Modern Wisdom - #648 - Chris Ferrie - 7 Ways To Ruin Your Life With Lies From Quantum Physics
Episode Date: July 1, 2023Chris Ferrie is a physicist and mathematician at the University of Technology Sydney and an author. The term “quantum” is liberally tossed around within the spiritual community, often suggesting a... level of insight into this mysterious field of science. But what do these people actually mean? What have these gurus correctly interpreted about the field of quantum physics, and where are they very confused? Expect to learn why the word “quantum” is so frequently employed by spiritual gurus, what “quantum entanglement” actually means, whether energy healing heals anything at all, whether it's possible to raise your vibrational frequency thing, why Schrödinger’s cat does not mean that you can do whatever you want with no consequences, how something can be so incorrect it's “not even wrong” and much more... Sponsors: Get 20% discount & free shipping on your Lawnmower 4.0 at https://manscaped.com/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get an exclusive discount from Surfshark VPN at https://surfshark.deals/MODERNWISDOM (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get 16 free meals plus free shipping from HelloFresh at https://hellofresh.com/modernwisdom16 (use code: MODERNWISDOM) Extra Stuff: Buy Quantum Bullsh*t - https://amzn.to/3pfYEa8 Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Hello friends, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Chris Ferry. He's a physicist and
mathematician at the University of Technology, Sydney, and an author. The term quantum is
liberally tossed around within the spiritual community, often suggesting a level of insight
into this mysterious field of science. But what do these people actually mean? What of these gurus
correctly interpreted about the field of quantum
physics? And where are they very confused?
Expect to learn why the word quantum is so frequently employed by spiritual gurus. What
quantum entanglement actually means? Whether energy healing heals anything at all, whether
it's possible to raise your vibrational frequency, why Schrodinger's cat does not mean that
you can do whatever you want with no consequences, how something can be so incorrect, it's not even wrong.
And much more.
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But now ladies and gentlemen,, please welcome Chris Ferry.
I'm very much looking forward to this episode. I have been for quite a while since I heard
about your book. I feel like the world of quantum physics is one which is used by all
manner of different people to explain things that they absolutely shouldn't be, but why
should we listen to you as some sort of judicial assassin of quantum physics.
What are your credentials?
Who are you?
Well, I'm an associate professor of quantum physics at the University of Technology Sydney
in Australia.
One of the big places to do quantum technology research and development, and I've been studying
quantum physics for 20 odd years now.
You've also written 60 books on science in one form or another.
Yeah, I have quite a few. Most of them are children's books, so the latest one probably shouldn't read the children.
And because of the place I had to sit in my house for the people watching anyway. Yeah, a lot of people.
Not for children.
Yeah.
Okay.
You need to study quantum physics.
So, what are the different types of quantum bullshit?
Talking about quantum physics, there are ways in which people misuse and abuse and misappropriate
it.
What are the broad buckets of quantum bullshit?
Yeah, so in the book, I go through the major concepts in quantum bullshit. Yeah, so in the book I go through the major concepts in quantum
physics, so like buzzwords that you might have heard superposition, entanglement, energy, and
they each have their own brand of bullshit attached to them. There's sort of the good, the bad,
and the ugly. The ugly is when it comes to quantum energy, which is associated with things
like quantum healing, which suggests that people do things that are unscientific and not medically
sound in lieu of actual medical attention and medical advice, so that's very bad. And then there's
like mundane things when people misinterpret, say, entanglement as some spiritual connection between things that are separated, which, you know, if you're not wasting, if you're not stealing people's money and you're not harming people, no big deal.
So there's a whole kind of range from, from, yeah, harmful to just annoying and head scratching if you're an expert.
Okay. Who are the biggest culprits of quantum bullshit in your view? You know,
do you remember the FBI had that deck of cards? And there was the Ace of Spades,
there was number one and so on and so forth. Who would be in your deck of cards?
Yeah, that's a good question. In the book, I try not to give much attention to specific instances, because, you know,
I'm afraid someone will go there and be like, Oh, yeah, that feels good to me.
I'm, I'm going to go with that instead of the difficult.
Thankfully, everyone, everyone watching this is way too rational for that to be a concern.
So you have carte blanche.
I think the probably the most famous
example is is Deepak Chopra who's been at it for a while. He had a book called Quantum Healing
of going back ages, but that's you know that kind of stuff has been debunked many times over,
but it keeps keeps coming back right you know someone will debunk it, it kind of disappear, and then he'll discover like YouTube, and then he'll blow up again because he has a new audience.
A people that didn't listen to the debunking.
So, yeah, so I think he's one of the worst examples, I would say, just because he has such a huge influence
and a big platform.
Most of them, they just disappear,
almost as quickly as they arrive.
If you've hopefully, nobody's done this,
but if you actually kind of click on a link that you shouldn't,
it usually takes you down this path of websites
that look like you might be able to put your credit card information.
But sometimes you can't even do that.
Like the websites don't even work.
You have to be right on the ball if you want to actually waste money because they just happen so quickly.
Meer quantum fluctuations in the world of quantum bullshit.
Yeah.
And then there's obviously, yeah, YouTube videos.
It's endless, right? Are you familiar with Gaia? Have you heard of that? Gaia? Yes. I like the
the Hindu God. It's a streaming platform that's reappropriated the name of a Hindu God. And it's like
of a Hindu god.
And it's like Netflix, but for sort of spiritual, woo stuff.
Okay.
I fear that you may have had an aneurysm
if you discovered this before you wrote your book.
But yeah, man, I mean, you know, from what I know
and from going through your work,
it seems like Deepak Chopra would probably be pretty high up
on the list. Didn't you do going to show or something?
I didn't you have an interaction with him?
I went on his one of his shows, the one called The Chopra Well, and that was for my last book.
So the last book was called Where Did The Universe Come From?
And other cosmic questions.
It's kind of, I refer to it as my love letter to quantum physics, whereas the latest book,
quantum bullshit is my hate now
and
it because it talks about how quantum physics
You know explains everything we know about the universe on even on cosmological scales
it it really kind of
Connected with his point of view and his audience
I was really surprised actually.
When I spoke to him, I was totally expecting
to have to argue with him, debunk, his nonsense.
But he genuinely, when you talk to him one-on-one,
he's just a really, really insatiably curious person
who just wants to know everything, right?
And he has this internal mental model and he's just extracting all this stuff and he doesn't
spend enough time to actually go through it and dive deep.
And so he's just at this superficial level and that's a real problem.
I mean, you know, if you've seen like the Dunnings Printer, Kruger effects curve, right? He's at like the peak of, you know, misunderstanding.
It's like what the Kazuma Vignorin is.
So something.
Yeah.
So he, you know, he says, he says a lot of stuff.
