The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality by William Egginton

Episode Date: October 24, 2023

The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality by William Egginton https://amzn.to/3tKTVPy Argentine poet Jorge Luis Borges was madly in love when his life was shattered by painful heartbreak. But the breakdown that followed illuminated an incontrovertible truth—that love is necessarily imbued with loss, that the one doesn’t exist without the other. German physicist Werner Heisenberg was fighting with the scientific establishment on the meaning of the quantum realm’s absurdity when he had his own epiphany—that there is no such thing as a complete, perfect description of reality. Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant pushed the assumptions of human reason to their mind-bending conclusions, but emerged with an idea that crowned a towering philosophical system—that the human mind has fundamental limits, and those limits undergird both our greatest achievements as well as our missteps. Through fiction, science, and philosophy, the work of these three thinkers coalesced around the powerful, haunting fact that there is an irreconcilable difference between reality “out there” and reality as we experience it. Out of this profound truth comes a multitude of galvanizing ideas: the notion of selfhood, free will, and purpose in human life; the roots of morality, aesthetics, and reason; and the origins and nature of the cosmos itself. As each of these thinkers shows, every one of us has a fundamentally incomplete picture of the world. But this is to be expected. Only as mortal, finite beings are we able to experience the world in all its richness and breathtaking majesty. We are stranded in a gulf of vast extremes, between the astronomical and the quantum, an abyss of freedom and absolute determinism, and it is in that center where we must make our home. A soaring and lucid reflection on the lives and work of Borges, Heisenberg, and Kant, The Rigor of Angels movingly demonstrates that the mysteries of our place in the world may always loom over us—not as a threat, but as a reminder of our humble humanity.

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but I don't know. Maybe you should leave the wife and kids. I don't know. We work it out with your psychiatrist. Uh, but that's why we do the show. So people learn about human nature. Uh,

go to good reads.com for says Christmas, LinkedIn.com for says Christmas, YouTube.com for says Christmas and Christmas one on the tickety talkity over there with thes.com, 4chesschrisfast, LinkedIn.com, 4chesschrisfast, YouTube.com, 4chesschrisfast, and chrisfast1 on the tickety-tockety over there with the kids. Today, we have an amazing multi-book author. He has put out his latest book called The Rigor of Angels, Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality. Wait wait we're going to talk about reality today wow i might uh i might i don't know if i'm ready for this but i probably should be in living

in reality but as you know uh i don't know there's a joke there somewhere but i'm not going to get into it august 29 2023 this book came out william egginton is on the show with us today he is a prolific author writer of over 10 10 books to his credit or more. He's probably got some in the can he's working on too. So I'm just going to give him a plus credit. William Egginton is the Decker Professor in Humanities, Chair of the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, and Director of the Alexander Grass Humanities Institute at John Hopkins University.

He's the author of multiple books, including How the World Became a Stage. Wait, was it Shakespeare that made that happen? You'll have to read the book to find out. Perversity and Ethics. I think that's a book he wrote about me in Vegas. A Wrinkle in History. The Philosopher's Desire. The Theater of Truth.

That's clearly not in the House of Representatives. In the Defense. Let me correct that right, in defense of religious moderation, the man who invented fiction, and more. We could go on and on. He's written so many books. People go on Amazon and just punch the buy all button. Welcome to the show, William. How are you? I'm doing really well, Chris. Thanks for having me on the show. Thanks for coming. We certainly appreciate it. Give us a dot com. Where do you want people to find you on the interwebs and stalk you? So williameganton.com. That's probably the easiest way. There you go. Simple and easy. And you can find everything there, folks. So what motivated you to write this latest book, Bill? I've been writing and thinking about the issues that are in this book, which have to do with philosophy, poetry, the relationship of both with theoretical physics for the last 30 years.

And bit by bit, it started coming out, and it was a book that had to write itself. So, yeah, been teaching on it as well. Awesome stuff. So this is something you teach in your university courses, talk about these gentlemen? That's exactly right. So we teach now at Hopkins every fall, introductory seminar for first-year students called the First-Year Seminar Series. And I'm teaching on this right now,

poets, physicists, philosophers, and the ultimate nature of reality. Cool. So give us a 30,000 overview of the book and what's inside, if you would. So three amazing thinkers from radically different fields, one a poet, another a philosopher,

a third a physicist, all converge on a fundamentally similar idea about space and time and the ultimate nature of reality and do so without ever having known each other, without ever having read each other's work. And that idea is behind everything. And it's been there for 2,500 years and people just really haven't been able to articulate it until these three men come along and do so. Ah. So for those people who don't understand, what is the nature of reality? Why are we studying this?

