might want to avoid it. Oh, but I was talking about, you want to save animals. I've never seen, I've never seen anyone say, save the leeches. No, no one cares about bugs. Save the ticks. In particular, parasites, save the mosquitoes. Mosquitoes, you know, the biggest enemy of humans as big and enemy as we are to each other through warfare and the history of civilization. The greatest enemy to human life has been the mosquito. Responsible for more than a billion human deaths in the history of civilization. And so here we have mosquitoes, ticks, tapeworms, you know, go down the list and

31:02you can ask if you really into animals and don't want to kill them, if you heard that ticks were endangered, would you start a movement to protect ticks? Would you do that? And if you would, a more power to you, but I'm thinking you're not. Why would you, if you know, about Lyme disease? This is my point. Yeah, or this is my point. By the way, the Lyme virus wants to live too, right? These are all creatures on God's green earth, right? And so you end up being a species bigot. That's in the chapter of meat terians and vegetarians. There's the philosophies that are that each of those camps will embrace. And the question is how thoroughly thought through are those philosophies? Like in one example, let's say you don't want to kill animals, but you, so you have a humane mouse trap in your basement. Okay? Why not? You don't want to snap the neck of

32:05the mouse. That's cruel. And you like animals, right? So you save the mouse. You got to check on it every few days because they dry out quickly if you trap it. So, and so what do you do when you catch it? What do they do? Release it? Release it back into the wild. Guaranteeing the mouse gets eaten whole by an owl or pecked apart by all manner of woodland predators between nine and 18 months of its life. So the safest thing to do with your mouse is to leave it in your basement. If that's, if you really care about animal life and the mouse managed to get into your basement, leave it there. It'll live up to six years in your basement. I lived in Colorado for a while next to an ashram and I was visiting the ashram and talking to the woman who runs it and she sprayed raid all over these ants. And I go, what are you doing? And she's like, well, it's unfortunate, but you know, we have to address the fact that we have an infestation of insects. I'm like, you just

33:09mass killed all these living beings, right? And poison from the sky. And you did it in front of me. Aerial assaults while you espousing the benefits of Buddhism and meditation and yeah, so people kind of cherry pick. Yeah. And I understand it, but and I don't mind if someone cherry picks as long as they're completely self-aware. Most of it. And by the way, the home that where you're saving the mouse, I did a rough calculation. It's it's probably made from the wood of about 50 trees. Each tree could have lived a hundred years, but didn't because it was cut down to make your home. The two by the, you know, the studs, the two by fours, the floorboards, the the wall panels, the, you know, the, the siding. And each of those trees was home to birds and insects and fungus and squirrels and and every day of that tree's life via photosynthesis. It created 15 times the

34:20mass of the mouse in breathable oxygen. So I ask you, who do you think nature cares more about? The tree or your one ounce mouse? Probably a tree. I'm thinking. And some trees live a thousand years. Well, have you paid attention to some of the new research that's being done about how trees communicate with each other? I'll get to that. Yeah, get to that. That's in that chapter, the Terrians and Vegetarians chapter. So, so trees are fascinating. I've heard people say, well, the mouse has a beating heart and the tree does not. What plants do not and animals do. And I said to my, well, let me think this through. If you cloak a tree, does it not suffocate? If you cut a tree, does it not bleed? If you cut off its nutrients at the base, does it not wither and die? Well, when they're aware they're being eaten, they release plant defense. I'm getting

35:22there. All I'm saying is the tree gets nutrients from the soil to the topmost leaf. It does it not for want of a beating heart. It does it in spite of not having one. It has a circulation. It just has a different game life. It's where I get my maple syrup from. Tree blood. So, let us, so to fall to tree or plant life for not having a beating heart, when it's not that they need one and don't have one, it's that they don't need one and never wanted one. Now, you talk about the, you're talking about the mycelium. So, this is a interconnected network. It's a fungal, fungal network underfoot in a forest where it connects multiple kingdoms of life. There are four kingdoms. You might have learned that there were two. We've upped it since then. Those two kingdoms are still intact, but like I said, now there's more. It's embedded in a larger

36:23truth. There's that plant kingdom, animal kingdom, fungal kingdom, and then we have a kingdom that includes all of the bacteria and archaea and other microscopic life forms. And so, here's an interesting fact. I lost sleep for a week over this, you ready? If you look at the common ancestor between fungus and animals, because the tree of life has, ultimately has one taproot. As it splits, it specieates and you get all these things, the diversity of life on earth is is enabled by the fact that life can speciate. Okay, you look at the common ancestor between animals and fungus. The common ancestor between humans and mushrooms, split later, then the common ancestor, then its common ancestor split with green plants. What that means is we and mushrooms are more alike

37:30than either we or mushrooms are to green plants. Well mushrooms breed oxygen. All I'm saying is you grill a portable mushroom? What's the first word people use to describe it? Vegetarian. No, no. No, you don't. You talk about mushrooms tasting meaty. Yeah, meaty, meaty mushroom. No one has, last I checked, no one has ever accused kale of tasting meaty. So in a way we're kind of biting into ourselves, plus mushrooms, you know, shrooms, you know, people have whole relationships with mushrooms. Oh yeah. Yeah. Mushrooms of fungus, fungus thrives on our body. Have you ever done psychedelic mushrooms? I've never done anything psychedelic. Can I tell you why? Yeah, please do. So I don't know if it's a good reason. I don't know if it's the best reason that can exist, but for me it's a really good reason.

38:34The human mind barely works as it is, barely. You ever see a book of optical illusions? No one doesn't love a good book of optical illusions. Can you tear in the pale? What is that? Was it in the page? Out of the pages? The line longer is it shorter and you scratch in your head. These are simple line drawings that confound the human mind's ability to interpret. Our brain barely works as an accurate decoder of the natural world around you. You know, I want to stir in chemicals. I recognize it'll take you on a ride, but I have always valued objective reality. I don't want anything interfering with my understanding of what is actually happening in front of me.

39:34And there are people who would claim that under the influence they're accessing some actual other reality. All I can say is if in that other reality you can invent the James Webb Space Telescope, tell me about it. If you can figure out how to fly, and if you can do that, tell us about it. And there are people say, oh, I visited Venus when I was on a head trip. Did you bring back evidence? Evidence matters? Okay. Do you bring it? No, but it was in their head. Well, the material world, we're talking about as actual physical objects, right? It's that like if you could bring back the physical universe, the physical, what they're experiencing is something akin to what you could call a hallucination. You could call it a portal where physical reality doesn't exist, and you only exist as consciousness. Here's my skepticism. I don't mind people saying that they visited another planet,

40:38or whatever they're visiting, or somewhat astral plane. Okay. I don't, okay. I'm, you know, write a travelogue and share it with people as some have done. I guess I would ask whether what you experienced is part of an objective reality that we can all recognize. Because if it's not, then it's completely in your head. And if it's completely in your head, but wait a minute. It's less useful. What do you mean by that? Part of an objective reality. An objective reality. So here's an example. When people have these near death experiences, or one where they're dying on a table, and they, a common lead described, they leave their body, and they look back on themselves. Okay. That's a thing going, that's something. Okay. Let's investigate this. So the test for whether you really left your body, or whether you were hallucinating it, is

41:40get some writing that faces the ceiling up above your body. Okay. And they've done this experiment. And if you're floating above your body, above that piece of paper, when you come back to life, you should be able to say what's written on that piece of paper. And that is yet to happen. If you get above it. Yeah. If you get above it. Correct. That is yet to happen. That'd be really good. Piece of paper be suspended. No, you have to put it up on a shelf or something. Yeah, you'd be able to see put it in a way that it would be clearly. But then the person would have to die knowing that piece of paper was there and then be brought back. Possibly if, if, if, yeah, I mean, the, the, you have to tell them, hey, I know you're going to die. You're going to die. We're going to, if you come back, I have a piece of paper up here. That's a pretty ridiculous experiment. No, if you care, wait, wait, wait, pause, pause from dip ridiculous experience. Okay. I know this guy's about to die. But instead of concentrating, bringing him back to life, let's write down a piece of paper. And leave it on the show. But what the fuck is going to do that?

42:42You know what they did? What? In the 1895 after Wilhelm Rungin discovers X-rays and they find out it penetrates your body and you can see bones inside your body. You know what they did? They set up X-ray machines at the bedside of dying people to see if they can see a soul leave the body. Hmm. And everybody just got cancer from radiation. They died from cancer. I thought that was an admirable attempt. Yes. To make a measurement. Yeah, that's interesting. But yes. But they never saw possibly know that someone is going to die and or have a near death experiment. And then every death experience, rather, and then put a piece of paper on a shelf. You want what you want to do? You'd have to be really organized about that. Yeah. And if you want to do this on mass, you'd have to just like have shelves and every every every every where we are. Every are correct. Or yeah, how often does that happen where people have above their body experiences? Very frequently. Very frequently. Oh, yeah. I'm just saying that the brain is capable of so much

43:49extraordinary thought within itself. Of course. That what I care about for the world is what is objectively true. And what's objectively true can be verified by multiple people. And if it's only true within your head, it's not useful. It's all I'm saying. How could it not be useful to other people to you? And if useful to you, but hold on. If it's useful to you, and then that usefulness to you actually manifests itself in something that gets created because of this experience. Like Kerry Mollis created the PCR method because he had an acid trip. And during the acid trip came up with this idea. So what we'd have to ask is how frequent is that? So you get everybody who takes trips of any kind, be it mushrooms or acid or and look at the body of their new thoughts that have come from them for them having when they credited. Okay. And Carl Sagan

44:54was a big pothead. Okay. And highly productive scientist. So the question is does it give you some insight which when you are not under the influence gets you closer to an objective reality? That's an interesting question. Carl Sagan actually believed that there was the way he described what was his description, the way he described it. But he said he believed that there are thoughts that were only available when you were under the influence of marijuana. That is certainly the case for any drug. But he felt like those thoughts were beneficial. Well, I can ask are those thoughts more connected to reality than if you were not so influential? So I did an experiment with myself. Okay. When I first started writing in graduate school at a monthly column, there's that stereotype of having a way with a drink and they're writing and that's their creative moment. I said, I don't really like hard liquor, but I like wine. So let me get a bottle of wine and drink my while I write. And I say, yeah, this is good. This is good. And I'm doing it. And then I did it without

46:02wine. This is an experiment. I conducted it on myself. And it was not as fun composing without the influence of just some, you know, a smooth sort of low level sort of wine buzz. But I looked at the two. There was no contest. My completely sober writing was vastly better than what I was writing under the influence of several glasses. Well, even though I believed it was really good. But hold on a second. What kind of writing are you talking about? If you're talking about fiction. No, no pros. Okay. Proves. Well, I like the greatest examples of fiction enhancing being enhanced rather by under the influence of drugs and chemicals is Stephen King. If you go and read Stephen King's early work versus the stuff after he got sober. And I'm a gigantic Stephen King fan. Was it just alcohol in his case or other drugs? A lot of cocaine, a lot of alcohol cigarettes, a lot of cigarettes. It was way better. It's vastly superior, darker, deeper, stranger,

47:03more bizarre, more shocking in the day. In the day, read it today. Read carry. No, no, no, no, man. You're saying what he created in the day under that influence is way the stuff under the influence of stuff he created. Care is deeply dark. It's so dark. Oh, yeah. It's so dark. So it was short. Semitary. All they're almost all of the short. An redemption. I think all of them were when he was fucked up. He wrote some good stuff after he was fucked up. But like, Koo Jo, he doesn't even remember writing it. Okay. So it's so tasked. So is this something you would recommend for creating? I recommend it, Stephen King. Get back on coke, sir. Stay off Twitter. Get back on coke. I'm kidding. So one little experiment with glasses of wine. Yeah, that's not enough. That experiment's not enough. Like I personally feel that under the influence of marijuana, I come up with some of my best ideas for comedy, for stand-up comedy writing. I like to I do the George Carlin. I'm ready to drop up. I'm looking forward to that. I love your work. Thank you very much. Thank you. I do the George Carlin method. I write sober and then I punch it up high. Okay. And sometimes it's just right.