I think he believes some of it genuinely and others, it's just him,
just him like he's, you do something for so long and you're just good at it and you have
no, no choice but to do it and he's really good at just spouting things that sound profound better, but are basic, basically nonsense. I don't know how, I think it's, you know,
he's sitting there.
I don't know how harmful he is, anyone,
he's, you know, just an old dude, right?
Who someone puts a camera in front of him
and he starts talking.
But the movement around him, I think,
is, you know, it's steamroll, it stoppable, and that's the really harmful thing.
One of the key terms that you're talking about here is quantum energy,
and energy medicine, and quantum healing, and stuff like that. What are the claims that are made
by the people that talk about this stuff? Well, there's this idea that, you know, yeah, I'm okay. So some of it is like, morally true.
You have to distinguish between like colloquial notions of energy that we all use today,
right? But, you know, we tell children, and you know, all energy comes from the sun and
plants take energy from the sun, and that's where we get our energy. And if you don't eat, then you'll feel tired because you need energy.
Right? These are all just like colloquial definitions, but there's technical definition as well.
And people often, you know, mix these up and they'll say, well, I have my, you know, my
everyday notion of energy. And then I read this thing about quantum physics
and energy, the concept there, and they feel similar, so that supports my interpretation,
right, which is not grounded in science. So with energy, it's that there's this, you
know, latent energy that's just spread out throughout the universe, and you can somehow
tap into it if you
You know you think hard enough or you meditate or you pull it your credit card and spend 20 bucks or whatever
But that's not how energy works. There's no
there's no
kind of
mystical source of energy
scientifically kind of mystical source of energy scientifically it's measurable and that's how do you know how do you
know that there isn't quantum energy? Well I don't but the thing is well they're okay I know that there is
there is there is quantum energy right I mean that's sort of what what we study what we research
in what I teach to the students but it's not the same kind of energy as this mystical force
that permeates the universe.
How do I know?
Well, I think that's a deeper question.
I mean, it's somewhat a philosophical question.
Like, what does it mean to know something?
In science, we have a very clear notion, right? If you can measure and perform repeatable
experiments and those experiments give similar or the same results, then we can say that
we know something and we assign some objective notion to that, at least an intersubjective notion that we all sort of come to agree that
that we're going to include that in our in our mental model of reality.
That's how it works in science. So, unless you can measure it and you can tell someone the procedure by which you measured it and they can repeat it, then
it's not scientific.
But that doesn't mean it's wrong, it's just probably useless.
Right.
And when people talk about energy healing, they're not just talking about repurposing their
killer jewels from a snickers this afternoon into somebody else's body.
They're talking about tapping into some sort of extra special quantum fields that gives them
the ability to go in and fix your past trauma or your athlete's foot or your gluten intolerance or whatever it is that you're dealing with. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's right. So if you can put
a number like, kill a jewels on it, then it becomes measurable. And then you can make predictions and say,
what you could do with it.
Now it's been connected to the rest of the scientific
corpus and you can start to make use of it.
Why is it the case that spirituality is such a hotbed for so much of this stuff?
It's like a quantum theory of the gaps almost.
Yeah, that's right. We do have a desire to know, like as humans, we despise uncertainty.
We want to have some idea that we have everything sorted out. We know. And when there is
when there is a gap in our knowledge, we have we just can't help but but fill it. And really the
problem is it's sometimes it's not fillable. And so you get people that come in and provide very attractive
options to fill these gaps and people maybe just don't have the time or energy or
or yeah understanding to know when yeah when they should use a proposed solution or or not.
should use a proposed solution or not. Well, what is it about quantum physics,
specifically, do you think,
that's allowing this speculation to be sucked in?
So I think the recipe is like,
you have some, you start with some problem.
You get some examples of athletes' foot,
or trauma or whatever.
And then someone comes along and says, you know, that's a really, really hard problem,
right?
And it's going to take some complicated, almost miraculous solutions.
I happen to have those, right?
And don't worry because, you know, I know quantum physics. And if you know anything about quantum physics, it's super complicated.
And it has all this counterintuitive stuff. So don't worry about all that. Just know that I've talked to the experts or I'm an expert myself.
And that sort of, you know, the person into accepting this miraculous solution.
So I think that's kind of the crux of the problem, right?
That quantum physics isn't well understood.
It has a reputation, you know, even scientists get out
in front of public and say that it's counterintuitive
and mystical and then, so when someone repeats that,
you're inclined to believe it.
And if, especially if you have a problem where you have, you feel like you've somehow tested out
sort of the scientific route or the medical route, like you've went to a doctor and the doctor didn't help you,
right? Didn't give you the right pills or didn't give you a procedure to fix your problem.
Now you have your inclined to distrust science. And so when someone comes along, you know, the rogue
scientists that that real doctors don't want you to know about, then yeah, you're kind of,
you feel compelled to believe them because there's somewhat aligned
with you, right?
They say, well, I'm against the status quo, I'm against convention.
And I have the backing of this miraculous, super mysterious and complex theory.
So it's way better.
And yeah, people buy into it.
Yeah, there's a number of elements,
I think, of quantum theory,
the sort of quantum world that lends itself
to charlatans and grefters being able to insert themselves.
One of them being the fact that it is not particularly easy to understand.
Even me who's done episodes with Michio Kaku and Sean Carroll and, you know, a ton of shit,
ton of different physicists who are very, very highly acclaimed, if someone asks me over a cocktail
party to explain what quantum gravity is, a quantum theory, or why we can't reconcile general
relativity with quantum gravity, I can't explain it. I can't even begin to explain it, right? And I've had hours
and hours of conversations about it. So first off, you have a topic which is difficult
for people to get into. That means that someone can be a gatekeeper to knowledge, kind of
in the same way that in the Middle Ages, the Bible was not translated into the common language
because that meant that the priests and the clergymen were the funnel
through which your communication with God could only occur, right? You had to go through them,
you were beholden to them because it was the only way that you could access this kind of information
and it kind of feels the same way. On top of that, I do think that I'm going to guess that you
would agree a lot of the information that you find out at the quantum level is very different to what we experience up here at the big sort of level.
There's everything kind of behaves in a very different way.
It's almost like a different universe, right?
It's not.
It's part of our universe.
It's just really, really, really small.
But it is very, it behaves in a different way, and that makes people think, oh, well,
maybe because it behaves in a different way, there are some degrees of freedom that allow me to extract that type of movement and momentum and energy out into the real world,
and I can kind of insert my own choose your own adventure, choose your own energy healing
thing into that world.
And when you have that, the difficulty of being able to understand the blurriness around
what it is, and certain people that are able to posit themselves as experts,
it is just a breeding ground for people that are charlatans and grifters.