Why is it important? Give us a foundation for those people like me who flunk second grade. So when we think of reality, as most of us do, and why wouldn't we? It's just something that's out there completely independent of our interpretations of it, one of the problems is that we are actually already forming it in our mind in certain ways. But when we form that reality in our mind, that it's extended in space, that it endures in time in a certain kind of methodical way. In fact, what we're doing is we're taking a very specific way that human beings have of inhabiting the world and projecting it out into the world the way the world is in of itself. This works for us most of the time, but when we try and do deep science, when we try and do deep

philosophy, when we try and think at the borders of what's thinkable, we end up making serious mistakes. And that's what each of these thinkers ended up figuring out. So it's important to get out of our own mind, you know, the stuff we believe where we, you know, sometimes some of us, especially me, probably live in their own private Idaho. And you form your own perceptions and biases of the world. But in reality, that's not many times what the world really is. Is that a kind of where you're going down the right path there? That's one of the ways of thinking about it, but really in some ways it's even more fundamental than that because we can take an example like Albert Einstein, one of the most brilliant, if not perhaps the most brilliant mind of the 20th century. What this book goes into in

some depth is how even with a mind that brilliant, he was still managed to import certain expectations that he had about how the world should be at its most fundamental level into his science. And as a result, he ended up in really important areas, getting things wrong, even though a lot fewer things wrong than most people would. There you go. So why did you pick these three gentlemen? And was there more? Did they not make the list? You had to kind of cut them like Pluto got cut off a planet. So you're like, well, you're not making the cut there, buddy. There was a big casting.

And the casting went on over years and years and years. I got to tell you, as I decided, maybe five or six years back, this idea that I've been teaching about in courses like the Cosmic Imagination that I've been writing articles about, I think the first article that I wrote on the subject went back 25 years ago. I said, this has got to be a book. It's compelling. It's interesting. Who am I going to include in it? And yeah, you're absolutely right. The first outline for the book ended up with 12 chapters, each of them dedicated to a different thinker. And it was in some ways, it was true to what I was trying to do, but it was also all over the place. And so I really had to pull all the way back. And I did at first, and I decided I'm going to try and do all of these ideas through one person.

And that was actually reeling it back in way too far. And then I realized about 10 years ago, I had published a piece in the New York Times, in the philosophy section of the New York Times called The Stone, and there they were. Those exact three thinkers were there. And I said, oh, well, it's been staring me at, you know, in my face the entire time. That's who I need to write the book about. And then it was the process of getting to know them through their biographies and living with them for five years. And that was an exciting discovery. There you go. So can you give us kind of a tease out on all three of these people, what they did and why they were important? And, you know, for the lay people out

there who aren't, you know, I mean, spent like time like you and I have on camp, at least, you know, 50,000 hours. We'll start with, we'll start with Immanuel Kant. I'm sure those are the number of hours you have to spend on anything to become an expert that's true that's right uh Immanuel Kant uh is considered by some to be the modern uh the the father of modern philosophy he's a German actually Prussian thinker from the late 18th early 19th century died in the early 19th century systematized philosophy so when we talk about academic philosophy as uh uh sort of modes of thinking that were established as in a university curriculum, this is the guy who really invented it. He wrote the first, well, literally wrote the book on it.

That's the earliest character, chronologically speaking. Then I've got the two others, a physicist, Werner Heisenberg was the inventor in some ways. I mean, many people contributed, but most made the most important contributions to the development of what's called quantum mechanics and quantum theory, which is the, in some ways, really the most successful scientific theory of the 20th century, perhaps of all time. And really interesting life involved having to make fundamental choices about whether to leave Germany during World War II. Spoiler alert, he ended up staying. Got into some interesting debates with Oppenheimer, about whom a big film was just released this summer. In fact,

has a caveat, what do you call it, a cameo appearance in that film. And then Jorge Luis Borges, an Argentine poet and short story writer. People who are just into fantastic literature, in particular of the 20th century, turned to him as a kind of beacon. He was not a Nobel Prize winner, and many people say that's kind of the most amazing thing of all because he inspired so many Nobel Prize winners throughout the world,

especially in Latin America, but throughout the world, with his style of story writing, which is boundary breaking, which is hard to place. And so these three characters had all sorts of interesting quirks to their life stories. And it became a really fun journey for me to both tell all three of those life stories, but then weave them together into this one big book. Wow. So what are some ideas that you discuss in the book that can impact the way an average person perceives their daily reality, those of us who flunk second grade? Those of us who flunk second grade those of us who flunk second grade i mean one of the things that's going to hit us first of all and kind of the most amazing thing is learning

about well i try to try to use the the book to teach both the basic ideas of quantum mechanics but also relativity so the twin theories of the 20th century of 20th century physics quantum mechanics is mind bending to say the very least. The idea that at its smallest level, the constituent particles that make up the world simply don't behave the way that larger particles do. And I'm not just talking about they do weird things. It's more than that. They actually seem to violate

the most basic laws of logic for us. So when you measure a fundamental particle in any given place, it is false to say that when it went from point A, where you first measured it, to point B, that it took a particular path to get there.

