Hello Internet - H.I. #67: Doctor Brady

Episode Date: July 31, 2016

Brady and Grey discuss: Brexit and emoji flags revisited, Brady doesn't want his problems fixed -- just his jokes laughed at, jousting and golf at the Olympics, Brady gets an honorary degree, and Grey's split-brain video which inevitably spills over into another discussion of free will in which Grey says part of the universe might not make sense but forgot to mention one key point of the argument. Brought to You By Fracture: Photos printed in vivid color directly on glass. Save 15% off your order with coupon code SUMMER. Audible: get a free 30-day trial by signing up at audible.com/hellointernet Hover: The best way to buy and manage domain names. Use coupon code 'DoctorBrady' for 10% off Listeners like YOU on Patreon Show Notes Discuss this episode on the reddit Brexit: Mustn't be so hasty Grey: Brexit, Briefly Reddit Brexit discussion The Great Guns Germs and Steel Debate Nepal Flag Emoji Man in Business Suit Levitating Let's make jousting an Olympic sport Brady: Doctor of Letters Grey: The Trouble with Transporters Clever Hans the Horse

Grey, for this episode and this episode only, will you call me Dr. Harron? Last time we spoke, we talked about Brexit. And at that point in time, we had no prime minister and no idea of what might or might not happen. And now we do have a prime minister. Things have moved along in the world, but I am still of the opinion that I think it seems unlikely that maximum Brexit is going to occur. I've been following the news like ever so slightly, and I just keep seeing a whole bunch of like, mustn't be so hasty news with regard to Brexit. Just yesterday, I even saw a headline, which was the new prime minister announcing something like, we will not do Article 50 until the beginning of 2017 at the earliest. So I feel like the campaign to push this back has begun. That's my feelings on what the current state of play is with Brexit. I have to say, I'm so upset about Brexit for so many reasons.

But one of the main ones is, I've never been one of those people that's that into politics. And I always find people who are like really into politics and talking about it all the time a little bit annoying. Yeah, it's like when people talk about sports. Well, okay, yeah, fair enough. For me, politics was that annoying thing. And I've become one of those people lately. Like I find myself at dinner parties talking about politics.

And I go out with people and I talk about politics. And I'm like, oh, no, I've become that annoying that annoying person and I blame Brexit so I'm really fighting against it I'm fighting I don't want to be that guy because I know politics is well I mean I'm not going to say it's boring because everyone finds different things interesting and like you say I find sport interesting yeah so I'm not going to say politics is boring but politics is usually a disagreeable thing to talk about a lot. You know, they say it's one of those topics you shouldn't bring up. I need to tone that down.

It's politics that's been so interesting lately, though. Brexit or no Brexit. It's just triggered such interesting stuff in the political parties as they've all sort of turned on themselves. It's like the Hunger Games. You can't stop watching so it's funny i kind of agree that for a long long time i was avoiding following any of the brexit news and i'm still not hugely following it now but just around when we recorded our last show i finally realized like oh there is something interesting to talk about here and i keep feeling like this has given us the most perfect dilemma for a representative democracy ever. I'm never

super interested in the particular details of the in-party fighting or who's doing what, but I do find the bigger picture quite interesting now, that if I'm right that the conservatives don't really want to do this, then I think it is like this quandary of what is a representative democracy to do? And so I think that's really interesting. But again, as far as I could tell think it is like this quandary of what is a representative democracy to do? And so I think that's really interesting. But again, as far as I could tell, it looks like they're just totally stalling for as long as they possibly can. I thought your Brexit video was quite good, too. It was a nice sort of crystallization of what we discussed in the last episode. I thought it was a nice return to form after a couple of bollocks videos you've done lately. So well done.

Thank you. I really appreciate that. Yeah yeah how's that for a backhanded compliment i've also found like you that it is absolutely unavoidable to discuss brexit with almost everybody in the whole of the uk for the past couple weeks like since i came back from america and since i've been here it's like literally everybody wants to talk Brexit. You go to like a dinner party, you end up talking Brexit. I've ended up like just in cafes, like the person giving me the coffee wants to talk Brexit. And like this doesn't seem like an appropriate venue for this, but just is clearly on everybody's mind and is unavoidable. Oh, dude, it's worse in America.

Well, if you're the British guy, if you're the British in quotation marks guy like me, because every party you go to, every dinner you go to, every conversation, it's all anyone wants to ask you about. It's like, what the hell happened, man? What's going on? Explain to me. And being someone who didn't vote for Brexit, I'm having to sort of try and explain what's going on. And I'm like, it puts you in a really difficult situation. But I feel like sort of the freak in the room all the time. So I was glad to get out of there and no longer have to answer questions about it we are again going to

be passing each other because you have just recently gotten back to the uk and i am going back to america again tomorrow so we keep flipping continents so you're back here you don't have to keep explaining to people what's going on you're not the representative of the whole of the uk as the australian guy anyway having done the video i mean obviously we talked about it on the podcast but it's another order of magnitude when you do a video on something did you find you sort of your inboxes and the ways that people try to get to you get sort of more demand than usual or did you manage to shelter yourself from all the hordes. It was a hugely, hugely active discussion on the Reddit. I sort of have a whole bunch of ways now to filter out my email so that it doesn't get

exploded when this occurs anymore, which is useful. But yeah, there was a whole bunch of discussion about it. And as always, YouTube comments aside, at least on the Reddit comments, I've found, you know, for the most part, people were pretty civil in their disagreements and discussions on what could otherwise be a touchy topic yeah people are passionate but i think that's fair i think generally people are more civil about it than some other topics i do have some advice for people though i mean people are obviously aware that one of the places they could get the attention of gray or to a lesser extent myself is to go into our subreddits i don't know if this is true for you, Gray, but it's true for me.

If you do want me to read your comment and reply to it, keep it short is my recommendation. If you say, here's what I have to say, and I see like 19 sentences, you are wasting your time. And I think you're probably wasting your time for anyone to read it. It's just like posting a five-minute YouTube video versus a 40-minute YouTube video. People don't even start when

they see how long it is from the start. Concise is key. Even if you've got a lot to say, you've got to think, no, just say one thing because that's the only chance anyone will read it. I feel sorry for these people that write these big long essays. Like I've got something to say and I want you all to read it. And then you see this like eight pages of text. It's like, dude, no one's reading that. I hope you realize it. Yeah. That's what they call eight pages of text it's like dude no one's reading that i hope you realize it yeah that's what they call the wall of text right you just see a giant wall of text and you feel like am i going to climb over this wall of text no i'm not i'm totally aware of that same thing every once in a while i read it i think perhaps the time in my life when i read the most biggest

longest walls of text ever was the great guns, germs and steel debate. I did read like all of that stuff. But in a regular Reddit thread, when someone leaves one of those, you're just like, forget it. I'm not going to read this. My other personal annoyance is when people try to put two different things in a single comment. I always feel like if you have multiple things to say, leave multiple comments so that the thread structure is really clear. I always get annoyed when people try to have like two totally separate unrelated ideas in a comment. Keep it clean, people.

Nice and simple. One idea per post. Every post very short. There's only a finite amount of attention in the world and you need strategies to get people's attention. It's totally true. Without a doubt, that is the case. I think I've said it before at some point on this podcast, but I really do think that in the modern internet, interconnected, info-dense world, that attention is a bunch of people's attention is a valuable thing and how you spend your own attention is a valuable thing and then that rolls into what you're saying here of how

do you attempt to get the attention of somebody else you have to be strategic about it i mean the people who are most successful on youtube people like yourself i mean i think your greatest skill is the curation and management of people's attention much more than the quality of the video which you make which are good but I think your canniness with managing people's attention is your greatest asset in many ways. What do you mean by that? into how to get people's attention and sort of keep them interested in what you're doing and engaged with you as a creator. I think you think about it a lot more than I do. I think if I was going for maximum amount of attention, more list videos. No, no, no. But in some ways, I imagine you as someone who weighs that up, weighs up the click baitiness of, you know, a list video or attention grabbing

thumbnail versus the goodwill and respect and longer term attention of someone who has more credibility and is a bit more proper about such things. I think you think about all these things a lot because there's a downside to list videos as well. I can imagine you thinking, do I make a list video? Here's what would be good about it. It would have a lot of short-term upside, but it might have downside in the longer term. And I imagine you as someone who thinks about all this stuff. I think you're very canny. It's true.

I do think about that stuff. And actually, just yesterday, I came up with what I thought was a really good idea for a list video. So I'm not against list videos in principle. It just depends on if it works. But actually, since you bring this up, I have a question for you, which is this is one of those times where I feel like I don't know if I'm having a subjective experience, you know, like you tune into a thing and then there's just a whole bunch of confirmation bias about the thing or not. But I feel like the clickbaitiness of headlines and thumbnails on YouTube has really gone up in the

last six months. Titles that are just ambiguous or they have very clickbait style thumbnails. I don't know. I have a feeling like some switch got turned somewhere in YouTube and they got even better about A-B testing what it is that humans will click on YouTube. But maybe this is just my own subjective experience of this. I don't know. I think it's possible. Certainly, I think the testing what it is that humans will click on YouTube. But maybe this is just my own subjective experience of this. I don't know. I think it's possible. Certainly, I think the number of people creating content on YouTube obviously is going up, but I think it's going up exponentially. And I think every man and their dog now considers themselves like a YouTuber, which is fine. They can be, but it's inevitably going to result in an arms war when it comes to attention seeking yeah well

that's why it's on my mind because i've been aware for the last couple videos and some of the things that i'm trying to work on now i've had this feeling of like has this arms war gotten strong enough that i kind of have to give in and do more clickbaity titles or more clickbaity thumbnails. Because I generally don't like kind of clickbait stuff. It doesn't just sit well with me, but I've been wondering if I'm just being foolish at a certain point. And maybe it's because I'm thinking about that. I am now more sensitive to super clickbaity kind of stuff on YouTube. But it's interesting.

