Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas - 133 | Ziya Tong on Realities We Don't See

Episode Date: February 8, 2021

It's a truism that what we see about the world is a small fraction of all that exists. At the simplest level of physics and biology, our senses are drastically limited; we only see a narrow spectrum of electromagnetic waves, and we only hear a narrow band of sound. We don't feel neutrinos or dark matter at all, even as they pass through our bodies, and we can't perceive microscopic objects. While science can help us overcome some of these limitations, they do shape how we think about the world. Ziya Tong takes this idea and expands it to include the parts of our social and moral worlds that are effectively invisible to us — from where our food comes from to how we decide how wealth is allocated in society. Support Mindscape on Patreon. Ziya Tong received a B.A. in psychology and sociology from the University of British Columbia, and an M.A. in communications from McGill University. She has served as host, writer, director, producer, and reporter from a number of science programs, most notably Daily Planet on Discovery Canada. She is a Trustee of the World Wildlife Fund, and served on the Board of WWF Canada. Her book The Reality Bubble: How Science Reveals the Hidden Truths that Shape Our World was published in 2019. Web site IMDb page WWF page Wikipedia Amazon author page Twitter

Hey, everyone, it's Cal Penn. I'm inviting you to join the best-sounding book club you've ever heard with my podcast, Earsay, the Audible and I-Heart Audio Book Club. Every episode, I nerd out with amazing guests and dive into the best new audiobooks available on Audible. It's the book club for your ears. Listen to Earsay, the Audible and I-Heart Audio Club on the I-Heart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Mindscape podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. And I'm pretty sure I don't need to tell anyone who is listening to this podcast that there's a difference between the world of our everyday senses, the world we see around us and the picture of that world that we construct mentally with tables and chairs and people and stuff like that, and the world as it really is. And this distinction between the world that we immediately see and the world as it is

comes in a number of different flavors. You know, we could talk about quantum mechanics, and we could talk about the fact that the real world in some sense, sense, as far as we know it right now, should be thought of as a quantum wave function of a set of fields in space time rather than a bunch of objects with, you know, masses and positions located in the universe. But there's another sense. It's sort of a more down-to-earth sense in that, you know, we just don't see, or sense, I should say, everything that is around us. And in the most obvious way, we don't see the entire electromagnetic spectrum, right? We see visible light. We don't

see radio waves or x-rays or whatever. We don't see neutrinos or gravitational waves or all the dark matter particles that are passing through us. There's a very direct sense in which we don't see all of the world. And there's another kind of deeper sense, which is that we tend to pay attention to certain aspects of the world, right? To things that happen on more or less human scales. So we know that there's microorganisms inside our body and whatever, and we know that there are events that only happen once every million years or something like that, but those don't really impinge upon our everyday awareness. And to some extent, science helps us overcome these limitations, right? We can look at very tiny things, very big things, we can think about very short time scales and

very long time scales. So today's guest, Zayatong, who's very well known in Canada. She's the co-host of Daily Planet, which is a science program on Discovery Canada. And she's also producer, host, writer, director for a number of different science shows. A couple of years ago, she wrote a book called The Reality Bubble. And it's about this, about this fact that we sort of create a version of reality from the data that we immediately get. And there's a whole bunch of data that we filter out. But the reason why I thought it was worth having a Minescape episode about this was because

Zaya goes beyond this idea, that we don't have immediate sensory access to everything that's going on in the world, to draw sort of philosophical and even social, moral, economic, political lessons about this. It's not just that we don't see microorganisms. We also don't see the power structures around us. We don't see the invisible features of our lives that we take for granted. We don't see our food being produced. We don't see where the plastic goes that we throw away. We don't see the rules that we choose to live by, or if we know that they exist, we take them for granted. So she develops this idea of the reality bubble of we filter out much of the data that exists out there and only accept some of it

to go beyond just the physical and the biological to deeper questions about the social world in which we live and whether we should, right? What should we be thinking about? What are the things we should be aware of that we're not necessarily? So whatever your take on what we should do about these things, I'm of the opinion that we should know about them, right? Even if you kind of don't want to do anything about this factory farm or this power structure out there, he should know that it exists, right? And that's why I thought this is a good conversation to have. There's a tremendous amount of food for thought

that we have here. It's a very ambitious program that she's talking about, and I think you'll enjoy thinking about it. There's a lot to chew on. So let's go. Zayatong, welcome to the Mindscape podcast. A joy to be on the Mindscape podcast, Sean. It is, and I'm glad you finally recognize it.

You know, so many people have to be, cajoled into thinking that. No, we're glad to have you here, and we're going to talk about your book, The Reality Bubble. So I do actually want to do more, I don't know, throat clearing or scene setting than usual, because there's a lot going on in this book. So why don't we start with you telling us what you mean by the phrase, the reality bubble? Sure. I mean, I think that many of us are familiar with bubbles of different sorts, whether we're talking about real estate bubbles or tech bubbles. And usually when you're in a bubble, you're sort of living in a distorted reality. You're with a group of people who have an idea of reality. And it's sort of a

fiction. And there's a much bigger picture reality out there. And if you're basically, if you're not paying attention to that reality, it can sometimes crash its way in. So bubbles tend to be quite dangerous. And what I'm actually suggesting in this book is that our entire sort of of idea of reality beyond what the human being is able to perceive with our five senses, that scientists have been able to detect a different reality that we're not exactly privy to. And because we're not privy to it, we're actually in quite a dangerous position. Right. And so is it fair to think of it as an update of Plato and his cave, that metaphor? I think that, you know, obviously people like Plato and, you know, different people through the ages, the notion of Maya and the notion of illusions, this has been something that has been with us for millennia for sure. And this is perhaps an updated version simply because with science, we actually have these tools that we can detect this reality with. So it's not so much philosophical. It's something a little bit more factual. So when I got into reality, I didn't.

want to get into, you know, whether reality exists or not. I wanted to look at realities that we could actually prove existed. And, you know, that was one of the things that I came across working as a science broadcaster, I think now for about 17 years, not to date myself too much. But, you know, every day on the show that I worked on Daily Planet, we had different scientists. So, you know, one day or even one part of the show, there would be a soil scientist, and then the next part you'd have a rocket scientist. And what I realized is they were seeing fundamentally different bigger picture realities or sometimes micro realities that existed in my own world landscape that I was not able to perceive.

And so when Naomi Klein called this book a sort of kaleidoscopic look at reality, it's because it was. It's almost like sometimes I picture the dragonfly's eye, you know, with that compound lens of, you know, 28,000 lenses on it. And speaking to so many different scientists, it was really exciting because I could see that they all had this really different vision of the world that they could prove existed. And that was the exciting part. But on the flip side, what sort of really sort of the engine of the idea for the book took place in the shower. It was one of those shower thoughts.

People have those shower thoughts that they post on Reddit all the time. And the book talks about this idea, which is in the 21st century, there are cameras everywhere, except where our food comes from, where our energy comes from, and where our waste goes. So that really struck me because we're the most powerful species on Earth, and yet we're fundamentally quite blind to how we survive. So how is it that we have this incredible ability to see, you know, outer space, under water, through walls, all these different visual capabilities? And yet when it comes to some of the fundamentals, we actually can't see very clearly at all.

And you've seen, I'm sure, that meme on the internet where they say, you know, at the beginning of every horror disaster movie, there's a scientist who's, you know, heralding a warning. And as I look through these lenses, I started seeing those warnings. And I wanted to put those warnings together in a book. Right. So I wanted to get that in your words because, you know, given the description, of the reality bubble, as you initially described it, I think there are a couple of places that listeners of this podcast might immediately go, which is sort of not the right places to go. So I wanted to let it be very clear.

Like, one place is the idea that the world that we see around us looks classical or, you know, ordinary, even pre-classical manifest image, folk science. Look, there are tables and chairs. But there's also a deeper underlying reality, which is quantum mechanics and, wave functions and quantum fields, and that is not really what you're focusing on in this book. Certainly not, because that's not my area of expertise. I mean, that's something that I would love to hear from you, like how you see a table or a chair.

Do you see it as sort of like this fizz of particles? I mean, of course, this is one area that we can't necessarily see, although we can detect. So while I do address those sorts of things, that's not particularly the realm at which I go. That's right, which is fine, which is perfect. And maybe I'll be on your podcast someday and we can talk about the underlying wave function. You sure will. But then there's the other use of the word bubble that has been, you mentioned housing bubbles and stock market bubbles. But recently, in recent years, the idea of a filter bubble and an online sort of news and information bubble that individuals can be in has become very prevalent. And that's related to what you're talking about. But it's also not exactly. the same thing. You're being a little bit more scientific here. Yeah, exactly, because I mean, I think that we are aware that there are political bubbles. And, you know, that is a bubble in a sense that you've got a certain select group of people with an insular form of thinking. Yeah. But in contrast,

you have other political bubbles that are more, you know, differences of opinion or differences of morality or differences of value. Whereas what I'm talking about is a bubble where you, your perceptual faculties tell you one thing. And then scientific tools and technology can basically envision a very different reality. And when there's a mismatch, that's when you have something that's quite dangerous. That's right. And I do want to, you know, I feel bad about doing this. But in some sense, I want to give away the punchline right away.