That's been proven now. All three Nobel Prizes in physics that were given out last September were given to people whose experimental work since the 1980s have established that. But it was already being established at the time that Werner Heisenberg did his work in 1925 and 1927, his most fundamental

work. This is mind-blowing, if you think about it. It means that if this were true, what happens at the quantum level, if it were true of objects that are large, like baseballs or airplanes or something like that, when we encounter them after a period of time of not having seen them, they literally took every possible path or no path in order to get to where we measure them. And as weird as it sounds, that's what happens at the quantum level. There you go. With Heisenberg, was it hard at the time to include his meth lab sort of design? Does he ever say my name in the book? No, I'm just kidding, people. That's a breaking bad Heisenberg.

That's a whole different show. Stop it. So Borg is, I'm not even saying that correctly, right? With an H sound, Borghese. Borghese, okay. He's a literally literary figure. Heisenberg's a scientific one making the meth. No, I'm just kidding people

stop it don't make a cult uh and cancel philosopher um it's kind of interesting that you took and merged those and and how do you make that uh how do you cook that mix since we're on a breaking bad callback joke the way the way you cook it is you think about what is the implication for each of you know for each of these thinkers, writers, philosophers, scientists, for what we take to be reality itself. Like we were just talking about in the case of Werner Heisenberg, there's implications when you think about, oh, wait a minute, down at the most micro, small level, the world isn't behaving the way that we think it's behaving. Well, there's also implications for philosophy. That's a philosophical question. When we ask,

what is the world as it is when I haven't measured it, when I haven't thought about it? What is the difference between me, a being who lives in a body in a particular way and has to think about the world, right? What kind of steps do I have to take to start being correct about my presumptions and assumptions about the world the way it is out there? You mean I can't just default to whatever I want and just make it up as I go along and just assume that? You know, there are people who believe that, Chris, but this book is not for them, or at least it is for them, and it's trying to prove them something else. And that plays into my next question. You know, in today's world, we live in this world of alternative facts. You know, we see a lot of attacks on truth. Uh, you know, we've had,

there's authors that have written books, I think described it well, where it's the death of expertise. Um, and you know, everyone's an expert in everything. Narcissism, uh, is on a global rise, at least narcissistic tendencies. Let's put it that way. Really tired of people saying that everyone's a fricking narcissist at this point. It's only five percent of the population people come on uh but there is tendencies i think um social media certainly has contributed to a lot of those tendencies um so in in today's uh world of uh you know you have politicians that are bending reality that seems to be a populist thing um you, you know, it, everybody's, everybody's kind of on the find your own truth.

You know, they go on social media and they, they just kind of find their vein of self, um, self, uh, you know, it, it, it reinforces whatever they believe or whatever they think their reality is and they can find lots of validation for it. So it's the, the Dunning Kruger's of the world not only can find lots of validation for it so it's the the dunning krugers of the world not only can find their poison of whatever bullshit they want to believe they can find a

million other people that used to uh to believe in that in fact there's a comedian that makes a joke that you know before the internet the stupid people couldn't find each other so it was easy to keep them you know under control now they can go on the internet. So why is your book important in keeping people down to reality and perception and understanding what is going on with their brains? Look, it's a great question. mechanics, in some ways you could say, well, what does that have to do with this macro reality that I live in that has political vectors and people engaging in conspiracy theories? And on the one hand, I'm not claiming that it does in the sense that learning something about quantum mechanics is going to directly impact your ability to decipher the real world as it is. On the other hand, it honestly has quite a lot to do with it. Because if you can, to go back to the example that I used before, if a scientist as discerning,

as important, as brilliant as Albert Einstein was so convinced that the world must be in a certain way, namely, it must be smoothly extended in space and time in some fundamental way, and so convinced of that, that he said, no, what Werner Heisenberg and these others are discovering about what we call now quantum leaps, a quantum discontinuity, the fact that at a microscopic level, reality doesn't behave like that at all. He was so convinced of that, that he refused all scientific evidence to the contrary of his opinions until the day of his death. If that's the case for someone as brilliant and as discerning as Einstein, how much more likely is it that that confirmation bias of that sort is going to work for us mere mortals as we kind of venture out into the fraught world of politics and as you say uh very correctly can find almost any uh uh depiction of reality that will fit our conference our bias that uh that we're confirming it to out there on the internet so the truth of the matter is yes it's it's very likely to to work that way and i I'm hoping that the cautionary tale of these kind of scientists, these kind of philosophers will help reverberate them and give us ways of thinking about reality that are going to help inure us to that sort of thinking. Let me ask you if this plays into what you're talking about in the book and these uh gentlemen um the one thing i i became aware of and started focusing on partially this

came from business innovation and trying to come up with ideas and of course realizing that i'm not the corner of all the great ideas in the world which is you know most of them but not maybe that right yeah at least you know nine out of ten uh i also have narcissism down really well. So there's, I tell this to my young nieces and nephews because they're coming of age. When I sat down one day and I said, what should I tell them that's important to know, that's important to watch for in life? And there's an axiom I use of three things that are important to watch for in life. The things you know, and those are the things you know, you know,

right? There's the things, you know, you don't know. So like, I don't know trigometry or, you know, geology very well.