It might come up later on, because if we talk about one of your videos later, we'll talk about CGP grey bait. Okay. All right. We can talk about that later. Cool. So seeing we're doing follow up, we better not go too far down the rubber hole. Emojis. What's going on here? Yes. So we were discussing the emoji flags last time. Who should and who should not get emoji flags? I believe I had a rock solid, unmovable argument about how the new flags should be generated. I think that's my memory of how it went. Basically, anything American or that you fancy.

Yeah, I think that might have been the conclusion that we came to. I wondered aloud in that episode if Vatican City had a flag. And the answer is yes, Vatican City does have a flag. Oh, really? Did someone get back to you on that, did they? I only got a thousand messages about that. I think every resident of Vatican City must have sent us something about it because I got at least that many emails.

Yeah. There's one from the Pope, right, who listens and lets us know. I use the Vatican City emoji flag every day. Pope Tim III. Yeah. So, of course, yes, there was a lot of feedback about that. But what I really liked is a couple people pointed out some of the more unusual flags that are already in there. So these include places like Western Sahara, which is sort of ambiguous but not really a country, has a flag.

The, I don't know how to pronounce it, I think it's Owland Islands has a flag. French Polynesia has a flag. The British Indian Ocean Territory has a flag. There's a bunch of just funny places like Greenland and Curacao, I never know how to say it, even though I said it in a video once. So there are already a bunch of places that are sort of semi-sovereign independent places, like Gibraltar, like Guernsey, like Jersey, like the Isle of Man. So there's already in this list of country flags in the emoji standard, there's just a ton of weirdness already. I thought that was interesting

the isle of man has an emoji and scotland doesn't that's correct that is nuts right isn't it all i can think of is how did someone sit down and make this list where they're like isle of man yes right gibraltar yes scotland no no scotland right now like what is the reasoning for this also i thought you might enjoy have you seen the nepal emoji oh there we go oh no they've had a bit of a problem there with the nepal one haven't they to describe what has gone wrong with the nepal emoji obviously the nepal is not a rectangular flag it's these two sort of triangles stacked on top of each other but what they've basically done for the emoji is had an all white rectangular flag and then just put the Nepal triangles off to the left-hand side. So it looks like it's the triangle set on a white background.

Yeah, that is a bit of a disaster. And the thing that I find strange about that is it's not as though emojis are required to be rectangular, right? Emojis come in all kinds of crazy shapes, but for some reason, the Nepal one, they have to put a little white background on it. It's like, oh no, this is terrible. You know there's going to be a technical reason, Gray, that all flags have to be standardized. And you're going to have like a nerd avalanche of people explaining why now.

No, there is no reason why they have to be standardized. No, but I bet there's a reason the flags do. For some reason, it's been decided all the flags must be the same shape for some silly reason. Look, like all software stuff, some human made it this way. You could make it a different way. You could have the Nepal one just be a special one, right? They have the bizarre, like, businessman floating over a hole shape emoji, which I don't understand at all. Like, I don't get that one. If they can do that, the Nepal one, it can just be the two triangles. Yeah, but there'll be some reason that they said flags have got to be rectangular because they're in some subset that

need to be standardized to be compatible with some other thing i'm very confident that there is no reason for this and if there is a reason please let brady know is the switzerland flag more square or is that sort of rectangularized as well because obviously switzerland has that much more square or is that sort of rectangularized as well because obviously switzerland has that much more square flag than others let's see switzerland flag emoji the switzerland flag emoji is also rectangularified see this is playing into my belief that they've decided to rectangularize no national flags for some reason hey don't don't get me wrong you know how much i love the nepal flag i'm outraged and i think it's silly i'm just saying there'll be some stupid reason i think it's laziness that's probably what it is laziness is the reason well inertia might be a better way to describe it that might be right all right so we had an email from a listener oh named caleb who wrote all

sorts of things that i won't go into but some of them were quite interesting actually now that i'm reading it back i've forgotten half of these things what are you doing here you're teasing the listeners you're teasing me or you're going through this email that what you're now going to pick out the least interesting of the things to mention as you go through it it's a very pro brady email which i find quite funny because so many listeners are sort of a big gray fans so he actually says if you're keeping track i was a brady fan first periodic videos is the first channel i subscribe to my wife is a fan too she loves objectivity she also wants you to know she has a crush on you

this seems very likely to get cut from the podcast. Yeah, I'm probably, I'm making it up. So the thing that's really interesting that Caleb says is, I did a small experiment in listening and I listened, this is to Hello Internet, I listened in reverse chronological order. It is kind of funny how often follow-up was the big conversation about something that in earlier episodes has only been brought up in passing. It actually worked well.

The only problem is that I finally made it through the archive. And I think this raises an interesting question because you know how you get these people that say you should watch Star Wars films in different orders and that sort of thing and they even have names to these orders. Machete order. Yeah. Could we have the caleb ordering of listening to hello internet which is listening in reverse chronological order and i wonder what the pros and cons of listening to a podcast in reverse are and what your thoughts are on that i don't know it depends a lot on the podcast what do you do when you get into a new

podcast and you think this looks good will you tend to pick it up from where they're at will you go to the start will you ever go backwards will you just pick and choose based on topics when you go into a new podcast that's been around for a while what's your immersion strategy okay so i generally listen to podcasts in chronological order so So if I find something that I think I might like, I will go back and I will download the whole of the archive and I will listen in chronological order. And I always feel like that's the best way to do it. Like that feels like the best way to experience it.

Because if you're doing it in reverse chronological order, like I have done this with some shows and I just think it ends up in this weird state where as you're listening to new episodes as they come out but then you're also listening to old episodes so you are a time traveler who is both going forward and backward in time well that just sounds awesome no it's it's confusing it's jarring it's. In my podcast player, which is I'm currently using Overcast, but you can do this in a bunch of different podcast apps. I have all of my podcasts ordered oldest to newest by podcast.

So when I open up my podcast player, I'm always seeing the oldest episodes. And then I am working my way through my podcasts that way. And there's a bunch of reasons why I like to do this. But I think that is the best way to see how it changes and to understand how a podcast is later on. I mean, the disadvantage is very often podcasts kind of start off in the beginning a little bit different than they end up towards the end. But I think oldest to newest is clearly the way to go. But what about you? That's disappointingly boring of you, Grey.

I thought maybe you would have some twist on it, not just like, oh, go to the start and then follow it through to the end. I mean, of course, that's the logical way to do it, but... What do you want me to suggest here? Do you think I'm going to do random order? I think you should listen in completely random order so that nothing in the universe makes sense. Well, in some ways, that's what I do.

Of course. Of course. Right. Okay. If there's a new one, a new podcast, because most podcasts do get better over time. So going straight back to the start, you might have to wade through some treacle before they find their feet. But also, if I find a new one, I'll listen to the most recent episode because that basically puts a marker in the sand that says, is this good or not?

And is the future bright or is the future gloomy? And if it is good, I would tend to look at the back catalogue and just cherry pick the titles that I think look like they'll be about things that interest me. Because I'm very aware that if you listen to old episodes, they'll be talking about things that are no longer in the news. Their opinions may have changed on things and I could be getting riled up by things that are no longer relevant. So I tend to just go back and look at the ones that are, oh, that's

really going to be in my sweet spot. Oh, the plane crash episode. I'll listen to that one. Right. And ignore lots of the back catalog. So cherry pick from the past and pick up from where they're at at the moment tends to be my philosophy but see here's why i really like doing all kinds of media in terms of oldest to newest i think there's a lot of advantages in going oldest to newest and i do the same thing like when i save articles to read so like i can press a button on my web browser and save them into an app to read later. I also have those kinds of things open up oldest to newest because I find that time acts as a kind of attention filter. time or I'm reading articles that passed me saved several weeks ago instead of what passed me saved minutes ago, it acts as a kind of filter of like, do I actually care about this thing anymore?

And so very often, like when a podcast will come up, I feel like, oh, great, this podcast is talking about things that are totally not relevant to me anymore. I can just delete. And I feel like, great, I got an hour of my life back because this thing would have mattered when I would have listened to it. But it doesn't matter now that I'm listening, you know, weeks behind. And I feel like it's an excellent way to have a bit of perspective on what matters or what doesn't matter. Like with articles as well, it's really easy to save a bunch of articles to read later that you realize later, I don't really care. I only just cared in the moment. And so you're acting as a kind of chronological attention filter for the

media that you consume. It's the same reason why I do this with like movies to watch and books to read. Like I put them all on a list and you let future you see what still matters or what is still relevant. That sounds like you're describing my method more than your method, where you pick up from where it's at now, but you look at the past and cherry pick the things that are worthy of your attention rather than listening to everything. You're just advocating what I said, not what you said. No, but I don't just go through the back catalog and select randomly. I will say like, download absolutely everything. And then I just delete as I'm going through, right? If something isn't relevant to the current time. Oh, well, that's just semantics. I mean, it's just a mechanism. I mean, I'm looking at the whole

back catalog. I may not have put them onto my player. I'm just looking at the feed. And then I'm just deleting in my mind, aren't I? Okay, I'm not going to listen to that one. That's not worthy of my time. The place where you can come unstuck with your strategy, and maybe it doesn't matter because you wouldn't listen to this sort of podcast anyway, is because you live in your bubble, you might not know what's relevant or not. And if I can give you an example.