Because, you know, people don't always listen to the podcast. I don't even know what the punchline of my own book is. So I look forward to this. Let me run by you what I think a punchline is and then you can fix it. You know, given the description that you gave of the reality bubble, and in fact, given all of the text on the back cover of your book, the subject in the book could easily have just been a list of anecdotes and factoid about cool things that science has taught us

about the world that our immediate senses don't have access to. And you have a little bit of that, but then you have a much, I want to say, deeper message or more profound. message about not just the physics and biology of our ways of sensing the world, but then you get into political, social, moral, economic impacts of this. You know, not just we don't see ultraviolet light, but we don't see the invisible power structures around us. And, you know, I think that's, I'm not, it's not really a bait and switch. You're not being dishonest about it, but I liked the fact that, you know, you really tried to see a bigger picture than just some science stories.

Oh, well, I'm so grateful that that's the punchline you got out of it because then I think I did my job properly. Yeah, I mean, I think what I found missing, you know, they say often try to write a book that you haven't seen on the bookshelves is one that actually does bridge politics with science. So political science. You know, quite often we know that scientists are, you know, creating and, you know, documenting more of an objective reality. so we don't tend to look for the politics there. But of course, that's quite necessary in this day and age when we look at things like climate change. And my book isn't exactly all about climate change, as you know. It's about a whole other spectrum of things.

But I think that it's really important to be able to bridge that gap. And that's one of the reasons why the book really focuses on rebel scientists. You know, Chapter 1 is looking at Van Leavenhook, and it is looking at Galilean, and looking at how, you know, these two fathers, these big fathers of science and microscopy today were really mocked and derided and considered charlatans. Van Lavenhook certainly was because he was seeing these invisible animal cules that, you know, in the 16th century basically didn't exist. Everybody thought he was a little bit mad.

And the same thing with the church really wanting to silence Galileo. So there is always a political. component to when you're trying to challenge the status quo. So that was definitely a component that I wanted to add. And my good friend Astra Taylor has been a guest on your show. And we're friends because we do have a strong interest in the political arena. So that is definitely a part of the book that I'm glad came forward for you. I always have to think carefully about the discourse around rebels,

scientists. And this would take, I don't want to get too much into it, but I will give you a chance to respond. It would be a whole podcast in itself. But, you know, like you say, people like Galileo and Van Leavenhoek were, were derided as charlatans. But, you know, most people who are derided as charlatans are charlatans. Exactly. And that's exactly what snake oil was all about. Yeah, yeah, exactly. People who want to take it as a badge of honor that they're derided as charlatans. I must be doing something right because so many people disagree with me. I don't think that quite logically follows. So we have to be careful about the valorization of rebels. I mean, the successful rebels like Galileo are absolutely crucial,

but it's hard being a rebel. Yeah, but I mean, when you're actually creating something that is, again, documenting, I mean, I suppose, or exposing something that's paradigm shifting, then you're going up against the status quo. And by that very nature, you are rebellious, not because you're choosing to be rebellious or provocative in any sense. I mean, you know, Galileo was just basically saying, hey, I'm seeing these mountains and these valleys on the moon, and we thought it was a smooth orb, and by the way, it isn't. And that we might not be the center of the universe. But that's, of course, you know, as many of your listeners will well know, something that the church

absolutely could not allow people to believe. So there was a sort of forced blindness on the population because that would challenge the word of God. But of course, as you know, that's just the very, very beginning of the book. Yeah, exactly. And honestly, you know, it's right on target for the podcast because if I think back to, you know, over 130 episodes ago, the very introduction I did to the idea of Minescape was if there's one theme I want to sort of tease out, it's that not just the importance of being rational and thinking about the world. but the importance of choosing which things to think about in the world, right? Paying attention to some things and not paying attention to others can be just as important for the conclusions we land on as the reasoning process we use once we pay attention to those things. Yeah, absolutely. Podcasts are small businesses.

I'll confess the Mindscape podcast is sufficiently small that there are no employees other than me. But if I wanted to hire someone, I would go to Indeed.com. Indeed is the hiring site that helps you find quality candidates with Indeed instant match. Indeed searches through the millions of resumes in their database to help show you great candidates instantly so you can do the part you really need faster, meeting and hiring great people. Unlike some sites, Indeed gives you full control and payment flexibility delivering a quality shortlist right away. With Indeed, there are no long-term contracts. You can pause your account at any time and you only pay for what you need.

With Instant Match, you see a list of great candidates with 08, and Indeed delivers four times more hires than all other job sites combined. If you want your quality shortlist fast, you need Indeed. Right now, our listeners get a free $75 credit to upgrade your job post at Indeed.com slash Minescape. This is Indeed's best offer available anywhere, a $75 credit at Indeed.com slash Minescape. Offers is valid through March 31, terms and conditions apply. And the final thing, the final bit of throat clearing before we get into the substance of your book, I apologize for this. But, you know, one of the features of your book, which I'm sure is entirely intentional, is that you say things that make people feel uncomfortable, right? Oh, I do.

Yes. Yes. People are just going to say, I don't want to hear that. And, you know, hearing certain things about the world might naively imply some moral or political conclusions. and I think that's why people will feel uncomfortable about it or might seem to imply them anyway. But I think we can all agree. I'm going to propose that we can all agree.

Let me know if you agree that we should all be able to face the facts, right? Like regardless of what conclusions you draw about how to think about the world and what is right and what is wrong, we can't hide from our view those facts which make us feel a little uncomfortable. Yes. And so as you know from reading the book, It's divided into three main sort of sections. And the first section really looks at those biological blind spots that we have.

These are the things that we can't see because of our senses. But the second section of the book really looks a little bit more at our willful blind spots. And these are some things that we're unable to see and sometimes that we deliberately don't want to see. And then the third section of the book is more civilizational blind spots. So this looks at some of the things that we don't see from an intergenerational lens that we've inherited, so that we've normalized such that we no longer see them. So there's different ways of not being able to see different forms of blind spots throughout the book. So don't you dare act surprised if I say that some of the things you say make people uncomfortable.

It's clear that this is part of the plan all along. Yeah. Yeah. And especially as a writer, you have to think about some of those things, because you know if you're writing about things that are going to make people uncomfortable, that when you're sitting with a book, it's very easy to just close the book, right? You might not want to read further if it's something that disturbs you. But at the same time, you have to structure a book as an author such that you can keep people interested and keep them going throughout. So that was some strategic thinking that went into the writing process. This is why professors are often not good at writing trade books because they're used to having a captive audience who gets a great,

at the end of the course. And they can start with the most boring parts. But okay, anyway, good. Throat clearing done. I'm glad that we're, you know, the landscape is a little bit clear. And now we can do some science. Let's start with some of the sort of scientific aspects of the story you're telling. I mean, you talk about, let's just go the literal, most literal interpretation of what you're

talking about. What are the ways in which there are literally things going on all around us that we don't see or sense personally and direction? correctly. Okay. So I mean, you know, even when I'm sitting here right now speaking with you, it would seem that I'm alone in a room. But, you know, once you start getting, you know, a micro lens on the world, I start to realize that, of course, there's trillions of beings that surround me. I'm in a very, very busy, busy office space right now. And even surrounded by creatures that are crawling on my face, for example. So one of the one of the very busy office space,

example. So one of the things that I talk about are the Demodex mites that, you know, are on almost all adults by the time we reach adult age. They're arachnids. So they're sort of relatives of spiders. And, you know, one of the strange things about them, of course, is while they have mouths, they can eat the sebum or other detritus on your face, they don't have anuses. So when they crawl about on your face every night, you know, they kind of, you know, eventually when they, when they pass, they do sort of explode their internal guts all over your face. And then inside of their guts are even smaller creatures, which are, you know, bacteria. And Lavin Hook being the very first person to ever spot them with his microscope. So of course, there's a, there's a huge living,

buzzing, vibrant reality with billions and billions of creatures that I'm simply unable to see. And of course, on the other side, perhaps on the macro end of it, and there are so many more spectrum-wise, but I think many of us were aware when scientists were able to image the black hole not too long ago and to be able to see something like that, something so massive, you know, it's so much larger has such a greater mass than our very own son, and yet it was completely invisible to the naked eyes. So there are many, many things that surround us that are invisible to the naked eye. I mean, forensics workers for another are very well aware. I was actually just watching the documentary, The Dissident the other day. This is the one about Jamal Khashoggi.

And in Istanbul, of course, the police officers went in and what looked like a perfectly clean room, once they sprayed luminal on the room, which detects the iron and the hemoglobin, you start seeing the blue light. You start seeing the blood splatters all around this room. And it, it starts to reveal this really grisly crime scene, this murder scene that you wouldn't see at all with the naked eye. So there are so many examples that pepper the book of ways in which we're able to see. And I think one of the ones that struck me quite a bit, is a story about a surfer whose name is Mike Sturdivant. And he's a surfer in Florida.