I know that I don't know that. I really don't give a shit. Number three is the, and thank other people that do. Number three is minding the things you don't know that you don't know searching and seeking them out and trying to find them and though because those are the ones usually come right out of the blue and smack you in the face you're like i didn't know that uh uh you know whatever those are the things usually hit you and so sometimes searching for them or trying

to educate or expand your your reality as you say uh is this factor do what i just say my little formula does that factor into uh what you're talking about the book as well i think it does factor and i think it's really great advice not just for your nieces and nephews but for all nieces and nephews out there right i mean is is learning to learning to keep some portion of your consciousness focused on what it could be, what realm of reality could be out there that you really don't have any idea about. And that presuming that you do have some idea about is likely getting things wrong. So it's about, for scientists or philosophers, but also for those of us just walking around trying to deal with the world as it is, as we

find it, it's about intellectual humility. It's about waiting, waiting to see. It's about, you know, just not presuming that the next thing that it's going to fire up across your internet screen is the God-given truth and you're ready to make a pronouncement on it and have an informed opinion. No, maybe there's something that you're not ready to have an informed opinion about because you're not informed on it yet. I like that. I like that because that's how I try and approach ideas nowadays. I'm like, wait, let's not jump to conclusion. Let's not pull the Dunning-Kruger. Let's get some more data. And I have people ask me, you know, I'll get like a message or something or email or something on social media people like hey what do you think about this you know it's the latest whatever thing i remember um somebody wrote me during the las vegas shooter thing i think 2017

um somebody wrote me and and i just woken up and they asked me to comment on on what was going on las vegas and i wrote a whole message back to them going, I don't know. They go, I think there's a shooting in Vegas. I'm like, yeah, that's Vegas. I just wrote this off-the-cuff thing to somebody as a reply. And then as I was about to press send, I was just like, yeah, whatever. It's Vegas. I'm sure it's not a big deal.

Whatever. It's probably some bullshit. I was about to send i was like you know maybe i should go on social media and find out what the hell's going on right and uh you know that was an example of where i you know my brain clearly was like hey you need to maybe find out what's going on i like this term you use though intellectual humility right tell us what that is if you if you could maybe give us a little bit more think about it you know people i think often if you were to say look what does

science tell us about and this goes kind of to the title of the book right well it tells us about reality it tells us uses the tools of science that are so fantastic that's been developed over centuries now to plumb ever deeper into reality and tell us the truth about the world. But that kind of misses part of the fundamental picture of science, which is that science, in order for science to work, there's something called the scientific method. And the scientific method is about making hypotheses, trying to go out and test those hypotheses, and being ready for them to be wrong. And when they're wrong, looking around for a new hypothesis, testing that, and maybe something that you've been convinced about for a long, long time, like say Newton's

laws of physics that he derived in 1666. Maybe they're good for eternity, but you know what? We don't know. Or it may be that in 1905, along comes Albert Einstein and upturns the entire world by showing, well, no, actually, it's just that you weren't looking hard enough. And now here's a new set of laws that explains the old ones and then explains all sorts of things that you were just kind of hiding under the rug because the old ones weren't explaining them. Intellectual humility, never deciding that you've reached the end. There's always something new. Something always change the uh upturn the table again always there you go uh you know that makes me laugh because i had seen a tiktok video of uh some

woman who was going you know we didn't have gravity until it invented it you're just like what it was so much fun i mean we could go around it was great yeah it was it was great you really screwed things up actually when you think about it. Because, you know, that gravity thing was, you know, we were having a lot of fun with that. But he screwed the pooch on that one. You know, the interesting thing about all of this is, you know, you need to take and understand. We need to take a look at uh reality like you're talking about where we go forward and we um you know what more do we need to learn do we need to have a bigger picture do

we need to understand things more um an important aspect of what i approach i think a lot what a lot of people um don't do with their reality in science is i love how people in science look at things as a theory and so i've learned to talk about my ideas or what i believe in as like well this is my current theory on that right because i recognize it's evolving and in the age that we talk about of denny krueger and people live in their own private idaho's they're always throwing shit at science lately you know the death of expertise if you will um where they're where they're like well you know, the death of expertise, if you will, um, where they're, where they're like, well, you know, sometimes science is wrong and you're like, no science operates off a theory base where it's evolving and changing, as you mentioned before, it could