48:07I'm yeah, George Carlin had a great point. He's like, you should write about things that you're thinking about and things that are like important or things that are on your mind. And then he would like let it sit and then he would smoke pot and go back to it. And then he would come up all the funny and all the ridiculous aspects of it and he would interject them into it. Yeah. Yeah. So, so I'm just saying to the extent I'd like to know how reliable that is. Well, here's the other point that I should say there's many people that don't do any drugs that write fantastic stuff. And there's many comedians that are completely clean and sober that have done their best work once they got clean and sober. That's true too. Both those things are true. But I think they're tools. And we lost some comedians for I mean, you know, Mitch Hedberg, for example, one of my favorites. Yeah. Genius. But he really loved his stuff. He had a really bad drug. His injectable heroin was his thing, which is one of the worst. But the point is it's like

49:10their tools. And I used to have a joke about it like that marijuana is like any other tool. It's like a hammer. You could build a house with a hammer or you could hit yourself in the dick if you're fucking crazy. And that's that's the problem with all sorts of things. They need to be managed responsibly. And people need to understand what the effects are, what the dosage is. And that's where science comes. Okay, here's what I'll do. Here's what I'll do. I still have some writing projects that I'm going to finish. Take mushrooms. No, no. When I'm done with what I know I wanted to write before I died. Okay. Then I will consider this. Then come to daddy. I'll come to papa. I'll come to papa. And then I'll see if some new creative thing comes out of me at that time. Well, I don't know if new creative things will come out of you, but I think I guess thoughts will come out that probably wouldn't exist without them. And when you're talking about like really breakthrough psychedelic moments like DMT or mushroom psilocybin, one of the really

50:11fascinating things is they mimic neurochemistry. Like DMT is in the brain. And it's in all the organs and it's it's a part of natural human neurochemistry. Well, except of course, so is fentanyl. So fentanyl is a part of the human neurochemistry. No, no, you have receptors for it. So right. But DMT is produced by the human body. It's actually a thing that the body makes. We don't know why. And the really heavy duty psychedelic people think that in large doses when you take it and have these breakthrough experiences, what you're doing is you're you're going through some sort of chemical portal. And this chemical portal is only available to people in these near death experiences under extreme moments of stress where they have like these moments where they go through the tunnel and the bright light they meet God. I mean, how many of these would I have to see to be convinced that it's a reliable consequence of it? I think you have to do it. Yeah. I think it's what we're at where this conversation is like talking to a person who's lived in an underground

51:13tunnel their whole life who's dismissing sunlight. They're like, what's the big deal with sunlight? I'm fine down here with light bulbs. You and your sunlight. Oh, yeah. Photocynthesis. I've got hydroponics. So you're being a very effective drug pusher. But the drugs that I'm interested in are not dangerous. They're not ones that kill you. Like, I've never done cocaine. I've never done heroin. I've never done endphetamines. I'm not interested in this. It's cocaine kill you. It can. It can. If you're rich enough. Well, it certainly can kill you today because so much of it is lace with fentanyl. Oh, yeah. It's just one of the number one killers of young people. Unfortunately, it's fentanyl contamination of drugs. But I'm interested in pharmacology. I'm interested in what what happens to the mind when it's under the influence of different substances. Yeah. I guess I'm less interested because I don't I have to think more about what you said. But

52:19look at how people misinterpret reality when they're not on anything. It's a good point. And it's another good point is there's many people that failure of eye witness testimony just to say what actually happened. That's a shame. The rest people end up in jail because of that for the rest of their lives. Yes. Well, listen, I've had many, many conversations with people on this podcast about that because I've worked with my friend Josh Dubin who was originally an ambassador for the Innocence Project and it's done a bunch of stuff on his own where he's gotten many, many, many people out of jail. Did an Innocence Project even have to exist in this world is itself a Travis, a travesty? Well, I'm hoping that with science, there's going to come a time where we can actually read the contents of people's minds and that this will no longer be I remember this. It's an episode of Black Mirror. Yes. Yes. Okay. But the I think maybe yes, that would be interesting. The problem is that false memories are a real thing. So there are people who believe something.

53:20And if you read their mind, you'll just see what it is that they believe. But I wonder if you could sort of back engineer that belief. I wonder if you could get to the point where you could say, oh, you believe this because this is a memory of the way you've described the memory. Black Mirror style. And you have a chip that records everything that you see. That's probably the future. There's a chapter in here called law and order where I get into the role of science in deciding whether someone is guilty or innocent. And it's the idea that in a courtroom someone says, I need a witness. This is like in the court of science, that's the last thing you are ever asking for. Yeah. Because we know, psychologists knew this first. The rest of us, you know, figured it out after the fact that I, when his testimony is one of the least reliable forms, I, the third time I was rejected

54:20from jury duty. I show up dutifully, okay? And the, the third time they said there was a woman who was robbed on the street of her groceries and her purse. And they had the person who she accuses positively identifies and she and her. And it's a literal, he said she said, okay? We read the particulars of the case. She said he robbed her, the groceries took it and then ran off. When they, the cops found the guy, he was not in possession of anything she said he took. They looked in the area if anything stashed and dumpsters anything, they didn't find anything. Okay? So that's, that's the state of the case. And the judge reads the particulars and goes to the, I'm down, like down to the last 15, I'm almost on a jury for the first time. I'm almost there. And said, do you have any, what does anyone have any, think they would not be able to convict based on the kind of information than evidence that's been presented? And, and they said, juror 14, whatever, you're numbered,

55:25right until you're selected. Said, would you have any, I said, yes, I'd have a problem if the only evidence available is eyewitness testimony, then everything I know about it tells me I should not trust it on the level where you end up putting someone in jail. So I, so I could not convict if that's the only evidence you have. What the judge said next was, are there any other jurors like juror 14 who said, who needs more than one witness before they would be able to convict? And I said, should I jump in now and say, that's not what I said, what should I do? I think it might, the person in front of me said, your honor, that's not what he said. Okay. And I said, thank you, thank you, thank you, Jesus, right? He said, that's not what he said. And I, I resisted with all my might to say, your honor, you were eyewitnessed to what I said 20

56:32seconds ago and got it wrong. Yes. But I resisted, but I was nonetheless on the street 20 minutes later. I think you should have said that just for his own advocate. No, it was a she, by the way, she, sorry, I'm sexy. You're totally sexist. We've all known that forever. Stop myself on the wrist. Right. So I'm just saying it's clear that the legal system, the precision of deeply flawed, it's deeply flawed. And the said was the best we have. Well, then fix it. I mean, if that's how you were talking when these to dunk people and if you died face up, you were innocent and died face down, you were guilty. That was the best they had then, but we improved on it. Right. If they drowned you, you weren't a witch. Congratulations. You weren't guilty. Well, it depends on yeah, if you, that's right. How you died. Yeah. And you otherwise go to heaven, where you wouldn't know. Right. So, um, plus there's, I, in Columbus's voyage, there's a lot, we talked about Columbus last time on the show. I talked about Columbus, many times. Yeah, yeah. Yes.

57:32Terrific. So, uh, in one of the voyages, they went on some stretch of time and they didn't have food and, and they had, um, Indians from the, the, that they'd brought on board as well as some of their own crew. And people were dying. And so at sea, what do you do with the dead body? You throw it overboard. Of course. Okay. So a person who's keeping notes said all the Indians they threw overboard, um, floated face down and all the Christians floated face up. Okay. Okay. I guess that could happen statistically. Perhaps I don't know. But now we have his handwritten notes. I witness testimony of something that is completely fulfilling his own world views, expectations of how things should be. So that's so in, in the whole, sort of law and order chapter, I just take, pick all that apart and just try to say, you know, why not have jurors that are really

58:37good at data analysis? How about that? That would be nice, but that's really hard to find. And then on top of that, if you are dealing with eyewitness testimony, what do you do? Do you just throw everything out completely or do you try to assess whether or not that person is capable of objective thought and reasoning? No, you just know because even people who are better at it or still flawed at it. Right. Okay. Especially under experiences under extreme stress, stress experts. Yeah. Correct. As they've done many times in psychology class, they have, you know, the class is unfolding and they stage some violent thing with an explosion and then they say, right, what you just saw, right? Right. Right. And nothing agrees. Right. Right. Right. So yeah, it's it's a challenge, which is the problem of conspiracy theories after big events like 9-11, like all the people that say they saw this and they saw that and I remember this and I remember that and these little sound bites of all these people and you piece them together like, oh my god, they planted bombs. And they're also, they're people who say before an earthquake. They knew it was

59:39going to happen. They say they see all the animals running. Right. And it's like, okay, you reported that after the earthquake happened not like before. But doesn't that happen during tsunamis? Animals actually do go to higher ground. I think that has actually been documented. I, okay. So I'm highly suspicious of whether that's true because tsunami, there's no way to know that. So, not me typically occurs from an earthquake way offshore. Right. Okay. And it's a very low amplitude wave in deep water that continues to gain amplitude as the water gets shallower and shallower. So that's why waves get bigger when they crash on the shores. So as it comes to the shore, so if you're just an animal in the woods, if you're not on the shoreline, there's no way to know that. I think they were talking about animals on islands and animals that do live closer to the shore. And maybe there's an indication because the water pulls back before us and not me. Sure.

1:00:41I can, I can recognize that. But if you're just an animal somewhere, you know, onshore away from the coast, I don't really see that. I need to see very good evidence for that and not just someone's account. Yeah, I don't know if they're talking about that. This is my whole point that people have accounts of all kinds of things. Do you know in the, there's a whole other chapter called risk and reward. All right. Here's something. Surely in your life, you have taken an average of numbers before. Okay. Tell me yes. Sure. Light of me. Even if it's not your half. Yeah. Okay. Do you realize that the first time anyone ever did that to realize that maybe this some interesting result here was after the invention of algebra, trigonometry, geometry, and calculus. Really? Statistics is just something that the human brain, it's just not natural.

1:01:42It is completely far into us. We don't know how to interpret simple random events because we want to give meaning to them. You know the thing where you're in a some other country in some other city and you meet someone like a childhood friend. Yeah. He's a small world. Yeah. That's your first thought. Right? Small world. Okay. Here's how to cure that. Okay. Next time you're in a foreign city, go up to every single person you walk by and say, do I know you? And they'll probably say no. I mean, no, you personally. They'll know you because you're dude, but they know you person. No, just keep doing this. And if they say no, I don't know. You then say big world. Just do that. You'll do that millions of times. Okay. Before you meet someone who you once knew and the proper statistics will then get recorded for that. To know it's not a small world. It's a fucking big world. And there are a lot of people in it who you don't know. It's just very

1:02:47unusual when you meet someone in another country. No, no, there's a point where well, if you do the math, there are a lot of things that people say are unusual. It would be unusual if you didn't. Well, if you fly to England and you don't tell anybody you're flying to England and you run into a friend from back home, that's pretty unusual. Look how often people say that say that it happens. That's why I trained for a lot of time. That's why I trained for a lot of time. That's precisely my point. Okay. Everybody you know has that story. If you run the statistics on it, it would be odd if you went your life. I presume you have a normal life and you know people and your school was big and all of this. Okay. You didn't grow up in a farm with, you know, with nobody. You didn't know anybody. It requires some basic number of people. So there's a lot of errors of statistics that we make of probability and statistics. The sad part of it is there's an entire industry that has risen to exploit that fact and they're

1:03:51called casinos. The fact that you could go to a roulette table and somebody's got a lot of money on seven. I said, why do you have money on seven? It's due. What do you mean it's due? Well, look at the previous roles because they'll show you the previous roles and seven hasn't appeared in 20 roles or whatever the number is they put it so it's due. No, it's not due. This is a failure of the human brain to understand and interpret probability and statistics. They're people who are going to roll dice. Okay. If they need a low number, they'll take the dice and like gently roll them. They need a high number of thrown hard. This is, this is, this is, this is crazy. But those people are suckers. There's other people that do understand statistics and they kick them out of casinos because they count cars. Only for those that are not purely random like a roulette table. Okay. We're dice. You mean things like blackjack. Yeah. Correct. You can tilt the odds in your favor a little bit and be systematic about it. But for I'm talking about pure probabilities. The fact that someone thinks that a number is due. Right. It's self. Do you

1:04:56realize the American physical society? These are my physics peeps. That's our physics society. 1986. They were going to have their annual meeting in San Diego and there was a hotel snafu. So they had to reschedule. And so Vega said, we'll take you. The MGM Marina, which became the MGM grant. We'll take you 4,000 physicists said, okay. 4,000 physicists had their annual meeting in Las Vegas. And let me tell you, okay. K through 12. Is there even a course offered in probability and statistics? You learn reading, writing and arithmetic, not reading, writing and probability and statistics, right? It's kind of not there. And if it's there, it's an elective. Okay. So as a scientist, especially as a physical scientist, I take some form of probability and statistics every single year I am in school. Different nuances and how data can be looked at and