And he loved going surfing, loved going to the beach all the time. And then suddenly he started getting, you know, sick. He started getting people on the beach around him as well, started getting lesions and, you know, sores and just feeling very, very unwell. But there seemed no reason for this. because everything looked just fine. You know, nothing externally had changed. And he used to go out at night on his boat, and he had a UV lamp that he would use to look for petrol leaks on the back of his boat.

So he decided to take that lamp out one night, and he shone it on the beach. And when he did, he was shocked. And I was shocked when I saw the images, because there are images online. The beach was glowing, this orange, color. And what was the cause of that? You know, he had absolutely no idea. So he actually does, does have a geologist friend. And the two of them together started taking samples. They took something like 70 samples to science labs to try to figure out what this bizarre, glowing orange material was on

the beach. And that's when they discovered that it was actually corrects it dispersant. So 200 miles away, of course, there was the BP oil spill. And during the BP oil spill, the desire was to, to use dispersant, not so much to get rid of the oil, but to disperse the oil. And in dispersing the oil, what they were doing was they were invisibleizing the oil. But here was a man who was finally able to see it. And, you know, a beach is considered clean if 1% of one meter of it does not have any oil deposits on it. But of course, if you look at it with a different light, quite literally, then you can see that there's a much more dangerous reality that is just beneath the surface. Yeah, I don't want to let go of the mite story, actually, because it is emblematic of what's going on here because part of the message that you have that we'll get into more is sort of not just that we see visible light and not ultraviolet or infrared, that's part of it, but also we see on certain scales of time and space.

And I think that if you tell this story of the mites living on your face to someone, their instant reaction would be, Well, surely I would notice that if there are all these mites on my face. But the only reason you don't, I presume, is because they're very tiny. Yes, yes, exactly. How tiny are they? How tiny are? You know, I don't know the exact size of one of the Dimodex mites, but I mean, I've looked at them online, and they're tiny enough that they can very snugly fit into the roots of your eyelashes.

So they're not so tiny that you need a scanning, a light, electron microscope to be able to see them. Yeah, so they're tiny, but, you know, I mean, they can, they can crawl something like 17, I think it was something like 17 millimeter across your face an hour. So if that kind of gives you a size of a sense of how small they would be to have to make that sort of journey across your face. But definitely they're small enough that, you know, you can't feel their little tiny arachnid footprints walking across your face.

in the evening. Are they hiding in nooks and crannies or they're just all over the place on your face? They're actually mostly in your eyelashes, but they come to hunt at night and mate at night. Well, not hunt, actually. They're basically coming to feed at night. And so that's when they make that sort of that journey. And for me, you know, again, just going back into that place of writing, because the first chapter is about scale, as you know, there's different chapters that look at things from different angles. But I couldn't help, but constantly feed. like I was in that microscopic reality. I was picturing, you know, when I would picture my nose, I no longer pictured it just does this sort of thing on my face, but more like an Everest for a Demodex

might. You know what I mean? Like a huge obstacle, a nightly obstacle that these little creatures have to get across in order to mate with each other from one eye to the other. So it's fun because once you start playing with scale, of course, you just start thinking very, very differently. And, you know, you look at grass very differently. You look at the world of, insects very, very differently. And I had, I had the pleasure of meeting an entomologist in England named Tim Cockrell, who is one of the, you know, one of the last, a man who, A, wants to revive the flea circus, but B, you know, is a wonderful, thoughtful entomologist. And we sat down and we had a beer together. And, you know, the book does start off with this quote that he says, which is, you know,

quite often you'll just be sitting, you know, at a pub having a beer and a little speck of something will fall into your beer and you'll just pick it up and flick it away like it's soot or like it's nothing. But that's actual animal diversity. And if you had the right lens and you could look, you know, he actually found a species, I believe, a brand new species previously unknown to science in a cup of tea. So there's a just a, I mean, I think. and I hope the sense that you got from the book is that there's a real sense of enchantment and awe and wonder alongside the horror that comes with science when you start looking deeply. Well, I did want to ask about this, and I'm sure this is going to show up again later in the conversation, but one of the things that happens when you tell a story like the mites or whatever, there's a million different versions of this story because we're not very aware of what's going on on very tiny scales. you do feel a little horrified, a little disgusted at this concept, but it's kind of an inappropriate response, right?

Because you're not saying, in this case, unlike the beach story, you're not saying something has gone terribly wrong and it's invisible to us. You're saying something is completely natural. And actually, you know, there might even be some symbiosis where the mites are helpful to us. I'm not sure about that. But it's not wrong. You know, the mites are going to be there. And you feel disgust because you're not used to it. but in fact, it's just part of what it means to be a big macroscopic organism.

Yeah. And I think that I do write about people who call themselves disgustologists in the book, right? Because, and that's a little bit later when we start talking about some of the horrors of how we treat our fellow species. But there's a lot that we don't want to know and with good reason. You know, if we think that said species or, you know, carries disease or, and that comes up quite often with insects or if we see things like lesions or death, these are all the things that, putrefaction, all of these things we've traditionally really tucked away and tried to keep away from our society and ourselves. And there's been a sort of an evolutionary biological mechanism that makes good sense for wanting to do that. things that discussed us traditionally haven't been really great for us. Right, not healthy.

Yeah, but you're right. In terms of the mites, this is not something that is harmful. It's just more harmful when you scale up the animal and you can see what it looks like on a larger scale. And another scale of which that happens is the microbiome, right, where I think that the numbers are not quite pinned down, but at least there's a reasonable estimate that many more of the living cells in a human body, are bacteria in our gut than human cells, right? We're sort of a delivery mechanism for bacteria more than anything else. Yeah, I think the number now, I mean, you know, if you see a meme, it'll say that we're outnumbered 10 to 1, but I think it's 1.3 to 1. So we are outnumbered 1.3

to 1. We're slightly more bacteria than we are human. But yeah, it's incredible because, of course, when we're born, we're born pretty much bacteria-free. So we pick up a lot of lot of hitchhikers through this journey of life. Well, and it goes to one of the other points you emphasize in the book, which is that the notion of a clear dividing line between the self and the rest of the world is fuzzier than we conceptualize it to be. We human beings are open systems that are constantly interacting with the world around us and what to call us and what to call the other is not always perfectly clear. Yeah, yeah. And that, That's, you know, that's the chapter that is quite tricky in a sense, right?

Because it is really the chapter of the illusion of the fact that we don't see the interconnectedness of all things. So I had some fun there in terms of looking for examples and ways to illustrate how porous we are. And one of the things that I became really quite fascinated, of course, by is neutrinos. because, you know, tiny, tiny little point-sized particles and a hundred trillion of them are just flying through our bodies at this very moment. And we are kind of ghost-like figures, you know, in a sense that we're so porous. And so I was really quite interested in looking at that notion of porosity and how we are made up of all these sort of atomic elements that are basically like molecular Lego that are constantly interchanging and exchanging with the outside world

and rebuilding our bodies and rebuilding the universe. And of course, you would know that so much of our bodies are made up of hydrogen from the Big Bang, in fact. So it's really incredible how ancient we are as beings, as well as how new we are, as condensed beings. Let's put it that way. Well, and there's an interesting philosophy question to get into. I'm not sure how much you did, because it's not really the subject of your book, but the very idea of taking a world that, let's simplify it as a world that is made up of particles, right, protons and neutrons and electrons, and then forces acting between them,

you know, the various physical forces, and then imposing a higher level emergent description on those things to say, oh, there's a language in which we can talk about human beings and tables and chairs, and this is very natural to us. It's automatic. You don't need to really teach children, the philosophy of emergence to get there. But when you step back and try to explain, well, what are the principled reasons why I take this table to be an individual and not, you know, the combination of this table and the number five? That's not a very good individual. That's a tricky kind of thing. And bringing up this porous nature of the human self highlights that trickiness. Yeah. And, you know, it's something that even young children,

are quite aware of, you know, you're right when you say that we don't necessarily have to learn it. We're aware of this sort of sense of object permanence. And, you know, young children realize that one object, you know, two objects cannot exist in one space. And yet, as you start to get into these other trickier sort of quantum questions, which are beyond my scope, I would most certainly say, that that reality certainly begins to blur quite significantly. And then you get to ask those much deeper philosophical questions. So I would wonder, even from your perspective, you know, what kind of lens you see the world through, given your background, when you look at physical reality and the interconnectedness of things? How do you sort of put that all together?

Yeah, you know, but I'm a big believer in emergence and levels of description. In my whole book, the big picture was all about how there are different vocabularies in which you can use to describe the world. One of them is there's just one big quantum mechanics. wave function. But then there's many others. Oh, there are particles and forces. Oh, there are chemicals. Oh, there are cells and, you know, all of these things.