completely go a different way. You know, maybe, I don't know, the gas runs out that supports, uh, I don't know, I'm just making shit up the sports gravity. And like one day we'll be like, i mean uh that or someone will vend a pill uh so that it can make me less fatter and make me float that would be nice uh if i could weigh about five pounds less or something gravity wise yeah can we get some help on that so i love that concept do you want to address that where people have this idea that you know that of science skepticism out there um i think what what people don't realize is that the skepticism that

they're, you know, supposedly kind of using to debunk science is already built into science. That's like the idea of science. Science is skepticism in practice. Science is, hey, this may not be right, but you know what? We're going to provisionally assume it's right because that assumption is helping us with the data so far. But you know what, there's a whole section of the data that's not crunching well. So we've got to be open minded about that. And now we have to actually come up with a new explanation. That's what scientists do. They do it literally every day. So the idea that somehow, you know, that's actually, and maybe that's also on us. And when

I say us, I mean, maybe the university folk, people who are kind of, you know, talking about the way they do science. I think about this during the pandemic a lot. So much of the credibility problem with what was happening with the CDC came from making pronouncements and then failing to say, this is based on what we currently know. This is based on our best guess right now. But as you just said, with when you're, you know, your approach to life, that it's my theory, and it's evolving, that's always the case, especially for something that's moving as fast and is as politically and socially important as a pandemic. Slow down, right? We do, we, you know, of course, you're going to need recommendations, but those recommendations can only be best based on our best science right now. guess what that could change and we saw

that over and over again that's not a weakness of science yeah strength and it's interesting this this this uh attack that people have on it you know people don't remember how fluid that situation was and how everyone was kind of thrown off their off their rails and uh and, of course, it was a fast-moving death machine. So, you know, there's a lot of people that are like, hey, you know, the lockdown was bad. And they forget the reality was is they had to do that because the hospitals would have been overwhelmed with people that were sick.

I mean, you would have had people maybe that were even in the hospital with other ailments, you know, maybe on kidney dialysis or cancer, you know, it was going to, it was going to overwhelm the system and you would have a collapse and we needed to stall time.

We were buying time to try and try and get it. Otherwise it would have been, it would have been upon an apocalypse. Well, and in some cases it was, it seemed to be at the time of numbers, right? I mean, about New York in the first months of the, uh, the pandemic, that's it. What, and that's, remember the phrase that was used at the time, that was one of the phrases that really went down and turned

out to have been the correct way to think about it. Flattening the curve. You try and slow down the number of people getting it at one, at one time so that hospitals can do their job so that they can try and save people that they have enough respirators to be used. You know, I mean, this is, that's exactly right. And,

and even then, you know, a lot of people through, uh, through shade and of course, you know, conspiracy on the bat shit that went on, uh,

which is sadly how people react to something that they, they don't understand or about something that is so horrific. They can't put their minds around it, which seems to be a default for a lot of people. But in, you know, that's a really good example of people having a hard time with the reality of it because their reality has suddenly been changed. And, you know, even now I hear people say,

you know, when do we get back to what life was like before then? I'm like, I don't think it's ever going to come back. And then, you know, the thing, the interesting thing about COVID was you had so many scientists that were still wary, you know, even then when it seemed like we passed the worst of it, then that new variation came along that actually went worse with the sicknesses and deaths and it went next level. And, you know, even now you hear of, you know, they've come out with, I think there are four or five different vaccines now they've issued, maybe four, four or five. And, you know, and scientists are like still going, hey, you know, things, you know, some new variant can come out that then ends up going next level. It's very likely that we'll have to, you know, that every year we'll see a new, at least slightly adjusted version of the vaccine, which has, you know, been the status quo for influenza vaccines for some time now. You know what you were talking about before, and I think this is an extremely important point. Our kind of investment in a very solid, absolutely confident

belief in a notion of reality that this is the way that it has to be is also a defense mechanism. It's a defense mechanism against uncertainty, against an uncertainty that sort of in some ways you have to think about it built into our ability to know the world. And that kind of gets us back to both, well, very specifically Werner Heisenberg, the principle that bears his name is called Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. And what he not just argued, but showed mathematically was that there is a built-in uncertainty to how closely we can observe the world. You get down and you can finally nail down with absolute precision where a particle is, you're never going to know how fast it's moving. Or you can figure out exactly how fast it's moving,