Okay. There's a podcast I quite like at the moment. It's the BBC Politics one with this guy called John Pienaar. He's really good. And every Sunday he does interviews. So I download it. And a week or so ago, his Sunday show was about the battle for the prime ministership of Britain. And the two women who it had come down to.

This face-off. And they were previewing the candidates and talking about it. And I downloaded it and thought, oh, that's going to be a nice listen tomorrow. And of course, the next day, one of those candidates dropped out. And Theresa May became prime minister. Now, if I lived in the grey bubble and didn't know that, I could have settled in with my pipe and my smoking jacket and sat on the sofa and thought, oh, this is going to be a nice listen.

I would have spent an hour and a half listening to this great setup of this great contest that was about to happen. And then I would have thought, oh, I can't wait to find out who wins. And then I found out it all finished a couple of days before. And I would have felt like, oh, that was a waste of my time. That preview of that battle didn't even happen. It'd be like watching a two hour preview of a big football match that then gets cancelled. Again, I can never understand the way you even phrase things. Two things here. First of all, you always imagine that I'm just totally isolated from the outside world 100%. It was

very likely that you would know that a prime minister has been elected. It's the same way when I'm going through stuff oldest to newest, I am dimly aware of events that have occurred in the world, which is the very reason I'm able to select what it is that I do or do not want to listen to. And secondly, if you did settle down with your pipe to listen to this excellent, excellent preview of the prime minister battle that was coming up, when it was over, wouldn't it be incredibly satisfying to say, I wonder who won this battle? And then you immediately get to know the answer. It's like binge watching TV. I have actually done that on occasion with stuff where I know an event has occurred, but I'm listening to people discuss an event beforehand. And I sort of listen and then I think, I'm going to sit here and try to

make a prediction about what will occur. And what's fantastic is I get to know if I'm right instantly. Don't get me wrong, right? In response to your response, first of all, I don't think I underestimate how out of touch you are. You never cease to amaze me with news stories you haven't heard of. It never matters. Okay. That's another argument. That's another argument, but it still never ceases to amaze me. And second second of all there's nothing wrong with living your life with a little bit of a time offset i don't think i do it quite as dramatically as you but i do do it sometimes i think it's hugely beneficial yeah and i do it if i'm out shopping on a sunday because i will often record the grand prix that day and avoid all social media so I don't know the result. And that night I will watch the race.

And I'm five or six hours behind the rest of the world, but I'm getting just as much excitement from watching it five or six hours later. So there's nothing wrong with a time offset. And in many ways, I see that's what you do in your life. In a lot of ways, you offset time and that's fine. The problem with this politics situation is you'd be doing a time offset and there'd be nothing wrong with hearing about the contest and then finding out what happened later with the contest but if the contest gets cancelled altogether there is a little bit of a robbery

that's happened because they'll be talking about things that they think will happen over the next six weeks and they could tell you and then they're going to be doing this in two weeks time and they're going to be having a debate in the community hall in three weeks time. And I think when that debate comes, you know, and if none of that stuff even happens, I do think you have sunk a little bit of time into something you probably shouldn't have. So there is value to be gained from thinking, ha, that's what everyone thought would happen. And none of it happened. Isn't that interesting? But put it this way. I didn't listen to it because I thought it would be a waste of my time. Right. And great. You saved yourself an hour of your life. I mean, this is, you know,

when I started doing this, I mean, a long time ago now, I used to listen to more political shows than I currently do. I mean, I don't think I have anything that could be even described as a political show on my subscriptions anymore. You know, but of course, shows sometimes touch on politics because it's unavoidable. But it was precisely this time offset that made me realize, like, why am I even listening to these political shows anyway? It's almost always stuff that totally doesn't matter in a week. If I wait a week to listen to it, and then it has no impact on anything, well, why am I listening to it the moment that it comes out? There's not really any benefit there. So I'm feeling extra intense about this because I was just talking to a friend of mine who I was trying to talk out of for a while

paying attention to the news. And he did do my like, read newspapers a week later experiment. And he was like, Oh, yeah, like introducing this time delay makes it really obvious that none of this stuff actually matters. And so I feel like everybody should have a little bit of a time delay with everything that they're doing, because time acts as an excellent filter of what are you going to be interested in long term, not just what do you think you're interested in immediately. Well, yeah. Where does that end? I mean, nothing matters in the long term, does it?

We're all going to be dead in 60 or 70 years. We might as well just stop doing anything. Excellent extrapolation, Brady. Can't possibly disagree. No disagreement there hello internet our fantastic friends at fracture are back for the summer if you're looking to get your photographs printed on glass fracture is the place to go these things look absolutely fantastic they're super lightweight. They make

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getting a fracture, use coupon code SUMMER for 15% off from now through August 19th. And finally, be sure to listen to the next fracture ad because they'll be doing another exclusive giveaway on the episode they next sponsor. Thank goodness it's summer. Thank goodness for fracture. So can we do a paper cut? Of course. There's a Brady's paper cut. My paper cut is everyone trying to solve my problems online. Now, I've discussed this before in the context of relationships. It can happen both ways, but I think from what I've heard and what I've experienced and what I've read, males are more guilty of this than females.

But everyone does it. And that is when someone complains or has a problem, they don't necessarily want you to try and solve it. Sometimes they just want some sympathy or they want to vent. And trying to solve it is not what you should do. Disagree. Well, I'm sorry it's true if your wife come home from work and has had a difficult day and says oh it's been so difficult

i had a really tough day today they don't necessarily want you to say well you should have done this or tomorrow you should do this sometimes they just want an arm around the shoulder or a sympathetic word saying wow that sounds tough good on you for getting through it let's have dinner and i think the same is true on social media. If I'm sometimes griping about something that annoys me, for example, the Twitter app, and I'm saying, oh, it's so annoying, Twitter. I don't want a huge, big, long list of all the other different apps I should use or the different things I should do or be told, oh, that's a crap app. You shouldn't be using it anyway. Sometimes I just want people to either say, yeah, sucks, doesn't it?

Or just say, you know, don't worry, that was a funny joke you made at their expense anyway, good on you. Let's all soldier on. I don't want to be told all the things I'm doing wrong and all the things I should change. Just put your arm around my shoulder and say, yeah, I hear you, man. You don't have to solve problems. Why do you want to wallow in your own problems and not receive solutions because that's humans are just like that sometimes sometimes they don't want to solve the problem they just want to grow if someone has a solution don't you want to hear the solution no not necessarily no no no because usually a solution

implies that i'm doing something wrong and if i'm feeling pissed off you are just going to piss me off even more by telling me i'm doing something wrong just tell me you're on my side don't like but what if you are doing something wrong if you and i gray if you and i played football together okay and i was the goalkeeper for the team and we made the world cup final okay and right at the end of the world cup final i jumped the wrong way and let in a goal and we lost the world cup final at the end of the game when final, I jumped the wrong way and let in a goal and we lost the World Cup final. At the end of the game, when I'm in tears in front of 100,000 people in the stadium, I would not want you to come up to me and say, Brady, if we make the World Cup final again in four years and that happens, next time jump to the left. It was obvious he was going to shoot. This is the worst comparison ever because there's no solution for that.

That's a situation where is there a solution that could be offered no there's no solution at all it's like oh you just lost us the big game i'm sorry buddy right i'll put my arm around you but if you're like oh i have a problem with the twitter client i don't like this thing about it and somebody says oh there's a different twitter client that does things differently that's a solution what you're saying here is a bit like if like someone's talking about like a death in the family and someone's like well you know if we invented anti-death technology right then this wouldn't be a problem it's like no this is not even remotely comparable you're giving an analogy for which there is no solution i would not offer a solution for like

you should have jumped the other way that's just uh what is it like monday morning quarterbacking if we had a time machine and could go back in time, things could have been different. That kind of stuff is just obnoxious. No, because at the end of the game, there would be value in you telling me, if that happens again in a future game, Brady, you should jump to the left or, you know,

learn from your experience. In the heat of the moment, and in three or four weeks after the football game, there would be value in us watching the video together and saying, now, Brady, if you're goalkeeping again and that same player does that thing now you know what to do but in the heat of the moment when passions are high that is not the time for solutions this is the time for sympathy and a consoling arm and it's the same on twitter if i'm venting on twitter and making a joke or saying something angry, I just want my friends to kind of agree with me and agree that things are crap. I don't want them

to be with their arms crossed in their serious CGP grey voice telling me, well, in fact, there is a solution to that problem which you're venting about. I just let the steam rise and let the passions go. And then later on, I'll probably find the solution myself. I'm just venting. I don't want you all telling me stuff like that. I'm sorry. And if I'm wrong, okay. But then why are there like thousands of books and bits of advice along these lines too about like, you know, relationships and stuff

saying when one person's like, you know, upset and venting about their problems, it doesn't mean they want you to sit there and solve them. This is like a known thing. But we're not married, so it doesn't matter. Yeah, no, we're not married, right? And this doesn't matter, right? So in the big book of why Brady and Grey cannot be shipped together, right?

This would be another one of these examples of like, Brady comes home and just wants to talk about his feelings and wants no solutions to easily solvable problems. And Grey has no patience for this whatsoever. Oh, don't get me wrong, Grey. I'm guilty of this. I am guilty of this when people are like upset. I'm also Mr. Know-it-all saying,

well, you should have done this or next time you should do that or you could fix that. But I do it. But the minute I do it, I realize it's a mistake. But you do it anyway. Yeah, because it's like, it's what we do. And it's certainly what everyone who follows me on Twitter does.

I mean, the closest I can get to sympathizing with this is if I complain on the podcast about something or if I complain on Twitter about something, people often offer solutions. But where I get annoyed at is when someone's solution is no good, right? When their solution doesn't work. And usually it's because you have not adequately understood the problem domain solution offerer. You are just giving me a thing that doesn't actually make stuff better. It's just an alternative. This is not actually a solution.