My roommate, Zack Talander has this thing, he calls the charlatan playbook,
and Diet is another one of these, because even the best dieticians on the planet,
it's really hard to do the interventions, we don't particularly know what's going on,
despite the fact that everybody eats multiple times per day. And there's a ton of contested stuff around
it. Where do they insert themselves? Right into diet, because it's this gatecap knowledge, and it's
kind of hard to understand, and you can sort of wish it, think it, believe it, and achieve it.
So I understand why I think both spirituality that attracts a particular type of person,
some wishful thinking, a lot of placebo effect,
some of this sort of spiritual woo language, and quantum theory, the world of quantum physics,
which is like the scientific counterpart to that with sufficient unknowns and degrees of freedom
that people can can make it happen. I can see how that would be a marriage made in hell, perhaps.
Yeah, quantum avocados. No, I think that's a very...
Yeah, you hit on some really good points, I totally agree. But I guess sometimes
public engagement, scientific communicators do act really as the gatekeepers of knowledge.
And I think some of them enjoy that, enjoy being in that position, rather than maybe they
set out to say, I'm going to educate the world on my particular topic of interest.
And then they quickly buy into the right and become sort of the gurus
and you know I can imagine you know it feels good when people are luring that.
Yeah being the being the the fucking gatekeeper of this knowledge is a luring.
Yeah well I mean I haven't made it that far that far yet so I'm still
I mean, I haven't made it that far yet. So I'm still, I'm waiting for the quantum energy healing
that doctors don't really want you to know about pivot
for Chris Ferry.
So one of the other terms that a lot of people listening
will have heard about will have been vibrational frequencies.
What do you think people mean?
Or what do you think people think they mean when they talk about vibrational frequencies?
Yeah, well, let me let me just point point out that just so that like there's like a clear
De-markation right so energy
The conventional concept or everyday notion of energy is that
The conventional concept or everyday notion of energy is that it includes the idea that it flows, right?
It's continuous.
And what quantum brings to the table is that that's not true at the most fundamental level
of understanding we have.
Energy comes in discrete chunks.
So energy is not like a slide that you can go up and down.
It's like steps.
You have to be on a step.
These steps are incredibly tiny. You'd never notice them in everyday down, it's like steps. You have to be on a step. These steps are incredibly tiny.
You'd never notice them in everyday life, but they're there.
So that's sort of the difference between quantum
and classical energy.
That's never actually used in any of the bullshit, right?
They don't actually use the real concept of energy.
But frequency is similar.
So again, we kind of understand that how energy is mediated
between things is through waves.
So there's electromagnetic waves that we're using right now to communicate over the internet.
There is sound waves that come from the speaker in your headset or on the speakers
on your device. That's vibrating air molecules. That's traveling as a wave. So waves carry
energy. Now, in order for that energy to be received, that thing has to resonate. So
again, it's just another one of these words that has many meanings,
there's colloquial meanings and there's technical meanings. They're very similar. So when you say
something resonates, it's like you're in tune with it, but technically it's when the wave that could
potentially interact with the thing is around the same size as
the object. So if you think about waterways, I think is an excellent example.
So imagine you're a boat and there's an enormous swell in the middle of the
ocean. You wouldn't even notice, right? You look around and it looks like it's pretty flat
around where you are because you can't see
the next peak in the wave.
And if there's tiny ripples, you wouldn't notice those as well.
When do you notice a wave if you're a boat?
It's when the distance between the peaks
is about the same size as a boat, right?
So that one end of the boat is at the top and the other end of the boat has gone to the bottom.
So when things are around the same size as the wave, that's when there's
there's an interaction and that that's when you quote on boat resonate with it.
So there's yeah, just sort of look around you and there's examples everywhere.
Like, so-
That's why we can't hear microwaves, right?
Oh, we can't, we can't see radio waves.
Yeah, so that, that, that, your eyes basically tuned to only the visible portion of this
vast electromagnetic spectrum that includes radio waves, infrared, micro waves,
and then the other end, higher energy waves, like ultraviolet x-rays and gamma rays.
They're all hitting you all the time, right?
But you can only see the visible ones, and that's just an accident at evolution because
it seemed to be useful for survival.
Now, so people think that they can somehow, I guess in the implicit assumption is that
they can change something about themselves, what they think or what they do, so that they
can tune to some wave that's out there. And, well, that's just somewhat ridiculous.
I mean, it's true in like a, you know,
a sort of mundane sense, right?
If I uncover my ears, then I've allowed my hearing apparatus
and all the stuff that goes on inside my ear and my brain
to be in tune with those waves, or if I open my eyes,
I can be in tune with those waves or if I open my eyes, I can
be in tune with visible light.
But there's nothing I can do to see infrared light.
Unless you trust scientists and engineers and use technology, then of course you can.
But we're pretty limited when we think about the biology of these bodies that we're carrying
around.
So, when people say vibrational frequencies, what they're probably talking about is their
emotional state, how they're receiving other people's emotional states, what they're putting
out into the universe and how that impacting a field,
the quantum field, perhaps? Yeah, so you do have several wavelengths associated with you and
different parts of your body. Again, your retina is associated with a certain wavelength that's
tuned to visible light. Your eardrum is associated with wavelengths of sound,
you know, 15 hertz up to however, you know, whatever it is, 44,000 hertz,
and your entire body can act like an antenna as well, which is tuned to roughly 10 hertz.
So, if someone was blasting a speaker that was 10 hertz, and you know if you've
been to concerts maybe you can kind of can feel this, right? Really, really low bass, some
of which you can't hear with your ears, but you can feel in your body, that's because
you are an antenna. And certain parts of your body will resonate with electromagnetic frequencies as well.
And those are regulated by the SEC.
Sometimes because it's unhealthy, but most of the time, just because if human bodies are
absorbing the signal, then you're not going to be able to get signal to your smartphone.
So don't use those frequencies, right?
Like, engineers don't think of humans as things
that they don't want to harm.
They think of things that are in the way
of their Wi-Fi signals.
Now, there is this notion that if we agree on something
or we have the same opinion, then somehow we are in tune.
But that opinion resonates with me. Which
is, you know, it's a it's a fine way to communicate and it works because it's embedded within
a system of language that we all understand and we can make use of. But it has its limitations and if you start to say that it does things beyond just
you know helping social interactions and people come to agreements then
then you're in trouble because you know that those those things aren't verifiable
And by this we're talking about someone
And by this we're talking about someone genuinely having a physical connection between themselves and somebody else, that them and the other interlocutor are moving or attached through
some kind of quantum wave or quantum energy field in a strange way.
Yeah, that's right. So if that were true, then you should be able to measure it, right?
And if you can't measure it, then you can't verify it.