1:05:57analyzed and put together an average. And the average that I told you about, yeah, numbers divide by the that's one of a dozen kind of ways you can average numbers. There are other ways you can have statistically weighted average. It depends on the needs, depends on the situation. Point is, the physicists came to Vegas. One week later, there was a news headline, physicists in town, lowest casino take ever. We're told to never return to Vegas. Really? Yes. They were told to never tell. They were told, well, that might be apocryphal, but it was in the headline. Really? Yeah. So that's funny. So these are people, these are my peeps, this is what we do. We think about it's not because we took advantage of the craps of the blackjack tables because they just simply didn't gamble. Well, I'm the same way. I don't gamble either. I just see, I look how big the place is. I'm like, how was this made by selling tickets to the buffet? I don't think so. I don't

1:06:57think so. No, this is made from suckers. Not me and my wife went, one other month ago, let's say you're you're you're winning. Yeah. In something that you're in the one-arm bandit and you and you you had a jackpot jackpot. What do they do with you? At that point, they see this is happening. What does the house do? They check the machine. No, no, no, no, they give you free drinks. They give you free drinks. Yeah. They got a company server to come over to you and say, would you like a free cocktail? Yes. Two stir chemicals into your brain to disrupt the little bit of objective reality that you experience. These are inhibitions. You're feeling lucky. Are you feeling lucky? Like you're feeling lucky. Yeah. I'm not a I don't feel lucky at all because you know, I feel stupid. Oh, and another thing with the state lotteries, if this is all in the in the risk and reward chapter, state lotteries, do you know what most of the revenue, you know, to state money, it goes into the coffers, tax coffers. Do you know where most of that money is allocated for in most states? No. It goes to education. Oh, that's good. You didn't know that? No,

1:08:01that's great. So that makes you feel a little better like you're helping out your own state when you buy your state lottery. Here's the thing. Part of me wonders. Okay. Let me join you in a conspiracy thing here. Okay. Okay. That's my my conspiracy. Okay. Am I allowed? Yes, please? My loud one. Please do. One per year. I'll give you all the ones. I love the conspiracy. The conspiracy is they have to make sure that the school curriculum does not teach probability statistics. What? What? Because if they did wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. They did then no one would play the lottery. So they allocate money to education with a specific man. No, I'm not saying that. What are you saying? Yes, I'm saying. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. He was it's not like a law. No, no, no, no, no, no. I'm just saying it's a little suspicious. Yes. That they don't teach those things. That would undermine the ability of the state lottery

1:09:06to make money is not a required part of the math curriculum in kindergarten through 12. So you think, but you don't think that's why? I'm just playing with the no, I don't really think that's why. Right. No, okay. So I see what you were doing there. You were assuming that I was totally in on this conspiracy theory. And I have charts on my wall and websites devoted to no, it just crossed my mind how odd it is that when you know enough about probability statistics, you bet less. And when you bet less, the revenue to the state would drop. And that's the revenue that would go to education. So it has the power to plants the seeds of its own undoing. And it doesn't do that. So I'm intrigued by that fact. Just removing ourselves from the conspiracy theory aspect of it. Do you think that it would be beneficial to teach probability and statistics to people? Oh my gosh. Look at how many bad decisions we make. Yeah. Because we think

1:10:11we have an understanding of what is random and what is not. Right. What is a, there's the one they did this, but actually their analysis was flawed, but the basis was well, was well placed. So the idea you're playing a basketball game and somebody hits a few shots in a row. They've got a hot hand given to them. Yeah. They don't have a hot hand. It is the natural consequence. If you're shooting 50% in a game or 40% yes. And you take, I don't know how many shots you take 30 shots. You can look at the probability that you'll have multiple shots in a row that are made. And it's very high and it's very real. But do you discount? So it's not something special happening. It is the randomness of the statistics that's happening. Okay, but this is talking about statistics, but from an individual basis, do you discount the idea that sometimes people feel really good and they have a very good sense of where the ball's going, where they're more loose or

1:11:14relaxed or more more practiced, whatever it may be. And they're more accurate because of that. If that's the case, no, so people, so people have good days, right? Right. Clearly. So this is why that original analysis was slightly flawed. Uh-huh. Because a person can have more than what is typical shots in a row. Right. Okay. And for that game, you could look at their data and they would make 60% of their shots instead of 40% of their shots. And if you make 60% of the shots, you then expect three in a row here, six in a row there, five in a row here, in the in the random expression of having a 60% success rate in a basket, you expect intervals where you make multiple shots in a row. That's my only point. And that could be a good day for you because you're shooting 60% right. And I want to, I want to recognize that. I'm going to hand you the ball if you have a good day. You can totally have a good day. But at the end of the day, you're not, you're not sinking 20 here and none before it. No. In the statistics, uh,

1:12:21maintain themselves in the game, unless you get injured or something, of course. So, but my point is we have such, and I don't want to blame people for this. If it was natural to think statistically about the world, it would have been the first branches of math we would have ever discovered. But it wasn't. It was like 1753 sounds like a long time ago, but it's 50 years after calculus was invented. After calculus, which is not even taught in salt long ago. Okay. Correct. Um, there's a simple paper on the benefits of taking the mean, mean is average, of, of observations in astronomical data. So an astronomer did it first to take a mean. And this is just, so that tells me we're victims of our own brain wiring. And so, and it takes many years to undo that wiring, we'll just see through it so that you are not, um, uh, you know, and it prevents you from seeing other things, okay. How so? Do you realize last year we lost as many people in the United States to

1:13:30traffic accidents as we did in all the years we fought in Vietnam. Look at the effort we put up as a country beginning maybe 1967, certainly 68, to stop the carnage. And that's just the American deaths, not to mention the millions of deaths of the Vietnamese themselves, North and South. Point is, our reactions to statistics are very different depending on what caused it. Yes. And that's, I'm intrigued by that. I don't have a good understanding of it. Um, any laws that treat it are going to have to fold in people's emotions. Here's an example. Uh, you, you, you shoot deer with your bone arrow. Uh, there's a certain number of deer deaths and human deaths by cars hitting deer in the roads, especially in suburban rural places. Okay. Well, what do you do about this? What are you

1:14:30going to do? Get a truck with a big ass bumper? That's what they do. Uh, the Joe Rogan solution. That's a text solution. You ever see those guys who work on ranchers? Make sure your ranchers have significantly more mass than the deer. No, they have specific bumpers that they, they build to save people's lives. Right. And of course, this is what, uh, the old locomotives had if they were cattle on the, you ever see that pointy front on locomotives? Yes. Yeah. That's the pride cattle. Yes. So wouldn't roll over the cow and derail the thing. So, um, so what do you do? Do you accept the hundred deaths a year in your county, whatever human deaths? Uh-huh. You know what's counting deer deaths a year, right? Or, or do you find something? There you go. Big ass bumper. Deer killer bumpers. Look at those suckers. I like the Ford F250 right there. That's what I'm saying. Look at that one. And the Ford F250, that red one. That's what I'm talking about. The problem is if the center of mass of the deer is above the level of that bumper, but it's not, well, for elk,

1:15:34it would be for mousse, it would be my wife who up in Alaska. No. Yes. No, not a 250 F250. Uh-huh. Center of mass of an elk. Uh-huh. I'm okay. So mousse. Yes. So mousse is a different thing. I saw mousse in my wife's. When you see him for the first time, you're like, how the hell is that real? The first time I saw how did that happen? I was in British Columbia and I saw it. It was like the scene in Jurassic Park where Jeff Goldblum gets out of the Jeep is like, yeah, it's like who invented that right? Right. Right. The size of that. Right. So if you're under the center of mass, then it will just roll up and crush your windshield. Yes. You have to watch out for that. Go through your windshield. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's terrific. Um, so here's my point. Uh, there's a group. I forgot where somewhere in New England who did a study. And the study was, um, if you have 100 deaths a year, we can drop that to maybe 30 deaths a year. Uh, how by introducing the natural cat predator to the deer. So it would be like the Puma

1:16:38or a bobcat, one of these sort of mid-sized cats that hold the deer as their quarry. Okay. And they ran some models of how this would go. And you could drop the number of human deaths by a factor of three. Okay. Uh, because still some deer would wander onto the road. But you'll lose about 10 children a year. Yeah. They'll just snatch your kid out of the backyard and eat your child. So look at these numbers. You killed 100 people in their cars or, or the deer killed 30 people plus 10 children. No, no, the, the, the deer killed 30 people. The bobcat kills 10 and the bucket might not kill an adult, not bucket, but whatever is the next mountain lion. That's the word, whatever was native in the region long ago. Okay. And so they did a study. And the point is you could not bring that suggestion forward. Right. Because the government

1:17:42would be introducing an animal that killed your children. But no one's looking at the hundred people that were, whatever the numbers were, it was a factor of three or so. I know there's another solution. The correct numbers are in the book. No, I'm just giving this as an example. I understand. Of, of, we don't, we're not equipped to fold our emotions with the data to arrive at a solution that would save the most lives. I see what you're saying. There's a technological solution that they've come up with. There's a device that they put at the front of the car that makes a very certain sound that alerted the presence on the, on the edges of the, I've heard about that. But I haven't read about it like 20 years ago. So I haven't heard much about it since. I don't know how effective it is. It runs the air going through it makes it kind of a siren effect. Is that what it is? Yeah, but when I last remembered it. Yeah, well, whatever it is, it develops some sort of a sound that the deer can hear and they avoid it. But they have a problem with

1:18:44the headlights. I was in Alaska and there was a deer and a grizzly bear must have been 300 yards away, must weigh down in the valley. And the deer noticed it. And it was eating, but it was eating very cautiously, always looking to the bear. And I'm saying, if it could notice a bear, 300 yards and be cautious of it, why can't it know a Ford 250 barreling down the road? Because it's not natural. But figure it out. Because it's a mammal, it's got a brain. Let me get angry with the deer for and how come we haven't killed all the stupid deer by now. So the ones that are left are the ones that recognize that cars kill them because they're all stupid. They just have really good senses. And I heard some of senses that are designed to avoid predation. But they're living with us now, you know, right? They don't end it, but how long have they had headlights figured out how to coexist with humans? Rats are very intelligent. They're very, they figure this out. Okay.

1:19:47The deer don't know what to do with headlights and cars. It's a completely unnatural thing. So everyone that doesn't they die and the ones that have a little bit of genetic variation that figures it out, they'll survive. Sort of because then they get horny. The problem with deer's, if you look at that number of things, I do. Okay. One of the things that happens is the uptick. Well, the rut, when deer rut is when you hunt them and one of the things that happens during the rut is they get ridiculous and they just run out of the track. They can't even control themselves. They change those into the street. That's oftentimes the male deer. Yes. Because they're just chasing them. The females are just trying to get away and they just run out in a traffic. That happens or the male is trying to chase the female and all he's got on his mind is got tunnel vision and they just boom. Get's it by that F-250. Speaking of deer, by the way, my sister drives an F-250. Where's it? A 450. Is there a 450? No, she does a 350. Excuse me. Oh, she has a duly. Yeah, she's got one where the the tires can do separate things. Okay. Up with this. Yeah. She's serious. She's

1:20:51she don't don't mess with my sister. Okay. Is your sister out there off road? What is she doing with that crazy truck? She just she'd like to be in bad ass when the time comes. I like the way she thinks. So but she doesn't hunt. So it's missing half the equation there. So on the subject of deer in the chapter on gender and identity. So I go there, gender and identity because it's very hot topic. Yeah. And I just apply some rational thinking to it. Do you know about Santa's reindeer? Do you know about them? Sure. I know very much about them. Oh, you do. Yeah. Okay. So do you know that? Caribou. Yes. Caribou, correct. Yeah. And well, you can domesticate the caribou. And when you do, then both the boys and the girls have antlers. Okay. Well, that's just the fact of all caribou. Oh, okay. So she's you. But sorry, the domesticated ones are called reindeer, but they're derived from the caribou. Correct. So now watch what happens. So as you may know, the male deer