And that's where I get annoyed. It just feels like you don't understand the problem. If I want a solution, I will make it clear that I want a solution. If I'm just trying to be a wise ass and making jokes at Twitter's expense, just go with me. You keep flipping around a couple of things here, which is you're joking on Twitter or like you're complaining about a thing that has a solution. Those are two, again, totally different social scenarios, right? I don't think so.

You don't think so? I think if something's pissing me off, like, you know, I'm saying I've got a sore hand because of the way I'm holding the iPhone, I can make some joke as my way of venting my frustration. Or I could say, has anyone got any suggested alternative ways to hold an iPhone because my hand's hurting? There are two different ways of dealing with problems. Sometimes you put the call out for help. Sometimes you say, this is pissing me off.

I'm just going to take a swipe at them because that's what we do these days. Look, if people have adequate solutions, they should offer them. This is clearly the better path in society. Just sitting around, everybody feeling sorry for everybody else. It gets you nowhere.

I disagree. I totally disagree. Well, I guess I'm suffering from expert fatigue because everyone's an expert. And I have, you know, when I've got hundreds and hundreds of them sharing their expertise with me, I can only handle so much expertise. But you want solutions, don't you? This is what I don't understand. I don't understand this part. Not always.

And look, this is behavior that you can train people out of. Well, why do you think I'm talking about it? No, no, I'm talking about you can train people out of the behavior where all they're doing is complaining because they want a bunch of sympathy from other people. Just shower me with sympathy so that I feel better in my own wallowing. Like, no, you can train people out of this. If this is a thing that you can do, you can learn to stop doing this. And I think you're better off if you stop doing that all right just complaining to get sympathy from other people it's not a good personality trait well when you say it like that it sounds pretty bad yeah because that's what it is but let me phrase it another way it's turning to my fellow men and women for comfort in times

of need. at the other end right and i just think so many people like to complain about stuff that's potentially fixable i mean the classic example of this is someone comes home and they start complaining about a bunch of stuff related to their job right this is like the standard scenario and and the answer in that is okay well let's talk about this let's come up with solutions like are there things that you can do differently at your job? Or can you leave your job? This is where it is good that you are matched with your wife. Because you are wrong about that. You are wrong. You are wrong that you should always sit down when someone is complaining and say, let's talk this through. I know for a fact that I'm not wrong on this.

I disagree with you. And I also disagree with some of the analogies you're drawing for a fact that i'm not wrong on this i disagree with you and i also disagree with some of the analogies you're drawing for a change to with deaths in the family but it's not really something we should wade into no we could totally wade into it look just to make it simple like i know like teenage much younger me used to have this thing that everybody does where like you complain about a thing and then you're like you're wanting people to express sympathy with you right like i used to do this when i was a kid but then you can train yourself out of this behavior right nothing useful is happening to you nothing useful is happening to the people that you're talking to like you can

learn not to do this i don't agree i don't agree if i say oh man twitter's crap and i make some funny joke and everyone's like yeah brady you made a funny joke and we agree twitter's crap i feel better stop right there humor is a thing that is valuable in and of itself if you are complaining about a thing in such a way that other people are laughing and it's a funny story that is valuable but you're moving the goal posts here well this was my original goal posts oh these are your original goal yeah okay okay yeah like i wasn't saying twitter is really poor and causing me some frustration today post and then being upset by people saying alternatives to twitter i i was making like a wise ass comment about the twitter app about something about it i didn't like i was

making like a joke about it oh okay and then everyone's like well if you use you know use this bot and use this and use tweet bot or use this and you've got this setting i'm like oh man i was just making a joke that they're crap you don't you've got this setting i'm like oh man i was just making a joke that they're crap you don't have to tell me that i'm using the wrong app now i understand clearly everybody when brady makes jokes on twitter just laugh at his jokes that's all he wants or just ignore me or unfollow me or mute me but don't give me tech support if i want tech support i'll ask for it actually if i want tech support i'll'll ask for it. Actually, if I want tech support, I'll call Gray. I know what's going to happen there, really. I am the tech support for a bunch of YouTubers and that's fine.

No, you've been going to ground too much lately. You're impossible to get. You're worse than usual at the moment. What do you mean? I'm always as reachable as I ever have been. I think you've been a bit less reachable lately. I don't agree with that. Okay.

Maybe I'm wrong. I think you are wrong. So, as you know the olympic games are about to start shortly do you know where they're being held no all right they're being held in a couple of weeks in rio i literally did not know this okay that's okay to be honest i've been a lot less excited by these Olympics. I haven't been getting as hyped by them as I normally would. Oh, yeah?

You normally get super excited for the Olympics? I wouldn't say I get super excited by them, but I'm not looking forward to them that much. But hopefully that changes. And so, obviously, normally I wouldn't have much to talk about with you about the Olympics. But there was a story that caught my eye a couple of days ago that I thought even you may slightly raise one eyebrow to. I think it's time introduction to the Olympics

for the sport of jousting. Ooh. Can you imagine jousting at the Olympics? I think even you would watch that. Yeah, I'd watch that at least once. That's something. So I haven't actually looked at the petition yet, but they're sort of arguing that jousting requires

a lot of skill and strength and things like that, and I find that hard to argue with. I think jousting must be a pretty difficult sport to be good at, and I think I'd be up for it. I think I'm willing to potentially, pending further investigation, particularly regarding the well-being of animals, I'd be up for consideration of jousting i was just quickly trying to pull this up here and of course you know when you google for olympic

games jousting there's all kinds of pictures of people on horseback in armor in front of castles i feel like yes right we need more of this this looks amazing it would definitely be a condition of my support that the jousters wore metal armor and not some rubber modern suits with helmets you know they'd have to be wearing old school jousting outfit i don't want the nike rubber jousting suit 100% agree go metal or go home right i don't want like oh we've made a super safe jousting suit not interested and then not to use like virtual cyber poles jousting sticks or've made a super safe jousting suit. Not interested. And then not to use like virtual cyber poles, jousting sticks or anything. It has to be. Jousting sticks?

That seems unlikely that that's the name of them. The whole thing that makes this exciting is it seems stupidly dangerous. Right? Yeah. And there's all kinds of dumb sports in the Olympics that people bring up all the time. I don't see why jousting couldn't be part of this i mean if you were someone else now i would get into a conversation with you about golf in the olympics which has been the big controversy is golf in the olympics golf is in this olympics no thumbs down yeah well it's causing a lot of problems actually is this new this year

yes i totally disagree with this and the problem is all the good players are pulling out, partly because of the Zika virus, which is this problem in Rio at the moment, but it also is just basically betraying how unseriously they're taking it. And the introduction of golf into the Olympics, I think, was a very cynical move by the International Olympic Committee,

and it's just turning into a bit of a debacle. I would much rather watch jousting than golf at the Olympics. Why is it a cynical move? Is it just to get the golf eyeballs onto the Olympics? Is that the idea of it? Well, particularly in Asia, because in Asia, golf has a huge following. And in Asia, there's a bit less engagement with the Olympics than in some other parts of the world. So I think they thought if we get golf in there, that will increase people's interest. And also just golf as a sport attracts huge corporate sponsorship in general

so i think they're thinking if we've got golf at the olympics you know we'll have more big corporate deals and better sponsors and things like that so i mean i guess golf is the sport of the corporate world yeah of course yeah exactly but it doesn't mean it has to be in the olympics and i think they've been shown up now because the players don't care you know the players have the four tournaments they really want to win every year the olympics isn't one of them so they're quite happy to pull out and you know they're citing this zika virus concern which is fair enough but it's not hitting other sports in the same way so just sounds really boring i mean that's my own personal bias against golf is it's it's really dull no you get some good golf tournaments

don't get me wrong i like watching a good major if there was any sport that was present in the house when i was growing up it was golf on tv via my father and i always thought this is incredibly boring does your dad play golf yeah he does play golf i'm not sure how much he plays currently but at least when i was in high school my dad played golf pretty regularly. And I was out on the court a couple of times. The court? I just realized, is that not the right way to describe it?

The course, yeah. And of course, as you might expect, the best part of playing golf was driving the golf cart for me. That was the super fun part. And those things can really move when you floor it so those my fondest memories of being out on the golf course is riding in the electric golf cart what other golf terminology do you know you have uh the the wooden clubs and you have the iron clubs yeah kind of what do you mean kind of there's no you have the wooden clubs and the iron clubs you have woods and irons yeah yeah but most of the time they're not actually made of wood they're just called woods right but the wood clubs are for long distance shots if i remember the

irons are for the close shots because they have they're steeper so you can do little fun upward trajectories yeah that's your your nine irons and your pitching wedges and sand wedges yeah right and there's a par for the course when you get the expected number of strokes per hole what if you get one less than you should have got for that hole uh is that a birdie something's yes is it really yes yes what if you get one more than you should have got for that hole i have no idea i got nothing nothing birdie is the only only one i knew there that's a bogey oh bogey okay yeah right i feel like i should have known these things but i don't what if you get two less than you should have got for the hole uh two less that's awesome what's better than a birdie i have no idea i got nothing a berry that's that's an eagle an eagle oh okay

oh yeah that sounds familiar yeah so what if you get two worse than you should have got for a hole what's worse than a bogey uh penguin is it a penguin rather boringly that's just a double bogey double bogey oh okay i bet you can guess what you get for three worse than a hole triple bogey yeah you're learning fast man there we go what an exciting sport this golf is so so i tell you what though i might know a lot about golf terminology but i know nothing about jousting terminology so that's uh that's next for me i couldn't name you anything about jousting i know that they joust it's a tilt yard is the word for where they're they're jousting have you still got the wikipedia article i have the bbc news article right today's episode is brought to you in part by audible.com who has more than 180 000 audiobooks