So it's just magical thinking otherwise.
But how much quantum physics can we measure?
Is it possible in your view as somebody who has spent an awfully long time studying quantum
physics that this could be something that exists? possible in your view as somebody who has spent an awfully long time studying quantum physics,
that this could be something that exists or is the only way that this exists if it is
tapping into something which is outside of the field of quantum physics most likely.
So you can take this point of view, right?
That everything in the world is just atoms right you know nowadays we teach
this to children or at least I do that all of this stuff around is including your body is made of atoms
and the world is just one everything you see is built up of several of 118 elements that we often see arranged in
the periodic table.
That's it.
That's all there is to the universe.
Everything is just a bunch of these atoms stuck together in different arrangements.
Their interactions are mediated by electromagnetic waves. So, with that understanding, there are things that are just ruled out.
So I can't have a physical interaction with you.
I mean, again, it's somewhat subtle, right?
Because in some sense, I can't influence you.
If I pause for a long enough, then you'll probably say something.
And that's happening at a distance.
But so it really depends on the kind of claim
that you want to make.
It usually, they're quite, they're seemingly miraculous things.
And you apply a simple rule, right?
If it sounds too good to be true, then it probably is.
So if it sounds too good to be true,
then it's not part of science
and not part of quantum physics.
If quantum physics is used to explain this idea of the world,
that everything is made of these fundamental building blocks
and what we see around us is just a built up
of many, many interactions of many of these things.
And we understand that to an extent
that our entire modern world is built on quantum physics.
Everything around you, the device you're using, the scans you get when
you go to, when you go see the doctor, compacts this, if anyone remembers those, lasers, clocks,
GPS, the internet, computers, everything is built from this understanding that the world is made of atoms.
And if we put these together in various ways, then we can put that to good use.
I was on a boat party talking to a girl that was part of another group that had turned up and she seemed perfectly nice
and was explaining about her young son and what she hoped for him in the future and the
job that she was doing in all of the rest of it.
And I was asking about how she'd changed.
She made some job changes recently, I think.
And she'd said, yeah, I just really started raising my frequency.
And I thought, well, now I'm interested.
And I asked, what do you mean when you say that?
And she said, well, you know, I sort of changed
the way that I thought.
And I adjusted my emotions.
And I said, yeah, okay.
But what about the frequency thing?
She says, well, emotions have got a frequency.
They vibrated a frequency.
Is that okay?
What do you mean by that?
She said, well, they vibrated a frequency
and I changed. I was like, right, what do you mean by that? And I kept on asking the
what question. And it resulted in her saying the sentence, I believe in quantum physics. Like this was some, like a walled off guard and a castle that she could retreat into that would explain
something that I didn't understand, but self evidently neither did she. I believe in quantum
physics and she did leave not long after this. I think that I was very polite. I didn't
like, I don't know, take the piss, but I did push a good bit to say, what do you mean?
I raised my frequency. What do you mean? Emotions have a frequency and they vibrate at a frequency.
What do you mean? I believe in quantum physics. Genuinely, for the love of God, what the
fuck do you mean? I don't think that she really knew.
And I think this kind of taps into what you're talking about
with the good, the bad and the ugly of quantum physics.
And also maybe even Deepak Chopra,
as somebody who from the outside might seem
willfully negligent or kind of like jovial ignorant purposefully ignorant in a way
that benefits perhaps himself, but it can start people down a slippery slope toward believing in
things that become increasingly and more and more disempowering and less and less accurate to the world around them.
And it can also cause people to do things like abandon their cancer treatment in place
of going to do crystal healing and stuff.
I'm pretty sure that wasn't it Steve Jobs who decided to try and do some very holistic
sort of woo things to try and cure his, was it pancreatic cancer? Incredibly
treatable, 90% each recovery rate had he have just decided to go and get standard treatment
from Western medicine and he went to somewhere in Tibet or India or something and then had an accave and had some treatment. And we lost one of the greatest marketers
and product inventors of ever.
Because of that, which shows that it doesn't really matter
how smart you are that these kinds of ideas,
I don't know how quantumly Steve Jobs's world view was.
But these ideas can take a hold of people.
And it is a very slippery slope.
If the thin end of the wedge is just believing in entanglement and two people
that love each other have an emotional connection that transcends space, time, and physics as we
know it, it is just a difference of degree all the way down to, I don't need chemotherapy
because I've got some tiger stones at home.
Yeah, no, that's right.
I mean, we like to say, okay, that's innocent,
whatever, but I think the issue is that,
again, people want simple stories, right?
And they're, once they have a story
that they're comfortable with,
that they stick with it.
The, as scientists,
this is just our basic state.
In order to make progress, you need some assumptions.
But we're always ready to abandon those assumptions
when they lead us astray.
So if you accept some set of assumption, some story,
then you're eventually going to be led down,
that down the wrong path. If you need to have
every new piece of evidence or new piece of information fit within that story. And, you
know, extreme examples are like conspiracy theorists, like flat authors, right? So in order
to believe that the earth is flat and then be told that people live in Australia, in order to believe that the earth is flat and then be told that people live in Australia,
in order to make those two things fit together, you have to say that we're all actors,
and we're in Hollywood, and there isn't really a place called Australia.
Some of us don't even have Australian accents. But that I think is the problem, right?
That I'm fine with people making assumptions
and having simple stories.
I do it all the time, even within a scientific context.
But you have to be ready to abandon them
when those analogies, those stories no longer
are fit for purpose.
You had a quote in the book from quantum love.
And he said, when you use the power of the quantum field, honing your emotions and intentions to create the frequency or vibration of that desire, you will draw the things you want to you.
Yeah, no, that doesn't work like that.
What the fuck does that mean?
That's, yeah, that's an interesting book.
I think probably one of them, my favorite examples of quantum bullshit,
because that person who wrote that book, Dr. Laura Berman,
I think she's Oprah's love expert, a relationship expert or something.
No, it has a PhD from New York University.
In what?
Probably sociology. I don't
know. That's right. The pivot, the seamless pivot from sociology into fucking quantum physics
is so brazen. I work so hard to gain fucking millimeters every single year in self-confidence.
And then there are people that decide to abandon social science and just dip into quantum
theory.
Like fair play, you know what I mean?
Fair play to it.
Well, I think, yeah, I mean, if that's allowed, then I can give people a relationship of
us.
Why not?
Downright.
But she, in her book, actually, if you read the first chapter,
it's her explanation of quantum physics, which reads
like something that would be in, you know,
scientific American, or some popular science magazine.
It's not accurate, but it's no less accurate than what
you would see from even a science journalist.
And then the problem starts to arise is when she tries to connect that to her particular area of expertise.
