Julian Dorey Podcast - #226 - Math-Physicist: "Terrence Howard's UFO Anti-Gravity Theory is NOT Wrong!" | Curt Jaimungal

Episode Date: August 13, 2024

(***TIMESTAMPS in description below) ~ Curt Jaimungal is a mathematical physicist, Documentary Filmmaker & YouTuber. He has a degree in mathematical physics from the University of Toronto and uses his YouTube channel, “Theories of Everything,” to explore theoretical physics, consciousness, Ai, and God in a technically rigorous manner. EPISODE LINKS: - Julian Dorey PODCAST MERCH: https://juliandorey.myshopify.com/ - Support our Show on PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/JulianDorey  - Join our DISCORD: https://discord.gg/Ajqn5sN6  CURT’S LINKS: YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@TheoriesofEverything/videos JULIAN YT CHANNELS: - SUBSCRIBE to Julian Dorey Clips YT: https://www.youtube.com/@juliandoreyclips  - SUBSCRIBE to Julian Dorey Daily YT: https://www.youtube.com/@JulianDoreyDaily  - SUBSCRIBE to Best of JDP: https://www.youtube.com/@bestofJDP  FOLLOW JULIAN DOREY: INSTAGRAM (Podcast): https://www.instagram.com/juliandoreypodcast/  INSTAGRAM (Personal): https://www.instagram.com/julianddorey/  X: https://twitter.com/julianddorey Get $150 Off The Eight Sleep Pod Pro Mattress / Mattress Cover (USING CODE: “JULIANDOREY”): https://eight-sleep.ioym.net/trendifier ***TIMESTAMPS*** 00:00 - Mutual Friend Brian Keating, Curt Background, Political Documentary 11:23 - Public Mistrust in Science, Neil deGrasse Tyson Argument, Terrance Howard Controversy 23:51 - What Does Truth Mean vs Science Infinity Explained, Cantor's Diagonal Argument 35:13 - Terrance Howard vs Eric Weinstein Reaction, Math & Physics, Psychedelic Trips 48:11 - Power of Perspective, Plato & the Cave, Institution Trust Gone, Trump’s Truth Social 55:39 - Famous German ‘Truth’ Study Reaction, Science & ‘Feel’/’Reality’ 01:11:29 - Curt’s REAL Thoughts on Terrance Howard 01:23:42 - Miracle of Earth, Fear of God, Gratitude & Jordan Peterson 01:39:05 - John Vervaeke, Reacting to Terrence Howard, Kanye West & Creativity 01:51:49 - UFOs & Aliens Curt’s Bet w/ Neil deGrasse Tyson on Aliens 02:05:33 - Kevin Knuth Notorious UFO/Alien Studies, Disclosure, Terrance McKenna, Anti-Gravity 02:22:13 - UFOs Close Encounter of 4th Kind, Ancient Civilizations & Tech, Curt’s Issue w/ Bob Lazar  02:30:51 - Curt’s Disagreement w/ Michio Kaku, String Theory Explained & debated 02:44:11 - Brian Greene (Scientific Community) Refuses to Reject String Theory 02:50:04 - Advanced Civilization & Time Travel, Meaning of Life 02:58:49 - Find Curt CREDITS: - Hosted by Julian D. Dorey - Intro Editor & Producer: Alessi Allaman: https://www.instagram.com/allaman.docyou/ Julian Dorey Podcast Episode 226 - Curt Jaimungal Music by Artlist.io Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

When it comes to UFOs, I believe that so much of what is said about UFOs I don't believe in. I disbelieve. Like, people will say they're much more advanced because they have a technology. I don't see why that's the case. And people just say it. So firstly, advanced is an ambiguous term. You're not just advanced. There's not a culture that's more advanced than another culture. So, for instance, we think all technologies just build on one another, and when you get one, you get the other. It doesn't work like that. So, you could conceivably It doesn't work like that.

So you could conceivably imagine a culture that has developed the steam locomotive, and another has developed medicine, like advanced medicine, whatever that means. Which is more advanced? What's up, guys? If you're on Spotify right now, please follow the show so that you don't miss any future episodes, and leave a five-star review. Thank you. Kurt Jamungle, and leave a five-star review. Thank you. Kurt Jamungle, welcome to New Jersey, my friend.

Thank you, man. It's a pleasure to be here. It's a super hot day. It's a super hot day, but you know what? We're inside. We got 69 degree air conditioning on right now. No pants on either. Yeah, no pants on. We're going to have a good time. But I had originally originally i probably found you maybe like a couple years ago something like that on youtube with one of your videos that went viral can't remember which one but i had seen your your channel in the background and then our mutual friend brian keating was talking with me a few months back and he's like you should totally have kurt on so took a little deeper dive into what you're doing. And ironically, over the past couple months, it's been, I guess you could call it the post-Terrence Howard era. All right.

So you were quite a voice in the middle of this as a guy who speaks to all different scientists and mathematical physicists and things like that. But before we get into that topic and many others today I want to talk about you with. Would you mind just telling everyone what your background is? Because it's very unique. You didn't have like a linear pathway to where you are right now. Sure. I've always been interested in puzzles and mathematical puzzles, physics puzzles since I was a kid. And I've always been interested in what are the largest mysteries. So what are the largest unsolved philosophical or physics related or even math related puzzles?

Then I went into university for mathematics and physics, did something special called a joint specialist degree, meaning it's the hardest of all the math degrees and it's the hardest of all the physics combined. Wow. Just because I have, we talked about this off air, that I'm psychologically disposed to Eminem. Eminem has something where it's inside him. It's a fire inside him. He has to be the goat. He has to be number one. So there's an insecurity that he has to prove it to himself.

And same with me. I'm just, I'm constantly trying to prove something to myself. So I never could take a course that was, if there were five courses offered and there was the hardest one, I have to take the hardest. I can't pass from the smallest, from the easiest so-called one. So I just went with whatever was the most difficult degree at the University of Toronto.

Did that. At the same time, I'm also, I don't like to do what I'm supposed to do and so while i was in university i didn't care about math and physics any longer i just wanted to do something else because it's now assigned to me you have to finish this assignment or study for this test i don't want to do that if someone's telling me you have to i can't or i don't want to i don't like it so then i did some stand-up comedy and then i and then i went into filmmaking from that pursued filmmaking after the degree and math and physics is in my bones and so i've always wanted to come back to it

since the pandemic that allowed me to come back to it in podcast form and now that's just banging on all cylinders i get to learn and I get to talk to extremely interesting people. Well, I like that. That's a really cool mindset. I would call that a form of ambition, picking the hardest one. But obviously, you know, like you just said, it's in your bones. So even before you did that, the concept of math and physics, to say none of putting them together, that's something that you did really like already before you chose it just upon it being the hardest though right oh yeah okay yeah i mean because people have to you know i can't

imagine doing something extremely difficult just to prove it but then locking myself into four years or five years whatever the program is of shit that i just hate like i'd never be able to do that yes it's hard but when you got into filmmaking, you became a documentary filmmaker, right? I did a narrative one, which was comedy drama. Yes. Comedy drama and then a documentary after that. Okay. And the documentary, I forget the name of it, but essentially you were trying to explore,

I guess you could say like the fall of political discourse in the West. Is that fair to say? Yes. Yes. It's called Better Left Unsaid. And what, and that came out when? Like 2018. 2018. Or it was completed in 2018. It took another two years to actually get released. Is that because of like distribution rights and stuff like that? One year was because of distribution. The other year was because there were some bits

that needed to be re-recorded. So so it just it was low quality footage and we needed to beef it up and it was entirely you were the director and and the soul guy intro wow yeah it's impressive but in terms of writing and editing it was pretty much complete by 2018 okay what got you into that topic though because that's more i that strikes me as obviously it's a political type topic because you're exploring you exploring the psychology of politics in a way. But it's also extremely philosophical because it represents, you know, you're trying to explore the things that could eventually lead to the quote unquote fall of the West. Was that something that you were always fascinated by? No.

It seems to tie to meaning. So it seems on the surface that our issues are philosophical, sorry, political, but the way that I saw it was philosophical. And so it's on the surface a topic, a documentary about the left, like in the title it says Better Left Unsaid, when does the left go too far in extremism? But then under that it's when does the right go too far in extremism? The reason why I didn't advertise with that is that if you want people who are on the right to watch it, you can't say this is a documentary about your extremism. Isn't that so annoying? You can't address the 500-pound elephant in the room. The fact that all political ideologies, regardless of which direction they lean, have an element that leads to extremism. I don't know why that's hard for people to have a grasp of.

Noam Chomsky said that the left can't go too far. He said they only go too far in tactics, whatever that means. Did he say that to you on the podcast? Yes, and I believe it's inside the documentary. To him, the left is just benevolent. I think that's quite naive, but that's how he views it. Almost everyone, if you adopt a side, you believe it to be the aesthetically pleasing side morally as well. There's aesthetics as well.

What sort of person does this make me feel like being? So even veganism is not just about morality. It's also about it feels cleaner. It feels like it's right. That's what leads to the virtue signal phenomenon. Because people, I think people start to, I mean you just said that pretty beautifully. But people start to believe in something good so much that they're willing to do everything they hate to stand up for it and not recognize in the process of doing that that what they're doing is the very things that they're against, from a tactical standpoint. So Scott Aronson, who's a quantum informationalist,

quantum computationalist, he said he had a blog post recently called My Prayer. He's not a political person, but in light of the recent events that happened to Donald Trump, he just released some almost akin to a poem. And then on it, the best part was the PS. It said, PS, to the people who are commenting, you think that you can either, you can go one of two routes. The, the, what you're doing is, okay, I'm not going to do violence because the expected utility is negative.

So in other words, me committing an act of violence to your side will be worse in the long run, even though I think it's in the short run better. So that's one route. And the other route is, well, let me commit some violence because in the long run it will be for the good. So that's the Stalin mindset. Then Scott said, actually, there's a third way. Even if it's the case that the expected utility is positive from committing violence, you then you don't go for the violence, you throw out the principle that you're an expected utility maximizer. That's a that's a brilliant way of putting it.

Yeah, I and I think, you know, this, this is where I get worried when I study history, because right now we're at a point where if you look around the globe, you look at Europe, you look at South America, I mean, look at East Asia, to say nothing of the Middle East, like we are seeing hard divides in our politicians. We're seeing harder and harder figures rise to prominence. And they usually, regardless of which way they lean, rise out of the opportunity of things not going well, or people being upset about how things are in their country, usually starting with their wallets, and maybe their lack of social movement upwards. And if you look at the build up to World War II,

and I don't want to sit here and say like oh we're about to have world war ii i like to be an optimist but like it's hard not to see some of those same parallels we think we're unhappy because we're mistreated so that's some of the slogans that you'll see in other words they may say oppressed or whatever it may be. But it's more like we're morose because we've accepted a frame of mind that renders this world lifeless. And that if we could see the animated splendor that characterizes so much of what's around us, then we wouldn't be so tormented. So in other words, you think you're despondent because you're deprived,

but you're lost because you're blind to wonder. That's why, that's the facet that I'm interested in. The meaning crisis behind this all. Guys, if you're not following me on Instagram, you can get me at Julian Dory Podcast or also on my personal page at Julian D. Dory. Those links are in the description below. You can also follow me on X at Julian D. Dory. That link is in the description below.

And as always, please smash that subscribe button if you haven't already and hit that like button on the video. It is a huge, huge help. I appreciate all of you who have been subbing and all of you who are liking all these videos. Thank you. The meaning crisis. So by the way, when someone gives you any simplistic answer like I just gave, you have to be wary because it's extremely rare that any issue can be boiled down to one phenomena. So if they say this concept is this concept merely by the way the word merely is one

of the most dangerous words that comes from c.s lewis says so when someone says god is love or god is this or god is you or the universe or whatever it may be you can be wary i agree i i think that we do trade it's just how we're wired as humans though. We do try to boil it down to one thing, which of us know we have in common. We all have some sort of search for that in some way at some point in our life, unless we literally don't have an ability to hold a thought due to medical issues or something like that. We all wonder where we come from and where we're going when the thing happens that happens to every single person that's ever been on this earth, which is we die. And that is at the very core of what it is to be a human being. So if you are, I like what you said, pointing out that, you know, a part of these problems are a search for meaning. I don't know, though, that if you did simplify it down to

that, it would be that dangerous. Because I would agree, I think if you look at the average, you know, the average upset person person regardless of political leanings, let's look in America, right? Maybe they have a lot of college debt. Maybe they feel like they wasted their time sticking to the plan that they were told is going to be a part of the American dream. Maybe they feel like they're in a dead-end job and they spend all their time scrolling on their social feed, which depletes their dopamine, and they wonder why they're depressed all the time. Maybe their parents are still trying to retire and they're 65 and there's no retirement in sight. And so they're wondering, well, what the fuck is there going to be for me? And it starts to get to like, well, what is the point of this whole thing?

Which to me, when I hear something like that, that's related directly to what is the meaning of my life. Some of the public mistrust in science, to me, comes from people who say, look, science for the past 100 years has been promulgating this idea of physicalism, that all there is is this dead matter. And then there's some people, since they've done some meditation or psychedelics or seen the phenomenon or what have you, they've had some experiences and they feel like

there's something more here. There's something more. This can't just be it. Then they get let down by the gods, their previous gods of science like Neil deGrasse Tyson, who sanctimoniously say, no, not only is materialism correct but you're

they they scorn the people who think that there's something else more than just materialism by the way materialism is the old word physicalism is the new one because you don't just accept that there's a cup but there's also physical law that's called physicalism okay can you can you actually expand upon that a little bit because you lost me there so you're now you're getting into physics so what what you're can you just say that again like what what neil's trying to say there i'm sorry neil would say that the opposite of materialism is spiritualism that's false he's he's philosophically not trained and that's fine but you don't despise philosophy just because you think you know what it is yeah and you also don't despise the people

who comprise the majority of your audience who are interested in ideas that go beyond just physics and that's the problem it makes up the bulk of the people who purchase tickets to his show so he should have him have some more gratitude. Yeah, you can't – when you start looking – especially if you're a really smart guy, maybe you know a few more things. But when you start looking down on outer ideas based upon the people who may promulgate them, you got a problem. That's how society shifts. And right now, we are seeing a massive, massive divide in institution versus Main Street, right, in everything. But at the forefront of that is certainly science. the experts, so to speak, is at an all-time low because on one very big issue, there appear to have been all kinds of not only mistakes made, but on the back end, almost disciplining of people who

even had questions about that on the way there. And so as a result, everything now at a scientific level, regardless of what it is or how much little or not to do at all with, say, the pandemic the science may have, people are naturally, with their trust broken, questioning all of it. And I kind of sit here like, well, we should be able to question things, right? But at what point do we go too far to the point that legitimate institutions that should exist, maybe to stay with the example specifically in science, become a victim to something that they had nothing to do with. And we risk tearing down part of what makes the West great. We're told that there is no such thing as a foolish question.

Just ask your questions. And then if someone's like, oh, could so and so be aliens or UFOs, then you're made to feel inane for asking a question. Yeah. I don't think that's right. It's not. And, you know, I think we also had a moment. Let's just get into this Terrence Howard thing. So. Yeah, that's more than a moment. Yeah, yeah, it's more than a moment. But in the context of all the things we've seen over the past few years, it's a moment out of that where this guy comes up, he's a well known actor, he clearly has a very, very creative functioning brain. And there are some things that he rethinks that maybe you're like, okay, you should question that. At the same time though, he brings up all kinds of stuff like almost like a decision tree. Like he takes one leap and then it leaps out into four more things and he leaps off those and leaps off those to where it gets so deep that you're so far away from where the truth even was. And it's like, how can we take this seriously? That said, the reaction to him had to, from what I could see, two main sides that were the loudest. You had the institutions who laughed

him off and went like this, which is only going to drive him and his followers further away. And then you had the people who are more open-minded to things who then said, you know what? Because they're pushing him off he must be right about everything exactly how do you solve that problem part of this is that at the seed of it is that people are obsessed with the notion that reality in its depth isn't what it seems that we have a fear of the unknown that people say often, fear of the unknown, but there's also equally potent a fear of the known that lurks beneath. We crave, and I mean deeply crave, Julian,

that there's some discrepancy in the conventional account to the point where it's like we're afraid, we're terrified that reality may not have some grand illusion behind it. What do you mean by that? The people who love the ideas of Terrence Howard, they're the type that... Firstly, I shouldn't say they're the type. They believe there's knowledge that's been hidden.