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Thanks again to Audible for supporting the show. Well, Dr. Haran. Yes? How are you feeling today? Hmm. Do you feeling today? Do you feel knowledgeable? Do you feel worldly? I'm feeling wise. You're feeling very wise. I'm feeling esteemed. Congratulations, by the way. Congratulations on your honorary doctorate. Thank you very much. It was a really, really great day. For those who don't know, the University of Nottingham,

where I've done a lot of work over many years now, awarded me an honorary doctorate a few days ago as we were recording. And it was at the graduation ceremony for the School of Physics, for all the physics and astronomy students who did real hard work and were getting their richly deserved degrees and doctorates and things also had to put up with

a short speech about me and me getting an honorary doctorate at the university and i got a nice certificate and i got to dress up in funny clothes and i got treated like a vip and it was one of the best days ever and it was like i had a smile from ear to ear and it was just a few notches below wedding day in terms of just super, super happy days. Oh, that's fantastic. I watched your speech online. The video is available and in the show notes for anybody who wants to see it. I think you did a very good job. Kept it nice and short, nice and punchy. Short is usually good. Short is good at things like that it's a funny thing that the day like i compared it to a wedding and it is like that it's one of

those days where like there's lots of attention on you and there's lots of goodwill and everyone's just really happy for you and you're feeling a lot of love and that's really nice like it's a really great celebration but the thing that's funny about it is you're very aware that it's happening for like 150 people at the same time in the same room and their families and friends are there and they're the center of their world and the person next to them has their family and friends there and as they come up in like that conveyor belt and they're all having their names read out and they're shaking the hand of the vice chancellor that's a really big moment in their life and for their family and it's all happening so much and so simultaneously it's a really difficult thing to get your head around and i

tried to reflect some of that also on what i said you know i realized that the day wasn't about me in many ways it wasn't about me because i just had an honorary doctorate and these people had done the real deal and they were the real heroes of the day. So I hope I reflected that in some way, but it was a really great day for me. And it was a really great day for those 173 other people as well. So how did it come about that you got an honorary doctorate? Like what is the process for selecting an honorary doctor? Well, I don't entirely know. They give out some every year. I don't know how many they give out i would guess in the range of a dozen they're normally to people a lot more esteemed than me that have done amazing things in business or whatever for umpteen many years so it was really

nice for them to to give one to me names are submitted by people i don't know i didn't submit it i don't you know i know nothing about it discussions i had committees meet the senate of the university then considers i imagine they considered recommendations and approved to them i don't know what gets disapproved but it all happened behind my back my wife was actually aware of it because they needed information about me to consider the application so it turns out Professor Merrifield at the University of Nottingham, who I think had a bit to do with this, contacted my wife to find out things about my past and history and work and things like that.

This is the doing background checks on you to make sure there's not something terrible. Well, maybe, yeah, there was some of that. So, it all happened behind my back and I knew nothing about it whatsoever at all. And then I got a letter from the vice chancellor of the university a few months ago. Actually, my wife was with me at the time and this university envelope came

and my wife was like, what's that? Are you going to open it? And because obviously I do business with the university, I was like, oh, it'll just be some boring letter about something financial I've got to do or something. So I wasn't going to open it.

And she said, no, you should open it. So I opened it and it was, of course, this lovely letter from the boss of the uni saying, we're going to give you this honorary doctorate. So I was over the moon and then obviously waited a few months and went and did all the official ceremony stuff this week. And it was great. It was great.

There was a special VIP lunch beforehand and got to wear the robes and the silly hat and walk down the aisle and all the fancy pompous music and national anthems. And I loved all the formality of it and got my nice certificate and very cool. Doctor of letters is what I am. I have to say the picture of you signing the certificate, I guess that's what that is in front of you, that you have up on your blog, which might be one of my favorite pictures of you ever somehow. I don't know. It just, it just looks perfect. You're there in this little fancy outfit. You have a funny look on your face. I really, I really like this photo of Dr. Brady at the ceremony. I think it's, it's absolutely fantastic.

So you, of course you don't have a doctorate as far as I know, do you? You didn't reach that Dr. Brady at the ceremony. I think it's absolutely fantastic. So, of course, you don't have a doctorate as far as I know, do you? You didn't reach that level, did you? No, I have not reached the heights that you have reached, Brady. No. So is there anything you'd like to ask me then? That's probably the more pertinent question

now that, you know, is there anything I can help you with? No, I mean, mostly when I'm saying stuff, I usually just want sympathy. I don't want the kind of answers that a learned man of letters might be able to provide. So I just like to throw stuff out there. I mean, that's basically what I'm doing is I'm sympathizing with your lower level of education. It's true.

I am a mere peasant in your shadow now, Brady. Well, that's all right. Also, do you think you could change the halloween internet website to say it's presented by cgp gray and dr brady harron well i mean i think that is an interesting question because although i you know i don't want to dwell on this fact but i understand that there are some questions about whether or not honorary doctors can use the doctor honorific outside of the day of ceremony that occurs? This is a fair question and I think it should be addressed. I mean, I don't want to bring it up.

I don't want to poo-poo on your parade here. No, no. Of course, it's basically the only question anyone will have about the whole thing. Yeah, exactly. Phrased perhaps in the way of, yeah, but are you a real doctor my position is that i am not there is mixed opinion on it actually and different people do different things with it and you can read different things about it but i think the proper way is to not use it and the only way it gets used is in official correspondence with the university that bestowed it on you but there are people who have taken the name doctor with an honorific degree like this

i think benjamin franklin was one of them oh yeah yeah so i may be wrong about that but i'm sticking with it until you google it and find out otherwise i'm not doing that at all i can hear your steampunk keyboard hissing away in the background no no not me so other than for this week and times of convenience i'm not going to rule out using it maybe on some plane bookings uh in the hope of getting upgrades i'm not going to rule it out i haven't done it and i won't necessarily do it but i i want to leave that option open do you think that's how they do upgrades on airlines like this guy's a doctor i don't i don't think that's how that works probably not probably not yeah i mean some people saying yeah you should do it you know get some of your things changed and that but i don't think it's the done thing and it's not going to be the

done thing by me so i'm just having a couple of days of glory lording it over people like my sister who was ahead of me in the education stakes for so long so i'm now telling her that i'm ahead of her but other than that it's just like a nice prize and some nice recognition and a really fun day with all the people at the university who i really like and care about and they did a nice thing for me and being able to stick it to your sister is a really nice bonus that is nice that is nice she didn't realize till the day she just thought i was getting an honorary degree she didn't realize it was this doctor of letters so when she found that out she went from being really like proud

and congratulatory to a little bit pissed off perfect just a sibling rivalry is supposed to work yeah so we had a bit of banter going on the uh on the i message up to the big moment but she is the one person i am going to insist calls me dr harron in all correspondence yeah i think that that's legitimate that's the way that should work it's funny though the longer this conversation goes on like i mean normally i have always just been of the opinion of like oh honorary doctorates obviously those people shouldn't use the word doctor but i find myself thinking like well presumably most of the time when honorary doctorates are given out it is to acknowledge work that is done in a field right the presentation that was given

for you was about the genuine work that you have done in the field of science it was a doctor of letters so it's about creatives because you can be made a doctor of science as well and there is a doctor of letters which apparently is just actually a peg above a phd in like the pecking order oh oh my of university things but it's supposedly for like you know a body of work over an extended period of time in which you've become an expert and this was for educational videos and films over a 10-year period and there's a whole oration and reasons given for it and i have to say my impression and it was also my wife's impression was on the day it suddenly seemed like a bigger deal than we realized like suddenly at the end we were like

that's actually like a really big thing they just did for me that like i just thought it was like a prize that you sometimes get in life but But it felt like a really big deal. And I was really, I was bursting with pride at the end of it. I was 95% proud and honored and 5% humbled. Of course. But humbled in the proper sense of what I would consider the proper sense of the word, because I kind of felt like, I'm not sure I deserve this. This seems like a really big thing they're giving me.

And I'm just like some crappy guy who does a podcast with Grey and the podcast and gray did get a mention in the speech by the way when they were listing off the things i do yeah i believe they they referenced it as clearly the most relevant part of this award yeah but but again like in all seriousness i'm finding my mind kind of changing in the course of this conversation. I'm thinking how, again, the idea, like you said, of a doctorate is some contribution over a period of time, like a unique thing that you have done. And I feel like I do know people whose actual work for their doctorate, while yes, they did a unique thing that no one else has ever done, the end result of that was like a document that sits on a shelf somewhere in a university, which is never looked at again by a human being. And I feel like you've gotten this for doing a body of work that genuinely has a bunch of influence on other people.

And I feel like if universities are giving out honorary doctorates for comparable kind of things to individuals who are doing bodies of work then it feels like how is this kind of not real like you are hearing me having a discussion in which i feel my mind is is changing on a thing it is partly contingent, I don't know how seriously all universities take honorary doctorates. Yeah. I mean, obviously I would like to have some sympathy with the argument you're making, having just received one.