guess what? You're never going to know exactly where it is. And that's impossible. It's impossible to do both. So that uncertainty, you get to a certain limit. You can't get any more certain than that. And that principle is also found in the poet Borges, in his work, in Kant's understanding of our relationship to the world as it is out there there you go uh you know there's this line always comes back to me a lot the line from the movie network um and there's two there's two facets to it the part where you're i'm mad as hell i'm not going to take any more and go yell and scream and and make change uh but this always reminds me this discussion like this remind me of the of the segment of that line that precedes it um you know where he talks about you know we sit in the house and slowly the world we're living in is getting smaller and all we say is please leave us alone in our living rooms let me have my toaster and my tv and my steel belted radios and i won't say anything just just leave us alone give me a modicum of peace if you will and it seems like you know the world's moving faster ai uh i think

might challenge our uh our our thinking of reality or might change our reality like your thoughts on that in a second but you know it seems like what we're talking about is is that people have this that like you mentioned that security that safety it could also be laziness too like jesus i don't have to learn anything more i mean i flunk second grade the callback of this show it sounded better than kindergarten we wrote the job yeah but second second grade as you know there's there's a certain stature that you're you arrive who flunks that for christ the very idea that there's tests that you can flunk in second grade is already a problem. Come on.

Yeah, who's testing second graders, you evil people? We need a show on that. Yeah, yeah. Get in that 60 minutes. So, yeah, we need to have less lazy brains, and I think we need to recognize our laziness. Is that what we need to do? We need to recognize that we're not living in reality. And are we ever going to live – like, if I read am i suddenly gonna have an epiphany about i'm living

in reality you know i'm not doing any of my own stupid shit or do we have to constantly fight and claw to go what is reality and live in the present and then i think that's it's more the latter right it's it's the understanding that you know what's going to set us uh on the wrong path is the belief that we either already have access to that ultimate reality or that we can ultimately get there. As opposed to understanding that our reality is always going to be subject to new knowledge. It's always going to be subject to interpretations, to new perspectives that ultimately, and if you will, that's because the word is ultimate in the title, what that ultimate nature of reality is, it's relational. It means that we are always

in relations with others when we are coming up with our version of reality. And anytime we go back to it and try and say, no, this is it, this is the way it is and the way it's always going to be, right? Then, you know, next thing we know, we may have a new perspective that's arising. And being ready and open to that and say ready and open ready and open you know that this doesn't mean that you can't have passion this doesn't mean that you can't you know argue with conviction for the things that you believe in but you're listening to the other side you're open to those other perspectives when they come around very important i'm trying to do that with politics more and more. My audience has, of course, heard me talk about this before.

I've gone from one side to the other, and now I find myself in the middle. And I try to look at both parties and what they're doing, and I see myself as an American is the most important part of that equation. I don't see myself as a party person, although I'm a moderate Democrat, full disclosure. But I find myself at the very middle where I'm looking at both parties, and I don't like either extremes of either party. But I try and look at people now as an American, which is the most important party, folks, above all.

And I say, okay, what is this person on right or left trying to accomplish what do they want and what do they what do they really want not what they're trying to apply it and so um then from there i can go well if this is important to them this is what they're trying to achieve it but the way they're going about is really the wrong way or a way that we can't meet the middle how can we bridge that gap and and negotiate something where we can all just get along uh in the classic words of of that one gentleman um do you think the ai uh is going to uh really give us some challenges to reality it's probably going to rock our world if it hasn't already if you watch what's going on

even i who tries to keep an open mind at what we've been talking about uh i'm just it's probably going to rock our world if it hasn't already. If you watch what's going on, even I, who tries to keep an open mind at what we've been talking about, uh, I'm just, just white knuckling, gripping the rollercoaster right, right now, just going for the love of God.

Uh, what do you think? Uh, is it going to become harder for us to, you know, get out of our ways or we need to come more stuck in them or separation of minds. Yeah. Unfortunately it's going to get better before it gets worse before it gets better. Sounds like my first five marriages.

I think, I think the issue there is precisely, and you know, it's, it's not far afield from what we're talking about at all. Um, if, if your conviction is that you've got access to some ultimate version of what reality is and you engage, as we often do, as it turns out, in retrospect, you might find out that you've just been engaging with opinions that are chatbot generated or that you've been looking at images that have been doctored up by extremely sophisticated AI or something else, so-called deep fakes. That prior conviction about access to reality is going to make it more and more difficult for you to autocorrect, right? More and more difficult to step back and say, wait a minute, wait a minute, maybe I'm not getting the full picture here. This idea, the self-questioning, maybe I'm not getting the full picture, this couldn't be more important in an age when political opinions can be flash generated and spread like lightning around the internet, when they can be backed up by, let me talk to this image generator and say, make me an image of such and such politician with the face of this doing the following action, right? I mean,

that's what AI is capable of. And the fact that we put so much credence in our prior convictions before getting into conversations makes it all the more difficult to debunk lies that spread faster and faster. This is why people who are in this field and thinking about cybersecurity and thinking about divisiveness in the internet talk about pre-bunking instead of debunking, right? Giving you a kind of, if you will, almost philosophical inoculation that leads you to ask these questions prior to being exposed to them. You know, was it Churchill says, like, it's around the world? I think it's cited was it Churchill says, like, it's around the world.