And that what you have to do is you have to uncover, you have to look beneath the surface. And that comes from something called the hermeneutics of suspicion, which came about from Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx. So Marx would say, look, this surface level that we're speaking at, don't trust it. Follow the money. Look at the economics of it. So that's even that phrase, follow the money, we still say today. Oh, yeah. That comes from Marx.

Nietzsche would say, no, you follow the power. You don't listen to what people are saying. Groups want power. Freud would say, you don't listen to the surface level utterings. You observe the unconscious so there's constantly this chronicle of something at the surface level that is false plato's cave is also like this what you're seeing is not here there's something else that's truer behind it furthermore it's being kept from you and so what you can do is you can truly experience it or whatever that may be for people

who aren't familiar with plato's cave can you explain that that whole thing plato had a firstly plato's spoken in an interesting way was dialogues it's just like reading a movie script it's just two people talking back for like a quentin tarantino scene where it's just dialogue it's just dialogue there's not even scene transitions and the person walks. No, it's just Socrates says this Glaucon was Plato's brother. He had Glaucon say something else in Plato's cave. So Socrates says, look, Glaucon,

what if knowledge is like, there are a set of people who are bound and they can only see the wall. And there are, there's some fire behind them. And there's some figurines like puppets or what have you. And they're making images see the wall. And there's some fire behind them. And there's some figurines, like puppets or what have you. And they're making images on the wall. And these people who are bound, they just see those images, those shadows cast by the fire. Will they not believe that to be the true reality?

Glaucon's like, hmm, that's impressive, Socrates. Everything is set up. It's bad writing, actually. In film, you wouldn't have this, where there's some characters obsequious and always agreeing to the other one. it's like hmm that's impressive soccer everything is set up it's bad writing actually like in film you wouldn't have this where there's some characters obsequious and always agreeing to the other one but socrates is the wise person so they didn't have the subtleties of screenwriting back then so socrates then further says well what would happen if one of these people got loose they would turn around they would see the fire They would get burned in their eyes from the fire because they're just used to the shadows on the wall, the flickering.

And then the person's like, yeah, that's very wise of you, Socrates. Then Socrates says, okay, now suppose this person exits the cave and goes to the surface and sees this city where everyone's happy and laughing and etc and then there's the sun they're also going to be blinded from the sun wouldn't they then when they go back down to the cave to tell all the other cave dwellers wouldn't they seem crazy i think he even uses that word crazy wouldn't they all say you've lost your mind so that's the the story that's in our bones that motivates plenty of the of the feeling behind what's going on in this ufo world and the terence howard world as well that the institutions whatever whatever that means, the academy, they have this false knowledge, or maybe they have in their possession some true

knowledge. Maybe the government has it. It just needs to be disclosed to you. Disclosed is also something that comes from the hermeneutics of suspicion. Guys, if you're still watching this video and you haven't yet hit that subscribe button please take two seconds and go hit it right now thank you now the problem is that you will always be suspicious so the government discloses something to you you're going to be suspicious of that something else happens aliens reveal themselves to you then what something that i ask that it seemed like you ask as well, is, then what? Like, someone says, I just want to know about X, Y, and Z. And then you think, okay, suppose you were to know it. Then what? Well, well what? Then what? And then, okay, by then I want to know about A, B, and C. Then what?

Lou Elizondo had a thought experiment. Actually, it's not a thought experiment. It's a question. He said something akin to, suppose that aliens were real, what have you. They've been here for some time. How do you treat your family? How does that change?

In other words, we think what we have to do is that there's different doors. We're constantly told this. You have to maximize your opportunities. Go through the doors that maximize the amount of doors that are there so that you can maximize the potential that's offered to you. In other words, keep searching, keep going, keep going. Which positions truth as something that you have to move toward in a propositional manner. So by propositions, I mean they're statements like x equals 2. What is 2 plus x? It's 4.

Something like that. Whatever Terrence Howard would say, we can get to that later. 1 times 1 equals 2. We can get to that. There's another view of truth that our current view of truth is impoverished we have a propositional view of truth that truth are just statements and you evaluate them as true or false by the way that's also incorrect there are independent statements we can talk about that afterward okay we'll put a pin in there yeah it's it's super cool comes from math there are statements which

are neither true nor false they're independent you cannot derive them from the axioms. You cannot prove them to be true. You cannot prove them to be false. Like, can you give an example? You've heard of Gödel's incompleteness theorem. I don't think so. So Gödel came about in the 1930s because, well, precipitated by a question from Hilbert of the 1900s. Hilbert was a mathematician, famous mathematician. To this day, there are still some 10 of, he put forward 10 problems and said, these are the 10 problems that we should work on. I think two or three of them are still unsolved. But one of the problems was, Hilbert said, prove it's the case that if I was to give you a mathematical statement, that if it's true, you can just show that it could be true. You don't have to prove. I'm not going to give you a mathematical statement, a specific one.

I'm just saying, in general, is it the case that if I give you a well-formed sentence, because you can also say gibberish, so it has to be well-formed. You can't just say xy. xy what? You have to say xy equals so-and-so, take that to be greater than this, square root that, and that is a prime number. That's like a statement. Sure. So Hilbert says, is it the case that any statement can be proved? If it's true, it can be proved.

That's called the completeness of mathematics. That if you have axioms, you start with something foundational, that you can get to any truth. Now, it turns out, Gödel showed that there are some truths out there that are true, but we can never prove them to be true. And what was the best example of those? It's quite involved. So just so you know. Okay. We got time yeah sure in u of t there's a third year math course one of my favorite math courses actually called mathematical logic and they the whole semester is just you have to prove girdle's incompleteness theorem it's just teaching you the steps to even understand his his theorem and then you have to on the exam prove it

oh man that was i remember waiting in the waiting room everyone was just looking over their notebooks and that was a that was fun anyhow the statement girdle contrived is almost like the liar statement this sentence is false have you heard that what is the truth of this sentence is false if this sentence is false is a true statement yeah it becomes false if it's false it becomes true so what is the what are you assigned to that you don't know what to start yeah girdle came up with a mathematical version of that saying this sentence is not provable so the girdle sentence is such that you can you can find a statement that you can't i you can neither prove it to be true nor prove it to be false so it's independent okay another example again this is quite convoluted but there's something called infinity so it's a large

large number that larger than any number you can say when you're six or seven or so someone says hey what's a large number 685 can you think of a larger number 1200 and so and then you realize okay this there's no bound to this no ending yep that one that we understand when we're in elementary school that is a certain type of infinity called an un called accountable infinity technically called aleph zero it just means one two three four five dot dot infinity goes at the other end okay that's called a countable infinity there are also uncountable infinities so one way of thinking about what is infinity is to think about what is what does size mean we look at this and there are seven of these guys here. You're looking for people listening, not watching.

You're looking at the Funko figurines on the table right here. So how do we know that it's of size seven? One other way is we have another set that we know the size to be seven and I can match them. So let's say you have seven here. You just by coincidence have seven. Okay. Chords, chords here that are plugged in. And then you could say, okay, that cord there corresponds to this person. That cord corresponds to this person. You can match them up one by one. You can actually take one and put it beside it. So you can put it into one to one correspondence. And then you can

say, okay, so that's seven. Okay. So this is size seven. Now you can do it into one to one correspondence. And then you can say, okay, so that's seven. Okay, so this is size seven. Now you can do the same with something that's size eight and size 10, all the way up to infinity. Now infinity is technically a set that you can pull elements away from, a finite amount. Okay, let's suppose this kept going on, dot, dot, dot. I can pull away some, and this still

has the same size. Yeah, like the laws stay the same, essentially. So infinity's the only number that that works for, because if I was to take some of these away, it then becomes five sets. Like there's a set of five if I take two of them. Seven minus two is five. Mm-hmm. But if I do

seven minus, I'm sorry, infinity minus seven, it's still infinity yeah so infinity that's what characterizes infinity you can take some ever feel like your wordpress site is moving in slow motion switch to kinsta's managed hosting for wordpress and watch it fly host your site on google cloud's fastest servers with worldwide data centers so your pages load instantly need help? WordPress experts respond in under two minutes and will migrate to your site for free. Try it yourself. First month free at Kinsta.com. That's K-I-N-S-T-A dot com. Kinsta. Simply better hosting.

I think finite for it's actually super philosophical. yeah you can take something finite from it and it remains the same that's any infinity has that then there's a countable and there's an uncountable infinity which is an even larger infinity we think that infinity is just infinity but there's an even larger infinity that comes after the countable one the dot dot here infinity how's that work how can it be larger? If it's an idea, I want to come back to another question I have, but I want to stay with what you're doing. I don't want to distract you.

How do you have one infinity that's larger than another? Well, one way is that you have another set. So think in terms of sets. So you just have some objects here, okay? And they have dot, dot, dots with them. And then you have some objects here, you have dot, dot, dots with them, meaning it's infinite. It's infinite. You can't look at them all can you place one set in one to one correspondent with one to one correspondence with another so for instance we think the set of

even numbers two four six eight nine sorry ten twelve is lesser than the set 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, because it has less elements. It should. It should just have less. It has half as many elements. Shouldn't it be half an infinity? It turns out you can just, let me write down 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. You just place 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 14, Right next to them. You can always pair them up. When you're in kindergarten, they say, hold on to your partner. Always have a partner. If you can always have a partner, then you have established a one-to-one correspondence.

That's what it means. It's the fancy mathematical way of saying, hold on to your partner with your pinky finger or whatever it is, is one-to-one correspondence. I understand what you're saying but my my issue with with the conversation is that infinity is this idea essentially that exists where we admit that we can never stop counting even if we don't know the terms at some point when we get past quintillion or whatever it is you know and don't have a literal word for, we know there's a number that comes after it. But it feels like doublespeak when we then say if you subtract from infinity, you don't change anything on the whole because you don't know which number within, I'm getting

a little meta, I'm sorry people, but which number within infinity that you are subtracting from. So I'm going to make up a random number right now that doesn't exist, like a name of something. Quadra six billion or something like that. Okay. Let's say that was the number. And then the number after it was quadra six billion and one. If I subtract five of these figurines from quadra six billion, and I subtract five from quadra six billion and one, the five that I took from quadra six billion and one leaves a larger number than the other but we referred to both of those numbers in the context here as infinity you understand what i'm saying it's a little bit hard to swallow i'm sorry i don't understand what you said okay let me let me try it let me try it a little more because i'm sure if you're not getting

it no one else out there is getting it i'm saying if I have number X within infinity, okay, it's past a number that we even have a term for it. And then this was a better way to say it. And then here I have X plus one. But when I referred to it, coming back to the equation you had, when I referred to infinity minus five, you said it doesn't change the value. I'm saying essentially we're just copping out on it, not changing the value because we can't even define what number within infinity that is. But if we knew these two numbers, if we had a name for them and I knew that one was x, whatever the name is going to be, and the other is x plus 1, I know that if I subtract 5 from x plus 1, it's 1 more than the 5 I subtracted here. Meaning we're using – That's correct in the finite

case in the finite case so when we say when we say infinity it's almost rather than it being a law it's more of an admission of the limits of the human the human capacity to understand all numbers i would say that it's it's the beautiful thing about the human mind that we can grasp infinity. So by the way, the person who established this, his name is Cantor. Cantor thought about infinity. So you can take the natural numbers infinity. So 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. Those are called the countable infinities because you can count them.

You can actually list them out on a spreadsheet except you have to put dot dot dot okay okay that's called that's called the countable infinities you could take the quote unquote power set of that that's how you construct the one that's higher you construct another set from the first set okay it doesn't matter it sounds abstract you take this one set we agree this is called some amount of infinity, let's call it infinity zero, because it's like the first infinity. Infinity zero. It could be infinity one, but for the sake of this, I'm going to say infinity zero. Infinity zero. You can construct another infinity called infinity one. Then you wonder, well, maybe infinity one is the exact same size as infinity zero. It turns out there's always elements in infinity one that you can never get from a one-to-one correspondence.

The actual proof of this isn't something that I could say. It's something called the, if you want you can look it up, it's called the diagonalization argument of Cantor. But the point is that there's a larger infinity. Then you can ask the question, is there a larger infinity than infinity one? And there is, infinity two. Then you wonder, how far does that go? And it turns out that goes up infinitely. And so Cantor was constantly thinking about the infinite,

the most infinite set. And he called it that limit to the highest infinity, God. Meaning there's an infinity to the infinity, essentially. Yeah. Yeah. Now what, we just looked this up cantor's diagonal argument i'm just going to read the basic definition on wikipedia cantor's diagonal argument is a mathematical proof that there are infinite sets which cannot be put into one-to-one correspondence

with the infinite set of natural numbers and formally that there are sets which in some sense contain more elements than there are positive integers such sets are now called uncountable sets and the size of infinite sets is treated by the theory of cardinal numbers which canter began so cardinal means size of the cardinality of the set of these little guys these little baubles is seven the cardinality of that happens to also be seven right you establish the cardinality by taking a set you know, let's say you know that's seven. And then another one, you don't know how many it is. You just pair them up like little children with their pinkies attached.

Which gets back to our core point, though. We have to know one thing to prove the other. I mean, you heard Terrence Howard do this with, I imagine you listened to the eric weinstein one he did with him a bit okay so there were different points in there where terrence would say things like well we that line's not perfectly straight if we put a micro if we put a microscope over it it would prove that there's a little bit of curvature there or something like that like he would do things like that meaning questioning something that like the base point that we can all agree on he'd be like no we can't agree on that hold on a minute yes so can we ever really prove anything if we can't prove that for example maybe these seven chords right here aren't actually

seven chords and we're living in some other space-time dimension that makes it look like it's seven but seven isn't even the thing that we even understand to be seven so what you're asking now about is proving something mathematically is different than proving something physically and people make a mistake of thinking that the map of math is the same as the territory of the physics so you can describe the physical world whatever that means with math it doesn't mean that that math corresponds to the physical world although you can means, with math. It doesn't mean that that math corresponds to the physical world, although you can make a structural argument and show, hey, with experiments, when we map it out with this math, then we get the answers that we predict. And so you can say

there is some correspondence in structure, sure. But does that mean that the underlying reality is truly what the math says? We don't know. But in Terence's case about the... Let me just get back to infinity 0 and infinity 1. It's technically called aleph 0 and aleph 1 for whatever reason. The independent question, the question that it turns out is not true or false, is, is there another infinity between infinity 0 and infinity 1?

Sure, we can construct a higher infinity from this, from the countable infinity. Okay, cool. Is there an in-between one? That's called the continuum hypothesis. It turns out that's independent of the axioms of set theory, which is what people use to build math. So there are other questions that seem like

these seem contrived. These seem like contrived examples of independent questions. But there's another one about if you have a graph and you have little dots on the graph and can you color the dots in different ways such that when you attach a vertice that you can assign a different color and no two colors are matching. It's called the Paris-Harrington theorem. So something that actually has, or seems like it has, application. Not just, this sentence is false. Not just, is there an infinity between two infinities? There is an independent statement that isn't Gerdelian, even though it technically is a Gerdelian statement. G-O-D-E-L. If you have someone though like a Terrence Howard – forget Terrence Howard actually. If you have anyone though who's coming up with let's say a lot of ideas that are provably wrong, right, out of what they say, nine out of ten things are wrong.

But the tenth thing isn't necessarily right, but it's asking a question that maybe we haven't answered all the way. Do you view that as a net win or a net loss for the conversation of science? For me conversing with the person, if it was private, I would consider it a win just because any conversation, this conversation, both you and I, hopefully we care about one another and we're not trying to deceive one another. That's right. And we're trying to say what's interesting and we're aware that there are some cameras and some microphone equipment and some guy. Some guy, let's see, behind the whole thing. Yes, sure. We're aware of that, but that's in our periphery.

And we're just trying to converse with one another. And so if that was the spirit of the conversation, then I would consider it a win. But you say in private, not in public. Well, no, I also think in public. I also think that as long as it's truthful. Now, going back to the truth argument, that we think truth is just propositions, statements that are supposed to be true or false. That's what got me into the independent statements. There are three other forms of truth. And this comes from John Vervaeke. There's a participatory truth, which means what is it like to participate in something dancing? There's some truth to dancing. There's a truth to procedures, so procedural truth.