Right, right. And I also have like a conflict of interest now. Of course you do. I say that, you know, if you've been doing something for 10, 15,

I mean, I've been journalists for over 20 years and doing science for a lot of it. I guess you do get a level of expertise that's comparable to someone who studies something for three years in an institutional environment. So I see the argument for that. It probably means a lot of people are eligible

for honorary doctorates, of course, because a lot of people become experts in their field. So where do you draw the line? But it does come unstuck because some universities, and i don't think the university of nottingham is guilty of this but some universities do turn them into sort of attention seeking events and therefore give them to celebrities or people they think will get lots and lots of media attention or just do it for more gimmicky ways and that probably devalues them sometimes, much the same way that the Nobel Prize,

the Peace Nobel Prize sometimes gets devalued when they give one to people who other people don't think deserve it. But everyone knows that's the laughingstock Nobel Prize. Oh, the Peace Nobel Prize. I give that to everybody. Anyway, yeah, I hear your argument and I'd like to think it's true, but... Well, because I'm just thinking this thing about,

oh, giving out honorary degrees unseriously is like, well, is this problem any different from things like diploma mills, right? Universities where you can essentially just buy a diploma or that just hand out diplomas to absolutely everybody. Maybe this is a kind of self-sorting problem where universities have reputations that they care to maintain so those universities are less likely to do just pandering kind of things with honorary degrees i don't know i just i feel like my whole world view about what does a degree mean is being thrown into confusion all of a sudden yeah i mean people have a very set idea of what it means and i think i probably have that set idea as well which is why i'm quite self-deprecating about the one I received because I'm more that old school that a degree in a doctorate

means you sat in a university and did X, Y and Z. But like I said, whether I should call myself a doctor or not, which I don't think I will be doing, well, I know I won't be doing, whether that's the case or not and how much of it is symbolic and how much of it is kind of an earned thing is debatable. I'm sure people have their own views but i just consider it like just a really nice thing that they did for me and it was kind of you know we've had a relationship for a long time and it made me really happy it was kind of like a little celebration of lots of years and years of work together as well

you definitely deserved it dr Dr. Brady Heron. This episode is brought to you in part by Hover, the best way to buy and manage domain names. Finding the perfect domain name is ridiculously easy with Hover. Whenever I want to buy a website, Hover is always the place I go. They're just beautiful. The first impression you get from looking at that Hover website, nice, clean, clear, simple. That's what it is all the way through. Getting a domain name with other registrars, it can be a real hassle, but not with Hover.

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plus more focused ones like.design and.tech to the crazy ones like.pizza and.coffee. So that idea in your head, go get the domain name for it. Go to hover.com and use the promo code DrBrady at checkout to save 10% off your first purchase. That's Hover.com Dr. Brady. Thanks to Hover for supporting the show. So, Gray, you've had a few videos out, like you do. I said that I enjoyed your Brexit one. Right. Your split brain one.

Uh-huh. I've watched it a few times now. I refreshed my memory watching it out while I was walking the dogs earlier. Not digging that one so much. Oh, yeah? It's this new path you've gone down in a few videos that's just not for me. Oh, yeah? Tell me. Tell me. I like a good map and I like a good border and I like some factual stuff.

But starting with your transporter one and now with your brain one, it's marking a sort of a new path you're taking that's not in my wheelhouse. But I do think it is in your viewers' wheelhouse, not just judging from the response, but judging from what I know of your viewers. And I am therefore going to start labelling videos like this either greybait. This is where we're going before.

Okay, all right, I see. I see the connection. I think the greybait or maybe even Reddit bait. Uh-huh. Because I think the sort of things Reddit people like is pretty similar to what the grey fanboys and fangirls like. You mean what the grey audience likes? Yeah, but I wanted to use the term fan, you know, fanboy, because it's such a cool term

and it's more inflammatory. Of course, yes. That's exactly why you want to do it. Yeah. Because you like poking people. Okay, right. Go ahead. So it just wasn't my bag and I was watching it and, you know, of course it was well written

and you researched it and you know it back to front and therefore I'm a bit reluctant to talk about it because you'll start citing papers and studies and things I know nothing about. But it also felt like just a bit speculative and hand wavy like maybe i've noticed in a couple of videos now you have this little gear change in the middle where you say speculation time or fantasy time speculation time happened in one video the last video no but there was something in the middle of the brain there was a word you said in the middle of the brain video too where basically it was a euphemism for the next part is like, I don't know.

I can't remember what the word was now. In the middle of the video, like just before you go off on a tangent, you basically said some little phrase like, this next bit is just me, what I think. And that's fair enough. You know, you think interesting things, but I prefer when you show me the border between America and Canada has an airport with a runway in the middle or something,

something a bit more real. That's what I always like. Yes, yes. And if it's just like one guy's opinion, it happens to be a guy I'm friends with and therefore I watch the videos because I'm interested in what my friend thinks. But I just think this you are two thing is bollocks.

So what's your beef with it? What's your beef with it? I don't think that human beings are two people having a fight inside a head i think that just doesn't ring true to me and i i saw like some of the examples and studies you've done but i think and i know one of the ways you learn how things work is to break them but i think a broken malfunctioning brain or a brain that's been cut in half with a scalpel is like of course it's going to start doing weird things because it's been broken and the thing i keep thinking about and you'll hate it because you hate my analogies but i only hate them when they're bad brady well you're definitely

going to hate this one when i was little a friend of mine her mum had a car and something broke in the wiring and steering wheel and whenever the car left, the car horn would toot. So we would sometimes do laps of the block and she would just go left around the block time and time again. And every time she turned the wheel, the car horn would toot and all us kids in the back would crack up laughing because it was the funniest thing we'd ever heard. But that doesn't mean every car on the road has this silent horn that wants to toot every time the car turns left,

but it's being muted by car society. It just means that car was broken and the wires had gone all wrong and it started behaving in a way that cars aren't supposed to behave and just the same if you go into a brain and start messing around with it you can start getting some behaviors that give the appearance of maybe something a little bit strange and abnormal but that doesn't mean that's happening in a normal brain that's just you know the brain has all these different departments and different things and everyone has a different job to do and they integrate in some ways we understand in some ways we don't but i think it's gray baity

or red at baity to then make the leap that there's some tortured soul spending 90 years screaming for attention or shrugging its shoulders inside our heads. I think that's a nice story. And it's the sort of thing that will make people say, mind blown. But I don't think it's true. The split brain stuff is one of these things that I came across. I mean, like when I was a teenager, I have this dim memory of like a Discover magazine or something, which originally talked about some of these studies.

This was a really weird and interesting topic to read. I like it when things are super clear. I prefer when there's an obvious answer to stuff. But I really do think that there is an interesting part of life that revolves around a kind of very difficult question to answer which is a question about human consciousness like what is human consciousness why does it exist it's an idea that the more you think about and the more you try to probe it it can lead you in some interesting directions. And I'll just say like directions that I think probably most of the listeners probably think of me as like an incredibly like logical, consistent, like we can only talk about the things that we can observe,

sort of super sciencey person. And I am mostly that way. But I am very interested in ideas around consciousness because i think they start to push you into places that are kind of uncomfortable so thoughts about like how is it that a collection of atoms is able to be aware of itself and you can start thinking all kinds of things about this like oh well maybe consciousness is a side effect of information processing and then you start thinking okay but wait what do you mean by the words information processing and so I feel like the two videos that I've done that have touched on this

the trouble with transporters and and the you are too I feel like they're each kind of dancing around this idea of what does it mean to be an individual in the world? And if you are correct in your starting first principles, you are led down roads that seem kind of crazy. And the UR2 one, like looking at a bunch of the old brain study stuff, and one of my big problems with a lot of the split brain research is it's very old. So there's a lot of stuff where I feel a little bit suspicious about it. I think there is no topic I have ever done that I have also felt more suspicious about than this one. Because I was reading a bunch of papers and they are all from ages and ages ago about what happens to people with split brain phenomenon. And I totally agree with you that there is something that's occurring here, which is that a person's brain is just broken, right?

Like what has happened is you've literally cracked open someone's skull, you've reached in, you've cut their brain in two. And once you do that, you can start to observe all kinds of strange behavior. But the reason that I think it's interesting and the reason why I wanted to do that video is because unlike, I think, your analogy with the car, there's a real question of like, what is happening inside the broken person's brain? Like, ignore for a moment a normal brain that that's connected but if we're thinking about okay we know we can go in you slice a person's brain in half and i see no way around assuming that all the papers that i'm reading through are accurately describing the situations i see no way around the idea that there is something that is separately conscious in the other side of your head if you cut someone's brain in two. Like, I have a very hard time trying to do what I think

some people do when you read through papers and you're reading about, like, what are possible descriptions that are going on? And people will come up with explanations like, oh, the other brain is just, like like reacting automatically to information that it's getting. So it seems like it's answering a question, but there's nobody really at home, right? It's almost like it's a reflex, like what's occurring when the other brain seems to be acting like it's an independent entity. But my feeling on a lot of that stuff is if you think this through, how is that argument

any different than the speaking half of the brain talking? When you say, oh, we asked this person a question and they were able to answer yes or no. It just feels like there's some kind of bias towards the speaking part of the brain being the quote, like real you obviously conscious person. I don't know. My feeling was just reading through a bunch of this stuff. I can't come up with any seemingly consistent answer for what is occurring other than the

right side of the brain, at the very least, when you cut it off, becomes a kind of separate consciousness. And whether or not what it's like to be the right half of your brain is the same as what it's like to be the left half of your brain, like whether those are the same is a totally different question that's up in the air. It feels like to me, there's some evidence that consciousness can be cut into as a result of some of the stuff that you see in split brain patients. And I think that is really weird and it is really interesting. And what does that mean for a person's brain that is whole and that is simply together

all the time? I think there's some really interesting questions to be asked about that. And the one that I hit upon in that video, that's a really big question, is why is it that if you go in and you cut someone's brain in two, that they seem mostly fine afterward? What seems to be incredibly traumatic brain surgery actually doesn't have very much of an impact on the person. And I feel like one of the most consistent explanations that I have come across in the literature is this explanation that your right hemisphere is already separately conscious, and that it has already been coordinating with the hemisphere that you think of as you. I'm not in that video trying to do what i think is like here's some wild speculation that's cool because i i really hate that kind of stuff what i feel like i'm trying to walk towards is