But yeah, I mean, all relationship advice is the same. It's just has different sort of layers of bullshit slapped on it. And she
decided, you know, there's a gap through a quantum experiment.
Quantum. Quantum love. But that, yeah, that, that, then when you make a claim like that
one that you just read out, that is very specific claim, which is, it's comically untrue. I don't know. Again, there are all of
these cognitive biases that come in, right? So if I say, okay, well, I read the book and
I did the sort of exercises that she suggested and then, you know, I played the lotto and
I won 20 bucks.
So it must have been that, right?
So there's confirmation bias happening all the time
because the other 100 tickets that you played didn't win.
Oh, so yeah, again, it's these huge gaps
and all of these cognitive biases that people aren't aware of
that allow these things
to thrive.
Well, there's also a placebo effect, which is unbelievably strong, right?
And I'm kind of torn, and this is more an ethical question, but the placebo effect or the
expectation effect is David Robson would call it, which kind of expands it out from taking
substances to expectations
to that we have around the world, is the most reliable effect in all of pharmacology or medicine,
right? If you could bottle it, you would have a panacea. And, you know, they've shown
that studies where people take sugar pills, that they've been told a sugar pills have
better outcomes than people that don't. And they've been told that sugar pills have better outcomes than people that don't.
And they've been told that it's a fucking placebo.
So, you know, I disregard the expectation effect
as little as I can, I think, that it is very, very useful.
But the mechanism that this thing is working on
is not what's being claimed. The outcome can be something which is positive
in the direction of what you wanted to occur, but the mechanism
that you said it operated on is not accurate. And is is
conning people or juping people aligned to people are convincing
them that a particular thing works worth the outcome, because the only way that that outcome can be achieved is by getting
them to believe it, which means that you need to give them a sufficiently convincing
lie.
I'm not sure.
And I'm definitely not sure when there is a slippery slope down toward believing things
which stop you gaining some of the benefits of expectation effect and actually start
causing you to believe a whole host of other silly who
Yeah
I guess the the issue I think is that there's a huge gray area, right?
There is there is no truth
But we have we have models of reality
We have these these simple stories that tell
cause and effect relationships of change events.
But these aren't true in any universal sense of the word.
There is no universal truth.
There's a big gray area.
And when you think about it that way, you can start to see,
OK, well, there are things that are more truthy
and things that are clearly untrue,
but even that our best theories are
just useful theories. They're not true theories. So our understanding of how the placebo effect works probably has something to do with
you know, human psychology and potentially we can get down to
chemical chemicals that are being passed around within our body. At some point, you can say,
well, those chemicals are made of molecules which are made of atoms. So, you know, it's all, yeah, it's some points all can be understood as being based on quantum physics. But I think you have to have
these different layers of explanation and accept that at any point, none of them are true in any
objective sense of the word. They're useful. So I think we should accept these lies
if they give us mileage.
But as soon as they stop giving us a return
for believing it, then we should abandon it.
So if you want to say, well,
this placebo effect works because, you know, there's some quantum interactions
that are happening in the brain and if you think the right way, you can make those
align and that achieves the outcome that you want.
The person gets better.
That's great, but maybe everything should just have an implicit disclaimer. Like your mileage may vary.
If you use this model to do something else, it probably won't work.
The problem that you have there is that stopping people at the bounds of,
this is what it's good for and it's not good for much else.
Or it's good for a small number of things.
Isn't the way that human brains work?
If we find success and win 20 quid
because we did our right energy crystal healing and tapped into the quantum realm,
I mean, that's going to fix everything. Like, my chronic flatulence is fixed by it, my erectile
dysfunction is fixed by it, like, everything, do you know what I mean? Moving on to another very common question around quantum physics, uncertainty, the uncertainty
principle, what are people getting wrong about Schrodinger and his cat and uncertainty and
all the rest of it?
Yeah, so this one's, I would say, is one of the probably more mild ones.
So nobody's, it's such an abstract concept that I don't think it's made its way into
these other places.
No one's found a way to monetize it yet is what you say.
Yeah, yeah.
So uncertainty, it's kind of the hallmark of quantum physics.
So, and there's this famous story that was how it was discovered by Werner Heisenberg who had hay fever. So he secluded himself on this island.
And it came to him in like in a dream or something like that. He woke up one
morning and had to write something down. And you know, it wasn't like, oh he just,
you know, wrote it down in his own tablet and then brought it back to
Copenhagen. It was more, uh, you know, he had this idea to scribble it down, and then he developed it over, over, you know, probably weeks to months. And it was probably some mess when it started,
but eventually, you know, we retell the story as it was like this Eureka moment, where he basically
at this Eureka moment, where he basically had this idea of trying to measure the property of something. So there's this idea of Heisenberg's microscope. So if you know how a microscope
works, a light microscope, you shine light on something, light bounces off of it and then
gets magnified and enters your eye.
Then he thought, well, what if the thing I was trying to look at with the microscope
was a single atom or a single electron, a fundamental subatomic particle?
Well, when I shine light on it, which is fundamentally other particles, it's like two billion balls hitting each other.
So just the simple fact of trying to measure something, alters it in some way.
So if I shine the light on the electron, yeah, it's going to bounce off and then come
and hit my eye and then I can infer something about where it was and other properties of
it. But now I've imparted something onto that electron
and it's gonna take off in some other direction,
some random direction that I don't know.
So that, so his notion was,
you can't simultaneously know where something is
and how fast and where it's going at the same time.
You can choose to measure one property,
but you can't obtain everything there
is to know about both properties.
Nowadays, we understand the concept a bit more subtly.
The real crux of the issue is that these properties
aren't even defined.
But it doesn't make sense to say that there is something pre-existing in the world, and our
job as observers is to go and figure out what those properties were.
That we're there regardless of whether we chose to go and measure them or not.
So you can choose to measure by setting up some apparatus, measure position of something,
find out where it is.
But by doing so, by arranging that apparatus,
you've caused something else about it to be undefined.
So there isn't some set of pre-existing set
of properties in the world.
Now, this gets sort of caricatured as, yeah,
when you measure something something you affect it.
And so you see this a lot in popular culture.
There's another related effect in psychology
called the Hawthorne effect or the observer effect,
which is like if I prime someone
before I ask them questions,
then the responses will be different
than had I not prime them.
So if like when you do these psychological studies, like, if you know the context of the
study, then you're not going to act in a natural way, right?
So this is basically why you should take every psychological study with a grain of salt,
because, you know, people aren't going to act naturally when they're set in a, in a
white room with one chair and asked to do a task, right?
That's not their natural state. They know they're being observed, so they're going to behave
differently. And this sounds similar, like it has uses a similar set of words and a similar set of
concepts, but it's unrelated. Like the effect in psychology has nothing to do with the effect in quantum physics.