And but it's, it's the sort of, even though that's natural to us, it's, it is not easy to say why it's so natural to us. I mean, clearly part of the story is it's, there's an enormous amount of stuff going on and we have to simplify, right? We have to, uh, coarse grain the world into individual little objects to talk about them. Like, the story I tell is when you go on a date with someone and they say, tell us about your, tell me about yourself, you don't list all of your atoms, right? That's not a very useful piece of information. You don't. Well, at Caltech we do, but, you know, the rest of the world,

it doesn't really happen that much. In other words, there's much more useful information to give than just a list of atoms, even though the list of atoms would be very comprehensive. By by sort of packaging the world into these discrete units, we get leverage over. it in a very useful way. And our brain does a lot of the work for us, right? So that's sort of what I was interested in teasing apart, too, is, you know, the taken for granted world that we have that is sort of delivered to us that we sort of take for granted as this is the way it is when, in fact, that might not necessarily be the way it is.

And I don't know if we want to skip ahead, but of course, you know, the third chapter is really looking at how different animals and different species see the world. And from what biologists have been able to uncover, that's a very different picture, again, using biological systems and a biological lens to see the world. You know, a bat would see the world in a completely different way than we would. Yes, Thomas Nagel famously wrote an article, right? You know, we all know that it's hard to know what it's like to be a bat. But I also, I mean, there's a, the other angle on the same question is you don't need to go to quantum mechanics to see the importance of this problem. artificial intelligence is faced with this problem because computers don't naturally divide the world up into tables and chairs and teaching them the common sense that every baby knows is a tricky thing.

That's kind of the, you know, I mean, artificial intelligence certainly has its biases. And I'm quite troubled, by the way in which it's used, especially in surveillance states. But it's interesting to see how artificial intelligence does parcel out its pattern recognition. is so fundamentally different than ours, that we don't even understand the logic by which it comes to its conclusions, and yet it often does come to the right conclusion. That's a beautiful sort of thing in itself. It is, and it's beautiful on the biological side too, right? Like our brains are not blank slates. We're built in with some way of thinking about the world that turns out to be very useful. Yes, yes, especially, I think, you know, I mean, we are still, you know, we haven't evolved that much

from, you know, 70,000 years ago or 200,000 years ago, we're still these sort of Neanderthals wearing suits in a way sometimes, I think. You know, we still have a lot of the same biological senses that our ancestors did. So, you know, I'm wearing a little gizmo that I just recently purchased. It's a ring that is kind of like a fitbit. It's a ring that sort of keeps track of my sleep cycles. And every morning I can see, you know, how much time I spent in REM sleep. and light sleep and when I was awake because the cats jumped on me and stuff like that. It is a brave new world of sensory apprehension of our world, right? We human beings are sort of melding with the technology that we're building

to give us different ways of thinking about the world around us and ourselves. Yes. And I think the question is, and the deeper question is, obviously, what are those sensors for and who are the powers who set up those sense? sensors ultimately and where is that data sort of accumulated, right? Because your FitFit, you know, it's being sold to you for the convenience of, you know, being able to monitor your heart or where you're traveling or where you're running or what have you. But ultimately, the bigger question is the database and who owns the data of all of our sensory knowledge, our combined

collective sensory knowledge today, which is sometimes, of course, used against us. Absolutely. And I do want to get there. But there's one last thing I want to cover on the sort of purely scientific side of thing. Oh, no, I love that you're going step by step. It's fantastic. Yeah, but I mean, there's a lot of steps. So I don't want to, you know, have wallow too much. And you're raining me back in from other chapters. I can see that. Well, the other thing on the biological side that you point to, which I've often, you know, thought about a lot, is this idea of scales of time and space, right? You know, we pay attention not just to what's in front of us, but to things that are the size that we are, right?

Like we've already talked about the mites or the microbes, which are very tiny, and we ignore things. We don't pay as much attention to the bigger things. It'll just look sort of smooth and homogeneous to us. But that's really interesting when you get to time, right? You know, human beings have a lifespan, and we're very good at dealing with things that happen on month or year-long time scales, but we're really bad at things that happen on thousand-year-long time scales, much less million-year-long time scales. And this kind of has implications for our species. It absolutely does. And, you know, I think that this is sort of a cultural artifact because I know that, for example, in Asian culture, I'm half Asian, I'm Eurasian. So my grandfather is Chinese. And there's a much more sort of cyclical, sort of dynastic sort of long-term thinking in Asian culture. My grandfather used to participate in something known as, you know, they were a thousand-year-old banquets. And the thousand-year-old banquets,

would be a bunch of his friends that were about 80 or 90 years old and they would get together and together they would be a thousand years old, for example, right? So there was always that sort of thinking. And also, you know, a friend of mine, Joel Solomon, when he was working on preserving the Great Bear Rainforest with many great activists working in the West Coast of Canada, when they were working on their project, they didn't come up with a five-year plan or a 10-year plan. they came up with a 500-year plan, which is, you know, when you're thinking about ecosystems, actually a far more reflective and vital time scale to be working in, especially when you're talking about trees that live a lot longer than we do.

So, yeah, there is a sort of human exceptionalism in the ways in which we think about time. Learning new things is incredibly empowering, knowing that you can do better, feel better, be better. And I know from personal experience that one of the best ways to learn is from the great courses plus, a streaming service that gives you unlimited access to thousands of video lectures on virtually anything that interests you, from Tai Chi to public speaking. One of my favorite courses is by previous Mindscape guest Indre Viscontis. You may remember we had a conversation with Indre about music and technology and neuroscience, and her course is called How Digital Technology Shapes Us.

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You know, we've all heard that climate change is happening, right? But it still happens slowly. Like, you can stand out on the beach and look at the Pacific Ocean and it's not actually rising as you see it. And that lack of immediacy and vividness makes it difficult for people to really work worry about this, maybe as much as we should. Yeah, I mean, that's really one of the greatest challenges is the fact that this is a slow apocalypse that we're witnessing, right?

Usually in a horror or movie or something, the monster comes at you really quickly and you have to be very nimble with your responses. But yeah, human beings don't tend to respond quite as well with longer timescales, which is why, you know, when we're talking about what we're facing today as an emergency, but our plans are not reflective of that when we're when we're setting dates and targets that are 10 years 20 years ahead you know 2040 2050 is when we have our plans then there's a sort of disjointed approach to being able to really treat the situation that we're in as an emergency and it's both space as well as time that we have this issue with right there's a the famous statement that one death is a tragedy a million

death is a statistic, right? If the million deaths are happening far away, it's just hard to get as emotionally invested in them. And maybe this makes biological sense from that 70,000-year-old perspective, and maybe it doesn't anymore. Maybe this is something we're going to have to change our, evolve out of in some way. Well, I do quite a bit of work with different environmental organizations. I'm on the, I'm a trustee. I'm on the board of WWF International, and I worked with WWF in Canada for eight years. And so I've been doing a lot of thinking over time over how do you actually get people to care.

I think you can probably tell from this book I didn't want to write. I mean, I certainly did not want to write an environmental book. And I barely used the word environment when I wrote the entire book. I think I managed to write an entire book without doing it so that I could put the word in when I wanted to at the end. But at the same time, one thing that did strike me is the first. fact that when you're dealing with that statistic question of, you know, a million deaths versus one, one of the best ways to reach people is just by telling them the story of one person. And in fact,

there's been studies that have been done that if you even, let's say if there's an earthquake and you just tell the story of one person in that earthquake, you're able to get far more people responding to that one person than if it's even two people. And that's one of the things that I wrote about too in the book is the sense of scale blindness. And people have done studies on this. You know, if you have, for example, just hypothetical seabirds, let's say you have 8,000 or 80,000 or 800,000, people respond in almost the exact same way. They'll donate $7 or $8 or $7. You know what I mean? They can't even differentiate even when the difference is 7,000 versus 700,000 seabirds that are covered in oil slicks, for example. So as the numbers start to get

really big, we do have a perceptual blindness. We're not able to really pick that up or differentiate it. And that's because, you know, as cave people, we never really needed to. We were never dealing in the billions when we were out in the savannah hunting. Yeah, literally the, as you say in the book, our ability to accurately conceptualize really big numbers. is kind of pitifully bad. We're just not very good at that, right? Yeah, we're not, but our machines are. And so, you know, today, you know, when we see all this stuff going on with these high frequency traders, they're also trading and working with time, for example, in figures and numbers that are just vastly beyond what we're able to perceive. You know, like you can basically send a signal

across the Atlantic, you know, there and back something like six times in the time that, you know, I've said the word go, you know, so it's incredible, the speed at which we, at which we work and which we operate and our computers operate. And there's a guy named Sal Arnica. I like to quote because he was saying, you know, by the time, you know, a normal person looks at a stock, like a high frequency stock, it's like a star that burned out 50,000 years ago. Our computers are working so quickly and with such big, massive numbers and at such high speeds that we can't perceive that this is, I believe what Jeremy Rifkin referred to as compute time, you know, a sort of time that is just beyond human perception. Yeah. And it's,

I mean, this is, this whole conversation is a list of ways the human brain is just not that good in some way. It's really good at something. We are meat flesh, but we've done well. We've done well overall in terms of like scaling things up and developing tools. You know, it's just a bit ironic that we're sort of, you know, we develop tools that have destructive effects. And then we develop tools that detect that we have destructive effects. So let's hope we're able to catch up with ourselves. Pat on the head to the human beings. We have done some good things.