That is to say, you can grasp this phone, you can grasp it incorrectly. You think that has nothing to do with truth, but there's the truth of an arrow, so the arrow's path is true. The word true has a historical root that isn't just propositions. Although the problem is that in our modern parlance, we think truth is just propositions. And we've forgotten about the procedural aspect of truth, the participatory aspect of truth, and the perspectival aspect of truth. So the four truths, this comes from John Vervaeke, propositional. the participatory aspect of truth and the perspectival aspect of truth so the four truths this comes from John Vervaeke propositional that's what most people think the truth is then there's procedural moving then there's

participatory then there is perspectival the perspectival one is a bit tricky to explain more like what is it like to be what is it like to be from your position many people say that has to do with consciousness what is it like when i think of topics like pretty much everything we've just discussed vis-a-vis math and physics my brain gets fried getting ahead of myself and what i mean by that is there's always a layer deeper in either direction let's use let's use numbers right if i want to go to zero i have to keep on adding what infinite decimal places there's never a place where it goes completely to zero where nothing went to something that we can concept in our head. But it's the same thing in the other direction.

When I go to count up at some point, I don't even have a term for the number I count. And I know that there are what? Infinite more numbers that I can count to. So when I realize that we are barred in by what the human collective intelligence has been able to term are the deepest numbers that we can even look at from to us exponential figures in both directions that could just be once it is in all likelihood one small speck though of the actual knowable numbers in the universe it starts to make me then wonder if i go deep enough on that like well do we really know anything then if we just have one small snapshot of the entire thing? That's right. So the idea about you have doors and you can explore them and that's what the curious mind is supposed to do is the Lou Elizondo statement that I think is the most profound of all

the six hours or so of all the statements he said, which is, what are you going to do now? Is saying, forget about going through different doors. There are people in the room with you already. How do you treat them? And that has to do with the other three forms of truth. I think you lost me on that one. So instead of walking through doors, you say and assume you already have people with you. How do you treat them?

What does that have to do with what we're talking about, though? I know you know. I just don't know. Have you heard the phrase, and at the end of all our searching'll be to arrive where we began and know the place for the first time. T.S. Eliot, I believe. I think I have heard that, actually. So, what? What I wonder is, then what? Then what? Okay, suppose you get some revelation about something. then what? What are you going to do? For me, it could be that you said the answer is that there are many numbers and they're beyond us and we have a snapshot. It could be that. It could also be that the universe is fractal-like and that there's the world in a

grain of sand. There's another quote about see the world in a grain of sand. There's another quote about, see the world in a grain of sand. It could be that. You have an element of the truth, and you're searching for it out there. And the truth is leniency, it's forbearance, tenderness, devotion. It's a form of truth that we don't think has anything to do with the truth john verveke pins the meaning crisis he's the one who studies the meaning crisis he may have coined that term or popularized it have you had him on your podcast a few times yeah i'm gonna listen to those sure go ahead he says it's it's quite interesting because many people will say well the, the meaning crisis since the nuclear age, we've lost meaning, blah, blah, blah, blah. He says, no, it came about since the 1100s. Why?

Because we introduced vowels, something like that. How the heck does vowels have anything to do with meaning? He said, what happened was we used to read aloud and it was a rare skill. We think, okay, it's great. We are literate now. What happens is that then you introduce vowels and spaces, and reading becomes easier, and you start to ascribe more reality to what's easier, what's cognitively more easy to process. That may be another reason why some psychedelic trips have an element of reality to them such that when you come back to this world, this is the one that feels like the dream world. Because there's a cognitive loop that's on steroids.

And I forgot what the name is, but I can send you it. Okay. And it has to do with processing. Now what's interesting is that we also, yes, we ascribe more truth to what is easier to to comprehend so if someone's speaking nietzsche's fantastic man nietzsche has these aphorisms he says the person who is deep tries to be clear the person who isn't tries to be obscure for the crowd presumes that what he can't see to the bottom of must be deep oh that is

fucking brilliant i might i might put that on a picture and hang it in the studio that's a good that's a bar so partly with the theories of everything podcast what i'm trying to do is to simplify as much as possible but simplify not to the point of whittling away some concept so that it no longer resembles the original but to speak in as plain language as one can anyhow verveke would say look we've now prioritized reading reading has to do with the propositional and we've lost analog so this just a, even walking and talking, there's a whole philosophical school of peripatetics. There's more. So even, so Nassim Tlaib, another great writer, fantastic writer, said there is, there are ancillary uses to something analog that become primary. So for instance, a book. We think, oh, we capture the book by putting it on Kindle. No, you've

digitized the book and you've made some lossy conversion. So you haven't captured the full essence of a book. Why? Because there's the feel. I asked my wife this the other day. If it's the case that the Kindle books cost the same as a real book and you didn't have to worry about transportation and so on, would you prefer the real book? And she said, yes, because then this is the case for most people. There's something about the feel of it. There's something about about transportation and so on would you prefer the real book and she said yes because then this is the case for most people there's something about the feel of it there's something about opening it up there's also nassim said there is something about a physical book that you put in behind you and you look brighter because look how many books i have so there's another element to it

you can he said right now i'm typing on a laptop propped up by a book so there are other uses of a book that don't get captured when it goes to Kindle. And he said, there are these auxiliary uses to a physical object. So for instance, aspirin, when it was first proposed or first invented, even though it came from a leaf that was known about for a while. So let's say it was introduced for runners, so that you can run faster. Then you realize, okay, it's not for that. Then that then you think okay maybe it's because maybe i can introduce it to people who need to drink more water it encourages them to drink water so on so on so on then you get side effects viagra was like that yes what did that start with that was for the heart yeah for the heart it's like you find something your primary use your primary use is actually not the best use. We're not smart enough to know the primary uses.

The analog is far smarter than us. I understand. We think we can capture a single element of it. And then also, by the way, there's a privacy element to this because as soon as you digitize something, it becomes tracked. Yeah, that's a whole other layer. But even before you get to that layer, the example you already gave with the other uses is well taken. Because you were saying this because Verveke goes back to the 1100s where people would pretty much only read things out loud. And then suddenly they started reading things in their head and it removed the second skill that they would – I mean, I guess they're using a new skill.

So Hervéky said that reading Shakespeare aloud is a completely different experience than just reading it on the page. I've never done this. I can imagine it's the case. If you read Shakespeare aloud, you feel something different. And the people around you feel something. Everyone silently reads Shakespeare. Yeah, of course. I mean, if someone sends you a text that's really deep,

or they say to you in a passionate way in person, which one comes across more? Obviously, sitting in person with them and them saying the tone, the movement, the eye contact, whatever it may be, like all these different things put together, it's way more powerful. So I would agree that totally makes sense. Speaking about the people who are in the room with you, and then what you're going to do, and this comes to Lovecraft, we can talk about Lovecraft after. Lovecraft. Yeah. Okay.

Because Lovecraft upgraded Plato's cave. So I'll just say the quote right now. Lovecraft said that the most merciful aspect of this world is the inability for the human mind to correlate its contents. So to make sense of it. The most merciful aspect of this world is our inability to make sense of it. The most merciful aspect of this world is our inability to make sense of it, and that one day unfettered scientific investigation may open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and our frightful position therein, that we may either

go mad from the revelation, or flee from the light into the peace and safety of the darkness. In other words, what Lovecraft is saying, Plato, my boy, you have such a contrived example here. You say city dwellers, rich city dwellers would say something like, I love the world. And I'm thinking, you love the world? What do you mean you love the world? You mean you love to fly on a private jet or first class to some first world other city and go from resort to manufactured hotel and so on?

That's not the world. Oh, I love the world. You have no idea what the world is. Someone else listening is like, yeah, you come to my street. You think you love the world. And someone listening to that would say, yeah, you go to your street, you come to the back slums of Mumbai if you think you know the world. And then someone else may say, that's not even the world. And someone listening to that would say, yeah, you go to your street, you come to the back slums of Mumbai if you think you know the world. And then someone else may say, that's not even the world. The person who's like, I love nature. Nature is most of the world. No, you like

walking in parks, a manicured government sanctioned place. You don't like the world. Oh, no, I do love the wilderness. Yeah, okay. If you do, you've been taught by millennia of people how to be a survivalist like survivor man so you bear just your b-a-b-a-r-b-a-r-e-u doesn't like the world it's you with all of your knowledge of what to eat what not to eat what to avoid how to make food and make clothes and even then you don't you don't like the swamp lands of louisiana you don't want to just be dropped there you're gonna die in five minutes and okay so someone's like no i love the world no you love this 70 of the world is water so you're telling me if i was to just drop you in an arbitrary place you're gonna you're gonna like that. Good for you. You get a job with knowledge like that

rattling around in your head. So Lovecraft is saying, Plato, your example where someone leaves the cave and enters a beautiful, bustling, civil city, what are the odds of that? Most likely what will happen is you'll just be in Amazon, where every 45 seconds, there's something that's going to kill you. Or you're going to be in the ocean, or you're going to be in a deeper cave. So don't think truth is this, that it's some trivially liberated, positive outflow that is just beautiful. And I just want the truth. I'm a truth seeker.

I don't believe people who say they're a truth seeker. You don't know what truth is. You're a grandstanding, navel-gazing, incognizant moral posturer if you call yourself a truth seeker. I think we've got to talk about the root word, though, too, in the context of modern society and discourse. That's the elephant in the room with this. Truth is now this – a two-cent word thrown around by people very liberally, no pun intended politically there, to make sense of what it is they believe. So as an example, we were talking about how institutions

have destroyed a lot of trust because of some major examples at high levels of society, not the least of which would be like the pandemic and some of the things that happened there. A lot of people who were very upset about that, let's use that example specifically, the pandemic, through that process lost what use that example specifically, the pandemic. Through that process, lost what? They lost trust in the institution. So they have now formed an attitude that says, I do not trust you, which is one of the worst things that a human being can form in the sense that it is very hard for you to earn.

You can build your reputation forever, but you can lose it immediately, right? And when you lose it, it's very, very hard to rebuild it back. Because of their lack of trust, which is perfectly understandable, they now think that everything is fucked. I'll use an example on this. I heard Dana White say, and Alessi, if we can look up this quote, because I'm going to paraphrase it, and I don't want to misquote him, but he said something along the lines of, I will never, ever, ever trust a doctor of any kind again after what happened during the pandemic. To which I look at that and I go,

okay, so when you host all your UFC fights and you got the two guys in the octagon right there, is there a doctor or your friend who's not a doctor who you think knows more than doctors ready to go in there and get them? Bringing this back to truth where I started this. A lot of people like a Dana White right there, but let's not even use his name. Let's say people who may think that way have now turned towards, they lied. In this case, the institutions about the pandemic. So as a result, any of these institutions are wrong and they are what? They are – they know the truth.

It's not because they're dumb. They know the truth, but they think we're too stupid to deal with it and they hate us so much that they're keeping it from us. So they are not disclosing the truth, which means I am what? I am a truth seeker. And in saying now that I am this truth seeker, I am already assuming that the truth that I seek is the truth that I believe exists on the other side of the candelabra right there because it's being hidden from me. And I am therefore eliminating the idea that perhaps even if these guys lie about this or lie about that, maybe this thing over here or that thing over there, they're not actually lying about. You understand? So it has changed. Like what's, what was Trump's platform called?

Truth social, you know, like you don't have to agree with what the other side may be doing on certain facets. Perfectly fine. But then giving the assumption there that our side is where the truth is, no matter what, non serviam, if I use that correctly. That's inherently against truth. That's a social problem we have right now. There's a German study from 2012 or so, which surveyed 51 countries. And there's a way you can tell if someone's honest or not. So there are you can play like you roll a die on your own privately and then you tell you write down your score the higher score you get paid more so you get paid per dollar so if you roll a die and you get three you write down three you get three dollars you can actually tell how many people lie because more people say six it's

a private game than statistically one over six so it's not it's a private game, then statistically one over six. So it's not, it's a lie. Right. Okay. So they did a study where they tested people's honesty and then they gave them a variety of questions. Do you pray? What is your religion? What sort of music do you listen to?

What race are you? Et cetera. And it seemed to not correlate with anything, whether you're honest or not, except one question. And it wasn't, how trustworthy are you? I thought it would be that. I thought, if you self-report yourself as, I'm not trustworthy, you're more likely to steal. It's not that. The one question that correlated the most was, do you trust other people?

So if you are a mistrustful person, that's a statement about your morality. That's also the hermeneutics of suspicion, is constantly being suspicious, and it's a vicious cycle, and the question is, what's the answer? So this is recent. It's, sorry, this is recent recent to me but this has been developing for the past couple well past centuries but articulated in the past few decades called the primacy of beauty primacy of beauty yeah that's also known as the hermeneutics of beauty but you can also say the primacy of beauty so beauty plato said plato wasn't a Platonist. Many people think I'm going to be like Plato. I'm going to be a Platonist. Sounds cool. Plato believed there was another perfect world.

This is Terence Howard saying there are no straight lines in our world, but there is a quote unquote straight line somewhere. It's just in some hypothetical mental realm. It's just this physical world doesn't have any of this. This physical world doesn't have any perfect objects. So that's what Plato would say. And this world is a pale imitation. It's an adumbration. It's those shadows on the wall. It's fake. That's Plato's view, except one, one we could perceive directly with our senses. And that was beauty. So what is beauty? Beauty would be saying, beauty would be saying that there's some truth about you that you can disclose to me. And you have to be trustful to get it.

So here's an example. I tell my wife all the time, Babe, if you were this tall, like the size of my finger, I would love you. I would love you no matter what. If you lose your limbs, if you're this tall, like the size of my finger, I would love you. I would love, I will love you no matter what. If you lose your limbs, if you're disfigured, no matter what, and I'll go to a mountain and I'll find you and I'll love you and I'll put you in my pocket and we'll walk around like that.

So what am I saying there? Anytime you, if you look at this cup, you see one aspect of it. You don't see all angles of it. You definitely don't see inside the cup, inside the interior, the plastic. you don't see all angles of it you definitely don't see inside the cup inside the interior the the the plastic you don't don't see that at any point you just see one aspect yet there's a quote-unquote through line the eidos as the greeks would call it of the cup there's something that's cup like in order for you to even call it a cup yet you could only see one facet of it so the suspicious people will be like we're only see one facet of it. So the suspicious people will be like,

we're only seeing one facet. This is not the truth. The beauty people are saying, no, there is something real about the patterns on the wall, even in the cave. You are seeing real patterns. Those are patterns on the wall. There is something in this cup. There is something in my wife that's a through line that despite whether she wears makeup or not or what have you or gets disfigured There's a through line in her that me with my love if I'm doing my job correctly I have a through line in me that can recognize the through line in her that makes her her and that comes about from beauty Now you may say it has nothing to do with beauty. Well has something to do with beauty There's a great saying you cannot love what's not beautiful in

Order for you to love it. It was beautiful beauty's in the united beholder yeah well i think and maybe i'm extrapolating this too far with your example you just gave using the cup but what you're referring to is the question of people looking at things versus in just the physicality and maybe I'll say the science behind that physicality and what we can't see and wondering about it versus the people who are looking at it for how it makes them feel. Science has done a horrible job by saying all of...

Science also... Science. I shouldn't say that. And by the way, when people say they mistrust science, it's always... I want to read those studies. Do they mistrust the scientific method? I very much doubt that. And by the way, when people say they mistrust science, it's always – I want to read those studies. Do they mistrust the scientific method? I very much doubt that because they use cell phones.

I think they mistrust some promulgators of science, especially the more money that are involved in the larger institution. So then they mistrust everybody. Hey, guys. If you have a second, please be sure to share this episode around on social media and with your friends, whether it's Reddit, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, doesn't matter. It's all a huge help. It gets new eyeballs on the show, and it allows us to grow and survive. So thank you to all of you who have already been doing that, and thank you to all of you who are going to do so now. So science – some people.

Let's just pick on the paradigmatic example of the modern day scientist who's sanctimonious, Neil deGrasse Tyson here. He would say, you're not perceiving this. What's actually correct are the atoms. You can never see the atoms or the quantum fields, whatever that means. So science goes along with this. And then we have this mistrust of everything that's around us. We're not seeing this.

I'm not experiencing you so the primacy of beauty says not to get rid of the hermeneutics of suspicion but anytime we say something's illusory anytime you say so and so is illusory you're presupposing a standpoint that you consider to be real otherwise you can't say that that's illusory i understand okay you have to stand at some point that you think is real so technically speaking if you were critically if you were a critical thinker enough you would apply your hermeneutics of suspicion on itself and even suspect why am i so suspicious so you could say well i'm suspicious because people are mistrustful yeah yeah okay that's the surface level.