1:21:56lose their antlers in late October early November. Depending upon what where they're at. Oh, what you castrated. They don't. They don't castrate them. They'll keep their antlers. But otherwise, they drop their antlers. Right. Before winter begins. That generally not. No, it depends on the animal. But a lot of them keep it until almost spring. And they drop when they grow back very quickly. That's nothing of what I've read or learned of this animal. Or just just caribou. No caribou. Just specifically. Okay. The ones that became Santa's reindeer. We're not talking about the deer on the, you know, in central Texas. No, they dropped them in the winter. They dropped them before. They dropped them November. Okay. The female don't. The female don't. So all that means is all eight of Santa's reindeer are female. Which means Rudolph has been misgendered. Interesting. Well, do you know where the myth of Santa's reindeer flying comes from? I think it's from mushrooms,

1:22:59isn't it? Yeah. I'm going to need a mascara mushroom, which looks like Santa Claus. Yeah. That's it. With the red and red and white. And they love those things. They love the aminita mascara mushroom to the fact that to the point where when people are doing mushroom ceremonies and they go outside to urinate. Oh, they drink the caribou will knock you over to get to your urine. Yeah. That's the trick. If you have domesticated caribou, they will knock you over to get to the urine because they smell the aminita mascara. And whatever the, it's not psilocyte. It has to be such a major. I, I, I, I'm trying to imagine how high I want to get to drink someone else's pee. Well, that's terrible. That's not that wise. Nor are they educated. Nor do they even understand the concept of urine. Whatever these are liquid compounds. Yeah. It's the, the, the, they're, well, their sense of smell is preposterously intense. I mean, we can't even imagine what a deer can smell. They can smell you hundreds of yards away. I mean, I've seen deer go like this a hundred yards away. And then they bolt because they smell you. They catch you wind. Yeah,

1:24:02they're amazing. Here's a mystery that I've always had to this day because dogs have very acute sense of smell as well. Yeah. That's how you say that. If you just say dog smell good, you don't know what that means, right? Do they smell better than we do? Right. It's an ambiguous sentence. That's right. So they're acute sense of smell. So if they smell so acutely, why do they get within like a half inch of each other's butt? Because they want to smell each other. But you could, you could smell that a hundred yards away. Yeah, but they want to smell everything. They want to smell the hormones. They want to, yeah, well, they're, they're intensely attractive. So good. Yeah. Let me get up on it. Yeah, they want. Okay. They want to know if you're feeling aggressive. Okay. In the heat, they want to know all those things. Yeah, I just, I'm, I've never had that urge to do that with other humans. You know, a bear could smell somewhere in the neighborhood of nine times greater than a bloodhound. Hmm. So we should domesticate bears and track down. Good luck with that. By the way, have you seen a bear? You got to be able to find this. It's on,

1:25:09uh, I saw it in social media. There's a bear walking down a highway and there's a tip over traffic cone and it looks at it and then writes it back up and keeps walking by it. Wow. And I say to myself, uh, because I have a chapter in here called body and mind. There it is. What? Check this out. Just watch. All right. It's a black bear. He's clearly wrong. Yeah. It looks wrong. Okay. By the way, you found this video really fast. Thank you for this. I think that's a grizzly bear. Oh, he's got the, the lump on the neck. Yeah. The way he looks. That's pretty crazy. That's, yeah, that's grizzly. That's total grizzly bear and keeps going. Didn't even look back. Right. So that, so I don't want to, I don't want to say this evidence of intelligence so much as it's evidence of more going on inside the animal's head than any of us would have previously ever credited credit it. Yeah. In another example, um, I give this example in body and mind again, there's a magpie bird. Oh, yeah. Who

1:26:13there's a, a bottle of water in some ground playground area, uh, park area. And it goes up to the bottle of water and it dips its beak into drink from it. Okay. Here it is. See it is. Okay. It goes in and drinks from it to watch. It's going to drink. But the problem is there's a limit to how far its beak can reach inside of it. So, and so it gets a stone that fits inside the bottle, which raises the water level so that its beak can continue to drink from it. Yeah. This is some Archimedean crazy stuff going on. It really is. The magpie by those in the know is ranked among the smartest of birds. And this is doing something I think humans wouldn't even think to do. Probably many humans. Right. Yeah. And so, so do you remember how do they teach you where humans were in the tree of life when you were in school? Like we were the smartest or the biggest brain. Well, how do they describe it to you? Yeah, with the top of the food chain. And it, okay.

1:27:14And what do they say about our brains? Just tell me in your, what's the size of our brains that makes us so superior? Okay. But, but, yeah, but dolphins brains are bigger. So, yeah. 40% larger. Okay. So then, so then therefore, what is, you know, whale brains are bigger. So, yeah. So, so then how do they, if there are other animals with bigger brains and we want to stay at the top, what do they say about those other animals? I don't know. What do they say? No, I'm saying. Okay. So, you know what they did? They say they're inferior. So, no, so what they do is say, they say, oh, no, we don't have the biggest brain. Oh, but brain to body weight ratio. Then we're the highest. Okay. Is that accurate with dolphins? Yes. So, our, because they're, they're bigger, much bigger creatures than we are. And the brain, when you divide the way to the brain by the way to the body, we win. Right. We beat out whales. We beat out dolphins. We beat out elephants. Then there are those who are fans of those say, well, you want to do it lean weight because those, the dolphins and the whales have a lot of blubber. And that's not, the brain is not having to control

1:28:18the blubber. So, cut away the blubber. That boosts them, but they still not as high as us. So, we walk away saying we're at the top. However, what they did not say, which I had to, 40 years later, I learned this, that we do not have the highest brain to body weight ratio among animals, only among mammals. The magpie has a higher brain to body weight ratio than humans do. As do all other mid-sized birds, like crows, owls, eagles, these, these folks, okay. All have a higher brain to body weight ratio than humans do. So, that rule that put us at the top was specifically for mammals. And I'm angry that I didn't think to hear how specific that was when I was taught that in eighth grade. Okay. Isn't our understanding of like crows using tools very recent, like within

1:29:20the last hundred years? All I can tell you is any animal that we have ever got to study in more detail than we previously did has shown to be more intelligent than we ever gave it credit for being. And you know, has the biggest brain to body weight ratio of any creature on earth? Who? Some species of ants. 15% of the body weight is their brain. And it's kind of obvious. Some of them, like the whole front section is their head. Right. It's kind of in retrospect, it's kind of obvious. And ants are very busy doing some complicated things and we don't know what they're doing. Especially leaf cutter ants. They're busy, carpenter ants, leaf cutting ants, and crossover into termite land. I don't know how big their brains are, but they're busy doing building stuff. And they work in communication with each other. And they communicate. Yeah. One of my favorite cartoons was two dolphins swimming together. And there's a human up, you know, it's like one of these water parks, right? And one dolphin says to the other. They've speaking of

1:30:21the humans that are up on dry land. They face each other and make noises, but it's not clear they're actually communicating. So I'm just saying we have a close up of an ant. Yeah, that's that recently released this image, I think. Yeah. So what a horrific demon that would be in sex with so much detail on their bodies. And to say, well, we're at the top, really? I got one for you. How much of the top are you? Do you realize one slice of your lower intestine, your colon? Once one centimeter slice lives and works more microbes than all, then the total number of humans who ever lived. So ask yourself, what are you to those microbes? Are you jarogon? No, you are

1:31:23an anaerobic vessel of fecal matter in which they thrive. And without them, you don't exist. Well, you don't digest your food. First of all, second, you want to keep them happy because if they're not happy, then they're in charge. They send you to the nearest toilet as fast as can be. So part of a cosmic perspective on this world is looking at things in a way that decentralizes who and what you are relative to everything else. And you get a much more honest account of how things work, how they put together. That's very hard for people to really grasp. It's an ego. You're actually an ecosystem. Yes. Yes. And what is the number? There's some some percent of your total body weight is the weight of other living things, especially what's alive and thriving in your gut. You're just carrying them along. Well, that's the case with all organisms that we like to think of organisms as being individuals, but they're actually. I don't think

1:32:25a mea business has not one of the single cells. When it's not single cells, but others, yeah. A lot of symbiotic relationships going on. Oh, yeah. And so you can have a cosmic perspective that's not just the cosmos. Yes. The cosmic perspective just here, life on earth. And you know, they talked about the overview effect where the astronauts, you probably had a few astronauts here as your guest. Looking down. Yeah, you look, you look down. I prefer the view from the moon. I'll take it from orbit. Are you going to do any of those? Like, would you, if they let you up on the Jeff Bezos spaceship? They send people up there all the time. Yeah. Yeah. So it's fairly regular. I'm an astrophysicist. You're not interested? No, let me hear me out. Hear me out. So take earth and shrink it down to like a schoolroom globe. So now we can think of distances relative to that. And ask, how high up did Bezos and Branson go? Okay. So here's the schoolroom go. How far away would you say? Quarter inch. You say quarter inch. Okay. They went the thickness of two dimes. Oh.

1:33:28And our boy who jumped out of a balloon some years ago. Yeah. What's his name? Felix Baumgartner. Thickness of one dime. So this idea that they go, oh, I see the curvature of the earth. No, you don't. You know, I'm sorry. Did Jeff Bezos doesn't see the curvature? You will see the edge of the earth. But ask how far away is your horizon when you're only that high up? You can just look at that. Go to the schoolroom globe. Go to dime thicknesses up and then draw line to ask how much of earth do you see? You will see a circle. That's a circle cookie cut out of the larger sphere. It's a perspective issue. It's a perspective issue. And by the way, the images when they showed Felix Baumgartner, where he's prepared to jump, you see this curved earth. That's a fish eye lens, dude. Okay.

1:34:28Fish eye lenses take horizontal lines and bend them convex when you're above the mid plane of the photo in order to gather in more of the image. Correct. That's the only way you can distort it to fit it onto a flat plane because it's looking at a full 360, well, 180, and it's trying to get it in. But what happens if you take that horizontal line, the horizon, and put it below the mid plane of the camera? It then bends the other way. Bends the other way. In fact, I have a tweet that did this. Look for Felix and put some keywords in there with my Twitter handle. And I have the example of the photos. So, no, he didn't see the curvature of the earth, but you think he did and he's high up, and what do we need NASA for? Right? He's one dime thickness. Elon Musk authentically goes into work because they didn't go into orbit. They went up and fell back to earth. He authentically goes into orbit. So, he is a centimeter. Not even. Let me say a little less than a centimeter above Earth's surface.

1:35:38The folks who really saw Earth were the folks that went to the moon. We went to the moon nine times three astronauts apop, 27 astronauts have seen Earth from the moon. And that'll change you. That, you know, a polyphorteen astronaut, Edgar Mitchell. I have a quote from him that opens this book. And that's all you have to read because the whole book issues forth from that quote. You know, here it is. Mm-hmm. Edgar Mitchell, a polyphorteen. You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world and a compulsion to do something about it. Mm-hmm. From out there on the moon, international politics looks so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter million miles out and say, look at that. You son of a bitch.

1:36:43Yeah. Edgar Mitchell also believes some wacky stuff. Did you know that? Yeah, I spoken with him about it. And he, he was one of the, was he co-founder of the Noetic Institute? Mm-hmm. He was, he was a big fan of the possibility that there was a deeper level of consciousness. And I don't think it involved drugs. But just that there was a deeper level of consciousness that the brain might be capable of if subjected to the proper influences. And he told me how he came across this. Okay, I'll tell you. They're on their way back from the moon and they're in the capsule. And the capsule rotates. It helps to stabilize it among other reasons for that happening. And he happened to be positioned in the capsule for three days where the windows to the capsule were aligned with the plane of the solar system. Which means every time the capsule rotated,

1:37:52what came in and out of view was the sun, the moon, earth, and all the planets. And so he's there for three days watching this drift by. And he felt like he had descended or ascended into a trans state that was beyond what he had ever experienced here on earth. By normal things you encounter just being a human on earth. And that led him to wonder whether this was an achievable state by some other means, by some other forces that you could emulate here on earth. And because he experienced that and I didn't, what am I, who might have say? I'm not going to judge that. He believed in psychokinetics. He believed people can do things with their mind. He had a lot of like very strange things. I think he, I think that the cleanest way to

1:38:55say that is he believed there was much more capacity of our mind than we had previously tapped. That opens up the gates to all these other things. But I was just sharing with you the cycle, the experiential origins of why he thought that way. But the point is that can change you. And in the chapter earth and moon, I talk about cosmic perspectives as you ascend that the earth does not look like the schoolroom globe. Color coded countries. You know, only as an adult did I look back in that and I say, you trained me from elementary school to know who my enemies are and who my friends are by color coding contiguous landmasses on a globe to teach me about the planet earth. But they weren't trying to do that. They were trying to explain it. It's a consequence of it. Geography. I knew who the evil, evil godless Russian Soviet Union was. Right. Okay. The country was painted red.