well you've totally done it i mean you've even called the video you are too yeah but that's because my reading of the literature and my sitting down and thinking about it is i really do think that this is the most logical conclusion that explains what is observed in the papers right i think that's a very different thing from saying like i'm just going to toss out a crazy idea it's the same thing that we had with that transporter video of like you seem to think that the thing at the end where i'm talking about like you die every time you go to sleep was like just fun speculation and that no that was that was the gray bait component of it or the reddit bait component right but from my

perspective it's like that is actually a thing that I take very seriously and I think if you start thinking too much about what does it mean to be a continuous person that this is a conclusion that you are pushed towards unwillingly and I feel like the same thing kind of occurs in the you are too video of I'm not just speculating for funsies. Like I'm doing that because I think that this is the only conclusion that I feel like can be drawn that explains why does this traumatic brain surgery seem to leave people kind of mostly normal? Why is it that the two hemispheres can seemingly act independently and be totally unaware of each other? That's what I'm trying to do with that video. Do you think I'm trying to do with that

video. Do you think there's like an evolutionary reason that brains would have evolved that way? Like, are we talking about some form of redundancy or like, why would this have been the way it happened? Well, I mean, this, this brings up some interesting things that are observed in other animals. Like for example, there are several species, particularly aquatic species, that can sleep one hemisphere at a time, which is just super weird to even think about. But there are animals that essentially never really fully go to sleep. And like, well, like, that's very interesting. Like, what is it that is occurring inside their subjective brains when this is happening. And of course, you can't know, you can't really know what it is subjectively like to be a duck when

one half is asleep or the other half is asleep. And the brain is just a crazy, very difficult to understand, also very plastic and flexible organ. This whole video fell out of what was supposed to be a much bigger, broader topic, which is more about how the idea of what you think of yourself as, as this stream of thoughts, that we have a lot of evidence that this isn't even exactly correct.

When you put people into brain scanners, what seems to happen is that brain patterns kind of fight with each other inside a person's head until one of them becomes dominant. And then that feels like, oh, this is the thought that I had. And maybe one of the other conclusions is not that you are two, but maybe the conclusion is like your brain is a whole bunch of like separately conscious entities that are working with or against each other. And that the experience we have of a consistent person going through life, that this is a little bit of a story that some part of the brain tells itself after the fact. If people think

about it, this is an experience that people actually have, right? That experience of feeling like you decide to do one thing, but you actually end up doing something else. Like, why does that occur? If you really go deep down that rabbit hole, it's a bit of a strange thing to think about how you don't always do the things that you want to do. What's an example of that? I mean, just totally simple. Going to the gym every day. It's a thing that you want to do, What's an example of that? I mean, just totally simple. Going to the gym every day. It's a thing that you want to do, but sometimes you don't do it. Okay. I don't agree with that. I think that's a different, that's a lot more easily explained, isn't it? Well, tell me,

what do you think about that? That's just competing desires, isn't it? That's not like two thoughts happening simultaneously. And like, I think I'm walking out to the gym and then suddenly I look down and think, oh my God, how did this donut get in my hand? It's not like that. It's a lot more like I have a desire to have a beautiful body and be healthy. I have a desire for that yummy sugary thing. And then in the end, one desire defeats the other. But it's not like it's a hidden thing or it's a probability or there were two scrambly thoughts in my brain and one popped out.

I think that's a lot simpler to explain. I know what you're saying there, but I still think even the notion of having conflicting desires in your brain, I think it's something that it's very easy for us to just accept as normal because it is our experience of the world, but is a strange thing the more you sit down and actually focus on it and think about it. Why is it that a person has conflicting thoughts in their head? Why is it that you decide things one way or another?

I think there are real rabbit holes that lead in interesting directions. This is all sort of like a bit of a side tangent, but I think the UR2 was originally going to be a smaller part of this bigger thing. But I think the UR2 stuff is the clearest way to talk about one part of this. you can unambiguously get a brain to disagree with itself in ways that, quote, the person, the talking person, finds confusing and finds difficult to understand what's going on. I just feel that the idea that there's some other consciousness in your head answers a lot of questions about a lot of the weirdness that goes on.

But just one other consciousness, you think it's two, which I can see like the brain is a very symmetrical two-halved thing. So you think there's two, there's not like a thousand or a million or three. You've settled on two. When I'm talking about the split brain stuff, I think, yeah, we can talk about there being like two different entities in the brain. What if we found another line somewhere we could cleft off and get a third interesting phenomenon going on? Could you be three? I don't see in principle why not.

There's this question of, okay, either we have a single consciousness that you can divide into two by cutting in the right place. And if that's the case, I don't see the reason why if we didn't cleverly cut somebody's brain in a different area, you could siphon off another part that seems like it is acting independently there's also the possibility of just like minds arise as a byproduct of the way neurons are structured this is the thing i'm not entirely comfortable with as well though say i accept that a brain cut in half has two different consciousnesses right okay if i then

rewire them the way they were before i cut is it not acceptable that they just merge into one why when the wiring is connected between the two do they still have to be two different consciousnesses why can't then they just click of your fingers become one consciousness again why does this second one still have to be in prison and shrugging its shoulders and unable to talk and working sometimes with and sometimes against? Like, surely then maybe when I plug the wires in, it just becomes one system. That is a total possibility, right? We don't know because we have no ability to regrow someone's corpus callosum inside of their head. And even if we did, and we'll have to get back to this because there's one thing

where i have like severe doubts about the reality of this whole thing like let's book note that and not forget it and i want to return to it um but let's say you were able to regrow someone's brain it would be hard to know like how would you interrogate the other brain to see if it's still there i think that would be the interesting question of it is sort of unknowable, maybe it's hard to imagine the scenario in which you could know for sure, did these two consciousnesses combine? Or is one now just hidden from view in a way? But I feel like, okay, if you can cut consciousness into with a knife, I don't see why in principle it would be impossible to bind two consciousnesses together with a needle and thread, right? Putting it back and fixing it.

I'm not opposed to that very idea. Like I said, I see that there are two options here, that the cutting creates a separate intelligence or that the separate intelligence exists all along. And I feel like the second theory is the more explanatory theory. It explains why this brain surgery seems to not affect patients very much afterward, why they don't need to relearn the basics of interacting with the world, even though their two halves are not able to communicate in the same way that they were able to before. For someone who doesn't believe in free will and believes the universe is just a series of, you know, to simplify it, dominoes falling over in sequence and we're just falling as we have to fall. Why are you so preoccupied with consciousness

at all? I don't see how those two things are not related. If consciousness is an ability to perceive the world around us, well, because we live in this no free will world where we have no control over anything, we don't have any control over the way we perceive it anyway. Like that's inevitable too. So the things you're looking at and thinking and the way you're perceiving the world, the way you're conscious of the world is not yours either. I agree. I'm surprised you can't just talk that out of existence as well and not even bother with this stuff. The thing that is fascinating about it is that there is no talking

consciousness out of existence. Like if I know anything, I know that I have some experience of the world, right? That this is a subjective experience that I have. That to me is a very different question than do I control my subjective experience? And I agree with you. Since I don't think that there is free will, I don't think that I control my subjective experience of the world. Like, for example, I'm sitting in my office right now,

and it's way too hot. The hotness is a subjective experience that is created in my brain. I have no ability to control it. And as we've discussed before, I have no ability to select my thoughts or even really no ability to choose what I'm saying in this very conversation. I've always said, like,

if you focus on things, you can realize, like, you don't even know how you talk, right? Words just come out, but you're not selecting them. You're not really choosing them. I don't even really know how I'm getting to the end of this sentence right now. It's a thing that if you look at it with your attention, you notice that it just happens. But I am thinking of options. Like while you talk, I'm thinking of, will I say this next? And then I'm, I am running a filtering process. I'm saying, oh no, I won't say that because it'll make me look like a dick. Or maybe I'll say that because it'll be fun. Oh no, actually, no, that's not funny. Don't say that. Say this instead. Or say this, but change that word to

that. Like I am, it's not like I'm just like, whoa, man, what just happened? I have made a series of decisions. Sometimes they're long considered decisions because you're waffling and I have time to think about it. Exactly. And other times I'm making those decisions at the speed of light, like on the fly, like I am now. But I do think the decisions are being made. Yes, but you are choosing from the options that occur to you. Yes.

I think that you've just pushed the problem up one level. Well, no, according to you, I'm not even doing that. According to you, options are passing by and then I'm choosing the one I had no choice but to choose. But yeah, I get what you're saying. I'm trying to go on your level here. Like, let's pretend for a second that you choose, right? The doctorate level that is, by the way. That's exactly it.