What's the deep? Apply your own hermeneutics of suspicion. Dig deeper. If you dig deeper, at least for me, I find I have six motivators. So anytime I think I'm a good person, like, look, I'm unblightedly searching for the truth. I say, no, I'm either motivated by cowardice,

covetousness, insecurity, indolence, greed, or malice. What's indolence? I know all the others. Fecklessness, like not doing your duty. Got it. Okay. Not wanting to exert effort. Understood.

So there's six reasons you were saying. Yes. Yes. And some of the other, well, see, truth-seeking, if you were a truth-seeker, a true truth-seeker, you would recognize the rancor and the anathematization that characterizes your own soul, your own attitudes and your beliefs and your desires and your behaviors, that they're not pure. And then you would seek to minimize that because truth has an element of goodness to it. Otherwise, why are you seeking the truth? You're seeking badness? Do you just want the truth for no reason? You believe that the truth is somehow salutary, somehow salvific. It will

bring about salvation or goodness. So there's an element of goodness to truth. Hopefully, hopefully you believe that. Otherwise, I don't know what you're doing with your truth seeking. And you would seek to minimize the the negative qualities in yourself truth is not truth is more about integration and union than it is about misgivings and divis Hmm. What do you mean by that? I could say a truth, a so-called fact, to my wife or to someone else. That is true, but it's not coming from a good place. So there are a variety. There are an infinite,

technically, maybe an uncountable amount of infinite amount of facts here in this room, just everywhere, just facts. So what are you going to choose to say? There's something that comes prior to the truth? There's something that comes prior to the truth. There's something that comes prior to the truth for you to select a truth in order to say it. So you could say, you're overweight, you're underweight. You could say something like that. You, you.

And that could come from a good place if you say it correctly, but it could also come, people say the truth hurts. Depends. you could say the truth in a hurtful way and you know that you're saying it in a hurtful way to hurt so i can use the truth like a sword rather than be used by the truth so what you're saying is i could i could look at my wife and say I'm not married but let's say I was looking at my wife and I could

give her a truth. Let's say she got a little overweight. I could either say A. You're getting fat or I could say B. You know if you came to the gym with me a couple times a week you're going to look the best you've ever looked. You're not far off. great example great example i never factually factually they're similar so there's

something else other than the facts that's again it gets back to like the layers thing right we want things to be we want at least some things to be black and white. And I'd like to think some of those do exist. And I can just turn my brain off from trying to question deeper and deeper, which I do a pretty good job of. But like, the fact of the matter is most things in the world, there really is no black and white to it. There's, there's a high degree of nuance that also injects what? Our own emotional urges as human beings to affect them. That's exactly what you're talking about with truth right here. And it's a beautiful way to put it because I didn't have the foresight to look at it that way When I'm talking about the people I see who might be, in that case, with that example, you know, questioning everything because of the pandemic or something like that, their truth is rooted in an emotional, visceral reaction to something that they hated. And therefore, they want to continue to find things they hate to hopefully get to the things that they love, which is a predetermined end point to hopefully get to what they love yeah correct hopefully yeah and it's so the truth is a reluctant place some people think oh i'm going to speak the truth meaning i'm going to speak without forethought but but truth is is a hurtful difficult slow process so for instance when you go to therapy you just say whatever comes to your mind you speak and you feel like oh I'm speaking honestly

that's something else that our generation has authenticity I have my issues with that word and you may say something like I hate my mother and then the therapist is like tell me about that and then you're like you know what

I don't know if i hate my mother i well my mother treated me like so and so and so blah blah blah blah blah blah 10 minutes later my teacher in third grade never respected me and i and i respected her so much and i wanted to be an astronaut she shut me down my father did that as well. You realize, I thought I hated my mother this whole time. I hate, I don't like my father. And actually it comes from that I'm insecure about my own intelligence and I wanted to be an astrophysicist so that I could prove it to myself. And that comes about from maybe months of therapy to build up to a point where you can get to that realization in 10 minutes. So people think, okay, what language is, is just this poor,

low resolution communication device that I have some internal feeling. I'm going to send it to you. It's never perfect language. Oh, they dismiss language. They deride language. They denigrate it. Yeah. Language is more like, if you're doing language, if you're using language honestly and truthfully, it's not that you're some helicopter searching for the word with trying to find planks of wood that are floating atop the ocean. You're like, yeah, that's what I mean. Let me bring that up to the surface and say that. Oh, that's what I mean. It's more akin to dredging. It's more akin to excavating. Setting something deep and trying to find

a plank of wood and then you bring out sometimes muck and every once in a while you bring out treasure. And so you're bringing out more than just the plank of wood. So language is a... If you're using it honestly as a way of uncovering

truth, it's not just conveying your pre-existing truths that are feelings. Language is a way of uncovering truth. You do this in therapy. You do it in therapy, like with talk therapy. Like I mentioned, 10 minutes to one hour. You think you have a surface level. This is what I mean by people conflate speaking without forethought with speaking the truth. You're not speaking the truth. You're speaking reflexively and unmeditatedly like instinctually that's what it that's perhaps perhaps the definition of superficial that is the planks that are floating on top of the ocean but it doesn't mean you're lying it means you're

trying to work it out and you're doing it live essentially but you could be lying i'm saying it doesn't have to mean you are i i understand it depends on their motivation so some people feel some people want to justify the fact that they don't have friendships that are long lasting or deep relationships because they're too blunt so they'll say i'm too blunt blunt. You can't handle my truth. My truth. Oh, yeah. Oh, that's a whole nother one. Yeah. Your truth, my truth.

Pretty subjective. Yeah, so don't hide behind your unprincipled lack of psychological substantiveness with some chronicle of your self-extolled righteousness. I don't trust people who say... I shouldn't say that.

I'm wary of people who say, I'm a truth seeker. Don't tell me with your words. Show me with your actions that you seek goodness. Forget about truth. Something comes prior to the truth because there's an infinite amount of facts to say if you think truth is just facts. Show me you're a goodness seeker with your actions.

Where does Terrence Howard fall on that scale for you? I think, I feel so horrible for terrence people in the academy just pile on him and it's so unfair because they're the ones who are saying like we we want people to be interested in science he did way more for getting people interested in science in the periodic table the history of it in what it means to have a a group so a number system you're even talking about aren't there other number systems terence can define his own number system by one times one equals two it's no longer the multiplication that we know it's something else but you can define systems like that like z2 for

instance people don't know one 1 times 1 can equal 2. 2 can equal 0 binary, by the way, on the computer works. Really? Yes. So you can look up z2, z underscore 2. You could try c underscore 2. What that is is a multiplication table where you have only two elements. You have 1 and you have 0.

So 1 plus zero equals one. Zero plus zero equals zero. We're on the home stretch right now. This is all obvious. But one plus one equals zero. So in that case you could have a different... Oh, so it always equals...

It doesn't matter. The point is that there are some rules that you want a number system to obey. Commutativity, associativity. These are all some math jargon. And you could define a number system such that you get something like 1 times 1 equals 2. Yeah, but Terrence wasn't, at least the way I took it, was not trying to define a new number system. He was trying to redefine the current system as it exists. And also, the one thing I couldn't understand with that example, let's stay on that because we're here.

His logic was at what point does like an energy or an action times another action get the same action? It needs to be more and i hear you but i think he's also ignoring equilibrium that i mean that's that's the way my brain thinks of it when i look at one times one if if let's change the numbers for a second if i have a zero to a hundred scale and they have equal power on each end right the old physics law for each action, there's an equal but opposite reaction. And they react on each other. They get to 50% in the middle. So they don't increase their value. They move 50 and they move 50, right? Minus 50 plus 50. So it's the same value. It still equals 100. With one times one, it's an offset to me. Whereas once I let's just use whole numbers to keep it simple. Once I get to two times one, well, now I know one side has more weight to it. So double the action to this is going to have double the type of result to the

number that it put the action on, right? Now, you can extrapolate this and say, okay, what about 2 times 2? Well, if 2 times 2 creates an action, you have Terrence here would now have the argument to say, well, why doesn't that offset to equilibrium? My thought on that, and I could be wrong, I'm a novice, is that 1 is like – it's back to the beginning of the conversation we had. It's the foundational number, zero and one. One, it goes from absolutely nothing to at least something. So it's just our baseline. It doesn't really equal anything, but it equals more than zero. Every number up above that is in its own way like a growing value in the universe. I'm probably saying that wrong, but do you understand the crux of what I'm saying? My issue is that it's not even that every action has a reaction. So you'd have some sort of globes, sorry, some sort of local conservation of momentum or conservation of energy is what he's referring to. But you don't have that in general relativity. You have a global breaking of conservation of energy because dark energy is just constantly adding to the universe. Can you extrapolate upon that, please?

In dark energy, there's something called dark energy where if you look at galaxies, one galaxy is here. So our galaxy, and you look at another one, the space between them is increasing. And that's increasing at an ever-increasing rate. So they're getting farther and farther apart faster and faster. And what's responsible for that is just called dark dark energy it comes from einstein's equations yeah that doesn't have some equal negative energy somewhere else now if it did the string theorist would love that because the string theorist by the way loves an ads universeS, anti-de Sitter space universe, meaning a negative cosmological constant. Positive cosmological constant is dark energy being added, energy being added to the

system. Negative energy would be the opposite of that. So an ADS system versus an DS. Energy being taken. Yeah. So anyway, the point is that string theory works in ads anti-de Sitter space whereas our universe seems to be in De Sitter space not anti regular positive cosmological constant so the point is to say Terence Howard his universe if he's living in our universe then it has a positive cosmological constant and you don't have this global conservation of energy. There's more energy tomorrow. There's more energy two seconds from now than there was zero, than there is now. Now, this is a tricky statement because in general relativity, you can't just have a moment of now, even in special relativity, global moment of now. It's actually super trippy if you think about it,

but it doesn't matter. Met the metaphorically the point still stands and then he'll say something like it's a metaphor one times one equals two a metaphor for okay but then are you not basing an entire precise physics off of that so is it a metaphor i don't what I found is that Terrence did something that no one else I know has done. He's done cold reading. You know cold reading? Cold reading is like a horoscope. You say, you're super ambitious,

but you're hard on yourself. And you work hard, but not hard enough. And many people comment about your creativity but you have doubts about your creativity even though sometimes you surprise yourself and you think other people underestimate you so what i've said some people will be like he's talking about me that's called cold reading and you can do this with horoscopes where you give people you tell them it's the same horoscope and you actually just put this is for sagittarius this is for sagittarius people this is for what are you what are we scorpios this is

for scorpios you get the idea each person will think this was taylor fit for me but it's actually the same one given to every single person because you're speaking in such generalities. So what happened was Terrence is speaking with a loose definition of words and many people. So I have on my WhatsApp, I have many people who are not in the academy and many people who are and i ask them what did you think of terence howard's first joe rogan experience like what did you what do you make of what he said many of the people who say 70 of the people in the academy would just say that's nonsense it's laughable and i'm like don't laugh at it even if it's nonsense okay whatever then there's almost all the people who are the

lay people the people outside the academy would say what he's saying makes complete sense so i'd ask them what what is he saying and they would contradict one another so there was also 30 of the academics who would say yeah he's making sense and then i'm like what is he making sense about then they're like because in m3 you have an m2 brain i'm like there is no way terence has an understanding of m2 brains and then the layman person definitely doesn't have an understanding of m2 brains so they're all picked they're all listening and they're saying ah okay what he's what he's saying makes sense because i also believe that the universe is is vibrational is has to do with energy and and then they map it onto their system okay yes yeah yes and then if they were to

reiterate their understanding back to terrence i imagine terrence would be like what are you talking about it's nothing to do with what i'm saying exactly and if they were to reiterate it back to one another they would both they would all be like what are you talking about yeah no it doesn't mean that so eat but but each person doesn't have access to other people to ask, hey, I think he means this and so on. I mean, there are some Twitter threads. Yeah. But the point is, Terrence Howard did the first that I've ever seen cold reading of physics unintentionally. And so everyone got something else for it and from it.

And they believe it's correct for them. And they just believe that person is correct. And their understanding matches that other person. Namely Terrence in this case. Well there's a parallel to what you're saying here. In our society that we've seen play out. That I think I could take the other side. To play devil's advocate on this.

With the idea that Terrence is bringing a lot of people into science. And getting them interested in it. The context with which he's bringing people into science is through controversy, where he's being shut down and laughed at, which I disagree with, by a lot of people, say, in the institution itself. And in bringing in maybe a bunch of younger kids or young adults who are now very interested in science because of him, he is bringing them in under the guise of being on his team or his wavelength of thinking such that that would include, hey, all these guys who are telling us to fuck off, fuck them. We don't want to listen to anything they say. And the parallel I'm going to draw here is actually in politics with Trump. When Trump

came up in 15, 16, he was so entertaining and so larger than life in every way, that he brought a ton of people from both sides into politics because of the polarizing figure that he was. And I'm not using this to like, take shots at Trump. I'm just speaking like objectively on just the nature of the whole beast around him. Their interest is misided so they're they're interested cool but then they come in with that mistrust and distrust even or but well from either side yes absolutely whether they come in hating him or loving him they're finding some sort of reason to find that distrust exactly i would argue though like i i saw a video it's god this has to be a couple months ago now, two, three months ago, where Trump met some kid. I mean this kid couldn't have been more than nine, ten years old who was wearing the Trump hat or the Trump fake hair and the suit, and the kid was crying meeting Trump like his hero.

And he's around all these other people who are there for, you know, I guess like one of Trump's political rallies or whatever. And I was thinking to myself, when I was nine or ten years old, I was worried about being a kid and experiencing life. I didn't give a fuck about politics. And we have now gotten to a point in eight years, through the fault of both sides, to where people's identity from a young age is now being centered on politics and it has to do with the fact that they came into it at a time where it was a vacuum and you had to

feel strongly this way or this way for this guy or not for this guy that it broke people's brains that old joe rogan line he says joe wrote he says, Donald Trump broke people. He either broke them against them or for them. And it changed the way we looked at the context of politics itself. So instead of, to bring this back and land the plane, instead of people getting into politics for the concept of being informed and wanting to get into politics, they got into it for reasons of being emotional to try to prevent or prevent the opposite of what their favorite figure was up against. And so when I look at science now, I could see a very similar pattern forming where let's say, just for the sake of argument, Terrence is really wrong about nine out of 10 things. Maybe that 10

thing, he's really onto something. And that's pretty cool. And I like that. And in a perfect world, I'd be like, this is great. But in our mass society, he has now created this bomb that went off that again, he doesn't control how people respond to him, but institutions responded to him the way they did such that now a lot of people are coming into the scientific process and being interested in it under the guise of, we got to fight back against the man who's keeping this man down and so the the the the scientific method itself which is supposed to be objective has now been changed i think that that could end up being a problem and i'm not saying that's his fault that's right i agree could be how do you prevent that though because as human beings we are tribal

like it's what we do throughout human history we're always tribal we're tribal around some sort of cause even if a cause didn't start as something that was supposed to be a cause it becomes a cause and then people have to take up arms this world is a miracle just this table this table is a miracle i I know. Me and Danny Jones built it. It was a miracle. These lights are a miracle. These curtains are a miracle, man. Just think about how much went into the lights.

And there's an electric system and people had to invent fluorescent tubes. These are fluorescent? They look whatever. I forget, but we've got a fancy computer system. If they're LED, that's even better. That's even more advanced. It's absolutely... Sometimes I have to stop myself

because if you just think about it, you can drop to your knees and not do anything about how unlikely and marvelous this all is by the way the hermeneutics of beauty would say beauty isn't the same as as just happiness being given to you and soft in a soft manner like Da Vinci's paintings or something akin to that. But beauty is more, the way that the ancients meant it, is more akin to the sublime. So there's this term called fear of God. Fear of God is the beginning of wisdom. Fear of God, you're like, as a modern person, no, let's go back to that root. What did it mean? Ah,

it meant respect. Okay, great. Let's say respect for God. I don't want to fear God. Why would you fear God? There's an article called The Dark Side of the Sublime, which talks about threat-based awe. If you experience awe, if you have a respect for what's immense and majestic, there's an intimidating quality to it. So for instance, a cyclone. You find that awesome you find it awe-inspiring and it's daunting at the same time so if something was truly beautiful truly sublime it's not just you're smiling and grinning and laughing you also have some fear neuropsychologically psychologically, there is a, if you feel awe in its utmost, there's a non-trivial amount of threat of fear inside as well. Ah, so the reason I was saying that was because, yeah, I think one of my reasons for not dropping down to my knees, it would be too much.