1:40:01All right. Not ours. I knew this even if it was not on purpose. It had a subliminal effect. And when you go into space, the country borders go away except for two places. There are two places. You can still see two borders from space. One of them in the daytime, you can see the border of Israel with surrounding deserts because Israel irrigates. And so it's green in the surrounding areas are brown. You can see that from space. Another border which you can see from space at night is of course North and South Korea right there. Yeah. That's crazy. And that's punched up. I mean, if you're in the dead of night, you don't know the difference between the ocean and the land as the as you your sight line crosses North and South Korea. And so so what you and if you look at the GDP per capita differences between Israel and surrounding

1:41:05nations and South Korea and North Korea, it's you know, factors of eight, nine, ten, twelve. So space can reveal economic inequities in at least those two places, which is itself kind of a stunning fact. So I want to tell Elon, you know, neighbors with him, right? Get him back here, say Elon build a bus, a space bus. We have an air bus. Why not a space bus? A space bus, we put all the warring leaders and have them send them to the moon and have them look back on Earth. So you know, we're fighting over that border. We are once they came back down, I think they just go right back to work. You think so? I just went to the Keck Observatory on Wednesday. Nice. It was Hawaii. Yeah. Big island. Very nice. I can go to the base camp or already at the top. The base camp. Yeah. I went specifically there because I had an experience there about I was six, 17 years ago. I went there and I caught it on a perfect night where the

1:42:11the moon wasn't out and it was phenomenal. And the view is so astounding. There's so many stars. You see the Milky Way in such clear detail that you have a totally different perspective of the cosmos. And you feel like you're flying through space with a windshield over your head, like you're in a spaceship. You know, there's some other my entire PhD thesis involved mountain going. It's a lost ritual because now we would have what's called service observing. You just write in what things you want to observe them, what nights for how many hours. And then they send you back the data. There used to be a pilgrimage to the top of a mountain and you live nocturnally and you go to them and be up all night with the telescope and the universe. There's a certain almost spiritual connectivity that brings upon you when it's just you alone. And there are moments that mountains are high up enough so that if clouds roll in, you're above the clouds. We were above

1:43:13the clouds. You're above the clouds. This is what makes it especially spooky, magical, mystical mountain Olympus like because you're on the top. There's no other land. It's just clouds. So it's you, the tops of clouds and the universe. Yeah. Communing with the cosmos. It's just a view that is so astounding. And many people who go to go to Australia say, oh, you got to see the southern skies. What they're what they don't know when they say that is any clear sky anywhere in the world will get you that. Yeah. In the southern hemisphere, only 15% of humans live there. So there's essentially no light pollution anywhere there. 85% of all humans in the north. You're hard pressed to find a completely dark sky in the north leaving you to think that there's something magically beautiful and different about the southern sky. You're observing the northern sky. Hawaii's like 15 degrees north, but so it's a lot of the southern sky as well.

1:44:18Point is you have the best observing site in the world, which is why they want to put a 30 meter telescope there. And there's some conflict with the indigenous groups regarding that and whether the mountain is sacred and in what ways it's sacred and the like. And so that's still going on. Last I checked, but I'm not surprised and I've delighted that you had that experience. And now you know how I feel when I look up. I was baptized in emotionally psychologically baptized with the night sky in New York City's Hayden Planetarium. Because as a city kid, I grew up in the Bronx. We don't have a relationship with the night sky. You know, we might see the moon and an occasional planet the setting sun. That's it. You look up dots. You see the tall buildings. You sit back then there was air pollution, light pollution. So my first night sky was the Hayden Planetarium. To this day, to this, that was I was nine years old, to this day when I go to mountain tops just as you experience.

1:45:21And I look up, I said, this is so beautiful. It reminds me of the Hayden Planetarium. That's fine. I know that's messed up, but that's how I feel. And you're sky, you got a sky here with mediums and I'm loving it. Man stars. I'm loving it. Yeah. The view that I saw on Wednesday was not as good as the view that I saw. Whatever it was 16, 17, 20, 20. Who laid out these stars? Oh, it's just there's daily D panel. Call me. You think? No, they're not accurate. They're just dots. Dude. All right. At least you have stars in my old pool in California. I had the star system of where like, you know, I was born in August. So it's the constellation. When you go, yeah, when I was born embedded into the ground of the pool. All right. There you go. There you go. Allegedly. You know, if they ask me to verify, I'm like, wow, it looks like stars. But that view

1:46:22of the Keck Observatory, just even from the base station, it's so stunning that it does reset your understanding of where we are. And it makes you angry that we have so much light pollution that people are denied that because I think it changes the way people view our relationship with the cosmos. In fact, it's, it goes even deeper than that. But let me quickly comment that the there is an entire indigenous community in the world that is very concerned about the loss of very dark night skies because so much of the culture relates to that night sky as part of what it values and what it passes down from one generation to the next. And it goes beyond just the light pollution because now folks like your boy Elon is launching. And I don't like the fact that they use the word constellation to refer to satellites because that's my word. That's my people's word constellations. They're actual stars. Not moving hardware. We got people talking to

1:47:28people. I got I got I got I know where we're friends. No, we're friends. We're using the wrong words. I feel completely at home speaking to he's on the spectrum a bit. I'd say one out of six of my colleagues is probably on the autism spectrum in retrospect. Now that I look at and once you've learned what the spectrum is, there used to be assburgers and then they folded that in. You know, there are colleagues who just would not relate to another person or a camera but they're graded in their lab and in the things. And so you say you're just not socialized. No, there's a something else going on. Can I ask you a question about that? Oh, sure. Do you think that that is an evolutionary advantage that in some way people are developing in this manner so that they can concentrate on things like technology, like astrophysics, like these like very specific things that require immense amounts of concentration and extreme focus. Do you think there's possibly that human beings

1:48:32are developing in that way specifically to accentuate our ability to innovate? So it would be very hard to draw that conclusion as some kind of modern force of evolution because for that to be the case, what would have to happen is those who had this sort of autistic level of focus, so high functioning autism, they would have to be making more babies than other people. Well, Eli is. He's out there doing his part. Okay, he's got it. Yeah. So they'd have to be making more babies relative to everyone else to affect the evolutionary path of modern civilization. Yes. And it's not clear that that's what's actually happening. So we have to ask, did that have any value historically? I mean, in the history of the evolution of our species. So in the chapter body and mind, I go over the variations that we that exist within our species. Huge variations in every height and weight and in speed and in all kinds of things. And

1:49:43you can ask, well, then what is normal? The day that we control the genome, is it going to be some place somewhere where there's a normal human and you're going to take your genome and that you're about to control in your unborn child and say, let me adjust it so that it matches this so that all your senses are working as they're supposed to and all the purports. Is that is that the future we should ask that because if that's what you're going to do, you're going to homogenize the species. Yes. Okay. Do you realize I have a run here of content. I have a run of descriptions of what people have accomplished. Okay. So for example, there's a guy, there's a guy growing up, he wanted to play basketball. Okay. And he wanted to be like be a professional basketball player. All right. So he worked really hard at it. And he just

1:50:45wasn't tall enough. So he says you should give it up, take on some, but he stayed with it. Stayed with it. They said, no, this is best. Well, it's for tall people. You're not tall. Okay. Okay. Um, he now plays for the Harlem Globetrotters. His name is Hutchot. What's his last name? Just what's a well, Mugsy Boogs is a great example. No, but this no, this guy is four feet five. Whoa. Yes. He's genetic. He's a genetic dwarf. People told him he can't play basketball. And now he's one of the most popular basketball players. There he goes. Wow. Okay. Swanson Hutchot Swanson. Okay. Well, well, there are kind of my point is all I'm saying is all so you can move around that. I'm all I'm making a different point. Yes. The best part of the point. Right. The point is when you look at someone and they're not quote normal and then you start listing what you think they should not do in life. Mm hmm. Constraining the options that maybe they have ambitions that are

1:51:52greater than anything you imagined. Right. And so there's a letter. There's a letter beautifully written of someone took a voyage on a on a on a steamship in 1915. And I rep, I reproduced the letter in here beautifully written. And this passenger was given a tour of their steamship. Okay. By the captain and this letter I can't find it in here, but it's beautifully. I mean, it's a time for me to read something. Sure. Can I do plenty of time? I gotta read it. We have all the time in the world. Give me a second here. And talk them on yourselves. What? What? Uh, um, see? H and G. G. I got it. Okay. There it goes. Okay. Here's a letter. Okay. Again, this is in the body and mind chapter where we explore.

1:52:59Here it is. So I had the wrong year. How about a letter written on April 10th, 1930, to Captain von Beck of the U.S. lines SS President Roosevelt. That's Teddy Roosevelt, of course. The captain had given a tour of the bridge to a passenger who later that day waxed poetic about the experience. Again, I stood with the captain on the bridge and he was quiet and composed in the presence of a million universes, a man with the power of a god. In imagination, I saw the captain standing on the bridge gazing into the wide canopy heavens and seeing the darkness sprinkled with stars, systems and galaxies. That passenger was Helen Keller, a 1904 graduate of Radcliffe College. Okay. So what my point is, and I have other, there's a whole run of pages of think, and there's

1:54:06a whole description of hotshot here. Okay. From the Harlem Goat Shots, my point is the moment you homogenize, I quote, normalize who and what humans should be. You have cut off so much of what has enriched civilization simply because people were different. Yes. Simply because. And so if everybody's the same, what kind of world, I don't want to live in that world. Give me a different world. Do you worry that I got another one here? One more. Okay. Okay. You probably know this, but those who don't know the name hold off on the hold off on it. Okay. Here it is. Jim Abbott. You know, Jim Abbott is sure. Okay. Some people won't, but here it goes. Jim Abbott wanted his whole life to be a professional baseball player. A dream shared by many American boys. Jim wanted to be a pitcher in the major leagues. He succeeded and played for many teams, chalking up a mixed record of wins and losses, but on September

1:55:114th, 1993, while playing for the storied. I don't remember. New York Yankees. Dude. I thought it was the match. No. I'm out of bait. He pitched a no hitter. That's when no batter gets a hit in the entire game. There have been about 320 no hitters in major league history out of 220,000 games played. Due to a congenital birth defect, Jim Abbott was born without a right hand. Is Jim Abbott disabled? Is he? He pitched a fucking no hitter for the New York Yankees. What I'm saying is obviously not everyone who has a disability will achieve this way. Yes. I don't want to don't get me wrong here, but what I want to say is look at what people would have told, and I have six other examples here, one right after another, what people would have told them coming up,

1:56:15and temple grand and among them. Probably the most famous autistic person there ever was. She's professor of farming at was at the University of Colorado somewhere in the in the west, where because she sees the world the way animals do, she could advise farmers in ways they can handle in herd cows that does not create stress in them. She figured stuff out. She has research papers. Yes. But you're going to say, oh, she's not the life of the party. Get her out of here. What are you? What are we doing? Can I give you an example? What the hell? And so I was angry writing that chapter. I was angry. One more. I gotta go. Okay. Let me give you a personal example. My Giujitsu instructor, John Jacques Machado was born on his left hand. He only has a thumb. He is a genetic defect where he has no fingers on his left hand. Covid a genetic feature. A genetic feature. Well, it is a feature because he's a multiple time world champion.

1:57:16Because of the fact that he was born with this one hand that didn't have fingers, he developed a style of Giujitsu that enabled him. You see his hand there? Uh-huh. He's one of the absolute best that's ever done it. And he developed a style of Giujitsu where he utilizes that left hand to get underchins because it's not encumbered by the fingers on the left fingers. And he slides it in there and sinks rear naked chokes on people. And he also developed a style that didn't rely on grips on over a developed style that's overhooks and underhooks which became modern Giujitsu which is incorporated in mixed martial arts because in mixed martial arts, they don't wear the kimono. And people who have fingers probably would have never even thought to think that way. And people who saw John Jacques Machado as a child said, oh, this poor child, he will never reach his full potential and turned out to be one of the greatest ever. Got one here. Um, so Oliver Sax was a noted neurologist, pioneering entire subfields within his profession.