But okay, then there's this conceptual shift, I think, at least from where I'm coming from, the way that I think about it, in the part of your book that sort of we've covered where, human sensory apparatus and conceptual apparatus filters out some things about the world and pays attention to other things. And then there's this shift where we say it's not just like the physical stuff, or by physical I include biological mites and things like that. There's conceptual stuff that we filter out. And what reminded me of is, you know, we went, my wife and I went on a powerboat ride

out of Marina del Rey, last summer when you could do the, not last summer, but a year and a half ago when you could do these things. Yeah, we skipped last year. And the importance of, you know, it's just a couple hours on a boat, but the boat is a little ecosystem, right, all by itself. Like you can't on the boat call for takeout, right? You're out there. You need to bring everything and be able to dispose of everything. And it's something we usually don't pay attention to. And, you know, one of those vivid chapters in your book is about where our food comes from. So why don't you tell us what do you think is the take-home message here? Wow. Okay. Well, that's a big one. And of course, food is something that is both the most comforting thing in the world for us because we're growing up, you know, with our families and our familial recipes,

and it's how we all kind of come together around the proverbial and the very literal fire. But also our food system is so damaging to the way, and it actually jeopardizes our, very existence on earth right now. One aspect, of course, that you know that I start getting into in the book is what I, a friend of mine actually coined the term, the jiz biz, which is really about the business of semen sales, right? Because really, we've hijacked the sort of reproductive systems of a lot of different animals. So today, about 95% of pigs and 90% of cows, never really get to do it the old-fashioned way.

They are, they are, you know, they're created through in vitro fertilization. In fact, every single turkey that you'll ever eat is something that humans got into the middle of and sort of messed with. And we've sort of basically hijacked their reproductive system so that we can take it over. Yeah. And so that we can turn animals fundamentally into these products that we consume. And in doing so, of course, today I think many people are aware that they're, you know, we have three to four percent wildlife and the rest of the vertebrate biomass on our planet is our domesticated animals and human beings.

So we've had our finger on the dial and we've been cranking it up. And every year now, we kill 60 to 70 billion animals every single year. But when we talk about blind spots, the real issue is that we don't see any of of it. We see none of it. Right. You know, and I sit on another board of a, of an organization that I'm so happy to tout because they do such incredible work. It's called Wee Animals. And it was started by a photojournalist named Joanne McArthur. And I just highly recommend anybody who's listening to go check out her work. She's been doing this for years. She goes everywhere. She documents the life of animals as they become products, in a sense, whether it's, you know, harvesting bears

for bile in China or animals and zoos, but of course, a lot of animals in factory farms. And when we talk about this notion of disgust and disgustology, we don't look there anymore. We've moved factory farms very far away from us. And so we don't see when there's disease or animal cruelty unless there's some sort of investigative episode every once in a while on an investigative show that will document it. But these photojournalists actually do go in there and they document a lot of this. that we can actually see what is happening to these, you know, intelligent, sentient beings. And in places like Ontario, where I live, I live in Toronto, we've just instituted ag laws,

which you may have heard of, which are laws that make it illegal to actually go and document any of these abuses that are taking place. But when we talked about that uncomfortable truth, these are things that we should really want to be able to see if we want to create a better world. So I hope that kind of explains, in a nutshell, a very small part of the broken food system, which is one of the three cycles that I talk about. I talk about the life cycle being broken, the death cycle being broken, and the rebirth cycle being broken. So that's really food, energy, and waste. Yeah, let me actually just tease out even more about this fact of the difficulty slash illegality of documenting what goes on inside these factory farms because as I started

saying out, as we started talking about, you may or may not be happy or content or accepting of what goes on in them, but there's another thing to say, well, you should be not allowed to know. And that seems like harder to justify. Is there some principled case for not allowing people to know how their food is made? Exactly. You would hope that your food system would be the most transparent system of all, right? Yeah.

And I think it's Margaret Heffernan that I quoted in the book when she talks about willful blindness, this notion that something has to actually be really, really bad if you don't even want to know how bad it is. A lot of people are like, don't tell me about what goes on in factory farms.

I don't want to know. And they kind of cover their eyes. And I've had a lot of experience with that. I mean, on Twitter, I post animal images all the time. And they're my most retweeted tweets, right? You know, if I show a syphonophore or some beautiful, you know, seahorse or whatever it might be, people love animals on the internet.

And they say that they love animals. Cute animals. Oh, if you try to actually talk about anything to do with what happens to animals kind of behind the scenes, oh, people don't like that. And I will instantly lose followers. It happens every time, and I continuously do it because, you know, that's not a good reason to tweet as by monitoring your follower account. So I still will tweet, but I will notice that if you actually share the truth, very uncomfortable truth of what we do to our fellow species, people don't like to see that. So you have to be really careful.

And, you know, that was why when I structured the book to be perfectly transparent about how I structured the book, I hope future readers don't mind. But I came into the food chapter only after really talking about the wonder and the enchantment of all the different ways in which animals are intelligent or able to see so that we remind ourselves of, you know, our fellow earthlings and how incredible they are. They're just as incredible as when you're watching them on a David Attenborough sort of life on Earth or Blue Planet documentary. You know, if you're watching Blue Planet and you see the sailfish, they're so beautiful and an incredible and awe-inspiring.

But then if you were to watch them on a fishing show, you suddenly, you know what I mean? The idea of them as products, when you see them all being pulled up in those nets, we forget that there's still those beautiful enchanting creatures that we were admiring on another channel just moments ago. And you have many examples, very vivid examples in the book. I mean, maybe just to pick out one to fix ideas, is maybe a hackneyed example, but still a good one. It's the chicken nugget. Very different thing than an actual piece of chicken is what you consume when you eat a chicken nugget.

Yeah, I mean, I found a study that was with scientists who did an autopsy on a chicken nugget because they wanted to actually see what's in the chicken nugget. And what they discovered, of course, was that a chicken nugget is very little actual chicken meat. and it's actually just the sort of sinew and muscle and fat that people are consuming. They were doing this as part of an obesity study. But as I started looking into that, I really wanted to look at how meat actually became deconstructed and all the different ways in which meat is delivered to us in ways that kind of fool our senses again. And so, you know, one of the examples that you'll remember from the book is the notion of the Samo fan.

which is developed by DSM. And the Samo fan is a fan. It looks like if you went to a hardware store and you pulled out those paint chips and you can see all the different colors that you want to paint your wall, except this is a color paint chip for salmon because, of course, farm salmon doesn't eat all the krill

and all the sort of rich goodness that gives salmon that pink color. So if you didn't actually taint their food, source with a particular color, their flesh would be gray, but nobody's going to go to the supermarket and want to buy gray salmon. So we have ways of sort of tricking the eye. And the same thing happens with egg yolks as well, right? So we kind of have this idea, this illusion that, oh, it's an orange egg yolk. It must be really, really farm fresh. And if you're not buying it from your local farmer, there's a very good chance that that's an artificially colored egg yolk.

And it's an example of how probably the instincts we have that a pink salmon, a yellow egg yolk, a bright red apple or something like that, instinctively, we think that that's fresh and beautiful and healthy. And maybe it was a few hundred years ago. But now whether or not this is a particularly healthy piece of salmon and what it looks like have just become completely separated because we can manipulate that. And that's dangerous, right? I mean, it's not actually the process that's dangerous as what it's disguising. It's that chemical blindness that's dangerous. So, you know, another example that, you know, I talk about in the book is the use of carbon monoxide on tuna.

So they use carbon monoxide to give that fish, the fish, that sort of bright red color that people really like if they're buying sushi or buying red tuna, for example. But what it's disguising is that that fish might be a year old, might be, you know, might have been frozen and thawed multiple times. And that becomes really quite dangerous because then you could get sick from that fish. And you wouldn't know it because it would look super fresh, but it's actually a really old piece of flesh. And there's just an argument to be made, isn't there, that on strictly sort of moral grounds, I should, it should be okay for me to ask questions and get the answers about what is actually in my food and what I'm eating, right? Like,

just a late like this controversy over whether or not you have to label what the ingredients are in something or the or the nutritional information and I just can't see the principled objection to knowing how many calories I have in my food but you know I can see why the businesses don't want it because I will confess there are restaurants in the United States that I no longer go to because since they started putting the calorie counts on their dishes I'm like oh my God I'm going to die if I keep eating yeah yeah but I think that you're right. I mean, I think the, you know, the ability to know, and that's why the book, I mean, thankfully, and I'm grateful to have a wonderful editor to, you know, there was no finger wagging in the book. I didn't want to say this is how you should think or this is how you should eat. It's just really a question of like, wouldn't you want to know this? I certainly would. Yeah. She'd be able to make an informed decision. And then there's, you talk a lot about, you know, okay, so where the food comes from. And that's kind of a mystery box in our current culture. but then what happens when it goes also?