I think it's cited to several people, but like it's around the world, halfway around the world before the truth even gets up out of bed or something like that. And, and with deep fakes, as you said, deep fakes AI, it's, there's, I mean, it's going to get crazy, man. I see Joe Rogan, who of course is the number one podcast in the world i see on tiktok all the time they're constantly deep faking his voice you can tell because you watch the lips and of course you can you're like this doesn't seem like something joe would do on a show and like i see advertisers there these aren't you know these aren't big reputable advertisers um but advertisers you know hawking some weird ass product i see't you know these aren't big reputable advertisers um but advertisers you know hawking

some weird ass product i see them you know that's how i know it's not i'm like i'm pretty sure he didn't do that on a show because he he should have gotten paid for it but you'll see there it's become really popular to deep fake him um and they'll you know they use it for everything they'll use it for all sorts of disinformation, philosophy. You know, we're, those of you watching the video 10 years from now, we're right now in the midst of Israel's 9-11 with a massive, horrific attack from Hamas and the back and forth. And in this, in these last few days, we've seen this, this rocket that exploded that killed, you know, 500-ish uh at a um at the gaza strip hospital there um and the blame has been going back and forth of who it was and and very quickly it was blamed on israel because they were bombing the hamas in gaza but you know there's all sorts of different accounts that are going on now it seems it seems there's a few different versions

i was on tiktok earlier today and somebody had some whole sound analysis version that I don't know. I'm, I'm questioning what the agenda is there. Uh, and I, I've had to kind of take a pinpoint on it because people have asked me, what do you think about this?

And, and I've had to go, Hey, I, I need to not read knee jerk to whatever. I mean, there's, there's a whole post analysis people are going to do with this between

scientists and governments and, and you don't know who to believe anymore. Sometimes really when it comes down to it, you know, if you've, if you've run enough CIA statements on anything, you, you know,

maybe, maybe the U S government sometimes does spread disinformation. We all do, I guess. But you know, we're living in that time where information moves fast and you need to maybe take a step back and go, I don't know, maybe we should figure it out first. Chris, thank you so much for saying that. I mean, I couldn't agree more. It is

really the faster information is going, the faster those lies that Churchill talked about fly around the world, the more it's incumbent on us not to make decisions like that on, you know, at the moment that someone tells us we have to make a decision. No, wait a minute. This is going to evolve. We know it's going to evolve, right? Fact-checking has to be involved. The fact-checking of the fact-checking has to be involved. And what's really the case that you were just talking about, just so illustrative about that, is that every single one of those moments was characterized by someone saying, ah, I got the truth. This is it. I know it now, right? I'm 100% certain now. Everyone's an expert.

Right, exactly. Everyone's an expert. No, how about not being an expert, but trusting that, not just trusting, investing in the idea that, you know, news sources that fact-check themselves and say that they're wrong are probably, you know, after, are probably not a bad thing, right? And say, hey, you know, I've got a whole section of my payrolls dedicated to proving me wrong. That might be a good thing. And that's, in some ways, what I was saying before about science. That's the point of science. When we do an experiment, the whole point of the experiment is repeatability, right? So do it again and do it again and wait for the falsified version.

Wait for the version that comes out and says, wait a minute, we didn't get those same results. And you know what? You don't hide that, that you put that forward and you say, explain, explain why it didn't come out this way. Yeah. The news media has a challenge with that these days. And I think it's the same with science.

That's the death of expertise. Everyone's an expert on everything. You know, I meet people now that, you know, they'll tell me something and I'll be like, and immediately you'll be able to go, you're getting your news and your politics information feed from memes on TikTok tiktok aren't you right and they'll be like well yes yeah why why wouldn't i found some guy and you know we have a lot of great journalists we have a pulitzer prize winners on the show uh we've had you know brilliant people like yourself

who put in tens you know maybe hundreds of thousands of thousands of hours of digging and, you know, playing with these ideas, exploring and researching was the word I'm looking for. And, you know, there's peer review in science. There's peer review in news where, you know, sometimes when a news channel does get it wrong, we're human people. I don't know if you've checked lately, but we are not infallible. Although some people think they are, maybe me. But, you know, the peer reviews are important.