1:58:20He was also a best-selling author describing the human brain as the most incredible thing in the universe. He let it remarkably varied life while suffering from a neurological affliction called Prusbopagnosia, more commonly known as faceplinus. This condition contributed to his severe shyness since he couldn't recognize faces even if he recognized everything else about you. At times, he would not recognize his own face in the mirror. Whoa. And he shy because if he's interested in a, how does that work? If he has a love interest, if he has a love interest, he doesn't know the next time he sees that person, whether that was who we had the conversation with. Okay. In 2012, after a lecture on hallucination at Cooper Union College in New York City, I asked him, if you could go back in time, would you take a magic pill in your youth to cure your

1:59:23neurological disorder without hesitation? He replied, no. His entire professional interest in the human mind was inspired by the very disorders in his own brain. He wouldn't have it any other way. How does that work? Where they can't see faces, but they can read. No, they can see faces. They just don't recognize them. It doesn't land in any place that you recognize. Every face, even if you've seen it before, is like a brand new face. Wow. So he'd have to recognize your voice, your vocabulary, your accents, your body gestures, this sort of thing. Wow. So, doesn't Brad Pitt supposedly have that? That I don't know. I don't know. Brad Pitt. Pruss Boag ignoges. Yeah. I see if that's true. I felt like he said he has some form of that. Is that what he told one girlfriend when he saw the next one? How did you say? How dare you?

2:00:28Yeah, he does. He has some some variant on that. What does this say? Thomas says that he's explained that. He's an officially big diagnosed with it. He has extremely extreme difficulty recognizing people's faces. Wow. So maybe there's a varying spectrum of that disorder. Of course. There would be an anything. Yeah, there it is. Yeah, yeah. Face blindness. No, it's a very recent article in this past year. How crazy is it? We've got one of the best faces ever. I can't recognize his faces. Yeah. So, so it's the I so all of this you'd expect to happen on some kind of spectrum of severity. Let's call it or featureity. And depending where you are on that spectrum, you will have certain access to ways people have never thought before, ways people have never done things before. Have you seen the video of the woman somewhere in East Asia who has no arms and she gets out of bed, folds up her, takes care of her child, puts on her makeup

2:01:32with her feet with her feet with her feet. Yeah. And so, yeah, she puts on her makeup and puts on her coat, puts on, there's a whole video about this. And so, I don't know what else to tell you. Oh, you must know this is my other guy here. You must you must know him. If not, get him on. Okay. Get the dude on your show. Hang on. Study show 150 people may have developed that face blindness. It could be genetic, but they just doesn't develop menal. Yeah, there's it's interesting. But how is it? He always finds out what hot women come up. He said people don't believe him because he's like they think itself for self-absorbiness and stuff. Yeah. That's interesting. Yeah. That's interesting. Here's another one. You ready? Yes. Matt Stutzman. I recognize the name. What is a championship

2:02:33archer? Oh, yes. That's an out-shoot. Most people who have ever wielded a bow and arrow. He's actually coached by my friend John Dudley. In competition. Yeah. By bow and arrow in competition. He's also a car enthusiast. Oh, he was born without arms. Yes. He shoots his arrows and fixes his cars using his uncommonly nimble legs, feet, and toes. Is Matt Stutzman disabled? All I'm here to say is because you started this conversation asking me on the spectrum of autism, where at some point in that spectrum you focus like no one can focus before, possibly to the exclusion of personal hygiene and other concerns related to your health. And civilization has definitely benefited from those who have been able to focus in such a way.

2:03:34Yeah. So maybe our species and civil, I'm just spitballing here, that our species and the advance of civilization itself has pivoted on the fact that in the variation of who, what, and what we are, some of us can focus and solve a problem like it was the most important thing we would ever do in our lives. Yeah. And end up doing so. Thereby pivoting civilization into some future that would have not otherwise been realizable. So, yeah. I'm all there. Yeah. I mean, the diversity of human beings and their interests and what they look like and their sizes and the way they interact with the world is one of the reasons why we can create such an amazing world. But consider also, and it goes beyond just this, what we call these disabled features, right, people with disabilities, it goes to other things. For example,

2:04:36that you must know that it was not until 1987 where the American Psychiatric Association, with some names such as that, but the psychiatrist removed homosexuality as a mental disorder from their records, from their encyclopedia. 1987, a disorder. And so, what does that even mean if whatever the number is, 10, 20% of people or higher are on a gender spectrum as measured in the multiple dimensions that have revealed, have been revealed in recent years. If you had control over the genome of your children 50 years ago, and if homosexuality has a genetic component, would you say, I don't want that, that's abnormal because you're going to go through that list of what is normal. And you can say, I don't want any abnormalities in my children.

2:05:38Not at all. So there's an entire ethical frontier that is yet to be touched, yet to be resolved, I should say. Certainly there are people thinking about it. Yes. Where, what kind of child are you going to create? Well, this is the question when you have, and this is what I wanted to get to, you have things like CRISPR, and you have what could be... Legitimate genetic engineering of fetuses and embryos. Legitimate, you mean authentic. Yeah, legitimate implies it's, I mean, like they can do it. I mean, not sanctioned. But the fact that that is an emerging technology, and that like all technologies, it will increase in its ability with innovation, with new versions. Where do you think this goes? Do you think it's inevitable that human beings engineer ourselves into these super creatures that are homogenous? Do you

2:06:38think... I think we, as has almost always been the case, the science is advancing faster than our morality. Yes. Or our sensibility. Our appreciations of humanity. You know, and often the scientific advance has very important plus sides to it. Here's what I want to see happen. If we can control the genome, let's just start with what already exists in nature. All right. We put ourselves at the top of the tree of life. But if Nutes could draw the tree of life, they put themselves at the top. Why? They can regenerate their limbs. And we can't. They would value that very highly. So would we. Let's get whatever that is in the Nutes, splice it into us. Line up all the veterans who have, you know, missing limbs, put them first. We generate the... If monsters can do it, and crabs can do it, and Nutes can do it.

2:07:43They are doing research on that. Correct? I have to... I haven't checked it. I believe I've right. I would hope so. But we're doing research on growing organs, if there's a huge need for that. Yes. You don't have to wait for someone to die. Right. Particularly the day we have self-driving cars on the road dominating the population of cars, I see that happening within decades by the way. And I have good reason for thinking that. But the day that happens, we lose... So no longer do 35,000 people a year die in peak physical health, which has been a source of so many organs, organ donors. Right? Yes. You sign your card when you get your driver's license so that when you die in a car accident, we can harvest your organs. You're young and all your organs work. We don't harness harvest organs of 80-year-olds because they're 80 or 90, right? So the day we lose the 35,000 deaths per year, I hope that happens at a time when we can start growing artificial organs.

2:08:47Have you done any playing around with auto-driving features on things like Tessles? I know it's there, but I'm not mentally ready to be... It's pretty amazing. Jamie and I have the latest beta Tesla self-driving. Have you mess with it at all, Jamie? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I've been waiting for it to take... I had someone drive me around with it in the beta. It's not comfortable yet. It's the best I would say. You keep your hands on the wheel. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. And I haven't had to take over, but there's like one time I was like, I'm not doing this right now. I'll test it another time. Here's what I did do in a Tesla. You put it on the Tesla. It's not so driving. No, just the simple... What's it called? All the old cars had it. Yeah, cruise control. Cruiser, but it's managed cruise control, right? So I put it at 50 miles an hour, the traffic slows to 30. It slows to 30 with a prescribed car distance in front of me. The traffic goes

2:09:53through a standstill, the car stops. All right, the traffic picks up. The old cars wouldn't do that, right? Right. So it's doing this. So I experiment with that. And I noticed that when it starts from a stop or when it slows down, it's way harder on its brakes than I am. Yes. I'm way smoother driver than my cruise control. Yeah. So, and I've seen cars come in from the side and abruptly stops when I saw it before it did. And so I don't know. But we have to begin. Judgment. It's done. It's the dawn of this. But you're recognizing patterns and judgment and whether or not someone's paying attention or whether or not it's going to happen. All that has to happen is that it goes into an AI learning mode and it gets the sum of all of these experiences of all drivers in these situations. Yeah. AI is going to kill some people in self-driving mode, but I guarantee you it's going to tell a lot less. It will kill fewer people than in, um, then without it. Have you seen Lex Friedman playing

2:10:55guitar while he's driving around self-driving car? Yeah. Lex drove around in a Tesla while playing guitar. Uh-huh. It's pretty fast. Right. So there's a headline here and that I'm going to reach a very simple headline. But, uh, where is it here? T. He. Oh my gosh. Where is it? There it is. There's Lex. Oh. That's pretty good. Lex didn't shred. Give me some of that. Yeah. You got to listen to this. Listen to this. Oh, yeah. He was playing along. Here it goes. It's good. Listen to here.

2:11:55Have you done Lex this podcast? No. You would love him. He's, uh, an AI researcher. Uh-huh. From MIT originally and now he's mostly, uh, doing independent work and doing his own podcast and brilliant, brilliant guy. You would love him. Mm-hmm. And he's got an amazing podcast too. Okay. So here it's going to be in this section. I don't think you're interested in Lex's podcast. Seems like it's not paying attention. What do you mean? I don't hang on. I got this. Lex, thank you for the tip of trying to get him on, buddy. Try to get him. Lex actually is one of the most brilliant people I know. I think you would love talking to him. We're interesting quote here from Walter Batchock. One of the greatest pains to human nature is the pain of a new idea. For really? That guy's an idiot. That's not the greatest pain. Someone needs to kick him in the nose. That's a lot of pain. It's human pain. It's a lot more pain.

2:13:00Actually, no, these are amazing quote. I have here just an all fairness to the fellow is, it is as common people say, so upsetting. It makes you think that after all your favorite notions may be wrong. Your firmest beliefs ill-founded. Naturally, therefore, common men hate a new idea. And are disposed more or less to ill treat the original man who brings it. Oh, boy. Now we're in the common man. That's 19th century. I liked that even last. All right, here's a headline. You ready? And it's why our brain is not statistically prepared. A headline. Okay. Tesla says autopilot makes its car safer. Crash victims say it kills. Both of those are true. Yeah, but less. It's all like introducing mountain lions into areas to kill. Correct.

2:14:07Both of those are true. And if you keep at it, yes, autopilot will kill, AI self-driving will kill people, but that number will drop every single year. And you know why? Because every way that someone dies, no other person will die that way again. Because they'll upload all the software. And that does not happen. And that this is what the airline industry did. The FAA investigates every single crash. You know why you can't take lithium ions onto a plane? Because there was a UPS plane that had lithium ion batteries in the cargo and it caught fire. And there's the audio of the pilots talking to each other and to the thing while the plane is on fire just before the thing crashes. Do you remember when they used to make you take the batteries out of Samsung phones when you got on planes? I never used a Samsung phone. Samsung phones had an issue. Well, they're galaxy notes. Oh, yeah, I remember I burst into flames. They juiced up the battery capacity.

2:15:09I remember it. Yeah. Yeah. And they went all too far. Well, I'm crazy. So all I was saying is that they fixed that now. Part of the diversity of who and what we are is who you love. Yeah. What you want to look like, you know, that this resistance to the gender spectrum concerns me because it's a it's a force of restriction on people's freedom. And somewhere I read that America is like pursuit of happiness. I read that somewhere. That's some document. Right. And so if someone wants to dress in whatever way they want and if it doesn't conform with your with your binary, you're going to create a law to prevent them from doing it. What is that? Does that are we any longer in a free country? If you have that power over me to express my happiness. And another thing we're not good at. Nothing and I got to go

2:16:17it like soon. How long we've been talking here, dude? A couple hours. Damn. Dude. Come on. This is fun. I love you, man. I love you. I love you, man. I love you. I love you. Love you too. People don't know. We were outside wrestling a few moves. I used to wrestle. You know, I used to. I was like, Captain of my high school. You said I have a little flashback. Yeah. There's a third period of down four points. Uh oh. Yeah. Yeah. The buzzers. Uh, yeah. So, uh, what was I saying? We're talking about diversity. Oh, yeah, yeah. Talking about. Yeah. Yeah. So here's something we're another thing we're bad at. We're bad at recognizing a spectrum of things when we confront it. Our urge is to categorize it. That urge is so great. We categorize things that are fundamentally not categorizable. For example, hurricane strength. Um, hurricane strength is a continuum of miles per hour of wind speed.