There's questions of, you know, the waste that we produce in the world, whether it's organic or just trash and plastics and so forth. And we tend not to ask very hard questions about that either. Yeah. And for me, the most staggering statistic, one of the most staggering statistics that I came across is the fact that in terms of all the food waste in the states, it's the equivalent of if you just like all the energy and oil,

if you just stopped all the offshore drilling in the United States, it would be the equivalent of that, right? Because that's how much food we waste. That's how much energy we waste to create the food that we end up throwing away. And that's absolutely, the enormity of that is mind-boggling to me. And so, yeah, I mean, food waste is certainly something. And of course, even the utensils with which we use to eat our food, there's that well-known meme on the internet. this idea that the energy that is used to go off to a foreign land, probably wage war, and then extract the oil, and then refine the oil, and then transport the oil, and then turn, you know, and then turn, you know, part of that, part of that into, you know, creating plastics, for example, and then shaping and molding the plastic, and then distributing

the plastic, and then getting a plastic spoon, and then eating some yogurt, and then throwing that spoon away is so much more energy than just washing a freaking spoon. It is. We are not very efficient despite our very global efficiencies that we've built into our infrastructure, I suppose. Well, this harkens to something that we'll get to later and you get to later in the book, but maybe it's worth bringing up now, that when you do, when your attention is drawn to some of these features of the world we live in, and you might find them

not to your liking. You might want to, you know, rebel against them. But most of the time, it's not because there's some evil genius manipulating things in the background. It is kind of a self-organized system in many ways. It's many little micro-incentives have led us to here, and they may or may not be leading us to an efficient outcome, even by the most basic of criteria. Well, human beings, you know, we are separate from all the other species because we developed a quote-unquote system, which is what a lot of this book sort of looks at, right? We're always like, fight the system. You've got to change the system, but nobody actually asks what that system is. And that system is our life support system. And we are different because we've manufactured systems that make us more efficient. So we're not beholden to the cycles of nature anymore. We're only beholden to our own.

own machinery. And the problem is that we got too good at it. We got so good at it that we're actually outstripping the ability for nature to provide the input, which is the actual, you know, the resources that actually make up all of our food and our energy. And we're not, you know, we're not sort of dancing along with nature cycles either in the ways in which nature is able to recycle all of those inputs and outputs. And so that's, what part of the damage is. The machine that we've created is a little bit, well, not a little bit very, very wildly out of whack at this point in time. Well, and speaking of the systems that we construct as human beings, you have a couple of chapters that were interesting to me

because I wouldn't have expected to find them in the kind of book you're writing, but they sort of made sense after the fact about time and space, you know, these grids that we human beings impose on the world. And then we sort of get used to them and treat them as natural. So, I mean, maybe I shouldn't talk and I should let you explain what you have in mind when you're talking about these things. Well, I just started, you know, I mean, that was the question. Once you have the system that's completely out of whack, you have to ask yourself, well, we made the system. So why are we not able to fix the system? And that's when I really wanted to look into those intergenerational blind spots, those sort of civilizational blind spots that we were

chatting about earlier. And to do that, I felt we needed to look into the blind spots of time and space. And the ways in which as human beings, we have created systems that scale time and space, in some sense, into a human scale, right? Because we know time is sort of this big, infinite thing from the big bang, well into some sort of future singularity. And space is absolutely enormous. But we're given what we're given on the planet and given our, you know, minute time scales as human beings on our lives. And we've chopped up time and space. And we've turned time and space, these vast dimensions, into these little measures that we can

buy and sell amongst each other. So, of course, you know, the most simplistic version of that is the way in which we've chopped up time into a human clock that we can buy and sell each other's time, such that some people's time like Jeff Bezos is like, I don't know, however many hundreds of millions of dollars he makes per day versus a delete who makes maybe, you know, a few pennies a day. And our space as well. We've chopped up the dimension of space such that, you know, some people today are inhabiting ghost mansions and other people are living in the equivalent of spatial coffins. And that's really the big picture overview of how we have chopped up time and space.

But of course, going into the book, that's the political dimension, but I'm always looking at it from sort of a scientific dimension of how did we kind of get there? How did we develop all these sorts of measurements? And I've always been kind of fascinated by that too. So that's another part of the story that gets us in there. The curators at Bespoke Post have done it again this winter with an all-new lineup of essential Box of Awesome collections that are guaranteed to upgrade your life. Whether it's showcase pieces to level up your indoor hosting skills or cozy threads for those blustery days, bespoke post only sends you the best stuff every month. From style and grooming goods to barware, cooking tools, and outdoor gear, Box of Awesome has collections for

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Like the idea of the smell clock I really was sort of compelled by. I kind of want to get myself a clock that will let me know what time of day it is by how things smell in the room, which kind of incense is burning. Yeah, and that's the way, you know, Chinese people used to be able to get people to know what time it was or what time it was to go to the, to the time. temple was by changing the incense and having different incense clocks. And I love that over time there have been different, you know, this notion that Linnaeus came up with of a flower clock of being able to tell the time by different blooms and people who come up with bird, you know, the sound of birds and different, you know, because they chirp and they rise at different times. So if you were, if you were so well attuned, you would know what time it was by by knowing the sound of which

bird was singing outside of your window. So there's many different ways in which we've approached time. For example, I think I mentioned in the book, in Madagascar, they measure time by a cricket frying, like how long it takes to fry a cricket. And through most of human history, time has been an event-driven process, how long it takes to fry that cricket or to make a bowl of rice, as opposed to this very rigid idea of time now, which is the synchronous time, that comes to us, you know, beamed from a satellite that we're all marching to, that we seldom think about now. So it's really how did we get to be trained out of a natural cycle and into a modern system. And those are the sorts of questions that I really wanted to address because they're

scientific questions. Science brought us here. So I just think that that needs a little bit more reflection. I'm a big proponent of, you know, polymaths, right? Because I really always think that, you know, science without humanity sort of lacks humanity. And I think that early science sort of was very, it had this really objectifying notion. And I would really love to see the humanity part of it come back in. You know, I've always felt some urge to stand up for clocks and the measurement of time.

There's almost a cliched idea that, you know, you can be a slave to the clock, right? Like in the modern world rather than living our lives, we're beholden to this artificial thing. But part of me, I'm going to try this out on you here, but part of me wants to think, you know, if you were the only person in the world, then what time it is wouldn't matter, except for maybe, you know, your crops and whatever, and then it's not very accurate. But the usefulness of time, measuring time, and having clocks all around us is that we're not

the only person in the world, that we synchronize our activities with others. So I would say, like, the happy side of measuring time is that it. it enables a whole kind of social cooperation that we wouldn't otherwise be able to experience. Oh, for sure. I mean, there's absolutely the sense that the four clocks came along, meetings were very difficult. You know, you pretty much be like, okay, we're meeting at 6 a.m. at dawn, or we're meeting at dusk, or we're meeting at high noon. You know what I mean? You didn't have that many options. And certainly, synchrony is a beautiful thing. But I think, again, it's how time has been used.

We can't sort of, it doesn't exist in that wonderful isolation. And so it's really when we became beholden to other people's time or to corporate time or to state time or to industry time. And the book does go into how that, you know, the emergence of master and slave clocks, which is what they were literally called. That sort of totalitarian, authoritarian time that has sort of seeped into. us. And of course, without giving too much away, the result in effects that our own human machine made time has now had on biological systems such that nature is out of whack. You know, you're starting to see birds now that are flying. And I don't know if you saw recently in the news, how many birds died of starvation? Did you see that? The migrating birds? No. It was in the

news. And I don't know if it's attributed to this particular example of phenology. And, Phenology is sort of like the timing in nature, but we're seeing a lot more mismatches now of, you know, used to be the early bird gets the worm. Well, now when you've got, you know, flowers and trees blooming a lot earlier and insects coming earlier, when you actually finally have the bird migration, the birds are all late, right? And so the birds are all starving. And so that's actually a result of how we have structured our time.

And it's incredible. So it's pretty strange that something that seems sort of imaginary and seems sort of poetic in some way can actually restructure the temporal systems of nature. Is this because our human influence has changed the flowering and growth cycles of the plants? Yes. Well, I mean, we've ultimately, the ways in which our human systems have become so efficient and hyperproductive and used so much energy. that, of course, we've created climate change. And climate change is something that is affecting plants and plant blooming times and all those sorts of things.

Yeah. So, you know, I looked up in the index of your book, the name Michel Foucault, because it seemed like there was a lot of residents there. So it appeared, but I was only like one glancing kind of reference. Were you at all heavily influenced by him, or did you just sort of, are you fellow travelers in some sense? You know, I wouldn't say heavily influenced, although if I peek over right over here and I look on my bookshelf, I can see that I have the book power here by Foucault. But no, I wouldn't say altogether influence. Certainly I read Foucault when I was in university.