But the point is that there is some gratitude that we have to have. There's some gratitude. So it's just so unlikely that all of this works. Just look at this man. Like, look, holy moly. Holy moly. What we've done as people. Holy moly. And we have Uber. I always thought when I was younger, rich to me would be being able to take a taxi anywhere because they were just tech, no Uber at that point. And being able to eat at a restaurant whenever I wanted to. And now I can have a restaurant come to me and it doesn't have to

be a local restaurant. And now I can, I could take an Uber at any point I want. I still cringe when there's surge prices and so on. But the point is like, and I'm still ungrateful. Like I'm an ungrateful person. Why do you say that? Well, that's a deep question. Why? I don't know why, but you just said it you seem because

for the last 150 seconds you seemed like a pretty grateful kind of person you were appreciating my courage i could see how much more grateful i could be yeah yeah there's we 3 000 years ago or no no, 3,000 BCE, or BC, whatever you want to say, is when the first city was founded, the first major civilization in Sumeria. You used to look at people and fear that they're going to rape you

and take from you and pillage and plunder. And now we just walk down the street, there's hundreds, there's thousands of people. Go to Times Square, you're not afraid. Some people may feel afraid, but it's nothing like thousands of years ago. You're not running from a grizzly bear when you wake up at 9 a.m.

Yeah. So there's this unrequested and undeserved grace that we have. And an acknowledgement of that can go far. There's a reason why many of the more secular ways of doing meditation start with gratitude, gratitude journal, whatever your feelings are on that and my feelings are on that. It doesn't matter. The point is that that's associated with union and integration and not misgivings and dismissiveness. So you're asking what is the solution to our tribal nature?

It's in part gratitude. It's in part the analog and appreciating it. So the other three forms of truth, which people can look up, the four Ps of knowledge is what Vervaeke calls it, but it's also the four Ps of truth. So one more time,

propositional are statements, perspectival is the perspective you have, procedural is actual, like you could fumble the ball. weren't truthful to the ball you can play baseball correctly and and work on your truth your procedural truth i don't want to i don't want to get you off your thought here but my only question for that kind of thing though is truth is supposed to be in the perfect world of being able to define things the opposite of false or maybe lying or something like that. How are you – how can you inject truth to effort that makes a mistake that's in the right place? Meaning if I swung at a pitch and missed, unless I was throwing money on the game or something like that and trying to throw the game, it's not because I was untruthful that I missed. Maybe I'm reading into this too much,

but like I just missed. It's a human error. Well, sin, you hear the word sin. Sin technically means to miss your bullseye, the etymological roots. You can look that up. Sin means to miss the mark, to not aim correctly. And so you stray from the path. People say you stray from the path. You could say I did so unintentionally. You could say I didn't, I wasn't doing what's consequential because it's easier to,

that's another route that people can take. You have to look up the etymology of it though all right so do sin etymology let's try that that's a new one i don't think we've ever searched something like that before i like it ety yeah yeah yep yep that one okay so it says origin old english sin sing wait you just lost it i just had. Just go to a website about it. Wait, sin, singin, and then Latin, sons, sunt. Yeah, don't look at that. Just look at a website where they analyze it.

Do we have a good link right there? What's the first link? It's just the Merriam-Webster. Scroll, keep scrolling. There's a website just on etymology. Do you know what it's called? It should just... Oh, you search sin meaning.

You should search sin etymology. In the Old Testament, the word for sin is kata, meaning to fail or to miss the goal. What is the goal? The answer comes on page one of the Bible, which says, We are all made in the image of God. Every human is a sacred being who represents the creator and is worthy of respect. So, for instance, if you were deceitful in this conversation or trying to manipulate, that would be a form of being false.

Correct. Even though you were being truthful with everything you said, you could actually be, you could say factually correct statements. You see this all the time with, with people who are interviewers in the political scene where they'll say, yeah, but why were you hanging out with that lady? Okay. That's a, that's a truthful question. He, that person did hang out with that lady. Uh-huh. But what were you doing at 7am? Why did you not go home home to your wife the connotation of it yes they have an angle that they're trying to expose that's a great point yeah i i think you know we can get a little lost in in I don't want to say this

I will observe people now usually online at this point because that's the best place to do it because that can include people who you don't know personally but you can follow everything they do you know like thought leaders so to speak stuff like that on Twitter, Instagram wherever it is but I will

constantly over time find myself maybe this is like only child people watching syndrome, but I'll find myself wondering how a person gets to this point, right? Maybe when I found them and started following them, they were here, but now they're here. I'm not even talking politically or anything. I'm just saying how they're thinking about given issue X. And are you comfortable giving an example yes it'll be a little bit political but jordan peterson so i think when and and i have a lot of respect for jordan peterson i think twitter's really bad for him i do think that i'm pretty

sure i don't follow him on twitter like Like that's on purpose, but Jordan, there's a complete disconnect between how he portrays himself in a video or he, he says his value, what he says is values are. And then what he tweets. Yes, I would agree. Jordan Peterson, when he came up, it was over. Well, you're a university of Toronto guy, right? I'm pretty sure he was at the same place. Right place right okay were you there when that was all going on no you weren't okay so he comes up at a time where i'm gonna way oversimplify this but it had to do with being forced to use pronouns argument and stuff like that that they were looking at doing legislation in canada over this and he i would say correctly truth, if you might say, put out there going, stop, wait a minute, this is the line. And he's like, I know where this goes.

I know when you start legalizing how people can say things, that is totalitarian type shit. Would agree. And so obviously he goes on Joe Rog rogan and he goes very viral not just for that but then people find out like all his life studies and the things that he's been even putting on youtube by that point and stuff and how smart he was thinking about the the psychology of humanity to oversimplify it for a second that he then blew up and suddenly he was this i mean he was a views machine for everyone So everyone who decided oh, I don't like him because he's coming out against this legislation And that's not woke enough for me and say the news media were like yeah

Let's get him in here and let's do what let's be deceptive interviewers with him to which he usually schooled all those people But Jordan Peterson, I think remains a really smart guy. Is he a very imperfect guy? Yes, so am I. We all are, right? I don't judge people on one or two things they do wrong or stuff like that. so long that he eventually moved towards becoming in some small ways, the very things that he probably wasn't at the beginning that his enemies untruthfully called him that he then took on those characteristics at the very least on Twitter. And so I will see him tweet something like, for example, this one hit close to home. He tweeted about Hoboken recently. He subbed – this was maybe six months ago. He subtweeted a tweet from the AP that said – I don't know if we can pull this up, Alessi. But it was a story I believe from the AP that said Hoboken changed its pedestrian laws and X number of years later, they've had no deaths. Meaning like it was a pretty successful thing.

Like the streets of Hoboken are so safe to walk on. I walk on them all the time. Sometimes I'm in awe of it because like it's a small town, but like it's very populous, right? It's a big place in that way. And so obviously like that's a win for whoever put that in. But Jordan Peterson had to like scream and say he slammed, here it is, Jordan Peterson slams woke report on traffic deaths decreasing. So Jordan Peterson hit back at a woke report that simply explained that there had been no traffic deaths in seven years. Over the weekend, AP reported on street parking in Hoboken, New Jersey, quote, not a single automobile occupant, bicyclist, or pedestrian has died in a traffic crash

since January, 2017. Elevating Hoboken is a national model for roadway safety. They wrote, the success comes after they removed parking spaces near intersections following the death of an elderly woman in 2017. In turn, Peterson quote tweeted the article writing, you have become pathetic beyond comprehension at AP and the woke death will soon visit you. And it's like, I'm trying to imagine Peterson saying that in real life if we brought that up in the context of a conversation. And I still genuinely, maybe it's because I'm a fan of him, don't think he would. But on Twitter, at least least it is changing the way his brain works on things. And I will watch him. I have watched him move in that direction over the years

because of the impetus of attacks coming his way. So I don't dignify those attacks. I think they're wrong, but people, we are all conscious of that. We are all capable of that. I should say, like we can move towards becoming the very thing that someone screams at us. I scream at you, you suck. You suck. You're an asshole. You're a horrible guy, Kurt. I scream that over and over and over again. And eventually you may tell me to go fuck myself just on the daily.

And maybe that does make you an asshole because you start doing it to everyone else because you're so pissed off at what's happening. So I'm trying to remember where I gave the example of watching people move. Why was I bringing this up though again Again, what was the beginning of that? I think you were trying to explain why, um, you were trying to explain, he was, you were asking for example of like, Hey, what's an example that is like, that you can describe where you're being pushed to a truth. And then I think it moves you in the opposite way to some degree. It sounded like that's where you were going at. Yeah.

I wish I, I wish I knew. Well, anyhow, the point what you bring up a great point. If you're in the digital behind a keyboard, you're going to be more adversarial than if you were to have a conversation in person.

This is even known. If you have ever gone to any of the, if you've ever gone to podcasting conferences or seen any of these people in real life, people who are controversial, you'll see their enemies go up to them in person and say, oh, I can't believe it's you. We'll just say, Peterson, I can't believe it's you, Jordan. That's so cool. And then they'll shake hands, take a photo. It's because they, it just, it melts away. When you're in person, very few, extremely few people are

aggressive in person, extremely few. And we're just removing that. And then we think, because we interact with the world in a digital manner with Twitter in this case, that everyone's like that, and we start to mistrust. So John Vervaeke of the meaning crisis guy that I keep bringing up, he has many in-person sessions where he talks to people. And he prioritizes that over then just promulgating in digital form on YouTube in lectures. We've talked about him so much today, I want to make sure in addition to having Kurt's channel linked down below, let's have a direct link to his most recent Vervaeke episode. I think that'd be really cool. I know I'm going to check that out when I'm done. This guy sounds really cool. channel link down below let's have a direct link to like his most recent brevaki episode i think that'd be really cool i know i'm going to check that out when i'm done this guy sounds really

cool peterson said that what you have to watch out for for charismatic individuals is if you state 100 statements and you're paying attention because you can't help but do so unconsciously that you'll notice the crowd is roused by three or four of them and then you will start to move toward that and you'll say a hundred other statements and then the crowd will be ignited by five of those statements and you start moving toward where the crowd is and he has documented that in his work and i think he's falling prey to that at least on twitter yeah and also it well right I was going to say, could be. So here's something else about Terrence Howard. Terrence Howard is stating so many statements, making so many assertions

that it's difficult, firstly, to follow. And secondly, some of them are going to be correct because it's so hard for you to make 300 statements and not have 20 of them land in the correct vicinity. So this is what I was saying to Lee Cronin when I did an analysis of Terrence Howard's Joe Rogan experience episode, the first one. That was really good, by the way. Thanks. And I wanted to make sure that it wasn't in a despising manner or denigrating manner toward Terrence. I wanted to make sure this is, let's just be level-headed. Let's not be Neil deGrasse Tyson, even though Neil deGrasse Tyson's comments on that were extremely diplomatic. He was. I was surprised about that.

He was. he didn't he was i was i was surprised about that he was so terence will when you're giving an explanation you have to slow it down and then pause and then look at the person's eye and you can tell from their body language are they understanding are they following sometimes you can wait like you interjected said i'm not following about infinity why can't you just line up so and so and so okay that's fantastic then you go back and said, I'm not following about infinity. Why can't you just line up so-and-so-and-so? Okay, that's fantastic. Then you go back and you re-explain, and then you re-explain. You don't jump to more and more new topics that supposedly build off of the previous topics. You lose people. You're supposed to slow it down, reference previous points, bring it back.

So Terrence was not doing that and i think eric said terrence you're not a great teacher yeah he said that a million times he kept saying please stop you're teaching again he said i'm not trying to he's like you're teaching and i and i i understood it because he's, we had mentioned this earlier in the podcast, but he's saying like, you're teaching where you've already taken three leaps. So now you're teaching something that already is three layers wrong. So even if you're getting this next idea in theory, somewhat right, if you don't have the basis of it right, you're not in the right, you're in the wrong zip code.

And another phenomenon is that people will use in the space of people who develop their own bespoke theory of everything. We haven't even said the word theory of everything. We haven't. Yeah, so just for people who have no idea what that is, in physics, the term theory of everything means we have two grand theories. One is called quantum mechanics, technically quantum field theory.

And then we have another one called general relativity, aka gravity, or aka Einstein's theory. Now, we don't have a single individual for this one because it was built up with tens of people interacting over decades, where Einstein was the genius who came up with general relativity. Now, both of these describe our universe in different domains. They seem to have to overlap, especially with black holes and the Big Bang, because black holes have something to do with gravity

and something to do with the small, because the singularity is extremely, well, it's as small as one can be. Plus, then there's something called Hawking radiation, which has to do with particles. So anytime you're dealing with fundamental subatomic particles, it's quantum field theory. So that's a place where you have to combine them. We don't know what happens before the big bang. That's because we don't have a theory of everything. A theory of everything is how do you combine both of these? Okay. So that's that. That's the holy grail of physics it's been the holy grail since the 50s or so yep string theory is a contender of a of a theory of everything

geometric unity is also a contender so that's eric weinstein's and peter white has his own theory and garrett lisi has his own theory and there's a variety of other theories lee smolin has his own theory called loop quantum gravity and so on. Then you have people who have not studied physics much because they feel like if you study physics, if you go to university, you become indoctrinated, you become entrenched. So let me not do that, but let me use some of the terminology that other scientists have developed. For instance, supersymmetry that I saw Terence say. And it was hilarious because he said, yeah, this is supersymmetric. And I'm thinking, you have supercharges and you have an algebra? And then he's like, no, no, no, it's just an extremely symmetric object.

And then I thought the same thing Eric thought. Supersymmetry doesn't mean just extremely symmetric. It means something specific. But what happens is people who are developing their own toe, they tend to glom onto extremely technical-sounding words because the crowd presumes what he can't see to the bottom of must be deep. So that's a hidden motivation. I'm constantly looking for unconscious motivations of myself.

And so I can see it in others. You have to be careful of not using jargon to spice up your theory to bring more credence to it. Because the person who doesn't understand will think you know what you're talking about. But then the person who does understand would say, you're absolutely ridiculous and I'm going to dismiss you. This, I like that you brought this up up this is actually why though my current opinion is not that terrence howard is say like a charlatan grifter type i i don't think that's what it is it doesn't mean that some of the things he's saying and their ability to be easily disproven in many cases doesn't point out that maybe he's in over his skis. The reason I'm saying that is because I think it has to do with how his

brain works. And let me explain this. So people talk about being left brain or right brain. I always forget which is which, but think about it to oversimplify creative is analytical okay so creative or logical so the creative is going to be right side i guess creative yes correct and the left is is is going to be there is a neuropsychological basis to it so it's not just right yeah it's it's real just it's real waving so i am naturally a creative brain so that that would be right side, right? And I don't want to – If you're right-handed. I don't want to make myself sound like more talented or important or anything like that.

I'm just using an example of how I process things. So when I see things, I have an artistic emotional reaction naturally. I have trained myself throughout my life though to access my left brain and I have a pretty strong left brain. So I, when something happens or I see something for the first time, I will usually kind of let out the emotion to myself, let it calm down and then pull it back to even a little bit by trying to be logical about the situation to kind of balance things out. What I have come to realize is that most people in doing a job like this – I talk with a lot of different people from a lot of different walks of life both on camera and off. Most people aren't like that.

Like I have – I've met a couple people who are like me like that but not many. And I don't believe Terrence is one of those people. I think Terrence is one of those pure right brain people. And I'm going to have to explain this because just bear with me here. But when I was listening to the Weinstein Howard podcast, maybe like 15, 20 minutes in 10 10 minutes in, something like that, it clicked for me, and I realized what Terrence is like. It was something simple. He was saying a line, and he's like,

you know, that would mean that something comes from nothing, no thing. And he was breaking down the word artistically, and I said, Kanye West. That's exactly, that's how Kanye West's brain, that's how his brain works. That's how my brain will work too. I constantly look at things and I'm like picking them apart and I'm going layers and layers deeper on it, but I'll pull myself back and I'll be like, wait a minute, we're running with something there that's not there. So for example, you could do what Terrence just did there with the word his story, which if I believe we've looked it up before, like it doesn't come from his story, right?