2:17:22But we cut it into five categories. And you know what happens? That affects us. Right. So a hurricane, Hurricane Irma goes some low category three to high category three. They're just oh, it's just category three. Irma, it goes up one mile an hour. It's breaking news. Hurricane Irma strengthens a category four just this past hour and everybody crowds around the TV set. So our brain doesn't allow a continuum. We can't. And so, so what happens? Are you a boy or are you a girl? You have to be one of maybe there's a continuum. Okay. Oh, you want to talk X chromosome, Michael? We can do that. Fine. All right. So biogenetically, I can say that there's a boy and a girl or some variant on that, which is in the rare case. Will you have the double up on the chromosomes? Yeah. Intersex. Um, sure. We can have that conversation. But that's not visible to me in what you do when you wake up in the morning. I don't see your chromosomes.

2:18:26You know what I do? I see what you do to make yourself look like a boy. You go to the gym. You have whip muscles if you didn't work out. Okay. That's what you do because you're a boy. You wear boy clothes so that everyone knows you're a boy. If it was that obvious, you were a boy, you wouldn't have to do all of that. So, so much of what we do to split us into this binary is artificially added on top of the chromosomes. So, like I said, if you're a wimpy guy and I, you know, you go wear man clothes and you go to the gym because you want to look like a boy. If you're a girl, you're a woman and you have hair on your lip, can't have a mustache, you're a girl. Got hair between your eyebrows, can't have that. Got to remove that. Okay. Your breasts are not large enough. Get them enlarged as what happens to what is a number 300,000 breast augmentations a year in the United States? Okay. These are huge

2:19:27numbers to make us look more to fit into this binary. And suppose I don't buy into that binary. I say I like the spectrum. Some day I feel a little feminine. Sometimes I feel I don't going to wear clothes that way. You're going to come after me and say I don't like that. I'm going to pass a law. Oh my gosh. That's no longer a free country. Is anybody saying that you should pass a law that men can't wear whatever they want or women can't wear whatever they want? They're, they're really trying to do forces of resistance in society that are strongly preventing it. Yes. Well, I think that's unfortunate. But come back to the news. And by the way, some solutions like which bathroom do you use? Yeah. These solutions there. Yeah. Just make unisex bathrooms. Yeah. Every new restaurant in New York City is that. So that takes an entire category of people's worries and concerns off the table. When we're talking about genetic engineering. By the way, that's in the chapter. Gender and identity. And I didn't even get to color and race. Oh my gosh. Just before I go, I want to read a quick thing from that section. We're going. Go ahead. No, no, no, no. Finish what you're

2:20:30pointing. My, my, my wonder is like where if you try to look at what human beings are capable of doing now in terms of genetic engineering and what the hopes are, where do you think this leads us if this is allowed? It's not good. Whether or not it's going to be allowed. It's going to happen. Where do you think this leads us to? Do you, do you think this lead? When you look at this is, when you look at the archetypal alien, what is it? It's got a large head and this no sex organs. And they never have hair. I want to know my alien one day. Hair with with hair dude. Right. Yeah, right. They're always bald guys. 70 Afro. Yeah. Yeah. What, what do you think that leads us to? Do you think that leads us to like one uniform shape? Or do you think it leads us to everyone looking like Thor? Like where does that lead us to? Yeah, but of course Thor still had to go to the gym. So, but what if there comes a point in time? Sorry, he's not actor who plays Thor. Right. Still had to go to the gym. Right. Well, with things like biostat inhibitors. You're aware of

2:21:33those? Yeah. Yeah. So if they incorporate that into the human genome, then you're going to have people that have incredible amounts of muscle mass and they don't even have to do anything to achieve it. But what you would have done was as a parent or as someone in control predetermined what they can or should be in life. Right. Whereas in a free world and a free society, a person's own ambitions should be what guides them? Certainly. In my opinion. And I don't think that's a controversial opinion. Certainly. I agree with you. So my concern is, yeah, it's a real concern. Oh, yeah. And if the technology gets to the point where it's a uniform strategy and that people just start doing that to their children, we're talking 100 years now, 1000 years now. Oh, wait, wait, wait, that 50 years easily. Where does this go? Easily 50 years. Yeah. So you want to have the muscle bound family, but suppose one of them wanted to be a ballet dancer and had to be a little more lanky, lanky, lanky, you know, we get to a point where genetic engineering could be utilized

2:22:33on fully formed adults. And you could change the shape of like, you know, there's people that are transgender. What if you could literally become a double X chromosome human being. And you will literally have a vagina, literally have breasts, ovulate. I don't know how that would have to think about how that would happen. That would be like an extreme limit of an evolution of technology, your genomes. Yeah. So that's a really interesting, different world. Maybe you can be whoever you want. Right. That's what we are on Halloween, right? Whatever you want to be. Your thoughts on human neural interfaces, like things like neural ink and these technologies that are being proposed that would allow human beings to integrate with technology in a physical way symbiotically. Yeah. So I have a chapter in here called, um, called exploration and discovery. We're talking about the rapid pace of technology and its impact on civilization, which is extraordinary.

2:23:37But I, most predictions are wrong. You get it right in the first few years and after a few decades. But with new technology, new possibilities emerged that couldn't even. It comes in from the side. Yeah. Rather than like the internet more of what correct. Correct. It reminds me of, uh, there's an ad in 1992, 1993, early 90s from AT&T. They had a relatively successful ad campaign where they said, have you ever wanted to buy it out? It out. It out. It out. And they say some futuristic thing. And they say, you will. AT&T will bring it to you. Yeah. I've seen that. One of the things, one of the commercials was something I've never wanted to do, never dreamed of doing, never did, and never will do. They show a guy on a beach. Okay. And he's working on a tablet, which was a good predictive thing. Tablets did come. He's looking at the town and said, have you, and there's a surf coming in. It's beautiful beach things that have you ever wanted to send a fax from the beach?

2:24:39You will. AT&T. It's like, no, thank you. No one has ever in the history of the universe wanted to do that. Um, so I, but why wouldn't they? If that was all that existed. I'm just saying, but now it's email, same thing. It's email attachment. Correct. Sure. But no, you don't see that coming if you're extolling the virtues of faxes. Right. That's like in, and back to the future part two, a film made in 1989, we're riding high in faxes, 89 to the early 90s. Um, do you know what year that took place? Would supposed to take place back the future to it's like modern. Yeah, 2015. Yeah. Okay. So Marty, pisses off his boss and he gets fired. Yeah. All right. So the boss communicates this via fax to his residence. Okay. Except this is the residence of the future. He has three fax machines in his office in his home. So you see them, they come out on three different fax machines. And no matter what room he was in, he would see it. Because that's the home of the future. Yeah. Because a modern home in 1989 with one fax machine, many homes had no fax machines. So this is how

2:25:43we're linear thinking people. And you're fired. There are three different fax four fax machines. That's the future. There it is. That's what they thought. Isn't that funny? Oh, no. The future. Wow. And so I talk about here how we also have linear brains, which prevents us from seeing exponential change. Yes. And the best example of this is the is algae on a pond. Okay. So algae, you know, as it grows and it floats on the pond, you see like one square foot of it and you learn someone tells you the algae is doubling every day. And you have this huge pond and you're told this. Okay. You go away for a month and come back. The pond is half covered with algae. They say, oh my gosh. I was away for a month and this happened. When will it be completely covered? So what's the answer? It took a month to get halfway. So how much more time? A week. No, a day. What did I

2:26:48say? Doubles. It doubles every day. Yes. That's how I started this conversation. Yes. See, the linear brain overrides even the stated facts. And you know how they deal with that? They introduce carp. Not good. I didn't know that. And carp eat all the algae. I didn't know that. Yeah. But then the problem is they eat all the all the vegetation and you get like Lake Austin. Oh, yeah. There's almost no vegetation. And all the bass have no place to hide. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. Lake Austin looks like the bottom of a swimming pool now. Interesting. Yeah. It's a mistake. Nothing there, too. Whoops. Yeah. It's you think you know all the causes and effects of things. And then you don't. Well, I want I was on the big island. What I found out about mongi. Yeah. When I was there for the camera. We called them monkeys. Is that allowed? They're so adorable. We saw one at the resort. A mongoose. Cute little fella. But how why he has no snakes? So what is what do the mongos eat? Unfortunately, they brought them in for rats and they went after ground nesting birds. So they've devastated local wildlife. There it is. Yeah. So you're an island in the middle of

2:27:49Pacific. That stuff is pretty tightly configured. Those little fellas are so cute. Yeah. Okay, the mongos is found a Hawaiian native to India. We're introduced to Hawaiian islands in 1883 by the sugar industry to control rats and sugarcane fields. Any species in Hawaii is going to be invasive. Yeah. But then it gets to a point where people are making the argument that wild pigs are no longer invasive because they've been there as long as the humans have. Yeah. So this so it's only a problem when it's a problem. Yeah. It's really what that comes down to. Right. Right. Right. I'm told that L.A. Palm trees are not native. Right. They're not. Yeah. But they do really well there. And then they don't overrun the city or anything. Also, they're like symbolic Los Angeles. Yeah. The Palm tree. Yeah, you got it. They're everywhere. Okay. So I make a prediction by the year 250. I have a bunch of predictions here. Okay. Let's hear it. And this is so that in 2050, you can say Tyson, you had your head up your ass. Okay. I have no hesitation because I go through a whole set of predictions that all didn't come out right. People predicting 30 years ahead. And so I just

2:28:51want to join the susceptibility. Okay. Maybe you'll nail a few. Neuroscience and our understanding of the human mind will become so advanced that mental illness will be cured, leaving psychologists and psychiatrists without jobs. In a shift that echoes the rapid conversion from horses to automobiles in the early 20th century, self-driving electric vehicles will fully replace all cars and trucks on the road. If you want to be nostalgic with your fancy combustion engine sports car, you can drive on specially designed tracks akin to horse riding stables of today. Verdi nostalgic. The human space program will fully transition to a space industry supported not by tax dollars, but by tourism and anything else people dream of doing in space. We develop a perfect anti-viral serum and cure cancer. Medicines will tailor to your own DNA, leaving no adverse side effects.

2:29:53And this is in response to your earlier question. We will resist the urge to merge the circuitry of computers with the circuitry of our brains. Have you ever seen this? I'm happy enough to just dig it up here. No, I don't need to surgically implant this. I'm seconds away from all the knowledge of the world that I could possibly want. I don't have to surgically implant it. I don't have that urge. I'm sorry. Right, but if they do increase the capacity for human knowledge and your access to information substantially to the point where someone with the neural interface has an enormous advantage over any of those. Well, the dover has to. But I don't. But not just faster, but change the way you see it. That remains to be seen. And of course our guy says that. Yeah, Mr. Singularity. No, no. Well, he's a big fan of that. He's a new book where it's the Singularity is nearer. His first book was the Singularity was near. What a prediction. We will learn how to regrow,

2:30:54loss limbs and failing organs, bringing us up to the level of other regenerating animals on Earth, like salamanders, starfish, and lobsters. Instead of becoming our overlord and enslaving us all, artificial intelligence will be just another helpful feature of the tech infrastructures that serve our daily lives. Those are my predictions to be found wrong. Do you have any fears of artificial general intelligence? No, not at all. I don't think that's where it's going to head. You don't think either. It's curtswild, by the way. Do you do? I think we'll put intelligence in things that need to do things. Get the perfect cup of coffee, put it in your car. So it drives and doesn't get it in accident, put it in things to have the one thing that does it all. I don't. I would love to hear you talk to Elon about this because he has a deep fear of it. Yeah. I'm anomalous there. So don't listen to me. Listen to others. You're anomalous in the fact that you're not concerned? Yes. If you go to AI experts, most of them are concerned that it poses an existential threat. I think it'll just be more stuff that'll help us out. But what about when it's used in

2:31:56military applications? Well, that is an ethical. I mean, all military operations involve some ethical decision tree. Right. So it would be added to the ethical decision. But when you have unethical foreign countries that will use these sort of artificial anti-tank warfare. So you need ways to combat that. Yeah. Yeah. Once it wants to get out of it. By the way, the countries have ministers of AI. We don't. Yeah. We're behind on that curve. I'm worried. We're worried about that. That's the concern, right? The concern is that someone else is going to implement it. Yeah. And they're not going to have ethics or morals behind it. They're just going to have this idea of control and dominance. Correct. And so there's always the bad actor that you've got to, and the military, they're paid to consider the conduct of a bad actor is that we become them to beat them. That's the fear. Yeah. It's like we're not autocratic or we don't think we are. So we wouldn't have to get an entire Congress and entire electorate to vote that way. Yeah. And