Well, always with this stuff, I think you end up getting wrapped, you as in like the conversation that occurs, right? You end up getting wrapped around the axle of the very word choose, right? I think choose and decision are always the words that you get everything messed up on. But even let's say like granting the idea that you are choosing from the things that you think in your head. And everybody has this experience, right? I have the same experience too, like trying to think of things to ask someone. But you are still, quote,

choosing among the alternatives that appear in your head. But you have no choice about the alternatives that appear in your head. And I feel like this is what always happens when we have a discussion about like talking with other humans. And you tell me, Brady, you're always like, oh, just it's easy to talk to other humans. You just say what pops into your head. I always feel like, but things don't pop into my head, right? I'm just sitting here

with a totally empty head and I don't know how to make things pop into my head in the course of human conversation. But just because I haven't got all the options, Gray, doesn't mean free will doesn't exist. I mean, I lean towards free will existing of course personally but anyway whatever maybe it doesn't maybe maybe it does but even in my world of believing it exists i can't jump to the moon right now if i say oh the moon looks nice i'm going to jump up there i can't do that it's not in my palette of options right and likewise when i'm thinking of something to say in a social situation and i'm choosing between the eight options that come into my head that's just just my palette of, you know, the realities of the world. Just because the palette is limited doesn't mean free will doesn't exist. So just because I'm having three

or four thoughts and I'm deciding which one to say from this limited palette that was presented to me, that doesn't explain away free will. Yeah. I mean, I understand what you're saying here. And this is where we reach the crux of our disagreement. Because like, I agree, people do not have an infinite number of choices, an infinite number of choices would not prove that there was free will either. I just think that the thing that I imagine is happening is happening on both levels. You are not selecting from the options that appear in your brain. You are not choosing among them either, right? The things just occur and you have a subjective feeling of choice, but there is no other thing that would have occurred were we to rewind the universe to that exact position. But where this connects with consciousness and why I find it so interesting is consciousness feels like this thing that shouldn't exist. And I don't use this word lightly, but I feel like this is perhaps the closest thing to a miracle that exists, that there is anything to experience the universe at all. I feel like there's almost no explanation that can ever possibly occur that answers this question.

Like, again, I am a very science-y kind of guy, but I can imagine a universe where we fast forward the clock on scientific progress 10,000 millennia and are still no closer to an answer about what is consciousness, why does it arise, than we are today, than we were a thousand years ago. We may be very good at describing exactly how the brain works in every possible way, but that's a different question from how does this bundle of nerves know that it's there? How does it have an experience of the world? Does your thinking in that way, does your kind of bewilderment at consciousness and confusion about consciousness ever make you think, maybe there's something else going on? And does that ever weaken your thoughts about free will? Do you ever think, well, if consciousness can exist,

and that is completely ridiculous and bewilderingering maybe there is something going on at some other level and therefore free will is also an option or is your free will position ironclad and consciousness is just bewildering to you what i would say is i am open to the possibility of free will existing i am harder pressed on that one because I feel like any explanation that, that may possibly occur is always just kicking the problem up one level. But like we were saying before about choosing, right? But you're choosing from options, right? But how did those options get there? Those options got there because those are the things that were going to pop up

in your mind. You know, it is the idea that that's even if there was some kind of magic part of humans, I can still see a way in which free will doesn't exist even if we accept the idea that there's magic in the universe. And consciousness gets to it as close as I'm going to reasonable to me is, well, why do we have to assume that every single part of the universe is perfectly logical and understandable? Like, maybe built into the clockwork of the universe are parts that are not logical. Like, we don't know how the universe works. We don't know how everything happens. And maybe consciousness is one of these things, like, this don't know how the universe works. We don't know how everything happens. And maybe consciousness is one of these things, like, this is just how the universe is. Consciousness exists,

and there's no ability to explain it in the same way that ultimately there's no ability to explain why an electron has the charge that it does. It just does. And at a certain point, you lose the ability to explain things any further. But you won't give that get out of jail free card to free will? I don't because I feel like it's a different kind of question. I'm open to this. I'm not shutting that down. But I just haven't yet found a line of inquiry, which I find convincing. Well, great. If nothing else, you've given some great fodder to all those people at bad philosophy or bad

talking or whatever these things are called. People who think they know all the answers to the universe, belittle people who they think don't. Yeah, those are absolutely always the best. And I feel like in these podcasts where I'm like, I'm very happy to acknowledge my total uncertainty and lack of knowledge in those conversations it always comes across as oh this guy tells everybody he knows everything it's like oh okay i guess you don't actually listen to the podcast it's just because

you sound too damn authoritative gray it's just your curse that is perhaps what i think is the funniest complaint that i get from people well they, they'll say like, oh, he shouldn't speculate because the sound of his voice is too authoritative. I was like, okay, I'm sorry. I didn't realize I am forbidden from expressing my thoughts because they sound too legitimate when I say them. Like, okay. Did we cover the item you wanted bookmarked, which was something you were unsure about? Okay. Yeah. So I do want to bookmark one thing here with the split brain study. If I didn't think it wasn't the case, I wouldn't have made the video. But there was one thing that kept niggling at my mind. And I would not be surprised if in like 30 years, as happens in science sometimes, there

comes a study where people say, oh, we know for a fact that the split brain phenomenon is garbage, right? That this isn't true. And one of the things that just kept making me suspicious is in all of these studies, there are limited ways to communicate with the silent hemisphere, right? With the brain that can't talk. And it's clear from reading some of the studies that the silent hemisphere it can read right it can it can understand written language right it can point to answers it can do all of this kind of stuff and in reading a bunch of these studies spanning over decades it felt like none of these studies ever got past the party trick phase right the kind of stuff that i talk about in the video, like, yes, you can have it select a different block, right?

You can have it disagree with the main hemisphere. But I kept feeling like if there are scientists who are working on this for decades, and there are some people who made their whole careers out of studying split brain phenomenon, it always felt to me like, why doesn't this ever go further? The obvious question to me would be like, okay, let's try to communicate with the silent hemisphere more than just asking yes, no questions. Let's try to get it to right answers. Like we have time, we have decades of time. Let's try to ask the right hemisphere, what does it think is going on? Because the left hemisphere, this is a thing, again, everybody's brain does. It's a thing that you can notice in yourself sometimes. The left brain has

this confabulation effect where it wants to weave together a coherent story about events that have occurred in its past. And you can pull hilarious tricks on normal people just with this kind of stuff. Like it's just something that those brains do. So you're kind of not going to get a useful answer out of the regular talking hemisphere. But does the right hemisphere do that too? We don't know because I could never find any papers that went into this in any depth. Everything was always a party trick in a way

of getting some disagreement, but never going too far. And I was a little bit suspicious about that. And what it made me think of was um hans the horse hans the horse was this this horse i don't know whatever it was in like the early 1900s that could supposedly do math like you could ask the horse math questions and it would it would click its hooves the number of times for the answer right it would stomp its hooves for the number that it wanted yeah and it would always get the math right and there were two things that were occurring here one of which was that the trainer was unintentionally unknowing to the

trainer giving little signals to the horse of when to stop like when to tell yeah little little tells and there are a couple of examples of taking Hans the horse away from the actual trainer and answering math questions and it was still able to get it right. But the thesis is that essentially the horse was reading the audience, right? That people are getting more and more tense as the horse gets closer to the correct answer and then kind of relieved when the horse doesn't. And I don't know, some of the split brain stuff, like it just put a little doubt in my head of is maybe what's occurring people have a broken brain but the investigator is kind of leading them down this path so that these phenomenon are the same all the time and the only reason i worry about that is just partly because all of these papers

are so old because this is not a surgery that's done anymore because there aren't very many of these people around. And it's just like, I just don't know. There's like a tiny niggle in the back of my mind that maybe this is one of those cases, like cases with false memories, where the investigator is putting something into the mind of other people and so i just had like a tiny doubt about this i don't know okay okay that's all right that's the first little chink in the armor that's all i need i'm gonna bring your jenga tower down over the years but but again my view of it reading through all this stuff was that was not the case like if i really thought that was the case i would have made this video in an entirely different way or not have made it yeah yeah but it's a thing that i was just aware of like all this stuff is

really old all of these different papers over different years are showing this this exact same kind of stuff and I just see no progress ever of somebody trying to investigate the silent hemisphere. I will just mention now briefly the creepiest thing which I left out of the video but there's one paper which is called Conflicting Communicative Behavior in Split-Brain Patients Support for Dual Consciousness by Victor Mark and there's an old paper with one of these patients but the freakish thing here is that this guy found a patient that had speech centers in both brains which is actually something that occasionally occurs in the population like not everybody has the speech center localized to one hemisphere some people do have it in both and so this guy happened to find someone who was both a split brain patient and had speech hemispheres in both brains. That's the fairy tale.

It's remarkable. But it's super creepy because he was able to get this patient to verbally disagree with herself. So he would ask her questions about what's in your hand or, you know, can you feel something in your hand? And she would essentially argue like, yes, no, yes, no. And then would yell at herself that something is right and something is not right. And the thing that I thought was just kind of like sad and creepy was he describes how she would get like really upset during these experiments. And at one point would say to the experimenter, why do I lie to you? Like she's not able to explain her own scenario. And so I'm reading through this paper. I'm like, this seems like, oh, this I must have found the gold mine here. Right. This is finally going to be the case where somebody is asking the other hemisphere, like, what does it think is going on? But even with this one, it's like, oh, of course, no. This patient happened to be mentally subnormal. So like, apparently he wasn't able to investigate or talk to the other hemisphere very well.

So it's like, I don't know. It was just like everything worked out this way. I don't know. It was strange. It's a weird, weird project to research. I mean, it felt there like we're veering towards the issue of people who don't have split brains but have multiple personality disorders yeah i mean do you think that's a whole separate thing or is this evidence of people having multiple

consciousnesses or did you even go there this was one of these rabbit holes that i felt like i couldn't go fully down but obviously there there is a lot of overlap here for a question of what is uh multiple personality disorder or I think that I think the modern term for it is like dissociative identity disorder it definitely like points in that direction as a place to go like maybe this is part of the explanation for what is occurring in those kinds of disorders you have other hemispheres or other parts of the brain that are way more active than they would otherwise be. Who knows? Who knows? It's all very strange.

And I think this stuff is super interesting because consciousness is intrinsic to everybody's life. Well, most people's lives probably. But it is maybe never explainable and i think that this split brain stuff is is the most concrete stuff that i could kind of point to to talk about to say like maybe our experience of consciousness is different than what we think it is i think it's totally explainable cgp greatest called it the miracle of the universe