But not necessarily. No, I wouldn't say so. And I think that's probably reflective of the fact that there's only one little quote in there. But I think I would like to write a book on power very much. That would be my next topic. And then I think I'm going to crack open that old Foucault book and take a better look. Well, I thought it was a fascinating move in your book where you went from, you know, the sort of direct physical science of what we can perceive about the world and then the sort of dynamical infrastructure in which we find ourselves embedded and yet don't pay attention to different aspects of it. And then in the final section of the book, you're talking about invisible power structures, right, that really only exist in human minds yet exert an enormous effect over how we live our lives and how we, what we consider.

to be good, bad, right and wrong, common weird, right? And the manifestation of that, you know, in early days was, of course, the panopticon, but the panopticon has become real. So, you know, talking all, you know, it starts off really looking at where we're blind and where we can't see and then sort of really questioning, well, why is it that now we've also created a state where the eyes are all turned on us? We're blind, but we're also so deeply and heavily surveyed. And of course, why would that be?

Why would that be? And so much of it is to keep us conforming to the system that we've built and to not stray or to not go too far out of line. Well, I first read about the patent opticon when I was reading Foucault as an undergraduate. That's what made me think of it. And he wrote about it in discipline and punish. Right, right, right. Exactly. Exactly.

But you're right. You make a very vivid point about the surveillance and the statistic that you quote, which hopefully you can elaborate on, is that 75% of United States companies in one way or the other are looking in on their employees as they work? Did I have that? I mean, I wrote the book a couple years ago, so I wouldn't know what the statistic is today. But I mean, you know, that wouldn't surprise me at all because there are, I mean, there's so many different forms of surveillance, right?

Sure. And I talk about so many of those different forms in the book. So it isn't just, say, having a camera on you, although that is the most basic form of surveillance. So it would easily be 75% now if you think of any single workplace that you go into. You'll see one of those black orbs on the ceiling or you'll see cameras. But of course, there's deeper levels of surveillance that we see as well, right? You see that if you're a trucker, all of your truck stops are monitored and surveyed. Gosh, in China, the level of surveillance is such that they even have people where,

wearing helmets to monitor, monitor whether they're focused or paying attention. So, yeah, surveillance is incredibly, incredibly deep. And I lay out a lot of that because I think that the average person still is not aware of the degree to which surveillance seeps in. I think that we had the Snowden revelation several years ago, and there's always the old refrain of, you know, if I'm not doing anything wrong, then why should it matter? And I think that hopefully by the time the reader finishes the book, you definitely get a sense that it's not about that. It's not about what you're doing.

It's simply about who you are. If you're the wrong category of person with the flip of a switch, for example, even when Trump obviously had power, you know, if you happen to be Muslim, if in another country you happen to be gay, if you happen to think a certain way or have a certain political alignment, well, there's a lot of data on you now. And that data can be used against you. And like we said before, with the million deaths being a statistic versus one story being compelling, the individual anecdotes really bring it home. And one of the things you mentioned is that several cities, including Las Vegas, one of my favorite cities, have, if I'm going to get it right, in the street lamps, there's not only video cameras, but audio recording devices eavesdropping on the conversations of people walking down the streets. Yeah, yeah, intelligent,

Intellisystems, I believe, had those. I haven't checked on them very recently, but certainly, you know, that reminds me of the lion, the witch, and the wardrobe. Whenever I came across that, you know, the sense that you could be in the forest and, you know, trees could be spying on you. And of course, today, it's not just your lampposts.

I mean, sometimes it's your kettle. Sometimes when you're walking in a store, we haven't done this for the past year, but it's mannequins. I mean, there are sensors and surveillance and camera systems just about everywhere. And of course, you know, the ones that we pay the least amount of attention to are the ones that we carry in our pockets or that we stare into in our laptops every single day. But yeah, absolutely. We have a lot of them everywhere.

Well, this is the joke going around on Twitter is that people are afraid of the idea that Bill Gates is going to implant microchips in the coronavirus vaccine. but they go out and spend hundreds of dollars to carry around microchips in their phones that are actually tracking them. It's like I don't know why you would need to have the, yeah, you wouldn't need to be microchipped. You're already carrying the surveillance device in your hand. Absolutely. I laughed at that when I saw that as well. I mean, we do know that our phones know where we are physically in space. Do we know how much control we have over that data?

I mean, they try to hide it from us. I know that. but, you know, I can turn off location services. Who gets this data? Who uses it? Do we have any idea? Well, all different actors use it. You know, whether it's state actors or, you know, whether it's companies trying to vie for you to buy, buy, buy, buy, buy,

so that we all become hyper-consuming beasts or, you know, security agencies who are, you know, hired security firms, who are hired to track down individuals. Again, I mentioned the film Dissident only because I saw it, you know, just a couple nights ago. But here's a situation where, you know, a young man here in Montreal was using his phone to chat with Khashoggi, and he had received a piece of malware from the Saudi government. And they had access to absolutely every single thing on his phone. And it wasn't benign at all. It resulted in a very gruesome death of a person who was an act.

advocate for free speech in the Middle East. So, you know, these little eyes can be used to silence us in very big ways. And you mentioned the famous example of Cambridge Analytica that not only tracked people on Facebook, but tracked the friends of the people who answered these quizzes and so forth. Yeah, a lot of scraping, as we're aware. And so, you know, that's one of the things that we have to think about today. It's not like Cambridge Analytica and any of those tools, which we're not just spying on people, but looking at their preferences and looking at their psychological weaknesses, you know, to be able to shape behavior. It's the fact that now that that's part of the way in which quote unquote business is done,

that's still being used. You know, we have all these bots. We have all these trolls. And we have all these ways of shaping opinion. And they haven't gone away. They've just been sort of tucked under the surface for right now. So it's important that we don't look away, that we don't look away, that we're We don't turn a blind eye to those mechanisms that are still out there in force.

But it's interesting to think about how people react to knowing this. I mean, you brought up the example of China where it's even more extreme than I guess we're used to here in the U.S. The extent to which the government tracks. I think you talked about, again, correct me if I'm wrong, that there are monitors in hats that you wear if you work in certain Chinese industries where they're basest. keeping track of your brain waves? Yeah, well, I mean, and I, again, being half Chinese, like, I write about the Uyghurs in the book and I have a huge problem with the Chinese state and its

surveillance system. But at the same time, I'm also really against the hyper demonization of China that I'm starting to see because China does some amazing stuff too. You know, a state is not necessarily its people. And I'm also marvel at like the Chinese engineers who've been able to create their incredible, you know, 300,000 kilometer, you know, bullet train system. And I kind of wish that we would look to China cooperatively for some of those technologies, because I think it would be just a godsend and a wonder if in the states we could have high-speed bullet trains as we do in China. And I think that China, again, when we talked about the sort of cyclical, dynastic sort of structure and way of thinking is very different. This is not to excuse Chinese state surveillance,

which, as I said, and as I will emphasize again and again, I don't agree. agree with. But I do think that the Chinese have a very different way of thinking that, wow, I mean, it's tricky. It's tricky. I'm Eurasian. So I have that sort of built into my mind how they see the world. And I just, I don't demonize it quite so much. You know, I mean, they have, what is it now, 1.6 billion people. And Chinese culture is a very collective culture. And it's really one of the reasons why, you know, today when we look at COVID, there's two viruses, right? There's a physical virus and there's a mind virus. And the mind virus is this anti-vax anti-mask virus that we have going quite strong here in the States and in Canada. I'll tell you, that virus is not in China.

You know what I mean? For better or for worse, that that mind virus does not spread over there. It doesn't have the opportunity to quite possibly because it has been clamped down. But when you have to look at, I get, I'm guessing, I'm totally guessing here, but I'm thinking if you're a Chinese leader and you know that you're kind of responsible for 1.6 billion primates on earth and that they can't kind of go completely haywire, I can sort of understand why such a surveillance system would be put in place because Chinese people have a lot of sense of filial piety and conformity and collective sort of response. So, the surveillance system there is kind of, it's quite different culturally than how we perceive it.

I don't know if that makes sense or not, but it's hard for us to put our sort of Western values on Chinese culture. No, it does. In fact, I did a recent podcast with Joe Henrik, a psychologist, anthropologist at Harvard, who talks about the weird societies, right, Western educated, industrialized, rich, democratic, and how they are very different and how we tend to. to treat our norms and morals as universals, but they're not. You know, there are different modes of being.

So, but I was actually not going to be judging about China. I think that's a complicated question that I'm certainly. Oh, no, I don't think you were. I was just, I was actually just vent something I wanted to vent because I just feel like sometimes I see that a lot on Twitter. That's why we're here. So let me vent. My side of it is one might think, given what you just said about the differences between

Western culture and Chinese culture or whatever, uh, that we rugged Western individualists would just, who live in nominally democracies where we get to choose what the laws are, we would never let it happen that we're constantly surveilled and our data is constantly kept because we're very private and we want to keep that stuff.