They just seem similar.
Yeah, there is a associated phenomenon that people talk about a lot, I guess, which is quantum
entanglement, the ability of something to travel faster than the speed of light.
And then this kind of gets stretched out to talk about
connection to the cosmos, because we're
becoming quantum entangled with somebody else through love and spiritual connection and
stuff like that.
What is and is not bullshit about quantum entanglement?
Yeah, that's a tough one because it's probably the most abstract in concepting quantum physics.
At its base is, if you try to understand quantum
physics from the point of view of information, maybe more of an engineering
point of view, then a lot of these things become clear. Again, the issue in
quantum physics is that at the same time it tells us that there is no
fundamental reality. There is no thing out there
that's independent of us waiting for us to come and observe it. But in order to make progress
as humans with our limited mental capabilities, we have to create these sort of concrete
stories of reality. But as soon as you do that, you've violated the one principle of quantum
physics.
So, we do this as physicists as well because it's difficult to carry around all of these
abstract conceptual concepts.
It's much easier to just have some concrete physical model in mind and then apply our
notions to that.
So with entanglement, you know, the basic idea is say you have two particles and you interact
them in some way, and then you separate them.
And if you've done it in a clever way, then the state of those particles is some specials
to state that we call entangled.
And what that means is if I measure a property of one
and I get some outcome, which is random,
I'll get the same outcome on the other one.
And it seems like, because I can choose
what measurement to do on one side,
that I have somehow influenced the other one.
And you'll see this in repeated by scientists and you know in science magazines and
there was a recent article even in the New York Times that quoted a scientist that said exactly
this. Intanglement is when things particles are separated and doing one thing in instantaneously
affects the other one. But that's not at all what happens. This is, you know, all of these problems that we've been talking about
repeated, but by scientists. Once you've committed to this story of there's
physical things in the world, and then you have this other piece of
information, oh, that, you know, they seem to be correlated in every possible way I
can choose, then you're
forced to say something instantaneous happened.
But that's just not true.
There's no influence, there's no information, nothing is traveling faster than light.
Now, everything is connected.
So gravity is a simple example. Gravity has no bound. The force of gravity
drops off the further two objects move away from each other. But there is a force of gravity
between you and the moon, and you and the sun, and you and all of the planets and all of the stars, right? It's just imperceptibly small.
But that connection between those two is mediated by Einstein's field, but it can't
travel faster than light.
So there's no sense in which those things can influence
me on any time scale that's relevant to me. I can shoot a laser and you know it will take
a few seconds to hit the moon and back. And if I go further and further away it just takes
longer. So yes, you know, in some real technical
sense, everything in the universe is connected. And probably everything has some small amount
of entanglement if you try to model it with quantum physics. But that doesn't actually
help you do anything, anything that was relevant on human scales, what in time or in space?
How much truth is there in people talking about using quantum entanglement to be able to
communicate in the future across galaxies? Well, we could use, we could entangle these
two things and then we'll spread them apart and then that means that we can communicate.
Is there a future in which you think that could happen?
No, I mean, we're always limited by the speed of life.
So if I entangle two particles, take one
to alpha centauri or something.
And then I've done it in a very clever way.
You saw all of our against engineering,
future technology, whatever.
What it means is they're just correlated.
It's like photocopying a book, right?
But not knowing what's in it.
And you separate those two books.
What do you know? You know that when those books are open,
they're going to have the same words in them.
But you can't use that to communicate faster than light.
In order to do anything with it, some more communication would happen.
Now, the correlation is useful. You can use these correlations in in some sense. There's everything about our our experience is
ultimately about correlations. This conversation deals with correlations. We
have a correlated dictionary of English, right? So that when I speak these words,
they have a meaning to you because there's this prior correlation
that has been set up.
But just because that correlation was there,
doesn't mean we could have said everything that needed to be said
without actually having the conversation, right?
So everything will be limited by the speed of light. And entanglement
is just a new kind of correlation that we can create in the world. And it can allow us
to do things more efficiently, but ultimately nothing, nothing miraculous. Any sense that that two humans can become entangled together?
No, so the...
I think the way I like to think about quantum physics is it's a theory about isolation.
So when you have an object
and you completely isolate it from its environment,
then if you use anything but quantum physics to describe that object
and when I say describe, I mean make predictions about the outcomes of experiments that you
might do, then you'll be wrong. You need to use quantum physics to describe that object
if it's isolated from its environment. Now, if you think about, okay, well, you know,
the atoms in my body are isolated, you know, why can I stick it in a MRI machine or something and call it in physics somehow?
Is the, is what's power in that technology?
It's that if you, if you've heard anything about atoms, it's that they are mostly empty
space.
So maybe you've heard this idea that the chair you're sitting on is mostly empty space.
And when you sit on the chair, you're not even touching the chair.
There's an enormous amount of space, at least on a small enough scale between you and the chair.
Nothing ever touches, right?
And the parts of the atoms, there's vast orders of magnitude and scale
between the size of the parts of the atoms, like protons, neutrons and electrons, and the actual space between them.
So basically everything is empty space.
So that's why quantum physics is useful to describe those things, because in some sense they're isolated from the other things around them.
Now, if you want to have something as big as a human body to be
usefully explained by quantum physics, you would have to isolate it.
And well, that means no light, no air, and it would cease to be a human pretty quickly.
So, yeah, you could get a large mass of object, two of them, and have them entangled,
but it would be nearly impossible to isolate them from their environment, and that's the real issue.
Like, the bigger the object is, the more ways it can interact
with stuff around it.
And so you have to remove all of those possible ways
in order for it to start to behave
in a way that's different from our everyday,
our everyday experience of the world.
And I think, you know, the largest thing
that we could probably get to be entangled might be a future
computer chip, right, that would be the basis of quantum computing technology.
But even then, the apparatus that you have to stick around it and to isolate it from
its environment would be huge.
So the places that they put these things, so if you've ever seen a picture of a quantum computer, it looks like, I mean, it looks like a giant tube, right?
An enormous sort of cylindrical that, and what that is is a dilution refrigerator and liquid helium is used to cool the inside of that thing down to thousands of a degree above absolute zero, which is that,
you know, thousands of times colder than even outer space. So we've created the most extreme
environment in the entire universe here on Earth, just so that we can, you know, watch, watch an
atom do something. You mentioned quantum computing, you also do a ton of stuff to do with computer
science, but supposedly on the cusp of a quantum computing age, and if we get there, it's going
to break all of the algorithms because everything that we've used to do credentials and security
for cryptography is going to be out the window. What can and can't quantum computing do?
is going to be out the window, what can and can't quantum computing do? Well, quantum, we don't know.