That's not what the etymology of it is. But you could take things too far with that type of logic and apply things to words that really aren't there because it worked for other words. words and so when i started to listen to terrence moore i was like he's exactly like kanye and that he is so artistic and he's operating 10 miles ahead of everyone else in that lane that he will then tie that into things where it does make sense and not be able to separate the difference between all those other things where it doesn't make sense and on top of that he probably is you know as a creative and a famous person slightly narciss narcissistic. Obviously, Kanye is very narcissistic that, you know, he can't really reel himself back in in some ways. So I don't think it was a matter of like Terrence is trying to promulgate a bunch of ideas or propagate a bunch of ideas that don't make sense because, you know, he's trying to make money or get attention i don't think it's that at all i think it's because his brain genuinely works that way and he doesn't realize that like the the brilliance of the artistic creativity that he has which puts him on a very high iq playing field and clearly he has some natural scientific abilities too

that i think also increase that iq playing field he. He is overestimating, though, what this part of the IQ can do to that part of the IQ. And he thinks that that IQ is up here with this one, and it's still not quite there because that's not what his life's work's been, and that's not how his brain naturally works. Yeah, I agree. It would be as if someone takes one of these,

their artistic devices, and then starts to make some images with it, and then says, you know what? I'm going to be a surgeon. I'm going to look up how do surgeons work. And then you apply some artistic interpretation. And then you say, the surgeons have it wrong. The stomach is above. how is the heart going to fit in that the stomach and the heart are where the brain is because it's in my artistic picture that makes sense with reality then you go to a surgeon and surgeon's like what are you talking about and then you find out by heart he means your soul and by stomach he means your drive yeah it's yeah that's cool by putting so with Terrence it's similar to the situation

it's not Terrence versus the Academy this is a similar situation with UFOs by the way it's it's precision versus recall so these are machine learning topics. Precision is when you make a prediction. So let's just say there are a variety of people here. Some have cancer, some don't. If you want to be precise, you want to say, if I point to you and I say you have cancer, that I'm correct. Okay. So then the recall person says i want to get every single person who has cancer i don't

want to miss people so technically speaking precision is number of true prediction number of correct predictions over all that you have predicted whereas recall is number of correct predictions over all that exist. Well, I'll break this down. So a precise person doesn't want to tell someone you have cancer when they don't. So I'm going to be extremely conservative. And that's something else that you can ask Neil deGrasse Tyson. Are you so willing to preserve the current scientific paradigm that you're unwilling to even entertain ideas that are unlikely but may have merit? That's the battle.

It's precision versus recall. I don't want to give credence to something that could be wrong, so I'll give its probability zero rather than minus one. I'll take its minus one. Sorry, I'll take its 5% probability. It's most likely incorrect. Squash it down to zero because I want to be precise. I don't want to make errors. There's another, there's another closely related term type one versus

type two errors. So false positives versus false negatives. That's probably much easier to understand. So false positive. I don't want to tell, I don't want to tell Alessi he has, did I pronounce that correctly? I don't want to tell you don't want to tell alessi he has did i pronounce that correct i don't want to tell you you have cancer as a doctor and you don't i want to be extremely precise but the cost is you there's a trade-off between precision and recall you can't maximize on one and you can't maximize on on both simultaneously if you want to be extremely precise you're going to have to sacrifice some recall and if you want to be extremely precise, you're going to have to sacrifice some recall. And if you want to be extremely, if you want to recall plenty, you have to lose your precision. So another example, Tylenol. They hear one report, oh,

someone got sick from Tylenol. What do they do? They technically recall them all. They're not thinking, how do I be precise and only take back the three tylenols that are contaminated no they're like i can't afford for this poison to spread so let me recall everything so now they're safe but they've lost their precision okay so this is a battle between precision and recall even in the ufo scene we don't want to give we don't want to tell a pilot yes you've seen something legitimate because we don't oh i've lost it oh don't you hate when that happens yes okay so let's let's stick to false positives versus false negatives for the cancer people the people who are watching, they're like, look, I would rather you give me a false positive.

I don't want a false negative. What is a false negative? If I have cancer and you tell me I don't, that's a false negative. I would rather a false positive because then it's such an important issue that I want to go get tested. I would rather be told I have cancer and then find out I don't have it than I be told, no, you don't have cancer. And I go about living my life and I actually do. And then I die. I'm going to oversimplify this, but you could say over-preparation versus under-preparation in a way, right? Sure. Okay. So if you have an issue that's extremely important this is something i was talking

to neil degrasse tyson about if you have something like you can't just take probabilities bare you can't just say this has a 10 probability of being correct it's low therefore we don't pursue it something like that because you also have to take into account values so for instance if you were to walk with this cup to the kitchen, you would walk at an almost ordinary rate, say three meters per second. If this was boiling water, the same level, you would walk much slower. Why? Even though the probability of spilling it is the same, because if you were to spill it, you would burn your hand, you would drop this. Oh, okay. I was thinking like my hand would be burning so i'd be running over there trying to get rid of it okay another issue another way of saying this is if you're driving up a hill

on your car are you going to drive are you going to drive on the left hand side on the opposite side no no it sounds ridiculous why even though you've been driving on this road for two hours and there's been no one you think well let me No, because even if it's a small probability, you can kill yourself and someone else. So there's a value. There's a small probability, but you also need to take into account the value. So when I was speaking to Neil deGrasse Tyson, I was telling him, you can't just speak about probabilities. You also have to take into account that this is an extremely important issue. One of the most important issues. Firstly, there could be new physics here.

Secondly, one of the questions that consumes us is, are we alone? And so, it's a valuable question. It does matter that the probability is low but you all you have to take both into account yes agreed i even had a bet with him by the way so that would neil degrasse tyson on aliens yes what's the bet what he said was just like a rationalist would say but there's a trap here he said i'm like'm like, what is the probability, Neil, that you would assign to these sightings being correct? Like having some veracity to them and it implies something non-terrene.

So that is non-ordinary. It could be a breakaway civilization. It could be extraterrestrials. It could be future humans, what have you. And he said, oh gosh. And then he does some calculation, which is false. He arrives at this calculation by by a means which if you watch that's not the the mathematical way of going about calculating this but doesn't matter he then lands on one in every one in 10 million something akin

to that that we're not alone yes yes no no that What we've seen so far. Just what we claim to have seen. Exactly. Okay. That what we've seen so far implies extraterrestrials or something like that, or that the pilots have engaged with extraterrestrials or a breakaway civilization or future humans or what have you. Okay, so he says one in 10 million. And I said, okay, technically speaking then, Neil, that would mean that I can put up $10

and you can put up $10 million and it would still be 10 times in your favor. That bet. Because if someone is saying, I believe, look, in blackjack, or sorry, what's the one where you throw a ball and that's 1 in 30?

What is the probability there? The roulette one. Okay, let's say it's 1 in 64. You throw let's say it's one in 64. You throw a ball and it's one in 64. You, for a fair probability, that would be I pay $63 and you pay me $1. That's the correct odds for that to make it even for each person. Okay, so for 10 million to one odds, technically I put up one dollar he should put up 10 million

dollars and that should be a fair bet now i'm saying i'll put up nay i will put up neil i will put up one thousand dollars you put up one million dollars so that should be wild like 10 000 times in your favor neil and then he, no. And the reason is that. Nope, not doing it. The reason is that he realizes it's ridiculous to make that claim that you also can't state probabilities bare. Firstly, you have to have a value associated. The money is that value. But also you have to have uncertainties with your probability.

You don't just say it's one in 10 million. That's that. No, you say it's one in 10 million and I have wiggle room. I don't know. And so that's what he's implying. But then my answer to him, which I didn't say, is you have to temper your your despising of all the people who think that there is something to this to match your professed uncertainty. You can't just say, hey, I'm uncertain, but you're a ridiculous person. No, if you're uncertain, then they may have something correct. Yeah, I think a real difference here that's a bad look for him is that what's being talked about,

while it relates to science, of course, because it would scientifically be very interesting if there were other species, particularly those who had been here. It also relates to things that are based upon implied experiences that people have claimed to have seen or whatever. And I think shutting that down is something you can't do. Where I would have a bigger issue, or less of an issue... How do I want to say this? Let's pull back from UFOs for a second. I want to talk about that. We're going to get there in a minute. But just pull back from there for a second.

Pullback is a great word, by the way. That's going to come up if you ask me to explain some string theory or geometric unity. Okay. The pullback operation. That's another star. all right we'll put the pin in it but if someone walks it like a terence howard walks into neil degrasse tyson's office didn't spend any time in school studying all these things that not only did neil spend in school but then afterwards remained around academia and stuff and studies this has been a part of this working his ass off on his whole life but comes

in with all these ideas to break the entire foundational part of the science that neil knows ironically this was one where neil was very measured i would say in his reply but i understand in the context of a way lesser example but like i learned every single thing in this studio to be able to do this and what equipment to use exactly how to use it perfectly i sit here to this day on podcasts and i master audio while we're doing it if somebody who had never touched a machine like this had never even listened to a podcast walked in here and suddenly told me no no i know the better way to do all this that breaks every rule of how audio production goes on, my reaction, my natural reaction will want to be

like, shut the fuck up, you moron, right? And so I think Neil has that reaction on things which can then unfortunately cause even stronger opinions from the other side, which is not good. Now, let's come back to aliens though. On something like this, this is now even beyond science. This is where we are injecting all different people from around the world who have had interesting experiences. Doesn't mean they're true. I'm not saying that. But for Neil to be so dismissive of it, where it's beyond just like a mathematical question, which he turned it into, but it's beyond that. It's also like human experience and what this could or could not mean is very disappointing. And it does feel like, and I like Neil deGrasse Tyson, but it does feel like there's

an attitude deeply rooted. There's a condescending quality for sure. I mean, if you heard, I think everyone's heard that clip on Joe Rogan where he's like, oh, you know, we're so uninteresting to them or whatever. And Joe's like, you're out of your mind. We're so interesting. That's also such a foolish, it's a foolish statement. It says it's less of a statement about reality and more a statement about how he views either humanity or himself. That's right. So firstly, it's factually, quote unquote, factually incorrect, because virtually every single species on Earth, there's someone who has their PhD on that species, studying it. Also, we spend decades trying to teach animals language, like gorillas and monkeys and then parrots and so on.

So we're actively trying to communicate. It's false to say, well, we're uninteresting or that life is so plentiful that why? Firstly, you don't know if life is plentiful. You don't know the relationship. You can't make a statement like that. The evidence that we have is that the more scientific or rational we become, the more interested we become in other living creatures

to the point where we think maybe grass is conscious. Can we communicate with that? Maybe trees are. Maybe atoms are. There's panpsychism. And if we could communicate with an atom, which some people think they're doing, then we would.

So many of the professed beliefs by a public intellectual are motivated this is something to keep in mind by the desire to bolster their appearance as an intellectual so in other words neil's superciliousness is sanctimony is pr it's scholarly. I'm better than you. The intellectual seeks to ensure that their intelligence is recognized by others. It's not enough for them to possess it. The public intellectual in particular. So, by the way, this implies that there's like some stratified IQ order where you can rise above and I'm not saying that I'm saying Neil implies that with his actions and his attitude and his his viewpoints otherwise why would he care about climbing the Alps of cognitive mount bravado if not to look down at the hypothetical caste system that comprises these obtuse untouchables.

That's a good way to put it, man. That's a good way to put it. But I said we put a pin in it and come back to it. We got to talk about UFOs. I mean, it's been in the background of some of the things we've talked about today. I say that to you in particular, though, because you have an unbelievable library of conversations about UFOs, sightings that could or could not have happened, things that could or could not be here. Also like meta ideas on what it is or what's behind it. You've done some – I believe you have Lou Elizondo on there.

You've had Ross Coulthard. You've had Richard Dolan who's going to be on this podcast as well, and many others to talk about this. You've also discussed it with a lot of the pure physicists that you've brought on the podcast. I mean, to tie it back to something we talked about earlier in the conversation, it is absolutely a part of the meaning question when people are thinking about this kind of thing. But at the front end of it, based on all the conversations you've had and all the people you have at you've had access to to discuss this topic what is your current stance on aliens are and by that i mean two layers number one do they exist like is their intelligent life

somewhere out in our galaxy or beyond? And B, have they been here before? My honest answer is I don't know. And it's the most humdrum answer. When I speak to people, they want me to buy into some reference frame like a threat-based reference frame or that it's a benevolent other some reference frame, like a threat-based reference frame, or that it's a benevolent other being reference frame, or it's a breakaway civilization, or it's future humans, or it's

past civilization that has emerged, and it's just some drones that are coming about. I don't know. people get upset when they, when you're not believing their viewpoint. Mm. Yep. I don't know, man. I've been jostled around so often in my head to different with different views from different

almost each person has a different theory and it's quite unnerving so I gave this I gave the example of reference frames or coordinate systems in math there's also something called a called a chart transition function so that is when you switch reference frames. And I've had too many chart transition functions where my brain is, it's too rattled on this subject. I can't make sense of it. Who do you think has

had the most compelling takes on it? Not necessarily that you agree or disagree kevin knuth why so kevin knuth i haven't done the calculation i've seen him do the calculations but i have to verify it myself and that's also something else that separates a potential terrence howard from someone who is uh someone who does math and physics from the academy is that i wrote on twitter i said this thing that said shut up and calculate which is a quote from physics shut up and calculate is less than speak up and understand now many people would like that but the point is that in order to get to the point where you can speak up and understand well forget about the speaking up

to understand you have to calculate you actually do have the speaking up, to understand, you have to calculate. You actually do have to shut up and calculate. You don't have to shut up, but you have to get your hands dirty. So I haven't gotten my hands dirty with what Kevin has said. But he did some calculation about if a craft, whatever this craft is, was to emit radiation at this pulse, which it should, because if it was this mass and this size, it should, and it would be in the UV, I believe, post UV, then it would shut off cars. And it would shut off cars at a rate of 12.5% because of some reasoning, somehow

the engine, the way the engine works, if you get a pulse that's of that frequency which shut off 12.5 percent of the times the cars then he's like if you look at the library of reports it turns out when craft leave there is the reports of sometimes cars are shut down and what is the rate you can do the calculation oh it's 15 which is close because there's an error bar so i'm like that's super interesting however i don't know if that's a retrodiction it's always easy to come up with what you think of as a prediction when you know the facts that's another reason why theories of everything or toes are difficult because we people will say oh i've predicted the fine structure constant or do you know it's one over 30 137 approximately and then you've made your theory work to that like you don't know if you

never knew what the fine structure constant was or you came up with some something else that's called a prediction that would be interesting but if you're saying hey look there's this data i know what the data is someone extrapolate that yes exactly yeah so i don't know i thought that was interesting he said that at the soul conference which was a wonderful conference because that was in person that's something else there's some people who would say not slander but snide comments toward some of the guests on theories of everything not always me but I take it personally oh sure I take it yes and in person they're just the sweetest little pieces of jello.

And then they even say, hey, Kurt, like, I'm sorry that I said, I'm like, oh, I don't know who this person is by their username. Like, I only know handles. So I can't tell what your handle is by your face, but it doesn't matter. They come up and then they apologize. And it's, and we have a great time and we bond. So that was a wonderful conference. Over there is where Kevin Knuth revealed. I don't know if it's actually a reveal,

but he showcased that calculation. That's fascinating. That's a way different angle to it than I've really heard anyone do. I like that. I mean, to me, it's like, comes back to the trust conversation. It's like suddenly the government's releasing all this info about UFOfos and they got these

different guys coming out the lou elizondo's the christopher melons david grushes and stuff like that and so now people are like wait a minute what's what's the catch here why why are they doing this and so now people are pushing a lot of people are pushing the other way like oh none of this shit's real but when i just sit back and think about the little speck we are on a universe of the unknown first of all i think it's to inject some math into it i think it's mathematically almost impossible that there is not intelligent life out there somewhere however that's a different conclusion than have they been here before though and saying yes to that

because you don't know that just because there's intelligence light somewhere out there in the universe doesn't mean they've been here before and you can start playing tricks with your head if if you start thinking about all these potential sightings and trying to pattern them based on what were similar about them but also based on when they occurred and where they occurred. And, you know, it gets a little crazy then when suddenly it becomes a calling card for people to, it's popular for people to say they saw something, right? So now with the internet in this current era, we have crowdsourced data where fucking everyone's saying they saw a UFO or whatever, and it starts to make it less trustworthy as far as like have they been here that said

there's so much in this world that isn't explainable that my my only conclusion is that there's some there is some form of either alien interaction you will if you will or straight up divine intervention that has had to occur across the context of the known history of our earth as we understand it for certain things to happen certain things to exist and i'm not getting like even meta with like oh where does an idea come from or whatever i'm not getting that granular i'm getting more towards like damn how do we build the pyramids you know or fuck like how did human beings figure out this or that? I was down in South America and talking to a shaman about ayahuasca. Potential combinations that it would have taken to figure out that this exact leaf from this tree and I forget if it was like the bark from this other plant in a perfect type of ratio combination could form this type of substance. It was – they did math on it.