2:33:04that's if we do, I don't know what the future of the world will be at that point. It's spooky. It's spooky because again, that we don't have the ability to sort of extrapolate and look at the future in terms of like how all these things are implemented and what the overall result is going to be. So you're not worried about these human neural interfaces at all. You don't see it happening at all. No, I think we'll resist it. I don't I think it'll. But didn't we, there's a lot of people that resisted email. Like we don't even have email, man. Those people all got on board. A lot of people who resisted print their emails. Remember that? And they print it and then read the printed email. But a lot of people resisted this idea of cell phones, but now they're everywhere. No, of course. No, I'm the only resistance I'm referring about is the machine biology interface. Right. That's what we're going to resist. We're not going to resist the continued advance of the technology. But if it creates a superior human being, it already has. It beats us a chest at go at any intellectual task. We give it. But it's already superior. If it's a symbiotic

2:34:08thing, if it becomes integrated with the human biology, I think we'll resist that. That's all. It's a prediction that we can hop on board right away. I'm going to be one of the first people. Drill a whole my head. The cyborg. Let's go. I don't want to be left behind. Okay. Well, the real concern is that it's really going to separate the halves from the half-nots because if it does give you an advantage economically and advantage in terms of your intellectual capacity, you're going to have this advantage because it's going to be prohibitively expensive. I would assume initially. Often things that are prohibitively expensive initially don't forever stay that way. Right. Like cell phones, of course. But eventually it becomes flat panel TVs. Sure. Like impulse items. It came out. I was just at a wall. We can't believe it. 50-inch TVs. It's nuts. Yes, it's nuts. Yeah. It's crazy. They were so expensive. I remember in heavy, like 20 grand. Yes, tens of thousands of dollars. And they'd come in like wood crates. Yep. Yep. And now you need power tools to undo it. You can do it yourself and mount them yourself on the wall. I got to, let me leave you with

2:35:09some thoughts here. Okay. I'm going to do this section here on race and color, which is another thing with the variation of what we have in the world. Just a point I want to make. When European anthropologists started running through Africa and started describing what they saw, the urge was to say everyone in Africa is this thing. And they have dark skin, woolly hair. And that is a thing. And they called it a race. And they called it the Negroes. Okay. And this is our attempt to classify into few categories, something that might actually, in real life, be on a spectrum. We know that the human species began in Africa. And everybody who populates everywhere else in the world came out of Africa to do that. What that tells you is that the genetic diversity within Africa as the origin of our species

2:36:15is greater than it is between any other two people anywhere else in the world. But because the anthropologists were not thinking genetic diversity, they're thinking skin color. They put them all in one bin. But if you have the most genetic diversity, then in practically every way humans vary, you would find the extreme of that in the African continent. Where would you find the tallest people in the world? What do you see tribe of Africa? How about the shortest people in the world? The pigmies. The pigmies. Not even that far away. Right. Geographically. They have the same skin color. So the European said these are one group of people, one race. Where might you find the slowest people in the world? Well, no one looks for them. Where would you find there's no races to find the slowest people? How about the fastest people?

2:37:16Africa. Okay. People of African descent have dominated the long distance as well as the sprints to completely different physical abilities. Oh, but they're all dark skin people. They're all Negroes. Okay. Where would you likely find the dumbest person in the world? Africa. How about the smartest person in the world? Africa. How about the Egyptians? The Europeans did not look for people smarter than they were. Okay. And to this day where they find evidence where that might have been the case, you have people saying aliens did it. Egypt is of course in Africa. Yeah. A brilliant civilization. Oh my gosh. While Europeans were still either disemboweling heretics or whatever the hell they were doing, I was even before that, thousands of years ago. So my point is if you

2:38:19don't look for it and you don't find it and you're going to create a map of humans of the world, you're going to put yourself at the top. That's what you're going to do. And you're going to write things like this. What do you want to hear from Thomas Jefferson or Francis Galton? Jefferson. Jefferson. 1785. Speaking of the Negroes, comparing them by their faculties of memory, reason and imagination, it appears to me that in memory, they are equal to the whites. In reason, much inferior. As I think one could scarcely be found capable of tracing and comprehending the investigations of Euclid. And in imagination, they are dull, tasteless, and unnormal. What is Euclid? I honestly don't know how many Euclid-fluent white people, Jefferson knew in the original

2:39:19American colonies, Euclid invented a geometry. Euclidian geometry is ancient Greece. And his book still exists to this day. So he's saying the black slaves don't know Euclid can't figure out Euclid. Well, they haven't been educated. Well, regardless. How many white farmers in 1785 USA also knew Euclid? No. Zero. Okay. But whatever were his observations and objections to black people, he had no hesitation continually mating with at least one of them producing six children. So you know what I did here? Then there's a guy who wrote a whole book comparing black people and white people, a book that was used into the 1960s. It was called The Origin of Races by Carlton Kuhn. He wrote, if Africa was the cradle of mankind, which he recognizes, it was only an indifferent

2:40:20kindergarten, Europe and Asia, where are principal schools. So these are people putting themselves at the top. He's white. So he's got to put white people at the top. Then I thought, suppose anthropologists were black racists instead of white racists. What would they write? What would they come up with? Well, also what he's saying is ridiculous because if it's kindergarten, how did they do the pyramids? It's the most complex structure ever known to man. Hold on. So we can't reproduce today. No, no. My only point is when you have that mindset and you have to put yourself at the top and all people with dark skin or one entity, you're not looking for people smarter than you. You're not of there's other evidence here. Do you realize that the people who get the highest scores on standardized tests in England are people immigrants from the Igbo tribe in Nigeria? And these are their kids who outscore all the the the the quote, native white people in the town.

2:41:22If you're not looking for them, you're not finding them. It just doesn't, it's a it's a it's a thing. It's all here in this chapter and all doing is bringing science to it. That's all I'm doing here. And uh, where's it? Where's it here? Okay. So a black yeah. Here it goes. Then I got to go. I can't keep staying here dude. It's okay. You can come back. There's a lot of little stickies on that book. I'm sure you have many other things to talk about. What is the book by the way? Oh, Starry Messenger. Cosmic Cosmic Perspectives. Is it out currently? Civilization came out eight weeks ago. Please tell me you did the audio version of it. I did. Thank you. I did. I hate when people have other people do the over. Yeah. I did the audio version. Oh, yeah. Of course you you have to. I could not do the

2:42:25audio version of this. I talk about the pyramids here. Um, even Elon Musk by the way tweeted, uh, uh, pyramids aliens built the pyramids obviously that even Elon said that he was joking around. Well possibly, but he said it and it's in a, um, you know Elon likes to joke around about shit. Here's one. On May 1st, 2021, a talented chess player reached the title of National Master for having achieved a US chess federation rating above 2200 landing among the top 4% of 350,000 rated players in the world. A rating achieved that was 500 points higher than that of his chess coach just a few years after learning how to play the game. That prodigy is a 10 year old boy named Tony Talua. Odd, Odd, they will me the son of Nigerian refugees to the USA in 2017. His

2:43:27family spent a brief time living in homeless shelters in New York City before his parents established stable employment and permanent residents. I played a brief chess game against the little fellow in March 2021 on Grandmaster Maurice Ashley's Twitch platform, a live streaming social media interface. The game was indeed brief. Yeah, he wiped the floor with me. Speaking of Nigerians, uh, immigrants to the US, uh, speaking of Nigerians, immigrants to the US enjoy an 8% higher household income than the national average Nigerian immigrants in the United States. Yeah. And ethnic Nigerian children in the United Kingdom, especially those from the Igbo tribe, consider consistently attaining higher test scores on average than their white UK counterparts. What is it about Nigeria? Because so many people pause and wonder what depths of intellect, these are occasions to pause what depths of intellectual capital in math, science,

2:44:29and engineering or any field lay hidden deep within the African continent or anywhere else on earth. Lost for now or lost forever for want of an opportunity to flourish. I'm going to leave you with a fast list. I want to tell you what my racist black anthropologist found. Let's go back to the 19th century and let all anthropologists be black racists instead of white racists. Okay. Okay. What would they say? So all right, um, chimpanzees are humans closest genetic relative. We just need to find similarities between chimps and white people and that would be surefire evidence of their less evolved state because that's what people were saying. The blacks were still evolving and they show a chimp a black person and a white person. And so that's you can enslave black people and it laws against them. It would wait to justify it because of course you

2:45:31going to put yourself at the top. So now hypothetical black racist anthropologist. Chimps and other apes. So this is a list. This is in there a book that there was never written. Chimps and other apes grow hair all over their bodies. The harriest people you've ever seen have been white people with mats of hair across their chests and ascending their backs. Their body hair can even reach upward and out of their shirt collar. Black people do not remotely approximate this level of herreness. There was no mention of this in any of those books. Distinct from their face hands and feet park the hair of most chimpanzees the way they do to each other when checking for lights and their skin color is white, not any shade of black or brown. Chimps tend to have big ears relative to their head size. After decades of ear watching I can attest that the biggest

2:46:35ears I've ever seen on humans have been on white people. Have a look yourself. Next time you're in a crowded public place. Doubtless they're strong overlap but the size of black people's ears can be as little as half the size of white people's ears. You might now ask about the famously large ears of President Barack Obama. But he is precisely half white just as much white as black. So maybe his big ears come from the white half of his family. For most of the 20th century, Neanderthals were portrayed as stupid and brutish. Turns out beginning in the 1990s genetic research revealed that Europeans are between 1 and 3% Neanderthal. Africans 0% that can't be good for Europeans time to clean up that backward primitive image. Since then, published references to Neanderthals

2:47:36instead comment on what must have been their creative artistic, inventive and articulate ways crafting sophisticated tools and technologies to shape their world. Look how easy it is to be racist. Let's continue. Chimpanzees invest quality family time pruning each other's hair. We've all watched them do this. Apparently the lice they find must be tasty because whoever plucks them from the other chim's head also eats them. Ever here of a lice outbreak among black children? Probably not. White children are 30 times more susceptible to lice infestation than our black children. The parasite simply likes to lay eggs in the hair of chimpanzees and white people more than on the hair of black people. This goes on. This could have been included and they would have said, well wait a minute, maybe all humans are together

2:48:37and chimps are something completely different. But they didn't go there. Their bias prevented their analysis of information that stares flat into their face. Okay? Here's one. I'm going to skip some here because I got to go. I got to plain waiting for me. I'm skipping some here. Ready? Yeah. This is one more from the chimp vault. I have others that are not chimp related. Here's one. Chimp hands ease. Love to swing in trees. Apparently so do suburban white children. They typically can't wait to build and live in a backyard tree house. You have not likely seen black children even contemplate the idea. The white people clearly want to return to their fully primitive state. This would be a racist black person. Okay? From the 19th century,

2:49:42publishing, trying to find ways to enslave white people. That's a cosmic perspective. That's a look, dude. This is what we were doing as humans to each other. Not recognizing authentic diversity and who and what we are. Trying to separate to say, I'm better. I make the rules and whatever rule I'm making, I'm going to put myself at the top and you're not going to be at the top because you're different. Do you anticipate that as people get more education, start more information and as we evolve, I want to believe that. Stop doing that and we'll start recognizing the importance of diversity. I want to believe that. And that it's our strength. I want to believe that. I want to believe that too. I so want to believe that. Okay. Here it is. Then I really got to go. Okay. Last one. This is a quote, a short quote from Harstman 200 years ago. I want this on my tombstone.

2:50:45I besiege you. Nobody uses besiege anywhere. I love it. I besiege you to treasure up in your hearts. These my parting words. Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity. Our primal urge to keep looking up is surely greater than our primal urge to keep killing one another. If so, then human curiosity and wonder, the twin chariots of cosmic discovery, will ensure that starry messages, these are messages from science, from the sky, from the universe, continue to arrive. These insights compel us for our short time on earth to become better shepherds of our own civilization. Yes, life is better than death. Life is also better than having never been born. But each of us is alive against stupendous odds. We won the lottery only once. We get to invoke our faculties of reason

2:51:50to figure out how the world works. But we also get to smell the flowers. We get to bask in divine sunsets and sunrises and gaze deeply into the night sky they cradle. We get to live and ultimately die in this glorious universe. That's a hell of a tombstone. Dude, I gotta run. Thank you so much. And one day I'll come back and just chill. We'll lift weights together. Okay? Rest a little few rounds. Let's do it. You know. Thank you very much. Rubbish here. Thanks for having me. Thank you. All right. Bye everybody.