I mean, a great quote from, I think, like late 1940s from the Ben CTO of IBM was there
never be a market in the world for more than six computers.
So clearly, you know, even someone of that caliber can't make accurate predictions about
future technology.
So I mean, I can say a few things, but the disclaimers, I don't know, and nobody knows what
this will be useful for.
The first application of a transistor was for overhearing aid, right?
And now we carry around a billion of them in our pocket.
We have algorithms, so these are like recipes.
If you can transform this data into this data,
then you can solve some problem. One of them is factoring numbers,
and this is what you'd have to do
to break current encryption systems
that secure the internet. But I don't think that would be a big problem for
when quantum computing happens. And we can already see certain people with
really important secrets like state governments and large corporations that are moving to what's
called post quantum cryptography, different encryption
schemes that quantum computers, we think,
won't be able to break.
So if you say, you have to ask yourself, well,
how important is my secret?
And important is how long do I need to keep it? So you can't keep a secret forever. Maybe you need to keep it for 50 years.
And then if you say, well, if someone learned this in 50 years time, that would be bad.
And then you say, well, quantum computers might be around in 50 years, then I should probably
switch. But if you're like, you know, I just, I, you know, I don't care if people know this
next year. If someone wants to, if someone leaks my nudes in 20 years time, that's totally okay.
Yeah. So you don't, you don't have to worry right now. You can, you can keep using,
iCloud or whatever. Right. Yeah. That's fun. But if you think that's really important, maybe,
maybe you want to switch or, you switch or send some customer feedback to Apple,
asking them to switch. But we say quantum computers will break the internet, but probably not.
Most likely not. People are in the process of switching to post quantum cryptography,
and when quantum computers become ubiquitous then we just
will use something different. The other thing I think the kind of the thing that
you should keep in mind, the back of your mind, when you think about future
technology is that it happens slowly, right? You know, you can think about probably
the most transformative example would be something like chat GPT, where it had
the fastest adoption of any technology.
Yet it hasn't broken the way the world works, right?
We still basically interact and engage with the world the same way we did before.
And the same will be true of quantum technology.
It will happen over a longer time scale,
but it won't be like, okay, one day,
you just throw out your old computer
and now you have a quantum computer in your house.
Now it'd be slowly integrated
and the end user won't have a different experience
because that would be terrible, right?
At the end of the day, it's all driven by
the economy and the customers and what they want and what they'll buy. Henry Ford could
crawl out of the grave and step into a Tesla and happily drive it away. The interface hasn't changed,
even though the entire technology behind it is different. So with quantum computers,
if you're just an average consumer and you're like, oh, what
I care about this, will I still be able to use TikTok?
Then, of course, because we wouldn't develop technology that can't be used in the exact
same way and sold to the same set of people. The other promising future prospects of quantum technology include things like quantum simulations,
and that sounds like just more complicated and annoyingly complex, but it's incredibly important.
So when we design new materials, when we design new drugs, and when we want to understand how things are made,
we want to understand them at the deepest and most fundamental level possible.
So that is basically at the level of atoms.
Like if I could understand what sort of atoms I need to put together to make a super strong material or to make
a material that can conduct electricity without dissipation or resistance, then I could, you know,
there's no limit to the imagination at that point, right?
Like just, yeah, for example, imagine you could make a material called the superconductor that works at high temperatures.
These are the things that make like levitating trains and maybe you've seen the levitating frog on
YouTube. If you could create a material that can conduct electricity with absolutely no resistance,
then you wouldn't have to build coal-fired smoke plants
right next to cities, right? You could just throw a whole bunch of solar panels at the middle of the
desert and the entire world would have free electricity. Why can't we do that? Well, because it's nearly
impossible for us to simulate using conventional technology, what happens when we put even just a few
atoms together.
At the number of degrees of freedom and the amount of data that we'd have to track is just
impossible for even today's supercomputing clusters, which still attempt to do this.
A huge fraction of the world's energy budget is just simulating interactions
so that we can make better fertilizer. If you could create a computer that just natively
does this without having to attempt to encode all of this information in a really inefficient
way, which is what we seem to have to do with conventional computers. Then, yeah, then you have all of these sort of dream applications, but we don't know exactly
how we would do that with a quantum computer.
We have the basic fundamental idea and some simple examples and some understanding of what it would be required.
But if someone dropped a quantum computer on my lap, it's not like I would be able to
get going on this right away.
So the progress again will be slow.
We'll see incremental improvements, but maybe 30 years down the line, and if you look
back and say, okay, compare
it now to 30 years ago, you'll say it's a huge, you know, it's an enormous change.
What about many worlds? Are we part of a multiverse? Is the fact that I decided to say many worlds
instead of multiple worlds meant that we've branched off into a different universe as
well now? So quantum, sort of quantum metaphysics, quantum philosophy,
is it an interesting place? It's a very interesting place because it's like, it's like
woo, but it's people with PhDs. So it's kind of like, it's a really, it's a really strange thing.
So it's kind of like, it's a really, it's a really strange thing. But I think it just goes to show that, yeah, there's no matter how much you learn,
no matter how educated you are, you can still just get attached to things that are,
to me, comically, comically miraculous.
So I don't know, there's no. It's an interpretation of quantum physics.
So you have this idea of superposition
and then the cartoon explanation is like
things can be in two states at once.
But when you go to measure them,
only one of them occurs.
So you mentioned earlier,
shorting your cat.
So that's like a famous example of
you put the cat, you put a cat in a box
and inside the box there's a vial of poison in a box, and inside the box, there's a violet poison in a hammer,
which breaks the vial, but the hammer will only fall
if some quantum event happens.
So you arrange for that event to be in superposition,
an atom decayed or not decayed at the same time.
So that means the hammer has broken the vial, or not broken the Decade at the same time. So that means the hammer has broken the vial
or not broken the vial at the same time,
which means the cat is alive and dead at the same time.
But whenever you attempted to perform this thought experiment
and open the box, you'd either find an alive cat or a dead cat.
Okay, so then the many worlds interpretation says,
well, there's a multiverse and in one branch of the multiverse
There's an alive cat in the one branch. There's there's a dead cat and you as an observer are on one of these branches
It's not testable and it's not
It doesn't simplify anything.
I mean, I think for most people, it's a luring because it gives you this,
yeah, it gives you the sense that, you know, that you could have done things differently or that they're,
that you could have done things differently or that there are better options that you could take. There's another version of me that it was more successful or didn't have health problems.
I think this idea that you could go back and change things. It's just something that people, you know, people like,
but it's, there's no, it's not, it's not based on, on anything that's measurable. Like,
you can't test, test the many worlds hypothesis.