It was like virtually impossible that in the context of human history we could have figured that out. It was like 0.0000001. So I guess it's possible. But like the idea is that there's something divine about that or something otherworldly about brother. And he said there was an ordinary explanation for that. And I forgot the explanation, but it was something like they already brew that sort of tea from that plant hundreds of years before. And they have, they were trying to make ayahuasca work, but then it just degrades extremely quickly because it doesn't have the MOAI inhibitor, something like that. Or MA, regardless. Send me that. I want to see that afterwards. And then he said, said well it was reasonable

that either a leaf fell down into their concoction or they just combined the two and i thought okay that's super interesting that someone who's a large proponent of of the of the careful but positive use of psychedelics absolutely would say something that was against the spiritual component to it because usually if you are in for for psychedelics you're down for anyone who says something positive about psychedelics even if it's a spiritual side that you don't believe in yeah i'm not by the way i use that as an example because that's one that came to my head i'm not married to that i'm not married to that at all so that's the case that's great okay now about the technology of the past i want to talk see, when it comes to UFOs, I believe that we're, so much of what is

said about UFOs, I don't believe in. I disbelieve. Like, people will say they're much more advanced because they have a technology. I don't see why that's the case. And people just say it. So, firstly, advanced is an ambiguous term. You're not just advanced. There's not a culture that's more advanced than another culture. So for instance, you could be like, well, let me forget I'm liberal. I don't want to use the word advanced to say one is better than the other. I'm going to use technologically advanced. That's more of a superior term. No, even that, you can break down technology.

So imagine we think all technologies just build on one another. And when you get one, you get the other. It doesn't work like that. So you could conceivably imagine a culture that has developed the steam locomotive, and another has developed medicine, advanced medicine, whatever that means. Which is more advanced? I don't know. Subjective. Yes.

And you could say well if you had the steam locomotive you would have medicine or vice versa that's not necessarily the case china had the printing press in 730 and other countries had a monetary system so what's more advanced a monetary system or the printing press again subjective what's more advanced if you invent a light bulb or someone has aqueducts yeah so the point is that we say well aliens are advanced how do you know maybe that's maybe they're looking at us like how the f do these earthlings do what they do and they've developed something with the people were like well it must be advanced physics and to get to that you know you have no idea Some people who believe they've cracked anti-gravity do so in their garage.

They're just playing around with magnets. So let's imagine it is the case that there's just one fundamental trick or switch that you need to apply in order to crack anti-gravity. Well, then it could just be like the K66 or whatever it was recently of the superconductor that came out. It turned out you could make it in your garage and it's a superconductor. You would think, no, you would need an advanced civilization, an LHC and varieties of scientists working on it to develop a superconductor.

And then, no, some people from Korea or China came up with a superconductor. It turned out to not be the case, but it was close to being the case and it was a whole sensation, almost like Terrence Howard at the time. It wasn't close. It conceivably could be that a superconductor

is something that you can make in your garage. So maybe it's the case that these, that anti-gravity is something you can make in your garage. I don't believe that it's necessary aliens are more advanced and so i don't buy when people like neil degrasse tyson say if they're so advanced why do they crash oh my gosh how do you even know there's so many answers to that what if this is a temperamental machine an extremely it's it's a miracle one out of 50 000 of them works and so and they're getting 30,000 out of 50,000 to work. So they're geniuses.

Could be that. It could be they don't care about them. Like we don't care about drones and we send them into lava. And so they just break. We don't care about drones. It could be that. It could be we think it's like a ballpoint pen. It's unbreakable technology.

It could be like Google Assistant here, where I've said Google, Google, turn off my Nest. It's like, okay, playing Adam's Family on Netflix. Oh my gosh. Google, turn off the living room light. Okay.

Calling your friend that you haven't spoken to in 10 years. Now you have to explain why. Jeez. Okay, whatever. It could be extremely temperamental technology. We have no idea. Or it could also be simulated in the sense that, let me expand upon that so you understand. If they are, and I want to come back to your advance point, because that's a great point.

I want to take it to another level. But before that, if, let's say for a second, for the sake of argument, they are more advanced than us. However subjective that is, they're way more advanced. They can do way more physically to get here and solve gravity and time in a way better way than we physically can as a civilization. so advanced that it was mistake proof meaning like it wouldn't crash like there there's it's it just wouldn't crash if it did perhaps it's because we're a part of a greater ant pen that they're watching and observing how the ants or the rats if you will are behaving inside the pen that they want to simulate these how we would respond to seeing certain things and they can also simulate ahead of time where and how and who is going to see it among our population and simulate what the rest of the population is going to think by the big claims that those people make you understand so like they could they could be doing it in a way to try to see let's see what

they're willing to believe or not. If people aren't actually witnessing something and there's only a select few who do. So for example, maybe let's crash in a, in, or let's land in a, in a very nondescript field back in, in Zimbabwe by this school where there's a bunch of seven-year-olds back there and we'll make sure only the seven-year-olds see us and then it'll be this big story but people will be like wait to the seven-year-old did these seven-year-olds really six-year-olds really just see like aliens you know floating around on logs in 1994 in the zimbabwe incident or did they not and and therefore maybe the aliens are trying to look at how society responds to such a claim you understand

you think that's possible yes possible yeah and then well would it just be one alien civilization or would it be multiple would they have some collusion like okay we stay off of earth are they in competition with one another do they have one that is the the superordinate alien civilization that says hey we get to perform the tests and you don't i don't know yeah but much of what people say is just hey here's how aliens operate i think that's not how it is it can't be that so for instance people say that they're following cars to intimidate cars it could also be that. So for instance, people say that they're following cars to intimidate cars. It could also be that they follow cars

because for whatever reason, that's their locking mechanism. Then in order to then shoot off, much like you need in Sonic, the video game Sonic, you need some headstart and then you just, then you start to roll faster. It could be for whatever reason, however, they operate at some locking mechanism and

then they go away and we think, oh my gosh, they're following us to give me a message no no they just needed something moving so that they can that's right yes they can lock onto it another one is is you mentioned that Egypt could have been advanced and ancient Greece could have been advanced and there was some orrery, a way of measuring the stars, the celestial objects in the sky that was advanced, almost like a watch, had many gears and pulleys and so on inside it, way ahead of its time. Yet they died. And so it seems like advancement, technological advancement isn't sufficient.

So that's why i'm saying i push back on when it firstly it's ill-defined anyone who says that they're advanced and then secondly even if they are advanced what difference does that make we've had many examples of civilization that were supposedly much more advanced even the well greeks and and ancient egyptians and i'm sure there's more, who just perished. So technological advancement isn't sufficient. But yes, it's possible. Now, something about Bob Lazar that he said that I just disagreed with, and it made me question him.

And it's so petty. It's so petty. He said, this comes from hearsays because Jeremy Corbell said it. So it's like two levels removed. Technically speaking in the law, that's hearsay. He said, oh gosh. Firstly, when someone predicts that there's a new element, that's no one predicts. You don't predict that there's a new element. It's obvious that there's going to be an element after a certain, you can just count the numbers like we were doing before.

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. So I can tell you right now, Kurt's prediction, there's an element after a certain you can just count the numbers like we were doing before one two three four five six seven eight so i can tell you right now kurt's prediction there's an element 257 100 years from now there's going to be some element it's going to be short-lived and they're going to be like oh my gosh kurt predicted that no okay you heard it here first on jdp baby so firstly that i don't think bob lazar predicted the existence of a different element and then even when jeremy corbell said look you were right you predicted it he said uh well 50 50 i could have been correct could have been wrong and i was thinking man so there are four different interpretations of probability and again this is petty and persnickety but one is classical

where you look at a coin you're like i don't know if it's biased. I'm going to say it's heads or tails. So it's 50-50. I'm going to say there are two options. So it's 50-50. That's called the principle of indifference. I don't know the difference between these guys. I'm going to assign them the same probability. Then there's the frequentist where you just watch something happen many times. This is why I also don't believe it's necessary that there's life on the outside of earth, nor is it unnecessary, because we only have one case. You can't generalize from n equals 1. You have no idea. Okay, so that's a frequentist interpretation. Then there's the subjective Bayesian, where you just assign some probability, and it has a reference class problem that I brought up to

Neil deGrasse Tyson. Here's's just for fun, if people are interested. If you were to say that, if I was to ask you, what are the odds that you're going to die tomorrow? You could say, well, I'm a white male. I'm 30-ish. I don't smoke. I drink. Okay.

But then you could also add that you're from a certain neighborhood, that there are many factors you can add so what is what you want to say is i am one of some example i am this guy and then i have to put something in the denominator in order to get the probability you have to put something over here and so you want to say i'm some representative of this class but then you have a problem choosing this class oh yeah so when i was talking to neil de grass tyson he was putting odds i'm like you have a reference class problem how do you know the reference class is correct because i could also say look the other the reference class is you're an element of all living creatures the majority of living creatures will die tomorrow because the

majority of them are bacteria who only live for let's say 10 hours so if i was to pull you out of a hat you're most likely going to die in the next 10 hours that's a valid statement but it's we think of that no that's absolutely incorrect because you chose a poor reference class then the issue is you're like well let me add more and more factors well if you add more and more factors you get less and less data and the probability becomes unreliable to the point where you just only have you in the denominator. So it's called the reference class problem. And then there's the metaphysical interpretation of probability, which almost no one believes except I think it may have some credence,

but people don't like to believe it. You went where I was going to ask. So yeah, that makes sense. That there is something inherent in the world that has some probabilities. Okay. So the reason why I didn't like what Bob Lazar said is he chose, he said, oh, it was 50-50 that this element could have been there or could not have been. I'm like, how do you, how do you assign a probability 50-50 to a yes, no, just because it's a yes and no. So an example is that, look, there are three cases when you flip a coin, it's heads, tails, but it could also go on his edge. Are you telling a priori you're going to assign one third to all those probabilities so the principle of indifference made me it's again like i mentioned it i'm i'm petty fogging i'm being carp carping on on bob lazar but

that of all of what he said, maybe the most doubtful. You think there's a psychological impact of a statement like that, meaning that could be a Freudian slip, if you will, of the way that he thinks be so how could you make a statement like that unless you're just humoring jeremy corbell because it wasn't offhand conversation but i'm like oh that just irked me i understand what i mean what do you think of him though minus my put that aside for a second put obviously like that's something that irks you but like when you hear a guy come out with a story that he's certain he saw what he saw, he had access to this deep government shit, and he's certain he did. And therefore, it's like, yes, not only are they here, but we're in possession of them and their technology in some cases as well. I don't like to give opinions on people that I haven't spoken to. And then also, even when I have spoken to them, I'm not a fan of giving opinions. I just don't feel like that's

right. I feel like that's, if they're not here, that's like taking a knife to them. I appreciate that. I know that's, if I was interviewing someone, I'm also a podcaster for people who don't know a channel called theories of everything if you're interested in looking it up link in description that i want to remember when you first reached out to me i'm like oh my gosh julian i don't even know if i can be interviewed because i just say i don't know to almost every question like i just don't know and it's going to be it's going to be arid it's going to be just a boring podcast a tedious podcast this has not been in any no no well i have not i've only said i don't know two or three times yeah yeah so there's that. I liked your Kaku conversation, by the way, your Michio Kaku conversation. there should be different factions trying to figure out which idea is better and so he's always caught in the middle of that but what a humble guy and true gentleman and total machine

i mean he's like 77 years old now i think 77 78 and i'm telling you that podcast was three hours long because i had to stop aha he would have gone for 12 hours man he he came down it was i was still in my parents house at the time. He came down on a Saturday morning. He's like, okay, let's go. And he's just a total all-business machine. It was really, really amazing to watch. But it was very cool to pick the brain of a guy who's got a lot of ideas that people fight over,

but also is, you know, definitely true brilliance defined so now i i don't okay well i had some negative comments and that's okay i don't know if i should not about you but about him and i just had said that i don't want to say anything negative when someone's not here so i understand how you think okay i'll just tell you about what he said that i disagree with please it's not negative about him i don't agree with what he said. You're not attacking him. Yes. No, no, no.

People know where your heart's at. He said, there's, okay. People don't dislike string theory. People dislike string theorists. And that's different. Because string theorists are extremely bright. And they know it. And they're arrogant.

Okay. That's a generalization. It's generally true. I just spoke to Kamran Vafa, who is the head string theorist at Harvard. Head string. He's the head of the theoretical physics department. The chair. Okay.

People say string theory is the only game in town. That sounds like something that people from outside the string community would say to capture the sanctimony of the string theory people, but it's not something they would say. It's something you tell them, hey, you guys think you're the only game in town. No, they say that. Kamran Vafa explicitly said, and other string theorists like Brian Green, and I don't know him on my podcast, but other string theorists have said it's the only game in town.

If you're working on something else, you have a low IQ and you're ignorant. That's their view. That's a problem. People don't – string theory is fantastic. I did this three-hour – so I did a deep dive that I thought would only be 10 minutes to 20 minutes. Then the script went up to 30 minutes. Then one then one and a half then two then two and a half to three hours long and i had to cut material where i did a technical deep dive it's called the iceberg of string theory because few people including myself myself prior to this i would just criticize string theory just because i'm spouting an opinion that I've heard from other people. Much like the hermeneutics of beauty. People spout that,

and they don't realize they're just living off of the dead matter of Nietzsche and Marx and Freud. And they think they're thinking for themselves, but they're just these little parasites on someone else's body. I'm a critical thinker, and everything just comes fed to them from some unknown source. So I was similar with string theory until I started to critical thinker. And everything just comes fed to them from some unknown source. So I was similar with string theory until I started to look into it. And it's fascinating. It is a fantastic mathematical framework. It's elegant. It's natural. It's in some ways beautiful, although I wouldn't use that term. I don't use that. I take back. It's beautiful. It's natural. Real quickly, just for people listening, I know a lot of people out there know string theory.

They've known it from previous conversations I've had on here, but can you just quickly define it for those who are listening for the first time? String theory says what you... Okay, the way that science worked before was we have objects here, and then someone said maybe they're atoms and then einstein showed there is a way that you can actually test for atoms okay so then we're like okay objects comprise atoms and then you find out what we thought of as an atom isn't atom actually means like in decomposable you can't decompose it you can it's called subatomic particles okay so let's say you have an electron is Is an electron fundamental? The string theorist would say what

you think of as a point particle is actually either something that should be modeled as a one-dimensional just curve or a loop. Okay, so a closed string versus an open string. That's string theory. That's the genesis of string theory. Now, why is string theory so lauded, so liked in the mathematical physics community? Most people would say it's sociological and reasons of power. This is Eric Weinstein. Sabine Hossenfelder would say something similar. The way that I view it is different. Physics is like whack-a-mole. So in other words, there are different problems that come up. Okay, so I'll give you an example prior to string theory. So Dirac, or I can give you an Einstein example or

a Dirac example. Which one would you like? Can we do Einstein? Sure. Is that cool? So Einstein said, okay, I have this idea. Acceleration and gravity are the same. It's called the strong equivalence principle. It doesn't matter. Acceleration and gravity are the same. Cool. I have that idea. Okay. Problem. How do I make this work with a scalar field? He wanted something called a scalar potential. What that is doesn't matter. Okay. He wanted it to work. So that's like a little mole that comes up. He whacks it down. He says, okay, maybe the reason I can't make this work is because I relied on space-time, my previous theory, and I need to go back to space.

It was a mistake to unite space and time. Okay. But then problem crops up. You have to introduce a variable speed of light. So then he's like, okay, let me knock that down. Forget about scalars. Let me introduce tensors, a different mathematical object. So then you don't have conservation of momentum.

So he's like, oh, shoot. Okay, I have to add some other term now. You knock that down. And then all of a sudden it's like, okay, the, the, no, that, that actually works. But then it turns out to not be consistent cosmologically so he adds another term okay so the point is that you constantly have problems you're solving oh you don't have linearity anymore he wanted linearity so now his solution is much more difficult so it's non-linear to the point he couldn't even solve his own equation except in

one small case with mercury he had to make approximation. It took someone else in the trenches of World War II who no one knows how he did this. He's in the trenches and he comes up with a solution to Einstein's equation. Einstein thought that there would never be a solution, like an actual exact solution, a non-perturbative solution is the technical term, meaning an exact solution without approximations.