And sometimes we get it wrong. And that's where I think people really fuck it up is they go, oh, well, you know, science got this wrong. Science got, you know, they nitpick it with their armchair thing. But this guy on TikTok who's in his mom's basement got you know they nitpick it with their armchair thing but this this guy on tiktok who's in his mom's basement you know uh he's he's he's got it do you think that uh i know we're going a little long here uh but my final question for you do you think that one of the problems with these these uh reality things and when we search for them is sometimes people believe that the reality is

just too shocking or so overwhelming to come with them that they embrace conspiracy theories that reality is too much or why why is that people embrace conspiracy theories and go on their own private idaho of reality i mean that's that is conspiracy theories in some ways is the uh the ultimate um version in the political sphere of what I'm talking about when I say in the title of the book, The Rigor of Angels. It's from a Borges story. And it's a story about a conspiracy theory, about a vast conspiracy theory that sort of takes over the world. And the point of the story is that it actually ends up changing reality, seeping into the world and changing our objects and our physical experience of them, because the conspiracy is so strong, because

it's so convincing, because the rigor that it reveals in the world is so captivatingly simple and pure and perfect that everyone ends up falling in love with and believing it. Moritz's point, and that's where the title of the book comes, is that humanity, as he says in that story, forgets and forgets again. There's a rigor out there, but it's not a rigor of angels. It's a rigor of chess masters. In other words, it's a rigor that we created for ourselves, and then we turn around and we're surprised to find it in the world,

and we attribute it to something even grander than ourselves. So conspiracy theories are something we're very natural and good at. We think that the world is kind of created in a certain way, and we're very attracted to those. We're very attracted to that all-encompassing, simple explanation that's going to make us not have to do all the fussy work of figuring out all the details, right? Don't say, it's all written out here, and you're never going to have to think about it again, but science tells us something else. You're going to have to think about it again and again. And after that, another time, you're going to have to keep on doing it. And that last kind of, that last tell all that, that, that story that's going to explain it all. It's never going to come up. You're, you're always going to be looking for something

else. Yeah. You see that you see in the, like the 9-11 conspiracies i remember my approach to 9-11 was actually uh assist into my political journey too uh i was you know a capitalist i still am a capitalist uh ceo and runner of business and felt like i was in the right party for that sort of uh. And then 9-11 happened, and I questioned my reality. I'm like, wait, I thought we were the greatest country in the world, and yada, yada, yada, all this stuff I've been sold. Why do people in the world hate us? And what's going on there, and why are they attacking our stuff? Other people want it, and it actually changed my politics

and changed my outlook on the world and trying to have a more world view more trying to understand my reality or reality not my reality reality out there more and um some people took a uh shock to it where the horror was so unimaginable and overwhelmed i think it might have been easier for them to close down and go well you know it know, it was the, I don't know, the alien, you know, whatever sort of BS they made up. John F.K., our current president, I'm sure knows from the QAnon people. Don't do that, people. So any thoughts on that? I don't know as we go.

Absolutely. It's this fear in the face of the shock of reality that, you know, because reality, weird things can happen. Something new can happen at any point. But if it really then undermines the way that you have been thinking about the world systematically for so long, I guess there's broadly described two different ways that you can go about dealing with that experience. One is to retrench, react in horror, kind of just excise any of that newness out of the world. And the other is, you know, to say, well, wait a minute, maybe there's something about the way that I was thinking about the world that needs adjustment. Maybe I've got to open up and change a little bit. And so I'm hoping with this book, you know, with all the stories that are in it, with the philosophy that's in it, with the science that's in it, that I'm going to be trying to convince

people to take that latter approach. There you go. And, uh, you know, maybe we can fix, help address conspiracy in the, and what goes on with the lazy brains of Dunning crew in the world. Final pitch out to people to buy the book and your.com as we go out.

So, um, the.com is William Egginton.com and the book, the rigor of angels is really about everything that Chris and I have been talking about. And, uh, it's,

it's also a hope, very much a fun read it should be filled with stories and should be a page page turner so i hope you tune in there you go order up the book folks we need we need more smarter people in the world because uh you know there's what is the old line from george carlin it's my favorite line i think how dumb the average person is and realize 50% of the people are dumber than that. Don't be one of those people. We need more smarter people. We need more people living reality

is the world that goes different there. Thank you very much for coming on the show, Bill. We really appreciate it, man. Very insightful. Thank you so much, Chris. It was really a pleasure. There you go.

And come back for your future books. We'd love to have you as well. I'm sure you've got some other great stuff cooking on the thing there, but continued success with this book. Thanks to back for your future books. We'd love to have you as well. I'm sure you've got some other great stuff cooking on the thing there, but continued success with this book. Thanks, Mattis, for tuning in. Go to goodreads.com, 4chesschrisvoss, youtube.com, 4chesschrisvoss, linkedin.com, 4chesschrisvoss, and expand your reality there

and sign up for the newsletter on the LinkedIn newsletter. Go to chrisvoss1 at TikTok. Thanks for tuning in, folks. Be good to each other. Stay safe. And we'll see you guys next time.