It removes the pressure of having to make decisions as well, because if the decision that you
make now, whether it be going left or going right,
is just one of a number,
and it almost creates this like,
liminal excuse,
this kind of get out of jail free card
that you have,
which I understand,
you know, it's psychologically comforting
to not be beholden to being locked into the future
by whatever decisions you
make now.
And I understand, it is part of me that really understands, is it agrophobia?
So people sometimes don't like to leave the house, I think.
I kind of get that.
I almost get the, you know, or the concern around germs and stuff like that.
Like there's just so many things that could happen that are outside of my control.
And if I don't make any sort of decision or commitment or if I try and change things
as little as possible, I try and make as few changes as possible to whatever state I'm
in now, that would suggest that I'm going to stay safe moving forward.
It's a fundamental fear of the unknown, the unexpected, the uncertain, the future. I understand, I understand why that's psychologically disquieting. But again,
with the many worlds thing, if the quantum physicist says it's untestable and therefore difficult
for us to work out whether or not it's true, I don't know. You can allow people to indulge in it as a sort of psychologically
comforting fantasy. So the person who developed it, his name is Hugh Everett, the third,
which is the worst, the worst one. Regenerations of he was. of his. He had a terrible life. People didn't take his ideas seriously. And he also developed
this notion of quantum suicide, which was basically that there is, you know, like think about quantum Russian rule that, right? You know, in six of the world, there's six worlds, and only one of which I'm dead in, right?
And in five of which I live.
So, you know, why not play the game?
Because I'll survive in one of them.
So if you, you know, imagine this sort of thought experiment, right? Like someone says, a flip of coin heads,
I give you a million dollars' tails, you die.
Then you should play, if you believe the many worlds,
you should play the game, right?
Because in one of the worlds, you're a million dollars richer.
And in the other one, you don't care.
So I think it sounds innocuous,
but I think if you really took it to its logical conclusion,
you'd be forced to also believe some pretty ridiculous things, and that's basically my
problem with it.
I've heard you use the term not even wrong.
I've never heard that before.
Can you explain what that is for the people that are uninducted?
I recently was told that it goes back to Pauli, which is a quantum physicist, but there's a book
by that title. And it is basically about, well, the book was written about these ideas and theoretical
physics that are just not testable.
You can't even say that they're wrong.
It's just a mental masturbation essentially
that you come up with all these ideas and theories,
and you can say, well, because they have mathematical symmetry,
they're beautiful, therefore there must be true,
things like that, but a practical person would come along and say
I can't tell you not to believe that because it's not even testable and you know
the the mental state that you put yourself in is difficult to get out of
so yeah you're it's not even wrong I can't even say it's wrong it's what is it it's nothing right
and say it's wrong, what is it? It's nothing, right?
Yeah, that's maybe one of the most,
like not kind of patronizing,
but good insults or pushbacks that I can think of
when someone starts spouting out a lot of horseshit.
You mentioned previously that you wrote a book
in the past that was a love letter to physics and quantum physics
and this is your hate mail. Did I see on your Twitter that you've been receiving genuine hate
mail from some people that are a part of the spiritual community that took a little bit of upset at
what you've been pushing? Yeah, I saw that off, to be honest. It's the recommendation I give in the book is to just not engage.
There's no, really no good can come out of it
unless you're prepared to put in the time
and it takes a lot of time.
So what if people been accusing you of?
Well, it's, I mean, they accuse me of everything
you can imagine, like that I've lost my way,
I need to find Jesus, you know,
quote, sort of, yeah, like, religious stuff to, um,
to like, uh, they have their pet theory and, and they, you know, they'll
accuse me that I don't really understand quantum physics because, yeah,
and then they'll just repeat something that's, again, not even wrong.
And it's not even worth, it's not even worth my time to engage because it would be like the conversation
that you have with that woman that they would just repeat themselves or go in circles.
That conversation I actually took an awful lot away from it. But yeah, man, I think as somebody that is
world class expert at receiving comments
from the internet,
my theory is absolutely just engage where you want to
and draw the line at that.
Like if you want to find out,
I wanted to find out from that girl
and it was a very enjoyable and respectful conversation.
And I wanted to find out what do you mean when you say raise your frequency?
What do you mean when you say I believe in quantum physics?
What do you mean?
What do you mean?
That was perfectly enjoyable.
It wasn't cantankeras at all or anything else.
But the line on the internet is just don't feed the trolls unless you want to
unless you've got some spare food lying around and some spare sanity that you want to throw at them. I have friends Destiny, this guy, he's a streamer and he lives, he absolutely breeds
for opposition and for antagonism and for debate and stuff like that. And that's his lifeblood. It's like, he's a plant and that's the sun.
Whereas for me and perhaps for you too,
that's not how I would enjoy spending my Saturday afternoon.
So I would choose to do other things.
And every time that I see some of my smart friends
on the internet getting into spats with people.
And I understand in some regards, if you use it to kind of make an example to signal boost a bad idea and show how easily
it can be fixed, that's not necessarily a bad way to do things, but one on one in the DMs
or in a message thread or a thread on Twitter or whatever, trying to slowly chip
away at some person's worldview.
It's like, look, I've done the work.
I've broadcasted my stuff in a video or in a book or at a presentation or whatever.
And if you disagree with that, that's fine.
But I don't know what you think my time or your time or anybody else's time
is worth, but I can promise you that it is worth way, way more than trying to convince
somebody that doesn't like me and doesn't agree with my worldview that they're in the
wrong.
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Don't feed the trolls.
I think it's good advice.
It will often have the opposite effect than you expect.
You catalyze the trolls rather than, yeah, it's the day.
Unless you're prepared to put in the time, like I, you know, if you have a family member
that believes in some conspiracy, then maybe you want to slowly kind of remove that, remove those beliefs.
But it probably takes, the problem is that it takes orders of magnitude more time to
fix than it does to create.
It takes me a second to create bullshit on the internet.
And then the damage is almost irreparable because even if all of the scientists in the world
went to debunk that, well, I could, I now, I could just create ten more pieces of bullshit
in the time that took one day.
Yeah, have you heard of Brandelini's law, which is what you're describing?
No.
Brandelini's law, also known as the bullshit asymmetry principle, it takes a lot more
energy to refute bullshit than to produce it, hence the world is full of unrefuted bullshit.
Yeah. There's a lot of, there's a law for everything, including the production of bullshit
on the internet. Dr. Chris Ferry, ladies and gentlemen, if people want to keep up to date
the stuff that you do and check out some of your work, why should you go? So the website is csfary.com and there you can contact me, you can follow me on all the social media
platforms though I tend not to use them very often but yeah a bit secret but you can contact me
via my website if you want or follow me on apparently you can follow people even on Amazon now
so you can follow me on Amazon. Alia, Chris, I appreciate you. Thank you for today.
you