But in fact, most people are like, eh, I'd rather have Google Maps tell me where to go and not undergo the inconvenience of not telling it where I am. So it's sort of a collective action problem, right? We don't quite live up to our own stated ways of thinking about this.

And we are equally surveilled, and we're so equally surveilled such that, you know, we've seen the impact of that surveillance be able to nearly topple democracy very, very recently. You know, whether it was Brexit or whether it was the voting in of Donald Trump, you know, Cambridge Analytica had a very big part to play in that. And that has to do with surveillance culture, right? The ability to shape opinion based on surveilled data. So, like we're talking about 20 different topics, all of which deserve a podcast all their own. So I apologize to listeners who think that we're skipping over.

But one last thing I did want to talk about. And it's a big, deep, provocative idea just about the way that I would put it is the idea that we invent laws and political systems and economic systems. And they develop and they evolve into certain kinds of structures. and then once they're there, we kind of treat them as natural, even though in some objective way, they're not only not natural, but sort of wildly unequal and maybe not very good for many people. So that's all very vague,

but I wanted to let you comment or put that into your own words. Sure. I mean, one example, you know, when you talk about sort of all these laws, and let's call them imaginary systems almost because they're human constructions. and how they sort of tend to trump natural reality in many ways. I think for me, the most important chapter in the book is the final chapter.

And it is the chapter that sort of brings all the other chapters hopefully together. I'm not going to give it away because I hope some of your listeners will become readers, but it is the main sort of main purpose, really, even of writing the book. But one of the things that's an example of what you just said is kind of, illustrated in one story that I kind of came across, and it's about the Little Mahoning watershed. I don't know if you remember reading about that, but there's a bunch of activists and this watershed, it was getting fracked. And so like many different places around the world right now, some of the activists were trying to get rights for this watershed. So I don't know

if you know, but like there's a river in New Zealand that basically kind of owns itself now. It has rights, just as there's a part of the Amazon basin that has rights so that, you know, human beings can't sort of just trample all over it. It has some legal, legal rights. So just to be super clear about this, you mean not the people of that area have those rights, but the literal part of the earth has those rights. Yeah, I think the technical term is sort of like ordinances of nature. So the actual river has almost a form of personhood, if we might put it that way, such that it could go to court and sort of fight for its own existence.

So they were fighting for this at the Little Mahoning Watershed. And in the states, I can't remember which state it was exactly, but the judge threw it out. And the judge was just furious with the lawyers for saying that, you know, making up this artificial idea that, this watershed should have rights. And what I loved about the legal response to that was the fact that they pointed out, well, who's fighting us in this court case? It's a corporation. You're trying to tell us that a corporation is more real than a river or than a watershed or than an ecosystem.

And so that for me was a little bit profound in the sense of, you know, these sort of organized systems and structures that we have and the power that we've given them to sort of reorder our natural world today and the need for us to sort of look a little bit more deeply at that. That's, of course, not the chapter. I don't want to give it away. There's more. There's more than that. That's a little small teaser about it. Well, yeah, you know, my personal attitude is that by and large, I'm a fan of the idea, for example, of private property in some cases. But I completely think that it's a something we invented, right?

Like we tend to invent it and then treat it as sacred and then hand it down from an objective feature of the universe. But we did invent it and presumably we invented it for reasons. And if that concept ends up being used in ways that go against what the original reasons were, then we should rethink our attitude toward it. Yeah, absolutely. And of course, you know, we came up with this invention at, um, at a time when we had a very different population here on Earth.

And I think we're definitely going to need to reevaluate some of our inventions like private property in the future if we're all to be able to cohabit together. So it may not be a return to the commons as we knew it, but something different than what we have today for sure. And it is hard in part because of what we started talking about where human beings are not very good at conceptualizing things that are way bigger or older or more numerous than ourselves. So when you have this idea that one person has a net worth a million times or much more than that the net worth of another person, economically speaking, it's just hard to know what to make of that in some sense. Yeah.

Again, you know, that kind of comes down to those artificial rules of the game that we've made up. You know, when we talk about private property here on Earth, it's funny, you know, when you read the outer space treaty because the outer space treaty is the one province that is open to all mankind. And it's like, well, what good is that? You know, like 0.000, 06, 7% of us have made it to outer space, but that is the province that we have not actually, you know, divvied up and parceled up that one person can own it or another person can't. So a lot of, a lot of it is really quite absurd. Well, I wonder, okay, here's the last questions then. A lot of what we're talking

about here is extraordinarily relevant to our lives here on Earth right now, but it will presumably be deeply affected by technological changes in the future, whether it's we will go to the moon and Mars and start living there, or whether it's we will grow our meat in vats rather than on farms. Do you want to speculate a little bit for how you think this view of the world and the reality bubble is subject to change in the near and far future? Sure. Yeah. You know, it's funny because I did just write an article for pop-up magazine on this very

sort of topic. And I think that, you know, one of the things, certainly, as you mentioned, that excites me the most is cellular agriculture because it's incredible that, you know, today we've been able to sort of separate the animal from the flesh, right? The fact that, you know, I was watching this video of Just, which, just as some of your listeners may know, they basically opened up, Singapore has sort of validated cellular agriculture there. And so they have all these scientists and they had this chicken. And I can't remember the name of the chicken right now. So let's just call the chicken head.

And basically they took a, they took, you know, some stem cells from a feather that had fallen from. from this perfect bird, and they manufactured meat with it. They put it in a bioreactor, grew the cells, and grew chicken meat, chicken breast, chicken flesh. And the entire Just team is sitting around eating chicken burgers for lunch. And the bird, the perfectly unharmed bird that they're all eating is walking around and just sort of clucking around them completely unharmed. And so the ability to put these bioreactors in different places where there is food,

scarcity, to be able to produce milk, to be able to produce protein, you know, to reduce the, you know, the water footprint, the methane footprint, the animal cruelty, all these sorts of things is just fantastic, you know. It's definitely a win-win sort of situation. And for me, you know, one of the things that, you know, I've been thinking about lately is, you know, so many of us are indoors now. And we don't have this. this sort of 24-7 lifestyle that we used to have. And I grew up in Hong Kong in my early years and, you know, when I was up till the age of 11. And we used to have 7-Eleven when I was growing up in Hong Kong.

But 7-Eleven was called 7-Eleven because it was open from 7 o'clock till 11 p.m. Right? And it was only later that 7-Eleven became this 24-hour sort of supermarket or convenience store. And now today, you know, 20, 30 years later, we live in a 24-7 capitalist cycle where, you know, day and night we're sort of fueling the economy. And of course, you can see this from space. But wouldn't it be really wonderful? And wouldn't we save so much tremendous energy if we were able to turn out the lights so that we would be able to have, you know, our night skies again and that birds could migrate again and insects would be able to sort of, you know, move with the state. of the moon. And sort of the inspiration for this, you know, as a final digression, is because I

remember, and the story that I told in the article is the fact that, you know, in the 1990s, there was a power outage in Los Angeles. And all these people started calling the Griffith Observatory freaking out because they didn't know what that magnificent orb like the cloud was in the sky. And they started fielding all these calls. And the reason was because these people people had never seen the Milky Way. Right. You know? And we live in the state right now where we've forgotten what it means to be humbled

by the state of the universe. We've forgotten what it means to be small, to scale ourselves against the vastness of the universe and how beautiful that is and how that can really reposition our place in the world. So those are just a couple of ideas in terms of a path forward. My version of that story is I used to work with Project Exploration in Chicago, which was an outreach organization that worked with disadvantaged children to get them interested in science. And their primary way was to get them to use dinosaurs, which is like the second most exciting

thing after the universe, right? So they would, you know, the ones who were accepted in the program would go on train trips to, you know, Montana to a real dinosaur or fossil site and dig them up. And you would think that would be, you know, the most amazing thing that had ever happened to these kids. but in fact, what really impressed them is that they could see the stars. Yes. Because they grew up in Chicago and had never seen stars before.

Forget about the Milky Way. You know, the idea of like their dots of light in the sky was a life-changing experience. Yeah, and that is so profoundly beautiful. And like that is very similar to, I mean, I was inspired by that because I did meet a friend when I lived in New York. And he had said to me as an adult, he had never seen the stars. And there's something really beautiful about that, which does bring us full circle back to that very beginning of Galileo, just being able to look up into the sky and the numinous, you know, it's incredibly inspiring. So food for thought, whether or not we're going to pay attention to where the food comes from.

Zayatong, thanks so much for being on the Mindscape podcast. As I said to you, I knew it would be a joy. It really was. In I shop Ashtro. At Ashtro, I find statement dresses, powerful suits and Afrocentric styles made for my life. Church, celebrations, date nights, moments that matter. turning outfits to the finishing touches, wigs, hats, handbags, and shoes. Astro helps me show up confident. For me, it isn't just fashion. It's how I express who I am. Shop your style at astro.com. That's ashro.com.