Okay, but someone did like two years later that's a wild story one year later one year his name is schwarzschild schwarzschild schwarzschild the first black hole is a schwarzschild black hole then someone named kerr came out and said well black holes could rotate and have charge and then but schwarzschild basically invented this wow in the trenches died a few years a few years later, young, I believe. Okay. Dirac also had something similar with whack-a-mole. So he's like, okay, I don't like Klein-Gordon's equation,

which is Schrodinger's relativistic equation. It means Schrodinger plus Einstein equals Klein-Gordon. Yeah. Dirac is like, I don't like that. It has negative energies. So it's maybe the problem. Okay. Knock something down.

It's a second order equation that maybe, oh, maybe linearity is the solution. Knock something down. Something else comes up. Oh, your scalars, which Einstein was dealing with before. Can't be scalars. They have to be matrices. Okay. Two by two.

Nope. Four by four. Okay. Four by four works. Thank God. What do I do with my mass? Okay. You multiply it by an identity matrix.

So another, okay. Knock that down. Oh, I actually still have negative energies. So what happens is in physics, the history of physics is the history of trying to solve problems, more creep up. And so your theory becomes more and more tortuous

and then you knock more and more down. So the- To protect it. Yeah. So because you have some idea and you're just, you're exploring and you don't want to abandon it. Okay, now string theory comes in.

Why is string theory successful? So string theory came about from, there were a collection of particles called hadrons. And there was no organizing principle. So you just throw them all on the desk and you're like, well, how do I make sense of these? Where did these guys come from? Turns out these can make, oh, okay. Here's, here's one way of thinking about it. So let's say you have a circle here. You have a circle. If you're, if imagine there's just two axes, mass and spin, and you plot them and they all align on the circle, then you could say, oh, maybe they're related by U1,

which means rotation, just rotates. Like these particles, maybe they're all akin to the same particle, just rotated. Okay. That's something you could say. Like you've, you think, oh, well, that's just an arbitrary plotting. You just put it down and you happen to find a circle. Okay. But that's sometimes how physics works. So you put these hadrons on the table. It turns out you don't put them on a 2D plane, you put them on something higher dimensional, and you realize it's not the group U1, it's not a circle group, it's something called SU3. What is that? Doesn't matter, it's just some rotation group. Okay, cool. We have, so that's a solution. Great. We've found a way to model particles, SU3.

Okay, now what? How do we calculate with this? That's called the amplitude, scattering amplitude problem. Okay, so Veneziano comes up with something called the scattering amplitude for SU3. Okay, but then the problem is, well, that's a solution. The problem is, how do you interpret that amplitude? So the solution is, oh, maybe there's strings. Then the problem is, and now I'm skipping because it actually didn't work like this historically.

It was abandoned and then came back, but this makes the narrative much easier. Understood. Problem is those strings have to operate in something like 26 dimensions. Okay. Problem. Then another problem is that they're just bosons, these force-carrying particles, like enforcer particles that come about and tell you you must do something. They're bullies. They're these bully particles called gluons in this case. No, sorry, not in this case. Something else. I'd be stopping you every half sentence if we were asking follow-up questions.

Okay, great. So some of this, as long as it's staying broadly followable, which I think it is, we're okay. For people out there, I just don't want to be cutting. I will simply, this is super simple. The point is, it turns out in order for string theory to work, it needs to be 26 dimensional. And it only had bosons at this point in the story. Okay, why don't we add something called supersymmetry? So we knock it down.

Okay, cool. Problem. There's still many types of string theory. And now there's 10 dimensional, not four dimensional, but it's some progress. Okay, solution, you combine some heterotic strings. Okay, problem, we still have five. And we have gauge anomalies. Gauge anomalies mean it doesn't matter. It's a problem. Then something else happens in 1984, Green and Schwartz mechanism, meaning that you have a gauge anomaly, you have an anomaly. You've heard this about Eric

Weinstein's theory, has an anomaly, a so-called anomaly. To me, the fact that a theory has an anomaly isn't a point against the theory in the same way that string theory had an anomaly and it just required people to work on it to find a clever workaround. So string theory was abandoned for a couple of years because there was an anomaly. When was that? 1981, 1982. And even Ed Witten found an SU2 anomaly and then a gravitational anomaly. He wasn't a string theorist before.

He was working in various fields and what he got the fields metal the mathematical version of the Nobel Prize for isn't string theory many people think it's string theory it's topological quantum field theory it's working with something like knots and then relating that to quantum fields as well it was a genius and he just after that he continued to come out with more and more and more and more oh my gosh man we man. We can talk about that. The point is, Green and Schwartz canceled the anomaly. Then it turns out, okay, well, how do we, we still have five flavors. Okay, we make it to M-theory.

Okay, but then how do you perfectly describe M-theory? Okay, you need matrix models. Okay, but now we're still in ADS. Blah, blah, blah. That's string theory. It's that there's these guys that crop up, you hit them down. So now how is that a reason for it to be valid?

Like why does that mean that it's powerful? It doesn't. What's different about string theory is that sometimes when you knock down these little gophers, there's a ding, ding, ding, ding, ding in the background. And you look and it's mathematical gold. So when you're working with string theory and you're solving some problems, all of a sudden some new field comes up called mirror symmetry that you had to invent in string theory.

And it has so much mathematical insight to it. So much that in 1994, this guy named Maxim Konsevich takes it, makes homological string theory, another huge field, which then comes back to string theory. Hit down another one. Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. Vertex operator algebras. Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding.

They have to keep creating buttresses to hold it up. Yes, Grobov-Witton invariance. Ding, ding, ding. Thomas-Donaldson invariance. The only time that's ever happened in physics is when there was something to it, like with Dirac.

Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. Dirac operators, years later, came about index theory. Ding, ding, ding, Einstein. Riemannian geometry in the whole field well that was developed before but he helped he helped it so string theorists will look at the other competitors to toes like loop quantum gravity and they'll say what have you produced come on guys let's be real you say you have a quantum theory of gravity show me matter in your theory you just have a quantized and show me something interesting mathematically and then they're they're just left there twiddling their thumbs saying like no we found something

interesting with partially ordered sets and you're like get the f out why do so many brilliant people subscribe to it i mean brian green's a guy i'm trying to get on the podcast you know i'd love to be able to do that he's right here at columbia but like he's he's an avid string theorist and and i love his talks and stuff the guy's obviously brilliant but he's one of many in this field who are who are so brilliant so in the hypothetical world where string theory is completely wrong i'm not saying it is i'm just saying like let's say this whack-a-mole idea is actually really onto something and like they have gotten this wrong. Why are so many smart people involved in it and holding to it religiously outside of just, well,

we don't want to say we're wrong. Now, I don't know, but plenty of it has to do with the publishing, the way that publishing works in the universities. In order to be hired, so firstly, you get hired as a, you get your PhD. Here's how it works. You get your undergraduate degree for four years or so, five years you study for your under, three years sometimes, and then you get a master's degree or you get a PhD. You can fast track and get a PhD. Now you're 27, you got a PhD. You want to get hired before 60 years ago was much more you were much more readily hired now it's extremely competitive so you have your phd then you become a postdoc so you have so you're basically working for free for three years at some different city

not for free but for relatively low pay it's not contract you're not told you're going to stay there for long then you're hoping someone please notice me so I can be hired as an assistant professor, not a professor. Then you hope that you're on a tenure track so you can get locked in. And then you become an associate professor. Then you become a full professor. And then you've supposedly made it at that point. Okay. In order to progress up this ladder, you have to publish to the point where even to be hired now some of the the job requests the resumes online the ones that you fill out yourself say the second question after your name is how many citations do you have how many citations do you have? That requires you to, it requires you to collaborate with people so you

can put out material quickly. And by the way, people think the revolutions in physics come from hockey. We play together and we come up, we achieve our goal. But it could be more like, it seems to me like it's more like rock climbing, where it's a single person against the edifice, or maybe even chess, where it's you against some other theory. So there is a financial and ambition-related incentivized component to the science community in a way such that when orders have been established, such as a string theory, you are literally disincentivized from writing anything that could question that because you won't get the job and you won't rise up. I would just not, I would not say

science in general. I'd say theoretical physics. And that's all I could say because that's all I follow. And this is the case in string theory. And it's not that you can't question string theory. It's just, you don't even think about how am I going to question string theory? You just contribute to the field. You don't think about how am I, well, if you were to say string theory. It's just, you don't even think about how am I going to question string theory. You just contribute to the field. You don't think about how am I, well, if you were to say string theory is off its rocker, off on the wrong track, I very much doubt that you'll be on tenure track.

You know, when I had Michu in here, one of the questions I asked him towards the end to paraphrase it, was, you know, how would you feel about it being proven later that technically, like, all your life's work was wrong? Would you think that that's a horrible outcome, or would you think that that's a part of the very being of what science is? Great minds come along, come up with an idea that eventually, more evidence is able to be produced to disprove it, such is nature. And that's how it goes on. And I don't want to say what he said because I'll get it wrong, but maybe we can cut it in here, Alessi. That spot just asked me for that afterwards.

I remember that. That was like the 2-hour, 40-minute timestamp, 2-hour, 42-minute timestamp in that episode, remember that that was at like the two hour 40 minute time stamp two hour 42 minute time stamp in that episode something like that you know i just kind of wonder like when you look on on your own life now and having put in decades and decades and decades as a physicist and you know you came up with string theory now like five decades ago it's it's a long time to put into the game do you ever worry about your work being wrong or proven wrong? Or is that precisely why you want to put the work out so that it can be proven wrong? Well, I think the latter more than the former in the sense that to err is human.

I mean, we will make mistakes. Technology moves in directions that are unforeseen. But once the basic laws are understood, then the predictions start to become more and more accurate. So basically, what I took from it and how he answered it was that he was okay with that. He was more humble in the nature of that. And yet, he is, as you pointed out, he's one of the founders of string theory. So he's a part of this community that maybe has unintentionally or even in some ways intentionally incentivized a system that protects that theory at all costs. So it's interesting because I wonder if that is just kind of like a passivity of humanity, right? You're brilliant at something. You come up with an idea.

This is the way things are done. And you don't consciously realize that essentially maybe you're locking out other ideas that could be good versus like saying, no, we got to be the mafia and stop this from happening and making it more sinister, if you will. So to be fair, Michio didn't and he's not one of the inventors of string theory i don't know why he keeps saying that he invented something called string field theory right remember before i used a term non-perturbative some fancy word it just means exact solutions you can think of it like that so he came out with a theory that would have exact solutions but it turns out there's some problems with it doesn't matter so he and he also he a collaborator. So he positions it, and he has something called the one-inch-long God equation, which is, again, for people who are interested, the theory of everything,

what if you could write it down in a small space? And to me, I think that's, hey, when will it be the first time that an Asian person has elevated the stature of what's approximately one inch long but so i see it less as a less a statement about physics and more a what'd you call it a freudian slip about the the first syllable of his last name oh i didn't see that one coming that was that was out of left field, man. Holy shit. Kurt, I don't have a hell of a lot more time with you because I got to get you to your plane soon. So there's a million things in there I still want to ask you about.

And there were a lot of other things within. There were a bunch of things today I still want to ask you about. We never got back to that whole point on what the context of an advanced society is, though. So real quick, I want to touch that. And then I want to go through, close this off with a meaning of life question. But when you were talking a while back, maybe 30, 40 minutes ago about us not knowing how are we able to say something's more advanced than not? I think that's a valid point. However, I think like everything else, there might be a line there. As an example, if we figured out that another civilization quite literally had the ability to time travel and completely ignore the laws of gravity as just

two things of the many things they can do, I would be perfectly willing to subjectively and more importantly, objectively say they're more advanced than us. Do you think that that's at least fair to say? I wouldn't say that you wouldn't no so how could a society that can quite literally bend time not be more advanced than us it depends on what you mean by advanced so mathematically speaking if you have a line you have zero like you mentioned before you had 100 like you mentioned before you could have negative 100 there you have an, like you mentioned before, you had 100, like you mentioned before, you can have negative 100. There you have an ordering. So you could say this point is greater than this point. But as soon as you have at least two axes, like this table or three, like this room, you can't say one point is more advanced than another. So I don't know how to

mathematically say that. All right, fair fair enough i'll accept that so what you talked about early on the man's search for meaning if you will but what's your meaning of life and on on a second point do you believe in a higher creator or is it one where you're more like i just don't know no I'd say I'm searching for the latter question and I don't dismiss it. I haven't heard an argument from an atheist that wasn't something I thought of when I was 14. So all these years later, I haven't heard a single argument from Sam Harris, from any of the, from Christopher Hitchens, from Richard Dawkins, any of the modern atheists on YouTube that they've said something that's made me go, that's an interesting way of

looking at the world. And I, well, I think what separates a thinker is the wrestling, the willingness to wrestle with ill-defined notions. So that's what separates the continental philosophers from the more analytic philosophers, is that they're willing to, what do you mean by love? And they're willing to wrestle with it, even for decades, and dance around the subject, and attack it from several angles. So for me, I'm not going to dismiss god because of the arguments that a clever me that i cited to other people when i was 15 13 i became an atheist when i was eight and i remember telling people about it because of quantum fluctuations that was my reason at eight yeah quantum fluctuations i didn't know what it meant i just heard my brother say it and then the lady i didn't know how to say that word when i was eight someone said someone then said flatulence doesn't that mean i'm like oh my gosh then i started that i never

said that word until i was like 18 never said that word again so i was like okay i gotta come up with different reasons but i always loved when i was younger just showing you you're an idiot because i was a i was a a smart aleck kid so I had this girl that I liked who was a Muslim and I would always just eviscerate, or I thought I was eviscerating her. I mean, she, whatever. I'd like to do that because I'm mean and I'm vicious. At least back then.

You're a monster. You're going to be a monster, goddammit. So I'm no longer like that and as for the meaning of life so in part i i think that the point of life is to find a love that is so great that it can outlast death. And then to nourish it. So with my wife, I don't know what that means. If you were to ask me, what does that mean?

I don't know. So going back to this room analogy where we're constantly searching, going out different doors and so on, but there are people in the room with you. And Lovecraft is saying, what are you doing? Why are you searching? Why are you trading? What's right here is so consequential. It's so meaningful. If you could nourish it, if you could water it, if you could notice it, I think our consciousness comprises attention, effort, and then the ineffable. So the attention is what we place our attention on. What do we care about? And the effort has to do with free will. And the ineffable, I don't know. That's just beyond me. But Shakespeare had this great quote, man. Shakespeare said this in a letter to someone. He wasn't even publishing this.

It's about trading the inestimable, so what you can't even estimate is so grand for the ephemeral so you go through that door i want knowledge but you can get right over that door you walk out and a train just hits you that's the lovecraftian view the burden of what will be unburdened by what has been. Oh gosh, that's so pretty. When I saw that, she's trying to say it anew each time. Oh boy. I'm sorry, I had to put that in there. I cut you off. Go ahead. Shakespeare said,

What win I if I gain the thing I seek? A dream, a breath, a froth of fleeting joy Who would buy a minute's mirth to wail a week or sell eternity for a toy? for one sweet grape who will the vine destroy I Think about I think about that for I've been thinking about I've had that in the back of my mind for six years what would I if I gained the thing I seek a dream a breath

a froth of fleeting joy jeez Louise man it's heavy as shit man Kurt this kind of sucks that you gotta leave this is a prime example of like we're just getting warmed up we would absolutely be sitting here for probably another five, six hours.

So we're going to have to do this again at some point. I love how you think. I love how you're very measured in what you think. And I also want to push back on something that I think you criticize about yourself a little bit, which is your willingness to say I don't know. I think that's a beautiful skill. And I think if you truly don't know something, you know, people, people with half a brain are going to respect you when, when you're willing to say that. Cause I think we run into a lot of problems in this world where people talk out of their ass on things that they really probably shouldn't be talking about. So I

appreciate that about you. You are clearly a very brilliant guy. You got an amazing show on YouTube and we will have that link down in the description once again. But thank you so much for coming down, man. And we're going to have to do this again. Thank you. I appreciate it, man. You as well. I love your podcast. Thank you, brother. I appreciate that. I got to tell you off-air then about

Kaku. Okay. Alright. TBD. We'll leave you in suspense. Everybody else, you know what it is. Give it a thought. Get back to me. Peace. Thank you guys for watching the episode. Before you leave, please be sure to hit that subscribe button and smash that like button on the video.

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